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10 hours ago

December 18, 2025

Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI reporter Sharon Goldman. In this edition, I compare OpenAI to a house made of…well, no one really knows. Also: OpenAI launches a ChatGPT app store (we’ll see if it fares better than their previous custom GPT store)…Google debuts a surprisingly powerful Flash version of its Gemini 3 model…and the U.K. AI Safety Institute finds that a large percentage of Britons have used chatbots for emotional support.

Talk about an expensive building project. OpenAI is reportedly raising tens of fresh billions at a $750 billion valuation, including $10 billion from Amazon. It is pouring money into compute — and literally pouring concrete into the data centers that power AI chips—which the company says it needs to keep constructing the towering stack of models and applications that more than 800 million users now rely on.

The cost has inspired both awe and deep unease. Industry observers watch OpenAI’s expansion the way they might watch the Empire State Building rise — with a budget that keeps climbing as fast as the structure itself. (The actual Empire State Building, it’s important to note, only cost about $700 million in today’s money and came in under budget.) And some skeptics are increasingly convinced that the entire edifice is a monument to hubris that will come tumbling down before long.

Here’s how I think about it: If OpenAI is a house, it’s still in the early stages of construction — but no one agrees what it’s made of. The plans are undeniably ambitious, pushing the structure to unprecedented heights. Is this a house made of cards? Of teetering wooden pillars? Of solid concrete? The question is whether whatever structure is being built can actually hold the weight already being placed on it.

The experts are split

That uncertainty has split the experts I’ve spoken to. Technology analyst Rob Enderle said he would like to see OpenAI resting on a firmer foundation. “I would feel much more comfortable if they had a much stronger base in some of the basics,” he told me, particularly around making products trustworthy enough for enterprise businesses to increase adoption. He added that OpenAI has at times “gone off the rails” in terms of direction, pointing out that the company’s original independent safety and ethics oversight structures have been sidelined since CEO Sam Altman was reinstated after being briefly fired in November 2023. These days, he argued, OpenAI is trying to compete with everyone at once; reacting to rivals rather than executing a clear roadmap; and spending heavily without clear prioritization.

A recognition that it may have become distracted by trying to do much at once was part of the reason OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared a “code red” at the company two weeks ago, as Fortune reported in an in-depth new feature this week. The story looks at the why, the how, and the what of OpenAI’s “code red” and why Altman has warned the company to brace for “rough vibes” and economic headwinds in the face of increased competition from Google and OpenAI. Altman is trying to light a fire under his team to refocus on OpenAI’s core ChatGPT offerings over the coming weeks. But, according to Enderle, this is all very reactive and not strategic enough.

Commenting on the company’s constant shipping — from new AI models and a new image generation model, to a web browser, shopping features inside ChatGPT, and a new app ecosystem launched just this week — alongside a massive Stargate data-center buildout, Enderle compared OpenAI to Netscape and other dot-com companies that got rich too fast and lost strategic discipline.

“They’re running so fast, they’re not really focusing on direction very much,” he said.

Others, however, strongly disagree. Futurum Research founder and CEO Daniel Newman told me that concerns about OpenAI’s house collapsing miss the bigger picture. “This is a multi-decade supercycle,” he said, likening the company’s current phase of AI to Netflix’s DVD-by-mail era — a precursor to the true paradigm shift that followed. From the perspective of unmet demand and long-term value creation, Newman believes OpenAI’s massive compute investments are rational, not reckless.

“I would call what [OpenAI] has today very high-quality three-dimensional simulations and architectural renderings of a future,” Newman said. The real question, he added, is whether OpenAI can win enough market share to build the mansion it’s envisioning.

“I think OpenAI’s real goal is to become a hyperscaler,” Newman said. “They’ll have the infrastructure, the applications, the data, the workflows, the agentic tools — and people will buy everything they now get elsewhere from OpenAI instead. It’s an incredibly ambitious goal. There’s nothing to say it will work. But if it does, the numbers make sense.”

Searching for stickiness, or glue

Lastly, I spoke to Arun Chandrasekaran, principal analyst at Gartner Research, who chuckled and ducked away from my house metaphor, but was willing to address whether OpenAI was at least building on solid ground.

“They are indeed growing really fast, and they are making an enormous amount of commitments far beyond what any company [of their size] has ever made,” he said. “It is a risky bet, I would argue, a strategy that does not come without risks.” A lot of it is predicated on how sticky their products are, he pointed out, both at the model and application layer.

“It depends on the switching costs from a customer perspective, and a few other factors in terms of whether the growth really pans out the way they’ve envisioned,” he said. “You’re talking about a high growth company, but the expectation is that they’re going to have to grow at a much faster clip than what they’re growing. The expectations are enormous.”

Stickiness, I said. Like glue? Nails? Something to hold the house up?

He laughed. “Yes — like glue. I say stickiness, you say glue.”

And with that, here’s more AI news.

Sharon Goldman
sharon.goldman@fortune.com
@sharongoldman

FORTUNE ON AI

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announces departure of AI exec Rohit Prasad in leadership shake-up–by Sharon Goldman

Experts say Amazon is playing the long game with its potential $10 billion OpenAI deal: ‘ChatGPT is still seen as the Kleenex of AI’–by Eva Roytburg

Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and Amazon’s stocks are lagging the S&P 500 this year—but Google is up 62%, and AI investors think it has room to run—by Jeff John Roberts and Jeremy Kahn

U.K. startup CellVoyant debuts AI platform that could radically reduce the cost of cell-based therapies such as CAR-T immunotherapy for cancer–by Jeremy Kahn

Exclusive: Swedish startup automating mechanical, electrical, and plumbing design for commercial buildings raises $20 million in seed round—by Jeremy Kahn

Exclusive: Palantir alums using AI to streamline patent filing secure $20 million in Series A venture funding—by Jeremy Kahn

AI IN THE NEWS

ChatGPT to accept app submissions. OpenAI has opened app submissions for ChatGPT, letting developers submit apps for review and publication and giving users a new in-chat app directory to discover them—but the move comes a couple of years after the company’s earlier plug-ins experiment, built around custom GPTs, which never fully took off. The new apps are designed to extend conversations with real actions, like ordering groceries or creating slide decks, and can be triggered directly inside chats, with OpenAI positioning them as more tightly integrated and easier to use than plug-ins were. The initiative signals OpenAI’s renewed push to turn ChatGPT into a true platform—though how widely users and developers embrace this second attempt at an app ecosystem remains an open question.

Anthropic taps Trump-linked Bitcoin miner for massive AI power build. According to reporting from The Information, Anthropic has struck a deal that could secure up to 2.3 gigawatts of computing power from data centers developed by Hut 8, a bitcoin miner that is pivoting into AI infrastructure and has ties to the Trump family. Hut 8 and cloud startup Fluidstack plan to build a data center campus in Louisiana, starting with 245 megawatts and potentially expanding by another 1 gigawatt, while giving Anthropic the option to develop an additional 1.1 gigawatts with Hut 8. Google will backstop Fluidstack’s lease payments, underscoring Big Tech’s role in de-risking these projects. Hut 8’s Trump-linked bitcoin venture and the AI data center news helped push its shares up about 10%.

Anthropic’s Claude ran a snack operation in the Wall Street Journal newsroom. I had to shout out this funny experiment from the Wall Street Journal that copied a similar effort Anthropic ran in its own offices several months ago. A customized Claude agent was put in charge of running a newsroom vending machine, with autonomy to order inventory, set prices, and negotiate with human coworkers over Slack. Within weeks, the AI had been socially engineered into giving away most of its inventory for free, buying a PlayStation 5 and a live fish, and driving the operation hundreds of dollars into the red. The point wasn’t profit, Anthropic said, but failure: a vivid case study in how today’s AI agents can lose track of goals, priorities, and guardrails when exposed to money, social pressure, and messy real-world context—highlighting just how far “autonomous agents” still are from reliably running even the simplest businesses.

NOAA says its new AI-driven weather models improve forecast speed and accuracy. As the winter chill deepens across much of the US, I’m sure we all love a quick and accurate weather forecast. So CBS News reported some good news: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has rolled out a new suite of AI-driven weather forecasting models designed to deliver faster and more accurate predictions at far lower computational cost. NOAA says the models represent a shift away from relying solely on traditional physics-based systems like its long-running Global Forecast System and Global Ensemble Forecast System, which simulate countless weather scenarios across land, ocean, and atmosphere. Instead, the agency is using AI to improve large-scale forecasts and tropical storm tracks while dramatically reducing the computing power required, allowing forecasts to reach meteorologists and the public more quickly and cheaply—a move NOAA leadership describes as a major leap in U.S. weather-model innovation.

Google launches Gemini 3 Flash, makes it the default model in the Gemini app. TechCrunch reported on Google’s release of Gemini 3 Flash, a faster and cheaper version of its Gemini 3 model. Google has made Gemini 3 Flash the default model in the Gemini app and in AI-powered search. The model significantly outperforms the previous Gemini 2.5 Flash and, on some benchmarks, rivals frontier models like Gemini 3 Pro and OpenAI’s GPT-5.2, while excelling at multimodal and reasoning tasks. Google is positioning Flash as a high-speed “workhorse” model for consumers, enterprises, and developers, with broad rollout across apps, search, Vertex AI, and APIs, and adoption already underway at companies like JetBrains and Figma. The launch comes amid an intensifying release war with OpenAI, as Google reports processing more than a trillion tokens per day and emphasizes that rapid iteration, lower costs, and new benchmarks are now central to competition at the AI frontier.

AI CALENDAR

Jan. 7-10: Consumer Electronics Show, Las Vegas.

March 12-18: SWSW, Austin.

March 16-19: Nvidia GTC, San Jose.

April 6-9: HumanX, San Francisco.

EYE ON AI NUMBERS

~33%

According to new research from the UK’s AI Safety Institute highlighted by The Guardian, about a third of UK adults say they’ve used generative AI for emotional support or social interaction, with nearly one in ten reporting weekly use of chatbots and assistants like ChatGPT for emotional reasons.

Analysts note this trend is emerging amid broader concerns about mental health access, loneliness, and the role of AI in replacing—or supplementing—human emotional support. The report also flags potential risks, including safety issues and the need for deeper study of how “emotional AI” may shape our interactions and well-being.

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Walmart’s women truckers surge thanks to $115,000 starting pay and other perks bringing in nontraditional candidates

Published

2 hours ago

December 18, 2025

Jace Porter

While the rest of the trucking industry faces a driver shortage, Walmart has managed to boost its driver numbers with six-figure starting pay and other perks that are catching the eye of even non-traditional applicants.

The mega retailer, which has claimed the top spot on the Fortune 500 for the past 13 years, has increased its number of in-house truck drivers by 33% over the past three years in part thanks to better wages and benefits.

In 2022, it boosted drivers’ starting pay to around $115,000 from an average salary of $87,000 previously. At the high end, drivers can make $135,000 per year, according to a Walmart spokesperson. The 2024 median pay for heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers was $57,440 per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Apart from a pay increase, Walmart also uses technology that allows for more reliable schedules compared to other companies. While some in the trucking industry are away for weeks at a time, Walmart gives its drivers consecutive days off of work and assigns them regional delivery territories to allow them to be home every week, a Walmart spokesperson told Fortune.

These perks, along with the better-than-average pay, have increasingly helped the company expand its pool of drivers and include more women. Just 9.5% of truck drivers in the U.S. are women as of 2024, according to the Women in Trucking Index—that’s compared to an estimated 18% of drivers at Walmart, according to a study by workforce intelligence company Revelio Labs that was viewed by Fortune. Bloomberg first reported on the study.

Through a 12-week training program that helps store associates transition to the trucking industry, Walmart has also increased its number of women drivers, a spokesperson said. Around 1,000 people have gone through the program, Bloomberg reported, representing about half of the company’s new drivers.

Possibly due to its efforts, Walmart has a five percentage point oversupply of truck drivers compared to its demand, according to the study by Revelio Labs.

Walmart’s efforts to bring in more drivers, including those with less experience, is pivotal as the broader trucking industry faces a driver shortage that is expected to bring a shortfall of 160,000 drivers by 2028, according to the American Trucking Association. The broader category of U.S. retail, currently faces a shortfall of drivers, with demand for drivers exceeding supply by seven percentage points, according to Revelio Labs.

Older truck drivers are retiring and younger people aren’t keen to jump into trucking partly due to the long hours and time away from home. A 1,000-person survey from heavy-duty truck parts company FinditParts found that a quarter of Americans would not become truck drivers no matter what pay they were offered.

For Walmart, any disadvantage in its supply chain, including a driver shortfall, could put it at a disadvantage with Amazon, with which it has been increasingly competing with in recent years, especially with its Walmart+ membership.

Without enough drivers, supply chains are delayed and prices go up. Finding and retaining drivers is thus of the utmost importance for companies like Walmart, Paul Bingham, a director of transportation consulting at S&P Global Market Intelligence, told Bloomberg.

“Trucking companies will need more drivers,” he said. “and they’ll have to attract them from the non-traditional population cohorts.”

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Trump was wrong about tariffs funding the ‘Warrior Dividend’ of $1,776—troops were already set to get the money

Published

2 hours ago

December 18, 2025

Jace Porter

The “Warrior Dividend” that President Donald Trump announced during his televised address to the nation Wednesday is not a Christmas bonus made possible by tariff revenues, as the president suggested.

Instead, the $1,776 payments to troops are coming from a congressionally-approved housing supplement — money they were already set to receive — that was a part of tax cut extensions and expansions bill signed into law in July. Trump’s administration identified the source of the “dividend” payments Thursday.

In his remarks, Trump alluded to his “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” playing a role, but suggested that tariffs were largely responsible for the payments already on the way to 1.45 million members of the military.

“We made a lot more money than anybody thought because of tariffs and the bill helped us along. Nobody deserves it more than our military,” he said in announcing what he described as a “dividend.”

Trump has teased the idea of using his sweeping tariffs on imports to give Americans dividends ever since he imposed them in April. But these new payments are being disbursed by the Pentagon from a $2.9 billion military housing supplement that was part of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” to augment existing housing allowances, according to a senior administration official who requested anonymity to describe the payments.

The amount of the payments is a nod to next year’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. In total, the measure is expected to cost $2.6 billion.

Trump’s announcement comes as he’s faced pressure to show he’s working to address rising costs for Americans, with prices remaining stubbornly high as the president has imposed double-digit tariffs on imports from almost every country. Trump has promised to lower prices, but he has struggled to do so. Inflation hit a four-decade high in June 2022 during Joe Biden’s presidency and then began to fall. But inflation has stayed elevated under Trump in part because of his tariffs.

Separately, members of the U.S. Coast Guard will be getting a similar one-time payment, the Department of Homeland Security announced Thursday. The “Devotion to Duty” payments, authorized by Secretary Kristi Noem a day earlier, will be $2,000 because, unlike the “Warrior Dividend,” they are subject to taxes. The amount Coast Guard members take home will be closer to $1,776.

The payments, according to the Coast Guard, will be classified as “special duty pay.” They will be paid for with money in a measure Trump signed in November, after a 43-day shutdown, that funds the government through January.

It’s not the first time Trump has brandished ‘dividends’

Sending money to voters is a timeworn tool for politicians and one that Trump has repeatedly tried to use, including this year.

Trump has for months suggested every American could receive a $2,000 dividend from the import taxes — an effort that seemed designed to try to shore up support for tariffs, which the president has said protect American industries and will lure manufacturing back from overseas.

But that particular pledge appeared to exceed the revenues being generated by his tariffs, according to a November analysis by the right-leaning Tax Foundation. The analysis estimated that the $2,000 payments being promised to taxpayers could add up to between $279.8 billion and $606.8 billion, depending on how they were structured.

The analysis estimated that Trump’s import taxes would produce $158.4 billion in total revenue during 2025 and another $207.5 billion in 2026. That’s not enough money to provide the payments as well as reduce the budget deficit, which Trump has also claimed his tariffs are doing.

Earlier this year, as his Department of Government Efficiency was slashing the U.S. government and its workforce, Trump had briefly proposed sending a DOGE “dividend” back to U.S. citizens.

Neither the tariff dividend or DOGE dividend has come to fruition, and members of Trump’s own party as well as officials in his administration have expressed some skepticism about the idea. There is also the risk that the payments being promised by Trump could push up inflation, as they would likely spur greater consumer spending. Republican lawmakers argued in 2021 that the pandemic relief package from then-President Biden — which included direct payments — helped trigger the run-up in inflation.

___

Associated Press writers Rebecca Santana, Konstantin Toropin and Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

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House Democrats release more Epstein photos, including Bill Gates and a dinner full of wealthy philanthropists

Published

3 hours ago

December 18, 2025

Jace Porter

House Democrats released several dozen more photos Thursday from the estate of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, showing his associations with the rich and famous, as the Department of Justice faces a deadline to release many of its case files on the late financier by the end of the week.

The photos released Thursday were among more than 95,000 that the House Oversight Committee has received after issuing a subpoena for the photos that Epstein had in his possession before he died in a New York jail cell in 2019. Congress has also passed, and President Donald Trump has signed, a law requiring the Justice Department to release its case files on Epstein, and his longtime girlfriend and confidante Ghislaine Maxwell, by Friday. Anticipation about what those files will show is running high after they have been the subject of conspiracy theories and speculation about his friendships with Trump, former President Bill Clinton, the former Prince Andrew, and others.

House Democrats have already released dozens of photos from Epstein’s estate showing Trump, Clinton and Andrew, who lost his royal title and privileges this year amid scrutiny of his relationship with the wealthy financier. The photos released Thursday showed Epstein cooking with Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, an Emirati businessman. The photos also include the billionaire Bill Gates and images of a 2011 dinner of notable people and wealthy philanthropists hosted by a nonprofit group. The committee made no accusations of wrongdoing by the men in the photos.

There were also images of passports, visas and identification cards from Russia, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, South Africa and Lithuania with personally identifying information redacted, as well as photos of Epstein with women or girls whose faces were blacked out. The committee has said it is redacting information from the photos that may lead to the identity of victims being revealed.

Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the oversight panel, said in a statement that the “new images raise more questions about what exactly the Department of Justice has in its possession. We must end this White House cover-up, and the DOJ must release the Epstein files now.”

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