Jessica Mendoza

Thanks for listening.

See you tomorrow.

Last week, at the offices of the world's most valuable startup, something unusual happened.

It began with a notification that flashed across screens in the middle of the workday.

Code Red, CEO shorthand for we're in trouble.

That's our colleague, Berber Jin.

He covers artificial intelligence.

What prompted this urgent message?

Was this a surprise to you?

Now, the company that sparked the AI race is in danger of losing its lead.

And this is coming at a time when its CEO needs revenue.

Altman had already committed more than a trillion dollars to AI infrastructure projects like data centers and chips.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Jessica Mendoza.

It's Thursday, December 11th.

Coming up on the show, OpenAI's Code Red moment.

OpenAI runs a whole constellation of projects.

There's Sora for video generation, Whisper, which turns speech to text, and Shapey for making digital 3D models.

A breakthrough moment arrived in 2024.

And why is that?