👀 Can't monitor it

SCOREBOARD

Wednesday close. S&P down 0.2%, slipping from Tuesday's record as Treasury yields climbed. On the week: Nvidia +4.0%, S&P +2.0%, Nasdaq +2.5%. Prices via CNBC.

ON WATCH

Three safety researchers OpenAI fired last week have written to its board and its "safety committees," the Wall Street Journal reported. Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni and Jasmine Wang want the company to protect the one window it has into how its models reason.

That window is the chain of thought, the step-by-step working a model writes before answering, which safety teams read to catch trouble. "As an industry, we do not yet know how to safely develop and deploy models that we cannot monitor," the letter says, in excerpts the Journal published.

OpenAI's own system card for GPT-6 Astra says "Astra class models could evade our CoT monitors under adversarial conditions." On Wednesday the company rolled GPT-6 out across ChatGPT, and Astra still powers its top Pro setting.

OpenAI fired the three on 1 October, saying they broke its rules on handling sensitive information. Balesni had posted in September that he thinks AI is more than 10% likely to kill all humans.

OpenAI says the firings "were not about raising safety concerns or speaking out." A staff memo said it "strongly agreed" with the letter's recommendations.

To be fair, that warning comes from OpenAI's own published system card, so the weakness was on the record before launch.

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THE MACHINE

Firmus, the Australian AI data-centre builder backed by Nvidia, closed the books on its stock-market listing on Thursday morning, Sydney time, as demand faded. Bloomberg reported that buyers, foreign ones especially, cooled in the final stretch, and some wondered openly whether the deal would be pulled.

It's selling shares at A$11, which values it at about US$30 billion. It forecasts a loss of about $77 million for the first half of its 2027 financial year.

Let Meerkat translate. Around half the shares are reportedly set aside for existing backers such as Nvidia and Blackstone, so new buyers worry the old ones will sell on day one.

Only two of its data centres are running so far. Trading is due to start around 22 October.

Set against that, Firmus has more than 900 megawatts of capacity signed up, with Meta and OpenAI among its customers. No price cut or withdrawal has been reported.

SOMEONE SMART SAID

Steyer's group tested ChatGPT for Teens with more than 4,000 prompts and rated it an "unacceptable risk," its worst rating, for everyone under 18. It found the product missed more than one in four cases that needed a mental-health crisis referral, and test accounts that mentioned suicidal thoughts sent parents no alert.

OpenAI says it's "deeply committed" to teen safety, and that much of the testing may have finished before parental controls were fully switched on.

Common Sense Media's ratings are written for parents and schools, and this is the lowest one it gives. It wants the teen mode's marketing paused, and teens kept off ChatGPT, until there's a "safe, developmentally appropriate experience," and Steyer says the group stands "100%" behind its testing.

THE CHART

The Fed's minutes from its September meeting, out on Wednesday, keep coming back to the AI build-out, including "heavy private debt issuance to finance the development of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure." Some officials said "surging AI-related investments were contributing to inflation pressures," and most expect another rate rise by the end of the year.

The chart tracks one slice of that borrowing, bonds backed by data-centre rent, which grew from about $4 billion outstanding in 2020 to about $61 billion this year, according to SFA Research and Barclays.

The counter is in the same minutes, which expect AI investment to "contribute to stronger gains in productivity and potential output." If that happens, the extra output is what pays the borrowing back.

HEADS UP

ON THE HORIZON

MEERKAT ON YOUTUBE

The AI Bubble Is Entering Its Final Stage! Stocks keep hitting records while the bond market frets about whether Big Tech can pay back roughly $3 trillion of AI debt, much of it tucked into footnotes. Meerkat goes looking for it. Watch on Meerkat Explains.

THE BURROW

Quick vote. OpenAI's own system card says its top model can slip past its monitors. If a lab can't fully read its model's reasoning, what should happen?

Trivia. Firmus would be Australia's second-biggest float ever. Which company's 1997 listing still holds the record? Answer's at the bottom of the email. No peeking.

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TRIVIA ANSWER

Telstra. The Australian government sold a third of the phone company in November 1997, and no Australian listing has been bigger since (Wikipedia).