Welcome back. The main thing happening today is OpenAI's second-quarter sales falling behind Anthropic's. Live 12–3 BST. Here's your Order of Play.
WHAT’S HAPPENING TODAY
According to The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI’s revenue rose 18% last quarter to $6.7 billion, but that growth was slower than investors had been promised. Anthropic, meanwhile, more than doubled its revenue to $11.6 billion, eked out a small operating profit, and overtook OpenAI in sales for the first time.
OpenAI's operating loss also widened from $9.3 billion to $12.3 billion. It subsidises hundreds of millions of users who don't pay for ChatGPT, and recently cut prices on two of its newest models as corporate customers became more cautious about AI spending.
Berber Jin, who reported the numbers, said the company's own figures were hard to pin down: "OpenAI has been tossing out a lot of vague ARR numbers, so we decided to take a deeper look."
The reporting has drawn objections. Frank Downing, director of research at ARK Invest, called the framing "hilariously outdated," pointing to a July in which ARR reportedly grew more in a single month than across the whole of Q2. Tae Kim, author of The Nvidia Way, accused the paper of a standing anti-OpenAI bias and asked why it hasn't covered the 20% month-on-month jump executives have discussed publicly.
OpenAI says the same, that growth picked back up after July's model launches. It is pointing to its new super app, which brings Codex, ChatGPT and a web browser together, and says the product is attracting users quickly.
We're diving into all of it on today's show at 12 BST.
YESTERDAY’S MOMENT
Peter Gostev, AI Capability Lead at Arena, joined us to argue that AI holds no responsibility or liability.
"Lets say that I hired claude to be my lawyer and they gave me bad advice," he said. Regardless of whether it was given a bad prompt, "how could they have liability. Its impossible."
He said the major labs have barely engaged with the problem. "What strikes me is that right now none of the tools, at least the big mainstream tools... they don't think about it at all."
Watch the conversation below.
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