AI Daily: OpenAI to take cut of ChatGPT’s shopping sales

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

CHATGPT’S SHOPPING SALES: Microsoft (MSFT)-backed OpenAI plans to take a cut from online product sales made directly through ChatGPT, The Financial Times’ Cristina Criddle, Hannah Murphy, and Daniel Thomas report. According to multiple people familiar with the matter, OpenAI is looking to integrate a checkout system into ChatGPT, ensuring users complete transactions within the platform, instead of clicking through links to online retailers, and merchants that receive and fulfill orders will then pay a commission to OpenAI. Shopify (SHOP) offers checkout technology that can be integrated into other online services, the report notes.

LAYOFFS: Scale AI is laying off hundreds of employees from its data-labeling business, one month after Meta Platforms (META) invested $14.3B in the startup and hired away its chief executive officer, Bloomberg’s Rachel Metz and Shirin Ghaffary report. The company cut 200 full-time employees, about 14% of its global workforce, and will provide severance, Scale spokesperson Joe Osborne said Wednesday. Scale will also stop working with 500 of its thousands of global contractors, he said. The move is aimed at “streamlining our data business to help us move faster,” Osborne said, adding that Scale plans to staff up in other areas including enterprise and government sales.

POISED FOR EXPANSION: Aurora Mobile (JG) said it is set to benefit from the recent announcement by Nvidia (NVDA) regarding the resumption of H20 chip sales in China. This development comes at a crucial time for Aurora Mobile’s AI agent platform, GPTBots.ai, which is experiencing rapid growth in the global market. Nvidia’s H20 chips are well-known for their prowess in AI inference tasks. With a computing performance of 148 TFLOPS@FP16 and 900 gb/s of interconnect bandwidth, these chips offer a competitive edge in the software ecosystem and interconnect capabilities. The H20 chip is currently the most powerful inference accelerator that can be legally exported to China under the existing US regulations. It is optimized for running existing AI models, which is of great relevance to GPTBots.ai’s operations.”

AI-OPTIMIZED CONCRETE MIX: Amrize (AMRZ) and Meta (META) have partnered to develop a first-of-its-kind, AI-optimized concrete mix tailored to meet the specific needs of Meta’s data center in Rosemount, Minnesota. This customized solution was designed to deliver high strength, maintain set-time and reduce carbon load, meeting Meta’s high performance, speed and sustainability targets. This solution leverages Amrize’s material engineering expertise and Meta-developed open-sourced artificial intelligence models, working in partnership with The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to create the data for the AI model.