Formerly CEO of AGI deployment at OpenAI, essentially the No. 2 executive at the AI lab, Simo left the company in July citing health reasons. She still advises the company on a part-time basis. Before OpenAI, Simo was chair and CEO of Instacart, where she led the company through its 2023 IPO. She also spent more than a decade at Meta, including as head of the Facebook app. Simo also sits on Shopify's board. Nscale's founder and CEO, Josh Payne, said Simo is one of the few leaders who understand what it means to scale products used by billions of people and the demands those products place on the underlying systems. 'That's what we're building for at Nscale,' he said in a statement. 'Fidji joins a board we've built deliberately, with the experience of scaling platforms to the largest in the world, and the independence, financial rigor and operating depth to which companies at this scale are held.' Nscale's valuation has skyrocketed since it was founded just two years ago on the back of booming demand for AI infrastructure. The startup, which designs, builds, and operates AI data centers, is reportedly trying to raise up to $3.5 billion ahead of a planned IPO, Bloomberg reported last week, citing unnamed sources....
The move was announced on X by OpenAI's product leader, Thibault (Tibo) Sottiaux, who leads core products like Codex and ChatGPT at the AI lab. He said that the Pro plan puts the most strain on its systems, which is why sign-ups for this service tier are now being disabled. 'We wanted to take the smallest step that allows us to continue giving the broadest access possible,' Sottiaux wrote. He added that the company's other plans, including the API and lower-cost Go and Plus plans, remain available. The company warned on Wednesday that such a change might come. At the time, Sottiaux wrote, 'Demand for Astra is really unprecedented. We're pulling all the levers possible to sustain the demand, but I've not seen anything like it until now and we went through very steep growth before. Priority will always be to keep excellent service for existing users, but we might have to pause new Pro subscriptions for a bit if this continues.' Launched on September 3, Astra has been rolling out across OpenAI's plans, including Pro, Plus, Enterprise, and Business accounts, in addition to its AI. The model promises a major leap forward in areas like AI reasoning, coding, and computer use ' all areas of steep competition. OpenAI even heralded Astra as the beginning of the 'AGI era,' and a generational leap, stoking demand even more....
In 1915, Albert Einstein unveiled his general theory of relativity and transformed our view of the fabric of the physical world. The theory, which explains gravitation as a deformation of space-time by mass, is a pinnacle of modern physics that underpins cosmology, from work on black holes to measurements of gravitational waves, and is used routinely to guide space missions and GPS satellites. It has also become a yardstick for leaders in the field of artificial-intelligence technology, who are asking whether their creations could ever make a breakthrough on that level. At the India AI Summit in New Delhi this February, Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of Google DeepMind in London, proposed training a large language model (LLM) on all that was known before a particular cut-off date ' he suggested the year 1911 ' to see whether it could reproduce general relativity. 'That would be a good test for AGI,' Hassabis said, referring to the nebulous concept of artificial general intelligence that is a goal for many in the AI industry....
' Hey, Linas here! Every day, I break down 3 stories shaping the future of FinTech & Artificial Intelligence - plus the money movements and trends worth tracking. First time here' 400k+ FinTech and AI leaders get this daily. Join them: Of course, we cannot really take this seriously, because it's like an oil CEO announcing that they've just discovered driving '. Researchers, commentators, and analysts also pushed back within hours, and this claim probably won't last until the next news cycle. The more useful number arrived three days earlier: in its September 3 evaluation, Artificial Analysis found Astra matched Claude Fable 5's score on its Coding Agent Index at less than half the cost per task. That cost result lands directly in a market Anthropic has dominated for quite some time. By the end of 2025, Menlo Ventures estimated Anthropic held 54% of enterprise coding against OpenAI's 21%, up from 42% six months earlier on the strength of Claude Code, and coding is arguably the largest category of enterprise AI application spending....
