Isomorphic Labs, a spinout of Google’s DeepMind AI development arm, has raised $600 million in its initial funding round outside of the company.
Category: 8 April 2025
MICROSOFT HALTS DATA CENTER PROJECTS IN FOUR COUNTRIES
Microsoft has paused or scrapped data center construction projects in Australia, Indonesia, the U.K., and the U.S. states of Illinois, North Dakota, and Wisconsin.
OPENAI IS NOW AMONG THE WORLD’S MOST VALUABLE COMPANIES
OpenAI has closed a $40-billion funding round, the most money ever raised in one round by a tech company.
PRINCETON LATEST SCHOOL TO SEE FUNDING STRIPPED FOR SUPPORTING FREE-SPEECH AND ALLOWING ANTI-GENOCIDE PROTESTS
New Jersey’s Princeton was informed by the Trump administration last week that the federal government will suspend funding for research grants during a probe into the school’s handling of alleged antisemitism on campus.
DEEPSEEK RECASTS CHINA’S AI INDUSTRY
Since announcing its open-source, world-class, cheap AI in January, DeepSeek has seen its technology restructure China’s AI industry.
NEW TEST SHOWS WHETHER AN AI IS LIKELY TO CAUSE “CATASTROPHIC HARM”
OpenAI’s engineers have assembled a suite of 75 very hard tests to determine whether an AI is capable of “autonomous machine learning engineering”—in other words, able to rewrite or otherwise modify its own code.
HARVARD COULD LOSE $9 BILLION IN FEDERAL FUNDING IF IT DOESN’T BOW TO TRUMP
The Trump administration announced last week that it would review about $9 billion in federal grants for Harvard as it looks into the school’s approach to dealing with antisemitism on campus, which one professor said was more a “dominance test” than an actual attempt to defend Jewish students.
TODAY’S AI ARCHITECTURE CAN NEVER ACHIEVE AGI, MOST RESEARCHERS SAY
Generative AI, the architecture that has delivered today’s large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, can never be scaled up to create artificial general intelligence (AGI), an AI that matches or outperforms humans’ cognitive capabilities, according to 76 percent of the 475 AI scientists responding to a poll organized by Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
U.S. STRIKES ON HOUTHIS INEFFECTIVE AND EXPENSIVE
The U.S. last week continued its punishment campaign against Yemen over the Houthi defense of Gazans amid the Israeli genocide and one of the targets was a water management building and infrastructure in Hodeidah, the large port city, that cut off water to about 50,000 residents.
TECHNOCRACY BRIEFS: EV GO FU STUNS WASHINGTON POST, AND MORE EVIDENCE AI COPYRIGHT THEFT
Even before Donald Trump was elected, Biden mega-billion Inflation Reduction Act spending (supposedly) meant to spur green energy technology development and uptake was failing.