OpenAI on Monday said it raised 40 billion in a new funding round that valued the ChatGPT maker at 300 billion, the biggest capital-raising session ever for a startup. The infusion of cash comes in a partnership with Japanese investment giant SoftBank Group and "enables us to push the frontiers of AI research even further," the San Francisco-based company said in a post on its website. "Their support will help us continue building AI systems that drive scientific discovery, enable personalized education, enhance human creativity, and pave the way toward AGI (artificial general intelligence) that benefits all of humanity," the company said.

OpenAI said it had raised US 40bn in a funding round that valued the ChatGPT maker at 300bn – the biggest capital-raising session ever for a startup. It comes in a partnership with the Japanese investment group SoftBank and "enables us to push the frontiers of AI research even further," OpenAI announced, adding it would "pave the way toward AGI (artificial general intelligence)" for which "massive computing power is essential". SoftBank said it wanted to realise "artificial super intelligence" (ASI) surpassing human intelligence and OpenAI was the partner closest to achieving that goal. SoftBank is to put 10bn at first into OpenAI and 30bn more by the end of 2025 if certain conditions are met. Also on Monday, OpenAI announced it was building a more open generative AI model as it faces growing competition in the open-source space from DeepSeek and Meta.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized code generation, significantly enhancing developer productivity. However, for a vast number of users with minimal coding knowledge, LLMs provide little support, as they primarily generate isolated code snippets rather than complete, large-scale project code. Without coding expertise, these users struggle to interpret, modify, and iteratively refine the outputs of LLMs, making it impossible to assemble a complete project. To address this issue, we propose Self-Rectified Large-Scale Code Generator (SRLCG), a framework that generates complete multi-file project code from a single prompt. SRLCG employs a novel multidimensional chain-of-thought (CoT) and self-rectification to guide LLMs in generating correct and robust code files, then integrates them into a complete and coherent project using our proposed dynamic backtracking algorithm. Experimental results show that SRLCG generates code 15x longer than DeepSeek-V3, 16x longer than GPT-4, and at least 10x longer than other leading CoT-based baselines. Furthermore, they confirm its improved correctness, robustness, and performance compared to baselines in large-scale code generation.

Computer use agents automate digital tasks by directly interacting with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) on computers and mobile devices, offering significant potential to enhance human productivity by completing an open-ended space of user queries. However, current agents face significant challenges: imprecise grounding of GUI elements, difficulties with long-horizon task planning, and performance bottlenecks from relying on single generalist models for diverse cognitive tasks. To this end, we introduce Agent S2, a novel compositional framework that delegates cognitive responsibilities across various generalist and specialist models. We propose a novel Mixture-of-Grounding technique to achieve precise GUI localization and introduce Proactive Hierarchical Planning, dynamically refining action plans at multiple temporal scales in response to evolving observations. Evaluations demonstrate that Agent S2 establishes new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on three prominent computer use benchmarks. Specifically, Agent S2 achieves 18.9% and 32.7% relative improvements over leading baseline agents such as Claude Computer Use and UI-TARS on the OSWorld 15-step and 50-step evaluation. Moreover, Agent S2 generalizes effectively to other operating systems and applications, surpassing previous best methods by 52.8% on WindowsAgentArena and by 16.52% on AndroidWorld relatively. Code available at https://github.com/simular-ai/Agent-S.

The other top robot vacuum brands can release as many models as they want, but the "Shark vs. Roomba" debate isn't leaving the Google search bar anytime soon. There's always an even bigger spotlight on the feud when comparing their deals during various sale events, and the last day of Amazon's Big Spring Sale is seeing a big showdown between Shark and iRobot's two most expensive robot vacuum and mop combos: The Shark PowerDetect NeverTouch Pro and iRobot Roomba Combo Max AutoWash Dock are both down from their over- 1,000 prices to 799.99 ( 799 for the Roomba, so you'd technically be saving almost a dollar extra). Both can wash and dry their own mopping pads whereas the models right below each in the family tree, the Roomba Combo j9 and Shark PowerDetect NeverTouch (no Pro) only refill their water tanks, but need you to throw the pads in the washing machine. The self-washing situation is definitely worth the upgrade in my eyes. I've tested both of them, and have some intel as to who should pick the Shark and who should pick the Roomba.

Vidya Nayak, Director of Product Design at Yahoo Search, is aware it's not easy to be a visible female tech executive. She also knows talking about her experiences as a woman in the industry makes a difference. "Sharing my own stories honestly and authentically encourages other women in the room to come forward and share theirs," Nayak tells Mashable. "This creates a sense of community and solidarity where women feel seen, heard, and empowered to navigate their day-to-day boldly." Nayak has a big job at Yahoo, which ranks as the U.S.'s second most-visited website.

SAVE 200: As of March 31, the Eufy E20 3-in-1 robot vacuum, cordless stick vacuum, and handheld vacuum is on sale for the first time since its debut at CES 2025. Get it for 399.99 -- a 33% savings. Amazon's Big Spring Sale has brought us the first discount on a major CES 2025 robot vacuum. Coincidentally, the Eufy E20 is not only one of the best robot vacuum deals from the sale but also one of the best stick vacuum deals. Yep, you read that right: It's a 3-in-1 robot vacuum that can transform into a cordless stick vacuum (as well as a handheld).

OpenAI has been doubling its audience for ChatGPT at a rapid rate, and the addition of its latest image generation feature has increased the AI assistant's popularity. Today, CEO Sam Altman posted to X that the service "added one million users in the last hour," calling it a "biblical demand" for the image generation. When the company announced the rollout of image generation in ChatGPT last week, the tool was meant to be available to all user tiers. However, the high degree of interest meant that access for free users was walked back. Now, the company is reporting "issues with new signups," which has been its status for more than a day.

Sam Altman today revealed that OpenAI will release an open weight artificial intelligence model in the coming months. "We are excited to release a powerful new open-weight language model with reasoning in the coming months," Altman wrote on X. Altman said in the post that the company has been thinking about releasing an open weight model for some time, adding "now it feels important to do." The move is partly a response to the runaway success of the R1 model from Chinese company DeepSeek, as well as the popularity of Meta's Llama models. OpenAI may also feel the need to show that it can train the new model more cheaply, since DeepSeek's model was purportedly trained at a fraction of the cost of most large AI models. "This is amazing news," Clement Delangue, cofounder and CEO of HuggingFace, a company that specializes in hosting open AI models, told WIRED.

LibreOffice, the open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, is seeing a serious uptick in downloads (as first reported by Computerworld) with February's release of version 25.2. According to the Document Foundation, LibreOffice, which runs on Linux, MacOS, and Windows, now boasts around 200 million worldwide users. Document Foundation's Mike Saunders said that the exact number of total users is difficult to pinpoint, as the Foundation does not track users in order to maintain their privacy. Sanders also noted that downloads of LibreOffice have been climbing with every new release, which is a good indicator that The Document Foundation is doing something right. Why is LibreOffice seeing an uptick in downloads now?