Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Good morning. If you’re a sports fan who’s grown bored with the athletic world’s run-of-the-mill scandals and controversies, perhaps it’s time to start paying attention to the International Mathematical Olympiads.

The glory of this year’s august tournament has been tarnished by some ugly accusations and recriminations. It started with OpenAI’s weekend boast that its general reasoning LLM had turned in a “gold medal-level” performance. Apparently the IMO had asked AI contestants to wait until the end of the month before announcing their scores to ensure that the (human) kids who competed got their moment in the spotlight.

An OpenAI researcher says it didn’t officially participate, had self-graded its results, and gave the IMO a heads-up of its announcement. An IMO coordinator called it “rude and inappropriate.” And Google DeepMind, upset by the gun jumping, reportedly decided to ditch the embargo and announce its gold-medal performance on Monday. Kids these days. —Alexei Oreskovic

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Is Stargate stuck at the starting gate?

President Donald Trump and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced plans for Stargate in January.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Stargate, the ambitious partnership between OpenAI, SoftBank Group, and others to develop a network of advanced AI data centers, is off to a sluggish start, reports the Wall Street Journal.

In January, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SoftBank boss Masayoshi Son stood alongside President Donald Trump to tout the project. The group would invest $100 million "immediately," they said, with eventual plans for up to $500 billion in investments.

Six months later however, not a single data center deal has been signed. Progress has apparently been held up by disagreements over some of the terms of the partnership, including locations for the datacenters, the Journal reports, citing anonymous sources. The partners have apparently settled on a more modest goal: Building a small datacenter by year's end, likely in Ohio.

In a joint statement to the Journal, OpenAI and SoftBank said they were advancing projects in multiple states, and moving at "hyperscale and speed." —AO

Google teases its new Pixel phone

Google isn't expected to launch its Pixel 10 smartphone until late August. But the company released a short teaser video Monday offering a glimpse of the phone, and (spoiler alert), it looks just like the Pixel 9.

Eagled-eyed tech bloggers noticed that the proportion of glass on the Pixel 10's backside array of cameras is slightly larger than on the Pixel 9, perhaps indicating the presence of a telephoto lens. Of course, a lot of the magic in phones these days comes from the AI packed on the inside. For the deetes on that, you'll have to wait until the August launch event.

Meanwhile, Apple's "thin" iPhone is set to be unveiled in the fall, while its long-awaited foldable smartphone appears to be on track for an end of 2026 launch. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman Apple will use a foldable OLED display made by Samsung—and used by Samsung in its exiting line of Galaxy Fold phones.

So will the foldable iPhone be a mere clone of the foldable Galaxy? According to Bloomberg, Apple intends to improve the hinge mechanism and make the fold crease in the display less visible than on existing foldable devices. And Apple will also fine-tune its iOS software for the new form factor. —AO

Figma puts some numbers on its IPO

Figma, the design software company whose $20 billion acquisition by Adobe fell apart in 2023, announced it was kicking off its IPO road show on Monday.

The company said it aims to sell roughly 12 million shares of its stock priced between $25 and $28 a pop, with investors selling an additional 24 million shares. At the high end of that price range, the proceeds of the offering would surpass $1 billion, and give Figma a market value of about $16 billion.

That's above the $12.5 billion valuation it fetched in a 2024 tender offer for some employee shares, but still below the $20 billion deal it had with Adobe (which was abandoned because of regulatory scrutiny).

Depending on how the road show goes, Figma could boost the proposed price for its shares—or lower the price—as well as change the number of shares it plans to sell.

But the real test for many market watchers will come after Figma begins trading, given the stunning pops that companies like Circle and Coreweave (and to a lesser extent, Chime) have experienced. —AO

More tech

—Anthropic's hiring U-turn. It's OK to use AI now, really.

—New Astronomer interim CEO speaks. "The spotlight has been unusual and surreal."

—OpenAI's incoming Applications boss speaks. "One of the biggest gifts we could ever receive."

—The fallacy of the Tim Cook haters. And what Goldman Sachs can teach them.

—The GENIUS Act's first lesson. Is the crypto market big enough to boost the dollar?