Happy Friday! Quick thought experiment: If you had $1 trillion, would you still want to deal with quarterly earnings calls? OpenAI decided yes, proving money can’t buy peace… or at least not private company peace. OpenAI is planning a Q4 IPO. Sam says he’s exactly “0% excited” about going public. Anthropic and SpaceX are also suiting up for IPO season, giving Wall Street front row seats to AI’s Super Bowl. First to market, first to IPO?
OpenAI thinks your face can fix social media. Sam Altman’s building a social network, no bots allowed. To get in, you’ll need to prove you’re human by using World’s eyeball scanning orb or Apple’s Face ID. The goal is to clean out the fake bot spam and scams that turned platforms like X into a toxic digital wasteland. If this clicks, it won’t be just another social app. Altman’s biometric login could become how you prove you’re real everywhere online. Convenient, until your biometric data leaks. Unlike a password, your iris doesn’t come with a reset button. And it won’t stop real people from spinning up bot armies, we’ll just know who’s behind them. (Forbes)
Musk wants to merge SpaceX with his AI startup. Think rockets, Starlink satellites, and xAI’s Grok chatbot all under one big trillion dollar roof. He claims running AI from space will be cheaper than Earth’s data centers within 3 years, tops. The Pentagon is sold on Grok in its systems. And Musk shuffling billions between his own companies is old news. Last year xAI swallowed X. Now Tesla’s handing over $2 billion for xAI’s supercomputer. Rockets and AI sharing one IPO is peak Musk, pushing big bets even further into orbit. (The Verge)
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Investors are panicking over OpenAI’s trillion dollar spending spree. Microsoft shares plunged nearly 12%, erasing over $440 billion in market value, after Wall Street realized half its cloud business depends entirely on OpenAI. Let that sink in. So far, OpenAI has committed roughly $1.4 trillion to future computing costs while earning barely $20 billion last year. Oracle stock took a similar hit for the exact same reason. To calm investors, OpenAI is rushing to raise another $100 billion from tech giants like Nvidia, Amazon, and SoftBank, all betting heavily on its AGI dream. Wall Street calls these investments circular. Big Tech sees the trillion dollar gamble as inevitable. (Fortune, NYTimes)
AI just broke the economics of thinking. Measuring AI’s impact by ROI or jobs replaced is outdated. For the founder of Freshly, the new flex is Synthetic Human Intelligence Hours (SHIH). It’s a measure of how many hours of high quality thinking AI can crank out at near zero cost. Think horsepower, but for brains. With agents, one employee can deliver 500 hours of analytical work in a 40 hour week, without burnout or overtime pay. SHIH is the smarter way to track AI’s real value. Not in flashy short term automation wins, but the compounding power of lean teams quietly outthinking giants. (Fortune)
There should be a Darwin Award for companies that replace devs with AI. Corporations jumped headfirst into vibe coding, believing it was the perfect excuse to fire expensive senior developers. What they didn’t realize was that vibe coding was mostly a flashy marketing trick, engineered to sell massive enterprise AI deals. Now CTOs are stuck scrambling to put out security fires as vibe coded apps open more vulnerabilities in one year than the previous four combined. Senior devs tried to warn them, but who listens to the old folks anyway? (Inc)
fun stats
🌴 100%. Code (supposedly) written by AI, not engineers, at Anthropic and Open AI. The head of Claude Code claims he hasn’t written any in 2 months.
📱 $100. The per user price for privacy as Google agrees to a $135 million settlement for collecting Android users’ data even when people closed its apps.
🎮 52%. Developers who think gen AI is bad for the gaming industry, up from just 18% last year.
🌱 3.5 feet. Height of Fauna Robotic’s new Sprout robot. The lightweight, friendly looking humanoid is designed to be safe around kids and has a Lego brick on its head.