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Left to right: Microsoft's Satya Nadella and Amy Hood, OpenAI's Sam Altman. Art: Shane Burke. Photos: Getty

Why Microsoft Let OpenAI Play the Field

By Aaron Holmes · Oct 16, 2025 6:00am PDT · 4 comments

Over the past three years, as OpenAI swelled from a tiny research lab into the world’s most valuable startup, one company has captured nearly all of its billions of dollars in annual spending on the servers needed to power OpenAI’s artificial intelligence: Microsoft. In recent months, though, OpenAI announced megadeals with several Microsoft... Over the past three years, as OpenAI swelled from a tiny research lab into the world’s most...

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Getty Images

The Big Question for Amazon and OpenAI

By Theo Wayt · Oct 15, 2025 5:00pm PDT · 2 comments

Walmart’s announcement this week that it would become the first major retailer to start selling products through ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout shows that big retailers are being forced to take new forms of artificial intelligence–related online shopping seriously. It’s not shocking that Walmart, as a megaretailer that wants to sell more stuff... Walmart’s announcement this week that it would become the first major retailer to start selling...

Art by Clark Miller

Why Cloud Profits Are Collapsing in the Chip Arms Race

By The Information Staff · Oct 15, 2025 12:27pm PDT

The AI boom is fueling massive cloud revenue growth, yet the true financial story is defined by a deep, hidden vulnerability: the staggering cost of specialized AI chips. This imbalance is creating a profit crisis, forcing cloud providers to accept razor-thin margins on their services and fundamentally altering their core business model. Our... The AI boom is fueling massive cloud revenue growth, yet the true financial story is defined by a...

Art by Mike Sullivan

Universities Are Part of the Cursor Resistance

By Rocket Drew · Oct 15, 2025 7:00am PDT

Art by Mike Sullivan

Universities Are Part of the Cursor Resistance

By Rocket Drew · Oct 15, 2025 7:00am PDT

I recently reported on the software engineers who have resisted using AI coding tools such as Cursor and Claude Code, even when their managers strongly encourage their use. AI still has technical limitations—and it threatens to make engineering jobs obsolete, they say. But there’s a wrinkle to this story: some engineering students have... I recently reported on the software engineers who have resisted using AI coding tools such...

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Getty Images

The Other Bubble

By Ken Brown · Oct 14, 2025 5:00pm PDT · 1 comment

If there is a bubble in artificial intelligence, much of the blame can be placed on Wall Street, not Silicon Valley. Financial markets are as frothy as they can be, and the appetite for risk appears to be insatiable. That’s why Sam Altman has been able to get otherwise rational companies and investors to fund his audacious growth plans. On... If there is a bubble in artificial intelligence, much of the blame can be placed on Wall Street,...

Reducto cofounders Raunak Chowdhuri and Adit Abraham. Photo courtesy of Reducto.

The Startup Using AI to Translate Documents Into Data

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Oct 14, 2025 7:00am PDT

If you’ve ever uploaded a picture of a receipt to an expense report or read a PDF of a book online, you’ve likely used optical character recognition, a decades-old technique that converts images of typed, handwritten or printed text into text that’s editable on a computer.OCR might not sound like the sexiest market. But it’s interesting enough... If you’ve ever uploaded a picture of a receipt to an expense report or read a PDF of a book...

Together AI CEO Vipul Ved Prakash. Photo via Getty

The Race to Rent Out Nvidia Chips in the Cloud Intensifies

By Stephanie Palazzolo, Wayne Ma, Miles Kruppa and Katie Roof · Oct 14, 2025 6:00am PDT

Demand for Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips has spawned half a dozen multibillion-dollar cloud providers that buy the chips, install them in data centers and rent them out to OpenAI and other AI developers. Another upstart, Together AI, is now joining the race among these neoclouds, which compete against traditional cloud providers such as... Demand for Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips has spawned half a dozen multibillion-dollar...

Hock Tan, CEO of Broadcom. Getty Images

OpenAI’s Computing Capacity Binge

By Martin Peers · Oct 13, 2025 5:00pm PDT · 3 comments

Hock Tan, CEO of Broadcom. Getty Images

OpenAI’s Computing Capacity Binge

By Martin Peers · Oct 13, 2025 5:00pm PDT · 3 comments

The hardest-working people in tech right now must be the OpenAI team responsible for writing press releases. On Monday—Columbus Day or, if you prefer, Indigenous People’s Day—when much of American business and government was closed, OpenAI put out its sixth big news announcement of the past three weeks. The company unveiled another chip-supply... The hardest-working people in tech right now must be the OpenAI team responsible for writing...

OpenAI's Sam Altman, left, and SoftBank's Masayoshi Son. Images via Getty.

OpenAI Is Working With SoftBank’s Arm on AI Chip Effort

By Qianer Liu and Anissa Gardizy · Oct 13, 2025 3:16pm PDT · 3 comments

OpenAI’s development of its own artificial intelligence chip could end up benefiting SoftBank, one of its biggest shareholders, which is also helping the ChatGPT maker develop and finance its ambitious data center plan. OpenAI is talking with SoftBank’s Arm subsidiary about using an Arm-designed central processing unit with OpenAI’s AI... OpenAI’s development of its own artificial intelligence chip could end up benefiting...

Art by Mike Sullivan

AI Ad Tech ‘Land Grab’ Pits Salesforce Against Google, Microsoft and Amazon

By Catherine Perloff · Oct 13, 2025 6:00am PDT

The murky, highly complex business of helping advertisers buy space on digital media is currently dominated by Google, Amazon and a handful of much smaller ad tech firms. But an array of other companies, including Salesforce, Microsoft and a new initiative led by AppNexus founder Brian O’Kelley, hopes to use new artificial intelligence tools to... The murky, highly complex business of helping advertisers buy space on digital media is currently...

Photo: Courtesy Morgan Stanley.

The Electric: Morgan Stanley's Uber Bull on Why Investors Should Be Looking at Humanoids, Flying Cars and Brain Implants

By Steve LeVine · Oct 13, 2025 4:30am PDT · 2 comments

“Look up in the sky,” Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said, speaking on Zoom from his office in a mid-Manhattan high-rise. “How many airplanes do you see?” None, I said. Jonas said he didn’t see any either—and that was wasted space. “Look up in the sky,” Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said, speaking on Zoom from his office in...

Art by Clark Miller

Rise of the Cursor Resistance: Why Some Techies Want to Ignore AI Coding Tools

By Rocket Drew · Oct 11, 2025 6:00am PDT · 28 comments

Art by Clark Miller

Artificial Intelligence

Rise of the Cursor Resistance: Why Some Techies Want to Ignore AI Coding Tools

By Rocket Drew · Oct 11, 2025 6:00am PDT · 28 comments

Over the summer, two software engineers at Mixus, a San Francisco–based artificial intelligence startup, staged a bit of a rebellion by refusing to follow instructions to rely heavily on Cursor or any of the other popular new coding-assistance software. They figured “they could do better than Cursor,” said an incredulous Shai Magzimof,... Over the summer, two software engineers at Mixus, a San Francisco–based artificial...

Photo via Adobe

Amazon and Google Take Another Stab at Being Glean

By Kevin McLaughlin · Oct 9, 2025 5:00pm PDT

It’s been nearly a year since we scooped the news that OpenAI, Google, Snowflake and Cohere were all working on artificial intelligence search products similar to the one startup Glean made a big splash with. Glean’s AI-powered search lets workers at companies easily find emails, Slack messages and other data scattered across business... It’s been nearly a year since we scooped the news that OpenAI, Google, Snowflake and Cohere were...

Art by Clark Miller

The $100 Billion Strategy: OpenAI Is Using Its Cash to Reshape the Chip Market

By The Information Staff · Oct 9, 2025 7:15am PDT

The path to building the most advanced AI is being throttled by a single point of failure: reliance on Nvidia’s hardware. OpenAI, the industry’s most demanding customer, is aggressively moving to dismantle this monopoly through a calculated multi-vendor strategy that is fundamentally reshaping the AI hardware market. We turned to our Deep... The path to building the most advanced AI is being throttled by a single point of failure:...

Art by Mike Sullivan

OpenAI Is Catching Up To Anthropic in AI Coding

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Oct 9, 2025 7:00am PDT

OpenAI’s effort to catch up to Anthropic in code-generating artificial intelligence seems to be working. New data show OpenAI’s Codex coding assistant has pulled ahead of Anthropic’s Claude Code assistant in certain coding capabilities. Codex usage among developers is also catching up to Claude Code’s.Developers approved 74.3% of code... OpenAI’s effort to catch up to Anthropic in code-generating artificial intelligence seems to be...

Relace cofounders Preston Zhou and Eitan Borgnia. Photo courtesy of Relace.

Andreessen Backs a Startup Developing Tools That Coding Agents Use

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Oct 8, 2025 7:00am PDT

Relace cofounders Preston Zhou and Eitan Borgnia. Photo courtesy of Relace.

Andreessen Backs a Startup Developing Tools That Coding Agents Use

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Oct 8, 2025 7:00am PDT

Countless startups sell tools to software engineers, such as version control systems to track who’s making changes to a codebase, and sandboxes where code can be safely run and tested without affecting the main system.Now, a startup is building such tools for artificial intelligence agents that aim to do the work of human coders. Andreessen... Countless startups sell tools to software engineers, such as version control systems to track who...

OpenAI DevDay 2025. Screenshot via YouTube/OpenAI

OpenAI Makes it Easier to Build Agents—and Harder to Switch Models

By Aaron Holmes · Oct 7, 2025 10:30am PDT · 1 comment

Over the past year, companies have been tinkering with generative artificial intelligence to create customized agents that automate complex tasks, but they’ve gotten mixed results. Now, OpenAI is pushing a new suite of tools to make the assembly of agents easier, and to peel customers away from competitors like Anthropic and Google.OpenAI on... Over the past year, companies have been tinkering with generative artificial intelligence to...

Image via Clark Miller

Internal Oracle Data Show Financial Challenge of Renting Out Nvidia Chips

By Anissa Gardizy, Anita Ramaswamy and Cory Weinberg · Oct 7, 2025 8:00am PDT · 8 comments

Oracle became the best-performing megacap stock of 2025 after its executives said last month that the once-sleepy database firm will generate an astonishing $381 billion in revenue from renting out specialized cloud servers to OpenAI and other artificial intelligence developers over the next five fiscal years. But internal documents show the... Oracle became the best-performing megacap stock of 2025 after its executives said last month that...

Sam Altman. Screenshot via YouTube

OpenAI’s Walled-Garden Moment

By Stephanie Palazzolo and Catherine Perloff · Oct 7, 2025 7:00am PDT

OpenAI on Monday unveiled its biggest-yet effort to bring all of the web’s consumer activities directly into ChatGPT, as it aims to turn the chatbot into a so-called superapp that people can use to control any app in their lives—similar to Facebook’s efforts from 15 years ago. But before we get too excited, we should remember we’ve been... OpenAI on Monday unveiled its biggest-yet effort to bring all of the web’s consumer activities...

Art via Mike Sullivan

Why OpenAI Offered to Pay $500 Million For A Startup With Videogame Data

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Oct 6, 2025 7:00am PDT · 2 comments

Art via Mike Sullivan

Why OpenAI Offered to Pay $500 Million For A Startup With Videogame Data

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Oct 6, 2025 7:00am PDT · 2 comments

Before we get to today’s column, in a sign of how insatiable OpenAI’s appetite for computing power is, the ChatGPT-maker and Nvidia rival Advanced Micro Devices announced a partnership Monday morning that would see OpenAI deploy six gigawatts of AMD’s chips over multiple years, starting in the second half of next year. As part of the deal,... Before we get to today’s column, in a sign of how insatiable OpenAI’s appetite for computing...