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OpenAI To Give It Away?
00:22:21
OpenAI floated giving the US government a 5% stake to court the Trump administration. Nvidia promised to backstop cloud providers for a revenue cut, SpaceX showed investors an xAI phone prototype, Apple ramped foldable iPhone orders, and Z.ai launched ZCode.
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Foreign welcome to the tech we write Home for Thursday, July 2, 2026 I'm Brian McCullough. Today OpenAI floated, giving the US government a 5% stake to court the Trump administration's favor. Nvidia promised to backstop cloud providers for a revenue cut, SpaceX showed investors an AI device prototype, Apple ramped up foldable iPhone orders, and Zai launched Z Code. Here's what you missed today. In the world of tech, The older I get, the more I really need a full eight hours of sleep just to function. At least that's until I tried Blueprint's Longevity Mix created by Brian Johnson. Just one scoop helps support energy, cognitive functions, mood focused sleep, cellular resilience and healthy aging. The Longevity Mix is packed full of ingredients like magnesium, taurine, glycine and creatine, all to help you age better and survive on less slee science backed Precision dosed no BS for a limited time only. Our listeners get 20% off plus free shipping at blueprint.bryanjohnson.com by using code TBRH at checkout. That's code TBRH@blueprint.brianjohnson.com for 20% off and after you purchase they will ask you where you heard about them. Please support me and tell them I sent you sources Tell the FT that OpenAI has discussed giving a 5% stake in itself to the US government, seeking to clear political obstacles by securing buy in from the Trump administration. But let me pause and underline something that I just said so you don't miss it. I said giving the US government not selling the US government a 5% stake quote Sam Altman, chief executive of the ChatGPT maker, has argued that giving the public a financial stake in the company is the best way to share the upside of AI, and has suggested a stake of this size and early conversations with the administration, according to two people familiar with the talks. The proposed arrangement, which would involve other USAI companies handing over a similar stake, although it is not clear if the other labs would be willing to do so, giving the government an ownership stake could help secure good relations with the administration and would mark an attempt to address political blowback by sharing the wealth generated by AI with the public. AI labs have faced an increasingly challenging environment in Washington as the American public and politicians grow more concerned about vast data center construction and the implications of AI for jobs and cybersecurity. OpenAI and its chief rival Anthropic, have recently both had the release of their cutting edge models held up by US scrutiny while some Republicans and advisors to President Donald Trump favor much tighter regulation of the sector. The two rivals are also preparing for public listings, which would expand their ownership base and generate big gains for current investors. Although OpenAI's float may not take place until next year. Altman and other OpenAI executives have suggested that each of America's leading AI developers allot 5% of their equity to a vehicle like the Aluminum Alaska Permanent Fund, a sovereign fund that invests the state's oil wealth into stocks and pays dividends to the state governments and residents. The companies might include Anthropic as well as Google, Meta and others, although it is not clear if any of these groups would agree with OpenAI's proposal. After publicly attacking Intel's chief, President Trump has swung behind the US chipmaker after the government took a 10% stake in that company. Conceptual talks between the government and OpenAI were in the early stages and any deal might require an act of Congress to implement, the people said. But the discussions point to a potential mechanism to distribute the financial gains from the technology. Altman has been in active talks with the administration about the issue of public ownership, including Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. The OpenAI chief has also spoken to Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders. In recent weeks. Sanders has pushed for public ownership of closer to half of each US AI company through a sovereign wealth fund, end quote quoting Dar Abasanjo intel stock is up over 500% since the Trump administration took a 10% stake in August of last year. It makes sense for OpenAI to seek a similar outcome, especially given Trump's recent interest in regulating AI models and the benefits of sweetheart government deals given a Trump administration equity stake. End quote. Well, all of this is funny capitalism lately if you ask me. Back to the so called circular investing. Nvidia is apparently promising to financially backstop young cloud providers like Firmis that rent out its AI chips in exchange for a revenue share through a new program. Quoting the information, the backstop would come in the form of promising to rent back unused GPUs if the companies can't find AI developers to rent them, according to GPU cloud providers Firmis and Shares and AI, which are participants in the new program, and three executives at other firms that do business with Nvidia. The deals are part of a program some people at Nvidia have dubbed the AI Compute Partnership. One of the people said Nvidia has offered to pay a guaranteed rate for the cloud provider's unsold GPU capacity. An Nvidia spokesperson also confirmed the program, which shows how the world's most valuable firm is increasingly leaning on its financial position to become a kind of central bank to the hundreds of companies that buy its chips in bulk. GPUs are typically the most expensive part of an AI data center, so guaranteeing to rent unsold GPU capacity makes it much easier for chip buyers with subpar credit ratings to get the loans they need. Nvidia kills two birds with one stone in such deals, said a data center executive. If Nvidia only backstops the leases tied to facilities, quote, then you're stuck with how do you finance the GPUs. But if Nvidia guarantees it will pay for unused computing capacity in the facilities, the GPUs get financed and the data center gets financed as well, the person said. End quote. The Journal says that SpaceX showed investors a handset like device prototype with AI tech from Xai inside it, as well as a proprietary os, a Snapdragon chip and a design slimmer than an iPhone. SpaceX told investors that the project was at an early stage the design could change, and it is unclear whether such a device will be made. Representatives for SpaceX and Qualcomm didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. The project is a sign of Elon Musk's sprawling ambitions as he builds a leading global satellite connectivity network, grows his Rocket company and creates new AI tools. AI companies are placing a variety of bets on the future of form and functionality of AI powered devices. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Elon Musk has in the past weighed building a smartphone due to frustration over how Apple controls distribution of third party apps such as X. It isn't easy, however, for a newcomer to break into the hardware business. The idea of making a phone makes me want to die, musk said last October. But if we have to make a phone, we will. In February, Musk denied that his company was developing a phone, pushing back against a Reuters report that SpaceX was building one that would connect directly to its Starlink satellite network. We are not developing a phone, he posted on X. But some investors in SpaceX and Tesla were told that Musk has long envisioned a consumer device to serve as a platform for his Ventures Technologies. A device could also help Musk become less reliant on other companies. Musk's XAI Chatbot is typically used via Apple or Android devices. Musk's Starlink satellite service already sells a dish to connect to the Internet, and it offers cell phone service in dead zones through partnerships with companies including T Mobile. The device prototype SpaceX recently showed to investors draws on the philosophy behind Musk's Everything app, a concept he championed when acquiring social media platform Twitter now X in 2022, some of the people familiar with the matter said. Often referred to as super apps, these software programs are popular in Asia and incorporate services that Americans usually access by downloading the separate individual apps. Users on China's WeChat and Alipay, owned by local technology giants Tencent and Ant, respectively, tap many apps and features available on the platforms to transfer money, order food, book travel and play games. This model has challenged the traditional app store business. Chinese companies are turning to AI to reinvent this super app model. They are integrating AI agents into existing super apps or trying to turn popular AI chatbots into the nucleus of new everything apps. End quote. Sources say that Apple has told suppliers to produce around 10 million foldable iPhones in 2026. That's up from their original estimate of 7 to 8 million and 80 million iPhones in total across all new models this year. Quoting 9to5Mac, the additional 80 million units of new iPhone models being introduced in the second half of 2026 would bring the total units ordered for the year to 220 million per the report. IDC recently forecasted that Apple would ship close to 240 million iPhones in 2026. The report later says that Apple has told some suppliers to expect as many as 85 new iPhone orders in the second half of the year. As for the first foldable iPhone, Apple is expected to tag it with a premium price. IDC recently predicted that the iPhone Ultra will carry an average selling price of 2,500 dol with storage options priced as much as $3,000. Apple is expected to unveil the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max and foldable iPhone Ultra in September. The foldable iPhone could launch after the iPhone 18 Pro models, although it's still expected to arrive this year. Meanwhile, Apple isn't expected to replace the standard iPhone 17 with the iPhone 18 until spring. This would extend the life of the iPhone 17 on the market from the typical 12 month run to around 18 months. Apple is similarly expected upgrade the iPhone air introduced in September 2025 with a new model in the spring of 2026. End quote. You know you could be experiencing productivity through a whole new Lens. Literally even G2, our productivity. Smart glasses with teleprompting conversations support real time translation and AI to help you stay on top of work and daily life. They're made to look and feel like premium eyewear with no camera and a lightweight 36 gram design you can wear all day. The more context you give them, the smarter they get. Adapting to how you work and what you need. To learn more about even G2, go to evenrealities.com use promo code techbrew to get 10% off evenring1 and or even clip when you add them to your even G2 order. Ever spent hours of your workday tracking down information only to find that it wasn't documented at all? It's an age old corporate conundrum. Critical knowledge isn't available or accessible to the folks who need it. That's the very problem our sponsor Scribe was built to fix. Scribe is a workflow AI platform that automatically turns your workflows into clear cut documentation. All you do is turn on the Scribe browser extension or desktop app and go through your processes as you would normally. Scribe builds a guide as you go, capturing every click, step and screenshot automatically. So what would have taken hours gets done in under a minute. To see what Scribe could look like for your org, head to Scribe how ridehome and mention Ride home for your first month of Scribe, capture free on select plans. That's S C R I B E How Ride home and you might not think this is potentially the biggest story of the day, but it might turn out to be. Quoting VentureBeat Zai, the Beijing based artificial intelligence lab formerly known as zhipu AI, on Wednesday officially launched Z Code, a free desktop application it describes as an agentic development environment purpose built for its flagship GLM 5.2 large language model. The move marks the company's most aggressive push yet into the fast growing AI powered coding tool market, where it now competes directly with Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub, Copilot, and Google's anti Gravity Red one way, Z Code is simply another entrant into a crowded market. Red another, it is a single product that crystallizes three of the most consequential trends in enterprise software today. The race to the bottom pricing of frontier AI models, the geopolitical balkanization of the AI stack, and the rapid maturation of agentic coding agents into we, Gartner now estimates is a roughly $10 billion market. Unlike traditional IDEs that bolt an AI on through a chat, sidebar or autocomplete extension, Z Code is best understood as an agent first development environment. Its core design is built around long horizon tasks. The user describes an outcome, the agent plans the work, edits files, runs, checks, reviews, progress and continues across multiple iterations until the goal is Method Z Code organizes the development experience around the Z Code agent deeply tuned for GLM 5.2 with emphasis on deep integration. The model tools and execution workflow are tuned together so that the agent fits continuous multi step real world development tasks. The environment supports continuous follow up across devices Desktop, mobile, remote and faceshoe WeChat bottle which can all keep the same workspace task moving. Sensitive commands, file changes and high permission actions go through confirmation before execution. That remote control feature, the ability to steer a running coding agent from WeChat, FishU or Telegram on a phone is a differentiator that speaks directly to the Chinese developer market where those messaging platforms dominate professional communication. You can keep checking progress and adding instructions while long running work continues from any device with these messaging apps. The tool is free to download. Revenue flows through Zai's GLM coding plan subscription tiers, which start at $16.20 per month for a Lite plan and scale to $144 per month for max prices that undercut Anthropic's clogged code and Cursors compatible tiers by significant margins. Through July 31, Zcode is offering a promotional 1.5x effective quota bonus for coding plan subscribers with off peak token consumption charged at at 0.67x as a coefficient. The platform also supports multiple AI models and agents including Claude Code, Codex, Gemini and OpenCode, a pragmatic concession to the reality that no single model wins every task. Zcode's value proposition is inseparable from GLM 5.2, the model it was designed to showcase. Zai released GLM 5.2 on June 16, first to its coding plan subscribers and subsequently as open source waits under the MIT license on Hugging Face, a sequencing decision that prioritized distribution over the traditional benchmark LED launch. The model specifications are formidable. GLM 5.2 is a 744 billion parameter mixture of experts architecture with 40 billion active parameters, a genuine 1 million token context window five times the 200,000 limit on its predecessor, and training on 28.5 trillion tokens. It ranked second globally on code arena as of mid June, trailing only Anthropic's Claude Fable 5, making it one of the highest performing publicly available models for coding tasks on benchmarks. GLM 5.2 performs within striking distance of the best proprietary Systems. It trails Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 by just 1 percentage point on Frontier SWE, a benchmark measuring multi hour autonomous engineering projects While edging out OpenAI's GPT 5.5 its API pricing, $1.4 per million input tokens and $4.4 per million output are a cost reduction of up to 82% compared to Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 at 5 and $25, respectively. Because Z Code is a first party tool from the same company that makes the model, it requires no manual endpoint configuration. The model is just wired in. Z Code's arrival cannot be separated from the geopolitical drama that has roiled the AI industry over the past three weeks regarding the Claude, Methos and Fable bans, Zai's timing was surgical. On the same day the Trump administration ordered anthropic's most advanced models blocked for foreign national Zhipu announced the open source release of GLM 5.2 with no usage restrictions. The South China Morning Post reported that GLM 5.2 would be available to all users of Zhipu's new GLM coding plan subscription priced at just a tenth of Anthropic's premium Claude code and Claudmax tiers. The market responded accordingly. GPU's AI market capitalization crossed $128 billion on June 22, driven by a 42% intraday share surge. JPMorgan raised its 2026 through 2030 revenue forecast for GPU by between 7 and 16% following the launch, projecting an over 534% revenue surge for 2026 and expecting the AI firm to turn a profit by 2028. The Fable 5 episode did more than embarrass Anthropic. It introduced a new risk category into enterprise AI procurement sovereign access risk. When a government can disable a commercially deployed AI model overnight, the traditional evaluation criteria of developer experience, benchmark scores and pricing becomes secondary to a more fundamental question. Will this tool still work tomorrow against the entrenched coding players? Zcode's pitch rests on three deep first party integration with GLM 5.2 that no third party editor can replicate, aggressive pricing that starts at a fraction of Western competitors and MIT licensed open weights that allow enterprises to self host, eliminating the regulatory kill switch risk that the Fable ban made viscerally real. End quote. Okay, so with July 4th coming up, the observed holiday as well as the actual holiday I will be taking tomorrow off and also Monday off. So the next regular news episode will be on Tuesday, July 7. But I do have a bonus episode for you tomorrow as well as one on Monday. Two completely different and new how I AI episodes. One on how someone transformed their job using AI and one on how someone is managing their backyard with AI. Enjoy that. Talk to you on Tuesday.