Matthias Bastian

Mar 23, 2026

OpenAI is offering private equity firms a guaranteed minimum return of 17.5 percent to win them over for joint ventures in the enterprise market. Moreover, participating firms would get early access to new OpenAI models. Reuters broke the story, citing people familiar with the matter. The investment amounts involved are reportedly larger than usual.

The goal is to get private equity firms—investment companies that buy and resell entire businesses—to rapidly roll out OpenAI's AI tools across hundreds of companies in their portfolios. Big names like TPG, Advent, Blackstone, and Permira are reportedly in the mix.

Anthropic is pursuing a similar distribution strategy, but allegedly without offering a comparable return guarantee. That could change now that OpenAI has raised the stakes. The already thin margins of AI companies compared to SaaS peers are likely to take an even bigger hit from these kinds of commitments.

The entire effort appears aimed squarely at Anthropic, which has been gaining ground with enterprise customers recently and currently leads in coding with Claude Code. OpenAI recently announced a renewed focus on the coding business with Codex and a consolidation of its products into a single super app.

Comment Source: Reuters

Matthias Bastian

Mar 23, 2026

Short News

Mark Zuckerberg is building a personal AI agent to help him run Meta. The tool is still in development, but, according to the Wall Street Journal, already helps him pull up information faster, bypassing the multiple layers of employees he'd normally have to go through.

The project is reportedly part of a broader reorganization at Meta. The company, which currently has around 78,000 employees, wants to flatten its hierarchies, build leaner teams, and keep pace with AI-native startups. Zuckerberg's long-term vision: everyone inside and outside Meta gets their own AI agent, and the company operates as efficiently as an AI startup, the WSJ reports.

That connects to a bigger picture: According to Reuters, Meta is planning to cut up to 20 percent of its workforce. The layoffs are reportedly tied not to efficiency gains already realized but directly to the company's massive investments in AI infrastructure. A Meta spokesperson called the report speculation.

Comment Source: Wall Street Journal

Matthias Bastian

Mar 22, 2026

Short News

Karpathy spent months hand-tuning his GPT-2 training setup. Then he let an autonomous agent take over for a single night. The agent discovered fine-grained adjustments Karpathy had overlooked, tweaks that also interact with each other in ways that are easy for a human to miss but straightforward for a systematic search to catch.

Karpathy's takeaway is that researchers should remove themselves from the loop, at least in areas where objective metrics exist. "To get the most out of the tools that have become available now, you have to remove yourself as the bottleneck. You can't be there to prompt the next thing," Karpathy says. Researchers at major AI labs, he argues, place too much unfounded trust in their own intuition and are ultimately in the process of systematically automating themselves out of a job. Which, Karpathy notes, is also their stated goal.

While models keep getting better at coding and other easy-to-verify tasks, Karpathy doesn't think these gains will carry over smoothly to less measurable domains. "Anything that feels softer is, like, worse," he says.

Comment Source: No Priors Podcast

Matthias Bastian

Mar 22, 2026

AI in practice

OpenAI publishes a prompting playbook that helps designers get better frontend results from GPT-5.4

In a new guide, OpenAI explains how front-end designers can get better results from GPT-5.4 when building websites and apps and how to stop the model from falling back on generic designs.

Read full article

Comment

Matthias Bastian

Mar 22, 2026

AI research

Terence Tao says AI drives idea generation cost to near zero but shifts the bottleneck to verification

Matthias Bastian

Mar 21, 2026

Short News

The AI lab wants to grow from 4,500 to 8,000 employees by the end of 2026, the Financial Times reports, citing two people familiar with the plans. Most new hires will go into product development, engineering, research, and sales. OpenAI is also bringing on "technical ambassadorship" specialists to help companies integrate its tools.

Much of this hiring likely ties back to OpenAI's Frontier, an agent-based AI platform designed to embed deeply into company workflows, the kind of integration that requires hands-on development at the customer's site. OpenAI has already launched the Frontier Alliance with consulting firms like McKinsey, and partnerships with private equity firms are in the works.

The broader context is OpenAI's push to win enterprise customers, particularly in coding, where Anthropic has been steadily gaining ground. While OpenAI was focused on ChatGPT features, image generation, video models, and all the weird outcomes that came with people actually using this technology, Anthropic quietly carved out a bigger share of the enterprise space. OpenAI is now reportedly building a desktop super app that bundles all its key features into one platform.

Comment Source: Financial Times

Matthias Bastian

Mar 21, 2026

AI in practice

OpenAI's chief scientist trusts AI with experiments but says it's not at the level to design complex systems

OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki used to write every line of code by hand. Now AI handles experiments that once took him a week, but he’s not ready to let it run the show.

Read full article

Comment

Matthias Bastian

Mar 21, 2026

Short News

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believes that if a developer earns $500,000 a year, their token budget should be at least half that amount. On the All-In podcast at Nvidia's GTC conference, Huang laid out a "thought experiment:" If a developer or AI researcher earned $500,000 a year and only used $5,000 in tokens by year's end, he would "go ape something else." If their token budget wasn't at least $250,000, he'd be "deeply alarmed."

To Huang, it's no different "than one of our chip designers who says, guess what, I'm just going to use paper and pencil. I don't think I'm going to need any CAD tools." The statement has at least as much meme potential as Huang's legendary "The more you buy, the more you save" line from GTC 2018.

On the AI industry's revenue potential, Huang says Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is "very conservative" with his forecast of hundreds of billions in AI usage revenue by 2027/28 and a trillion dollars by 2030. His reasoning: every enterprise software company will eventually act as a "value-added reseller" of tokens from Anthropic or OpenAI, dramatically expanding the market.

Comment Source: All-In Podcast

Matthias Bastian

Mar 21, 2026

Update

AI in practice

Cursor quietly built its new coding model on top of Chinese open-source Kimi K2.5

Matthias Bastian

Mar 20, 2026

Short News

OpenAI is acquiring Astral, the company behind the widely used Python tools Ruff, uv, and ty. Astral founder Charlie Marsh announced that his team is joining OpenAI's Codex team, the company's platform for agentic AI coding. According to Marsh, Astral's tools are downloaded hundreds of millions of times each month and have become a core part of modern Python development. Marsh says integrating them with Codex gives both projects the most room to grow. Astral was backed by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz, among others.

Our goal with Codex is to move beyond AI that simply generates code and toward systems that can participate in the entire development workflow—helping plan changes, modify codebases, run tools, verify results, and maintain software over time. Astral’s developer tools sit directly in that workflow.
OpenAI

OpenAI says it will keep the tools open source after the acquisition closes. Astral's Douglas Creager wrote on Hacker News that the tools are under a permissive license, so in a worst-case scenario, the community could fork the software and continue developing it independently.

No one can guarantee how motives, incentives, and decisions might change years down the line. But that's why we bake optionality into it with the tools being permissively licensed.
Douglas Creager

Comment Source: Astral | OpenAI