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Perplexity AI apps on a smartphone and a computer screen.
Hard Numbers: Perplexity’s fundraising drive, CoreWeave prepares for an IPO, Next stop: India, Aardvark will forecast the weather, Bowdoin’s big AI gift
26 billion: CoreWeave, which is expected to start trading next Friday on the Nasdaq stock exchange, updated its prospectus on Thursday to disclose that it’s targeting up to a $26 billion valuation from its initial public offering. The Nvidia-backed company is a New Jersey-based cloud computing company that specializes in offering infrastructure to AI developers.
85: OpenAI and Meta are seeking partnerships with India’s Reliance Industries to expand their AI presence in the subcontinent, according to a report in The Information published Saturday. OpenAI, in particular, has floated the idea of distributing ChatGPT through Reliance’s wireless carrier, Jio, and even cutting subscription prices up to 85% for Indian customers.
10: Researchers have developed an AI weather prediction system called “Aardvark Weather,” which operates thousands of times more efficiently than conventional forecasting methods. This breakthrough from the University of Cambridge, Alan Turing Institute, Microsoft Research, and ECMWF can run on a desktop computer instead of supercomputers and uses just 10% of the input data that existing systems need. Aardvark is currently a research model and not yet available for public use.
50 million: Billionaire Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix, announced a donation to his alma mater, Bowdoin College, to the tune of $50 million on Monday. It’s a large gift for the small liberal arts college in Maine — the largest since its founding in 1794, according to the New York Times. Hastings said he wants Bowdoin to use the money to become a leader in studying the risks of AI and ethical questions associated with the technology.
Security cameras representing surveillance.
OpenAI digs up a Chinese surveillance tool
On Friday, OpenAI announced that it had uncovered a Chinese AI surveillance tool. The tool, which OpenAI called Peer Review, was developed to gather real-time data on anti-Chinese posts on social media.
The program wasn’t built on OpenAI software, but rather on Meta’s open-source Llama model; but OpenAI discovered it because the developers used the company’s tools to “debug” code, which tripped its sensors.
OpenAI also found another project, nicknamed Sponsored Discontent, that used OpenAI tech to generate English-language social media posts that criticized Chinese dissidents. This group was also translating its messages into Spanish and distributing them across social media platforms targeting people in Latin America with messages critical of the United States. Lastly, OpenAI’s research team said it found a Cambodian “pig butchering” operation, a type of romance scam targeting vulnerable men and getting them to invest significant amounts of money in various schemes.
With the federal government instituting cuts on AI safety, law enforcement, and national security efforts, the onus for discovering such AI scams and operations will increasingly fall to private companies like OpenAI to self-regulate but also self-report what it finds.
Elon Musk wants to buy OpenAI
Elon Musk is leading a contingent of investors seeking to buy OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT.
The group, which also includes the firms Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, Atreides Management, Vy Capital, and 8VC, reportedly offered $97.4 billion to buy OpenAI. The plan: To buy the biggest name in AI and merge it with Musk’s own AI firm, xAI, which makes the chatbot Grok.
This bid comes as Musk is taking a prominent role in the Trump administration and could help dictate the direction of AI investment in the country. Sam Altman has also sought to get into Trump’s good graces, despite being a longtime Democratic donor, standing by Trump last month to announce Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure project.
Altman is also attempting to convert the nonprofit OpenAI to a for-profit company. In doing so, OpenAI is expected to soon close a historic funding round led by the Japanese investment house SoftBank, which could value OpenAI around $300 billion. Not only would that make OpenAI the most valuable privately held company in the world, but it’d also make Musk and Co.’s offer a serious lowball. However, Musk’s offer could complicate OpenAI’s attempts to establish a fair value for an untraditionally structured corporate entity.
Altman responded to the offer on X, which Musk owns. “No thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” he said. In response, Musk called Altman “Scam Altman” and has previously claimed the company does not have the investment it’s claiming for Stargate, a rare point of tension between Musk and Trump, who heralded the deal.
Silicon Valley is taking center stage in the Trump administration, but two of the loudest voices in Trump’s ear — at least on AI — are in an increasingly hostile spat.
OpenAI logo seen on screen with ChatGPT website displayed on mobile seen in this illustration.
OpenAI strikes a scientific partnership with US National Labs
OpenAI said that its models will be used to accelerate scientific research into disease prevention, cybersecurity, mathematics, and physics.
The agreement comes just days after OpenAI announced ChatGPT Gov, a version of the popular chatbot specifically designed for government personnel. The company is the face of the Project Stargate data center and AI infrastructure initiative heralded by President Donald Trump in January.Open AI CEO Sam Altman, left, and SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son attend a marketing event in Tokyo, Japan, on Feb. 3, 2025.
Hard Numbers: OpenAI monster funding round, Meta’s glasses sales, Teens fall for AI too, The Beatles win at the Grammys, Anthropic’s move to reduce jailbreaking
1 million: Meta said that it sold 1 million units of its AI-enabled Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2024. It’s the first time the company has revealed sales numbers for its glasses, which retail between $299-$379.
35: Even young people get tricked by AI. A new report from Common Sense Media, a nonprofit advocacy group, found that 35% of teenagers aged 13–18 self-report being deceived by fake content online, including AI-generated media.
8: The Beatles won their eighth competitive Grammy Award on Sunday for the AI-assisted song “Now and Then.” A production team used AI to turn an unreleased John Lennon demo from the late 1970s into a polished track.
95: Anthropic announced a new “constitutional classifiers” system that in a test was 95% effective in blocking users from eliciting harmful content from its Claude models — up from 14% without the classifiers. Similar to the “prompt shields” Microsoft introduced last year, this is the latest effort to reduce “jailbreaking,” where users coerce AI models into ignoring their own content rules.The ChatGPT logo, a keyboard, and robot hands are seen in this illustration.
OpenAI launches ChatGPT Gov
This product launch serves a dual purpose: OpenAI is both advancing its business strategy of becoming a government contractor, and it’s advancing its political strategy of becoming more enmeshed with Washington. In December, OpenAI reversed course on its longstanding prohibition of its tools being used for military purposes and partnered with the drone maker Anduril on defensive systems for the US military.
Announcing the government version of ChatGPT, OpenAI framed its mission as a global one. “We believe the US government’s adoption of artificial intelligence can boost efficiency and productivity and is crucial for maintaining and enhancing America’s global leadership in this technology,” the company wrote. Part of the sales strategy: convincing the government that it needs to use the latest large language models to stay ahead of its rivals, namely China.
A 3D-printed miniature model of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and TikTok logo are seen in this illustration.
Hard Numbers: Could Microsoft buy TikTok?, Get me the Operator, Meta and ByteDance spend on AI, ElevenLabs’ billions, Ready for “Humanity’s Last Exam”?
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%.What Stargate means for Donald Trump, OpenAI, and Silicon Valley
In his first week back in office, Donald Trump gathered tech leaders Tuesday to announce a half-trillion-dollar project called Stargate.
Flanked by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Trump announced a $500 billion private investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure that he said is “a resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential.” SoftBank’s Son called it the “beginning of a golden age” of AI in the United States.
While Trump heralded the announcement from the White House, Stargate is a privately funded joint venture. The new entity is backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, but also MGX, an Abu Dhabi-based investment firm. Microsoft and chipmakers Arm and Nvidia were named “technology partners” for Stargate. The purpose: to build massive data centers across America to spur the increased demand for AI.
The flashy price tag caught plenty of attention, but Stargate also has spurred controversies about Trump’s relationship with Silicon Valley and raised questions about the value of energy-guzzling data centers in the age of AI.
Elon Musk scoffs at Stargate
Within hours of the announcement, the Stargate announcement sparked criticism from Elon Musk, who has been a major funder of Trump’s presidential campaign and adviser to him in the White House. Musk, who runs xAI, a rival firm to Altman’s OpenAI, claimed on social media that “they don’t have the money.” He went on to say that he has it on “good authority” that SoftBank has less than $10 billion secured for the project.
Altman refuted this in a response to Musk. “Wrong, as you surely know,” he wrote on X. “This is great for the country. I realize what is great for the country isn’t always what’s optimal for your companies, but in your new role I hope you’ll mostly put America first.”
Musk’s critique may have been rooted in jealousy. Stargate appears to primarily benefit one company: OpenAI. “Even if the Stargate infrastructure is made available to other AI developers, OpenAI could potentially use its ‘operational responsibility’ to tilt the playing field in its favor,” said Jack Corrigan, a senior research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
Should Trump get credit for Stargate?
The public spat between Silicon Valley’s top CEOs-turned-lobbyists was only one controversy that emerged from this announcement. News outlets reported that the Stargate deal was in the works for months before Trump took office and that an Oracle data center complex in Abilene, Texas, highlighted during the event, was already under construction as of this past summer.
“This project was started well before the Trump administration,” said Scott Bade, a geo-technology analyst at Eurasia Group. “It was really more about branding it with the White House imprimatur than Trump playing a real role.” He said Trump is happy to take credit for Stargate even if there aren’t federal dollars supporting it.
How much energy will Stargate need?
There are open questions about how to power all of this new infrastructure. AI systems require enormous amounts of energy, and the Stargate project will require an estimated 15 gigawatts across sites, according to Morgan Stanley. It’s unclear what the energy mix will be, but the first site in Abilene will rely on natural gas.
While the Biden administration pushed for clean energy sources — even backing the use of nuclear energy — Trump has signaled his openness to relying on fossil fuels for data centers. Perhaps the most likely outcome is there’s no cop on the beat pushing data center developers and AI companies toward renewable and clean energy sources, pushing us closer toward an energy crisis at a time when Goldman Sachs estimates AI will drive data center power demand 160% by 2030.
“Building data centers for AI without considering their environmental impact to nearby communities could cause massive shortages of various finite resources, especially in Texas where the first Oracle data centers are being built,” said Gadjo Sevilla, senior analyst at eMarketer.
The DeepSeek question
Stargate is built on the assumption that to train and run powerful AI models developers need access to powerful chips running in high-tech data centers that can support them.
But the recent emergence of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup claiming it’s developed a top large language model without access to top Nvidia chips or extensive data center infrastructure, has raised questions about the importance of such a massive scale in developing and deploying AI.
If DeepSeek is telling the truth about its breakthrough, that could throw Stargate’s entire premise out the door and reset the AI market entirely. Suddenly, AI demand for data centers could fall through the floor.