Silicon Investor - OpenAI

[zax] [graphic]

zax — 6/5/2026 8:14:37 AM

[zax] Anthropic Urges Global Pause in AI Development, Flags 'Self-Improvement' Risk s...

zax — 6/5/2026 3:04:57 AM

Anthropic Urges Global Pause in AI Development, Flags 'Self-Improvement' Risk

slashdot.org

Anthropic is urging leading AI labs to consider slowing development, warning that frontier models are advancing fast enough that they may soon be able to improve themselves without direct human intervention. The company says a global ability to pause or slow AI development would "likely be a good thing," citing internal data about accelerating model capabilities. From a blog post:

Using public benchmarks and previously unreported data from within Anthropic, The Anthropic Institute is showing that AI is already accelerating the development of AI systems. To take just one example: today, Anthropic engineers on average ship 8x as much code per quarter as they did from 2021-2025.

The technical trends discussed in this piece suggest that AI systems are going to become much more capable in coming years. These trends have huge implications. AI that can build itself would be a major development in the history of technology -- one that could bring enormous good for the world in science, healthcare, and beyond. But full recursive self-improvement also might increase the risks of humans losing control over AI systems. If systems are capable of fully building their own successors, the ways we secure them, monitor them, and shape their behavior all grow much more important. [...]

If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing. But if a slowdown simply lets the least cautious actors catch up technologically, it could leave everyone less safe. Without a global coordination mechanism, companies and governments will have to make difficult decisions about safety while under competitive and geopolitical pressures.

We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. The Anthropic Institute will conduct research -- in collaboration with many others -- and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require. These systems would enable frontier AI developers to verify that others globally have actually stopped or slowed, and that a bad actor could not use the auspices of a coordinated slowdown to jump ahead in secret. If such systems existed, we expect that we would slow down or temporarily pause, if other developers at or near the frontier also did so in a verifiable manner...

[zax] SFTBY / 9984: The proxy has become its own story.

zax — 6/3/2026 11:22:10 AM

[zax] Anthropic Files to Go Public, Setting Stage for Huge I.P.O. The artificial int...

zax — 6/1/2026 3:53:43 PM

Anthropic Files to Go Public, Setting Stage for Huge I.P.O.

The artificial intelligence company, which is racing OpenAI to the stock market, has seen explosive growth over the last year thanks largely to technology that can automatically write computer code.

nytimes.com

Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the chatbot Claude, confidentially filed on Monday for an initial public offering, joining what could be a once-in-a-generation, moneymaking moment on Wall Street.

With its I.P.O. filing, Anthropic is expected to be among three high-profile companies preparing to go public this year, along with the rocket company SpaceX and OpenAI, which started the A.I. boom in 2022 with its ChatGPT chatbot.

Their I.P.O.s, which would be among the biggest ever, could create a tsunami of investment and employee wealth, and mint the world’s first trillionaire in Elon Musk, who owns about 50 percent of SpaceX. The public offerings could also flood the nonprofit world with new money, since Anthropic and OpenAI have both pledged a large part of their shares to charity. SpaceX’s I.P.O. is expected this month, and OpenAI has been preparing to file in the coming weeks.

An I.P.O. filing also ratchets up Anthropic’s competition with OpenAI. Last week, Anthropic officially passed OpenAI as the world’s highest-flying A.I. start-up with $65 billion in new financing that valued it at $900 billion before the inclusion of the new capital. OpenAI’s last valuation was $730 billion.

In a statement, Anthropic said the filing “gives us the option to go public” after a review of its paperwork by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company did not provide details about the timing or size of an I.P.O. and said the deal would “depend on market conditions and other factors.” With the filing on Monday, a public offering could happen as soon as this fall.

Among the three companies racing to go public, Anthropic is the youngest and fastest growing, thanks in large part to its A.I. tools for automatically writing computer code. Last week, Anthropic said its revenue run rate, which is its expected revenue for the year based on its current performance, crossed $47 billion in May. It is unclear if the company is profitable.

“The coding focus is what makes this filing interesting,” said Shashi Bellamkonda, a director at Info-Tech Research Group, a technology research and advisory firm. “Anthropic didn’t try to be everything. No browser, no image generation, no commerce layer. That discipline is now a $47 billion run rate.”

Founded in 2021, Anthropic was started in San Francisco by Dario Amodei, its chief executive, and a handful of other researchers who worked with him at OpenAI. Since he started the company, Mr. Amodei has repeatedly described what he believes is the transformative nature of so-called artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., an as-yet-unattained artificial intelligence that can match the abilities of the human brain.

</snip> Read the rest here: nytimes.com

[zax] SoftBank Group Corp. (SFTBY) 28.54+4.84 (+20.42%) As of 11:30:41 AM EDT. Market...

zax — 6/1/2026 11:46:39 AM

SoftBank Group Corp. (SFTBY)
28.54 +4.84 (+20.42%)
As of 11:30:41 AM EDT. Market Open.

[zax] PARIS— SoftBank Group9984 +14.67% is promising to spend at least $52 billion on ...

zax — 6/1/2026 2:23:44 AM

PARIS— SoftBank Group 9984 +14.67% is promising to spend at least $52 billion on building a network of massive data centers in France, helping advance Europe’s goal of tech independence with what would be the continent’s largest artificial-intelligence infrastructure project.

[zax] Wow! +13.5% in Tokyo now. 2:43 PM JST.

zax — 6/1/2026 1:58:23 AM

[zax] Interesting. I sort of expected them to stay focused purely on disembodied intel...

zax — 6/1/2026 12:16:21 AM

Interesting. I sort of expected them to stay focused purely on disembodied intelligence until it can design the robots / train the models and blow past the competition like Figure AI. But robotics progress has been moving quickly enough recently that they might now expect it to become a significant source of revenue before that happens.

Remember that they were into robotics before starting to solely focus on ChatGPT: openai.com

-- Alexander Kruel facebook.com

[zax] SoftBank Group Corp. SFTBY / 9984 ¥ 8,212 (+ ¥723 or +9.65%) in Tokyo 11:04 AM...

zax — 5/31/2026 10:19:57 PM

SoftBank Group Corp. SFTBY / 9984 ¥ 8,212 (+ ¥ 723 or +9.65%) in Tokyo 11:04 AM JST (9:04 PM EST)

[zax] MSFT 426.99 +14.32 (+3.47%) At close: May 28 at 4:00:01 PM EDT 434.19 +7.20 (+1...

zax — 5/29/2026 8:58:34 AM

MSFT
426.99 +14.32 (+3.47%) At close: May 28 at 4:00:01 PM EDT
434.19 +7.20 (+1.69%) Pre-Market: 8:56:26 AM EDT

A safe, no brainer bet on AI right now, IMO.
GOOGL had a great run.

[zax] SFTBY 24.54 +1.70 (+7.44%) 1:10:59 PM EDT

zax — 5/28/2026 1:28:08 PM

[zax] Full text of Magnifica Humanitas: Read Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical ewtnnews...

zax — 5/26/2026 1:06:41 PM

Full text of Magnifica Humanitas: Read Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical

ewtnnews.com

... OMG

Many portions of Magnifica Humanitas appear to be AI-written

lesswrong.com

Magnifica Humanitas is a recent ‘ encyclical’ by Pope Leo XIV, leader of the Catholic Church. It outlines a vision for how humanity should interact with artificial intelligence, emphasizing the importance of human dignity and ensuring that AI does not replace human relationships, among other topics. Interestingly, many portions appear to be written by AI.

[EDIT: since I put up my post, Linch Zhang has posted a more comprehensive analysis with the same conclusion, that I would recommend readers also look at.]

Why I thought to check this Friends of mine Linch Zhang and the Axolotl noticed that parts of the English text appear to be AI-generated, and twitter user kartr found that the Italian text had the largest fraction of AI-generated content out of all the translations published by the Vatican, speculating that it was the original copy, and translations by humans appear less ‘AI-generated’ to various tools.

What I actually did I took the Italian text of Magnifica Humanitas, and ran it thru the Pangram AI detector software.

Why the Italian text? As mentioned in the previous segment, it had previously been claimed to be the most AI-ish version. Also, given that the Vatican is in Italy, it’s a reasonable guess that the text was initially drafted in Italian (presumably by a few different people with the Pope’s input).

Why Pangram? Pangram is a reasonably accurate AI text detector. In particular, it manages to achieve an extremely low rate of marking human-written text as AI-written, while maintaining a reasonable rate of flagging AI-written text as AI-written.

My results The whole text is too long to fit into Pangram, so I ran it section by section. Note that for some paragraphs only part of the paragraph was flagged as AI-written, I’m trying to only flag paragraphs that are mostly flagged.

The introduction 43% of the text was flagged as AI-generated. This included paragraphs 7-9 (on the images of the tower of Babel and Nehemiah rebuilding Jerusalem) and 13-16.

Chapter 1 62% of the text was flagged as AI-generated. This included paragraphs 21-24, 26-29, 31-32, 34-36 (where large parts of 36 were flagged as being ‘AI assissted’, I’m not sure how accurate Pangram is when making these judgements), and 41-45.

Chapter 2 34% of the text was flagged as AI-generated. This included paragraphs 70-71 and 74-86.

Chapter 3 41% of the text was flagged as AI-generated. This included paragraphs 104-112 and 122-128.

Chapter 4 24% of the text was flagged as AI-generated. This included paragraphs 141, 152-153, 155-156, 163-164, 168-171, and 178-181.

Chapter 5 18% of the text was flagged as AI-generated. This included paragraphs 182-183, 186, 190-191, 198-199, and 211-212.

Conclusion 43% of the text was flagged as AI-generated. this included paragraphs 230-233 and 238-240.

Should you trust these results? IMO, you should feel confident that paragraphs flagged as AI-written are, and suspect that some paragraphs that were not flagged might also have been AI-written. That said, you probably shouldn’t trust it down to the sentence level: Pangram appears to be ‘chunking’ the text and judging each chunk as AI-written, AI-assisted, or human-written. Sometimes those chunks cross paragraph boundaries, and produce results like saying the first sentence of a paragraph was AI-written but the rest was human-written, which seems unlikely.

... lesswrong.com

[zax] Ashton Kutcher Invested In OpenAI Early: $30 Million Bet Could Be Worth Billions...

zax — 5/26/2026 7:05:41 AM

Ashton Kutcher Invested In OpenAI Early: $30 Million Bet Could Be Worth Billions At $1.5 Trillion IPO

finance.yahoo.com

Actor Ashton Kutcher is best known to many for his role on TV shows like "That ‘70s Show" and "Two and a Half Men." To the finance world, Kutcher has built a reputation as a good investor with his Sound Ventures fund. One investment made years ago could turn into Kutcher's biggest win ever.

Kutcher Invested In OpenAI Early

AI startup OpenAI counts Microsoft Corporation as its largest investor, a company that could benefit from a potential IPO of the company.

Valued at $852 billion in a March $122 billion funding round, OpenAI could become worth even more if the company goes public.

Prediction market Polymarket shows that users are predicting a valuation of $1 trillion or more with 15% predicting a range of $1 trillion to $1.25 trillion, 11% predicting a range of $1.25 trillion to $1.5 trillion and 22% predicting $1.5 trillion or more. Some (30%) are predicting that the IPO won't happen in 2026 though.

Further down the list of investors in OpenAI is Sound Ventures, the fund co-founded by Kutcher. According to leaked documents, Sound Ventures ranks 22nd on the list of OpenAI investors, as reported by Inc.

Sound Ventures invested $30 million in OpenAI years ago. That stake was valued at around $1.3 billion in March when the company was valued at $852 billion.

With a potential value of $1.5 trillion, Kutcher's company investment would be worth $2.29 billion. This represents a huge multiple on the original investment.

Kutcher's Investment Success

While still a major force in acting, Kutcher has also made a name for himself in the investing world, landing stakes in companies like Airbnb Inc, Uber Technologies and Spotify Technology.

Kutcher turned $30 million into $250 million by investing in companies he believed in and by using a set of guidelines to determine his investments. A-Grade Investments was co-founded by Kutcher, Guy Oseary and Ron Burkle. The trio invested the $30 million in tech companies like Spotify, Airbnb, Uber, Foursquare and Skype.

</snip> Read the rest here: finance.yahoo.com

[zax] SoftBank Group Corp. SFTBY / 9984 ¥ 7,841 (+ ¥427 or +10.91%) in Tokyo 2:30 AM ...

zax — 5/26/2026 4:00:42 AM

SoftBank Group Corp. SFTBY / 9984 ¥ 7,841 (+ ¥ 427 or +10.91%) in Tokyo 2:30 AM EST

[zax] SoftBank Group Corp. SFTBY / 9984 ¥ 7,487 (+ ¥427 or +6.03%) in Tokyo 9:17 AM J...

zax — 5/25/2026 8:35:16 PM

SoftBank Group Corp. SFTBY / 9984 ¥ 7,487 (+ ¥ 427 or +6.03%) in Tokyo 9:17 AM JST (8:37 PM EST)

Softbank is on a fucking tear. I anticipate a very nice opening tomorrow.

[zax] The Trillion-Dollar IPO Test: SpaceX and OpenAI Face Public Markets investing.c...

zax — 5/24/2026 7:56:12 PM

The Trillion-Dollar IPO Test: SpaceX and OpenAI Face Public Markets

investing.com

Two companies that reshaped aerospace and artificial intelligence are preparing to test a question that private markets have not yet answered: whether public investors are willing to underwrite trillion-dollar AI infrastructure narratives at the scale and speed the founders have been negotiating privately.

SpaceX filed its S-1 with the SEC on May 20, 2026. OpenAI is preparing to file confidentially within days. If both listings proceed near the reported fundraising ranges, combined new equity supply could approach or exceed $135 billion, a scale with little modern precedent.

Section 1 — Market Context: Two Filings, One Window

On May 20, 2026, SpaceX filed its public S-1 prospectus with the SEC, disclosing for the first time the audited financials of its combined SpaceX-xAI entity. Within the same twenty-four-hour window, CNBC and The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI is preparing to confidentially file a draft IPO prospectus, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley advising on the process. The company is targeting a public listing as early as September 2026 at a valuation above $1 trillion, pending regulatory review and market conditions.

The SpaceX S-1, confidentially submitted on April 1, 2026 and publicly circulated May 20, discloses $18.67 billion in consolidated 2025 revenue following the February 2026 all-stock acquisition of xAI. The entity reported a $4.94 billion net loss for the year alongside adjusted EBITDA of $6.58 billion. Bloomberg and Reuters have reported a target valuation range of $1.75 trillion to above $2 trillion, with a raise of up to $75 billion; those figures are reported targets, not final offering terms. SpaceX is targeting a June 12 Nasdaq debut under the ticker SPCX, with Goldman Sachs leading the deal alongside Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan.

OpenAI’s March 2026 funding round closed at a post-money valuation of $852 billion, with major participation from Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank, and other investors, and remains the company’s last disclosed private transaction. CFO Sarah Friar confirmed in a January 2026 blog post that the company’s annualized revenue rate exited 2025 above $20 billion, against estimated full-year actual revenue of approximately $13.1 billion, reflecting rapid growth concentrated in the second half of the year. The distinction between annual revenue and year-end run rate is material: the S-1 prospectus, when filed, will be the first opportunity for investors to see audited full-year financials. A May 18 jury verdict dismissed all claims in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the company under California’s statute of limitations. Musk has announced plans to appeal; the appeal remains a process risk, but absent a new court order, the ruling reduces the immediate legal overhang over the IPO.

Section 2 — Comparative Snapshot

The snapshot above draws on SpaceX S-1 disclosures for the company’s audited figures, and on CFO-confirmed statements, Sacra analysis, and analyst estimates for OpenAI. OpenAI forward-looking revenue figures are estimates derived from the $20 billion year-end 2025 ARR base; they are not derived from a filed prospectus. IPO valuation targets for both companies are reported figures; final offering terms will be disclosed in the respective public S-1 filings.

</snip> Read the rest here: investing.com

[zax] Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based...

zax — 5/22/2026 9:51:47 PM

Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products.

My Take
The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested.

This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown.

[X]

🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just… pic.twitter.com/zBGccaP3e6
— Hedgie (@HedgieMarkets) May 21, 2026

[/X]

[zax] I wish I could impress on people how impressive the latest update to ChatGPT is....

zax — 5/21/2026 10:59:56 PM

I wish I could impress on people how impressive the latest update to ChatGPT is. The system is beyond being a tool. It is a collaborator. I cannot understate how fast forward it, and we, are moving.

SoftBank Group Corp. SFTBY / 9984 ¥ 6,704 (+ ¥ 1000 or +11.01%) in Tokyo 11:30 AM JST (10:30 PM EST)

[zax] Made a big pre-market bet on MSFT. Short term.

zax — 5/21/2026 9:17:24 AM

[zax] SoftBank Profit Surges as OpenAI Stake Delivers $25 Billion Gain SoftBank post...

zax — 5/21/2026 4:41:54 AM

SoftBank Profit Surges as OpenAI Stake Delivers $25 Billion Gain

SoftBank posted ¥1.83 trillion quarterly profit as OpenAI valuation gains offset weaker returns elsewhere in its investment portfolio.

gurufocus.com

SoftBank reported a sharp profit surge after valuation gains from its OpenAI investment helped offset weaker returns elsewhere in the Japanese technology group's portfolio. Net income reached ¥1.83 trillion in the fiscal fourth quarter, far ahead of the average analyst estimate of ¥295.2 billion, with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Kirk Boodry attributing the profit entirely to $25 billion in valuation gains tied to OpenAI. The result could strengthen confidence around Masayoshi Son's AI strategy, even as market volatility from the Middle East and weaker public holdings underscored how much of SoftBank's latest performance is now tied to the ChatGPT maker.

SoftBank's OpenAI bet has expanded rapidly since its first investment at a $157 billion valuation, with the US startup's valuation now rising to $852 billion. The company has committed to increasing its total investment in OpenAI to $64.6 billion by the end of the year, while CFO Yoshimitsu Goto said OpenAI's value has grown significantly as expected and that SoftBank is looking forward to more growth. Still, Goto also suggested there may come a time when SoftBank needs to consider an exit, in line with other Vision Fund assets. The Vision Fund segment reported a ¥3.08 trillion investment gain, despite declines in key public holdings such as Coupang Inc. and Grab Holdings Ltd.

The financing side remains the pressure point for investors. Son has been unwinding positions and increasing SoftBank's debt load to support a broader AI push that spans data centers, AI hardware, neoclouds, battery cells for AI data centers, a possible US listing for AI robotics company Roze, and potential talks around a French AI data center project with President Emmanuel Macron. SoftBank secured a $40 billion bridge loan facility in March, raised another $5.2 billion from T-Mobile shares in fiscal fourth quarter, held ¥3.5 trillion in liquidity at the end of March, and issued $6.2 billion of bonds in April. But Bloomberg Intelligence said SoftBank still faces a funding shortfall of more than $30 billion, with sizable debt maturities by the end of 2027 and a $40 billion bridge loan due next March, meaning OpenAI could be the earnings engine while financing risk remains the key investor debate.

[zax] SortBank Group Corp. SFTBY / 9984 ¥ 6038 (+ ¥1000 or +19.85%) in Tokyo 11:24 AM...

zax — 5/20/2026 10:28:20 PM

SortBank Group Corp. SFTBY / 9984 ¥ 6038 (+ ¥ 1000 or +19.85%) in Tokyo 11:24 AM JST (10:34 PM EST)

SoftBank Group Shares Rise on News of OpenAI's IPO Plans

marketwatch.com

SoftBank Group shares rose sharply after news that OpenAI, one of its key investments, is preparing to file for an initial public offering in the coming days or weeks.

Shares were recently up 20% at their daily limit of 6,039 yen, equivalent to $38, on Thursday.

The Japanese technology investment company is one of OpenAI's largest shareholders.

The Wall Street Journal reported that bankers at firms, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, have been helping the artificial-intelligence company on a draft IPO prospectus it plans to file confidentially with regulators, possibly as early as Friday. OpenAI was valued at $852 billion in a recent funding round.

SoftBank Group in February agreed to invest an additional $30 billion in OpenAI in phases as part of the ChatGPT maker's recent funding round. That would bring SoftBank's total investment in OpenAI to $64.6 billion, representing a stake of about 13%, the Japanese company has said.

The ChatGPT maker will have to overcome a host of challenges, including concerns about whether the company will be able to generate enough revenue to support its large data-center spending commitments.

OpenAI recently missed multiple internal revenue and user targets after facing competition from rivals Google and Anthropic.

Besides SoftBank Group, other Japanese semiconductor-related stocks are broadly higher after U.S. chip company Nvidia reported record sales and income Wednesday, driven by surging demand for data-center computing and the rise of artificial-intelligence agents.

Renesas Electronics was recently 7.6% higher and Tokyo Electron was up 5.5%.

[zax] An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry openai....

zax — 5/20/2026 3:39:37 PM

An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

openai.com

For nearly 80 years, mathematicians have studied a deceptively simple question: if you place nn points in the plane, how many pairs of points can be exactly distance 11 apart?

This is the planar unit distance problem, first posed by Paul Erdos in 1946. It is one of the best-known questions in combinatorial geometry, easy to state and remarkably difficult to resolve. The 2005 book Research Problems in Discrete Geometry, by Brass, Moser, and Pach, calls it “possibly the best known (and simplest to explain) problem in combinatorial geometry.” Noga Alon, a leading combinatorialist at Princeton, describes it as “one of Erdos’ favorite problems.” Erdos even offered a monetary prize for resolving this problem.

Today, we share a breakthrough on the unit distance problem. Since Erdos’s original work, the prevailing belief has been that the “square grid” constructions depicted further below were essentially optimal for maximizing the number of unit-distance pairs. An internal OpenAI model has disproved this longstanding conjecture, providing an infinite family of examples that yield a polynomial improvement. The proof has been checked by a group of external mathematicians. They have also written a companion paper explaining the argument and providing further background and context for the significance of the result.

The result is also notable for how it was found. The proof came from a new general-purpose reasoning model, rather than from a system trained specifically for mathematics, scaffolded to search through proof strategies, or targeted at the unit distance problem in particular. As part of a broader effort to test whether advanced models can contribute to frontier research, we evaluated it on a collection of Erdos problems. In this case, it produced a proof resolving the open problem.

This proof is an important milestone for the math and AI communities. It marks the first time that a prominent open problem, central to a subfield of mathematics, has been solved autonomously by AI. It also demonstrates the depth of reasoning these systems now support. Mathematics provides a particularly clear testbed for reasoning: the problems are precise, potential proofs can be checked, and a long argument only works if the reasoning holds together from beginning to end. The method by which the problem was solved is also notable. The proof brings unexpected, sophisticated ideas from algebraic number theory to bear on an elementary geometric question.

Fields medalist Tim Gowers, writing in the companion paper, calls the result “a milestone in AI mathematics.” According to leading number theorist Arul Shankar, “In my opinion this paper demonstrates that current AI models go beyond just helpers to human mathematicians – they are capable of having original ingenious ideas, and then carrying them out to fruition”.

</snip> Read the rest (and an excellent video) here: openai.com

[zax] Tether Buys SoftBank's 26% Twenty One Stake gurufocus.com

zax — 5/20/2026 3:03:35 PM

[zax] Elon Musk loses lawsuit against OpenAI May 18, 202612:35 PM CDT reuters.com ...

zax — 5/18/2026 3:30:46 PM

Elon Musk loses lawsuit against OpenAI

May 18, 202612:35 PM CDT

reuters.com

OAKLAND, California, May 18 (Reuters) - A U.S. jury on Monday ruled against Elon Musk in his lawsuit against OpenAI, finding the artificial intelligence company not liable to the world's richest person for having allegedly strayed from its original mission to benefit humanity.

In a unanimous verdict, the jury in Oakland, California, federal court said Musk had brought his case too late. The jury deliberated less than two hours.

The trial had widely been seen as a critical moment for the future of OpenAI and artificial intelligence generally, both in how it should be used and who should benefit from it.

Following the verdict, Musk's lawyer said he reserved the right to appeal, but the judge suggested he may have an uphill battle because whether the statute of limitations ran out before Musk sued was a factual issue.

"There's a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury's finding, which is why I was prepared to dismiss on the spot," U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said.

MUSK INVESTED EARLY IN OPENAI

In his 2024 lawsuit, Musk accused OpenAI, its Chief Executive Sam Altman and its President Greg Brockman of manipulating him into giving $38 million, then going behind his back by attaching a for-profit business to its original nonprofit and accepting tens of billions of dollars from Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab and other investors.

Musk called the OpenAI defendants' conduct "stealing a charity."

OpenAI was founded by Altman, Musk and several others in 2015. Musk left its board in 2018, and OpenAI set up a for-profit business the next year.

OpenAI countered that it was Musk who saw dollar signs, and that he waited too long to claim OpenAI breached its founding agreement to build safe artificial intelligence to benefit humanity.

"Mr. Musk may have the Midas touch in some areas, but not in AI," William Savitt, a lawyer for OpenAI, said in his closing argument.

The verdict followed 11 days of testimony and arguments where Musk's and Altman's credibility came under repeated attack.

Lawyers for OpenAI embraced each other after the verdict was announced.

Microsoft faced an aiding and abetting claim. In a statement, a Microsoft spokesperson said, "The facts and the timeline in this case have long been clear and we welcome the jury’s decision to dismiss these claims as untimely."

OPENAI PREPARES FOR IPO

People use AI for myriad purposes such as education, facial recognition, financial advice, journalism, legal research, medical diagnoses, and harmful deep-fakes.

Many people express distrust of the technology and worry it could displace people from their jobs.

Each side accused the other of being more interested in money than serving the public.

In his closing argument, Musk's lawyer Steven Molo reminded jurors that several witnesses questioned Altman's candor or branded him a liar, and that Altman did not give an unqualified yes when asked during the trial if he was completely trustworthy.

"Sam Altman's credibility is directly at issue," Molo said. "If you don't believe him, they cannot win."

Musk accused OpenAI of wrongfully trying to enrich investors and insiders at the nonprofit's expense, and failing to prioritize AI's safety. He also contended that Microsoft knew all along that OpenAI cared more about money than being altruistic.

OpenAI competes with AI companies such as Anthropic and xAI, and is preparing for a possible initial public offering that could value the business at $1 trillion.

Microsoft has spent more than $100 billion on its partnership with OpenAI, a Microsoft executive testified.
Musk's xAI is now part of his space and rocket company SpaceX, which is preparing an IPO that could exceed OpenAI's in size.

Reporting by Kenrick Cai and Deepa Seetharaman in Oakland, California; Additional reporting by Jonathan Stempel and Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Nick Zieminski

[zax] SoftBank Group Expected to Post Lower Quarterly Net Profit -- Earnings Preview ...

zax — 5/12/2026 11:53:09 PM

SoftBank Group Expected to Post Lower Quarterly Net Profit -- Earnings Preview

marketwatch.com

May 12, 2026 at 12:04 a.m. ET

SoftBank Group is scheduled to report fourth-quarter results on Wednesday. Here's what you need to know:

NET PROFIT FORECAST: SoftBank Group's net profit is expected to have fallen 64% to 187.8 billion yen, equivalent to $1.19 billion, for the three months ended March, according to a poll of analysts by Visible Alpha. That would compare with the net profit of Y517.2 billion in the year-earlier period.

The stock has climbed 31% so far this year through Monday, driven by growing expectations for rising artificial intelligence-related demand. That follows a 92% gain in 2025.

WHAT TO WATCH:

--Its Vision Funds business recorded a profit of Y735.49 billion in its third quarter, compared with a loss of Y309.93 billion in the year-earlier period. Investors will be focusing on further signs of recovery in its tech funds business.

--SoftBank Group has agreed to invest an additional $30 billion in OpenAI in phases as part of the ChatGPT maker's recent funding round. Upon completion, SoftBank Group's total investment in OpenAI is expected to be $64.6 billion. Investors will be closely watching any updates on SoftBank's investment in and other initiatives with OpenAI.

--SoftBank Group issued debt, sold stakes in companies like Nvidia and Deutsche Telekom, and borrowed against its stake in Arm Holdings and other assets to fund investments in recent quarters. Investors will be paying attention to any additional steps the Japanese tech company may be taking to raise funds.

[zax] [bluesky] Sam Altman was winning on the stand, but it might not be enough— The ...

zax — 5/12/2026 7:50:08 PM

[bluesky]

Sam Altman was winning on the stand, but it might not be enough
— The Verge (@theverge.com) 2026-05-12T23:30:04.080Z

[/bluesky]

[zax] SFTBY was up 8.69% in last trading session, and was up 18.44% overnight in Japan...

zax — 5/7/2026 8:49:09 AM

SFTBY was up 8.69% in last trading session, and was up 18.44% overnight in Japan.

[zax] Man, watching Elon on the stand in this OpenAI trial has been a masterclass in...

zax — 5/5/2026 7:44:31 AM

Man, watching Elon on the stand in this OpenAI trial has been a masterclass in self-sabotage. He starts off contradicting his own tweets about Tesla chasing AGI, then admits he was a fool for dumping nearly forty million into the place without reading the fine print on a four-page document. The judge keeps shutting down his extinction-level AI rants like they're off-topic distractions. He gets all heated, evasive, and even that pre-trial settlement text where he says Altman and Brockman will be the most hated men in America? Yeah, that one just got entered as evidence. Classic case of a guy trying to win by torching his own credibility.

facebook.com

[zax] Elon Musk’s Lawyers Ask OpenAI’s President Why He Is Worth $30 Billion The leg...

zax — 5/5/2026 4:14:27 AM

Elon Musk’s Lawyers Ask OpenAI’s President Why He Is Worth $30 Billion

The legal team implied in a federal trial that Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and co-founder, was driven by greed rather than building safe A.I.

nytimes.com

Two days before the start of the blockbuster trial pitting Elon Musk against the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, Mr. Musk sent a text message to Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and co-founder, asking if he was interested in settling the case.

When Mr. Brockman suggested that both sides drop their claims, Mr. Musk responded with a text attacking Mr. Brockman and Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive. “By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be,” he wrote, according to a document filed in the trial.

As the trial’s second week kicked off in an Oakland, Calif., federal courthouse on Monday, it was unclear if the public standing of Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman had changed at all. But Mr. Brockman spent most of the day on the witness stand defending his credibility against suggestions that his A.I. work was driven by greed.

Steven Molo, Mr. Musk’s lead lawyer, showed evidence that while Mr. Brockman had never invested money in OpenAI, he now owned a stake worth about $30 billion.

“Do you believe that OpenAI has maintained the moral high ground by allowing you to have a stake with close to $30 billion?” Mr. Molo asked.
OpenAI’s legal team has argued that Mr. Musk’s suit amounts to “ sour grapes.”

Mr. Brockman, calmly responding to Mr. Molo’s questions, said that OpenAI had not veered from its original promise and that he was not driven primarily by money. “Solving for the mission has always been my primary motivation,” he said, wearing a blue suit with his hair closely cropped, as always. “It remains so today.”

Mr. Molo showed an email that Mr. Brockman sent in 2015 to Yahoo’s chief executive at the time, Marissa Mayer, as he and others were working on what would become OpenAI. In the email, Mr. Brockman said he was donating $100,000 to the new organization. But he did not end up making a donation.

“Did you think it was morally bankrupt to say you would donate $100,000 and then not do that?” Mr. Molo asked. “No,” Mr. Brockman responded.

As Mr. Brockman testified, Mr. Altman listened intently, sitting behind the OpenAI legal team. Just behind him, Mr. Brockman’s wife, Anna Brockman, sat on the edge of her seat, looking toward the stand.

Mr. Molo repeatedly quoted from a journal that Mr. Brockman kept in 2017 and 2018 as OpenAI’s co-founders realized the nonprofit could not raise the enormous amounts of money it would need. They discussed whether they should attach the lab to a for-profit company.

As Mr. Brockman and others started to tussle with Mr. Musk over the future of the lab, he wrote: “This is the only chance we have to get out from Elon. Is he the ‘glorious leader’ that I would pick? We truly have a chance to make this happen. Financially, what will take me to $1B?”

The question of OpenAI’s motivations for building A.I. is a centerpiece of Mr. Musk’s lawsuit against the company. He claims that Mr. Altman and others breached OpenAI’s founding agreement by putting commercial gain over its earlier promise to build safe A.I. for the sake of humanity.

He is asking for $150 billion in damages and a court order that would remove Mr. Altman from the OpenAI board of directors. He also wants an order unraveling the for-profit company structure that the company adopted last year.

Mr. Musk helped create OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015 along with Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman and a group of A.I. researchers. They vowed to freely share its technologies with the rest of the world. But Mr. Musk left the organization less than three years later after a power struggle. He later founded his own artificial intelligence start-up, xAI.

Mr. Molo repeatedly asked Mr. Brockman if this meant he was primarily interested in financial gain. Mr. Brockman said no, adding that he was trying to decide whether to continue to build OpenAI with Mr. Musk or move it in a new direction.

“There was a fork in the road,” he said. “Do we accept Elon’s terms?”

Under questioning from Sarah Eddy, one of OpenAI’s lawyers, Mr. Brockman said he had never misled Mr. Musk about his intentions with OpenAI. He also said that as Mr. Musk was leaving OpenAI, he told Mr. Brockman that he intended to create a new effort to build artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., essentially a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.

Mr. Musk said that there had to be a serious competitor to Google in the race to A.G.I. and that OpenAI would not be able to do it. So he intended to build that competitor at Tesla, Mr. Brockman said.

“As far as you know, has Tesla ever been a nonprofit?” Ms. Eddy asked. “No,” Mr. Brockman said. He was expected to return to the witness stand on Tuesday.

Before Mr. Brockman testified, the nine-member jury heard from Stuart Russell, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in A.I. safety. Dr. Russell said dangers could emerge as commercial companies raced to build A.G.I.

“Whichever company develops A.G.I. first would have a significant advantage that would then increase relative to the other companies,” Dr. Russell said. “That company — or a small handful of companies — may control a majority of economic activity on the planet, and governments would become subordinate to these companies.”

Mr. Musk’s case was dealt a blow on Friday when Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is presiding over the case, struck parts of the testimony of Jared Birchall, who manages Mr. Musk’s family office. While being questioned by Mr. Musk’s legal team on Thursday afternoon, Mr. Birchall discussed a $97.4 billion bid by Mr. Musk and others to purchase OpenAI’s assets last year.

He said he was concerned that Mr. Altman was inappropriately removing value from the OpenAI nonprofit as he and others created a new for-profit company in anticipation of a public offering. He accused Mr. Altman of “sitting on both sides of the negotiations” as those plans were made.

But Judge Gonzalez Rogers ordered Mr. Birchall’s discussion of the bid removed from his testimony because he did not have personal knowledge of Mr. Altman’s involvement in the negotiations.

Mr. Birchall acknowledged that he had arranged the $97.4 billion bid with Marc Toberoff, one of the lawyers representing Mr. Musk in his suit against OpenAI.

nytimes.com

[zax] The humiliating cross-examination of Elon Musk oligarchwatch.substack.com [gra...

zax — 5/3/2026 2:19:40 AM

The humiliating cross-examination of Elon Musk

oligarchwatch.substack.com

A blockbuster trial pitting Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman kicked off this week in Oakland, California. Musk sued OpenAI, claiming that company executives, including Altman and President Greg Brockman unjustly enriched themselves by straying from OpenAI’s non-profit mission. Musk contributed about $38 million to OpenAI in its early days, when it was structured as a non-profit. OpenAI has since transformed to a hybrid structure, with its for-profit arm raising tens of billions of dollars. Musk founded a competing for-profit AI company, xAI, in 2023.

Musk is asking for $134 billion in damages and for OpenAI to return to a non-profit structure.

In his opening statement, Musk attorney Steve Molo told the jury, “we are here today because the defendants in this case stole a charity.” Musk left OpenAI in February 2018, citing a conflict with his role at Tesla, which was also developing AI capabilities. OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019.

Musk was the first witness, testifying for hours. “I gave them $38 million of essentially free funding, which they used to create an $800 billion for-profit company,” Musk said. He framed his lawsuit as an effort to protect the greater good. “If we make it okay to loot a charity the entire foundation of charitable giving in America will be destroyed,” Musk declared.

Emails uncovered as part of the discovery process, however, revealed that Musk had previously embraced moving OpenAI to a for-profit model. “[Google] Deepmind is moving very fast,” Musk wrote to a colleague at another one of his companies, Neuralink, in 2016. “I am concerned that OpenAI is not on a path to catch up. Setting it up as non-profit might, in hindsight, have been the wrong move. Sense of urgency is not as high.” Before leaving, Musk sought control of a new for-profit arm, seeking a majority of board seats and 51% of shares. He only left after Altman and Brockman refused his demands.

Musk’s cross-examination revealed his loose relationship with the truth and selective short-term memory. At one point, Musk testified that Tesla was not pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI). “No, Tesla is not pursuing AGI. It’s literally trying to make a car drive from A to B,” Musk said. The defense attorney then pulled up an X post from March when Musk said, explicitly, that Tesla was pursuing AGI.

During the cross-examination, Musk was comically reluctant to concede even the most basic facts. Asked whether he was romantically involved with venture capitalist Shivon Zilis, Musk replied, “ I think so.” Zilis is the mother of four of Musk’s children.

Before the trial’s conclusion, Altman, Brockman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella are all expected to testify. The lawsuit resumes on Monday.

[zax] Elon Musk testifies against OpenAI, seeking Sam Altman's ouster npr.org [grap...

zax — 4/29/2026 1:17:35 PM

Elon Musk testifies against OpenAI, seeking Sam Altman's ouster

npr.org

[zax] Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court yro.slashdot.org Technology ...

zax — 4/28/2026 4:32:44 AM

Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court

yro.slashdot.org

Technology tycoons Elon Musk and Sam Altman are poised to face off in a high-stakes trial revolving around the alleged betrayal, deceit and unbridled ambition that blurred the bickering billionaires' once-shared vision for the development of artificial intelligence. The trial, which started Monday with jury selection, centers on the 2015 birth of ChatGPT maker OpenAI as a nonprofit startup primarily funded by Musk before evolving into a capitalistic venture now valued at $852 billion. The trial's outcome could sway the balance of power in AI -- breakthrough technology that is increasingly being feared as a potential job killer and an existential threat to humanity's survival. Those perceived risks are among the reasons that Musk, the world's richest person, cites for filing an August 2024 lawsuit that will now be decided by a jury and U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California.

The civil lawsuit accuses Altman, OpenAI's CEO, and his top lieutenant, Greg Brockman, of double-crossing Musk by straying from the San Francisco company's founding mission to be an altruistic steward of a revolutionary technology. The lawsuit alleges they shifted into a moneymaking mode behind his back. OpenAI has brushed off Musk's allegations as an unfounded case of sour grapes that's aimed at undercutting its rapid growth and bolstering Musk's own xAI, which he launched in 2023 as a competitor. Gonzalez Rogers questioned potential jurors Monday about their views on Musk, Altman and artificial intelligence. Some jurors said they had negative views of Musk, but most said they would still be able to treat him fairly and focus on the facts of the case. [...] "Part of this is about whether a jury believes the people who will testify and whether they are credible," Gonzalez Rogers said during a court hearing earlier this year while explaining why she believe the case merited a trial. The judge will make the final decision on the case, with the jury serving in an advisory role.

The latest development is that a jury has been seated. During selection, several prospective jurors expressed negative views of Elon Musk, but Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected attempts by Musk's lawyer to remove some of them solely on that basis, saying dislike of Musk does not automatically mean someone can't be fair.

The court is selecting nine jurors, and the case is expected to wrap by May 21, when it would go to the jury. Tomorrow, April 28th, will feature opening statements.

[zax] Marius Comper "When Anthropic told the world this month that it had built an ar...

zax — 4/27/2026 11:53:42 AM

Marius Comper

"When Anthropic told the world this month that it had built an artificial intelligence model so powerful that it was too dangerous to release widely, the company named 11 organizations as partners to help mount a defense.

All were from the United States.

Within two weeks, the model, called Mythos, had set off a global scramble unlike anything yet seen in the A.I. era. Mythos, which Anthropic has said is uncannily capable of finding and exploiting hidden flaws in the software that runs the world’s banks, power grids and governments, had become a geopolitical chip — and a U.S. company held it.

World leaders have struggled to figure out the scale of the security risks and how to fix them, with Anthropic sharing Mythos with only Britain outside the United States. The Bank of England governor warned publicly that Anthropic may have found a way to “crack the whole cyber-risk world open.” The European Central Bank began quietly questioning banks about their defenses. Canada’s finance minister compared the threat to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

For U.S. rivals like China and Russia, Mythos underscored the security consequences of falling behind in the A.I. race. One Russian pro-Kremlin outlet called the model “worse than a nuclear bomb.”

The responses illustrated a reality that A.I. researchers have long warned about mostly in theoretical terms: Whoever leads in building the most powerful A.I. models will gain outsize geopolitical advantages. Major A.I. breakthroughs are beginning to function less like product launches and more like weapons tests, and most nations want to understand how the technologies work and what protections are needed.

As foundational A.I. “models become more consequential, access becomes more geopolitical,” said Eduardo Levy Yeyati, a former chief economist at the Central Bank of Argentina and a regional adviser on growth and A.I. at the Inter-American Development Bank. “I would take this episode as a policy wake-up call. Governments can no longer ignore the issue.”

Even the U.S. government, which has been embroiled in a clash with Anthropic over the use of A.I. in warfare, has taken notice of Mythos. On Friday, Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, met with White House officials after some in the Trump administration noted the potential for the new model to wreak havoc on computer systems.

Anthropic, which is based in San Francisco, told The New York Times that it was keeping access to Mythos small because of safety and security concerns. It has focused on sharing the model with more than 40 organizations that provide technology used in maintaining critical global infrastructure like the internet or electricity grids. Anthropic named 11 of the organizations, including Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, that pledged to help develop security fixes for vulnerabilities identified by the model.

The company said that it had no immediate timeline for widely expanding access, but that it would work with the U.S. government and industry partners to determine next steps. It said that it had been bombarded by calls from governments, companies and other organizations seeking access and information, but that these organizations could have varying levels of expertise to safely evaluate such a powerful A.I. model.

Anthropic added that it expected other groups to release A.I. models with similar cyber capabilities more widely within at least 18 months, giving organizations limited time to make the necessary security fixes.

On Tuesday, Anthropic said it was investigating a report that unauthorized users gained access to a version of Mythos.

The scramble over Mythos comes at a moment of minimal international cooperation on A.I. Governments are viewing one another with suspicion as corporations race to outpace rivals. There is no equivalent of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, no shared inspections and no agreed-upon rules for how to handle something like Mythos.

When Anthropic announced the model, many experts praised the company’s caution in limiting who gets to try the model, but expressed concerns about the lack of international coordination to deal with the risk.

Britain was the only other nation to gain access. Its A.I. Security Institute, a government-backed organization, tested Mythos and published an independent evaluation last week, confirming that it could carry out complex cyberattacks that no previous A.I. model had completed.

“This represents a step up in A.I. cyber capabilities,” Kanishka Narayan, Britain’s A.I. minister, said last week on social media, saying the country was taking steps to protect “critical national infrastructure.”

Others got less information. The European Commission, the executive branch of the 27-nation European Union, has met with Anthropic at least three times since the Mythos release, an E.U. official said. But the company has not provided access to the model because the two sides have not agreed on how to share it with the commission, the official said.

In a statement, the commission said it was “assessing possible implications” of Mythos, which “exhibits unprecedented cyber capabilities.”

Claudia Plattner, the president of Germany’s cybersecurity agency, known as B.S.I., said it had not received access to Mythos, but she met with Anthropic employees in San Francisco recently for “meaningful insight” into how it works. The capabilities point to “a paradigm change in the nature of cyber threats,” Ms. Plattner said in a statement.

Among U.S. rivals, the response has been more muted. Despite Anthropic’s recent clash with the Trump administration, Mr. Amodei has made clear that A.I. should be used to defend the United States and other democracies and defeat autocratic adversaries.

Neither Beijing nor Moscow has made a major public statement on Mythos. Inside China, researchers and the broader A.I. community have been watching closely, according to analysts studying the country’s tech community. Many of the country’s banks, energy companies and government agencies run on the same software in which Mythos found vulnerabilities — but for now, they have no seat at the table.

“For China I think this is the second wake-up call after ChatGPT,” said Matt Sheehan, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He added that a U.S. policy to prevent China from obtaining the most sophisticated semiconductors for building advanced A.I. systems was helping to extend the U.S. lead.

Some A.I. researchers in China have privately expressed concern that the country could fall further behind, missing out on advantages that come with building a foundational model first, said Jeffrey Ding, a professor of political science at George Washington University.

Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said China was not familiar with the specifics of Mythos but supported a peaceful, secure and open cyberspace.

Mythos is the latest sign of a growing global A.I. divide. Nations without powerful computing infrastructure and A.I. models risk being left dependent on companies like Anthropic, Google and OpenAI while having little sway over how their products are designed and safeguarded, Mr. Yeyati said.

“The idea that access to frontier A.I. is something a company can unilaterally restrict, using criteria that are opaque and unappealable, should be a real concern,” he said."

[zax] The unflattering secrets revealed so far in Elon Musk’s latest legal feud Hundr...

zax — 4/23/2026 1:33:09 PM

The unflattering secrets revealed so far in Elon Musk’s latest legal feud

Hundreds of court filings have revealed cringey texts, emails or private diary entries of Musk, Sam Altman, other OpenAI founders and other public figures.

washingtonpost.com

Tesla chief executive Elon Musk and Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, are scheduled to face off in court next week in a case brought by Musk that claims Altman and others enriched themselves by allegedly betraying the artificial intelligence company’s founding mission.

The bitter legal feud between the two tech titans is prying open the industry’s most powerful circles by spilling the tea of Silicon Valley VIPs.

Hundreds of court filings have revealed cringey texts, emails or private diary entries of Musk, Altman, other OpenAI founders and other public figures. They include Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg privately offering to use his social platforms to help Musk’s interests, Musk insulting Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos (twice) and a journal in which a big MAGA donor muses about becoming a billionaire, according to the filings. (Bezos owns The Washington Post; OpenAI has a content partnership with The Post.)

There will be fireworks in the federal courtroom in Oakland, California, predicted Andrew Stoltmann, a corporate litigation lawyer not involved in the case who has followed it closely. “We are about to witness the landing of the Hindenburg on the deck of the Titanic; we know it’s going to be crazy and nasty.”

Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but Musk left the company in an acrimonious split in 2018. His lawsuit, originally filed in 2024, alleges that OpenAI broke its founding pledges to share its technology openly with the world as a nonprofit artificial intelligence research lab. Musk argues that Altman and Greg Brockman, another OpenAI co-founder, conspired to enrich themselves at Musk’s expense and asks the court to remove them from their leadership positions and to restore OpenAI to a full nonprofit.

OpenAI has said Musk is simply trying to undercut a competitor to his own AI company, xAI. A spokesperson for OpenAI referred The Post to a website where it has posted running commentary on the dispute. “Motivated by jealousy, regret for walking away from OpenAI and a desire to derail a competing AI company, Elon has spent years harassing OpenAI through baseless lawsuits and public attacks,” the site says.

...

Musk’s alleged secret agent inside OpenAI was also the mother of four of his children

Shivon Zilis is a longtime ally of Musk and has worked at several of his companies. She acted as an “Elon whisperer” to OpenAI, Altman said in his deposition, and the company says she served on its board of directors from 2020 to 2023. Documents in the case include text messages in which the pair appear to discuss how Zilis can feed information from inside OpenAI back to Musk.

</snip> Read the full article here: washingtonpost.com

[zax] Amazon To Invest Up To Another $25 Billion In Anthropic slashdot.org Amazon ...

zax — 4/21/2026 12:34:55 PM

Amazon To Invest Up To Another $25 Billion In Anthropic

slashdot.org

Amazon is expanding its Anthropic partnership with a deal to invest up to another $25 billion, while Anthropic commits to spending more than $100 billion on AWS infrastructure over the next decade to power Claude. "Anthropic's commitment to run its large language models on AWS Trainium for the next decade reflects the progress we've made together on custom silicon, as we continue delivering the technology and infrastructure our customers need to build with generative AI," Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement. CNBC reports:

Amazon's investment includes $5 billion into Anthropic now, with up to $20 billion in the future tied to "certain commercial milestones," according to a release. The initial investment is at Anthropic's latest valuation of $380 billion. Anthropic said in the release that it will bring nearly 1 gigawatt total of Trainium2 and Trainium3 capacity online by the end of the year.

With all of the major hyperscalers competing to build out AI capacity as quickly as possible, Amazon said in February that it expects to shell out roughly $200 billion this year on capital expenditures, mostly on AI infrastructure.

[zax] [bluesky] You can now use ChatGPT with Apple’s CarPlay— The Verge (@theverge.co...

zax — 3/31/2026 5:13:11 PM

[bluesky]

You can now use ChatGPT with Apple’s CarPlay
— The Verge (@theverge.com) 2026-03-31T21:10:01.954Z

[/bluesky]

[Silvio Maria Dragoni] Hello zax, If this were to prove true, I wouldn’t see it as a failure on META’s...

Silvio Maria Dragoni — 3/21/2026 7:24:04 AM

Hello zax,

If this were to prove true, I wouldn’t see it as a failure on META’s part, but rather as evidence that the AI market is becoming an oligopoly faster than expected.

Scale alone (data, computing power, talent) might not be enough in the short term if certain players already have proprietary ‘formulas’ that are difficult to replicate.

My impression is that only a handful of companies will actually reach the finish line. The others will merge, form partnerships or fall behind.

Figures like Elon Musk may ultimately have to focus less on building everything from scratch and more on securing a dominant position within an ecosystem; otherwise, the risk is not only that of falling short of expectations, but of becoming irrelevant.

— Silvio Maria Dragoni

[zax] It is reported that META has delayed the release of its new underperforming mode...

zax — 3/14/2026 6:25:03 AM

It is reported that META has delayed the release of its new underperforming model and is now considering licensing Gemini from Google as a temporary solution.

If this is true, it is evidence that frontier labs have internal recipes that cannot be easily beaten by scaling compute and data, or by hiring human talent, at least not in the short term. META has all the data one could wish for, sufficient compute, and has paid billions to hire the best people. It wasn't enough.

P.S. People keep leaving xAI.

facebook.com

[zax] DOA, IMO New York bill would ban chatbots from answering medical questions boi...

zax — 3/4/2026 5:12:13 PM

DOA, IMO

New York bill would ban chatbots from answering medical questions

boingboing.net

[zax] "... a business and political coup for OpenAI, taking advantage of a rival’s tro...

zax — 2/28/2026 3:07:34 AM

"... a business and political coup for OpenAI, taking advantage of a rival’s troubles."

OpenAI Reaches A.I. Agreement With Defense Dept. After Anthropic Clash

The deal came hours after President Trump had ordered federal agencies to stop using artificial intelligence technology made by Anthropic, an OpenAI rival.

nytimes.com

OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, said on Friday that it had reached an agreement with the Pentagon to provide its artificial intelligence technologies for classified systems, just hours after President Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using A.I. technology made by rival Anthropic.

Under the deal, OpenAI agreed to let the Pentagon use its A.I. systems for any lawful purpose. The San Francisco company also said it had found a way to ensure that its technologies would not be applied for domestic surveillance in the United States or with autonomous weapons by installing specific technical guardrails on its systems.

“In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome,” Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said in a social media post, using the initials for the Department of War, the administration’s preferred name for the Department of Defense.

The Department of Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The deal appeared to be a business and political coup for OpenAI, taking advantage of a rival’s troubles. Anthropic, which competes with OpenAI, had battled the Pentagon in recent weeks over how its A.I. could be used. In negotiations over a $200 million contract, the Pentagon had demanded that it be able to use Anthropic’s A.I. system for all lawful purposes, or it would cut the company off from government business.

But Anthropic said it needed terms that would ensure that its A.I. technology would not be used for domestic surveillance of Americans or for autonomous lethal weapons. The Pentagon, in turn, said a private contractor could not decide how its tools would be used for national security. Their disagreement erupted into public view this month and escalated as both dug in their heels.

Anthropic and the Pentagon failed to agree on terms by a 5:01 p.m. deadline on Friday. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth then designated Anthropic a “supply-chain risk to national security,” a label that cuts the A.I. company off from business with the U.S. government. Mr. Trump also weighed in, calling the start-up a “radical Left AI company.”

Amid the maelstrom, OpenAI stepped in. This week, Mr. Altman publicly backed Anthropic’s position that A.I. should not be used for domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons. On CNBC on Friday, he said he mostly trusted Anthropic and that “they really do care about safety.”

At the same time, Mr. Altman engaged in talks with the Pentagon, starting on Wednesday, over a deal for its technology, said two people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Altman negotiated with the Department of Defense in a different way from Anthropic, agreeing to the use of OpenAI’s technology for all lawful purposes. Along the way, he also negotiated the right to put safeguards into OpenAI’s technologies that would prevent its systems from being used in ways that it did not want them to be.

OpenAI “will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted,” Mr. Altman said.

These moves allowed Mr. Altman to uphold safety principles around A.I. while still landing the Pentagon contract. He added that the Pentagon had agreed to have some OpenAI employees work alongside government personnel on classified projects to “to help with our models and to ensure their safety.”

</snip> Read the rest here: nytimes.com

[Frank Sully] Trump is a Bully!

Frank Sully — 2/27/2026 5:54:35 PM

[zax] BREAKING Trump orders U.S. government to drop use of Anthropic’s technology ...

zax — 2/27/2026 4:25:03 PM

BREAKING

Trump orders U.S. government to drop use of Anthropic’s technology

President Trump made a dramatic intervention in the dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon over use of AI for autonomous weapons or surveillance.

washingtonpost.com

President Donald Trump said he was directing all federal agencies to stop working with Anthropic, blasting the artificial intelligence company as a risk to national security after a tumultuous week of negotiations between the start-up and the Pentagon.

“The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media site Truth Social, using the administration’s preferred name for the Defense Department. “Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY.”

Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The company has resisted Pentagon demands that Anthropic allow the military to use its AI system, Claude, for any purpose permitted by the law. Anthropic had insisted on protections against its technology being used to power fully autonomous weapons or wide-scale domestic surveillance.

... washingtonpost.com

[zax] [bluesky] OpenAI's Sam Altman says he shares the "red lines" set by rival Anthr...

zax — 2/27/2026 3:32:42 PM

[bluesky]

OpenAI's Sam Altman says he shares the "red lines" set by rival Anthropic restricting how the military uses AI models, amid Anthropic's escalating feud with the Pentagon. n.pr/4rO27YE
— NPR (@npr.org) 2026-02-27T20:31:31.740821Z

[/bluesky]

[zax] OpenAI Raises $110 Billion in the Largest Private Funding Round Ever slashdot.o...

zax — 2/27/2026 10:12:30 AM

OpenAI Raises $110 Billion in the Largest Private Funding Round Ever

slashdot.org

OpenAI has closed what is now the largest private financing in history -- a $110 billion round at a $730 billion pre-money valuation that more than doubles the $40 billion raise it completed just a year ago, itself a record for a private tech company at the time.

Amazon invested $50 billion, SoftBank put in $30 billion, and Nvidia committed $30 billion, and additional investors are expected to join as the round progresses. The valuation is a sharp jump from the $500 billion OpenAI commanded in a secondary financing in October, and the round dwarfs recent raises by rivals Anthropic ($30 billion) and xAI ($20 billion).

The company has been telling investors it is now targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spend by 2030, a more measured figure than the $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments CEO Sam Altman had touted months earlier. OpenAI is projecting more than $280 billion in total revenue by 2030, split roughly equally between consumer and enterprise. ChatGPT now has over 900 million weekly active users and more than 50 million paying subscribers.

[zax] Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei just released a striking statement detailing the comp...

zax — 2/27/2026 6:43:07 AM

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei just released a striking statement detailing the company’s deep integration with U.S. military and intelligence systems — and why it is now drawing a hard line against certain uses of AI it says could threaten democratic values.

Here is the full statement:

Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
Feb 26, 2026

I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.

Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community. We were the first frontier AI company to deploy our models in the US government’s classified networks, the first to deploy them at the National Laboratories, and the first to provide custom models for national security customers. Claude is extensively deployed across the Department of War and other national security agencies for mission-critical applications, such as intelligence analysis, modeling and simulation, operational planning, cyber operations, and more.

Anthropic has also acted to defend America’s lead in AI, even when it is against the company’s short-term interest. We chose to forgo several hundred million dollars in revenue to cut off the use of Claude by firms linked to the Chinese Communist Party (some of whom have been designated by the Department of War as Chinese Military Companies), shut down CCP-sponsored cyberattacks that attempted to abuse Claude, and have advocated for strong export controls on chips to ensure a democratic advantage.

Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner.

However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do. Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now:

• Mass domestic surveillance. We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties. To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI. For example, under current law, the government can purchase detailed records of Americans’ movements, web browsing, and associations from public sources without obtaining a warrant, a practice the Intelligence Community has acknowledged raises privacy concerns and that has generated bipartisan opposition in Congress. Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale.

• Fully autonomous weapons. Partially autonomous weapons, like those used today in Ukraine, are vital to the defense of democracy. Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk. We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems, but they have not accepted this offer. In addition, without proper oversight, fully autonomous weapons cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained, professional troops exhibit every day. They need to be deployed with proper guardrails, which don’t exist today.

To our knowledge, these two exceptions have not been a barrier to accelerating the adoption and use of our models within our armed forces to date.

The Department of War has stated they will only contract with AI companies who accede to “any lawful use” and remove safeguards in the cases mentioned above. They have threatened to remove us from their systems if we maintain these safeguards; they have also threatened to designate us a “supply chain risk”—a label reserved for US adversaries, never before applied to an American company—and to invoke the Defense Production Act to force the safeguards’ removal. These latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.

Regardless, these threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.

It is the Department’s prerogative to select contractors most aligned with their vision. But given the substantial value that Anthropic’s technology provides to our armed forces, we hope they reconsider. Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department and our warfighters—with our two requested safeguards in place. Should the Department choose to offboard Anthropic, we will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider, avoiding any disruption to ongoing military planning, operations, or other critical missions. Our models will be available on the expansive terms we have proposed for as long as required.

We remain ready to continue our work to support the national security of the United States.

[zax] [X] A Bloomberg Terminal costs $24,000 a year. Someone just recreated one using...

zax — 2/26/2026 9:41:23 AM

[X]

A Bloomberg Terminal costs $24,000 a year. Someone just recreated one using Perplexity Computer for $200 a month.

Bloomberg's moat was never the data, that's increasingly commoditized. It was the interface: thousands of keyboard shortcuts, proprietary screens, and muscle memory… https://t.co/0aBAU75u9i
— Mark Gadala-Maria (@markgadala) February 26, 2026

[/X]

[zax] OpenAI Has No Moat, No Tech Edge, No Lock-in and No Real Plan, Analyst Warns sl...

zax — 2/20/2026 5:32:19 PM

OpenAI Has No Moat, No Tech Edge, No Lock-in and No Real Plan, Analyst Warns

slashdot.org

OpenAI faces four fundamental strategic problems that no amount of fundraising or capex announcements can paper over, according to analyst Benedict Evans: it has no unique technology, its enormous user base is shallow and fragile, incumbents like Google and Meta are leveraging superior distribution to close the gap, and its product roadmap is dictated by whatever the research labs happen to discover rather than by deliberate product strategy.

The company claims 800-900 million weekly active users, but 80% of them sent fewer than 1,000 messages across all of 2025, averaging fewer than three prompts a day, and only 5% pay. OpenAI has acknowledged what it calls a "capability gap" between what models can do and what people use them for -- a framing Evans reads as a polite way to avoid admitting the absence of product-market fit. Gemini and Meta AI are meanwhile gaining share rapidly because the products look nearly indistinguishable to typical users, and Google and Meta already have the distribution to push them. Evans compares ChatGPT to Netscape -- an early leader in a category where the products were hard to tell apart, overtaken by a competitor that used distribution as a crowbar.

On capex, Evans argues that Altman's ambitions -- claiming $1.4 trillion and 30 gigawatts of future compute -- amount to an attempt to will OpenAI into a seat at a table where annual infrastructure spending may need to reach hundreds of billions. But a seat at the table is not leverage over it; he compares this to TSMC, which holds a de facto chip monopoly yet captures little value further up the stack.

OpenAI's own strategy diagrams from late last year laid out a full-stack platform vision -- chips, models, developer tools, consumer products -- each layer reinforcing the others. Evans argues this borrows the language of Windows and iOS without possessing any of the underlying dynamics: no network effect, no lock-in preventing developers from calling a different model's API, and no reason customers would know or care which foundation model powers the product they are using.

[zax] [X] This was a 2 line prompt in seedance 2. If the hollywood is cooked guys are...

zax — 2/16/2026 9:32:55 AM

[X]

This was a 2 line prompt in seedance 2. If the hollywood is cooked guys are right maybe the hollywood is cooked guys are cooked too idk. pic.twitter.com/dNTyLUIwAV
— Ruairi Robinson (@RuairiRobinson) February 11, 2026

[/X]

[Frank Sully] NVIDIA To Invest $20B In OpenAI impactnews-wire.com

Frank Sully — 2/4/2026 1:26:39 PM

[zax] OpenAI's Lead Is Contracting as AI Competition Intensifies from the not-the-o...

zax — 2/4/2026 1:16:29 AM

OpenAI's Lead Is Contracting as AI Competition Intensifies
from the not-the-only-game-in-town dept.

m.slashdot.org

OpenAI's rivals are cutting into ChatGPT's lead. From a report: The top chatbot's market share fell from 69.1% to 45.3% between January 2025 and January 2026 among daily U.S. users of its mobile app. Gemini, in the same time period, rose from 14.7% to 25.1% and Grok rose from 1.6% to 15.2%.

The data, obtained by Big Technology from mobile insights firm Apptopia, indicates the chatbot race has tightened meaningfully over the past year with Google's surge showing up in the numbers. Overall, the chatbot market increased 152% since last January, according to Apptopia, with ChatGPT exhibiting healthy download growth.

On desktop and mobile web, a similar pattern appears, according to analytics firm Similarweb. Visits to ChatGPT went from 3.8 billion to 5.7 billion between January 2025 and January 2026, a 50% increase, while visits to Gemini went from 267.7 million to 2 billion, a 647% increase. ChatGPT is still far and away the leader in visits, but it has company in the race now.