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As the generative AI field heats up, consumer-facing chatbots are fielding questions about business strategy, designing study guides for math class, offering advice on salary negotiation and even writing wedding vows. And things are just getting started. 

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s Bing and Anthropic’s Claude are a few of today’s leading chatbots, but over the coming year, we’ll likely see more emerge: In the venture capital space, generative AI-related deals totaled $1.69 billion worldwide in Q1 of this year, a 130% spike from last quarter’s $0.73 billion – with another $10.68 billion worth of deals being announced but not yet completed in Q1, according to Pitchbook data. 

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Two months after ChatGPT’s launch, it surpassed 100 million monthly active users, breaking records for the fastest-growing consumer application in history: “a phenomenal uptake – we’ve frankly never seen anything like it, and interest has grown ever since,” Brian Burke, a research VP at Gartner, told CNBC. “From its release on November 30 to now, our inquiry volume has shot up like a hockey stick; every client wants to know about generative AI and ChatGPT.” 

These types of chatbots are built atop large language models, or LLMs, a machine learning tool that uses large amounts of internet data to recognize patterns and generate human-sounding language. If you’re a beginner, many of the sources we spoke with agreed that the best way to start using a chatbot is to dive in and try things out. 

“People spend too much time trying to find the perfect prompt – 80% of it is just using it interactively,” Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies the effects of AI on work and education, told CNBC. 

Here are some tips from the pros:

Keep data privacy in mind. 

When you use a chatbot like ChatGPT or Bard, the information you put in – what you type, what you receive in response, and the changes you ask for – may be used to train future models. OpenAI says as much in its terms. Although some companies offer ways to opt out – OpenAI allows this under “data controls” in ChatGPT settings – it’s still best to refrain from sharing sensitive or private data in chatbot conversations, especially while companies are still finessing their privacy measures. For instance, a ChatGPT bug in March briefly allowed users to see parts of each others’ conversation histories. 

“If you wouldn’t post it on Facebook, don’t put it into ChatGPT,” Burke said. “Think about what you put into ChatGPT as being public information.”

Offer up context. 

For the best possible return on your time, give the chatbot context about how it should act in this scenario, and who it’s serving with this information. For example, you can write out the persona you want the chatbot to assume in this scenario: “You are a [marketer, teacher, philosopher, etc.].” You can also add context like: “I am a [client, student, beginner, etc.].” This could save time by directly telling the chatbot which kind of role it should assume, and which “lens” to pass the information through in a way that’s helpful to you. 

For instance, if you’re a creative consultant looking for a chatbot to help you with analysis on company logos, you could type out something like, “Act as if you are a graphic designer who studies logo design for companies. I am a client who owns a company and is looking to learn about which logos work best and why. Generate an analysis on the ‘best’ company logos for publicly listed companies and why they’re seen as good choices.” 

“If you ask Bard to write an inspirational speech, Bard’s response may be a bit more generic – but if you ask Bard to write a speech in a specific style, tone or format, you’ll likely get a much better response,” Sissie Hsiao, a VP at Google, told CNBC.

Make the chatbot do all the work.

Sometimes the best way to get what you want is to ask the chatbot itself for advice – whether you’re asking about what’s possible as a user, or about the best way to word your prompt.

“Ask it the simple question, what kinds of things can you do? And it’ll give you a list of things that would actually surprise most people,” Burke said. 

You can also game the system by asking something like, “What’s the best way to ask you for help writing a shopping list?” or even assigning the chatbot a prompt-writing job, like, “Your job is to generate the best and most efficient prompts for ChatGPT. Generate a list of the best prompts to ask ChatGPT for healthy one-pot dinner recipes.” 

Ask for help with brainstorming. 

Whether you’re looking for vacation destinations, date ideas, poetry prompts or content strategies for going viral on social media, many people are using chatbots as a jumping-off point for brainstorming sessions. 

“The biggest thing…that I find them to be helpful for is inspiring me as the user and helping me learn things that I wouldn’t have necessarily thought of on my own,” Josh Albrecht, CTO of Generally Intelligent, an AI research startup, told CNBC. “Maybe that’s why they’re called generative AI – they’re really helpful at the generative part, the brainstorming.” 

Create a crash course. 

Let’s say you’re trying to learn about geometry, and you consider yourself a beginner. You could kick off your studies by asking a chatbot something like, “Explain the basics of geometry as if I’m a beginner,” or, “Explain the Pythagorean Theorem as if I’m a five-year-old.” 

If you’re looking for something more expansive, you can ask a chatbot to create a “crash course” for you, specifying how much time you’ve got (three days, a week, a month) or how many hours you want to spend learning the new skill. You can write something like, “I’m a beginner who wants to learn how to skateboard. Create a two-week plan for how I can learn to skateboard and do a kickflip.” 

To expand your learning plan beyond the chatbot, you can also ask for a list of the most important books about a topic, some of the most influential people in the field and any other resources that could help you advance your skill set. 

Don’t be afraid to give notes and ask for changes. 

“The worst thing you could do if you’re actually trying to use the output of ChatGPT is [to] just ask it one thing once and then walk away,” Mollick said. “You’re going to get very generic output. You have to interact with it.”

Sometimes you won’t choose the perfect prompt, or the chatbot won’t generate the output you were looking for – and that’s okay. You can still make tweaks to make the information more helpful, like asking follow-up questions like, “Can you make it sound less generic?” or “Can you make the first paragraph more interesting?” or even restating your original ask in a different way. 

Take everything with many grains of salt.

Chatbots have a documented tendency to fabricate information, especially when their training data doesn’t fully cover an area you’re asking about, so it’s important to take everything with a grain of salt. Say you’re asking for a biography of Albert Einstein: A chatbot might tell you the famous scientist wrote a book called “How to Be Smart,” when, unfortunately, he never did. Also, since large language models are trained upon large swaths of the internet, they’re best at pattern recognition, meaning they can generate biased outputs or misinformation based on their training data. 

“Where there’s less information, it just makes stuff up,” Burke said, adding, “These hallucinations are extraordinarily convincing…You can’t trust these models to give you accurate information all the time.”

Experiment and try different approaches.

Whether you’re asking for a chatbot to generate a list of action items from a meeting transcript or translate something from English to Tagalog, there are an untold range of use cases for generative AI. So when you’re using a chatbot, it’s worth thinking about the things you want to learn or need help with and experimenting with how well the system can deliver. 

“AI is a general-purpose technology; it does a lot of stuff, so the idea is that whatever field you’re in and whatever job you’re in, it’s going to affect aspects of your job differently than anyone else on the planet,” Mollick said. “It’s about thinking about how you want to use it…You have to figure out a way to work with the system…and the only way to do that is through experimenting.” 


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Mark Zuckerberg unveils $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses

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Mark Zuckerberg unveils 9 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses

At the Meta Connect developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg, head of the Facebook group Meta, shows the prototype of computer glasses that can display digital objects in transparent lenses.

Andrej Sokolow | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday unveiled the $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, the social media company’s first consumer-ready smart glasses with a built-in display.

The glasses, which costs $799, contain a small digital display that can be controlled via hand gestures through a wristband powered by neural technology, confirming a CNBC report in August. A promotional video of the new smart glasses appeared on Meta’s YouTube page on Monday but was later removed.

Tune in Thursday at 11:00 a.m. ET: Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox joins CNBC TV to discuss with Julia Boorstin the highlights of Meta’s annual Connect event, live from the company’s HQ in Menlo Park CA.

The new smart glasses are a bridge between the company’s audio-only Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and the experimental Orion augmented reality glasses that the company revealed at last year’s Connect event. Orion can overlay 3D visuals over a person’s real-world field of view with the help of a wireless computing puck, but the glasses are expensive to make and not yet available to consumers.

The Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses come with the Meta Neural Band, an EMG wristband that allows users to control the device using hand gestures.

“These are glasses with the classic style that you’d expect from Ray-Ban, but they’re the first AI glasses with a high resolution display and a fully weighted Meta neural band,” Zuckerberg said.

With the new glasses, people can do tasks like watch videos through the display or see and respond to text messages, Zuckerberg said. The display doesn’t block a person’s view, and it disappears when not being used, he said.

The glasses go on sale in the U.S. on Sept. 30.

During a demo, Zuckerberg repeatedly attempted to call Meta tech chief Andrew Bosworth unsuccessfully.

“This is uh — you know, it happens,” Zuckerberg said.

Meta has been developing its smart glasses with eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica since 2019, and last year renewed a long-term partnership agreement to continue making the products.

The company on Wednesday also debuted the Oakley Meta Vanguard smart glasses, intended for athletes who participate in high-intensity sports like snowboarding and mountain biking. The Oakley-branded glasses will cost $499 when they launch on Oct. 21, making it $100 more expensive than the Oakley Meta HSTN glasses that went on sale in June.

The Oakley Meta Vanguard smart glasses have a sportier look than the Oakley Meta HSTN glasses thanks to a wraparound design that extends its colorful lenses around a person’s temples. Unlike the Oakley Meta HSTN glasses, the new model contains a button on the underside of its frames so that athletes who wear helmets can more easily capture photos and videos.

The new sports-centric smart glasses have up to nine hours of battery life, can capture 3K video and contain speakers that are louder than their predecessors. The glasses can connect with Garmin-branded fitness watches to track certain stats like their heart rates using the Meta AI assistant. Preorders start today.

Meta also debuted the Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2), the latest version of the company’s original smart glasses. The Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) costs $379, up from $299 for the version released in 2023. The Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) has double the battery life of the previous model, lasting 8 hours on a single charge, and a more powerful camera that can capture 3K Ultra HD video. The new glasses go on sale today.

Zuckerberg also announced Horizon TV, pitching it as a way to watch television shows, sporting events and movies using the company’s Quest VR headsets. Some of Meta’s partners who will be contributing content to the app include Disney and Universal Pictures, Zuckerberg said.

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Netskope prices IPO at $19, valuing company at $7.3 billion

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Netskope prices IPO at , valuing company at .3 billion

Thomas Fuller | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Cybersecurity company Netskope is eying a $7.3 billion valuation after pricing shares at $19 for its upcoming IPO, at the top end of its expected range.

Netskope will start trading on Thursday on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NTSK.” The share sale raised $908.2 million.

Earlier this week, Netskope lifted its expected pricing range to between $17 and $19 a share, up from an original range of $15 to $17. The company revealed plans to go public last month.

Netskope’s offering comes amid a hot period for IPO activity after a years-long lull spurred by step inflation and soaring interest rates. The long-overdue resurgence has fueled optimism on Wall Street and in a venture capital industry eager for return on investment.

Ticket reseller StubHub slid 6% it its first day of trading Wednesday, but a lackluster start may not be reason for concern. CoreWeave went public in March and closed flat in its first day, with shares going on to triple.

Swedish buy now, pay later firm Klarna jumped 15% in its debut this month. Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish, design software company Figma and stablecoin issuer Circle have also jumped since their recent market debuts.

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The cybersecurity sector is also undergoing a busy stretch for dealmaking fueled by ongoing artificial intelligence advancements and a shifting threat landscape.

This year’s biggest tech deals include Google’s whopping $32 billion acquisition of Israeli cloud security startup Wiz and Palo Alto Network‘s $25-billion CyberArk buyout. Thoma Bravo-backed SailPoint went public in February after the private equity firm took it private in 2022. Cybersecurity competitors CrowdStrike and Zscaler have also made acquisitions this year to beef up their offerings.

Santa Clara, California-based Netskope was founded in 2012 and is led by co-founder and CEO Sanjay Beri. At the end of July, the company said it had 2,910 employees and 4,317 customers across 90 countries.

Netskope says it competes in the IT security vendor and networking space against the likes of Broadcom, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks and Zscaler.

Annual recurring revenues rose 33% to $707 million at the end of July and revenues reached $328 million for the six months ended July 31. The company also reported a net loss of $170 million during that period.

Some of Netskope’s significant backers include Accel, Iconiq and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

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AI startup Nscale came out of nowhere and is blowing away Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

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AI startup Nscale came out of nowhere and is blowing away Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

Nscale, the UK-headquartered AI infrastructure provider.

Courtesy: Nscale

Two years ago, Nscale was a brand new startup in the U.K. that had yet to raise any outside funding or officially announce its existence.

Last year the London-based company came out of stealth, and in December announced that it had raised its Series A fundraising, totaling $155 million.

Now, Nscale finds itself at the center of the action in the hottest market on the planet: artificial intelligence. And it has close to $700 million in fresh capital from Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company.

In press releases on Tuesday, Nscale was named as an AI infrastructure partner for Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI, as the companies expand their buildouts in the U.K. Nscale then said it signed a five-year $6.2 billion agreement with Microsoft and Aker to develop “hyperscale AI infrastructure” in Europe, specifically Norway, where Aker is headquartered.

OpenAI made prior headlines with Nscale, announcing plans in July for a data center in Norway for a Stargate-branded AI data center. Nscale agreed to commit $1 billion for the project, with the goal of racking up 100,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) at the site before 2027.

It’s a remarkably quick rise for a company that wasn’t even around when OpenAI kicked off the generative AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. At that time, what’s now Nscale was part of Arkon Energy, which was established a year earlier to provide infrastructure for cryptocurrency mining. Nscale was spun out to address soaring demand for data centers capable of handling AI workloads.

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Like CoreWeave, which went public this year and now sports a market cap of $58 billion, Nscale is combining data center space, power and lots of GPUs with its own software in order to an provide end-to-end service for AI infrastructure.

CoreWeave, which supplies infrastructure to Microsoft, Google, Nvidia and OpenAI, also has roots in crypto. Founded in 2017, the company built up its initial fleet of Nvidia GPUs for ethereum mining before pivoting to AI.

Nscale didn’t respond to a request for comment following this week’s announcements, but CEO Josh Payne, who previously founded Arkon, told CNBC in late July that the company was targeting two big problems in Europe. One is a lack of sufficient computing capacity and the other is a “very fragmented market.”

“What the continent needs is large AI infrastructure projects deploying compute [power],” Payne said, after the announcement with OpenAI for the Norway buildout. “The ecosystem can consume from the project to build AI products, to generate productivity growth and economic benefit.”

Payne wrote in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday that the agreement with Microsoft and Aker is a “huge win for European-owned AI infrastructure.”

Europe has been pushing the concept of “sovereign AI,” requiring data centers and AI workloads to be located and processed on European soil. Nscale has quickly emerged as an important player in the U.K.’s bid to evolve into a global leader in AI. In January, Britain laid out an AI “action plan,” promising to reduce bureaucracy to help its domestic AI sector thrive.

Trump’s UK trip sparks tech investment splurge

While Nscale is addressing the European market, many of its early partners are big U.S. AI vendors. They timed their announcements on Tuesday to President Donald Trump’s state visit to the U.K.

On Wednesday, Trump visited Windsor Castle and met with King Charles, Queen Camilla and other members of the royal family. His trip comes at a contentious moment for U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who is under pressure to bring stability to the country after the exit of Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner over a house tax scandal and a major cabinet reshuffle.

Microsoft headlined the U.K. announcements, committing $15.5 billion of new investment to computing equipment. The software giant said it plans to work with Nscale to construct what will become the U.K.’s largest supercomputer in Loughton, a suburban town in the English county of Essex.

The site will initially house 23,040 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs to be delivered in the first quarter of 2027. When it goes live, it will generate 50 megawatts of AI capacity, scalable to 90 megawatts, according to a statement from Nscale.

“No one can make that kind of capital investment unless they’ve got somebody already committed to spend the money once the work is complete, and that’s the role we’re playing,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said Tuesday, adding the deal represents a major vote of confidence in Nscale.

OpenAI said it would launch a U.K. version of Stargate through a partnership with Nscale and Nvidia. OpenAI will deploy 8,000 GPUs in the project’s first phase early next year, with the option to expand capacity to approximately 31,000 GPUs over time.

Stargate U.K. will operate across a number of sites in the country — one of the early ones being Cobalt Park, an industrial state in the Northern English city Newcastle. Stargate was initially spawned in the U.S. in January as part of President Trump’s effort to push investments in AI infrastructure.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.

Kent Nishimura | Reuters

Nvidia’s announcement on Tuesday included an investment of up to £11 billion ($15 billion) with Nscale and CoreWeave to boost U.K. AI infrastructure.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang separately revealed on Wednesday that the chipmaker had made a £500 million ($683 million) equity investment into Nscale.

“We convinced ourselves that Nscale could be a national champion for AI infrastructure in the U.K.,” Huang told journalists at a press conference in London.

Nick Patience, AI practice lead at the Futurum Group, told CNBC that Nscale is “a key part of Nvidia’s push in the U.K. market and an acknowledgment by the government that it has to do something to get the AI infrastructure built here, which has been a long slog.”

Rapid growth

After exiting stealth in May of last year, Nscale’s first public announcement came two months later, when the company partnered with UAE’s Open Innovation AI to deploy 30,000 GPUs. Around the same time, Nscale said it was acquiring Kontena, which was founded in 2018 and specialized in high-performance computing data centers.

The next month, Nscale announced an agreement with Asian telecom company Singtel to offer a “GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS),” and serve customers in Europe and Southeast Asia. Initially, Nscale’s infrastructure relied on GPUs from Advanced Micro Devices. Today, the startup promotes various offerings from market leader Nvidia.

Nscale’s big financing landed in December, when the company said it raised $155 million in a round led by Sandton Capital Partners, with participation from Kestrel0x1, Blue Sky Capital Managers and Florence Capital.

Sandton co-founder Rael Nurick said in the press release that with its “unique vertically integrated approach, Nscale is building the hyperscale AI platform to power AI at scale.”

Nscale said at the time that it had grown its AI data center pipeline to 1.3 gigawatts from 300 megawatts the prior year to and that it was aiming to have 350,000 GPUs running by the end of 2027.

By comparison, CoreWeave said at a banking conference last week that its portfolio consists of “about 2.2 gigawatts of capacity that’s coming online.” The company said in its IPO prospectus in March that its 32 data centers were running 250,000 GPUs.

It’s been a whirlwind few years for Payne, Nscale’s founder. While he was serving as executive chairman of Arkon, he was also operating chief at Australia’s Battery Future Acquisition Corp., a blank check company that says it’s “targeting critical battery minerals and related supply chains.”

He’s got a lot of work in front of him.

Building out AI data centers with costly GPUs is a capital intensive process that’s historically required a hefty amount of debt. CoreWeave had raised a total of $12.4 billion in debt through the end of 2024, in addition to well over $1 billion in equity financing before its IPO. It announced a $1.5 billion bond sale in July after a $2 billion debt offering in May.

Nscale was trying to raise $1.8 billion earlier this year through a private credit deal led by bankers at Goldman Sachs, according to Bloomberg.

In the December video tied to Nscale’s equity fundraising, Payne called it “one of the largest Series As raised in U.K., European history.” He said the company would use the cash to deploy up to another 4,000 GPUs in its data center in Norway and to develop up to 180 megawatts of capacity in the company’s portfolio.

The aim, Payne said, was to deploy 50,000 GPUs by the end of 2025 and 150,000 by the end of next year.

“The key challenges that we see in the market is the significant increase in density at the GPU level,” he said. “This funding allows us to scale up materially” he said, and to become “one of the largest players in Europe.”

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