Stephen Silver

Islamic Scholar in Sydney, Australia: “Jihad is definitely part of our religion. Allah prefers and rewards Muslims who directly fight our infidel enemies more than those who do nothing.”

Ronan Farrow, the reporter who broke the Weinstein story, spent 18 months investigating the CEO behind ChatGPT. He got a secret 70-page memo from the company's own top scientist. First item on the list: "Lying." Farrow and Andrew Marantz interviewed over 100 people and obtained two documents that have never been public. The first is that memo. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's top scientist at the time, put it together in fall 2023: workplace chat logs, HR files, screenshots taken on personal phones to dodge company tracking. He told a fellow board member, "I don't think Sam is the one who should be holding the button." The second is over 200 pages of private notes kept by Dario Amodei during his years at OpenAI. (Amodei now runs Anthropic, a competing AI company. The notes were written while he was still at OpenAI.) His conclusion: "The problem with OpenAI is Sam himself." OpenAI publicly promised that 20% of its computing power would go to the safety team, the people whose entire job was making sure AI doesn't become dangerous. Four people on that team said the real number was 1-2%, running on the oldest, worst machines they had. When the reporters asked to speak with a researcher working on long-term AI safety, an OpenAI spokesperson said: "What do you mean by 'existential safety'? That's not, like, a thing." The team was shut down before it finished. The pattern stretches back before OpenAI. At Altman's first startup Loopt, employees asked the board to remove him as CEO twice. At Y Combinator, the startup program he ran next, Paul Graham privately told colleagues Altman "had been lying to us all the time." A board member described him as having "a strong desire to please people in any given interaction, and almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences of deceiving someone." A Microsoft executive, someone with a financial stake in OpenAI doing well, compared him to Bernie Madoff. Altman denied being deliberately deceptive in over a dozen conversations with the reporters. He called his shifting commitments "well-intentioned adaptation." This drops while OpenAI prepares to sell shares on the stock market for the first time, possibly later this year, at a price that would value the company at up to $1 trillion. They just raised $122 billion in private funding at a value of $852 billion. Revenue is about $25 billion a year, but the company expects to lose $14 billion this year and doesn't plan to turn a profit until 2029. The same week this came out, a separate report said OpenAI's own chief financial officer told colleagues she didn't think the company would be ready to go public in 2026. OpenAI's response: "anonymous claims and selective anecdotes sourced from people with clear agendas." The 70 pages Sutskever compiled and the 200 pages Amodei wrote had never been reported on before this investigation.

EXCLUSIVE: "Worse Than the Iran Helium Problem"... Semiconductor Industry Faces 'Tungsten Crisis' "Helium can be sourced from the U.S. or Russia. For tungsten, there's nowhere to go but China." While concerns over semiconductor process material procurement — including helium — have emerged in the wake of the Iran war, the semiconductor industry points to tungsten hexafluoride (WF6) as an even more urgent supply risk. Japanese suppliers, which account for roughly 25% of global WF6 supply, have signaled production cuts in the second half of the year. The reason: China's tightening of tungsten export controls toward Japan has made it difficult for them to secure raw materials. According to multiple industry sources on April 3, Japanese WF6 suppliers such as Kanto Denka and Central Glass began notifying Korean semiconductor companies — including Samsung Electronics and DB HiTek — of raw material supply disruptions starting last week. A source familiar with the matter said, "They indicated they can maintain supply through May–June using existing tungsten inventory, but cannot guarantee anything beyond that for the second half." The source added, "They asked Korean clients to seek alternatives such as SK Specialty or Foosung." Samsung Electronics has a higher dependence on Japanese WF6 than SK Hynix, making the switch to domestic suppliers more urgent. SK Hynix is reportedly in a relatively better position, as it already sources some volume from SK Specialty, Foosung, and the Chinese supplier Peric. Meanwhile, some foundries are now under pressure to fast-track process qualification of Korean-made WF6 — a procedure that typically takes over 18 months, parts of which are now being skipped given the urgency. WF6 is a critical precursor used to deposit tungsten films on semiconductor wafers. These tungsten films serve as pathways for electrical signals within chips. While WF6 is used across DRAM, NAND, and logic, consumption is overwhelmingly concentrated in 3D NAND — its vertically stacked cell structure means that at 200 layers, tungsten must be deposited 200 times. A technology transition to replace tungsten interconnects with molybdenum is partially underway in leading-edge NAND processes, but full-scale adoption will take considerable time. WF6 manufacturers import Chinese tungsten powder, react it with fluorine gas at high temperatures, then distill and purify it into high-purity gas for semiconductor use. China accounts for 80% of global tungsten powder supply. Since February of last year, China has imposed an export licensing regime on strategic minerals including tungsten. On top of that, following Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's remarks on Taiwan in January of this year, China added export controls on "dual-use" items destined for Japan. Tungsten powder qualifies as a dual-use item — it is both a semiconductor material and a component used in weapons systems including tanks, missiles, and aircraft. As China's export controls have taken hold, tungsten prices have surged relentlessly. Tungsten powder prices have risen 6–7x over the past year. According to Bloomberg, the international benchmark price for ammonium paratungstate (APT) — the raw material for tungsten powder — has climbed 557% since February of last year. South Korea remains relatively free from China's export controls, and SK Specialty and Foosung have maintained their tungsten powder imports. However, SK Specialty has reportedly notified customers of a more-than-double price increase for WF6. Foosung is taking the same stance, as the cost structure is identical. An industry source said, "The bottom line is that domestic WF6 suppliers stand to benefit from the windfall."

$122 billion is the largest private funding round in history. The number everyone should pay attention to is who wrote the checks. Amazon put in $50 billion. As part of the deal, OpenAI expanded its AWS compute commitment by $100 billion. Nvidia put in $30 billion. OpenAI's training fleet and inference stack run on Nvidia GPUs. SoftBank put in $30 billion, funded partly by a $40 billion bridge loan. The three largest investors in this round are also three of OpenAI's largest vendors. Amazon gets the money back through cloud contracts. Nvidia gets it back through chip orders. The capital isn't just flowing in. It's circulating. OpenAI is generating $2 billion a month in revenue. It is also projected to lose $14 billion this year alone. Revenue tripled year over year and losses grew alongside it. The IPO isn't a liquidity event. It's a financial necessity. Internal projections show the $122 billion gives them roughly 18 to 24 months of operational runway before they need to raise again. Meanwhile, $35 billion of Amazon's commitment is contingent on OpenAI either going public or hitting AGI by end of 2028. That's a $35 billion put option disguised as a capital commitment. $852 billion valuation. $24 billion annualized revenue. That's a 35x revenue multiple for a company that has never posted a profit, burns $150 million a day, and just shut down Sora because it couldn't afford the compute. The fundraise is real. The money is real. But follow where each dollar actually goes and you'll find most of it returns to the companies that wrote the checks.

Bos, Irankunda, McGree. Toure. Circati. Okon-Engstler. I don’t have a point here, I’m just listing Socceroos players who I like to watch.

The Anthropic mini IPO is unfolding and you already missed a 15x return The stock is named VCX by Fundrise and just went up 1,500% in 5 days on the NYSE It’s a fund holding: - Anthropic = 21% - OpenAI = 10% - SpaceX = 5% - Databricks = 18% - Anduril = 7% $VCX has a NAV of $19 per share. This morning it just traded at $312. That means the market is valuing a $650 million fund at $5.4 billion 🤯 Investors are paying an 8x premium just to touch these companies. Why? Because the most important companies being built right now refuse to go public. And people are so desperate for exposure that they will pay almost anything to get it. The private markets are sitting on trillions in value that public investors have been locked out of and this stampede tells you everything about how much hype there will be around these IPOs. I hope this speeds things up