Sequoia Capital co-steward Alfred Lin personally purchased 200 Mac Minis, had each one custom-engraved with a design mixing old cartography and machine learning contour plots, and distributed them to attendees at Sequoia’s “AI at the Frontier” event. Each machine contained two easter eggs: Sequoia’s ethos statement about creative spirits and underdogs, and a quote generated […]
Foundation Future Industries, a San Francisco startup founded in April 2024, has secured $24 million in research contracts with the US Army, Navy, and Air Force to test humanoid robots designed to breach enemy positions. The company’s Phantom MK-1 is a 5-foot-9, 176-pound humanoid with 19 upper-body degrees of freedom, five-fingered hands, a camera-first vision […]
Jury selection begins Monday in Oakland federal court for the trial that will determine whether OpenAI’s conversion from a nonprofit to one of the most valuable companies in the world was a breach of charitable trust. Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and donated at least $38 million to it, is suing Sam Altman, […]
China’s Ministry of Commerce issued a formal condemnation on Saturday after the European Union included approximately 27 Chinese and Hong Kong entities in its 20th sanctions package against Russia, the largest round of listings in two years. Beijing said the move “runs counter to the spirit of the consensus reached between Chinese and EU leaders, […]
China’s most powerful governing bodies, the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee and the State Council, issued comprehensive labour rules for gig workers on Sunday, the first time the party’s highest authority has formalised protections for the more than 200 million people who deliver food, drive cars, and livestream products through online platforms. The mandate requires […]
Sam Altman published an open letter to the community of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, on Thursday, apologising for OpenAI’s failure to alert law enforcement after its own systems flagged a user who went on to carry out the deadliest school shooting in Canada in nearly four decades. “I am deeply sorry that we did not […]
China’s Ministry of Commerce warned on Friday that US legislation advancing through Congress would “severely disrupt the international economic and trade order and seriously undermine the stability of the global semiconductor industry chain and supply chain.” The legislation in question is the MATCH Act, the Multilateral Alignment of Technology Controls on Hardware, which passed the […]
The Shiller cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio for the S&P 500 stands at approximately 38 to 40, depending on the day you check. In 155 years of recorded data, the CAPE has been higher exactly once: March 2000, when it reached 44.19, one month before the Nasdaq began a decline that would erase 78% of its […]
In short: Oracle closed a $16.3 billion financing for a single data centre campus in Saline Township, Michigan, the largest single-facility technology debt package ever assembled. PIMCO anchored roughly $10 billion of the bond tranche because US banks retreated from the deal, citing doubts about AI infrastructure demand sustainability. The financing is part of $72 […]
Summary: Meta signed a multibillion-dollar, multi-year deal to deploy tens of millions of Amazon’s Graviton5 ARM CPU cores in AWS data centres for agentic AI workloads. The chips are general-purpose processors, not AI accelerators, handling the CPU-intensive inference and orchestration tasks behind real-time reasoning and multi-step agents. The deal is one piece of a procurement […]
