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Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, at the Hope Global Forums annual meeting in Atlanta on Dec. 11, 2023.

Dustin Chambers | Bloomberg | Getty Images

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has admitted that he was surprised by the popularity of ChatGPT, which was released as a research project a little more than a year ago. His team had spent an entire meeting debating whether it was worth even opening up the chatbot to the public.

As it turns out, OpenAI’s decision to launch ChatGPT in November 2022 became the defining moment for generative artificial intelligence and set the stage for a rush of investments and a mountain of new products and services in 2023.

Some form of generative AI has made its way into virtually every industry, from financial services to biomedical research. Some 95% of utility and energy companies are discussing using generative AI algorithms, according to a July survey

To see the financial effect of the generative AI rush, you need only to look at Nvidia’s bottom line. The chipmaker’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, are at the heart of the large language models created by OpenAI as well as those from Alphabet, Meta and a growing crop of heavily funded startups all battling for a slice of the generative AI pie.

Through the first three quarters of 2023, Nvidia generated $17.5 billion in net income, up more than sixfold from a year earlier. Its stock price jumped 237% this year, far exceeding any other member of the S&P 500.

Generative AI quickly became the buzzy phrase for corporate earnings calls, as every company needed a narrative. Sometimes, the story was painful, such as when digital education company Chegg said in May that it was seeing a “significant spike in student interest in ChatGPT,” which appears to be “having an impact on our new customer growth rate.” The stock plunged 48% in one day following the warning.

Perhaps no company was less prepared for the generative AI boom than OpenAI itself. In November, Altman was suddenly ousted by the board for a dispute that reportedly had to do with his aggressive push to develop new commercial products at the expense of safety. However, Altman quickly returned to the helm after employees threatened to flee and large investors banded together to fight for his reinstatement.

The public spat included a reshuffling of OpenAI’s board and shined a bright light on the debate raging between AI skeptics and evangelists. While advances in generative AI showcase the potential for technology to unlock all sorts of business opportunities and efficiencies, fears of the algorithms’ perceived power gained equal resonance. Some of the real-life harms for minorities and vulnerable populations showed up in FTC proposals, wrongful arrests, contaminated datasets and more.

Here were some of the key areas for generative AI advancements in 2023: 

The Anthropic website on a laptop arranged in New York on Aug. 15, 2023.

Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Chatbots

ChatGPT opened up the floodgates for investments in chatbots, as it became clear how the input of a few words could produce more thorough and creative responses than ever before.

Nearly two months after launch, ChatGPT broke records as the fastest-growing consumer app in history — until Meta’s Threads dethroned it last summer. ChatGPT now has about 100 million weekly active users, along with more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies using the platform, according to OpenAI. 

Earlier this year, Microsoft plunged an additional $10 billion in the company, making it the biggest AI investment of the year, according to PitchBook, and OpenAI is in talks to sell employee shares at a price that would suggest a valuation of $86 billion. According to Bloomberg, the company is in discussions to potentially raise capital at a valuation of $100 billion or more.

Google was caught off guard by ChatGPT’s success and responded by accelerating the public release of its Bard chatbot, powered by its LLM called LaMDA, which stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications.

Google has been rolling out new Bard features, including integrations with Google Search and a YouTube extension, and recently released Gemini, the new and buzzy AI model to power Bard. Gemini’s launch this month involved a marketing blitz and controversy over an edited video promoting the model’s capabilities. 

In addition to its internal investments, Google is one of many big names behind Anthropic, an AI startup that’s currently in talks to raise $750 million at a valuation of $18.4 billion. Founded by former OpenAI research executives, Anthropic is the developer of the chatbot Claude.

In July, Anthropic debuted Claude 2, and said it has the ability to summarize up to about 75,000 words, which could be the length of a book. Users can input large datasets and ask for summaries in the form of a memo, letter or story.

As a category, new generative AI chatbots have been used this year to answer questions about business strategy, as well as to design study guides, offer advice on salary negotiation and spark creative writing prompts. They’ve even assisted in writing wedding vows. 

“It’s probably one of the most influential step function changes in technology that we’ve seen,” Jill Chase, investment partner at CapitalG Ventures, told CNBC. Chase said it’s up there with the dawn of the internet and the shift to mobile. “Things like that just open up people’s imaginations,” she said.

Academics and ethicists have voiced significant concerns about the technology’s tendency to fabricate information and to propagate bias. Still, it has quickly made its way into schools, online travel, the medical industry, digital advertising and beyond. Microsoft and IBM have invested increasing amounts in enterprise AI offerings, including development studios for companies to personalize the use of LLMs. 

There are plenty of detractors.

Publishers, artists, writers and technologists have been pushed to pursue legal action against companies behind popular generative AI tools, out of concern that their creative content is being used as free training data. John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and other prominent authors sued OpenAI in September over alleged copyright infringement.

This photo taken on Jan. 31, 2023, shows an artificial intelligence manga artist, who goes by the name Rootport, wearing gloves to protect his identity, demonstrating how he produces AI manga during an interview with AFP in Tokyo.

Richard A. Brooks | Afp | Getty Images

Image and video generation 

Generative AI for images and video emerged in 2022, due to powerful image generators such as OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and video-generation AI tools from Meta, Google and Amazon

While interest in those technologies continues, progress has waned compared to chatbots, according to Brendan Burke, an analyst at PitchBook. 

“Multimedia content generation has fallen behind language in the pace of progress,” Burke told CNBC. “The initial excitement with Stable Diffusion in 2022 exposed both the general interest but also the drawbacks of AI content generation. Progress has been incremental this year, yet still disappointing for the most sophisticated content creators.”

Meta’s Instagram recently debuted a feature that allows users to change the background of Stories posts using AI. Google and Amazon have incorporated generative AI tools into advertising technology to create more appealing marketing images.

Some industry leaders say the future of generative AI is “multimodal,” bringing the various mediums together.

“The world is multimodal,” Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s operating chief, told CNBC in a recent interview. “If you think about the way we as humans process the world and engage with the world, we see things, we hear things, we say things. The world is much bigger than text. So to us, it always felt incomplete for text and code to be the single modalities, the single interfaces that we could have to how powerful these models are and what they can do.”

Agents and assistants

After the chatbot comes the agent.

It’s not just about getting sophisticated answers, but it’s also about using generative AI to be productive in completing tasks. That could be scheduling a group hangout by scanning everyone’s calendar to make sure there are no conflicts, booking travel and activities, buying presents for loved ones or doing a specific job function such as outbound sales.

Last month, OpenAI announced custom GPTs, or customized, niche versions of ChatGPT that users can personalize for getting travel recommendations, recipe help or startup advice. However, the company chose to delay the release of the platform that would popularize different use cases — the “GPT store” — until next year. 

One type of AI assistant that has gained popularity is for coding. Take, for example, Microsoft’s GitHub coding repository. GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke wrote in a blog post earlier this year that an average of 46% of all code on GitHub, “across all programming languages,” was AI generated.

Last month, GitHub introduced a more expensive version of its Copilot assistant that can explain and provide recommendations about internal source code.

“Copilot, when it started at the very beginning, was thought to be a tool that could help developers write docs,” Kyle Daigle, GitHub’s chief operating officer, told CNBC in an interview. In the past year, he said, the company has expanded the technology, looking for more places “to help developers collaborate and work together and solve problems outside of just the code.” 

But PitchBook’s Burke said coding assistants are in their very early days and currently can only do “a small part” of a developer’s work. That’s true in the broader world, he said. 

“Users have found how little AI can do for them this year,” he said. “AI knows a lot, but it can’t do a lot yet. We’re still far away from AI truly being able to do the complex tasks that people are used to doing in their personal lives and at work. That has been shown by the struggles of AI agents this year.” 

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks at the Supermicro keynote presentation during the Computex conference in Taipei on June 1, 2023.

Walid Berrazeg | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Looking ahead 

Overall, 2023 was a big year for consumer excitement surrounding generative AI and for adoption of a few popular products. But business success stories have been few and far between.

“It was an especially transformative year from a consumer perspective where AI became much more tangible than before,” Grace Isford, a partner at Lux Capital, said in an interview. “AI is nothing new, but the awareness — and in turn, the adoption — has skyrocketed. Many more hackers and builders are leveraging the technology and the really exciting advancements into products.” 

CapitalG’s Chase said the consumer fascination with the space has allowed people to “see what was possible” in AI, allowing for a “cake tasting” of sorts and a teasing of the imagination.

Early in the year, people “extrapolated out early exploration of that technology into lasting and enduring use cases,” Chase said. She added that there hasn’t been a straight line from early adoption and widespread use of one or two products to mainstream popularity. Companies and developers are now going back to doing research and development to “build the right infrastructure and tooling” that can hopefully lead to mass adoption.

“I think that will happen over the next year,” she said. “I think some people thought it would happen this year.”

In 2023, it’s clear that the overwhelming beneficiary from all the hype was Nvidia. The challenge for the coming year and beyond is for businesses to show that their hefty spending on those advanced GPUs and the models they power can lead to the development of products that allow more companies to share in the wealth.

“I thought that the excitement at the end of last year would quickly translate into enterprise adoption, but the reality is that very few companies have launched generative AI applications into production and experiments aren’t quickly translating into reliable applications,” Burke said. “We’re still looking at an outlook where companies may not widely deploy products until later next year or even the following year.”

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Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish files to go public on NYSE

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Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish files to go public on NYSE

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, holds hundred dollar bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 Conference at Miami Beach Convention Center on April 7, 2022 in Miami, Florida.

Marco Bello | Getty Images

The Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish filed for an IPO on Friday, the latest digital asset firm to head for the public market.

The company, led by CEO Tom Farley, a veteran of the finance industry and former president of the New York Stock Exchange, said it plans to trade on the NYSE under the ticker symbol “BLSH.”

A spinout of Block.one, Bullish started with an initial investment from backers including Thiel’s Founders Fund and Thiel Capital, along with Nomura, Mike Novogratz and others. Bullish acquired crypto news site CoinDesk in 2023.

“In the first quarter of 2025, Bullish exchange executed over $2.5 billion in average daily volume, ranking in the top five exchanges by spot volume for Bitcoin and Ether,” the company said on its website. The prospectus listed top competitors as Binance, Coinbase and Kraken.

The IPO filing says that as of March 31, the total trading volume since launch has exceeded $1.25 trillion.

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The filing is another significant step for the cryptocurrency industry, which has fought for years to convince institutions to embrace digital assets as legitimate investments.

It’s already been a big year on the market for crypto offerings, highlighted by stablecoin issuer Circle, which has jumped more than sevenfold since its IPO in June. Etoro, an online trading platform that includes services for crypto investors, debuted in May.

Novogratz‘s crypto firm Galaxy Digital started trading on the Nasdaq in May, moving its listing from the Toronto Stock Exchange. And in June, Gemini, the cryptocurrency exchange and custodian founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, confidentially filed for an IPO in the U.S.

Meanwhile, investors continue to flock to bitcoin. The digital currency is trading at over $117,000, up from about $94,000 at the start of the year.

President Donald Trump, on Friday, signed the GENIUS Act into law — a set of regulations that establish some initial consumer protections around stablecoins, which are tied to assets like the U.S. dollar with the intent of reducing price volatility associated with many cryptocurrencies.

In its filing with the SEC, Bullish says its mission is partly to “drive the adoption of stablecoins, digital assets, and blockchain technology.”

Crypto industry players, including Thiel, Elon Musk, and President Trump’s AI and Crypto czar David Sacks spent heavily to re-elect Trump and have pushed for legislation that legitimizes digital assets and exchanges.

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Microsoft stops relying on Chinese engineers for Pentagon cloud support

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Microsoft stops relying on Chinese engineers for Pentagon cloud support

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella (L) returns to the stage after a pre-recorded interview during the Microsoft Build conference opening keynote in Seattle, Washington on May 19, 2025.

Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images

Microsoft on Friday revised its practices to ensure that engineers in China no longer provide technical support to U.S. defense clients using the company’s cloud services.

The company implemented the changes in an effort to reduce national security and cybersecurity risks stemming from its cloud work with a major customer. The announcement came days after ProPublica published an extensive report describing the Defense Department’s dependence on Microsoft software engineers in China.

“In response to concerns raised earlier this week about US-supervised foreign engineers, Microsoft has made changes to our support for US Government customers to assure that no China-based engineering teams are providing technical assistance for DoD Government cloud and related services,” Frank Shaw, the Microsoft’s chief communications officer, wrote in a Friday X post.

The change impacts the work of Microsoft’s Azure cloud services division, which analysts estimate now generates more than 25% of the company’s revenue. That makes Azure bigger than Google Cloud but smaller than Amazon Web Services. Microsoft receives “substantial revenue from government contracts,” according to its most recent quarterly earnings statement, and more than half of the company’s $70 billion in first-quarter revenue came from customers based in the U.S.

In 2019, Microsoft won a $10 billion cloud-related defense contract, but the Pentagon wound up canceling it in 2021 after a legal battle. In 2022, the department gave cloud contracts worth up to $9 billion in total to Amazon, Google, Oracle and Microsoft.

ProPublica reported that the work of Microsoft’s Chinese Azure engineers is overseen by “digital escorts” in the U.S., who typically have less technical prowess than the employees they manage overseas. The report detailed how the “digital escort” arrangement might leave the U.S. vulnerable to a cyberattack from China.

“This is obviously unacceptable, especially in today’s digital threat environment,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a video posted to X on Friday. He described the architecture as “a legacy system created over a decade ago, during the Obama administration.” The Defense Department will review its systems in search for similar activity, Hegseth said.

Microsoft originally told ProPublica that its employees and contractors were adhering to U.S. government rules.

“We remain committed to providing the most secure services possible to the US government, including working with our national security partners to evaluate and adjust our security protocols as needed,” Shaw wrote.

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The investor behind Opendoor’s 190% run nearly shut down his fund

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The investor behind Opendoor's 190% run nearly shut down his fund

Courtesy: Opendoor

On June 6, online real estate service Opendoor was so desperate to get its beaten-down stock price back over $1 and stay listed on the Nasdaq that management proposed a reverse split, potentially lifting the price of each share by as much as 50 times.

The stock inched its way up over the next five weeks.

Then Eric Jackson started cheerleading.

Jackson, a hedge fund manager who was bullish on Opendoor years earlier when the company appeared to be thriving and was worth roughly $20 billion, wrote on X on Monday that his firm, EMJ Capital, was back in the stock.

“@EMJCapital has taken a position in $OPEN — and we believe it could be a 100-bagger over the next few years,” Jackson wrote. He added later in the thread that the stock could get to $82.

It’s a long, long way from that mark.

Opendoor shares soared 189% this week, by far their best weekly performance since the company’s public market debut in late 2020. The stock closed on Friday at $2.25. The stock’s highest-volume trading days on record were Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week.

Jackson said in an interview on Thursday that the bulk of his firm’s Opendoor purchases came when the stock was in the 70s and 80s, meaning cents, and he’s bought options as well for his portfolio.

Nothing has fundamentally improved for the company since Jackson’s purchases. Opendoor remains a cash-burning, low-margin business with meager near-term growth prospects.

What has changed dramatically is Jackson’s online influence and the size of his following. The more he posts, the higher the stock goes.

“There’s a real hunger for buying the next big thing,” Jackson told CNBC, adding that investors like to find the “downtrodden.”

It’s something Jackson’s firm, based in Toronto, has in common with Opendoor.

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When Opendoor went public through a special purpose acquisition company in 2020, it was riding a SPAC wave and broader gains driven by low interest rates and Covid-era market euphoria. Investors pumped money into the riskiest assets, lifting money-losing tech upstarts to astronomical valuations.

Opendoor’s business involved using technology to buy and sell homes, pocketing the gains. Zillow tried and failed to compete.

Opendoor shares peaked at over $39 in Feb. 2021 for a market cap just above $22.5 billion. But by the end of that year, the shares were trading below $15, before collapsing 92% in 2022 to end the year at $1.16.

Rising interest rates hammered the whole tech sector, hitting Opendoor particularly hard as increased borrowing costs reduced demand for homes.

Jackson, similarly, had a miserable 2022, coinciding with the worst year for the Nasdaq since 2008. Jackson said his key client withdrew its money at the end of the year, and “I’ve been small ever since.”

‘Epic comeback’

While his assets under management remain minimal, Jackson’s reputation for getting in early to a rebound story was burnished by the performance of Carvana.

The automotive e-commerce platform lost 98% of its value in 2022 as investors weighed the likelihood of bankruptcy. In the middle of that year, with Carvana still far from bottoming out, Jackson expressed his bullishness. He told CNBC that April that he liked the stock, and then promoted its recovery on a podcast in June. He also said he liked Opendoor at the time.

Investors willing to stomach further losses in 2022 were rewarded with a 1,000% gain in 2023, and a lot more upside from there. The stock closed on Friday at $347.52, up from a low of $3.72 in Dec. 2022, and almost triple its price at the time of Jackson’s appearance on CNBC in April of that year.

After Carvana’s 2022 slide, “then obviously began an epic comeback,” Jackson said. Opendoor, meanwhile, “continued to roll down the mountain,” he said.

Jackson said that the fallout of 2022 led him to pursue a different method of stockpicking. He started hiring a small team of developers, which is now four people, to build out artificial intelligence models. The firm has experimented with several models —some have worked and some haven’t — but he said the focus now is using what he’s learned from Carvana to find “100x” opportunities.

In addition to Opendoor, Jackson has been promoting IREN, a provider of power for bitcoin mining and AI workloads, and Cipher Mining, which is in a similar space. He’s seen his following on Elon Musk‘s social media site X, which he said was stuck for years between 32,000 and 34,000, swell to almost 50,000. And after a lengthy lull, investors are reaching out to him to try and put money into his fund, he said.

Jackson has a lot riding on Opendoor, a company that saw revenue and number of homes sold slip in the first quarter from a year earlier, and racked up almost $370 million in losses over the past four quarters.

In early June, Opendoor announced plans for a reverse split — ranging from 1 for 10 to 1 for 50 — to “give us optionality in preserving our listing on Nasdaq.” With the stock now well over $1, such a move appears less necessary, as shareholders prepare to vote on the proposal on July 28.

“I think it’s a terrible idea,” said Jackson. “Those things usually further cement a company’s move into oblivion rather than hail some big revival.”

Opendoor didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Banking on growth

Analysts are projecting a more than 5% drop in revenue this year, followed by 20% growth in 2026 and 12% expansion in 2017, according to LSEG. Losses are expected to narrow over that stretch.

Jackson said his analysis factors in projections of $11.5 billion in revenue for 2029, which would be well over double the company’s expected sales for this year. He looked at the multiples of companies like Zillow and Carvana, which he said trade for 4 to 7 times forward revenue. Opendoor’s forward price-to-sales ratio is currently well below 1.

With Zillow and Redfin having exited the instant-buying home market, Opendoor faces little competition in allowing homeowners to sell their property online for cash, rather than going through an extended bidding, sales and closing process.

Jackson is banking on revenue growth and increased market share to lead to a profitable business that will push investors to value the company with a multiple somewhere between Zillow and Carvana. At $82, Opendoor would be worth about $60 billion, which is roughly 5 times projected 2029 revenue.

Jackson said his model assumes that “like Carvana, Opendoor can prove that it can permanently turn the tide and get to sustained profitability” so that the “market multiple would get reassessed.”

In the meantime, he’ll keep posting on X.

On Friday, Jackson wrote a thread consisting of 11 posts, recounting the challenge of having “99.5% of my AUM” disappear overnight after his primary investor pulled out in 2022.

“Translation: he fired me for losing him too much money,” Jackson wrote. He said he almost shut down the fund, and was even encouraged to do so by his wife and accountant.

Now, Jackson is using his recent momentum on social media to try and attract investor money, while still reminding prospects that he could lose it.

“All I have is my reputation,” he wrote, “and, unless I keep picking good stocks, it will be gone.”

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