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By Stephanie Palazzolo

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Recent Editions

Sam Altman. Photo by Getty.

OpenAI Plots Charging $20,000 a Month For PhD-Level Agents

By Stephanie Palazzolo and Cory Weinberg · Mar 5, 2025 7:09am PST

OpenAI is betting big on ChatGPT, which is generating at least $4 billion in annualized revenue. But that’s not the only application the AI firm is hoping will make big bucks. If you saw our story last month detailing OpenAI’s financial projections, you might have noticed an intriguing reference to revenue expected to come from another type of... OpenAI is betting big on ChatGPT, which is generating at least $4 billion in annualized revenue....

Figure's Helix AI demonstration

Humanoid Robotics Firm ‘Figure’ Attracts $39 Billion Valuation—and Questions

By Rocket Drew · Mar 4, 2025 7:00am PST

Figure AI is the talk of the robotics town these days.The three-year-old startup, which designs humanoid robots for work in factories and homes, is planning to raise $1 billion to $2 billion in equity financing at a $38.5 billion pre-money valuation. That’s a staggering 15 times its valuation from a year ago. However, the venture funds... Figure AI is the talk of the robotics town these days.The three-year-old startup, which designs...

Poolside co-founder Jason Warner. Photo via Getty.

OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 Underwhelms; Is Poolside Worth $5 Billion?

By Stephanie Palazzolo, Aaron Holmes and Sri Muppidi · Mar 3, 2025 7:00am PST · 1 comment

I enjoyed meeting many of you at AI Agenda Live in San Francisco last week! Thank you for coming. Next up is our April 28 event in New York on how the AI boom is being financed. Right on cue, my colleagues just published articles about the tens of billions of dollars that SoftBank and CoreWeave are hoping to borrow to develop artificial... I enjoyed meeting many of you at AI Agenda Live in San Francisco last week! Thank you for coming....

Art by Mike Sullivan via Midjourney

CFOs Are Crashing the AI Buying Party; Six Takeaways From Nvidia Report

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Feb 27, 2025 7:00am PST

Art by Mike Sullivan via Midjourney

CFOs Are Crashing the AI Buying Party; Six Takeaways From Nvidia Report

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Feb 27, 2025 7:00am PST

Happy AI Agenda Live day! I’m so excited to see many of you at our event later today, where we’ll hear from executives at top AI firms like Anthropic and Google as well as venture capitalists and founders on what research breakthroughs are coming and where to invest.One topic we’ll be sure to broach is the growing pressure chief financial... Happy AI Agenda Live day! I’m so excited to see many of you at our event later today, where we’ll...

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. Photo via Getty

Is Perplexity Worth $15 Billion?

By Natasha Mascarenhas and Stephanie Palazzolo · Feb 26, 2025 7:14am PST

Before we get into today’s column, leaders at OpenAI have told some employees that GPT-4.5—the model known internally as Orion—will be released this week, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations.Don’t get too excited though. A person who’s tested the model told us that its performance on certain tasks have been mixed; for... Before we get into today’s column, leaders at OpenAI have told some employees that GPT-4.5—the...

Photo by Shutterstock

Why xAI and Anthropic’s New Products Matter

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Feb 25, 2025 7:00am PST · 1 comment

If you’ve been on X at all in the last few days, you’ve probably come across posts in which people described jailbreaking xAI’s new Grok 3 model. For instance, one person asked the chatbot how to make chemical weapons, while another revealed instructions xAI gave the model to stop it from saying that Elon Musk is the top spreader of... If you’ve been on X at all in the last few days, you’ve probably come across posts in which...

Aidan Gomez. Photo by Getty

Cohere Boosts Revenue Pace to $70 Million on Overseas Growth

By Jon Victor, Natasha Mascarenhas and Sri Muppidi · Feb 24, 2025 7:00am PST

Cohere, one of the earliest venture-backed developers of artificial intelligence models, has faced plenty of headwinds in the last two years. The company has been under threat from better-funded competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic and faces competition from cheap, open-source alternatives like DeepSeek.In spite of all that, the company is... Cohere, one of the earliest venture-backed developers of artificial intelligence models, has...

Clara Shih. Photo by Getty

Meta’s Open-Source AI Prepares to Go to Market

By Kalley Huang · Feb 20, 2025 7:00am PST

Clara Shih. Photo by Getty

Meta’s Open-Source AI Prepares to Go to Market

By Kalley Huang · Feb 20, 2025 7:00am PST

As Meta Platforms tries to make its large language model Llama the industry standard for artificial intelligence, it is not only courting big businesses but also taking steps to work with one of the largest customers in the world: the U.S. government. In November, the company poached Clara Shih from Salesforce, where she was CEO of ... As Meta Platforms tries to make its large language model Llama the industry standard for...

Photo by Mike Sullivan via Midjourney

How Can Investors Continue Funding AI Developers?

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Feb 19, 2025 7:00am PST

One of the earliest AI Agenda newsletters in August 2023 made the bear case for large language model developers. Over the last year-and-a-half, our predictions from that day seemed to largely come true, as model makers like OpenAI moved more into applications and cheap AI releases from DeepSeek and others threatened the margins of those selling... One of the earliest AI Agenda newsletters in August 2023 made the bear case for large language...

Photo via Getty

The Three Classes of AI Coding Assistants

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Feb 18, 2025 7:10am PST

The model race continues. On Monday evening, Elon Musk’s xAI released a new family of large language models, Grok 3, which includes a baseline model, a smaller and faster version of the baseline model, and two “reasoning” models.Early reactions seem promising. Andrej Karpathy, one of the cofounders of OpenAI who left the company last year, said... The model race continues. On Monday evening, Elon Musk’s xAI released a new family of large...

Photo by Getty

Anthropic Strikes Back

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Feb 13, 2025 7:00am PST

After OpenAI released its reasoning models last fall, Google, Alibaba, High-Flyer Capital Management and others followed with their own. One prominent competitor, Anthropic, has been noticeably absent from the race. Now we know one reason: Anthropic is taking a slightly different approach to reasoning. It has developed a hybrid AI model... After OpenAI released its reasoning models last fall, Google, Alibaba, High-Flyer Capital...

Thrive Capital founder Josh Kushner.

OpenAI Investor Kushner Tells Startup’s Staff: Leaving Is a Bad Idea

By Natasha Mascarenhas, Erin Woo and Amir Efrati · Feb 12, 2025 11:57am PST

Thrive Capital founder Josh Kushner.

OpenAI Investor Kushner Tells Startup’s Staff: Leaving Is a Bad Idea

By Natasha Mascarenhas, Erin Woo and Amir Efrati · Feb 12, 2025 11:57am PST

How fierce is the fight for talent at OpenAI and its rivals?One sign came Tuesday when Josh Kushner, founder of major OpenAI investor Thrive Capital, gave a presentation to some of OpenAI’s staff. As part of his talk about why Thrive had committed over $1 billion to the ChatGPT maker, Kushner drove home this message: Leaving would be a bad... How fierce is the fight for talent at OpenAI and its rivals?One sign came Tuesday when Josh...

Photo of Elon Musk via Getty

Musk’s OpenAI Bid Leaves Door Open For Boardroom Activism

By Rocket Drew and Stephanie Palazzolo · Feb 12, 2025 7:00am PST

As the OpenAI-Elon Musk drama bogged down in arguments about whether Musk’s group had actually sent the takeover offer to the board, another issue surfaced. While OpenAI is signalling it will dismiss the Musk-led group’s offer, it turns out any of OpenAI’s 10 board directors could take matters into their own hands. That’s because of a... As the OpenAI-Elon Musk drama bogged down in arguments about whether Musk’s group had actually ...

Photos by Getty

The Strategy Behind Musk’s $97 Billion Bid for OpenAI

By Stephanie Palazzolo and Rocket Drew · Feb 11, 2025 7:00am PST · 1 comment

You've got to hand it to Elon Musk: He is great at getting attention for his causes. In the latest example, the OpenAI cofounder-turned-rival made a $97.4 billion bid for the assets of OpenAI’s nonprofit—namely, control over the OpenAI for-profit arm that runs ChatGPT. This is all part of Musk’s monthslong effort to stop the for-profit from... You've got to hand it to Elon Musk: He is great at getting attention for his causes. In the...

Aaron Ginn, cofounder and CEO of Hydra Host

The ‘GPU Whisperer’ Making Software for Data Centers

By Anissa Gardizy · Feb 10, 2025 7:00am PST

Is going “bare metal” in data centers the future for cloud computing? If so, it could signal a shift away from big cloud firms toward a new group of AI computing startups.Bare metal isn’t a subset of rock music but an industry term for renting servers to cloud customers on terms that give them access to the hardware, allowing customers to... Is going “bare metal” in data centers the future for cloud computing? If so, it could signal a...

Photos by Getty

Google Closes In On DeepSeek’s AI Efficiency, While DeepSeek’s Chatbot Blows Past Google’s

By Amir Efrati and Rocket Drew · Feb 6, 2025 7:00am PST

Photos by Getty

Google Closes In On DeepSeek’s AI Efficiency, While DeepSeek’s Chatbot Blows Past Google’s

By Amir Efrati and Rocket Drew · Feb 6, 2025 7:00am PST

Google doesn’t get the accolades OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepSeek are getting in advancing artificial intelligence, but it’s arguably doing some things right.Case in point: On Wednesday, Google made a trio of new Gemini AI models generally available to app developers, including a reasoning model akin to OpenAI’s o1 and the much-discussed DeepSeek... Google doesn’t get the accolades OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepSeek are getting in advancing...

Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI. Photo by Getty

Will DeepSeek Hurt Scale AI’s Business Model?

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Feb 5, 2025 7:00am PST · 1 comment

To understand how OpenAI has been improving the quality of its reasoning models in recent months, check out the following question the company recently asked scores of biology PhDs:“Please write a summary of wet-lab experimental approaches available before August 2024 for assessing in parallel the gene expression effects of many different... To understand how OpenAI has been improving the quality of its reasoning models in recent months,...

Photo by Getty

ChatGPT’s New ‘Research’ Feature: The Good and the Bad

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Feb 4, 2025 7:00am PST

It’s been barely a day since OpenAI released Deep Research, a new ChatGPT feature that helps customers conduct multi-step research. And already it’s gotten at least one rave review.Derya Unutmaz, a professor of immunology at the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine who’s been testing the feature since he was granted early access on Friday,... It’s been barely a day since OpenAI released Deep Research, a new ChatGPT feature that helps...

Photo via Getty

OpenAI’s DeepSeek Response: Catch Us If You Can

By Stephanie Palazzolo and Rocket Drew · Feb 3, 2025 7:17am PST · 1 comment

OpenAI’s release on Friday of o3-mini, its latest artificial intelligence reasoning model, wasn’t a surprise. CEO Sam Altman had previously said it would drop by then.But it was impossible to ignore the coincidence of the release coming a few days after a blaze of news erupted over DeepSeek R1, a Chinese reasoning model that has matched or even... OpenAI’s release on Friday of o3-mini, its latest artificial intelligence reasoning model, wasn’t...

Photo by AP

Why It’s Cheap and Easy to Mimic OpenAI’s Reasoning Model

By Rocket Drew · Jan 30, 2025 7:06am PST · 1 comment

Photo by AP

Why It’s Cheap and Easy to Mimic OpenAI’s Reasoning Model

By Rocket Drew · Jan 30, 2025 7:06am PST · 1 comment

The word of the moment in artificial intelligence is distillation. Distillation is the technical term for transferring knowledge from one large language model, which acts like a teacher, to another model that acts as a student. And it’s likely one of the key ways a Chinese quant fund replicated OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model and set the... The word of the moment in artificial intelligence is distillation. Distillation is the...