Nvidia's OVER investing in OpenAI

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• Nvidia’s latest OpenAI deal “might be the last”: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang told attendees at a Morgan Stanley tech conference this week that his company’s recent $30 billion investment in OpenAI will likely be its last fresh capital infusion into the GPT-maker. Not because they’ve developed a sudden case of Codex-based cynicism. Huang simply believes OpenAI will be going public soon, limiting further opportunities for private investment. Nvidia’s latest $30 billion investment in OpenAI came alongside pledges from SoftBank and Amazon, as part of a $110 billion round announced late last week.

• Anthropic investors want a DoW deal: Semafor reports that a number of high-profile Anthropic backers and investors are privately urging the company to end its feud with the Pentagon and cut a deal to supply the US military with its technology. Yes, even if it’s used on mass domestic surveillance or kill-bots. Specifically, Semafor reports that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy declined to defend Anthropic or its CEO Dario Amodei during a recent meeting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. (Amazon’s stake in Anthropic is worth around $60.6 billion.) A different, unnamed investor told Semafor that many are still pulling for a deal, behind the scenes. Will the company bow to the combined pressure from investors and the US government? Doesn’t seem SUPER likely. The Information quotes Amodei today theorizing that his company lost favor with the White House for failing to “give dictator-style praise to Trump,” unlike rival Sam Altman of OpenAI. That’s not exactly a reach across the aisle gesture.

• Former OpenAI’er launches Arda: Bob McGrew formerly served as OpenAI’s chief research officer. His new startup is Arda, which is designing an AI “world model” specifically aimed at training robots working on factory floors. Arda’s video model uses footage shot in factories to virtually map them, then uses this to train software that develops and coordinates bespoke production processes around a combination of these machines and humans. And YES, like Palantir, and Anduril, and Erebor before it, this is yet another startup named for a “Lord of the Rings” reference. Arda is J.R.R. Tolkien’s name for the planet upon which Middle-earth is located.

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Controversy continues swirling around prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket when it comes to wagers based on military actions and global conflicts. Kalshi’s rules specifically exclude a person’s death as a deciding factor in resolving markets, forcing them to refund trades based on the ouster of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, once it was revealed that he’d been killed. The Israeli government has also filed charges against suspects accused of using classified information to place Polymarket wagers.

Still, this has not stopped Polymarket from offering a bevy of new potential trades rooted in the Iranian conflict. There’s one predicting the date of a US ceasefire, another looking ahead at an official US declaration of war, another for the name of the country’s next Supreme Leader, and more covering whether or not US forces will physically enter the country. Kalshi has also added more Iran-themed markets, but has a slightly more strict rule: no wagers that directly reference military actions.

Polymarket does have some third rails it remains unwilling to cross. The platform removed long-running markets in which users placed wagers on the potential for global nuclear conflict, including the likelihood of a nuclear weapon being detonated before a line-up of specific dates. (Some of these markets have been circulating around the site for YEARS. In 2023, one market posited a 19% chance that a nuclear weapon would be detonated before the end of the year.)

Prediction markets are currently regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Under their current (hotly-debated) rules, any contract is barred if it “involves, relates to, or references terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or an activity that is unlawful under any State or Federal law.” There’s been a recent push by Democratic lawmakers to clarify and strengthen these rules, codifying a ban on contracts that “incentivize physical injury or death.” Absent any additional actions, there appears to be a lot of wiggle room in how these rules are interpreted. For example, debates about whether or not sports betting counts as “gaming.” – Lon

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