Snorkel AI, a company that builds AI training data sets and simulated environments, closed a $350 million Series E at a $3.5 billion valuation, nearly triple its $1.3 billion valuation from 17 months earlier. The round included existing backers Addition, Lightspeed, Greylock, GV, and Wells Fargo, alongside new leads Insight Partners and S32. Snorkel reports an annualized revenue run-rate of $375 million, up 18-fold over the past year.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-22
Court documents made public in an ongoing copyright lawsuit reveal internal OpenAI communications in which employees discussed the expense and legality of acquiring books to train early ChatGPT models, with some staff flagging the sourcing as questionable. The messages suggest teams weighed pirated material as a cheaper alternative to licensing content properly.
wsj.com
· 2026-09-19
An Entrepreneur commentary argues that the backlash over Google's Gemini AI producing biased outputs was wrongly dismissed as a mere technical glitch. The author contends that because AI models learn from human-generated data, they inherit the assumptions and blind spots of that data, and scaling such systems only amplifies those flaws. The piece stresses that any business deploying AI tools—regardless of whether it built the model—inherits this bias risk.
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-09-17
Multiple AI companies are now accusing each other of stealing proprietary technology, models, or data, even as the broader industry itself has built its foundation on scraping internet content without explicit consent from original creators. This dynamic has created a contradictory landscape where firms decry theft while relying on similarly extractive practices for their own products.
gizmodo.com
· 2026-09-13
Mecka AI, a startup that pays people to record themselves performing everyday tasks to generate motion data for training humanoid robots, is close to finalizing a new funding round led by Sequoia Capital valuing the company at roughly $500 million. The deal comes just three months after Mecka raised $60 million in a round led by Framework Ventures, though the exact size of the new round remains unknown and terms could still change.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-11
Sony Music and Warner have filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging the AI company scraped and used their song catalogs without permission to train its models. This follows a similar suit from Universal Music Group in January, meaning all three major music publishers are now pursuing legal action against Anthropic.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-11
Meta piloted a Model Capability Initiative that would have captured employees' keystrokes and mouse movements to help train its AI models. Workers pushed back quickly, circulating an internal petition, and the program was ultimately shelved after concerns about privacy and a reported data breach.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-11
A user posting on Hacker News says OpenAI's account setting that disables use of chat data for model training has reverted to 'on' after being turned off, despite no action from the user. They say this has happened more than once, and they only caught it by deliberately tracking when they last disabled the option.
news.ycombinator.com
· 2026-09-10
Mathematician Andreas Thom says his prior ChatGPT conversations may have fed into OpenAI's recent non-sofic groups breakthrough, echoing a similar complaint from NYU professor Tristan Buckmaster about undisclosed use of his Codex interactions. Thom noted OpenAI's unusually detailed grasp of niche techniques and has asked researchers Sébastien Bubeck and Mark Sellke whether his exchanges with ChatGPT were used as training data.
theverge.com
· 2026-09-10
Microsoft and the American Federation of Teachers signed a legally enforceable agreement barring the company from using student or teacher data to train its AI models, except in narrow safety and security cases. The deal also prohibits tracking students, requires human oversight for any AI decisions affecting schools, and mandates transparency with parents and educators about how the tools function. Protections take effect for school districts starting November 1.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-09
A technical essay argues that describing large language models as mere next-token predictors is outdated once reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) enters the picture. Unlike pre-training, which only reinforces sequences already present in training data, RLVR lets models generate novel token sequences and learn from evaluating their outcomes. The piece walks through pseudocode contrasting the two training loops to show how post-training changes what the model is actually optimizing for.
gmcgoldr.github.io
· 2026-09-04
GoKawiil