AI Daily Brief — 30 March 2025

A genuinely quiet Sunday — except for Altman’s exhausted plea to ChatGPT users to stop generating images. The Ghibli wave was at its absolute peak. OpenAI’s $40B SoftBank round was wired up for a Monday close.

Top stories

• Sam Altman: ‘can yall please chill on generating images, this is insane, our team needs sleep.’ A candid plea about the unprecedented demand for ChatGPT’s new GPT-4o native image generation. Studio Ghibli stylization had gone viral worldwide; the company was already throttling output and saying ‘GPUs are melting.’ via X
• OpenAI $40B SoftBank-led round wired up for Monday close. Bloomberg and CNBC weekend reporting confirmed the financing was finalized at $300B post-money. SoftBank committed $30B; Microsoft, Coatue, Altimeter and Thrive filled out the syndicate. Will become the largest private tech funding round on record once formally announced. via Bloomberg
• xAI / X merger fallout dominates weekend discourse. Friday’s surprise xAI Holdings consolidation kept driving analysis — focus on the data-pipeline implications (X user data into Grok training) and Musk consolidating his AI/social empire under one holding company.

Quiet corners

No model releases, no papers of note, no policy announcements dated Sunday. The week’s mid-week shippings (DeepSeek-V3-0324 on Mar 24, GPT-4o image gen and Gemini 2.5 Pro on Mar 25) had no follow-on releases.

By the numbers

• $40B / $300B / $30B — OpenAI round / valuation / SoftBank commit, ready for Monday
• 150M+ — ChatGPT weekly active users at the Ghibli peak
• Most-mentioned company: OpenAI

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 30 March 2025.