Microsoft and OpenAI announced a sweeping overhaul of their partnership today. OpenAI can now serve products across any cloud provider — ending Azure exclusivity — clearing the path for its up-to-$50B Amazon deal. Microsoft retains a non-exclusive IP license through 2032 and stops paying revenue share to OpenAI, while OpenAI's payments to Microsoft continue (with a cap) through 2030.
Source: Microsoft Official Blog — Link
Jury selection began today in the high-stakes civil trial where Elon Musk alleges Sam Altman and Greg Brockman betrayed OpenAI's founding nonprofit mission. Musk is no longer seeking personal damages but wants funds directed to OpenAI's charitable arm. OpenAI calls it sour grapes aimed at boosting Musk's rival xAI.
Source: Bloomberg — Link
Beijing's National Development and Reform Commission ordered the cancellation of Meta's acquisition of Manus, the Singapore-based AI agent startup with Chinese roots. Meta had already integrated Manus into internal systems and onboarded its executives, making the unwinding highly complicated. The decision reflects intensifying US-China tech war dynamics around AI talent and IP.
Source: Bloomberg — Link
Alphabet committed $10 billion now at a $350 billion valuation, with up to $30 billion more contingent on performance targets, plus a 5-gigawatt compute commitment. This comes days after Amazon's fresh $5 billion commitment with $20 billion more to follow. Anthropic's ARR has topped $30 billion and an IPO may come as soon as October.
Source: Bloomberg — Link
DeepSeek dropped V4-Pro (1.6T parameters, 49B activated) and V4-Flash (284B parameters, 13B activated), both with 1M-token context. The major story: V4 was trained entirely on Huawei Ascend 950 and Cambricon chips — no Nvidia hardware. Performance rivals top closed-source models at a fraction of the cost ($1.74/M input tokens for Pro).
Source: MIT Technology Review — Link
The Sora web and mobile app went dark yesterday (April 26) after OpenAI pulled the plug on its AI video generation tool. The service was hemorrhaging an estimated $1 million per day, with active users dwindling from 1 million to under 500,000. Disney reportedly learned of the shutdown less than an hour before the public announcement, complicating its $1 billion partnership. API access continues until September.
Source: TechCrunch — Link
Google co-founder Sergey Brin assembled a dedicated team within DeepMind with a single mandate: catch Anthropic in AI-assisted coding. In an internal memo, Brin wrote that Google "must urgently bridge the gap in agentic execution and turn our models into primary developers." Google's AI writes about 50% of its code; Anthropic claims near-100%. The team is led by DeepMind engineer Sebastian Borgeaud.
Source: The Decoder — Link
Meta announced a deal with startup Overview Energy for up to 1 gigawatt of space-based solar power — satellites in geosynchronous orbit collecting sunlight and beaming it as near-infrared light to ground-based solar farms. Orbital demo is planned for 2028, commercial grid delivery by 2030. Meta has now contracted over 30 GW of clean energy total, including 7.7 GW of nuclear.
Source: Bloomberg — Link
The Stanford AI Index Report and a related Nature feature found that despite the rush to adopt AI agents for scientific workflows, there is little evidence AI is actually improving researchers' productivity on complex tasks. AI-related mentions appear in 6-9% of natural science publications, but agents still fall short on multi-step scientific reasoning. The report cataloged a surge in science foundation models but struck a skeptical tone on agent autonomy.
Former OpenAI executive Mira Murati's startup Thinking Machines Lab signed a new multi-billion-dollar agreement to expand its use of Google Cloud AI infrastructure, including access to Nvidia's latest GB300 chips. The deal, valued in the single-digit billions, deepens the Google-Thinking Machines relationship and signals continued infrastructure buildout outside the OpenAI-Microsoft axis.
