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OpenAI announced Friday a New York City art gallery collaboration that gives artists access to unreleased artificial intelligence tools.

The exhibit, a series called “Strada Nuova: New Road” on view at Strada Gallery will run for three weeks and centers on a “diverse group of artists [that] is curated to consist of brilliant researchers, academics, and creators working between physical and digital artwork,” according to Strada founder Paul Hill.

Hill told CNBC he reached out to OpenAI to suggest the project. Talks began about six months ago and the plan came together with OpenAI offering artists access to tools including its Sora video generator, its Voice Engine voice generator, its DALL-E 3 image generator and ChatGPT, its viral chatbot, as well as educational resources and artist stipends.

Minne Atairu, an interdisciplinary artist who has specialized in using AI in art for the past four years — before ChatGPT even launched — uses image generation, both 2D and 3D, as well as video generation in her art to highlight “understudied gaps” in Black historical archives. For this exhibit, she said she used Sora to create an AI-generated video, “Regina Gloriana,” inspired by supernatural horror films produced in Nigeria in the 1990s.

The use of AI in art, in many forms, is part of a wide-ranging debate that has generated heaps of controversy — and an increasing number of lawsuits over alleged copyright infringement and training data.

Anthropic, the Amazon-backed AI startup, was recently hit with a class-action lawsuit in California federal court by three authors over alleged copyright infringement. Last year, a group of prominent U.S. authors, including Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and Jodi Picoult, sued OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement in using their work to train ChatGPT. And last January, a group of artists filed a class-action lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt over alleged copyright infringement by their AI image-generation tools.

When asked about the use of AI in art, Strada’s Hill told CNBC, “I think on the controversy level, all good artworks are controversial. I’ve never seen a good artwork that isn’t. Only the bad ones that lack importance or significance are the ones that nobody talks about.”

Hill added that across different industries, he views AI development as an industrial revolution of sorts.

“Historically speaking, the communities and networks that are the last to receive these tools are typically Black folks,” Hill said, adding, “This next industrial revolution, we can kind of be like the pioneers, making sure that marginalized communities are not the last to receive them. This exhibition, six of the artists are black; one is from Kyoto, Japan.”

Some of Hill’s artists echoed the sentiment about not being left behind, regarding access to AI tools or representation within them.

Curry Hackett, a transdisciplinary designer and public artist, told CNBC he uses AI to rethink how images can be created and sourced. His project for the exhibit builds on one of his public art projects, “Ugly Beauties,” in which he used Midjourney to manually collage images together for a 50-foot-long scene suspended in a Brooklyn plaza, “to speculate on Black relationships with nature and plants,” he said. For the Strada exhibit, that same work is suspended in the gallery, and Hackett used Sora to animate the still canvas scenes.

“I realize that there are environmental concerns and political concerns, there are ethical concerns, but I also think that there’s something real about opening pathways to create creative media,” Hackett said of AI. “And as a black artist, it’s not a given that our forms of media will show up in these models. So there’s a case to be made that underprioritized groups should actually be actively using these tools in imaginative ways.”

Hackett also said, “I could definitely understand, however, a lot of the concerns that a lot of folks in creative fields are feeling right now, because there are concerns that the models are being trained on data without consent… I think we’re just in a moment where we need to develop norms and best practices so that people are actually comfortable using these tools.”

Sophia Wilson, a photographer and visual artist, works primarily with film photography hand-printed in a color darkroom. She told CNBC she was already adept at Photoshop and other retouching software, and that’s how she thinks of AI tools like Sora.

“Nothing’s perfect and there are downsides to everything, but if I’m able to use it for my own gain as an artist… I look at it as more of a retouching tool or an editing tool that enhances my work, rather than something that I should be afraid of, because I just don’t want to be part of the crowd that gets left behind in history,” Wilson said.

For the Strada exhibit, Wilson documented Black women bodybuilders in New York, and she used Sora to animate some of her still images, such as a chandelier shifting in the wind. She also used OpenAI’s Voice Engine to read some of the transcribed interviews with the subjects.

“AI is reading the story as an audio part accompaniment,” Wilson said. “It sets everyone on an even playing ground. Black women get judged a lot for — women in general, but especially Black women — for their voices and different inflections… I wanted it to come from a uniform voice, where you can’t judge people based on their voices.”

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Elon Musk’s xAI raises $10 billion in debt and equity as it steps up challenge to OpenAI

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Elon Musk's xAI raises  billion in debt and equity as it steps up challenge to OpenAI

Elon Musk announced his new company xAI, which he says has the goal to understand the true nature of the universe.

Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto | Getty Images

XAI, the artificial intelligence startup run by Elon Musk, raised a combined $10 billion in debt and equity, Morgan Stanley said.

Half of that sum was clinched through secured notes and term loans, while a separate $5 billion was secured through strategic equity investment, the bank said on Monday.

The funding gives xAI more firepower to build out infrastructure and develop its Grok AI chatbot as it looks to compete with bitter rival OpenAI, as well as with a swathe of other players including Amazon-backed Anthropic.

In May, Musk told CNBC that xAI has already installed 200,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) at its Colossus facility in Memphis, Tennessee. Colossus is xAI’s supercomputer that trains the firm’s AI. Musk at the time said that his company will continue buying chips from semiconductor giants Nvidia and AMD and that xAI is planning a 1-million-GPU facility outside of Memphis.

Addressing the latest funds raised by the company, Morgan Stanley that “the proceeds will support xAI’s continued development of cutting-edge AI solutions, including one of the world’s largest data center and its flagship Grok platform.”

xAI continues to release updates to Grok and unveiled the Grok 3 AI model in February. Musk has sought to boost the use of Grok by integrating the AI model with the X social media platform, formerly known as Twitter. In March, xAI acquired X in a deal that valued the site at $33 billion and the AI firm at $80 billion. It’s unclear if the new equity raise has changed that valuation.

xAI was not immediately available for comment.

Last year, xAI raised $6 billion at a valuation of $50 billion, CNBC reported.

Morgan Stanley said the latest debt offering was “oversubscribed and included prominent global debt investors.”

Competition among American AI startups is intensifying, with companies raising huge amounts of funding to buy chips and build infrastructure.

OpenAI in March closed a $40 billion financing round that valued the ChatGPT developer at $300 billion. Its big investors include Microsoft and Japan’s SoftBank.

Anthropic, the developer of the Claude chatbot, closed a funding round in March that valued the firm at $61.5 billion. The company then received a five-year $2.5 billion revolving credit line in May.

Musk has called Grok a “maximally truth-seeking” AI that is also “anti-woke,” in a bid to set it apart from its rivals. But this has not come without its fair share of controversy. Earlier this year, Grok responded to user queries with unrelated comments about the controversial topic of “white genocide” and South Africa.

Musk has also clashed with fellow AI leaders, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Most famously, Musk claimed that OpenAI, which he co-founded, has deviated from its original mission of developing AI to benefit humanity as a nonprofit and is instead focused on commercial success. In February, Musk alongside a group of investors, put in a bid of $97.4 billion to buy control of OpenAI. Altman swiftly rejected the offer.

CNBC’s Lora Kolodny and Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.

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China’s Huawei open-sources AI models as it seeks adoption across the global AI market

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China's Huawei open-sources AI models as it seeks adoption across the global AI market

In recent years, the company has transformed from a competent private sector telecommunications firm into a “muscular technology juggernaut straddling the entire AI hardware and software stack,” said Paul Triolo, partner and senior vice president for China at advisory firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group.

Ramon Costa | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Huawei has open-sourced two of its artificial intelligence models — a move tech experts say will help the U.S.-blacklisted firm continue to build its AI ecosystem and expand overseas. 

The Chinese tech giant announced on Monday the open-sourcing of the AI models under its Pangu series, as well as some of its model reasoning technology.

The moves are in line with other Chinese AI players that continue to push an open-source development strategy. Baidu also open-sourced its large language model series Ernie on Monday. 

Tech experts told CNBC that Huawei’s latest announcements not only highlight how it is solidifying itself as an open-source LLM player, but also how it is strengthening its position across the entire AI value chain as it works to overcome U.S.-led AI chip export restrictions.

In recent years, the company has transformed from a competent private sector telecommunications firm into a “muscular technology juggernaut straddling the entire AI hardware and software stack,” said Paul Triolo, partner and senior vice president for China at advisory firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group.

In its announcement Monday, Huawei called the open-source moves another key measure for Huawei’s “Ascend ecosystem strategy” that would help speed up the adoption of AI across “thousands of industries.”

The Ascend ecosystem refers to AI products built around the company’s Ascend AI chip series, which are widely considered to be China’s leading competitor to products from American chip giant Nvidia. Nvidia is restricted from selling its advanced products to China. 

A Google-like strategy?

Pangu being available in an open-source manner allows developers and businesses to test the models and customize them for their needs, said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia. “The move is expected to incentivize the use of other Huawei products,” he added.

According to experts, the coupling of Huawei’s Pangu models with the company’s AI chips and related products gives the company a unique advantage, allowing it to optimize its AI solutions and applications. 

While competitors like Baidu have LLMs with broad capabilities, Huawei has focused on specialized AI models for sectors such as government, finance and manufacturing.

“Huawei is not as strong as companies like DeepSeek and Baidu at the overall software level – but it doesn’t need to be,” said Marc Einstein, research director at Counterpoint Research. 

“Its objective is to ultimately use open source products to drive hardware sales, which is a completely different model from others. It also collaborates with DeepSeek, Baidu and others and will continue to do so,” he added. 

Nvidia CEO: Huawei ‘has got China covered’ if the U.S. doesn’t participate

Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research, said the chip-to-model strategy is similar to that of Google, a company that is also developing AI chips and AI models like its open-source Gemma models.

Huawei’s announcement on Monday could also help with its international ambitions. Huawei, along with players like Zhipu AI, has been slowly making inroads into new overseas markets.

In its announcement Monday, Huawei invited developers, corporate partners and researchers around the world to download and use its new open-source products in order to gather feedback and improve them.

“Huawei’s open-source strategy will resonate well in developing countries where enterprises are more price-sensitive as is the case with [Huawei’s] other products,” Einstein said. 

As part of its global strategy, the company has also been looking to bring its latest AI data center solutions to new countries. 

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As nations build ‘sovereign AI,’ open-source models and cloud computing can help, experts say

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As nations build 'sovereign AI,' open-source models and cloud computing can help, experts say

Digital illustration of a glowing world map with “AI” text across multiple continents, representing the global presence and integration of artificial intelligence.

Fotograzia | Moment | Getty Images

As artificial intelligence becomes more democratized, it is important for emerging economies to build their own “sovereign AI,” panelists told CNBC’s East Tech West conference in Bangkok, Thailand, on Friday.

In general, sovereign AI refers to a nation’s ability to control its own AI technologies, data and related infrastructure, ensuring strategic autonomy while meeting its unique priorities and security needs.

However, this sovereignty has been lacking, according to panelist Kasima Tharnpipitchai, head of AI strategy at SCB 10X, the technology investment arm of Thailand-based SCBX Group. He noted that many of the world’s most prominent large language models, operated by companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI, are based on the English language.

“The way you think, the way you interact with the world, the way you are when you speak another language can be very different,” Tharnpipitchai said. 

It is, therefore, important for countries to take ownership of their AI systems, developing technology for specific languages, cultures, and countries, rather than just translating over English-based models. 

Sovereign AI rises as governments become power brokers

Panelists agreed that the digitally savvy ASEAN region, with a total population of nearly 700 million people, is particularly well positioned to build its sovereign AI. People under the age of 35 make up around 61% of the population, and about 125,000 new users gain access to the internet daily.

Given this context, Jeff Johnson, managing director of ASEAN at Amazon Web Services, said, “I  think it’s really important, and we’re really focused on how we can really democratize access to cloud and AI.”

Open-source models 

According to panelists, one key way that countries can build up their sovereign AI environments is through the use of open-source AI models. 

“There is plenty of amazing talent here in Southeast Asia and in Thailand, especially. To have that captured in a way that isn’t publicly accessible or ecosystem developing would feel like a shame,” said SCB 10X’s Tharnpipitchai. 

Doing open-source is a way to create a “collective energy” to help Thailand better compete in AI and push sovereignty in a way that is beneficial for the entire country, he added. 

Access to computing 

Open-source AI will have a massive impact on the world, says Hugging Face CEO

“We’re here in Thailand and across Southeast Asia to support all industries, all businesses of all shapes and sizes, from the smallest startup to the largest enterprise,” said AWS’s Johnson. 

He added that the economic model of the company’s cloud services makes it easy to “pay for what you use,” thus lowering the barriers to entry and making it very easy to build models and applications. 

In April, the U.N. Trade and Development Agency said in a report that AI was projected to reach $4.8 trillion in market value by 2033. However, it warned that the technology’s benefits remain highly concentrated, with nations at risk of lagging behind. 

Among UNCTAD’s recommendations to the international community for driving inclusive growth was shared AI infrastructure, the use of open-source AI models and initiatives to share AI knowledge and resources.

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