The United States’ OpenAI Equity Stake, Meta The Neocloud, Karp’s Attack
Ahead of the holiday weekend, here’s what’s happening and what to look out for.
OpenAI is discussing providing an equity stake to the United States government, Meta is considering selling its excess compute, and Palantir CEO Alex Karp just called out the frontier labs for competing with their customers.
Though the U.S. may be slowing down ahead of a holiday weekend, and the globe may be settling in for the final stages of the World Cup, the AI news keeps coming at a rapid pace. Here’s a look at the top stories ahead of the weekend, with some analysis of each:
OpenAI May Give the U.S. Government a 5% Equity Stake
The news: OpenAI is considering giving a 5% equity stake to the U.S. government to “clear political obstacles by securing financial buy-in from the Trump administration,” the Financial Times reports. The proposal would include similar action by Anthropic, Google, Meta, and others.
The bottom line: This is an absurd idea that will likely never come to fruition. It seemingly requires a broad coalition of partners to move forward, and these potential partners have no incentive to join with OpenAI. Moreover, giving the United States 5% equity in OpenAI would make the government an approver of models while simultaneously being an investor with a vested interest in some labs’ success over others. The U.S. should share in OpenAI’s success via taxes, not equity. It’s a bad idea.
Meta Is Considering Selling Compute and Models
The news: Meta is “developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business that will sell access to AI computing power and models,” per Bloomberg. The company is doing this because it has excess compute and wants to make money from it, similar to SpaceX.
The bottom line: Becoming a ‘neocloud’ selling AI compute should be a good business as long as the AI boom persists, but it’s also telling that Anthropic and OpenAI can’t get enough capacity while others have left over. It sure feels like the winners and losers of the AI boom are sorting out quickly, with the bigger business being those who can sell compute + a proprietary frontier model (and sometimes an application too) for a markup vs. simply compute and licensed models.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp Slams Frontier Labs
The news: Palantir’s Alex Karp went after the frontier AI labs in a lengthy CNBC interview this week, asking “Who owns the data? Is it being cached? Are the prompts secure?” implying that nothing was safe in the hands of OpenAI and Anthropic.
The bottom line: As the AI labs consolidate control, and start competing with industries that rely on them (like coding, design, finance, etc.) we’re likely to see great pushback from those at risk of being disintermediated. For Karp, calling out this conflict (which he rightly points out is discussed behind closed doors) is a way to sell his own, competing product. Though some of the same criticisms could be applied to Palantir itself.
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This Week On Big Technology Podcast: OpenAI’s Plan To Merge Chat And Agents — With Greg Brockman
Greg Brockman is the president and co-founder of OpenAI. Brockman joins Big Technology Podcast live from the Big Technology AI Summit to discuss OpenAI’s trajectory, the state of the frontier, and why he believes compute will ultimately decide the AI race. Tune in to hear Brockman make the case that there will never be enough compute to satisfy demand, why he thinks the interface itself will eventually melt away into a persistent agent that acts on your behalf, and how he expects pricing to evolve as today’s premium intelligence becomes tomorrow’s commodity. We also cover the competitive dynamic with Microsoft and the “models are a commodity” argument, the path to a personal AGI, voice as an interface, and why Brockman is most excited about AI’s potential in health. Hit play for a wide-ranging conversation about where OpenAI and the frontier go next.
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