ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, the company announced Monday in a blog post. The filing comes a little more than a week after its main rival, Anthropic, also filed to go public, ramping up the race between the two AI firms. OpenAI, which was last valued at $852 billion post-money, submitted a draft registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed IPO. OpenAI hasn't shared any specifics yet. However, the company said it posted the blog because it expected a leak. 'We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,' the company wrote. 'But it's a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.' Around the same time, and in a separate blog post, OpenAI published a sweeping philosophical statement about its mission, its vision for AGI, and its belief that AI should benefit all of humanity ' the kind of forward-looking communication that companies entering a quiet period have historically been careful to avoid. That OpenAI appears comfortable publishing it so close to a confidential filing says something ' not necessarily about its own legal judgment but about the regulatory environment it's operating in. The SEC under the Trump administration has taken a markedly more hands-off posture toward tech and AI companies than it did under previous administrations, and OpenAI may simply be reading the room....

The word 'recursion' is the latest buzzword in AI circles. Two separate startups have taken on the name, and many more have started referencing recursive self-improvement (RSI) in their roadmaps. Like AGI before it, RSI has become a three-letter byword for a cataclysmic AI takeoff ' even if there's still a little disagreement about what it exactly means. In basic terms, RSI refers to an AI system that can continuously upgrade itself. Once AI systems can manage the upgrade cycle better than humans, the process can become a closed loop, limited only by the compute power they can access, and humans are no longer necessary or even helpful. Earlier this month, well-known AI researcher Richard Socher launched the aptly named Recursive Superintelligence with RSI as an explicit goal. 'Our main focus is to build truly recursive, self-improving superintelligence at scale,' Socher told TechCrunch at launch, 'which means that the entire process of ideation, implementation, and validation of research ideas would be automatic.'...

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