AI funding rounds, acquisitions, partnerships and leadership changes, plus regulation, copyright lawsuits and big compute deals.
Perplexity just launched a revenue-sharing program for publishers, signing up partners like TIME, Der Spiegel, and Fortune. When media content is cited in sponsored follow-up queries, publishers will earn a revenue share, plus free API access to build custom on-site answer engines and a year of Enterprise Pro for their entire staff.
Canva just acquired generative AI startup Leonardo.Ai to bake advanced image generation directly into its design suite. Leonardo.Ai will continue to operate as an independent platform with unchanged pricing, while its foundational models power new creative features across Canva.
Elon Musk just shared an AI-manipulated parody of a Kamala Harris campaign ad on X without context, calling it "amazing." By omitting the original creator's parody disclaimer, the repost appears to breach X's own rules against deceptive synthetic media, drawing fierce pushback from lawmakers.
Apple is reportedly delaying Apple Intelligence past the initial September release of iOS 18, pushing public rollout to an October software update. That means the first batch of iPhone 16 buyers won't get AI out of the box, as Apple buys more time to squash bugs. Developers are expected to get early access via an iOS 18.1 beta this week.
The IOC's Olympic AI Agenda is seeing its first real-world test at the 2024 Paris Olympics. AI tools are assisting coaches with real-time motion analysis and injury prevention, supporting gymnastics judging, and automatically scrubbing abusive social media posts directed at athletes. Why it matters: Elite sports are treating AI not just as a training shortcut, but as infrastructure for competitive fairness and athlete safety.
Elon Musk’s X quietly turned on a default setting allowing user posts and interactions to train xAI’s Grok chatbot, sparking immediate pushback from UK and Irish regulators. The pre-ticked consent setting breaches GDPR rules against default opt-ins. Users currently have to dig into the web version's settings just to turn it off.
Apple just signed the White House's voluntary commitment to AI safety, joining 15 other tech giants including OpenAI and Google. Under the pledge, Apple agrees to conduct pre-release red-team testing, treat model weights confidentially, and develop content watermarking systems. With Apple Intelligence rolling out to 2 billion devices soon, the move is a clear effort to appease regulators early.
Anthropic just came under fire after its ClaudeBot crawler pounded repair site iFixit nearly a million times in 24 hours, ignoring terms of service that explicitly ban AI scraping. Anthropic defended itself by claiming its bot only listens to robots.txt files, which iFixit eventually used to stop the assault. Why it matters: It shows how toothless website policies are when AI giants insist on robots.txt as the only off switch.
Reddit is now blocking web crawlers and search engines from indexing its recent posts unless they pay up. Google is currently the only major engine surfacing fresh Reddit results, following its $60 million AI training deal, while Bing and DuckDuckGo are left in the cold after Reddit updated its robots.txt file.
Senate Democrats just sent a pointed letter to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, demanding the company commit to letting U.S. agencies test its next frontier model before public release. Lawmakers also pressed OpenAI on compute allocation for safety following whistleblower complaints over rushed launches. Regulators are officially running out of patience with voluntary self-policing.
The Verge's Decoder podcast just dug into the uncomfortable reality of AI's massive power appetite. While tech giants like Microsoft and Google blow past their emissions targets to pack data centers with GPUs, high energy use is already standard across video streaming and gaming. The real debate is how we decide if AI is actually worth the juice.
Elon Musk just fired up xAI's Memphis Supercluster, packing 100,000 liquid-cooled Nvidia H100 GPUs tied together on a single RDMA fabric. Musk boasts it is the world's most powerful AI training cluster and aims to deliver the strongest AI on every metric by December, though local utility contracts for its massive 100-megawatt power appetite are still not finalized.
California lawmakers are advancing a controversial AI safety bill that would force tech giants to test models for catastrophic risks—like bioweapons or grid shutdowns—before public release. Tech heavyweights including Google and Meta strongly oppose the measure, arguing its mandates are technically unfeasible and could stifle innovation. Why it matters: With Republicans threatening to roll back federal AI rules, California is positioning itself as the battleground for tech regulation.
A deep dive by The Markup found that widely cited benchmarks like MMLU and HellaSwag—heavily touted by Google and Meta—are fundamentally broken. Many tests rely on outdated datasets or amateur trivia that fail to test actual reasoning or safety. Why it matters: Bragging rights on leaderboards don't equal real-world reliability, especially in sensitive areas like medicine.
Meta just confirmed it won't launch its upcoming multimodal Llama model—or future multimodal versions—in the EU, blaming an unpredictable regulatory environment under GDPR. European firms won't get access even under an open license, though a larger text-only Llama 3 model will still release there.
AI pioneer Andrej Karpathy just unveiled Eureka Labs, a startup building an "AI-native" school. The idea pairs human teacher-designed materials with personalized AI teaching assistants to guide students, starting with an undergraduate-level course called LLM101n that walks learners through training their own AI.
UK antitrust regulators just opened a formal merger investigation into Microsoft’s hiring spree of Inflection AI staff. The watchdog is evaluating whether poaching co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and most of the startup's team functions as an unapproved backdoor acquisition. The CMA set a September 11 deadline to decide on a deeper review, putting Big Tech's clever AI deal structures on notice.
A bipartisan group of US senators just introduced the COPIED Act to protect artists and journalists from AI scrapers. The bill directs NIST to set provenance standards, makes it illegal to tamper with or remove digital watermarks, and lets creators sue platforms that train models on their protected work. Why it matters: If passed, removing AI tags won't just be sneaky—it'll be a federal offense.
OpenAI just shared an internal five-level framework to track its progress toward AGI, and executives say it is already closing in on Level 2. The ladder runs from basic conversational chatbots up to "Reasoners" capable of human doctorate-level problem-solving, all the way to systems that can do the work of an entire organization. It gives the clearest view yet of how the company defines human intelligence.
Beeble AI just raised $4.75 million in seed funding to launch a virtual production platform that replaces million-dollar LED soundstages. Its AI turns regular 2D phone footage into accurate 3D assets, giving indie filmmakers precise post-production control over lighting, camera angles, and environments. Why it matters: Unlike text-to-video generators that produce random shots, Beeble offers the predictable control directors need to tell real stories.
