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(WSJ) Silicon Valley’s venture-capital firms are having an easy time finding promising startups to back. The hard part is cashing out. Last year, U.S. venture firms returned $26 billion worth of shares back to their investors, the lowest amount since 2011, according to the data provider PitchBook. Startup investors say 2024 has continued the trend,…

(The Information) OpenAI’s loss of Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati and safety systems chief Lilian Weng has galvanized concern among some of the remaining women at the firm that the management isn’t doing enough to promote and retain women, two people who have worked at the ChatGPT maker said. One female staffer circulated a memo…

(Platformer) Over the past week, several stories sourced to people inside the big AI labs have reported that the race to build superintelligence is hitting a wall. Specifically, they say, the approach that has carried the industry from OpenAI’s first large language model to the LLMs we have today has begun to show diminishing returns. …

(Futurism) Character.AI is an explosively popular startup — with $2.7 billion in financial backing from Google — that allows its tens of millions of users to interact with chatbots that have been outfitted with various personalities. With that type of funding and scale, not to mention its popularity with young users, you might assume the…

(Financial Times) The drawn-out downturn in private market returns is hitting one group of investors especially hard: Ivy League university endowments. Leading US university endowments, many of which allocate outsized portions of their portfolios to private equity and venture capital, have underperformed the university average for the second year in a row, with prominent ones…

(TechCrunch) When Skydio, a young maker of drones in San Mateo, California, sent a customer proposal in 2023 to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, its chief of staff, Mike Gennaro, forwarded the email to VC Ben Horowitz. “Which deployment are you looking to do?” Horowitz wrote back. “Whatever you want, Ben,” Gennaro replied, according…

(TechCrunch) Anthropic on Thursday said it is teaming up with data analytics firm Palantir and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to Anthropic’s Claude family of AI models. The news comes as a growing number of AI vendors look to ink deals with U.S. defense customers for strategic and…

(Inc.) “I don’t like my job. And I don’t think I’m going to go anymore.” That there is maybe the best line from the 1999 Mike Judge movie Office Space, the precursor to the even more on-the-nose Silicon Valley. Look at the four-digit-number in that sentence again. That line was uttered (checks watch) 25 years…

(AP) Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy.” But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts…

(KKR Academy) The power need for the largest hyperscale data centers is currently 1 GW, and estimates show that 18 GW of additional power capacity will be needed to service US data centers by 2030. For comparison, the total power demand for New York City is currently around 6 GW. In other words, there is…