Why OpenAI's AMD Deal Could Be Bigger News than DevDay

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, why OpenAI's AMD deal could be even bigger than anything announced at Dev day, and before that in the headlines, CEOs think AI ROI is coming even faster than they did before. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.

0:23All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Notion, Blitzy, Superintelligent, and Robots and Pencils. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash AI Daily Brief or subscribe via Apple Podcasts. And if you are interested in sponsoring the show, shoot us a note at sponsors at AI Daily Brief.ai. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines Edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. We kick off today with an interesting survey from KPMG, their 2025 Global CEO Outlook. This is the 11th edition of this study, which surveys about 1 ,350 CEOs, all of whom have annual revenues of at least over 500 million, and a third of which have revenues of over$10 billion.

1:03The survey was conducted between the 5th of August and the 10th of September, so this is pretty fresh. Overall, confidence in the global economy is falling. It's at its lowest level in five years, although not hugely. But bullishness around AI seems to be going up. A full 69 % of CEOs anticipate spending between 10 % and 20 % of their budget on AI in the next 12 months. Only 17 % say that they're going to spend less than 10%. Even more interestingly, In last year's survey, only 20 % said that they anticipated ROI on their AI investments within one to three years. That number has jumped to 67%, with almost that same amount, 19%, saying they expect it within six months to one year.

1:42So a major pull forward on the sense of time to value. With all that change, they are also thinking about how talent changes. I have a job show that I've been putting together for a while with all the latest updates on that front. And basically, I think the story of this survey is that the response to how AI is going to have to change how they handle jobs and careers is all of the above. Yes, 41 % are planning workforce reduction in some areas, but then by significant majorities, they're also all focused on retraining, redesigning roles, hiring new talent focused on AI, and basically generally just changing the nature of the org chart.

2:13So in many ways, CEOs seem to be reflecting the larger market analysis. In general, things are rough, but man, are we bullish AI. Next up, another story from the world of consulting, although one which has been much maligned and hyperviral for reasons that the firm in question does not want, Deloitte will issue a partial refund to the Australian government after turning in a report that they used AI to assist with that was riddled with errors. The report was commissioned by Australia's Department of Employment and Workforce Relations last December with a price tag of$290 ,000. The independent assurance review was intended to help assess issues with an automatic penalty system within the unemployment welfare department.

2:52The Australian Financial Review found that the report contained multiple errors, including citations of academic studies that did not exist. The report was first published last December with a new corrected version published last Friday. The Australian government made clear that the substance of the report and its recommendation had not changed, but obviously this is a highly embarrassing episode. Among other embarrassments are the fact that it appears that the firm, despite having the reasoning models available to it, decided to use GBT-40 instead. Now, there are a lot of issues here, frankly, the least of which in my mind is the fact that they used AI.

3:25Guess what? AI is going to happen. AI is going to become the single most powerful tool of consultancies. I believe that it will absolutely put downward price pressure on a lot of services that exist today, but I also think that those gaps are going to be filled with all sorts of things that weren't possible before. To take superintelligent as just one example, we don't just charge less for discovery and do it faster. we do it in a way that was completely impossible before. It was never a consideration of whether you were going to interview every single employee in your firm about a particular decision.

3:56That would just cost way too much money, and it would take way too long. But it turns out with voice agents, you can. And there are all sorts of really interesting and exciting opportunities that opens up. The point being that even as AI changes the cost expectations of services today, it's going to open up all these new possibilities that simply weren't possible before, meaning that it's not some zero-sum game where inherently the revenue of these companies is just going to go down. But to capture those new opportunities, they're going to have to not do stuff like this. At a very minimum, guys, you got to check your citations.

4:28This was also a very rough day for this news to break because separately, Deloitte and Anthropic announced a sweeping new partnership that will make Claude available to more than 470 ,000 global Deloitte personnel. This is Anthropic's largest enterprise AI deployment to date. And in addition, the two firms are partnering to develop a formal certification program to train and certify 15 ,000 practitioners. They will develop compliance features to make AI use compatible with highly regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and public services. And Deloitte plans to make use of Claude's customization features, building out different personas for different groups of employees.

5:00Look, obviously here, the Anthropic deal is the much bigger story than this one random errant report, which seems pretty clearly to be a mistake of human judgment of the small team that was responsible for that report. If anything, it validates the need for this sort of training, And so, hey, maybe I'm wrong. And maybe yesterday was the perfect day to make this announcement. Lastly today, we move over to a fun product announcement. Eleven Labs has shipped a new tool called Agent Workflows. It allows users to design complex logic for voice agents using a visual interface similar to N8N, Zapier, Lindy, or OpenAI's newly introduced agent builder.

5:36Rather than using a single voice agent, users can define a system of sub-agents together with rules that govern when a conversation will be passed from one subagent to another. Each subagent can be configured individually and can use different models as well as tapping into their own task-specific tools and knowledge bases. This allows users to optimize each step of the workflow for cost, accuracy, latency, or whatever other considerations matter most to them. So to take an example, you might set up a customer service agent workflow to start off using a lightweight model to take customer details.

6:06That lightweight model would then hand off to a subagent running a more powerful model to receive the query and troubleshoot the correct resolution, then hand back off to a sub-agent optimized for tool use to interact with your logistics backend and action that resolution. The system also allows users to set clear rules on how and when a call will be escalated to a human worker. All of this strikes me as extremely intuitive and exactly the sort of thing that's going to help companies put these tools into production in a much bigger way. AI for Success writes, this is how you build production-grade conversational systems that won't break in the real world.

6:37He continued, current voice agents have fundamental problems. Prompt engineering doesn't scale because those 5 ,000 token prompts break when you change anything. You have no visibility into what's happening, can't audit what went wrong, or test individual pieces. It's a pure black box. Security is impossible too. You can't control system access without writing complex prompt hacks that break constantly. This is perfect for developers tired of debugging massive prompts, companies moving from proof of concept to production, and enterprise teams needing auditable AI workflows. If your agent works in demos but fails with real users, this fixes it.

7:09I think it's a great update. I think it's going to make 11 Labs tools massively more useful. And so I'm excited to see how people take advantage of it. For now, though, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief Headlines edition. Next up, the main episode. Chatbots are great, but they can only take you so far. I've recently been testing Notion's new AI agents, and they are a very different type of experience. These are agents that actually complete entire workflows for you in your style. And best of all, they work in a channel that you already know and love because they are purpose-built Notion super users.

7:41Notion's new AI agents completely expands the range of what Notion can do. It can now build documents from your entire company's knowledge base, organize scattered information into organized reports, basically do tasks that used to take days, and get them complete in minutes. These agents don't just help with work, they finish it. Getting started with building on Notion is easier than ever. Notion agents are now your very own super user to help you onboard in minutes. Your AI teammates are ready to work. Try Notion AI for free at the link in our show notes. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, the enterprise autonomous software development platform with infinite code context.

8:15Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise-scale code bases with millions of lines of code. Enterprise engineering leaders start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements. The Blitzy platform provides a plan, then generates and precompiles code for each task. Blitzy delivers 80 % plus of the development work autonomously while providing a guide for the final 20 % of human development work required to complete the sprint. Public companies are achieving a 5x engineering velocity increase when incorporating Blitzy as their pre-IDE development tool, pairing it with their coding co-pilot of choice to bring an AI-native SDLC into their org.

8:51Blitzy is providing a limited-time, 30-day free proof-of-concept for qualifying enterprises. The team will provide a 5x velocity increase on a real development project in your org. Visit blitzy.com and press book demo to learn how Blitzy transforms your STLC from AI-assisted to AI-native. That's blitzy.com. Today's episode is brought to you by Superintelligent. Now, for those of you who don't know who are new here, maybe Superintelligent is actually my company. We started it because every single company we talked to, all the enterprises out there are trying to figure out what AI can do for them.

9:25But most of the advice is super generic, not specific to your company. So what we do is we map your AI and agent opportunities by deploying voice agents to interview your teams about how work works now and how your people would like it to work in the future. The result is an AI action map with high potential ROI use cases and specific change management needs, basically everything you need to go actually deliver AI value. Go to Super.ai to learn more. AI isn't a one-off project. It's a partnership that has to evolve as the technology does. Robots and Pencils work side-by-side with clients to bring practical AI into every phase.

10:04Automation, personalization, decision support, and optimization. They prove what works through applied experimentation and build systems that amplify human potential. As an AWS-certified partner with Global Delivery Centers, Robots and Pencils combines reach with high-touch service. Where others hand off, they stay engaged. Because partnership isn't a project plan. It's a commitment. As AI advances, so will their solutions. That's long-term value. Progress starts with the right partner. Start with robots and pencils at robotsandpencils.com slash AI Daily Brief. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief.

10:38Today, we are first talking about this massive OpenAI AMD deal and why it might be an even bigger deal than the things that were announced at Dev Day. And then we are following up with the benefit of a day of reactions and responses to see how the announcements from Dev Day are settling into the community. So even before the lights went up at Fort Mason and OpenAI announced Agent Builder and apps and all the things that it announced, they were making news with a massive new deal with AMD. The deal will theoretically see OpenAI deploy six gigawatts worth of AMD AI chips over multiple years. And boy, are there a lot of takes going around with this.

11:13First of all, there are the implications for AMD itself. AMD relative to NVIDIA is one business battle where the number two is not even in the same league as number one, at least when it comes to market response. This is, in fact, the biggest deal that AMD has signed, as CEO Lisa Su put it. She wrote, this is certainly the largest deployment we've announced so far. Now we're embarking on a massive buildup. It's a big deal for us, for our shareholders, and for our teams. Now, the deal is not traditional. As part of the deal, OpenAI acquired the option to purchase 160 million AMD shares at a penny apiece, which represents around 10 % of the company.

11:51AMD shares have not traded below$50 in the past five years, so this represents a 99.9 % discount under any foreseeable market conditions. The options are tied to OpenAI's purchase and deployment of AMD chips, as well as AMD's stock price increasing. Sue said that she wanted to ensure that, quote, OpenAI would be motivated for AMD to be successful, And the more OpenAI deploys, the more revenue we get, and they get to share on the upside. On OpenAI's side, the deal is all about securing as many chips as they can from any source available. Sam Altman said,

12:26Now, given NVIDIA and OpenAI's recent deal, some people were surprised to see OpenAI jump in bed with NVIDIA's competitor AMD. BubbleBabyBoy on Twitter went viral with a tweet that said, Sam has crossed the one person you don't cross. He only exists because Jensen says so. It's going to get ugly here. Altman clearly thinks that this is not the moment for that sort of competition, and we are very much in a all boats rise kind of phase. Said Altman in the Wall Street Journal, we're in a phase of the buildout where the entire industry's got to come together and everybody's going to do super well.

12:59You'll see this on chips, you'll see this on data centers, you'll see this lower down the supply chain. Of course, for those looking for signs of a bubble, this absolutely reignited that conversation. Tashi Michel from Tam Capital Management said, This deal feels like a jump-the-shark moment. The deal structure is just so stupidly unbelievable. Matt Levine had a much-retweeted take. In his newsletter, he wrote, How do those negotiations go, like schematically? OpenAI says, We would like 6 gigawatts worth of your chips to do inference. AMD says, Terrific, that'll be$78 billion. How would you like to pay?

13:30OpenAI says, Well, we were thinking that we would announce your deal, and that would add$78 billion to the value of your company, which should cover it. AMD, No, pretty sure you have to pay for the chips. OpenAI says, Why? AMD says, I don't know, just seems wrong not to. OpenAI says, OK, why don't we pay you cash for the value of the chips and you give us back stock? And when we announce the deal, the stock will go up and we'll get our$78 billion back. AMD says, yeah, I guess that works, though I feel like we should get some of the value. OpenAI says, OK, you can have half. You give us stock worth like$35 billion and you keep the rest.

13:57You also saw some folks like Paul Tudor Jones weigh in with their renewed bubble calls. As reported by Walter Bloomberg, Paul Tudor Jones told CNBC that stocks could surge sharply before a blow off top, once again comparing today's setup to the 1999 tech bubble. Now, PTJ was talking about far more than just the sort of open AI deals. He was also looking at broader macro conditions as well. Overall, unfortunately, we are due for another bubble show as this conversation has surged once again. There are also plenty of people out there still pointing out what makes this cycle different, most notably the fact that so far, at least, this CapEx boom is not funded by debt.

14:31In other words, the hyperscalers who are making these CapEx bets are not leveraged. There's also another interesting dimension to explore, which Doug Laughlin from Semi analysis put this way, the real issue, he said, is how much liquidity the private credit market can handle. They're sitting on an ungodly amount of capital and they have to deploy it. Still, when it came to the immediate term reactions, for traders on Wall Street, this was a moment to get enthusiastic or get out of the way. AMD stock ripped by 24 % following the deal announcement, getting close to their all-time high from last March.

14:59And by the way, it was not just AMD. Companies that were mentioned on stage during Dev Day also saw a big pop. HubSpot was up as much as 10%. Figma was up 15%. Even HumbleBookings.com and Coursera were up 2 % and 4 % respectively. Like I said, we are going to have to come back to this bubble conversation later in the week. But for now, let's turn back to DevDay and see how narratives are settling now a full day after the announcements. So to briefly recap everything that was shipped at DevDay, the two big announcements were apps in ChatGPT that you could now interact with things like Canva and Bookings.com and Coursera and Expedia and eventually a whole slew of other things directly from within that chat GPT window.

15:42And of course, the other big announcement was AgentKit, a new tool for building agents. That's the one that we had started to hear about about 24 hours before Dev Day. We also got a bunch of updates around the API. Sora 2 and Sora 2 Pro are now in the API, as is GPT-5 Pro. Plus, there were a bunch of updates for Codex, including Codex and Slack. And separate from DevDay, they also announced a cheaper image model and a cheaper real-time voice model. Now, I did my highly scientific gut check of what people thought was the most exciting announcement at DevDay, and it was pretty split between apps and agent builder, with Sora 2 and GPT-5 Pro in the API making a nice little showing as well.

16:18But as the messages have settled in, I think that there are a few big conversations that stand out. The first is that, at least in my little corner of the world, people are more bullish than I might have even thought about the apps feature. I had wondered if folks were going to think it was just GPT's 2.0, which was one of the main things I talked about in yesterday's rapid reaction episode. But instead, it definitely seems like people have a sense that there could be a major interface inflection here. Investor Hemant Pahaptra writes, ChatGPT is the next browser. Swix pointed out that it's even better on mobile, saying, does this look like a browser?

16:49It's not. It's the ChatGPT app being your browser. VC Anish Chacharya writes, an open question was answer today. What will the AI native distribution channel be? It looks like ChatGPT will be that channel with 800 million active users and the apps SDK. This is likely as important as Steve Jobs announcing the App Store in March of 2008. Now we've heard that analogy before, but the fact that it's coming back up is telling in and of itself. And just like with the App Store, one of the other points of conversation is the interesting trade-off that companies now face. Keep control of your experience with your own app or focus on accessing those 800 million potential customers by building in someone else's experience.

17:27Another analogy that was being thrown around a lot was ChatGPT as the non-Chinese everything app. Signal writes ChatGPT is turning into WeChat, and more than a few folks made the joke that at this point, ChatGPT looks more like the everything app than X does, despite Elon Musk's explicit intention to turn X into the everything app. Aaron Levy from Box, who was one of their launch partners, points out still how early we are in figuring out what the next generation of interfaces actually look like. He wrote,

18:10He basically says that while there is a lot of stuff that's great about text, for example, how fast it is, it's not necessarily the best interface for monitoring what an agent is doing. He concludes, what disparate interactive GUIs could look like when showing up in a common interface. They nailed a bunch of the right early interaction challenges in this first rev. One thing that will become tricky, of course, he writes, is how the industry coalesces on some form of standardization for these interaction patterns. We're most likely in for a set of OS wars like we've seen on desktop and mobile, now with potentially even higher stakes.

18:42And this idea of ChatGPT as expanding its footprint is not just coming from outside, it's also coming from within. During a Q &A with reporters, head of ChatGPT Nick Turley said, what you're going to see for the next six months is an evolution of ChatGPT from an app that is really, really useful into something that feels a bit more like an operating system. Within ChatGPT, he said, people will be able to access services and software, both existing software that they're used to using and new software built natively atop ChatGPT. All right, so that's where a lot of the talk about apps is. But what about AgentBuilder?

19:14In that case, the initial bullish response seeded a little bit to a bunch of critiques around the UI. This screenshot of just a very confusing control panel has been flying around on X a lot. And one of the people who shared it was Gosu Coder, who wrote, I had some time to think about OpenAI's agent kit. I think my thoughts can be summed up as, somehow we ended up circling back to no code, which didn't really work out before. But the quick deploy of these agent workflows will result in a ton of use, so I could see this getting a lot of use. Seeing this image floating around, which looks pretty rough, but I'm sure they will improve it.

19:46I like this take because it embodies the, well, I'm not sure, but maybe kind of thinking that I think a lot of people have around this. Fruquan Riedan was more critical of that UI, saying, OpenAI's agent kit launch shows the industry is still thinking in old paradigms. Visual builders and drag-and-drop canvases feel like we're creating no-code tools from a decade ago. The real breakthrough will be a conversational agent that lets you describe what you want in natural language and it builds itself. No canvas, no nodes, no workflows. I'm John Massad from Replit Agrees, saying AI was supposed to save us from UIs like this, which is why we bet on a pure natural language interface for Replit's agent builder.

20:20Visualization is there for debugging and understanding, not building. Still, Gergalia Rose writes, I really don't think most people appreciate the difference between shipping something in six weeks, beating the global competition, i.e. first to offer an agent workflow builder, then fixing up small issues in six more weeks, versus building for six months and no one cares by launch. I think there are a couple things going on here. The first of all, broadly speaking, I totally agree that the broad paradigm that for mass usage, we're going to have to shift to a different type of UI paradigm than this sort of drag and drop workflow builder thing that we've had for a long, long time now.

20:52I think that style of interface is extremely intimidating. It's got a high barrier to entry. But also that makes me think that this product isn't designed for the average user. This doesn't feel like in this state it is meant to be a consumer facing tool. It's instead supposed to have more fine grain control for developers who are building with this. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but that's my interpretation. So I think between that and Gergerly's point, that speed and velocity are basically the only thing that matters. I think it starts to make a bit more sense. Now, when it came to the Q &A with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman that happened after the keynote, there wasn't all that much that was novel and worth sharing, except for the fact that they do seem to be thinking a lot more about enterprise and B2B issues than I might have thought.

21:33Brockman said that boring enterprise problems are still massively underserved by AI startups right now. And of course, building an enterprise AI startup, I totally agree. Sam Allman also mentioned that they feel like their forward deployed engineers are getting closer to having a templated kind of understanding around how to implement AI inside enterprises. So I will definitely be watching to see if anything interesting comes from that. A lot of the chatter following the event was all about just how powerful Codex is, embodied if nothing else, in how much it's being used internally to open AI to ship at this crazy velocity that they're currently shipping at.

22:05Some of the stats that they shared were that 92 % of the technical staff are now using Codex daily. 70 % more PRs are submitted per week by engineers that use Codex as opposed to those who don't. And 100 % of PRs are now reviewed by Codex. OpenAI Stephen Heidel wrote, it's difficult to overstate how important Codex has been to our team's ability to ship new products. For example, the drag and drop agent builder we launched today was built end to end in under six weeks, thanks to Codex writing 80 % of the PRs. Hader at Slow Developer points out that this matches the AI 2027 reports' 2026 forecast, four coding automation going mainstream, agents working like teammates, and AI R &D speeding up because of algorithms, not just compute.