Elastic has agreed to acquire DeductiveAI, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to identify and fix bugs in software, for up to $85 million. The three-year-old company was backed by Cascade Ventures. The deal marks Elastic's latest move to expand its platform with AI-powered capabilities for enterprise customers. Source
Baseten, an AI inference startup, is reportedly close to closing a $1.5 billion funding round at a $13 billion valuation, months after completing its previous mega-round. The raise underscores investor appetite for infrastructure to run AI models efficiently, as what some describe as an "inference gold rush" accelerates. Source
OpenAI has hired Noam Shazeer, a Transformer co-inventor from Google DeepMind, and Dean Ball, a former Trump administration AI policy official, in the same week. The moves come as the company prepares for its initial public offering. Both additions bolster OpenAI's technical depth and political connections ahead of going public. Source
Amazon Web Services is in discussions to sell its custom AI chips to other data centers, a move that would pit the company more directly against Nvidia. Chief executive Andy Jassy has described the opportunity as worth $50 billion to the company. The shift marks AWS's most aggressive push yet to monetize the semiconductors it has developed for its own infrastructure. Source
Barret Zoph, OpenAI's head of enterprise AI sales, has departed the company after just five months. Zoph had returned to OpenAI in mid-January following a stint as co-founder and chief technology officer of Thinking Machines Lab, a competing AI company founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati. His departure marks another reshuffling in OpenAI's leadership ranks. Source