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Dec 22, 2025
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Supported by
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Welcome back! OpenAI's higher compute margin shows the firm is getting more efficient at running its AI. Delaware's highest court reinstates Elon Musk's 2018 Tesla pay package. Google sues SerpApi, a startup used by OpenAI and others to access Google’s search data.
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OpenAI’s compute margin, or its share of revenue after the cost of running AI models for paying users, has jumped to about 70% in October from about 52% at the end of last year and roughly 35% in January 2024, The Information reported Sunday. These gains compare favorably to rival Anthropic, which had a compute margin of about negative 90% last year. Anthropic has been on track to improve that margin to about 53% by the end of this year. OpenAI’s improvements followed an internal “code red” in
February after the launch of a new model from China’s DeepSeek. OpenAI prioritized reducing its server costs to run its AI products, also known as inference. It also benefited because the cost of renting computing power fell throughout the year.
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Elon Musk’s 2018 CEO compensation package at Tesla, which had been overturned by a Delaware judge last year, must be reinstated, the state’s highest court ruled on Friday. That means Musk will get options on about 304 million shares, worth more than $139 billion today. The grant will increase his percentage stake to 19.8%. “We reverse the Court of Chancery’s rescission remedy and award $1 in nominal damages,” Delaware Supreme Court judges wrote in an opinion issued Friday. The Chancery court had overturned the 2018 compensation package in January 2024 in response to a shareholder lawsuit, finding that Musk had too much sway over the company’s board of directors. In Friday’s opinion, the supreme court said that the court’s decision to rescind Musk’s pay package was too extreme. The ruling further cements Musk’s control over Tesla. In November, he handily won shareholder approval for a new compensation package worth $1 trillion if Tesla hits a series
of ambitious financial and product goals over the next decade.
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Google on Friday sued SerpApi, a startup used by OpenAI and other tech companies to access Google’s search data. The suit, filed in federal court in California, accused SerpApi, which scrapes Google’s search results and sells those results to other companies, of bypassing technology restricting access to Google’s search access results pages. Because those pages contain copyrighted material such as the Knowledge Panels that Google licenses from partners, Google argued in the complaint that SerpApi’s actions violate the Copyright Act. In a statement,
SerpApi said that its actions were protected by the First Amendment. “SerpApi has not been served with Google’s complaint, and prior to filing, Google did not contact us to raise any concerns or explore a constructive resolution,” SerpApi’s general counsel Chad Anson wrote. Earlier this month, a federal judge issued a final remedies judgment on how to address Google’s illegal search monopoly, including a requirement that Google must syndicate its search results to qualified competitors, which will likely include OpenAI. Google’s suit against SerpApi may signal that Google is willing to be more aggressive now that its search monopoly case has been resolved in court. Google has long known of SerpApi’s existence and has tried various techniques to make it harder for the firm to scrape high-quality information, The Information has previously reported, but this is the first time Google has pursued legal action against the company.
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Waymo on Sunday resumed its self-driving car service in San Francisco after suspending the service Saturday during a broad power outage in the city. More than 130,000 homes and businesses lost power in San Francisco on Saturday afternoon, or nearly one-third of the utility’s customers, in part due to a fire in a substation. The outage cut off transit and shut down restaurants and businesses in large parts of the city. Some residents shared videos on social media of Waymo’s self-driving cars stalled at intersections during the outage. The autonomous
vehicles treat non-functional signals as four-way stops, said a spokesperson. The scale of the outage led the vehicle to be stationary longer than usual as they confirmed the state of the intersections.
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Over the past year, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and many of Silicon Valley’s other top venture capital firms have funneled at least $1.2 billion in funding to startups selling technology to city police departments and local public safety agencies. Those companies illustrate the technology industry’s growing enthusiasm for making software and hardware for the government and law enforcement—a trend that has accelerated over the last decade by the success of Palantir, SpaceX and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril. (You can read more about the boom in our Weekend section’s latest Big Read.) One of the fastest growing is Peregrine, which makes Palantir-style data-analytics software. It has seen its revenue go from $10 million in 2023 to $75 million in 2025. (In March, Sequoia led a funding round valuing Peregrine at $2.5 billion—up from $400 million in 2024.) Another is Flock Safety, which makes drones and cameras that can read license plates, technology that has proved to be controversial with privacy safety advocates, such as the ACLU.
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