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Jun 30, 2025
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Supported by
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Welcome back! OpenAI’s research chief reassures staff that the company is responding to poaching efforts by Meta Platforms. President Donald Trump says he has a "buyer for TikTok." Elon Musk calls Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill “utterly insane.”
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OpenAI’s Chief Research Officer Mark Chen sent a memo to staff on the weekend promising that the company was aggressively responding to poaching efforts by Meta Platforms, according to a report in Wired magazine. The memo came as The Information reported Saturday that Meta had hired four more researchers from OpenAI. News of the hires came several days after reports
about four other researchers jumping from OpenAI to Meta. Wired quoted Chen in the memo saying that “we’ve been more proactive than ever before, we’re recalibrating comp, and we’re scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent.” He added that “I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something…Please trust that we haven’t been sitting idly by.” Wired said Chen’s note included comments from other researchers, including one who said staff should contact them if they got an offer from Meta. “If they pressure you, or make ridiculous exploding offers just tell them to back off, it’s not nice to pressure people in potentially the most important decision.“
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President Trump said “we have a buyer for TikTok” which he’ll identify in about two weeks, adding it was a “group of very wealthy people.” Trump made the comments in an interview with Fox News that aired on Sunday. He acknowledged that he needed the approval of the Chinese goernment but said he expected Chinese president Xi Jinping would probably approve the deal. In early April, The Information reported that Trump had a deal to put TikTok’s U.S. business into a new company called TikTok America, which would be more than half
owned by U.S. investors and less than 20% owned by TikTok’s existing parent ByteDance. That ownership level would put TikTok in compliance with a law requiring it sever ties with ByteDance or be banned, although Trump has repeatedly delayed implementation of the law. The deal fell apart amid the imposition of U.S. tariffs on China.
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Elon Musk called the latest Senate version of President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill “utterly insane and destructive” that “will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!.” In posts on X, Musk renewed an attack on the bill, which cuts off tax credits to wind and solar projects in development that don’t begin producing energy by 2027, according to The Hill. The bill also increases taxes on such projects that start after that date. Musk said the bill “gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.” Musk fell out with President Trump a few weeks ago after blasting the bill. Musk later backtracked, reportedly calling Trump to apologize. His latest criticisms didn’t take aim at anyone personally and were more specifically pointing out the impact of the bill on renewable energy, which will affect Tesla.
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Tesla announced that one of its vehicles had driven itself to its new owner’s home, in a big step forward for Elon Musk’s ambitions to dominate the self-driving car sector. A video posted on X by Tesla shows the car driving itself from Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory to its new owner’s home, about half an hour’s drive away, by “crossing parking lots, highways & the city,” Tesla said. The delivery comes a couple of weeks after Tesla launched a limited robotaxi service in Austin, in its first step towards competing with Alphabet’s Waymo.
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Hewlett Packard Enterprise has settled a Justice Department lawsuit aimed at blocking its $14 billion purchase of Juniper Networks, the companies announced, clearing the way for the deal to close. The government sued to block the deal in January, arguing that it would create a duopoly, with Cisco Systems in the market for wireless networking equipment for businesses. In the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On business As part of the settlement, HPE has agreed to divest its global Instant On networking switch business.
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Nvidia this month acquired CentML, a startup developing software to make artificial intelligence run more efficiently on specialized server chips, according to The Logic. The startup’s chief executive officer, co-founders and other employees now work at Nvidia, according to their LinkedIn profiles. Nvidia has acquired around half a dozen startups similar to CentML in the past two years in an attempt to lower the cost of using its chips and to boost its own service that rents out Nvidia chips to app developers. Toronto-based CentML said its software reduced the cost of running AI on server chips made by Nvidia, Google, Amazon Web Services, Advanced Micro Devices, and Intel. CentML raised just over $30 million since it was founded in 2022 from investors including Radical Ventures and Nvidia, which invests in numerous
AI startups that work with its chips, according to Pitchbook. A spokesperson for Nvidia and CentML’s CEO did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Meta Platforms is in advanced talks to raise $29 billion from private equity firms as it invests further in building data centers for artificial intelligence, the Financial Times reported. Apollo Global Management, KKR, Brookfield, Carlyle and Pimco | | | |
