AI digest: Big money, new models, and shifting partnerships
OpenAI breaks free from Microsoft, DeepMind's Silver raises £1.1B, and researchers build models that think differently.
A week of seismic shifts in AI partnerships and some genuinely clever research.
OpenAI ditches Microsoft exclusivity for Amazon deal
OpenAI has rewritten its deal with Microsoft to escape exclusivity and sell products on AWS. Microsoft loses its exclusive licence to OpenAI’s tech but gets more revenue sharing in return. The controversial AGI clause that would have cut Microsoft off once artificial general intelligence arrives is also gone.
David Silver raises £1.1B for data-free AI
Former DeepMind researcher David Silver has raised £1.1 billion at a £5.1 billion valuation for Ineffable Intelligence, founded just months ago. The goal is building AI that learns without human data, which sounds ambitious even by AI standards. Silver created AlphaGo, so investors clearly think he can pull off another breakthrough.
Researchers build LLM trained only on pre-1931 text
A team led by Nick Levine and Alec Radford has created Talkie-1930, a 13B model trained exclusively on English text from before 1931. It’s never seen the internet, smartphones, or World War II. This kind of historically disciplined training could reveal how much modern AI relies on contemporary knowledge versus genuine reasoning ability.
Meta’s Sapiens2 tackles human-centric vision
Meta has released Sapiens2, a foundation model for human-centric vision that handles pose estimation, segmentation, and 3D geometry from a single backbone. It’s pushing state-of-the-art across multiple human analysis tasks. Useful for AR/VR applications where understanding human movement and appearance matters.