• In October, Sam Altman said “erotica for adults” was coming to ChatGPT.
• Now those plans are reportedly being mothballed.
• It’s fine for young startups and even mature companies to try out new ideas. But OpenAI and Altman are trying out a lot.

Last fall, Sam Altman told us he was about to bring spicy chat — “erotica for adults,” in his words — to ChatGPT.

That never happened, and now it looks like it never will: Altman’s OpenAI has put those plans on hold “indefinitely,” per the Financial Times.

This is Altman’s second big walkback in the last few days. Earlier this week, the company canned Sora, the briefly popular video app it rolled out last fall. I’ve asked the company for comment.

Both retreats are supposed to be part of a new push at OpenAI to focus the company’s efforts on things that could make money today, as it preps for an IPO at the same time it faces real competition from the likes of Google and Anthropic.

So all this starting and stopping could be viewed as necessary growing pains at a fast-growing tech company — ones that won’t mean anything in the long run, if it delivers on its world-changing ambitions.

Not only that, but Altman told us we should expect this sort of stuff. “Please expect a very high rate of change from us,” he wrote last fall, after hearing from content owners who were outraged to find their stuff on Sora without their permission. “We will make some good decisions and some missteps, but we will take feedback and try to fix the missteps very quickly.”

It’s not that companies aren’t allowed to make wrong turns and head up dead ends as they grow up, and even once they’re fully mature. That kind of pivoting is celebrated in tech (and is why very few people are mad that Mark Zuckerberg has stopped telling us the metaverse is the future, or that Google once bought Motorola and decided that was a bad idea a couple years later.)

But “move fast and break things” lands differently when the company doing the moving and breaking isn’t running a photo app or playing around with crypto.

Instead, OpenAI and its competitors say they’re leading us into a world where everything — the way we live and work (or don’t work) and fight wars and everything else — will change in fundamental ways.

And investors have bought this pitch, which means our economy now seems yoked to all this — which means all of us are yoked to it, even if we never touch a chatbot.

Which makes me slightly queasy to see Sam Altman promise dirty chats in October, and then walk away from the plan less than six months later.

Not because dirty chat is obviously absurd. Lots of people in AI think romantic or sexual chatbot conversations are a real use case and could be a real business.

But the reasons it might be a bad idea for OpenAI were pretty obvious from the start. It’s a giant, heavily scrutinized company that wants to be treated as central and indispensable, and it’s only going to get more scrutiny.

If those objections only became real after Altman floated the idea in public, that’s not charming startup experimentation. It’s a sign that OpenAI is still making itself up as it goes. And that would be easier to shrug off if the rest of us weren’t already being told to build our lives, jobs, and businesses around what OpenAI says comes next.

• A court dismissed a lawsuit by Elon Musk’s X that had accused advertisers of illegally boycotting the platform.
• The Texas federal judge cited a lack of jurisdiction and X’s failure to state a claim.
• The defendants included Mars, Lego, and Nestlé.

A court tossed out a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s X that accused big advertisers like Mars, Lego, and Nestlé of illegally boycotting the platform.

A US District Court judge in Texas dismissed the case, citing a lack of jurisdiction and X’s failure to state an antitrust claim.

X sued several major brands in August 2024, alleging their participation in an ad industry initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, GARM, was tantamount to a conspiracy to “collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising” from X after Musk’s takeover of the company, then known as Twitter. It later added other brands to the suit.

X claimed the alleged boycott made it less competitive than other platforms in winning advertisers and user engagement.

Other plaintiffs named in the suit were the World Federation of Advertisers, CVS Health, Ørsted, Twitch, Abbott Laboratories, Colgate-Palmolive, Pinterest, Tyson, and Shell.

WFA shut down GARM, its initiative, after the suit was filed, citing limited resources.

The suit was partly spurred by an investigation by the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan, into whether advertisers were illegally banding together to demonetize conservative platforms and voices in violation of antitrust law.

The plaintiffs fought back, calling the lawsuit “an attempt to use the courthouse to win back the business X lost in the free market when it disrupted its own business and alienated many of its customers.”

X’s relationship with advertisers has been fraught since Musk bought the platform in 2022. Advertisers left en masse as X loosened moderation and account-verification rules and reinstated the banned accounts of some provocative figures.

EMARKETER, Business Insider’s sister company, estimated its revenue would reach $2.2 billion in 2026, below its pre-acquisition level of $4.5 billion.

X has tried to win back advertisers by underscoring its commitment to brand safety and promoting its use of block lists that let advertisers avoid showing up around certain topics.

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Big-name macro managers like Brevan Howard, Caxton, and Taula have lost money in March.
• Ripple effects from the US-Israel strikes on Iran have dragged down hedge funds.
• Bridgewater Associates has so far avoided most of the pain.

Macro hedge funds have, for the most part, not been deft enough to avoid losses in this month’s market turmoil brought on by the strikes on Iran by the US and Israel.

Brevan Howard’s Master fund, its longest-running strategy, has given back its 2026 gains after falling 6% this month through last Friday. Andrew Law’s Caxton Associates is down 15% on the month through last Friday, while Millennium-backed Taula Capital has lost more than 7% in over the same period.

The funds either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment. Bloomberg first reported Brevan and Taula’s losses, while the Financial Times first reported Caxton’s losses.

There is one big-name macro investor that has been able to avoid the fallout, though. Bridgewater Associates, the $92 billion manager founded by Ray Dalio, is down less than 1% in March in its flagship Pure Alpha strategy through last Friday, a person close to the Connecticut-based fund told Business Insider.

The fund had one of its best years on record in 2025, with a 33% surge. Bridgewater did not respond to requests for comment.

Macro investors use forecasts on geopolitical outcomes to make bets on a range of asset classes, including currencies, bonds, and interest rates.

It’s not clear what specific trade tripped up the stung macro managers listed above, but three different investors said a reversal in short-term interest rate expectations in the UK and Europe hurt traders across Wall Street and Mayfair, London’s posh neighborhood full of hedge fund offices.

The expectation coming into the year was that the Bank of England and the European Central Bank would cut interest rates, but fears of inflation driven by rising energy costs from the Iran conflict have forced central bankers to reconsider. Caxton’s Law told the FT last year that he expected UK borrowing costs to fall in 2026, for example.

It’s not only macro investors who have been hurt by the fallout from the strikes on Iran. Global stocks have fallen, and HSBC’s Hedge Weekly report notes that quant pioneer Renaissance Technologies, Tiger Cub Maverick Capital, and $80 billion Marshall Wace’s multistrategy offering, Alpha Plus, have all lost money this month. The firms declined to comment.

• Arm announced its own AI chip, the AGI CPU, and is partnering with OpenAI and Meta.
• The new Arm AGI CPU aims to address energy efficiency and memory constraints in AI data centers.
• Despite strong growth prospects, Arm faces competition from established players like Nvidia and AMD.

ARM has long run its business as an architect behind the scenes, designing chips that power almost all the world’s smartphone and making money off royalties from the chips it designs for customers.

Now, Arm is changing it up by announcing its own AI chip, the Arm AGI CPU.

Arm CEO Rene Haas said Tuesday at a company conference that this massive pivot wasn’t just an internal strategy shift—it was a direct plea from the world’s most powerful AI giants. The company name-dropped OpenAI and Meta as major partners for this chip.

“The biggest reason we’re doing this is that our partners have asked for it,” Haas said Tuesday.

With energy constraints and memory shortages, the AI boom has created a massive bottleneck in data centers. Faced with this demand, Arm stepped up with an AI chip that it says is more energy-efficient. Arm says it sees a $1.5 trillion market opportunity as it moves into AI chips for cloud, edge, and physical AI.

Arm stock was up by more than 18% on Wednesday. Mizuho analysts wrote that they see “strong growth opportunities” for Arm in AI infrastructure and the automotive industry. Bank of America research analyst Vivek Arya wrote in a note to investors that the company’s outlook could be “too ambitious.”

Meta and OpenAI partner with Arm

Meta has been building out data centers at a massive scale to power its apps and its latest superintelligence ventures. Santosh Janardhan, head of infrastructure at Meta, said Tuesday onstage that its coming “Hyperion” cluster could draw 5 gigawatts of power, enough to power 50 towns the size of Palo Alto.

“If we met the performance, we couldn’t get the power. If we got the power, we wouldn’t get the performance,” Janardhan said.

This sparked an engineering project within Meta, where engineers were “working ’round the clock” to port its systems to Arm in three months, said Paul Saab, a Meta engineer.

“I didn’t even ask my boss here for permission to buy these machines or even start the project,” Saab said onstage.

While Saab says he saw major performance benefits, at the time, there wasn’t an ARM chip available to buy.

OpenAI faced a similar problem. Its compute demand has grown massively as it trains and runs its ChatGPT models, its AI coding tool Codex, and more.

“That is one of the most common things I hear inside OpenAI. I need more compute,” Kevin Weil, vice president of OpenAI for science, said onstage, adding that it needed chips that were energy-efficient.

Arm said it expects this chip to generate $15 billion in revenue by fiscal 2031.

The chip market is ‘getting very crowded’

Arm faces the risk that the CPU market is “getting very crowded,” Arya wrote in his analyst note. Other competitors, such as AMD, Nvidia, and Intel, have more CPU products and more established customers. Notably, both Meta and OpenAI also work with AMD and Nvidia, which could leave “limited” opportunity for Arm’s new CPU, Arya wrote.

“Moreover, the bigger AI grows, the more pressure ARM’s smartphone/consumer markets would have from limited memory supplies,” Arya wrote.

That said, the increasing demand has led many customers to turn to chip companies beyond Nvidia for their computing needs. Both Meta and OpenAI also work with Broadcom to build AI chips.

The rise of AI agents has also led to greater demand for inference, or how AI models draw conclusions and make predictions. While Nvidia’s core AI chips, the GPUs, dominate AI training, CPUs like Arm’s AGI CPU can also help with inference. Nvidia also recently made moves into this market.

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• The acting head of the TSA said more than 480 officers working without pay have quit during the shutdown.
• She said they can’t be replaced fast enough to adequately staff airports for the World Cup in June.
• It could be another saga of long security lines due to understaffed TSA during a peak travel period.

Even if the partial government shutdown ends soon, the fallout at the Transportation Security Administration could spill into the summer’s marquee event.

In a House testimony on Wednesday, acting TSA administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill said that so many officers have quit since their pay stopped in mid-February that the agency can’t get replacements fast enough to adequately staff airports ahead of the World Cup in June.

She said TSA officers spend four to six months in training before working checkpoints, but the games — which will take place across 16 cities in the US, Canada, and Mexico — start in just 80 days.

“This is a dire situation,” she said, adding that more than 480 officers have quit so far. “We are facing a potential perfect storm of severe staffing shortages and an influx of millions of passengers at our airports.”

TSA agents haven’t been paid for nearly six weeks, yet are deemed “essential” and expected to work during the shutdown, with back pay promised afterward. Their annual pay starts at around $40,000 and averages $60,000 to $75,000 a year with experience.

Still, many live paycheck to paycheck and can’t afford to work unpaid for months at a time — quitting and finding another job or doing gig work is often their best option.

Mass TSA agent quits and callouts amid the shutdown, compounded by peak spring break travel, have already created hourslong security lines and stranded travelers. It’s a preview of the chaos that could repeat when an estimated 6 million fans descend on potentially understaffed airports for the World Cup.

“If we see any spikes [in attrition], we’re going to have to pivot and assess how we are going to staff the FIFA locations adequately,” McNeill said.

Passengers traveling to the scheduled World Cup games in San Francisco and Kansas City, however, are likely safe from staffing chaos.

Both city airports use private security officers employed by contract companies instead of TSA, meaning their agents are being paid despite the shutdown.

It’s not just the TSA sounding the alarm

Former Republican Sen. from Oklahoma, Markwayne Mullin — who was confirmed as the new head of the Department of Homeland Security on Monday after Kristi Noem’s ousting in early March — said in a Senate hearing last week that the US is “behind” on World Cup preparations and the shutdown is making it worse.

“It’ll take four months once funding comes in to start replacing those that we’ve lost for training before we can get them out in the field; we don’t have four months with FIFA,” he said. “How do we expect these people to stay on the job and work? We’re losing institutional knowledge, we’re losing people we’ve already trained.”

The mass quits are exacerbating a problem that was already flagged last year.

A February 2025 report from the US Travel Association — long before the shutdown’s impact could be factored in — warned that the TSA may not be efficient enough to handle surging travel volumes during the World Cup.

On its busiest days, the agency screened about 3 million passengers. During the games, the organization said that level of traffic would be the norm.

Lawmakers are still negotiating a funding deal to reopen DHS and end the partial shutdown.

• Another xAI cofounder, Manuel Kroiss, has told people he is leaving Elon Musk’s company.
• Just one cofounder out of 11 remains besides Musk.
• The company has been in flux ahead of a widely anticipated IPO at SpaceX, which recently acquired xAI.

And then there was one.

XAI cofounder Manuel Kroiss has told people he is leaving the company, according to insiders with knowledge of his exit.

Kroiss, who is also known as “Makro,” is one of 11 engineers who helped launch the company alongside Elon Musk in 2023. With his exit, the number of cofounder departures now sits at 10.

Guodong Zhang, Zihang Dai, Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Greg Yang have all stepped away since January.

XAI and Kroiss did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Kroiss led pretraining, which helps train the company’s AI models on large datasets, and reported directly to Musk. He also worked on improving xAI’s coding models alongside Zhang, who left earlier in March. Musk said at the Abundance Summit earlier this month that xAI is “behind in coding,” but the company is working to “exceed our competitors on coding.”

Before joining xAI, Kroiss worked at Google and DeepMind.

Ross Nordeen, who came to xAI from Tesla, is the only remaining cofounder aside from Musk.

The company’s organizational structure has been in flux over the past few weeks, according to people with knowledge of the changes. Musk has taken over managing dozens of direct reports and has brought in workers from Tesla and SpaceX. It has also shed dozens of employees, the people said.

Earlier this month, Musk said on X that “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.”

He has also said that the company is resifting through old xAI candidates to bring in new people.

“Many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview @xAI,” Musk wrote on X.

Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, acquired xAI earlier this year. The company is expected to file an initial public offering this year, which could value it at $1.5 trillion.

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