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Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI reporter Sharon Goldman. In this edition, I compare OpenAI to a house made of\u2026well, no one really knows. Also: OpenAI launches a ChatGPT app store (we\u2019ll see if it fares better than their previous custom GPT store)<\/em>\u2026Google debuts a surprisingly powerful Flash version of its Gemini 3 model\u2026and the U.K. AI Safety Institute finds that a large percentage of Britons have used chatbots for emotional support.<\/em><\/p>\n Talk about an expensive building project. OpenAI is reportedly raising tens of fresh billions at a $750 billion valuation, including $10 billion from Amazon. It is pouring money into compute \u2014 and literally pouring concrete into the data centers that power AI chips\u2014which the company says it needs to keep constructing the towering stack of models and applications that more than 800 million users now rely on.<\/p>\n The cost has inspired both awe and deep unease. Industry observers watch OpenAI\u2019s expansion the way they might watch the Empire State Building rise \u2014 with a budget that keeps climbing as fast as the structure itself. (The actual Empire State Building, it\u2019s important to note, only cost about $700 million in today\u2019s money and came in under budget.) And some skeptics are increasingly convinced that the entire edifice is a monument to hubris that will come tumbling down before long.\u00a0<\/p>\n Here\u2019s how I think about it: If OpenAI is a house, it\u2019s still in the early stages of construction \u2014 but no one agrees what it\u2019s made of. The plans are undeniably ambitious, pushing the structure to unprecedented heights. Is this a house made of cards? Of teetering wooden pillars? Of solid concrete? The question is whether whatever structure is being built can actually hold the weight already being placed on it.<\/p>\n That uncertainty has split the experts I\u2019ve spoken to. Technology analyst Rob Enderle said he would like to see OpenAI resting on a firmer foundation. \u201cI would feel much more comfortable if they had a much stronger base in some of the basics,\u201d he told me, particularly around making products trustworthy enough for enterprise businesses to increase adoption. He added that OpenAI has at times \u201cgone off the rails\u201d in terms of direction, pointing out that the company\u2019s original independent safety and ethics oversight structures have been sidelined since CEO Sam Altman was reinstated after being briefly fired in November 2023. These days, he argued, OpenAI is trying to compete with everyone at once; reacting to rivals rather than executing a clear roadmap; and spending heavily without clear prioritization.\u00a0<\/p>\n A recognition that it may have become distracted by trying to do much at once was part of the reason OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared a \u201ccode red\u201d at the company two weeks ago, as Fortune<\/em> reported in an in-depth new feature this week. The story looks at the why, the how, and the what of OpenAI\u2019s \u201ccode red\u201d and why Altman has warned the company to brace for \u201crough vibes\u201d\u00a0and economic headwinds in the face of increased competition from Google and OpenAI. Altman is trying to light a fire under his team to refocus on OpenAI\u2019s core ChatGPT offerings over the coming weeks. But, according to Enderle, this is all very reactive and not strategic enough.<\/p>\n Commenting on the company\u2019s constant shipping \u2014 from new AI models and a new image generation model, to a web browser, shopping features inside ChatGPT, and a new app ecosystem launched just this week \u2014 alongside a massive Stargate data-center buildout, Enderle compared OpenAI to Netscape and other dot-com companies that got rich too fast and lost strategic discipline.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re running so fast, they\u2019re not really focusing on direction very much,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Others, however, strongly disagree. Futurum Research founder and CEO Daniel Newman told me that concerns about OpenAI\u2019s house collapsing miss the bigger picture. \u201cThis is a multi-decade supercycle,\u201d he said, likening the company\u2019s current phase of AI to Netflix\u2019s DVD-by-mail era \u2014 a precursor to the true paradigm shift that followed. From the perspective of unmet demand and long-term value creation, Newman believes OpenAI\u2019s massive compute investments are rational, not reckless.<\/p>\n \u201cI would call what [OpenAI] has today very high-quality three-dimensional simulations and architectural renderings of a future,\u201d Newman said. The real question, he added, is whether OpenAI can win enough market share to build the mansion it\u2019s envisioning.<\/p>\n \u201cI think OpenAI\u2019s real goal is to become a hyperscaler,\u201d Newman said. \u201cThey\u2019ll have the infrastructure, the applications, the data, the workflows, the agentic tools \u2014 and people will buy everything they now get elsewhere from OpenAI instead. It\u2019s an incredibly ambitious goal. There\u2019s nothing to say it will work. But if it does, the numbers make sense.\u201d<\/p>\n Lastly, I spoke to Arun Chandrasekaran, principal analyst at Gartner Research, who chuckled and ducked away from my house metaphor, but was willing to address whether OpenAI was at least building on solid ground.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThey are indeed growing really fast, and they are making an enormous amount of commitments far beyond what any company [of their size] has ever made,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is a risky bet, I would argue, a strategy that does not come without risks.\u201d A lot of it is predicated on how sticky their products are, he pointed out, both at the model and application layer.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt depends on the switching costs from a customer perspective, and a few other factors in terms of whether the growth really pans out the way they\u2019ve envisioned,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019re talking about a high growth company, but the expectation is that they\u2019re going to have to grow at a much faster clip than what they\u2019re growing. The expectations are enormous.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Stickiness, I said. Like glue? Nails? Something to hold the house up?<\/p>\n He laughed. \u201cYes \u2014 like glue. I say stickiness, you say glue.\u201d<\/p>\n And with that, here\u2019s more AI news.<\/p>\n Sharon Goldman<\/strong> Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announces departure of AI exec Rohit Prasad in leadership shake-up\u2013by Sharon Goldman Experts say Amazon is playing the long game with its potential $10 billion OpenAI deal: \u2018ChatGPT is still seen as the Kleenex of AI\u2019\u2013by Eva Roytburg<\/span><\/p>\n Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and Amazon\u2019s stocks are lagging the S&P 500 this year\u2014but Google is up 62%, and AI investors think it has room to run\u2014by Jeff John Roberts and Jeremy Kahn<\/p>\n U.K. startup CellVoyant debuts AI platform that could radically reduce the cost of cell-based therapies such as CAR-T immunotherapy for cancer\u2013by Jeremy Kahn<\/span><\/p>\n Exclusive: Swedish startup automating mechanical, electrical, and plumbing design for commercial buildings raises $20 million in seed round\u2014by Jeremy Kahn<\/p>\n Exclusive: Palantir alums using AI to streamline patent filing secure $20 million in Series A venture funding\u2014by Jeremy Kahn<\/p>\n ChatGPT to accept app submissions.\u00a0 <\/strong>OpenAI has opened app submissions for ChatGPT, letting developers submit apps for review and publication and giving users a new in-chat app directory to discover them\u2014but the move comes a couple of years after the company\u2019s earlier plug-ins experiment, built around custom GPTs, which never fully took off. The new apps are designed to extend conversations with real actions, like ordering groceries or creating slide decks, and can be triggered directly inside chats, with OpenAI positioning them as more tightly integrated and easier to use than plug-ins were. The initiative signals OpenAI\u2019s renewed push to turn ChatGPT into a true platform\u2014though how widely users and developers embrace this second attempt at an app ecosystem remains an open question.<\/p>\n Anthropic taps Trump-linked Bitcoin miner for massive AI power build.<\/strong> According to reporting from The Information, Anthropic has struck a deal that could secure up to 2.3 gigawatts of computing power from data centers developed by Hut 8, a bitcoin miner that is pivoting into AI infrastructure and has ties to the Trump family. Hut 8 and cloud startup Fluidstack plan to build a data center campus in Louisiana, starting with 245 megawatts and potentially expanding by another 1 gigawatt, while giving Anthropic the option to develop an additional 1.1 gigawatts with Hut 8. Google will backstop Fluidstack\u2019s lease payments, underscoring Big Tech\u2019s role in de-risking these projects. Hut 8\u2019s Trump-linked bitcoin venture and the AI data center news helped push its shares up about 10%.<\/p>\n Anthropic\u2019s Claude ran a snack operation in the Wall Street Journal newsroom.<\/strong> I had to shout out this funny experiment from the Wall Street Journal that copied a similar effort Anthropic ran in its own offices several months ago. A customized Claude agent was put in charge of running a newsroom vending machine, with autonomy to order inventory, set prices, and negotiate with human coworkers over Slack. Within weeks, the AI had been socially engineered into giving away most of its inventory for free, buying a PlayStation 5 and a live fish, and driving the operation hundreds of dollars into the red. The point wasn\u2019t profit, Anthropic said, but failure: a vivid case study in how today\u2019s AI agents can lose track of goals, priorities, and guardrails when exposed to money, social pressure, and messy real-world context\u2014highlighting just how far \u201cautonomous agents\u201d still are from reliably running even the simplest businesses.<\/p>\n NOAA says its new AI-driven weather models improve forecast speed and accuracy.<\/strong> As the winter chill deepens across much of the US, I’m sure we all love a quick and accurate weather forecast. So CBS News reported some good news: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has rolled out a new suite of AI-driven weather forecasting models designed to deliver faster and more accurate predictions at far lower computational cost. NOAA says the models represent a shift away from relying solely on traditional physics-based systems like its long-running Global Forecast System and Global Ensemble Forecast System, which simulate countless weather scenarios across land, ocean, and atmosphere. Instead, the agency is using AI to improve large-scale forecasts and tropical storm tracks while dramatically reducing the computing power required, allowing forecasts to reach meteorologists and the public more quickly and cheaply\u2014a move NOAA leadership describes as a major leap in U.S. weather-model innovation.<\/p>\n Google launches Gemini 3 Flash, makes it the default model in the Gemini app.<\/strong> TechCrunch reported on Google’s release of Gemini 3 Flash, a faster and cheaper version of its Gemini 3 model. Google has made Gemini 3 Flash the default model in the Gemini app and in AI-powered search. The model significantly outperforms the previous Gemini 2.5 Flash and, on some benchmarks, rivals frontier models like Gemini 3 Pro and OpenAI\u2019s GPT-5.2, while excelling at multimodal and reasoning tasks. Google is positioning Flash as a high-speed \u201cworkhorse\u201d model for consumers, enterprises, and developers, with broad rollout across apps, search, Vertex AI, and APIs, and adoption already underway at companies like JetBrains and Figma. The launch comes amid an intensifying release war with OpenAI, as Google reports processing more than a trillion tokens per day and emphasizes that rapid iteration, lower costs, and new benchmarks are now central to competition at the AI frontier.<\/p>\n Jan. 7-10:<\/strong> Consumer Electronics Show, Las Vegas.\u00a0<\/p>\n March 12-18:\u00a0<\/strong>SWSW, Austin.\u00a0<\/p>\n March 16-19:<\/strong> Nvidia GTC, San Jose.\u00a0<\/p>\n April 6-9:<\/strong> HumanX, San Francisco.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n According to new research from the UK’s AI Safety Institute highlighted by The Guardian<\/em>, about a third of UK adults say they\u2019ve used generative AI for emotional support or social interaction, with nearly one in ten reporting weekly use of chatbots and assistants like ChatGPT for emotional reasons.<\/p>\n Analysts note this trend is emerging amid broader concerns about mental health access, loneliness, and the role of AI in replacing\u2014or supplementing\u2014human emotional support. The report also flags potential risks, including safety issues and the need for deeper study of how \u201cemotional AI\u201d may shape our interactions and well-being.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #OpenAI #house #constructionbut #agrees<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4869,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[2593,4571,2936,501,3715,703],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4868"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4868\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\nThe experts are split<\/h2>\n
Searching for stickiness, or glue<\/h2>\n
sharon.goldman@fortune.com
@sharongoldman<\/p>\nFORTUNE ON AI<\/h3>\n
<\/span><\/p>\nAI IN THE NEWS<\/h3>\n
AI CALENDAR<\/h3>\n
EYE ON AI NUMBERS<\/h3>\n
~33%<\/h2>\n