California Gov. Newsom To Order State Officials To Begin Dismantling Homeless Encampments

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US homelessness reaches highest point since at least 2007

There are more people without housing in the US amid a lack of homes for sale and apartments available to rent.

12/27/24 2:26PM

Homelessness in the US grew by 18% year on year as of January 2024, reaching its highest point since the federal government began counting in 2007.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development said in a report released Friday that the spike in people without housing could be traced to rising inflation, natural disasters, an influx of immigration, and the end of Covid-era government programs like the Child Tax Credit.

A lack of affordable housing is linked to the fact that there are simply fewer homes for sale and apartments available to rent. That’s partly because of rising mortgage rates, which makes it less appealing for current homeowners to sell and harder for new buyers to enter the market.

The 30-year fixed mortgage rate has been sitting above 6% since 2022, a level it hadn’t reached since 2008. Mortgage rates tend to track the 10-year US Treasury yield, which recently hit a seven-month high as traders ratchet down expectations for how much more easing the Federal Reserve will deliver following a string of hotter-than-expected CPI inflation reports and the potential that President-elect Trump’s fiscal and trade policies could add to price pressures.

With fewer people being in a position to buy homes, real-estate stocks have taken a hit. The Vanguard Real Estate ETF is down 3.5% over the past five years. Construction firms like DR Horton and Lennar are each down more than 6% this year.

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Netflix made $1.5 billion from advertising last year, about 3% of its total revenue

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OpenAI’s ARR reached over $20 billion in 2025, CFO says

Sam Altman’s $500 billion artificial intelligence behemoth hit a major financial milestone last year, according to a new blog post over the weekend from OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, as the company confirmed it had hit a more than $20 billion annual revenue run rate at the end of 2025.

Elsewhere in the blog post, Friar spent time addressing the company’s shifting goals, referencing plans to “close the distance between where intelligence is advancing and how individuals, companies, and countries actually adopt and use it.” As has become customary in the AI company press release genre, the CFO was also keen to tout the unending growth of the business, writing:

“Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time highs. This growth is driven by a flywheel across compute, frontier research, products, and monetization.”
“Compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025: 0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in 2024, and ~1.9 GW in 2025.”

And, perhaps most importantly for current backers and those keeping an eye on the private company before its rumored mega IPO:

“Revenue followed the same curve growing 3X year over year, or 10X from 2023 to 2025: $2B ARR in 2023, $6B in 2024, and $20B+ in 2025. This is never-before-seen growth at such scale.”

That latest figure has certainly set tongues in the tech world wagging, just as the company announced it would begin rolling out ads to free and ChatGPT Go users. It also puts the chatbot giant a fair way ahead of competitors like Anthropic, the company behind Claude.

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A business that scales with the value of intelligence

“Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time highs. This growth is driven by a flywheel across compute, frontier research, products, and monetization.”
“Compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025: 0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in 2024, and ~1.9 GW in 2025.”