OpenAI’s “12 days of shipmas” tell us a lot about the AI arms race

This week, OpenAI announced what it calls the 12 days of OpenAI, or 12 days of shipmas. On December 4, CEO Sam Altman took to X to announce that the company would be “doing 12 days of openai. each weekday, we will have a livestream with a launch or demo, some big ones and some stocking stuffers.”

The company will livestream about new products every morning for 12 business days in a row during December. It’s an impressive-sounding (and media-savvy) schedule, to be sure. But it also speaks to how tight the race between the AI bigs has become, and also how much OpenAI is scrambling to build more revenue.

While it remains to be seen whether or not they’ve got AGI in a pear tree up their sleeve, and maybe putting aside whether or not Sam Altman is your true love, the man can ship. OpenAI has been a monster when it comes to actually getting new products out the door and into the hands of users. It’s hard for me to believe that it was just two years ago, almost exactly, that it released ChatGPT. That was a world-changing release, but was also just one of many. The company has been on an absolute tear:  Since 2022, it’s shipped DALL-E 2, DALL-E 3, GPT-4, ChatGPT Plus, a realtime API, GPT-4o, an advanced voice mode, a preview version of a new model called o1, and a web search engine. And that’s just a partial list.

When it kicked off its 12-days shenanigans on Thursday, it was with an official roll out of OpenAI o1 and a new, $200-per-month service called ChatGPT Pro. Friday morning, it followed that up with an announcement about a new model customization technique.

If the point you have taken away from all this is that OpenAI is very, very bad at naming things, you would be right. But! There’s another point to be made, which is that the stuff it is shipping is not coming out in a vacuum anymore, as it was two years ago. When DALL-E 2 shipped, OpenAI seemed a little like the only game in town. That was still mostly true when ChatGPT came out a few months later. But those releases sent Google into full-on freakout mode, issuing a “code red” to catch up. And then it was off to the races.

Now, there is a full-scale sprint happening between OpenAI, Google (which released its Gemini models to the public almost exactly a year ago), Anthropic (which was founded by a bunch of OpenAI formers), Meta, and, to some extent, Microsoft (OpenAI’s partner).

To wit: A little over a month ago, Anthropic unveiled a bananas demo of its chatbot Claude’s ability to use a computer. On Thursday (aka: the first day of shipmas), Microsoft announced a version of CoPilot that can follow along with you while you browse the web using AI vision. And ahead of what is widely predicted to be OpenAI’s biggest release of shipmas, its new video generation tool Sora, Google jumped ahead with its own generative video product, Veo (although it has not released it widely to the public yet).

Oh. There was also one other announcement from OpenAI, just ahead of shipmas, that seems relevant. On Wednesday, it announced a new partnership with defense contractor Anduril. Some of you may remember that OpenAI is the company that had once pledged not to let its technology be used for weapons development or the military. As James O’Donnell points out, “OpenAI’s policies banning military use of its technology unraveled in less than a year.”

This is notable in its own right, but also in crystallizing just how much OpenAI needs cold hard cash. See also: the new $200-per-month ChatGPT Pro tier. (And while recurring revenue from users will bring in some much-needed cash flow, there is a fortune in defense spending.) In addition, the company is looking into bringing paid advertisements to its services, according to its CFO Sarah Friar in an interview with the FT way back in … (checks watch) … Monday.

As has been oft-discussed, OpenAI is just incinerating piles of money. It’s on track to lose billions and billions of dollars for several more years. It has to start bringing in more revenue, lots more. And to do that it has to stay ahead of its rivals. And to do that, it has to get new, compelling products to market that are better in some way than what its competitors offer. Which means it has to ship. And monetize. And ship. And monetize. Because Google and Anthropic and Meta and a host of others are all going to keep coming out with new products, and new services too.

The arms race is on. And while the 12 days of shipmas may seem jolly, internally I bet it feels a lot more like Santa’s workshop on December 23. Pressure’s on. Time to deliver.

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The News

• Bitcoin breaks $100,000 after Trump announces Paul Atkins as SEC pick. 

• China’s critical mineral ban is an opening salvo, not a kill shot. This is what it means for the US.

• OpenAI announced a deal with defense contractor Anduril. It’s a huge pivot. 

• In an effort to combat sophisticated disinformation campaigns, the US Department of Defense is investing in deepfake detection. 

• President-elect Trump names PayPal Mafia member, All-in Podcast host, and former Yammer CEO David Sacks as White House AI and crypto Czar. 

• An appeals court upheld the US’ TikTok ban. It’s likely going to the Supreme Court.

The Chat

Every week, I talk to one of MIT Technology Review’s journalists to go behind the scenes of a story they are working on. This week, I hit up Amanda Silverman, our features and investigations editor, about our big story on the way the war in Ukraine is reshaping the tech sector in eastern Europe.

Mat: Amanda, we published a story this week from Peter Guest that’s about the ways civilian tech is being repurposed for the war in Ukraine. I could be wrong, but ultimately I think it showed how warfare has truly changed thanks to inexpensive, easily-built tech products. Is that right?

Amanda: I think that’s pretty spot on. Though maybe it’s more accurate to say, less expensive, more-easily-built tech products. It’s all relative, right? Like, the retrofitted consumer drones that have been so prevalent in Ukraine over the past few years are vastly cheaper than traditional weapons systems, and what we’re seeing now is that lots of other tech that was initially developed for civilian purposes—like, Pete reported on a type of scooter—are being sent to the front. And again, these are much, much cheaper than traditional weaponry. And they can be developed and shipped out really quickly.

The other thing Pete found was that this tech is being quickly reworked to respond to battlefield feedback—like that scooter has been customized to carry NATO standard-sized bullet boxes. I can’t imagine that happening in the old way of doing things.

Mat: It’s move fast and (hope not to) break things, but for war…. There is also this other, much scarier idea in there, which is that the war is changing, maybe has changed, Eastern Europe’s tech sector. What did Pete find is happening there?

Amanda: So a lot of the countries neighboring Ukraine are understandably pretty freaked out by what happened there and how the country had to turn on a dime to respond to the full-scale invasion by Russia. At the same time, Pete found that a lot of people in these countries, particularly in Latvia and particularly leading tech startups, have been inspired by how Ukrainians mobilized for the war and they’re trying to sort of get ahead of the potential enemy and get ready for a conflict within their borders. It’s not all scary, to be clear. It’s arguably somewhat thrilling to see all this innovation happening so quickly and to have some of the more burdensome red tape removed.

Mat: Okay so Russia’s neighbors are freaked out, as you say, understandably. Did anything about this story freak you out?

Amanda: Yeah, it’s impossible to ignore that there is a huge, scary risk here, too: as these companies develop new tech for war, they have an unprecedented opportunity to test it out in Ukraine without going through the traditional development and procurement process—which can be slow and laborious, sure, but also includes a lot of important testing, checks and balances, and more to prevent fraud and lots of other abuses and dangers. Like, Pete nods to how Clearview AI was deploying its tech to identify Russian war dead, which is scary in and of itself and also may violate the Geneva Conventions.

Mat: And then I’m curious, what do you look for when you are assigning a story like this? What caught your attention?

Amanda: I felt like I’d read quite a bit about the total mobilization of Ukrainian society (including a story from Pete inWired). But I had sort of thought about all this activity as happening in a bit of a vacuum. Or at least in a limited sense, within Ukrainian borders. Of course, the US and our European allies are sending loads of money and loads of weapons but (at least as I understand it) they’re largely weapons we already have in our arsenals. So when Pete pitched us this story about how the war was reshaping the tech sector of Ukraine’s neighbors, particularly civilian tech, I was really intrigued.

The Recommendation

Several weeks ago, we had our e-bike stolen. Some guy with an angle iron cut the lock. And as it turned out, our insurance didn’t cover the loss because the bike (like almost all e-bikes) had a top speed above 15 mph. As I came to learn, this is not uncommon. But you know what is common? E-bike theft. The police told us there is little chance of recovering our bike—in large part because we did not have a tracker attached to it. It was an all-around frustrating experience.  We replaced the bike, and this time I’ve invested in one of these Elevation Labs waterproof mounts to affix an AirTag to the frame, hidden away below the seat. They have a whole line of mounts, a few of which are bike-specific. Much cheaper than a new bike. They make a good stocking stuffer.