Parameter Update: 2025-41

Not much in here but Atlas, but still one of the more interesting weeks in recent memory!

OpenAI

ChatGPT Atlas

In this week’s biggest announcement, OpenAI now has a web browser?! While they’ve clearly been teasing it for a while, I didn't expect them to go for it this quickly - or this aggressively. On the feature-side, there’s very little that’s actually new (Agent mode feels like a pretty big unlock, but most of the features have been done before by players like Perplexity or even The Browser Company). What has surprised me instead is how producitzed the experience feels. The same company that launched GPT-3 through a heavily restricted, rate-limited and expensive API is now pushing a massively polished product full of dark patterns and stuff designed to go viral. It’s clear why they are doing this - they clearly realize how hard it is to make a brower-switch stick - but when the launch UX displayed the little award telling me when I made my OpenAI account, I actually gagged (let alone the rate limit increase if you make it your default browser!). Also, not sure how I feel about it being called "ChatGPT Atlas" (vs. "OpenAI Atlas").

Sky acquisition

In other news, OpenAI's ambitions know no bounds, so they are now trying to beat Apple at their own game, by integrating deeper into macOS - by buying start-up "Sky". F0r a while, I've felt that the only reason Apple's lack of AI power hasn't hurt them more is because no one has cracked the AI UI stuff yet - which still seems to hold, but also this is the clearest indication yet that OpenAI is certainly trying (while Apple really isn't).

Google: Quantum Echos

Not really AI, and not really my expertise at all, but worth noting anyway: Google has announced "Quantum Echos", a new computational algorithm that accelerated something way beyond what traditional computers are capable of - seems useful?

Anthropic: Google TPU deal

While we've talked plenty about OpenAI raising massive amounts of compute, here's something I didn't expect to see (at least not this soon): Anthropic is partnering with Google, renting out 1 Million TPUs on Google Cloud for a total spend in the tens of billions, with >1 GW coming online in 2026. This is still far removed from OpenAI numbers, but at least it's actually real - and might cement Google as a winner in some of the infra wars?

Meta Layoffs

After the hiring spree of the last few months, Meta has let go of ~600 people from both their FAIR and Superintelligence divisions. Based on various Twitter takes, no one really saw this coming, and it seems to have affected some extremely talented people. They are still hiring, and I even saw some speculations that some of the decisions might have been made by Wang based on arbitrary metrics like LoC - if that turns out to be true it's not a great look.