TLDR AI 2026-04-28
OpenAI misses targets 🎯, OpenAI Microsoft renegotiate 🤝, Manus deal blocked 🚫
Microsoft OpenAI Partnership Update (2 minute read)
OpenAI and Microsoft revised their agreement to increase flexibility, including non-exclusive IP licensing, multi-cloud support for OpenAI products, and capped revenue-sharing terms through 2030.
OpenAI Misses Key Revenue, User Targets in High-Stakes Sprint Toward IPO (6 minute read)
OpenAI missed its own targets for new users and revenue, raising concern among company leaders about whether it will be able to support its massive spending on data centers. The company's Chief Financial Officer has said that she is worried that OpenAI may not be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue doesn't grow fast enough. Board directors have been questioning CEO Sam Altman's efforts to secure even more computing power despite the business slowdown. Company executives are now seeking to control costs and instill more discipline in the business.
OpenAI Smartphone Rumors (3 minute read)
Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported that OpenAI explored building a smartphone with partners like MediaTek and Qualcomm, potentially replacing app-centric interfaces with AI agents and hybrid on-device/cloud models.
China Blocks Meta Manus Acquisition (2 minute read)
China halted Meta's $2B acquisition of agentic AI startup Manus, ordering the deal unwound amid regulatory scrutiny, complicating Meta's push into AI agents and cross-border expansion.
To Train or Not to Train (10 minute read)
The companies integrating down into the model layer are doing it because, at their scale, the economics and differentiation arguments work out. Almost all of them are doing post-training, not pre-training from scratch. Companies should start collecting data and build small, specialized models. The more data companies collect, the better models they can produce.
Batch API is terrible for one agent. It might be great for a fleet (6 minute read)
Batch API offers a 50% discount but adds latency, making it less suitable for single-agent use. For fleets of agents where multiple requests can be pooled, the batching approach becomes economically viable. Optimal usage involves routing slower, costlier models through batches, while employing faster models via synchronous paths, potentially managed by intelligent proxies like the developing LunaRoute.
GPT 5.5: The System Card (20 minute read)
GPT-5.5 is a solid improvement and is competitive with Claude Opus. It seems to be better for factual queries, web searches, and straightforward, well-specified requests, while Claude Opus excels in more open-ended or interpretive purposes. The model is unlikely to pose new big risks, and its alignment seems similar to that of previous models. This post examines the system card for GPT-5.5.
Recursive Language Models, clearly explained (3 minute read)
MIT researchers have introduced Recursive Language Models (RLMs) to solve "context rot," a phenomenon where large language models experience reasoning degradation when processing massive context windows, even if they excel at basic retrieval tasks. Instead of forcing a model to ingest an entire document at once, an RLM loads the context into a Python REPL runtime memory slot.
The Moat or the Commons (10 minute read)
American AI was financed on the bet that frontier models would be the next great monopoly business. That assumption is now breaking as open weight models are commoditizing the capability that the American capital paid-for moat was supposed to protect. The gap between the open frontier and the closed frontier is closing. The question will be whether countries choose to subsidize the private moat or the open commons.
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