Tech News

Databricks is close to finalizing a $9.5 billion round at a $60 billion valuation, including a secondary sale for employees that could climb even higher before it closes, Reuters reports. Just 17 days ago, Reuters reported that the deal was at $8 billion and a $55 billion valuation. Thrive Capital is leading the deal with … Read more

XAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, may be embroiled in an escalating lawsuit with OpenAI. But that’s not stopping it from shipping new products — on a Friday night, no less. This evening, xAI revealed that it has begun to roll out an upgraded version of its flagship Grok 2 chatbot model to all users on … Read more

A former OpenAI employee, Suchir Balaji, was recently found dead in his San Francisco apartment, according to the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In October, the 26-year-old AI researcher raised concerns about OpenAI breaking copyright law when he was interviewed by The New York Times. “The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner … Read more

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever spoke on a range of topics at NeurIPS, the annual AI conference, before accepting an award for his contributions to the field. Sutskever gave his predictions for “superintelligent” AI, AI more capable than humans at many tasks, which he believes will be achieved at some point. Superintelligent AI will be “different, … Read more

Telegram has been under unprecedented pressure to clean up its platform this year, after its founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France and faces charges over the alleged harmful content shared on his messaging app. After first announcing a crackdown in September, Telegram now says it has removed 15.4 million groups and channels related to … Read more