🕶️ The secret hole in OpenAI’s armor

A presidential demand, a CEO under fire, and a global tech race with billions at stake — all in one heated showdown.

Author

Lucila Sarquis
August 09, 2025

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AI’s making waves — and a few splashes. Pinterest says shopping bots aren’t ready yet, but Google Finance just got an AI glow-up. Meta’s buying its way into AI audio, a Swedish startup’s making stem cells dirt-cheap, and Apple’s losing its AI brain trust. Oh, and there’s a $3B coding startup sale to spice things up.

Video pick: The WORST founder betrayal in startup history

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Ten bullets of updates

  1. 🛍️ Pinterest CEO says AI shopping agents are still far off, as the company reports $998M revenue but misses earnings expectations

  2. đź“Š Google Finance gets an AI makeover with advanced charts and live news to challenge Yahoo Finance

  3. 🕵🏻 Trump demands Intel CEO resignation due to  ties to Chinese tech , spotlighting a $45B market rivalry.

  4. 🎙️ Meta acquires AI audio startup WaveForms, which raised $40M, to boost its Superintelligence Labs

  5. 🧬 Swedish startup plans to cut MSC prices by 90%, offering 200 doses from 50ml of marrow, marking a milestone in stem cells at scale

  6. đź’» AI coding startup Windsurf faces high costs and thin margins, leading to a $3B sale to Cognition after an OpenAI deal fell through

  7. đź’§ SpaceX is building a water pipeline to Starbase, with the 60K gallons/day cap set to be lifted, affecting local access

  8. đź’ł Brex secures an EU license, enabling spend management services across 30 countries and eyeing the UK next amid $500M revenue forecast

  9. 🙋‍♂️ Apple's AI talent drain sees a dozen top researchers leaving amid doubts on AI progress.

  10. đź‘€ Researchers found a vulnerability in OpenAI's Connectors allowing data extraction from Google Drive without user interaction.

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OpenAI’s GPT-5: cheaper, smarter, and ready to start a fight

Sam Altman with ChatGPT logo blurry background. New York, US - 04 Apr 2025 // www.shutterstock.com

OpenAI made waves this week by launching its flagship GPT-5 model just days after releasing two open-source models, positioning it as “the best model in the world” and undercutting competitors with aggressive pricing. GPT-5 performs strongly across a range of tasks, particularly coding, and costs $1.25 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens — well below Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.1 rates and competitive with Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro.

The move has been praised by developers and industry voices as a potential “pricing killer”, raising speculation of a long-anticipated LLM price war. While such a shift could ease the financial strain on AI startups and coding tool providers, it remains to be seen if rivals will match these cuts, especially given the massive infrastructure investments by tech giants like Meta, Alphabet, and OpenAI itself.

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The WORST founder betrayal in startup history

We dive into the surprising true story behind Snapchat's billion-dollar success. While the two well-known co-founders are credited with creating the app, the real genius behind the idea was Reggie Brown. But a crucial mistake led him to lose out on billions. Watch as we break down the legal battle, the investigation by Billy Gallager, and the leaked deposition of Evan Spiegel to piece together this drama. Who really deserves credit for Snapchat's success? You decide.

🕶️ More videos here đź•¶ď¸Ź 

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Former Zillow exec targets $1.3T

The top companies target big markets. Like Nvidia growing ~200% in 2024 on AI’s $214B tailwind. That’s why the same VCs behind Uber and Venmo also backed Pacaso. Created by a former Zillow exec, Pacaso’s co-ownership tech transforms a $1.3 trillion market. With $110M+ in gross profit to date, Pacaso just reserved the Nasdaq ticker PCSO.

Paid advertisement for Pacaso’s Regulation A offering. Read the offering circular at invest.pacaso.com. Reserving a ticker symbol is not a guarantee that the company will go public. Listing on the NASDAQ is subject to approvals.

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SaaS Growth Calculator

A growth calculator that lets you forecast the impact of your ARPU (average revenue per user) and Churn Rate on the long-term potential of your subscription business.

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Used by Execs at Google and OpenAI

Join 400,000+ professionals who rely on The AI Report to work smarter with AI.

Delivered daily, it breaks down tools, prompts, and real use cases—so you can implement AI without wasting time.

If they’re reading it, why aren’t you?

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 Tesla workers start DensityAI

Around 20 engineers exited Tesla’s AI team to spin up DensityAI, a new data center player now surfing the wave left after the shock decision to shut down Dojo, the hyped AI supercomputer once billed as essential for Tesla’s self-driving dreams.

Clearly, not everyone wanted to watch their work get mothballed. The DensityAI upstarts are betting big on custom infrastructure for large-scale AI, which means fresh competition in the land grab for GPU capacity and generative compute. Expect venture funds to circle—if ex-Tesla engineers can’t raise in this climate, who can?

With the push from hyperscaler cloud to on-prem talent, chasing new ways to train LLMs at scale just got a little less Tesla-branded and a lot more unpredictable.

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Master ChatGPT for Work Success

ChatGPT is revolutionizing how we work, but most people barely scratch the surface. Subscribe to Mindstream for free and unlock 5 essential resources including templates, workflows, and expert strategies for 2025. Whether you're writing emails, analyzing data, or streamlining tasks, this bundle shows you exactly how to save hours every week.

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Startup Events and Deadlines

  1. Startupbootcamp | Energy & Sustainability | Deadline: Aug 10 | South Africa

  2. Startupbootcamp | Health & LifeScience | Deadline: Aug 10 | Netherlands

  3. New York Venture Summit | 9, 10 Sept | NYC

  4. Antler Canada | Deadline: Sept 29 | Canada

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