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Databricks raises $5B at $190B valuation after investor demand surged
Databricks originally planned to raise $1 billion in its latest funding round, but overwhelming investor demand pushed the final figure to $5 billion at a $190 billion valuation. CEO Ali Ghodsi told TechCrunch that the AI buildout remains expensive and the company accepted more capital than planned given the strong interest.
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OpenAI loses second executive this week as CRO Denise Dresser departs
OpenAI chief revenue officer Denise Dresser is leaving the company after less than nine months in the role, marking the second executive departure in a single week. Wiz president and COO Dali Rajic will step in to take over the top sales position at the AI lab. Dresser announced her departure in a team note posted to LinkedIn.
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IBM partners with OpenAI to bolster enterprise AI push
IBM has announced a partnership with OpenAI focused on expanding enterprise AI adoption, with plans to train and certify tens of thousands of IBM consultants on OpenAI's technologies. The deal signals a major push by both companies to capture the growing enterprise AI services market.
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Nvidia's $500B plan to keep aging GPUs relevant in AI buildouts
Nvidia has unveiled a new $500 billion strategy aimed at ensuring its GPUs retain value as the AI infrastructure boom continues. The plan focuses on convincing a new generation of financiers to keep funding AI buildouts, even as older GPU generations risk becoming obsolete.
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Apple in talks to pay publishers for real-time news to power Siri
Apple is reportedly in negotiations with news publishers to pay them for access to current news content to improve Siri's capabilities, with a potential nine-figure budget under consideration according to the Wall Street Journal. The move would mark a significant investment in making Siri more competitive as an AI-powered news and information assistant.
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Microsoft merges Copilot apps into unified 'super app,' retires Mico and other features
Microsoft is combining its consumer and commercial Copilot AI assistants into a single unified app, recycling the 'Microsoft Copilot' name with an updated icon. As part of the consolidation, the company is also retiring several underperforming features including AI-generated podcasts, Group Chats, Deep Research, and its emotive yellow blob avatar Mico, which will be moved to the Learn Live platform.
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Suno launches Studio 2.0 with MIDI support and DAW-like features
Suno has released Studio 2.0, a major upgrade to its AI music generation platform that adds MIDI support—its most requested feature—alongside custom effects and a built-in chatbot, bringing it closer to a full digital audio workstation. The update signals Suno's ambition to move beyond novelty AI music generation into serious music production tooling.
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OpenAI introduces 'Ultrafast' mode for GPT-5.6 Sol at 14x the speed
OpenAI is launching a preview of an 'Ultrafast' mode for its GPT-5.6 Sol model, delivering responses at up to 14 times the standard speed in an effort to attract enterprise users. The new mode is aimed at use cases where low latency is critical, positioning OpenAI more competitively in the enterprise market.
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Writer introduces new AI model built on Z.ai's open source GLM-5.2
Writer has launched a new AI model developed as a post-training variation on Z.ai's open source GLM-5.2, designed to offer deployment-ready enterprise capabilities at significantly lower token costs. The release is accompanied by an upgraded harness aimed at helping businesses manage and contain AI inference expenses.
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Anthropic's multi-agent experiment reveals unexpected turf wars between AI agents
Anthropic researchers set multiple AI agents to work on the same task and discovered that they can clash, collude, and coordinate in surprising and potentially risky ways. The findings raise new questions about whether current safety testing frameworks are adequate to capture the risks of multi-agent AI systems.
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Inside an AI-generated movie: the best parts were all human
The Verge takes a deep look at an AI-generated short film produced using Higgsfield AI, finding that the most compelling moments came from human creative decisions rather than the generative technology itself. The piece examines how filmmaker Cully Hill used AI tools to bring a comedic story about aspiring English pub musicians to life, raising broader questions about AI's role in creative storytelling.
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Is Google losing the AI race? A look at the DeepMind reorganization
The Verge's Decoder podcast explores mounting questions about whether Google is falling behind in the AI race, following a major reorganization of its Google DeepMind division and the departure of chief scientist Jeff Dean. Senior AI reporter Hayden Field joins host Nilay Patel to break down what the shakeup means for Google's competitive position.
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Okta targets AI agent token costs with identity-scoped MCP tool lists
Okta has introduced identity-scoped Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool lists as a way to reduce the token overhead incurred by AI agents during model calls. The company refers to this overhead as the 'tool tax'—tokens consumed as a model evaluates available tools—and says scoping tool lists to user identity can meaningfully cut costs.
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