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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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Intel is getting a $2 billion investment from SoftBank

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Intel is getting a  billion investment from SoftBank

Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive officer of SoftBank Group Corp., speaks during the company’s annual general meeting in Tokyo, Japan, on Friday, June 27, 2025.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Intel and SoftBank announced on Monday that the Japanese conglomerate will make a $2 billion investment in the embattled chipmaker.

SoftBank will pay $23 per share for Intel’s common stock, which closed on Monday at $23.66. The shares rose about 6% in extended trading to $25.

The investment makes SoftBank the fifth-biggest Intel shareholder, according to FactSet. It’s a vote of support for Intel, which hasn’t been able to take advantage of the artificial intelligence boom in advanced semiconductors and has spent heavily to stand up a manufacturing business that’s yet to secure a significant customer.

“Masa and I have worked closely together for decades, and I appreciate the confidence he has placed in Intel with this investment,” Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in a statement, referring to SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son.

Intel shares lost 60% of their value last year, their worst performance in the company’s more than half-century on the public market. The stock is up 18% in 2025 as of Monday’s close.

Tan took over as Intel CEO in March after his predecessor, Pat Gelsinger, was ousted in December.

Intel has been a major topic of discussion in Washington of late, due to the company’s role as the only American company capable of manufacturing the most advanced chips.

However, Intel’s foundry business, which is designed to manufacture chips for other companies, has yet to secure a major customer, a critical step towards stabilization and expansion. Last month, Intel said it would wait to secure orders before committing to certain future investment in its foundry.

Tan met with President Donald Trump last week after the president had called for the CEO’s resignation. The U.S. government is considering taking an equity stake in Intel, according to reports.

SoftBank, meanwhile, has become an increasingly large player in the global chip and AI markets.

In 2016, SoftBank acquired chip designer Arm in a deal worth about $32 billion at the time. Today the company is worth almost $150 billion. Arm-based chips are part of Nvidia’s systems that go into data centers.

And in March of this year, SoftBank announced plans to acquire another chip designer, Ampere Computing, for $6.5 billion.

SoftBank was also part of President Trump’s Stargate announcement in January, along with OpenAI and Oracle.

The three companies committed to invest an initial $100 billion and up to $500 billion over the next four years in the AI infrastructure project. Two months later, SoftBank led a $40 billion investment into OpenAI, the largest private tech deal on record.

“This strategic investment reflects our belief that advanced semiconductor manufacturing and supply will further expand in the United States, with Intel playing a critical role,” Son said in a statement.

WATCH: Intel’s message to Washington

Intel's message to Washington

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Palo Alto Networks reports earnings beat, says founder Nir Zuk retiring from company

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Palo Alto Networks reports earnings beat, says founder Nir Zuk retiring from company

Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks, looks on during the closing bell at the Nasdaq Market in New York City on March 25, 2025.

Jeenah Moon | Reuters

Palo Alto Networks reported better-than-expected quarterly results and issued upbeat guidance for the current period. The cybersecurity software vendor said Nir Zuk, who founded the company in 2005, is retiring from his role as chief technology officer.

The stock rose about 6% in extended trading.

Here’s how the company did compared to LSEG estimates:

  • Earnings: 95 cents adjusted vs. 88 cents expected
  • Revenue: $2.54 billion vs. $2.5 billion expected.

Revenue in the fiscal fourth quarter rose 16% from about $2.2 billion last year, the company said in a statement. Net income fell to about $254 million, or 36 cents per share, from about $358 million, or 51 cents per share, in the year-ago period.

The company also issued upbeat guidance for the fiscal first quarter. Earnings per share will be between 88 cents and 90 cents, Palo Alto said, topping an 85-cents estimate from StreetAccount.

For the full year, Palo Alto said revenue will range from $10.48 billion to $10.53 billion on adjusted earnings of $3.75 to $3.85 per share. Both estimates exceeded Wall Street’s projections.

Palo Alto said that for the fiscal first quarter, remaining purchase obligations, which tracks backlog, will range between $15.4 billion and $15.5 billion, surpassing a $15.07 billion estimate.

Last month, the company announced plans to buy Israeli identity security provider CyberArk for $25 billion. It’s the largest deal Palo Alto has made since its founding, and most ambitious in an acquiring spree that ramped up after CEO Nikesh Arora took the helm of the company in 2018.

Shares sold off sharply after the news broke and have yet to recover previous highs. The stock is down about 3% this year as of Monday’s close.

“We look for great products, a team that can execute in the product, and we let them run it,” Arora told CNBC following the announcement. “This is going to be a different challenge, but we’ve done well 24 times, so I’m pretty confident that our team can handle this.”

Lee Klarich, the company’s product chief, will replace Zuk as CTO and fill his position on the board.

WATCH: Power check on Palo Alto, Viking Holdings and Estee Lauder

Power Check: Palo Alto Networks, Viking Holdings, and Estee Lauder

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Musk’s Starlink suffers apparent outage as SpaceX launches more satellites

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Musk's Starlink suffers apparent outage as SpaceX launches more satellites

Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Satellite internet service Starlink, which is owned and operated by Elon Musk‘s SpaceX, appeared to suffer a brief network outage on Monday, with thousands of reports of service interruptions on Downdetector, a site that logs tech issues.

The outage marked the second in two weeks for Starlink. SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The network’s July 24 outage lasted for several hours, with SpaceX Vice President of Starlink Engineering Michael Nicolls blaming the matter on “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network” behind Starlink.

That outage followed the launch of T-Mobile‘s Starlink-powered satellite service, a direct-to-cell-phone service created to keep smartphone users connected “in places no carrier towers can reach,” according to T-Mobile’s website.

SpaceX provides Starlink internet service to more than six million users across 140 countries, according to the company’s website, though churn and subscriber rates are not publicly reported by the company.

Read more CNBC tech news

The SpaceX Starlink constellation is far larger than any competitor. It currently features over 7,000 operational broadband satellites, according to research by astronomer Jonathan McDowell.

On Monday, Musk’s SpaceX successfully launched another group of satellites to add to its Starlink constellation from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in Southern California.

SpaceX is currently aiming to increase the number of launches and landings from Vandenberg from 50 to about 100 annually.

On Thursday last week, the California Coastal Commission voted unanimously to oppose the U.S. Space Force application to conduct that higher volume of SpaceX launches there.

The Commission has said that SpaceX and Space Force officials have failed to properly evaluate and report on potential impacts of increased launches on neighboring towns, and local wildlife, among other issues.

President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order seeking to ease environmental regulations seen by Musk, and others, as hampering commercial space operations.

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