Normal view

OpenAI hit the brakes. Now what?

19 August 2026 at 19:10

With a looming IPO, intense competition from Anthropic, and Chinese and open-weight rivals nipping at its heels, OpenAI has plenty of reasons to move fast. Instead, it hit the brakes.

On Tuesday, the company said it had slowed the pace of some AI development while it tightened security and safeguards. That included a two-week pause in reinforcement learning training on its "latest models intended for deployment," and an ongoing delay to its "largest planned frontier RL run."

The decision is a very public test of an idea AI safety advocates have pushed for for years: that companies should be willing to bow out of the AI race and slow things …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Meet the startup helping Wall Street put a price on AI compute

19 August 2026 at 19:26
The AI buildout shows no signs of slowing. And with hundreds of billions of dollars a year going into data centers and GPUs, compute has become the single biggest cost for anyone building AI products. But for all that spending, there still isn’t a straightforward way to put a price on compute — or for firms to hedge their exposure when the price changes.  Silicon Data […]

Nvidia’s new financial strategy does not compute

19 August 2026 at 14:00
Digital photo collage of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
“Compute is an asset class! Compute is an asset class!” I continue to insist as I slowly shrink down and turn into a corncob | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

April - 1805

Napoleon is master of Europe

Only the British fleet stands before him

Compute is now an asset class

I see it is once again time to talk financial innovation. Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR are all working with Nvidia to put together $500 billion in financing to turn compute into an asset class.

"This is really the first time that technology chips have become an investable asset class," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said to CNBC. "These are revenue-generating assets now. They're productive, they're long-lived, they're fungible, they're flexible."

"This is the very beginning, like what it was whe …

Read the full story at The Verge.

❌