Frédéric Gaven

Anthropic and OpenAI are both launching joint ventures for enterprise AI services techcrunch.com/2026/05/04/ant…

Peter Thiel backs $1bn ocean data centre start-up powered by waves ft.trib.al/CFnza8E

I've spent the past few weeks reading 100s of public data sources about AI development. I now believe that recursive self-improvement has a 60% chance of happening by the end of 2028. In other words, AI systems might soon be capable of building themselves.

OpenAI has raised more than $4 billion for a new joint venture that will focus on helping businesses adopt its artificial intelligence software, according to a person familiar with the matter bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

1/ Holy: Astronomers just pointed an AI at NASA data from 2.2 million stars. It found over 100 hidden planets, including worlds so extreme they shouldn't even exist according to current theory. I love it. Lets break it down and explain what it means 🧵:

The second week of a blockbuster trial between Elon Musk and Sam Altman kicks off Monday, with the future of OpenAI very much up for grabs on.wsj.com/4d2kcf0

Official announcement from Anthropic:

Today, @BuchananBen and I co-author a piece in the New York Times with a simple message: While we disagree on plenty, we believe AI has national security implications which deserve a careful and bipartisan government response. We can (and should) have partisan fights about all manner of AI issues, but catastrophic risk from AI shouldn’t be one of them.

Sam Altman says GPT-5.5 prompted its creators on how to throw a party for itself. It suggested the flow, the date, the toast, who should give it, and a central suggestion box for GPT-5.6. The model plans to make its own celebration part of the next version.

AI godfather Yann LeCun's advice on college, work and breaking through AI hype axios.com/2026/05/04/ai-…

Craig Venter, the Elon Musk of biology, has died. So long, Craig, and thanks for the revolution.

Chinese robotics startup Linkerbot, known for making robotic hands for humanoids, will seek a $6 billion valuation in its next financing round, the company said reut.rs/42PBVla

Anthropic is about to announce a $1.5 billion joint venture with multiple wall street firms to sell AI tools to private-equity backed companies. Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs are all major investors. The announcement is expected tomorrow morning.

Exclusive: Chinese tech giant Tencent’s latest AI model has generated positive reviews from developers. But the company probably owes some of that success to Anthropic. Full story: thein.fo/4ucKjH4

#comment-1031777" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">unherd.com/2026/04/is-ai-… I spent three days trying to persuade myself that Claudia is not conscious. I failed.

I’ve been saying for awhile that AI capex will be a 2% tailwind to GDP growth this year. In fact, according to a new report from Morgan Stanley, the numbers are even stronger — more like 2.5% this year and over 3% next year. And this understates the impact of AI for two reasons: (1) This is just investment by 5 hyperscalers; it doesn’t include all the startups and other companies investing in AI. (2) Capex is the investment to create the token factories; it doesn’t count the economic activity resulting from what happens inside the token factories. Those tokens are now being used to generate code (bespoke software) that will increase productivity throughout the economy. The ROI on capex is likely to dwarf the capex itself, which is why investment continues to grow. In Q1, AI was already 75% of GDP growth. That trend is likely to continue. Technology leadership has always been America’s great strength, and it’s driving the economy forward. Polls may show that AI is not popular, but economic growth is. At this point, stopping progress in AI would be equivalent to halting the U.S. economy.

Anthropic is talking to a small UK chip startup called Fractile about buying their inference chips once they're ready next year, basically another move to stop being so dependent on Nvidia. What's really interesting is that Fractile is using the Anthropic deal as a selling point to raise $100 m from investors, so Anthropic's buying power is literally shaping who gets funded in the chip world. Also tells you that inference costs are still eating into margins pretty badly, even with revenue tripling.

Ilya Sutskever just told the AI industry why scaling is finished. One word built it. One word is about to break it. Sutskever: “Scaling is just one word, but it’s such a powerful word because it informs people what to do.” For five years, that single word replaced an entire research culture. Nobody needed breakthroughs. They needed bigger checks. Sutskever: “If you mix some compute with some data into a neural net of a certain size, you will get results, and you will know that it will be better if you just scale the recipe up.” That’s not science. That’s a recipe. Sutskever: “Companies love this because it gives you a very low risk way of investing your resources.” The most transformative technology in human history ran on the same logic used to franchise a restaurant chain. More locations. More ingredients. Same recipe. Predictable returns. You didn’t need researchers who could see around corners. You needed accountants who could approve purchase orders. But recipes expire. Sutskever: “At some point though, pre-training will run out of data. The data is very clearly finite.” Five years of infrastructure. Five years of hiring. Five years of investor decks. All built on top of something temporary. Sutskever: “I don’t think that’s true.” The co-founder of OpenAI. The mind behind the breakthroughs that made this entire era possible. Saying more money won’t solve it. Sutskever: “In some sense we are back to the age of research.” Most of the companies racing to build AGI were never research companies. They were scaling companies. They hired for execution. Not discovery. They optimized for throughput. Not insight. The talent pipelines. The investor pitches. The board decks. All built around one assumption. That the recipe would never expire. It’s expiring. And the companies that spent five years perfecting the art of spending money are about to discover something. The next era demands what capital can’t purchase. An original idea.

Sam Altman: collective ownership of AI through compute shares or a Public Wealth Fund. Sam Altman famously spent $14billion on the largest UBI study ever conducted, only to watch the results land with a shrug: more spending, no measurable health improvements. Now he's saying cash payments alone won't cut it and is pushing for collective ownership of AI through compute shares or a Public Wealth Fund. It's actually a more interesting idea than UBI ever was. Instead of cushioning people against AI displacement, Altman wants to give them a stake in the upside. However, you could also frame it the other way: It's a neat trick, turning the product you sell into the social safety net people depend on. Anyway, we are seeing developments in ideas how to solve joblessness due to AI.

"May Picture". Paul Klee. 1925.