OpenAI paid over $300 million for Glass Imaging, a company founded by ex-Apple engineers that uses AI to improve smartphone camera image quality in real-time rather than through post-processing. The acquisition signals OpenAI's push into hardware, following its earlier $6.5 billion purchase of designer Jony Ive's startup.

• Glass Imaging was founded by former Apple Portrait Mode engineers and uses neural networks to optimize images at the moment of capture, tailored to specific camera hardware
• The $300 million deal represents a major step in OpenAI's hardware ambitions, which reportedly include smartphones, earbuds, and AI companion devices
• This follows OpenAI's 2025 acquisition of Jony Ive's device startup io for $6.5 billion, showing a pattern of hardware investment

The article explains how unglamorous, overlooked industries—funeral homes, parking lots, trash hauling—generate outsized profits because competitors simply ignore them. Steve Ross built a media empire by rolling up these "invisible" businesses, and companies like Constellation Software continue this playbook today by acquiring niche software firms others dismiss as too small or slow-growing.

• Invisible companies exist in plain sight because no one searches for them: they're unknown, their data is private or buried, they're assumed to be mature dead-ends, or they carry social stigma. Since potential competitors don't know what they're missing, they never compete, leaving profits untouched.
• Standard business filters—looking for large markets, rapid growth, novel technology—screen out smaller, operationally mundane businesses that are quietly profitable. The opportunities aren't hidden; the algorithm most investors use just skips over them.
• Constellation Software has returned 34% annually since 2006 by buying boring vertical-market software businesses (marina management, funeral home records, library cataloging) that venture capitalists and other acquirers abandoned as too small. The company estimates 38,000+ similar businesses still exist.

This article breaks down The New Yorker’s 18,000-word exposé on Sam Altman and OpenAI, detailing boardroom coups, safety disputes, secret pacts, and clashes with Musk, Amodei, and others. It then covers OpenAI’s policy “new deal” proposal and their acquisition of TBPN.

• Sutskever compiled seventy pages of Slack messages before Altman's firing, arguing he and Brockman shouldn't lead the company
• Musk, Altman, and Brockman had a secret pact that Altman would step down if both Brockman and Sutskever asked—Musk allegedly broke it by building a shadow leadership team
• A merger-blocking clause was quietly inserted into OpenAI's charter during Microsoft's investment, contradicting a "merge-and-assist" safety provision Amodei had demanded—Altman denied its existence until forced to read it aloud
• Summers and Taylor's promised investigation into Altman was narrowed to only assess criminality, produced no public report, and cleared him without most board members ever seeing a briefing