Author: GT

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says he is “very excited” to supply OpenAI, the search giant’s largest competitor in AI, with cloud computing resources to train and serve the company’s AI models as part of a recently struck partnership. “With respect to OpenAI, look, we are very excited to be partnering with them on Google Cloud,” said Pichai on Google’s second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday. “Google Cloud is an open platform, and we have a strong history of supporting great companies, startups, AI labs, etc. So super excited about our partnership there on the cloud side, and we look forward to…

When DeepSeek, Alibaba, and other Chinese firms released their AI models, Western researchers quickly noticed they sidestepped questions critical of the Chinese Communist Party. U.S. officials later confirmed that these tools are engineered to reflect Beijing’s talking points, raising concerns about censorship and bias. American AI leaders like OpenAI have pointed to this as justification for advancing their tech quickly, without too much regulation or oversight. As OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane wrote in a LinkedIn post last month, there is a contest between “US-led democratic AI and Communist-led China’s autocratic AI.” An executive order signed Wednesday by…

A new AI coding challenge has revealed its first winner — and set a new bar for AI-powered software engineers.  On Wednesday at 5pm PST, the nonprofit Laude Institute announced the first winner of the K Prize, a multi-round AI coding challenge launched by Databricks and Perplexity co-founder Andy Konwinski. The winner was a Brazilian prompt engineer named Eduardo Rocha de Andrade, who will receive $50,000 for the prize. But more surprising than the win was his final score: he won with correct answers to just 7.5% of the questions on the test. “We’re glad we built a benchmark that…

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet Inc., during Stanford’s 2024 Business, Government, and Society forum in Stanford, California, April 3, 2024.Justin Sullivan | Getty ImagesGoogle is going to spend $10 billion more this year than it previously expected due to the growing demand for cloud services, which has created a backlog, executives said Wednesday.As part of its second quarter earnings, the company increased its forecast for capital expenditures in 2025 to $85 billion due to “strong and growing demand for our Cloud products and services” as it continues to expand infrastructure to power more AI services that use its cloud technology.…

Gupshup, a business messaging startup that began its journey in India over two decades ago and became a unicorn four years ago, has raised a new $60 million round — but is keeping its new valuation under wraps. In 2021, Gupshup raised two funding rounds within four months, securing $340 million from prominent investors, including Tiger Global, Fidelity Management, Think Investments, and Malabar Investments. These rounds — the startup’s first in roughly a decade — valued Gupshup at $1.4 billion. However, Fidelity, which led the round following its unicorn milestone, slashed its internal valuation of the startup at least three…

Synthetic fertilizer is a modern wonder, helping to feed billions of people, but it’s not without its costs. Fertilizer runoff from farm fields has led to dead zones in oceans around the world, where low oxygen levels have starved normally teeming coastal waters of life. Eliminating synthetic fertilizers is a tall order, but one startup thinks that its bacteria can eliminate up to half of it, all while undercutting fertilizer on cost. NetZeroNitrogen has developed a suite of bacterial strains that is applied directly to the seed and allows the plant to get nitrogen from the atmosphere instead of chemicals.…

Meta is introducing additional safeguards for Instagram accounts run by adults that primarily feature children, the company announced in a blog post on Wednesday. These accounts will automatically be placed into the app’s strictest message settings to prevent unwanted messages and will have the platform’s “Hidden Words” feature enabled to filter offensive comments. The company is also rolling out new safety features for teen accounts. Accounts that will be placed into the new, stricter message settings include ones run by adults who regularly share photos and videos of their children, along with accounts run by parents or talent managers that…

Instagram parent company Meta has introduced new safety features aimed at protecting teens who use its platforms, including information about accounts that message them and an option to block and report accounts with one tap. The company also announced Wednesday that it has removed thousands of accounts that were leaving sexualized comments or requesting sexual images from adult-run accounts of kids under 13. Of these, 135,000 were commenting and another 500,000 were linked to accounts that “interacted inappropriately,” Meta said in a blog post. The heightened measures arrive as social media companies face increased scrutiny over how their platform affects…

The energy sector is lagging the S & P 500 this year, but Wolfe Research spotted a couple of stocks that could be poised to gain. Oil prices have been soft this year, with West Texas Intermediate crude futures off about 9% per barrel, and Brent crude futures down 8%. Supply of the commodity has remained plentiful, and eight members of the OPEC+ cartel agreed earlier this month to lift production by 548,000 barrels a day. Similarly, the performance of energy stocks has been lackluster, with the S & P 500 sector only up by about 1% in 2025 versus…

Owners of the Lucid Air sedan will be able to charge their luxury EVs at thousands of Tesla Supercharger stations in North America starting July 31, nearly two years since the automakers reached an agreement. But there is a notable caveat: Lucid Air vehicles won’t be able to charge as fast as Tesla vehicles. Lucid said on Tuesday that all Lucid Air sedans, regardless of model year, will be able to access Tesla’s network of fast chargers with an approved adapter that costs $220. Tesla V3 (and above) Supercharger stations are compatible with the Lucid Air adapter. However, the Air…