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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is making waves again, this time crediting Paul Graham and Peter Thiel with teaching him a foundational investment principle — that chasing the popular trade rarely produces spectacular returns. It's a contrarian lesson that shaped his thinking long before he became one of the most powerful figures in artificial intelligence.
Speaking of AI, the safety evaluation lab METR, founded by a former OpenAI researcher, is running into a hard ceiling on growth. Despite offering salaries north of five hundred thousand dollars, the Berkeley nonprofit says a severe talent shortage is bottlenecking its critical work evaluating frontier models for OpenAI, Anthropic, and several governments. When half a million a year isn't enough to fill seats, that tells you something about how thin the pipeline truly is.
And shifting to equities, billionaire Steve Cohen's Point72 Asset Management has been quietly loading up on Mondelez in the first quarter while trimming exposure to big tech. Cohen's move into the consumer staples name suggests at least one major fund is rotating toward defensive, cash-generating businesses as sentiment around high-multiple technology stocks grows more complicated.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
