Author: GT

The BP logo is displayed outside a petrol station that also offers electric vehicle recharging, on Feb. 27, 2025, in Somerset, England.Anna Barclay | Getty Images News | Getty ImagesBP shares jumped on Wednesday after activist investor Elliott went public with a stake of more than 5% in the struggling British oil major, which has pivoted back to oil in a bid to restore investor confidence.BP shares were last seen up 4.75% at 9:44 a.m. London time. The London-listed stock price is down around 5% year-to-date.Hedge fund Elliott Management has built its holding in the British oil major to 5.006%,…

A China-based startup, Sand AI, has released an openly licensed, video-generating AI model that’s garnered praise from entrepreneurs like the founding director of Microsoft Research Asia, Kai-Fu Lee. But Sand AI appears to be censoring the hosted version of its model to block images that might raise the ire of Chinese regulators from the hosted version of the model, according to TechCrunch’s testing. Earlier this week, Sand AI announced Magi-1, a model that generates videos by “autoregressively” predicting sequences of frames. The company claims the model can generate high-quality, controllable footage that captures physics more accurately than rival open models. 👀…

(Bloomberg) — Cantor Fitzgerald LP, Tether Holdings Ltd. and SoftBank Group are in talks to form a $3 billion vehicle that would absorb billions of dollars in cryptocurrency. Most Read from Bloomberg Cantor Equity Partners I Inc., a special purpose acquisition company, raised $200 million in January and will use the cash to create a new firm. Stablecoin giant Tether will contribute $1.5 billion of Bitcoin, while Tether-affiliated exchange Bitfinex and SoftBank plan to put in $600 million and $900 million of the cryptocurrency, respectively, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named as…

AI agents handle increasingly complex and recurring tasks, such as planning supply chains and ordering equipment. As organisations deploy more agents developed by different vendors on different frameworks, agents can end up siloed, unable to coordinate or communicate. Lack of interoperability remains a challenge for organisations, with different agents making conflicting recommendations. It’s difficult to create standardised AI workflows, and agent integration require middleware, adding more potential failure points and layers of complexity. Google’s protocol will standardise AI agent communication Google unveiled its Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol at Cloud Next 2025 in an effort to standardise communication between diverse AI agents.…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk says he may keep doing work with the Department of Government Efficiency through the remainder of President Donald Trump’s second term, amid calls for him to step away from politics. Musk said he plans to reduce his role with DOGE to a “day or two” per week starting next month, “or as long as the President would like me to do so, and as long as it is useful.” The executive made his comments on Tesla’s quarterly earnings call, just about an hour and a half after Tesla admitted in a shareholder letter that “political sentiment”…

(Bloomberg) — Bitcoin continued to climb after US President Donald Trump said he had no intention of firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, easing concerns over the central bank’s autonomy. Most Read from Bloomberg The largest cryptocurrency rose about 3% before trimming some gains to exchange hands at $93,804 at 7:28 a.m. in London on Wednesday. Smaller tokens including Ether, XRP and Solana also rose. Bitcoin topped $90,000 on April 22 in a sign it was breaking free of a longstanding tendency to move in the same direction as US stocks. But the token then rose in line with stocks…

Huawei is expected to begin large-scale shipments of the Ascend 910C AI chip as early as next month, according to people familiar with the matter. While limited quantities have already been delivered, mass deployment would mark an important step for Chinese firms seeking domestic alternatives to US-made semiconductors. The move comes at a time when Chinese developers face tighter restrictions on access to Nvidia hardware. The US government recently informed Nvidia that sales of its H20 AI chip to China require an export licence. That’s left developers in China looking for options that can support large-scale training and inference workloads.…

Anysphere, maker of AI coding assistant Cursor, is growing so quickly that it’s not in the market to be sold, even to OpenAI, a source close to the company tells TechCrunch. It’s been a hot target. Cursor is one of the most popular AI-powered coding tools, and its revenue has been growing astronomically — doubling on average every two months, according to another source. Anysphere’s current average annual recurring revenue is about $300 million, according to the two sources.  The company previously walked away from early acquisition discussions with OpenAI, after the ChatGPT maker approached Cursor, the two sources close…

xAI’s Grok chatbot can now answer questions about what’s in view of your smartphone’s camera, similar to real-time vision features available for Google’s Gemini and ChatGPT. On Tuesday, xAI announced the launch of Grok Vision, which lets users point their phone at objects like products, signs, and documents and ask questions about them. Grok Vision is accessible from the Grok app for iOS, but not the Grok Android app just yet. GROK CAN SEE WHAT YOU SEE—LITERALLY Grok’s voice mode comes with camera access, letting users point their phone at something and ask, “What am I looking at?” The Vision…

(Reuters) -Brandon Lutnick, son of U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and chair of brokerage Cantor Fitzgerald, is partnering with SoftBank, Tether and Bitfinex to create a multibillion-dollar bitcoin acquisition vehicle, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday. The vehicle, Cantor Equity Partners, will use the cash to create a new firm, called 21 Capital. It will receive $3 billion in bitcoin from the other cryptocurrency investors and trading firms, the report added, citing unnamed sources. Tether would contribute $1.5 billion of bitcoin, while SoftBank and Bitfinex would contribute $900 million and $600 million, respectively, of the digital currency, according to the…