On Tuesday (May 19), as Sundar Pichai unveiled a slew of A.I. updates at Google’s annual I/O developer conference in Mountain View, Calif., the company’s president and chief investment officer, Ruth Porat, took the stage in a scorching New York City to explain the massive financial stakes behind the tech giant’s ambitious A.I. push. Google’s…
The latest barb in the intensifying rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic: Dario Amodei’s hiring of Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former head of Tesla’s self-driving unit. Karpathy has joined Anthropic’s pretraining team, he announced on X yesterday (May 19). “I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially…
Just like oil powered the industrial age, conversational data is the digital fuel of the A.I. era. Reddit, a 20-year-old platform hosting forums used by roughly 500 million people each week, is one of the internet’s largest reservoirs of online conversation, making it a gold mine for large language models (LLMs) that rely on massive…
Mark Stevens, an early Nvidia investor who has reaped billions from the chipmaker’s rise, is now directing his philanthropy closer to home. He and his wife, Mary, are donating $175 million to fund the first new medical school in the region in more than a century, which will be operated as a partnership between Santa…
Michael Botta built Sesame Care on a simple premise: for a growing number of Americans, it can be cheaper and easier to pay for some health care directly than to go through insurance. Sesame, the New York-based cash-pay marketplace he co-founded, is built around that idea and expanding it into areas where demand is high,…
There’s one thing top of mind for CFOs at A.I. companies: compute power. As their firms race to dominate Silicon Valley—and trounce one another—OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar and Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao are focused on raising funds, securing chip deals and tracking demand for compute. Compute power is a “huge competitive advantage,” especially in a landscape where “there’s…
Cerebras Systems didn’t just go public this week; it minted billionaires and delivered one of the biggest venture paydays in years. The A.I. chip startup priced its IPO at $185 a share on Wednesday (May 13), above a range it had already raised twice. Shares opened at $350 on Thursday and closed at $311.07, valuing…
Meta spared no expense in building up a new A.I. team last year, shelling out multimillion-dollar pay packages to poach researchers at the heart of its superintelligence strategy. But those who joined weren’t driven by money alone, according to Alexandr Wang, Meta’s A.I. chief who joined from his startup, Scale AI. “It’s an incorrect assumption…
When Meta cut 8,000 employees in April and framed it explicitly as an investment in artificial intelligence, it joined a growing list of highly profitable companies trading headcount for computing. Coinbase followed weeks later, cutting around 14 percent of its workforce, citing market volatility and the proliferation of A.I. tools in the same breath. The…
On the heels of Sam Altman’s testimony in the ongoing trial over Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, a clearer picture is emerging of how Musk might have run the company differently. Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI as a nonprofit, is suing the company, its CEO Altman and president Greg Brockman for “stealing a charity.” He…
