TheChek News Flow

The Flaw in Altman’s Thesis for AI Devices

One of the problems with this guessing game is that it may well prove irrelevant, because the arguments about our need for AI-specific devices don’t hold water. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, talking with Ive in a slick video explaining the io deal, seemed to deliberately obfuscate how people currently use AI chatbots. He described how asking ChatGPT currently requires someone to get out their laptop, launch a browser and start typing. Come on! At the most basic level, you can already talk to ChatGPT and ask it questions. Even more convenient is the option to talk to a locked phone—such as Google’s Pixel—and ask the Gemini chatbot a question (which it answers!). You can do the same with Meta Platforms’ Ray-Bans smart glasses—no need for laptop, browser or typing. Whatever OpenAI is planning, can it really be simpler than using a device we already carry with us? (Bloomberg reported Thursday that Apple is also planning to get into the smart glasses market).

Now, Altman obviously knows all this. The real reason he is talking up the value of new devices is surely strategic: OpenAI, like Meta, doesn’t want to be dependent on smartphone makers—such as Apple—for distribution of its apps. The company has tried unsuccessfully to strike deals to preload its ChatGPT app onto phones, an executive testified at a Google antitrust trial recently, in an attempt to replicate Google’s strategy of expanding availability of its search app by getting it preloaded onto smartphones and browsers. Altman likely thinks OpenAI needs to control its destiny by developing its own hardware.

That’s fine, but consumers may have other ideas. Aside from the difficulty of persuading people they need another device, there’s the time it will take OpenAI to get to market with its new device. According to The Wall Street Journal today, Altman told OpenAI staff on Wednesday evening that he hopes to ship the first new AI device by late next year. Eighteen months is a long time in the fast-evolving AI world. By the time OpenAI’s devices finally make it to market, people may be talking to AI assistants on their phones or smart glasses as freely as they upload videos to TikTok or Instagram.

Datadog Invents New Language

If there’s a guaranteed way to produce impenetrable jargon, it’s by combining AI and open-source technology. Check out this blog post from Datadog on Wednesday about—according to our grizzled enterprise software reporter Kevin McLaughlin—its new open-source AI model and an accompanying new benchmark to measure how accurate the AI model is at forecasting server and app performance issues.

The blog post, however, takes our monthly award for incomprehensible jargon. Even Kevin couldn’t translate this sentence: “Observability time series have challenging distributional properties, including sparsity, spikes and noisiness; anomaly contamination; and contain high-cardinality multivariate series, with complex relationship among variates.”

Translated by ChatGPT, that means: “This kind of data is messy. It has missing parts, random ups and downs, weird spikes and lots of things happening all at once that are connected in confusing ways.”

Waymo’s gross bookings, or the amount customers pay to take the robotaxi service, will almost triple this year to $230 million and rise another 61% next year to $370.4 million as the robotaxis expand to more cities, TD Cowen analysts predicted in a report published Thursday.

This surge in paying customers could make the Alphabet-owned unit worth as much as $75 billion next year, up from a valuation of $45 billion when the unit last year raised money from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Fidelity.

The analysts also estimated a Waymo robotaxi will have to cost $98,000 before an individual car breaks even, or equals the cost of the car, assuming a $16 ride booked on a ridesharing network. For robotaxis on Waymo’s own network, a car that costs $98,000 would generate a profit of 35 cents per trip. The firm estimates that one Waymo robotaxi currently costs $160,000 to build.

The firm’s autonomous vehicles report also predicts that Waymo will command 5% of the robotaxi market in the U.S. by 2034, with Uber and Lyft’s shares, currently at 71% and 28% respectively, decreasing slightly over time, before factoring in partnerships between the ridesharing companies and Waymo.

Elad Gil, the prolific investor known for placing early bets on Airbnb and Stripe, says he’s been backing ventures buying mature businesses and incorporating artificial intelligence into their work. Now we know the identity of one of them.

Gil recently led a funding round in Enam Co., a one-year-old AI startup focusing on worker productivity, according to a person familiar with the deal. The investment valued it at more than $300 million, said that person and another person. Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI’s Startup Fund are also investors in the company, according to their representatives.

Enam Co.’s website gives little indication of what it’s actually working on, but people familiar with its approach said it’s looking to buy companies and make them more efficient using AI. Zayd Enam, the startup’s eponymous founder, was previously CEO of customer service company Cresta. He indicated six months ago on Linkedin that his startup already had at least $10 million in revenue.

A spokesperson for Gil declined to comment. Enam also declined to comment on the fundraising, saying the company is “heads down right now building.”

Venture capitalists have been looking more like private equity investors of late, scouting for opportunities to refurbish relatively boring businesses such as accounting firms with the latest AI advances, as my colleague Natasha recently wrote. In that vein, Thrive Capital said last month it was starting a vehicle to buy and hold companies that can benefit from new technologies. General Catalyst and 8VC have pursued similar strategies.

Gil, who a few years back became the face of the solo venture capitalist movement, is often early to big trends in Silicon Valley. His interest in buyouts could be a signal for others to begin taking the concept more seriously.

Asked on a podcast last year about his interest in AI-driven buyouts, Gil said he had invested in two already and thought it could be the right approach in industries that are slow to adopt new software products or for which AI could bring down costs.

“Maybe what you do is you just buy some assets and roll them up and go after it,” Gil said. In addition to backing Enam Co., Gil helped start AI evaluations company Braintrust and in 2023 co-led an investment in legal AI startup Harvey that valued the company at $715 million.

For its part, Enam Co. says on its website it’s “on a mission to accelerate the future of work,” drawing inspiration from Ford’s innovation in assembly lines and Toyota’s production system. It has set up offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and Berlin, where it’s looking to hire technical staff. The company also has a side hustle selling hats bearing the slogan “Make AI Great Again.”

And while Enam Co.’s website doesn’t say much about its strategy, it does take a jab at another corner of the financial world: “We don’t wake up excited to make the world a harsher place—we are not private equity,” it says.

Loan means giant data center project involving Oracle and Crusoe is fully funded.

JPMorgan Chase has agreed to lend more than $7 billion to the firms building OpenAI’s giant artificial intelligence data center campus in Abilene, Tex., according to two people with direct knowledge of the deal.

The deal with JPMorgan, which has not been previously reported, reflects continued interest from lenders and investors in backing the physical infrastructure needed to develop advanced AI software.

The bank already lent $2.3 billion to the companies developing the Abilene data center, which funded the initial phase of the project. The new $7 billion loan will round out the funding for the construction of the data center, which would be one of the largest in the world, with eight buildings that cost $1.4 billion each. The data centers can hold a total of 400,000 Nvidia chips.

The project is being developed by a group of companies and will be used by OpenAI. The actual project is being built by data center developer Crusoe, and it is partly owned by asset manager Blue Owl and Primary Digital Infrastructure, an investment fund. Oracle has agreed to lease it for 15 years. Oracle will then rent the chips to OpenAI. At full capacity, the site is expected to have more than 1 gigawatt of power for AI chips.

JPMorgan, Crusoe and Primary Digital declined to comment. Oracle and Blue Owl did not respond to requests for comment.

OpenAI plans to use the campus to train its AI models. OpenAI used to exclusively rely on Microsoft, a major backer of OpenAI, for data center capacity. But the startup grew impatient with the tech giant last year because it wasn’t getting chips fast enough. The Abilene site was the first example of OpenAI deciding to work with another cloud provider—Oracle—to get Nvidia GPUs.

The developers of the data center have already moved to expand the joint venture that owns the project to build additional AI data centers. Crusoe, Blue Owl and Primary Digital said Tuesday they had raised another $11.6 billion for the expansion. The funding primarily comes from Blue Owl, according to someone involved in the deal.

The lending and fundraising signal that there is little fear among investors about overspending on AI. On Wednesday, data center builder CoreWeave raised $2 billion in a high-yield bond offering.

Lenders seem particularly hungry for projects that have a long-term, credit worthy tenant, in this case Oracle. The company signed the initial lease for two buildings last year and expanded to the entire site in January.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son and Oracle’s Larry Ellison have said the Abilene campus is a part of their $500 billion data center effort, called Stargate. But so far none of the funding has come from SoftBank. The loan from JPM does not cover the cost of the GPUs. The details of SoftBank’s involvement in the Abilene project is still being worked out, according to someone with direct knowledge.

The massive Abilene project was started by Crusoe, which later formed a $3.4 billion joint venture with Blue Owl and Primary Digital Infrastructure to fund the OpenAI data center last fall. The joint venture later raised $2.3 billion in construction debt from JPMorgan, enough money to fund the initial build out of two data centers for Oracle that could hold 100,000 GPUs for OpenAI.

The project grew in January when Crusoe signed an larger lease agreement with Oracle for 6 more data centers, covering the entire 1.2 gigawatt site, The Information first reported. The deal quadrupled the amount of capacity Oracle could provide to OpenAI, adding an additional 300,000 GPUs. The original joint venture with Blue Owl did not cover the expansion.

Glam Srl, the company behind the Superglamourous shoe brand, and its investor, the Imerman Family Office fund, have taken over the storied footwear firm.

Storied Italian luxury footwear brand Moreschi has found a pair of white knights.

Glam Srl, the company behind the Superglamourous shoe brand, and its investor, the London-based Imerman Family Office fund, have taken over the Moreschi brand.

They won the auction set up by the Court of Pavia, Italy, which had declared Moreschi bankrupt in 2024. The brand was previously owned by the Swiss fund Hurleys.

The acquisition includes the Moreschi trademark, all related intellectual property, machinery and in-house materials.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The joint acquisition builds on the existing relationship between the Imerman Family Office and Glam Srl, as the former invested in the latter last year becoming its majority stakeholder.

The new owners are committed to resurrect Moreschi, known primarily for its luxury men’s formal shoes, in addition to a women’s line, by leveraging Superglamourous’ digital-first expertise and capabilities. The latter brand, established by Andrea Usuelli and Riccardo Libertino in 2012, is best known for its slippers defined by bold designs.

Moreschi was established by Mario Moreschi in 1946 in Vigevano, Italy — a renowned shoe manufacturing hub located about 30 miles southwest of Milan, which has partially lost its prominence in recent years. In the wake of the acquisition, manufacturing of Moreschi shoes is to continue in Italy.

Building synergies between Moreschi’s heritage and Superglamourous’ digital-first DNA will be instrumental in fueling renewed growth for the former brand and provide a strong business-to-business footprint for the latter. The two companies will continue to operate as independent brands, leveraging shared operational infrastructures.

“Moreschi’s legacy in Italian shoemaking is unparalleled. Our goal is to build on that heritage, evolving the brand with thoughtful innovation while staying true to its core values of craftsmanship, elegance and timeless design,” said Bianca Ladow, director of the Imerman Family Office and director of Glam Srl and Moreschi.

“The partnership plans to leverage Superglamourous’s digital expertise and Moreschi’s renowned craftsmanship to create a unique offering in the luxury footwear market. This acquisition underscores a commitment to preserving Made in Italy craftsmanship and artisans while adapting to the evolving landscape of luxury retail,” Ladow said.

As part of the new business plan, the existing Moreschi showroom on Milan’s Via Manzoni will be home to both brands’ collections, while a new unit is to bow on London’s Mount Street, where Superglamourous already operates its own exhibition space. The Moreschi flagship on Via Manzoni and the Superglamourous store on Corso Venezia, both in Milan, will be strategically enhanced with a stronger direct-to-consumer focus, the new owners said.

“Moreschi represents a pillar of Italian artisanal heritage. This is not just a revival, it’s a long-term vision to honor tradition while embracing transformation. By combining Moreschi’s legacy with the strategic agility of Glam, we are creating a structure pivotal to sustainable growth and global reach,” Usuelli said.

According to market sources Moreschi’s estimated revenues at the peak of its business success stood just south of 50 million euros.

“We see in Moreschi the kind of elegance that transcends time, understated, yet deeply expressive. This is an extraordinary opportunity to reframe that refinement for a new generation, bringing a modern sensibility to materials, proportions and styling, all while remaining faithful to the brand’s DNA,” Libertino said.

The Imerman Family Office is helmed by businessman Vivian Imerman and is part of Vasari, a consumer-focused investment group with decades of experience owning and operating companies focused on branded goods and alcoholic beverages in Europe, Asia and Africa.