Actor Ben Affleck appeared on GQ's 'One More Question' series discussing AI concepts including neural networks, transformers, tensors, and GPUs, explaining how he writes basic Python scripts. Affleck, who sold his AI filmmaking startup to Netflix for a reported $587 million earlier this year, described how machine learning has long been part of visual effects workflows and detailed technical concepts like convolutional neural networks to the interviewer.
Arena, the crowdsourced AI model ranking platform that began as a UC Berkeley research project in 2023, announced a $200 million Series B funding round at a $3.1 billion valuation. The raise follows a $150 million Series A in January at a $1.7 billion valuation, when annualized revenue stood at $30 million; the company says that figure has since hit $100 million. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, a16z and others, and Arena also introduced a new alignment category to its leaderboard.
The Financial Times reports OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue is 'approaching $50 billion,' roughly $20 billion below a figure circulated just over a week earlier. That earlier $70 billion estimate had reportedly been constructed by OpenAI's own investors using company-shared data to compare against Anthropic's reported run rate, but the two firms calculate annualized revenue differently since Anthropic counts sales from cloud partners while OpenAI does not.
OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue stood at roughly $50 billion at the end of September, below the $68 billion figure widely reported last month, CNBC confirmed. A person familiar with the matter said the higher figure had included gross revenue from OpenAI's partners, used for comparison with rival Anthropic. Shares of Nvidia, Oracle and CoreWeave fell after the revised figure emerged, alongside reported growth rates of 77% overall and 107% in enterprise business.
Google Cloud unveiled a new agentic AI feature for Gemini that can plan and execute multi-step tasks, not just answer questions, using a single interface. The rollout targets business users first, with Gemini Enterprise already used by nearly 90% of Fortune 100 companies, before expanding to consumers. The agent can connect to internal business systems, use custom tools, and let users pick which AI model handles a task, including Anthropic's Claude.
Anthropic updated its usage policy on Thursday, adding explicit bans on election interference, weapons software, and surveillance. The policy also now formally prohibits users from engaging in prolonged, cruel verbal abuse of Claude, building on an August update that let the model end harmful conversations. Anthropic says the abuse rule targets only extreme, purposeless cruelty, not frustration, pushback, dark creative writing, or testing.
Pocketty is a new iPhone and iPad app providing SSH terminal access designed for monitoring coding agents, built to work with a tool called herdr. The app sends notifications readable only on the user's phone when an agent is blocked or has finished a task, letting the user respond directly in a mobile terminal session. It offers a 14-day free trial followed by a one-time launch price of $99, discounted from $129.
OpenAI released hundreds of claimed proofs to difficult open math problems using its proprietary models, saying it consulted the Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (AGMAI) to avoid prior controversies. But the release violated several of the group's own recommendations, including continuing to test proprietary models on hard problems, releasing chain-of-thought reasoning for only 10 of 719 manuscripts, and leaving 42% of proofs unformalized for human verification.
An executive in the cotton industry describes spending close to 200 days annually traveling to farms, mills, factories, brand headquarters and trade meetings worldwide. The executive says this constant in-person contact with people across the supply chain has shaped how they lead and make decisions.
Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist known as the 'Godfather of AI,' said on the Smart Girl Dumb Questions podcast that AI companies should be required to prove their products are safe to a federal regulator before public release, similar to drug approval. He noted that drug makers must spend roughly $1 billion proving safety to the FDA, and argued AI should face at least that level of scrutiny. Currently, AI firms rely on their own internal safety benchmarks rather than external review.
Apple has named Steve Smith as its new head of mergers and acquisitions, succeeding Adrian Perica, who held the role for more than a decade, according to Bloomberg. Perica is moving into a larger services role reporting directly to Eddy Cue, while Carson Oliver has been promoted to vice president of the App Store, also reporting to Cue.
ESET researchers report that threat group UAC-0099 has been steadily upgrading a malware downloader called MatchBoil since 2024, using it to deliver a C# backdoor dubbed MatchWok against Ukrainian transportation, manufacturing, and energy organizations. The latest version adds stronger obfuscation, sandbox-evasion checks, and new persistence mechanisms, turning it from a one-time downloader into a dropper that can repeatedly fetch updated payloads from its command-and-control server.
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