Global Money Managers Are Reluctant to Return to Chinese Stocks
Money managers and strategists at Franklin Templeton, UBS Global Wealth Management and Jupiter Asset Management are among those expecting the trade war to be drawn out and inflict significant pain on the Chinese economy, making them cautious. Their wariness suggests any temporary detente will likely prove insufficient to lure back global funds en masse.
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CNBC
an hour ago
- CNBC
OpenAI's Altman warns the U.S. is underestimating China's next-gen AI threat
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned that the U.S. may be underestimating the complexity and seriousness of China's progress in artificial intelligence, and said export controls alone likely aren't a reliable solution. "I'm worried about China," he said. Over Mediterranean tapas in San Francisco's Presidio — just five miles north of OpenAI's original office in the Mission — Altman offered a rare on-the-record briefing to a small group of reporters, including CNBC. He warned that the U.S.–China AI race is deeply entangled — and more consequential than a simple who's-ahead scoreboard. "There's inference capacity, where China probably can build faster. There's research, there's product; a lot of layers to the whole thing," he said. "I don't think it'll be as simple as: Is the U.S. or China ahead?" Despite escalating U.S. export controls on semiconductors, Altman is unconvinced that the policy is keeping up with technical reality. Asked whether it would be reassuring if fewer GPUs were reaching China, Altman was skeptical. "My instinct is that doesn't work," he said. "You can export-control one thing, but maybe not the right thing… maybe people build fabs or find other workarounds," he added, referring to semiconductor fabrication facilities, the specialized factories that produce the chips powering everything from smartphones to large-scale AI systems. "I'd love an easy solution," added Altman. "But my instinct is: That's hard." His comments come as Washington adjusts its policies designed to curb China's AI ambitions. The Biden administration initially tightened export controls, but in April, President Donald Trump went further — halting the supply of advanced chips altogether, including models previously designed to comply with Biden-era rules. Last week, however, the U.S. carved out an exception for certain "China-safe" chips, allowing sales to resume under a controversial and unprecedented agreement requiring Nvidia and AMD to give the federal government 15% of their China chip revenue. The result is a patchwork regime that may be easier to navigate than enforce. And while U.S. firms deepen their dependence on chips from Nvidia and AMD, Chinese companies are pushing ahead with alternatives from Huawei and other domestic suppliers — raising questions about whether cutting off supply is having the intended effect. China's AI progress has also influenced how OpenAI thinks about releasing its own models. While the company has long resisted calls to make its technology fully open source, Altman said competition from Chinese models — particularly open-source systems like DeepSeek — was a factor in OpenAI's recent decision to release its own open-weight models. "It was clear that if we didn't do it, the world was gonna head to be mostly built on Chinese open source models," Altman said. "That was a factor in our decision, for sure. Wasn't the only one, but that loomed large." Earlier this month, OpenAI released two open-weight language models — its first since GPT-2 in 2019 — marking a significant shift in strategy for the company that has long kept its technology gated behind application programming interfaces, or APIs. The new text-only models, called gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, are designed as lower-cost options that developers, researchers, and companies can download, run locally, and customize. An AI model is considered open weight if its parameters — the values learned during training that determine how the model generates responses — are publicly available. While that offers transparency and control, it's not the same as open source. OpenAI is still not releasing its training data or full source code. With this release, OpenAI joins that wave and, for now, stands alone as the only major U.S. foundation model company actively leaning into a more open approach. While Meta had embraced openness with its Llama models, CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested on the company's second-quarter earnings call it may pull back on that strategy going forward. OpenAI, meanwhile, is moving in the opposite direction, betting that broader accessibility will help grow its developer ecosystem and strengthen its position against Chinese rivals. Altman had previously acknowledged that OpenAI had been "on the wrong side of history" by locking up its models. Ultimately, OpenAI's move shows it wants to keep developers engaged and within its ecosystem. That push comes as Meta reconsiders its open-source stance and Chinese labs flood the market with models designed to be flexible and widely adopted. Still, the open-weight debut has drawn mixed reviews. Some developers have called the models underwhelming, noting that many of the capabilities that make OpenAI's commercial offerings so powerful were stripped out. Altman didn't dispute that, saying the team intentionally optimized for one core use case: locally-run coding agents. "If the kind of demand shifts in the world," he said, "you can push it to something else." Watch: OpenAI's enterprise bet pays off as startups in Silicon Valley switch to GPT-5
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Retail units and takeaway approved in Shildon despite obesity concerns
Plans for a hot food takeaway and retail units have been approved despite concerns from residents. The new facilities will be built on land at Jubilee Field in Shildon after support from Durham County Council. A new bakery, hair salon, and Chinese takeaway have shown initial interest in opening at the new site. The site is currently occupied by a Spar convenience store and the Frydayz fish and chips takeaway. Jubilee Fields Community Centre also shares the same car park. A previously proposed car wash facility has been removed from the plans. The new development is expected to put an end to speculation over the site's future, as similar proposals were previously granted permission but never built. However, Shildon Town Council warned the new facilities are not needed. An objection read: 'There is already an over-concentration of takeaway outlets in Shildon. The development would lead to noise/ disruption to residents and would increase traffic/ congestion in the housing estate.' Five new parking spaces will be created for the new development, but residents have warned that the existing car park is already busy and leads to parking on Jubilee Road. A resident added: 'We already have several takeaways within the town and one located right next to this proposal. This is another unnecessary requirement and is only increasing the already high obesity levels.' But Manjinder Singh Jagpal, the applicant, said the new shops would make it easier for nearby residents to access local facilities. 'The proposed new bakery, hair salon and hot food takeaway would help to meet the day-to-day needs of residents on the eastern side of Shildon,' he said. Recommended reading: Residents warn loud and abusive language from leisure centre will increase Aycliffe bar that lost licence plans High Court challenge and booze-free reopening Concern County Durham solar farm could have 'enormous' impact on locals 'They would enhance the accessibility and availability of local-level retail and service facilities for these residents, in an area where existing provision is very limited. 'This area contains no bakeries or hair salons, with the only hot food takeaways being two fish and chip shops (which would have a quite different offer to the proposed Chinese takeaway).' Construction work is expected to commence later this year.
NBC News
2 hours ago
- NBC News
OpenAI's Sam Altman sees AI bubble forming as industry spending surges
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thinks the artificial intelligence market is in a bubble, according to a report from The Verge published Friday. 'When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,' Altman told a small group of reporters last week. 'Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes,' he was quoted as saying. Altman appeared to compare this dynamic to the infamous dot-com bubble, a stock market crash centered on internet-based companies that led to massive investor enthusiasm during the late 1990s. Between March 2000 and October 2002, the Nasdaq lost nearly 80% of its value after many of these companies failed to generate revenue or profits. His comments add to growing concern among experts and analysts that investment in AI is moving too fast. Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai, Bridgewater Associates' Ray Dalio and Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok have all raised similar warnings. Last month, Slok stated in a report that he believed the AI bubble of today was, in fact, bigger than the internet bubble, with the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 more overvalued than they were in the 1990s. In a Monday email to CNBC, Ray Wang, research director for semiconductors, supply chain and emerging technology at Futurum Group, said that he thought Altman's comments carry some validity, but that the risks are company-dependent. 'From the perspective of broader investment in AI and semiconductors... I don't see it as a bubble. The fundamentals across the supply chain remain strong, and the long-term trajectory of the AI trend supports continued investment,' he said. However, he added that there is an increasing amount of speculative capital chasing companies with weaker fundamentals and only perceived potential, which could create pockets of overvaluation. Many fears of an AI bubble had hit a fever pitch at the start of this year when Chinese start-up DeepSeek released a competitive reasoning model. The company claimed one version of its advanced large language models had been trained for under $6 million, a fraction of the billions being spent by U.S. AI market leaders like OpenAI, though these claims were also been met with some skepticism. Earlier this month, Altman told CNBC that OpenAI's annual recurring revenue is on track to pass $20 billion this year, but that despite that, it remains unprofitable. The release of OpenAI's latest GPT-5 AI model earlier this month had also been rocky, with some critics complaining that it had a less intuitive feel. This resulted in the company restoring access to legacy GPT-4 models for paying customers. Following the release of the model, Altman has also signaled more caution about some of the AI industry's more bullish predictions. Speaking to CNBC, he said that he thought the term artificial general intelligence, or 'AGI,' is losing relevance, when asked whether the GPT-5 model moves the world any closer to achieving AGI. AGI refers to the concept of a form of artificial intelligence that can perform any intellectual task that a human can — something that OpenAI has been working towards for years and that Altman previously said could be achieved in the 'reasonably close-ish future. ″ Regardless, faith in OpenAI from investors has remained strong this year. CNBC confirmed Friday that the company was preparing to sell around $6 billion in stock as part of a secondary sale that would value it at roughly $500 billion. In March, it had announced a $40 billion funding round at a $300 billion valuation, by far the largest amount ever raised by a private tech company. In The Verge article on Friday, the OpenAI CEO also discussed OpenAI's expansion into consumer hardware, brain-computer interfaces and social media. Altman also said that he expects OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars on its data center buildout in the 'not very distant future,' and signaled that the company would be interested in buying Chrome if the U.S. government were to force Google to sell it. Asked if he would be CEO of OpenAI in a few years, he was quoted as saying, 'I mean, maybe an AI is in three years. That's a long time.'
