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Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue.

I'm your host, Ed Zittron.

It's not all right.

It's been a peculiar week. Two days ago, Sarah Fryer, chief financial officer of OpenAI,

said in a stage at a Wall Street General Conference that an IPO isn't on the cards and foolishly said that Open AI was, and I quote, looking for an ecosystem of banks, private equity,

maybe even governmental, and that the way governments

can come to bear can really drop the cost of financing but also increase the loan to value,

so the amount of debt you can take on top of an equity portion. Now, she also, according to Bloomberg,

hinted at some sort of federal backstop, literal government backing for loans for data centers. Very strange.

Now, I will add this as being completely misreported as OpenAI demanding government funds.

I'd someone ring me the other night's egg. Did you hear about this? It's not what happened.

To be clear, I believe absolutely that Sarah Fryer was throwing out the idea to see if governments

might bite, only to find the entirety of social media and most of the mainstream media reacting like Fryer had throwing out the idea to see if governments might bite, only to find the entirety of

social media and most of the mainstream media reacting like Fryer had kicked the family dog.

Nevertheless, I want to be clear that OpenAI has not requested a federal backstop and that,

as ever, it appears that even the big media outlets do not seem to go and listen to the things

that people say or check. It's ridiculous. This is a huge

story if you misreport it, which is what's happened. Nevertheless, as I said on Blue Sky, this is an

absolute diva moment for Open AI. Oh, I'm so messy. I can't even afford me data centers. Please,

...