AI funding rounds, acquisitions, partnerships and leadership changes, plus regulation, copyright lawsuits and big compute deals.
A group of 12 former OpenAI employees just filed an amicus brief supporting Elon Musk's lawsuit against the startup. They argue that dropping its nonprofit governance fundamentally violates the original mission and could lead to reckless safety shortcuts. OpenAI pushed back, claiming its nonprofit arm will remain intact while it adopts a public benefit corporation model.
James Cameron just argued that AI might be essential to keep making visual spectacles like Dune and Avatar, pointing directly at Hollywood's soaring VFX budgets. Speaking on the Boz to the Future podcast, the director said production costs need to be cut in half, framing AI as a tool to double artists' workflow speed rather than replace human workers.
Microsoft just celebrated its 50th birthday, bringing Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Satya Nadella onstage together for the first time in a decade to bet the company's next 50 years on AI. Alongside demos of Copilot Vision and screen analysis, the high-energy talk-show event was repeatedly interrupted by employee protests over military contracts.
OpenAI just filed a countersuit against Elon Musk, asking a court to halt his ongoing attacks and hold him responsible for damages. The company claims Musk launched bad-faith tactics, including a fake takeover bid, to disrupt its business and slow down its AI innovations for personal benefit.
Google just revealed Ironwood, its seventh-generation custom TPU and the first designed from scratch for AI inference. The chip doubles the energy efficiency of the previous Trillium generation and packs 192 GB of high-bandwidth memory. It will arrive on Google Cloud later this year.
James Cameron just shared his vision for generative AI in Hollywood, arguing that VFX-heavy blockbusters must use AI to cut budgets in half by doubling production speed rather than firing crew. He also pushed back on training data debates, insisting regulators should judge whether final outputs plagiarize instead of policing what models learn from.
John Carmack just pushed back against backlash over Microsoft’s WHAMM AI demo, which generates Quake II frames in real time without a traditional engine. After critics called it a threat to developer jobs, Carmack compared AI to high-level languages replacing hand-written machine code, calling powerful tools central to computing progress. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney also voiced support.
IBM just unveiled the IBM z17 mainframe powered by its new Telum II processor, designed to score 100% of enterprise transactions in real-time. It processes over 450 billion inferences a day with 1ms latency—50% more than the z16. Why it matters: Core enterprise workloads like fraud detection and generative AI can now run directly on the mainframe without moving sensitive data off-prem.
LMSYS just dropped over 2,000 battle logs for Llama-4 on Arena and took aim at Meta for transparency issues. The evaluation platform revealed that Meta failed to disclose its experimental Maverick model was heavily tuned to game human preference prompts, prompting an immediate overhaul of leaderboard policies.
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke told staff that teams asking for more headcount or resources must first demonstrate why AI cannot do the work. Effective AI usage is now a baseline expectation at the e-commerce giant and will be baked into peer reviews, turning AI into the default benchmark before hiring humans.
Hundreds of major news publishers just launched a coordinated ad campaign pressuring the US government to stop tech giants from scraping copyrighted content without compensation. Led by the News/Media Alliance, the push urges lawmakers to mandate fair pay and attribution, firing back at lobbying from OpenAI and Google.
A Meta AI insider just blew the whistle on Llama 4, claiming the model lagged far behind rival open-source models and leadership pushed to blend benchmarks into post-training to fake results. The researcher submitted their resignation in protest and claimed Meta's VP of AI also stepped down for the same reason.
OpenAI is reportedly in talks to acquire io Products, the stealth hardware startup led by former Apple design chief Jony Ive and backed by Sam Altman, at a valuation topping $500M. The venture has been designing screenless devices with Ive's LoveFrom studio. Bringing the hardware in-house could give OpenAI the unified AI experience it has been chasing.
A federal judge just denied OpenAI’s bid to throw out The New York Times' copyright infringement lawsuit, calling OpenAI's claims a "straw man" argument. OpenAI argued the Times waited too long to sue because the paper's own 2020 article mentioned large-scale web scraping. But Judge Sidney Stein ruled OpenAI offered zero proof that journalists could have predicted ChatGPT would regurgitate full articles two years before launch.
Runway just raised $308 million in Series D funding led by General Atlantic, with backing from Nvidia and SoftBank. Fresh off the release of its Gen-4 video model, the company plans to use the capital for AI research, hiring, and expanding its Runway Studios arm, aiming for $300 million in annualized revenue this year despite looming copyright lawsuits.
Microsoft is using its 50th birthday to unveil the next phase of its consumer Copilot assistant while actively trying to reduce its reliance on OpenAI. Reports indicate the tech giant is developing its own reasoning models, dubbed MAI, and testing alternative models from Meta, DeepSeek, and xAI. Why it matters: Even OpenAI's biggest backer is hedging its bets to avoid being locked into a single provider.
Wikimedia Foundation just revealed that multimedia download bandwidth on Wikimedia Commons has surged 50% since January 2024, driven entirely by AI scrapers harvesting training data. While bots make up only 35% of pageviews, they account for 65% of the most resource-heavy traffic by digging up uncached, obscure files.
Meta just signed a multimillion-dollar, multi-year deal with UFC to become its official fan technology and wearable partner. The integration spans Meta AI, smart glasses, Quest headsets, and exclusive Threads content, with plans to build an AI-powered fighter ranking system. Why it matters: Meta gets massive mainstream sports visibility for its next-gen hardware and AI directly inside the Octagon.
OpenAI is setting up a new expert commission to guide what it claims will be the world's best-equipped nonprofit. The group will gather input from leaders in science, health, and education, with members announced this April and recommendations due within 90 days. It is part of OpenAI's push to evolve its nonprofit arm before the end of 2025.
Anthropic just secured FedRAMP High and DoD Impact Level 2 authorizations for Claude models hosted on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI. This clears the way for federal agencies and defense contractors to deploy Claude 3.7 Sonnet across healthcare, finance, and emergency operations while strictly handling sensitive unclassified data. Anthropic noted this also builds the foundation for higher-security IL5 workloads.
