OpenAI has secured its $40 billion in fresh funding from SoftBank — probably. The FT lists $30 billion from SoftBank and $10 billion more from Microsoft and various venture capital funds. [OpenAI; FT, archive]

That $30 billion from SoftBank may not exist yet. SoftBank is currently looking for someone to loan them $16 billion to help fund all of this. [Bloomberg, archive]

If OpenAI doesn’t transition by the end of 2025 to being a for-profit company, that $30 billion from SoftBank becomes only $20 billion.

It sounds like they did a deal to try to do an actual deal. If everything goes well.

So let’s pump up the user base! OpenAI is now giving out trial signups so current customers can get their friends in. And Sam Altman claimed on Monday afternoon that putting GPT-4o with images into ChatGPT “added one million users in the last hour.” [Twitter, archive]

OpenAI is not adding users to become profitable — it still loses money on every query. It’s adding users to sell a story to investors.

Sam next big pre-announcement is an “open weights” AI model that you can download and run at home, coming “this summer.” This is entirely to fight off Llama and DeepSeek. [Twitter, archive]

Sam still has his proof-of-eyeballs cryptocurrency, Worldcoin, with a new programme to pay people to develop for it in the hope of drumming up any sort of user interest. Top Worldcoin developers could earn up to $25,000 a week! Paid in Worldcoin, not actual money. [Business Insider, archive]

• Video version

From geometric, white panels riveted together into an undulating sphere, Marc Fornes / THEVERYMANY’s newest public installation invites visitors to immerse themselves in a luminous experience on Google’s Charleston East Campus in California.

Designed as a physical embodiment of innovation and creativity, “The Orb” invites us into a 10-meter-tall, 26-meter-wide labyrinthine form made of ultra-thin aluminum. “Edged yet edgeless, surfaces curve, branch, split, rejoin, and split again,” the studio (previously) says. “This extreme curvature—achieved through cutting-edge computational design—enables the surfaces to be entirely self-supporting despite being just three millimeters thick.”

“The Orb” comprises 6,441 individual components connected with more than 217,000 rivets. During the day, a pattern of holes speckles sunlight across the pavilion and onto the ground. At night, the structure is illuminated, casting deep shadows that contrast the bright details.

Fornes’ mission, hybridizing elements of art and architecture, is to spark “the joy wandering, the joy of marveling.”

Find more on THEVERYMANY website.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article More Than 200,000 Rivets Secure the Ultra-Thin Aluminum Facets of ‘The Orb’ by Marc Fornes appeared first on Colossal.

Die BBC fragte 1994 die Menschen vor der Röhre, ob sie bereit für das Internet wären. So geil wie das dann alles mal wurde, waren das offenbar einige. Die, die es damals noch nicht waren und sich da erst „rein arbeiten“ mussten (und ich meine nicht die Jüngeren, ob ihres Alters), haben es dann irgendwann verändert. Heute weiß ich manchmal nicht genau, ob die Welt ohne dieses Internet nicht vielleicht doch ein besserer Ort wäre.

Kate Bellingham reports that an exciting new interconnected world – a world where every word ever written, every picture ever painted and ever film ever shot will be at our fingertips – is tantalisingly close. The information superhighway will be a high-capacity digital communication network, which in time could revolutionise the way we shop, socialise and work.

The groundwork for this technological behemoth is already well underway, with computers already communicating with one another to allow users to send electronic mail (President Bill Clinton is already connected) and access news, weather and even some shopping services. For the information superhighway to really take off though, it needs more capacity than the UK’s ageing network of copper telephone wires can provide. Is Britain prepared to invest in the sort of high-capacity fibre-optic cable network that can make the technological utopia a reality?

(Direktlink)

In-Game-Käufe sind nicht nur bei EA ein perfides Mittel, um den Leuten das Geld aus der Tasche zu ziehen. Am besten man beißt gar nicht in den für einen ersten ausgelegten Köder. Aber man versteht die hier gezeigte Frustration so oder so. Und nervig ist es eh.

(Direktlink, via The Awesomer)

Hey, psst, was würdet ihr sagen... wenn jemand einen Signal-Gruppenchat für die Bombardierung im Jemen aufsetzt... meint ihr, der hat dann nur eine Signal-Gruppe?

Natürlich nicht!

Waltz’s team set up at least 20 Signal group chats for crises across the world

Wired hat ein Update zu dem gekidnappten Crypto-Professor.

Das war offenbar guter alter Antikommunismus. Der hat mit Kollegen aus China kooperiert und so auch Funding acquiriert und das gegenüber den Amis nicht ordentlich deklariert, scheint das Problem zu sein.

Klar, da sperrt man ihn erstmal aus seinem Büro aus in der Uni, löscht alle Erwähnungen seiner Existenz von der Webseite, und tut so, als habe es ihn nie gegeben.

Interessanterweise sieht es so aus, als habe gar nicht ER das Geld von China kassiert sondern seine Kollegen in China. Er hatte sein Funding von der National Science Foundation in den USA.

Aber wenn du in der Nähe von Kommunisten gesehen wirst, dann musst du ins memory hole, klar.