Tariffs already making an impact on Amazon

Top News

• Anker raises Amazon prices: The China-based retailer increased prices on around one-fifth of its total Amazon inventory, in an early indication of how US consumers could be impacted by President Trump’s tariff policies. Around 127 Anker products — including power banks, phone cases, and more — have increased in cost by an average of 18% since last week. The President’s import tariffs on Chinese goods currently stand at 145%, while China has increased its tariffs on US goods to 125%.

• Optilogic raises $40M Series B: The startup produces software that helps clients design and reorganize their supply chains to avoid disruptions and, yes, tariffs. (CEO Don Hicks told Axios that it’s not a coincidence interest in the company has spiked this month.) High-profile clients already using Optilogic’s tools include General Motors, Coca-Cola, Whirlpool, and Nordstrom.

• Nate founder charged with fraud: The US Department of Justice has indicted Nate founder Albert Sangier, claiming that he made misleading statements about the fintech platform, defrauding investors to the tune of around $40 million. According to the DOJ, Sangier and Nate were telling clients that the platform’s transactions were AI-powered, when they were actually being completed by bots or even human contractors overseas. A 2022 report from The Information suggested that Nate used human labor rather than AI in between 60% and 100% of its transactions.

TWiST500

We love all of our TWiST 500 companies equally, but some of them definitely grab more headlines than others, and simply demand more attention. Such is the case with OpenAI, the squeakiest wheel in the entire T500 line-up, which seemingly makes the front page every day.

This week, the company made noise by announcing that it plans to retire the wildly popular GPT-4 model first introduced two years ago, and will replace it with GPT-4o as ChatGPT’s default. (The GPT-4 model will not sunset entirely, and will remain available via API.)

GPT-4 rolled out in March 2023, and was notable as the company’s first widely-deployed model that could understand both images and text. It’s at the center of a lot of OpenAI’s current legal battles; GPT-4 was the model that trained on the work of authors and publishers, including the New York Times, without their knowledge or consent. OpenAI claims that falls under “fair use,” but this will likely fall to the courts for a final ruling.

In other OpenAI news, a group of former employees has filed an amicus brief in support of co-founder Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the company, joining him in opposing the pivot from non-profit to a for-profit corporation. Creative Commons founder and academic Lawrence Lessig filed the brief, which also includes a number of notable ex-OpenAI staffers. They claim that a switch to for-profit status would “fundamentally violate” the company’s mission. (OpenAI has counter-sued Musk, claiming that he has attempted to slow their growth for personal benefit through the use of “bad-faith tactics.”)

Finally, a number of news sources — including the Financial Times — reported this week that OpenAI has cut the amount of time and resources spent safety testing its models. Eight unnamed insiders told FT that staff members are given just a few days to evaluate new models for both risks and performance, compared to several months for previous models. There are apparently concerns that, as the pressure to continually release new and improved AI models heats up, OpenAI has started cutting corners. Which, let’s face it, is going to be hard to get away with, long term, under this kind of relentless media scrutiny. - Lon

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