AI funding rounds, acquisitions, partnerships and leadership changes, plus regulation, copyright lawsuits and big compute deals.
SoftBank is buying up to $1.5 billion worth of OpenAI shares directly from current and former employees through a new tender offer. The deal, pushed hard by Masayoshi Son after his $500 million check in October, prices shares at $210 to match the startup's $157 billion valuation. It gives staff a rare liquidity window while an IPO remains nowhere in sight.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon believes AI will dramatically boost living standards, predicting future generations might only work 3.5 days a week. While acknowledging job displacement risks, Dimon said the bank aims to redeploy displaced workers into new roles across its branches rather than laying them off.
Inflection AI is officially done trying to build next-generation frontier models. New CEO Sean White says competing against 100,000-GPU systems makes no sense for them anymore. The startup has acquired three companies over two months to pivot completely toward practical on-prem enterprise software.
President-elect Trump is considering appointing a White House AI czar to steer federal policy and government tech adoption, Axios reports. Elon Musk won't take the job himself, but he and Vivek Ramaswamy are set to help pick who does. Because the post wouldn't require Senate confirmation, whoever gets the nod could start revamping regulations on day one.
Zoom just dropped "Video" from its official corporate name to become Zoom Communications, rebranding itself as an "AI-first work platform." Pressed by Microsoft and Google's bundled office suites, the company is pivoting toward its all-in-one Zoom Workplace and the recently upgraded AI Companion 2.0 to automate routine daily work.
IMAX just partnered with Dubai-based startup Camb.ai to localize its original content, starting with documentaries. Camb.ai's specialized speech models, Boli and Mars, support over 140 languages and are built to preserve background audio nuances without scraping the open web. IMAX plans a phased rollout starting with high-resource languages to cut dubbing costs.
Apple is reportedly developing a revamp of Siri, dubbed "LLM Siri," designed to hold conversational interactions like ChatGPT. Internally tested as a standalone app, it will tap Apple AI models and App Intents to handle complex tasks across apps. Apple could preview it in 2025, but a rollout isn't expected until spring 2026.
Amazon just poured another $4 billion into Anthropic, bringing its total investment to $8 billion. Under the expanded partnership, Anthropic will use AWS's custom Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest models, while AWS customers get early access to fine-tune Claude on their own data. Amazon remains a minority investor without a board seat.
OpenAI just teamed up with Common Sense Media to launch a free online training course called "ChatGPT Foundations for K-12 Educators." Designed to take under an hour, it teaches AI basics, data privacy, and practical classroom workflows. It is available to all teachers today without needing a ChatGPT Edu subscription.
Google Cloud just launched AI Agent Space, an enterprise ecosystem program designed to help companies discover, deploy, and co-create custom AI agents. Partners get early tech previews and direct engineering support, with plans to distribute agents via Google Cloud Marketplace. It trails Microsoft's Copilot Studio in catalog size, but marks Google's serious push into agentic workflows.
Nvidia just confirmed its flagship Blackwell AI chips are in full production, brushing off recent server cooling rumors. The company has already shipped 13,000 samples to customers this quarter, with CEO Jensen Huang assuring investors that systems are standing up in great shape. Why it matters: Demand remains voracious, and Nvidia's AI data center revenue engine is showing zero signs of cooling down.
Microsoft just partnered with publishing giant HarperCollins to use select nonfiction books for training a new AI model. The agreement lets authors opt in for a reported $2,500 fee per title over a three-year period, though some writers are already pushing back against the offer.
Meta just hired former Salesforce AI CEO Clara Shih to run a newly formed Business AI group. The unit will build Llama-powered tools for millions of merchants across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, likely focusing on AI-generated ads and creative workflows. Instead of charging subscription fees, Meta is betting these tools will keep businesses hooked and boost ad revenue.
Microsoft just announced Microsoft 365 Companions for the Windows 11 taskbar, letting you pull up contacts, files, and calendar events with a single click. Similar to the Phone Link panel, it surfaces Microsoft Graph data directly from floating taskbar cards without opening full apps. It's not yet clear when it rolls out or if third parties can tap in.
President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping just reached a landmark agreement to bar artificial intelligence from controlling nuclear weapon systems. Meeting at the APEC summit in Lima, both leaders committed to keeping human control over any decision to deploy nukes. Why it matters: It establishes a rare and vital military baseline before a new US administration takes over.
ESPN just revealed FACTS, an AI-generated avatar being tested to complement hosts on its college football show SEC Nation. Powered by Nvidia’s ACE, Azure OpenAI, and ElevenLabs, the bot pulls from ESPN Analytics to make complex sports metrics accessible. ESPN insists it is definitely not built to replace human talent.
Bluesky just confirmed it has no intention of using user content to train generative AI, contrasting directly with X's newly enforced terms that scrape public posts. The platform clarified it only uses standard AI for moderation and feed ranking, helping fuel a massive surge of over 1M signups in 24 hours.
Elon Musk's lawsuit just revealed old emails showing OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever deeply distrusted Sam Altman as early as 2017, questioning whether AGI was tied to his political ambitions. The records also show early fears of Musk becoming a dictator, Altman considering an ICO to fund the startup, and intense paranoia over DeepMind.
Ben and Casey Affleck are leaning into AI, arguing the tech will lower movie production costs and break studio barriers for everyday creators. Ben noted AI is a craftsman at best that only imitates existing work, but said cutting costly, tedious tasks will finally let new voices make movies.
Elon Musk just amended his federal lawsuit against OpenAI, officially naming Microsoft, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and his own startup xAI as plaintiffs. The filing claims OpenAI and Microsoft effectively formed an anticompetitive "de facto merger" that actively shuts out rivals like xAI from vital funding and cloud compute.
