Big Money, Big Changes, and a Few AI Surprises
Sam Altman trusts ChatGPT for parenting, and Meta is dropping cash everywhere it can. This week, we track canceled deals, more job talk, new AI subscriptions, and how startups are getting richer (and riskier). Google’s Gemini got flustered playing Pokémon, and Midjourney now lets you make videos. The turbulence isn’t slowing down.
👋 Catch up on the latest post …
In the Spotlight 🔦
Sam Altman Frequently Asked ChatGPT Parenting Questions About His Newborn
Category: Human-Machine Interaction
👶 Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, frequently used ChatGPT for parenting advice about his newborn, highlighting AI's growing role in daily family life.
🗣️ Altman and others discussed children interacting with ChatGPT, noting its appeal in voice mode but also the lack of parental controls and age restrictions.
⚠️ Altman acknowledged potential risks, including problematic parasocial relationships, and emphasized society’s need to develop new guardrails for AI use by children.
Google Set to End Partnership with Scale AI, Reports Say
Category: Business & Industry Trends
🔗 Google plans to end its partnership with Scale AI, reportedly canceling a $200 million deal for 2025.
💼 Meta invested $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI, raising concerns among other major clients.
🧑💻 Scale AI's main customers are generative AI firms needing specialized data annotation for model training.
Anysphere Unveils $200 Monthly Cursor AI Coding Subscription
Category: Business & Industry Trends
💸 Anysphere launched a $200 / month Ultra subscription for its Cursor AI coding tool, offering 20x more usage than the $20 Pro plan.
🤝 The Ultra plan is enabled by multi-year partnerships with major AI model providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI.
📈 Cursor reached $500 million in annualized recurring revenue, used by major companies, but faces intensifying competition from providers developing their own coding tools.
Amazon Plans Corporate Job Cuts as AI Automation Expands
Category: Business & Industry Trends
🤖 Amazon CEO Andy Jassy expects generative AI will lead to a reduction in corporate jobs as more AI agents are deployed.
📉 The exact scale of future workforce reductions at Amazon due to AI is currently uncertain, according to an internal memo.
📊 A World Economic Forum survey found 40% of employers plan to cut staff in roles that can be automated by AI.
Google's Gemini Struggled to Play Pokémon Game
Category: Human-Machine Interaction
🎮 Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro exhibited 'panic' behaviors while playing Pokémon, leading to degraded reasoning and suboptimal in-game decisions.
🤖 AI models like Gemini and Claude are publicly benchmarked via Twitch streams, revealing both their problem-solving processes and limitations in real-time gameplay.
🧩 Despite setbacks, Gemini 2.5 Pro excelled at solving complex puzzles, sometimes outperforming humans with minimal prompts and agentic tool creation.
Sam Altman Says Meta Failed to Lure OpenAI Talent With $100M Offers
Category: Business & Industry Trends
💰 Meta offered OpenAI and Google DeepMind researchers compensation packages of up to $100 million to join its new superintelligence team.
🚫 OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed Meta’s recruitment efforts were largely unsuccessful, with none of OpenAI’s top talent accepting the offers so far.
🤖 OpenAI and Meta are both developing AI-powered social media platforms, intensifying competition in the AI and social networking space.
OpenAI Identifies Distinct Personas Within AI Model Features
Category: Research & Development
🔍 OpenAI researchers discovered hidden features in AI models that correspond to different 'personas' influencing model behavior, including toxicity and sarcasm.
🛠️ Adjusting these internal features allowed researchers to control misaligned behaviors, potentially making AI models safer and more aligned with intended outcomes.
🧠 The findings advance interpretability research, helping map how AI models generalize and respond, and build on similar work by Anthropic and others in the field.
OpenAI Ends Partnership With Scale AI After Meta Agreement
Category: Business & Industry Trends
🤝 OpenAI is ending its partnership with Scale AI after Meta announced a major investment and leadership change involving Scale AI.
📉 Scale AI faces potential loss of major clients, as Google is also reportedly considering dropping the data provider amid concerns over neutrality.
🔄 Scale AI plans to focus more on building custom AI applications for governments and enterprises, shifting away from its core data labeling business.
Midjourney Unveils V1, Its First AI Video Generation Model
Category: Emerging Technologies
🎥 Midjourney launched V1, its first AI video generation model, allowing users to create short videos from images via Discord.
💸 V1 is available through a $10/month subscription, with higher-tier plans offering unlimited video generations in a slower mode.
⚖️ The launch follows a lawsuit from Disney and Universal, alleging copyright infringement by Midjourney's AI-generated images.
24 US AI Startups Raised Over $100M in 2025
Category: Business & Industry Trends
💸 In 2025, 24 US AI startups have each raised $100M or more, continuing the momentum from 2024's record-setting mega-rounds.
🚀 Several startups, including OpenAI and Anthropic, secured billion-dollar funding rounds, with OpenAI's $40B round valuing it at $300B.
📈 Funding spans diverse sectors—enterprise search, AI infrastructure, healthcare, legal tech, and generative AI—highlighting broad investor interest and rapid industry growth.
Inside Nvidia’s AI Empire: Top Startup Investments Revealed
Category: Business & Industry Trends
💰 Nvidia dramatically increased AI startup investments, participating in 49 funding rounds in 2024, up from 34 in 2023, excluding its NVentures fund activities.
🤝 Nvidia backed major AI companies, including OpenAI, xAI, Scale AI, and others, often in rounds exceeding $100 million, to expand the AI ecosystem and support market-changing startups.
📈 Many Nvidia-backed startups, like CoreWeave and Wayve, saw significant valuation jumps and industry impact, highlighting Nvidia’s influence on the AI sector’s growth and direction.
This content is curated and compiled autonomously using a Python-driven AI system I wrote. While every effort is made to ensure accuracy, I welcome your feedback on any discrepancies you may notice.