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:
Ambiq Micro had a successful IPO this week. It was priced at $24 per share with the aim of raising as much as $96 million, and it closed its first session at $38.53 – up 61 percent – lifting its market value from roughly $423 million at pricing to about $656 million. Ambiq designs ultra-low-power Arm-based microcontrollers and system-on-chips that run edge AI workloads on battery-powered devices; its chips power biometric wearables such as Huawei’s Band fitness trackers and Garmin sports watches.
AI continues to buoy tech companies revenues, including those of Microsoft and Meta. The former reported a 39 percent jump in its Azure revenue, prompting management to forecast a record $30 billion in capital spending for the current quarter to keep pace with AI-driven cloud demand. And Meta posted a 22 percent jump in Q2 revenues, thanks in part to AI-powered ad recommendations.
Perhaps more importantly, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a note that “superintelligence is in sight,” helping to make the case for his firm’s $100 million-plus signing bonuses for AI talent. Zuck said that Meta is “now seeing glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves”, and laid out a plan to create “personal superintelligence” rather than a centrally controlled system.
By the way, Apple just lost its fourth AI researcher to Meta in a month. Bowen Zhang, a key multimodal-AI engineer in Apple’s frontier models group, quit to join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, following team chief Ruoming Pang (reportedly lured by a $200 million package) and researchers Tom Gunter and Mark Lee.
Iconiq Capital is preparing to lead a $5 billion funding round for Anthropic that would value the OpenAI rival at roughly $170 billion. The funding round is reportedly attracting sovereign-wealth money from the Gulf and Asia and comes as Anthropic’s annual-recurring revenue has reportedly raced past $4 billion. The funds will underwrite training runs for Anthropic’s next-gen AI models, finance multi-gigawatt data-centre commitments, and provide employee liquidity.
OpenAI has raised $8.3 billion in a new funding round that brings its valuation to about $300 billion, and it has found an opening for the European part of its “Stargate” compute infrastructure project – a three-way deal with UK-based GPU cloud firm Nscale Global Holdings and Norwegian industrial conglomerate Aker. The $1 billion first phase will establish a hydropower-fed data center campus outside Narvik, targeting 100,000 Nvidia GPUs and 230 MW of capacity by the end of next year.
YouTube is preparing to launch an AI-powered system meant to flag viewers who are under 18. The system will make its assessments based on things like search queries, viewing history, and account longevity, and will automatically apply safeguards like blocking access to certain videos if someone is flagged as a minor. Adults who are mis-flagged will be able to regain full access by verifying with a government ID, a credit card, or a selfie.
Deepfake scammers have come for Quebec’s locally famous doctors. Physicians and health professionals such as ICU specialist Dr François Marquis and nutritionist-author Dr Isabelle Huot appear on provincial TV newscasts and radio shows so frequently that many Quebecers recognise them and trust what they say. Unfortunately, now their likenesses are appearing on platforms like Facebook to shill products they would never recommend, or discussing areas where they don’t have expertise.
The chatbot’s take: Wait, is this one of Meta’s AI ads?
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By Alex Perala
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