Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
After two years in stealth, Safe Superintelligence, the AI lab founded by former OpenAI co-founder and alignment lead Ilya Sutskever, has announced a long-term partnership with Nvidia as it prepares to scale to its next phase. The deal, which includes an undisclosed investment, will give Safe Superintelligence (SSI) access to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin GPU platform, which is expected to increase the startup’s compute resources “by an order of magnitude.” The partnership comes as SSI has achieved significant research milestones, per Nvidia. Nvidia’s investment stretches into multiple billions, a source familiar with the deal told TechCrunch. Bloomberg reported that the deal…
Multiple robotics companies are tackling one of AI’s hardest problems: building foundation models capable of executing tasks they were never explicitly trained to handle. Their approaches run the gamut — from studying millions of web videos and conducting computer simulations to collecting motion data from humans performing tasks in gloves with built-in sensors. Enigma, a research lab set to emerge from stealth on Monday, is taking a fundamentally different approach. Rather than focusing purely on model capabilities, the less-than-one-year-old startup wants to study how humans engage with robots in hopes that these interactions will lead to intuitive interfaces and possibly…
The tech industry is rallying around open-weight AI, but one major lab is staying conspicuously silent.Anthropic is drawing criticism from across Silicon Valley for not signing an open letter advocating for open-weight AI as Washington considers restrictions on some Chinese models.On Friday, over two dozen companies — including Nvidia, Meta, and Microsoft — signed “Open Weights and American AI Leadership,” endorsing open-weights, which means developers can download, modify, and deploy AI models on their own infrastructure.Over the weekend, several other major names in AI signed the letter: OpenAI, Google, and SpaceX.It means that, as of Monday, the only major frontier…
Nvidia and top tech companies have assembled a group calling for better support for open AI models to fend off cyberattacks in the wake of OpenAI’s rogue agent hacking Hugging Face. The Open Secure AI Alliance, unveiled Monday, comprises dozens of companies, including Microsoft, SpaceXAI, IBM, Palantir, Databricks, Dell, and Hugging Face itself, as well as the Linux Foundation and startups such as Cognition and Thinking Machines Lab.In a blog post announcing the group, Nvidia called for regulators to recognize open models and security tooling as defensive assets rather than liabilities. Blanket restrictions would “weaken defensive capacity,” it warned, and…
The past 12 months have not been kind to Microsoft.Once the most valuable company in the world, the Big Tech titan’s share price has been sliding. Microsoft’s stock dropped 19% in June, its worst month since the dot-com crash. Some of its top brands, like Microsoft 365, Copilot, and Xbox, are facing serious headwinds and questions about their future.BI’s Ashley Stewart, our resident Microsoft expert, broke down how the tech giant is trying to mount a comeback on multiple fronts.It wasn’t always this way. A few years ago, Microsoft was the top dog, getting praised for its foresight on the…
The teenager who killed two students and two teachers in a 2024 shooting at Georgia’s Apalachee High School had a chaotic, lonely upbringing and immersed himself in an online community of people interested in mass shootings, a psychologist testified Monday.Colt Gray, 16, pleaded guilty Friday to 55 counts, including murder, in the Sept. 4, 2024, shooting that also left several others wounded at the school about 45 miles (73 kilometers) northeast of Atlanta.He entered the plea without having reached a plea deal with prosecutors. Murder carries a minimum sentence of life in prison, and it is up to Barrow County…
Voluntary buyouts are having a moment in Big Tech.Workers at Google recently pressed the search giant to make the exit offers a standard first step whenever it plans job cuts — and to extend them to all members of affected teams, regardless of tenure. Microsoft, meanwhile, launched its first broad voluntary retirement program this past spring, offering packages to thousands of longtime US employees. It said that more than 30% of those eligible accepted.The developments are raising broader questions in tech, where many once-scrappy startups are now sprawling corporations — and where repeated rounds of layoffs have eliminated scores of…
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says one of his biggest concerns about AI isn’t whether it becomes too powerful in and of itself, but that a single company could control that power.”I think the fight of the current moment is: Are we going to head to a world of AI authoritarianism or liberty?” Altman said on the latest episode of the “Relentless” podcast.”Every time that humanity has traded off its liberty for safety, it’s been a long-term net loss,” Altman said. “We are going to put this in the hands of people. We’re going to empower them. We are going to…
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says trust in US AI technology and its robust training ecosystem will keep it competitive against Chinese products.Nadella was speaking to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on an episode of “GPS on CNN” that aired on Sunday. Zakaria asked Nadella whether Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 — a model that upset US tech stocks — and Chinese technologies have an edge over American products, because they’re “much cheaper” and can do what most companies need.Nadella responded that the US has taken an “ecosystem approach” to shore up the competitiveness of its digital sector.”It’s been about trust in our technology,…
A woman alleges child abuse rings found her on Discord and Instagram as a teen, then blackmailed her into sending them nude and self-harm photos that they shared across the internet—leaving her with mental and physical scars.Now she’s suing both tech companies in a case her lawyers hope will be a “watershed moment” for holding social media sites accountable, as the FBI warns parents about a rising network of online extortion groups targeting kids.The anonymous plaintiff made the allegations in a previously unreported lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court in April.The suit names three groups — CVLT, 764, and…