OpenAI Trims Its Ask as AI Flunks the Toughest Test Yet
OpenAI scales back its mega fundraise and signs Abu Dhabi deals, a brutal new benchmark tops out at 12%, and Apple Intelligence finally heads to China.
Grab your coffee, future overlords, because this weekend's AI news came with a reality check or two.
OpenAI Shrinks the Ask, Not the Ambition
OpenAI is now looking to raise up to $20 billion in its latest funding round, down from an earlier target of about $30 billion, as CNBC confirmed on Saturday after the Financial Times broke the story. 💸 The FT says the round values OpenAI at $1.25 trillion, and it's still open, so the numbers could change.
- 🛢️ On Monday, OpenAI signed a stack of deals in Abu Dhabi: oil giant ADNOC and G42 will deploy OpenAI's tech across ADNOC's operations.
- 💼 Mubadala, Inception42 and OpenAI will use AI for investment analysis, and Inception42 signed a five-year deal to bring OpenAI to government, business and schools.
- 📜 The Abu Dhabi government also wants to turn its rules and policies into a machine-readable format.
UAE investors are co-leading the round, so this is basically showing up to the bake sale with your biggest customer.
The Test Where 12% Wins
Research firm SemiAnalysis launched GDPx, a benchmark of 206 long, tricky tasks across 11 high-value fields like chip design, cybersecurity, biology, finance and law. 🧩
- 🏆 Claude Opus 5.5 leads with just 12.0%, ahead of Gemini 4 Carbon at 10.9% and GPT-6 Astra at 9.6%.
- 📝 On the finance and legal tasks, basically every model scored zero.
- 🛑 SemiAnalysis says safety filters dragged down Opus and Astra on the cyber, biology and alignment tasks.
So the smartest AI on Earth just got a 12 on the exam, and it still topped the class.
Apple Intelligence Lands in China
Apple confirmed its first Apple Intelligence features for China, with developer testing in the iOS 27.3 beta starting November 4 and a public rollout planned for December. 📱
- 🤝 Alibaba's Qwen model powers some of the features in China.
- 🚫 The new AI-powered Siri shown at WWDC isn't part of this first wave.
Bonus flex: on Friday, Apple passed Nvidia to become the world's most valuable company again, at about $5.03 trillion, per Bloomberg.
Other Cool Things to Know Today
- 📰 Amazon's cloud arm AWS grew 39.3% last quarter to about $46 billion, its fastest growth in nearly five years, thanks to AI demand.
- 👾 South Korea's president proposed 21.3 trillion won for AI and related megaprojects in the 2027 budget, nearly double this year's amount.
- 🔥 OpenAI says ChatGPT will limit practical weapons info for teens and can end chats that fixate on violence, with the changes rolling out over the next few weeks.
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