Sora’s ghoulish reanimation of dead celebrities raises alarms
OpenAI’s video generation app Sora has spent its first two weeks at the top of the charts.
The startup’s fast-and-loose approach to enforcing intellectual property rights has seen the app flooded with videos of trademarked characters in all sorts of ugly scenarios.
But another area where Sora users have been pushing the limits involves videos that reanimate dead celebrities.
And we’re not talking just JFK, MLK, and Einstein. Videos featuring more recently deceased figures such as Robin Williams (11 years ago), painter Bob Ross (30 years ago), Stephen Hawking (seven years ago), and even Queen Elizabeth II (three years ago) have been generated. Some of the videos are racist and offensive, shocking the relatives of the figures.
OpenAI told The Washington Post that it is now allowing representatives of “recently deceased” celebrities and public figures to request that their likenesses be blocked from the service, though the company did not give a precise time frame for what it considered recent.
But another area where Sora users have been pushing the limits involves videos that reanimate dead celebrities.
And we’re not talking just JFK, MLK, and Einstein. Videos featuring more recently deceased figures such as Robin Williams (11 years ago), painter Bob Ross (30 years ago), Stephen Hawking (seven years ago), and even Queen Elizabeth II (three years ago) have been generated. Some of the videos are racist and offensive, shocking the relatives of the figures.
OpenAI told The Washington Post that it is now allowing representatives of “recently deceased” celebrities and public figures to request that their likenesses be blocked from the service, though the company did not give a precise time frame for what it considered recent.
Tesla is selling unsold Cybertrucks to Elon Musk’s other companies
Sales of Tesla’s Cybertruck, once expected to reach hundreds of thousands per year, are currently in the low tens of thousands range and falling. Last quarter in the US, Tesla sold fewer than 5,400 of the “apocalypse-proof” vehicles, for a total of about 16,000 this year, Business Insider reports, citing Cox Automotive data.
That’s a 63% drop from the same quarter a year ago, even as Tesla as a whole notched its best quarterly sales ever, spurred by the expiration of the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.
With sales lagging, the company has dialed back production of the stainless steel behemoths, but there’s still been an excess.
Fortunately for Tesla, Electrek reports that CEO Elon Musk has other uses for Cybertrucks within his other companies, which often share resources and personnel. Tesla is delivering truckloads of the EV to both xAI (which Tesla shareholders will vote next month on whether to invest in) and SpaceX, where Cybertrucks are replacing internal combustion engine support fleets.
There’s a lot of chatter about “circular deals” in the billion-dollar pacts announced in the AI space on a weekly basis. But it doesn’t get much more circular than this, with production and buying activity kept within the Musk corporate family.
That’s a 63% drop from the same quarter a year ago, even as Tesla as a whole notched its best quarterly sales ever, spurred by the expiration of the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.
With sales lagging, the company has dialed back production of the stainless steel behemoths, but there’s still been an excess.
Fortunately for Tesla, Electrek reports that CEO Elon Musk has other uses for Cybertrucks within his other companies, which often share resources and personnel. Tesla is delivering truckloads of the EV to both xAI (which Tesla shareholders will vote next month on whether to invest in) and SpaceX, where Cybertrucks are replacing internal combustion engine support fleets.
There’s a lot of chatter about “circular deals” in the billion-dollar pacts announced in the AI space on a weekly basis. But it doesn’t get much more circular than this, with production and buying activity kept within the Musk corporate family.
Tesla has begun selling the Model Y Standard in parts of Europe, where it has lots of cheaper competition
Days after rolling out “Standard” trim levels of its Model Y and Model 3 in the US, Tesla has started selling the Model Y Standard in some European countries. Standard Model Ys begin at about 40,000 euros, depending on the country, roughly 10,000 euros cheaper than the current Premium versions. In the US, Standard versions are about $5,000 cheaper than their souped-up peers. The model isn’t yet on sale in the UK or Ireland, where cars are driven on the left-hand side of the road.
While the Standard Teslas are cheaper, they pale in comparison to the many affordable EV options available in Europe, including those from China’s BYD, some of which start below 25,000 euros. CEO Elon Musk has called Europe the company’s “weakest market,” blaming the lack of approval for Tesla’s full self-driving technology for the shortfall.
Model 3 Standards don’t appear to be available yet in Europe.
OpenAI commits up to $25 billion for 500-megawatt “Stargate Argentina” data center
OpenAI has reportedly signed a letter of intent to invest up to $25 billion on “Stargate Argentina,” a new 500-megawatt AI data center.
Reuters reports that the deal would involve tax incentives.
In a video announcing the project, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said:
“Our vision for Stargate Argentina is to deliver a major boost to the country’s AI infrastructure, creating a foundation for new capabilities from smarter public services to tools that help small businesses compete globally.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
You may remember the name “Stargate” from the megaproject that tech giants and the Trump administration announced earlier this year to build a huge number of data centers in the US. And you may remember Argentina as the nation the Trump administration is now bailing out with a $20 billion currency swap.
Meta considering a stand-alone TV app as it leans into Instagram videos
Meta is considering building a dedicated TV app to expand the reach of Instagram’s video content, according to comments by Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, at a Bloomberg conference.
Instagram has 3 billion monthly users and is leaning into its Reels vertical videos, which puts it head-to-head with TikTok. Mosseri told Bloomberg:
“If behavior [and] the consumption of these platforms is moving to TV, then we need to move to TV, too.”
A move to living room screens could let Meta compete against Alphabet’s YouTube, but adapting vertical videos to TV could prove challenging.
“If behavior [and] the consumption of these platforms is moving to TV, then we need to move to TV, too.”
A move to living room screens could let Meta compete against Alphabet’s YouTube, but adapting vertical videos to TV could prove challenging.
Nvidia backs Reflection AI in $2 billion fundraising round
When DeepSeek R1 was released at the end of last year, it shook the AI world to its core.
The scrappy Chinese startup developed a competitive open-weights reasoning model that bested several state-of-the-art models from OpenAI and Google in several benchmarks.
The release caused the industry to question its bet on massive AI infrastructure over clever engineering done with constrained resources.
American startup Reflection AI thinks the West needs its own DeepSeek, and plans on being the company to build it.
On Thursday, Reflection AI announced it had raised $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation, with Nvidia leading the fundraising round with an $800 million investment.
Reflection does not appear to have developed a frontier-scale model yet, but has built the software needed to train one. A $2 billion cash infusion will certainly help with the company’s training costs, but by comparison, DeepSeek’s R1 model was trained for only $249,000.
The release caused the industry to question its bet on massive AI infrastructure over clever engineering done with constrained resources.
American startup Reflection AI thinks the West needs its own DeepSeek, and plans on being the company to build it.
On Thursday, Reflection AI announced it had raised $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation, with Nvidia leading the fundraising round with an $800 million investment.
Reflection does not appear to have developed a frontier-scale model yet, but has built the software needed to train one. A $2 billion cash infusion will certainly help with the company’s training costs, but by comparison, DeepSeek’s R1 model was trained for only $249,000.
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang throws shade at OpenAI-AMD deal
In an interview on CNBC yesterday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang threw some shade at the recently announced megadeal between competitor Advanced Micro Devices and its partner, OpenAI.
The unusual deal calls for AMD to sell multiple generations of its GPUs to OpenAI, totaling 6 gigawatts of computing power, in exchange for stock warrants for OpenAI to buy about 10% of the company.
When asked about the deal, Huang said:
“Yeah, I saw the deal. It’s imaginative, it’s unique and surprising. Considering they were so excited about their next-generation product, I’m surprised that they would give away 10% of the company before they even built it.”
The move diversifies part of OpenAI’s GPU supply chain away from Nvidia, which supplies the vast majority of GPUs for hyperscalers today.
When asked about the deal, Huang said:
“Yeah, I saw the deal. It’s imaginative, it’s unique and surprising. Considering they were so excited about their next-generation product, I’m surprised that they would give away 10% of the company before they even built it.”
The move diversifies part of OpenAI’s GPU supply chain away from Nvidia, which supplies the vast majority of GPUs for hyperscalers today.
The Washington Post’s Geoffrey Fowler tracked prices before and during Amazon’s recent “Prime Big Deal Days” and found the savings to be paltry: on a group of nearly 50 products he’d bought on Amazon over the past six months, he would have saved just 0.6% if he’d bought them during Amazon’s high-profile sale. And those savings, Fowler points out, don’t factor in the annual $139 Prime membership fee.
In a number of cases, some big-ticket items like TVs were actually more expensive during the e-commerce giant’s much-hyped discount days than they are normally.
Some 8% of kids ages 5-12 have interacted with AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of their parents. While that’s nowhere near the usage rates of other devices like smartphones or even voice assistants, it’s still notable for a relatively new technology — especially one that’s already had devastating consequences for young people.
Ives says he’s “relatively disappointed” in the price point of lower-cost Tesla models
On Tuesday, Tesla unveiled its long-awaited lower-cost cars, which turned out to be downgraded versions of the existing Model Y and Model 3. Tesla bull and Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives wasn’t particularly impressed with the price point, noting that it’s “still relatively high versus other vehicles on the market.”
The Model Y Standard and Model 3 Standard cost about $40,000 and $37,000, respectively. That’s more than the Model Y Premium and Model 3 Premium — what previous editions (or “trim levels”) are now called — cost last month, before the US federal government’s $7,500 tax credit expired. And the Standard models are missing a lot of Premium features, including Autopilot, second-row screens, and Tesla’s iconic glass roofs, among numerous other downgrades.
In other words, Tesla buyers will now be paying more for less, in what amounts to car-sized shrinkflation.
The stock closed down 4.5% yesterday on the news.
Ives doesn’t think it’s the end of the world but is “disappointed” in the price tag:
“We believe the launch of a lower cost model represents the first step to getting back to a ~500k quarterly delivery run-rate which will be important to stimulate demand for its fleet with the EV tax credit expiring at the end of September but we are relatively disappointed with this launch as the price point is only $5k lower than prior Model 3’s and Y’s.”
Nvidia helps boost xAI funding round to $20 billion
xAI’s latest funding round has now doubled to $20 billion from $10 billion a month ago, thanks in part to backing from Nvidia, which invested $2 billion in the equity portion of the transaction, Bloomberg reports. In an interview with CNBC, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang confirmed the investment, adding that his “only regret” was that he didn’t give xAI more money.
The mix of $7.5 billion in equity and $12.5 billion in debt will finance a special purpose vehicle that will purchase Nvidia chips that xAI will then rent. It’s one of many circular AI deals these days that’s contributing to chatter over an AI bubble by some, while being seen by others as a rational way for industry leaders to boost the potential size of the addressable market and lift their longer-term prospects in the process.
Investors in Elon Musk’s other company, Tesla, will vote next month at the company’s annual shareholder meeting on whether to invest in xAI as well — an outcome Musk has he said supports.
The mix of $7.5 billion in equity and $12.5 billion in debt will finance a special purpose vehicle that will purchase Nvidia chips that xAI will then rent. It’s one of many circular AI deals these days that’s contributing to chatter over an AI bubble by some, while being seen by others as a rational way for industry leaders to boost the potential size of the addressable market and lift their longer-term prospects in the process.
Investors in Elon Musk’s other company, Tesla, will vote next month at the company’s annual shareholder meeting on whether to invest in xAI as well — an outcome Musk has he said supports.
In the past few weeks, OpenAI has announced a flurry of massive deals with Oracle, Nvidia, CoreWeave, AMD, and others as hundreds of billions fly between technology partners racing to expand AI infrastructure at unprecedented scale. The Financial Times tallied it all up and found that the company has signed about $1 trillion worth of deals, and it isn’t clear at all that it will be able to fund them.
The “circular” nature of some of these arrangements is also one factor playing into fears that we’re in an AI bubble.
Tesla abandoned plans to make thousands of Optimus robots this year
At the start of this year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on an earnings call that his company planned to build 10,000 Optimus robots for internal use in 2025. On that same call, he hedged and said he thought the company would definitely build “several thousand” of the bots and that they would “be doing useful things by the end of the year.” Tesla apparently abandoned those plans this summer, according to new reporting from The Information, amid “difficulty Tesla has had with the hands for the robots” and other problems.
The importance of Optimus to Tesla has skyrocketed as sales of the company’s EVs have fallen. Last month, Musk said Optimus would some day amount to 80% of the value of Tesla.
Musk, who has been continually sharing videos of Optimus on X, reportedly hopes to impress investors next month at the company’s annual shareholder meeting with a “dancing troupe of Optimus bots.”
The importance of Optimus to Tesla has skyrocketed as sales of the company’s EVs have fallen. Last month, Musk said Optimus would some day amount to 80% of the value of Tesla.
Musk, who has been continually sharing videos of Optimus on X, reportedly hopes to impress investors next month at the company’s annual shareholder meeting with a “dancing troupe of Optimus bots.”
Microsoft-backed OpenAI now has 800 million weekly users for ChatGPT — up from 700 million last month — according to CEO Sam Altman, who spoke during the company’s developer conference today. For those who are counting, that’s about 736 million more users than Grok has each month.
OpenAI’s Altman: Sora will let copyright holders control how their characters appear
The buzzy AI video generation app is tweaking its lax controls for generating copyrighted characters in users’ videos.
Musk’s xAI spending $18 billion for another 300,000 Nvidia GPUs for “Colossus 2”
Elon Musk’s xAI is racing to finish its “Colossus 2” AI data center in Tennessee, and will need to spend at least $18 billion for the remaining 300,000 Nvidia GPUs, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
Musk is spending billions to keep the company’s Grok AI model at the front of the pack in the AI race, and he’s taking any shortcuts he can to get there.
According to the report, the site for the Colossus 2 data center sits on the border with Mississippi, and the company is building out a 1-gigawatt power station across state lines and running the power back to Tennessee.
By importing the power across state lines, Musk is taking advantage of looser regulations for power generation in Mississippi. The first Colossus used temporary gas turbines to get around permitting requirements, as Musk was reportedly too impatient to wait for local infrastructure to be upgraded.
Recent reports say the company is burning through as much as $1 billion per month and hopes to turn a profit in 2027.
According to the report, the site for the Colossus 2 data center sits on the border with Mississippi, and the company is building out a 1-gigawatt power station across state lines and running the power back to Tennessee.
By importing the power across state lines, Musk is taking advantage of looser regulations for power generation in Mississippi. The first Colossus used temporary gas turbines to get around permitting requirements, as Musk was reportedly too impatient to wait for local infrastructure to be upgraded.
Recent reports say the company is burning through as much as $1 billion per month and hopes to turn a profit in 2027.
