AI Reading for Saturday October 11

OpenAI, now valued around $500 billion, has expanded from research into data centers, consumer apps, coding tools and hardware—its ChatGPT reaches about 800 million weekly users—and its partnerships with Nvidia, Broadcom, Oracle and AMD raise competition concerns. - CNBC

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's rapid expansion is projected to generate over $13 billion in revenue this year but will incur $155 billion in computing costs through 2029, drawing industry acclaim for speed and concerns about consumer safety. - Business Insider

OpenAI has positioned itself at the center of a $1 trillion network of deals by signing agreements with major tech firms, creating financial dependencies and expanding adoption of its AI technology across the industry. - Financial Times

It comes as OpenAI is pretty much tied in core model capabilities, but dominating the market, even as Claude and Gemini have caught up and even have the edge in some areas.

OpenAI subpoenaed AI-regulation advocates, including Encode AI lawyer Nathan Calvin, claiming they were fronts for Elon Musk, and seeking seeking personal messages and information about alleged Elon Musk funding; OpenAI says subpoenas aimed to clarify support for Encode's legal challenge. - The Verge

A court terminated a preservation order, allowing OpenAI to stop preserving most deleted and temporary ChatGPT logs as of September 26; some deleted chats will still be monitored. - Ars Technica

Duolingo allegedly tops an unverified list of OpenAI’s top 30 customers by token consumption - Reddit

The browser wars are back, as Google has integrated Gemini into Chrome, while Perplexity's Comet and Opera's Neon launched AI-native browsers that perform tasks like booking travel and managing email, despite privacy concerns over agents running amok and inappropriately sharing personal data. - Fortune

Comet browser breezes through a Coursera course, Srinivas says "don't do this' - Benzinga

Generative AI can now act as a personal shopper that learns individual preferences, enabling personalized purchasing and streamlined commerce, potentially making AI-driven shopping mainstream and reshaping retail business models. - Financial Times

Mark Cuban granted users on OpenAI's Sora 2 permission to create AI-generated videos of his likeness, which have been going viral and now must include an ad for his Cost Plus Drugs affordable drug company. - Business Insider

Nvidia developed a reinforcement-learning pre-training (RLP) method that trains LLMs to generate reasoning chains before token prediction, boosting reasoning-benchmark performance by up to 17% and improving downstream fine-tuning reliability for enterprise workflows. - VentureBeat

SemiAnalysis launched InferenceMAX, an open-source benchmark that nightly measures LLM inference across GPUs and accelerators (NVIDIA, AMD, Google TPU, AWS Trainium), evaluating models like LLaMA 70B, DeepSeek 670B and GPT-OSS 120B for throughput, latency and cost-per-token. - newsletter.semianalysis.com

Lisa Su is the old-school tech CEO is leading Nvidia's main rival AMD. - The Wall Street Journal

AMD will launch its Instinct MI450 AI GPUs built on TSMC's 2nm-class N2 node—the first AMD GPU on 2nm—with Helios rack integration and higher memory/bandwidth than Nvidia's N3-based Rubin, and initial shipments to OpenAI in second half of next year. - Tom's Hardware

Google says model usage is growing fast, like on pace to triple annually. - THE DECODER

Alex Kantrowitz interview with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian on Gemini Enterprise, AI's Labor Implications, Investment Frenzy - Big Technology

Rapid AI adoption in finance is outpacing financial regulators' ability to update rules and oversight, leaving gaps in consumer protection, risk management and enforcement. - Bloomberg.com

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski warns AI will wipe out swathes of knowledge-work jobs across sectors like banking and translation; Klarna cut staff from 7,400 to about 3,000 while raising pay and plans to expand banking using its UK electronic-money license. - Bloomberg

Translators face job displacement from advancing AI language technologies, with linguists reporting emotional and professional strain as employers push automation, forcing the industry to adapt and reshape practices. - Financial Times

Campaigns from major parties are increasingly using AI, prompting concerns about regulation, misuse, misinformation and impacts on democratic processes. Use cases include to automate fundraising, voter targeting and mobilization, while some organizers and unions employ AI for policy deliberation. - The American Prospect

"I’m not a tech naysayer. Far from it. But we’re doing it again." Former Twitter and Meta global affairs lead Sean Evins warns that AI replicates social-media governance mistakes, posing opaque, unregulated risks and prompting calls for regulation, cross-sector testing and global standards. - Fortune

Food delivery robots now operate on 78 U.S. college campuses; Starship leads with over 2,000 robots on 60 campuses, $230 million raised and Grubhub partnerships, while adoption favors meal-plan subscriptions amid speed, navigation and pricing challenges. - Business Insider

Your plumber has a new favorite tool: ChatGPT - CNN

A reporter tested chatbots' ability to find cheap flights for the holidays and found mixed results in pricing accuracy, usefulness, and reliability. - Fast Company

Developers embrace Taskmaster open source project with > 22k GitHub stars. IIUC this helps you create to-do lists, break down tasks and accomplish longer-running tasks, adding capabilities similar to Claude Code within your IDE like Cursor or Windsurf. - GitHub

Dolly Parton: "I ain't dead yet." Reba McEntire and Dolly Parton dismissed AI-generated fake images falsely depicting them in a hospital; McEntire condemned the misinformation and Parton reassured fans in a video. - HuffPost

Camera Intelligence's Caira Kickstarter lets you do on-device AI editing and Nano Banana generative voice edits - Creative Bloq

Adding that Sora watermark to the 4k footage of your real crimes - Reddit

When you put yourself in videos and your AI self is having all the fun - The Wall Street Journal

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