OpenAI / ChatGPT

Noam Shazeer has left Google and joined OpenAI. Google paid $2.7 billion to bring him back two years ago. The post doesn't disclose his role at OpenAI or when the move happened.

Microsoft is selling OpenAI models to Chinese firms via Azure, sidestepping OpenAI's own China block. Revenue from this line has grown fast over the past year, though Bloomberg doesn't disclose absolute numbers. ByteDance, Xiaomi, and Nio are named as customers. Worth flagging: growth is real, but the base may be small and export controls remain a live risk.

Audited financials obtained by journalist Ed Zitron show OpenAI's revenue hit $13.07B in 2025, but R&D alone cost $19.18B—$10.59B of that paid to Microsoft. Cost of revenue and sales/marketing pushed the operating loss to $20.92B. A one-time ~$30B accounting charge tied to the for-profit conversion inflated the net loss to $39B; stripping that out leaves roughly $8B. Operating loss improved from 237% to 160% of revenue, but the 2030 profitability target still looks distant. The post doesn't disclose user counts or per-customer pricing details.

OpenAI connected GPT-5.4 to Molecule.one's automated Maria lab and gave it an open-ended goal: improve a challenging reaction class. The model zeroed in on Chan–Lam coupling of primary sulfonamides—a high-value but low-yield substrate class—and proposed TEMPO as a mild oxidant. Across 10,080 reactions in two experiment cycles, yields improved for 88% of boronic acids and 83% of sulfonamides tested. Mean yield rose from 16.6% to 25.2%, and the share of reactions above 30% yield jumped from 15.6% to 37.5%. Bench-scale replication by human chemists confirmed the micro-liter results: 11 of 14 substrate pairs showed higher yields, most more than doubled. Sulfonamides appear in oncology, antimicrobial, and diuretic drugs, so a more reliable coupling route could widen what medicinal chemists can practically make. Humans stayed in the loop throughout—steering proposals, grading outputs, and validating the final finding.

The Information obtained an OpenAI shareholder document showing $3.7B cash burn in Q1 2026 against $3.5B revenue. Spending is driven by compute, model R&D, and talent. OpenAI has confidentially filed for an IPO, potentially as early as September, with a valuation that could reach $1 trillion. I'd discount that for now—both the timeline and valuation are single-source claims, and the post doesn't break down the cost structure further.

Reasoning models didn't appear overnight in 2024. Chain-of-thought prompting, STaR self-training, process reward models, and test-time compute scaling laws all predate o1. What o1 actually changed was productization: turning reasoning into a billable, schedulable resource and opening a second axis for scaling. DeepSeek R1 made the know-how public, triggering industry-wide convergence within five months. But the most hyped part—pure RL spontaneously creating reasoning—is the weakest claim. Independent studies show base models already contain reasoning fragments; RL merely amplifies their frequency. The real lesson: distinguish the birth of a capability from its packaging.

OpenAI released LifeSciBench, a 750-task benchmark authored and reviewed by PhD scientists with biotech/pharma experience. It tests real research workflows—interpreting conflicting evidence, designing experiments, assessing translational risk—not fact recall. 53% of tasks require processing attached artifacts like figures or sequence files, averaging four reasoning steps per task. Grading uses 25 rubric criteria per task on average, checking scientific validity and operational usefulness, not just final answers. The post does not disclose model scores.

Anthropic hit 41% enterprise AI subscription share in May, edging past OpenAI at 39.5%, per Ramp data. The company just closed a $65B round at a $965B valuation and confidentially filed for IPO after its first profitable quarter. The Trump administration ordered Mythos 5 and Fable 5 pulled over export controls, barring non-US access. Ramp's chief economist notes that similar controversies—like a March DoD supply-chain risk designation—drove record enterprise adoption, with spending concentrated on Claude Opus 4.8.

Gary Marcus argues OpenAI's moat is gone, citing three data points: market share fell below 50% for the first time as Google eats into it; Microsoft is exploring DeepSeek over OpenAI for Copilot; and audited 2025 financials show $13.07B revenue against $34B in costs—losses up nearly 8x year-over-year. Marcus says pure LLM businesses lack stickiness since regular users see no difference between ChatGPT and Gemini. He also notes Washington may inadvertently help OpenAI by targeting Anthropic with export controls, but stands by his prediction that OpenAI will be acquired, with Elon Musk as a dark-horse bidder.

Zhipu released and open-sourced GLM-5.2, scoring 51 on the Artificial Analysis composite leaderboard—top three alongside Anthropic and OpenAI. It ranked first among globally available models in the Code Arena front-end dev blind test. The headline upgrade is solid 1M lossless context for long-horizon tasks: the model handled an 880K-token multi-platform app pipeline in one go and scored only 1% below Claude Opus 4.8 on FrontierSWE. Developers report more stable project-level context and fewer derailments on complex tasks. It runs on domestic hardware including Huawei Ascend and Cambricon, and is released under the MIT license for commercial use.

Ed Zitron obtained audited OpenAI financials, independently verified by the FT. In 2025, OpenAI had $13.07B in revenue against $34B in costs, an operating loss of $20.92B. A $41.55B fair-value hit from the nonprofit-to-for-profit conversion pushed the net loss attributable to the company to $38.53B — nearly 8x the $5.09B loss in 2024. R&D alone was $19.18B, including $10.59B paid to Microsoft for training and cloud. Total 2025 payments to Microsoft reached $17.2B. SoftBank paid OpenAI $867M, Microsoft paid $303M. The post doesn't explain the $17.87B in costs removed via noncontrolling interests, so treat the headline loss with that caveat — but even the operating loss is staggering.

ChatGPT still leads with 1.1B monthly users, but its share just dipped below 50% for the first time. Gemini has 662M, Claude 245M. The post doesn't disclose exact share figures, methodology, or the measurement window—worth waiting for more detail.

The US Commerce Department issued an export control order last Friday requiring Anthropic to block all foreign nationals—including its own non-US employees—from accessing Mythos 5 and Fable 5. Anthropic fully disabled both models and sent executives to Washington to negotiate with Treasury Secretary Bessent and Commerce Secretary Lutnick. Anthropic argues the jailbreak cited by the government is narrow and non-universal, and that OpenAI's GPT-5.5 can achieve the same capability. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy may have reported red-team findings to the government, but Anthropic says the same conclusion holds for GPT-5.5. The post doesn't disclose the status of negotiations or when the models might return.

The Pentagon has moved over two-thirds of its daily AI workloads off Anthropic and plans to sever ties completely by September. The trigger: earlier this year the Pentagon asked Anthropic to sign an agreement allowing Claude to be used for mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. CEO Dario Amodei refused, citing model unreliability. The Pentagon then labeled Anthropic a supply-chain risk and sued unsuccessfully. OpenAI adjusted its stance and won the contract. Polymarket puts the chance of a settlement by end of June at just 9%.

OpenAI replays recent real conversations through a candidate model before release, then checks for new undesired behaviors. Across GPT‑5‑Thinking deployments, this Deployment Simulation gave more accurate frequency estimates than traditional evals, surfaced novel misalignment, and reduced the chance models could tell they were being tested. It also works for agentic rollouts with tool use. The method can’t catch behaviors rarer than 1 in 200,000 messages.

AI coding agents are fluent in the terminal but clumsy in browsers. agentbrowse wraps any website as a CLI so agents like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini, and Windsurf can open, snapshot, click, fill, read as clean markdown, and even log in. It targets elements via the accessibility tree instead of brittle CSS selectors, and auto-refetches a snapshot when a reference goes stale. Adoption is one command: `npx agentbrowse skill` detects agents in your project and writes each one's native config. The post doesn't clarify whether login sessions reuse the user's existing browser state or start fresh—commenters are asking the same thing.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman tested the new Siri early and listed 7 real improvements: faster responses, on-screen awareness, cross-app actions, and more natural voice. But the core issue remains—Siri still hands off complex requests to ChatGPT and only handles simple commands itself. Gurman's take: this update pulls Siri back from 'disaster' to 'barely usable,' but it's still far from the proactive assistant Apple promised at WWDC 2024.

Gary Marcus argues the White House's Friday action against Anthropic reeks of favoritism. The decision helped OpenAI and Amazon—OpenAI president Greg Brockman is a major Trump donor, and Jared Kushner's brother Josh is a big OpenAI investor. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth publicly boasted about kicking Anthropic out of the Pentagon three months ago, making the move feel personal. Marcus acknowledges Anthropic overhyped its Mythos model, but says the government gave the company less than 24 hours to respond, relying on an Amazon-triggered report. David Sacks' follow-up statement was desperately vague on what the actual risk was and whether it was unique to Fable/Mythos. The fallout: global customers will rush toward sovereign AI from Europe, Canada, or China rather than bet on US labs that can be shut down without warning. Marcus cites Anthropic's own statement and Cato Institute's Kevin Frazier, both demanding transparent, fair, evidence-driven process. Congressman Ro Khanna proposed an independent agency—Marcus calls that the only way forward.

OpenAI confirmed Saturday that a coalition of states including New York and Colorado subpoenaed the company Friday, seeking internal documents on user data handling, minor safety, and advertising. OpenAI said it takes the concerns seriously and noted the latest ChatGPT version adds safeguards like parental controls. The probe comes amid rising cases of child self-harm linked to AI and AI-generated scams; the article does not disclose specific case counts or a timeline.

SemiAnalysis bought all Anthropic and OpenAI subscription plans and ran high-load coding tasks until hitting weekly caps. The $200/month Claude Max 20x plan consumed tokens worth roughly $8,000 at API rates; ChatGPT Pro 20x reached about $14,000. Direct API calls would cost far more. The post does not disclose which model versions or token pricing were used for the conversion. SemiAnalysis notes that when heavy users consistently max out limits, the gap between inference cost and subscription revenue could widen, making the current pricing hard to sustain.