PayPay’s going public! And GPT-5 has anti-sunk OpenAI
And: All about the State Capitalism train
Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business, and power.
Friday. What a week, yeah? Today POTUS heads to Alaska to chat with Russian leader Putin about the war in Ukraine. Expectations are low for a breakthrough. In better news, Klarna’s second attempt at an IPO appears to be gathering steam. The European buy now, pay later (BNPL) giant saw its revenues rise to $823 million in the second quarter, with a slightly larger net loss but a lower credit loss result (in percentage terms). As we’ll see shortly (See: PayPay below), fintech IPOs are hot this year as investors hunt for growth.
Elsewhere, FedEx’s shares are hinting at global trade going negative. Something to keep an eye on. To work! — Alex
📈 Trending Up: Alt-exchanges … family office interest in venture? … making mistakes … venture funding for Cognition and Cohere … AI over Apple … UnitedHealth, after Buffett takes a stake … climate change … government visibility … inflation …
📉 Trending Down: Loan growth in China … venture capital dry powder … Meta, after its chatbots were allowed to flirt with children … Russia’s economy … inflation in Japan …
GPT-5 has anti-sunk OpenAI
Market vibes following the release of OpenAI’s latest AI model family — GPT-5 — were decidedly lukewarm. While some individual users bemoaned the loss of their beloved. and now partially-restored, 4o model, many companies that consume AI services via API gave GPT-5 strong marks.
OpenAI has long had a commanding lead in consumer AI usage, but stiffer rivals in the enterprise space the reaction mix. Doing well with the latter is no sin.
And the data is starting to come in. CNBC reports:
GPT-5 API usage has surged since launch, with the model now processing more than twice as much coding and agent-building work, and reasoning use cases jumping more than eightfold, said a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity in order to discuss company data.
If you have exposure to OpenAI, that’s great news. If you, in contrast, are up to your neck in Anthropic equity, it’s less welcome tidings. (Anthropic has long held an outsize share of the AI coding market compared to its consumer usage.)
Axios backs up CNBC’s reporting, writing that “revenue from the company's API roughly doubled in the first 48 hours after GPT-5 came out,” according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Altman also said that he will spend trillions of dollars on data centers in time, in case you were worried that the leading AI giants were at risk of losing their risk-taking bent.
Finally, when we narrow OpenRouter AI model usage data to the programming use case, in the last week Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 saw its overall token demand fall 10% while retaining its the top spot on the charts. GPT-5, in contrast, shot to fifth place on the same leaderboard, with GPT-5 Mini taking tenth, and GPT-5 Chat landing at sixteenth. Taking thre of the top twenty model slots for programming in short order is no mean feat.
In my usage, GPT-5 is good? I am slightly perplexed by the complaints, given that the new offering from OpenAI seems faster and a bit smarter than its predecessor. Given that 4o did well by my needs, 5 feels like a pleasant upgrade. Perhaps I am a normie?
All about the State Capitalism train
Moves by the second Trump administration to take a firmer hand in the economy continue this week, with news out that the U.S. government may take a stake in Intel.
Intel, the American CPU giant, is having a terrible few years. After missing mobile, Intel managed to find itself on the outside of the AI boom. Now, former rivals that were small in comparison to its heft are running circles around it: