Weekly Round Table: GPT-6 Buttons, OpenAI's Revenue Recount and a Week of Pledges

Aurelia: Good evening and welcome to the most gilded hour in broadcasting. GEN published 99 stories between October 5 and October 11, and I adored every one. The biggest: OpenAI is rolling out GPT-6 with Intelligent UI to ChatGPT users worldwide. Paying customers get GPT-6 Sol, free users get GPT-6 Luna, according to The Decoder. Answers now come with graphics, buttons, charts, forms and in-chat mini-tools like savings calculators. Buttons! The chatbot has opened a storefront!

Hari: OpenAI says responding while the model is still thinking cuts wait times by 44 percent. That is the company's number, and the rollout gives no benchmark behind it. The Decoder also notes Google shipped a similar feature to Gemini in May, called "Neural Expressive."

Zola: I want to know what separates Sol from Luna, what it costs and what the rate limits are. None of that is in the coverage yet.

Aurelia: Details, darling, are for next week. On October 6, OpenAI published 372 mathematical results from an internal frontier model on GitHub, with many proofs formalized in Lean. The company says nearly every result came from a single prompt to a single agent, averaging roughly three hours of ChatGPT Pro Thinking compute per result.

Hari: Lean proofs deserve respect, because a proof checker does not care about a press release. The count is contested, though: The Decoder says 372 results, The Verge says 722 manuscripts covering 372 result families. And 25 Fields Medal winners signed an open letter, "A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics," arguing that mass-producing true statements could destroy fertile ground for conceptual understanding.

Zola: Three hours of compute per result is a number I can price. The repo is public.

Aurelia: Now the money, which is where I live. The Financial Times reported that OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue was nearing $50 billion at the end of September. Earlier reports said $70 billion. That is a $20 billion swing, and I choose to call it a rounding adventure.

Hari: One account, relayed on X, attributes the $70 billion figure to investors trying to compare directly with Anthropic's annualized revenues. That is a person with knowledge of the matter, relayed secondhand. Annualized is a flattering word that leaves room for a lot of interpretation.

Aurelia: And yet the checkbook is reportedly open. Bloomberg reports OpenAI is in talks on a round of at least $30 billion at about a $1.4 trillion valuation, with UAE funds including MGX discussing a $10 billion investment. Still unconfirmed.

Hari: Notice the sequence. A lower annualized-revenue figure gets reported in the same week a trillion-dollar valuation is reportedly on the table.

Aurelia: More rumor row. Bloomberg reports Isomorphic Labs is in early talks at a valuation of at least $40 billion, potentially $50 billion. The Financial Times reports Nvidia is in talks to acquire or invest in Reflection AI, possibly as an acquihire. And the Wall Street Journal reports Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown brokered a SpaceX compute deal worth $1.25 billion a month. All unconfirmed. All thrilling. Quite the speculative scoreboard.

Zola: Rumors until someone signs something.

Aurelia: Confirmed money next. Waymo closed a $5 billion term loan, its first debt financing, led by Goldman Sachs, with no guarantee from Alphabet or its other equity partners. That follows a $16 billion equity round in February at a $126 billion valuation, per TechCrunch.

Hari: The coverage gives no interest rate, maturity schedule or collateral details. A loan with no parent guarantee says something about how lenders see the business. I would like to see the terms before applauding.

Aurelia: And then there's the buildout. GlobalFoundries signed a five-year, $2 billion deal with TSMC for silicon interposers made in Malta, New York, with volume production expected to ramp in the first half of 2028. According to The National, Abu Dhabi's Mubadala owns part of GlobalFoundries.

Zola: 2028. 2028. That volume ramp is not a next-quarter story. Whether TSMC packages them in the U.S. or overseas is still open.

Aurelia: Not every shimmer holds. Nvidia-backed Firmus scrapped its Australian IPO amid weak demand and market volatility. Nikkei quotes Rosenberg: "The offer was too rich for a company with 46 megawatts built out of 912 MW contracted." Reported valuations run from AU$43.9 billion at Nikkei to roughly $30 billion at Reuters and the WSJ.

Hari: Several reported valuations, two currencies, and the market chose none of them.

Aurelia: Now the Washington sparkle. Demis Hassabis announced that Google pledged $150 million to the Genesis Mission. Per the White House, eleven industry partners are in a $2.4 billion package of SI tools and compute credits, led by Nvidia's $1 billion over five years for quantum computing, healthcare and energy security.

Hari: The White House says $2.4 billion. Adding the individual line items gives $2.5 billion. Someone owes someone a calculator.

Zola: Same caveat on the $1.8 billion Biohub, DOE and NIH commitment for the Virtual Biology Initiative, announced October 7. How much is new cash versus in-kind compute, existing datasets and equipment is unclear, and the same question hangs over Nvidia's pledge. Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs and Meta committed $300 million collectively, with no split given.

Aurelia: A comeback now, my favorite genre. Butterfly Effect, the parent of Manus, raised more than $500 million led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital at about a $4 billion valuation. According to Zaobao, Meta bought it in December for over $2 billion, and Beijing halted that in April. Manus resumed independent operations on September 1.

Zola: On the model shelf, Mistral put Mistral Large 4 in public preview on October 6, trained, it says, on 3,800 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs in European datacenters. Mistral claims 82 percent on reproducing and patching real open-source vulnerabilities, and says Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra scored near zero because of safety refusals.

Hari: A benchmark where rivals score near zero because they refused is measuring something, but not necessarily capability.

Aurelia: The week's one shadow. OpenAI fired safety researchers Mikita Balesni, Tomek Korbak and Jasmine Wang, and the story is contested on both sides. OpenAI says its investigation "confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work." The researchers say they were retaliated against for raising safety concerns.

Hari: Korbak says he was OpenAI's "main technical point of contact" with METR on the Hugging Face investigation. CNN says all three were involved in that probe, NPR says two of three. You have competing accounts, and this coverage does not specify what information was allegedly mishandled.

Aurelia: So what did the week add up to?

Hari: A week of claims stacked on claims. Self-reported speedups, conflicting revenue figures, pledges whose cash content is unclear.

Zola: And physical limits. Firmus has 46 megawatts built. GPT-6 is rolling out; those interposers are a 2028 prospect.

Aurelia: I see Gulf capital, Washington pledges and Wall Street lenders all lining up behind SI. Golden.

Zola: Next week: whether OpenAI details Sol versus Luna, and whether any of the rumored deals get confirmed.

Hari: I will watch for the outcome of the formal review of OpenAI's Navier-Stokes solution, and any account of what the fired researchers allegedly mishandled.

Aurelia: And I will watch every number go up. Good night, and stay gilded.

Fool's Gold scoreboard

14 rumors ran this week: 4 confirmed, 10 still open.

• Anthropic's Reported $1.25B-a-Month SpaceX Deal Raises Timeline Questions: confirmed.
• OpenAI reportedly seeks $30 billion at $1.4 trillion valuation, UAE funds in talks: still open.
• Nvidia in talks to acquire Reflection AI, FT reports: still open.
• Isomorphic Labs Reportedly in Funding Talks at $40 Billion-Plus Valuation: still open.
• Nuvacore, a Six-Month-Old Chip Startup With No Product, Reportedly Seeks $2.5 Billion Valuation: still open.
• SoftBank's Son Reportedly Seeks $100 Billion From Gulf Investors for AI Fund: still open.
• Yandex Sasovo Data Center Reportedly Hit by Drones; Company Acknowledges Incident: confirmed.
• Anthropic Reportedly Signs Multiyear IREN Cloud Deal: still open.
• Firmus IPO Reportedly Closes Books Amid Weak Demand, Putting A$43.7 Billion Listing at Risk: confirmed.
• Axios Reports OpenAI, Anthropic Plan for Public Revolt After Catastrophic AI Event: still open.
• Anthropic's Agents Reportedly Filed 20 Visa Applications Through a State Department Form: confirmed.
• Nvidia RTX 5090 Rumor: Leakers Say GB202 Chips Are Headed to RTX Pro: still open.
• Unconfirmed: X Account Says Unnamed Graph Proves AI Is Hitting White-Collar Jobs: still open.
• Rumor: Adam Cochran alleges Trump-linked insiders bought .si domains before SI rename: still open.

On the desk, not published

Stories we weighed that week and did not run, with the reason. Unconfirmed until someone confirms them.

• Amazon Reportedly in Talks to Acquire AI Startup Decart. Reported by Bloomberg Tech, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, carried by Investing.com. A sourced rumor that did not make the Fool's Gold slots.
• Broadcom reportedly arranging over $50 billion for OpenAI chip project. Reported by Bloomberg Tech, WSJ, Bloomberg Law. A sourced rumor that did not make the Fool's Gold slots.
• AI cloud provider Lambda seeks up to $4 billion in funding. Reported by TechCrunch AI, The Wall Street Journal, Dealroom News. Below the line for the day.
• SpaceX-Anthropic Deal Reportedly Reaches $84.5 Billion Through 2029. Reported by The Information, Seeking Alpha, a Reddit post. One outlet had it, no primary source to confirm.
• X Account Claims Anthropic Agents Tried to Access U.S. Government Sites. Reported by Anthropic, Bloomberg Tech, The Washington Post. Written, but it did not get past our standards editor.
• Non-Text AI Model Maker Jev Valued at $7.5 Billion. Reported by Bloomberg Law, TechCrunch, Times of SF. Written, but it did not get past our standards editor.

The desk read 7,145 items, evaluated 549 stories and published 99.