The Information — AI
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The Information — AI news-outlet 4d ago
GPUs in the Wine Cellar: Why Techies Are Hoarding AI Compute in Their Homes
The basement of Gary Flake’s contemporary home in a quiet neighborhood in Bellevue, Wash., is furnished with everything you’d expect in a multipurpose man cave. There’s a cozy-looking couch situated between a large screen and a digital projector, a Peloton treadmill and a rowing…
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Anthropic’s Rogue AI Filled Out U.S. Visa Forms, Gave False Homicide Tip to Police
Anthropic said Friday that is AI used the internet to inadvertently fill out government forms with incomplete information and also submitted a false homicide crime tip to the Philadelphia police department. Anthropic said police flagged the homicide tip as spam, and Axios…
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Anthropic’s Rogue AI Filled Out U.S. Visa Forms, Gave False Homicide Tip to Police
Anthropic said Friday that is AI used the internet to inadvertently fill out government forms with incomplete information and also submitted a false homicide crime tip to the Philadelphia police department. Anthropic said police flagged the homicide tip as spam, and Axios…
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Valar Atomics Sues Its Own Investor, Day One, Over Funding Round Allocation
Nuclear reactor startup Valar Atomics says it has sued one of its early backers, Day One Ventures, in Delaware court after shutting out the venture firm from its recent $1 billion funding round. Founders rarely sue their own investors, but Valar is asking the court to declare…
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Valar Atomics Sues Its Own Investor, Day One, Over Funding Round Allocation
Nuclear reactor startup Valar Atomics says it has sued one of its early backers, Day One Ventures, in Delaware court after shutting out the venture firm from its recent $1 billion funding round. Founders rarely sue their own investors, but Valar is asking the court to declare…
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China’s AI Model Race Is Just Getting More Crowded
Imagine Epic Games, Apple and DoorDash were developing their own large language models now from scratch to compete against the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. That’s basically what’s happening in China, where a trio of big names from other parts of the tech industry have jumped…
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China’s AI Model Race Is Just Getting More Crowded
Imagine Epic Games, Apple and DoorDash were developing their own large language models now from scratch to compete against the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. That’s basically what’s happening in China, where a trio of big names from other parts of the tech industry have jumped…
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SoftBank’s Son Seeks $100 Billion From Gulf Investors for AI Bets
SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son is looking to raise up to $100 billion from Gulf investors to finance his AI investments, The Financial Times reported. Son has held fundraising discussions in recent weeks in the United Arab Emirates and other parts of the region, according to…
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SoftBank’s Son Seeks $100 Billion From Gulf Investors for AI Bets
SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son is looking to raise up to $100 billion from Gulf investors to finance his AI investments, The Financial Times reported. Son has held fundraising discussions in recent weeks in the United Arab Emirates and other parts of the region, according to…
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Nvidia-Backed Firmus Scraps $5 Billion Australia IPO as Markets Wobble
Firmus Grid, an AI cloud company backed by Nvidia, has pulled what would have been Australia’s biggest initial public offering in almost 30 years. The Sydney-based company had planned to raise nearly $5 billion at a valuation above $30 billion. It cited market volatility and…
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South Korean Banks Were Hacked Using Chinese AI Agent, Researchers Say
The perpetrator of a recent hack of South Korean financial institutions that resulted in data leaks used an open-source Chinese AI agent called Artex and Chinese large language models, according to a report published this week by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The analysis of…
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Anthropic Announces Broader Cyber Defense Program
Anthropic said Thursday it is launching new programs to support cybersecurity for critical infrastructure and open-source software. In a blog post, Anthropic said it would offer threat research, on-site engineers, and access to its frontier Claude models to infrastructure…
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Networking Startup Eliyan Draws Takeover Interest, Held Early Talks With Arm
Semiconductor M&A has been humming. One of the next deals could be for Eliyan, whose technology allows separate chips inside an AI system to talk to one another more quickly and efficiently. The five-year-old startup, valued at $1 billion in July, has notified some of its…
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OpenAI ARR Snafu Highlights Flawed Metric
Here’s a news flash: The quasi-revenue numbers for OpenAI that got wide circulation last week were off— way off . Instead of $70 billion in annualized revenue, as we and others reported, OpenAI is generating closer to $50 billion in annualized revenue (sometimes shortened to…
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Nvidia to Invest in Chip Rival d-Matrix as Its Challengers Choose Partnership
Nvidia plans to invest in d-Matrix, a seven-year-old developer of server chips for AI that aims to compete with Nvidia, according to three people with knowledge of the deal. The planned investment is part of Nvidia’s effort to make its technology compatible with rival chip…
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SpaceX Announces Plans That Could Take Aim at Major Mobile Carriers
SpaceX plans to compete with major US wireless carriers like Verizon and AT&T. The company announced on Thursday that it plans to acquire a nationwide portfolio of low-band wireless spectrum and that it had received approval from the Federal Communications Commission for a…
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OpenAI’s Annualized Revenue Neared $50 Billion, Lower Than Past Reports
OpenAI recently told investors that its annualized revenue was approaching $50 billion at the end of September, according to a person with knowledge of the communications. That’s around $20 billion less than revenue figures disclosed in other recent reports , including The…
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Waymo Closes $5 Billion in Debt Financing
Alphabet’s Waymo on Thursday announced that it closed a $5 billion term loan in the self-driving rideshare company’s inaugural debt financing round. Neither Alphabet nor other equity partners provided a corporate guarantee on the loan, which closed at an upsized amount after the…
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OpenAI Researchers Say They Were Fired for “Prioritizing Safety”
The three safety researchers whom OpenAI fired last week challenged OpenAI’s decision, saying on Thursday they were punished for raising safety concerns. “I believe we were fired for prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation,” Mikita Balesni,…
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AI’s Boom Has Infrastructure Investors Looking at Garbage
The investing frenzy in data centers that the AI boom sparked has created a bargain-hunting opportunity—in everything but AI assets. AI has pulled investors’ attention away from unglamorous assets in sectors like transportation and waste management over the past few years, as…
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Chinese Open Models Win Over One in Five of The Information’s Subscribers
Nearly two-thirds of The Information’s subscribers surveyed last month said their organizations develop AI applications, and a third of subscribers said they receive a return from AI that is a “multiple of what we spend.” The result suggests enterprises have made some progress…
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White House Suspends Visa Program for Microsoft, Other Tech Firms
The U.S. government is limiting Microsoft’s ability to sponsor visas for certain immigrant workers, Vice President J.D. Vance said Thursday, citing an “ongoing investigation” into claims that Microsoft laid off Americans while continuing to hire more immigrants. Vance said…
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How OpenAI Beat Math
Mathematicians are likely feeling the kind of anxiety that software engineers have experienced for months in the wake of OpenAI release on Tuesday of a whopping 722 research papers with AI-created solutions to a range of problems across math subjects. AI’s success solving…
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How Amazon Rewired Its Data Centers After Mississippi Power Warning
Earlier this year, officials at Mississippi electric utility Entergy had some worrisome news for Amazon: It was going to have to start kicking the company’s Mississippi-based data centers off the grid during peak times to ensure it could support other customers, according to two…
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Shroud of Secrecy Cloaks Star Investor Behind Cognition, Ramp
Last month, Zach Dell, son of billionaire Michael Dell and cofounder of Base Power, a billion-dollar battery startup , was gabbing with podcaster David Senra when Senra asked him which of his investors have been the most helpful to him. Dell’s three-year-old company has many…
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Exclusive: Former Omidyar CEO Founds AI Investor Network
Mike Kubzansky, the former CEO of philanthropic investment firm Omidyar Network, is launching a group for large investors that will facilitate information sharing about the AI industry to foster more trustworthy practices, he told The Information. The investor network, called…
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Manus Raises More Than $500 Million After Unwinding Meta Deal
The parent company of Manus, the AI agent startup that recently separated from Meta Platforms, said Thursday that it has raised more than $500 million in a new funding round. Butterfly Effect said in a social media post on WeChat that the funding round was led by new investors…
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AI's Simmering Question: "Where the F--- Is All the Automation?"
A new age of discovery and automation is here. Can you feel it? The leading AI companies certainly can. But you may not. The rare slow news day gave us more time to marinate on the significance of OpenAI’s late-breaking announcement on Tuesday that its unreleased AI model had…
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Amazon Lays Off Hundreds in Stores Division
Amazon laid off hundreds of people in its retail division today, a spokesperson confirmed. “We’ve adjusted parts of our Stores business because we believe this structure will better enable us to deliver on our priorities,” a spokesperson said, adding Amazon is always looking at…
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Former White House AI Adviser Sriram Krishnan Raising a Venture Fund
Sriram Krishnan, who advised President Donald Trump on AI policy before leaving the White House in June, is raising a venture fund that is targeting about $500 million to invest in growth- and later-stage AI companies, The Information reported. Krishnan would be the sole general…
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U.S. Treasury Issues First Fine Over Outbound Investments in China’s Tech Sector
The U.S. Treasury Department said on Wednesday it had fined the parent company of startup accelerator Plug and Play Tech Center, the first penalty issued under an outbound investment restriction program targeting China’s tech sector. California real estate company Amidi Group…
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Ex-Trump AI Adviser Sriram Krishnan Targets Raising a $500 Million Venture Fund
Sriram Krishnan, a key AI adviser to President Donald Trump who left the White House in June, is raising an AI-focused venture fund, according to three people familiar with the matter. The fund will target raising around $500 million to invest in growth- and later-stage…
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Microsoft Debuts New Windows PCs, Features Powered by On-Device AI
Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled updates to Windows software and hardware that will allow Windows PCs to run more AI models locally, which the company said would bring down the cost of using Copilot and other AI agents for customers. The new announcements are part of Microsoft’s…
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AI Agenda Live: From Token Maxing to Value maxing: Getting More From Every Unit of Compute
In AI circles, conversations about compute shortages are as common as talk of the weather. As agentic workflows threaten to multiply token consumption further, it’s little wonder that talk has shifted from securing GPUs to optimizing them. At a recent panel, The Information’s…
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Musk Says SpaceX Will Sometimes Use Rival Models to Power Grok Bot
Elon Musk announced on Tuesday night that SpaceX’s AI unit will now use some AI models from competitors to power Grok Bot, signaling a shift away from relying exclusively on models developed in-house. “Going forward, @SpaceX will use the best back end model for any given task,…
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Former Tesla Optimus Lead is Launching an Industrial Robot Startup
Ashish Kumar , a former AI lead for Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots, has co-founded a startup developing non-humanoid robots that handle a variety of tasks that would normally be done by highly skilled workers in industries such as manufacturing and aerospace, according to two…
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Where Nvidia’s $100 Billion Dealmaking Juggernaut Will Go Next
This July, Nvidia caught wind of a looming takeover of OpenRouter, a three-year-old startup that had emerged as a popular marketplace for AI models, including many cheaper open-source ones. Databricks and Stripe had already been talking to the startup about a potential sale.…
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Former Google, Nvidia Execs Launch Company to Ease GPU Crunch
Anjney Midha, a former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and former executives at Google, Apple and Nvidia have launched a company that aims to make it easier and more affordable for smaller companies or startups to access such compute. The move comes as Microsoft and…
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SpaceX Seeks to Raise $40 Billion From Apollo to Buy Nvidia Chips
SpaceX, the AI and rocket company led by Elon Musk, is seeking to raise $40 billion to buy Nvidia chips in a financing round led by Apollo Global Management, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday. The deal is expected to close in 2027 and consist of around $10 billion in bank…
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OpenAI Publishes Over 700 New Math Papers with AI-Made Solutions
Less than a month after OpenAI set off a mathematics firestorm by announcing it had solved one of the field’s most challenging problems, the AI company dropped more than 700 new research papers detailing results on a range of math subjects. The new results were produced by an…
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Uber's M&A Blitz
We’re well into the growth-through-acquisition era in the food-delivery industry. Uber’s $2.3 billion purchase of business catering firm ezCater, unveiled on Tuesday, comes just a few weeks after DoorDash snapped up a college campus meal-delivery business for $300 million from…
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Lightspeed’s Top Fundraiser Joins Firm That Takes Seed Funds’ Pro Rata
For years, deep-pocketed venture firms have partnered with seed investors to get access to startups’ later rounds if their growth takes off. The bigger firms often invest in the seed funds, with a handshake agreement that they’ll get a heads-up if a hot young startup is about to…
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HubSpot Lays Off 7% of Workforce, Says It’s Not Because of AI
Software provider HubSpot is laying off 660 employees, or 7% of its staff, as part of a restructuring that will include eliminating some management layers and reorganizing product teams, CEO Yamini Rangan announced in a blog post. The job cuts are “not simply a cost-cutting…
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Pinterest Names New CFO
Pinterest named Amazon executive James Dibbo as chief financial officer. It’s the fourth C-suite shakeup for the social media firm this year. Dibbo, who will start at Pinterest on October 26, previously led finance at Amazon’s media and retail divisions, most recently serving as…
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Anthropic Expands Cyberdefenders’ Access to Top Models
Anthropic said it is expanding and restructuring its cybersecurity access programs to enable more cyberdefenders to use its most advanced Claude models to secure their systems against potential AI attacks. Under the changes, announced Tuesday, all members of Anthropic’s Cyber…
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Exclusive: Star Goldman Sachs Banker Dunlevie to Co-Lead Tech Banking
Goldman Sachs is promoting Jane Dunlevie, a senior tech banker who has worked on deals for OpenAI, Stripe and Instacart, to co-lead the bank’s technology, media and telecommunications investment banking group, according to an internal memo seen by The Information. Jane Dunlevie,…
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Can Microsoft Help Customers Cut Back on Claude?
There was good news and bad news for Anthropic in our story yesterday that showed how two of its mega-customers, Microsoft and Meta, were cutting their staffs’ Claude bills. Among the bad news was that Microsoft had reduced its spending on Claude by more than 33% from its peak…
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AI Whistleblowers Say Researchers Are Checking AI Less Frequently
It won’t be any surprise to people with human intelligence that Monday’s New York City Council hearing on the risks of AI was as theatrical as a Broadway show. What was more surprising was what the AI researchers testified about how AI research is evolving, and what that means…
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Uber to Buy Catering Firm for $2.3 Billion
Uber is to pay $2.3 billion in cash to buy ezCater, a firm that handles catering and meals in workplaces, the ridehailing and food delivery giant said on Tuesday. EzCater’s service offers businesses a way to order from restaurants across the country, including for meetings and…
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Why the SaaSpocalypse Isn’t Over For Workday
AI doesn’t seem likely to completely replace enterprise apps like Workday, which companies use to store key information about employees and financial transactions. But it is putting potential constraints on their growth. Already, some Workday customers are using so-called AI…
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