 | Apr 01, 2025 | | | | Supported by  | | | | | Happy Tuesday! President Trump says a deal to sell TikTok's U.S. assets would be reached before the Saturday deadline. Open AI plans to release free, open-weight reasoning model. French regulator fines Apple over data-sharing rules.
| | | | President Donald Trump said a deal to sell TikTok's U.S. assets would be reached before the deadline on Saturday. "We have a lot of potential buyers," he told reporters on Air Force One late on Sunday, according to Reuters. "There's tremendous interest in TikTok." In January, Trump extended the deadline to April 5 for TikTok to divest from its Chinese parent company ByteDance or face a ban in the U.S. Trump previously said he'd be willing to extend the deadline again if necessary. The private equity firm Blackstone is also considering taking a small stake in TikTok, The New York Times reported on Friday. Other interested buyers include a group led by Wyoming entrepreneur Reid Rasner and a consortium led by billioniare Frank McCourt. | | | | OpenAI is planning to release artificial intelligence with so-called reasoning capabilities for free for consumers and developers in the coming months, according to a post on X from CEO Sam Altman. The model will be "open-weight," meaning the weights, or settings, that determine how the model responds to queries will be available. Such information is considered to be the secret sauce of firms like OpenAI, which typically hide it from outsiders. Reasoning models work by spending additional computing resources when users ask them more complex questions. Other information about the forthcoming open-weight OpenAI model, such as the data used to train it, won't be available. Releasing a model that's free for users to download could help OpenAI win brownie points with developers who have turned to cheaper open models in recent months. OpenAI may hope to upsell those developers to its paid models, which are currently helping the company generate at least $1 billion in revenue per year. Altman first introduced the idea of OpenAI releasing an open-weight model last year and again in January, shortly after the Chinese firm DeepSeek released an open-weight reasoning model that's still making waves across the world as more businesses use DeepSeek models in lieu of more expensive ones from the likes of OpenAI. When OpenAI was a nonprofit, its primary goal was to release AI in an open manner. The last open-weight language model OpenAI released was GPT-2, which came out in February 2019, the same year OpenAI started a for-profit subsidiary. | | | | The French competition regulator fined Apple €150 million, or around $162 million, saying Apple had tougher requirements for data collection by outside apps than its own apps under its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework. Apple released the ATT framework inside its iOS 14.5 operating system update in April 2021, in the name of increasing privacy for its users. ATT asks users whether they will accept being tracked by mobile identifiers upon downloading an app, prompting user opt-outs that limit how much data advertisers can collect to target mobile ads and measure their effectiveness. The French regulator found that while Apple's objective of protecting user privacy was fine, Apple's own applications faced less of a burden than those operated by third parties. The authority also said seeing both ATT and General Data Protection Regulation compliance was unnecessarily complex for users. A spokesperson for Apple said the company was disappointed with the decision, but noted that the French regulator has not asked for changes to ATT. | | | | Circle, the second biggest stablecoin issuer, is aiming to publicly file paperwork for its initial public offering in late April, according to Fortune. The company is working with investment banks JPMorgan and Citi on the IPO, the publication reported, citing two unnamed people. It's seeking a valuation between $4 billion to $5 billion, Fortune said. Circle didn't immediately return to a request for comment. Circle issues USDC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin backed by cash and treasuries used mostly in crypto trading, that has reached $60 billion in market circulation. Tether, the largest stablecoin, has $144 billion in market circulation. In January 2024, Circle announced it filed confidentially for an IPO. Last month, CEO Jeremy Allaire said the company is committed to going public. The Congress is currently deliberating legislation on stablecoin, which will decide how Circle and other issuers will be regulated. | | | | President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday to set up a new office to oversee the CHIPS and Science Act and to facilitate foreign investments above $1 billion into the U.S. Dubbed the United States Investment Accelerator, the new entity will reside within the Commerce Department and take responsibility for the department's CHIPS Program Office, which supervises the dispersal of $57.2 billion federal subsidies for boosting semiconductor research and production on U.S. soils as authorized under the Act. Trump has repeatedly criticized the bipartisan CHIPS Act, which was signed into law by President Biden in August, 2022. Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. have been the two largest recipients of subsidies under the Act. The new investment accelerator will be established within 30 days with staffing decided by the secretary of commerce. | | | | OpenAI said Monday it was raising $40 billion in new funding at a pre-investment valuation of $260 billion, confirming earlier reports about the round. The ChatGPT maker also confirmed that SoftBank Group, an existing OpenAI investor, was involved in the funding efforts. Other existing investors Coatue Management, Founders Fund and Altimeter Capital Management, as well as new investor Magnetar Capital, a backer of AI data center provider CoreWeave, are expected to participate in the deal, Bloomberg reported last week. The deal is going to close in two parts. OpenAI is expected to raise a $10 billion tranche in the next two weeks, and then will raise a $30 billion tranche by the end of 2025, as previously reported. OpenAI last raised capital at a $157 billion valuation, including the investment, in October 2024, in a financing led by Thrive Capital. OpenAI has hit 20 million paying subscribers and 500 million people use ChatGPT weekly, according to a spokesperson for the company. The Information previously reported that ChatGPT is generating more than $4 billion in revenue annually and that the company has projected total revenue this year of nearly $13 billion, up from around $4 billion in 2024. | | | | Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's AI drug discovery subsidiary, has raised $600 million in its first funding round, the company said Monday. Thrive Capital led the round, with participation from Alphabet and Google Ventures, another subsidiary of Alphabet, according to the company's press release. Thrive is one of the biggest investors in OpenAI, among other AI startups. The company didn't disclose its valuation. It is developing artificial intelligence models to design drugs and has signed billion-dollar deals with the pharmaceutical giants Eli Lilly and Novartis. Last year, Demis Hassabis, who runs both Isomorphic Labs and Google's AI research unit Google DeepMind, shared a Nobel Prize in chemistry for work developing AlphaFold, an AI system for predicting protein structure. | | | | Runway released its latest video-editing tool on Monday that makes it simpler to pull together clips into a longer video—an effort by the startup, which investors were looking to back last summer at a $4 billion valuation, to compete against OpenAI's Sora and other rivals. The new model, Gen-4, is better than previous versions at generating characters, locations and objects that look the same across different video clips based on a user-provided reference image. Runway's paid users will be able to generate clips with Gen-4 that are five and 10 seconds long at a 1080-pixel resolution. The New York-based startup sells subscriptions to customers including CBS and Nickelodeon, and it also has a deal with Lionsgate to use the studio's movies as training data. But it faces tough competition from rival startups including Pika Labs, HeyGen, Luma AI and, most notably, OpenAI. | | | | | | | | | Opportunities Empower your teams to stay ahead of market trends with the most trusted tech journalism.
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