The Tensions Between Altman and CFO

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The EU has just hit pause on its own AI act, and the entire compliance map for 2027 is now up in the air. Before that, Google's Athletica just cracked math problems that no human had solved. OpenAI's CFO is reportedly at war with Sam Altman. Over $660 billion in compute spending, and Big Tech earnings week kicks off tomorrow, so there's a whole bunch of questions that are gonna be hanging around over AI and ROI that we're gonna be covering. Let's get into it. So first, I wanted to talk about Google DeepMind. They've just dropped Athletica this week. This is an autonomous math agent, and it's actually just built on top of Gemini 3 DeepThink, and the results that it has been producing are really wild. So on the first proof challenge, which is basically a benchmark of unsolved or really complex kind of novel math problems, Athletica actually produced solutions that according to human expert evaluators were graded as, quote, publishable after minor revisions, meaning like it basically got it there. There might have been a couple of tweaks, but I mean, it solved these really complex math things to a high level, which was basically ready to get published. And it actually did this on six out of 10 questions that it was given. It also scored above 91.9% on the IMO proof benchmark.
Anjay Midha at A16Z called it the moment, quote, AI math went from playing the game to writing the rules. I think that's kind of a fair framing because up until this point, with all of the different AI models, proving these kind of novel theories is one of the hardest possible tests for these AI agents, and Athletica just did it. Sony is also coming out swinging. So they have something called Sony AI, and they have a project called ACE, and they just published on this, their project that was just published on the cover of Nature, one of the top journals for science this month. And it is the first known autonomous robot that beats elite and professional level human table tennis players in real matches. So there's a whole bunch of different domains of these advancements that we're seeing in science and technology. But I think the same point is happening. AI is now hitting professional human performance in tasks that require sub 200 millisecond planning loops. Ping Pong, I mean, I'm no expert, but I do love Ping Pong. And that is a game that if you see the pros play, the ball is flying so fast, is moving so quickly, and the precision has to be insanely high. Now, I think for a lot of people, it's just this like pure muscle memory. We're not thinking, we're not computing the angle of the paddle, the spin, how we hit it. Like, I mean, it's all computing in our brain, but this is happening with muscle memory with years and years of training. And the fact that we can just give a robot the ability, Sony is able to give a robot the ability to beat a human at this is incredible. And because obviously, like ping pong, whatever, I mean, I don't mean to belittle all the ping pong players of the world. This is not, you know, something that has a big impact on society, ping pong, the ping pong industry.
But man, I can just hear all the ping pong pros being deeply offended by that statement.
But this is really incredible when you think of the advancements in robotics. There's so many industries where these robots are going to be able to play a huge role. And I think one of the biggest ones that everyone is thinking about is humanoid robots that are going to be able to do so many different tasks. Maybe I know this sounds crazy to some people, but like help your aging parents, maybe feel more empowered to live in their home without having to go into like a retirement home. Maybe it's able to reach higher things off the, you know, off the shelf for them and help them get up when they fall down. Now, I'm sure this sounds like dystopian and whatever. I mean, you know, putting that all to the side, I think there are real use cases where these can really help people in the industries where it, you know, just wouldn't, it's hard to get that help otherwise. So all of this to say, I'm really impressed with what Sony AI has done there. And I think we're gonna see a lot more of these really incredible advancements coming quickly. So obviously that's exciting, but like just to the last 24 hours, you can also add to that the fact that Apple has a paper that came out at ICLR in Rio, which just wrapped up yesterday, and they have a new paper on privacy preserving on-device learning. This is basically a new approach to time test compute. That's really incredible. You have Google's TurboQuant, which they showcased at ICLR, which cuts inference memory by 6X. I think these are some of the stories that not a lot of people are covering. A lot of these frontier model releases, they get the big headlines like, oh my gosh, the new version of ChatGBT or the new version of Claude just came out. But I think the next 12 months of the actual economic impact of AI, they're being decided right now on a lot of these kind of efficiency papers and a lot of these kind of like benchmarks. And I think the labs that are getting this right are going to print so much money so you can kind of see who's putting out a lot of this research. I mean, people like Apple, Sony, Google are doing some really incredible things. But the thing is, the labs that do not get this right, they're going to be paying $660 billion in compute bills for nothing, which is, as it turns out, exactly what is tearing OpenAI apart this week. So, Fortune just broke a piece this morning, which is kind of building on some reporting from the information in the Wall Street Journal and the picture inside of OpenAI right now is pretty rough. The CFO, Sarah Fryer, reportedly told colleagues earlier this year that she doesn't believe the company is ready to go public in 2026 She's specifically worried about $660 billion in projected AI compute commitments, and whether the revenue ramp can support those contracts. Sam Altman is pushing for a Q4 IPO, and Fryer is publicly opposed. She's the CFO inside of OpenAI, so we have some serious headbutting from the top people inside of OpenAI. And I think it gets worse than a disagreement. So the information actually reported that Fryer stopped reporting directly to Sam Altman last August, and now reports to Fiji Simo, who runs the applications business. And Sam Altman has reportedly been excluding Fryer from certain financial conversations. I think that's definitely not very normal CEO, CFO.