Fidji Simo is wrapping up her first week at OpenAI, where she is expected to oversee most of the company's roughly 3,000 employees.
To investors and partners, OpenAI leaders have been describing the former Instacart CEO as the kind of steady hand the company needs. Her mandate is clear: turn a chaotic, unprofitable startup into a disciplined, publicly traded tech giant. On paper, she seems well-suited. She lived through Facebook's hyper-growth era in the early 2010s, helped take Instacart public, and knows the advertising industry inside and out - experience that will be valuable once ads arrive in ChatGPT.
Last Thursday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told reporters at a private dinner that investors are overexcited about AI models. "Someone" will lose a "phenomenal amount of money," he said, according to The Verge. The statement came as his company negotiates a secondary share sale at a $500 billion valuation—up from $300 billion just months earlier.
"Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes," Altman told the journalists, comparing the current market to the dot-com crash of the 1990s. Wired reported that he also predicted his company will spend "trillions of dollars on data center construction in the not very distant future" and that ChatGPT will soon serve "billions of people a day."
For context, Facebook serves about 3 billion monthly active users. Altman's projection would require ChatGPT to reach nearly half the world's population as daily users (not monthly, like Facebook), which is an extraordinarily optimistic outlook.
As banks around the world prepare to replace many thousands of workers with AI, Australia's biggest bank is scrambling to rehire 45 workers after allegedly lying about chatbots besting staff by handling higher call volumes.
In a statement Thursday flagged by Bloomberg, Australia's main financial services union, the Finance Sector Union (FSU), claimed a "massive win" for 45 union members whom the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) had replaced with an AI-powered "voice bot."
The FSU noted that some of these workers had been with CBA for decades. Those workers in particular were shocked when CBA announced last month that their jobs had become redundant. At that time, CBA claimed that launching the chatbot supposedly "led to a reduction in call volumes" by 2,000 a week, FSU said.
New research reveals open-source AI models use up to 10 times more computing resources than closed alternatives, potentially negating cost advantages for enterprise deployments.Read More
Anthropic launches learning modes for Claude AI that guide users through step-by-step reasoning instead of providing direct answers, intensifying competition with OpenAI and Google in the booming AI education market.Read More
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