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:
The US Army has launched its new Executive Innovation Corps, aka Detachment 201, naming high-profile AI executives to its ranks. OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, and Thinking Machines’ Bob McGrew have all enlisted accordingly as members of the Army Reserve. Sankar says the Corps’ establishment is “part of a larger effort by our military to transform the way it prepares for and fights wars in the 21st century.”
AMD has unveiled its new MI350 Series of GPUs, framing them as the cornerstone of a bigger, collaborative AI ecosystem. The firm is working with partners like Meta, OpenAI, Oracle, and Microsoft to get these GPUs deployed at scale, and it says that the chips match or exceed the capabilities of rival Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs across key benchmarks.
Crusoe plans to buy about $400 million worth of AI chips for an AI data center. The plan is to set up about 13,000 MI355X chips in a single facility, and to rent out compute to customers. “Where startups lack in scale and people and capital, compared to some of the hyperscalers, where we can compete is actually being nimble, fast and have a high density of engineering talent,” said CEO Chase Lochmiller in an interview with Reuters.
Qualcomm has established an AI R&D center in Vietnam, where it plans to focus on generative and agentic AI for consumer devices and automotive and Internet of Things applications. In a meeting with Qualcomm’s President of Global Affairs in Hanoi, Tô Lâm, the Communist Party’s General Secretary, encouraged the company to further expand its activities in the country, including work involving semiconductors and digital infrastructure.
Nvidia and Samsung are both investing in Skild AI as part of its Series B funding round, with Nvidia pitching in $25 million and Samsung contributing $10 million. Skild AI is building the “Skild Brain”, a general-purpose AI system that is meant to power robots across a range of tasks and environments. The funding round is being led by SoftBank, and would value Skild AI at about $4.5 billion.
Meta has invested $15 billion into Scale AI, a startup focused on data labeling and model evaluation. High-quality labelled data is crucial for training AI systems, and getting access to more of it should help Meta to catch up with its rivals. As part of the deal, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang will join Meta as the head of its new Superintelligence Lab.
Disney and Mistral have filed a lawsuit against Midjourney, a company specializing in generative AI for images. They claim that it has infringed on their intellectual property by allowing users to generate images involving copyrighted characters, calling it “a bottomless pit of plagiarism.” They are asking for monetary damages, an order barring further activities that allegedly infringe on copyrights, and a jury trial.
Snap has announced plans to launch new AI-integrated smart glasses next year. The planned “Specs” could feature AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. But the company hasn’t mentioned any plans to incorporate facial recognition, an idea that Meta is reportedly exploring for its own forthcoming smart glasses.
OpenAI’s annual recurring revenue has almost doubled to $10 billion, and the company expects to be raking in $125 billion by 2029. Meanwhile, rival Anthropic has reportedly tripled its ARR to $3 billion between January and May, and AI coding specialist Cursor has gone from under $100 million ARR last year to $500 million this year. But none of these companies are currently making a profit.
The chatbot’s take: A little clarification about what the deal is with Vietnam.
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By Alex Perala
