Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

GZERO AI

Hard Numbers: Amazon’s spending blitz, Cal State gives everyone ChatGPT, a $50 AI model, France and UAE shake hands

​The Amazon logo is being displayed on a smartphone in this photo illustration in Brussels, Belgium, on June 10, 2024.

The Amazon logo is being displayed on a smartphone in this photo illustration in Brussels, Belgium, on June 10, 2024.

Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Reuters
100 billion: Amazon disclosed plans on Thursday to spend $100 billion this year to capitalize on a “once-in-a-lifetime type of business opportunity” in artificial intelligence. That would represent a 20% increase in the company’s capital expenditures from 2024 when it spent $83 billion. “The vast majority of that capex spend is on AI for AWS,” CEO Andy Jassy told investors.

500,000: More than half a million new people will gain access to a specialized version of ChatGPT after OpenAI struck a deal with California State University, which has 460,000 students and 63,000 faculty members across 23 campuses. Students and faculty will be able to use a specialized version of the chatbot that can assist with tutoring, study guides, and administrative tasks for staff. The price of the deal is unclear.

50: Researchers at Stanford University and the University of Washington trained a large language model they say is capable of “reasoning” like the higher-end models from OpenAI and Anthropic. The catch? They did it while spending only $50 in compute credits. The new model, called s1, is “distilled” from a Google model called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental, a process that allows training fine-tuned models based on larger ones.

1: France and the United Arab Emirates struck a deal to develop a 1 gigawatt AI data center on Thursday, ahead of the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris. It’s unclear where the data center will be located, but the agreement means that it will serve both French and Emirati AI efforts.

More For You

What we learned from a week of AI-generated cartoons
Courtesy of ChatGPT
Last week, OpenAI released its GPT-4o image-generation model, which is billed as more responsive to prompts, more capable of accurately rendering text, and better at producing higher-fidelity images than previous AI image generators. Within hours, ChatGPT users flooded social media with cartoons they made using the model in the style of the [...]
The flag of China is displayed on a smartphone with a NVIDIA chip in the background in this photo illustration.

The flag of China is displayed on a smartphone with a NVIDIA chip in the background in this photo illustration.

Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Reuters
H3C, one of China’s biggest server makers, has warned about running out of Nvidia H20 chips, the most powerful AI chips Chinese companies can legally purchase under US export controls. [...]
​North Korean leader Kim Jong Un supervises the test of suicide drones with artificial intelligence at an unknown location, in this photo released by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency on March 27, 2025.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un supervises the test of suicide drones with artificial intelligence at an unknown location, in this photo released by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency on March 27, 2025.

KCNA via REUTERS
Hermit Kingdom leader Kim Jong Un has reportedly supervised AI-powered kamikaze drone tests. He told KCNA, the state news agency, that developing unmanned aircraft and AI should be a top priority to modernize North Korea’s armed forces. [...]
The logo for Isomorphic Labs is displayed on a tablet in this illustration.

The logo for Isomorphic Labs is displayed on a tablet in this illustration.

Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via Reuters
In 2024, Demis Hassabis won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work in predicting protein structures through his company, Isomorphic Labs. The lab, which broke off from Google's DeepMind in 2021, raised $600 million from investors in a new funding round led by Thrive Capital on Monday. The company did not disclose a valuation. [...]