CNBC reports: OpenAI announces new revenue figures on June 9 and figures that represent a nearly 100% growth in the past year. But it’s only a fraction of what they project by 2029:
OpenAI is also targeting $125 billion in revenue by 2029, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the details are confidential. The Information first reported on OpenAI’s revenue ambitions.
That’s a lot of $20/mo. subscriptions.
Business Insider cut about 21% of its staff last month, a move CEO Barbara Peng said was aimed at helping the publication “endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control.” Organic search traffic to its websites declined by 55% between April 2022 and April 2025, according to data from Similarweb.
Aside the the spurious and clickbaity nature of BI content, I’ve noticed how Google’s tools reduce my reliance on source content. Why click a link when the information is there?
Aside from well-documented hallucinations, fewer clicks is ultimately helpful for searchers looking for a specific piece of information.
Altman takes a philosophical if not mystically reverent tone as he considers the future of AI. Starting with, “We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started.” has a certain rhetorical flair to it, although it feels too exhuberant.
Quibbles aside, there are some really interesting nuggets in the post:
And perhaps the piece that many of us were wondering about: electricity consumption:
People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes. It also uses about 0.000085 gallons of water; roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) — Google has offered buyouts to another swath of its workforce across several key divisions in a fresh round of cost cutting coming ahead of a court decision that could order a breakup of its internet empire. The Mountain View, California, company confirmed the streamlining that was reported by several news outlets.
The Verge also reports, Google is offering employee buyouts in Search and other orgs:
Google is starting to offer buyouts to US-based employees in its sprawling Search organization, along with other divisions like marketing, research, and core engineering, according to multiple employees familiar with the matter.
Per Bloomberg last month:
Beyond that upheaval, AI is already making gains with consumers. Cue noted that searches on Safari dipped for the first time last month, which he attributed to people using AI. Cue said he believes that AI search providers, including OpenAI, Perplexity AI Inc. and Anthropic PBC, will eventually replace standard search engines like Alphabet’s Google. He said he believes Apple will bring those options to Safari in the future.
A week after TechCrunch profiled Anthropic’s experiment to task the company’s Claude AI models with writing blog posts, Anthropic wound down the blog and redirected the address to its homepage. Sometime over the weekend, the Claude Explains blog disappeared — along with its initial few posts.
I read the announcement of the AI-blogging tool last week, but the blog had already disappeared. This strikes me as another example of AI tools are useful co-workers, but an experienced programmer/writer/editor is still needed.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/09/anthropics-ai-generated-blog-dies-an-early-death/
It’s not a frontier model, but that’s a sizable drop for a tool that is effective in a lot of contexts.
Update from Simon Willison on the o3 price drop:
This is a pretty huge shake-up in LLM pricing. o3 is now priced the same as GPT 4.1, and slightly less than GPT-4o ($2.50/$10). It’s also less than Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 ($3/$15) and Opus 4 ($15/$75) and sits in between Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro for >200,00 tokens ($2.50/$15) and 2.5 Pro for <200,000 ($1.25/$10).
Google’s AI research notebook, NotebookLM, just got a lot more collaborative. You can now share any notebook publicly with a simple link—no sign-in or permissions required.
I co-worker recently shared one of his NotebookLM creations. It’s hard to overstate how incredibly real the voices sounded. This could be an incredible tool for anyone who travels, rides public transportation, or perhaps walks across a college campus to class.
Zuckerburg recently declared that we’ll all have AI friends (lots of them, in fact), and now Meta is working on replacing designers with AI tools:
The social-media company aims to enable brands to fully create and target ads using artificial intelligence by the end of next year, according to people familiar with the matter.
But, with all of the data that Facebook has about people, the ads could be personalized and rather interesting:
Meta also plans to enable advertisers to personalize ads using AI, so that users see different versions of the same ad in real time, based on factors such as geolocation, the people said. A person seeing an advertisement for a car in a snowy place, for example, might see the car driving up a mountain, whereas a person seeing an ad for that same car in an urban area would see it driving on a city street.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-aims-to-fully-automate-ad-creation-using-ai-7d82e249
A recent NYTimes essay by Michal Leibowitz explores the growing childlessness and starts by mentioning a number of commonly postulated factors like climate change. But then the twist:
I suspect there’s some truth in all of these explanations. But I think there’s another reason, too, one that’s often been overlooked. Over the past few decades, Americans have redefined “harm,” “abuse,” “neglect” and “trauma,” expanding those categories to include emotional and relational struggles that were previously considered unavoidable parts of life. Adult children seem increasingly likely to publicly, even righteously, cut off contact with a parent, sometimes citing emotional, physical or sexual abuse they experienced in childhood and sometimes things like clashing values, parental toxicity or feeling misunderstood or unsupported.
This cultural shift has contributed to a new, nearly impossible standard for parenting. Not only must parents provide shelter, food, safety and love, but we, their children, also expect them to get us started on successful careers and even to hold themselves accountable for our mental health and happiness well into our adult years.
And
A result of these changes is that parenthood looks more like a bad deal. For much of history, parent-child relationships were characterized by mutual duties, says Stephanie Coontz, the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families. Parental duties might include things like feeding and clothing their children, disciplining them and educating them in the tasks and skills they would need in adulthood. Children, in turn, had duties to their parents: to honor and defer to them, to help provide for the family or household, to provide grandchildren.
Today, parents still have obligations to their children. But it seems the children’s duties have become optional. “With parents and adult children today, the adult child feels like, ‘If you failed me in your responsibility as a parent’ — in ways, of course, that are increasingly hard to define—‘then I owe you nothing as an adult child,’” says Dr. Coleman.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/therapy-estrangement-childless-millennials.html