Good morning. I’m thrilled to announce that Jeffrey Katzenberg will join us at Fortune Brainstorm AI next week in San Francisco.
The media mogul and three-time Brainstorm veteran—his last was in 2019—will speak alongside his WndrCo founding partner Sujay Jaswa and Writer CEO May Habib about how AI is transforming storytelling. The trio is the final piece of a brilliant two-day program.
Want to see it IRL? We’re at capacity, but please bookmark our livestream page, where you can watch mainstage sessions for free. I hear this AI stuff is gonna be big, folks. —Andrew Nusca
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Pat Gelsinger abruptly exits Intel
Pat Gelsinger is suddenly out as Intel CEO. His retirement was announced yesterday, with immediate effect.
Gelsinger was the consummate Intel vet, joining the company in 1979 and working his way up to CTO in 2001. He left the fold in 2009 to serve at EMC (president and COO) and then VMware (CEO), then returned to Intel as CEO in 2021.
Gelsinger’s task was existential for the company—with its glory days long behind it, he had to turn it around. His plan for that revolved around separating Intel’s legacy chip-design business from its manufacturing side, in the hope that other chip firms would pay to use the latter.
But Intel has so far failed to make a sustainable business out of its foundry arm. It has also fallen way behind in the AI chip race.
The company recently announced job cuts and the freezing of key factory build-outs as it tries to repair its financials, and it seems Gelsinger has fallen victim to that scramble for survival. He was reportedly forced out by a board frustrated with his pace of progress.
Intel’s new interim co-CEOs are David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holthaus, and the search is on for a permanent replacement…or maybe a buyer. —David Meyer
Bezos backs AI chipmaker to take on Nvidia
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has joined a $700 million funding round for Tenstorrent, a Toronto-born, Silicon Valley-based AI chip startup that wants to take on Nvidia.
The round included investments from South Korea’s AFW Partners, Samsung Securities, LG Electronics, Fidelity, and Hyundai Motor, as well as Canada’s export credit agency and a major pension fund in Ontario, according to Bloomberg.
The money will reportedly be used to hire engineers, purchase computing equipment, and expand its global supply chain. TSMC and Samsung are expected to manufacture the company’s next-generation chips.
Nvidia dominates the AI chip market, but its products are relatively expensive and extremely proprietary. Like other Nvidia rivals, Tenstorrent hopes to cater to customers who seek better interoperability and more value by using open-source software and hardware components that are less specialized.
The company has reportedly signed $150 million worth of customers deals so far.
OpenAI weighs ad business model
OpenAI is reportedly discussing plans to add advertising to its artificial intelligence products.
CFO Sarah Friar told the Financial Times that the firm, which is in the midst of restructuring as a for-profit company, was weighing a business model that would include ads. OpenAI would be “thoughtful about when and where we implement them,” she told the paper.
(Friar subsequently said that OpenAI has “no active plans to pursue advertising” and was simply exploring other revenue streams. The FT notes that OpenAI has recently hired advertising talent from rivals Meta and Google.)
The ChatGPT-maker currently generates most of its revenue by selling access to its AI models through subscriptions and other types of usage fees.
The company’s monthly revenue reportedly reached $300 million in August, and it expects about $3.7 billion in annual sales this year; on the flip side, it will lose billions after accounting for computing equipment, employee salaries, and other costs.
AWS CEO: AI race will never end
The new CEO of Amazon’s cloud computing business previewed the division’s annual Re:Invent confab—which takes place this week in Las Vegas—by saying that the AI arms race is one without end.
“It is such a foundational technology,” said Matt Garman, who was named chief of Amazon Web Services in June, to the Wall Street Journal. “It’s just a thing that’s going to happen forever.”
Re:Invent runs through Friday, but AWS plans to roll out major product news today.
Earlier this year, Amazon announced a fresh $4 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic and $100 billion in data center investment over the next decade. There have also been rumors of a new version of its in-house “Tranium” AI chip, first launched in 2020.
With about 39% of the market, Amazon is the world’s largest cloud computing provider and is perpetually at risk of losing its sizable lead to Microsoft (23%), Google (8%), and a number of smaller players including Alibaba, Oracle, IBM, and Salesforce.
Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs offers first glimpse of its AI
World Labs—founded in 2023 by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li and technologists Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall—has revealed an AI system that can generate three-dimensional worlds from a single image.
That’s right: Input a 2D image, output a video-game like 3D environment. The company says it’s a “first step towards spatial intelligence.”
Like early text-to-image examples of generative AI, the results are a bit blurry and more than a little fantastical. (Generating environments from Edward Hopper’s iconic Nighthawks from 1942 or Wassily Kandinsky’s 1908 work Murnau – Landscape with Green House only underscores the point.) They’re also limited in how far you’re able to explore.
But it’s certainly an exciting development, and not at all difficult to see how the technology could be deployed at a video game studio. World Labs says the generated worlds “obey basic physical rules of 3D geometry” and don’t change once created—important if you’re in the business of designing levels for games.
World Labs announced in September that it had raised $230 million from an array of high-profile investors including venture firms Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, and Radical Ventures, the venture arms of Adobe, AMD, Databricks, Intel, and Nvidia, as well as tech luminaries Marc Benioff, Eric Schmidt, and Ashton Kutcher.
More data
—SuperMicro external review finds no wrongdoing. Its stock price has doubled in the last two weeks.
—Nike-owned NFT startup RTFKT will shut down. Digital shoes, we hardly knew ye.
—Ryan Serhant raises $45m to rethink real estate listings. The Million Dollar Listing star’s app is called S.MPLE.
—Layoff videos are getting traction on social media. Hashtag yikes.
—Will Reid Hoffman leave the U.S.? Fears of a different kind of bully pulpit in Washington.
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