A championship-winning, 2,346 pound pumpkin, grown by Santa Rosa's Brandon Dawson, will take center stage at Saturday's Great Pumpkin Parade in Half Moon Bay Saturday. Those interested in growing their own giant pumpkin instructions included in the article could win a hefty $21,000 grand prize. [The Press Democrat]
Days later, OpenAI struck a similar multibillion-dollar arrangement with AMD. Celebrated by investors, these deals also raised eyebrows. To some observers, they looked eerily like the circular financing arrangements of the late 1990s, when vendors and clients reinforced each other's valuations without generating real value. Bloomberg aptly described the pattern as an "increasingly complex and interconnected web of business transactions" fueling a trillion-dollar AI boom.
ChatGPT prices were inflated since the service's inception, with price levels reaching an eye-popping 100 to 200 times competitors' prices on a per-token basis amidst a February 2025 price war. A secretive agreement struck between OpenAI and Microsoft early in OpenAI's development allowed Microsoft to control the supply of compute to its horizontal competitor's products. It used an exclusivity clause to restrict OpenAI's product output, and to impose a price-or, conversely, output and quality-floor on its competitor OpenAI's ChatGPT products.
At a Cabinet Office press conference, Minister of State for IP and AI Strategy Minoru Kiuchi emphasized that anime and manga are "irreplaceable treasures" representing Japan's cultural pride (via IGN). The government urged OpenAI to respect Japanese copyrights and avoid misuse of its technology. Digital Minister Masaaki Taira echoed this sentiment, suggesting that if OpenAI doesn't voluntarily comply, Japan could invoke provisions under the AI Promotion Act--legislation that promotes AI development while also addressing risks such as copyright violations.
Every startup lives with the same tension: a large incumbent can copy or crush it at any time. For Harvey, an artificial intelligence startup that builds tools for law firms and enterprises, the model-maker that powers its tech also has the power to destroy it. From Harvey's Manhattan office on Friday afternoon, cofounders Winston Weinberg and Gabe Pereyra put it bluntly. Harvey's toughest competitor isn't another niche startup; it's OpenAI.
ChatGPT Go includes everything offered in the Free plan with the addition of extended access to GPT-5, image generation tools, file uploads, Python and other data analysis tools, extended file upload access, and longer memory. The Go tier sits between ChatGPT Free, which offers limited access to features like fast response times, memory, data analysis, and vision, and ChatGPT Plus, a $20 monthly subscription with extended access to GPT-5, access to ChatGPT Agent, and more access to different models.
But there's something very worrying about many of these deals: they're often "circular," as a slew of recent coverage has noted, meaning that AI companies are pouring money into one another, creating an illusion of a robust ecosystem that skeptics worry could quickly come crashing down. And many of the deals tie back to Nvidia, the chipmaker whose hardware is underpinning our age of AI, for which it has become the world's most valuable company.
The 23-year-old's career didn't exactly start auspiciously: He spent time at the philanthropy arm of Sam Bankman-Fried's now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange before a controversial year at OpenAI, where he was ultimately fired. Then, just two months after being booted out of the most influential company in AI, he penned an AI manifesto that went viral-President Trump's daughter Ivanka even praised it on social media-and used it as a launching pad for a hedge fund that now manages more than $1.5 billion.
The deals are so vast that they defy comprehension - the Financial Times put the company's recent commitments at north of $1 trillion - and they're making public companies' stock prices jump. Stock analysts dub some of these agreements "circular," because investment money is flowing between companies that also buy from or sell to one another. The worry then is that such deals might prop up or overhype a bad business.
AMD has sold 6 gigawatts and $90 billion worth of AI capacity to OpenAI. In addition, the arrangement sets up the ChatGPT maker to purchase up to 10 percent of AMD's shares. The deal inspires extraordinary confidence in Nvidia's biggest competitor. Why? First, OpenAI will use a single gigawatt of Instinct MI450 GPUs for AI calculations. As it happens, this chip design will not be released for another year.
