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SpaceX backs Anthropic with data centre deal amidst Musk's OpenAI lawsuit

Al Jazeera

SpaceX backs Anthropic with data centre deal amidst Musk's OpenAI lawsuit Anthropic has reached a deal to tap the computing resources of Elon Musk's SpaceX, marking a detente with its one-time critic and a boost for both companies in the high-stakes artificial intelligence race. Under the agreement announced on Wednesday, Anthropic will use the full computing power of SpaceX's Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, Tennessee, which houses more than 220,000 Nvidia processors and will give the Claude chatbot maker 300 megawatts of new capacity within a month. That's enough electricity to power more than 300,000 homes - as the Dario Amodei-led company seeks to boost the capacity of its Claude Pro and Claude Max AI assistants for subscribers. The tool allows AI systems to review work between sessions, spot patterns, and update files that store user preferences and other context. Available as a research preview, "dreaming" comes with software for managing agents, or AI programmes that perform tasks with little human involvement.


Anthropic Gets in Bed With SpaceX as the AI Race Turns Weird

WIRED

In an unexpected turn, the two companies signed a deal for Anthropic to use computing resources from Elon Musk's xAI. Anthropic and Elon Musk's SpaceX said on Wednesday that the two entities have signed an agreement for Anthropic to use computing resources from xAI's data center in Memphis, Tennessee. It's the latest tie up in an industry that is scrambling to find enough computers to run complex AI software. SpaceX and xAI were previously separate companies, but the two merged earlier this year. The combined entity, also owned by Musk, is called SpaceXAI.


High-Dimensional Gaussian Mean Estimation under Realizable Contamination

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study mean estimation for a Gaussian distribution with identity covariance in $\mathbb{R}^d$ under a missing data scheme termed realizable $ε$-contamination model. In this model an adversary can choose a function $r(x)$ between 0 and $ε$ and each sample $x$ goes missing with probability $r(x)$. Recent work Ma et al., 2024 proposed this model as an intermediate-strength setting between Missing Completely At Random (MCAR) -- where missingness is independent of the data -- and Missing Not At Random (MNAR) -- where missingness may depend arbitrarily on the sample values and can lead to non-identifiability issues. That work established information-theoretic upper and lower bounds for mean estimation in the realizable contamination model. Their proposed estimators incur runtime exponential in the dimension, leaving open the possibility of computationally efficient algorithms in high dimensions. In this work, we establish an information-computation gap in the Statistical Query model (and, as a corollary, for Low-Degree Polynomials and PTF tests), showing that algorithms must either use substantially more samples than information-theoretically necessary or incur exponential runtime. We complement our SQ lower bound with an algorithm whose sample-time tradeoff nearly matches our lower bound. Together, these results qualitatively characterize the complexity of Gaussian mean estimation under $ε$-realizable contamination.





Elon Musk's xAI announces it has raised 20bn amid backlash over Grok deepfakes

The Guardian

AI company's chatbot faces criticism over its generation of sexualized, nonconsensual images of women and girls Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company has raised $20bn in its latest funding round, the startup announced Tuesday, even as its marquee chatbot Grok faces backlash over generating sexualized, nonconsensual images of women and underage girls. The funding round exceeded its initial $15bn target, according to xAI's press release. The company touted Grok's image-generation abilities in the announcement of its latest funding round. Nonetheless, the company has been able to win government contracts and billions of dollars in investment amid the AI boom. Over the past week, Grok has responded to tens of thousands of prompts from users on X requesting the chatbot remove women's clothing in images or pose them in sexualized ways.


Elon Musk's 2025 recap: how the world's richest person became its most chaotic

The Guardian

Though the drama surrounding Elon Musk was frequently absurd and unpredictable, it was also consequential. Though the drama surrounding Elon Musk was frequently absurd and unpredictable, it was also consequential. Elon Musk's 2025 recap: how the world's richest person became its most chaotic How the tech CEO and'Dogefather' made a mess of the year - from an apparent Nazi salute during his White House tenure to Tesla sales slumps and Starship explosions T he year of 2025 was dizzying for Elon Musk . The tech titan began the year holding court with Donald Trump in Washington DC. As the months ticked by, one public appearance after another baffled the US and the world.


'A lot of this is speculative': faith and fear mix amid 3tn global datacentre boom

The Guardian

Several new sites such as this are in the pipeline in the UK. Several new sites such as this are in the pipeline in the UK. 'A lot of this is speculative': faith and fear mix amid $3tn global datacentre boom The global investment spree in artificial intelligence is producing some remarkable numbers and a projected $3tn (£2.3tn) spend on datacentres is one of them. These vast warehouses are the central nervous system of AI tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Veo 3, underpinning the training and operation of a technology into which investors have poured vast sums of money. Despite concerns that the AI boom could be a bubble waiting to burst, there are few signs of it at the moment.