Happy Monday and what a time to be live. The main thing happening today is OpenAI cutting its fundraising target by $10 billion. Live from 12-3 GMT, here's your Order of Play.
1:00 PM - Marius Meiners, Co-Founder & CEO at Peec AI
1:30 PM - Pierre Stock, VP of Science at Mistral AI
2:00 PM - Joe Diamond, CEO at Axonius
2:15PM - Peter Specht, Partner at Creandum
What’s Happening Today
OpenAI has cut its latest fundraising target by $10 billion amid growing concerns over AI spending.
It had hoped to raise $30 billion at a $1.4 trillion valuation ahead of a planned IPO next year. It's now seeking about $20 billion at a $1.25 trillion post-money valuation. OpenAI has secured around $11 billion so far, which is less than half of the original target, and the FT says some investors have cut their allocations.
A group of UAE investors including state-backed MGX is expected to be the largest participant, alongside Coatue, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz. Sam Altman is also in Abu Dhabi, where he's met with the emirate's Crown Prince. ADNOC, G42 and OpenAI also signed an agreement making ADNOC the first energy company to deploy OpenAI's technology across its operations.
The cut comes after the Nasdaq 100 fell 3.5% on Friday as Intel's 29% plunge dragged chip stocks down, capping a week in which results from Alphabet, Amazon and others deepened worries about how much AI spending is costing. OpenAI raised $122 billion in March at an $852 billion valuation, but the WSJ reports that it plans to spend around $750 billion on computing power through 2030, roughly six times that amount.
We're getting into all of it on today's show at 12 GMT.
etn. Insight
Aikido Field CTO Mackenzie Jackson came on the show and shared his thoughts on North Korea's cyber attacks.
He believes North Korea is “almost exclusively trying to get financial return from this”, while other nation states are “really targeting information, data” or trying to disrupt services. He pointed to the $1.5 billion Bybit attack, which he says North Korea was behind.
He also described another attack where hackers compromised an “open-source maintainer” whose packages were downloaded “2.6 billion times every week”. Within four hours, the malware had spread to “around about 10% of cloud accounts”. But the attackers had only installed “a crypto stealer for a very specific browser-based wallet” and managed to steal just $700.
Watch the full clip below.
Continental Breakfast
