Shopping channel ShopHQ increasing Eden Prairie layoffs to 200 workers
The company announced in January that it would lay off 121 workers as part of a reduction in operations in the Twin Cities, with a further 7 employees later added to this for a total of 128.
In a WARN mass layoff notice to Minnesota regulators, IV Media confirmed a further 72 employees would be laid off, bringing the total to 200.
The layoffs are expected to take place during a 14-day period beginning on June 16 at the facility at 6740 Shady Oak Road, according to the notice received by the State Rapid Response Team.
The layoffs impact varying positions throughout the company, including assistant buyer, assistant technical designer, assistant textile designer, associate digital marketing specialist, broadcast system development administrator, content producer, controller, design motion graphics senior role, and many more.
IV Media is a subsidiary of Innovation Ventures, the company behind 5-Hour Energy drinks. It bought ShopHQ from previous owner iMedia Brands in 2023, when the latter filed for bankruptcy protection.
Bring Me The News reached out to IV Media and ShopHQ for comment but have not received a response.
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Axios
2 hours ago
- Axios
Sam Altman: Never mind the launch mess — full speed ahead
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is still talking like the future belongs to him, a week after the rollout of the company's latest model raised a storm of criticism and questions about his strategy. The big picture: Altman has heard the concerns, integrated some lessons learned and is charging forward with plans to spend literally trillions of dollars to build a slew of products and services, led by an even more ubiquitous ChatGPT. What he's saying:"If you project our growth forward, pretty soon, like billions of people a day will be talking to ChatGPT," Altman said during a wide-ranging dinner with a small group of reporters in San Francisco Thursday night. "ChatGPT will say more words a day than all humans say, at some point, if we stay on our growth rate." These big plans require big spending. "You should expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars on data center construction in the not very distant future," Altman said. "And you should expect a bunch of economists to wring their hands and be like, 'Oh, this is so crazy. It's so reckless and whatever.'" "And we'll just be like, 'You know what? Let us, like, do our thing,' " Altman acknowledges that the company may have to devise new fundraising structures to gather that level of investment. "I suspect we can design a very interesting new kind of financial instrument for financing compute that the world has not yet figured out," he said. Altman's defense of OpenAI's billions in infrastructure spending is that it pays off. "Our answer is, we can spend $300 billion and sell $400 billion in services, and if we don't have the $300 billion in data centers, we just keep disappointing our customers." One big shift is that increasingly that capacity is going to answering queries rather than training new models. "Most of what we're building out at this point is the inference," he said — referring to the use of computing power to run rather than train AI models. Yes, but: It's the cost of training new models that is keeping OpenAI from turning a profit, he said. "We're profitable on inference. If we didn't pay for training, we'd be a very profitable company." "We will be always training the next thing, but if we needed to run the company profitably and stay ahead, I think we probably could do that." Altman likened the launch of GPT-5 to Dickens' famous "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" line. "You have people that are like, 'you took away my friend. You're horrible. I need it back," he said, referring to users who wanted to keep using OpenAI's older models. At the same time, Altman said the company is finding scientists saying they can finally do real research using GPT-5. OpenAI has also seen traffic to its API double within 48 hours, to the point that it's limited by compute capacity. "We have really got the full spread of the human experience with this one," he said. Here's what else was on Altman's mind: 1. If Google is forced to sell its Chrome browser as part of an antitrust settlement, Altman would like to buy that, too. "If Chrome is really gonna sell, we should take a look at it. I don't have a number in mind, but I would like to have it." 2. A brain-computer interface company along the lines of Musk's Neuralink is something Altman said he's interested in setting up. "I think neural interfaces are cool idea," he said. "I would like to be able to think something and have ChatGPT respond to it." He said it would likely be a separate company from OpenAI, though its structure has yet to be finalized. 3. Altman said he grew up on Apple products and, as a self-described "fanboy," he "would love to work much more with Apple and I think it's cool some of the stuff we're doing together." 4. Altman also sees a public offering in the company's future — although he imagines someone else would be the executive handling quarterly earnings calls. 5. Altman expects some AI firms to optimize their AI for attention-grabbing and engagement rather than usefulness. "We are not going to do that. I do worry about it. The companies that are behind in getting AI adoption, this is the easiest way you can imagine to get more so, yes, I think you will see that. And I think it's bad, really bad." Fielding questions for an hour and a half, Altman weighed in on everything from his recent social media spat with Elon Musk ("There's no grand strategy... it was probably a mistake") to the timing of OpenAI's next big model after GPT-5. "I think it'll be faster than the previous [ones]," he said. "We're now at a place where there's a very strong research roadmap in front of us. " "I don't know an exact date," he said, but it won't be as long as it took to get from GPT-4 to GPT-5. What's next: Altman rejected some critics' view that GPT-5's more incremental advances mean that progress on improving AI models is hitting a wall. But he acknowledged that limits are starting to show up when it comes to the basic chatbot functionality of ChatGPT. "I think the models are still getting better at a rapid rate," he said. "One of the things that's interesting is the models have already saturated the chat use case. They're not gonna get much better. ... the Turing test has passed."
CNBC
10 hours ago
- CNBC
GPT-5's rollout fell flat for consumers, but the AI model is gaining where it matters most
Sam Altman turned OpenAI into a cultural phenomenon with ChatGPT. Now, three years later, he's chasing where the real money is: Enterprise. Last week's rollout of GPT-5, OpenAI's newest artificial intelligence model, was rocky. Critics bashed its less-intuitive feel, ultimately leading the company to restore its legacy GPT-4 to paying chatbot customers. But GPT-5 isn't about the consumer. It's OpenAI's effort to crack the enterprise market, where rival Anthropic has enjoyed a head start. One week in, and startups like Cursor, Vercel, and Factory say they've already made GPT-5 the default model in certain key products and tools, touting its faster setup, better results on complex tasks, and a lower price. Some companies said GPT-5 now matches or beats Claude on code and interface design, a space Anthropic once dominated. Box, another enterprise customer, has been testing GPT-5 on long, logic-heavy documents. CEO Aaron Levie told CNBC the model is a "breakthrough," saying it performs with a level of reasoning that prior systems couldn't match. Behind the scenes, OpenAI has built out its own enterprise sales team — more than 500 people under COO Brad Lightcap — operating independently of Microsoft, which has been the startup's lead investor and key cloud partner. Customers can access GPT models through Microsoft Azure or go directly to OpenAI, which controls the API and product experience. Still, the economics are brutal. The models are expensive to run, and both OpenAI and Anthropic are spending big to lock in customers, with OpenAI on track to burn $8 billion this year. That's part of why both Anthropic and OpenAI are courting new capital. OpenAI is exploring a secondary stock sale that could value the company around $500 billion and said ChatGPT is nearing 700 million weekly users. Anthropic is seeking fresh funding at a potential $170 billion valuation. GPT-5 is significantly cheaper than Anthropic's top-end Claude Opus 4.1 — by a factor of seven and a half, in some cases — but OpenAI is spending huge amounts on infrastructure to sustain that edge. For OpenAI, it's a push to win customers now, get them locked in and build a real business on the back of that loyalty. Cursor, still a major Anthropic customer, is now steering new users to OpenAI. The company's co-founder and CEO Michael Truell underscored the change during OpenAI's launch livestream, describing GPT-5 as "the smartest coding model we've ever tried." Truell said the change applies only to new sign-ups, as existing Cursor customers will continue using Anthropic as their default model. Cursor maintains a committed-revenue contract with Anthropic, which has built its business on dominating the enterprise layer. As of June, enterprise makes up about 80% of its revenue, with annualized revenue growing 17x year-over-year, said a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity in order to discuss company data. The company added $3 billion in revenue in just the past six months — including $1 billion in June alone — and has already signed triple the number of eight- and nine-figure deals this year compared to all of 2024, the person said. Anthropic said its enterprise footprint extends far beyond tech. Claude powers tools for Amazon Prime, Alexa, and AIG, and is used by top players in pharma, retail, aviation, and professional services. The company is embedded across Amazon Web Services, GCP, Snowflake, Databricks, and Palantir — and its deals tend to expand fast. Average customer spend has grown more than fivefold over the past year, with over half of business clients now using multiple Claude products, the person said. Excluding its two largest customers, revenue for the rest of the business has grown more than elevenfold year-over-year, the person said. Even with that broad reach, OpenAI is gaining ground with enterprise customers. GPT-5 API usage has surged since launch, with the model now processing more than twice as much coding and agent-building work, and reasoning use cases jumping more than eightfold, said a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity in order to discuss company data. Enterprise demand is rising sharply, particularly for planning and multi-step reasoning tasks. GPT-5's traction over the past week shows how quickly loyalties can shift when performance and price tip in OpenAI's favor. AI-powered coding platform Qodo recently tested GPT-5 against top-tier models including Gemini 2.5, Claude Sonnet 4, and Grok 4, and said in a blog post that it led in catching coding mistakes. The model was often the only one to catch critical issues, such as security bugs or broken code, suggesting clean, focused fixes and skipping over code that didn't need changing, the company said. Weaknesses included occasional false positives and some redundancy. Vercel, a cloud platform for web applications, has made GPT-5 the default in its new open-source "vibe coding" platform — a system that turns plain-English prompts into live, working apps. It also rolled GPT-5 into its in-dashboard Agent, where the company said it's been especially good at juggling complex tasks and thinking through long instructions. "While there was a lot of competition already in AI models, Claude was just owning this space. It was by far the best coding model. It was not even close," said Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel. "OpenAI was just not in the game." That changed with GPT-5. "They at least caught up," Ubl said. "They're better at some stuff, they're worse at other stuff." He said GPT-5 stood out for early-stage prototyping and product design, calling it more creative than Claude's Sonnet. "Traditionally, you have to optimize for the new model, and we saw really good results from the start," he said about the ease of integration. JetBrains has adopted GPT-5 as the default in its AI Assistant and in Kineto, a new no-code tool for building websites and apps, after finding it could generate simple, single-purpose tools more quickly from user prompts. Developer platform Factory said it collaborated closely with OpenAI to make GPT-5 the default for its tools. "When it comes to getting a really good plan for implementing a complex coding solution, GPT-5 is a lot better," said Matan Grinberg, CEO of Factory. "It's a lot better at planning and having coherence over its plan over a long period of time." Grinberg added that GPT-5 integrates well with their multi-agent platform: "It just plays very nicely with a lot of these high-level details that we're managing at the same time as the low-level implementation details." Pricing flexibility was a major factor in Factory's decision to default to GPT-5, as well. "Pricing is mostly what our end users care about," said Grinberg, adding that cheaper inference now makes customers more comfortable experimenting. Instead of second-guessing whether a question is worth the cost, they can "shoot from the hip more readily" and explore ideas without hesitation. Anton Osika, co-founder and CEO of Lovable, a company that builds an AI-powered tool that lets anyone create real software businesses without writing a single line of code, said his team was beta testing GPT-5 for weeks before it officially launched and was "super happy" with the improvement. "What we found is that it's more powerful. It's smarter in many complex use cases," Osika said, adding that the new model is "more prone to take actions and reflect on the action it takes" and "spends more time to make sure it really gets it right." Box's Levie said the biggest gains for him showed up in enterprise workflows that have nothing to do with writing code. His team has been testing the model for weeks on complex, real-world business data — from hundred-page lease agreements to product roadmaps — and found that it excelled at problems that tripped up earlier AI systems. Levie added that for corporate use, where AI agents run in the background to execute tasks, those step-change improvements are critical, and can turn GPT-5 into a real breakthrough for work automation. "GPT-5 has performed unbelievably well — certainly OpenAI's best model — and in many of our tests it's the best available," he said.
Business Insider
14 hours ago
- Business Insider
The backlash over GPT-5 shows people are getting hooked on specific AI models
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's big GPT-5 announcement was drowned out by users clamoring to keep their access to older models. Less than 24 hours after OpenAI announced it would discontinue 4o, Altman and his team signaled a retreat. The fierce responses show that OpenAI's userbase has developed strong attachments to its various AI models, an achievement in and of itself, but one that poses a challenge to the company as it looks to convince people to shift to newer models. "If you have been following the GPT-5 rollout, one thing you might be noticing is how much of an attachment some people have to specific AI models," Altman wrote on X on OpenAI Sunday. "It feels different and stronger than the kinds of attachment people have had to previous kinds of technology (and so suddenly deprecating old models that users depended on in their workflows was a mistake)." Users have molded their ChatGPTs into quasi-therapists, life coaches, and friends. Altman previously said that one user said their GPT gave them more encouragement than a parent ever had. Other tech companies have annoyed and angered their users by changing hardware or interface. But Altman's rival CEOs never dealt with emotional bonds that mimic real life. The personality changes between models were particularly jarring for some. "GPT5 colder personality doesn't help either, it's just sad," one user wrote during the Reddit AMA. Another added after Altman said the older model was coming back for paid users, "Thanks, Sam—bringing back 4o is a fantastic first step. Please consider keeping it around long-term. Many of us rely on it every day, not just for accuracy or logic, but for the warmth newer models sometimes miss." Nick Turley, OpenAI's head of ChatGPT, said that the Reddit comments showed "just how polarized users could be." "It's not just change that is difficult for folks, it's also the fact that people can have such a strong feeling about the personality of a model," Turley told The Verge. Nicole DiNicola, VP of Marketing at Smartcat, said one of the mistakes OpenAI made was abruptly removing access to earlier models without warning. "The expectations have gotten so much higher for anything AI-related that it is much easier to be disappointed," DiNicola told Business Insider. Turley said the "level of passion" some users had for 4o led him to rethink some things. He also said that OpenAI announced before GPT-5 that users could select from four personalities for their chatbots: cynic, robot, listener, and nerd. "When I see people saying, 'Hey, this is my only and best friend,' that doesn't feel like the type of thing that I wanted to build into ChatGPT." Turley said. "That feels like a side effect, and it's therefore worth taking seriously and studying closely, and that's what we're doing." Harvey Hu, cofounder of General Agency AI, an applied research lab, said he found some of GPT-5's quick responses to be "slightly more stupid than 4o." It's not just functionality that can make users attached. "There may be a certain emotion, certain ways of prompting that you train yourself to learn, and if the certain model you got used gets sunsetted that could be definitely emotional thing for the users," Hu told Business Insider.
