✖️ xAI promised employees $420 for tax returns and hasn’t paid

xAI asked employees to submit their personal tax returns as training data for Grok and offered $420 in return, according to Bloomberg.

The company wanted to improve Grok’s tax capabilities before the April 15 filing deadline as users increasingly turned to ChatGPT and Claude for accounting tasks.

Two months later, employees are still waiting for the payments.

Even training data can end up as an unpaid invoice.

✔️ @venture

🤖 OpenAI had 11 founders. Only 3 are still there.

The OpenAI trial brought renewed attention to the company’s early days. Today, only Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba remain at the company.

🖱 Wojciech Zaremba remains at OpenAI. He spent years leading robotics research and recently shifted his focus to AI safety and long-term alignment.

🖱 Elon Musk left the board in 2018 after disagreements over the company’s direction. He later launched xAI and merged it into SpaceX.

🖱 Ilya Sutskever left in 2024 after co-leading OpenAI’s research team and co-founded Safe Superintelligence, a company focused entirely on building safe AGI.

🖱 Andrej Karpathy left in 2017 to lead Tesla’s Autopilot team, returned briefly to OpenAI, founded education startup Eureka Labs, and has now joined Anthropic.

🖱 Durk Kingma, one of the most respected researchers in deep learning, moved to Google DeepMind and later joined Anthropic.

🖱 John Schulman helped create reinforcement learning systems behind ChatGPT. He left in 2024 and is now chief scientist at Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines.

🖱 Pamela Vagata was the first founder to leave. She joined Stripe’s AI efforts and later launched venture fund Pebblebed.

🖱 Trevor Blackwell had a background in robotics, left in 2017, and later became a partner at Y Combinator.

🖱 Vicki Cheung worked on engineering and infrastructure before leaving to co-found Gantry, a platform for improving machine learning systems.

OpenAI’s founders now lead or advise many of the most important companies in AI.

The original team ended up shaping the entire industry.

✔️ @venture

GameStop $GME raised its stake in eBay $EBAY from 5% to 6.6%.

Ryan Cohen is still keen to acquire GameStop and may even launch a hostile takeover bid (half cash, half stock).

✔️ @venture

🤖 Altman Offers Startups $2M in Tokens for Equity

Sam Altman proposed giving each YCombinator startup $2 million in tokens for about 7% equity, roughly YCombinator's usual stake.

The tokens come from Codex, which Altman aims to promote by tying new startups to his ecosystem amid competition with Anthropic.

✔️ @venture

🤖 DeepMind Founder Holds Stake in Anthropic

The Financial Times revealed that Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind, secretly invested early in Anthropic as an angel investor.

Anthropic is an AI startup competing closely with DeepMind.

Despite this rivalry, Google recently agreed to invest $10 billion in Anthropic, possibly influenced by Hassabis.

✔️ @venture

🤖 OpenAI to File for IPO Soon

OpenAI plans to submit its IPO application to regulators within days, according to WSJ. The company waited for the conclusion of its legal dispute with Elon Musk before moving forward.

The IPO review process will take several months, making a public offering possible in Q4 2026. It could become one of the largest IPOs ever.

✔️ @venture

🍣 Trump’s sushi investment sparked theories he bought the wrong stock

Donald Trump disclosed a $1 million to $5 million investment in Kura Sushi, a Japanese conveyor-belt sushi chain. The stock jumped more than 5% after the filing became public.

The trade stood out because most of Trump’s largest purchases were tied to AI, semiconductors, or defense companies. Kura Sushi was the only restaurant chain among the biggest buys.

Social media quickly pushed a theory that Trump may have confused Kura Sushi with Fujikura, a Japanese cable and AI infrastructure company whose name sounds similar.

✔️ @venture

🤖 Anthropic expects its first profitable quarter while paying xAI $1.25B a month

Anthropic told investors it could reach operating profitability for the first time in Q2. Quarterly revenue is expected to more than double to about $10.9 billion.

At the same time, reports say Anthropic agreed to pay xAI $1.25 billion per month for compute capacity at the Colossus 1 data center near Memphis.

The deal covers the facility’s full 300-megawatt capacity and runs until May 2029. In total, the contract could generate more than $40 billion for xAI.

One AI company is becoming profitable by sending billions to another AI company’s GPUs.

✔️ @venture