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Today:

• xAI Raises $10B for Grok

• Cloudflare Blocks AI Crawlers Default

• Surge AI Seeks $1B Raise

• Amazon Hits One Million Robots

• Grammarly Acquires Superhuman Email Startup

xAI Raises $10B for Grok

Elon Musk’s AI company xAI secured $10 billion—half as loans (debt) and half by selling shares (equity)—in a deal arranged by Morgan Stanley. The blended financing lowers borrowing costs and widens funding sources, giving xAI about $17 billion raised to date. Money will build one of the world’s largest data centers and advance Grok, its flagship AI system. A December 2024 round brought in $6 billion from top investors, including Nvidia and Sequoia.

Why this matters for AI

1. Scaling frontier models – With $10 billion more, xAI can fund the massive compute and data needed to compete with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic on next-generation models.
   

2. Hybrid financing blueprint – Mixing debt and equity shows a new way Big AI labs can tap cheaper capital without ceding as much ownership, signaling mature capital-market interest in AI infrastructure.
   

3. Hardware supply chain impact – The planned “one of the world’s largest data centers” will drive huge orders for GPUs and energy, influencing chip availability, pricing, and power-grid planning across the industry.

Cloudflare Blocks AI Crawlers Default

Cloudflare, a content delivery network (stores website data closer to users), will now block artificial-intelligence crawlers—automated bots that copy text and images—unless site owners opt in or accept payment. All new domains using Cloudflare must choose to permit these bots, and a “pay per crawl” option lets publishers charge for access. Since Cloudflare handles about 16 % of world internet traffic, the change could limit free data for AI training.

Why it matters for AI

1. Tighter data supply – Less free web content means AI labs must find new, legal data sources or pay for them, raising costs and possibly lowering model quality.
   

2. New payment model – “Pay per crawl” introduces a clear way to compensate (pay) creators when their work trains AI, shaping future business deals and copyright rules.
   

3. Industry ripple effect – Other networks and big sites may copy Cloudflare’s policy, forcing AI developers to negotiate (make formal agreements) or rely more on synthetic or licensed data.

Surge AI Seeks $1B Raise

Surge AI, a premium data-labeling company founded by former Google and Meta engineer Edwin Chen, is seeking up to $1 billion in fresh funding, targeting a value above $15 billion. Profitable and self-funded until now, Surge earned over $1 billion revenue in 2024, outpacing rival Scale AI’s $870 million. Scale lost key customers after Meta bought 49 percent and hired its CEO, pushing Google and OpenAI toward Surge’s higher-quality labeling services for data security.

Why it matters for AI

1. Training fuel – Better, human-reviewed labels improve how future AI systems learn and reason.
   

2. Cost and control shift – A $15 billion valuation shows investors view data labeling as strategic, not just back-office work, which raises the price—and importance—of quality data.
   

3. Competitive reshuffle – Scale AI’s customer losses and Surge’s rise signal that tech giants will switch partners if trust or confidentiality is at risk.

🧠RESEARCH

Ovis-U1 Technical Report

Ovis-U1 is a 3-billion-parameter AI model that can understand images, create pictures from text, and edit images. Using a new training method, it outperforms other models in key tests. It marks a major step forward in combining multiple abilities into one powerful system for visual and language tasks.

SPIRAL: Self-Play on Zero-Sum Games Incentivizes Reasoning via Multi-Agent Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning

SPIRAL is a training method where AI models play games against themselves to get smarter without human help. By learning through zero-sum games like poker or tic-tac-toe, models improve reasoning skills. This self-play approac

VMoBA: Mixture-of-Block Attention for Video Diffusion Models

VMoBA is a new method that speeds up how AI creates videos without lowering quality. It replaces slow, full attention systems with a smarter, block-based one that focuses only on the most important parts of a video. This makes training and running video models faster while keeping or improving video results.

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MyEssayWriter - Free AI Essay Writing tool

📲SOCIAL MEDIA

🗞️MORE NEWS

• Amazon has deployed its one millionth warehouse robot and launched a new AI system, DeepFleet, to boost robot efficiency by 10%. Robots now assist 75% of global deliveries and match human worker numbers.

• Grammarly is acquiring email startup Superhuman to expand its AI-powered productivity tools. Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra and his team will join Grammarly. The move follows Grammarly’s $1B funding round and aims to boost enterprise AI features.

• Meta is updating WhatsApp for business users with centralized marketing tools across apps, smarter AI support for customer chats, and new voice and video calling options. These features aim to boost efficiency and customer engagement.

• X is testing AI-generated Community Notes using chatbots like Grok. These AI notes will be vetted like human ones, but concerns remain over accuracy, hallucinations, and overload on volunteer fact-checkers.