OpenAI's $40 Billion Investment and AI Advances

**Jaden Schaefer** (0:00)
Welcome to the podcast, I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer. Today on the podcast, guys, we have so much lined up. We have SoftBank that is lining up a $40 billion OpenAI investment. I'm gonna talk a little bit about where I think the money is going. We have Humanoid Robots that were at the White House recently, and this made a lot of headlines. We have an update on OpenAI, they're pivoting away from Sora, they're shutting it down, but apparently their pivot is going into robotics, so they're not just shutting down Sora, they're actually putting it somewhere else. And we also have Apple, that is making a huge move with Syrian iOS 27, that affects basically every iPhone user ever, that I'm actually kind of excited about, and maybe turns Apple into a winner in an area where I thought they were only a loser in AI. The biggest story is that there is a data leak at Anthropic, and it revealed a secret model called Claude Mythos. Anthropic's own internal documents describe it as a quote unquote step change in capabilities, and they're saying that it poses an unprecedented cybersecurity risk. This is coming from the safety company, so we're going to unpack all of that on the podcast today. But first, really quick, if you're someone that is trying to keep up with all of these different AI models, Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, all of them, and you don't want to be paying $20 a month for every single subscription, go check out my startup aibox.ai, where you will be able to access over 70 of the top AI models in one place, and you can chat with any of them, you can compare the outputs, and I think the part that is the most useful is that you can actually build tools and automations with them. So basically, you describe the tool you want, and we'll chain together, and we'll add prompts, and build the whole thing for you with no coding. I am not a developer, so I made this mostly for myself, and now for everyone. So if you want to set up a content pipeline, or a research workflow, or basically anything where you're doing the same thing over and over again, you can automate that on AIbox. It's $8.99 a month, and it's linked in the description, so go check it out, and yeah, let's get into the first story. The first thing I want to talk about is AI robots at the White House. This is kind of honestly just sort of like a funny story. A lot of people talked about it. I think there's like a headline on TechCrunch, which said like Melania Trump wants AI robots to homeschool your kids. Anyways, people are kind of just being funny with it. But basically what happened was Melania Trump brought in the Figure 3 humanoid robot, and it was basically walking around on two feet. It was greeting guests. It was speaking in 11 different languages. Now, I think on the surface, you can really look at this like a PR moment for Figure 3 and actually probably in the White House, right, to say like, look, we're like super high tech. But I think the reason why it matters is it's a signal of how fast physical AI is moving. If you look at a year ago, we were seeing these robots in these kind of controlled lab demos, and now we have one walking through the White House. I think this is a really big jump in a very short amount of time. And I think it connects a really big trend we see everywhere, which is just this week, Agile robots announced a partnership with Google DeepMind. They're going to integrate Gemini models into physical robots for manufacturing. They're also doing automotive and logistics. So you're seeing Google, OpenAI, and a bunch of other companies all converging on this idea that physical AI, which is robots that can actually do things in the real world, this is the next frontier. And I think we're going to be talking about this a lot more in the coming months. And I would say by the end of the year, we're going to see some pretty sizable rollouts of companies rolling these out in a big way.
The second thing I want to talk about is SoftBank's $40 billion OpenAI investment. So they're putting together this big round for OpenAI. I think this is obviously a massive number, but that's almost secondary to what it represents when industry is really headed in an interesting direction. I think for me, what it's showing is there is a barrier to entry for building these kind of top line AI models. And it is, this barrier to entry is very high. We have a lot of amazing companies, I mean myself included, taking these tools and building cool things with them, but if you want to be a frontier model company, the stakes and the barrier to entry is insane. And it kind of honestly makes me feel bad for some of these companies like Mistral AI, which are just smaller in regional areas like France, and yes, they're raising billions of dollars, but like are they able to raise $40 billion? Are they able to have the entire arsenal of Google behind them? Like it's pretty hard to compete in these ways. I think it's not just about having the most talented research team anymore. You have to have billions of dollars in compute, in infrastructure, and you need to have the ability to scale your distribution globally at the same time. So I think a lot of these companies are really pulling further and further ahead. Like OpenAI, like the top hyperscalers, they're getting way further than anyone else just because they had the lead at the beginning. So SoftBank has basically made OpenAI a core pillar of their entire AI investment thesis. And when you look at the landscape, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, the gap between all of these front labs and everyone else is getting huge. So I think for the average person using these tools, it's actually a good thing. More investment means that more compute is going to make the models better. But from a competition standpoint, I think it raises a lot of questions about how concentrated this industry is going to get, right? It's becoming a very expensive game to play. And I mean, even if you think like $40 billion, let's say there was eight different AI companies and SoftBank gave each of them, or ten different AI companies and SoftBank gave each of them $4 billion, you could build some cool stuff, right? But like, would that be able to compete with Anthropic, OpenAI, Google? And that's kind of the question. So it's really, really wild just the numbers that go into all of this. And unfortunately, I think it really makes it so there's not a lot of competition in the market. All right. The third thing I want to talk about is OpenAI's robotics pivot. So we already talked about robots walking around the White House. Recently I gave an episode about OpenAI shutting down Sora, their video model.