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OpenAI officially closes $122 billion funding round at $852B valuation

OpenAI is by far the most used and valued AI lab, with 40% of revenue from enterprise customers. (Picture: Adobe)

Ahead of a possible stock market debut, the ChatGPT maker is also saying that it will be available in «several» market-traded ETFs managed by Ark Invest.

This will be the first time OpenAI can be traded by individual investors, and over $3 billion is being raised by banks.

The round is led by «strategic partners» Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank, as previously reported, and OpenAI is committed to consume 2 gigawatts of compute from AWS as part of the deal.

In its announcement, OpenAI brags that ChatGPT has «more than 900 million weekly active users, and over 50 million subscribers. ChatGPT has 6x the monthly web visits and mobile sessions than the next largest AI app, while total AI time spent is 4x the next largest AI app.»

— These are not just growth milestones — they show that frontier AI is becoming part of everyday life for people around the world, they say.

At the same time, OpenAI is openly confirming that they are indeed building a super app, that will combine ChatGPT, Codex, browsing, and «broader agentic capabilities»

Read more: OpenAI’s announcement, CNBC, and TechCrunch.

OpenAI developer releases Codex plugin for Claude Code

Codex for Claude Code might be a tad cheeky, but it’s useful. (Picture: screenshot)

Thanks to OpenAI’s Dominik Kundel, you can now call up OpenAI’s coding agent Codex within the Claude Code environment.

The plugin is fairly easy to install and use, so long as you have a ChatGPT account to log in with.

It’s handy for people who switch between the two models, and Codex on Claude can do things like review code, do an adversarial review, or hand off the entire task — where you should be able to switch apps and finish the work in Codex.

— This plugin is a simple way to keep your Claude Code workflow and still use Codex where Codex is strong, writes OpenAI developer Vaibhav (VB) Srivastav in the instructions.

Whether Anthropic will like Codex integration in its flagship coding product is anyones guess.

Mistral raises $830 million in debt to build data center just outside Paris

It’s a big investment for European AI, but significantly lower than what US AI labs are spending. (Picture: Mistral)

The new 44 MW data center will be powered by 13,800 Nvidia chips, and should be online by the second quarter of 2026.

The French AI lab is hoping to secure 200 megawatts of capacity by the end of 2027, Reuters reports.

— Scaling our infrastructure in Europe is ⁠critical to empower our customers and to ensure AI innovation and autonomy remain at the heart of Europe, says Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch.

The news comes hot on the heels of Mistral’s February startup of a €1.2 billion data center in Sweden, according to CNBC.

Mistral is the largest European AI lab, has contracts with the French armed forces, and has secured $3.1 billion in funding so far, TechCrunch writes.

Read more: Reuters, CNBC and TechCrunch.

OpenAI projects $100 million in annualized revenue from ChatGPT ads test

Ads on ChatGPT are just being shown to a tiny fraction of users, but that’s about to change. (Picture: Adobe)

The figure was reached from a small pilot of 600 advertisers serving less than 20% of Free and Go users, Reuters reports.

85% of these users in the USA are eligible to receive ads, but far fewer ads are shown in the trial that started in February.

The minimum asking price to get on the test program is said to be $200,000 and the projected revenue once the trial goes live to more users is about a billion dollars a year.

80% of the advertisers on the platform are small and medium-sized businesses, Reuters notes, and OpenAI is set to debut a self-serve advertising platform already in April.

Read more: Reuters and CNBC.

OpenAI scraps Adult Mode «indefinitely,» Financial Times reports

After running into strong headwinds, letting «adults be adults» is out at OpenAI. (Picture: generated)

It now seems official that there won’t be an Adult Mode, or «smutty chat» on ChatGPT, due to challenges of training it, internal dismay and investor concerns, The Financial Times (paywalled) says.

Offering an Adult Mode on ChatGPT was a promise made by CEO Sam Altman in October 2025, but quickly ran into problems, leading to delays, and later postponement.

Continue reading “OpenAI scraps Adult Mode «indefinitely,» Financial Times reports”

Gemini introduces chat and memory imports from competing chatbots

It now seems easier to switch to Gemini, but finding the files to do it can sometimes be difficult. (Picture: Google)

Switching from a chatbot with lots of history to a fresh one can be a pain, which is why Google is now launching new switching tools, that lets you import from other chatbots, with hopes of snagging some extra users from others.

The first step is to simply prompt the bot you are switching from to output your preferences, or its memories, and it will provide them in a prompt reply. This can then be pasted into Gemini.

The second feature will import your entire chat history — up to 5GB of it. Doing this is a little more complicated and involves a trip to the settings panel, but it should result in getting a zip file from your provider, which can be uploaded to Google.

From there on, Gemini promises to pick up right where you left off with the other chatbot, and you won’t have to train a whole new AI. Anthropic already does this.

Read more: Google’s presentation, step-by-step tweet, writeups on Engadget and The Verge.

Apple will open up Siri to different chatbots in iOS 27, coming in June

Previously, Siri would hand off more complex questions to ChatGPT when it couldn’t handle it itself — but that’s about to change, according to Bloomberg (paywalled).

Starting in June, if users have Gemini or Claude installed on their phones, Siri will be able to use those bots instead, by recording their preferred «Extension» in Settings.

That would end the ChatGPT monopoly that OpenAI has enjoyed since 2024, and opens up the chatbot ecosystem to other players, likely staving off regulators.

Opening up the platform is for the system level Siri queries native to iOS itself, and must not be confused with the standalone Siri app, which will use Gemini in a billion dollar deal.

Read more: Bloomberg (paywalled), Gizmodo, Reuters, and MacRumors.

Anthropic wins preliminary judgment against supply chain risk designation

Anthropic can again be used by defense contractors after a judge blocked the Pentagon’s ban. (Picture: Shutterstock)

The ruling of Judge Rita Lin in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco also upends the Trump directive banning Anthropic from all government use.

The Pentagon signaled it would label Anthropic a supply chain risk in February, after the lab refused to do mass surveillance and autonomous killing, and was banned from government use the next day.

Continue reading “Anthropic wins preliminary judgment against supply chain risk designation”

Apple able to extract model responses from their custom Gemini solution

With Gemini running on Apple’s own servers, they have wide access and permission to customize it. (Picture: generated)

With Google’s bespoke Gemini model running on their internal servers, Apple will have full access to the AI, The Information (paywalled) writes.

That entails that they can run «distillation» on the model, meaning they can use it to provide answers and reasoning over a wide array of tasks and use that to train smaller, more capable Apple models, MacRumors says.

Distillation is a controversial technique, and many of the big AI labs have been accusing Chinese startups of doing it to make their own models more capable.

Apple can also tinker with Gemini, to make it give responses that Apple likes, MacRumors writes.

The Gemini model is optimized for chatbots and coding, and might not always produce the kinds of answers that Apple wants, they note.

Read more: The Information (paywalled), MacRumors.

Github Copilot to start training on user interactions from April 24

Github is coming for your code, after a successful trial on internal Microsoft data. (Picture: Github)

If you ever used Github to complete your code, your data can now be «used to train and improve our AI models,» Github says.

This comes after a trial period where Copilot has been feeding on internal Microsoft engineers’ data, which they say «improved model performance.»

They will not train on your entire code repositories, and will only use your interactions with Copilot — including accepted outputs, inputs sent to the model and «code context.»

Github is hardly alone in doing this, as Anthropic and OpenAI have been doing this for more than half a year. It’s common industry practice.

If you don’t like Copilot training on your data, you can opt out on the Copilot features page.

Read more: Github’s announcement, How-to Geek.

Arm releases its first physical silicon chip, the AGI CPU, for agentic inference

Arm says agent workflows are set to rise four times, and their new CPU is tailor made for the process. (Picture: Arm)

Precisely catching the fastest growing trend in AI computing, Arm says its new CPU is tailor made for agent workloads.

Co-developed with Meta, the chip is claimed to deliver twice the performance per rack compared to x86 platforms.

Agentic AI compute is expected to require more than four times the current capacity per gigawatt in data centers, and both Arm and Meta expect the design to iterate across several generations.

The AGI CPU is projected to lift Arm’s revenue by «billions» of dollars, Reuters reports, and has over fifty launch partners, including OpenAI, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Meta.

Read more: Arm presser, Meta presser, product page, Reuters, and The Verge.

OpenAI axes Sora video app and API, and it won’t live on in ChatGPT

Contrary to earlier rumors, the app won’t be integrated into ChatGPT, writes The Wall Street Journal and Reuters, citing an internal email by CEO Sam Altman.

The video generation app had amassed 920 million users since December 2025 and was for a while the number one app on the App Store, before declining to #165 recently.

Closing the free app, estimated to cost $15 million per day, opens up resources for OpenAI’s recent focus on coding and business, as it was labelled a «side quest» internally.

With Sora discontinued, OpenAI is also leaving behind a $1 billion deal with Disney — which had licensed some of its characters for use on the platform. Disney says they are open to new investments, and «respects» OpenAI’s decision.

Read more: The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Tibor Blaho.

Claude Code and Cowork get computer use agent, works with phone

Code and Cowork from anywhere on your mobile phone; they now seamlessly hand off tasks. (Picture: Anthropic)

Anthropic’s most popular apps can now spin up an agent to use your computer to complete tasks — and you can even start it from your mobile.

Available as a research preview for Pro and Max subscribers, it will identify what tools it needs to complete a task, and then ask for connectors to, say, the Finder on the Mac or Chrome.

Anthropic warns that the feature is «still early» and can make mistakes, as well as having vulnerabilities to threats. It can also be slower than doing the thing yourself.

The feature works especially well with Dispatch, Anthropic says, a tool released last week to let you start a task from your mobile and finish it up on the computer.

With it, you can get Claude to check your emails in the morning, or pull updates from spreadsheets, or «spin up a Claude Code session» directly from your phone.

Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, Anthropic on Dispatch, and Engadget.

As OpenAI prepares to show ads to all Free and Go users, advertisers are giddy

Everyone on Free and Go plans will be getting ads before soon. (Picture: screenshot)

According to The Information (paywalled), OpenAI will soon stop its «experiment» in ads. They will go for a full advertising service in «the coming weeks,» reports Reuters.

That means the test with showing some ads to about 5% of users is coming to an end, and the full plan will start up just after easter.

The limited advertising has so far been a success. The main complaint from advertisers is that it’s going too slow, according to CNBC. Most of them are happy and ready to spend more — with more varied ads.

— We’re encouraged by early signals from users and participating brands, and continue to see strong interest from advertisers, OpenAI tells CNBC.

The advertising program on Free and Go tiers is expected to earn OpenAI about $1 billion per year, and usher in a third tier for advertisers in addition to Search, Social, and Retail.

Read more: The Information (paywalled), Reuters, and CNBC.