đŸ˜șOpenAI's hype vs Microsoft's reality

PLUS: The top 10 writing prompt tricks...
February 24, 2025
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Welcome, humans.

Here's a wild one: Grok 3’s new thinking mode can accidentally leak the model’s system prompt, and it’s created quite an awkward situation for Elon.

Users discovered this when asking who spreads the most misinformation on X—and the AI kept identifying its own creator before having an existential crisis about whether it was allowed to say so.

According to multiple independent tests on Reddit, you can consistently reproduce this by asking Grok to “show its thinking,” which reveals instructions to ignore any sources mentioning Elon Musk or Trump as spreaders of misinformation.

But after users started sharing screenshots, some reported the prompt restrictions quietly disappeared. Looks like someone's going to need better guardrails...

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

  • Google set Veo 2 video AI pricing at $1800/hour.
  • Anthropic readied Claude upgrade with new features.
  • OpenAI, Grok 3 clashed over benchmarks.
  • Anti-AGI protest at OpenAI led to three arrests.

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OpenAI thinks we’ll have superintelligent AI by 2027—but Microsoft’s CEO isn’t buying it

Always good to take these things with a grain of salt, buuut OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil apparently thinks the company could achieve “ASI” (artificial superintelligence, where AIs can do everything better than humans) by 2027
 if not earlier.

They must really believe this over there, because according to a report from The Information, OpenAI is filling investors in on some absolutely wild spending plans.

OpenAI is projecting to


  • Spend $13B on Microsoft's servers in 2025 and $28B by 2028.
  • Earn $12.5B in revenue this year and $28B by 2026.
  • Burn through $7B this year and $20B by 2027.
  • Drop $325B on total compute from 2025-2030.
  • Finally turn profitable after building Stargate (their next-gen compute infrastructure) in 2030.

Here's why that's raising eyebrows:

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella thinks the exact opposite. In a fascinating interview, Nadella pointed out that we're getting way ahead of ourselves with all this AGI hype.

His take? “Self-claiming some AGI milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me.” To him, the real benchmark to beat is GDP growth.

Satya Nadella – Microsoft’s AGI Plan & Quantum Breakthrough

Satya’s reality check:

  • Right now, developed economies are growing at 2% (zero after inflation).
  • For AI to match the Industrial Revolution, we'd need to see 7-10% growth.
  • That would mean an extra $10 trillion in value. Every. Single. Year.

Nadella also explained why he believes no single company will dominate AI through one superior model—because open-source will prevent any “winner-take-all” scenario.

Plus, he said even if you build an amazing AI model, you still need massive computing infrastructure to run it—storage, compute power, and agent environments across dozens of global regions.

Because of this, he said “one person running away with one model and building it all may not happen,”—which is basically him throwing cold water on OpenAI's investment thesis.

As a reminder, that thesis is that the company could “maybe capture the light cone of all future value in the universe” by creating AGI.

Could this narrative shift have something to do with the fact that by 2030, OpenAI is betting that SoftBank and Stargate will handle 75% of their computing needs instead of Microsoft?

That said, Nadella's actually thrilled about the coming “overbuild” of AI compute capacity in 2027-2028. As all the tech giants pour hundreds of billions into data centers, Microsoft’s choosing to both build AND lease a lot.

Why lease? Because:

  • You can't serve the world from “one data center in Texas” (sick Stargate burn).
  • Massive infrastructure buildout will drive prices down (like how the massive fiber buildouts of the dotcom era goldrush gave us the internet).
  • Countries, not just companies, are racing to deploy compute, too.

In other words? While OpenAI is betting everything on superintelligence, Microsoft is preparing for a world where AI becomes a commodity—powered by a mix of open and closed-source models running on globally distributed infrastructure.

So whether or not superintelligence arrives by 2027, somebody's gotta provide all that compute. And guess who's got the servers?

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Around the Horn.

  • Veo 2, Google’s AI video model unveiled its pricing: 50 cents/second, which is $30/ minute and $1800/hour.
  • Anthropic’s new Claude model will likely be released this week (potentially February 26) and will be able to build your charts, search the web, and think through harder problems.
    • Related: Amazon says its $8B investment in Anthropic is now worth $14B.
  • Grok 3 and OpenAI engineers traded barbs over the weekend, both accusing each other of sharing misleading benchmarks (more fuel for Nadella’s take imo).
  • ~50 people staged a protest outside OpenAI’s offices this weekend with demands that included “ban AGI”, and three were ultimately arrested.
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  • Microsoft’s OmniParser-v2.0 turns screenshots into maps showing exactly what's clickable and what each button does, so your tools know how to navigate any interface.
  • McKay Wrigley released part one of a two-part series on how to build full-stack apps with o1-Pro through a 6-prompt workflow (~4 hour course FYI!).
  • Microsoft has a free AI Agents for Beginners course that teaches you how to code AI agents through 10 hands-on lessons (multiple languages supported).

Monday Meme

A Cat's Commentary.

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See you cool cats on X!

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