Welcome back to The Prompt.
When Sergiy Nesterenko joined SpaceX as an intern, a technical error caused a circuit board he’d designed to catch fire in his hands. In his role working on rockets like Falcon 9, he realized just how cumbersome and labor intensive it is to design printed circuit boards— key hardware components that power every electronic device from phones to LED light bulbs to fighter jets.
Conventionally, designing these tiny green squares of metal involves using a mouse and keyboard to tediously draw thousands of wires and connections before sending a digital layout to a manufacturer for production. The entire process can take up to three months, in part because of its error-prone nature. “Usually you find out you screwed up somehow and then you repeat,” Nesterenko told Forbes.
So in September 2019, he started Quilter to use artificial intelligence to accelerate designing electronics. A human designer feeds the software a rough sketch, and then AI gets to work finalizing it and adding in the details. “The website does it all automatically and then in a much faster time returns a result which they can then inspect, review and modify,” said Nesterenko.
The Los Angeles-based startup announced today it has raised $25.5 million in Series B investment led by Index Ventures. Quilter is valued at around $200 million, according to a person familiar with the round.
One key differentiator for its AI is the training data: Instead of learning from human designs, which are often ridden with mistakes, Quilter uses the laws of physics —the ABCs of how heat moves or signals travel— to teach its AI program how to correctly design boards, using reinforcement learning to improve its performance. Nesterenko claims Quilter doesn’t use any external large language models under the hood.
Nina Achadjian, a partner at Index Ventures, said the world is experiencing a type of “hardware renaissance,” with more pressure from the Trump administration to manufacture electronics in the U.S. That’s created demand–and increased costs. Nesterenko said human designers cost around $100 an hour and many are reaching retirement age, which have created labor shortages and bottlenecks in the production process, creating an opportunity for Quilter.
Let’s get into the headlines.
BIG PLAYS
OpenAI wants to turn ChatGPT into the next internet. At its packed annual Dev Day in San Francisco, the company announced users will be able to directly use external apps like Spotify, Zillow, Coursera and Expedia through its chatbot. For instance, you can search for a home with a specific budget on Zillow or create a Spotify playlist without leaving ChatGPT. OpenAI now touts some 800 million weekly users and 4 million developers building software with its models.
The event came on the heels of the viral launch of its TikTok-style video sharing app, Sora 2. The invite-only app lets users create and share short form videos with AI and topped the App Store within days of its release. It also lets people use another user’s likeness (as long as they’ve given permission) in their own AI videos. It’s a feature meant for friends, but has potential for misuse. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has allowed anyone to create videos using his likeness, is “inescapable” on the app, Sources’ Alex Heath writes. Bizarre videos featuring an AI Altman as the U.S. president, a beggar—and even stealing GPUs from a Target store—went viral on the internet. People quickly found that you could create videos of an array of popular animated and gaming characters, raising both copyright concerns and a mechanism for misinformation. AI-generated videos of Pikachu, SpongeBob Squarepants and McDonalds’ mascot Ronald McDonald have been shared on the app, CNBC found. While OpenAI initially required copyright holders to opt out from someone using their intellectual property, the company later said it will add “granular controls” for rightsholders and potentially a revenue-share model.
CHIPS + COMPUTE
In its unending quest for compute, OpenAI signed a multibillion dollar deal with chipmaker AMD to buy and consume 6 gigawatts worth of its AI chips starting in 2026—a move that could challenge Nvidia’s dominance in the AI space. The chipmaker issued OpenAI a warrant for up to 160 million shares, representing an estimated 10% stake in AMD at $0.01 per share, which will vest when a specific share price milestone is met. The deal’s announcement helped bump AMD’s shares by 30% — which in a roundabout way could benefit OpenAI. “Schematically, OpenAI could buy AMD stock to predictably profit from the stock-price bump it created,” Bloomberg’s Matt Levine explained.
SHOW ME THE MONEY
ARR —short for annual recurring revenue— has become the financial metric of choice for AI startup founders and VCs to demonstrate traction and business growth. But it's not clear how reliable this figure is in the hype cycle of AI, especially when startups’ revenue might not actually be recurring, Fortune reported. One VC even called it “vibe revenue.” Forced by investor pressure to bring in revenue in order to pick up more funding, founders are including one time deals, pilots and unactivated contracts into their ARR calculations.
DEEP DIVE
The shares of 12-year-old nuclear fission company Oklo are up 47% over the last week and more than 400% over the past six months, thanks to excitement around the potential for nuclear energy to power the AI boom. The most recent jump comes after the U.S. and U.K. governments signed an agreement last Thursday to invest some $350 billion (flowing both ways) into AI, quantum computing and nuclear energy; despite the jump, it’s not yet clear the nuclear deals will benefit Oklo directly. The Santa Clara-based company also broke ground on its first nuclear power plant, at the Department of Energy-controlled Idaho National Laboratory on Monday. As of market close, Oklo’s market cap sits at $20 billion.
Oklo’s runup makes husband-and-wife cofounders Jacob DeWitte, who is CEO, and Caroline Cochran, who is chief operating officer, new billionaires. The couple founded the company in 2013, while DeWitte was a PhD student at MIT studying nuclear engineering. Cochran, who graduated from MIT with a masters degree in nuclear engineering in 2010, had just completed a stint as a marketing and engineering consultant. The name came from the uranium-rich mineral deposits at Oklo, Gabon, renowned for having undergone self-sustained fission two billion years ago. Each founder is now worth $1.7 billion, per Forbes estimates, based on their combined 16% stake in Oklo and approximately $30 million from share sales. Cochran, who is 42, is one of just three dozen self-made women billionaires in the U.S., and one of just six under 50.
Oklo also has strong ties to Sam Altman, who cofounded and co-led AltC, the SPAC that took Oklo public last year. Altman also served as Oklo’s board chair from 2015 to April, when he stepped down—perhaps to make it easier for Oklo and OpenAI to pursue a deal “as Oklo explores strategic partnerships to deploy clean energy at scale, particularly to enable the deployment of AI,” Altman wrote in a statement. Altman is also a big shareholder, owning an estimated $880 million stake, most of which came from his buying founder shares in AltC for $0.002 per share back in 2021. That’s a more-than 70,000x return on investment, perhaps even his best yet. Also involved in AltC was OpenAI’s chief operating officer Brad Lightcap, though it’s unclear if he still has a role in Oklo.
Read the full story on Forbes.
MODEL BEHAVIOR
Consulting giant Deloitte plans to issue a partial refund to the Australian government for creating a report filled with AI-generated errors like made up quotes and references to nonexistent research studies. The country’s Department of Employment and Workplace Relations paid Deloitte $290,000 (440,000 Australian dollars) to conduct an independent review of the department’s IT system. A revised version of the document disclosed that OpenAI Azure was used to write the report. The blunder marks another instance of AI hallucinations causing trouble for those relying on it.