OpenAI provides apps to ChatGPT and makes its bid to turn into “the common interface” to computing

The primary was the announcement of a significant new strategic partnership between OpenAI and chipmaker AMD. The deal will see AMD present its M4150 graphic processing models (GPUs) to OpenAI’s knowledge facilities starting within the second half of 2026. OpenAI will use these chips primarily for inference—that’s, operating its AI merchandise comparable to ChatGPT, Sora, and its API, relatively than for coaching new fashions.

Finally, OpenAI has dedicated to buying six gigawatts price of AMD chips, and AMD has granted OpenAI warrants that might, if sure situations are met, give OpenAI rights to as much as 10% of AMD’s shares. AMD’s inventory initially jumped by greater than a 3rd on the information, earlier than ultimately closing up about 26% for the day. My colleague Sharon Goldman had extra on the deal here.

The second information merchandise yesterday was OpenAI’s announcement of a new apps feature in ChatGPT. This primarily permits ChatGPT to simply name on different providers, comparable to Spotify for music, or Expedia for journey inquiries, and ship responses from these apps instantly into the chat.

At first, this may appear to be OpenAI taking goal at the marketplace for present digital assistants, comparable to Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and the Google Assistant. All of those assistants already work together with third-party apps—Amazon known as these interactions “expertise”—to carry out features from the voice-based assistant. ChatGPT has already received over a variety of customers—its 800 million lively weekly customers tops the 600 million “Alexa-enabled” units that Amazon claims to have. And this transfer may very well be seen as a approach to stop the upgraded, LLM-powered variations of those different digital assistants from stealing again any market share.

However I believe one thing else, one thing way more profound, is definitely afoot. OpenAI needs ChatGPT to turn into nothing lower than the brand new, common interface to our digital lives. And whereas the thought of “ambient intelligence” (always-on AI that we are able to summon at any time, by voice or the contact of a button) has been round for some time, Siri and Alexa by no means lived as much as that imaginative and prescient. They merely weren’t succesful sufficient.

Now OpenAI appears to assume that with ChatGPT—maybe embedded in no matter piece of {hardware} CEO Sam Altman and former Apple designer Jonny Ive are cooking up (extra on that within the information part under)—it will possibly make ambient intelligence a actuality. Overlook AI-enabled browsers, like Perplexity’s Comet or Gemini in Chrome. If apps in ChatGPT turn into a sufficiently big ecosystem, you received’t want a browser in any respect. (Though, hedging its bets, OpenAI is reportedly additionally at work on an AI-enabled browser.)

The nice platform shift

That is the good “platform shift” folks have been anticipating since ChatGPT debuted. Now the one query is how rapidly and the way utterly customers and companies will transfer to this mannequin. What’s clear although is that if ChatGPT does turn into the common interface to all issues digital for a considerable variety of customers, OpenAI goes to want much more computing energy. Already the corporate complains that it will possibly’t get sufficient GPUs from Nvidia, the dominant AI chipmaker, to serve present wants, not to mention future ones. Therefore offers just like the one it signed with AMD.

Whereas it’s true that a part of the logic of the AMD deal is to make sure OpenAI isn’t utterly beholden to Nvidia, a variety of that is merely about making certain OpenAI has sufficient computing energy to serve its present consumer base as they eat an increasing number of tokens because of issues like the flexibility to faucet apps instantly from ChatGPT. Altman went out of his means on social media to elucidate that the AMD partnership was “incremental to our work with Nvidia” and that “the world wants far more compute.”

(In the end, OpenAI will most likely search to design its personal AI chips for inference—as lots of the hyperscalers have achieved. Altman appeared to be laying the groundwork for this throughout a latest swing by means of Asia the place he met with Samsung and SK Hynix to strike offers on high-bandwidth reminiscence chips and reportedly held dialogue with main foundry operator TSMC.) 

There are many causes to be skeptical concerning the AI infrastructure growth. It’s not clear the place the vitality to energy the 250 gigawatts’ worth of AI compute OpenAI has talked about constructing by 2033 goes to return from. It’s not clear how OpenAI will be capable to monetize its customers in a means that may pay for all of that compute. It’s not clear if the platform shift OpenAI is making an attempt to midwife will occur quick sufficient and absolutely sufficient to justify that stage of compute in that timeframe. However, if Altman is true, and AI is basically the brand new interface to all computing—a view Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has additionally endorsed—then constructing out this sort of spending begins to look much less like an insane gamble, and extra like a sound funding.

4G as an analogy for the AI infrastructure growth

That’s the bull case for AI infrastructure that was sounded final week in a note from analysts at Bank of America. They mentioned there are historic precedents for this sort of infrastructure spending when a significant platform shift is underway. They seemed on the build-out of 4G wi-fi infrastructure within the decade between 2010 and 2020 and famous that international telecoms corporations spent $1.3 trillion {dollars} on putting in new tools throughout that decade to help the know-how. What’s extra customers then spent $3.6 trillion upgrading their smartphones to benefit from 4G.

In fact, not each telecom operator got here out of that decade effectively—there have been a number of bankruptcies, and the debt wanted to construct all that 4G infrastructure was a significant driver of widespread consolidation within the business. In the meantime, a lot of the worth of the 4G shift accrued to the social media firms and apps, to not the telecom suppliers, which emerged from the infrastructure growth as arguably much less wholesome companies than they’d been stepping into: The typical debt-to-equity ratio within the business greater than doubled, for example.

However most firms survived, and the infrastructure did get used. It wasn’t Tulip Mania. We’ll see what occurs this time.

With that, right here’s extra AI information.

Jeremy Kahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
@jeremyakahn

Correction, Oct.9: A earlier model of this story gave an outdated determine for ChatGPT’s weekly lively customers.

Earlier than we get to the information, two issues. First, if you wish to know the way AI is remodeling industries and the way even non-tech firms are seeing actual ROI from the know-how, try the newest version of the Fortune AIQ Playbook. On this version, contributors John Kell and Sage Lazzaro study the strategy Honeywell has used to deploy AI throughout the corporate and why Coca-Cola says AI is “the actual factor.” That and much extra too, together with a have a look at all the women CEOs at firms within the Fortune AIQ 50, our first-of-its-kind rating of Fortune 500 firms based mostly on the maturity and success of their AI implementation.

After which, if you wish to be taught extra about how AI can assist your organization to succeed and listen to from business leaders on the place this know-how is heading, I hope you’ll take into account becoming a member of me at Fortune Brainstorm AI San Francisco on December eighth and ninth. Amongst these confirmed to seem to date embody Google Cloud chief Thomas Kurian, Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, Glean CEO Arvind Jain, Amazon’s Panos Panay, and lots of extra. Apply now to register.

With that, right here’s extra AI information.

FORTUNE ON AI

‘I think you’re testing me’: Anthropic’s newest Claude model knows when it’s being evaluated—by Beatrice Nolan

Why ‘the 26 words that made the internet’ may not protect Big Tech from legal liability in the age of AI—by Beatrice Nolan

Weather forecasting is getting harder. DeepMind’s AI just passed a real test—by Beatrice Nolan

Former Cisco CEO John Chambers navigated the dot-com crash—now he sees the same red flags with AI—by Jessica Coacci

EYE ON AI NEWS

Jeff Bezos calls AI “a bubble”—however a very good bubble. Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos mentioned synthetic intelligence is in an “industrial bubble,” with inflated valuations and widespread investor pleasure much like the dot-com period—however argued the underlying know-how is actual and transformative. Talking at Italian Tech Week in Turin, he famous that in industrial bubbles, each good and unhealthy concepts obtain funding, making it tough to separate substance from hype. Nonetheless, Bezos urged that industrial bubbles can in the end profit society, as occurred with biotech within the Nineties, by accelerating innovation that endures after weaker gamers collapse. His feedback echoed broader issues from different enterprise leaders, together with OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, about speculative excesses within the present AI growth. Learn extra from CNBC here.

Europe tries to reinforce its “AI sovereignty.” The European Fee is making ready a brand new “Apply AI Technique” geared toward boosting the EU’s technological sovereignty by selling homegrown AI instruments and lowering dependence on U.S. and Chinese language methods, in line with a draft of the plan seen by reporters for the Monetary Occasions. The draft technique doc requires accelerating adoption of European generative AI in public administration and key sectors comparable to healthcare, protection, and manufacturing, backed by €1 billion ($1.17 billion) in present funding. Brussels frames AI as a strategic asset important for industrial competitiveness and safety, warning that reliance on overseas AI infrastructure may very well be “weaponised” amid rising geopolitical tensions.

OpenAI’s secretive {hardware} mission hits technical snags. That’s in line with one other story within the Monetary Occasions, which says OpenAI and former Apple designer Jonny Ive are struggling to get the secretive system they’re constructing to work correctly forward of a deliberate launch subsequent yr. The palm-sized, screenless gadget is meant to answer customers by means of audio and visible cues, however points round computing energy, privateness, and the assistant’s “character” have slowed progress, the newspaper mentioned, citing unnamed sources acquainted with the mission’s standing.

Anthropic and IBM signal partnership. Anthropic and IBM have struck a partnership to combine Anthropic’s Claude AI fashions into IBM’s enterprise software program, starting with its built-in improvement setting—the software program during which programmers write code. IBM may even publish steerage for firms to construct and scale AI brokers utilizing Anthropic’s Mannequin Context Protocol. The transfer is a part of Anthropic’s push to deepen its already sturdy enterprise presence. Learn extra in The Wall Road Journal here.

Microsoft turns to Anthropic too, for its latest Copilot. Microsoft has launched an upgraded model of its Workplace Copilot, known as Workplace Agent, which incorporates new AI instruments for PowerPoint and Excel. However whereas Copilot was powered below the hood by OpenAI’s fashions, the Workplace Agent is basically based mostly on Anthropic’s Claude fashions. Microsoft made the swap to repair long-standing points with design high quality and spreadsheet accuracy, in line with a story in The Data, which additionally reported that the corporate is paying to entry Anthropic’s fashions by means of Amazon.

Meta acquires AI chip startup Rivos. Meta is, in line with reporting from Bloomberg Information, shopping for the small chip firm to reinforce its in-house semiconductor improvement and scale back dependence on Nvidia. Rivos had been creating its personal GPU and lately sought funding at a $2 billion valuation. The quantity Meta is paying for Rivos was not disclosed.

OpenAI buys investing app. The AI powerhouse acquired Roi, a private finance app that used an AI chatbot to offer funding recommendation. It might be a prelude to OpenAI enhancing the monetary recommendation and providers accessible by means of ChatGPT. The phrases of the deal weren’t disclosed. You possibly can learn extra here from Engadget.