Apple is restructuring its AI leadership, moving Siri development away from AI chief John Giannandrea and placing it under Mike Rockwell, who previously led the Vision Pro headset team, Bloomberg reports. While Giannandrea will remain at Apple and continue to oversee AI research, technologies and robotics projects, Rockwell will now lead Siri development and report directly to software chief Craig Federighi. According to Bloomberg's sources, the company views Rockwell as an experienced leader and problem solver. The timing of this reorganization appears to be unrelated to the recent Siri debacle, as Bloomberg reports that "the AI management shift has been months in the making." Giannandrea joined Apple in 2018, after serving in a senior AI leadership role at Google since 2015.
Nvidia and xAI are joining forces with BlackRock, Microsoft, and Abu Dhabi to create a massive AI infrastructure fund. The initiative aims to raise up to $100 billion through investments and debt financing to build new data centers and energy projects. Under the arrangement, Elon Musk's xAI and Nvidia will become equal partners alongside Microsoft and the Abu Dhabi-backed MGX Fund. The move follows January's announcement of "Stargate," a similar initiative from SoftBank and OpenAI. That project started at $100 billion with plans to expand to $500 billion by 2029. Meanwhile, the EU has announced its own plans to invest 200 billion euros in AI infrastructure.
William Fedus, who served as Vice President of Post-Training at OpenAI, has announced his departure from the company to pursue AI applications in scientific research. In an internal memo to colleagues, Fedus explained his plans to focus specifically on developing AI systems for physics applications. Post-training involves optimizing pre-trained AI models through additional training methods. Recent advances in this field include using reinforcement learning to enhance models' capabilities in mathematics and coding.
Fedus joins a growing list of senior executives who have left OpenAI in 2024, including the company's Head of Technology Mira Murati and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, who departed to launch their own ventures. However, Fedus emphasizes that his departure remains amicable - OpenAI plans to invest in his new startup, viewing advances in scientific AI as an important pathway toward achieving artificial superintelligence (ASI).
Cognition AI has secured hundreds of millions in new funding at a nearly $4 billion valuation, with venture capital firm 8VC leading the round. The investment doubles the startup's previous valuation, according to Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the matter. The funding round attracted several prominent investors, including Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Elad Gil and Conviction Partners. The company's flagship product, Devin, which it markets as "the world's first AI software engineer," competes in an increasingly crowded AI coding landscape where competitive advantages remain unclear. Most existing coding tools function as AI-enhanced workspaces, powered by large language models from established labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Elon Musk's AI company xAI has acquired video startup Hotshot, which has developed three video generation models over the past two years: Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One and Hotshot. The startup says it's "excited to continue scaling these efforts on the world's largest cluster, Colossus, as part of xAI." The company's own service has been shut down. Existing users will be able to download their videos through the end of March.
