7/29: ChatGPT Hits A Billion Users
Moonshot raises $3.5B at $35B, ChatGPT hits 1B weekly actives, GDM dismantles AlphaFold team
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Welcome back. Yesterday we saw Pacing the Frontier, a new open letter from frontier lab employees calling for new tools and institutions to be able to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development. All kinds of responses trickled in, from the labs themselves to accelerationists to doomers, and we got to cover the whole thing on MTS. Be sure to catch us live on X and YouTube, and follow us on Instagram.
Today’s Experts
Joshua Monrad (Sentinel Bio)
Max Spero (Pangram)
Bola Malek (Baseten)
Andrew Trask (Google DeepMind, OpenMined)
Zvi Mowshowitz (Don’t Worry About the Vase)
Justin Drake (Ethereum)
Niko Bonatsos and Michael Fertik (Verdict Capital)
Sean Cheetham (Blockchain Capital)
lumpenspace (anonymous)
Making Sense of the World
Sam Altman endorsed pacing AI development in meetings with top lawmakers and officials including Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent, Commerce Sec. Howard Lutnick, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, OSTP Director Michael Kratsios, and Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX), Bernie Moreno (R-OH), Jon Husted (R-OH), and Raphael Warnock (D-GA).
Moonshot AI raises $3.5B at $35B, led by China’s state-backed National AI Industry Investment Fund and others. Moonshot is also planning a round at a $50B valuation and an IPO later this year or next.
ChatGPT finally hits ~1 billion weekly active users seven months after planned. Still, this makes it the fastest internet application in history to reach this milestone, in just 44 months since release.
GPT-5.6 Sol is SOTA on ARC-AGI-3 and helped improve its own inference. OpenAI’s flagship model managed to triple its score on ARC-AGI-3, a benchmark of puzzle games meant to be easy for humans and difficult for AIs, just by retaining reasoning and compacting context. Also, Sol managed to cut serving costs by 20% and increase token generation efficiency by 15% by making improvements in OpenAI’s inference stack, an early sign of models helping to improve themselves.
OpenAI announces ChatGPT for Academic Researchers, giving at first 10,000 and later up to 100,000 scientists, mathematicians, and engineers free access to frontier models.
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar says July ARR exceeded Q2 ARR. Friar told employees at a meeting that OpenAI’s annualized recurring revenue in just July was greater than that in the entirety of Q2 (April, May, and June combined), a good sign for frothy markets.
NextEra and Brookfield are working on a $100B data center on the site of an old nuclear enrichment facility in Kentucky, including a 2 GW power plant and up to 2.6 GW of battery storage capacity. NextEra is the world’s largest energy utility, and Brookfield is a Canadian asset manager.
Stocks continue to fall on AI fears. SPY dropped 1.5%, the Nasdaq 2%, and semiconductor index SOX 5.3%. SK Hynix fell 9.6% today and is now down 52% from its all-time high in June, but is still up 107% YTD.