Welcome to the newest edition of ID Tech’s AI update. Here’s the latest big news on the shifting landscape of AI and identity technology:
OpenAI is asking the White House to exempt AI companies from state-level AI regulations if they share their models with the federal government. In a 15-page policy proposal, the company argued that this would be an important means of ensuring that American AI companies remain competitive in the larger international context.
Manus may be having its own “DeepSeek moment” in terms of disrupting the AI market with a compelling new Chinese product. Manus is designed to autonomously execute complex tasks, along the lines of OpenAI’s Operator, but without the need for a $200 subscription service. It has generated some very enthusiastic responses from early users, though others have complained about the bot crashing and taking too long on tasks.
OpenAI has sealed a five-year deal with CoreWeave ahead of the latter’s IPO. The partnership is valued at just under $12 billion, and gives OpenAI a stake in CoreWeave, which in turn will provide compute to train and run OpenAI’s artificial intelligence models. That would help to make OpenAI less reliant on Microsoft, its biggest investor, for computing power.
Microsoft says it has developed its own in-house AI models that rival the top models from OpenAI and its arch-competitor Anthropic in internal testing. These “MAI” models will help it to be less reliant on OpenAI’s tech, and it’s planning to launch them in consumer products like Microsoft 365 Copilot. By the way, Microsoft has so far invested about $13 billion in OpenAI, its soon-to-be rival.
The former head of Airbus is urging Europe to embrace robotic technologies such as drones for the continent’s defense strategy. While Tom Enders left Airbus in 2019, he remains influential, including through his role as head of the German Council on Foreign Relations. He made the comments in a rare interview with Reuters.
Redwood, California-based Dexterity has raised $95 million in a new funding round, bringing the industrial robotics startup’s valuation to $1.65 billion. The funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sumitomo Corp, which is also a Dexterity customer. Dexterity’s robots are powered by swarms of AI agents via its proprietary Arbiter software.
Google has brought native image generation to its Gemini 2.0 Flash platform, enabling users to create and, importantly, alter images via conversational text-based prompts. People are having fun with it, and also subtly highlighting its potential for misuse.
The Spanish government has drafted legislation that would impose steep penalties on companies that don’t properly label AI-generated content. Offenders could be fined up to €35 million or seven percent of their global annual turnover for “serious offences”. The bill still needs to be approved by Spain’s lower house.
The chatbot’s take: We tried to get GPT-4.5 to gossip a bit, but it didn’t really take the bait.
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March 14, 2025 – by Alex Perala
