AI: Weekly Summary. RTZ #843

1. Oracle’s move off OpenAI Contracts: Oracle (48), led by founder Larry Ellison (81), added half of ten year old OpenAI’s $500 billion recent valuation this week in two days. All over its erupting AI Data Center Building revenue backlog from its $300 billion OpenAI Stargate buildout deal. This is another contractor after CoreWeave, building value with public investors off OpenAI’s migration to its own AI data centers. All slowly away from Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure. On that front, OpenAI made big progress on negotiating its transition from a non-profit to a profit enterprise, while also coming to an agreement with Microsoft over that difficult transition. In the end, it looks like the non-profit organization and Microsoft will each own 30% of the new ‘ready-for IPO’ OpenAI, leaving 40% for employees and investors. All as it ramps its business model from $13 billion in revenues today to $100 billion in 2028 and $200 billion in 2029, while AI capex grows to $300 billion and more. Which of course continues to benefit Oracle and other contractors. Whole new type of Tech/AI Flywheel indeed. More here.

   

2. Microsoft partners with Anthropic: As Microsoft transitions its relationship with OpenAI, it continues to work with other LLM AI companies like Anthropic. This builds on its relationship with Elon Musk xAI’s Grok, and other relationships to come. The Anthropic transaction provides access to the company’s Enterprise oriented Claude models to Azure’s business customers and opportunities to integrate some of that technology into Microsoft products like Office 365 productivity apps amongst others. All being rethought from an AI perspective. Down the road it may involve hosting Anthropic models on Microsoft Axure, diversifying its current fleet on Amazon AWS and Google Cloud. The ‘Frenemies’ era in AI in AI Chips, AI Coding and beyond continues. More here.

   

3. Apple’s Fall 2025 Launch & AI: Apple’s Fall launch of its four new iPhone 17 models including the so-thin iPhone Air got generally good reception in the market. Along with more context by Apple executives. The devices all have more memory in both RAM (up 50% from the iPhone 16 to 12 GB from 8GB), and storage (up from 126 GB to 256GB on base models). This is important so that Apple and millions of 3rd party Developers can build more AI features and functionality that run smoothly on the new phones. So Apple is making its phones and devices more ready for AI applications. That of course includes the long awaited AI powered Siri, which is now slated for next year. Over 20% of the 1.5+ billion iPhones out there are four years old, so there is a 300+ million user base that is ripe for upgrading. Prices are staying at previous levels despite the headwinds Apple has faced on tariffs and production in India. More here.

   

4. OpenAI’s ChatGPT leads the field amidst AI Applications Push: New report on how OpenAI’s ChatGPT continues to lead the chatbot field despite vigorous, sustained competition across chatbots, AI Reasoning, Agents and more. The new reports indicate that “ChatGPT from OpenAI is by far the most popular AI chatbot in the world, according to data from Similarweb, with nearly 6 billion monthly desktop and mobile visits,” The report also highlights that “ “ChatGPT receives around 8 times more monthly visits than its next closest competitor, Google’s Gemini, and around 9 times more than the open-source Chinese app DeepSeek”. Google remains formidable with its “AI Overviews, now prominently featured across Google’s search browsers”. OpenAI is also laser focused on broadening and deepening its portfolio of AI applications under the leadership of its new ‘CEO of Applications’, Fidji Simo. She recently re-organized her team to accelerate more AI product flows this year and next. Expect continued inroads into AI Coding, AI Search, AI Browsing, Enterprise and more. The company also continues to lead on AI Research in making the products more reliable. Its recent research report on AI Hallucinations is a case in point. All this is important for the company to continue to ramp its revenues which have tripled this year to $13 billion, on its way to $100 billion in 2028 and $200 billion in 2029. More here.

   

5. Perplexity’s new round: Perplexity continues to ramp up fund raising in an ongoing ramp of its AI products and infrastructure. The latest round raises $200 million on a new valuation of $20 billion up from $14 billion a few months ago. The company also needs to expand distribution for its Comet AI Browsers now that Google gets to keep Chrome post the ‘Remedies’ decisions by Judge Mehta recently. Also Perplexity is likely not going to be acquired by Apple as had been speculated. Separately, the $650 million acquisition of The Browser Company for its Dia AI Browsers by Enterprise Developer focused software company Atlassian marks the industry focusing on ‘Enterprise AI Browsers’. It’s an area that Microsoft needs to focus on as well given its #3 position with its Edge browser behind Apple Safari and Google Chrome. So Perplexity may see an Enterprise opportunity to partner or more with Microsoft with its Comet AI browser. More here.

   

Other AI Readings for weekend:

1. OpenAI’s candid new AI Hallucinations Research. More here.

   

2. Anthropic’s $1.5 billion book copyright settlement. More here.

   

(Additional Note: For more weekend AI listening, have a new podcast series on AI, from a Gen Z to Boomer perspective. It’s called AI Ramblings. Now 20 weekly Episodes and counting. More with the latest AI Ramblings Episode 20 here, on AI issues of the day. As well as our latest ‘Reads’ and ‘Obsessions’ of the Week.

Co-hosted with my Gen Z nephew Neal Makwana).

Up next, the Sunday ‘The Bigger Picture’ tomorrow. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)