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:
Nvidia beat Wall Street expectations in its latest corporate update, reporting a 78 percent sales increase year-over-year, with revenues amounting to $39.3 billion. CEO Jensen Huang said demand for his firm’s Blackwell chips, which are designed for heavy-duty AI applications, is “amazing”. Nvidia is widely seen as a bellwether for the broader AI sector. One analyst said that its “earnings were not a blowout, but they didn’t show any glaring vulnerabilities either.”
Nvidia is also suing European Union antitrust regulators over their scrutiny of its deal to acquire Run:ai, a small startup focused on optimizing Graphics Processing Unit usage for AI. The deal has already been approved by the relevant EU authorities, but Nvidia argues that the scrutiny should never have been allowed, as legal precedent had previously established that the European Commission doesn’t have the authority to restrict minor M&A deals.
Meta is in talks to raise $35 billion in financing to build data centers in the U.S. Apollo Global Management is leading the talks, which are at an early stage. But Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously said that his firm plans to spend as much as $65 billion on AI-related projects this year.
Anthropic is looking to raise $3.5 billion at a valuation of $61.5 billion. The firm is widely seen as a direct competitor to OpenAI thanks to its beloved “Claude” chatbot, which received an update this week that boosted its reasoning capabilities, among other improvements. VC firms Lightspeed Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and Bessemer Venture Partners are said to be involved in the talks.
CoreWeave is preparing to file for an IPO, possibly as soon as next week, that would value it at over $35 billion. In another life, the New Jersey-based firm was a crypto-mining company that had acquired lots of GPUs from Nvidia. Those turned out to be useful for offering cloud-based AI computing services. CoreWeave revenues went from about $200 million in 2023 to roughly $2 billion last year.
Microsoft President Brad Smith is urging the Trump administration not to proceed with planned AI chips sanctions against China, arguing that it would be a “strategic misstep” that will hinder allies like India, Israel, and Singapore, and possibly push many companies to buy more AI chips from China due to restrictions on American purchases. “As drafted, the rule undermines two Trump administration priorities: strengthening the US AI leadership and reducing the nation’s near trillion-dollar trade deficit,” Smith wrote.
OpenAI has banned several ChatGPT users that it believes were linked to the Chinese surveillance apparatus. The accounts were allegedly using the AI tool to debug code that appeared to be meant for a real-time social media surveillance tool. They also used it to write pitches for their “social listening” software, presumably aimed at the Chinese Communist Party.
OpenAI also unveiled GPT-4.5, its latest chatbot model. It is not a reasoning model and does not outperform other state-of-the-art models on math or logic-related benchmarks. But it has a bigger knowledge base and is being pitched as a chatbot that feels more human. The vibes are good.
The chatbot’s take: This week, we gave the new Claude a spin.
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February 28, 2025 – by Alex Perala
