DailyAI Briefing: Amazon burns $42.4bn on AI, plus 4 more

Welcome to the DailyAI Briefing, the day’s five biggest AI stories. Amazon spent $42.4 billion more cash than it brought in over the past year, and it says AI is the reason. A report claims two Chinese labs trained their newest models on OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, Mistral has given away a trillion-parameter model while Google keeps its strongest one under lock, the free version of ChatGPT now flatters less but gets more facts wrong, and Reddit says Google’s AI Mode cost it more than 1 million visits a week.

Let’s dig in.

Amazon burns $42.4 billion on the AI build-out

The number is minus $42.4 billion. That was Amazon’s free cash flow for the 12 months to 30 September, against $14.8 billion left over a year earlier, according to its third-quarter results. Spending on property and equipment rose 82% to $210.7 billion, which Amazon says “primarily reflects investments in artificial intelligence”, while cash from operations grew a slower 29% to $168.3 billion.

The business itself is fine. Sales rose 12% to $201.9 billion in the quarter and AWS, its cloud arm, grew 39%. But investors have stopped giving the giants a free pass. Amazon shares fell in early trading on Friday, CNBC reported, a day after Alphabet’s record 13% drop, and Microsoft is now the only big cloud company still producing positive free cash flow, CNBC adds. Our reading, set out this afternoon, is that Big Tech is now paying for AI from reserves and borrowing rather than spare cash, which works only as long as demand keeps up. It follows our look at Google and Microsoft on Thursday.

Chinese labs reportedly trained on GPT-6 Astra

DeepSeek and Moonshot AI “relied heavily” on outputs from OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra to build their latest models, The Information reported, citing people with direct knowledge. The models named are Moonshot’s Kimi K3.1 Pro and DeepSeek’s V4.1-Flash 1017. Neither company has addressed the claim, and no evidence has been published on how much Astra output was used.

The technique is distillation, training one model on another’s answers. It’s routine inside a lab and contested when done to a rival without permission. The report lands a month after OpenAI tied an earlier extraction campaign, with 16,000 attempted requests from more than 4,000 users, to people linked to Moonshot. If it holds up, banning accounts after the fact isn’t stopping anyone, as we wrote this morning. For now the central claim rests on anonymous sources, so watch for OpenAI to confirm it.

Mistral gives away a trillion-parameter model

Mistral has published the weights of Large 4, nicknamed Le Chonk, so anyone with enough hardware can run it themselves. The model card lists about 1 trillion parameters, with around 52 billion active for each word, a 1 million token context window and an Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index score of 26. Mistral calls that the best of any Western open model, while admitting the leading Chinese open models score higher.

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Today, we release the weights of a new and improved Le Chonk, advancing the open frontier for agentic coding and cybersecurity.

— Mistral AI October 29, 2026

The interesting part is the contrast. Mistral pitches Large 4 at cyber defenders, on the logic that an open model can’t be cut off. Google went the other way with Gemini 4 Carbon, which scores 59 on the same index and goes first to a small group of vetted defenders. Both arguments are reasonable, which is why this split is worth following: a model good at finding holes in software is good at using them too.

Free ChatGPT flatters less and errs more

From 29 October, the free version of ChatGPT gives shorter answers with less flattery, according to OpenAI’s release notes. The change covers Free and Go users and anyone not signed in, while Plus and Pro only get it on the backup model. On OpenAI’s HealthBench test, average answers fell about 12%, from 3,361 to 2,970 characters.

The catch is in the system card addendum. OpenAI says the new version shows higher factual-error rates than the 7 October one on all six measures it reported, though it does better on teen safety tests. Less sycophancy is a real fix, and it’s an honest disclosure, but the practical advice for free users is plain: expect blunter answers and check anything that matters.

Reddit says AI Mode cost it 1 million visits a week

Reddit’s visits from Google search fell by more than 1 million a week on average in October, its letter to shareholders says, and it warns daily visitors could drop by a low-double-digit percentage this quarter from about 130 million. “The reality is, AI Mode does not drive traffic,” chief executive Steve Huffman said, as quoted by The Verge.

Although Google’s AI-powered modes reduce traffic to Reddit, Steve Huffman says that Reddit is still a ‘top search term’ on Google.

— The Verge (@verge) October 29, 2026

Revenue still rose 53% to $895 million, but the shares fell more than 15%. Reddit’s answer is a login wall, tested first in some markets outside the US. On its own numbers that’s logical, as we argued this morning, since logged-in users bring in most of the money. It’s also a warning for every site that relies on Google, which is spreading ads in AI Mode rather than pulling back.

Signing off

So that was Friday, and the week ends where it began: AI is costing more than anyone is earning from it yet, and everyone is fighting over who gets to use whose work. Elsewhere on the site today, Canada bought into Cohere with up to C$1.6 billion of public money.

Have a good weekend, and see you tomorrow.