OpenAI is now valued at $1.25 trillion in a new round of funding that has raised another $11 billion, according to Bloomberg. That would make it one of the world's most valuable companies, not long after raising $122 billion from investors in March at a valuation of $852 billion.

Echoing FT and Wall Street Journal reports from last week, Bloomberg says OpenAI is still pursuing additional investments that could increase the amount to $20 billion, and that it had initially hoped to raise as much as $30 billion at a higher valuation of $1.4 trillion. That was before tech stocks dropped, and the results of the midterms showed how much public o …

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On Tuesday, millions of American voters went to the polls and voted overwhelmingly for Democrats and against AI. The fight against Big Tech is about to come roaring back, and the fight over data centers is looking even harder for the folks trying to build them.

On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay and David discuss what the 2026 midterms mean for the tech industry going forward. They dig into the self-quarantining echo chamber that is X, the congressional energy likely to be pointed at tech CEOs and AI regulation, and whether anything is actually likely to get done in the next two years.

After that, the hosts turn to AI. Specifically, …

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Following this week's midterms where voters resoundingly voiced their opposition to data center expansion, OpenAI today announced new commitments to communities where it is working on data center projects, including that it won't use non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with public officials.

Many data center projects have come under scrutiny for relying on NDAs to hide discussions between developers and local officials. However, OpenAI says it is now allowing "only narrow protections covering legitimate security information, trade secrets, or proprietary or competitively sensitive information." In October, Amazon announced it would no longer u …

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OpenAI is launching GPT-6 Cyber, the latest version of its cybersecurity AI model, which it says is better at finding vulnerabilities and less likely to go rogue and hack other platforms in the process. OpenAI says that during testing, GPT-6 Cyber went out of bounds less than 1 percent of the time, down from around 5 percent with GPT-5.6 Cyber.

The evaluation, called ExploitGym HoneyPot, is modeled after the Hugging Face Incident, in which OpenAI's AI agents breached the open-source AI community to find answers to a problem they were tasked with solving. "With the 6 Cyber model, we were able to make huge improvements on this evaluation," Fo …

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ChatGPT can now create GIFs using a prompt or a photo uploaded to the AI chatbot. The update, which is rolling out alongside OpenAI's new Images 2.6 model, allows you to adjust the GIF's animation speed, edit individual frames, and share it with others.

Before this change, ChatGPT couldn't natively generate GIFs in a single step. An example shared by the company shows how ChatGPT can generate a GIF in response to the prompt, "can you make a gif of a cat dancing?" while also providing you with the option to change the playback speed and view it frame by frame.

Along with support for GIF-making, the Images 2.6 update also enables faster imag …

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spent election night defending his position on PC RAM purchases. He changed his name on X to "Ram Altman" in response to another user's comment, saying, "i actually do want the world to have tons of memory and people to put as much as they want in their computers, and it is fucking annoying that this was taken out of context. i have been arguing for the world to ramp up memory production for a long time."

He replied to another comment, saying, "i want you to have so much ram lets build more."

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In many circles, "Ask Chat" has replaced "Google it," and that's reflected in a new announcement from OpenAI: the volume of search queries run through ChatGPT now equals 20 percent of the volume run through Google.

Adam Fry, OpenAI's consumer product lead for ChatGPT, made the announcement at a press event on Monday. He said the company defines a search as any time a user inputs a query that results in a web search, as opposed to tasks like defining a term or a simple how-to explanation. (Fry did not specify the source of the Google search volume number.)

Having one-fifth as many searches as Google is still a long way from overtaking it, b …

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People hate data centers. They're loud, resource-hungry eyesores that are so profoundly unpopular they have managed to achieve the near-impossible in today's polarized political landscape: genuine bipartisan opposition. But what about "compute campuses"? Those sound lovely, right?

OpenAI seems to be gambling that a quiet rebrand could be all it takes to defuse the growing political backlash that threatens to derail the infrastructure fueling the AI boom.

OpenAI debuted the new terminology on Monday in an announcement launching its new "Grid Protectors Program." The initiative, starting with an upcoming site in Effingham County, Georgia, ai …

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In an announcement on Monday, OpenAI says it will pilot its "Grid Protectors Program" at an upcoming data center in Effingham County, Georgia, where the company promises to free up to 1,000 megawatts of power during extreme weather or emergencies, enough to power air conditioners in around 700,000 homes.

The announcement comes as opposition to data centers spreads across the US, in response to massive projects that have begun development and construction, frequently with little or no input from local residents. In Utah, residents protested after Box Elder County commissioners signed off on a data center expected to consume more than double …

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Asked about supply chain shortages, like the ongoing RAM shortage, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview that it's "terrible" to have RAM in personal PCs instead of data centers. During his appearance on the Cheeky Pint podcast, where he also commented on AI's impact on math, Altman said:

"A lot of people want local inference. And somehow, they assume that the problem is solved now because we are going to have open-source models, we're going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we're not going to need all the stuff in the data center.

But from a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybo …

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After months of bombarding mathematicians with a relentless stream of AI-generated results, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he sympathizes with researchers struggling to make sense of it all. But he has no intention of stopping - and hints there could be much more to come from the company's stockpile of discoveries.

"I think, on net, the world deserves to understand how the universe works," Altman said during an episode of the Cheeky Pint podcast released Thursday. "But I do have empathy for the method."

His comments mark one of the first times the OpenAI chief has directly acknowledged the company's impact on mathematicians, following a strin …

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