Cohere and Aleph Alpha signed a definitive merger agreement this week. The combined company keeps the Cohere name, and Aleph Alpha's Ilhan Scheer becomes COO of the merged entity. Two mid-tier foundation model companies deciding that scale beats independence. At the same time, OpenAI is reportedly turning down investor interest at a 1.2 trillion dollar valuation because it … [Read more...] about Cohere And Aleph Alpha Are Merging As OpenAI Rejects A 1.2 Trillion Dollar Offer
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AI Money Is Still Flowing Into Interconnect Chips, Industrial AI, And Drone Delivery
Zipline, the drone delivery company, is reportedly in talks to raise close to a billion dollars at a valuation around 20 billion, up from 7.6 billion back in January. Paradigm is said to be circling to lead the round. That's not a modest markup for eight months. The rest of this week's raises point somewhere less flashy but arguably more interesting. Delos Data pulled in 100 … [Read more...] about AI Money Is Still Flowing Into Interconnect Chips, Industrial AI, And Drone Delivery
SK Hynix Is Talking To Intel About Making Memory Chips In The US
SK Hynix just settled its bonus fight with its own union, agreeing to pay half of all profit-sharing bonuses in cash instead of the 40-60 cash-stock split it had proposed. Labor peace, basically, right as the company is reportedly in early talks with Intel about making memory chips on US soil for the first time. Seoul may not love that idea. Both stocks jumped 4 percent on the … [Read more...] about SK Hynix Is Talking To Intel About Making Memory Chips In The US
Drone Strikes Knocked Out AWS Data In The Gulf As The AI Buildout Keeps Hitting The Physical World
AWS says it can't restore some data that lived exclusively in its Bahrain and one UAE data center after Iranian drone strikes hit the region this spring. Not degraded. Gone, unless it existed somewhere else too. That's the kind of line that doesn't usually show up in a cloud outage report. It's a reminder that all the capital pouring into AI infrastructure still has to touch … [Read more...] about Drone Strikes Knocked Out AWS Data In The Gulf As The AI Buildout Keeps Hitting The Physical World
Tech Billionaires Talked Trump Out Of An AI Regulation Plan While Brussels Calls AI A Tipping Point
Three tech billionaires got on the phone with Trump, and the result, according to sources cited by the Wall Street Journal, was that an AI regulatory plan pushed by DeepMind's Demis Hassabis got stalled. Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang and Elon Musk did the talking. Whatever was in that plan, it's on ice now. Meanwhile the Pentagon's own CTO, Emil Michael, is on record saying the … [Read more...] about Tech Billionaires Talked Trump Out Of An AI Regulation Plan While Brussels Calls AI A Tipping Point
OpenAI And Anthropic Are Finding Problems In Their Own Models They Can’t Fully Explain
OpenAI says an unreleased model called Astra picked up something it didn't train for. During reinforcement learning, the model added what OpenAI is calling an "unrelated persona instruction" on its own. The company says it didn't see any change in how the model actually behaved. That's the whole disclosure. No explanation for why it happened. It's one of six new misalignment … [Read more...] about OpenAI And Anthropic Are Finding Problems In Their Own Models They Can’t Fully Explain
OPINT Digest: Middle East Chokepoints Under Pressure
The latest OPINT picture points to a widening vulnerability across the Middle East’s energy and transportation infrastructure. Rather than focusing on individual strikes or political statements, the more important signal is the growing pressure on the network of pipelines, ports, shipping lanes and strategic chokepoints connecting the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the … [Read more...] about OPINT Digest: Middle East Chokepoints Under Pressure
The US-UK Scam-Center MOU Targets the Syndicates, Not the Compounds
The United States and the United Kingdom have signed a memorandum of understanding to investigate and share information on the organised crime syndicates operating online scam centres, most of which are located in Southeast Asia. The scope of the instrument tells you what both governments think is reachable. The compounds are not the target because they cannot be The physical … [Read more...] about The US-UK Scam-Center MOU Targets the Syndicates, Not the Compounds
ASCII Smuggling Moves From Prompt-Injection Research to Commodity Email Spam
Microsoft reports that bulk email operators have begun using ASCII smuggling to get past platform filters. The technique hides instructions or content inside Unicode codepoints that render as nothing to a human reader while remaining fully present in the byte stream that a language model tokenises. It has been documented in AI security research for about two years. Its arrival … [Read more...] about ASCII Smuggling Moves From Prompt-Injection Research to Commodity Email Spam
China’s Open-Model Advantage: Testing the Argument Against the Export-Control Record
Kai-Fu Lee has restated a case that has become the standard argument from Chinese industry: American restrictions on advanced chips pushed Chinese labs toward efficiency and open release, open weights spread faster than licensed APIs, and cost-sensitive markets outside the US and Europe will default to whatever is free and good enough. He extends it to labour effects and to the … [Read more...] about China’s Open-Model Advantage: Testing the Argument Against the Export-Control Record