Sam Altman

Eat Your Words

The New Yorker articulated something that has been on my mind for a long time. AI’s self-inflicted messaging crisis. This is as clear an example of my long standing argument that words have consequences.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants to “de-escalate” the rhetoric around artificial intelligence, days after a Molotov cocktail hit the gate of his San Francisco mansion and bullets were fired at his home. He is certainly the most high-profile of targets, but there have been others who have earned the ire of those who are threatened by AI and the rhetoric around it.

The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka says that Altman is at fault himself. After all he did say that AI would “most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there’ll be great companies created.” You cannot spend years telling people your product is an existential threat and then ask them

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More Magic Math from OpenAI?

When it comes to OpenAI, smart money is starting to do the math out loud. And something doesn’t add up. On surface, today’s news that OpenAI is offering 17.5% guaranteed returns to private equity firms looks like a shot at the Anthropic threat. Scratch the surface, and you start to see the story behind the story.

The PE deal is the kind of deal you do when you’ve borrowed against the future and the future is taking longer than expected.

Remember a few weeks ago when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (one of the backers of OpenAI) said that OpenAI was not a well-run business. Now Thoma Bravo founder Orlando Bravo is saying it out loud. Bravo walked away from the JV idea after questioning the long-term profit profile. It is not a coincidence that two smart money operators are arriving at the same conclusion. Just different words.

As I wrote

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The Debt Beneath the Dream

Every gambler knows that the secret to survivin’
Is knowin’ what to throw away and knowing what to keep
‘Cause every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep

Kenny Rogers, The Gambler.

I don’t know Masayoshi Son, and I don’t need to. But my guess is that the SoftBank founder and CEO can’t be having a good start to his week. The stock of his flagship, SoftBank, is deflating faster than a balloon stuck in powerlines after a New Year’s party. He has bet big on OpenAI as his all-in wager. Whether he is right or wrong remains to be seen.

SoftBank’s shares dropped as much as 12.5 percent. Reports emerged that OpenAI and Oracle had scrapped plans to expand a flagship data center in Texas. Bloomberg reported the expansion fell apart over a combination of

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$110 Billion in Name Only

I wrote last month about the announcement economy, where bombast and news releases are meant to dominate news cycles. Being right or wrong doesn’t matter. Whether the money actually arrives is a different question entirely. OpenAI’s $110 billion funding round is the purest example yet. We (including me) are talking about the headline number, regardless of how much and when the actual money hits the bank accounts.

I wrote a piece based on that jaw-dropping headline number. I mean, that is the kind of amount the VC industry would raise in total less than a decade ago. Still, as someone on social media pointed out, it isn’t money till it’s money. So, I looked at the SEC filings. They tell a different story. To be pedantic, and I am, on day one the actual cash committed was zero. Anyway, here is a quick update from SEC filings and disclosures.

Amazon

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Block & Tackle: Job Cuts & the AI Narrative

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Block (the company formerly known as Square), went on X (the company formerly known as Twitter, which he co-founded) and shared a lower-case employee memo, candidly outlining his decision to cut about 4,200 people, just over 40 percent of the company’s staff. The memo was in sharp contrast to the investor letter shared with shareholders, prompting John Gruber to quip on Daring Fireball, “That’s a telling sign about who he respects.”

Wall Street loves nothing more than job cuts. It loves them more than it loves vision. In my jaded eyes, the market wasn’t rewarding his AI narrative. It was rewarding the cut. Block stock surged 22 percent on the news. And frankly, no one is looking at Block for any AI vision.

Either way, the thrust of the memo was AI. In way too many words, what Jack was saying was that AI is here,

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Sam “Claws” Attention Back OpenAI

Sam Altman got his man. Not only to compete with Anthropic’s Claude Code, but also to show the world what is possible with Codex. And at the same time, he got a brand-new story to tell about invisible autonomous agents and to raise ever more money. And the extra olive in this vodka gimlet: he kept OpenClaw from the hands of rival Meta.

This weekend, OpenAI’s CEO announced that Peter Steinberger, the Austrian developer behind the viral open-source AI agent OpenClaw, was joining the company to “drive the next generation of personal agents.” Steinberger, who built OpenClaw as a side project that exploded to over 180,000 GitHub stars in a matter of weeks, had been courted by every major lab in Silicon Valley, including Zuckerberg’s Meta, which came very close to landing him. I first reported that Peter was talking to Zuck, Sam, and that everyone else was chasing him

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Why did OpenAI buy Jony Ive & Co

OpenAI, made the biggest acquihire in  Silicon Valley’s history. Sam Altman and his crew  bought Jony Ive and his coterie of ex-Apple hotshots for a whopping $6.5 billion. It is an all-stock deal for io Products, a 55-person company that is building an “amazing AI device.”

It is hard to say what that device is because in the nine-minute video accompanying the news of the deal Ive and Altman don’t say anything. The slick video harkens back to Ive’s glory days at Apple when he would talk about the chips, designs, and aluminum on videos extolling the iPhone, the watch, and the laptops. In a way, what he and Altman are indicating, through words, and subliminal marketing, is that we are building the next Apple.

In 2021, OpenAI was valued at $6.1 billion. Now they are buying a 55-person company with a mystery product for $6.5 billion. This talk of the

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AI, China & Copium

When it comes to technology in general, and artificial intelligence in particular, it has been surreal to watch events unfold. From politicians in technology backwaters to opportunists and fashion billionaires, everyone has jumped on the “AI” version of Shinkansen. And if that wasn’t enough, the arrival of DeepSeek has unleashed a wave of fear, nationalism, and old-fashioned protectionism.

DeepSeek makes two major points.

First, as noted earlier, DeepSeek represents more than just a product — it embodies a different way of thinking that challenges the conventional approach to AI. It’s not about a specific company, but about demonstrating that others can also leapfrog the big boys with clever thinking.

Second, for the past ten years, the Chinese have been relentlessly focused on their “Made in China 2025” initiative. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the technology gap between the U.S. and China has narrowed. “China 2025 sets specific targets:

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