Author: GT

This week, OpenAI and Oracle shocked the markets with a surprise $300 billion, five-year agreement, part of a surge of new business that sent the cloud provider’s stock skyrocketing. But maybe the markets shouldn’t have been taken by surprise. The deal is a reminder that, despite Oracle’s legacy status, the company still plays a major role in AI infrastructure. On the OpenAI side, the agreement was more revealing than the lack of details suggest. For one, the startup’s willingness to pay so much for compute provides a measurement of the startup’s appetite — even if it’s unclear where the electricity…

Rainmaker Technology’s bid to deploy cloud-seeding flares on small drones is being met by resistance from the airline pilots union, which has urged the Federal Aviation Administration to consider denying the startup’s request unless it meets stricter safety guidelines. The FAA’s decision will signal how the regulator views weather modification by unmanned aerial systems going forward. Rainmaker’s bet on small drones hangs in the balance. The Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) told the FAA that Rainmaker’s petition “fails to demonstrate an equivalent level of safety” and poses “an extreme safety risk.” Rainmaker is seeking an exemption from rules that bar…

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — A top Google scientist and 2024 Nobel laureate said Friday that the most important skill for the next generation will be “learning how to learn” to keep pace with change as Artificial Intelligence transforms education and the workplace.Speaking at an ancient Roman theater at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens, Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google’s DeepMind, said rapid technological change demands a new approach to learning and skill development.“It’s very hard to predict the future, like 10 years from now, in normal cases. It’s even harder today, given how fast AI is changing, even week…

Investors took a cautious approach to transit software startup Via’s IPO on Friday, with shares opening below the company’s IPO price before recovering at end the day slightly higher.  The company, which initially filed confidentially for IPO in July, priced its IPO at $46 per share, raising $492.9 million. Those shares slipped to $44 when the stock began trading Friday afternoon, and then inched back into the green to finish at just over $49. The modest gain values Via at roughly $3.9 billion at the close of its first trading day. Via raised about $328 million in its IPO, while…

Immediately after Charlie Kirk was shot during a college event in Utah, graphic video of what happened was available almost instantly online, from several angles, in slow-motion and real-time speed. Millions of people watched — sometimes whether they wanted to or not — as the videos autoplayed on social media platforms. Video was easy to find on X, on Facebook, on TikTok, on Instagram, on YouTube — even on President Donald Trump’s Truth Social. The platforms, generally, said they were removing at least some of the videos if they violated their policies, for instance if the person was glorifying the…

Perplexity, the AI-powered search startup that competes with Google by providing conversational answers to user queries, has secured $200 million in new capital at a $20 billion valuation, The Information reported. The fresh funding comes just two months after the company raised $100 million at an $18 billion valuation, according to a July report in Bloomberg. Since its founding three years ago, the rapidly growing AI company has raised $1.5 billion in total funding, according to PitchBook data.  It’s unclear who led Perplexity’s latest capital injection. Bloomberg reported that the July financing was an extension of a previous $500 million…

There’s plenty of uncertainty to go around this year, including a global trade war, shifting policy priorities, and an economy that’s starting to stumble. Breakthrough Energy, a climate tech organization founded by Bill Gates, has also been shifting in response. The group always placed long bets, though it appears to be reappraising some of them. Its policy team was scrapped in March, for example, and it didn’t continue funding a publication that covered the climate tech world. Still, its investments in startups continue, as does its longest bet, a fellowship program for budding entrepreneurs. Breakthrough Energy Fellows, as the program…

Opendoor co-founder and newly minted board chair Keith Rabois said remote work and a “bloated” workforce have been a drag on the company’s culture, as he vowed to slash headcount.”There’s 1,400 employees at Opendoor. I don’t know what most of them do. We don’t need more than 200 of them,” Rabois told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Friday. The online real estate platform on Wednesday appointed former Shopify executive Kaz Nejatian as its new CEO after investor pressure caused his predecessor, Carrie Wheeler, to resign last month. Opendoor also named Rabois as chairman and said Eric Wu, who served…

On Thursday, Box launched its developer conference BoxWorks by announcing a new set of AI features, building agentic AI models into the backbone of the company’s products. It’s more product announcements than usual for the conference, reflecting the increasingly fast pace of AI development at the company: Box launched its AI studio last year, followed by a new set of data-extraction agents in February, and others for search and deep research in May. Now the company is rolling out a new system called Box Automate that works as a kind of operating system for AI agents, breaking workflows into different…

OpenAI has reached a new tentative agreement with Microsoft and said its nonprofit, which technically controls its business, will now be given a $100 billion equity stake in its for-profit corporation. The maker of ChatGPT said it had reached a new nonbinding agreement with Microsoft, its longtime partner, “for the next phase of our partnership.” The announcements on Thursday include a few details about these new arrangements. OpenAI’s proposed changes to its corporate structure have drawn the scrutiny of regulators, competitors and advocates concerned about the impacts of artificial intelligence. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 and its…