AI Leadership Weekly

Top Stories

Musk leads bids to buy OpenAI
An investment contortion lead by Elon Musk offered to buy OpenAI for $97 billion.

The offer was immediately rejected by CEO Sam Altman, who said that OpenAI is "not for sale." This then lead to a brief Twitter/X exchange between Altman and Musk, where Altman offered to “buy Twitter” for $9.74 billion.

The offer was not seen by most as a serious one, though, especially as Musk already owns his own AI competitor which is rapidly falling behind the current crop of reasoning models. The offer was seen by many as just another attempt by Musk to harrass OpenAI, which is in the process of becoming 'for profit'. Altman will already have to pay the non-profit arm of OpenAI a hefty sum in the for-profit move, and some argue that by placing a figure on its value, this will force Altman to pay in the region of $100 million.

This will no doubt be challenged in court as an insincere offer, with Musk's own history of offering buy-outs (e.g. , for Twitter) then declining the purchase as evidence.

US and UK refuse to sign AI ethics pledge
61 countries, including China, recently signed a joint declaration which advocates for a focus on "ensuring AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy."

The declaration was signed this week at the AI Action Summit in Paris, with two big holdouts being the US and UK. "The United States of America is the leader in AI, and our administration plans to keep it that way," US Vice President JD Vance said. And, without any irony, he also said that the US felt that AI should remain free of "ideological bias" and doesn't want it "co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship."

Altman teases GPT-5
OpenAI execs were at the University of Tokyo Center for Global Education, discussing the company's future.

In the talk, CEO Sam Altman discussed the importance of the Stargate Project, which is slowly building out new AI datacentres across the US, and that it will lead to more advanced models like GPT-5. He also claims that these advancements will lead to the creation of new and original scientific knowledge, as well as AIs that best humans in every general domain.

In Brief

• SoftBank posts loss, even with AI investments pending

• Displeasure over AI “artwork” for sale

• Governments and tech leaders meet in Paris for AI summit

Market Trends

€200 billion EU investment
The European Union will channel €50 billion towards AI investments on the continent in an attempt to compete with the US and China.

The announcement was made at the AI Action Summit in Paris, where EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that the €50 billion will be added to an existing €150 billion pledge from private investors known as the European AI Champions Initiative.

This is all in addition to other AI investments from individual EU members, such as France investing €109 billion in a plan it compares to the US's Stargate series of datacentres.

OpenAI developing custom AI chips
OpenAI is finalising the designs for its own custom AI chip, which it is developing with TSMC.

The 40-person team is being lead by ex-Googler Richard Ho, and expect the chip to handle both training and running AI models. Industry experts say that this head count is low for a chip-making team, though, and it's speculated that this is more of a negotiation tactic for future purchases of AI chips that are currently in high demand.

Apple partners with Alibaba over DeepSeek
Apple will partner with Alibaba to help bring Apple Intelligence (their in-house AI services) to China.

They had previously selected Baidu, and also explored partnerships with DeepSeek and ByteDance, but all of these fell through. The company has previously worked with OpenAI in the US, and is open to partnerships with other AI companies in the future.

Tools and Resources

Zonos
A real-time text to speech (TTS) model which includes voice cloning.

Bernstein AI Framework
Build your own deep research agents by combining different components as needed, just like “Lego.”

Readdy
Use descriptive prompts to generate the front-end code to a website for desktop or mobile.

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