A 3D-printed miniature model of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and TikTok logo are seen in this illustration.
2020: Microsoft is in talks to acquire TikTok, according to President Donald Trump. If that rings a bell it’s because Microsoft sought to buy the social media app in 2020, the last time Trump tried to ban the app. The deal fell through, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella later called the attempted TikTok takeover the “strangest thing I've ever worked on.” This time around, all the company has said on the matter is that it “has nothing to share at this time.” Meanwhile, Trump has also nodded to there being “great interest in TikTok” from several companies.
200: OpenAI announced Operator, its AI “agent,” in an experimental “research preview,” on Thursday. The point is that this model can not only chat with you but can actually perform tasks for you, like booking a restaurant reservation or ordering food for delivery. It’s currently available to subscribers of ChatGPT Pro, a $200-a-month subscription.
65 billion: Meta said Friday it expects to spend up to $65 billion in 2025, up from $40 billion in 2024, to fuel its growing AI ambitions. Meanwhile, TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance has reportedly earmarked $21 billion, including $12 billion on AI infrastructure.
3 billion: The AI voice-cloning company ElevenLabs has raised a new $250 million funding round announced Friday that values it at around $3 billion. We tried out ElevenLabs’ software last year to clone our author’s voice and translate it into different languages.
3,000: Researchers at the Center for AI Safety and Scale AI released “Humanity’s Last Exam” on Thursday, a 3,000-question multiple-choice and short-answer test designed to evaluate AI models’ capabilities. With AI models succeeding at most existing tests, the researchers strived to create one that will be able to stump most — or at least show when they’ve become truly superintelligent. For now, they’re struggling: All of the current top models fail the exam with OpenAI’s o1 model scoring the highest at 8.3%.Over the past two weeks, President of El Salvador Nayib Bukele has sent around 2,000 troops to Haiti to rescue four Salvadoran nationals working in Haiti who were kidnapped by gangs. But the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator” may have bigger ambitions.
In the end, the long-predicted “blue wave” turned into a tsunami as the Democrats, harnessing widespread frustrations over high living costs, opposition to the war in Iran, and misgivings about Trump’s deportation policies, swept back to power on Capitol Hill.
Last night’s wins were not only pivotal, but also broke multiple glass ceilings in American politics.
The elections are widely seen as a referendum on the African National Congress (ANC), the party that has governed South Africa since the end of apartheid, amid frustration over pervasive corruption, crumbling public services, and rising migration.