Dear Studio Fam,
As the year winds down, we saw an interesting theme in this week’s tech news: updates. OpenAI kicked off twelve days of product announcements that seem to suggest a major update to its business model. There are zero profitable providers of gen AI technology, and OpenAI’s initial announcements indicate that the willingness of investors to cover losses is coming to an end. At the same time, tech leaders are previewing updates to something unexpected: the Federal government.
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OpenAI Announces Holiday Updates
OpenAI announced its “12 Days of OpenAI” event, promising new capabilities announcements every day over the coming weeks.. At face value, it feels like a festive countdown for tech enthusiasts. But OpenAI still has a long way to go in proving gen AI can be sold profitably, particularly as open source competitors continue to match OpenAI’s pace of innovation. Read on for details of the first two days’ announcements.
Day 1 of OpenAI: o1 Model Launch
The first day of the 12 Days of OpenAI spotlighted the official release of the o1 “reasoning” model, components of which have been previewed inside the last update to the GPT4 model. ChatGPT users may recall seeing more and more “analyzing” moments inside their consoles these past months as OpenAI has refined the compute requirements for breaking down requests into actionable steps. The o1 model takes these innovations to a new level with even greater speed, going so far as to return each result with an analysis of how much time it spent “thinking” about the prompt.
Day 2 of OpenAI: ChatGPT Pro
The second day of the 12 Days of Open AI is ostensibly dedicated to the most intense GPT customers, but it’s really for OpenAI investors. OpenAI announced ChatGPT Pro for researchers, scientists, and engineers, promising these power users “scaled access to the best of OpenAI’s models and tools”. This means dedicated infrastructure with no caps on “reasoning” time for the newest models.There’s even a new progress bar to show how long it’s going to take to return answers to prompts. But it’s also good news for OpenAI investors. ChatGPT Pro is $200 per month, literally 20x more expensive than ChatGPT.
Elon Musk Previews Government Updates
Elon Musk visited Capitol Hill this week in his capacity of co-leader of the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), the unofficial initiative announced by President-elect Trump to streamline the Federal Government. But go into the details and you’ll find familiar Republican cost-cutting proposals that have little to do with efficiency. Proposals range from privatizing $125 billion of veterans health services to eliminating the $5 million per year the Army spends on Christmas dinner lobsters for soldiers deployed overseas. Government agencies run quite efficiently compared to their private sector counterparts so we’re left to wonder if these “updates” to governance are just branding for trimming budgets in a digital cloak.
NASA Updated With Tech Exec Leader
President-elect Trump announced tech executive Jared Isaacman as his nominee to run NASA, adding yet another billionaire to his new team. Isaacman founded payment technology firm Shift4, which may seem like an odd choice for a NASA Administrator. But he’s also an aerospace engineer and founder of Draken International, a private company that works with the US Air Force and Navy to train fighter pilots.