Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Sam. The $500 billion Stargate AI infrastructure project touted by Donald Trump will solely serve OpenAI, the FT reported. Despite public criticism by archrival Elon Musk, OpenAI’s chief hailed the Texas investment in terms the president would appreciate, describing it as “big. beautiful. buildings.”

➘ BREAK THINGS: Elon. Musk’s dunk of the Stargate initiative has drawn White House anger, according to Politico, which quoted unnamed Trump aides saying they were furious with the First Buddy. Still, the president said he wasn’t bothered, noting Musk “hates one of the people” in a nod to the entrepreneur’s feud with Altman.

We all make mistakes, chatbots included. This week, Meta is cleaning up its bot’s latest faux pas in naming the incorrect US president. When asked who the current commander in chief was, Meta AI answered Joe Biden, despite Donald Trump being sworn in on Monday, Reuters reported.

“Everyone knows the President of the United States is Donald Trump,” a Meta spokesperson told Reuters. “All generative AI systems sometimes return outdated results, and we will continue to improve our features.”

The error comes at a delicate time for Meta, whose CEO Mark Zuckerberg has cozied up to Trump and made moves that align with his views, like scrapping fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram. The blunder is also a reminder that even as Big Tech takes steps towards AGI, there is still a way to go in building accuracy and trust in these emerging systems. As of Friday morning, Meta AI was giving the correct answer, according to a Semafor test.

Google has found a cheaper way to run AI models, one of the tricks up its sleeve that could give it a long-term edge in the high-stakes race between the largest tech companies, DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis said in an interview with Semafor.

For years, the compute power used in generative artificial intelligence was concentrated in the “pre-training” phase, when a raw AI model is initially created. But as models have evolved, the demands of running them — known as inference — have grown.

If an AI model were a brain, inference would be akin to thinking. And it turns out, thinking longer can drastically increase the model’s capabilities. That means the compute power available to AI companies today isn’t sufficient to extract the full value of the technology.

Hassabis said new processors, known as “light chips,” are in the works that could make it more cost-effective to run the models.

“Sometimes you have the ‘victim of your own success’ problem,” Hassabis said. “If you build a very performant model, like [Google’s Gemini] 2.0 Flash, everyone wants it, which is great. But then suddenly, you only have a set amount of chips. You need more for serving.”

He said the new Google chips are based on the same architecture as the company’s Tensor Processing Units, a custom-designed AI chip that the company has been working on for around a decade.

Silicon Valley-based payroll platform Deel has requested a Florida court dismiss charges that it facilitated money laundering transactions, contending the case is actually a hit job from its biggest competitor, likely indicating Rippling.

Earlier this month, court-appointed receiver Melanie Damian filed a class action against Deel, alleging it processed payments without the proper licenses and enabled money laundering related to dealings with former customer Surge Capital Ventures. Surge is part of a separate US Securities and Exchange Commission action alleging a Ponzi scheme that defrauded church members out of $35 million, and Damian is tasked with recovering assets. Though the SEC has not accused Deel of any crime, Damian’s complaint against the company claims it facilitated at least $2.27 million in illegal payment transactions on behalf of Surge, as well as facilitating payments to Russia, violating US sanctions.

Deel denied any wrongdoing and pointed to its biggest competitor, Rippling, calling the lawsuit “a coordinated effort by a major investor in Deel’s primary competitor seeking to tarnish Deel’s stellar reputation.” While Deel does not name Rippling in the lawsuit, that’s the likely competitor. The plaintiff’s lawyer, Thomas Grady, helped set up Waveling Insurance Services, now known as Rippling, according to documents filed to the Florida Department of State. He was reportedly an investor in the venture.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince thinks the conventional wisdom about the Gulf region’s AI prowess is upside down. Abundance of capital, cheap energy, and innovative regulation are often cited, in that order, as the top reasons why the biggest tech companies are flocking there.

But Prince said it will actually be the Gulf’s approach to AI rules that will determine its place in the development of the technology. “My hunch is that when the history books are written about this 50 years from now, it’s going to be that experimentation around regulation, which will probably turn out to be the thing that is hugely beneficial,” Prince said at a Semafor Davos event. “Or if they do it wrong, what holds it back.”

Few CEOs know the double-edged nature of dealing with US President Donald Trump as viscerally as Pfizer’s Albert Bourla, Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson writes.

In an interview on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the pharma executive said he is optimistic about the new US administration but is also realistic about the risks that come with “radical change,” and discussed how he plans to work with Trump.