Tag: money

Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs raises $1 billion for spatial intelligence, world models

Marble can make intricate 3D worlds from prompts or pictures, and Autodesk wants in. (Picture: World Labs)
As «the godmother of AI’s» Marble model is slowly taking off, some say World Labs has hit a $5 billion valuation, according to Reuters.

Most notable, they collected $200 million in funding from Autodesk — which makes 3D CAD software in a somewhat overlapping fashion.

They will now officially become advisors to World Labs, and are starting up a collaboration, writes TechCrunch.

— You might want to take an object that you’ve designed in our [platform], and put it in a context that you create through one of [World Labs’] prompts, says Daron Green, Autodesk’s chief scientist, to the website.

World Labs themselves have not provided a valuation from the funding round.

Read more: Autodesk’s announcement, World Lab’s announcement. More detail from TechCrunch, Reuters.

Ireland enacts basic income for artists, says it creates more than they spend

Basic income schemes are closely watched in case AI supplants jobs at scale. (Picture: Images Money, CC BY 2.0)
After a pilot scheme lasting from 2022-25 with basic income for artists, the Irish Government is moving to make it permanent.

2,000 eligible artists will be randomly selected to get €325 per week, after the pilot found that for every €1 invested, society received €1.39 in return.

It’s not enough to live on, but it is enough to see artists through their arts without taking on side gigs and onerous secondary jobs.

During the pilot, artists reported they had more time for their art, produced more work, experienced a boost in well-being, had greater life satisfaction and that it reduced their anxiety.

— The BIA [Basic Income for Artists] pilot research has consistently demonstrated both the positive impact it has had on those in receipt of it and how difficult it is to work as an artist in Ireland, says Culture Minister Patrick O’Donovan.

This is the first such officially enacted Government-based basic income program in the world, O’Donovan says.

Read more: Irish Government announcement, writeups on IrishCentral and The Guardian.

Anthropic closes $30 billion funding round at a $380 billion valuation

Anthropic secures what has become a normally enormous valuation. (Picture: Anthropic)
The round is the second largest tech investment in history, and puts Anthropic close to the top of the valuation range for AI labs, having grown its revenue ten times for every year the last three years.

Their current run-rate revenue sits at $14 billion, they say, well within that range.

Continue reading “Anthropic closes $30 billion funding round at a $380 billion valuation”

Alphabet set to double AI spending as Google owner hits record revenue

AI spending increases twofold at Alphabet this year. (Picture: generated)
The Google owner is set to join Amazon and Meta in spending more than $100 billion on AI this year, as its 2025 revenue tops $400 billion.

The headline capex number of $175 to $185 billion is in comparison to a spend of $91 billion in 2025, as their cloud VP, Amin Vahdat, has said they need to double capacity every six months.

In 2026, Meta will spend $135 billion, Microsoft expects a decrease from $37 billion last quarter, and Amazon clocks in at $146 billion, according to CNBC.

Combined, Big Tech looks set to cross $500 billion in AI spending this year, Reuters reports.

As for Google’s AI push, it seems on the rise, having sold 8 million enterprise subscriptions in 2025 and now reaching 750 million monthly active users, up from 650 million last quarter.

Read more: Alphabet’s numbers, writeups at CNBC, Reuters, TechCrunch.

OpenAI’s latest numbers; 3x yearly financial/compute growth since 2023

Impressive tally; OpenAI shows unprecedented growth in their new numbers. (Picture: OpenAI)
OpenAI is scaling like never before, according to CFO Sarah Friar, who is out with some hard numbers.

Friar says revenue and compute grow in tandem with the advent of more powerful models — that they «scale with intelligence,» so to speak.

Looking at the numbers, compute has gone from 0.2 gigawatts in 2023 to 1.9 GW in 2025, growing about 3x every year since ChatGPT’s debut.

Financially, OpenAI now has $20 billion in revenue, following the same curve as the compute scale and growing about 3x per year from $2 billion in 2024.

All this is of course before ads arrive on the free tier, and before OpenAI sees any results from its global rollout of the go subscription on their revenue.

On the compute side, OpenAI is chasing infrastructure like there is no tomorrow, closing in on more than 30 GW before 2030 in what would be truly explosive growth — and we can only wonder as to how advanced frontier AI models will get by then.

Read more: OpenAI’s announcement, writeups on Reuters, .

Anthropic signs deal for $10 billion investment at a $350 billion valuation

The Claude makers value just keeps soaring. (Picture: Adobe)
Hot off the heels from discussing a $300 billion valuation, Anthropic is raising the bar in its latest funding round.

The leading financiers are Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and Coatue Management, which are forking out $10 billion to the AI lab’s coffers.

Recently, Anthropic started testing the IPO market in what would be the strongest market debut for quite some time.

They also got a $30 billion investment from Microsoft and Nvidia in late November, and started this funding round in December.

It works out to a respectable middle ground for Anthropic, valuing the company between xAI’s recent $230 billion and OpenAI’s well documented worth of $500 billion.

Read more: Reuters and CNBC.

Disney invests $1 billion in cross-licensing deal for characters in Sora

Disney licenses beloved characters for use on Sora, and will get to use OpenAI tools in production.
While Disney is licensing to OpenAI, they are fighting other hard over others’ copyright violations. (Picture: andy orin, CC BY 2.0)
Users will be able to use Disney characters without breaking copyrights, in return for Disney getting to use the technology internally for three years.

The deal will license some 200 Disney-owned characters from the likes of Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars for use in Sora, free of charge (as in money) and charges (as in lawsuits).

The deal will also see Disney adopt ChatGPT and Sora internally, which is the other way of the license — helping Disney do everything from light sketches to development planning.

Continue reading “Disney invests $1 billion in cross-licensing deal for characters in Sora”

Big Tech doubles down on even bigger AI spend

Big tech will spend about a quarter of a trillion dollars on "capital expenditures" this year, according to quarterly reports.
Data center deals are flourishing and none of the big tech spenders feel they can afford not be in the race. (Picture: Adobe)
Quarterly results are in for Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta — and while the numbers are mixed, they all agree on big capital expenditures — needed for building data centers — for fiscal year 2025.

The coming AI wars will be fought with data centers and gigawatts, and nobody wants to lose out.

Continue reading “Big Tech doubles down on even bigger AI spend”

Anthropic is now a 183 billion dollar company

Anthropic is on fire, and investors are taking notice.
Anthropic is firing on all cylinders lately, and now has the valuation to prove it. (Picture: Anthropic)
Growth seems exponential for the company, both in annual revenue, numbers of subscribers — and now in investor valuation.

The company has just finished a «Series F» fundraising round of $13 billion at a valuation of $183 billion, which will «expand our capacity to meet growing enterprise demand, deepen our safety research, and support international expansion as we continue building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems,» Anthropic writes.

Continue reading “Anthropic is now a 183 billion dollar company”

OpenAI hits $10 billion in yearly revenue — well ahead of schedule

ChatGPT is turning into a pure money-making machine.
OpenAI is raking in the money, almost reaching its yearly projection by June. (Picture: Pictures of Money, CC BY 2.0)
The ChatGPT maker had forecast ~$11 billion in revenue for all of 2025, now it’s close to that target and it’s only June.

According to TechCrunch, the revenue streams from consumer products, 500 million active weekly ChatGPT users, API sales, and 3 million paying business customers.

AI industry is booming
This caps six months of remarkable growth for the AI business. Recently, Anthropic reported record revenue growth, having reached $3 billion in revenue so far this year.

Continue reading “OpenAI hits $10 billion in yearly revenue — well ahead of schedule”

Anthropic reaches $3 billion in revenue so far this year

Claude coding is delivering stellar results for Anthropic.
Sources say Anthropic’s revenue is growing exponentially. (Picture: Anthropic)
The company hit $1B in revenue in December last year, $2B in March and just jumped another billion in May, according to sources speaking to Reuters.

These numbers are so impressive, one analyst says they lack comparison:

Continue reading “Anthropic reaches $3 billion in revenue so far this year”

OpenAI expects positive cash flow, $125 billion in sales by 2029

OpenAI predicts astronomical revenue by the end of the decade.
OpenAI predicts astronomical revenue by the end of the decade. (Picture: Conceptphoto.info, CC BY 2.0)
ChatGPT use is up to about «something like 10% of the world» said CEO Sam Altman, putting the numbers reached at roughly 800 million people, according to Pymnts.com, but that won’t be the main driver of income in coming years.

The company said in March that it anticipates revenue above $11.6 billion in 2025 – nearly tripling its 2024 numbers. It will then jump from $125B in 2029 to $174B in 2030.

Revenue will rise significantly once it can develop and charge for AI agents, and «free user monetization,» according to Slashdot.

What that «monetization» will entail is unclear so far, but Pymnts.com says they have considered things such as charging affiliate fees on links, giving it a cut of sales generated from the platform.

According to this post on r/singularity, they are not currently considering considering selling traditional advertising, but that references a December FT.com article and may well have changed.

Read more at paywalled The Information, a writeup on Pymnts.com, March 16. report on Reuters and discussion on r/singularity.