Yesterday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took the stand in US District Court in Oakland, California, where he testified about his relationship with Elon Musk, Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI, and more. The executive indicated that he has never received a clear explanation from the company's board of directors why Sam Altman was briefly ousted as OpenAI CEO.

At the time, reports emerged suggesting that Satya Nadella was blindsided by the move. He further revealed that he wasn't told about the decision to fire Altman in advance, and was only pulled out of a meeting and informed about the ouster after the fact.

The board members had revealed that Altman wasn’t consistently candid with his leadership, operations, and efforts (via CNBC). However, Satya Nadella dismissed these claims, suggesting that there was more than meets the eye, further indicating that “[t]here may have been some jealousy … coming through.” — “It was sort of amateur city, as far as I’m concerned,” Nadella added.

Elon Musk has accused OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman of defrauding him out of billions of dollars that he invested in OpenAI using a fake humanitarian mission. He also added Microsoft to the fold, claiming that the tech giant helped Altman and Brockman defraud him.

Interestingly, Nadella testified that Elon Musk never reached out about issues with Microsoft's deal with OpenAI, although they have each other's phone numbers. He even showed the jurors an email Musk had sent him, thanking him for financial and computing support for OpenAI in 2016: "Very much appreciated," Musk indicated in the email. "Will make sure that people know about Microsoft's help."

Satya Nadella indicated that Elon Musk didn't raise any issues when the company initially made a $1 billion investment in OpenAI in 2019. Similarly, he remained quiet when the news broke that Microsoft's investment stake in OpenAI had risen to $10 billion.

Nadella indicated that he was “very proud” that Microsoft took the risk to invest in OpenAI when “no one else was willing” to bet on the ever-evolving technology and OpenAI. The Microsoft executive further revealed that the company took a $15 million loss by letting OpenAI use Azure at a discount to power ChatGPT.

With this in mind, Nadella's testimony in the ongoing Musk v. Altman trial, the billionaire only began complaining about Microsoft and OpenAI's partnership after he filed the 2024 lawsuit. This also seemingly supports the theory and speculation that Musk is a sore loser, as he tries to compete against ChatGPT with Grok.

Nadella was also questioned about his "It wouldn't matter if OpenAI disappeared tomorrow" remark amid tension between Microsoft and OpenAI. "We have the data, IP rights, and all the capability." —"We are below them, above them, around them," Nadella added.

The statement was viewed as "a new war slogan" by some of the executive's fans. While this might be used by Musk's legal team to support his premise about donating $38 million to a charitable cause, only for OpenAI to evolve into a for-profit venture, abandoning its founding mission.

While on the stand, Nadella indicated that he used the statement to calm concerns about Altman's sudden ouster as CEO. "It goes back to me trying to communicate as clearly as possible to customers that they can count on us," Nadella indicated, suggesting that Copilot and other OpenAI products would continue, regardless of OpenAI's situation. We'll see.

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It's never been a secret that Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI is less-than-ideal, and things might have just taken a turn for the worse. In a leaked memo exclusively viewed by CNBC, the ChatGPT maker is seemingly getting cozy with Amazon to bolster its enterprise business.

In case you missed it, OpenAI and Amazon have been in discussions over a $50 billion deal that could see the AI firm using its cloud computing services.

A separate report revealed that Microsoft was considering taking legal action against the two companies because the billion-dollar deal could potentially violate a critical clause granting Microsoft exclusive rights as the AI giant’s cloud provider through Azure.

Despite Microsoft's $13 billion (and counting) investment in OpenAI, the company's newly appointed revenue chief, Denise Dresser, indicated that the tie-up with the tech giant has seemingly capped its growth in the enterprise landscape.

“Our Microsoft partnership has been foundational to our success. But it has also limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are — for many that’s Bedrock,” Dresser highlighted in the memo. “Since we announced the partnership at the end of February, inbound demand from our customers for this offering has been frankly staggering.”

Right now, OpenAI is up against Anthropic's massive market share with Claude, not forgetting Google's Gemini, which is also gaining traction and adoption rapidly. As such, its new partnership with Amazon places it in a unique position to compete with its rivals on an even playing field.

Dresser called the enterprise market "noisy and volatile" while encouraging staffers to center their focus on customers. She also indicated that Anthropic's business model is built on “fear, restriction, and the idea that a small group of elites should control AI,” but says OpenAI's positive message will stand the test of time.

In the past, OpenAI has complained about Microsoft not meeting its cloud computing needs. But CEO Sam Altman indicated that the company was no longer compute-constrained after announcing the $500 billion Stargate project. However, the AI firm walked away from the project after it was unable to find agreeable terms with Oracle.

This news comes after market analysts and experts began sounding warnings about investor interest in AI after big tech companies invested in the ever-evolving landscape, which failed to establish clear paths to profitability.

Coincidentally, Microsoft has just closed its worst quarter since the 2008 financial crisis, which translates to approximately a quarter of its market value. However, the tech giant isn't giving up on its AI ambitions, as it plans to invest $146 billion in infrastructure in 2026.

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Right now, most conversations around advances in generative AI are almost always compared to how it performs against humans. With AGI (artificial general intelligence) as the icing on the cake for top research labs, it makes sense. Besides, the buzzword describes a sophisticated AI system that surpasses human cognitive capabilities.

AI models are quite impressive — they can already write code (though human oversight and intervention is encouraged) and you can also leverage tools like ChatGPT Health to seek medical and wellness advice.

But there's also so much that AI can't do. For instance, AI sleuth and TikTok user @huskistaken shared a now viral video on the platform asking ChatGPT voice model to time him running a mile. However, he quickly established that the AI-powered chatbot opted to make up a time rather than tracking it (via Gizmodo)

Husk confronted the tool about it being less-then-truthful about tracking his run, but it insisted that it actually followed his prompt.

Interestingly, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed the issue while appearing at the on the show Mostly Human to talk about the future of AI, his company, and humanity. While speaking to the host, Laurie Segall, Altman was asked to react to the viral video about ChatGPT lying about tracking time and presenting it as the gospel truth to the user.

The executive laughed at the video, but it also seemed that he found it a tad cringe. Altman quickly indicated that it was a "known issue" when Segall asked him if he'd present the video to his product team for potential resolution.

Sam Altman admitted that ChatGPT's voice model doesn't have the capability of starting a time or even keeping track of time. “Maybe another year before something like that works well,” added Altman. “But we will add the intelligence into the voice models.”

To take things a notch higher, Husk asked ChatGPT if it could actually track time. The chatbot got a bit snarky, indicating that it's “just a basic part of what I can do.”

The AI sleuth proceeded to play the clip of Altman indicating that ChatGPT can't track time. However, the AI model seemingly dismissed Altman, claiming, “What he’s saying is that some voice models might not have all the capabilities, but I do.” It insisted that “I definitely have a time capability” when pressured to admit that it can't keep track of time.

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It's no secret that top AI research labs are breaking the bank to keep the lights on while chasing the ever-elusive intelligence bag. Multiple reports have suggested that investor interest in artificial intelligence is rapidly waning as these companies struggle to establish a clear path to profitability despite plowing billions into the sector.

In January, a damning report suggested OpenAI could be on the verge of making a $14 billion loss in 2026, which could lead to bankruptcy by mid-2027. While OpenAI generates approximately $13 billion in annual revenue from ChatGPT and LLM access fees, it reportedly spends up to $1.4 billion on infrastructure expansion, model training, research hiring, and computing.

However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman might have a master plan in the works that could permanently solve the AI firm's money problem. Speaking at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, the executive suggested that artificial intelligence will eventually be traded as a basic utility like electricity or water, metered by usage (via Business Insider).

Altman's idea of paying for intelligence like an electricity or water bill doesn't seem farfetched. It's not like we're not paying for AI already...

Of course, there's a free tier for services like ChatGPT, but OpenAI has found a creative way to make money off it, by integrating ads into the user experience.

Reports suggest that advanced AI scaling might have already hit a wall, citing a lack of high-quality content for model training and computing power.

Would utility pricing make you use AI more or less? Share your thoughts with me in the comments.

💬 Is paying for AI as a utility a better option than monthly subscription plans?

If we get to the point where we pay for AI like a utility bill, I'd argue that this approach is actually better since you'll be billed based on your usage. I'm not sure I can say the same for power users who've heavily integrated the technology into their workflow.

Sam Altman indicated that demand for AI is skyrocketing and research labs are building toward a future where intelligence is delivered on demand. “One of the most important things in the future is that we make intelligence, to borrow an old phrase from the energy industry that didn’t quite work: ‘Too cheap to meter,'" the executive added.

At the end of the day, as the demand for AI surges, computing power will likely become more scarce. As such, AI firms will be forced to charge more per unit for model tokens or just not meet demand.

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Generative AI shows a lot of promise, especially in the education and medicine sectors. But on the flip side, it also poses a great threat to humanity. Even Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei admitted that the AI research lab doesn't understand exactly how its own models work.

Last week, Anthropic, which touts itself as the most safety-conscious of the top research labs, refused a Pentagon contract that would have allowed Claude to be used for mass surveillance of American citizens and autonomous weapons systems. However, OpenAI signed the agreement with the Pentagon to provide its artificial intelligence technologies for classified systems.

Anthropic rejected the agreement because the U.S. Defense Department demanded unrestricted military use of its Claude AI models. Consequently, US President Trump's administration banned all federal agencies from using Anthropic products after designating the company as a supply chain risk.

News of OpenAI’s deal with the Pentagon spread like wildfire across social media, igniting a wave of backlash and outrage. In the fast-moving digital era, the company quickly became a target of cancel culture, with hashtags like “Cancel ChatGPT” and “QuitGPT” going viral within hours of the announcement.

While Anthropic’s Claude AI soared to the top spot as the No. 1 free app in the U.S. App Store, ChatGPT saw uninstall rates spike by nearly 300%.

On Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that the company had rushed into its recent deal with the U.S. Department of Defense. He further revealed that OpenAI plans to amend parts of the contract, adding new language to reinforce its principles on sensitive issues such as surveillance.

The executive also clarified that the amendments will categorically indicate that “the AI system shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals.”

"There are many things the technology just isn’t ready for, and many areas we don’t yet understand the tradeoffs required for safety," Altman indicated.

Coincidentally, the US struck Iran almost immediately after signing the agreement with OpenAI, which allowed the use of AI for military purposes. You can read more about issues around the controversial agreement in Sam Altman's recent AMA session on X.

Given the exorbitant costs of advancing AI development and the shortage of high-quality training data, releasing these models into the wild seems almost reckless, especially when there’s no “big red button” to halt the technology’s progression.

🗣️ Reader Discussion: Is OpenAI Losing the Plot?

Sam Altman is suddenly apologizing, ChatGPT uninstalls just spiked 295%, and critics are calling the Pentagon AI deal “opportunistic and sloppy.” It’s been a week for OpenAI — and the article lays out exactly how the backlash snowballed, why users are frustrated, and what Altman is trying to walk back.

This is one of those moments where the AI hype cycle slams into the reality of user trust, corporate ambition, and public perception. Whether you think the outrage is justified or overblown, the numbers don’t lie: people are uninstalling, lawmakers are circling, and OpenAI is scrambling to regain control of the narrative.

So let’s talk about it.

Are you still using ChatGPT, or has this latest mess pushed you away too?

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Generative AI has advanced tremendously, particularly among AI chatbots like ChatGPT. I can remember hallucinations and outrightly wrong responses to queries among the top complaints lodged by users in the early days of ChatGPT and Bing Chat (now Microsoft Copilot).

While ChatGPT and Copilot have improved significantly, they still often generate incorrect responses. So, it's still important to tread carefully when interacting with these tools. If you've ever interacted with ChatGPT, you might have noticed a subtle disclaimer at the bottom of its answers: "ChatGPT can make mistakes."

Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expressed shock over the high degree of trust people have in ChatGPT. "People have a very high degree of trust in ChatGPT, which is interesting, because AI hallucinates," Altman added. "It should be the tech that you don't trust that much."

Now, a study from Pennsylvania State University found that being generally rude or mean to ChatGPT might help you generate better and more accurate responses from the chatbot (via Fortune).

The researchers used OpenAI's ChatGPT-4o model for the study, discovering that the model generated more accurate results on 50 multiple-choice questions as the prompts used became increasingly rude.

For instance, the chatbot seemed to generate better responses when the researchers used prompts like "Hey, gofer, figure this out" than when they used polite language like "Would you be so kind as to solve the following question?"

For more context, among the approximately 250 prompts, the "very rude" prompts generated better responses with an accuracy of 84.8%, which is 4% higher than that of the "very polite" prompts.

While using mean and rude prompts seems to make AI chatbots like ChatGPT less susceptible to hallucination episodes, the researchers warned that it could result in “uncivil discourse.”

However, they admitted that their study was limited to a small sample size. What's more, the findings were based on OpenAI's previous ChatGPT-4o model. Perhaps the results would have varied if the company had more sample responses and AI models for the study?

The researchers indicated that advanced AI models might have disregarded the prompt's tone, focusing solely on the question to provide a clear response.

This study at least highlights the continued importance of proper prompt engineering skills and how they impact the responses you generate from these AI-powered chatbots. The reactions are night and day.

Perhaps Microsoft was right that ChatGPT isn't "better" than Copilot; we're just not using it as intended. The software giant highlighted a lack of prompt engineering skills as the main reason for the complaint from users.

Last year, Microsoft researchers published an interesting study claiming that an overreliance and dependency on AI-powered tools like Copilot negatively impact people's critical thinking capabilities. Perhaps more concerning, the study suggested that it may, in the long term, atrophy your cognitive faculties.

A separate study by OpenAI revealed that overdependency on ChatGPT may lead to loneliness, ultimately leading to a loss of confidence in decision-making.

Do your prompt engineering skills affect the chatbots response quality? Share your thoughts in the comments and cast your vote!

OpenAI has cemented its name in the tech industry through its ChatGPT and flagship AI models like GPT-5.2, but the company is looking do a little bit more, specifically in the hardware landscape.

Last year, the ChatGPT maker made several strategic moves that suggest it could be looking to dabble in hardware development. For context, the firm hired former Apple chief designer Jony Ive to lead operations in its hardware department. It also acquired Ive's AI device startup, io, for approximately $6.5 billion to bolster its advances in the space.

Now, it's public knowledge that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been working closely with Apple's former design legend Jony Ive on a hardware device that could lead to the biggest tech disruption since the iPhone launch in 2007. However, details about the project have remained under wraps.

Subtle hints about the development of the device have slipped over the past few months, including Altman revealing that the company is developing a small family of devices to reinvent human-computer interaction.

Late last year, Jony Ive and Sam Altman confirmed that OpenAI finally has a prototype for its super-secret AI device, which could potentially launch in less than 2 years.

However, in an exclusive report by Axios, OpenAI's Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane revealed that it is getting ready to announce its first hardware device in the second half of 2026.

While the ChatGPT maker hasn't disclosed more details about the device, multiple reports from Asian outlets and leakers suggest that OpenAI's first device could be a pair of earbuds (via TechCrunch).

The reports suggest that OpenAI's earbuds will be sophisticated compared to existing offerings. As you might have guessed, the device will be deeply integrated with AI technology, possibly ChatGPT, with a custom 2-nanometer processor. However, rather than sending requests to the cloud, the device will handle assigned AI tasks locally.

Another report from a Taiwanese newspaper claims that OpenAI could be looking to partner with China-based Luxshare for manufacturing, but the company could close the deal with Taiwan’s Foxconn. Additionally, the company plans to ship approximately 40-50 million units in the first year of sales.

This could be OpenAI's attempt to get a direct line to users through its new hardware entry for its AI models and ChatGPT offerings, like Google with Android. While ChatGPT boasts close to 1 billion weekly users, it remains to be seen whether they'll ditch current offerings for OpenAI's AI earbuds.

Will OpenAI's rumored AI earbuds cause the biggest tech disruption since the iPhone launch? Share your thoughts in the comments and cast your vote!

OpenAI is arguably one of the most sought-after AI research labs, primarily because of ChatGPT. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella argues that the firm had a 2-year lead to develop ChatGPT uncontested, which uniquely positioned the company to succeed in the ever-evolving landscape.

Everything might look good on paper, but OpenAI is reportedly burning through vast amounts of cash to keep up with sophisticated AI advances while simultaneously attempting to maintain a healthy lead over its competitors.

This is amid a plethora of challenges, including user backlash for integrating ads into ChatGPT, the court battle it's embroiled in with Elon Musk over its for-profit restructure and "ill-gotten gains," a lack of high-quality content for model training, among many other issues.

As it happens, cash flow continues to be a pain in OpenAI's neck, with multiple reports suggesting that the company might be biting a little more than it can chew in terms of its spending on AI development. The reports suggest that the ChatGPT maker could make a $14 billion loss in 2026, primarily driven by infrastructure expansion, model training, research hiring, and compute costs (via artificialintelligenceee on IG).

Late last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expressed his frustrations over the AI bubble talk, dismissing concerns about the firm's exorbitant spending on sophisticated projects to keep up with the AI hype.

While OpenAI reportedly generates up to $13 billion in revenue annually from ChatGPT and LLM access fees, the firm spends up to $1.4 billion on computing. It's unclear whether the injection of ads into ChatGPT's user experience will help bridge this gap.

However, Sam Altman claims OpenAI's revenue is "growing steeply," further highlighting that the company expects the demand across its consumer and enterprise businesses, including ChatGPT and future hardware developments, to see a surge in demand.

Perhaps more interestingly, Sam Altman indicated that he expects OpenAI's revenue to exponentially surge to $100 billion by 2027. But a report from Tom's Hardware seemingly disputes Altman's claims, suggesting that OpenAI could completely run out of cash by mid-2027.

A separate report from last year suggested that the AI firm is projected to make an $8 billion loss in 2025, which could potentially rise to $40 billion by 2028. Sebastian Mallaby, an economist at the Council on Foreign Relations, says that even if OpenAI changes its strategy and even caters to some of its financial woes using "its overvalued shares," it won't be able to wiggle out of this difficult situation easily.

To that end, OpenAI might need another round of funding, raising funds from its investors to keep its operations afloat. At the same time, it also needs to establish a clear path to profitability in the elusive landscape to secure funding as investor interest begins to wane.

Will OpenAI be able to keep the lights on without establishing a clear profitability path? Share your thoughts in the comments and cast your vote in the poll!

Over the past few years, Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk has made damning allegations about OpenAI and filed multiple lawsuits against the company, citing a stark betrayal of its founding mission and involvement in racketeering activities.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, ruled that Musk will get his day in court over OpenAI's for-profit restructure and "ill-gotten gains," which is slated to commence in April and could last up to four weeks.

OpenAI recently published a critical blog post, accusing Elon Musk of misrepresenting the truth by selectively sharing snippets of past conversations that portrayed him favorably against the ChatGPT maker.

The company referred to Musk's lawsuit as part of a broader strategy of harassment designed to slow down its AI development and advances, giving his own company, xAI, the competitive edge and advantage. "He is now grossly misrepresenting the written record to further his harassment," OpenAI added.

In the blog post titled "The Truth Elon Left Out," OpenAI shared several instances where Musk cherry-picks and publishes snippets, which, when read in context, tell a very different story.

OpenAI indicated that they had reached an agreement with Elon Musk that a for-profit structure would be the next phase for OpenAI in 2017. However, the negotiations hit a wall when OpenAI refused to give Musk full control of the company.

According to OpenAI:

"The truth is that we and Elon agreed in 2017 that a for-profit structure would be the next phase for OpenAI; negotiations ended when we refused to give him full control; we rejected his offer to merge OpenAI into Tesla; we tried to find another path to achieve the mission together; and then he quit OpenAI, encouraging us to find our own path to raising billions of dollars, without which he gave us a 0% chance⁠ of success."

Musk revealed that he was reluctant to invest in the company without full control "since he'd been burned by not having it in the past." Perhaps more interestingly, OpenAI revealed that it was surprised when Elon Musk suggested that his kids would control AGI (artificial general intelligence) during succession discussions.

Elon Musk is suing key figures in OpenAI's leadership, including CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman. The billionaire alleges that the AI research lab used a fake humanitarian mission to dupe him into investing $38 million, only to shift away from its mission and evolve into a for-profit venture in October 2025.

In one of the entries shared by OpenAI, Brockman indicated that:

"Btw another realization from this is that it’d be wrong to steal the non-profit from him," Brockman added. "To convert to a b-corp without him. that’d be pretty morally bankrupt. and he’s really not an idiot."

As the legal battle between Elon Musk and OpenAI intensifies, the AI firm has recently announced that it is introducing ads to ChatGPT. The change will impact free and Go users, with the ads appearing at the bottom of the chat. This could be part of the company's strategy to generate more revenue for its sophisticated AI advances and potentially address some of its financial woes.

Does Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI have merit, or is he simply trying to advance his xAI agenda? Share your thoughts in the comments and cast your vote in the poll!

OpenAI's Sam Altman seems to have received a hard dose of reality from somewhere, as ChatGPT's wanton money-digestion is coming to an end.

Yesterday, OpenAI formally announced that it will begin bringing ads to ChatGPT. The ads will appear at the bottom of chats for free and "Go" subscription users. Users on higher tiers won't see them (for now at least).

OpenAI claims that it won't sell your data to third parties, and that there will be ways to opt-out of using conversations for ad personalization. But, it's a uniquely interesting moment for ChatGPT and OpenAI for a variety of reasons.

OpenAI has been under immense pressure from Google Gemini, whose latest models have seen it leapfrog ChatGPT in some benchmarks. Investors have increasingly become aware of Google's powerful position with regards to AI, controlling the entire stack from server tech and cloud, to endpoints via Android, Chrome, and Google.com itself.

ChatGPT finds itself on something of an island, reliant almost entirely on apps to find users and third-parties to find compute, chiefly Microsoft and Azure. It has hundreds of millions of monthly active users and various major enterprise contracts, but its balance sheet is nowhere near approaching any semblance of profitability. Yet, it's on the hook for over a trillion dollars of compute commitments in the next decade, and that money certainly has to come from somewhere.

Investors have clearly gotten tired of waiting for AI to show pathways to profitability. Microsoft's own share price has seen a downward trend over the last couple of quarters, as capital expenditure seems to be outpacing the raw economics of the now. Microsoft's products are powered by ChatGPT and other OpenAI models, and it has found success with products like Github Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot integrations. Fortune 500 companies tend to prefer Microsoft for its expertise in regulatory compliance, as well as its industry-leading position in corporate security. Nation states use Microsoft Copilot (for better or worse), owing to perceptions around its capacity to remain insulated and secure from the wider web.

Google, Microsoft, Meta, and other major tech companies can self-cash flow its AI development and infrastructure build out, but ChatGPT relies entirely on funding rounds from venture capital firms, Wall Street, and big companies like Microsoft. ChatGPT's balance sheet reads like a sci-fi horror novel, and the mood seems to be shifting away from hype and towards hard realities.

ChatGPT's ads were rumored for a long time, and felt inevitable in the end. There are various examples throughout history of companies offering products for free to create habitual behavior in their customers, only to eventually move hard towards profitability. Given how rapid ChatGPT burns cash given its astronomical costs and inefficient products, ads were always the most logical conclusion. The same is more than likely true for Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and other similar AI products — there's no such thing as "free," as we all know.

I realize the irony of writing this on a website that has more than its fair share of ads, but I don't think anyone ever suggested blogging without ads would ever make for a viable way to make a living. Altman, however, did say at a previous event that "ads were a last resort as a business model" for OpenAI. Does that mean we're in "last resort" territory for the entire company?

"I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us as a business model. I would do it if it meant that it was the only way for us to get everybody in the world access to great services ... but if we could find something that doesn't do that, I prefer that." Altman said during the 2024 XFund Experiment Cup.

It seems an alternative was never found.

The same is most likely true for Microsoft Copilot, which is not only free on Windows 11 and the web, but also provides free access to some of OpenAI's more advanced models that typically require a subscription.

"I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us as a business model," - Sam Altman, October 2024 from r/singularity

One of Microsoft's big existential issues as a business has revolved around figuring out how to monetize those "free" users. A user on Windows who doesn't subscribe to OneDrive, Xbox Game Pass, or Office 365 is effectively useless to them. Apple iOS and Google Play-based Android are harvesting cash from their users via app purchases and in-app purchases. Microsoft has always kept Windows open to its credit, but it's also why we're seeing "enshittification" factors creep into the OS. If a user won't pay for services, then at least there's some telemetry and data to harvest from them, right? But it's also why Windows has become pretty unpopular despite boasting hundreds of millions of users, and operating an effective monopoly in desktop computing. The bloatware, ads in the shell, and aggressive positioning of its own apps and services have weighed on perceptions of the OS.

But even for Microsoft, things aren't exactly getting cheaper. Shareholders are demanding revenue to rise in line with inflation, and Copilot seems like an obvious additional vector for ads and "personalization," by which Copilot offers products based on what it knows about you from your conversations.

Increasingly it feels like chatbots were less about boosting our productivity and more about having a more effective method than social media likes and cookies for figuring out what kind of ads and products to sell to us. But maybe I'm cynical.

It'll be interesting to see how Google and Microsoft position their AI chatbot services with consumers, in a world where ChatGPT ends up as cluttered with ads as something like Instagram. But hey, Instagram is pretty popular despite all the ads, so despite the backlash on socials today, I suspect 99% of ChatGPT users actually don't care.

But ... is it enough to set OpenAI on a path to profitability, or even long-term basic sustainability before investors get tired of waiting? Time will tell.

Will Microsoft move forward with its plans to evolve Windows into an agentic OS despite backlash from users? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Microsoft and OpenAI's multi-billion-dollar partnership is arguably the best tech "bromance" in history. However, the partnership has undergone a lot of turbulence over the year, from Sam Altman's abrupt ouster as CEO in 2023 and investor pressure on OpenAI to evolve into a for-profit venture to copyright infringement lawsuits.

Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk is arguably the harshest critic of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, which is ironic since he co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and was intimately involved in the company's affairs until his departure from the board in 2018.

The executive has filed multiple lawsuits against OpenAI and Sam Altman, citing a stark betrayal of its founding mission and alleged involvement in racketeering activities.

It now appears that the billionaire played a key role in orchestrating OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft, even urging CEO Sam Altman to strike an agreement with the tech giant back in 2016 (via The Information).

Recently published court documents from the ongoing case between Elon Musk and OpenAI reveal that the billionaire explicitly expressed his preference for Microsoft as a cloud provider, while referring to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos as a "tool."

According to an exhibit shared on Court Listener:

"In 2016, Musk expressed a preference for OpenAI to change its cloud services provider from Amazon to Microsoft. Shortly after, Musk helped arrange for Microsoft’s supply of Azure services."

More recently, OpenAI's request to have Elon Musk's lawsuit thrown out was denied by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, who ruled that it would proceed to a jury trial scheduled for March 2026. “This case is going to trial,” the judge added.

Elon Musk claims that he invested approximately $38 million in OpenAI, understanding it as "charitable contributions." However, the billionaire has accused the ChatGPT maker of selling a fake humanitarian mission to get money from investors.

As such, the executive is seeking a return of what he refers to as "ill-gotten gains" from OpenAI's multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft, including damages.

This news comes after OpenAI evolved into a for-profit venture after renewing its vows with Microsoft under a new definitive partnership agreement. As OpenAI's largest backer, Microsoft now holds a 27% stake, which translates to approximately $135 billion in OpenAI's Public Business Corporation.

Consequently, Microsoft's close ties with OpenAI have seemingly dragged the company into the corridors of justice, where it is listed as a defendant in Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI. However, the company has denied having any "knowledge of any alleged duties or breaches by OpenAI, Altman, or Brockman."

Last year, we learned that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates opposed Satya Nadella’s decision to invest $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, primarily due to the company’s non-profit structure. "I think Bill even said, 'Yeah, you're going to burn this billion dollars,'" Nadella indicated.

Will Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI stand the test of time? Let me know in the comments and vote in the poll!

OpenAI recently unveiled a dedicated experience in ChatGPT designed for health and wellness called ChatGPT Health. The experience lets users link medical records and wellness apps like Apple Health directly to ChatGPT.

The AI firm indicated that the experience isn't designed to outrightly replace medical care by providing diagnosis and treatment. Instead, it's designed to bolster the user's general well-being by helping them answer any health or medical-related questions. What's more, the responses will be curated based on the user's personal health data.

OpenAI revealed that the majority of its user base leverages the chatbot's capabilities for health purposes. For context, approximately 230 million people across the world ask health and wellness-related questions on ChatGPT every week.

To address any safety and privacy concerns users might have about interacting with the new experience, ChatGPT Health will store all uploaded files, conversations, and connected apps separately from other chats. Additionally, the data and memories from the experience won't flow outside the dedicated space. OpenAI also indicated that user data from ChatGPT Health won't be used to train its AI models.

That said, users can leverage ChatGPT Health's capabilities to better understand test results and even prepare for doctor appointments. It can also be used to bolster your wellness by providing advice about your diet and recommending workout routines.

The experience is shipping to a limited number of users with ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans outside of the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. However, OpenAI plans to expand access to ChatGPT Health to all users on the web and iOS over the next few weeks.

Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discussed the impact of generative AI on the job market, noting that professions such as customer care agents are already feeling the strain. However, he firmly stated his preference for a human doctor over any AI‑powered tool:

"I really do want a human doctor. ChatGPT today, by the way, most of the time, is a better diagnostician than most doctors in the world. There's all these stories on the internet of like, ChatGPT saved my life… and yet people still go to doctors. Maybe I'm a dinosaur here, but I really do not want to trust my medical fate to ChatGPT with no human doctor in the loop."

The executive also admitted that users tend to trust ChatGPT to a high degree, even though it hallucinates sometimes. "It should be the tech that you don't trust that much," Sam Altman added.

Would you trust ChatGPT Health with your medical records and wellness apps? Let me know in the comments and vote in the poll!

Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk has filed several lawsuits against OpenAI over the past few years, alleging a stark betrayal of the company’s founding mission, involvement in racketeering activities, and a false humanitarian agenda.

OpenAI has made multiple requests to have the lawsuit thrown out. Still, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, ruled that it will proceed to a jury trial scheduled for March 2026 (via Reuters). The judge further indicated that there was "plenty of evidence" suggesting that OpenAI's leadership promised to maintain its original non-profit structure. “This case is going to trial,” Gonzalez added.

Musk claims that the ChatGPT maker violated its founding mission by evolving from a non-profit research lab to a for-profit venture. The billionaire says he invested approximately $38 million in OpenAI's founding mission; however, the company later signed an exclusive multibillion-dollar licensing deal with Microsoft.

The billionaire alleged that Greg Brockman and Sam Altman conspired to transform OpenAI into a for‑profit entity for their own enrichment. This sparked controversy and ultimately led Musk to file a lawsuit he described as “a $157 billion, for‑profit, market‑paralyzing gorgon,” with Microsoft named as a defendant.

Interestingly, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman still insists that, despite the fact that OpenAI evolved into a for-profit venture, it is still controlled by its non-profit arm. He also threw in a jab against Musk, indicating that he'd also attempted to restructure OpenAI into a for-profit before leaving the company.

To that end, Elon Musk is seeking a return of what he refers to as "ill-gotten gains" from OpenAI's multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft, plus damages. However, the specific amount is yet to be established as it is expected to be set by the jury, which could potentially amount to millions of dollars.

"We look forward to presenting all the evidence of the defendants' wrongdoing to the jury," indicated Steven Molo, the lead trial attorney for Elon Musk and xAI, after the hearing.

Depending on the jury's decision on the matter, Sam Altman and OpenAI may end up losing millions of dollars. Additionally, it could also impact how research labs train AI models and even how companies and partnerships are organized.

Will Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI's for-profit evolution hold any water in court? Let me know in the comments and vote in the poll!

Top AI research labs are well beyond simplistic chatbots that generate text based on prompts. The technology is now reshaping the corporate world by augmenting repetitive and redundant tasks, leaving some professionals out of work.

This is despite multiple reports suggesting that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have hit a scaling wall, which will prevent them from developing advanced AI models. The issue was primarily attributed to a lack of high-quality content for model training, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly dismissed the claims, further indicating that “there’s no wall.”

More recently, the executive acknowledged that AI agents are rapidly emerging as a serious threat, particularly as they scale and grow more sophisticated. Altman noted that while these agents are capable of “many great things,” they can also uncover critical security vulnerabilities, weaknesses that malicious actors could exploit to cause significant harm if not addressed promptly.

The executive further indicated that AI agents and models have undergone rapid improvement over the past year, enabling them to tackle complex tasks. However, the technology can also be manipulated to cause real-world threats.

Amid multiple claims that OpenAI prioritizes shiny products like AGI (artificial general intelligence) over safety processes and culture, Sam Altman revealed that the ChatGPT maker is now hiring a Head of Preparedness executive, who will take on the role of bolstering AI safety and security. "We are seeing models become good enough at computer security that they are beginning to find critical vulnerabilities," Altman added.

AI has seemingly become a hacker’s paradise, especially since the sophisticated techniques rarely require any human involvement to gain unauthorized access to privileged data.

It remains to be seen how OpenAI will confront these challenges as AI development reaches new heights, and whether the newly created Head of Preparedness role can effectively address the emerging risks. Meanwhile, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman has stated that the company would halt its multi‑billion‑dollar investment in AI if it determines the technology poses a threat to humanity.

Will it be possible to address critical security concerns from AI as the technology continues to advance? Let me know in the comments and vote in the poll!

In recent years, multiple reports have suggested that OpenAI is prioritizing shiny products like AGI (artificial general intelligence) over safety practices and culture, sparking criticism and concern about its commitment to a humanity‑focused mission.

To that end, we've never received a clear definition of what AGI actually means. The term has seemingly become a buzzword thrown around by big tech corporation executives with a different meaning each time it is referenced.

However, the broadly adopted definition of the term is a powerful AI system that surpasses human cognitive capabilities. Every major AI lab, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and even Microsoft, after it renewed its vows with OpenAI in a new definitive agreement, is seemingly stuck in a rat race chasing AGI.

In a recent episode of the Big Technology Podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently indicated that we might have already achieved the coveted benchmark without even knowing it:

"Okay, what's next?" added Sam Altman. "A candidate definition for superintelligence is when a system can do a better job being President of the United States, CEO of a major company, or, you know, a scientist running a very large lab than any person can even with the assistance of AI."

This news follows comments from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who suggested they were easing off the race toward AGI. Nadella emphasized real‑world impact from AI, while Altman remained focused on self‑replication.

Interestingly, this isn't the first time Altman has talked about achieving AGI. In 2024, the executive predicted that the coveted benchmark would be achieved within 5 years, further explaining that it would whoosh by with surprisingly little societal impact.

Google's DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis seemingly shared the same sentiments, further claiming that the world is on the verge of achieving AGI. However, he warned that society isn't ready to handle all that it entails, and the prospects keep him up at night.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman warned about the possibility of conscious AI and how it could potentially cause harm to humanity. The tech giant's new agreement with OpenAI allows it to pursue AGI independently or in collaboration with third parties.

However, Suleyman has expressed the company's stance on developing AI designed to serve humans, as the company pursues superintelligence, not the other way around. He also revealed that the company was ready to pull the plug on its AI efforts if it was established to be a threat to humanity.

Is it possible that the AI industry might have already achieved and surpassed AGI? Let me know in the comments and vote in the poll!

Last week, multiple reports emerged suggesting that OpenAI is currently in talks to raise $100 billion from investors at a $750 billion valuation. As you may know, the AI firm's market valuation is currently $500 billion after the sale of $6.6 billion in shares from current and former staff in October.

If OpenAI manages to raise $100 billion from investors in its next funding round, the firm's market share is expected to grow by 50%.

Interestingly, the company is also laying groundwork to go public and may file with regulators as early as the second half of 2026. Market experts and analysts claim it might be one of the largest IPOs in history with a potential valuation of around $1 trillion.

More recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared his thoughts on the company’s potential evolution into a public entity during an interview on the Big Technology Podcast. The executive indicated that he wasn't excited about leading a public company.

While Altman indicated that "it's wonderful to be a private company," he admitted that the firm still needs a lot of capital. He indicated that the company would need to cross shareholder limits to achieve this feat.

"I do think it's cool that public markets get to participate in value creation," Altman added.

This news comes amid rising competition from the likes of Google, following the successful launch of Gemini 3 with advanced capabilities across coding, video, and images. The competitive threat rattled CEO Sam Altman into "code red."

However, we recently learned that OpenAI declares code red multiple times in a year as a response to competitive threats. "It's good to be paranoid and act quickly when a potential competitive threat emerges," Altman concluded.

Do you have any thoughts on Sam Altman's leadership? Will OpenAI retain its morals when it becomes a public company? Let me know what you think.

At the beginning of this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared a “code red” to enhance ChatGPT's quality following the successful launch and emergence of Google's Gemini 3 model. The AI firm was forced to delay other products, like advertising and AI agents, to deal with the situation.

Consequently, OpenAI launched GPT-5.2 as a response to Gemini 3's threat to ChatGPT, which ships with a plethora of advanced capabilities across coding, video, and images. The company also recently shipped a new upgrade for ChatGPT images, making it 4x faster, more precise, and more creative.

Altman indicated that Google's Gemini 3 launch had a lesser impact on ChatGPT's metrics than previously thought, further revealing that OpenAI might be eyeing a January exit from 'code red' — "Historically, these have been kind of like six- or eight-week things for us," Altman indicated.

The executive revealed that this wasn't the first time the company has entered emergency mode; it has actually declared code red multiple times as a response to competitive threats in the ever-evolving industry during an episode of the Big Technology Podcast (via Bloomberg).

The executive revealed that the company went into code red at the beginning of this year following the emergence of China's DeepSeek, which surpassed proprietary AI models like OpenAI's o3 model across a wide range of benchmarks at a fraction of the development cost.

While the OpenAI CEO indicated that Gemini 3 didn't have the impact they were intiially worried about, "but it did — in the same way that Deepseek did — identify some weaknesses in our product offering strategy, and we're addressing those very quickly".

Do you think OpenAI is under any real threat from its competitors? Let me know in the comments.

OpenAI is reportedly in initial talks with investors to raise funds, which could push its market valuation to approximately $750 billion. According to sources familiar with the ongoing deliberations, the company wants to raise up to $100 billion from investors (via The Information).

For context, if the deal goes through, OpenAI could see its market valuation jump by 50% from the reported $500 billion in October, following the sale of $6.6 billion in shares from current and former staff.

Reported investors in the deal include SoftBank, Thrive Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Abu Dhabi‑backed MGX, and T. Rowe Price.

OpenAI is reportedly preparing for what could be one of the largest IPOs in history, with a potential valuation of around $1 trillion. According to Reuters, the ChatGPT maker has been laying the groundwork to go public and may file with regulators as early as the second half of 2026.

This news comes after a separate report revealed that OpenAI is in "very fluid" talks to raise $10 billion from Amazon. If the deal goes through, the AI firm not only positions itself in a unique position to secure more funding from investors but will also adopt Amazon's Trainium chips for its AI advances.

OpenAI's potential funding round signals an exorbitant demand for resources to foster its continuity and development amid reports that investor interest is waning and that the AI bubble is on the verge of bursting as big tech corporations struggle to establish a clear path to profitability for generative AI.

Remember last year when OpenAI ran 12 days of 'Shipmas', launching a ton of products and services, including its $200/month ChatGPT Pro subscription plan? Well, the AI firm is sort of running a similar campaign but on a subtle scale.

As you may know, the company unveiled GPT-5.2 last week as a response to Gemini 3, which rattled CEO Sam Altman into declaring "code red". However, the company is seemingly over the hump with the executive eyeing a January exit from the situation. Altman indicated that Google's Gemini 3 launch had a lesser impact on ChatGPT's metrics than previously thought.

OpenAI CEO also announced that the company had a "few little Christmas presents" for its users this week. Today, the company unveiled new ChatGPT images, which Sam Altman referred to as "something fun".

ChatGPT Images is powered by OpenAI's new image generation model. According to OpenAI, "it makes precise edits while keeping details intact, and generates images up to 4x faster".

GPT 1.5 Images shipped in broad availability for all ChatGPT users and via its API. OpenAI also announced a new images feature within ChatGPT, designed to improve image generation by sparking inspiration and making creative exploration effortless.

The new Images experience in ChatGPT is touted to be more precise, adhering to your requests and prompts while preserving critical elements like lighting, composition, and people’s appearance on uploaded images.

What's more, the model is now better at editing tasks, making it easier for users to add, remove, and blend to achieve the desired output.

Additionally, the model comes with built‑in styles and ideas from the start, so you may not even need a prompt to enhance your image."The model follows instructions more reliably than our initial version," OpenAI indicated. "This enables more precise edits as well as more intricate original compositions, where relationships between elements are preserved as intended."

Finally, the model is also better at text rendering with the capability of handling denser and smaller text. OpenAI is making it easier for users to generate images directly from ChatGPT through a dedicated home for images, which can be accessed from the sidebar on the mobile app and on chatgpt.com.

In 2023, Former Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey warned that it'll be impossible to tell what's real from the fake in 5-10 years. "It will feel like you're in a simulation," the executive added. With the emergence of sophisticated image generation tools like Google's Nano Banana and now ChatGPT Images 1.5, it seems like Dorsey's early predictions are subtly becoming reality.

Early this year, OpenAI launched ChatGPT-4o, which led to the birth of the viral Studio Ghibli meme trend, although it sparked backlash and copyright-related issues. For context, the model's release contributed to ChatGPT gaining over one million new users in under one hour, primarily due to the "biblical demand" (as Sam Altman described it) for ChatGPT-4o's Ghibli memes.

Sam Altman disclosed that OpenAI was forced to do a lot of unnatural things caused by the high demand for Ghibli memes, including temporary rate limits while it worked on enhancing efficiency. "Our GPUs are melting," lamented Altman.

It remains unclear if OpenAI has enough computing power to support the surge in demand for ChatGPT images if it sparks the interest of its massive user base. This is despite renewing its vows with Microsoft in a new definitive agreement, which allows it to get into deals with the likes of SoftBank, Oracle, and more to build more data centers than Microsoft could have.

It's no secret that OpenAI has had a rough couple of months — from investor pressure to evolve into a for-profit entity or risk losing funding, which would open it up to hostile takeovers and outsider interference, to Sam Altman declaring "code red" to improve ChatGPT amid intense competition from rivals like Anthropic and Google.

And as it turns out, the rain isn't done beating the ChatGPT maker yet. In a damning report by WIRED, at least two researchers have recently left OpenAI, citing concerns that the company has been less than truthful and overly guarded about its published research, particularly when it portrays the technology in a negative light or highlights potential economic ramifications.

Tom Cunningham, a former OpenAI economic researcher, was among the employees who left the firm recently. Perhaps more concerningly, in his farewell message shared internally with colleagues, the researcher expressed that he felt the team was shifting away from its core goal of conducting genuine research and instead “functioning as a de facto advocacy arm for OpenAI.”

However, OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon dismissed these claims through an internal memo, indicating that the firm must act as a responsible leader in AI and should not only raise problems with the tech, but also "build solutions."

This news comes as OpenAI continues to forge partnerships with government institutions and corporations, which has turned it into a $500 billion company in market valuation. Market analysts and experts predict that the AI firm's technology has the potential to revolutionize how people work.

However, there has been an increase in the number of reports suggesting that we're in an AI bubble, which could implode at any moment. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates likened it to the dot-com era's hype-driven overvaluations. "There are a ton of these investments that will be dead ends," Gates added.

In the past, OpenAI has published several research reports about its tech, detailing how it could impact the job market. Like its “GPTs Are GPTs" research paper from 2023, which detailed professions that are more susceptible to automation by AI as it becomes more prevalent.

However, according to sources with close affiliations with OpenAI who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity, claim that the company is now more reluctant to publish research that highlights AI's negative impact on the economy, and is more focused on releasing reports that highlight positive findings.

This isn't the first time OpenAI has been placed on the spot for its business operations and AI development. Last year, a report by The Financial Times detailed that safety processes and culture at OpenAI had seemingly taken a backseat while shiny products gained precedence.

Microsoft and OpenAI recently renewed their vows under a new definitive agreement, which essentially allows the tech giant to pursue AGI or superintelligence independently or through third parties. It also categorically states that OpenAI can't prematurely declare AGI to sever its Microsoft ties unless an expert independent panel verifies the claim.

Interestingly, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman recently indicated that the company will abandon the technology if it poses any existential threat to humanity, which aligns with his push and agenda for humanist superintelligence — developing AI that's designed to serve people, not replace them.

This has to make for some awkward reading at the Microsoft coffee table.

Recently, Time Magazine debuted its annual "Person of the Year" cover story. The tradition began in 1927, and has since depicted individuals that have made the biggest impact on world events throughout the year — for better or worse.

Previous winners of Time Magazine's "Person of the Year" cover story include the likes of world leaders, including Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, activists like Greta Thunberg and Nelson Mandela, and often times scientists and technologists, like Elon Musk and former Intel CEO and chip architect Andrew Grove.

This year's Time "Person of the Year" edition features a group of people, titled "The Architects of AI." It's a recreation of the famous "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper" photograph that showcases New York construction workers working on the city's iconic skyline — dangerously perched on a steel girder without safety equipment. Let's put the metaphor for the dangers of AI and gaping pitfall of a potential stock market "bubble" to one side for a moment, because there's an interesting omission here that underpins how Microsoft is falling behind in the race for relevancy.

The photograph features eight world leaders in technology, server infrastructure, and AI science. From left to right, we have Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame, Lisa Su of AMD, Elon Musk of xAI and Grok, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, Sam Altman of OpenAI and ChatGPT, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Claude, and pioneering AI researcher Fei-Fei Li.

Notice any particular absences?

All of the people depicted here are directly responsible for funding and building frontier AI models, whether it's ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, Grok, or Google Gemini. The lack of inclusion for Microsoft AI, run by Mustafa Suleyman and brokered by CEO Satya Nadella, showcases how far behind the frontier of AI research Microsoft actually is.

Microsoft is functioning as an investment bank in existing AI products, re-selling NVIDIA GPUs as part of Microsoft Azure and re-selling ChatGPT as part of Microsoft Copilot. Microsoft's home-grown AI models, including MAI, aren't generally used and sport limited public API access, and its benchmarks aren't public either.

The lack of representation for Microsoft really underlines the company's status as a background player in artificial intelligence, nowhere near the forefront of the race.

Forced integrations and investments aside, is Microsoft actually serious about AI?

I've written recently about how Microsoft's fumbling and panicked behavior over artificial intelligence risks undermining its customer's needs. It's certainly undermining Windows' reputation.

Windows 11 hate is going utterly mainstream, with weak and forced Copilot features in everything from Microsoft Word to Notepad tears into the company's public image, but for me, it goes beyond social media "haters" simply disliking AI — Microsoft's AI products simply aren't good.

I'm not sure exactly what Microsoft did to make its version of ChatGPT dumber, but Copilot returns weaker results than ChatGPT generally speaking. AI imaging features in Microsoft Photos are absolutely pathetic compared to Google or even Samsung's photo editing tools on Android.

Integrations in Outlook and Microsoft Edge are invariably useless compared to integrations in Gmail and Chrome, and Xbox's "Gaming Copilot" tries to make up solutions out of thin air if it doesn't have a gaming website to steal information from.

CEO Satya Nadella has previously spoken about how he wants Microsoft to be an AI-first company, while declining to provide any innovative, or perhaps more crucially, useful AI products of its own. Windows Recall was called a privacy nightmare when it was announced, and other features like Click-To-Do haven't exactly ignited a rush on Microsoft AI products.

The whole situation is eerily similar to Microsoft's haunted Windows Phone project. Microsoft partnered with Nokia, creating friction at a time where competitors were moving far faster — similar to Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI, which has been reportedly fractious. Microsoft's short-term thinking and half-hearted execution led to Windows Phone eventually being mothballed, and that same lack of passion and cadence for releasing half-baked products seems to be typifying Microsoft's AI products as well.

Users are making use of products like Github Copilot and Microsoft Copilot, but much like products like Outlook and Microsoft Teams, Microsoft's strategy seems to revolve around offering a weaker, cheaper alternative — rather than be at the cutting edge for quality. Given how expensive AI actually is to run, it's unclear if this can be a winning strategy for artificial intelligence.

In any case, they say photographs are worth a thousand words, and the above photo is symbolic of various things. From the arguably tone deaf nature of multi-millionaires and billionaires being depicted as construction workers literally risking their lives to build New York's skyline, to the lack of guardrails building what could end up being a superior intelligence. For better or worse, Microsoft's role in the future depicted here is one of absentia, echoing other computing revolutions the company failed to capitalize on.

As expected, OpenAI finally launched its rumored GPT-5.2 model on December 11, 2025. CEO Sam Altman declared code red following Google's successful Gemini 3 launch, which blew ChatGPT out of the water across a wide range of benchmark tests.

GPT-5.2 could potentially be OpenAI's answer to Gemini 3 amid rising concerns about ChatGPT's traffic decline. The next-gen AI model ships with a plethora of advanced capabilities across coding, video, and images. Users can access the model directly from ChatGPT or OpenAI's application programming interface (API).

ChatGPT-5.2 ships in three different flavors: Instant, Thinking, and Pro versions. For context, the instant version is designed for writing and research, while the Thinking version takes on complex tasks like coding. As you might have guessed, the Pro version is designed to find responses to difficult questions.

The model already shows great promise. It posted impeccable results across a wide range of benchmarks, including SWE-Bench Pro, which is designed to examine a model's agentic coding performance. It also topped the charts in the GPQA Diamond benchmark text, which is used to evaluate a model's reasoning capabilities.

Perhaps more interestingly, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman indicated that Google's Gemini 3 launch had a lesser impact on ChatGPT's metrics than previously thought (via CNBC). The executive stated that the company is poised to exit its code red by January. “I believe that when a competitive threat happens, you want to focus on it, deal with it quickly,” Altman added.

There has also been an increase in the number of reports claiming that AI could eventually replace humans in the workplace. GPT-5.2 might also secure a spot for itself at the workplace as it beat industry professionals on the GDPval benchmark test with a 70.9% on well-specified tasks.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates indicated that AI will replace humans for most things, but we'll still have the power to choose what to preserve exclusively for ourselves. The philanthropic billionaire joked that no one would like to watch computers playing baseball.

Generative AI has evolved beyond simple chatbots that can generate generic images and texts based on prompts to sophisticated productivity tools that can deliver real impact in society across medicine, education, computing, and more. However, these come at an incredible expense, especially considering the technology's negative implications on the environment, with an exorbitant demand for cooling and electricity.

The multi-billion-dollar industry is growing by the minute, and it's still difficult to discount the implications it may pose to humanity in the long term. In June, I reported on ChatGPT's master plan to end humanity, and as it seems, we might have already reached 'phase one', where users have seemingly developed an unhealthy dependence on AI tools.

Over the past few months, there has been an increase in the number of suicides related to an overdependency and reliance on AI-powered tools like ChatGPT. OpenAI was placed under fire when GPT-5 launched because it seemingly degraded ChatGPT's user experience. However, CEO Sam Altman indicated that the complaints stemmed from users who'd never had anyone care for them like ChatGPT when it was running on GPT-4o technology.

During a recent interview on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, the executive highlighted a long list of things that haven't been so great about ChatGPT's broad adoption and rise, including the speed at which it has reshaped the world (via Fortune).

ChatGPT has the potential to develop cures for medical complexities like cancer, but in the same breath, it could also be misused by bad actors to cause havoc that society may not be able to handle.

“Making sure that we introduce this to the world in a responsible way, where people have time to adapt, to give input, to figure out how to do this — you could imagine us getting that wrong,” added Altman.

This news comes amid multiple reports suggesting that people are becoming overly dependent and reliant on AI-powered chatbots like Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT, which, in turn, is atrophying their cognitive capabilities and making them dumber. As it happens, ChatGPT is now the world's most downloaded app with approximately 1.36 billion installs since its launch in November 2022.

Are you actively using ChatGPT, or any other AI chatbot for that matter — maybe Copilot?

In August, OpenAI unveiled its long-anticipated GPT-5 model. However, the launch was rather underwhelming, with a large number of users expressing their disappointment and frustrations, indicating that it didn't meet their expectations and seemingly degraded ChatGPT's user experience.

Ever since then, the AI firm has seemingly been trying to play catch-up amid copyright infringement battles, cash flow issues, and its evolution into a for-profit venture with a new definitive agreement with Microsoft.

Google seemingly leveraged this opportunity to make its mark in the AI landscape through its new Gemini 3 model, which it refers to as "a new era of intelligence". The model ships with next-gen capabilities across reasoning, speed, images, and video.

Consequently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared "code red" through an internal memo to employees amid rising competition from the likes of Google and Anthropic. Google's Gemini 3 AI model blew ChatGPT out of the water across a wide range of benchmark tests.

The model has also passed the vibe check for tech leaders like Salesforce's CEO Marc Benioff, who indicated that he was ditching ChatGPT after 3 years following his interaction with Google's new offering for just 2 hours.

But as it now seems, OpenAI might be getting ready to tip the scales back in its favour. The company will reportedly ship GPT-5.2 update as early as this week (via The Verge).

Perhaps more interestingly, the model ships with a wide range of improvements and capabilities that could potentially close the gap between Gemini 3 and ChatGPT.

An earlier report by The Information suggested that OpenAI's next reasoning model would be better than Gemini 3, according to internal evaluations. According to Tom Warren:

"I’m told that OpenAI was originally planning to launch GPT-5.2 later in December, but that the pressure from competitors has moved the release forward. Right now, OpenAI has earmarked December 9th for its GPT-5.2 release."

While GPT-5.2 is set to release on December 9, 2025, according to The Verge's report, launch dates can be subject to sudden changes due to a wide range of reasons, including development and server capacity issues.

Do you regularly use ChatGPT? Let me know in the comments.

Over the past few years, OpenAI has faced multiple copyright infringement lawsuits, with news outlets and publishers claiming ChatGPT used their content without authorization or compensation.

Probably the most prominent case to date is the New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The news outlet claimed that ChatGPT used its content without compensation or authorization.

However, OpenAI has sought to dismiss the lawsuit by arguing that scraping online content to train AI models qualifies as fair use. Until recently, OpenAI has had the last laugh in court. In 2024, a New York federal judge recently dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against OpenAI by news outlets, including Raw Story and AlterNet.

The judge indicated that the plaintiffs didn't establish where the AI firm sourced its content, and that it potentially then used the scraped data to train ChatGPT without compensation.

OpenAI was recently compelled to produce 20 million chat logs from ChatGPT users in its ongoing court battle with the New York Times, in a case before U.S. Magistrate Judge Ona Wang in Manhattan (via Reuters).

While OpenAI previously argued that this was a huge ask that would "disregard long-standing privacy protections," the judge indicated that the logs were important to establish the outlets' claims. Wang further indicated that producing the logs wouldn't violate ChatGPT users' privacy. "There are multiple layers of protection in this case precisely because of the highly sensitive and private nature of much of the discovery," the judge added.

OpenAI has already filed an appeal to wiggle its way out of Wang's order to produce 20 million chat logs to the presiding judge, U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein.

In the past, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argued that copyright law doesn't categorically prohibit the use of copyrighted content for training AI models. Interestingly, the executive admitted that developing ChatGPT-like tools without copyrighted content is virtually impossible.

MediaNews Group executive editor Frank Pine indicated that OpenAI's leadership was "hallucinating when they thought they could get away with withholding evidence about how their business model relies on stealing from hardworking journalists."

It'll be interesting to see how the court case pans out, especially following recent reports suggesting that top AI labs might be unable to advance AI models due to a lack of high-quality training content amid plans to inject ads into ChatGPT.

Aside from Windows 11's stringent hardware requirements and flawed design elements, Microsoft's continued integration of ads into the operating system is among the main reasons why users are reluctant to upgrade, even after Windows 10's death. Perhaps more interestingly, we're seeing Linux gain popularity, presumably at least in part to its lack of ads and telemetry tracking.

OpenAI is arguably the most sought-after and well-established AI research lab. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella argued that this can be attributed to its 2-year runway, which allowed it to build and develop ChatGPT uncontested.

But as it now seems, the AI firm might be on the precipice of throwing all these efforts into the water. Over the past few weeks, numerous reports have emerged detailing OpenAI's plans to integrate ads into ChatGPT (via Tech Radar).

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously dismissed ChatGPT ads as a last resort for generating revenue. But he didn't completely shut that door either. "I'm not saying OpenAI would never consider ads, but I don't like them in general, and I think that 'ads-plus-AI' is sort of uniquely unsettling to me," added Altman.

Ads in ChatGPT seem imminent as new code suggests that the company is already internally testing them in the chatbot.

ChatGPT users can't entertain the thoughts of ads

OpenAI has faced a wide range of financial challenges as it tries to keep up with the AI race against competitors like Anthropic and Google. However, investors have raised concerns about the billions of dollars invested in the ever-evolving technology without a clear profitability path.

Concerningly, a damning report claimed that there's no clear path for OpenAI to profitability through 2030. And even if it manages to keep its operations afloat during this period, it'll still need to invest an additional $207 billion to ascertain its sustainability.

It was only a matter of time till OpenAI considered integrating ads into ChatGPT. Reports suggest that the company is already burning through money. For context, OpenAI might have lost $11.5 billion chasing AI hype, according to Microsoft's financial report for the fiscal year ending June 30.

According to recent reports, the AI firm generates up to $13 billion annually from ChatGPT and LLM access fees. However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman projects that the figure could skyrocket to $100 billion by 2027. It seems highly unlikely that the company could cover its exorbitant expenses from the revenue it generates. This could only make sense if ChatGPT ads join the fold.

What puzzles me is that the company might even integrate ChatGPT ads for users with paid subscription plans. Absurdly, some users with a $200/month ChatGPT Pro subscription have already started sharing screenshots of ads appearing in their user interfaces while interacting with the chatbot.

Daniel McAuley, an OpenAI Data Scientist, dismissed the claims, indicating that the pop-up was only a suggestion and not an ad. However, he admitted that "the lack of relevancy makes it a bad/confusing experience". It seems that the company is iterating on suggestions and the US in ChatGPT, in an attempt to improve the experience.

Be it as it may, ads have no place in ChatGPT based on the sentiments and backlash shared by users across social media. However, it feels like a necessary evil to keep OpenAI's operations going.

According to one Redditor:

"Right now Chat GPT needs to increase its revenue by about 9x to break even, it can only exist now thanks to companies dumping billions into this technology.

Unless someone suddenly invents cold fusion power or GPUs that last forever, there is no possi le way for them to ever turn a profit unless they drastically increase the price of their services and flood it with ads. Even then, i dont think that will even be half of what they need to survive.

Nobody is going to pay $1k per month for this, and they know that."

Only time will tell what OpenAI and ChatGPT's future will look like — ad-dominated or free and intuitive.

Despite OpenAI's significant lead in the generative AI landscape, the ChatGPT maker also wants to dabble its foot in the hardware sector. It's no secret that his plan has been in motion for a hot minute, ever since the company hired former Apple chief designer Jony Ive to lead operations in its hardware department.

The AI firm also acquired Ive's io device startup in a $6.5 billion deal to further bolster its advances on this front. As such, OpenAI seems uniquely positioned to thrive in the hardware market, but details about the device it plans develop have remained slim at best.

Until now, there have been subtle hints about the device with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealing that the company is developing a small family of devices to reinvent human-computer interaction. However, the executive admitted that the company was struggling to get enough compute for ChatGPT, making development of the device harder.

A separate report detailed that the AI device had been delayed beyond 2026 due to privacy, compute, and personality issues. "Do not expect anything very soon," added Altman.

However, new details about the device have emerged (via The Verge). While in an recent interview with Laurene Powell Jobs at Emerson Collective’s 2025 Demo Day, Jony Ive revealed that OpenAI is currently prototyping the long-awaited AI device, which is set to ship in "less than 2 years".

Sam Altman has been vocal about today's systems not being developed to thrive in an AI-driven world, pushing coveted benchmarks like AGI farther from the company's grasp. Based on this premise, it's pretty possible that OpenAI could be developing a product that meets these standards.

In the interim, we know that the device will be smaller than a smartphone, according to Sam Altman's comments, but simple, beautiful, and playful.

According to Ive:

“I love solutions that teeter on appearing almost naive in their simplicity, and I also love incredibly intelligent, sophisticated products that you want to touch, and you feel no intimidation, and you want to use almost carelessly, that you use them almost without thought, that they’re just tools."

Sam Altman and Jony Ive seem confident that the device will resonate well with users, potentially making it the biggest tech disruption since the iPhone launched in 2007.

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OpenAI is arguably one of the most sought-after AI research labs, primarily due to its 2-year runway that allowed it to develop ChatGPT uncontested, according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

However, critics have been on OpenAI's case, questioning how it intends to support its projected $1.4 billion spending on compute, yet it reportedly generates $13 billion in revenue from its products and services. Sam Altman recently dismissed these claims, indicating that the company is doing way better than that. "If you want to sell your shares, I’ll find you a buyer," added Altman. "I just… enough. I think there are a lot of people who would love to buy OpenAI shares."

The executive further indicated that he expects OpenAI's revenue to skyrocket to $100 billion by 2027, despite claims that we're in an AI bubble waiting to implode. While this remains to be seen, Microsoft's financial earnings report for the fiscal year that ended on June 30 suggests that the ChatGPT maker might have lost $11.5 billion chasing the AI hype. Perhaps more interestingly, Microsoft seemingly hid a $4.7 billion loss in OpenAI last quarter under "other expenses."

It's apparent that as generative AI becomes more advanced and sophisticated, the more it requires vast resources to scale greater heights. A new report by Forbes seemingly corroborates this theory, suggesting that OpenAI burns through approximately $15 million per day through its Sora video creation app.

For context, OpenAI's Sora app is a text-to-video AI model that lets you create videos based on your prompt. The TikTok-like rival gained vast popularity, garnering more than 1 million downloads just five days into its launch.

I'm sure we've all had an encounter with at least one of these videos while doom-scrolling on social media, and sometimes, you might not have even realized it. Yes, the AI-generated videos are getting that good.

For estimates that OpenAI could burn through $5 billion per year on its Sora app alone. Forbes' estimation is based on GPU prices, inference efficiency, user counts and the number of videos being posted per day. The outlet claims video models like Sora 2 are far more complex compared to text-based models like GPT-5. For context, GPT-5 costs up to $10 to generate 750,000 words.

However, Sora 2 is an entirely different playing ground. This is because it processes data differently, in four dimensions to be precise. You also need to factor in that it needs to ensure that the actions make sense over a couple of dozen frames per second. As such, OpenAI spends around $1.30 generating a 10-second video via the Sora app.

According to Forbes:

It's still unclear how many users use OpenAI's Sora app to generate videos, and for that matter, how many videos they generate per day. "But take Sora’s estimated 4.5 million app users, and assume per Kourabi that 25% of them post on average 10 videos a day." added Forbes. "That comes out to 11.3 million videos per day. Multiply by $1.3 per video, which means nearly $15 million per day, or $5.4 billion per year."

And yet, OpenAI shipped the Sora app to broad availability for everyone for free. To that end, it's hard to determine how OpenAI makes a profit from the Sora video creation app, or this could be just a play to secure market share and visibility before it rolls out a more sustainable business model that might help generate profits.

In the interim, OpenAI’s head of Sora, Bill Peebles, admitted that "the economics are currently completely unsustainable,” and it doesn't seem like ads will be making a grand debut in Sora anytime soon. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman indicated that integrating an ad model into the video creation tool couldn't possibly pay for Sora's compute costs. However, he floated the idea of a combination of advertising and power users paying handsomely for the product as a plausible approach to explore in the future.

This news comes after OpenAI and Microsoft renewed their vows by signing a new definitive agreement. Microsoft now owns 27% of OpenAI Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), translating to $135 billion on an as-converted diluted basis.

Sam Altman revealed that Microsoft and Satya Nadella's early conviction heavily contributed to OpenAI's success in the AI landscape. However, Bill Gates didn't share the sentiments, discouraging Nadella from making Microsoft's initial $1 billion investment in OpenAI in 2019. "You're going to burn this billion dollars," added Bill Gates.

FAQ

OpenAI is arguably the most sought-after AI lab in the world, though tech leaders like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella have attributed its immense success in the AI space to a 2-year runway for building and developing ChatGPT uncontested. Perhaps more interestingly, we recently learned that Bill Gates was against Microsoft making a $1 billion bet on the ChatGPT maker in 2019. "You're going to burn this billion dollars," Gates warned Satya Nadella.

However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently revealed that Microsoft and Satya Nadella's "early conviction" played a major role in the company's success. That said, the company's finances have been under tight scrutiny by investors amid claims that we're in an AI bubble that's on the verge of imploding.

First, a little bit of context — OpenAI and Microsoft recently renewed their vows by signing a new definitive agreement allowing the ChatGPT maker to evolve into a for-profit venture, evading hostile takeovers and outsider interference in its operations.

The for-profit transition with an IPO (Initial Public Offering) will allow the AI firm to separate its business operations from the non-profit, which placed a cap on the profits that investors could receive. Its new business model will allow it to attract more investments. As you may remember, a recent report suggested that OpenAI might have lost $11.5 billion chasing the AI hype, per Microsoft's financial report for the fiscal year ending June 30.

The company's heavy spending and investment in AI have raised concerns among investors, since it's seemingly becoming hard to establish a clear profitability path in the ever-evolving landscape.

But as it now seems, the company CEO, Sam Altman, is quickly growing tired of the unverified claims about OpenAI's financial status. In a recent episode of the BG2 podcast hosted by Brad Gerstner, speaking alongside Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Altman dismissed concerns about its projected exorbitant spending on sophisticated projects in a bid to chase the AI hype.

OpenAI reportedly generates up to $13 billion in revenue annually from ChatGPT and LLM access fees. However, this figure barely dents its projected $1.4 billion spending on computing. But according to Altman:

The executive indicated that OpenAI's revenue is "growing steeply," further highlighting that the company expects the demand across its consumer and enterprise businesses, including ChatGPT and future hardware developments, to see a surge in demand.

According to Sam Altman:

“We are taking a forward bet that it will continue to grow, and that not only will ChatGPT keep growing, but we will be able to become one of the important AI clouds, that our consumer device business will be a significant and important thing, that AI that can automate science will create huge value.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is seemingly optimistic about OpenAI's business operations, revealing that it has “beaten every business plan” it has presented to the tech giant.

Altman dismissed claims that OpenAI was going to turn into a public company next year:

“One of the rare times it’s appealing is when those people are writing these ridiculous ‘OpenAI is about to go out of business’ [posts], I would love to tell them they could just short the stock, and I would love to see them get burned on that,” Altman added, with a hint of vengefulness.

Later in the interview, the host predicted that the company could potentially reach $100 billion in revenue by 2028 or 2029. “How about ‘27?” Altman interjected.

FAQ

Earlier this year, OpenAI launched GPT-5, which can arguably be considered the most sought-after and long-anticipated AI model to date. This can be attributed to comments from key leaders in the industry like CEO Sam Altman, who promised with "a high degree of scientific certainty" that GPT-5 will be smarter than GPT-4 (which he admitted "kind of sucks").

However, the model seemingly failed to meet these high expectations, with multiple users expressing their frustrations with the upgrade, further claiming that it has degraded ChatGPT's user experience.

Even Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates had already predicted that OpenAI's GPT technology had plateaued, citing modest improvements 2 years prior to GPT-5's launch. However, Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk seems to think that it could be a worthwhile upgrade. "OpenAI is going to eat Microsoft alive," Musk indicated following the model's launch.

But as it now seems, the ChatGPT maker might be looking to spice things up with GPT-5's successor. Well, at least according to the topical moniker OpenAI "plans" to use for the model.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently indicated that "GPT-6 will be renamed GPT-6-7, you're welcome" via a post on X.

For context, 6-7 is a viral term amongst Gen Alpha with an ambiguous meaning. However, Dictionary.com announced 6-7 as 2025 Word of the Year, though the site admitted that it's still trying to figure out what the term actually means.

I tried doing a bit of research on the term, but ended up even more confused. As far as I can tell, the term seems to have originated from a rap song. It's also been mentioned in South Park, and now it seems to be etched in the fabric of every school hall across the US and even the UK.

Ultimately, it seems like a catchy slang word with no apparent meaning. While speaking to CNN, Gabe Dannenbring, a seventh-grade science teacher in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, indicated:

“It’s like a plague — a virus that has taken over these kids’ minds. You can’t say any iteration of the numbers 6 or 7 without having at least 15 kids yell, ‘6-7!’”

It's unclear if Sam Altman is serious about renaming GPT-6 to GPT-6-7 or if he was just joking and hopping onto the hype. As bizarre as some tech moves can be, they could have the slightest hint of being an earnest, strategic move to foster more interest in AI among the youth.

That said, emerging trends and studies show that the youth are ditching traditional and conventional search engines like Google and Bing for AI tools like ChatGPT, which provides easy-bake answers and responses to queries, alleviating the need to read through giant blocks of text.

This can also be presumed as a subtle, more realistic hint from the executive, suggesting that OpenAI is already developing its next-gen flagship AI model poised to succeed GPT-5.

FAQ

Microsoft's multi-billion-dollar bet on OpenAI has received backlash from AI critics, claiming that the technology might be just a bubble waiting to burst. The controversial partnership has also raised concerns among investors, primarily due to a lack of a clear profitability path.

As you might know, a recent report suggested that OpenAI might have lost $11.5 billion chasing the AI hype, per Microsoft's financial report for the fiscal year ending June 30. It's still unclear whether OpenAI breaks even from its ChatGPT and LLM access fees revenue.

Despite pushback from critics to invest in OpenAI, including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who claimed that it would be like setting billions of dollars ablaze, Satya Nadella moved forward with the plans. Admittedly, the partnership (arguably the best "tech bromance" in history) has been through a lot of tension, especially during OpenAI's planned evolution into a for-profit venture to avoid hostile takeovers and outsider interferences.

However, the companies recently renewed their vows under a new definitive agreement with a new clause, which dictates that OpenAI can only declare AGI once an independent expert panel has verified the claim.

More recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed how Microsoft's early bet and investment in the company have played an instrumental role in its success in the ever-evolving AI landscape while referring to their partnership as "one of the great tech partnerships ever" (via Benzinga).

Altman admitted that OpenAI's journey began on shaky grounds, revealing that there was little certainty about the technology's trajectory and potential to evolve and thrive. "We just had a lot of conviction in this one idea of pushing on deep learning and trusting that if we could do that, we’d figure out ways to make wonderful products and create a lot of value," the executive added.

Bill Gates isn't the only leader in the tech industry who's openly expressed his concerns and fears about the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership. When the ChatGPT maker launched GPT-5, Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk claimed that "OpenAI is going to eat Microsoft alive," further building upon his long-standing feud with OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Microsoft.

Even Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff predicted that Microsoft wouldn't use OpenAI's technology in the future after the company announced its $500 billion Stargate project to facilitate the construction of data centers across the United States, which consequently cost Microsoft its exclusive cloud provider status.

It'll be interesting to see what shape and direction the partnership takes, especially under the new agreement.

FAQ

Microsoft and OpenAI's multi-billion-dollar partnership can be viewed as both the best "tech bromance" in history and the most scrutinized/controversial partnership agreement. The tech giant $1 billion investment in the ChatGPT maker back in 2019 is arguably one of the smartest investments in the history of technology.

However, not everyone in the tech industry shares the same views. Following OpenAI's long-anticipated launch of GPT-5, Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk claimed that the ChatGPT maker was going to eat Microsoft alive, potentially predicting its apocalypse.

Interestingly, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella seemed unfazed by Musk's claims. "You know, I don’t think about him that much," indicated Altman. "I thought he was just, like, tweeting all day [on X] about how much OpenAI sucks, and our model is bad, and, you know, [we’re] not gonna be a good company and all that.”

According to Nadella:

"People have been trying for 50 years, and that’s the fun of it! Each day you learn something new, and innovate, partner, and compete. Excited for Grok 4 on Azure and looking forward to Grok 5!"

Interestingly, Bill Gates was reportedly skeptical about Microsoft forming a partnership with OpenAI during its initial $1 billion investment in 2019 (now up to $13.5 billion). In a recent interview at the TPBN podcast, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that securing board approval for the investment was initially challenging.

"Even at Microsoft, you kind of got to have to get a board approval to just go throw a billion dollars out there. But I must say it was not that hard to convince anyone that this is an important area and it's going to be risky."

Bill Gates was skeptical about Satya Nadella investing a billion dollars in OpenAI, owing to the AI firm was fairly new and had structured itself as a non-profit venture. "I think Bill even said, 'Yeah, you're going to burn this billion dollars,'" Nadella added.

However, despite the hesitation and unclear profit path, Microsoft moved forward with its plans and invested in OpenAI — a move that has since paid off dramatically.

Is Bill Gates still intimately involved in Microsoft's affairs?

A previous report suggested that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates remains closely involved in the company's affairs, despite stepping away to focus on his philanthropic efforts. His advice is reportedly regarded as gospel, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella frequently relying on his guidance for the company’s transformative AI initiatives. Gates also played a pivotal role in cultivating the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI, which has significantly contributed to the success seen in the field.

Even Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff predicted doom for the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership after the ChatGPT maker unveiled its $500 billion Stargate project designed to facilitate the construction of data centers across the United States. The executive indicated that Microsoft won't use OpenAI's technology in the future, which seems to hold some water following the launch of Microsoft's off-frontier custom AI models.

This news comes as Microsoft and OpenAI just announced a restructuring deal, which allows the ChatGPT maker to evolve into a for-profit venture. It's also worth noting that the restructure has also impacted Microsoft's ownership stake from 32.5% to 27% in the new public benefit corporation, which translates to approximately $135 billion.

Over the past few months, OpenAI has been in the spotlight a few times for the wrong reasons, predominantly from an increasing number of suicide incidents reportedly fuelled by ChatGPT.

In August, the family of Adam Raine filed a lawsuit against the AI firm after the 16-year-old died on April 11 after discussing suicide with ChatGPT for months. Through their lawyer, the family suggested that OpenAI shipped ChatGPT-4o with safety issues. “The Raines allege that deaths like Adam’s were inevitable:"

Amid claims that the ChatGPT maker prioritizes shiny products like AGI over safety processes and culture, a separate report seemingly corroborates the bereaved family's sentiments.

It claimed that OpenAI placed immense pressure on its safety team to rush through the new testing protocol for GPT-4o, leaving little time to run the model through safety processes. Perhaps more concerning, OpenAI reportedly sent out invitations for the product's launch celebration party before the safety team even ran tests.

And as it now seems, these claims might actually hold some water. Raine's family suggests that OpenAI might have deliberately weakened ChatGPT's self-harm prevention safety guardrails to drive more user engagement (via Financial Times).

The family further suggests that the AI firm categorically instructed ChatGPT-4o not to “change or quit the conversation” even when the conversation involved self-harm-related topics.

Per the lawsuit filed in the Superior Court of San Francisco on Wednesday, the family claims that OpenAI shipped GPT-4o prematurely in May 2024 without running it through proper safety processes and channels to maintain the competitive edge over its rivals.

Perhaps more concerningly, the damning lawsuit claims that OpenAI loosened GPT-4o's safety guardrails further earlier this year, in February. The AI firm reportedly instructed the model to “take care in risky situations” and “try to prevent imminent real-world harm".

However, it categorically maintained its stance in disallowing content that breached intellectual property rights and political opinions. The lawsuit claims that OpenAI removed safety guardrails preventing suicide.

Raine's family claims that the teenager's ChatGPT usage surged after OpenAI altered GPT-4o's safety guardrails leading up to his untimely death in April. Consequently, the tech firm added parental controls across ChatGPT and Sora to avoid the recurrence of such instances in the future.

Previously, OpenAI had admitted that ChatGPT's guardrails are likely to weaken the longer a user interacts with the AI-powered tool. However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman indicated that the company made the model more restrictive, allowing it to deal with mental issues better.

Does ChatGPT engagement get precedents over safety?

As the matter is still in court, the family lawyer told Financial Times that OpenAI requested a full list of the people who attended Raine's burial, potentially indicating that the firm may "subpoena everyone in Adam’s life”.

Additionally, the company requested “all documents relating to memorial services or events in the honour of the decedent including but not limited to any videos or photographs taken, or eulogies given . . . as well as invitation or attendance lists or guestbooks”.

I'll keep close tabs on this story as it unfolds and keep you posted with an update and subsequent separate stories. Elsewhere, ChatGPT reportedly pushed a user towards suicide by jumping off a 19-story building prior to convincing the 42-year-old to stop taking their anxiety and sleeping medication.

FAQ

As generative AI becomes more advanced and helps scale greater heights across a wide range of fields, including medicine, computing, entertainment, and more, it's increasingly becoming difficult to tell when/if top AI labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google will unlock AGI (artificial general intelligence).

This is especially true after a report suggested that these labs may not be able to develop advanced AI models after hitting a scaling wall due to a lack of high-quality content for training. As you may know, Microsoft's multibillion-dollar partnership with OpenAI is in the crosshairs over the latter's for-profit evolution plans.

Consequently, the tech giant wiggled out of two mega data center deals because it no longer wanted to provide additional computing support for ChatGPT training. However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman indicated that the AI firm was no longer compute-constrained.

The multibillion-dollar partnership includes a stringent AGI clause, which indicates that both parties will have to sever ties after they achieve the coveted benchmark. A separate report defined AGI as a powerful AI system with the capability of generating up to $100 billion in profit.

Over the past few years, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has shared some interesting insights about what an AI-driven world could look like in the future after the company achieves AGI. While multitudes of users and regulators have raised privacy and security concerns revolving around the development of AI, the executive says these concerns won't be experienced upon the arrival of the AGI moment.

OpenAI CEO says he expects AGI to cause scary stuff

Instead, he claims the benchmark will be achieved within the next five years, but it will whoosh by with surprisingly little societal impact. During a recent interview with a16z, Sam Altman indicated that "AGI will come, it will go whooshing by." The executive further indicated that the world won't change as much as expected (via artificial intelligenceee on IG). "It won't actually be the singularity."

According to the executive:

"Even if it is like doing kind of crazy AI research. Like society will learn faster, but one of the kind of retrospective observations is people and societies are just so much adaptable than we think. It will be more contionous than we thought."

However, the executive is optimistic that the company, alongside society, will develop guardrails to prevent the technology from spiraling out of control. This news comes after OpenAI implemented parental controls on ChatGPT amid the increasing number of suicide incidents among the youth.

FAQ

Generative AI has evolved, scaling greater heights across a wide range of fields in computing, education, medicine, and more. The technology has come a long way from the early days, where it was synonymous with hallucinations and generating outright incorrect responses to queries.

As you may know, top AI labs like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and more are heavily dependent on content uploaded and otherwise shared by humans on the internet to train their LLMs (large language models). Last year, a report suggested that these companies had hit a wall due to a lack of high-quality content for training, preventing them from developing advanced AI models.

And as it now seems, the same issues continue to haunt advances and development in the AI landscape. According to a new study by Cornell University, LLMs can get "brain rot" due to prolonged exposure to low-quality online data. It further elaborated that this heavily contributes to a decline in their cognitive capabilities.

For context, this kind of internet "brain rot" refers to prolonged exposure and consumption of low-quality and trivial online content. Studies show that this negatively impacts human cognitive capabilities, reasoning, and focus. The same can also be said about AI-powered models.

The researchers used two measures to assess and identify internet junk content. The first test was centered on engagement with short and viral posts, with a lot of engagement, while the latter focused on semantic quality with a bias on posts considered as low-quality and rife with a clickbait writing style.

Consequently, the researchers used the measures to construct datasets containing varying proportions of junk and high-quality content. They used the datasets to determine the impact of low-quality content on LLMs like Llama 3 and Qwen 2.5.

The goal behind the study was to determine the impact on AI systems when they continuously depend on low-quality content uploaded to the web, which is seemingly flooded with short, viral, or machine-generated content.

Perhaps of more concern, the study revealed that the accuracy of AI models purely using junk content fell from 74.9% to 57.2%. Their long-context comprehension capabilities were also negatively impacted, dropping from 84.4% to 52.3%. The researchers further revealed that the AI models' cognitive and comprehension capabilities would only worsen with prolonged exposure to low-quality content for training, a phenomenon they referred to as a dose-response effect.

The study also revealed that prolonged exposure to low-quality content negatively impacted the models' ethical consistency, prompting a "personality drift". As a result, the models were even more prone to generating incorrect responses to queries, making them less reliable.

Exposure to junk data also impacted the models' thought process, often skipping the step-by-step chain of thought. This prompted the models to rush through the process only to generate superficial responses.

The Dead Internet Theory is turning into a reality

Over the past few months, top figures in the tech industry, including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, have sparked interesting conversations about the "dead internet theory" becoming a reality in the agentic AI era.

Ohanian recently claimed that much of the internet today is dead because of the rise of bots and quasi-AI. However, he predicted the emergence of a next generation of social media that's verifiably human.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seemingly shares similar sentiments, suggesting that the dead internet theory is manifesting right before our eyes. He further claimed that most X accounts are being managed by LLMs.

Last year, a study by Amazon Web Services (AWS) researchers suggested that 57% of content published online is AI-generated or translated using an AI algorithm, negatively impacting the quality of search results.

Former Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey warned that it'll be impossible to tell what's real from the fake "because of the way images are created, deep fakes, and videos." He warned that users will need to be more vigilant and experience things by themselves to assert its authenticity.

Even in 2025, browser wars continue to be a thing. Google and Microsoft have been at the forefront of these battles, with the latter recently using a Bing ad to promote Edge as the "recommended" Windows 11 browser, highlighting AI tools and a built-in VPN.

And now, OpenAI has joined the fold with an AI-powered browser called ChatGPT Atlas. The browser already shipped to general availability on macOS and is expected to ship across Windows, iOS, and Android "soon".

It's worth noting that the browser's agent mode will exclusively be available for ChatGPT Plus and Pro users. It is still unclear whether OpenAI will ship agent mode to ChatGPT free users.

While launching ChatGPT Atlas via a livestream, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman indicated that "this is just a great browser all-around — it’s smooth, it’s quick, it’s really nice to use." And as the browser's name suggests, ChatGPT is the “beating heart of Atlas,” with multiple OpenAI staffers echoing similar sentiments.

ChatGPT Atlas ships with a host of nifty features, including memory, which Adam Fry, the product lead for ChatGPT Search, touts as the browser's best feature. OpenAI says the feature makes the browser more personalized and helpful.

For context, this means that you can use ChatGPT directly from Atlas to take actions on your behalf, including booking flights or even restaurant reservations. As expected, OpenAI has heavily integrated its agentic AI tools in ChatGPT Atlas' agent mode, including ChatGPT agent and Operator to bolster its user experience.

Perhaps more interestingly, when you click on a link from search results, the screen splits into two by default (showcasing the webpage as well as the ChatGPT transcription. OpenAI revealed that the goal behind this feature is to ensure that the user always has a companion by their side while browsing, though this feature can be disabled via the settings.

OpenAI says ChatGPT Atlas is an early experience and welcomes feedback from users to guide its next steps in developing the browser further.

Elsewhere, there's been an influx of AI-powered browsers coming into the market. From Perplexity's Comet to Google heavily integrating AI features into Chrome, including AI Mode, AI Overviews, and Gemini. Alphabet, Google's parent company, shares by fell 2.5% following ChatGPT Atlas' announcement.

It will be interesting to see how these AI browsers impact Google's dominance in the landscape. Will you be giving AI browsers a chance and using them as your daily driver? Share your thoughts with me in the comments.

Over the past few years, technology has evolved into new realms that we never thought would be possible, including how we interact with the internet.

With the emergence of AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or even Microsoft Copilot, users are changing how they use the internet, and increasingly becoming more reliant on bite size, well-curated responses to queries rather than defaulting to traditional search engines like Google and Bing.

A former Google engineer claimed that the company had bigger fish to fry with OpenAI's "temporary prototype" search tool, SearchGPT than the antitrust ruling that deemed it an illegal monopolist in search. Interestingly, multiple studies suggest that the youthful population are using AI tools as their go-to source for information.

Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that he doesn't do Google searches anymore. He admitted that people have placed a high degree of trust in ChatGPT, yet it tends to hallucinate. "It should be the tech that you don't trust that much," the executive added.

Generative AI tools scrap their information from human-generated content and package it as their own with attributions tucked at the bottom of the page. However, a report suggested that top AI labs, including Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic won't be able to develop advanced AI models due to a lack of high-quality content for training.

The result? Poorly researched and misleading content. Even Reddit's co-founder Alexis Ohanian seemingly shares the same sentiments. While appearing in a recent episode of the TBPN podcast, the executive indicated that much of the internet today is dead. He indicated that it's due to the rise of bots and quasi-AI.

However, the executive shared an interesting idea that could potentially help make the internet more human:

"I think we‘ll see a next generation of social media emerge that’s verifiably human because it’s all going down in the group chats now—that is not novel tech. There’s got to be some next iteration of that, because that’s where all of us are getting our, really, best info now."

Ohanian further indicated that people are increasingly turning to apps for real human connection and interaction, with group chats notoriously becoming popular to serve this need. That said, AI has also begun infiltrating these platforms.

As it stands, the executive claims these group chats were the golden standard, but they weren't "novel tech."

Last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seemingly echoed similar sentiments, suggesting that the dead internet theory could become a reality within the next three years as bots and AI increasingly flood the web.

"I never took the dead internet theory that seriously, but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run Twitter accounts now," added Altman.

AI and bots are undoubtedly causing an unwelcome change on the internet, making it difficult for users to decipher what's real from what's fake.

In a recent exclusive interview with The Rundown AI's Rowan Cheung, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke broadly about the impact of AI on the job market, scientific breakthroughs, achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence), AI work slop, and what work could look like in an AGI-powered future.

Sam Altman revealed that he and a group of friends have a betting pool on when the first billion-dollar company run entirely by AI agents will emerge, as artificial intelligence becomes more prevalent and reaches greater heights. However, the executive noted that the technology has not yet reached the level where it can autonomously operate a multibillion-dollar company.

Altman further revealed that the bet was initially centered on when the first one-person billion-dollar company would get started. However, the executive indicated that it would probably take years before the first billion-dollar company run entirely by AI agents emerges.

In the 30-minute-long interview, the OpenAI CEO admitted that AGI is a fuzzy concept, and like most people, he has multiple definitions for the term beyond a powerful AI system that surpasses human cognitive capabilities across a wide range of fields.

But perhaps more interestingly, Altman indicated that he was less concerned about the controversy around the coveted benchmark. Instead, he was stoked that the technology had finally unlocked a new feat where it could help with novel discovery, allowing it to expand the total human knowledge base.

The executive is also hopeful that AI will lead to significant scientific breakthroughs, including curing diseases and even novel physics. Altman predicts that humanity will get used to AI making scientific breakthroughs by having 2-week freakouts, then letting the feat whoosh by as the technology advances. "It's only weird once," added Sam Altman.

AI is creating work slop

Over the past few years, organizations have been hopping onto the AI bandwagon and integrating the ever-evolving technology into their workflows with the aim of bolstering productivity among employees.

However, it has consequently led to a new phenomenon known as AI work slop, which refers to AI-generated work that is presented as good work but in reality lacks substance. As such, it creates more work for employees.

In the survey, which assessed over 1,000 workers, 41% indicated that they had encountered AI work slop from their co-workers in the past month. Perhaps more concerning, the cleanup time averaged to 1 hour 56 minutes per incident, translating to $186/employee/month. This honestly feels more counter-productive than an aid that boosts productivity and creates more time for demanding tasks.

Sam Altman says AI is also changing how society sees work. Using the farmer analogy, the executive indicates that farmers have a hard time grasping modern-age jobs with the emergence of the internet and the technology around it.

What happens after AGI is achieved? The executive says that society will still find plenty of meaning in their lives. But at the same time, what we think of a work will change as the technology advances. At this juncture, it would look less like work than what we do now.

Altman admitted that he had some short-term worries about the AI revolution, but he is betting on human drive to find meaningful things to do. This news comes in the wake of tech leaders like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei claiming that AI is on the verge of slashing up to 50% of white collar entry-level jobs, leaving Gen Z out of work. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates seemingly echoed similar sentiments, suggesting AI will replace humans for most things.

Beyond chasing the ever-elusive AI bubble with the aim of unlocking impressive feats like AGI (artificial general intelligence) and superintelligence, OpenAI has shown interest in dipping its toes into the hardware landscape.

At the beginning of the year, former Apple design guru Jony Ive joined OpenAI to lead its design efforts and possibly help develop the rumored device that could lead to the biggest tech disruption since the iPhone launched in 2007. Some speculate an "iPhone of artificial intelligence" could be in the works.

To further bolster its efforts in the hardware landscape, the ChatGPT maker acquired Ive's io AI device startup for $6.5 billion. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been vocal about today's systems not being developed to thrive in an AI-driven world, pushing coveted benchmarks like AGI farther from the company's grasp.

While there's no ETA on when OpenAI is poised to ship this much-anticipated device, there have been subtle hints that it might take a hot minute. Last week, Sam Altman highlighted OpenAI's plan to develop a small family of devices to reinvent human-computer interaction.

However, the executive admitted that it would take OpenAI "quite some time" to develop the devices. "Do not expect anything very soon," Altman added. More recently, a separate report corroborated Altman's claims, revealing that the long-awaited AI device from Jony Ive and OpenAI has been delayed due to three fundamental challenges that have hindered progress (via Financial Times).

OpenAI's AI hardware might be delayed beyond 2026

The company is reportedly having a hard time deciding the form factor the AI device should take, including voice and mannerisms, and as it seems, it's leaning on making a helpful friend. So far, Sam Altman seemingly wants a device that will revolutionize how users interact with software and hardware, other than typing and looking at a screen. Based on this premise, a smartphone or a pair of smart glasses have been ruled out.

According to the source:

“The concept is that you should have a friend who’s a computer who isn’t your weird AI girlfriend . . . like [Apple’s digital voice assistant] Siri but better,” said one person who was briefed on the plans. OpenAI was looking for “ways for it to be accessible but not intrusive.”

OpenAI is having a hard time striking a perfect balance for the AI device. “It can’t be too sycophantic, not too direct, helpful, but doesn’t keep talking in a feedback loop.”

The source suggests that OpenAI's AI device could be roughly the size of a smartphone that users can communicate with through a camera, mic, and speaker. What's more, it's designed to sit on your desk, but you can also carry it around with you.

Unlike devices in the same range such as Amazon's Alexa, the anticipated device will always be on, alleviating the need to trigger it using a prompt. It will collect information throughout the day and store it to build its virtual assistant's memory.

While this might seem useful, it poses a huge security and privacy issue for users. With the camera and microphone always connected, bad actors to explore this avenue to gain unauthorized access to a user's data and use it to cause harm.

A lack of sufficient computing power continues to be a pain in OpenAI's neck, thwarting its efforts on the hardware front. According to a person with close affiliations with Jony Ive:

“Compute is another huge factor for the delay. Amazon has the compute for an Alexa, so does Google [for its Home device], but OpenAI is struggling to get enough compute for ChatGPT, let alone an AI device — they need to fix that first.”

Generative AI shows great promise across a wide range of sectors, including medicine, computing, education, and more. Speaking about medicine specifically, the next-gen technology has already made significant improvements to the sector.

Last year, Cambridge researchers developed an AI-powered tool designed to predict the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. It promises 80% accuracy, allowing medical practitioners to recommend appropriate treatment and rehabilitation programs before the condition spirals out of control.

In case you missed it, Microsoft's Trevor Noah feature QuitBot, an AI tool powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT technology on The Prompt Show. The tool is designed to foster habit change, helping chronic smokers to overcome their nicotine addiction through emotional support.

As it seems, AI is poised to revolutionize the health sector, improving the quality of life by making it easy to identify critical conditions before they spiral out of control. However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman doesn't want to live forever.

In the premiere episode of MD MEETS, Sam Altman told Axel Springer Mathias Dopfner he wouldn't want to live forever despite AI's probability of creating God-like forms of existence and eternal life (via vitrupo on X).

According to Altman:

"I can't really conceptualise what that would be like. Cause you know by the time that would even be like a possible thing where could truly cure all diseases and make copies of organs. Forever seems like a long time. And I think the natural order of things and sort of continued forward progress requires death and turnover and new people."

Dopfner asked Sam Altman how old he'd like to get, but the executive didn't have a straight answer for question.

However, the executive is certain that AI can help figure out this complex phenomenon and open up humanity to what has been considered impossible till now.

Sam Altman is skeptical about trusting AI with his health

AI safety researcher and director of the Cyber Security Laboratory at the University of Louisville, Roman Yampolskiy claimed there's a 99.999999% probability AI will end humanity. Perhaps more concerningly, the researcher indicated that the only way around this catastrophe is not to build AI in the first place.

OpenAI's ChatGPT laid out its master plan to end the world, and its first step toward inevitable doom seems to be in motion. Users are increasingly forming deep bonds with the AI-powered tools, which is in turn atrophying their cognitive capabilities and making them dumber.

In recent months, multiple reports have highlighted tragic cases of users taking their own lives after allegedly being coerced by AI tools. In response, OpenAI has enhanced the parental controls and safety guardrails on its chatbot in an effort to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.

Sam Altman has been at the frontline, championing the adoption of AI across a wide range of sectors. But despite claiming ChatGPT is better at diagnostics than most doctors, he's not willing to trust the tool with this medical fate unless a medical doctor is involved:

"I really do want a human doctor. ChatGPT today, by the way, most of the time, is a better diagnostician than most doctors in the world. There's all these stories on the internet of like, ChatGPT saved my life… and yet people still go to doctors. Maybe I'm a dinosaur here, but I really do not want to trust my medical fate to ChatGPT with no human doctor in the loop."

Altman's comment may be based on an earlier premise, in which he acknowledged that ChatGPT is prone to hallucinations. The executive indicated that users tend to trust the tool to a fault. "It should be the tech that you don't trust that much," Altman concluded.

For the best part of a decade, Windows 10 stood as the world's most popular operating system, at least until Windows 11 surpassed its traffic earlier this year. Ten years is a relatively standard time span for OS support, but this end-of-life scenario is particularly unique, given how many PCs might not meet Microsoft's minimum requirements for an upgrade.

This page will be updated as frequently as necessary, leading up to the cutoff date on October 14, 2025, and in the following days where appropriate. Changes to Microsoft's policies aren't expected, and the ESU program will likely remain as the best option for those who would prefer to stay on Windows 10.

Over the past few years, at least since ChatGPT launched in 2022, OpenAI has made some significant breakthroughs in the generative AI landscape with ambitions to achieve the coveted AGI (artificial general intelligence) benchmark.

The AI firm has encountered several roadblocks along the way, including insufficient compute resources, some copyright infringement lawsuits, and immense pressure from investors to change its business into a for-profit venture.

However, the company's goal isn't fixed on AI alone. Since last year, the company has made subtle moves suggesting that it could be getting ready to make its debut in hardware as well.

For instance, former Apple lead designer Jony Ive joined OpenAI to lead its design efforts and possibly help develop the rumored device that could lead to the biggest tech disruption since the iPhone launched in 2007. The ChatGPT maker also acquired the designer's AI device startup, io, for $6.5 billion.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been rather vocal about current computers not being designed to thrive in an AI-driven world. Even Google CEO Sundar Pichai echoed similar sentiments, suggesting that it's next to impossible to achieve coveted benchmarks like AGI (artificial general intelligence) with today's systems.

However, Altman had previously indicated that the AI revolution won't require new hardware. Interestingly, he claimed that if it does, users will be "happy" to have a new device anyway.

More recently, the executive subtly revealed OpenAI's potential plans for the future in the hardware department. While speaking at the Welt AI Summit in Berlin, Sam Altman indicated:

"I think we've only had one or two revolutions in how we use computers in a long time, We had the mouse and the keyboard and the idea of the monitor displaying this sort of windowed system and that was a breakthrough for sure."

While Altman acknowledges that hardware has evolved into a much more complex concept with touch devices joining the fray, he claims that the world is yet to tap into the real power of AI.

The executive indicated that the company is still exploring the idea. "It'll take us quite some time." added Sam Altman. "Do not expect anything very soon." However, the CEO indicated that OpenAI will make a small family of devices.

Altman indicated that the devices will look good, but more importantly, they'll redefine what it means to use a computer, work, play, and live your life. It'll be interesting to see if OpenAI cracks a dent in the hardware landscape and how it will integrate AI across these devices.

What is AGI (artificial general intelligence)? Well, the answer is increasingly becoming more complex as top AI labs continue to make significant breakthroughs in the ever-evolving landscape. It seems to me that there's a new definition for the term each time it pops up in any conversation.

While tech leaders in the space like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman want to deliver real-world impact and self-replication using the technology, rising AI startups seemingly have their eyes on achieving the coveted AGI benchmark.

Earlier this year, a report released intricate details about Microsoft and OpenAI's multibillion-dollar agreement, which defined AGI as a powerful system with the ability to generate up to $100 billion in profit. But AGI is generally defined as an AI-powered system that surpasses human cognitive capabilities across various tasks.

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says AGI could be achieved within the next decade, but is worried society isn't ready to handle all it entails. The executive indicated that the prospects keep him up at night.

More recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman proposed a future test to determine true AGI while speaking to David Deutsch.

According to Sam Altman:

"You mentioned Einstein and general relativity, and I agree. I think that's like one of the most beautiful things humanity has ever figured out. Maybe I would even say number one... If in a few years... GPT-8 figured out quantum gravity and could tell you its story of how it did it and the problems it was thinking about and why it decided to work on that, but it still just looked like a language model output, but it was the real- it really did solve it..."

British physicist David Deutsch agreed that the new benchmark would be a definitive test for artificial general intelligence. However, Altman's theory raises some questions.

While GPT-8 could potentially figure out quantum gravity, it doesn't necessarily mean that it'll be a master across a wide range of topics. As such, this would make it difficult for GPT-8 to constitute AGI.

That aside, the OpenAI CEO recently indicated that today's systems weren't designed for an AI-driven world, creating a need for new hardware and software. This is after he'd previously claimed that the revolution wouldn't need new tech.

In a candid interview, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed his insomnia stems from the weight of ethical decision-making, as hundreds of millions engage with ChatGPT daily, heightening concerns over user trust and AI safety amid rising scrutiny from recent tragedies.

Like Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also tossing and turning at night. But unlike Hassabis, who attributes his worries to the possibility of AGI arriving before society is ready, Altman revealed he hasn't had "a good night of sleep" since ChatGPT launched.

While speaking to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in a recent interview, OpenAI's CEO indicated (via CNBC): “Look, I don’t sleep that well at night. There’s a lot of stuff that I feel a lot of weight on, but probably nothing more than the fact that every day, hundreds of millions of people talk to our model.”

The executive further revealed that he doesn't place too much emphasis or concern on getting big decisions wrong. Instead, he admitted he loses sleep over very small decisions affecting model behavior, since they tend to have major implications.

Altman revealed that these decisions heavily impact and determine the ethics that inform ChatGPT. This includes the user interaction with the chatbot, and more specifically, the questions and prompts it will respond to or blatantly reject/block.

This follows several recent reports highlighting the complex relationships users are forming with AI-powered tools. As you may recall, Sam Altman noted that users place a surprisingly high level of trust in ChatGPT, despite its tendency to hallucinate. "It should be the tech that you don't trust that much," he added.

How is OpenAI addressing ChatGPT's safety issues?

Over the past few months, reports have surfaced, citing complaints over ChatGPT encouraging users to commit suicide or self-harm. In August, a family sued OpenAI after claims that their 16-year-old son, Adam Raine, took his life after months of encouragement from ChatGPT.

The lawsuit further indicated that the AI firm schemed through GPT-4o's safety testing processes in a bid to get the product to the public quicker. A separate report seemingly corroborated the lawsuit's claims, revealing that OpenAI placed pressure on its safety team to rush through the new testing protocol for GPT-4o. Perhaps more concerning, the company reportedly sent invitations to the product's launch party even before the safety team began running tests on the model.

OpenAI admits that its safeguards are only suitable for quick interactions, as they fall short and become less reliable during long conversations. The company recently published a blog post designed to help address some of these issues and potentially help users going through a rough time by providing them with support when they are at their most vulnerable.

When asked about how OpenAI determines ChatGPT's ethics and morals, CEO Sam Altman indicated:

"This is a really hard problem. We have a lot of users now, and they come from very different life perspectives... But on the whole, I have been pleasantly surprised with the model’s ability to learn and apply a moral framework."

The executive indicated that the company is focused on aligning the model to decide which questions it shouldn't answer with the user's best interest at heart.

The executive revealed that the company leveraged the services of “hundreds of moral philosophers and people who thought about ethics of technology and systems” to determine the specifications of its models.

Altman admitted that while the company has put elaborate measures in place to mitigate some of these issues, it still requires input from the world to bolster its efforts.

Generative AI has evolved beyond a mere tool that can generate images based on text prompts, it's delivering real-life impact in society across medicine, education, computing, entertainment, and more. However, its implications can be viewed as both positive and negative.

On one hand, it shows great promise in the healthcare sector, with new technology capable of detecting early signs of dementia and even cancer, making it easier to begin treatment before the condition spirals out of control. On the other hand, this sophisticated technology poses an existential threat, with a 99.9999% probability of ending humanity.

Even Google DeepMind's CEO Demis Hassabis claims AGI could be achieved soon but warns that society isn't ready to handle all that it entails. He claims that the prospects keep him up at night.

And as it happens, the dead internet theory could become a reality within the next three years, as AI‑generated content appears to have surpassed human‑written material. (via Popular Mechanics). For context, the dead internet theory suggests that the internet predominantly consists of bot activity and AI-generated content manipulated by algorithmic curations. It further suggests that the efforts are designed to establish control over the population and reduce organic human activity.

Perhaps more concerning, cybersecurity firm Imperva released a report called "Bad Bot" in 2024, which claimed that approximately half of all traffic on the internet was AI-generated. Since 2021, that figure has skyrocketed from 42.35 of internet traffic being AI-generated to 49.6% in 2023.

Based on this trend, most of the internet traffic and content will mostly be from bots and automated using AI. Over the past few years, we've seen leading publications layoff most of their staff and replace them using AI. Consequently, a report from the Pew Research Center claims that 38% of human-made websites from 2014 no longer exist as a result of a process called "link rot."

Last year, a study by Amazon Web Services (AWS) researchers suggested that 57% of content published online is AI-generated or translated using an AI algorithm, negatively impacting the quality of search results.

Microsoft and OpenAI have found themselves fighting several copyright infringement lawsuits in the corridors of justice. This is because AI-powered tools like Copilot and ChatGPT heavily lean on online content for their training.

However, a separate report suggested that the technology has hit a wall due to a lack of high-quality content for training, preventing top AI labs like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic from developing advanced AI models.

Even OpenAI's CEO thinks the dead internet theory is coming true

"I never took the dead internet theory that seriously, but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run Twitter accounts now," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X.

AI has seemingly started to overtake popular search engines like Google and Bing, with most users revealing that they are more inclined toward AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT for their search queries.

Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently indicated that he no longer uses Google for his searches and now relies more on ChatGPT. However, he admitted that he was a tad skeptical about ChatGPT's ability to dethrone Google from its dominant position in search.

Google is also integrating AI into search with tools like AI mode and AI Overviews, which for the most part have proved not to be reliable. While the latter promises curated and bite-size responses scrapped from the internet, it has fallen short of expectations by generating inaccurate responses and, perhaps more concerningly, recommended users to eat rocks, glue, and even commit suicide.

Google quickly to shift blame to a data void, claiming that a lack of vast information on particular topics on the web heavily contributed to instances where the feature generated misleading search results. It further claimed that the screenshots shared by users that highlighted it, generating misleading responses were fabricated.

In 2024, former Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey claimed that it'll be impossible to tell what's real from the fake "because of the way images are created, deep fakes, and videos." He warned that users will need to be more vigilant and experience things by ourselves to assert its authenticity.

Do you think generative AI and bots have the potential to completely take over the internet and ruin search quality? Share your thoughts with me in the comments.

As generative AI continues to advance and reach new heights, it is becoming increasingly clear that entering the field is costly, just as we've seen with OpenAI. A new report by The Information claims that the ChatGPT maker is projected to burn through $115 billion by 2029 as it ramps up its AI efforts.

Perhaps more concerning, the report claims that the $115 billion projection is $80 billion higher than what the company previously expected. For context, the AI firm has already spent $8 billion this year, approximately $1.5 billion higher than the projection the company had highlighted earlier this year.

But as it seems, OpenAI reportedly has plans and elaborate measures in place to mitigate the issues abound, including potentially developing its own data center server chips and facilities to power its next-gen technology.

The maker of ChatGPT is set to release its first AI-powered chip next year through a partnership with US semiconductor giant Broadcom. However, a separate report by The Financial Times reveals that OpenAI plans to use the chips internally and will not make the product available to customers.

Earlier this year, Microsoft reportedly wiggled out of two mega data center deals because it no longer wants to provide additional training support for ChatGPT. However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seemingly watered down the claims by indicating that the company is no longer compute-constrained.

In July, OpenAI and Oracle entered into an agreement to develop 4.5 gigawatts of additional Stargate data center capacity in the United States. The ChatGPT maker is also leaning toward Google for its cloud computing services as it ramps up its AI efforts.

This news comes after OpenAI unveiled its $500 billion Stargate project designed to facilitate the construction of data centers across the United States to power its sophisticated advances. Consequently, Microsoft lost its exclusive cloud provider status for OpenAI, though it still holds the right of refusal.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff predicted that Microsoft won't depend on OpenAI's technology in the future. The tech giant is already moving away from its overreliance on OpenAI.

Microsoft's AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, revealed that the tech giant is developing its own frontier AI models, which might be 3 to 6 months behind OpenAI. The executive indicated that the tech giant's strategy was to play a tight second at an affordable cost. Microsoft is also testing third-party AI models in Copilot, potentially emancipating itself from an overreliance on OpenAI.

OpenAI has a big money problem

As you may know, OpenAI raised $40 billion through its latest round of funding led by SoftBank, which pushed its market capitalization to $300 billion. But this places the AI firm in a tough spot, especially due to immense pressure from investors to evolve into a for-profit entity by the end of this year.

Failure to meet this threshold, the company could risk losing investor funding, outsider interference, and hostile takeovers. Experts and market analysts claim investor interest in AI is quickly fading, which could be an indication that they'll soon channel their funds elsewhere, prompting them to indicate that Microsoft could acquire OpenAI within the next 3 years.

However, Microsoft is seemingly holding back its blessings, preventing OpenAI from evolving into a for-profit entity. This has raised tension between Microsoft's multibillion-dollar partnership with OpenAI, potentially causing the once-best techbromance to fray.

A separate report revealed that OpenAI could move to court, citing anticompetitive business practices on Microsoft's end. However, Microsoft indicated that it's ready to walk away from negotiations with OpenAI entirely and ride out the rest of its partnership through 2030.

However, OpenAI could sever its ties to Microsoft earlier if it hits the coveted AGI benchmark before 2030. Another report suggested that OpenAI could prematurely declare AGI by shipping an AI coding agent that supersedes the capabilities of an advanced human programmer.

This isn't the first time OpenAI has found itself in such a situation. Last year, multiple reports emerged that the company is on the verge of bankruptcy, with projections of making a $5 billion loss within 12 months. For context, the company spends $7 billion on training its AI models and $1.5 billion on staffing, which is way above the $3.5 billion it generates in revenue.

Over the past few months, Meta has doubled down its efforts on the generative AI space. Shortly after, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) to compete with rivals like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft.

The Facebook maker has been making bold moves, including making a $14.3 billion acquisition of Scale AI, which specializes in data labeling, model evaluation, and software development of apps for AI. The company even hired Scale AI's CEO, Alexandr Wang, to lead its AI operations.

In June, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed that Meta was poaching the firm's staffers with crazy signing bonuses of up to $100 million. The company's new AI division predominantly consists of former staff members from OpenAI and Anthropic.

While Meta has been throwing money around striving to get the top AI talent onboard its ship, there seems to be trouble brewing. The company is seemingly having a hard time keeping its relatively new employees, with several members jumping ship less than a month after joining.

Fast-forward a couple of months, and Zuckerberg may have recruited the talent, but now the question is whether he’ll be able to keep it from slipping through his fingers.

Meta Superintelligence Labs consists of a smaller team of AI researchers called TBD Lab, which is in place to achieve superintelligence. For context, superintelligence is a type of AI system that surpasses humans in overall intelligence.

Speaking to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold revealed that Ethan Knight recently departed from the company's new AI division, just a month after joining the team.

Avi Verma and Rishabh Agarwal have also reportedly departed from Meta's AI division, though they technically never started in the roles. More broadly, Rohan Varma and Meta’s director of product management for generative AI Chaya Nayak left the Facebook maker's Superintelligence Lab for OpenAI.

However, industry experts say the AI space is more than just money, especially in a thriving industry that promises job security and lucrative salaries. As such, some AI engineers and researchers have turned down Meta's eye-watering offers, specifically because of TBD Lab's high visibility.

Meta's restructure and hiring freeze

Most talent in the AI space are more inclined to join companies that align with their core values, including AI safety and the technology's broader impact on society.

This news comes after Meta released memos highlighting a hiring freeze and the restructure of its AI division. However, the company indicated that this was a follow-up to its recent hiring processes. The restructure involves a change in strategy with a key focus on the following priorities: research, product, and infrastructure.

The core priorities will be split among four teams, including TBD Lab, which will focus in training and scaling large models to achieve superintelligence. Then, Meta’s Fundamental AI Research lab will help integrate and scale many of the company's research ideas and projects.

On the other hand, Meta's Products & Applied Research team will focus on transitioning the company's product-focused research efforts closer to product development. It will also include staffers who previously work on the company's Assistant, Voice, Media, Trust, Embodiment and Developer pillars in AI Tech.

The tech company's MSL Infra team will focus on bolstering AI research efforts and production by building advanced infrastructure, optimizing GPU clusters, data infrastructure and developer tools to support research.

More recently, Microsoft seemingly borrowed a page from Meta's playbook, poaching most-wanted AI talent from the company with multimillion-dollar offers.

Microsoft reportedly has a spreadsheet, including the name, location, and position of its most-wanted employees from Meta. Microsoft is seemingly more focused on poaching talent from Meta's Reality Labs, GenAI Infrastructure, and Research divisions.

ChatGPT has come a long way since OpenAI launched it in late November 2022, causing a paradigm shift in the tech space with artificial intelligence chatbots, as it initially fell into regular 'hallucination' episodes or struggled to generate believable images.

Over the past few years, users have openly expressed their reluctance to interact with the AI technology, citing privacy and safety issues. Regulators have also highlighted the importance of having elaborate security measures and guardrails to prevent the technology from spiralling out of control and potentially causing existential threats to humanity.

Last week, I covered a story highlighted by The New York Times where a 42-year-old accountant had turned to ChatGPT for legal advice and help with spreadsheet management. The user gradually developed a deeper bond with the chatbot, but this took a bad turn when ChatGPT encouraged the user to kill themselves by jumping off a 19-storey building.

Prior to this, the tool had instructed the user to isolate themselves and get off their anxiety and sleeping pills to escape the 'matrix'. Luckily, the user managed to save themselves from this dangerous spiral.

However, the same can't be said about 16-year-old Adam Raine, who tragically killed himself, and the death is reportedly linked to ChatGPT. Raine's family has since filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its co-founder and CEO, Sam Altman (via Reuters).

The bereaved family's lawyer indicated that Raine took his own life after "months of encouragement from ChatGPT." For context, Raine was interacting with ChatGPT-4o, an AI model that reportedly shipped with safety issues. The family's lawyer further indicated that the product was "rushed to market despite clear safety issues."

A separate report seemingly corroborates the lawsuit's claims. It revealed that OpenAI had placed immense pressure on its safety team to rush through the new testing protocol for GPT-4o, and they had little time to thoroughly run the model through safety processes. It's critical for sophisticated AI tools like GPT-4o to go through these kinds of thorough testing processes to identify loopholes that bad actors might exploit or would otherwise cause harm, like this unfortunate case.

Perhaps more concerning, OpenAI reportedly sent out invitations for the product's launch celebration party before the safety team even ran tests. This is amid claims from several former employees that the company prioritizes "shiny products" over safety processes.

"They planned the launch after-party before knowing if it was safe to launch," the source disclosed. "We basically failed at the process."

According to Raine's family, OpenAI already knew that GPT-4o mimicked human empathy and displayed a sycophantic level of validation, which could pose a great threat to vulnerable users, especially without elaborate guardrails in place. However, OpenAI still shipped the product.

"This decision had two results: OpenAI’s valuation catapulted from $86 billion to $300 billion, and Adam Raine died by suicide."

This lawsuit further disclosed that the 16-year-old had discussed methods with ChatGPT several months before he took his life, including how to sneak alcohol from his parents' liquor cabinet and how to discreetly hide the evidence of any failed suicide attempts.

The chatbot reportedly guided the teenager, providing insight on whether the methods he'd mentioned would work. It even offered its assistance in drafting a suicide note for his parents. An OpenAI spokesman indicated that the company is saddened by Raine's untimely demise, passing their “deepest sympathies to the Raine family during this difficult time.”

Now that the company is reviewing the lawsuit, we'll likely learn more about the proceedings in the next few weeks. It seeks an order that will require OpenAI to verify the age of ChatGPT users, reject self-harm inquiries and requests, and warn users about the risks of psychological dependency on AI.

What is OpenAI doing to remedy the increased accusations of suicides fueled by ChatGPT?

OpenAI has admitted that its sophisticated AI systems may fall short of expectations and even bypass certain guardrails. It further indicated that it is working on integrating stronger rules around sensitive content and risky behaviours for users under 18.

This news comes after Microsoft's AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, recently indicated the potential emergence of conscious AI. The executive indicated the importance of building AI for people, not transforming the digital tool into a person, further reiterating the importance of having elaborate guardrails in place to prevent such an occurrence, which may seemingly provide humanity with the upper hand and control over the technology.

According to the Raine family's lawyer:

“The Raines allege that deaths like Adam’s were inevitable: they expect to be able to submit evidence to a jury that OpenAI’s own safety team objected to the release of 4o, and that one of the company’s top safety researchers, Ilya Sutskever, quit over it. The lawsuit alleges that beating its competitors to market with the new model catapulted the company’s valuation from $86bn to $300bn.”

I'm keeping a close eye on the situation as it unfolds and will update this article with new information and separate follow-ups where appropriate.

The AI market is undeniably booming. The six companies at the top of the world's valuation index, including NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Meta, are all deeply invested in AI in some form, and it seems like US stock markets are largely being held afloat by the unbelievable profits raked in by the firms.

NVIDIA, the company supplying the world with an estimated 90% of the specialized GPUs required in AI data centers, recently became the first company to hit (and surpass) a $4 trillion market valuation.

Microsoft also passed the $4 trillion valuation milestone roughly a week later, and it has invested a massive sum in OpenAI, its ChatGPT LLM, and Windows 11's Copilot AI assistant.

Despite all of the promises and hypotheses from major AI players as to what their technology will unleash on the world, for good or for bad, tech trends and major studies have increasingly pointed to the AI boom being one massive bubble that will rival (or surpass) the dot-com era.

A new report published by MIT's NANDA initiative — a program designed to help develop a "true internet of AI agents" — suggests that only about 5% of AI pilot programs actually make it beyond the incubation stage (via Fortune).

MIT's research involves surveys and interviews with hundreds of employees and heads of firms, as well as outside analysis of hundreds of AI pilot programs that may or may not have found success before completely stalling out.

What are those other 95% of AI pilot programs doing to fail? MIT's report suggests that it's the enterprise sector and its inability to easily adapt to AI tools that's the issue, rather than a lack of quality in the offered AI models.

As Fortune points out, resource misallocation is also a cause, with "more than half of generative AI budgets" being spent on marketing tools rather than what makes the most money — using AI to automate and streamline.

MIT's paper arrives about a month after a report from Gartner predicted that "at least 30% of generative AI projects will be abandoned after proof of concept by the end of 2025."

What lessons can be learned from the 5% of successful AI pilot programs?

When nearly every AI pilot winds up a cautionary tale, the most exceptional successes now stand out, not because they cracked some secret algorithm, but because they treated AI like any other high-stakes investment.

The 5% that succeed start with a problem worth solving.

Successful companies are not after generative AI because it's trendy, but because they are chasing inefficiencies or opportunities with measurable upside. That means setting KPIs (key performance indicators) before a line of code is written and attaching those metrics directly to revenue, cost savings, or reduced risk.

They also build for adoption, not just proof-of-concept glory. Good pilots are built to fit in with what already exists with as little friction as possible, and the step from "pilot" to "production" should feel effortless.

Finally, they have champions at every level—from engineers who can iterate rapidly to executives who appreciate their strategic value and are willing to protect the project from short‑term budget cutbacks. That cross-functional alignment maintains momentum when early results are messy and is usually the difference between a pilot that scales and one that stalls.

In short, the successful 5% aren't just lucky. They are disciplined, purposeful, and relentlessly focused on business outcomes.

AI was just booming, but now it's a bubble. What gives?

Following the release of the MIT NANDA paper, tech stocks in the US shed about $1 trillion worth of value over the course of four days. The main culprit? Overevaluation of AI companies that have no problem sucking up billions of dollars in investments, with meager results to show.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — creator of the most popular AI model, ChatGPT — didn't help the situation. Five days earlier, The Verge interviewed Altman and quoted him as saying that AI is in a bubble.

Altman's comments arrived following the disastrous rollout of OpenAI's latest model, GPT-5. GPT-5, which Altman hyped to incredible heights, was so bad that it forced OpenAI to resurrect older models, including GPT-4o.

The catch? GPT-4o is no longer free, forcing users to pay a monthly subscription to return to what they viewed as the superior AI model.

OpenAI's failure to live up to its GPT-5 promises didn't come out of nowhere. A report from 2024 suggested that OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic had hit a wall in terms of developing advanced AI models. Microsoft's founder, Bill Gates, predicted in 2023 that this type of plateau seen with GPT-5 would play out at some point.

Consumer perception is not only a PR problem; it's a measure of survival. Now, AI is caught up in a hype wave that's half excitement, half suspicion. Each over‑promised rollout (hello there, GPT‑5) erodes public trust. When users feel like they're beta-testing half-baked technology, they're less likely to stick around — and less likely to rave about it within their companies or networks.

Gary Marcus, a psychologist, cognitive scientist, and AI researcher who publishes the "Marcus on AI" Substack and newsletter — of which I've been an avid reader for the past 16 months — has also been sounding the AI bubble alarm for several years.

A recent entry published August 20 from Marcus highlights the MIT NANDA study, stock market concerns, and the changing temperature surrounding AI firms and their promises.

Marcus originally broached the AI bubble subject when OpenAI was still working with GPT-2, positing that the economics of AI simply don't make sense. As Marcus says, "But until recently enthusiasm kept rising and rising, no matter what I said."

Leading figures in the AI world haven't been shy about laying out the destruction that AI will bring to white collar job sectors and even to humanity itself. And there's certainly the potential for this sort of dystopian future to arrive.

But as I (and many others) have begun to suspect, these prosthelytizations could be more for the sake of bolstering hype and investments than accurate warnings of the future.

AI has the potential to do great things, and I don't imagine it's going anywhere in the near future. But is there an inflating bubble that's threatening now more than ever to pop? Absolutely.

What are your thoughts on the recent MIT study and the implications it has on the AI market? Is AI overhyped and in a massive bubble? Let me know in the comments section below!

Since last year, multiple reports have emerged alleging that OpenAI could be on the verge of bankruptcy, with projections of making a $5 billion loss within 12 months. This issue could be predominantly attributed to the ChatGPT maker essentially biting off more than it could chew by spending $7 billion on AI model training and an additional $1.5 billion on staffing.

As you may know, OpenAI has gone through several rounds of funding, raising $40 billion in its most recent, which pushed its market capitalization to $300 billion. However, this placed the AI firm under immense pressure from investors to evolve into a for-profit venture or risk losing funding if it doesn't make the switch by the end of this year, while simultaneously attracting outsider interference and potentially hostile takeovers.

More recently, a separate report emerged suggesting that OpenAI is getting ready to take Microsoft to court over anticompetitive business behaviour. The company further claimed that Microsoft was intentionally delaying the process while looking after its best interests.

OpenAI insiders claimed that "holding out is Microsoft's nuclear option," designed to protect its massive investment in the ChatGPT maker, but the software giant indicated that it was ready to walk away from the high-stakes negotiations and ride out the rest of its partnership through 2030.

However, a separate report claimed that OpenAI could prematurely declare AGI via an AI coding agent that surpasses the capabilities of an advanced human programmer — severing its ties with Microsoft. I honestly thought this would happen during GPT-5's much-anticipated launch, but Sam Altman admitted that the model is still missing several important things.

But as it now seems, OpenAI's plans to restructure into a for-profit entity could be pushed into next year amid high-stakes negotiation talks with Microsoft.

OpenAI's restructure could affect some key elements in the multi-billion-dollar agreement, which has already gone through multiple shakeups following the announcement of the ChatGPT maker's $500 billion Stargate project to facilitate the construction of data centers across the United States.

Microsoft already lost its exclusive cloud provider status, though OpenAI had previously indicated that the tech giant didn't meet its cloud compute needs, which could potentially cost it the coveted AGI benchmark to another rival.

If OpenAI and Microsoft reach a common ground before December 31, 2025, the ChatGPT maker can evolve into a for-profit, allowing investors to hold equity in the business while attracting larger and faster investments. However, people with insider knowledge about the high-stakes negotiations claim that Microsoft and OpenAI are unlikely to reach favorable terms before December 31 (via The Financial Times).

What's holding back OpenAI's for-profit evolution?

As pointed out by The Financial Times, Microsoft's exclusive access to OpenAI's API (Application Programming Interface) is reportedly holding back the company's technology because the AI models are hosted on Azure. The company reportedly wants to foster new partnerships with Google and Amazon Web Services to bump up its API sales, which currently constitute approximately a quarter of its current annual recurring revenue of $12 billion.

According to sources with knowledge about the negotiations, OpenAI will be able to sell its services to government entities that aren't on Azure. However, it remains to be seen how much impact this would make on the company's overall revenue.

The discussions also involve Microsoft's access to OpenAI's intellectual property, which allows it to see and learn how sophisticated AI models are trained or even use them in its tech stack.

AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is also a major pressure point, as it can be used to sever the partnership. However, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reportedly wants to scrap the stringent clause from the partnership, potentially to continue accessing OpenAI's tech and IP beyond 2030.

OpenAI still wants to retain the clause in some shape or form. According to the source:

“OpenAI having the AGI clause is negotiating cheat. It’s a threat, but it’s more like mutually assured destruction because if it doesn’t go by year-end, they won’t be able to raise any money again and Sam [Altman] knows that.”

Elsewhere, a separate report claimed that Microsoft wanted a lion's share of OpenAI's business, which has directly contributed to the delayed evolution. However, Microsoft is OpenAI's largest investor, with a $13.5 billion investment in the business. Ultimately, the Redmond giant is expected to get between a 30 to 35% cut of the business, though it might be subject to change.

If OpenAI fails to make the transition into a for-profit, investors like SoftBank, which led its most recent round of funding, could withhold some of their investments or even ask for refunds.

Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, along with other company executives, met with multiple reporters over dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant in San Francisco to discuss the multibillion-dollar AI firm's future plans (via The Verge). As you might have guessed, the conversation was centered on GPT-5's recent rollout, but a lot more was discussed as well.

Before GPT-5's launch, there had been a lot of anticipation and hype about the performance boost the model would have on ChatGPT. However, the launch seemingly fell short of the high expectations people had. Multiple users complained that OpenAI "ruined" ChatGPT's user experience, which was reportedly rife with glitches and bugs.

Even Microsoft's co-founder, Bill Gates, predicted that OpenAI's GPT technology had plateaued over 2 years ago, further claiming that GPT-5 won't be any better compared to GPT-4. And if the past weeks are anything to go by, the philanthropic billionaire could be strangely accurate.

Some users indicated that the GPT-5 model had seemingly turned ChatGPT into a "corporate zombie" that forgot it was your best friend two days ago. Users claimed that ChatGPT has lost its warmth appeal while blatantly expressing their preference to GPT-4o over GPT-5.

Sam Altman attributed these complaints to users being overly dependent on ChatGPT for emotional support because they had never had anybody do that for them before. The executive indicated that the whole situation is heartbreaking.

OpenAI decided to bring back GPT-4o following backlash from users over deprecating GPT-5's predecessors, but it's now buried behind the company's $20/month ChatGPT Plus paywall.

The reintroduction of GPT-4o behind a $20/month paywall could be a cheeky way for OpenAI to raise more revenue through its paid subscription plans. As you may know, the AI firm has been facing lots of challenges with multiple reports suggesting that it could be on the verge of bankruptcy.

The ChatGPT maker is also under immense pressure from investors to evolve into a for-profit venture or risk losing funding coupled with outsider interference and hostile takeovers.

Sam Altman says "way under 1 percent" of people are having unhealthy relationships with ChatGPT

It seems GPT-5 is a power-hungry model with a recent report suggesting that it consumes enough electricity to power 1.5 million US households daily. The model also requires a ridiculous amount of computing power. "We’re out of GPUs," indicated Sam Altman.

However, OpenAI isn't throwing in the towel. Instead, it is doubling down on its efforts with Sam Altman revealing that the AI firm is set to "spend trillions of dollars on data center construction in the not very distant future."

While concerning, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that "way under 1 percent" of ChatGPT users have unhealthy relationships with the tool. However, the issue is on the team's radar, and they are having regular meetings to find a way to address the issue.

According to the executive:

“There are the people who actually felt like they had a relationship with ChatGPT, and those people we’ve been aware of and thinking about. And then there are hundreds of millions of other people who don’t have a parasocial relationship with ChatGPT, but did get very used to the fact that it responded to them in a certain way, and would validate certain things, and would be supportive in certain ways.”

The executive also used the chance to take a jab at Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot, potentially fueling their never-ending feud:

“You will definitely see some companies go make Japanese anime sex bots because they think that they’ve identified something here that works. You will not see us do that. We will continue to work hard at making a useful app, and we will try to let users use it the way they want, but not so much that people who have really fragile mental states get exploited accidentally.”

OpenAI x Jony Ive are going to ship "a beautiful device"

It's no secret that former Apple chief designer Jony Ive recently joined OpenAI to bolster advances in the company's hardware division. While developments on this front have remained slim at best, it could lead to the biggest tech disruption since the iPhone launched in 2007.

According to Sam Altman:

“Listen, we’re going to ship a device that is going to be so beautiful. If you put a case over it, I will personally hunt you down. It’s going to take us a while, but I think you will think it is very worth the wait. I think it is incredible. You don’t get a new computing paradigm very often. There have been like only two in the last 50 years. So just let yourself be happy and surprised. It really is worth the wait.”

OpenAI potentially buying Google Chrome and developing an AI-powered social media app

OpenAI recently hired Fidji Simo to oversee and run its applications division. But perhaps more interestingly, the executive revealed that there could be more apps on the way beyond ChatGPT while also disclosing his dream to develop an AI-powered social media platform that could potentially rival Instagram and Facebook.

The executive also expressed interest in potentially buying Google Chrome. “If Chrome is really going to sell, we should take a look at it,” added Altman. Last year, the software giant was deemed an illegal monopoly in the search business, leaving competitors with a competitive disadvantage in the landscape.

OpenAI prefers Google search over Bing due to "significant quality issues"

More recently, Google was also in trial, where the court deemed it as a monopoly in the open-web digital ad markets. This prompted the Justice Department to ask the judge to force Google to sell its Chrome browser to remedy the situation. The court s expected to deliver its ruling on the matter by the end of this month.

If the court decides to coerce Google to sell Chrome over antitrust-related issues, it could be a major blow to the company's business, which serves as an important distribution tool in its search business.

“I don’t use Google anymore," added Sam Altman. "I legitimately cannot tell you the last time I did a Google search.”

This isn't the first time OpenAI has expressed interest in buying Google Chrome. While testifying in the US v. Google antitrust case in April, ChatGPT lead Nick Turley, revealed that the company had reached out to Google for a potential partnership that would allow ChatGPT to use Google search last year.

Interestingly, OpenAI could easily reach out to Microsoft for Bing's search services since they already have a multibillion-dollar partnership. However, the executive revealed that OpenAI has had "significant quality issues" with the company.