Meta launches 'Arena,' a standalone AI-powered prediction market app using its Llama model to auto-generate questions and resolve bets in near real-time, entering a booming but legally contested industry alongside rivals like Kalshi, Polymarket, and DraftKings.
Two senior Google AI researchers are defecting to Anthropic, rattling investors as Alphabet faces a growing talent exodus with high-profile departures to rivals Anthropic and OpenAI, sending shares dipping amid fears Google is losing its competitive edge in the AI race.
Menlo Ventures raises a record $3 billion for AI-focused funds as its $1 billion bet on Anthropic skyrockets to nearly $14 billion in value, fueling the firm's ambitions to make even bigger investments in AI startups.
Groq Inc. secures a massive $650 million funding round led by Disruptive and Infinitum to aggressively expand its AI data centers and cement its position as a major competitor in the rapidly growing AI infrastructure market.
OpenAI's enterprise AI sales head Barret Zoph is departing after just five months, dealing a blow to the company's critical revenue push ahead of its planned IPO — his return in January had already followed a controversial exit from a rival AI startup over alleged misconduct.
AI pioneer Yann LeCun declares Elon Musk's xAI a 'failure' and warns OpenAI and Anthropic are heading toward a 'big bubble explosion' as AI service costs far outpace user payments, while his own $3.5 billion startup bets on 'world models' as the future of AI.
DeepSeek closes its first funding round at a $50 billion valuation, cementing its status as China's most valuable AI-only company, while founder Liang Wenfeng demands investors sign a strict no-poaching agreement to protect its talent from rivals like Xiaomi and Tencent.
Microsoft is overhauling Copilot's pricing to a usage-based model amid soaring costs from power users, while simultaneously exploring a fine-tuned, Azure-hosted version of DeepSeek V4 as a cheaper AI alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic, with a decision expected within weeks.
Enterprise AI costs are spiraling out of control as token bills from frontier models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini blow past budgets, forcing companies to adopt smarter model routing and hybrid compute strategies while vendors like Databricks race to offer cost-control solutions.
Atom Computing secures $100 million in Series C funding led by Third Point Ventures, cementing its position as one of only nine U.S. government-backed quantum computing startups and signaling surging investor confidence in the quantum computing sector.