Latest AI News
Chiratae Ventures Launches Sonic DeepTech Cohort, Commits up to $10 Mn
This initiative provides startups in deeptech sectors with access to NVIDIA Inception resources.
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Indian IT's Biggest AI Partners are Its Newest Enterprise Threats
Anthropic and OpenAI are pushing deeper into enterprise services, but their continued reliance on Indian IT firms like Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services underscores a deeper paradox.
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Indian Personalities Outside Professional Chess Who are Passionate About the Game
As the AIM Chess League brings India's tech sector into competitive chess, here are nine influential non-professionals who already swear by the 64 squares.
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Hexaware Q1 Revenue Rises 12.6% on AI-Led Deal Wins; Margin Slips 133 bps
The Mumbai-based company posted revenue of ₹3,613 crore for the quarter ended March 31, while net profit rose 7.5% year-on-year to ₹351.6 crore.
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Google Brings Reddit & Forum Advice Into AI Search Results
The update marks a significant shift in how Google’s AI Overviews surface real-world perspectives alongside traditional web results.
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Skyroot Aerospace Becomes Unicorn With $60 Mn Funding Ahead of Vikram-1 Launch
The Hyderabad-based company said the fresh capital will be used to scale manufacturing and establish a higher launch cadence for Vikram-1 missions.
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Is xAI a neocloud now?
On Wednesday, xAI and Anthropic announceda surprise partnershipthat has the Claude-maker buying out “all of the compute capacity at [xAI’s] Colossus 1 data center,” roughly 300MW that allowed Anthropic to immediately raise its usage limits. It’s a huge deal for xAI, likely worth billions of dollars. More importantly, it immediately monetizedone of the company’s most impressive accomplishments, turning xAI from a consumer to a provider of compute. It’s tempting to see the arrangement as a shot at OpenAI amid the ongoing lawsuit. But Musk’s explanation on X was that xAI had alreadymoved training to a newer data center, Colossus 2, and xAI simply didn’t need them both. In the short term, there’s an obvious logic at work. xAI’s existing products are mostly focused on Grok, which has seenplummeting usagesince the image generation debacles earlier this year. If xAI’s data center buildout is that much more than what Grok needs to operate, partnering with Anthropic adds a lot of green to the balance sheet. This is especially useful as the company, now combined with SpaceX, speeds toward an IPO. More broadly, having Anthropic lined up as a customer makes it easier to believe that SpaceX’s orbital data center playmight actually work. But beyond the short-term benefit, the Anthropic partnership sends an unusual message about where Elon Musk’s priorities really lie. It suggests the company’s real business may be more about building data centers than training AI models. It’s rare to see a major tech company treat compute resources this way when companies like Google and Meta, who are also training models, are building more data centers. It’s an easy point to miss, because so many of these companies are working as enterprise AI vendors, online services, and cloud providers all at once. But when forced to make a choice between selling more available compute to customers and preserving some to build their own tools, they reliably choose door No. 2. Just last month, Sundar Pichai admitted on a call that Google Cloud revenue was lower than it could have been because the company was “capacity constrained” — and when given the choice of renting out their GPUs or using them to develop AI products, Google chose the AI products. Facebook has faced a more extreme version of the same constraint, spinning up an entirely new cloud apparatus just to ensure they would have enough GPU power to chase Mark Zuckerberg’s AI ambition. As he put it when announcing Meta Compute in January, “How we engineer, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage.” The key word there is “strategic.” Both Zuckerberg and Pichai are looking toward a future where AI is powering the most popular and lucrative systems in the world. Computing power isn’t just a way to satisfy today’s inference demand, but to build tomorrow’s products — and running short on compute means missing out on that chance. By focusing on data centers (earthbound and otherwise), xAI is positioning itself more like a neocloud business: buying GPUs from Nvidia and renting them out to model developers like Anthropic. It’s a far more difficult business, squeezed by both chip suppliers and the shifting cycles of demand. The valuations for most active neoclouds reflect that reality: xAI wasvalued at $230 billionin its January funding round; CoreWeave, which oversees a comparable quantity of computing power, is worthless than a third of that. Musk’s version of a neocloud is more ambitious, as you might expect. Some of the data centers might be in space — at least by 2035, if things go according to plan. xAI will be making its own chipsat the Terafab, which will take away some but not all of Nvidia’s pricing power. But none of it changes the basic economics of the neocloud business. As recently asthe February all-hands, xAI had real ambitions in software. That was the presentation that unveiled the orbital data center project, but it also teased significant ambitions in coding (since bolstered bythe Cursor partnership) and interesting ideas like leveraging computer use into full-scale digital twins (in the unfortunately named Macrohard project). These are the kind of long-horizon projects that need committed computing resources to succeed. As long as xAI is selling large quantities of compute to its competitors, it’s hard to think such new ambitions have much of a future.
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Snap says its $400M deal with Perplexity ‘amicably ended’
Snap no longer has a deal with Perplexity, the company revealed on Wednesday as part of itsquarterly earnings report. The deal,announcedlast November, would have seen Perplexity’s AI search engine integrated directly into Snapchat. Perplexity was set to pay Snap $400 million in cash and equity over one year as part of the deal. Snap said that the companies “amicably ended the relationship in Q1″ and that its sales guidance “assumes no contribution from Perplexity.” When Snap announced the deal as part of its third-quarter earnings last year, it said it expected revenue from the partnership to begin contributing to its financials in 2026. The deal would have seen Perplexity integrated into Snapchat’s “Chat” interface, allowing users to ask questions and receive conversational answers directly within the app. Although the integration wasbeing testedwith select users, Snapsaid in Februarythat the companies had “yet to mutually agree on a path to a broader roll out.” Snap CEO Evan Spiegelsaid at the timeof the initial announcement that the deal reflected the company’s vision to use AI to enhance discovery on Snapchat, and that Snap was looking forward to “collaborating with more innovative partners in the future.” Perplexity did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. Snap revealed on Wednesday that Snapchat’s global daily active users (DAU) rose 5% year-over-year to 483 million, while monthly active users (MAU) also grew 5% to reach 965 million. The company attributed the growth to new features across the app, including Snap Map and its Lenses AR filters. “In Q1, we returned to growth in daily active users, accelerated revenue growth, expanded margins, and generated strong free cash flow,” Spiegel said in a press release. “We remain focused on disciplined execution as we invest in Specs and our long-term opportunity in intelligent eyewear and look forward to sharing more at AWE on June 16th.” Snap said in April that it was laying offroughly 16%of its global workforce, impacting around 1,000 full-time employees, citing advancements in AI for the cuts.
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Barry Diller trusts Sam Altman. But ‘trust is irrelevant’ as AGI nears, he says.
Billionaire media mogul Barry Diller doesn’t think OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is untrustworthy, despiterecent reporting to the contrary. Onstage at The Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” conference this week, Diller vouched for the AI exec, who has been accused by some former colleagues and board members of being manipulative and deceptive at times. Diller, who is friendly with Altman, was responding to a question about whether or not people should put their faith in Altman to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits humanity. In particular, he was asked about the theoretical form of AI known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which could one day outperform humans on any task. The media exec, a co-founder of Fox Broadcasting and chairman of IAC and Expedia Group, said that while he believes Altman is sincere in his pursuits, that’s not really the area of concern people should be focused on. Rather, it’s the unknown consequences that will result from AI. “One of the big issues with AI is it goes way beyond trust,” Diller said. “It may be that trust is irrelevant because the things that are happening are a surprise to the people who are making those things happen. And I’ve spent a lot of time with various people who’ve been in the creation mode of AI, and they have a sense of wonder themselves. So…it’s the great unknown. We don’t know. They don’t know,” he explained. “We have embarked on something that is going to change almost everything. It is not under-reported. Now, whether these huge investments are going to come through — I couldn’t care less. I’m not invested in it, but progress is going to be made,” Diller added. Still, the media mogul said he believes that most of the people leading the charge are good stewards, saying he believes that Altman is sincere and “a decent person with good values.” (Diller wouldn’t say which of the AI leaders he thinks is insincere, we should note.) “But the issue is not their stewardship. The issue is … it’s dealing truly with the unknown. They don’t know what can happen once you get AGI, and we’re close to it. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting closer and closer, quicker and quicker. And we must think about guardrails,” Diller noted. Plus, he warned, if humans don’t think about guardrails, then the alternative is that “another force, an AGI force, will do it themselves. And once that happens, once you unleash that, there’s no going back,” Diller said.
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DeepSeek could hit $45B valuation from its first investment round
DeepSeek is in talks to raise its first round of venture capital, and in just a few weeks, its potential valuation has soared from $20 billion to $45 billion, theFinancial TimesandBloombergreported. The Chinese AI labcame to prominence in early 2025after launching a large language model that trained on a fraction of the compute power and at a fraction of the cost of the big U.S. models like those from OpenAI and Anthropic. It has since keptreasonable pacewith the top models in the world in areas like reasoning and coding while remaining open weight (versions are freely available onHugging Face). Founded by Chinese hedge fund billionaire Liang Wenfeng, who controls nearly 90% of the company, the lab has not previously sought out investors, the FT reports. However, faced with competitors poaching DeepSeek’s researchers, Liang opted to raise funds in order to offer employees shares in the company, sources tell the FT. The round is said to be led by the state investment vehicle China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, Bloomberg reports. China is seeking to fund homegrown AI technology to sidestep the difficulty of obtaining U.S. technology, particularly chips. DeepSeek has been optimized to run on chips made by China’s hardware giant Huawei Technologies. That combo is considered a powerful duo for the nation to develop its own AI to rival the United States. The country’s cloud giants Tencent and Alibaba are also reportedly in talks to participate, per Bloomberg. DeepSeek could not be immediately reached for comment.
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SpaceX may spend up to $119B on ‘Terafab’ chip factory in Texas
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space company that also houses his AI company, xAI, is considering spending $55 billion, at least initially, to build a semiconductor factory in Grimes County, Texas, according to aproposalon the county website. The company estimates it may spend a total of $119 billion on the project, which would be a “multi-phase, next-generation, vertically integrated semiconductor manufacturing and advanced computing fabrication facility,” according to the filing. Musk has previouslyoutlinedplans for the project, dubbed “Terafab,” that will also see Tesla contributing resources. The companies haveroped chipmaking giant Intel into the effort, aiming to develop chips for AI servers, satellites, SpaceX’s proposed data center in space, as well as autonomous Tesla vehicles and robots. The billionaire has said the manufacturing facility will, sometime in the future, manufacture enough chips to provide 1 terawatt of power per year, arguing that semiconductor manufacturers aren’t making chips quickly enough for his companies’ artificial intelligence and robotics needs. “We either build the Terafab or we don’t have the chips, and we need the chips, so we build the Terafab,” he wrote. However, Muskwrotein a tweet on Tuesday that Grimes County, Texas, was only one of several locations under consideration for the factory. The filing comes as Musk has doubled down on ensuring xAI has enough computing power available to train and power its Grok series of AI models. He’s also intent on capitalizing on the demand for AI compute by building data centers in space, which he has cited as a big reason for combining xAI with SpaceX. The combined entity is said to have a valuation of $1.25 trillion and isexpectedto go public in June.
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How Elon Musk left OpenAI, according to Greg Brockman
In late August 2017, key figures at OpenAI (then a small nonprofit research lab) gathered to discuss how they would create a for-profit to commercialize its technology and raise the funds needed to realize AGI. Elon Musk was demanding full control of the company and had just given each of his co-founders a Tesla Model 3. CTO Greg Brockman said he saw that as way of buttering them up at a time when Musk and Sam Altman were vying to win support for their respective visions of the company’s future. OpenAI’s head of research, Ilya Sutskever, had commissioned a painting of a Tesla to give Musk during the meeting as a friendly gesture. The conversation didn’t follow that mood: When Musk was told the others would not accede to his demand for control of the company, Brockman said he got angry and upset. He sat for several minutes thinking quietly. Then, in Brockman’s telling, Musk said, “I decline.” The SpaceX and Tesla founder “stood up and stormed around the table…I thought he was going to hit me. He grabbed the painting and started to storm out of the room. And then he turned around and said, ‘When will you be departing OpenAI?’” Brockman and Sutskever didn’t leave or commit to Musk’s vision. Musk stopped his regular donations to the company’s operating budget, and within six months, he would leave the board, though he paid for office space the company shared with Neuralink until 2020. As today’s legal battle over the future of OpenAI proceeds, scrutiny has settled on a key period in 2017 when the organization’s original co-founders disagreed about who would control its future, eventually bringing us Musk’s lawsuit against his co-founders. We have yet to hear from Sam Altman, but OpenAI president Greg Brockman testified for two days, often referencing a personal journal that offers a rare insight into what it’s like to be a 30-year-old tech executive in a pitched battle with Elon Musk. “It’s very painful,” Brockman said of the publicity around the journal, which he called “deeply personal writings that were never meant for the world to see. [But] there’s nothing in there I’m ashamed of.” Cutthroat negotiations between startup founders are rarely shared so publicly, especially when a company becomes as world-changing as OpenAI. We saw a recent taste of this rancor when OpenAI’s lawyers shared a text message Musk sent to Brockman two days before the trial began: “By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be.” The jury won’t see that note, but Musk’s lawyers have done their best to realize its spirit. They are trying to show the court that Altman and Brockman “stole a charity,” while OpenAI’s legal team tries to show that Musk had the exact same plan in mind. The inciting incident for all of this was when an OpenAI model defeated the top human player in the video game DOTA II. Brockman said that convinced everyone in the organization that compute was the key resource to create powerful AI tools, but that fundraising purely as a nonprofit would be insufficient. That led to talks about a for-profit subsidiary, of which Musk wanted “unequivocal” control, at least at the start. The other founders proposed equal shares, and perhaps more equity commensurate with a cash investment. Another idea on the table was somehow connecting OpenAI to Tesla’s AI work. Shivon Zilis, an OpenAI advisor who acted as a go-between for Musk and the team there, said there were more than 20 variations on the plan. But when the other founders wouldn’t give Musk control, their partnership unraveled. “It should not be the case that there exists one person with full and absolute control over OpenAI,” Brockman testified. Brockman and Sutskever discussed a plan to kick Elon off OpenAI’s board in order to move forward, resulting in November 2017 journal entries that Musk’s lawyers have focused on. ‘[C]an’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight,” Brockman wrote. “[I’m] just thinking about the office and we’re in the office. and his story will correctly be that we weren’t honest with him in the end about still wanting to do the for profit just without him….btw another realization from this is that it’d be wrong to steal the non-profit from him. to convert to a b-corp without him. that’d be pretty morally bankrupt. and he’s really not an idiot.” That “steal the non-profit” line may seem damning, but the context, according to Brockman, was whether or not to try and toss Musk off the board. They ultimately did not do that. Musk left the board voluntarily in February 2018, concluding that “OpenAI is on a path of certain failure,” saying he planned to focus more on AI at Tesla. Brockman described his reflections as an effort to determine whether he would be satisfied with his work life. “This is the only chance we have to get out from Elon,” he wrote during the talks. “Is he the ‘glorious leader’ that I would pick? We truly have a chance to make this happen. Financially what will take me to $1B?” That last reflection was also seized on by Musk’s lawyers as a sign that Brockman was thinking more about his personal wealth than the nonprofit’s mission. Brockman said his current stake in the company is worth almost $30 billion, which became an opportunity for Steve Molo, the main trial attorney for Musk, to berate him. “Why you didn’t take the $29 billion more than the billion you said you would be good with, and donate that to the charity?” Molo demanded.“Look at what we accomplished,” Brockman replied. “The OpenAI nonprofit has over $150 billion of OpenAI equity value. That is something we have built through hard work, blood, sweat, and tears, all this time since Elon has left.” Molo also dwelt on emails from where Brockman said he will donate $100,000 to OpenAI, something he never did. Ironically, Brockman might be best known to the public for making the largest donation of the 2025 political cycle, $25 million given to MAGA Inc., a SuperPAC supporting President Donald Trump, but that didn’t come up in the trial. Molo did mock Brockman’s description of the charged meeting around his control of the company as Musk being “mean” to Brockman, and suggested that Brockman didn’t understand the governance issues the way Musk, a serial founder, did. Brockman, though, said Musk didn’t understand AI. “He did not and does not know AI,” he testified, describing Musk dismissing an early demonstration of the software that would become ChatGPT. “We did not think he was going to spend the time required to actually get good at it.” “The fact that Elon saw this very early version of the research, that really set all these things in motion, [and] didn’t recognize that spark — that was exactly the kind of thing that was critical to avoid happening in this environment,” Brockman said. In 2019, OpenAI would create a for-profit and use it to raise $1 billion from Microsoft. The company would raise a further $13 billion from the software giant over the next four years, fueling its rise as the leading AI frontier lab. It also fueled the net worth of the company’s executives and employees, as well as the assets held by OpenAI the nonprofit. And ultimately, those deals fueled Musk’s suspicions that Altman and Brockman got one over on him, leading him to file his suit in 2024. The trial is expected to continue through next week.
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