What Did OpenAI Do This Week?

A big week for OpenAI. A $500 billion initiative + agent launch. News count: +25

OPENAI’S BIG INTERACTION WITH THE DIGITAL [WHOLE] WORLD.

OpenAI, Trump and SoftBank launched "The Stargate Project". A $500 billion initiative over four years to ‘build advanced AI infrastructure in the U.S’. It doesn’t get much bigger than this. With an initial $100 billion investment, the project aims to bolster U.S. AI leadership. Immediately, it came under fire for 1) the lack of a fully developed plan, 2) actual funding levels [Musk jumped in on that], 3) no government support, and 4 ) its intent to exclusively serve OpenAI once operational. DeepSeek, a Chinese A.I. company that released DeepSeek R1, a new large language model that scored as high or higher than OpenAI’s o1 on a variety of third-party benchmarks was spotlit as proof of the need for Stargate in the US-China AI arms race.

OpenAI also launched its first agent ‘Operator’ in “research preview.” Operator works independently using its own web browser [pour another one out for Google] in the cloud to autonomously accomplish tasks for you. We know this ‘smart concierge’ is powered by a new model called Computer-Using Agent (CUA) and works using GPT-4o. It opens in its own browser and starts clicking and typing while you watch to complete tasks such as booking travel, ordering food, paying bills, scheduling appointments, and conducting online research. Available in the US only to Pro-tier subscribers [but included in the $200/month subscription] for users, key features are: