| |  | Feb 10, 2026 | | | | | Supported by |  | | | | | | Happy Tuesday! OpenAI starts testing ChatGPT ads. Tony Wu, one of the cofounders of Elon Musk's xAI, resigns from the company. Google parent Alphabet is set to raise $20 billion in the U.S. bond market.
| | | | OpenAI said Monday it's beginning to show ads in ChatGPT for some U.S. users. The ads, which OpenAI says are a test, will be shown to logged-in users with free subscriptions, as well as subscribers to OpenAI's new Go tier, which costs $8 per month. Free users can opt out of seeing ads in exchange for fewer daily messages, the company said. OpenAI said it decides what ad to show by matching ads submitted by advertisers to the topic of a conversation, in addition to previous chats and interactions with ads. For example, OpenAI said, if a user is searching for recipes, they might see ads for meal kits or grocery delivery services. Advertisers won't be able to see chats or personal details about users, OpenAI said, and will only receive aggregate information about how their ads perform like number of total views or clicks. OpenAI is charging advertisers on a per-view basis, The Information previously reported and was aiming for premium prices on par with pricey streaming ads in early conversations with potential advertisers. The company said Monday that it will "evolve" the ads business over time "to support additional formats, objectives and buying models and build new ways for businesses to interact with consumers in ChatGPT." It also said it would add "guardrails to prevent narrow ads targeting," but didn't specify any rules or control measures. | | | | Tony Wu, one of xAI's cofounders, said he has resigned from Elon Musk's AI company. Wu's exit follows the departure last year of another xAI cofounder, Igor Babuschkin. "I will deeply miss the people, the warrooms, and all those battles we have fought together," Wu said in a post on X. "It's time for my next chapter." Wu, a computer scientist who got his doctorate from the University of Toronto, joined xAI from Google in 2023 when Musk created the company. Wu, who was in charge of reasoning and reported to Musk, played a central role in xAI's core AI model development. Wu's departure comes at a time when xAI is going through major changes. Earlier this month, Musk's aerospace company SpaceX announced a merger with xAI. The deal valued SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion. | | | | Alphabet is set to raise $20 billion in the U.S. bond market, as part of a massive debt sale that will also see the company selling bonds in British pounds and Swiss francs, Bloomberg reported. The bond offering comes days after the Google parent company announced that it expected to double its capital expenditure spending to around $185 billion this year. The tech industry has increasingly turned to debt financing to fund exploding spending on data centers and chips. Capital expenditures are slated to take up all of the projected free cash flow at Amazon, and most of it at Alphabet and Meta, according to the companies' earnings and analyst projections. Alphabet increased the dollar bond sale to $20 billion after initially offering $15 billion, as debt investors showed intense interest, according to Bloomberg. Alphabet is also offering a rare 100-year bond in the UK. As of the end of last year, Alphabet had $126.8 billion in cash and cash equivalents, according to its most recent earnings filing. | | | | Databricks said it had raised $7 billion of fresh capital after hitting a $5.4 billion annual revenue pace in the fourth quarter. The fundraising effort, which started in November and was split between $5 billion of equity and $2 billion of debt capacity, shows the company has been able to continue to tap the private markets ahead of a widely anticipated initial public offering. Its fourth-quarter revenue growth rate, more than 65%, would be among the fastest growing software firms if it were public. | | | | Stripe is preparing a potential tender offer that could value the payments company at more than $140 billion, Axios reported. That would put the company's valuation well above the $107 billion mark at which it bought back shares from investors last fall. It marks a significant rebound from the $50 billion valuation investors gave Stripe when it raised money in 2023. A Stripe spokesperson declined to comment. | | | | Uber is expanding its presence in Turkey by buying Getir's food delivery operations in that country for $335 million in cash. Uber is also paying $100 million to buy 15% of Getir's grocery and water delivery businesses, with purchase of the rest "subject to certain operating and financial performance conditions." The purchase comes about nine months after Uber bought 85% of Trendyol Group, another food and grocery delivery service in Turkey, for $700 million. Uber said it plans to integrate the two services, by having Getir's app include restaurants delivering through Trendyol Go, and Getir's grocery offerings available through the Trendyol app. Getir's food delivery business generated over $1 billion in gross bookings in 2025, up more than 50% from the prior year on a constant currency basis, Uber said. The company's global food delivery business generated $25 billion in gross bookings in the fourth quarter alone. | | | | Zhipu, one of China's prominent AI developers, has anonymously released its new large language model under a different name on OpenRouter, a popular AI model marketplace for developers. Pony Alpha, a new open-source LLM launched on OpenRouter a few days ago, is Zhipu's new model, known as GLM-5, in disguise, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. In a post on X, OpenRouter said Pony Alpha "delivers strong performance across coding, reasoning and roleplay." Beijing-based Zhipu, which went public in Hong Kong under the corporate name Knowledge Atlas Technology, is planning to officially launch GLM-5 later this week, the person said. Zhipu's previous model, GLM-4.7, was ranked high among open-source models for coding and agentic tasks. By releasing the model first under a different name on OpenRouter without telling users that it's a new Zhipu model, the company is trying to gather and assess feedback from users without preconceptions or prejudices, the person said. Zhipu's GLM-5 comes as Chinese open-source AI models are gaining popularity among U.S. developers who are looking for cheaper but capable alternatives for coding to Anthropic's Claude and other U.S. models. | | | | Workday, which sells human resources and financial management applications, announced that co-founder and executive chair Aneel Bhusri is returning as CEO. He is taking over for Carl Eschenbach, who is stepping down after two years in that role and also vacating the board seat he has held since 2018. Bhusri becomes the latest tech founder to return to operational roles in their companies in challenging times, a list that has recently included Google co-founder Sergey Brin and UiPath co-founder Daniel Dines. The biggest immediate task Bhusri will face is battling the perception that AI is a threat to Workday's business, one that many of its enterprise software peers are also grappling with. Workday has made a number of moves to boost its AI capabilities in recent years, acquiring enterprise AI startups Sana and Paradox and developing its own models to automate tasks such as generating job descriptions and scanning resumes. But so far, Workday's CEO switch hasn't seemed to soothe investors' anxiety, as its shares dropped more than 6% after the announcement and are now down more than 25% since the start of the year. | | | | Michael Grimes, a long-time tech banker, is returning to Morgan Stanley after a one-year stint with the Trump administration, where he was a senior advisor to the U.S. Department of Commerce and oversaw the government's investment unit, according to an internal memo viewed by The Information. He'll be chairman of investment banking at the bank, the memo said. Before he became a government employee, Grimes had been Morgan Stanley's head of technology investment banking and managed some of the firm's most high profile tech IPOs, including Facebook and Uber. Grimes, who has a close relationship with Elon Musk, is returning at a time where the Wall Street bank is gearing for a year of mega listings. Elon Musk's SpaceX is preparing for a summer listing after it recently merged with his AI startup xAI that values the combined company at $1.25 trillion. It has not formally hired bankers for the listing, although Morgan Stanley is considered to be one of them. | | | | | Popular articles
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