Author: Paul

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Sam Altman says OpenAI plans to release o3 and o4-mini “after all” and GPT-5 “in a few months”, citing challenges in “smoothly integrating everything”  —  After effectively cancelling the consumer release of its o3 reasoning model, OpenAI now says that it plans …

Reuters: China places some rare earth elements under export restrictions as part of its response to Trump’s tariffs and imposes a 34% retaliatory tariff on US goods  —  China placed some rare earth elements under export restrictions on Friday as part of its sweeping response to President Donald Trump’s …

Kalley Huang / The Information: Sources: Meta aims to release Llama 4 later this month after pushing back its release date at least twice due to underperformance in reasoning and math tasks  —  Last spring, Meta Platforms was on a tear.  It had just released Llama 3, a new generation of its large language model…

Wall Street Journal: Chainalysis estimates North Korean hackers stole over $6B in crypto over the past decade and accounted for ~60% of industry-wide theft losses in 2024  —  More than $6 billion from heists highlights the sophistication of cyber operations funneling cash to Kim Jong Un’s nuclear program

Foreign Affairs: Big Tech risks losing access to Europe by embracing Trump, pushing Europe to build its own companies and platforms and letting Chinese companies expand access  —  How Silicon Valley Got Entangled in Geopolitics—and Lost  —  Technology companies such as Alphabet, Meta, and OpenAI need to wake up to an unpleasant reality.

Pew Research Center: Survey: 35% of US adults say AI will have a negative impact in the US over the next 20 years, while 56% of AI experts say AI will have a positive impact  —  The public and experts are far apart in their enthusiasm and predictions for AI.  But they share similar views…

Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch: Google hasn’t released safety reports for its latest models, like Gemini 2.5 Pro and 2.0 Flash, raising concerns that it is prioritizing speed over transparency  —  More than two years after Google was caught flat-footed by the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the company has dramatically picked up the pace.

Moneycontrol: Nasscom-Zinnov: Indian tech startup funding surged 23% YoY to $7.4B in 2024, with the number of deals up 27% YoY and newly founded startups more than doubling  —  DeepTech startup funding increased by 78%, reaching $1.6 billion, while deal volume surged by 24%.  —  Representative image.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Midjourney begins rolling out V7, its first new AI image model in nearly a year with a “totally different architecture”, a week after OpenAI’s new image tool  —  Midjourney, one of the earliest AI image-generating services on the web, has released its first new AI image model in nearly a year.

Katie Roof / Bloomberg: Redpanda, which offers companies AI-powered data analytics tools, raised a $100M Series D led by GV, with participation from Lightspeed, at a $1B valuation  —  Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated in the deal, which Redpanda announced Thursday.  The funding doubles the startup’s valuation …