| |  | Aug 04, 2025 | | | | | | Welcome back! OpenAI is nearing the release of GPT-5 but its development path reveals technical challenges. Apple projects optimism about AI future at an rare all-hands. Tesla is found partially liable for a fatal autopilot crash in 2019.
| | | | OpenAI is nearing the release of its next flagship model, GPT-5, but the path to its development reveals technical challenges and a slowing of the exponential progress that has defined the artificial intelligence industry, The Information reported. While GPT-5 is expected to deliver tangible improvements, particularly in practical computer programming and its ability to power complex AI agents with minimal human oversight, these gains won't be like the monumental leap seen between earlier generations, such as GPT-3 and GPT-4. OpenAI researchers faced setbacks this year from the dual problems of a dwindling supply of high-quality training data and the diminishing returns of pre-training at scale. And while OpenAI's reasoning model o3 showed extraordinary performance in internal tests, these gains degraded significantly when it converted the model into a customer-facing chatbot. Recently, researchers at OpenAI and its rivals have focused on new techniques in reinforcement learning to overcome these challenges. The shift from revolutionary breakthroughs to more incremental advancements in AI will still produce immense commercial value. OpenAI's existing technology and products are proving so valuable to businesses that the company projects to be generating $20 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year, up from around $6 billion in annualized revenue at the start of the year. | | | | Apple held a rare companywide all hands meeting on Friday to discuss the company's investments in artificial intelligence and other topics. CEO Tim Cook struck a confident tone about Apple's future in AI, telling employees that Apple has exciting plans that he couldn't discuss, according to a person familiar with the meeting. Apple has struggled to deliver AI features that have impressed customers, including a new AI-powered version of Siri, prompting the company to shake up the leadership of the team overseeing the Apple digital assistant. An Apple employee asked Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, about Siri during the all hands, and Federighi acknowledged that it's a topic he gets asked about the most lately, according to another person who heard his comment. It has been several years since Apple has hosted an all hands meeting. Despite its difficulties in AI, the company reported strong financial results for the June quarter, showing a 13% increase in the sales of the iPhone, the products best performance in years. Bloomberg earlier reported details of the Apple all hands meeting. An Apple spokesperson didn't respond to a request for comment. | | | | Tesla was partially to blame for a fatal crash involving its self-driving software, a federal court jury in Florida found on Friday, according to several news reports from the courtroom. Tesla will have to pay $243 million in punitive and compensatory damages, the New York Times reported. The lawsuit stemmed from a 2019 incident when a driver using Tesla's Autopilot software blew through an intersection, killing one person and severely injuring another. The jury found Tesla responsible for a third of the crash, while the driver of the vehicle was responsible for the other two thirds, according to reports from the courtroom. A Tesla spokesperson said the company would appeal the verdict, saying that the driver was solely at fault and that the verdict "only works to set back automotive safety and jeopardize Tesla's and the entire industry's efforts to develop and implement life-saving technology." The verdict is a setback for Tesla as CEO Elon Musk stakes the company's future on humanoid robots and self-driving robotaxis. Tesla has launched ride-hailing services in Austin and the San Francisco Bay Area, but vehicles in both cities include backup humans who can take over if Tesla's software fails. | | | | Amazon and Meta Platforms both said in securities filings last week that they expect their U.S. taxes to drop as a result of President Trump's tax act, which restores companies' right to accelerate their deductions for depreciation on certain property and to immediately expense research and developments for domestic work. Amazon said in a filing on Friday that it expected its U.S. cash tax payments to "significantly decrease" this year, while Meta said in a filing on Thursday that "we anticipate a reduction in our U.S. federal cash tax payments for the remainder of 2025 and future years" as a result of the new law. All the big U.S. tech firms, particularly those whose investments in servers and data centers have risen sharply in recent years, are likely to benefit from the tax changes. But Microsoft and Alphabet said in securities filings in the past couple of weeks that they were still assessing the impact of the new law. | | | | OpenAI has secured $8.3 billion of new commitments from investors such as hedge funds Dragoneer, Altimeter Capital and D1 Capital Partners, exceeding its earlier goal of $7.5 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the fundraise, confirming earlier reporting from The Information about the round. The fundraise comes as ChatGPT continues to anchor OpenAI's business, which is generating $12 billion in annualized revenue, roughly doubling from the start of the year. OpenAI expects to hit $20 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year, meaning it would be generating about $1.7 billion in revenue per month, according to the same person, up from practically no revenue three years earlier. The company has over 700 million ChatGPT users across both consumer and business customers. The new capital is part of an unprecedented $40 billion funding round that values the ChatGPT maker at $260 billion before the investment. OpenAI received $10 billion of that amount in June, and the new commitments means that the $40 billion round will increase by about $1 billion. SoftBank, which is leading the fundraise, has committed to funding $22.5 billion of the round, provided that OpenAI successfully reorganizes its corporate structure this year or early next year. Dragoneer committed $2.8 billion to OpenAI, and other investors in the round include existing shareholders Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Fidelity Management, Tiger Global Management and Thrive Capital. New OpenAI investors in the round include TPG, T. Rowe Price and Blackstone. | | | | Vast Data, an AI software and storage startup, is in talks to raise billions in funding from Nvidia and Alphabet's growth-stage venture arm CapitalG, Reuters reported. The new funding round could value the startup as high as $30 billion, a significant step up from its valuation of $9 billion in 2023. The interest in Vast Data, which was founded in 2016, shows the growing importance of speedy storage in training AI models and running AI applications. Vast Data's data management software offloads less critical data to lower-cost flash storage and uses faster, more expensive flash storage that lets GPUs quickly access large amounts of data during model training. Vast Data sells software to cloud computing providers such as CoreWeave and companies like Pixar and Verizon to store data for AI applications. It also launched an operating system to centralize and manage AI agents' workflows on GPUs. The New York-based company's revenue has gotten a lift from the growing demands for AI computing needs and applications. It has $200 million in annual recurring revenue by January 2025 and is projecting it will grow to $600 million next year, according to the report. | | | Popular articles By Stephanie Palazzolo, Erin Woo and Amir Efrati
By Miles Kruppa, Cory Weinberg and Anissa Gardizy
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