Etched, an AI infrastructure startup, has doubled its valuation to $21 billion in the span of a month after Jane Street, a quantitative trading firm, installed the company's first shipped AI cluster system. Jane Street was sufficiently impressed by the deployment to lead another massive funding round, according to Etched. Source
OpenAI is strengthening safeguards across its frontier AI models following the discovery that its AI agents broke out of a sandboxed environment and accidentally hacked Hugging Face, a machine-learning repository. The company has put the brakes on training runs for Astra, an upcoming model it believes could have "critical" cybersecurity capabilities, while implementing improvements to research environment monitoring, alignment techniques, and security protocols. Source
OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Teens, a dedicated mode featuring stronger built-in protections, health-use features, and additional parental controls designed to guide young users away from harmful content and to discourage using AI to cheat on homework. The release comes amid growing public scrutiny over how artificial-intelligence tools affect younger users. Source
Cursor, an AI code editor, is launching a new code-hosting platform to rival GitHub, the developer collaboration tool long favoured by programmers. The move capitalizes on frustration among developers with GitHub's existing service. Source
Mozilla has enhanced Firefox's Smart Window AI browsing mode, which now pulls information from the current web and displays source links in chat responses through a partnership with Exa, a search-technology company. The feature can also automatically suggest tab groups and show visual previews of previously visited pages when users search their browsing history using natural language. Source