What’s up: U.S. could take a stake in Intel;  AI’s role in funding universal basic income; Cognition cinches $500 million for AI coding; dynamic pricing for chocolate.

Good morning. Is GPT-5 worse than we expected? That’s what some users have been saying after OpenAI’s long awaited debut of its new model last week.

Users have flooded social media with embarrassing examples of how the chatbot failed to answer simple math questions or accurately draw a map of North America. Others have criticized its colder tone, reminiscing about older models that OpenAI initially killed off. A new limit of 200 questions a week rankled devotees.

OpenAI Chief Sam Altman on Tuesday promised to imbue GPT-5 with a “warmer personality,” restored a popular model after OpenAI declared it to be obsolete and introduced the capability for users to decide which kind of query they want to make. The company has learned how much users expect customization, he said in a post on X.

“We expected some bumpiness as we roll out so many things at once,” Altman wrote. “But it was a little more bumpy than we hoped for!” Read the story here.

What about enterprise use cases?

Vanguard Chief Technology Officer Mike Carr said that as Microsoft Copilot has integrated GPT-5, improvements feel more incremental than like a breakthrough. But the new model is shining in some areas: “It's gotten better at coding more complex tasks, so that's not something you want to sit on the sideline for,” he said.

WSJLI: Tell us about your experience using GPT-5.

Carr: My initial experience was similar to a lot of the press, where it's like, hmm, this feels like incremental rather than breakthrough. My day-to-day use is through Microsoft products, the various Microsoft Copilots. It feels good, but it does feel somewhat incremental.

Our coders like GPT-5. It's a good bit better at coding than previous OpenAI models, so we're pretty bullish on using it going forward for coding.

WSJLI: Sometimes we hear that enterprises like to be ‘model agnostic’ in their approach. Is that the case for you?

Carr: I wouldn't say we want to be model-agnostic. I think we want to not put all our eggs in one basket. The different model providers tend to leapfrog each other, so you don't want to paint yourself in a corner. A lot of the GenAI-based coding we do, we do through GitHub Copilot, which has done a good job of making different models available within the tool.

People should definitely use GPT-5 and figure out what are the use cases where that's your go-to model, but definitely not turn a blind eye to other models. And I would expect that developers would continue to use a healthy set of models in their day-to-day coding.

WSJLI: Does OpenAI have the legs to become a true enterprise vendor? Are you tempted by their ChatGPT enterprise tool?

Carr: We think there could very well be some advantages to using something like ChatGPT Enterprise. And Anthropic has a product in that space, Amazon has a product in that space. So there's a lot of people competing in that space, and there are some attractive features there. We don't have enough usage yet to say, ‘Oh my gosh, this is so much better,’ but we think that it is definitely worth trying.

Intel and the Trump administration are discussing the possibility of the U.S. government taking a financial stake in the company, according to people familiar with the matter. It's a deal that could advance the president’s America-first manufacturing agenda while relieving political pressure on the company’s beleaguered chief executive, WSJ reports.

The administration has been seeking ways to increase American market share in semiconductor manufacturing, and some officials said Intel has the best chance of taking on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the dominant player in chip fabrication. Tech companies across the board have been rushing to boost or emphasize their U.S. investments to win favor with Trump and get favorable policies.

A deal would be the latest of Trump’s personal interventions in the U.S. private sector. He recently secured a commitment by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices to pay the government 15% of their sales in China in exchange for export licenses. Read the story.

🎧 LISTEN | How Intel’s CEO Became a Political Liability. President Trump has called for the resignation of Intel’s CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, who played a key role in building up China’s chip industry. Now his ties to China have opened him up to criticism, just as he’s struggling to turn Intel’s business around.

Tech leaders like Elon Musk and Sam Altman say AI could potentially help fund universal basic income, WSJ reports. As the technology makes ever more jobs obsolete, so-called universal basic income, or UBI, could be part of the solution, they say.

Some tech heavyweights have endorsed no-strings cash distributions for a decade. While many think of UBI as a taxpayer-funded system, Silicon Valley’s elite envision AI doing humans’ work, from mundane factory jobs to highly skilled white-collar roles, and funding payouts through cost savings and more revenue.

Tech leaders say that revenue can be shared under a massive wealth-redistribution system. Suddenly, an idea once seen as a socialist policy that would reward idleness is one of the AI boom’s hottest acronyms. Read the story. 

Cognition cinches about $500 million to advance AI code-generation business. WSJ reports the deal brings the San Francisco-based company’s valuation to $9.8 billion, more than double the level earlier this year, said a person familiar with the deal. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, an existing backer, is the lead investor in the round, several people said.

Apple watch brings back blood oxygen feature. The feature, known as pulse oximetry, measures oxygen saturation in blood similar to the clamshell devices that doctors slip on patients’ fingers, WSJ reports. Some models of the Apple Watch will bring it back it nearly two years after Apple was forced to remove the capability due to a bruising patent dispute with a rival.

CISOs tap AI cyber analysts to combat constant hacks. Limited staffing and a constant battering of AI-fueled attacks are pushing companies to use AI agents for cyber defense as well, WSJ reports. The reasoning is simple for them: Why waste human expertise on trying to manage this deluge of information when a specially trained algorithm could do it?

CoreWeave sparks investor concern. CoreWeave’s latest quarterly report on Wednesday showed growth in the company’s revenue backlog that disappointed some investors hoping for a bigger rise, WSJ reported. Additionally, it projected a major jump in its own capital spending in the final quarter of the year. Investors might also be growing concerned about whether CoreWeave can maintain such an exalted valuation if a lot more of its shares flood the market.

Better data helps chocolate-maker tap dynamic pricing. Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory is changing its prices more frequently than ever to combat rising cocoa costs, WSJ reports.  The plan was put into motion this year after the company revamped its data collection on sales, input costs and other items. Such figures used to come with a delay, and often weren’t granular enough to make decisions about specific products.

President Trump and Vladimir Putin are set to meet face-to-face Friday for the first time in several years to discuss what it will take to end the war in Ukraine. (WSJ)

City officials in Washington rejected Trump’s latest move to tighten his grip on D.C.’s local police force. (WSJ)

Fresh data on China’s economy pointed to a slowdown last month, adding to the pressure on Beijing to rev up growth and consumer spending in the face of Trump’s tariffs. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette, and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.