AI Reading for Friday January 30

Alexa, buy OpenAI: Amazon is in talks to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI, according to people familiar with the matter, in what would be a giant bet on the hot artificial-intelligence startup. - The Wall Street Journal

Initial Prompt Offering: OpenAI is laying groundwork for an IPO in Q4 2026, and its executives have privately expressed concern that rival Anthropic could beat them to market. - The Wall Street Journal

Too Big To FailGPT: Tech groups are lining up to invest in OpenAI, calling its fundraising "too-big-to-fail" because investors say OpenAI's strength will directly affect their businesses, prompting strategic partnerships, tighter commercial integration and likely increased regulatory scrutiny. - Financial Times

OpenAI may be building an X competitor that blocks bots using the World orb or Face ID. - Forbes

Prism break: Publishers and researchers warn OpenAI's Prism, a free ChatGPT-linked LaTeX workspace embedding GPT-5.2 for drafting papers, citations and diagrams, may amplify low-quality AI-assisted papers and strain peer review. - Ars Technica

Inside OpenAI’s in-house data agent - OpenAI

OpenAI says agents can open indexed web pages, trusts search engines to not index malicious pages; flags non‑indexed links with safety warnings. - OpenAI

OpenAI hired over seven employees from AI coding startup Cline, including Nik Pash, who left Cline after posting "imagine the smell" on X about an xAI hackathon. - The Information

Cerner? I hardly knew her: TD Cowen says Oracle may cut 20,000–30,000 jobs and sell Cerner health care unit to help fund an AI datacenter build supporting a reported $300 billion, five‑year OpenAI contract that TD Cowen estimates needs roughly 3 million GPUs and $156 billion in capex. - The Register

Microsoft shares plunged about 12%, wiping $440 billion in market value after a revenue miss, as capital expenditures rose 66% to $37.5 billion and Microsoft said about 45% of its $625 billion remaining performance obligations are tied to OpenAI. - Yahoo

The Pentagon and AI developer Anthropic are at odds after talks stalled over an up-to-$200 million contract as Defense officials press to remove safeguards that could block U.S. use of Anthropic’s AI for autonomous weapons targeting and domestic surveillance. - Reuters

Anthropic: Randomized trials find AI assistance harms developers' learning — 17‑point drop in code comprehension - Anthropic

Top engineers report AI now generates most code: Anthropic's Boris Cherny says 100% of his code was AI-written for two-plus months; Anthropic estimates 70–90% company-wide (Claude Code ~90%), while Microsoft, Salesforce and a Science study show roughly 29–30%. - Fortune

Some weirdness going on, I noticed more than a few surprisingly low quality Sonnet answers, they might be allocating GPUs to an upcoming 4.7 release or otherwise turning the dial from 'ultrathink' towards 'efficient'. - Margin Lab

Anthropic: The tech we are building could doom us all, can we please have billions to get there faster? - The Atlantic

Dario always looks pained and worried

Apple reports $143.8B Q1 revenue; execs play down AI features, cite 3nm chip limits - Yahoo

On its quarterly earnings call reporting $143.8 billion revenue (16% year-over-year), Apple CEO Tim Cook told Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring that Apple is integrating AI across the operating system but offered no concrete monetization plan. - TechCrunch

I think they’ll be OK, they know how to monetize stuff. Think different, delight everyone, but charge a premium for everything.

Siri, explain this contract: Apple planned to rebuild Siri around Anthropic's Claude but walked away after Anthropic reportedly sought several billion dollars annually, doubling over three years, and then chose Google Gemini after Gemini 3's November 2025 improvements and Google accepted Apple's terms. - Cult of Mac

Read my lips: Apple acquires startup Q.ai , which maybe will let AirPods and future devices hear better with AI, possibly by adding lip-reading ability in noisy environments - CNBC

Make your own universe, 3d game or navigable Toy Story world or something, from text prompts - Google

Summarize this: Google is exploring updates letting websites opt out of Search generative AI features introduced summer 2024 after publishers reported massive traffic drops, while the UK Competition and Markets Authority will consult and expects to decide in about a year. - CNET

Google's 'Personal Intelligence' exposed license‑plate and travel records when accessing Gmail, Photos and search/YouTube history. “Personal Intelligence feels like Google has been quietly taking notes on my entire life and finally decided to hand me the notebook.” - Business Insider

A San Francisco jury unanimously convicted former Google engineer Linwei Ding on all seven trade‑secrets and seven economic‑espionage counts for copying thousands of internal Google documents—including 105 files on TPU and GPU designs—to found Shanghai Zhisuan Technologies in China. - Bloomberg Law

SpaceX Machina: Musk might merge xAI and SpaceX before IPO - Reuters

Elon Musk is reportedly planning to merge xAI into SpaceX, Bloomberg says SpaceX may merge with Tesla, and xAI has raised about $20 billion in private funding. - Business Insider

Full self-crashing: Tesla robotaxi data: nine Austin crashes in ~500,000 miles; crash rate ~1 per 55,000 miles, >3× higher than humans - Electrek

Department of Homeland Surrealism: DHS is using Google and Adobe AI to make bizarre AI-generated content. - MIT Technology Review

No, deflation will not make you rich, dumbass. - Futurism

half the broligarchs are, let’s do everything in crypto and make dollars worthless (dollar hyperinflation). the other half are, we’ll have massive abundance and stuff will be practically free.

deflation means your debts go way up, it means depression. contracts and debts are in nominal prices (with important exceptions) so ok let's just break all the contracts and expropriate one side or the other, surely this will have no follow-on ill effects (beyond the first-order expropriations).

then they say, normal, pragmatic, let’s do good things, greatest good for the greatest number types are radical left-wingers who are detached from reality. gtfo

China's National Development and Reform Commission has conditionally approved DeepSeek and other firms, including ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent, to buy more than 400,000 Nvidia H200 AI chips, with regulatory conditions and shipment details still being finalized. - Reuters

GPU polygamy: Last year Amazon and Google deployed thousands of their own AI chips into large data-center networks, generating billions in revenue and prompting Anthropic to build multiple non-Nvidia chip data centers, signaling growing competition to Nvidia's dominance. - The New York Times

A.I. companies are buying large quantities of memory chips, driving up prices for components used in laptops and smartphones and increasing costs for new personal computers. - The New York Times

Lights will be off, but we can look at AI memes til phone batteries run out: alf of Americans are at high risk of power shortfalls amid the AI boom. - Bloomberg

GEM reports that in 2025 US gas- and oil-fired power projects nearly tripled to 251,737 MW in development—about a quarter of the global pipeline—with over one-third linked to datacenters and an estimated 12.1 billion tonnes of US lifetime CO2. - The Register

Blackstone's Gray said AI's disruption of industries is the biggest risk. - Bloomberg

Large randomized Swedish trial of ~100,000 women found AI-supported mammography reduced subsequent-year cancer diagnoses by 12% compared to non-AI assisted screening, increased screening-detected cancers to 81% (vs 74%), and cut aggressive cancers by 27%. This is using pre-gen-AI tech. - the Guardian

Ant Group's AI health chatbot Ant Afu reached about 30 million monthly active users by January, offering AI Q&A, appointment booking, test-result analysis and medication reminders, ranked among China's top iOS downloads, and plans expansion to Africa and Southeast Asia. - Rest of World

MOSAIC, an open-source AI published in Nature on Jan. 19, used a clustered database of about 1 million patent reactions to train 2,498 Llama-based specialized models and recommended conditions that enabled synthesis of 35 new compounds. - Nature