Entertainment
An AI 'gold rush.' What to know about OpenAI's record $40-billion funding round
SAN FRANCISCO — ChatGPT maker OpenAI this week announced it raised a whopping $40 billion as it races to dominate a competitive AI landscape against tech giants like Google, and rivals including Anthropic and Chinese upstart DeepSeek.
The investment was the highest ever raised for a startup and places OpenAI at a $300-billion valuation, tying it with TikTok parent company ByteDance and behind the $350-billion valuation for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, according to research firm CB Insights.
“It’s a gold rush of epic proportions of gold rushes before,” said Ben Bajarin, chief executive and principal analyst at San José-based consulting firm Creative Strategies. “They’re not sitting on hoards of cash like Amazon, Microsoft and Google … they have to raise that money in order to compete with those three companies and that’s what you’re seeing.”
OpenAI’s funding round shows how much investors are willing to pour into technology that has the potential to disrupt entertainment, healthcare, education and other major industries. The rising popularity of ChatGPT, released in 2022, set off a race among tech companies that could change how people work.
The ability of AI-powered chatbots to quickly generate text and images has sparked concerns among some creatives over how AI models are trained and copyright holders are compensated. But tech companies have also pointed to AI’s potential benefits such as combating diseases and climate change.
Here’s what to know:
How does the deal work?
Softbank said it plans to fund up to $30 billion of the $40-billion investment round and will syndicate no more than $10 billion to other co-investors.
Softbank has the option to reduce its amount of investment to $20 billion if OpenAI does not change its business structure to a for-profit business by the end of this year, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment.
OpenAI began as a nonprofit in 2015 and later launched a for-profit subsidiary to oversee its commercial operations. The company is exploring changing the for-profit subsidiary to a public benefit corporation.
Elon Musk, who founded xAI, opposes OpenAI’s restructuring plan because he believes it veers away from the company’s founding principles and misleads investors. Meta also raised concerns about the transition, telling California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta in a letter last year that it would have “seismic implications for Silicon Valley” because investors would have an incentive to launch organizations first as nonprofits and benefit from tax-free donations.
What will OpenAI use the money for?
OpenAI said the funding will help the San Francisco-based company conduct AI research, release more powerful tools for the 500 million people who use ChatGPT weekly and grow its computing infrastructure such as data centers. People use ChatGPT to quickly generate text and images, search, brainstorm and complete other tasks.
“This investment helps us push the frontier and make AI more useful in everyday life,” said OpenAI’s Chief Executive Sam Altman in a statement.
Softbank, which led the investment round, said it’s backing OpenAI because the company is the closest to achieving what’s known as artificial general intelligence. OpenAI describes AGI as “AI systems that are generally smarter than humans,” making it possible for people to get help with any tasks. Softbank also cited an effort called Stargate they announced with President Trump in January to invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure over the next four years.
About $18 billion of the investment round will go toward Stargate, according to a person familiar with the matter who declined to be named.
“Their support will help us continue building AI systems that drive scientific discovery, enable personalized education, enhance human creativity, and pave the way toward AGI that benefits all of humanity,” OpenAI said in a post announcing the funding round.
Bajarin said OpenAI will need to expand its infrastructure to power the use of its AI tools. After OpenAI released a new image generator in March that people used to turn themselves into Studio Ghibli-style characters, the startup warned of delays as it dealt with a surge in traffic.
How will this affect the race to dominate AI?
OpenAI still faces plenty of competition from rivals.
“No one knows who’s going to be the winner in AI, and it’s probably not one winner,” said Mike Gualtieri, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, a research and advisory firm based in Massachusetts.
Rivals such as Google and Meta already gather a trove of valuable data on their users and created apps used by billions of people, he said. Startups don’t always end up winning the race against their more established rivals. Blackberry, for example, dominated the market with a device that paired a phone with a physical keyboard — until Apple introduced its groundbreaking iPhone with a touchscreen.
OpenAI also faces competition from China, where startups such as DeepSeek claim they can compete against ChatGPT at a much lower cost.
“In order to compete with DeepSeek, you got to be better than DeepSeek, and they need this kind of money to do just that,” said Gene Munster, managing partner at Minneapolis-based Deepwater Asset Management.
It’s unclear whether the multibillion-dollar bets on AI’s future will pay off for investors, but infrastructure such as data centers is still a valuable asset for companies.
AI companies could make money from their models by striking business partnerships and releasing applications for consumers and businesses. “You need to get some data to be unique, to have some value, or they need applications,” Gualtieri said.
Jeffrey Wlodarczak, a principal and senior analyst at Pivotal Research Group, said he wouldn’t rule out ChatGPT as a big contender in the AI race against tech giants.
“The big question is … to win, do you have to spend the most?” Wlodarczak said.
Movie Reviews
Movie Review – SHAKA: A STORY OF ALOHA
Entertainment
Tommy Lee Jones’ daughter reportedly found dead at San Francisco hotel on New Year’s Day
Victoria Jones, the daughter of Academy Award-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones, was reportedly found dead at a hotel in San Francisco on New Year’s Day. She was 34.
According to TMZ, the San Francisco Fire Department responded to a medical emergency call at the Fairmont San Francisco early Thursday morning. The paramedics pronounced Victoria dead at the scene before turning it over to the San Francisco Police Department for further investigation, the outlet said.
An SFPD representative confirmed to The Times that officers responded to a call at approximately 3:14 a.m. Thursday regarding a report of a deceased person at the hotel and that they met with medics at the scene who declared an unnamed adult female dead.
Citing law enforcement sources, NBC Bay Area also reported that the deceased woman found in a hallway of the hotel was believed to be Jones and that police did not suspect foul play.
“We are deeply saddened by an incident that occurred at the hotel on January 1, 2026,” the Fairmont told NBC Bay Area in a statement. “Our heartfelt condolences are with the family and loved ones during this very difficult time. The hotel team is actively cooperating and supporting police authorities within the framework of the ongoing investigation.”
The medical examiner conducted an investigation at the scene, but Jones’ cause of death remains undetermined. Dispatch audio obtained by TMZ and People indicated that the 911 emergency call was for a suspected drug overdose.
Jones was the daughter of Tommy Lee and ex-wife Kimberlea Cloughley. Her brief acting career included roles on films such as “Men in Black II” (2002), which starred her father, and “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” (2005), which was directed by her father. She also appeared in a 2005 episode of “One Tree Hill.”
Page Six reported that Jones had been arrested at least twice in 2025 in Napa County, including an arrest on suspicion of being under the influence of a controlled substance and drug possession.
Movie Reviews
Movie Review: “I Was a Stranger” and You Welcomed Me
Just when you think that you’ve seen and heard all sides of the human migration debate, and long after you fear that the cruel, the ignorant and the scapegoaters have won that shouting match, a film comes along and defies ignorance and prejudice by both embracing and upending the conventional “immigrant” narrative.
“I Was a Strranger” is the first great film of 2026. It’s cleverly written, carefully crafted and beautifully-acted with characters who humanize many facets of the “migration” and “illegal immigration” debate. The debut feature of writer-director Brandt Andersen, “Stranger” is emotional and logical, blunt and heroic. It challenges viewers to rethink their preconceptions and prejudices and the very definition of “heroic.”
The fact that this film — which takes its title from the Book of Matthew, chapter 25, verse 35 — is from the same faith-based film distributor that made millions by feeding the discredited human trafficking wish fulfillment fantasy “Sound of Freedom” to an eager conservative Christian audience makes this film something of a minor miracle in its own right.
But as Angel Studios has also urged churchgoers not just to animated Nativity stories (“The King of Kings”) and “David” musicals, but Christian resistence to fascism (“Truth & Treason” and “Bonheoffer”) , their atonement is almost complete.
Andersen deftly weaves five compact but saga-sized stories about immigrants escaping from civil-war-torn Syria into a sort of interwoven, overlapping “Babel” or “Crash” about migration.
“The Doctor” is about a Chicago hospital employee (Yasmine Al Massri of “Palestine 36” and TV’s “Quantico”) whose flashback takes us to the hospital in Aleppo, Syria, bombed and terrorized by the Assad regime’s forces, and what she and her tween daughter (Massa Daoud) went through to escape — from literally crawling out of a bombed building to dodging death at the border to the harrowing small boat voyage from Turkey to Greece.
“The Soldier” follows loyal Assad trooper Mustafa (Yahya Mahayni was John the Baptist in Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints”) through his murderous work in Aleppo, and the crisis of conscience that finally hits him as he sees the cruel and repressive regime he works for at its most desperate.
“The Smuggler” is Marwan, a refugee-camp savvy African — played by the terrific French actor Omar Sy of “The Intouchables” and “The Book of Clarence” — who cynically makes his money buying disposable inflatable boats, disposable outboards and not-enough-life-jackets in Turkey to smuggle refugees to Greece.
“The Poet” (Ziad Bakri of “Screwdriver”) just wants to get his Syrian family of five out of Turkey and into Europe on Marwan’s boat.
And “The Captain” (Constantine Markoulakis of “The Telemachy”) commands a Hellenic Coast Guard vessel, a man haunted by the harrowing rescues he must carry out daily and visions of the bodies of those he doesn’t.
Andersen, a Tampa native who made his mark producing Tom Cruise spectacles (“American Made”), Mel Gibson B-movies (“Panama”) and the occasional “Everest” blockbuster, expands his short film “Refugee” to feature length for “I Was a Stranger.” He doesn’t so much alter the formula or reinvent this genre of film as find points of view that we seldom see that force us to reconsider what we believe through their eyes.
Sy’s Smuggler has a sickly little boy that he longs to take to Chicago. He runs his ill-gotten-gains operation, profiting off human misery, to realize that dream. We see glimpses of what might be compassion, but also bullying “customers” and his new North African assistant (Ayman Samman). Keeping up the hard front he shows one and all, we see him callously buy life jackets in the bazaar — never enough for every customer to have one in any given voyage.
The Captain sits for dinner with family and friends and has to listen to Greek prejudices and complaints about this human life and human rights crisis, which is how the worlds sees Greece reacting to this “invasion.” But as he and his first mate recount lives saved and the horrors of lives lost, that quibbling is silenced.
Here and there we see and hear (in Arabic and Greek with subtitles, and English) little moments of “rising above” human pettiness and cruelty and the simple blessings of kindness.
“I Was a Stranger” was finished in 2024 and arrives in cinemas at one of the bleakest moments in recent history. Cruelty is running amok, unchecked and unpunished. Countries are being destabilized, with the fans of alleged “strong man” rule cheering it on.
Andersen carefully avoids politics — Middle Eastern, Israeli, European and American — save for the opening scene’s zoom in on that Chicago hospital, passing a gaudily named “Trump” hotel in the process, and a general condemnation of Syria’s Assad mob family regime.
But Andersen’s bold movie, with its message so against the grain of current events, compromised media coverage and the mostly conservative audience that has become this film distributor’s base, plays like a wet slap back to reality.
And as any revival preacher will tell you, putting a positive message out there in front of millions is the only way to convert hundreds among the millions who have lost their way.

Rating: PG-13, violence, smoking, racial slurs
Cast: Yasmine Al Massri, Yahya Mahayni, Ziad Bakri, Omar Sy, Ayman Samman, Massa Daoud, Jason Beghe and Constantine Markoulakis
Credits: Scripted and directed by Brandt Andersen. An Angel Studios release.
Running time: 1:43
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