Artificial intelligence is more a part of our lives than ever before. While some might call it hype and compare it to NFTs or 3D TVs, generative AI is causing a sea change in nearly every part of the technology industry. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is still the best-known AI chatbot around, but with Google pushing Gemini, Microsoft building Copilot, and Apple adding its Intelligence to Siri, AI is probably going to be in the spotlight for a very long time. At The Verge, we’re exploring what might be possible with AI — and a lot of the bad stuff AI does, too.
He’s explaining that firing a CEO is “a fairly big things” and when he didn’t get any details on why Altman was fired, he felt that OpenAI’s board was “sort of amateur city as far as I was concerned.”
We also discover that Nadella has no idea if Altman and Musk talked about Musk’s mean Microsoft/OpenAI tweets. As a side note, we are referring exclusively to “Twitter” and “tweets” even for posts after the X rebrand.
I recognize Musk has identified this as the spot where he was convinced he’d been swindled. But the main thing I’m hearing here is that OpenAI was unstable. I don’t know what the correct way to respond to that kind of chaos is, especially if you have a partnership with the company that appears to be rapidly imploding. Trying to suggest that Nadella’s attempts to stabilize the company and preserve his investment was somehow improper seems weird? This is a genuinely odd situation, not necessarily one you run into in business school. (Well, until then anyway.)
“Pretty definitive statement as to why they fired him, right?” Well, Mr. Molo, no. I remember a great deal of speculation about what this meant; for instance, if Altman had gotten up to something criminal. One of those moments where I wonder what the jury is thinking, since I doubt they recall any of this.
Nadella is cooler than everyone else on cross, but he’s still getting worked up. Molo just got told by the judge that his question was argumentative. Molo is yelling about how the risk MSFT took on OpenAI was “prudent.” Nadella notes it’s still a risk. “At the time the was a risk it could to to zero,” Nadella says. “It was a calculated risk.” Molo, of course, is focused on projected return, of $92+ billion.
Molo is asking about this line Nadella wrote in a 2022 email, and it’s very funny. Nadella has explained a couple times that to him it’s about IP rights. “The context for me was making sure that Microsoft was benefitting from the IP rights that we had because that’s what happened in the case of Microsoft and IBM.” Molo then says, didn’t Microsoft become more prominent and important than IBM? Nadella agrees.
OpenAI is expanding its enterprise arm with the launch of the OpenAI Deployment Company, which will work with businesses to build, test, and deploy AI systems tailored to their needs. The new company received $4 billion in investments and has a $10 billion pre-money valuation, according to Axios.
Nadella’s attitude is not notably different than it was on direct. We are talking about donating commute to OpenAI from Azure services. From a 1/12/18 email: “The 2016 deal, where they agreed to pay $10M for $60M in Azure services was projected at a $15M loss over 3 years, given assumed usage profile. They’ll have consumed all the usage in ½ that time.” The funny recurring theme here through the trial is the gaping maw of compute required is always bigger than whatever huge number people had projected. Interesting to know ahead of AI IPOs!
He misstated at first that he didn’t currently serve on any such boards, though he is a trustee at the University of Chicago, which is a nonprofit.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was just asked to explain what Copilot is during the Musk v. Altman trial. “Copilot is an AI assistant, similar to ChatGPT.” That’s funny because you won’t find a mention of ChatGPT in Microsoft’s Copilot marketing materials.
The Microsoft CEO said that though things “started off as, essentially, a bunch of people leaving,” it turned into them “talking about creating a new company. That was obviously very concerning to me.” He said he was trying to make sure Altman and Greg Brockman joined Microsoft instead of launching a new competitor: “I just wanted to make sure we could hang onto the band that created all this technology, one way or the other.”
Nadella is being asked about possibly the most baller thing he’s ever said. “Below them” means compute. “Around them” means API. “Above them” means products like Copilot. “The question was being asked, what happens if OpenAI disappears, will everything crumble? So I was trying to reassure everyone,” he says. The problem was that until he said this to Kara Swisher, “the drama of what was going on was drowning out what the customers care about.”
He was being asked if at any point Musk contacted him to say that the OpenAI deals with Microsoft violated any agreement Musk had with OpenAI’s nonprofit. Musk did not. “Does he know how to contact you?” his lawyer, asked. “He does.”
The partnership itself was “a fairly big decision for us” because “to make the call we’d use some of the scare resources we had” on it. But Microsoft accepted the risk of investing in Open AI because Microsoft has a “core ethos as a platform and partner company,” he says. “So if you find partners you can create these win/win with, it’s great to make them longterm stable.”
He looks very nice. I am fully expecting his testimony to be the equivalent of a pair of pleated khaki pants.
Michael Wetter, the VP of corporate development at Microsoft, “We’ve recognized $9.5B of total revenue life to date” as of 9/8/2025. He notes there’s context: a $13B investment with OpenAI and Azure compute.
“I can’t get my head around why [Musk lawyer] Mr. Molo told me this was not a focus of the trial,” YGR says. “That’s what my ruling is based on.”
Last week, an expert witness testified about the 2025 recapitalization of OpenAI. OpenAI has said they’d like to include the AG’s conclusions, since the removal of the profit cap was mentioned. YGR is annoyed; she told Musk’s team not to go into detail, and OpenAI didn’t object at the time. “We’re in mud,” she just said. The problem is that Musk’s team is treating it as the crux of the “breach” Musk is alleging.
While Gloria Caulfield’s invocation of AI at a commencement fell flat, over the weekend, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang received an honorary Doctor of Science and Technology degree and a few ovations while delivering a nearly 20-minute speech about AI and robotics.
After joking that, “CMU students, like robots, take instruction one at a time,” he exhorted them to “help create a future more abundant, more capable, and more hopeful than the world you inherited.”
At the University of Central Florida graduation ceremony for the College of Arts and Humanities, as well as communications and media, commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield didn’t get the response she was apparently expecting after calling AI “the new industrial revolution.”
As a VP of strategic alliances at a real estate firm, celebrating AI and Jeff Bezos probably goes over differently in her meetings.
The journalist and author of I Am Not a Robot on her year living with AI and starting a new media company.
Maybe — at least for one X user, who claims Codex earned them $16.88 after being told “to go off and make me $5.” Not exactly life-changing, but not nothing. And it caught Sam Altman’s eye. Still, it reportedly took 22 hours, and the token bill is unclear. Not quitting the day job just yet.
What happened in the second week of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman? The Verge senior AI reporter, Hayden Field, can help you catch up.
Less than two months after shutting down its open beta relaunch and downsizing its team, Digg has launched a new version at di.gg. This updated version of the platform, instead of functioning similar to Reddit, is more like an online sentiment tracker. Right now, it’s focused only on tracking AI news, but “it’s going to be all the things,” according to Kevin Rose.
Meta recently began tracking employees’ computer activity to train its AI models, plans to cut 10 percent of staff later this month, and is pushing “employees to make so many A.I. agents that others had to introduce agents to find agents, and agents to rate agents,” sparking “anger and anxiety,” reports the New York Times:
Some said they no longer saw Meta as a place for a long career. Others were looking for new jobs or trying to signal that they wanted to be laid off so they could receive severance pay, the current and former employees said.
Earlier this week I wrote about the social media “clippers” that get paid to semi-covertly promote podcasts, TV shows, and other media through anonymous accounts. One of the clipping campaigns was for Perplexity AI — but nobody can tell me who, exactly, is responsible for the clips:
Reached via email, Perplexity distanced itself from clipping company Vyro, with spokesperson Jesse Dwyer saying Perplexity “has no knowledge” of the company and “takes any unauthorized use of the Perplexity name or logo very seriously.” When asked to confirm Perplexity had not run or authorized clipping campaigns, Dwyer initially stopped responding to The Verge. After publication, Dwyer told The Verge it was “not accurate” to say Perplexity launched the clipping campaign.
So who did?
The two companies are forming a joint venture that will combine Sony’s designs with TSMC’s manufacturing capabilities to develop next-gen image sensors. The joint venture, majority owned by Sony, will also allow the companies to explore opportunities in physical AI applications in the robotics and automotive industries, the press release says.
CEO Gimmy Chu says the commoditization of smart lighting is behind Nanoleaf’s pivot.
Google says it’s rolling out a feature for its Help me write tool that lets it generate emails personalized to your tone and style. Depending on your prompt, Help me write can also pull in relevant context from Google Drive and Gmail.
Following The Academy Awards saying last week that only humans can get acting Oscars, the Golden Globes’ eligibility rules seem to have slightly more wiggle room allowing for AI to be used for acting awards.
“Performances submitted for acting categories must be primarily derived from the work of the credited performer,” according to the rules, but “the use of AI for technical or cosmetic enhancements” like de-aging “may be permissible.”
“Codex can now use Chrome on your computer to complete work inside the websites and apps where you’re already signed in,” according to the Chrome Web Store listing for the extension. It works in “task-specific” tab groups so you can keep using your active tabs.
You’ll also need the Chrome plugin for Codex for it to work.
Ordinarily we keep detailed bug reports private for several months after shipping fixes and issuing security advisories, largely as a precaution to protect any users who, for whatever reason, were slow to update to the latest version of Firefox. Given the extraordinary level of interest in this topic and the urgency of action needed throughout the software ecosystem, we’ve made the calculated decision to unhide a small sample of the reports behind the fixes we recently shipped.
[Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog]
Here’s what Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said about the decision:
Today’s actions are not a cost-cutting exercise or an assessment of individuals’ performance; they are about Cloudflare defining how a world-class, high-growth company operates and creates value in the agentic AI era.
The former OpenAI CTO had receipts. But they mostly confuse her own story.
Which gets something like $2 billion from hospital operations, more than $1 billion in tuition, and an endowment of $16 billion, plus $2.2 billion in philanthropy. Does this mean that Columbia is deviating from its mission to educate kids and support research?
