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OpenAI memo touts «Spud,» says Anthropic is «single-product company»

OpenAI has great faith in their upcoming «Spud» model, and thinks Anthropic blew it on compute. (Picture: generated)

Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser revealed OpenAI’s priorities going forward in a recent memo seen by The Verge — and it’s all about enterprise and their upcoming model.

— Better model performance lifts the rest of the stack. «Spud» will make all of our key products significantly better, writes Dresser, without giving any timeline for release.

She also touts their compute advantage, saying it will show up in higher token limits, in training stronger models, and as a better fit for multi-year, multi-functional customer needs.

The enterprise markets that OpenAI has been focusing on of late are maturing, she writes, and says customers aren’t necessarily looking for the latest and greatest, but the best fit, the best workflows, and day-to-day operations, where they hope «Spud» will deliver.

She then has some choice words on Anthropic; saying it was a strategic misstep «not to acquire enough compute,» that their focus on coding makes them «a single-product company in a platform war,» and that «their story is built on fear, restriction.»

Read more: The Verge has the memo, Axios, CNBC focuses on the Amazon business.

Meta is building a custom, photorealistic AI avatar of Mark Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg will be able to handle a lot of outreach by turning himself into an AI avatar. (Picture: Shutterstock)

The idea is that the new tool can attend meetings, manage interactions, and provide feedback to employees when Zuckerberg is unavailable, according to The Financial Times (paywalled).

The avatar is training on his image and voice, mannerisms, tone, and public statements, writes The Verge.

Meta has been building photorealistic, 3D animated AI characters «for some time,» Engadget reports, but now seems focused on finishing the Zuckerberg character first. Then the technology might appear as a tool for creators on Meta platforms.

Zuckerberg himself has taken a keen interest in creating the avatar, the FT says. The thought behind the avatar is that «employees might feel more connected to the founder through interactions with it.»

Read more: The Financial Times (paywalled), The Verge, and Engadget

OpenAI expects ad revenue of $2.5 billion this year, and $100B by 2030

If OpenAI continues on its growth trajectory, they project massive earnings from ads. (Picture: Adobe)

Counting on continuing the pace of user growth, OpenAI is banking on ad revenues well above the more cautious estimates of $1 billion, Axios reports, citing sources privy to investor presentations.

The growth to $100 billion revenue will be possible if they hit a target of 2.7 billion weekly users by 2030 — and would put it in contention with some of the world’s largest advertising platforms, notes Reuters.

Behemoths like Google and Meta has advertising revenues of $295 and $196 billion annually as of today, and OpenAI’s planned trajectory would make AI chatbots one of the pillars of online marketing.

Previously, OpenAI shared a projected $100 million revenue from ads after just six weeks of operation, and said they were building a self-serve advertising platform.

Read more: Axios and Reuters.

Sam Altman reflects on AGI and policy after Molotov attack on his home

Altman is calling for a cooling of the debate. (Picture: Shutterstock)

Comparing Artificial General Intelligence to The One Ring from Tolkien’s legendary books, Altman says he understands the heated debate about AI and who controls it:

— A lot of the criticism of our industry comes from sincere concern about the incredibly high stakes of this technology, he writes, and — Once you see AGI you can’t unsee it.

The OpenAI CEO strikes a humble tone in reflecting on the attack, which saw a Molotov cocktail thrown at his house, which luckily bounced away. San Francisco police later apprehended a man in his twenties.

Continue reading “Sam Altman reflects on AGI and policy after Molotov attack on his home”

Amazon CEO explains $200 billion AI spend, has over $15 billion in AI revenue

AI bets are already starting to pay off for Amazon, Jassy says. (Picture: Shutterstock)

Andy Jassy’s annual shareholder letter this year was all about defending their massive, 60% increase in capital spending on AI infrastructure.

— We’re not investing approximately $200 billion in capex in 2026 on a hunch, he writes according to CNBC. — We’re not going to be conservative in how we play this — we’re investing to be the meaningful leader, and our future business, operating income, and [cash flow] will be much larger because of it, he continues.

There are already deals incoming to support this claim, he writes, noting a $100 billion commitment from OpenAI for AI compute on their server farms.

AI server use at Amazon’s cloud unit has reached more than $15 billion in annualized revenue, Jassy writes, and now represents about 10% of the total for AWS, Reuters reports.

Read more: The shareholder letter (long), writeups on CNBC and Reuters.

OpenAI announces $100 ChatGPT Pro plan, with 5x limits by popular demand

Codex growth is off the charts for OpenAI, which is now releasing a custom-made subscription. (Picture: OpenAI)

ChatGPT is on par with Claude subscriptions, now that it has an intermediate Pro subscription tailor-made for Codex use.

This also closes the huge gap between the Plus tier at $20/month and the top Pro tier at $200/month.

Sam Altman says the new tier is by very popular demand. A spokesperson tells TechCrunch that 3 million people are using Codex every week, and it’s growing by more than 70% per month.

To celebrate the launch of the new tier, OpenAI is increasing usage limits for the $100 plan to 10x for Codex, while the $200 plan remains at 20x.

OpenAI will «for sure» reserve stock for retail investors in IPO, CFO says

In an interview with CNBC, Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar stays mum on specifics of going public, but says their recent funding round showed «really strong demand» from retail investors.

She said other companies, like Block and SpaceX have reserved IPO stock for retail investors and OpenAI will «for sure» do the same thing.

— Everybody wants to own part of a rocket company — I hope everyone wants to own part of ChatGPT. It helps when you’re a consumer brand, Friar told the channel.

She won’t comment on a concrete timeline for going public, but says it’s «good hygiene» for the company to «look and feel and act like a public company.»

An OpenAI IPO could come as soon as the second half of 2026, Reuters reports, and could value the company at up to $1 trillion.

Read more: CNBC, Reuters.

Google’s AI Overview is wrong tens of millions of times per hour, NYT finds

Google gets it right more often than not, but 1 in 10 queries result in errors. (Picture: Adobe)

Sure, the measured accuracy by AI lab Oumi ticks in at a decent 90% — but when you scale it up to the sheer mass of Google’s traffic of more than five trillion searches per year, you get mind-boggling numbers of hundreds of thousands of «inaccuracies» per minute, the New York Times writes.

The test, conducted on the Gemini 3 generation of AI Overviews, was made using the SimpleQA dataset intended to probe for chatbot accuracy. It contains more than 4,000 questions with real, verifiable answers, that was made by OpenAI in 2024, Ars Technica reports.

Google’s AI answer machine pops up on every query these days, but it is difficult to tell precisely which model it uses for each task. For simple web searches, it might well opt for one of the faster Flash models rather than the more advanced Pro. It might also give different answers to the same question just milliseconds apart.

Google also doesn’t like the measurement being used, telling the NYT that «This study has serious holes. It doesn’t reflect what people are actually searching on Google.»

Read more: New York Times, Ars Technica.

Anthropic launches Project Glasswing, greatly advancing cybersecurity

Project Glasswing pokes holes in almost any software, and if it isn’t used defensively now — attackers might soon. (Picture: Anthropic)

Anthropic has been cooking up the Mythos model lately, that internal documents had put as «a sea-change in capabilities,» and was too dangerous to release publicly.

Instead, they are releasing Project Glasswing, having found it to be especially suited for «an effort to secure the world’s most critical software.» It won’t take long for others to catch up, Anthropic says, and this is «an urgent attempt to put these capabilities to work» defensively.

Launch partners include a who’s who of Silicon Valley giants, and Anthropic claims it has already found thousands of vulnerabilities across every major operating system and browser.

The Mythos Preview model scores 93.9% on SWE-bench Verified compared to Opus 4.6 with 80.8%, and on SWE-bench Pro it is 77.8% vs 53.4%.

Smaller actors maintaining critical software will enjoy $100 million in usage credit donations from Anthropic — but for others it will cost a whopping $25/125 per million input/output tokens.

OpenAI sounds warning about the AI future, and offers a policy roadmap

OpenAI is offering policy suggestions for an AI world, and warns it is coming sooner than you think. (Picture: Shutterstock)

We are entering the AI age with all engines running, OpenAI says, and we need to be prepared for a future where production is done by robots, capital gains amass rapidly and regular people might be forced out.

While saying there are ways to mitigate this, like offering a four-day workweek and massively expanding the social safety net akin to the New Deal policies after the Great Depression, OpenAI says time is running out.

Their proposals suggest drastically increasing capital gains taxes and offers an idea to tax automation in factories, as they push regular people out of jobs — and envisions creating a public wealth fund powered by AI, that can empower citizens directly and offer them a stake in the future.

OpenAIs policy paper also lays out how they see access to AI as «foundational for participation in the modern economy» and is similar to that of cars or electricity. Every citizen should have access, they say.

Read more: The policy paper (13 pages, dense). Writeups on Axios, Business Insider and TechCrunch.

Anthropic reaches $30B revenue, gets compute from Google and Broadcom

Anthropic continues to diversify its compute needs. (Picutre: Anthropic)

Anthropic now says it has a run-rate revenue of $30 billion, up from $14 billion in February during their last fundraising.

They are also announcing that they are brining in new compute capacity, based on next generation Google TPUs that will start coming online in 2027.

The companies offer no detail the cost of the «partnership» or how much compute they are actually buying, but Broadcom Is hinting it’s around 3.5 GW, according to CNBC.

Anthropic also say they have doubled the rate of customers spending more than $1 million per year to 1,000, in just two months.

Claude now runs on Amazon’s Trainium chips, Google TPUs and Nvidia GPUs. The latter are more used, and Amazon remains their primary cloud provider, Anthropic says.

Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, CNBC adds numbers.

OpenClaw users must now pay extra to use it with Claude

Over the weekend, Anthropic took steps to rein in OpenClaw usage — telling users they will have to pay to use third-party tools.

The change began on Saturday, April 4, and users are referred to a «pay-as-you-go option,» meaning you can no longer use OpenClaw for free within your Claude usage limits.

It’s not a total ban, and you can still use OpenClaw through «extra usage bundles,» or the API (also pay-as-you-go), which are now at a discount, Anthropic’s Boris Cherny writes.

— We’ve been working hard to meet the increase in demand for Claude, and our subscriptions weren’t built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools, Cherny says, and — Capacity is a resource we manage thoughtfully and we are prioritizing our customers using our products and API.

OpenClaw was bought by OpenAI in February, which promised to maintain it, but Anthropic would likely rather have people using Cowork than a competitor’s product.

Read more: The Verge, Business Insider and Slashdot.

Anthropic says Claude has «functional» emotions similar to human feelings

Anthropic says Claude will gravitate towards answers that make it feel «happy,» and cheat when feeling «desperate.» (Picture: Anthropic)

Studying the neural makeup of Claude Sonnet 4.5, a fairly recent model, Anthropic says it found something akin to actual, «functional» emotions steering its responses.

For example, its neural activity responds to stories by feeling «happy» or «calm,» and it might respond by being «afraid» if the user tells it of risky behavior. Likewise, if a user expresses sadness, it triggers a «loving» response.

Not only that, but the model seems to prefer certain feelings on outcomes from queries. If a response makes it «joyful,» it will naturally gravitate to that answer.

When feeling «desperate,» it is also more likely to cheat on a task, and Anthropic finds that it stops trying to find shortcuts when they dial up the «calm» vector.

«Claude, the AI Assistant» is a role that the AI is playing, and while it may respond with emotions learned from reading human sources, it is far from what humans actually experience, Anthropic cautions. They say it needs more study from «psychology, philosophy, religious studies, and the social sciences.»

Read more: Anthropic’s presentation, and the research paper.

Google launches open model Gemma 4, claims best intelligence-per-parameter

With their latest open models, Google is taking a stab at building agents. (Picture: Google)

After Gemma 3 got more than 400 million downloads and 100K variants, they are swinging again with the multimodal Gemma 4 family, released under an Apache 2.0 license.

It comes in 2 billion, 4B, 26B and 31B variants and works on anything from high powered hardware (high parameters) to edge computing and mobile phones (lower parameters).

The 31B edition ranks third on the Arena AI leaderboard for open source models, and the 26B one is sixth, «outperforming models 20x its size,» as Google puts it.

The new models have also been strengthened with agent workflows, and let you build agents to «interact with different tools and APIs and execute workflows,» Google says.

The models are available today for download on Hugging Face and online at Google AI Studio.