Three things landed in AI today that are worth your coffee. OpenAI wants to sell you ads, Anthropic just hired a Nobel winner, and China quietly built the fastest supercomputer on the planet without a single foreign chip. Let us get into it.
OpenAI Is Chasing $100 Billion in Ad Money
Over at Cannes Lions this week, OpenAI pitched advertisers on a ChatGPT ad business. The number they floated is wild. They want $100 billion in ad revenue by 2030, with the ad product rolling out across seven markets, and all of it is happening right before a rumored IPO.
Here is why it matters. ChatGPT has hundreds of millions of folks using it for free. Somebody has to pay for all those GPUs, and that somebody usually ends up being advertisers. This is the oldest move on the internet. Google did it, Facebook did it, and now the chatbot crowd is lining up at the same trough.
My take? I do not love it. The whole pitch of an AI assistant is that it gives you a straight answer. The second there is a paid placement sitting behind that answer, you start wondering who the thing actually works for. You, or the highest bidder. I will keep using it, but I am reading every recommendation a little more sideways from here on out.
A Nobel Prize Winner Is Jumping to Anthropic
John Jumper, the Google DeepMind researcher who won a Nobel for AlphaFold, is reportedly headed to Anthropic. For folks who do not follow this stuff, AlphaFold cracked the protein folding problem that stumped biologists for fifty years. The man is not a lightweight.
Talent is the whole ballgame in AI right now. The big models are close enough to each other that the real edge is who is in the building. So when a Nobel-level researcher walks out of the company that made him famous and lands somewhere new, that tells you something about where the smart folks think the work is headed.
Here is my read. Anthropic pulling in somebody like Jumper says the science-first crowd likes where that ship is going. Researchers at that level do not chase paychecks. They chase hard problems. And wherever they go, the hard problems tend to follow.
China Built the Fastest Supercomputer With Zero Foreign Chips
A Chinese system called LineShine just topped the Top500 list at 2.2 exaflops. That is the first time China has led that ranking since 2017. The kicker is the hardware. It runs entirely on homegrown Huawei ARMv9 silicon. Not one foreign AI chip in the whole rack.
This matters because the entire point of the export controls was to keep China a step or two behind on compute. Cut off the chips, slow down the program. Instead they went and built their own. Turns out you can squeeze a market only so hard before it stops waiting on you.
I am not even surprised. Tell a country with that much factory muscle that it cannot buy something, and it will go make the thing itself. The chip race was already tense. It just got a lot more interesting, and the next couple of years are going to be something to watch.
That is the rundown for today. Same time tomorrow.