Forbes Daily Briefing

Forbes

The Forbes Daily Briefing shares the best of Forbes reporting on wealth, business, entrepreneurship, leadership and more. Tune in every day, seven days a week, to hear a new story. The Daily Briefing is edited, produced and hosted by Kieran Meadows.

  1. Three Dudes Run The Biggest AI Romantic Fantasy Site For Women

    4 DAYS AGO

    Three Dudes Run The Biggest AI Romantic Fantasy Site For Women

    After moving to a new city in North Carolina in 2024, Cookie (a pseudonym) felt the weight of a new city. Their husband was traveling a lot for work, and as a stay-at-home parent with a now 4-year-old daughter, the days were “very draining”. Since Cookie didn’t know anybody in their new town, they turned to Janitor AI, a social chatbot site known for its unbounded, often explicit, fantasy roleplay. It was a “nice release,” Cookie told Forbes. Cookie grew up around fantasy and romance novels—their mother kept a collection—and Janitor AI became an easy way to escape the drudgery of the day-to-day. By the time their daughter is down for a nap or tucked in for the night, Cookie is creating "slow burn" romance characters with detailed and often explicit prompts. There’s Charlie, a nudist werewolf roommate; Marcus, a seven-foot ghoul with a taste for dive bars; Greenwood, Colorado, a fictional town where humans live alongside supernatural “demihumans.” Beneath Greenwood’s romance and monster lore is a civic rot: a glossy new church masking an organ-harvesting operation, with seedy bars serving as bait. Cookie is one of Janitor AI’s 2.5 million daily, die-hard users. The platform claims more than 15 million total users and with 100 million monthly visitors, and it's the tenth most popular consumer AI app, according to Similarweb, a digital market intelligence company. By Anna Tong, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    7 min
  2. OpenAI Is A Third Of CoreWeave’s Business. What If The AI Company Can’t Pay Up?

    9 MAY

    OpenAI Is A Third Of CoreWeave’s Business. What If The AI Company Can’t Pay Up?

    Over the last year, as its CEO Sam Altman preached a gospel of insatiable compute, OpenAI has created a web of deals that tie a meaningful chunk of Silicon Valley’s AI buildout to its own trajectory. Big names like Nvidia, Oracle and SoftBank have all inked infrastructure contracts with the ChatGPT maker, but there is one company perched further out on a limb than the rest: CoreWeave, an AI cloud company with a roughly $60 billion market cap. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that OpenAI missed internal projections for revenue and user growth. It claimed OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar is worried the company may not be able to pay for future computing contracts. If that’s even directionally right, it will land hardest on CoreWeave—which counts OpenAI as one of its biggest customers and has borrowed more than $40 billion in mostly high-interest debt used to finance GPUs and data centers. CoreWeave’s view, at least publicly: it can ride out turbulence as long as demand for AI compute keeps outrunning supply. "OpenAI is a terrific partner, but not our only one,” a CoreWeave spokesperson said, namechecking other big-name customers including Meta, Anthropic, Microsoft and Google. “As more companies build and deploy AI, demand for compute continues to grow. We continue to see demand exceed supply across the AI ecosystem.” Problem is: that “AI ecosystem” is not a broad-based consumer market so much as a coterie of spenders writing very large checks. Trillions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure commitments are concentrated in a few places: big tech balance sheets (Oracle, Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia) and a handful of newer entrants that buy AI capacity and then rent it out (like CoreWeave, Nebius and Nscale). CoreWeave’s model—buy GPUs, spin up data centers, lease the capacity to labs—turns that concentration into both opportunity and fragility. By Phoebe Liu, Reporter Richard Nieva, Senior Writer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    7 min

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The Forbes Daily Briefing shares the best of Forbes reporting on wealth, business, entrepreneurship, leadership and more. Tune in every day, seven days a week, to hear a new story. The Daily Briefing is edited, produced and hosted by Kieran Meadows.

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