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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the OpenAI DevDay event on November 06, 2023 in San Francisco, California. Altman delivered the keynote address at the first ever Open AI DevDay conference. 

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

OpenAI announced its new, more powerful GPT-4 Turbo artificial intelligence model Monday during its first in-person event, and revealed a new option that will let users create custom versions of its viral ChatGPT chatbot. It’s also cutting prices on the fees that companies and developers pay to run its software.

OpenAI’s announcements show that one of the hottest companies in tech is rapidly evolving its offerings in an effort to stay ahead of rivals like Anthropic, Google and Meta in the AI arms race. ChatGPT, which broke records as the fastest-growing consumer app in history months after its launch, now has about 100 million weekly active users, OpenAI said Monday. More than 92% of Fortune 500 companies use the platform, up from 80% in August, and they span across industries like financial services, legal applications and education, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati told reporters Monday.

The event also included a surprise appearance by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

“The systems that are needed as you aggressively push forward on your road map require us to be on the top of our game, and we intend fully to commit ourselves fully to making sure you all… have not only the best systems for training and inference, but also the most compute,” Nadella told OpenAI CEO Sam Altman while onstage together. He added, “That’s the way we’re going to make progress.”

Earlier this year, Microsoft‘s expanded investment in OpenAI — an additional $10 billion — made it the biggest AI investment of the year, according to PitchBook, and in April, the startup reportedly closed a $300 million share sale at a valuation between $27 billion and $29 billion, with investments from firms such as Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. As recently as last month, OpenAI was reportedly in talks to close a deal that would lead to an $80 billion valuation.

In his speech Monday, Altman said the day’s announcements came from conversations with developers about their needs over the past year. And when it comes to GPT-5, Altman told reporters, “We want to do it, but we don’t have a timeline.”

Here’s what OpenAI announced Monday:

GPT-4 Turbo

OpenAI ChatGPT

GPT-4 Turbo is the latest AI model, and it now provides answers with context up to April 2023. Prior versions were cut off at January 2022. For example, if you asked GPT-4 who won the Super Bowl in February 2022, it wouldn’t have been able to tell you. GPT-4 Turbo can.

“We are just as annoyed as all of you, probably more, that GPT’s knowledge about the world ended in 2021,” Altman said in a speech Monday.

It also accepts a lot more input. While earlier versions limited you to about 3,000 words, the GPT-4 Turbo accepts inputs of up to 300 pages in length. It means you could ask it to summarize entire books.

GPT-4 also supports DALL-E 3 AI-generated images and text-to-speech. It also has six preset voices to choose from, so you can choose to hear the answer to a query in a variety of different voices.

OpenAI said GPT-4 Turbo is available in preview for developers now and will be released to all in the coming weeks.

OpenAI said it’s also cutting the prices for developers. “GPT-4 Turbo input tokens are 3x cheaper than GPT-4 at $0.01 and output tokens are 2x cheaper at $0.03,” the company said, which means companies and developers should save more when running lots of information through the AI models.

Personalized chatbots

Personalized chatbot builder

OpenAI

Until now, ChatGPT’s enterprise and business offerings were the only way people could upload their own data to train and customize the chatbot for particular industries and use cases. Now it’s adding the option for anyone to create custom chatbots.

AI “agents” are one of the buzziest uses of the technology recently, with many startups vying to offer the kind of personalized AI tools that consumers may already be familiar with via pop culture representations, such as Tony Stark’s J.A.R.V.I.S. in Marvel movies, or Pam in Disney Channel’s Smart House.

“Anyone can easily build their own GPT—no coding is required,” the company wrote in a release. “You can make them for yourself, just for your company’s internal use, or for everyone. Creating one is as easy as starting a conversation, giving it instructions and extra knowledge, and picking what it can do, like searching the web, making images or analyzing data.”

More than two million developers building their own tools using ChatGPT’s API will also be able to customize the chatbot, meaning consumers will likely see personalized AI chatbots popping up in many more places, including apps and websites they use regularly.

Open AI’s version of the App Store

OpenAI GPT Store

OpenAI

Now that users and developers can launch their own, personalized AI chatbots, OpenAI is introducing a new revenue driver for the company: Its own version of the app store.

The GPT Store allows people who create their own GPTs to make them available for public download, and in the coming months, OpenAI said people will be able to earn money based on their creation’s usage numbers.

“Once in the store, GPTs become searchable and may climb the leaderboards,” the company wrote in a release. “We will also spotlight the most useful and delightful GPTs we come across in categories like productivity, education, and ‘just for fun.'”

As for revenue share for people who create custom chatbots featured in the store, the company will start with “just sharing a part of the subscription revenue overall,” Altman told reporters Monday. Right now, the company is planning to base the payout on active users plus category bonuses, and may support subscriptions for specific GPTs later.

“What OpenAI is really in the business of selling is intelligence — and that, and intelligent agents, is really where it will trend over time,” Altman told reporters.

New all-in-one image-generation, browsing and summarization

Until Monday, ChatGPT users had to hop between different apps and websites to use all of OpenAI’s tools, which contributed to a slightly higher learning curve. On Monday, the company announced it has streamlined its AI tools into one place: Using ChatGPT now offers image generation via DALL-E, browsing, data analysis, document upload and PDF search. Before now, Anthropic’s Claude was the only competitor chatbot to allow PDF search.

Copyright shield

As generative AI-related legal action is on the rise, Altman announced Monday that OpenAI will “step in and defend our customers” and “pay the costs incurred if you face legal claims around copyright infringement.” It echoes similar statements made by Google, Microsoft and Adobe.

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Tech founders call on Sequoia Capital to denounce VC Shaun Maguire’s Mamdani comments

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Tech founders call on Sequoia Capital to denounce VC Shaun Maguire's Mamdani comments

Almost 600 people have signed an open letter to leaders at venture firm Sequoia Capital after one of its partners, Shaun Maguire, posted what the group described as a “deliberate, inflammatory attack” against the Muslim Democratic mayoral candidate in New York City.

Maguire, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, posted on X over the weekend that Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic primary last month, “comes from a culture that lies about everything” and is out to advance “his Islamist agenda.”

The post had 5.3 million views as of Monday afternoon. Maguire, whose investments include Elon Musk’s SpaceX and X as well as artificial intelligence startup Safe Superintelligence, also published a video on X explaining the remark.

Those signing the letter are asking Sequoia to condemn Maguire’s comments and apologize to Mamdani and Muslim founders. They also want the firm to authorize an independent investigation of Maguire’s behavior in the past two years and post “a zero-tolerance policy on hate speech and religious bigotry.”

They are asking the firm for a public response by July 14, or “we will proceed with broader public disclosure, media outreach and mobilizing our networks to ensure accountability,” the letter says.

Sequoia declined to comment. Maguire didn’t respond to a request for comment, but wrote in a post about the letter on Wednesday that, “You can try everything you want to silence me, but it will just embolden me.”

Among the signees are Mudassir Sheikha, CEO of ride-hailing service Careem, and Amr Awadallah, CEO of AI startup Vectara. Also on the list is Abubakar Abid, who works in machine learning Hugging Face, which is backed by Sequoia, and Ahmed Sabbah, CEO of Telda, a financial technology startup that Sequoia first invested in four years ago.

At least three founders of startups that have gone through startup accelerator program Y Combinator added their names to the letter.

Sequoia as a firm is no stranger to politics. Doug Leone, who led the firm until 2022 and remains a partner, is a longtime Republican donor, who supported Trump in the 2024 election. Following Trump’s victory in November, Leone posted on X, “To all Trump voters:  you no longer have to hide in the shadows…..you’re the majority!!”

By contrast, Leone’s predecessor, Mike Moritz, is a Democratic megadonor, who criticized Trump and, in August, slammed his colleagues in the tech industry for lining up behind the Republican nominee. In a Financial Times opinion piece, Moritz wrote Trump’s tech supporters were “making a big mistake.”

“I doubt whether any of them would want him as part of an investment syndicate that they organised,” wrote Moritz, who stepped down from Sequoia in 2023, over a decade after giving up a management role at the firm. “Why then do they dismiss his recent criminal conviction as nothing more than a politically inspired witch-hunt over a simple book-keeping error?”

Neither Leone nor Moritz returned messages seeking comment.

Roelof Botha, Sequoia’s current lead partner, has taken a more neutral stance. Botha said at an event last July that Sequoia as a partnership doesn’t “take a political point of view,” adding that he’s “not a registered member of either party.” Boelof said he’s “proud of the fact that we’ve enabled many of our partners to express their respected individual views along the way, and given them that freedom.”

Maguire has long been open with his political views. He said on X last year that he had “just donated $300k to President Trump.”

Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, has gained the ire of many people in tech and in the business community more broadly since defeating former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the June primary.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

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Samsung expects second-quarter profits to more than halve as it struggles to capture AI demand

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Samsung expects second-quarter profits to more than halve as it struggles to capture AI demand

Samsung signage during the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California, US, on Thursday, March 20, 2025.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics on Tuesday forecast a 56% fall in profits for the second as the company struggles to capture demand from artificial intelligence chip leader Nvidia. 

The memory chip and smartphone maker said in its guidance that operating profit for the quarter ending June was projected to be around 4.6 trillion won, down from 10.44 trillion Korean won year over year.

The figure is a deeper plunge compared to smart estimates from LSEG, which are weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate.

According to the smart estimates, Samsung was expected to post an operating profit of 6.26 trillion won ($4.57 billion) for the quarter. Meanwhile, Samsung projected its revenue to hit 74 trillion won, falling short of LSEG smart estimates of 75.55 trillion won.

Samsung is a leading player in the global smartphone market and is also one of the world’s largest makers of memory chips, which are utilized in devices such as laptops and servers.

However, the company has been falling behind competitors like SK Hynix and Micron in high-bandwidth memory chips — an advanced type of memory that is being deployed in AI chips.

“The disappointing earnings are due to ongoing operating losses in the foundry business, while the upside in high-margin HBM business remains muted this quarter,” MS Hwang, Research Director at Counterpoint Research, said about the earnings guidance.

SK Hynix, the leader in HBM, has secured a position as Nvidia’s key supplier. While Samsung has reportedly been working to get the latest version of its HBM chips certified by Nvidia, a report from a local outlet suggests these plans have been pushed back to at least September.

The company did not respond to a request for comment on the status of its deals with Nvidia.

Ray Wang, Research Director of Semiconductors, Supply Chain and Emerging Technology at Futurum Group told CNBC that it is clear that Samsung has yet to pass Nvidia’s qualification for its most advanced HBM.

“Given that Nvidia accounts for roughly 70% of global HBM demand, the delay meaningfully caps near-term upside,” Wang said. He noted that while Samsung has secured some HBM supply for AI processors from AMD, this win is unlikely to contribute to second-quarter results due to the timing of production ramps.

Meanwhile, Samsung’s chip foundry business continues to face weak orders and serious competition from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Wang added.

Reuters reported in September that Samsung had instructed its subsidiaries worldwide to cut 30% of staff in some divisions, citing sources familiar with the matter.

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Waymo to begin testing in Philadelphia with safety drivers behind the wheel

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Waymo to begin testing in Philadelphia with safety drivers behind the wheel

A Waymo autonomous self-driving Jaguar electric vehicle sits parked at an EVgo charging station in Los Angeles, California, on May 15, 2024.

Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images

Waymo said it will begin testing in Philadelphia, with a limited fleet of vehicles and human safety drivers behind the wheel.

“This city is a National Treasure,” Waymo wrote in a post on X on Monday. “It’s a city of love, where eagles fly with a gritty spirit and cheese that spreads and cheese that steaks. Our road trip continues to Philly next.”

The Alphabet-owned company confirmed to CNBC that it will be testing in Pennsylvania’s largest city through the fall, adding that the initial fleet of cars will be manually driven through the more complex parts of Philadelphia, including downtown and on freeways.

“Folks will see our vehicles driving at all hours throughout various neighborhoods, from North Central to Eastwick, and from University City to as far east as the Delaware River,” a Waymo spokesperson said.

With its so-called road trips, Waymo seeks to collect mapping data and evaluate how its autonomous technology, Waymo Driver, performs in new environments, handling traffic patterns and local infrastructure. Road trips are often used a way for the company to gauge whether it can potentially offer a paid ride share service in a particular location.

The expanded testing, which will go through the fall, comes as Waymo aims for a broader rollout. Last month, the company announced plans to drive vehicles manually in New York for testing, marking the first step toward potentially cracking the largest U.S. city. Waymo applied for a permit with the New York City Department of Transportation to operate autonomously with a trained specialist behind the wheel in Manhattan. State law currently doesn’t allow for such driverless operations.

Waymo One provides more than 250,000 paid trips each week across Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, Texas, and is preparing to bring fully autonomous rides to Atlanta, Miami, and Washington, D.C., in 2026.

Alphabet has been under pressure to monetize artificial intelligence products as it bolsters spending on infrastructure. Alphabet’s “Other Bets” segment, which includes Waymo, brought in revenue of $1.65 billion in 2024, up from $1.53 billion in 2023. However, the segment lost $4.44 billion last year, compared to a loss of $4.09 billion the previous year.

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