Oracle has two magic words for investors concerned with the company’s aggressive data center spending: fast and cheap.
Shares of the cloud giant rose as much as 10% on Tuesday after it surpassed investor expectations for the third quarter and raised revenue guidance to $67 billion for fiscal 2026.
Still, Oracle faced some questions about its AI data center buildout and how it plans to justify the billions of dollars it burns along the way. In February, Oracle announced a $50 billion debt raise to help fund its AI ambitions. In the last year, the company has announced major data center projects in Texas, New Mexico, and Michigan.
On Oracle’s third-quarter earnings call Tuesday, Bernstein analyst Mark Moerdler asked, “How comfortable are you with the values you’re creating from the AI data center business itself?”
Oracle co-CEO Clay Magouyrk reassured Moerdler that the company is focused on minimizing the cost of its data center buildout to maximize future profitability.
“We continue to get better and better at running these data centers, delivering them more cheaply, optimizing the amount of cost for networking and hardware spend, as well as power,” said Magouyrk.
He added that Oracle is focused on accelerating the time its buildings spend under construction.
“We’re very good at it,” he said.
“We’re very, very good at reducing those costs during that time period.”
He did not give any other details on how exactly Oracle manages its data center budget.
In 2022, Oracle undertook significant cost-cutting measures, laying off thousands of people in the wake of its $28 billion acquisition of medical records giant Cerner.
In January, Business Insider reported that Oracle was struggling to find financing for Stargate, its $500 billion data center initiative with OpenAI.
Lenders and investors told Business Insider they were growing weary of the project’s lofty ambitions as it races to keep up with the rest of Big Tech amid the AI race.
Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are on track to spend $600 billion on data centers and AI infrastructure in 2026 alone.
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Last year, Paramount said it would use $24 billion in funding from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar to help buy WBD.
Now that Paramount has won that deal, it won’t say whether that’s still the plan.
A key Paramount backer suggests that Gulf money would be a good thing for this deal.
We still don’t know if Paramount intends to use billions of dollars from Gulf states like Saudi Arabia to help it buy Warner Bros. Discovery.
But if Paramount does end up doing that, it wouldn’t be a bad thing, says a key Paramount backer.
That update comes via Gerry Cardinale, who heads up RedBird Capital Partners, the private equity company that helped finance Larry and David Ellison’s acquisition of Paramount last year and is doing the same with their WBD deal now.
In a podcast with Puck’s Matt Belloni published Wednesday night, Cardinale wouldn’t comment directly on Paramount’s previously disclosed plans to use $24 billion from sovereign wealth funds controlled by Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar to help buy WBD.
Instead, he reiterated Paramount’s current messaging on the deal’s financing: The $47 billion in equity Paramount will use to buy WBD will be “backstopped” by the Ellison family and RedBird — meaning they are ultimately on the hook to pay up. The rest of the $81 billion deal will be financed with debt.
Cardinale also acknowledged what Paramount has disclosed in its current disclosure documents: It intends to sell portions of that $47 billion commitment to other investors: “We haven’t syndicated anything at this time,” he said. “We do expect to syndicate with strategic, domestic, and foreign investors. But at the end of the day, that alchemy shouldn’t matter because it’ll be done in the right way.”
And when asked about concerns about Middle Eastern countries owning part of a media conglomerate that includes assets like CNN, Cardinale suggested that could be a plus.
“I think we want to be a global company,” he said. “You look at what’s going on right now geopolitically. What’s going on right now geopolitically out of the Middle East wouldn’t be, the positives of that would not be happening without some of those sovereigns that you’re referring to.”
He continued:
“The world is changing. We can stick our head in the sand and pretend it’s not, or we can embrace globalization and the derivative benefits both geopolitically and otherwise that come from that. Content generation coming out of Hollywood is one of America’s greatest exports.I firmly embrace the global nature and orientation that we bring to this from a capital standpoint, from a footprint standpoint, etc. At the end of the day, I do understand some of the concerns that you’ve raised, but that will work itself out between signing and closing because at the end of the day, worst-case scenario, Ellison and RedBird are 100% of this thing.”
All of which suggests to me that Paramount still intends to use money from Gulf-based sovereign wealth funds to buy WBD.
What I don’t understand is why the company won’t say that out loud. Does that mean it’s still negotiating with potential investors? Or that it’s reticent to disclose outside investors, for whatever reason, until it has to? A Paramount rep declined to comment.
Anthropic’s CEO is prepared to walk away from its contract with the military, according to a new statement published on Thursday.
In a blog post, CEO Dario Amodei said that the company “cannot in good conscience accede” to the request of the Defense Department concerning safeguards around its frontier model, Claude.
On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic an ultimatum to agree with the military’s terms over the use of Claude or get blacklisted by the government.
Defense officials gave Anthropic until Friday evening to agree to the terms.
The terms were not clarified, but the issue, according to Amodei’s statement, appears to revolve around two red lines Anthropic is not willing to cross when it comes to how Claude is deployed: mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
A spokesperson for Anthropic declined to comment.
Hours before Amodei put out a statement, Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson, posted on X that the department had no interest in using AI to conduct mass surveillance of US citizens or to develop autonomous weapons.
And several hours after Amodei released his statement, the Department’s undersecretary for research and engineering, Emil Michael, lashed out at the CEO in a social media post.
“It’s a shame that @DarioAmodei is a liar and has a God-complex. He wants nothing more than to try to personally control the US Military and is ok putting our nation’s safety at risk,” Michael wrote on X.
“The @DeptofWar will ALWAYS adhere to the law but not bend to whims of any one for-profit tech company,” added Michael, who was previously Uber’s chief business officer.
A person familiar with the negotiations told Business Insider the department provided a new proposal just 36 hours before Hegseth’s deadline, and the language around the provisions on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons allowed for “any lawful use” of Anthropic’s AI.
The person said that the additions essentially gave the military to discretion to set aside Anthropic’s red lines and use Claude as it sees fit.
A senior Pentagon official told Business Insider on Tuesday that the department will consider invoking the Defense Production Act — a wartime law that would essentially give the president control over Anthropic’s resources in the interest of national security — and deem the company a supply chain risk.
Both uses of the national authorities would be unprecedented, experts told Business Insider, considering that the levers are being used as a negotiating tactic and against an American company.
“I’m not aware of this ever having been used as a weapon in a negotiating posture,” Dean Ball, an ex-senior policy advisor for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told Business Insider.
Amodei wrote in his blog post that the two threats are “inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.”
The CEO wrote that Anthropic hopes the government will “reconsider” its position on the safeguards and that the company’s preference is to continue working with the military.
“Should the Department choose to offboard Anthropic, we will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider, avoiding any disruption to ongoing military planning, operations, or other critical missions,” Amodei wrote.
It’s not yet clear how the Pentagon plans to respond.
February 27, 2026: This story was updated to reflect a public statement by Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for research and engineering, about Amodei.
My grandma and I spent most of our lives apart, yet she taught me a deeper way to live.
I grew up in California, while my Grandma Jackie lived in Minnesota. We saw each other only on special occasions — summer visits, my high-school graduation, and a few holidays.
Because of the distance, I got to know her through stories from my parents. Most of what I knew about my grandma came from tales of her days fishing, playing slots, and trying her luck at Pokeno.
These stories, mixed in with my own memories of her wide smile and the taste of her one-of-a-kind sweet-potato pie, cemented my connection to her. Yet when she passed away at 99, I felt guilty for not being closer to her.
During my grieving, I reflected on our relationship that flourished despite the time and miles between us. Through our scattered time together, Grandma Jackie gave me three lessons that shape how I live today.
Love doesn’t need many words
Although my grandma didn’t always say much, I knew she loved me.
Kiersten Brown
My grandma wasn’t much of a talker — oftentimes, she could communicate more with a smile than with words.
Whenever I visited her, her brown eyes would light up, and in her raspy voice, she would say, “Well, hi sweetie, how ya doing?”
After a few minutes of pleasantries, the conversation would end. Then we would sit together and watch “Wheel of Fortune.” Occasionally, I’d glance at her, and she’d shoot me a smile.
The same pattern played out during her yearly birthday calls, which lasted three minutes, at best. She would sing “Happy Birthday,” ask how I was doing, and end with, “Well, I’ll holla at you later.”
Interactions felt more like small talk with a coworker than chats with a loved one, and these brief interactions made me question our connection. Short conversations made me feel like we weren’t close because we didn’t have much say.
Yet one day after my grandma’s passing I was talking with my aunt who revealed that love is measured in time spend together.
My aunt mentioned that Grandma Jackie often asked about me and prayed for me nightly. Although we didn’t speak often and saw each other less, she was always thinking of me.
This insight made me realize that silence was more of a way of being than a reflection of our relationship. I realize now that not having much to say was a choice rooted in acceptance and love — she was content with simply having me around.
Because of her, I now focus more on appreciating someone’s presence rather than filling space with chatter.
It’s never too late to change how you live and chase life — no matter the circumstances
My grandma had an unwavering will to live and really took charge of her health at the age of 80 when the doctor’s told her that her she might not have much time left.
She quit smoking, cold turkey. She enrolled in exercise programs, walked daily laps around the house, took supplements, and focused on eating more fruits and vegetables.
More than fearing death, I believe my grandma enjoyed life too much not to fight for it. She had always been someone who loved spending time with her friends, enjoyed traveling within her own state, and considered everyone she met a friend.
When I visited my family a year ago, my grandma attended nearly every event. If she saw someone getting ready to leave, she’d ask, “Where we going?” and expected us to bring her with us. It didn’t matter whether we went to the park or out to eat; she made sure to tag along.
Every day I’m reminded that circumstances don’t have to dictate how I live, and her strength has inspired me to live life to the fullest.
Never stop doing what you enjoy
My grandma tried to spend time with friends and family as much as she could.
Kiersten Brown
As a music lover, she danced whenever her favorite songs came on. When she became less mobile, she would still rock her hips and sway in her chair.
She loved visiting casinos, never focusing on hitting big wins, but rather finding pleasure in simply playing. During her last few years of life, she attended virtual and in-person family bingo every Friday night. When she craved cake and ice cream, she would have some — in moderation, of course.
As time goes on and I grow older, I’m committed to following my grandma’s example. I will be dancing, hiking, and hanging out with friends for as long as I’m alive.
I’d say my grandma reached 99 for two reasons: good genes and complete dedication to living her life the best way she could. Because of her, I live with more purpose and intention.
Leaders at the software company Canva used to wonder whether job candidates were secretly using AI during technical interviews.
By early last year, that concern gave way to a bigger question: How good are they with AI?
Managers saw the company’s engineers getting more done with the technology, so they needed to ensure new hires could do the same.
“We just flipped the script and went, ‘OK, we’re going to invite you to use AI,'” Brendan Humphreys, Canva’s chief technology officer, told Business Insider.
The result, he said, has been stronger hires better equipped to wield powerful AI tools to help write code and solve problems.
Canva is one of a growing number of companies — including Meta and McKinsey — that are inviting some job candidates to use AI in parts of the hiring process.
Broadly, when ChatGPT emerged in late 2022, many employers worried that job seekers would use AI to help talk their way past interviewers. Yet as the technology becomes more capable and embedded in daily work, a number of companies are moving from policing it to evaluating candidates’ AI know-how.
That’s what happened at Arcade, an IT infrastructure startup. The company has always asked technical candidates to complete a take-home exercise. Yet now, it expects them to use AI in the process, Alex Salazar, the company’s cofounder and CEO, told Business Insider.
As the technology’s capabilities surged over the past year or so, he realized that candidates would likely turn to AI regardless of whether Arcade sanctioned it. Ultimately, Salazar said, the company wants its workers, including new hires, to use AI.
“So why are we creating this artificial test that doesn’t even really reflect the work they’re going to do when they get here?” he said.
Humphreys came to a similar conclusion at Canva. To factor in AI, he said, the company reworked its technical interview to make the questions “complex, ambiguous, and problematic.”
“If you just dump the question that we’re giving you into an AI, you’re going to get a substandard answer,” Humphreys said.
To land a job at the company, which has about 265 million monthly users of its graphic design software, technical candidates need to know how to thoughtfully question AI, he said.
Show us you can work with AI
One way to avoid concerns that candidates might be leaning too hard on AI is to have job seekers show their work. In Canva’s case, the company asks candidates to share their screen during a technical interview.
“We want to see the interactions with the AI as much as the output of the tool,” Humphreys said.
Brendan Humphreys, CTO at Canva
Courtesy of Canva
Arcade tells candidates to use whatever AI tools they want on their exercise, then include a transcript of their conversations with the AI. The idea is to learn who knows how to do the job and to work with an agent. Doing so, Salazar said, comes with a “very real learning curve.”
He said that the shift to allowing AI use in the exercise meant that Arcade placed greater emphasis on a candidate’s “taste.” That sensibility is important, he said, because AI can kick out answers, yet the best results often come from repeated iteration with these tools, he said.
“It’s going to show their ability to use the AI, but it’s also going to show what they think ‘good’ is,” Salazar said of candidates’ interactions with AI.
‘Ride the dragon’
Other companies want workers to demonstrate their AI acumen during the hiring process, too.
In a June post on an internal message board, Meta said it was developing a coding interview in which candidates could use an AI assistant, Business Insider previously reported.
That mode of working, Meta wrote, was “more representative” of the environment in which future developers would be operating. It also makes “LLM-based cheating less effective,” the company said, referring to large language models.
The consulting firm McKinsey & Company is piloting a change to its graduate recruiting process, asking candidates to use the company’s internal AI assistant, Lilli, during case interviews to assess how they work with the technology, several media outlets reported in January.
The acceptance of, or even the preference for, AI in some parts of hiring doesn’t mean companies will welcome job seekers who use the tools to misrepresent their skills. Even if a candidate gets away with it at first, hiring managers are likely to eventually discover that someone doesn’t have the goods, Susan Peppercorn, an executive coach, told Business Insider.
That’s because candidates who complete an assessment, for example, “are going to have to explain how they arrived at their thinking,” she said.
Understanding that thought process is what Canva seeks in its hiring, said Humphreys, who oversees roughly 2,600 technical employees in roles including software engineering, IT, and machine learning.
It’s a way of seeing whether a candidate makes sound technical decisions when it starts producing code, he said.
“What we’re testing for now in our interview process is an ability to harness that power, to control that power — to kind of ride the dragon,” Humphreys said.
Do you have a story to share about your career? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com
Over eight years of writing for travel publications, Kim Magaraci developed a passion for domestic travel. She learned that travel tips online couldn’t compete with those destinations you could only discover by word-of-mouth.
So, when she founded her travel business, KGM Travel Design, in 2024, she hoped to emphasize personal relationships with vendors and customers and avoid using AI, despite her experience with it.
“I don’t think you can get good advice asking ChatGPT for an itinerary,” she says. “It’s antithetical to everything I stand for.”
And yet, Magaraci realized that using AI for administrative tasks like analytics, compiling reports, and generating condensed client briefs allowed her to spend more time on the personalized relationships that set her business apart.
She’s one of many solopreneurs who told Business Insider that outsourcing administrative tasks to AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Nano Banana — Gemini’s photo-editing AI — has allowed them to scale their business by spending more time on strategic and creative work, including growth decisions and building personal connections with customers.
“It’s getting harder and harder to deny the time-saving aspects,” Magaraci says, adding that she has embraced AI “in order to run a successful business and grow this business into what I want it to be.”
AI supports growth by creating more free time, solopreneurs say
Seneca Connor, founder of The Bag Icon, an accessories brand, uses Nano Bana and other AI products to edit photos and videos. That not only saves her money — up to $2,000 per monthly photo shoot, she says — but also time.
Seneca Connor is the founder of The Bag Icon.
Ian Tuttle for BI
With the hours saved, Connor has been able to design more original bags and launch a greater number of bags curated from other designers, all while reducing her marketing costs.
As a result, The Bag Icon saw more than a 20% year-over-year increase in profits last year, despite the impact of tariffs.
Accountant and solopreneur Gloria Hebert uses ChatGPT for her business, Aybear Services, to instantly create educational client worksheets that previously took an hour or two to set up.
This frees up time that she then uses to prioritize analyzing financial data from her bookkeeping clients — data she doesn’t feed into AI because of privacy concerns. Managing finances is the core of her business, so having more time to spend on that has allowed her to streamline her workdays.
Gloria Hebert is an accountant and the founder of Aybear Services.
Stephe Ross Goldstein for BI
The time saved also allows her to organize networking events and community education classes for local business owners, which has led to an uptick in business. “Several of those entrepreneurs hired me to do their books,” Hebert says.
AI allows more time for personalized communications, which build brand following
Lisa York is the owner of Sell More Stuff, an email marketing business. Although she has a small audience, she saw a 33% conversion rate for sales last year, she says. She credits that growth to her personalized, voicey emails, which always open with a personal anecdote and are never written with AI.
“I use a lot of story-led emails,” York says. “People enjoy them, and they open the email because they can see my name.”
That’s something AI just can’t replicate, she says. But York is able to spend time drafting engaging copy because she outsources other tasks — including tech support for her website, research, and brainstorming marketing strategy — to ChatGPT.
Lisa York is the founder of Sell More Stuff.
David Oates for BI
Like York, Connor uses the time that AI saves to build robust communication and rapport with her customers, which she says builds loyalty to her business. Less time spent on photos and video gives her more time to respond to emails and direct messages from clients seeking advice about their purchases.
“It’s building community that’s missing in the big brands,” Connor says.
AI frees up time so solopreneurs can focus on their business’s core
While AI has allowed these solopreneurs to grow their businesses without hiring a team, the technology shouldn’t take over the core aspects of a business, Hebert says. Rather, it can be a tool that allows owners to focus on those critical areas.
“Use it as a resource,” she says.
York — whose target clientele are other solopreneurs — says she’s seeing more people recognize that. “People aren’t scared of it anymore,” she says.
Seneca Connor emphasizes that while she uses AI, all thoughts, ideas, and suggestions she shares with her clients are her own.
Ian Tuttle for BI
Connor plans to expand her use of AI this year. She’s experimenting with a digital clone — a video avatar that can deliver a script explaining new products. That approach will save her time on filming videos, but she says she’ll always be the one dishing out the original advice that her clients have come to trust.
Even if a video is created using AI, Connor says, “all thoughts, ideas, and suggestions — those are my own.”
Every December, cinephiles ask: Was this a good year for movies? By the end of 2025, I knew my answer instantly: Yes.
The box office told a different story. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, annual box-office grosses routinely reached $10 to $11 billion. This year, totals are expected to fall short of $9 billion.
“It looks like it’s going to be two years in a row that the industry flatlined,” Alamo Drafthouse COO Michael Sherrill told Variety.
But if you look beyond the box-office numbers, you’d see the year was packed with wonderful movies. And it’s just one reason we should be paying less attention to what the box office tells us.
Underrated gems were everywhere
Not every year has a “Barbenheimer,” which together raked in $2.4 billion at the box office in 2023, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t plenty of five-star films in 2025.
Some of the best movies of the year included “28 Years Later,” “Blue Moon,” “Sentimental Value,” “Splitsville,” “Hamnet,” “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” “Black Bag,” and “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” and all but two made less than $11 million worldwide.
“The Final Reckoning,” which grossed $598 million at the box office, was still unable to become profitable due to ballooning production costs, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Another, “Black Bag,” was a slick thriller starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as a pair of married spies who are pitted against each other when a mole is discovered. This film was visually stunning, featured strong performances, and the tension never let up.
“Black Bag.”
Focus Features
When it was released in March, “Black Bag” earned $44 million at the box office, likely because it catered to, for lack of a better term, “adults.” Yet Gen Z and Gen Alpha are the generations “sort of single-handedly keeping film alive” more than any others, according to reports from CinemaUnited and the National Research Group, suggesting there may be a ceiling on how far adult-focused theatrical releases like “Black Bag” can go today. By comparison, another Soderbergh-directed thriller, “Out of Sight,” made nearly double that in 1998.
Another great 2025 film, “Sorry, Baby,” was a movie written by, directed by, and starring Eva Victor in their directorial debut. Victor played a college professor grappling with the aftermath of a sexual assault. It was simultaneously heartbreaking, funny, and uplifting.
It also only made $3 million at the box office — a respectable total for a small indie film with a reported budget of $1.5 million and a very limited theatrical run, but not a smash by any means.
Another movie that made $3 million? “Splitsville,” which made me laugh harder than almost anything else I saw this year.
“Splitsville.”
Neon
What I learned from these movies: Don’t let the “flop” label or a small box-office number scare you. Just because it didn’t have “Avengers: Endgame”-level marketing, fanfare, and box-office take-home, it doesn’t mean it’s not worth your time.
The new normal
In fact, even some of the biggest hits of the year could be considered flops by Old Hollywood standards.
Movies like “Superman,” “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” and “Captain America: Brave New World” each earned hundreds of millions of dollars globally but fell far short of the blockbuster heights superhero films once enjoyed.
Arguably the best superhero movie of the year, “Thunderbolts*,” made $382 million worldwide, making it a superhero flop according to outlets like Variety and Screen Crush.
“Thunderbolts*.”
Marvel Studios
Over the last decade, viewers’ habits have changed; more people stay home and stream their favorite films, rather than head to theaters.
With the advent of streaming, fewer people are interested in going to cinemas. A US Kagan Consumer Insights survey, released in October, found that the percentage of frequent movie-goers dropped by 22% between 2019 and 2025.
Meanwhile, in July 2025, Netflix reported its best-ever numbers during an earnings call. Free streaming services like YouTube and Tubi increased viewership by 53% between 2023 and 2024, and Peacock gained 3 million subscribers in just the first week of the Olympics.
The era when every major release was expected to make a billion dollars is over.
We should all know less about marketing budgets
This comes as there’s more focus on the theater box office and studio budgets. Over the past decade, trade publications have leaned into coverage of how much money a movie needs to earn “to make its money back.”
This reporting only opens up films like Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” a record-breaking, singular film that depicts an area of the country rarely shown on screen, to bad-faith criticism, as viewers use data to tear a movie down, regardless of quality.
“Sinners.”
Eli Adé
It not only ignores creative value but also obscures other stories, such as how Coogler secured a rights deal to own the rights in 2050, which could set a new precedent for how creatives take ownership of their work.
Instead, the narrative was about how this film, which grossed over $360 million on a $90 million budget, per IndieWire, wasn’t close to making its money back.
“Sinners” has amassed $61 million in its global debut. It’s a great result for an original, R-rated horror film, yet the Warner Bros. release has a $90 million price tag before global marketing expenses, so profitability remains a ways away. https://t.co/gjPXGBYkZ1pic.twitter.com/wwXjVC2GT5
so in order for the film to break even (70M budget), it will have to gross 175M, but that doesn’t include the marketing costs, so the break even point is prob +200M. so happy timotheé is getting a financial failure attatched to his face 🙏🏻 https://t.co/ZvYV2sUQqf
This phenomenon isn’t completely new. In Nancy Meyers’ “The Holiday,” a film released almost 20 years ago, a character complains we shouldn’t be tracking box-office returns like baseball scores: “Now a picture has to make a killing the first weekend or it’s dead. This is supposed to be conducive to great work?”
Still, with movies like “Sinners” and “Black Bag” in our rear-view mirrors, we should remind ourselves that box-office success shouldn’t matter to us cinema lovers — we should only care about how the movies are making us feel and think.
So, as 2026 begins, stop worrying and love the bomb — and an entire world of cinema will be opened up to you.
“What’s your age?” isn’t typically a fair question, but Spotify’s making it OK.
Spotify Wrapped is back, and the big, new feature for the streamer’s year-end recap for users is the “listening age.” While some weren’t too exciting — my listening age (34) wasn’t far off from my real one (36) — others had a different experience, like newsletter editor Grace Lett, 28, whose listening age was 51.
Grace took the news in stride, but others weren’t so happy, writes BI’s Katie Notopoulos.
The whole thing might seem like a silly gimmick (it is), but it’s also the perfect representation of Spotify Wrapped: a smart marketing tool to get people talking about their Spotify use with each other.
There’s also a method to the madness. Wrapped isn’t just about doing a quick search of users’ top artists and songs. (Justice and “Hate” by ThxSoMch for me, since I know you were dying to know.)
Wrapped takes the entire year, with work for next year’s edition beginning as soon as the current year’s drops. Executives analyze reactions on social media and figure out how to adjust going forward. Three Spotify executives walked BI’s Henry Chandonnet through the whole process.
Spotify Wrapped isn’t easily replicable.
Like most popular things, plenty of companies have tried recreating Spotify’s success. That includes rival YouTube, which launched YouTube Recap this year.
But few, if any, have penetrated the zeitgeist quite like Spotify.
Some platforms don’t deserve a recap. I’d be depressed if I saw how much I spent on takeout this year or the number of hours I logged playing video games.
Others come off as too braggadocious. I would rather gouge out my eyes than see a recap of your Strava or Peloton history.
Music is a sweet spot, though. It’s fun to look back at what you listened to throughout the year, kind of like catching up with an old friend. And there’s a genuine interest in how others’ lists stack up. (It’s always fun finding an undercover Swiftie or a lowkey Deadhead.)
One group still seemed unimpressed on Spotify’s big day: investors. Spotify’s stock finished down almost 3.5%.
Two “code red” alerts — the first from a veteran tech giant worried about a buzzy AI upstart, the second from the AI upstart after the tech giant gained ground.
What a difference three years can make.
News of a recent Sam Altman memo to OpenAI employees, first reported by The Information, is reverberating around the tech world and highlighting the competitive heat it’s facing as Google narrows the gap in the AI race.
On Monday, Altman reportedly told OpenAI employees in an internal Slack memo that he was issuing a “code red” and that the company would be putting more resources into ChatGPT and delaying other products as a result.
Altman’s memo illustrates just how much the AI race has changed. In 2022, Google’s management issued its own “code red” in the wake of ChatGPT’s launch, a moment that illustrated in sharp relief just how far behind the search giant was in the AI race despite financing the breakthrough research that paved the way for AI’s development.
Three years later, it’s clear that OpenAI’s throne is under threat. Here are some of the pressure points it’s facing as Google nips at its heels.
Google is catching up
The elephant in the OpenAI room is Google’s Gemini 3 AI model, which debuted to widespread praise.
The model’s capabilities demonstrated that Google is no longer far behind in the AI race. It’s not just OpenAI that’s unnerved, either. Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company by market cap, recently found itself defending its AI chips after a report about Google’s own chip progress.
The search giant said in November that Gemini had more than 650 million monthly active users, a large increase from the 450 million such users it reported in July. In comparison, OpenAI has said nearly 800 million weekly active users.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently said that he was ditching ChatGPT in favor of Gemini 3 because of Gemini’s “insane” improvement.
“Holy shit,” Benioff wrote on X last month. “I’ve used ChatGPT every day for 3 years. Just spent 2 hours on Gemini 3. I’m not going back. The leap is insane — reasoning, speed, images, video… everything is sharper and faster. It feels like the world just changed, again.”
Last month, Google launched “Nano Banana Pro,” its AI image generator, showcasing hyper-realistic images that users quickly used to imagine tech CEOs hanging out together or pretend famous Thanksgiving dinner table guests.
Altman’s “code red,” according to The Information’s report, specifically mentions Gemini 3 and teases a coming OpenAI model that it says tested “ahead” of Google’s flagship model, as well as mentions prioritizing OpenAI’s Imagegen image generation model for ChatGPT users.
Google’s advertising cash cow can fund its AI — while OpenAI faces a $1.4 trillion bill
The AI game is an expensive one, and Google has the advantage of being a cash-generating advertising juggernaut.
Sure, Google plans to spend between $91 billion and $93 billion this year on cap ex, much of which is going toward AI costs. But it also brought in $100 billion in revenue in just the last quarter alone — $74.18 billion of which came from its advertising business.
And unlike OpenAI, Google can leverage its massive size for a full-stack advantage, allowing it to control AI development from research to chip manufacturing to its in-house cloud, which hosts everything.
Meanwhile, some on Wall Street have raised concerns about OpenAI’s mounting AI spending commitments, which tally at least $1.4 trillion over the next eight years. In response, Altman has said OpenAI is on track to bring in $20 billion in revenue this year, and expects its annualized revenue to grow to hundreds of billions in the coming years.
But OpenAI is still figuring out its own ads business — the launch of which could be delayed by Altman’s “code red,” according to The Information.
OpenAI has a head start — but Google has a platform advantage
OpenAI hasn’t squandered its head start, and it’s landed some major wins this year.
In recent months, OpenAI has made significant plays into other industries, including social media with Sora, its TikTok-esque AI video generation app. In a direct shot at Google Chrome, OpenAI also launched Atlas, its own web browser.
And it sounds like OpenAI has more up its sleeve as it battles the bottleneck of lining up enough compute and energy to power its developments.
OpenAI executives have said compute constraints are holding back other initiatives, like making ChatGPT Pulse, a personalized update feature within the chatbot for Pro users, available to everyone. Last week, Bill Peebles, OpenAI’s head of Sora, announced that free users would face significant cuts in the number of videos they could generate per day.
ChatGPT also remains synonymous with AI — not unlike Google and online search. That will likely help continue to drive app downloads and usage and could also stave off Google’s attempts to convince users to switch to Gemini or Google’s other AI-infused products.
But humans are creatures of habit, and many already use a Google product or service everyday — a platform advantage that the tech giant is already utilizing to siphon away ChatGPT users.
Silicon Valley’s history is built on startup disrupting the status quo.
Now, with OpenAI (smartly) looking over its shoulder, we get to watch the AI race heat up as Google, a former startup, gets its AI legs and hits its stride.
For OpenAI, it’s a reminder that tech giants can put up quite a fight when facing the prospect of being disrupted — and sometimes, can turn the tables.
“I try not to think about competitors too much,” Altman said last May before critiquing Google’s aesthetic.
