If you’ve ever worked at a company with more than say, a couple dozen employees, you’ve probably been frustrated by some of the bureaucratic bottlenecks. It’s part of the reason many people in tech like to work at startups (well, that and the potential IPO jackpot).

At OpenAI, employees have a magic word to eliminate logjams and cut through the red tape that develops as the company gets larger. It’s called “friction,” and it even has the power to summon CEO Sam Altman.

Here’s how it works, as Emily Forlini reports:

The process starts when someone emails friction@openai.com to report an internal bottleneck. The issues range from a technical system that isn’t working, a process that’s not having the intended result, or office-related frustrations, such as there not being enough IT vending machines.

OpenAI’s leadership team triages the emails sent to friction@, moving forward with ones they deem worthy… If the matter is considered important enough, Altman or Brockman will get involved to ensure it’s resolved.

“Literally anybody can complain about big company bullsh*t directly to Sam and they can act on it,” a former employee said.

Sounds effective. Let’s just hope Sam Altman is using AI to deal with all the emails. Read the full story here.

Today’s news below.

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Coreweave's $100 billion backlog

If there is a limit to how much AI infrastructure the world needs, we haven't hit it yet.

Neocloud provider CoreWeave said yesterday that its revenue more than doubled in the second quarter, totaling $2.58 billion. Coreweave's revenue backlog—deals that it has not billed yet— rose 246% year-over-year to $104.2 billion in the second quarter. And that figure doesn’t include roughly $25 billion of net new customer commitments already added in early Q3.

“Our near-term capacity remains effectively sold out,” CEO Michael Intrator said on a call with analysts on Tuesday as shares rose nearly 15% in after hours trading.

Fears of excessive capital expenditures and potential over investment in AI infrastructure have flared throughout the past year. And the debate intensified earlier this week as chipmaker Nvidia (which owns close to 13% of CoreWeave) announced a plan to mobilize $500 billion in financing for AI infrastructure in partnership with Apollo Global Management Inc., Blackstone Inc., BlackRock Inc. and Brookfield Asset Management. 

To judge by investors' reaction to Coreweave's results, the debate may be on pause once again.—Amanda Gerut

OpenAI's Lightcap heads for the exit

Brad Lightcap, one of the most recognizable faces of OpenAI’s senior leadership team, is leaving the company to “start something new,” he announced on Tuesday, representing the latest in a string of executive departures at the ChatGPT maker.

Anthropic's AI generated text watermark

Anthropic is planning to introduce a subtle watermark that can be used to identify AI-generated text.

Starting with models released on or after August 2, Anthropic says it’s weaving an imperceptible, machine-readable signal directly into Claude-generated text. People won’t be able to see it, and the company says it won’t affect quality or readability.

While other AI companies have attempted this kind of watermarking before, it’s been mostly aimed at images. Text has traditionally been more difficult to identify in this way because it gets copied, paraphrased, translated, chopped up and folded into someone else’s writing all the time. And Anthropic acknowledged that its new text watermark is not perfect: The company says the mark only shows that Claude had a hand in something, not that a Claude model generated the entire thing.—Bea Nolan

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—SpaceX and Cursor's new app. Meet Grok Bot.

—Why Steve and Connie Ballmer are splitting their $8 billion philanthropy into three.