U.S. Bureau Of Engraving And Printing Oversees Dollar Bill Production

Sheets of one dollar bills run through the printing press (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Who’s really profiting from all the money pouring into AI?

7/31/24 2:50PM

This earnings season is revealing new details of big tech’s eye-popping spending on all things AI, and it shows no signs of slowing. But who is profiting from all this investment, and will it ever lead to profitable AI businesses?

Nvidia seems to be continuing to make a killing selling its AI computing hardware to all of the companies in the space. Unless there is a huge shift away from training ever larger AI models, its products are likely to be in demand.

Microsoft is making money selling OpenAI’s technology to customers via Azure, and they are planning long-term to meet demand. On Microsoft’s Q4 earnings call this week, executives said demand for AI computing from Azure boosted revenue, and signaled that large investments in data centers, and expensive GPUs will continue, laying out a 15 year timeline to build capacity, allowing them flexibility to respond to demand for AI services.

New reporting from The Information reveals that Microsoft is on track to make about $1 billion annually reselling OpenAI’s services (as part of their complicated partnership), but currently a quarter of that revenue is coming from one customer — TikTok, which could turn elsewhere for its AI computing.

Microsoft’s deal gives them access to OpenAI’s technology, and is rumored to include a hefty slice of their OpenAI profits until their investment is recouped.

Speaking of OpenAI, the company makes money selling Plus, Team, and Enterprise tiers of ChatGPT subscriptions, and by charging developers access to its API, which is estimated to generate several billion dollars per year. But OpenAI’s business depends upon expensive hardware, high energy costs and has to bankroll some of the highest paid roles in tech.

OpenAI has been busy spending Microsoft’s $10 billion investment on a quest to build artificial general intelligence, which may not be a thing that will ever actually exist. But industry observers are starting to question the fundamentals of OpenAI’s business and can’t figure out how it will continue to raise the cash it needs to power its research and development. Not to mention its ChatGPT service, which is incredibly expensive to operate.

OpenAI’s technology will be showing up on Apple iPhones this year as part of iOS18, but Apple isn’t paying them for the deal, raising more questions about how OpenAI will fund those increased costs.

Meta has been spending massively on AI research and hoarding expensive chips, with plans to spend between $35 billion and $40 billion on capital expenditures in 2024. But its AI spending hasn’t yielded much in the way of revenues yet, other than AI improvements to its advertising business.

Earnings reports from Meta later today and Amazon tomorrow may tell more of the story. Last quarter, AI was a key driver of big tech’s capex spending spree:

Tom Jones2h

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Tesla used skewed data in push for European FSD approval, Reuters finds

Tesla has used highly questionable safety stats in an effort to win over European regulators and rekindle sales in the region, according to a Reuters investigation.

Tesla reportedly pitched regulators in Sweden and the Netherlands with claims that its Full Self-Driving (FSD) tech is over 7x safer than human drivers. However, independent researchers told Reuters that the stats are misleading because Tesla compares airbag-deployment crashes involving FSD-equipped vehicles with much broader US crash statistics, while also benchmarking newer Teslas against the entire US vehicle fleet, which is significantly older on average.

Despite the flawed metrics, the Dutch regulator approved FSD in April, saying its decision was based on its own “tests, analyses and verifications,” and Tesla is now pushing for EU-wide clearance. A version of FSD is currently available in five European markets.