Could OpenAI shake up self-driving cars?
Sam Altman has made many big claims about what OpenAI will be able to do, including spearheading ultra-expansive data centers and building artificial intelligence that can rival the abilities of Ph.D. holders.
But he also recently made a significant, yet largely overlooked, assertion. OpenAI is seeking to crack the code for advanced autonomous driving.
“We have some new technology that could just do self-driving for standard cars way better than any current approach has worked,” Altman said last week on the “Uncapped With Jack Altman” podcast, which his brother hosts. Altman added, “If our A.I. techniques can really go drive a car, that’s pretty cool.”
The technology is in its early stages — DealBook hears that it involves both OpenAI’s Sora video software and its robotics team — but commercializing it is still a distant goal. An OpenAI spokesman declined to comment.
That could make Altman even more of a competitor to Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI but has since waged war on the company. (A short reminder: Musk has sued to try to stop OpenAI from revamping its corporate structure, and he’s building a direct competitor, xAI, that’s raising — and spending — billions of dollars.)
Autonomous vehicles are key to Musk’s vision for Tesla, which he increasingly sees as the producer of huge fleets of fully self-driving cars. Tesla is focusing on A.I.-powered vision rather than on the array of sensors like lidar that Waymo, a Google spinoff, uses.
One big question mark for OpenAI: Where will its systems get their data? Tesla and Waymo have already amassed huge amounts of information and video through their years of driving on the roads.
That raises the question of whether OpenAI believes in a fundamentally different approach to self-driving tech, one that relies less on real-world data and more on advanced simulation, synthetic data or a breakthrough in “generalizable” A.I. Of note: The company recently collaborated with Applied Intuition, a start-up focused on putting A.I. in cars.
(OpenAI’s venture arm also invested in Ghost Autonomy, a self-driving start-up, though the business folded last year.)
Speaking of Altman and podcasts … The OpenAI chief sat down last night for a live interview with Kevin Roose and Casey Newton of “Hard Fork,” The Times’s tech podcast. Here are some of the highlights from the conversation:
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“I think he really gets it,” Altman said of President Trump’s approach to A.I. (Altman has forged close ties to the president, including by donating to his inauguration fund and announcing the Stargate data center project at the White House.) “I think he really understands the importance of leadership in this technology.”
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Altman was uncertain about whether the right A.I. regulations would come to pass: “I have become a bit more, jaded isn’t the right word, but it’s something in that direction, about the ability of policymakers to grapple with the speed of technology.”
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Altman played down reports of tensions between OpenAI and Microsoft as they rework their relationship: “Do you believe that, when you read those things?”
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
Republicans continue to battle one another over a huge domestic policy bill. President Trump and congressional leaders urged lawmakers not to leave Washington at the end of the week for a scheduled recess, and instead focus on passing the legislation. But several House Republicans — who are needed to approve the many changes Senate counterparts are making — suggested that they wouldn’t vote for the revised bill.
Jay Powell pushes back on pressure to cut rates sooner. The Fed chair told House lawmakers on Tuesdayon that he most likely wanted to see more data on the inflationary effects of Trump’s tariffs before lowering borrowing costs. That was a notable divergence from calls by two Trump-appointed Fed governors, Christopher Waller and Michelle Bowman, who suggested they would support cutting rates as soon as next month.
Anthropic scores a big, if partial, court victory over its use of copyrighted material. A federal judge ruled that the artificial intelligence start-up’s use of lawfully purchased books to train its models was fair use. The decision could reshape how U.S. courts view A.I. companies’ use of copyrighted works for training purposes. But the judge ordered a separate trial on Anthropic’s use of pirated material.
An international banking group criticizes stablecoins. Officials from the Bank for International Settlements, a clearinghouse for central banks, said that the crypto tokens “perform badly” on three requirements for becoming linchpins of the global monetary system, including sufficient protections against illicit use, singleness and elasticity. Shares in Circle, a major stablecoin issuer, fell 15 percent on Tuesday on the report.
The moguls’ Mamdani dilemma
It was a scenario many New York City business leaders had feared: Zohran Mamdani is on track to win the Democratic nomination for mayor, upsetting Andrew Cuomo in a victory few could have seen even a couple of months ago.
The corporate elites who donated millions to stop Mamdani are left to figure out how to continue opposing the democratic socialist with large and expensive economic plans for the city.
“This is the biggest upset in modern New York City history,” Trip Yang, a Democratic consultant, told The Times. Cuomo conceded to Mamdani, despite neither having crossed a 50 percent threshold to win the nomination outright. But the math of the city’s ranked-choice voting system and Mamdani’s amassing of endorsements from other rivals meant the former governor had little chance of winning.
“Tonight we made history,” Mamdani said. “In the words of Nelson Mandela, it always seems impossible until it is done. My friends, we have done it.”
Prominent business representatives lamented Mamdani’s victory. Remember that an array of top executives — including Mike Bloomberg, Blair Effron of Centerview Partners and Alex Karp of Palantir — had donated tens of millions to Cuomo’s campaign or to an affiliated super PAC.
“The economic stability of the city is very much at risk as employers and taxpayers digest the possibility of a mayor who says he wants to further increase taxes and move us toward policies of socialism,” Kathryn Wylde, the leader of the Partnership for New York City, a business group, told The Times. “This election is a true test of the resilience of our city.”
The financier Bill Ackman, who also prominently backed Cuomo, reposted a flurry of X posts critical of Mamdani. “Good luck NYC. Florida is about to experience population boom,” read one X message that Ackman reposted.
And Dan Loeb, a fellow hedge fund manager, posted on Wednesday morning, “It’s officially hot commie summer.”
What’s next? Mamdani is set to compete against other candidates in the general election in the fall, including the incumbent, Mayor Eric Adams; Jim Walden, a corporate lawyer running as an independent; and Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee.
Cuomo may run as an independent as well, but he sounded less clear about that last night. He may not retain the backing of all of the business moguls he had drawn for the primary. “Unless @andrewcuomo or @ericadamsfornyc drops out before the general election, @ZohranKMamdani wins,” Ackman posted on X. Loeb responded that Adams looked like the better pick.
“I don’t know if they’re competing for cash or steak dinner or what, but it’s crazy how much they’re getting up.”
— Bill Schalliol, an economic development official in Indiana on the huge data center development that Amazon is building there for the start-up Anthropic. The facility is expected to consume 2.2 gigawatts of energy, enough to power a million homes.
Airlines on edge
Major international airlines have already been grappling with airspace closures over Russia and Ukraine for the past three years.
Now, uncertainty over the conflict between Iran and Israel, even as a cease-fire continues to hold, could hit airlines’ bottom lines, Danielle Kaye reports.
Thousands of planes have been diverted since June 13, when Israel started striking Iran, Ian Petchenik, the director of communications at Flightradar24, told DealBook. Since then, roughly 3,000 flights a day have been rerouted because of Iraqi and Iranian airspace closures, he said.
He conceded, however, that it was hard to attribute flight cancellations specifically to the war.
Tehran’s attack in Qatar this week intensified the industry’s dilemma. On Monday, Iran launched missiles at a U.S. air base in Qatar in retaliation against U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, prompting the Gulf country to temporarily close its airspace. (Iran had given advance warning to minimize potential casualties.) Bahrain and Kuwait also briefly closed their airspaces. More than 20 commercial flights bound for Doha, Qatar, were diverted that day, according to the aviation data firm Cirium.
Who’s affected: Middle Eastern carriers, including Emirates and Qatar Airways, are the most disrupted. But airlines based in other regions, including Europe, Asia and the U.S., are feeling the pinch, too. British Airways canceled flights to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, as did Singapore Airlines, after the U.S. struck Iranian nuclear sites over the weekend. Air France-KLM, American Airlines and Air India have also suspended, diverted or halted some flights.
“We’re running out of places to put airplanes,” Petchenik said, adding that a potential regional escalation of the conflict “dramatically increases the effect on commercial aviation.”
Rerouting can be costly. “If a flight that normally takes, let’s say, six hours all of a sudden becomes seven or eight hours or more, the fuel costs for that increase proportionately,” Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst at Atmosphere Research Group, told DealBook. “But it’s not just the fuel costs; the crew costs increase as well.”
The financial effect depends on how long the tensions last. The truce appears to be holding.
But the commercial aviation industry remains on high alert. “This story is by no means done yet,” Harteveldt said. “What we don’t know is how extensive this disruption will be.”
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In other Middle East conflict news: A preliminary classified U.S. intelligence report found that the American strikes on Iran set Tehran’s nuclear program back by only a few months. And President Trump said that China could continue buying oil from Iran.
THE SPEED READ
Deals
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Spirit Airlines urged the Transportation Department to block a proposed partnership between JetBlue and United Airlines. (Reuters)
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“JPMorgan Traders Are Getting Shut Out of Private Credit Market” (Bloomberg)
Tech and artificial intelligence
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The prediction market operator Polymarket is said to be raising $200 million in new financing at a $1 billion valuation. (The Information)
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Scale AI, a start-up with a $14 billion Meta investment, reportedly uses publicly accessible Google Docs for sensitive training information for clients including Google and xAI. (Business Insider)
Best of the rest
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“Buy now, pay later” loans will start showing up in FICO credit scores. (NYT)
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“With Bezos Wedding, Venice Braces for Love in the Time of Tech Billionaires” (NYT)
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Andrew Ross Sorkin is a columnist and the founder of DealBook, the flagship business and policy newsletter at The Times and an annual conference.
Bernhard Warner is a senior editor for DealBook, a newsletter from The Times, covering business trends, the economy and the markets.
Sarah Kessler is the weekend edition editor of the DealBook newsletter and writes features on business.
Michael J. de la Merced has covered global business and finance news for The Times since 2006.
Danielle Kaye is a Times business reporter and a 2024 David Carr Fellow, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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