OpenAI's $10B PE play (and Musk's confession)

Bloomberg

OpenAI has formed a $10 billion joint venture with 19 PE firms to systematically deploy its AI technology across thousands of portfolio companies, marking a significant shift toward enterprise-scale AI adoption through financial industry partnerships.

Meta acquired humanoid robotics startup ARI to bolster its Superintelligence Labs division, bringing top-tier robotics talent to develop foundation models for whole-body humanoid control as part of its path toward AGI through physical world training.

Elon Musk confirmed in court that xAI trained Grok using distillation techniques on OpenAI's models, validating assumptions that U.S. AI labs use these methods on each other despite publicly opposing the practice when done by Chinese competitors.

Testing Catalog

OpenAI updated Codex with playful animated Pets overlays and quietly added auto-import of competitor config files, signaling a strategic shift toward making Codex a sticky, cross-agent desktop super-app beyond pure coding functionality.

GreaterWrong

The article traces how Transformers' parallel processing architecture and self-supervised pretraining on massive unlabeled datasets enabled LLMs to scale dramatically, with supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning added later for alignment and specific behaviors.