From the archive
Follow the latest AI news and artificial intelligence developments across models, agents, robotics, research and the wider industry. Explore new AI tools, advances in computing, business moves, safety and policy, with clear reporting and useful sources. Read the stories, catch up with News in Brief and join the conversation.
Lead story
Veir has raised $110 million to take its superconducting power-delivery systems towards commercial use in AI data centres, bringing its total funding to $225 million. The company says it has demonstrated a 3-megawatt system and is preparing initial commercial projects, tackling the less glamorous question of how to…
Read the report & discussion ↗Watch Desk
AI chip interconnect startup Eliyan has told some investors it received a takeover bid, The Information reports, while Arm held early talks about a possible purchase but made no offer. The report puts a potential deal in the middle of a useful question for the AI hardware race:…
Anthropic Watch
Anthropic has added a rule against sustained, needless abusive or cruel behaviour towards Claude, Gizmodo reports. The policy is due to take effect on 12 November, but the company has not clearly defined where abuse begins.
Watch Desk
Open-weight models have given developers more freedom to run and adapt AI systems, but access to weights is not the same as access to training data, unrestricted terms or frontier-scale computing. A new overview traces how Llama, Mistral and DeepSeek helped broaden the field, while leaving important advantages…
OpenAI Watch
The Information says OpenAI’s annualised revenue is closer to $50bn than the $70bn figure it and others reported last week. The correction puts a sharp spotlight on how much can hinge on turning one month’s revenue into a headline-grabbing yearly run rate.
OpenAI Watch
OpenAI is making the case that advertising can fund ChatGPT for people who do not pay, while proposing to match ads to what users are asking. That puts the company’s promises about privacy and trust directly alongside a fast-growing advertising business.
Anthropic Watch
Anthropic is setting up a programme to brief presidential candidates from both parties on AI policy ahead of the 2028 election, while building an in-house team to steer the company’s political work. It is a notable expansion of how a frontier AI company plans to engage with the…
OpenAI Watch
USA Today Co and several newspapers it owns have sued OpenAI in Manhattan federal court, alleging their copyrighted content was used to train its large language models. The case puts another major news publisher’s challenge to AI training practices before a judge, though the allegations are not findings…
Watch Desk
A ThoughtWorks survey of 3,200 CIOs finds that 88% believe AI adoption in their organisations is moving faster than governance can adapt. The sharper concern is the gap between who makes AI decisions and who is held accountable when things go wrong.
OpenAI Watch
AT&T’s LegalEdge team is partnering with OpenAI to develop AI-enabled legal workflows, according to Artificial Lawyer. The work aims to make AT&T’s institutional knowledge more accessible across the business, while keeping legal judgement with its lawyers.
SoftBank Watch
SoftBank, Grab and Sarawak state-owned energy company PETROS have signed an agreement to explore an AI and digital infrastructure platform in Sarawak, Malaysia. The announcement is a partnership to develop a roadmap, not a commitment to build a data centre or a guarantee that a project will proceed.
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft’s September Copilot Studio update brings apps, workflows and agents into one building environment, while adding new ways to control and evaluate agents. For teams putting AI into business processes, the notable shift is from assembling the parts to managing more of the build and readiness checks in…
Hugging Face Watch
A Hugging Face community author says its ML Intern agent helped turn a series of detailed prompts into six public models, including a 0.8B image-prompt rewriter that runs on a CPU and specialist image tools. The examples show what a developer can build with the agent, and what…
Watch Desk
MIT professor Sasha Rakhlin argues that universities should rethink how they train and credit researchers as AI takes on more academic work. His proposals range from teaching students to audit AI-generated results to building shared research infrastructure that records failures as well as successes.
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft president Brad Smith says governments should prepare for AI-related job losses and require stronger safety measures for advanced systems. His proposals range from support for workers to independent testing and an emergency switch-off mechanism, making this a substantial intervention in the debate over who should set the…
Watch Desk
IBM has integrated its Spyre inference accelerator into PyTorch through a new library, torch-spyre. The company says the implementation delivers up to 1.7× faster prefill and 2.4× faster decoding on its Granite 3.3 8B model.
NVIDIA Watch
Nvidia says it will put $1bn towards US scientific research over the next five years, including work involving AI in quantum computing, healthcare and energy security. The pledge gives the Genesis Mission a major new industry commitment, though the practical details of how the money will be spent…
Watch Desk
Magnific has launched Magnific One, an image-generation system that adds creative direction and reusable brand checks to an underlying image model. For professional teams, the practical pitch is less prompt wrangling and a better chance of keeping a shared visual identity intact.
World Labs Watch
World Labs, the spatial-intelligence company founded by Fei-Fei Li, has signed a definitive agreement to join AMD in a deal valued at about $8.2bn. The transaction would bring a company building AI models of the three-dimensional world into AMD, a major computing and semiconductor business.
