AI funding rounds, acquisitions, partnerships and leadership changes, plus regulation, copyright lawsuits and big compute deals.
Airbnb just made its first acquisition as a public company, snapping up stealth AI startup Gameplanner.AI for just under $200 million. Cofounded by Siri creator Adam Cheyer, the team will help Airbnb build a generative AI 'travel concierge' that learns user preferences and matches them with the right stays.
Andreessen Horowitz just backed Civitai in a $5.1 million seed round, valuing the open-source image model marketplace at $20 million. Built around the Stable Diffusion community, the platform boasts over 3 million registered users, though it faces growing scrutiny over copyright concerns and non-consensual generated content.
YouTube just announced new AI guidelines allowing record labels to take down tracks that mimic an artist's singing or rapping voice. Starting next year, creators must also label realistic AI-generated videos or risk demonetization. Music partners get a manual takedown form with zero parody exceptions, showing how far YouTube will bend to keep the music industry happy.
Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd revealed the dating app plans to harness AI to create better romantic pairings and proactively block toxic relationships before they begin. Wolfe Herd stressed that women must be heavily involved in developing AI models to ensure the tech doesn't repeat past male-skewed tech biases.
Google just filed a lawsuit in California against scammers who used Facebook ads to trick users into downloading a fake version of Bard. The download actually delivered malware designed to steal social media credentials. The search giant is aiming to set a legal precedent and block scammers from registering future malicious domains.
Nvidia just unveiled the HGX H200 and H200 Tensor Core GPU, making it the first chip to feature ultra-fast HBM3e memory. The upgraded architecture delivers 141GB of capacity at 4.8 terabytes per second, nearly doubling prior limits. Server makers and cloud platforms can drop it right into existing infrastructure starting next year.
OpenAI's non-profit board of six directors will exclusively determine when the company has attained AGI. Crucially, once the board decides AGI has been reached, the technology is legally excluded from commercial IP licensing with Microsoft. Why it matters: just a half-dozen people hold the power to cut off OpenAI's biggest backer.
Sam Altman just used OpenAI’s new custom GPTs feature to troll Elon Musk’s rival chatbot, Grok. Altman instructed the builder to create a bot with awkward, "cringey boomer humor," which the system humorously dubbed Grok. It marks the latest jab in an ongoing feud between the two former co-founders.
OpenAI just launched a new Data Partnerships program, inviting organizations to collaborate on building both public and proprietary datasets for training next-generation AI models. The company is hunting for massive, non-public data across text, audio, and video, offering its internal OCR and speech recognition tools to help digitize files. It is a clear push to secure high-quality human knowledge as public web data gets tapped out.
Hollywood actors just agreed to end their 118-day strike after SAG-AFTRA reached a tentative deal with major studios. The agreement includes unprecedented provisions on consent and compensation to protect performers from AI, alongside streaming participation bonuses. It sets one of the first major labor guardrails against AI in the entertainment industry.
OpenAI just restored ChatGPT and its developer APIs after a major outage knocked services offline for over 90 minutes. The crash hit its 100 million weekly users with capacity errors following DevDay launch hype. Sam Altman warned that surging demand means short-term instability will likely stick around.
Meta just partnered with Hugging Face and European cloud provider Scaleway to launch an AI startup program at STATION F in Paris. The initiative will mentor five early-stage startups building on open-source foundation models, giving them direct access to FAIR researchers, developer tools, and dedicated cloud compute.
The FTC just submitted a rare comment to the U.S. Copyright Office, warning that training AI on copyrighted material and deceptive synthetic mimicry could violate antitrust and consumer protection laws, even if defended as fair use. Critics argue the agency is overstepping its mandate.
SAG-AFTRA and Hollywood studios just hit another wall in strike negotiations, and AI likeness rights are the breaking point. Studios reportedly proposed owning digital scans of higher-earning performers in perpetuity—even letting them resurrect deceased actors without estate consent. SAG-AFTRA walked away, demanding clear consent and pay every single time an actor's face is reused.
Elon Musk just confirmed plans to integrate xAI's newly launched Grok assistant into Tesla electric vehicles, running a smaller quantized model natively using local car compute. Musk noted this setup could turn parked Teslas into a massive distributed inference network. Why it matters: Bringing LLMs directly to vehicle hardware cuts latency and cloud dependence, though there is no official launch date yet.
Scarlett Johansson is taking legal action against developer Convert Software after its app, Lisa AI, used an unauthorized clone of her voice in an ad. The promo spliced real footage with an AI voice pitching features behind a flimsy disclaimer. Stars are finally drawing a line against deepfake ads.
The UK just announced a £225 million investment to build Isambard-AI, set to become one of the world's fastest AI supercomputers. Hosted at the University of Bristol, the system packs 5,448 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips to deliver 21 exaflops of AI performance. Why it matters: The UK is securing sovereign compute to anchor frontier AI safety research and scientific discovery.
World leaders just backed the Bletchley Declaration at the AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park, agreeing to collaborate on risks posed by frontier foundation models. US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo also announced a new AI safety institute under NIST to work with international partners on aligning safety policies.
Collins Dictionary just named "AI" its word of the year for 2023, reporting that usage of the term quadrupled over the past 12 months. The publisher noted that artificial intelligence has evolved from a futuristic concept into an everyday presence alongside email and streaming, dominating global conversations on innovation and safety.
Apple just hosted its late-night "Scary Fast" showcase to reveal its next-generation M3 family of silicon. The event brought major GPU upgrades to refreshed 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros powered by M3 Pro and Max, alongside an overdue refresh for the 24-inch iMac.
