OpenAI is preparing to release a new model family, tentatively using the name “Astra,” with improved abilities to complete long-running tasks, according to three people briefed on the plans. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman demonstrated Astra to policymakers and regulators in Washington, D.C., this week, according to the people. OpenAI touted its abilities to have multiple agents work together over a

A new venture capital fund called SemiAnalysis Capital Fund I, managed by Dylan Patel, the founder of chip and infrastructure research firm SemiAnalysis, is targeting raising $400 million, according to a securities filing. The Information reported in February that Patel’s firm SemiAnalysis, which writes Substack’s top technology newsletter, was considering raising hundreds of millions of

For the last several years, a startup accelerator called Infinita City has devoted its attention to establishing a thriving enclave for biotech companies in Prospera, a charter city on a small Honduran island. Last year, Tim Draper, a billionaire venture capitalist who backed Infinita, hosted a ...

Amazon has completed its $50 billion investment in OpenAI, putting in the remaining $35 billion in two stages in recent months, the commerce-and-cloud firm revealed in a securities filing on Friday. Amazon agreed in late February to invest $50 billion into the ChatGPT creator, but it only put in $15 billion immediately, with the rest to come either when OpenAI goes public or when OpenAI meets

Chinese AI firm MiniMax on Friday announced a new open-source video generation model, H3, cranking up competition against AI video rivals like ByteDance and Google. MiniMax is trying to shake up the market by open-sourcing its flagship video model for the first time. MiniMax said H3, a multimodal model that understands text, image, video and audio in prompts, can generate videos up to 15

Elon Musk denied a Wall Street Journal report that Tesla is considering a sale of its China business. The Journal earlier reported that Tesla executives have been told to prepare for a separation of the China business ahead of the electric car maker’s potential merger with SpaceX. Tesla’s strong presence in China could create hurdles for a merger between Tesla and SpaceX, a U.S. defense

CyrusOne, a data center operator owned by private equity giants KKR and BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners, is getting ready to interview and hire investment banks to advise on what could be one of the largest initial public offerings next year, according to people familiar with the ...

There’s no doubt about it: AI gave the big cloud firms a lift in business in the June quarter. We’ve already heard that from Google and Microsoft, and on Thursday, Amazon, the biggest cloud firm, followed suit by posting 37% growth in its Amazon Web Services cloud unit for the quarter. That’s 9 ...

Nscale, a privately held cloud provider, on Thursday said it agreed to buy Anyscale, a startup that trains, finetunes and runs AI models and applications. Nscale is paying $1.6 billion, The Information earlier reported . The deal will let Nscale offer more AI services, pairing its data centers with Anyscale’s software to help developers manage workloads such as data processing, training and

Apple expects choppy waters ahead for the quarter that ends in September, the company said on its June quarter earnings call. Apple’s Chief Financial Officer Kevan Parekh warned that supply constraints for advanced chip manufacturing will “increase significantly.” The company experienced such constraints during the June quarter for Macs, and to a lesser extent iPhones and iPads, due largely to

Amazon stock surged in after hours trading after the ecommerce-and-cloud firm reported that revenue from its cloud division Amazon Web Services soared 37% in the second quarter, nine percentage points faster than the first quarter, bringing the division’s revenue to $42.2 billion. AWS’ operating margin also improved to 39% compared with 37.7% in the first quarter. Buoying AWS’ growth is its AI

A jittery stock market isn’t the best environment for new public listings. But one young startup with deep ties to the AI boom is marching ahead with its IPO plans, at least for now.Nscale, a UK-based AI cloud provider heavily backed by Nvidia, has been meeting with prospective investors ...

Amazon Zoox won approval to put its cars into robotaxi service commercially. Zoox has been offering free rides of its wheelless autonomous cab in San Francisco and Las Vegas, but hasn’t been able to charge for them without federal approval. Zoox won the approval from the National Highway Traffic Safety Authority, which limited Zoox to charging for rides on up to 2,500 vehicles annually for two

Ori Herrnstadt, an engineering veteran of both Apple and Google, joined Amazon Web Services in May as vice president of compute AI services, an AWS spokesperson confirmed. Herrnstadt’s role includes oversight of AgentCore, a service launched last October that customers use to build, run, and manage AI agents; and SageMaker, an AWS service for training and running AI models, the spokesperson

Cybersecurity is top of mind for many businesses following the remarkable hack of Hugging Face earlier this month. And rightly so. The problem they now face is that many of the AI firms selling tools to find and patch vulnerabilities are themselves vulnerable to security problems.The latest is ...

Situational Awareness, a $20 billion hedge fund started by former OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner, sold much of its public equity bets to Ken Griffin’s investment firm Citadel after suffering recent steep losses from its public AI stock portfolio, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. The hedge fund held talks with existing lenders and investors to raise new cash, The Financial

Graphics processing units are all the rage, but startups developing the networking equipment that connects GPUs to one other are getting some love from investors, too. The latest is Xsight, a nine-year-old startup based in Israel that makes server networking and storage chips, the latter of ...

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is developing an advanced chip-packaging technology similar to what Intel already offers, according to two people with direct knowledge of the project, a sign that the world’s leading chip manufacturer is worried about competition from a distant rival. Chip ...

A group of U.S. senators are urging Apple to drop any plans to buy memory chips from Chinese suppliers ChangXin Memory Technologies and Yangtze Memory Technologies, citing national security risks, Bloomberg reported. In a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, the lawmakers, led by Indiana Republican Jim Banks and New York Democrat Chuck Schumer, said using chips from those Chinese firms could make

OpenAI’s revenue growth has accelerated this month compared to the second quarter of this year, Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told employees on Wednesday, as the company tries to close the distance with rival Anthropic. OpenAI in July has added more annual recurring revenue—a measure of monthly sales times 12—than the increase in that figure over the previous three months combined,