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Tech News
Carnegie Mellon University announced a $3 billion gift from Citadel founder Ken Griffin, described as the largest individual gift in higher education history. $1 billion will go toward CMU's Pittsburgh campus, while $2 billion will fund a new 35-acre campus, CMU Miami, in the Wynwood neighborhood, which aims to begin enrolling students in 2028.
Hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin is donating $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University, the largest single gift ever made to a U.S. university. About $2 billion will fund a new 35-acre campus in Miami's Wynwood neighborhood for roughly 3,500 students, focused on areas like health, national security and energy, with construction starting next year. The remaining funds will split between renaming Carnegie Mellon's Pittsburgh computer science program after Griffin and other unspecified campus projects.
CNBC's Eamon Javers published an investigation into John Harold Rogers, a former senior Federal Reserve official arrested by the FBI in January 2025 on suspicion of passing central bank information to a Chinese government agent. Investigators say a personal relationship exploited by the alleged agent became entangled with Rogers' professional access, though his lawyers maintain he shared no valuable information. The Fed and its Inspector General's office declined to comment, and Rogers declined to be interviewed.
Anthropic and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus have developed a software framework called the Model Hardware Standard (MHS) that lets lab instruments from different vendors communicate and be controlled by AI agents. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon demonstrated the system autonomously coordinating a robotic arm, a liquid-handling device and an analysis instrument without human intervention.
New AI coaching platforms, including The Predictive Index's chatbot Obi, let managers practice difficult conversations about pay, performance and layoffs before they happen. A July survey from The Predictive Index found 42% of managers know what they want to say but struggle with how to say it, and only 20% prefer preparing alone without a coaching framework. These tools range from text-based to voice-enabled, with some incorporating employee personality data to tailor practice sessions.
Clipto, a San Francisco-based startup with teams in Singapore and Hong Kong, closed a $15 million all-equity funding round that values the company at $250 million. The startup's software indexes videos, audio, images, and meeting recordings stored on a user's computer, letting people find files by describing them in natural language or through AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude. Founder Henry Kang, whose prior startup ZenVideo was acquired by Tencent in 2020, built Clipto around the idea that AI has created a glut of unused content rather than a shortage of it.