With OpenAI's status as the poster child of AI, it should then be no surprise that OpenAI announced the closing of the largest private tech funding round on record, amounting to a staggering $40 billion in funding. Led by SoftBank with $30 billion and joined by Microsoft, Altimeter, Coatue, and Thrive, the fundraiser puts OpenAI at a $300 billion valuation - just behind companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX at $350 billion and TikTok's parent company ByteDance. OpenAI says it will use the extra cash to push AI research further and scale its compute infrastructure, and of the $40 billion raised, $18 billion is expected to go towards Project Stargate, according to an insider.
Known for its strides in bringing AI to creators in entertainment, Runway recently debuted its next state-of-the-art series of models, collectively named Gen-4. The family of models is purpose-built for media generation and excels in maintaining consistency of the world, characters, and objects across scenes without needing any fine-tuning or additional on the user's part, making it extremely user-friendly, as detailed in a blog post. Runway says that the model is rolling out to all paid plans and Enterprise customers, with plans to release its "References" feature shortly after.
Elon Musk has sold his social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), to his 2023-launched AI startup xAI in a $33 billion all-stock deal, announced Musk himself in a post on X. Musk explained that the move will "unlock immense potential by blending xAI's advanced AI capability and expertise with X's massive reach," adding that the two company's futures are intertwined, though it's not clear whether anything will change for its users. The deal values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion, the latter of which was bought by Elon for $44 billion in 2022.
Chinese AI startup Zhipu AI has launched AutoGLM Rumination, a free AI agent that can perform deep research, web browsing, travel planning, and research report writing, all powered by its proprietary GLM series of models. The company claims that its GLM-Z1-Air reasoning model is a fierce competitor of DeepSeek's R1, matching in performance while running "up to eight times faster" and using just" one-thirtieth of the computing resources." Founded in 2019 as a spinoff from a Tsinghua University lab, Zhipu has recently secured millions in government-backed funding as it looks to become one of China's best in AI.
According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is reportedly developing a new version of its Health app that will feature food tracking and a "personal AI coach" to provide case-by-case health advice based on data from users' medical devices. The report says that these features could potentially launch with iOS 19.4 in the spring or summer of 2026 under the tentative name Health+. The aforementioned health coach is currently being trained on data from staff physicians, with Apple looking to bring in extra doctors to record health-related videos.
Isomorphic Labs, Google's drug division spun out from its DeepMind AI research arm, has announced that it has raised $600 million in funding, led by Thrive Capital with additional backing from GV and Alphabet. Isomorphic builds on breakthroughs like AlphaFold, a protein research model that won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, to eventually reach a point where most drug discovery work is conducted via computers. The new funds are said to go towards expanding its research models and recruiting top talent to take aim at cancer treatments and immune disorders.