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The biggest money move in academia today: hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin is giving Carnegie Mellon University three billion dollars, one of the largest gifts in American higher education history. It's a bet on CMU's role at the center of AI research, and it raises real questions about what private wealth increasingly means for the direction of public science.
On the AI industry front, AMD has agreed to acquire World Labs, the spatial intelligence startup co-founded by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal worth eight point two billion dollars. Li, who helped build ImageNet and shaped the modern deep learning era, will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist. It's a significant move as AMD pushes to compete with Nvidia not just on chips, but on the research talent that defines where AI goes next.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is navigating rougher waters. The company has apologized following a Medicare data breach and has shelved the launch of its next generation ChatGPT. At the same time, it's reportedly seeking thirty dollars — that figure appears garbled in the source — in fresh funding at a valuation of one point four trillion dollars, even as its IPO remains delayed. The gap between its ambitions and its accountability continues to be a story worth watching.
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