Billionaire media mogul Barry Diller doesn’t think OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is untrustworthy, despite recent reporting to the contrary. On stage at The Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” conference this week, Diller vouched for the AI exec, who has been accused by some former colleagues and board members of being manipulative and deceptive at times.

Diller, who is friendly with Altman, was responding to a question about whether or not people should put their faith in Altman to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits humanity.

In particular, he was asked about the theoretical form of AI known as Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, which could one day outperform humans on any task.

The media exec, a co-founder of Fox Broadcasting and chairman of IAC and Expedia Group, said that while he believes Altman is sincere in his pursuits, that’s not really the area of concern people should be focused on. Rather, it’s the unknown consequences that will result from AI.

“One of the big issues with AI is it goes way beyond trust,” Diller said. “It may be that trust is irrelevant because the things that are happening are a surprise to the people who are making those things happen. And I’ve spent a lot of time with various people who’ve been in the creation mode of AI, and they have a sense of wonder themselves. So…it’s the great unknown. We don’t know. They don’t know,” he explained.

“We have embarked on something that is going to change almost everything. It is not under-reported. Now, whether these huge investments are going to come through — I couldn’t care less. I’m not invested in it, but progress is going to be made,” Diller added.

Still, the media mogul said he believes that most of the people leading the charge are good stewards, saying he believes that Altman is sincere and “a decent person with good values.” (Diller wouldn’t say which of the AI leaders he thinks is insincere, we should note.)

“But the issue is not their stewardship. The issue is … it’s dealing truly with the unknown. They don’t know what can happen once you get AGI, and we’re close to it. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting closer and closer, quicker and quicker. And we must think about guardrails,” Diller noted.

Plus, he warned, if humans don’t think about guardrails, then the alternative is that “another force, an AGI force, will do it themselves. And once that happens, once you unleash that, there’s no going back,” Diller said.

Snap no longer has a deal with Perplexity, the company revealed on Wednesday as part of its quarterly earnings report. The deal, announced last November, would have seen Perplexity’s AI search engine integrated directly into Snapchat. Perplexity was set to pay Snap $400 million in cash and equity over one year as part of the deal.

Snap said that the companies “amicably ended the relationship in Q1″ and that its sales guidance “assumes no contribution from Perplexity.” When Snap announced the deal as part of its third-quarter earnings last year, it said it expected revenue from the partnership to begin contributing to its financials in 2026.

The deal would have seen Perplexity integrated into Snapchat’s “Chat” interface, allowing users to ask questions and receive conversational answers directly within the app. Although the integration was being tested with select users, it never fully rolled out.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said at the time of the announcement that the deal reflected the company’s vision to use AI to enhance discovery on Snapchat, and that Snap was looking forward to “collaborating with more innovative partners in the future.”

Snap said in February that companies had “yet to mutually agree on a path to a broader roll out.”

Perplexity did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

Snap revealed on Wednesday that Snapchat’s global daily active users (DAU) rose 5% year-over-year to 483 million, while monthly active users (MAU) also grew 5% to reach 965 million. The company attributed the growth to new features across the app, including Snap Map and its Lenses AR filters.

“In Q1, we returned to growth in daily active users, accelerated revenue growth, expanded margins, and generated strong free cash flow,” Spiegel said in a press release. “We remain focused on disciplined execution as we invest in Specs and our longterm opportunity in intelligent eyewear and look forward to sharing more at AWE on June 16th.”

Snap said in April that it was laying off roughly 16% of its global workforce, impacting around 1,000 full-time employees, citing advancements in AI for the cuts.

On Wednesday, xAI and Anthropic announced a surprise partnership that has the Claude-maker buying out “all of the compute capacity at [xAI’s] Colossus 1 data center,” roughly 300MW that allowed Anthropic to immediately raise its usage limits. It’s a huge deal for xAI, likely worth billions of dollars. More importantly, it immediately monetized one of the company’s most impressive accomplishments, turning xAI from a consumer to a provider of compute. 

It’s tempting to see the arrangement as a shot at OpenAI amid the ongoing lawsuit. But Musk’s explanation on X was that xAI had already moved training to a newer data center, Colossus 2, and xAI simply didn’t need the both. 

In the short term, there’s an obvious logic at work. xAI’s existing products are mostly focused on Grok, which has seen plummeting usage since the image generation debacles earlier this year. If xAI’s data center buildout is that much more than what Grok needs to operate, partnering with Anthropic adds a lot of green to the balance sheet. This is especially useful as the company, now combined with SpaceX, speeds towards an IPO. More broadly, having Anthropic lined up as a customer makes it easier to believe that SpaceX’s orbital data center play might actually work. 

But beyond the short-term benefit, the Anthropic partnership sends an unusual message about where Elon Musk’s priorities really lie. It suggests the company’s real business may be more about building data centers than training AI models. 

It’s rare to see a major tech company treat compute resources this way when companies like Google, Meta who are also training models, are building more data centers. It’s an easy point to miss, because so many of these companies are working as enterprise AI vendors, online services and cloud providers all at once. But when forced to make a choice between selling more available compute to customers and preserving some to build their own tools, they reliably choose door #2. 

Just last month, Sundar Pichai admitted on a call that Google Cloud revenue was lower than it could have been because the company was “capacity constrained” — and when given the choice of renting out their GPUs or using them to develop AI products, Google chose the AI products. 

Facebook has faced a more extreme version of the same constraint, spinning up an entirely new cloud apparatus just to ensure they would have enough GPU power to chase Zuckerberg’s AI ambition. As he put it when announcing Meta Compute in January, “How we engineer, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage.” 

The key word there is “strategic.” Both Zuckerberg and Pichai are looking towards a future where AI is powering the most popular and lucrative systems in the world. Computing power isn’t just a way to satisfy today’s inference demand, but to build tomorrow’s products — and running short on compute means missing out on that chance.  

By focusing on data centers (earthbound and otherwise), xAI is positioning itself more like a neocloud business: buying GPUs from Nvidia and renting them out to model developers like Anthropic. It’s a far more difficult business, squeezed by both chip suppliers and the shifting cycles of demand. The valuations for most active neoclouds reflect that reality: xAI was valued at $230 billion in its January funding round; Coreweave, which oversees a comparable quantity of computing power, is worth less than a third of that. 

Musk’s version of a neocloud is more ambitious, as you might expect. Some of the data centers might be in space — at least by 2035, if things go according to plan. xAI will be making its own chips at the Terafab, which will take away some but not all of Nvidia’s pricing power. But none of it changes the basic economics of the neocloud business. 

As recently as the February all-hands, xAI had real ambitions in software. That was the presentation that unveiled the orbital data center project, but it also teased significant ambitions in coding (since bolstered by the Cursor partnership) and interesting ideas like leveraging computer use into full-scale digital twins (in the unfortunately named Macrohard project). These are the kind of long-horizon projects that need committed computing resources to succeed. As long as xAI is selling large quantities of compute to its competitors, it’s hard to think such new ambitions have much of a future.