OpenAI burned $8 billion in six months. Only 5% of its 800 million users pay. Sam Altman once called advertising "a last resort." On Friday, OpenAI reached for it. The era of free-and-delightful ChatGPT is over.
The Trump administration wants PJM to hold an emergency power auction where only data center operators can bid. Fifteen-year contracts, no exit clauses. The grid operator wasn't invited to the announcement.
San Francisco | January 16, 2026 The story at Thinking Machines was never about ethics. It was about a company that
OpenAI burned $8 billion in six months. Only 5% of its 800 million users pay. Sam Altman once called advertising "a last resort." On Friday, OpenAI reached for it. The era of free-and-delightful ChatGPT is over.
Attackers already use AI. Novee just handed defenders the same weapon. Three Unit 8200 veterans built an AI pen tester, raised $51.5M in eight months, and signed customers faster than most startups hire engineers. The race is on.
TSMC's Q4 profit jumped 35% to a record $16 billion. CEO C.C. Wei declared "AI is real" and backed it with $56 billion in 2026 capex, the largest semiconductor investment in history. Intel and Samsung are scrambling to catch up. They're not close.
Cerebras pulled its IPO in 2024 when its biggest customer, a UAE conglomerate, made regulators nervous. Fourteen months later, OpenAI signed a $10 billion deal for 750 megawatts of Cerebras systems. The chipmaker just rekindled its IPO filing. Coincidence? The sequence tells a different story.
Apple tried to build its own AI. It failed. Now it's paying Google $1 billion a year to license Gemini while pretending the arrangement is strategic. The company that controlled every layer of the stack is now renting the most important one.
Meta just named a Goldman Sachs banker—not an AI researcher—to lead its $600 billion infrastructure buildout. The appointment signals that AI has become a capital and political problem, not a technical one. Powell McCormick's job is handshakes in Riyadh and zoning hearings in Nevada.
Britain's media regulator has opened a formal investigation into Elon Musk's X over AI-generated sexual images of women and children. The platform restricted the feature to paying subscribers—turning abuse into a premium service.
Anthropic announced Claude for Healthcare five days after OpenAI's rival launch. Both entered a market that has already buried Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health. The question is whether AI models can succeed where human engineers kept failing
Microsoft says one in six people now use AI. The methodology: counting clicks on Microsoft products. The US ranks 24th despite hosting every major AI lab. South Korea's surge? A viral selfie filter. The company selling AI infrastructure has appointed itself scorekeeper of AI adoption.
When Google locked AlphaFold 3 behind commercial restrictions, three MIT PhD students rebuilt it in four months. Now Boltz has $28M, a Pfizer partnership, and a bet that open-source can capture drug discovery infrastructure.
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