James Altucher:

Sam Altman Wants To Compete With Elon Musk’s SpaceX

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is reportedly considering either partnering with a rocket company or acquiring it altogether in order to compete with Elon Musk's SpaceX. That could represent a gamble of billions of dollars from the founder and venture capitalist.

The status of any talks at present is unclear. Altman reportedly reached out to Stoke Space, a startup founded in 2020 by veterans of Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. Proposals included OpenAI making equity investments in the company with the goal of acquiring a controlling stake.

Should Altman follow through with his space plans, it would be yet another field where he and Musk face off. Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI, but has since left the company (after trying to merge it with Tesla in 2018). Earlier this year, Musk attempted to purchase OpenAI, but was rebuffed. He has been one of Altman's most vocal critics in recent years, has filed several lawsuits against OpenAI and has launched his own AI company to compete.

Altman has since launched a startup that competes with Musk's Neuralink and OpenAI is working on a social media network that would compete with X.

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Chris Campbell:

Meta To Slash Metaverse, VR Spending by up to 30%

Four years after changing its name to reflect its focus on the loosely defined “metaverse,” Meta is planning deep cuts to the company’s money-losing virtual reality efforts, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Meta’s Reality Labs division, home to the teams working on metaverse products – which include Quest VR headsets, Horizon Worlds, and its Ray-Ban Meta glasses – has lost about $70 billion since the company started breaking out the unit in 2020.

The company has struggled to get consumers to buy into CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of working and playing in virtual reality worlds, like the company’s Horizon Worlds platform.

Investors seem to love the news of the pivot, as shares shot up as much as 5% in early trading.

Meta’s recent hiring spree of AI superstars from competitors for its Meta Superintelligence Labs shows that the company’s attention is now all in on AI.

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Greg Guenthner:

OpenAI CEO Declares “Code Red” As Gemini Gains 200 Million Users in 3 Months

The shoe is most certainly on the other foot. On Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly declared a “code red” at the company to improve ChatGPT, delaying advertising plans and other products in the process, according to a leaked internal memo. 

The move follows Google’s release of its Gemini 3 model last month, which has outperformed ChatGPT on some industry benchmark tests and sparked high-profile praise on social media.

In the memo, Altman wrote, “We are at a critical time for ChatGPT.” The company will push back work on advertising integration, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant feature called Pulse. Altman encouraged temporary team transfers and established daily calls for employees responsible for enhancing the chatbot.

The directive creates an odd symmetry with events from December 2022, when Google management declared its own “code red” internal emergency after ChatGPT launched and rapidly gained in popularity. At the time, Google CEO Sundar Pichai reassigned teams across the company to develop AI prototypes and products to compete with OpenAI’s chatbot. 

Now, three years later, the AI industry is in a very different place.

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