AI

According to Bloomberg, a “nearly year-old investigation” is looking into the possibility that a16z “investment partners are improperly serving on the boards of competing artificial intelligence companies.” Co-founder Ben Horowitz is on the board of Databricks, while partner Martin Casado was on the board of dbt labs before it was acquired by Fivetran, where he now holds a seat.

AI terminology has broken containment so thoroughly that there’s actually something called “Fries GPT” on the menu at Dave & Buster’s, I regret to inform us. GPT stands for garlic, parmesan, and truffle dust in this case, which is a lot going on, flavor-wise. Personally, I think D&B should have committed to the bit and let you wash them down with an ice-cold LLMonade, but alas.

The new AI Ads tracking data set for ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews pulls insights from anonymized web usage data provided by a panel of Similarweb users, instead of relying on synthetic prompts. Similarweb reports that 26 percent of ChatGPT responses and nearly 30 percent of ad-eligible Google AI Mode queries include a sponsored ad.

The news comes as part of OpenAI’s plans to lease an Ohio data center being built by SB Energy, a subsidiary of SoftBank. The deal will allow OpenAI to secure 8 gigawatts of capacity, with the first 800 megawatts expected to come online in 2028. Nvidia will also invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy.

After saying to This Week in Videogames that he would have been “happy to replace her with AI,” Sacco says CEO Matthew Karch emailed her and “apologized unreservedly for the awful way he spoke about me in the press.” You can read her full statement below.

404 Media put a tracker inside a shipment of rare books, which arrived at an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas:

Citing an unnamed source, CNBC reported that OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said at a recent investor meeting that OpenAI “entered the year at 60-40, but enterprise has accelerated much faster than expected and those lines have now crossed … The majority of our revenue is now enterprise.”

The newly-announced Gemini 3.7 Flash is rolling out today as an option for AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers. The updated model is better at following instructions and “understanding your intent, so you get even more helpful responses,” says Search VP of product Robby Stein.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of the AI coding tool Cursor on Friday. Cursor says it’s going to work on the company’s Grok AI chatbot, which added a new AI agent feature this week.

A new “take notes” button is rolling out now for paid Workspace accounts that records audio from your mic so Gemini can generate notes for in-person meetings. Just like the virtual version of the feature, it also generates a transcript and “action items” and saves them to a Google Doc in your Drive account.

The new Gemini 3.7 Flash makes the Spark AI agent “more efficient for knowledge work with improved tool use for Google Workspace apps, delivering improved accuracy and output quality for complex, multi-skill workflows,” Google says. The AI model itself also offers “substantial” improvements in software engineering and web development workflows, according to the company.

The end of USAID, which Elon Musk fed “into the wood chipper”, will cause an extra 14 million deaths through 2030, including 4.5 million in children under the age of 5. SpaceX shares are $141.10 as of this writing, above their IPO price of $135.

According to Twitch chief product officer Mike Minton, that’s the “honest answer” as to why the streaming platform has started training Amazon’s generative AI models on users’ content by default. Twitch users can choose to opt out, but Minton defends the default setting because “almost every content service in the world” is also doing it.

The “Ask YouTube” conversational search experience that YouTube started testing in April is now rolling out to the mobile app. It’s available for signed-in users in the US who are 13 or older, and can be found by tapping the “Ask” option in the YouTube search bar.

We live blogged almost 90 minutes of a show that was, honestly, better than expected. Our video team cut it down to eight.

The company working on deals that would let Siri to lean on publisher content for news and information, The Wall Street Journal reports. Apple has apparently proposed a plan where publishers would get paid when content is actually used.

Anthropic updated its Chrome extension so using the side panel bot now saves chats to your history, where you can continue them outside in the browser in Claude’s desktop, web, or mobile apps.

AI data center projects are continuing to pop up across the US, with frequent opposition from locals concerned about their impact. Here are a few recent articles about the projects:

The rapper admitted to using AI on his ’80s-tinged $TARFACE project and received a rare zero. Jet was the last to receive the dishonor in 2006 for Shine On. Pitchfork pulls no punches, saying:

Lots of smart internet people have been talking about this Lauren Leek essay on the algorithmic flattening of cities and culture and everything else, and it’s as good as advertised. It also offers a shockingly simple way to fix the problem, which is why I spent the morning reading about a machine learning framework known as multi-armed bandits.

Seedance 2.5’s ability to generate longer clips that can be carefully edited without starting over scratch are two of the model’s biggest improvements over Seedance 2.0. But Deadline reports, that the new model also much better at detecting and refusing to comply when it’s been prompted to generate outputs based on copyrighted material.

After initially being tested by “select creators,” Creator Studio is now available for iOS users in the US and Canada. The original Creator Studio page manager experience was shut down in 2023, but Meta describes this revived version as an “AI-powered companion app” that helps creators to grow and engage with their audience.