AI

Elon Musk’s xAI lands $6B in new cash to fuel AI ambitions

Updated December 25, 12:21 p.m. Pacific: Added details of xAI’s valuation and Kingdom Holdings’ contribution. xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has raised $6 billion in a Series C financing round. The company announced this week that Andreessen Horowitz , Blackrock, Fidelity, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Nvidia, […]

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Google is using Anthropic’s Claude to improve its Gemini AI

Contractors working to improve Google’s Gemini AI are comparing its answers against outputs produced by Anthropic’s competitor model Claude, according to internal correspondence seen by TechCrunch.  Google would not say, when reached by TechCrunch for comment, if it had obtained permission for its use of Claude in testing against Gemini. As tech companies race to

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OpenAI’s o3 suggests AI models are scaling in new ways — but so are the costs

Last month, AI founders and investors told TechCrunch that we’re now in the “second era of scaling laws,” noting how established methods of improving AI models were showing diminishing returns. One promising new method they suggested could keep gains was “test-time scaling,” which seems to be what’s behind the performance of OpenAI’s o3 model —

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Palantir and Anduril reportedly building a tech consortium to bid on defense contracts

Two big defense tech players, Palantir and Anduril, are talking to tech companies including SpaceX, OpenAI, Saronic, and Scale AI about forming a consortium to bid on Pentagon contracts, according to a report in the Financial Times. The goal, the FT says, is to challenge the dominance of “prime” defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon,

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