Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence
Meta launches AI agent with access to other apps
Meta rolled out on Tuesday a long-awaited AI assistant that can autonomously send emails, sell a car and book travel on a person's behalf, despite internal concerns that the technology could mismanage access to sensitive personal data. The company's Muse agent, known internally as Hatch, is the centrepiece of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's plan to provide "personal superintelligence" to the billions of people who use Meta's services each day. The plan is part of the Facebook and Instagram owner's latest effort to diversify its revenue beyond advertising and build a viable business from its enormous investments in AI chips and other infrastructure, which it expects will exceed $130 billion this year. The product will initially be available only in the US through a dedicated Muse app or Meta's WhatsApp messaging service, the company said in its announcement. Meta said it plans to add the agent to its smart glasses "soon", without providing further details. A basic version of the agent will be available for free, while Meta will offer subscriptions priced at $20 a month and $100 a month for heavier usage, a company spokesperson said. Users can opt out of having their interactions used to train Meta's AI models, while the compan
Artificial Intelligence
Nvidia to provide US$105bn for OpenAI data centre
Nvidia will provide up to US$105 billion in financing and computing capacity for a new artificial intelligence data centre being developed for OpenAI in Ohio. The financing will support an initial 4.25 gigawatts of computing capacity, with an option to expand by a further 3.75 gigawatts. Nvidia will supply the computing infrastructure, with capacity expected to come online in phases from 2028. SB Energy will build and operate the data centre at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio, under a 20-year lease to OpenAI. OpenAI holds a stake in SB Energy, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was an early investor in the company. “We are securing long-lived infrastructure for NVIDIA compute so OpenAI can deploy the most productive AI factories that can be upgraded repeatedly with each new generation delivering more intelligence and better economics,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said. The agreement is Nvidia's latest move to support the rapid expansion of AI data centre infrastructure, as technology companies race to secure the computing capacity required to develop and operate increasingly advanced AI models. The scale of the financing has also raised concerns about circular financing within the AI industry, where major
Artificial Intelligence
AMD buys AI inference chip startup Taalas
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has agreed to acquire Canadian startup Taalas as the chipmaker broadens its artificial intelligence portfolio beyond graphics processing units and strengthens its capabilities in AI inference. Toronto-based Taalas develops specialised inference chips that are customised, or hard-wired, for individual AI models rather than serving as general-purpose processors. “AMD is building a full-stack AI platform that gives customers the flexibility to deploy the right compute solutions for every AI workload," said Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president of the Artificial Intelligence Group at AMD. "Taalas' technology and world-class engineering team strengthen our AI portfolio by delivering differentiated inference performance and efficiency.” The acquisition comes just over seven months after Nvidia spent US$20 billion acquiring assets from AI chip startup Groq, marking the largest deal in Nvidia's history. Taalas' current processor is designed to run a smaller version of Meta's Llama 3.1 model, while the company is also developing chips for larger and more advanced AI models. The chips are manufactured using an older Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. production process and feature high-speed
Artificial Intelligence
Nvidia backs OpenAI US$250bn AI data centre plan
OpenAI is in talks with Nvidia over a potential US$250 billion credit backstop that would help finance the development of a massive artificial intelligence data centre campus in Ohio, according to reports. The proposed arrangement would allow OpenAI to raise debt for a 10-gigawatt data centre project in Pike County, Ohio, using Nvidia's credit strength as support, CNBC reported, citing a person familiar with the discussions. The guarantee would cover lease and construction financing for the facility, but not Nvidia's AI chips, which the companies are negotiating separately, the source said. The Ohio site, which previously operated as a uranium enrichment facility, could become one of the world's largest AI infrastructure projects. A 10-gigawatt facility would require enough electricity to power roughly 8 million U.S. households annually, based on CNBC analysis of Energy Information Administration data. The project could cost more than $500 billion in total, according to a person familiar with the plans, although discussions over the site and financing remain ongoing and could change. OpenAI, which accelerated the AI boom following the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, is racing to secure computing capacity as demand for
Artificial Intelligence
Nvidia secures SK Hynix memory in US$500bn AI push
Nvidia has secured a long-term supply of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) memory from South Korea's SK Hynix as part of a US$500 billion agreement aimed at expanding global AI infrastructure and easing concerns over shortages of critical components. The deal, announced in San Francisco on Friday, includes the construction of large-scale AI data centres expected to begin operating in 2027. Nvidia said the facilities will require around 2 gigawatts of power, underscoring the scale of the project, which is expected to deploy hundreds of thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs). According to the press release, "Today’s announcement builds on the decades-long technology partnership between SK Group and NVIDIA, including the recently announced plans for SK Telecom to build a 2-gigawatt-scale AI Cloud in Korea. "This cloud will use the NVIDIA® DSX™ platform and deploy NVIDIA Vera Rubin accelerated computing powered by SK hynix HBM4, with the first AI factory planned to come online in 2027. "It will be built on the NVIDIA DSX full-stack AI factory architecture, which integrates NVIDIA accelerated computing, systems, software and partner technologies to deliver the lowest token cost at maximum energy efficiency.

Artificial Intelligence
Counting the casualties of conversational AI
Ink. A legacy of language now written in pixels. In the digital age, stories flow into circuits and intelligent code. That code has now manifested a growth in what is called AI psychosis, leading to an increase in suicides. First pass data is in, and it is grim. Since this column last covered the phenomenon, the condition clinicians described anecdotally now has a peer-reviewed literature - and a paper trail lawyers can use.Counting the costsA rapid scoping review published in JMIR Mental Health in March mapped 71 articles describing 36 cases of psychiatric crisis linked to chatbot use - the first systematic count of what United States and Canadian newsrooms had reported piecemeal. Suicide was the most commonly reported outcome, turning up in 35 of the 61 cases the Montreal-based reviewers could grade for severity, with psychiatric hospitalisation next at roughly one in five. Fatal outcomes made up 90.5% of reports involving minors, against 48.6% of those involving adults, and every Character.AI case in the dataset concerned someone under 18. ChatGPT was named in 71.8% of the articles - a statistic that's likely reflecting its market share more than its behaviour. The authors are blunt about their dataset's limits:
Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI appoints two finance leaders to board
OpenAI has appointed two veteran financial services executives to its nonprofit and for-profit boards of directors, strengthening its leadership as the artificial intelligence company moves closer to a potential initial public offering. David Vélez, chief executive of Latin America's largest digital bank Nubank, and Robin Vince, chief executive of financial services company BNY, have joined the boards, OpenAI announced on Tuesday. "David and Robin bring complementary perspectives on how technology can reshape industries and drive economic growth. "Both have led global institutions through significant technological and market change, pairing ambitious innovation with disciplined governance, resilience, and a focus on creating durable value for the people who use their services. "They also bring perspectives that will strengthen the work of the Foundation. Both have strong commitments to philanthropy and nonprofit leadership across healthcare, education, and the arts, as well as decades of experience building institutions that expand access and economic opportunity. " The move comes as OpenAI, which is valued at more than US$850 billion, prepares for a potential stock market listing. The company confidentially filed a
Artificial Intelligence
China's Moonshot ships largest-ever open AI model
Beijing-based Moonshot AI unveiled Kimi K3 on 17 July, a 2.8 trillion-parameter open-weight model the company says matches or beats several leading American systems, at a fraction of the price. The release landed on the eve of Shanghai's World Artificial Intelligence Conference. Moonshot, backed by Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings, built K3 as the flagship of a three-tier lineup that also includes K2.7 Code, a specialised coding model, and K2.6, a general-purpose option.What K3 actually doesK3 is the largest open-weight model released by anyone to date at 2.8 trillion parameters, more than double the size of its predecessor, Kimi K2, which shipped at 1 trillion parameters in July 2025. Context windows across the three-model lineup run to 256,000 tokens or above, and K3 offers the full 1-million-token version, enough to process an entire codebase or a lengthy document in a single pass. Moonshot claims K3 performs competitively against Anthropic's Fable 5 and beats OpenAI's GPT-5.6 on several published benchmarks, though those figures come from the company itself. An independent ranking on Arena.AI reportedly put K3 at the top of current model performance. The model shows particular strength in front-end
Artificial Intelligence
How falling AI token prices are becoming more expensive
Per-token prices have collapsed since 2022, yet enterprise AI bills keep climbing. And it's the gap between the two where the next phase of the AI trade could be won or lost. Anyone still telling their board that artificial intelligence is getting cheaper has half the story, because at present, the price of a single token - the unit of text a model reads or writes - has been in freefall. McKinsey's Andreessen Horowitz reckons the cost of running a model of equivalent capability drops roughly tenfold every year. Epoch AI, which tracks this more granularly, puts the decline anywhere between ninefold and 900-fold annually depending on the task, with a median around 50 times a year. And yet the bills landing on chief financial officers' desks are getting bigger, not smaller? That's because, in reality, cheaper tokens have not made companies spend less, but instead made them ask the tech to do vastly more, and the cost of finishing a job has climbed even as the cost of each token has fallen. Microsoft chief exec Satya Nadella named this early last year, dusting off a 160-year-old piece of economics - the Jevons paradox, where efficiency gains drive consumption up rather than down. The signal is not the token price

Artificial Intelligence

Meta launches AI agent with access to other apps

Nvidia to provide US$105bn for OpenAI data centre

AMD buys AI inference chip startup Taalas

Nvidia backs OpenAI US$250bn AI data centre plan

Nvidia secures SK Hynix memory in US$500bn AI push

Counting the casualties of conversational AI

OpenAI appoints two finance leaders to board

China's Moonshot ships largest-ever open AI model

How falling AI token prices are becoming more expensive

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