Meta has invested $15 billion into data-labeling startup Scale AI and hired its co-founder, Alexandr Wang, as part of its bid to attract talent from rivals in a fiercely competitive market.

The deal values Scale at $29 billion, double its valuation last year. Scale said it would “substantially expand” its commercial relationship with Meta “to accelerate deployment of Scale’s data solutions,” without giving further details. Scale helps companies improve their artificial intelligence models by providing labeled training data.

Scale will distribute proceeds from Meta’s investment to shareholders, and Meta will own 49 percent of Scale’s equity following the transaction.

Read full article

Comments

The world’s leading artificial intelligence companies are stepping up efforts to deal with a growing problem of chatbots telling people what they want to hear.

OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic are all working on reining in sycophantic behavior by their generative AI products that offer over-flattering responses to users.

The issue, stemming from how the large language models are trained, has come into focus at a time when more and more people have adopted the chatbots not only at work as research assistants, but in their personal lives as therapists and social companions.

Read full article

Comments

Warner Bros. Discovery will split its business into two publicly traded companies, with one focused on its streaming and studios business and the other on its television network businesses, including CNN and Discovery.

The US media giant said the move would unlock value for shareholders as well as create opportunities for both businesses, breaking up a group created just three years ago from the merger of Warner Media and Discovery.

Warner Bros. Discovery last year revealed its intent to split its business in two, a plan first reported by the Financial Times in July last year. The company intends to complete the split by the middle of next year.

Read full article

Comments

One of the “godfathers” of artificial intelligence has attacked a multibillion-dollar race to develop the cutting-edge technology, saying the latest models are displaying dangerous characteristics such as lying to users.

Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian academic whose work has informed techniques used by top AI groups such as OpenAI and Google, said: “There’s unfortunately a very competitive race between the leading labs, which pushes them towards focusing on capability to make the AI more and more intelligent, but not necessarily put enough emphasis and investment on research on safety.”

The Turing Award winner issued his warning in an interview with the Financial Times, while launching a new non-profit called LawZero. He said the group would focus on building safer systems, vowing to “insulate our research from those commercial pressures.”

Read full article

Comments

Donald Trump has hit out at Apple’s plans to produce more iPhones in India as a way of avoiding US tariffs on Chinese-made goods, as he continues to push the tech group to manufacture its best-selling device in America.

Speaking in Qatar on the latest leg of his Middle East tour, the US president said he had “a little problem with Tim Cook yesterday” after the Apple chief executive confirmed last week that Indian factories would supply the “majority” of iPhones sold in the US in the coming months.

The Financial Times previously reported that Apple planned to source from India all of the more than 60 million iPhones sold annually in the US by the end of next year.

Read full article

Comments

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates ratcheted up his feud with Elon Musk, accusing the world’s richest man of “killing the world’s poorest children” through what he said were misguided cuts to US development assistance.

Gates, who is announcing a plan to accelerate his philanthropic giving over the next 20 years and close down the Gates Foundation altogether in 2045, said in an interview that the Tesla chief had acted through ignorance.

In February, Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) in effect shut down the US Agency for International Development, the main conduit for US aid, saying it was “time for it to die.”

Read full article

Comments

The US data center industry has warned that the Trump administration’s crackdown on renewable energy could slow its growth and undermine Washington’s goal to win the global artificial intelligence race.

Renewables have become a flashpoint since Donald Trump re-entered the White House, with his administration suspending clean energy developments on federal land, pausing federal loans, and last month canceling high-profile projects such as Equinor’s $5 billion Empire Wind site.

For tech companies struggling to secure reliable energy supplies to power and train AI, a clampdown on renewables could create power bottlenecks, drive up costs, and push operators towards dirtier energy, experts said.

Read full article

Comments

The Trump administration has excluded smartphones and other consumer electronics from its steep “reciprocal” tariffs in a significant boost for Big Tech as the White House battles to calm global markets after launching a multifront trade war.

According to a notice posted late on Friday night by Customs and Border Patrol, smartphones, along with routers, chipmaking equipment, wireless earphones and certain computers and laptops, would be exempt from reciprocal tariffs, which include the 125 percent levies Donald Trump has imposed on Chinese imports.

The carve-out is a big win for companies such as Apple, Nvidia and Microsoft, and follows a week of intense turbulence in US markets after Trump unleashed a trade war on “liberation day” on April 2. The announcement rattled global investors and triggered a stock market rout.

Read full article

Comments

Samsung has turned to Chinese technology groups to prop up its ailing semiconductor division, as it struggles to secure big US customers despite investing tens of billions of dollars in its American manufacturing facilities.

The South Korean electronics group revealed last month that the value of its exports to China jumped 54 percent between 2023 and 2024, as Chinese companies rush to secure stockpiles of advanced artificial intelligence chips in the face of increasingly restrictive US export controls.

In one previously unreported deal, Samsung last year sold more than three years’ supply of logic dies—a key component in manufacturing AI chips—to Kunlun, the semiconductor design subsidiary of Chinese tech group Baidu, according to people familiar with the matter.

Read full article

Comments