Meet the new OpenAI! (Same as the old OpenAI?)

Top News

• OpenAI completes recapitalization: After months of prep and negotiation, and against the wishes of co-founder Elon Musk (more on him further down the page), the AI giant reorganized itself into a for-profit corporation within a larger non-profit foundation. The non-profit OpenAI Foundation maintains legal control over the public benefit corporation — OpenAI Group — holds on to a significant stake, and appoints the board of directors, though the Group can still acquire companies or raise new funds without authorization. As for early OpenAI backers Microsoft, they hang on to a 27% stake (valued presently at $135 billion), while extending their IP rights over OpenAI’s models through 2032. (That infamous AGI clause remains in play: if OpenAI believes it has reached this milestone, they’ll submit the model to an independent expert panel to verify their findings.) News of the agreement pushed Microsoft’s valuation over $4 trillion.

• Skyworks and Qorvo join forces: Both companies produce radio-frequency chips used in a variety of smartphones, including Apple’s iPhone. Skyworks is offering Qorvo shareholders $32.50 in cash and 0.96 worth of Skyworks stock for each of their shares. Once united, they’ll rank among the largest suppliers of these chips in the US, with a collective value of around $22 billion. Bear in mind, however, that we’re now in a world in which Apple designs its own radio chips; the iPhone 16e arrived earlier this year with Apple’s C1 cellular modem in place of chips from previous supplier Qualcomm. So the question becomes: Can Skyworks earn back its investment in Qorvo before Apple finishes drinking its milkshake?

• Securitize is going public: Securitize makes real-world assets (like stocks, bonds, or gold) available for investment through tokenization, which registers “ownership rights” on the blockchain. Perhaps most famously, Securitize powers the tokenized money market fund — known as BUIDL — offered by BlackRock. Now, the business plans to go public via a SPAC deal, merging with a blank-check company created by Cantor Fitzgerald, known as Cantor Equity Partners II, Inc. The agreement currently values Securitize at $1.25 billion. Their stock — which could go on sale as early as January — will sell under the symbol SECZ.

TWiST 500

Grokipedia is here. xAI and its founder, Elon Musk, have touted the online reference as a less biased and more even-handed alternative to Wikipedia, and just hours after the first articles debuted, it’s already proving divisive. Proponents argue that Grokipedia will offer fair-minded takes on political, cultural, and historical topics that are free of Wikipedia’s alleged left-wing bias. (In September, Musk posted that it’s already “a massive improvement over Wikipedia,” and an important step in xAI’s models developing a true understanding of “The Universe.”)

Critics maintain that Wikipedia is based on mainstream, widely-accepted, fact-checked news sources, with teams of moderators that independently, and transparently, verify all information, while Grokipedia’s content are decided by an AI model that has not always proved entirely trustworthy. (Commentators including The Verge additionally point out that, at least so far, much of Grok’s content appears poached from, or at least strongly inspired by, Wikipedia’s entries.) Others fall somewhere in the middle, noting the core issues with Wikipedia, but expressing skepticism that Grok is providing the solution.

Grokipedia remains in an early v0.1 release, with just 885,279 articles to date, so it’s perhaps too soon to tell whether it’s an inevitable Wikipedia killer. And it’s undeniable that, sometimes, Grokipedia substitutes or includes information that reflects a more right-of-center perspective than Wikipedia. (One example highlighted by the Washington Post seems to downplay the significance and severity of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, and also suggests the media exaggerated President Trump’s personal responsibility.)

On the other hand, a lot of Grokipedia’s entries are also objectively longer and more thorough than their Wikipedia counterparts. Comparing the entries on our fearless leader and pod host, Jason Calacanis, Wikipedia’s anodyne entry clocks in at just 1,176 words, with just two sentences on his global hit podcast “All-In.” Grokipedia’s far more thorough entry hits nearly 8,000 words, was accurate so far as we could detect, and boasts an insightful and voluminous section summarizing JCal’s approach to investing, along with his Syndicate platform and LAUNCH Accelerator programs. It’s difficult to argue that Grok’s version, in this particular instance, is not the superior result. Make of this what you will. – Lon

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