💰 OpenAI — the company best known for making a chatbot that writes cover letters, generates wrong answers with total confidence, and refuses to help you do anything fun — has closed a new funding round worth $122 billion at an $852 billion post-money valuation, making it one of the most valuable private companies in human history. 🤯 According to a new report from the Institute for Numbers That Should Not Be Real, this is the largest private financing the tech industry has ever seen, and OpenAI is now generating $2 billion per month in revenue while approaching 1 billion weekly active users — most of whom are asking it to write emails they were perfectly capable of writing themselves.
😂 CEO Sam Altman, who has spent the better part of the past three years alternating between being fired and rehired by his own board and telling Congress that AI will either save humanity or destroy it (sometimes in the same sentence), is reportedly in the process of transitioning OpenAI from a non-profit to a for-profit company — a pivot that investors are describing as “finally” and ethicists are describing as “we knew this would happen.” 🎩 Meanwhile, OpenAI has also acquired TBPN, a popular tech podcast, because apparently owning the AI that generates tech content was not enough and they also need to own the show where people discuss the AI that generates tech content. This is called “vertical integration” and is completely legal.
🤯 The funding news arrives at a complicated moment in the AI landscape: Anthropic is dealing with a significant security breach involving leaked source code for their Claude AI agent — which represents one of the most serious AI model security compromises to date — and Cisco has unveiled a Zero Trust architecture specifically designed to secure AI agents, suggesting that “AI security” is becoming its own industry, which means we have now created a problem so large that we need a new industry to manage it. 🔐 Google has launched the Gemma 4 Good Hackathon. Apple announced a completely reimagined AI-powered Siri. NVIDIA partnered with someone to simulate autonomous vehicles. Everything is happening simultaneously and there is no off button.
💬 Industry observers note that OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation means the company is worth more than most G7 nations’ GDP growth for the past three years, despite the fact that nobody can fully explain what it does to someone’s grandmother without using the phrase “it’s kind of like Google but it talks to you.” 🗣️ OpenAI’s board of directors, which famously fired Sam Altman for a weekend in 2023 before rehiring him out of what sources describe as “sheer panic,” declined to comment on whether the $852 billion figure has changed any internal dynamics. “Everything is great,” said an unnamed OpenAI executive who has worked there for four months and would like to vest their options before commenting further. “We are definitely going to make AI that benefits all of humanity.” He then got into a Waymo.
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