Future Technology[Daily Briefing] OpenAI's IPO numbers 📉, Lazarus zero-day 🎣, Sun whirlpools 🌀
OpenAI is going public, and the filing is more interesting than the valuation
OpenAI has filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC and is working toward a listing as early as September, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley running the process. The valuation talk ranges from roughly $730 billion to over $1 trillion, which is a wide enough spread to tell you nobody outside the room actually knows yet.
The financials are the part worth reading twice. Around $6 billion of revenue in Q1, an annualised run rate near $25 billion, and more than 230 million weekly ChatGPT users. Against that sits a non-GAAP operating margin of negative 122 percent. In plain terms, the company lost about $1.22 for every dollar it earned during the quarter.
OpenAI has also been careful to say the timing is not settled, and that some of what it wants to do next is easier to do as a private company. That is a reasonable hedge, though it is a slightly odd thing to say while bankers are assembling a listing.
Why it matters: This is the first time anyone outside OpenAI gets audited visibility into what running frontier AI actually costs. Whatever number the market settles on becomes the reference price for every other AI fundraise for the next two years. And a business burning more than it earns at $25 billion of revenue reframes the sustainability argument with actual figures rather than vibes.
Quick hits
- North Korea is using a fresh Windows zero-day on aerospace firms. CVE-2026-68820 gives SYSTEM privileges through a race condition in the WinSock driver, and Lazarus used it to plant a kernel rootkit via fake recruiter PDFs. Read more
- Apple's new Siri reportedly runs on Nvidia chips in Google's data centres. Three dependencies on two rivals, inside the product Apple markets hardest on privacy. Read more
- Humanoid robots quietly stopped being demos. Boston Dynamics' Atlas is logging hours at Hyundai's Georgia plant, and leasing prices have finally dropped to where the maths works. Read more
- What a Vision-Language-Action model actually is. One model takes camera input plus a spoken instruction and outputs motor commands, which is why nobody hand-codes robot tasks any more. Read more
- The 3-2-1 backup rule, done properly in 2026. Three copies, two media types, one offsite, plus the bit everyone skips: actually testing a restore. Read more
Tool of the day
Samsung T7 1TB portable SSD
If you read the backup piece above and felt a small flicker of guilt, this is the least painful place to start. It is a pocket-sized SSD, fast enough that a full backup does not become an evening's work, and it costs less than recovering a single dead drive would. The honest caveat is that a portable SSD on its own is not a backup strategy. It is one of the three copies. Leave it permanently plugged in and ransomware will happily encrypt it along with everything else, so unplug it between backups.
One question for you today: if OpenAI does list in September, are you buying, watching, or staying well clear? Hit reply and tell me which, I read every one.
Nath, Future Technology
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