Mecka AI nears $500M valuation in Sequoia-led funding round

OpenAI announced it will stop training frontier models on live internet data, citing significant risks. The decision comes weeks after an OpenAI engineer stated such a solution would not be viable. The move represents a major shift in the company's training methodology, which has historically relied on internet-sourced data for model development.

NVIDIA has expanded its Cosmos platform with new tools for training, evaluating, and deploying world models, including Cosmos Data Factory blueprints for data curation and synthetic data generation. The platform ranks in the top five on six open model leaderboards and now supports fine-tuning and optimization of compatible models like GR00T, Alpamayo, and QWEN. Early adopters including Porsche, ANYbotics, and Ultralytics are using the tools to reduce physical testing and accelerate model development.

A new market has emerged in which AI labs and data companies are purchasing datasets from defunct startups through intermediaries like SimpleClosure and Sunset. The practice, which became common only in the past year as AI training labs exhausted public datasets, has grown to include major deals such as Google's $10 million acquisition of Spirit Airlines' data during bankruptcy. The trend raises legal and privacy concerns, as the data often contains personally identifiable information embedded in emails, calendars, and other workplace communications.

Google is joining Apache Ossie, an industry group that includes Snowflake and Nvidia, to standardize how AI tools access data from applications and databases. The move aims to reduce friction in data integration for enterprise AI deployments. Apache Ossie is working to create common standards that make it easier for AI systems to understand and work with data across different sources.