Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
Companies are burning through exorbitant sums of money to keep pace in the AI arms race. Debt is climbing. Amidst this flurry of activity, Amazon has signed a deal to borrow some $17.5 billion from a number of financial lenders, according to Bloomberg. The banks behind the loan reportedly include Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, HSBC, and BofA Securities. The deal has been characterized as a delayed draw term loan, meaning Amazon can draw down the funds on its own timeline rather than taking the full sum upfront, giving it flexibility in how and when the money gets deployed. The…
OpenAI said it banned likely China-based users after they used ChatGPT to try to fuel a suspected influence operation aimed at undermining support for US data centers.”This looks like a classic example of a foreign influence operation, jumping onto the bandwagon of a genuine pre-existing domestic debate, and trying to manipulate it by using fake accounts, posing as Americans,” Ben Nimmo, principal investigator on OpenAI’s Intelligence and Investigations team, told reporters on Wednesday ahead of the report’s release.While OpenAI has previously identified other suspected Chinese influence operations, none of them had specifically used the company’s AI models to try to…
Paramount Skydance is preparing to move around some streaming staffers as David Ellison’s company wraps up its long-term project of unifying the tech platforms of Paramount+ and free streamer Pluto TV.This so-called “convergence” project has been a top priority for Paramount. Two high-level streaming employees recently said that convergence is on pace to meet the company’s stated goal of a “mid-year launch.” While Paramount is planning to keep Paramount+ and Pluto TV as separate services, the hope is that having a single tech platform will save resources and improve recommendations across each app, which could drive higher engagement.Once convergence is…
More of your Uber fare is going to the company than the driver, according to a new study.Uber’s “take rate,” or the percentage of each fare that the company hangs on to, has risen above 50% this year in some cities, according to an analysis by Len Sherman, an executive in residence and adjunct professor at Columbia Business School.That’s well above the 15% to 20% share of each fare that Uber took about a decade ago, Sherman found. Uber does not regularly report its take rate.Sherman’s analysis examined nine years of ride-hailing data for three Uber drivers in different cities…
An Nvidia executive recently said that the cost of compute is now greater than the salaries of his employees. Last week, Mercor’s CEO said the startup is spending more on tokens for internal agents than on employee headcount. As enterprises blow through their token budgets, a big question is: Are companies actually spending more on AI than on humans? Not quite yet, according to fresh research from the Ramp AI Index, which measures the adoption rate of AI among American businesses. The top 1% of firms — which Ramp describes as “AI-pilled” — are spending $7,500 per employee per month.…
Microsoft founder Bill Gates on Wednesday is sitting before a congressional panel to testify about his relationship with late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.In a prepared statement to the House Oversight Committee investigating the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files, Gates expressed regret for his association with Epstein and said he was “deeply sorry” if the time he spent with the disgraced financier “lent him any credibility.””I should never have met with Epstein in the first place,” Gates told the committee in his opening remarks during the closed-door interview, according to a copy posted by Gates online. “Based on…
One of the biggest selling points for modern AI systems is their ability to adapt to users. Every time an AI assistant takes on a task for you, it’s also adapting to your style and preferences, which are incorporated as context for future tasks. With more context and an improved understanding of the user, the model can get better every time you use it — or at least that’s the theory. New research suggests that models’ adaptive abilities might be a mixed blessing. On Wednesday, researchers at the AI company Writer published two papers showing how popular memory systems can…
Anthropic released its latest model Fable on Tuesday, billing it as a public and limited version of its powerful and much-hyped cybersecurity model Mythos. But not everyone is happy with the restrictions, and a number of cybersecurity researchers and professionals have aired complaints online. “[Fable] rejects any request that could be tangentially cyber related. Even innocuous tasks like reading a blog post,” said Valentina “Chompie” Palmiotti, a well-known security researcher who works at IBM X-Force. When a prompt triggers its guardrails, Fable pauses the chat and says that its “safety measures flagged this message for cybersecurity or biology topics.” The…
AI coding agent startup Niteshift has raised a $7 million seed round led by Greylock’s Jerry Chen. That’s a modest sum by AI standards, but the startup, founded by two former early Datadog engineers, has attracted some big-name angels like Reid Hoffman, Datadog’s Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, Ankur Goyal of Braintrust, and Misha Laskin of Reflection AI. Founded by Sajid Mehmood and Conor Branagan, who helped grow Datadog from its early days to a multi-billion valuation, the company has entered the crowded AI coding space with a compelling idea: Why would any company trust its most sensitive assets —…
SpaceX is coming to market on Friday, and investors can barely contain their excitement. The $75 billion stock offering is reportedly deeply over-subscribed, with some institutional investors ponying up for $10 billion blocks of Elon Musk’s empire. There are lots of reasons to be skeptical of the investment — big IPOs tend to sink, the company is losing money, and Musk’s erratic online behavior would be terrifying coming from any other tech CEO — but it doesn’t seem to be slowing anyone down. Tech investors have learned to never bet against Elon, whatever the business logic indicates. But a dispassionate…