OpenAI CEO Sam Altman<\/p>\n
AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n
Welcome back to The Prompt, <\/p>\n
OpenAI has missed important internal revenue and user growth targets, the Wall Street Journal<\/a> reported. CFO Sarah Friar expressed concerns about the company\u2019s ability to fulfill future compute contracts if revenue can\u2019t keep up, according to the report. The news comes ahead of a highly anticipated IPO later this year as the company tries to control its costs and streamline<\/a> its products by scrapping \u201cside quests.\u201d <\/p>\n Thanks to CEO Sam Altman\u2019s spending spree last year, the company is on the hook <\/a>for $600 billion in future compute commitments. But the AI behemoth missed its goal of reaching $1 billion weekly active users for ChatGPT as well as multiple monthly revenue targets earlier this year as marquee products from rivals like Anthropic and Google grew in prominence, according to the report. <\/p>\n OpenAI\u2019s business slowdown has spooked investors. Shares of prominent OpenAI investors and partners like Oracle, Nvidia, Microsoft, CoreWeave and Softbank fell on Tuesday, Forbes<\/a> reported. OpenAI spokesperson Steve Sharpe called the Journal\u2019s report \u201cclickbait\u201d in a statement to Forbes. Sharpe said OpenAI\u2019s business is \u201cfiring on all cylinders,\u201d adding its consumer strength is starting to show up in revenue and its enterprise business is \u201cin the best place it has ever been.\u201d<\/p>\n In case you missed it, Forbes published its eighth annual AI 50 list<\/a>, with sponsoring partner Mayfield, that highlights the most promising privately held AI companies in the world. <\/p>\n Now let\u2019s get into the headlines. <\/p>\n BIG PLAYS <\/p>\n Buzzy AI coding startup Cursor<\/a> announced<\/a> last week that it\u2019s partnering with SpaceX, which owns xAI. As part of the deal, SpaceX got the right to acquire Cursor for $60 billion or pay $10 billion to Cursor as a break up fee of sorts. Cursor will be able to use compute from xAI\u2019s Colossus datacenter to train its models. The move comes amid the startup\u2019s high-stakes race against AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI to build the most powerful coding model. <\/p>\n Industry experts say the deal makes sense for both parties: Elon Musk has tons of idle and underused compute but lacks the researchers to use it after an exodus of xAI cofounders. Cursor, constrained by compute, appears to have the opposite problem. <\/p>\n POLITICS <\/p>\n China blocked<\/a> Meta\u2019s $2.5 billion acquisition of AI agent startup Manus on Monday. Originally founded in China in 2022, Manus relocated its headquarters and engineers to Singapore to gain access to Western AI models and investors. In March, China ordered two of the startup’s cofounders not to leave the country as it reviewed the deal, the Wall Street Journal<\/a> reported. But unwinding the acquisition will not be easy. <\/p>\n DATA DILEMMA <\/p>\n Google\u2019s newest source of training data is its own trash, Forbes<\/a> reported. Last week the search giant said it\u2019s partnering with Mill, a startup that makes smart trash cans, to use a machine learning dataset it made from its own food scraps to help in computer vision research. The idea is that by knowing what\u2019s going in the garbage (through a camera inside the bin), it can help companies reduce food waste. <\/p>\n AI DEAL OF THE WEEK<\/p>\n Cognition<\/a>, the coding startup being AI agent Devin, is in talks to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in venture funding at a $25 billion valuation, Bloomberg<\/a> reported. The company has seen tailwinds from news of Cursor\u2019s proposed acquisition by SpaceX, as more of its customers want to rely on startups independent of the big AI labs. <\/p>\n DEEP DIVE<\/p>\n HED: For This Family, AI Is The New Lemonade Stand <\/p>\n Mommy and daddy would always bring home boring notebooks, pens, and chargers with company names on them, but that would just go in the trash. But why not stuffies? You never throw stuffies away.\u201d<\/p>\n Quincy Fuller is 8 and already delivering that line like he spent too much time in pitch meetings. He and his 10-year-old brother, Jackson, are co-CEOs of Stuffers, a family-run business that makes custom stuffies, or plush toys, for corporate swag. Their customers include companies like Reddit and marketing agency New Engen. Their office is their play room. Their design team includes an AI model. Their first-year revenue: $100,000.<\/p>\n That makes the Fuller siblings a case study for the “AI-native” generation, one where the gap between a child\u2019s imagination and the finished product has effectively vanished. In previous decades, kids\u2019 entrepreneurship was limited by what they could do physically. Delivering newspapers. Squeezing lemons for lemonade. Mowing lawns. But with AI, the internet, and parents handling the adult work, the gap between a kid\u2019s idea and a manufacturable product has dramatically narrowed.<\/p>\n Their workflow is a hybrid of old-school creativity and new-age tech. It begins with hand-drawn sketches. For a client selling GLPs online, the brothers drew at a “mean fat blob” stuffy to embody the challenges of weight loss. They uploaded the drawing into OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT, which transformed it into high-fidelity renderings that could be sent to a manufacturer.<\/p>\n Read the full story on Forbes<\/a>. <\/p>\n MODEL BEHAVIOR<\/p>\n