AI Leadership Weekly

Issue #21

Brad
March 06, 2025

Welcome to the latest AI Leadership Weekly, a curated digest of AI news and developments for business leaders.

Top Stories

CoreWeave acquires Weights & Biases
What a time to be alive! CoreWeave has reached an agreement to purchase the AI developer platform Weights & Biases.

Their hope is that, by combining CoreWeave's infrastructure and managed cloud services with W&B's developer platform, users will have a single end-to-end solution to develop and run their AI applications.

Weights & Biases was founded in 2017, and has been used by over one million AI developers. It has also been used by industry-leading companies such as OpenAI, Nvidia, and Meta, to name a few.

Source: openai.com

GPT-4.5’s mixed launch
OpenAI's GPT-4.5 is now out for preview, but it has received a mixed response.

OpenAI is calling this their "last non-reasoning model", and also their largest and best model for chat. In their announcement video, OpenAI developers talked up it's more "natural" speech and responses, noting that it had a much higher "EQ" (Emotional Quotient).

That said, given its model size, it's also significantly more expensive than their 4o model. And while it produces better output than other "chat" models, it lags behind results accuracy when compared to reasoning models. Historically, though, OpenAI eventually lowers their prices, and models can be tweaked and improved, so time will tell where it ends up in the LLM leader boards.

OpenAI launches NextGenAI research consortium
OpenAI has announced a new consortium of top US research institutions, who have a mission to use AI to accelerate research and "transform education."

The consortium includes fifteen US institutions, including MIT, Harvard, and Caltech. OpenAI has provided a $50 million fund to NextGenAI, which can be used towards research grants, API access, and raw compute resources.

In Brief

Market Trends

OpenAI floats idea to sell ‘credits’ instead of ‘subscriptions’
On Twitter/X, Sam Altman floated the idea of converting their $20 'plus' subscription into credits, which could be used across any of their products.

This drove quite a conversation on the OpenAI subreddit, where the idea was met with negativity. The most generous said that it would just make ChatGPT like their API offering, which is already billed by use. The most negative respondents said that this was OpenAI seeing how far they could nickel-and-dime their users, or is a sign of financial troubles from the company.

Robot cops on China’s beat
The PM01 robots from EngineAI have been spotted on the streets of Shenzhen, walking alongside police officers. Their interactions with the public seem to be limited, though, to a few waves and hand-shakes.

That said, this isn't China's first experiment with robots in their police force. Late last year, they tested the RT-G robot from Logon Technology. It is spherical and built for rugged environments (including use on water), which hints at a search and rescue role.

Deutsche Telekon developing “AI Phone”
Deutsche Telekom (the parent company of T-Mobile), has partnered with Perplexity to develop a mobile phone optimized for and built around an AI assistant.

They hope to have the device out later this year, and are aiming to sell it for less than $1,000. The main differentiator, it seems, is that the Perplexity AI will be accessible from the lock screen as opposed to requiring users to open up various apps to access AI features. They also hint at the phone "taking actions" for the user.

The criticism of standalone AI devices such as the Rabbit R1 were that they felt like experiences that would fit perfectly "in an app" on a smart phone, so this seems like a step in the right direction. That said, IOS and Android already have AI assistants built into their ecosystems, and their parent companies both have in-house AI models and close ties to other AI companies. So, while it'll be interesting to see what capabilities and interest this project brings, their technical moat feels rather shallow.

Tools and Resources

Opera’s AI Browser Agent
Remember the web browser Opera? They are now previewing their "Browser Operator" which is an AI agent that runs in your local browser, and doesn't send your login data to a third-party.

Podcastle AI Text-to-Speech
Get access to over 450 lifelike AI voices for text-to-speech.

Google’s Data Science Agent
This addition to Google's Colab helps you crunch your data-science numbers!