AI progress outran nearly every 18-month forecast, Benjamin Todd writes, including his own and the superforecasters'. Epoch's FrontierMath benchmark hit 94% by September 2026, more than three years ahead of his 97% by 2030 prediction. He puts median AGI around 2030, with the early 2030s as a real scenario.
Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok says AI has delivered "zero financial payoff" to corporations outside tech. In a recent note, Slok cites flat profit margins and revenue per worker across the S&P 493 and argues AI lacks judgment on accountability and trust.
OpenAI is close to finalizing a funding round of up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation, led by investors from the United Arab Emirates and Coatue, according to people familiar with the deal. The company is positioning the financing as a bridge ahead of a potential IPO and is negotiating a commercial deal for more computing capacity from the UAE. OpenAI told investors it aims to secure signatures by the end of next week, though the final size is still being determined.
Canva releases Canva Craft, its first image generation model, built by its research team to compete with Google, OpenAI, ByteDance, and Meta. Canva says it produces images up to 2K resolution in 30 aspect ratios and legible text, trained on human-designed templates rather than photographs. It is available to all users through the Dream Lab tab.
Dario Amodei rejects the thrust of Nathan Calvin's critique, saying Anthropic's costly choices reflect a race-to-the-top strategy. He cites holding Mythos-class models from February to June for cyber safeguards, and says Anthropic is putting 5% of the company into a public benefit fund. He concedes some communication mistakes.
OpenAI says it is partnering with Google Cloud to put its frontier models and Codex agentic workflows in Google Cloud's Model Garden, with general availability planned in coming weeks. Customers can buy them through the Google Cloud Marketplace and apply GCP commitments. Microsoft remains OpenAI's primary cloud partner.
OpenAI acquired Orchestra Bio, a four-year-old startup whose AI agents handle drug-discovery operations such as clinical trial scheduling and finances. Terms were not disclosed; Orchestra had raised about $20 million. OpenAI says it will fold the team and technology into Rosalind, its life sciences model, and Rosalind Workbench, which it says Moderna and Novo Nordisk use.
Nscale and Anthropic are negotiating a second $45 billion compute deal, Bloomberg reports, roughly a month after announcing the first. Sources say talks continue and terms could change. Both companies are pursuing IPOs, and Nscale faces investor pushback over its proposed $30 billion valuation.
Llama 4 Maverick's experimental build scored an Arena Elo of 1417, then fell to 32nd when the released model was retested; Yann LeCun says Meta's results were "fudged a little bit." Contrary Research argues such benchmarks steer reinforcement learning toward wrong targets as labs spend $700 billion on 2026 compute.
Anthropic says its new Public Benefit Fund, an LLC, would hold 5% of the company's equity if shareholders approve, about $48 billion at its May valuation. Anthropic says each 50% gain in value past a baseline could add 2%. It also reports junior technical hires fell to 9% from 27%.