AI startup Manus said on Tuesday that it will “soon return to operating as an independent company,” implying it is close to finalizing the reversal of its acquisition by Meta Platforms. The Chinese government in April ordered the deal be unwound.

In a blog post, Manus said users need to back up ...

Anton Levy, the former co-president and chair of the global technology group at General Atlantic, has raised more than $1.1 billion for his inaugural fund, a sign that he has been able to compete with some of the biggest names in venture and growth equity during a challenging environment for ...

Nvidia is doubling down on its open-source efforts, pouring investment into an ambitious new in-house AI model that it hopes will drive demand for its hardware—but that could also compete with customers and partners.

Nvidia is aiming for the new model, the biggest of a family that it is calling Nemotron 4, to be on par in its performance with the best open-source AI models in the world, according to several people who work on Nemotron. The research paper detailing Nvidia’s last big model had 570 authors, and employees said Nemotron 4 would involve even more people. “Everyone just wants to be involved at this point,” one former employee said.

Meta Platforms said it plans to release an open-weight version of its most advanced Muse Spark 1.2 model soon. The Facebook owner also announced a new small-size open-source model called Muse Glimmer that can run on personal computers.

Meta’s move could provide customers with alternatives to ...

Caitlin Kalinowski, who previously led OpenAI’s robotics effort, has joined Anthropic as a member of technical staff working on research, according to her LinkedIn.

Kalinowski’s move is the latest sign of Anthropic’s interest in robotics. Anthropic last month released new research on using ...

If at first people don’t pay attention to what you say, say it again. That appears to be Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s philosophy. About two weeks after publishing a roughly 1,000-word opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal headlined “The AI Future Is for Everyone,” Zuckerberg published a 6,500 word version of the same piece on Meta.com on Monday. (Today’s essay carried a nearly-identifical headline, while the first half-dozen paragraphs were almost word for word what ran in the WSJ opinion piece.) Hint to Zuckerberg: Shorter is better.

Zuckerberg’s opus was part of a growing number of lengthy essays, published under the bylines of AI leaders, that discuss AI and society. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is a frequent contributor to the genre, with his most recent publication “Policy on the AI Exponential.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has his own blog, supplemented by weighty posts from his company like this one. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posts on X. For the most part, these essays are long and dry. In other words, they’re perfect for an AI chatbot to summarize. It makes you wonder if they’re meant to prove to consumers the value of AI!

Anthropic, Australia’s Macquarie Asset Management and the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC said Monday they were launching a new entity to develop, operate and lease AI data centers for Anthropic to meet demand for its Claude models.

The group will initially focus on U.S. data centers but ...

OpenAI bought about $7 billion in shares from employees in a recently closed tender, according to a person familiar with the deal. The buyback happened at the $852 billion post-money valuation reached in a March funding round. OpenAI used some of the $122 billion in funding from the round for ...

A group of private equity giants has signed a preliminary agreement with Nvidia to raise $500 billion to help finance AI infrastructure, Nvidia said on Monday. The firms are Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR. The partnerships haven’t yet been finalized, per an ...

Applied Compute, a year-old startup that helps companies run and customize open-source models with their own data, is discussing a new funding round that would value it at around $3 billion, more than double its valuation from a round announced four months ago, according to a person with knowledge of the funding.

The financing follows strong revenue growth in recent months. Applied Compute is currently generating around $50 million in annualized revenue, the person said, up nearly four times from what its CEO Yash Patil has said it was generating last November.

Enterprise software firm Monday.com reported a 22% lift in second quarter revenue, but projected a slowdown in third quarter revenue growth to between 16% and 17%, partly because of the impact of a big layoff it undertook last month. Monday shares fell 9%.

At the same time, Monday.com said it ...

Even before Stripe entered talks to buy startup OpenRouter for $10 billion, several tech companies were exploring or developing router technology, which helps customers use the most cost-effective AI models. And Stripe’s talks with OpenRouter, which my colleagues last week reported have entered the advanced stage, have set off a frenzy of interest in router startups —including from big software companies like Snowflake that have yet to get into the fray. 

That’s been the experience of Thibault Jaigu, CEO and co-founder of Requesty, a five-person UK startup whose software routes developers using AI to various models. “The race to optimize is crazy,” said Jaigu, who said at least 25 companies had approached Requesty in the past couple weeks wanting to talk, including about possible investments, acquisition or other partnerships. 

By optimize, Jaigu is referring to developers’ demand for tech that helps cut costs by switching to older models from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI for some tasks, or to cheaper open-source alternatives such as China’s Kimi. Need for this technology has risen as AI agents consume more tokens, the units of text or other data that are the basis for pricing many AI services, and as open-source technology has advanced. 

Intel is raising $15 billion in a public offering of its stock, taking advantage of the enormous improvement in investor sentiment it has enjoyed in the past year to raise money. Intel stock is up 175% over the past 12 months. Intel shares fell 4% Monday.

The iconic chip maker, which has ...

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for changes to U.S. policy to reduce the “friction” that American AI labs have to deal with in developing open-source models, compared to foreign counterparts, as a way of ensuring the U.S. leads in open-source AI. At the same time, Meta unveiled its ...

Microsoft is planning to significantly increase production of its internally designed next-generation AI chips next year in hopes of persuading big cloud customers like Anthropic to use them, according to two people with direct knowledge of the plans.

That’s despite slow uptake of the current generation of Microsoft-designed chips, known as the Maia 200. Microsoft plans to publicly unveil its new Maia 300 chip this fall, potentially as soon as next month, one of the people said. The cloud giant has been in talks with chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to secure manufacturing capacity for over 300,000 of the chips for delivery in 2027, the second person said—an order of magnitude above the tens of thousands of Maia 200 chips Microsoft has produced so far.

Sony Group and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. are planning to invest about 1 trillion yen ($6.3 billion) in a joint venture that will start mass producing next-generation image sensors in Japan as early as 2029, the Nikkei newspaper reported.

The new joint venture, expected to be ...

After last week’s earnings onslaught, things will likely quiet down this week. Aside from neoclouds CoreWeave and Nebius, no major tech earnings announcements are scheduled, which gives us a chance to assess what we learned in the past week. One big takeaway is that the enterprise software sector has bifurcated between those firms that are getting something out of AI and those that are not. 

It’s no secret Palantir is a winner—its revenue leapt 89% in the first half of this year. As we wrote, Palantir has succeeded in winning lots of business with AI agents and human consultants that help clients make AI work for them. Then there’s Shopify, whose software powers online storefronts for merchants. The company last week reported 34% revenue growth for the quarter, in line with the first quarter—but an improvement on last year’s growth rate, which in turn was faster than 2024’s. Shopify is benefiting from AI chatbots that are giving shoppers recommendations on what to buy, pulling in many cases from its catalog of merchant products. 

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Friday on X the company was pausing work on its upcoming Astra model to make sure the rollout was done safely “given its cyber capabilities.” The decision followed revelations that models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta had jumped their guardrails to breach other ...

Nvidia has agreed to invest $2 billion into Lancium, the power infrastructure developer behind the OpenAI and Oracle AI campus in Texas, and has agreed to commit another $1 billion as the developer secures additional planned power, The Information reported late Friday. The deal values Lancium ...

Microsoft came out of this summer’s earnings season looking like a prudent spender. Unlike rival cloud computing firms Amazon and Alphabet, which both burned cash thanks to their heavy AI investments, Microsoft not only generated $19.6 billion in free cash flow in the June quarter but forecast it will continue to generate cash for at least the next year. The result helped swing investment sentiment to the positive side, lifting the stock 29%.

What hasn’t received enough attention is how Microsoft has managed to stay cash flow positive. One longstanding reason is that Microsoft leases data center capacity from other companies including neocloud firms—such as CoreWeave—much more heavily than either Amazon or Google. That reduces its near-term capital expenditures but could give it less control over costs in the future.