OpenAI's new talent, Amazon's AI chip challenge

Noam Shazeer, a key inventor of the Transformer neural network architecture, has officially joined OpenAI.

Shazeer previously worked at Google DeepMind and is credited with co-authoring the influential 'Attention Is All You Need' paper.

This strategic hire is seen as a move to bolster OpenAI's talent pool as the company reportedly moves towards an initial public offering.

The addition of such a prominent figure underscores OpenAI's commitment to advancing its foundational AI research and model development.

If Amazon Web Services has its way, the cloud giant is going to push even deeper into Nvidia’s market, in what might be one of the biggest challenges to Nvidia’s AI chip dominance we’ve seen so far.

Amazon’s AI chief Peter DeSantis told Bloomberg that AWS is in talks to sell its AI chip Trainium to other companies for use in data centers. DeSantis declined to specify which companies could be the buyers of such chips.

Such talks about selling chips are in the early stages, the company tells TechCrunch, and stem from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s annual shareholder letter in early April, in which he said the company’s homegrown AI chips were so coveted that he was thinking about selling them.

“If our chips business was a standalone business, and sold chips produced this year to AWS and other third parties (as other leading chips companies do), our annual run rate would be ~$50 billion. There’s so much demand for our chips that it’s quite possible we’ll sell racks of them to third parties in the future.”

How much of a challenge to Nvidia could Amazon be? A $50 billion competitor wouldn’t exactly tank Nvidia — which is currently on a $326 billion revenue run rate — if it keeps delivering quarters like the last one . But it’s akin to Intel’s annual revenues .

Meta has entered agreements to purchase 1.6 gigawatts of computing capacity from Crusoe, a data center developer.

This significant power acquisition will be distributed across new data center facilities located in Texas and Missouri.

The move highlights Meta's substantial and ongoing investment in building out its core infrastructure for AI development.

Such large-scale resource commitments are essential for training and deploying the next generation of Meta's AI models and applications.

Google has claimed that developer verification is a necessary change to smartphone software distribution, pointing to the increased prevalence of scams that trick Android users into installing malware apps. Google’s solution requires verifying the identities of developers outside the Play Store just like it does for devs publishing on its platform. This has proven to be a contentious change for myriad reasons.

In the new blog post , Google’s Matthew Forsythe confirms that the developer verification system is slated to come online on September 30 of this year. The initial deployment will be limited to countries with a high level of app scams: Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand.

Google released its new developer console back in March, inviting external developers the opportunity to pay $25 and verify their identities early. Developers who don’t register will find that their apps cannot be sideloaded on Google-certified Android devices once verification has rolled out.

This system places more burden on developers who want to make software for Android, even if they don’t want to deal with Google directly. There are a few updates that aim to streamline the experience. Google is following through on its promise to extend verification to trusted third-party stores—if a developer is verified in one of these storefronts, they are verified on Google’s side.

Developers will also have access to new APIs to make registering as an external developer less arduous. In the coming months, Google will release an Android Developer ID Status API that will check if a package name is already registered with Google. The Android Developer Console API will let you register and manage your app package names without leaving your development environment, too.

AI inference company Baseten is close to finalizing a stunning $1.5 billion funding round at a $13 billion valuation, the Wall Street Journal reports . Just five months ago, the startup announced that it had raised a $300 million Series E at a $5 billion valuation. And that round was just nine months after raising a $150 million Series D.

If finalized, this latest round would represent a 160% increase in valuation in less than half a year. However, the WSJ reports that this is a split-priced round , a tactic startups are using to boost their headline valuation and make lead investors look good on paper.

Launched in 2019, Baseten is a startup benefiting from what The Next Wave hailed the “ inference gold rush ,” in which VCs are pouring enormous amounts of money into companies building the inference layer. Inference is what the model does after a user submits a prompt.

Get an inside look at what it takes to scale and succeed from leaders at Mach Industries, Founders Fund, and Shinkei Systems. Through candid fireside chats and high-impact networking, you’ll walk away with valuable insights and new connections.