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Just when you thought the checkbooks couldn’t get any bigger, Masayoshi Son is reportedly ready to double down on his OpenAI bet.
SoftBank is said to be in advanced talks to lead a new funding round for the Sam Altman-led company. The Japanese investor’s participation alone comprises US$30 billion, according to reports last week.
These eye-watering numbers might not make sense to us, but it seems like investors are buying it.
Meta recently said it plans to spend US$135 billion in capital expenditure this year. Investors are also loving the news, with the Mark Zuckerberg-led company’s stock climbing around 10% right after the announcement was made.
But even as AI titans continue to pull in big bucks, questions are mounting over whether their products can justify the spending.
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There’s a chorus of critics getting louder, pointing out that Silicon Valley is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure for LLMs and agents that don’t generate the revenue to match these investments.
So these companies need to suck more money out of us. This is evident in OpenAI’s plans to integrate ads into ChatGPT, even if Altman himself said just over a year ago that ads were a “last resort” for them, income-wise.
This also brings us to agentic commerce, the subject of today’s top AI read. My colleague Scott notes that experts are predicting a rapid rollout where OpenAI and Google transform their chat windows into checkout counters. Major retailers like Walmart, Target, and Shopify are already on board, integrating their systems to allow AI agents to handle orders directly.
Meanwhile, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei provided a sharper warning last week by suggesting that “powerful AI” could come to us soon, and they could morph into a “country of geniuses in a data center.”
With hundreds of billions at stake, OpenAI’s shift toward advertising, the huge bets on agentic commerce, and expansive visions of “powerful AI” underscores the growing pressure to make the economics of AI add up.
The question is whether any of this will actually make our lives better.
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