Today's Newsletter Highlights:

• Musk wants up to $134B in OpenAI lawsuit, despite $700B fortune

• AI cloud startup Runpod hits $120M in ARR — and it started with a Reddit post 

• OpenAI to test ads in ChatGPT in bid to boost revenue

• Best AI Tools

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Musk wants up to $134B in OpenAI lawsuit, despite $700B fortune

Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and Microsoft. He says they tricked him by leaving OpenAI’s original nonprofit mission and making a lot of money after he helped start the organisation. He believes he deserves a share of those profits.

Key Points:

• The $79 B – $134 B Demand

• Musk’s legal team is demanding up to $134 billion in damages.

• This demand comes from an expert's estimate of "wrongful gains." This refers to the money OpenAI and Microsoft supposedly made from his early support.

• The claimed gains include $65.5 B – $109.4 B for OpenAI and $13.3 B – $25.1 B for Microsoft.

• Musk’s Argument

• Musk says he gave around $38 million in seed funding. He also helped with recruitment and added credibility when OpenAI started in 2015.

• He says OpenAI’s valuation of about $500 billion means his contributions should be worth a lot more. He also says he was misled about OpenAI’s nonprofit status.

• After leaving the board in 2018, Musk started his own AI company, xAI. He has also been critical of OpenAI for focusing on profit.

• Legal Process & Timeline

• A federal judge in Oakland, California, has set a jury trial for April 2026.

• Musk’s lawyers might also seek punitive damages or injunctions if the jury rules in his favour.

• Responses from OpenAI & Microsoft

• OpenAI calls the lawsuit baseless and part of an “ongoing pattern of harassment.”

• Microsoft denies any wrongdoing or that it “aided and abetted” OpenAI’s actions.

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AI cloud startup Runpod hits $120M in ARR — and it started with a Reddit post 

Runpod is an AI app hosting and GPU cloud platform. It has hit an impressive $120 million in yearly revenue. This is a key milestone for a startup that started around four years ago.

Key Points:

• How It All Started

• Founders Zhen Lu and Pardeep Singh, ex-Comcast developers, started Runpod. They aimed to solve the frustration developers faced with GPU infrastructure.

• Origins: They began by converting their Ethereum mining rigs into AI compute servers. This shift happened when crypto mining lost its profitability.

• Key Growth Tactic: Lacking a marketing background, they posted on Reddit in early 2022. They offered free access to their servers in exchange for feedback. This helped them attract beta users who later became paying customers. They were able to quit their jobs within nine months and hit their first $1 million in revenue.

• Funding & Scaling

• Runpod bootstrapped for nearly two years before seeking outside funding. They focused on creating a product that could support itself financially.

• In May 2024, they raised a $20 million seed round led by Dell Technologies Capital and Intel Capital. Notable investors were Julien Chaumond, co-founder of Hugging Face, and Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub. All discovered the company through personal use of the product.

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OpenAI to test ads in ChatGPT in bid to boost revenue

OpenAI has announced plans to test ads in the free and Go tiers of ChatGPT in the U.S. starting soon. Some users on these plans will see ads. This move aims to boost revenue and cover high AI development costs.

Key points :

• Where ads will appear: In the free tier and the lower-priced ChatGPT Go subscription.

• Who won’t see ads: Users on Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans will remain ad-free.

• Ad format: Ads will be separate from ChatGPT’s responses and won’t affect the quality of the AI’s answers.

• Data privacy: OpenAI promises not to share users’ conversations with advertisers.

• Limits: Ads won’t be shown to people under 18 or next to sensitive topics like health or politics.

• Context & Implications

• This change marks a shift from OpenAI’s earlier subscription-only revenue model. It reflects the need to fund costly AI infrastructure and growth.

• With hundreds of millions of active users each week, ads could offer a major new revenue source. However, analysts caution that mistakes could push users to competitors.

• The new ChatGPT Go tier costs about $8/month in the U.S. and sits between the free version and standard paid plans.

• What’s Next

• Testing will start soon. OpenAI aims to make ads relevant and unobtrusive, not part of core AI responses. Feedback from this trial could influence how widely ads are used later.

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