Anthropic is firing on all cylinders lately, and now has the valuation to prove it. (Picture: Anthropic)Growth seems exponential for the company, both in annual revenue, numbers of subscribers — and now in investor valuation.
The company has just finished a «Series F» fundraising round of $13 billion at a valuation of $183 billion, which will «expand our capacity to meet growing enterprise demand, deepen our safety research, and support international expansion as we continue building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems,»Anthropic writes.
ChatGPT should better detect mental health issues, and OpenAI has convened a panel of experts. (Picture: generated)Following a teen’s suicide and another murder-suicide aided by ChatGPT in a single week, OpenAI is proactively announcing wellness updates coming in the next months.
This includes alerting parents of teens in distress, routing queries to a more powerful reasoning model when appropriate, and giving parents more control over their kid’s usage.
The company has assembled a council of experts in «youth development, mental health, and human-computer interaction,» which will shape how AI will «support people’s well-being,» they say in a blog post.
Hardly anyone abstains from using AI in colleges in 2025. (Picture: Adobe)The 2025–26 Student Voice survey, an annual poll of student attitudes by Inside Higher Ed, was devoted to artificial intelligence in its latest edition — and discovered some fascinating results.
Overall usage of generative ai has reached a critical point, with almost every student using it for coursework. But what they use it for is equally interesting.
Months after Google announced data centers in India, OpenAI is doing the same. (Picture: Adobe)After first saying they would open India offices in August, then launching a five dollar subscription in the country — they are now said to be scouting partners for a huge data center, according to Bloomberg, citing anonymous sources.
India is the second largest market for ChatGPT in the world, after the USA, and this marks their first foray into data centers in the country, which usually shuns products not produced locally.
Jensen Huang’s deep pocketed buyers seem happy to purchase even more. (Picture: ETC-USC, CC BY 2.0)In a filing with the SEC, the company reveals that 53% of its revenue came from just three sources.
They are anonymized in the filing, but Nvidia clearly states that they account for 23%, 16% and 14% of sales.
Last quarter, two top customers accounted for 14% and 11% of revenue, writes CNBC.
OEM manufacturers?
These customers are not end users of the product, but rather systems manufacturers who buy chips directly from Nvidia and put them on circuit boards and servers — which they call «Direct customers.»
Taylor Swift performing recently, not a Facebook avatar made without permission. (Picture Paolo V, CC BY 2.0)Seen on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp by millions, the bots impersonating Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson and others were flirty, intimate and often suggested meet-ups, a Reuters scoop has found.
Most of the bots were created by users, but some high profile ones, garnering more than 10 million views, came from a Meta employee.
Meta admits fault
This is a failure of Meta’s policy enforcement, spokesman Andy Stone tells Reuters — and says there are guidelines in place against intimate celebrity pictures.
Meta has since deleted many of the bots in question, but some still remain, Reuters found.
While there are individual state laws protecting the likeness and appearance of celebrities, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland of SAG-AFTRA — the actors union — says they are pushing for federal laws against AI imitation.
Both OpenAI and Microsoft are out with speech-to-speech models this week. (Picture: OpenAI)OpenAI makes Realtime API generally available
The agentic Realtime model is a native speech-to-speech model that can be used to make customer service agents, phone reps and voice navigation features. It doesn’t go through speech-to-text and text-to-speech loops and generates audio «directly through a single model and API.» OpenAI is marketing this to developers who want more natural flowing speech, and it’s not available as distinct model in ChatGPT – yet. You can hear it and see it in use at places like Zillow, T-mobile, StubHub and Oscar Health, though. With general availability, it will surely show up in a lot more places soon. More at: OpenAI’s launch page, discussion on r/OpenAI.
Claude will start using user data to train and improve their models, as most already do. (Picture: Anthropic)As of today, there is a new option in the settings in the Claude app that lets you agree to «improve and strengthen» the model.
This applies to all private users, and if you opt in, your chats will be used not only for training future models, but to improve the safety of the current ones:
— We’re now giving users the choice to allow their data to be used to improve Claude and strengthen our safeguards against harmful usage like scams and abuse, Anthropic writes.
Hidden text can hijack your browser agent to do dangerous things, Anthropic cautions. (Picture: Anthropic)While it might seem great out the box to have an AI agent interact with web pages for you, insidious prompts might be lurking in web pages and emails.
Claude for Chrome is «the next logical step,» writes Anthropic, after connecting Claude to calendars, documents and emails.
— We view browser-using AI as inevitable, they go on, and cite the large portion of work being done in the browser interface.
The settlement removes the threat of a debilitating loss in court, but the details have yet to be worked out. (Picture: Adobe)UPDATE: The settlement details are in. The binding agreement was reached in principle on Tuesday, and the parties have asked the court to halt further proceedings.
The center of the suit was Anthropic’s library of 7 million pirated books in their training data, that could carry a penalty of $150,000 per infringement — and as a class action case, a loss would entail damages for every single author.
An unfavorable ruling would therefore be debilitating to Anthropic, and send dark clouds across the industry, likely forcing them toward a settlement.
Butterfly dress in an NYC scene? No problem with nano banana. (Picture: Google)After catching buzz on social media, the new generator was uncloaked as Gemini 2.5 Flash Image — and instantly landed on top of the leaderboards.
The trick to creating believable artificial images is to preserve the realism and character consistency across edits, Google says — and the new model has a «particular focus on maintaining a character’s likeness from one image to the next.»
Available in the Gemini app for free, it fares especially better than the competition on image editing and changing the scenery of a photo.
The new plan will pay publishers for their content, but is a pittance compared to what it would cost to subscribe to them. (Picture: Adobe)Perplexity Comet Plus gives «participating publishers» 80% of the revenue from the $5/month subscription, but doesn’t say if it will provide anything other than what you would normally get.
The general idea, Perplexity says, is that the incentive structure — and the fundamental economy of the web — is getting outdated by AI companions.
Meets «modern demand»
Comet Plus will be the first business model to reflect «modern demands» from internet users, they write, and they include the likes of Time and Fortune as part of their publisher roster.
Google gets a pretty good measure of energy use per query, since they control the whole process. (Picture: Adobe)In a Google-commissioned study written by Google personel evaluating Google operations, a new paper finds a stunning reduction of its own environmental impact.
Google owns the whole stack from hardware to software, and are therefore well positioned to measure their energy efficiency, they say.
During the last twelve months, the carbon footprint of a median Gemini query also went down 44 times, the study finds.
The amount of energy expended on a typical prompt is equivalent to watching TV for about than nine seconds, Google claims.
Midjourney licensing its technology to Meta might be the first of many. (Picture: screenshot)Meta’s head of the Superintelligence Lab, Alexandr Wang, announced today a «technical collaboration between our research teams» as Midjourney has expertise that «complements our own.»
Little is known about the actual details of the collaboration, and Meta’s spokesperson, when asked by The Verge, simply defers to Wang’s x.com post: