
Loading the player… While the AI fundraising machinekeeps breaking its own records, some founders are building in the other direction. Mirror founder Brynn Putnam just raised money forBoard, a startup focused on bringing people together through in-person games and social experiences.Cyberdeck creators are going viralcrafting whimsical DIY computers that literally encourage users to touch grass. Unlike theAI-free browser crowd, this doesn’t just feel like backlash, but also people genuinely gravitating toward things that feel a little more human. WatchEquitypodcast hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into the week’s headlines, from the “together tech” wave to what Anthropic’s confidential IPO filing means against the backdrop of Alphabet’s $80 billion AI raise, and whether the money is all flowing back to the big guys anyway. Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
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OpenAI has announced a major upgrade to ChatGPT's memory capabilities, allowing the chatbot to make better use of information from previous conversations. The update aims to improve how ChatGPT remembers user preferences, ongoing projects, and personal details over time. OpenAI said the changes are intended to address issues such as outdated memories while making the feature more effective for a growing user base. The new system is built on a redesigned architecture that the company says can manage memory more efficiently at scale.
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Blackstone-backed data center operator AirTrunk said on Thursday it would invest $30 billion in India by 2030, adding to a wave of commitments from technology and infrastructure groups seeking to expand computing capacity in the country. The Australian companysaidit would develop 5 gigawatts of new data center capacity in India, one of the largest commitments to the South Asian nation’s digital infrastructure sector. AirTrunk entered India earlier this year through the acquisition of Lumina CloudInfra. AirTrunk’s commitment underlines India’s growing appeal as a destination for AI infrastructure, as tech companies and investors seek new geographies to expand computing capacity. Data center capacity in the country isprojected to riseto as much as 8GW by 2030 from about 1.5GW today, according to research firm Bernstein. The Indian government has also taken steps to attract investment in AI infrastructure. Earlier this year, New Delhi offered foreign cloud providerstax exemptions through 2047on services sold overseas if those workloads are run from Indian data centers. AirTrunk has already begun laying the groundwork for its expansion in the country. Earlier this week, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavissaid in a post on Xthat the western Indian state had exchanged a letter of intent for land allotment at the Raigad Pen Growth Center, where AirTrunk is planning a 3GW data center involving an investment of about ₹2 trillion (around $21 billion). The company already has a development pipeline of about 600MW across Mumbai, Chennai and Hyderabad. AirTrunk did not respond to questions on whether the proposed Raigad project would account for most of the planned 5GW capacity, or whether it plans to make additional developments elsewhere in India. The announcement follows a meeting between AirTrunk CEO Robin Khuda and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whosaid in a post on Xthat the planned investment would help strengthen India’s position as a global hub for cloud computing and artificial intelligence. AirTrunk joins a growing list of companies investing in infrastructure in the country.Amazon,Google,Microsoft,OpenAI, andUberhave announced major investments in cloud and AI infrastructure, while Indian companiesReliance Industries,Adani Group, andTCShave laid out ambitious plans to expand data center capacity. However, data centers require vast amounts of electricity, water and land, and industry executives and analysts have pointed to resource issues as a potential bottleneck, particularly regarding power. Deloitteestimatesdata center build-outs in the Asia Pacific could require tens of terawatt-hours of additional electricity by the end of the decade. AirTrunk’s investment thesis is underpinned by government support, a large pool of technical talent, and access to renewable energy, Khuda said.

As AI deployment grows, companies must improve governance, monitor ROI, and prioritise business outcomes over usage costs.
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In its latest content experiment, Founders Fund swaps podcasts for Mafia, pitting Silicon Valley’s biggest names against one another.
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Three projects are expected to create about 8,200 employment opportunities across the state.
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Snowflake’s latest AI push brings agents, model training and governance together on a single enterprise platform.
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According to him, India is in a better place with the “Make in India” push “right on target”.
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![[Exclusive] Tech Mahindra is Working on World Models, Eyes ARC-AGI Milestone This Year](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fteenyfy-assets.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com%2Ftemp_exclusive_5de4a59518.jpg&w=1080&q=75)
Earlier this year, the company launched an 8-billion-parameter Hindi-first education LLM under the IndiaAI Mission.
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Google is rolling out its Gemini Avatar feature to a wider group of paid Gemini subscribers. It allows users to create an AI-powered digital version of themselves that can be used to generate videos and other content within Gemini. The feature is powered by Google's Gemini Omni, Google's new AI model that is claimed to be capable of generating anything from any input. First discovered during an APK teardown in March, Gemini Avatar is designed to replicate a user's appearance and voice.
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Mira Murati isn’t a natural creature of the conference stage. As the CTO of OpenAI, she was present but rarely the public face of the company. As CEO of her own company, Thinking Machines Lab, she has been even harder to find. So when she sat down with Bloomberg in San Francisco on Thursday — her first major media appearance in roughly 18 months — it was worth paying attention, even if she was careful not to say too much. The timing makes sense. Thinking Machines has spent the better part of a year and a half operating largely in the background: raising capital, hiring researchers, and shipping one product,Tinker, an API for fine-tuning open-source AI models. In the meantime, the companies competing for the same talent, customers, and headlines have only grown more omnipresent. OpenAI, where Murati spent six years as CTO, is constantly in the news cycle. Anthropic’s momentum is all that anyone can talk about right now. And xAI, Elon Musk’s AI venture, has been folded into SpaceX ahead of what is expected to be its massive public offering, generating its own gravitational pull on attention and investment. In that environment, staying heads down has diminishing returns; at some point, you have to make some noise just to remind the market you exist. Murati used the Bloomberg appearance to do exactly that and not much more. She previewed what Thinking Machines is calling “interaction models,” which she described as a fundamentally different kind of AI interface. Rather than the turn-based, prompt-and-response dynamic that defines most AI products today, she told interviewer Emily Chang, the company’s models are designed to process continuous streams of audio, text, and video in 200-millisecond intervals. The idea is that they can pick up on the texture of human communication — the interruptions, the mid-thought corrections, even pauses to think — in something closer to real time. But Murati was careful to frame it as a first step, not a finished product, and she declined to put a specific release date on anything. She also answered questions about the episode that first put her more squarely in the public eye: the chaotic week in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman and she became interim CEO. Inside OpenAI it came to be called “the blip.” Murati said she felt clear about her decisions in each moment — that protecting the mission and the team was the through-line that made the choices feel obvious even as the situation appeared to be falling apart from the outside. She said the company would have “imploded” if not for her involvement through that strange five-day stretch and its immediate aftermath. But she acknowledged that clarity of intent is not the same thing as clarity about consequences. In retrospect, she said, she would have pushed harder for more information, a better transition plan, and more transparency. What she did not say, at least not directly, is whether she thinks things turned out well. Asked whether she still trusts her former boss, she sidestepped the question, steering the conversation toward a larger concern that she returned to several times: the concentration of consequential decisions in too few hands — not just at OpenAI but across the industry. Her worry, she said, is less about the character of any individual leader (though she acknowledged that matters) and more about the absence of structural checks. Good people make bad calls. Well-intentioned organizations drift. Too much attention has been paid to virtue and too little to governance, she suggested. Chang also politely pressed her on the departures of several high-profile researchers from Thinking Machines in recent months , a subject Murati has largely avoided in public and that she downplayed on Thursday. First, she said, building a frontier AI lab from scratch compresses years of normal organizational volatility into months. She also acknowledged that compensation — the nine-figure packages that have become standard currency in the war for AI talent — captures people’s imaginations, but she suggested it isn’t usually the whole story. To some audience laughter, she said of her own competitive instincts, “When I wake up in the morning, I am not thinking about how to kill the competitor.” Naturally, Chang asked about what comes next for AI broadly, including for the humans who AI companies once said would be empowered by AI but who’ve more recently grown scared by talk of mass job displacement, not to mention a future where AI is used to create chemical weapons. Murati, who was born in Albania and speaks with a slight Eastern European accent, was measured in her response. She pushed back on the framing of inevitable dystopia or inevitable utopia, arguing that neither outcome is predetermined and that the period we’re in right now is the one that will determine which way things go. Still, she said — and not for the first time during the interview — that if humans take their hands off the wheel too soon, the future will look very different, and not better.

As self-improving AI models advance, Anthropic says governments and AI labs should develop verification systems that could support a slowdown or pause in frontier AI development.
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