AI news flash: Arbitr, a New Zealand investor information services company, has developed an AI-powered dubbing service that translates executives’ videos into multiple languages in real time, letting them speak in many languages and speeding up information disclosure. Arbitr Group co-CEO David Sowerby says traditional dubbing doesn’t always capture the speaker’s passion and tonal nuance. The original summary only gives…
AI news flash: U.S. federal judge Debra M. Brown denied xAI’s motion to dismiss, letting the NAACP’s lawsuit against the SpaceX-owned company move forward. Represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), the NAACP alleges xAI installed and ran at least 35 gas turbines at its Colossus data center outside Memphis without the required pre-construction permits and operating air permits…
AI news flash: In an interview with Wired’s Steven Levy, Apple CEO John Ternus defended where Apple stands on AI right now. Over the past two years Apple has often been rated as behind in AI, especially since a more powerful version of Siri was delayed again and again until it finally launched this summer. Ternus is a longtime Apple executive who officially took over as CEO in early September. He admitted that ’everyone has their own opinion,’ but stressed that ‘I really like where we are right now.’
AI news flash: Companies and institutions outside Japan are joining the global fundraising wave sparked by AI hyperscalers and are now raising money from Japanese investors. According to Nikkei, yen-denominated bonds issued by foreign issuers in the April to September half-year hit an all-time high, at roughly $16 billion as the headline puts it. Alphabet led the way in the yen bond market in May, …
AI news flash: OpenAI’s latest funding round isn’t going as well as expected. The company was earlier reported to be raising $30 billion at a $1.4 trillion valuation ahead of its IPO, then the valuation was revised down to $1.25 trillion, but the Financial Times reported on Friday that OpenAI has cut the target further to $20 billion, and the first closing is expected to come in below that figure.
AI news flash: Zest, a restaurant discovery app founded last November, has launched a new feature: a personal AI ‘restaurant concierge’ that lives in your text messages, similar in concept to AI agents like Instinct or Poke. Users just text Zest to get recommendations based on their own and their friends’ dining history, and can book a table right away. Founder and CEO Mario Gomez-Hall says ’the agent is the product’ because the system starts from places users have actually been…
AI news flash: Big Tech’s AI infrastructure spending is making investors nervous. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft reported over the past two weeks that their combined capex this year tops $740 billion, which Wall Street reads as spending on AI infrastructure like data centers and chips. Early in the AI boom, the market mostly rewarded big spending like this, but in Q4 the focus has shifted to negative free cash flow, rising debt, and whether these investments will pay off…
AI news flash: This TechCrunch piece is a lighthearted Halloween-eve feature listing a few last-minute costume ideas for tech nerds, each labeled with a different level of effort. The first idea is based on ‘recursive self-improvement.’ AI leaders like Dario Amodei and Sam Altman worry AI is moving too fast, and if models can keep improving themselves without human involvement, any effort to control the pace of the frontier falls apart…
AI news flash: Blackstone predicts that Anthropic could receive a ‘high junk’ rating from credit rating agencies after its IPO. The original article makes clear this is only Blackstone’s prediction, not a formal decision already made by the agencies. The key point of the prediction is financing cost. A junk rating means higher credit risk, so if Anthrop…
AI news flash: Intel’s stock plunged about 28% in a single day on Friday, one of its worst single-day performances ever, after the company gave a Q4 forecast below market expectations. Intel expects Q4 revenue of $15 billion to $16 billion, versus analyst estimates of about $17 billion, and gross margin will drop from 43% to 37%. With heavy investment spending, it also doesn’t expect positive cash flow. The drop wiped roughly $12 billion off the value of the US government’s Intel stake…