Wow, what a day of news! In case you missed it (which would have been difficult), we broke a number of stories yesterday regarding OpenAI and Anthropic.

Most memorable was this piece about the fiery, 1,600-word memo Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei penned to staff last Friday criticizing the OpenAI-Pentagon deal. (You can check out the full memo here for some of the fun phrases Amodei uses.) Though the memo garnered some support for Anthropic on social media, it could hurt Anthropic’s efforts to use the Pentagon controversy as a recruiting tactic to poach OpenAI employees. I’m hearing that more than a few staffers at OpenAI were offended that Amodei referred to them as a “gullible bunch.”

Meanwhile, OpenAI seems to be taking a more cautious approach to shopping and advertising. The company is scaling back its shopping plans for ChatGPT by having checkouts take place inside of apps that plug into ChatGPT rather than in the chatbot itself. Despite that, the company seems to be chugging along. OpenAI recently passed $25 billion in annualized revenue, up 17% from the $21.4 billion in annualized revenue it was generating at the end of last year. Anthropic is closing the gap, however, and recently passed $19 billion in annualized revenue.

There are signs that OpenAI is progressing toward an IPO. We reported that it's hired two law firms, Cooley and Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz, to prepare for the offering, which could come as soon as later this year. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was more specific about the timing of the offering at Morgan Stanley’s conference on Wednesday, saying “they're going to go public towards the end of the year.”

Onto today’s column…

ChatGPT isn’t exactly a sparkling conversationalist. If you try talking to the chatbot today, using its Advanced Voice Mode, you’ll have a very stilted conversation. For instance, if you interrupt at all, just to acknowledge that you’re listening with an “okay” or a “mm-hm,” the model will stop speaking entirely rather than adjust what it’s saying based on your comments the way another person would.