Maximilian Schreiner

Dec 17, 2025

Amazon is reportedly in talks to invest at least $10 billion in OpenAI. According to three people familiar with the discussions who spoke to The Information, the deal would push OpenAI's valuation past $500 billion. The influx of cash is intended to help OpenAI cover its massive server costs, including a recently agreed-upon $38 billion deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS). As part of the arrangement, OpenAI would commit to using Amazon's proprietary "Trainium" AI chips rather than relying solely on Nvidia hardware.

The companies are also discussing the possibility of turning ChatGPT into a shopping platform. However, Microsoft's exclusive rights to sell OpenAI models to cloud customers could limit Amazon's options here. Talks reportedly began in October following OpenAI's corporate restructuring but haven't concluded yet. OpenAI remains in urgent need of capital, as the company expects to burn through more than $100 billion over the next four years.

Comment Source: The Information

Maximilian Schreiner

Dec 16, 2025

AI in practice

OpenAI has updated its Realtime API with three new model snapshots designed to improve transcription, speech synthesis, and function calling. According to developers, the gpt-4o-mini-transcribe variant significantly reduces hallucinations. For text-to-speech tasks, gpt-4o-mini-tts cuts the word error rate by 35 percent. The gpt-realtime-mini model, which targets voice assistants, follows instructions 22 percent more accurately and improves function calling by 13 percent.

? New audio model snapshots are now live in the Realtime API with improvements to reliability, lower error rates, and fewer hallucinations:

- gpt-4o-mini-transcribe-2025-12-15: 89% reduction in hallucinations compared to whisper-1

- gpt-4o-mini-tts-2025-12-15: 35% fewer word... pic.twitter.com/E8clreR1R0

- OpenAI Developers (@OpenAIDevs) December 15, 2025

OpenAI also explicitly mentioned improvements for Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, Hindi, Bengali, and Italian.

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Maximilian Schreiner

Dec 16, 2025

AI in practice

Nvidia is taking over software provider SchedMD to expand its presence in open-source technology. On Monday, the company confirmed it will continue to distribute SchedMD's "Slurm" software as an open-source product. The platform helps plan large-scale computing tasks in data centers, ensuring server capacity is used efficiently.

Nvidia views the technology as critical infrastructure for generative AI, noting that developers rely on it to train models. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in California in 2010, SchedMD employs around 40 people and serves clients like cloud provider CoreWeave and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

Comment Source: Nvidia

Maximilian Schreiner

Dec 15, 2025

AI research

The case against predicting tokens to build AGI

Maximilian Schreiner

Dec 15, 2025

AI in practice

Robot vacuum pioneer iRobot has filed for bankruptcy and plans to hand control to its main Chinese supplier, Shenzhen PICEA Robotics. According to Bloomberg, shares of the Roomba maker will be wiped out under the bankruptcy plan. While the company will be delisted, it intends to continue operations as a going concern.

To set up the deal, Shenzhen PICEA acquired $191 million of iRobot's debt from the Carlyle Group. iRobot attributed the filing to a post-pandemic sales slump, supply chain issues, and stiffer competition from cheaper rivals. The move comes after a planned acquisition by Amazon fell apart in 2022 following opposition from EU regulators.

The company listed assets and liabilities between $100 million and $500 million. In a statement, iRobot confirmed it would continue paying employees and suppliers throughout the court proceedings.

Comment Source: Bloomberg

Maximilian Schreiner

Dec 15, 2025

AI and society

Trump attempts to block state AI laws by withholding broadband billions, but faces shaky legal ground.

"I think the administration has a 30 to 35% chance of this working legally," says Dean Ball, a former White House official who contributed to the administration's AI Action Plan.

The executive order directs the Commerce Department to block states with onerous AI regulations from the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program (BEAD), reports Reuters in an analysis of the new order. However, experts doubt whether Congress intended to give the administration authority over state AI regulation when it authorized broadband funding. Furthermore, the move risks political blowback from within the party: Republican governors like Ron DeSantis have previously spoken against federal interference, and withholding funds would impact rural voters—a key demographic that supported Trump by wide margins.

Comment Source: Reuters

Maximilian Schreiner

Dec 12, 2025

AI in practice

AI lab Anthropic has placed orders totaling $21 billion with Broadcom for Google's AI chips. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan confirmed that the startup is purchasing "Ironwood Racks" equipped with Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs).

The move follows a massive cloud partnership between Anthropic and Google announced in late October. That deal grants Anthropic access to up to one million TPUs and is expected to bring over one gigawatt of new AI compute capacity online by 2026. Anthropic maintains a multi-cloud strategy, spreading its workloads across Google TPUs, Amazon's Trainium chips, and Nvidia GPUs.

Comment Source: CNBC

Maximilian Schreiner

Dec 12, 2025

AI and society

On Thursday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order threatening to withhold federal funding from states whose AI regulations impede American innovation. Speaking to reporters, Trump argued that a patchwork of state-level rules slows down the industry.

The order directs the Secretary of Commerce to review state laws and, in cases of conflict, block access to the $42 billion broadband fund. Previous attempts to enforce such bans had failed.

The directive specifically targets anti-discrimination rules in states like Colorado, which the administration claims lead to "ideological bias." While tech giants like Google and OpenAI welcomed the move toward national standards, Representative Don Beyer warned that the order could create a "lawless Wild West" and potentially violates the Constitution by undermining state-level safety reforms.

Comment Source: Reuters