#openai

#openai

OpenAI is taking an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, whose parent company is one of the AI giant's major investors, Thrive Capital. Thrive Holdings operates like a private equity firm for AI, rolling up companies that it believes could benefit from the tech in sectors like accounting and IT services. Neither company disclosed the terms of the deal, but it will involve OpenAI embedding engineering, research, and product teams within Thrive's companies to accelerate AI adoption and boost efficiency, the company says.

OpenAI is reportedly scaling up its crawling infrastructure for the holiday shopping season. The folks at Vercel noticed OpenAI adding a lot of new IP ranges for its bots and crawlers. Ryan Siddle from Merj wrote on LinkedIn, "OpenAI scaling up their infrastructure ahead of Thanksgiving & Black Friday with a lot of /28 blocks." He added later in the comments, "That's just across OpenAI User for new IPs. It doesn't include what they already had. We've seen quite a significant ramp up over the past 1-2 months."

A federal judge has temporarily blocked OpenAI from using the term "cameo" in the Sora video app. US District Judge Eumi K. Lee's ruling lasts until December 22. Cameo, the personalized video company, sued OpenAI for trademark infringement. OpenAI may have to go back to the drawing board to name a core feature of its popular AI video generation app, Sora.

Amazon appears to be doing just that. The e-commerce giant has quietly blocked more OpenAI-related bots from crawling Amazon.com, according to updates in its publicly visible robots.txt file. The change was first spotted by independent e-commerce analyst Juozas Kaziukėnas, who posted a screenshot on LinkedIn showing new disallow rules for several ChatGPT-associated crawlers responsible for model training, web browsing and search. Modern Retail also confirmed the change by reviewing the code that underpins Amazon's e-commerce site.

Dubbed AI‑DADA, Swatch says this AI-powered design tool lets you create entirely unique watches starting from a blank canvas and using only your imagination as a guide to the final outcome. After logging into your Swatch account, you prompt AI‑DADA with your own idea, then, in less than two minutes, a "unique watch design comes to life." To underline this uniqueness, each AI‑DADA watch carries a "1/1" sign on its case back.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is pressing the Trump administration for more information on potential plans to "prop up" major AI companies with money from taxpayers.

This is all about deepening our commitment to bringing the best infrastructure, model choice and applications to our customers, Nadella said on a video call with the other two executives, adding that it builds on the critical partnership Microsoft still has with OpenAI.

Current and former OpenAI employees have grown increasingly frustrated by the fact that the company hasn't allowed them to donate their equity to charity in years. But OpenAI has finally seemed to bow to pressure, sending out an email from the company's equity team stating that current and former employees with eligible shares will be able to participate, according to a memo viewed by The Verge.

Lilt, an AI translation company, contracts with the US military to analyze foreign intelligence. Because the company's software handles sensitive information, it must be installed on government servers and work without an internet connection, a practice known as air-gapping. Lilt previously developed its own AI models or used open source options such as Meta's Llama and Google's Gemma. But OpenAI's tools were off the table because they were closed source and could only be accessed online.

Leaked documents show the company paying more than $12 billion to Microsoft for compute power since 2024 and suggest much weaker revenue than it needs to pay for all those expenses. According to internal Microsoft financial documents obtained by AI skeptic and tech blogger Ed Zitron, OpenAI blew $8.7 billion serving its models, a process called inference, on Azure alone in the first three quarters of 2025. That's more than double the $3.7 billion the AI flag bearer reportedly spent in 2024.

A German court ruled that OpenAI's ChatGPT violated the nation's copyright laws by training its language models on licensed musical work without permission, multiple news outlets, including The Guardian reported. The decision came from a lawsuit that GEMA, the society that handles music rights in Germany, filed last November against OpenAI. The company was ordered to pay an undisclosed amount of damages to GEMA, but said it disagreed with the ruling and is "considering next steps."

OpenAI is releasing GPT-5.1 today, an update to the flagship model it released in August. OpenAI calls it an "upgrade" to GPT-5 that "makes ChatGPT smarter and more enjoyable to talk to." The new models include GPT-5.1 Instant and GPT-5.1 Thinking. The former is "warmer, more intelligent, and better at following your instructions" than its predecessor, per an OpenAI release, and the latter is "now easier to understand and faster on simple tasks, and more persistent on complex ones."

Stuckey wrote that the publication's demand for users' ChatGPT logs, which it asked to review as part of its copyright infringement lawsuit, "disregards long-standing privacy protections" and "breaks with common-sense security practices." "Journalism has historically played a critical role in defending people's right to privacy throughout the world," Stuckey wrote. "However, this demand from the New York Times does not live up to that legacy, and we're asking the court to reject it."

"Sam had just helped us raise a round of funding," Ohanian said on the podcast, recounting details of Reddit's $50 million Series B investment round it announced in 2014. In 2015, Altman cofounded OpenAI as a nonprofit. Between 2015 and 2016, Ohanian said, Altman had begun asking "to basically aggressively scrape Reddit." A debate ensued between Ohanian and Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman (who still serves as the now-public company's CEO). "Sam is a very smart guy, incredibly cunning," Ohanian said.

"Both the memorisation in the language models and the reproduction of the song lyrics in the chatbot's outputs constitute infringements of copyright law," the court ruled.

The company's CFO, Yoshimitsu Goto, said in an earnings presentation, which was translated by the company, that its decision to divest has "nothing to do with Nvidia itself" but is a way to reallocate its funds toward OpenAI. "This year the OpenAI investment is large," he said, adding that it plans to make the final part of its $30 billion investment by the end of the year.

"They'll get over 100 example chats that were written by OpenAI veterans based on real transition tasks," Mulligan said. "They'll get a custom 'Getting Started' video that was built specifically for servicemembers and veterans by another member of our team who is also actually an Army veteran. And they'll also get onboarding through the OpenAI Academy. We're partnering with ShareID to verify eligibility, so we can deliver this directly to those who served."

Free money is always better than a loan!

Tech analyst and professor Scott Galloway has issued a stark warning regarding the highly inflated valuations of the Magnificent 10 mega-cap companies, asserting a financial collapse at generative AI leader OpenAI would trigger a systemic shock leaving "nowhere to hide" for investors across the global markets. Galloway, speaking on his Prof G Markets podcast, characterized the current market reliance on AI as precarious, noting AI has been responsible for 80% of the stock market returns since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022.