The Canonical OpenAI

Research Rundown #162, plus new memos on Radiant, Applied Intuition and more.

Research Rundown

After launching ChatGPT in November 2022, OpenAI saw faster user growth than any other company in history. But ChatGPT wasn’t just a watershed moment for OpenAI. It was a defining moment for the tech industry as a whole.

In the years since, the tech landscape has been reshaped by an unprecedented frenzy of hype, capital, talent, and innovation all flowing into AI. OpenAI itself has grown into a formidable force within tech, rivaling the Mag 7 in both scale and importance, having grown to a valuation of $500 billion as of October 2025. The company is on track to exceed $12.7 billion in revenue in 2025, with over 800 million weekly users as of November 2025. It has also enmeshed itself in multi-billion dollar deals with partners such as Microsoft, Oracle, NVIDIA, and AWS, as the buildout of datacenters for compute infrastructure continues to reshape the global economy.

As such, it could easily be argued that OpenAI is the most important startup in the world. It’s almost certainly the most important that Contrary Research has ever covered. Today, we’re proud to publish our long-awaited update on OpenAI, which is intended to match the importance of its subject in its breadth and quality. We began working on this report over a year ago, and at almost 35K words, we believe it’s the most comprehensive and in-depth resource ever published on OpenAI.

Read our full company report on OpenAI here.

Radiant’s microreactor flips the script: clean, continuous power that fits inside a shipping container. Check out the full memo here to learn more.

---

Applied Intuition is becoming the quiet infrastructure layer behind every serious autonomy program. Find out more in our memo here.

• Nvidia beat performance expectations for the third quarter of the year, according to the company’s long-awaited earnings call on Wednesday. The company’s stock rose 5% on Wednesday, but reversed course on Thursday and closed almost 3% lower. This market action followed news Monday that Peter Thiel’s investment fund, Thiel Macro LLC, had sold the entirety of its $100 million Nvidia position, and news earlier in the month that Softbank had also liquidated its Nvidia position.

• Google released Gemini 3 this week, including Pro and Deep Think versions, available to users in the Gemini App and to subscribers in Google Search. The model achieved a new ARC Prize high score on the ARC-AGI-2 test, doubling the performance of previous state of the art models.

• The US approved sale of AI chips to Middle East, coming after the administration’s decision earlier this month to block the sales of advanced Nvidia AI chips to China and the indictment of four people allegedly involved with a plot to illegally smuggle those chips to China.

• The Trump administration is considering options for overriding individual state AI laws with the drafting of an executive order that would form a Justice Department team tasked with suing and potentially withholding federal funding from states with AI regulation policies. This follows the failure of a similar effort earlier this year, in which the Senate voted 99-1 to remove a ban on AI regulation from the tax- and spending-cut bill passed in July.

• The federal government extended a $1 billion loan to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant this week, which will sell power directly to Microsoft and be operated by Constellation. The company plans to bring the plant back online by 2028 and provide 835 MW of electricity.

• A judge ruled in favor of Meta in the FTC case accusing the company of social media monopoly after its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, with the memorandum opinion noting that “it once might have made sense to partition apps into separate markets of social networking and social media, that wall has since broken down.”

• Microsoft will invest $5 billion and Nvidia will invest $10 billion into Anthropic in a deal that includes a commitment from Anthropic to purchase $30 billion of Azure cloud compute capacity from Microsoft, and up to 1 GW of Nvidia Blackwell and Rubin compute capacity. This deal increases Anthropic’s valuation to near $350 billion.

• OpenAI announced a partnership with Foxconn to design and build data center server racks, cabling, power and cooling systems, which will all be manufactured in the US. This is the first frontier AI lab deal focused on manufacturing in the US, with Sam Altman describing the deal as “a step toward ensuring the core technologies of the AI era are built here.”

• Prediction Markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have continued to gain traction in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, progressing further this month with the partnership announced between Kalshi and Coinbase Custody to protect USDC assets stored by Kalshi. This news follows the announcement of the NHL partnership with both Kalshi and Polymarket, the latest in an expanding set of associations with financial, news, and sports-betting companies.

---

At Contrary Research, we’ve built the best starting place to understand private tech companies. If you're interested in researching and writing about tech, apply here for our Research Fellowship!