Max is the managing editor of THE DECODER, bringing his background in philosophy to explore questions of consciousness and whether machines truly think or just pretend to.
The AI boom could cost Apple up to $57 more per iPhone – for memory chips alone.
"The rate of increase in the price of memory is unprecedented," says Mike Howard, an analyst at TechInsights, speaking to the Wall Street Journal. By the end of this year, the price of DRAM will quadruple from 2023 levels, and NAND will more than triple.
For Apple, the numbers are stark: The base-model iPhone 18 due this fall could cost $57 more in memory alone compared with the current iPhone 17 – a significant hit to profit margins on a device that retails for $799. This aligns with recent rumors that Apple may delay the base model's release to later this year.
The cause: AI companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta are now outbidding Apple for scarce components. Nvidia has even overtaken Apple as TSMC's largest customer, a position Apple held for years.
OpenAI is preparing for an IPO in the fourth quarter of 2026, the Wall Street Journal reports. The startup, valued at $500 billion, is holding informal talks with Wall Street banks and building out its finance team. Recent hires include Ajmere Dale as Chief Accounting Officer and Cynthia Gaylor for investor relations.
According to the report, OpenAI executives are worried internally that competitor Anthropic might beat them to the public markets. Anthropic has told financial partners it's open to an IPO by the end of 2026 and is expanding its finance team with experts like Andrew Zloto and former Blackstone investor Kevin Chang.
CEO Sam Altman said in a December podcast that he's not exited about running a public company. Some of those responsibilities will fall to Fidji Simo, the former Instacart CEO who now leads OpenAI Applications.
OpenAI is trying to raise more than $100 billion. The deal would value the startup at $830 billion. SoftBank is considering investing around $30 billion, while Amazon is negotiating a stake of up to $50 billion. Both AI startups are still burning billions of dollars annually. Anthropic expects to break even in 2028, while OpenAI doesn't anticipate reaching that milestone until 2030.
SpaceX is negotiating a merger with Elon Musk's AI company xAI ahead of a planned IPO, Reuters reports. The deal would bring SpaceX, Starlink satellites, the social media platform X, and the Grok chatbot under one corporate roof.
According to Reuters, the merger would involve exchanging xAI shares for SpaceX stock. Two companies were reportedly incorporated in Nevada on January 21 to handle the transaction. One of them lists SpaceX and its CFO Bret Johnsen as managing partners. Some xAI executives may receive cash instead of shares.
No final agreement has been signed yet, and the timeline and structure remain undecided, Reuters says. SpaceX is currently the world's most valuable private company at $800 billion, while xAI was valued at $230 billion in November. According to Bloomberg, SpaceX is also exploring a merger with Tesla.
OpenAI develops six-layer context system to help employees navigate 600 petabytes of data
OpenAI has developed an internal AI data agent that lets employees run complex data analyses using natural language. A key technique called “Codex Enrichment” crawls the codebase to understand what tables actually contain.
China has authorized ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent to purchase Nvidia's H200 AI chips, Reuters reports, citing four people familiar with the matter. The three tech giants can import more than 400,000 H200 chips combined. Additional companies are on a waiting list for future approvals.
The approval came during Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's visit to China. Huang arrived in Shanghai last Friday and has since traveled to Beijing and other cities. The Chinese government is attaching conditions to the approvals that are still being finalized. A fifth source told Reuters the licenses are too restrictive, and customers aren't converting approvals into orders yet. Beijing has previously discussed requiring companies to buy a certain quota of domestic chips before they can import foreign semiconductors.
The H200 is Nvidia's second most powerful AI chip, delivering roughly six times the performance of the H20. Chinese companies have ordered more than two million H200 chips, according to Reuters - far more than Nvidia can deliver. Beijing had previously held off on allowing imports to support its domestic chip industry. The U.S. approved exports in early January.
AI startup Decart has unveiled Lucy 2.0, a real-time video transformation model. The system can modify live video at 30 frames per second in 1080p resolution with near-zero latency. Users can swap characters, place products, change clothing, and completely transform environments - all controlled through text commands and reference images while the video is still running.
According to Decart, Lucy 2.0 doesn't rely on depth maps or 3D models. Instead, the system's understanding of physics comes entirely from patterns learned during video training. A new technique called "Smart History Augmentation" prevents image quality from degrading over time, letting the model run stably for hours, the startup says.
The technology runs on AWS Trainium3 chips. A demo is available at lucy.decart.ai.
