Shirley Siluk

OpenAI is hemorrhaging billions: Microsoft filing reveals OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter amid AI bubble hype - Tech Startups Just a few weeks ago, we wrote about how OpenAI became the $500 billion hub of the AI ecosystem — the company at the center of everything, and potentially the industry’s single point of failure. Now, ...

Today's headline: "OpenAI is hemorrhaging billions: Microsoft filing reveals OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter amid AI bubble hype" techstartups.com/2025/10/31/o...

From techstartups.com: OpenAI revenue targets, meanwhile, are ambitious. Bloomberg reported that OpenAI expects to hit $12.7 billion for all of 2025, with plans to more than double that to $29.4 billion next year. But the company doesn’t expect to be cash-flow positive until it reaches $125 billion in revenue, a milestone it doesn’t see coming until 2029.

From techstartups.com: "“OpenAI generated around $4.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2025, about 16% more than it generated all of last year, according to financial disclosures to shareholders. The company said it burned $2.5 billion, in large part due to its research and development costs for developing artificial intelligence and for running ChatGPT. Some of its largest expenses were non-cash, including stock payments to employees,” The Information reported."

techstartups.com/2025/09/30/o...

Nope, not at all.

Quote from an academic study on the use of LLMs that says: "Taken together, our findings suggest that one of the major benefits of LLM syntheses—sparing users the need to browse through results and synthesize information themselves—can come at the expense of developing deeper knowledge on a subject in certain contexts. In this sense, one might view learning through LLMs rather than traditional web search as, at times, analogous to being shown the solution to a math problem rather than trying to solve it oneself."

This quote from the study says a lot, doesn't it?

Yet another reason to love Guillermo del Toro.

Such a good article: thorough & persuasive in its advice to be highly skeptical of all the AI hype, w/arguments backed by actual AI scientists who understand the limitations better than most. Really refreshing to see some in academia pushing back against this credulous insistence on AI everywhere.

Puffling (Short 2023) ⭐ 7.5 | Documentary, Short 20m

I love puffins so much - always have. And if you do too, I really recommend watching the short titled Puffling - just so sweet: www.imdb.com/title/tt2621...

Thanks! I'm looking forward to reading that.

"Weaponized interdependence" is quite the phrase, and really sums up where we appearing to be heading.

"It’s as if climate change had fans." Wow: this line sums up as well as anything I've ever read about the hype surrounding so-called AI. And in the meantime, there are legitimately useful applications of machine learning that are getting little to no attention because of the GenAI bubble.

Really good piece - thanks for laying it out so clearly. As you note, it's a Mafia-style "protection" plan in which only one side has the power to determine what "compliance" looks like.

Getting off US tech: a guide I’m in the process of dropping US tech services. Here’s how I did it, and options you should consider.

If you haven't been following @parismarx.com on this topic, check this out: disconnect.blog/getting-off-...

100 percent this one. I've gone back to it so many times, not just to reread the whole thing but to hunt down favorite passages that are as relevant as ever to today. It's probably Sagan's most prescient work.

Absolutely delightful - so glad I clicked on this. Thanks for the share.

What an absolutely wonderful story - love it! And the Bridget Everett/Patti LuPone video is a real treat.

Really good article by @hagenblix.bsky.social and Ingeborg Glimmer about AI and why the biggest problem with it isn't "hype" - it's how it's enabling assaults on democracy, workers and anyone who disagrees with the current political project of those in power.

What an awesome piece - great read!

💯

Yes, it's even a more glaring need for the "normie" crowd. I'm regularly trying to explain various online things to Facebook-dwelling friends, who believe that things like Signal chats involve the "dark web" and hadn't heard of K*rk at all before last week.

Americans told to watch what we say about ‘free speech icon’ Charlie Kirk Professors, teachers, journalists and others get canceled for what they said about right-wing free speech advocate Charlie Kirk.

It was weirdly fitting that the Charlie Kirk murder blended into the 9/11 anniversary as once again Americans were told to “watch what they say”

The hypocritical censorship around a “free speech hero.” My new column www.inquirer.com/opinion/comm...

This! It's why I believe that using GenAI even for "brainstorming" is counterproductive, because it's not helping to you to generate original ideas but it's rather pushing you toward median-level thinking. @tressiemcphd.bsky.social summed it up so well when she described this tech as "mid."

This says a mouthful: "It is sometimes considered gauche, in the world of American political commentary, to give words the weight of their meaning." As you note, @jamellebouie.net, it's part "performance." By papering over extremism as doing it for the LULZ, it gives extremism permission to grow.

Jason Isaac as Field Marshal Zhukov, dramatically throwing off his coat in the movie "Death of Stalin."

Colorful graphic with a smiley face at the top showing that the ebishirl.bsky.social account uses alt text for images 100.00% of the time.

"J Edgar Loser" - I'm going to be laughing about this all afternoon.

I Tested How Well AI Tools Work for Journalism Some tools were sufficient for summarizing meetings. For research, the results were a disaster.

"Like other LLMs, ChatGPT is particularly good at summarizing long documents." Only they're not: "Only about half the facts included in the human-generated long summaries were found in the AI-generated ones. The AI-generated long summaries also had more hallucinations..." www.cjr.org/analysis/i-t...

Great column, Will. As you noted, Pritzker & co. have shown that they themselves are speaking the language of resistance. "They have sent the message to everyday Chicago residents that acquiescence to authoritarianism is not an option, and that someone will have their back if and when they resist."

Oh, I read every bit of it - great stuff. "We didn't stop them, but we slowed them down." That's key to resisting this fascism: do what you can, when and where you can. Every little action adds up to irritating sand in fascism gears.

Definitely a thing of beauty. And the whole thing is just *chef's kiss*