Author: AI News First

Meta is forming a new team within its Reality Labs hardware division to build robots that can assist with physical tasks, Bloomberg reported. The team will be responsible for developing humanoid robotics hardware, potentially including hardware that can perform household chores. Meta’s new robotics group, which will be led by Marc Whitten, driverless car startup Cruise’s former CEO, will also create robotic software and AI, according to Bloomberg’s reporting. Whitten has also had stints at Amazon, Microsoft, and Sonos, according to his LinkedIn profile. To be clear, Meta’s plan isn’t to build a Meta-branded robot — at least not initially.…

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng is reportedly set to meet with China’s top politicians, including Chinese leader Xi Jinping, during a summit that Alibaba founder Jack Ma is also expected to attend. The summit, which could happen as soon as next week, may be intended as a signal by China’s Communist Party that it aims to adopt a more supportive stance toward domestic private-sector firms, according to Bloomberg. In 2020, Chinese authorities effectively prevented Alibaba from executing what would have been the biggest public offering in history. Liang, who founded DeepSeek in 2023 as a subsidiary of his…

OpenAI’s board of directors has “unanimously” rejected billionaire Elon Musk’s offer to buy the nonprofit that effectively governs OpenAI, the company said on Friday. In a statement shared via OpenAI’s press account on X, Bret Taylor, board chair, called Musk’s bid “an attempt to disrupt his competition.” “OpenAI is not for sale, and the board has unanimously rejected Mr. Musk’s latest attempt to disrupt his competition,” Taylor said. “Any potential reorganization of OpenAI will strengthen our nonprofit and its mission to ensure [artificial general intelligence] benefits all of humanity.” The New York Times reported that OpenAI also sent a letter…

New court filings in an AI copyright case against Meta add credence to earlier reports that the company “paused” discussions with book publishers on licensing deals to supply some of its generative AI models with training data. The filings are related to the case Kadrey v. Meta Platforms — one of many such cases winding through the U.S. court system that’s pitted AI companies against authors and other intellectual property holders. For the most part, the defendants in these cases — AI companies — have claimed that training on copyrighted content is “fair use.” The plaintiffs — copyright holders — have…

Perplexity has become the latest AI company to release an in-depth research tool, with a new feature announced Friday. Google unveiled a similar feature for its Gemini AI platform in December. Then OpenAI launched its own research agent earlier this month. All three companies even have given the feature the same name: Deep Research. The goal is to provide more in-depth answers with real citations for more professional use cases, compared to what you’d get from a consumer chatbot. In a blog post announcing Deep Research, Perplexity wrote that the feature “excels at a range of expert-level tasks—from finance and…

Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI plans to continue using 15 gas turbines to power its “Colossus” supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, according to an operating permit with the Shelby County Health Department for non-stop turbine use from June 2025 to June 2030. Why does it matter? The Commercial Appeal, a news outlet that obtained the documents, observes that environmental concerns have emerged as the 20-year-old turbines emit hazardous air pollutants (HAP), including formaldehyde, at levels exceeding the EPA’s 10-ton annual cap for a single source. (Per the story, the facility’s operating permit self-reports that the turbines each emit 11.51 tons of…

Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI employee, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on Nov. 26; on Friday, the city’s medical examiner ruled his death a suicide, countering suspicions by his family that had fueled widespread speculation online. Balaji made headlines in October when he accused OpenAI of illegally using copyrighted material to train its AI models. He shared his concerns publicly and provided information to The New York Times, which later named him as a key figure with “unique and relevant documents” in the newspaper’s lawsuit against OpenAI. His revelations came amid a growing number of publishers and…

Large language models (LLMs) landed on Europe’s digital sovereignty agenda with a bang last week, as news emerged of a new program to develop a series of “truly” open source LLMs covering all European Union languages. This includes the current 24 official EU languages, as well as languages for countries currently negotiating for entry to the EU market, such as Albania. Future-proofing is the name of the game. OpenEuroLLM is a collaboration between some 20 organizations, co-led by Jan Hajič, a computational linguist from the Charles University in Prague, and Peter Sarlin, CEO and co-founder of Finnish AI lab Silo…

Controversial facial recognition firm Clearview AI has been found to have extensive ties to far-right individuals and movements. Clearview AI has come under scrutiny for scraping billions of photos from across the internet and storing them in a database for powerful facial recognition services. Privacy activists criticise the practice as the people in those images never gave their consent. “Common law has never recognised a right to privacy for your face,” Clearview AI lawyer Tor Ekeland said recently. “It’s kind of a bizarre argument to make because [your face is the] most public thing out there.” The company’s facial recognition…

OpenAI is changing how it trains AI models to explicitly embrace “intellectual freedom … no matter how challenging or controversial a topic may be,” the company says in a new policy. As a result, ChatGPT will eventually be able to answer more questions, offer more perspectives, and reduce the number of topics the AI chatbot won’t talk about. The changes might be part of OpenAI’s effort to land in the good graces of the new Trump administration, but it also seems to be part of a broader shift in Silicon Valley and what’s considered “AI safety.” On Wednesday, OpenAI announced…