
Google pledges $9 billion to expand AI, cloud infrastructure in Oklahoma
Last month, Alphabet raised its annual capital spending plans to about $85 billion from $75 billion previously and signaled more to come next year.
Alphabet and its peers have defended their heavy AI spending as essential to fueling growth and improving products amid high competition from Chinese rivals and investor frustration over slower-than-expected returns.
Google also committed $1 billion to AI education and training for U.S. higher education institutions and nonprofits last week. Rivals including OpenAI, Anthropic and Amazon have made similar pushes around AI in education.
More than 100 universities have signed on to Google's initiative so far, including some of the nation's largest public university systems such as Texas A&M and the University of North Carolina.
Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump's onshoring push has also accelerated AI infrastructure investments by companies such as Micron, Nvidia and CoreWeave.
Apple also announced last week that it plans to spend $600 billion in the U.S. over the next four years.

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Indian Express
16 minutes ago
- Indian Express
Sam Altman says OpenAI ‘screwed up' GPT-5 rollout: Here are the changes ‘coming soon'
Weeks after the bumpy debut of its latest flagship AI model, OpenAI has said it is tweaking GPT-5 to make its AI-generated responses seem warmer and more familiar. The post-launch changes are based on user feedback that GPT-5's responses 'felt too formal.' 'Changes are subtle, but ChatGPT should feel more approachable now. You'll notice small, genuine touches like 'Good question' or 'Great start,' not flattery. Internal tests show no rise in sycophancy compared to the previous GPT-5 personality,' OpenAI said in a post on X on Friday, August 15. The behavioural changes to GPT-5 are expected to roll out in the coming week. It is one of many updates that have been announced by the Microsoft-backed AI startup since the model was launched on August 7. Users have been left disappointed by the underwhelming release of GPT-5, which has been hyped up since the company's 2023 release of GPT-4. GPT-5 also suffered several delays due to safety testing and compute limitations. When the model became freely available in ChatGPT this month, users pointed out that the advancements they had been expecting seemed incremental, with GPT-5's main improvements related to cost and speed. In response to these issues, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly told journalists at a dinner last week, 'I think we totally screwed up some things on the rollout.' 'On the other hand, our API traffic doubled in 48 hours and is growing. We're out of GPUs. ChatGPT has been hitting a new high of users every day. A lot of users really do love the model switcher. I think we've learned a lesson about what it means to upgrade a product for hundreds of millions of people in one day,' Altman was quoted as saying by The Verge. ChatGPT has quadrupled its user base in a year, and is nearing over 700 million people each week, as per reports. On GPT-5's behavioural issues, Nick Turley, the product head of ChatGPT, said, 'GPT-5 was just very to the point. I like that. I use the robot personality — I'm German, you know, whatever. But many people do not, and they really like the fact that ChatGPT would actually check in with you.' Here's a brief list of all the changes and improvements announced by OpenAI since the launch of GPT-5. GPT-5 includes Auto, Fast, and Thinking modes. Fast mode gives users faster answers from GPT-5 while Thinking mode means the model takes more time to give deeper answers. Auto mode routes between Fast and Thinking modes. The three modes can be selected by users within the model picker in ChatGPT. 'GPT-5 will seem smarter starting today. Yesterday, the autoswitcher broke and was out of commission for a chunk of the day, and the result was GPT-5 seemed way dumber,' Altman said in a post on X. During a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) session, multiple users requested OpenAI to bring back GPT-4o. Replying to the Reddit thread, Altman said that the OpenAI team had heard user feedback and had decided that they will offer an option for Plus users to continue using GPT-4o and 'will watch usage to determine how long to support it.' GPT-4o is available under 'Legacy models' by default for paid users. Other legacy AI models such as o3 and GPT-4.1, as well as GPT-5 Thinking mini, can be added to the model picker within ChatGPT by enabling 'Show additional models' in ChatGPT's settings. To be sure, this option is only available for paid users. Moving forward, Altman said that the company will give users a more clear 'transition period' when deprecating AI models in the future, as per a report by TechCrunch. ChatGPT Plus and Team subscribers now get up to 3,000 messages in a week when using GPT-5 in Thinking mode, with extra capacity on GPT-5 Thinking mini when they hit this limit. The company has also made GPT-5 available for ChatGPT Enterprise and Edu subscribers. Additionally, OpenAI has said it is working on improvements at the user interface (UI) level so that users can more easily enable Thinking Mode in GPT-5 and more clearly see which AI model is responding to their query or prompt.


Mint
16 minutes ago
- Mint
Google's Gemini AI is training on your personal conversations by default. Here's how you can turn if off
Artificial Intelligence chatbots have seriously taken off since ChatGPT became a viral sensation back in late 2022. While ChatGPT remains the most popular chatbot on the market, Google's Gemini AI has caught up with some great new model launches in the last few months. What also helps Gemini's case is that the chatbot is present across a number of Google services including Gmail and Calendar, making for easier integration. Google by default uses your conversations with Gemini to train its upcoming AI models. Notably, large language models (LLMs) like Gemini are trained on massive datasets in order to learn patterns in language, reasoning and context. In one sense, modern LLMs are essentially pattern recognisers and while publicly available datasets can help the model learn some useful patterns, they are not enough for the model to handle natural queries better. By training on user interactions, LLMs like Gemini understand what queries users ask most and how the model could adapt to deliver more useful content. With users increasingly going to chatbots to ask questions about everything in their lives, from simple tax troubles to past emotional traumas, the thought of Google having access to this data for training its new AI model could be unsettling. But if you want to revoke Google's access to train its AI model on your conversations, there's a quick fix for that. In order to stop Gemini from training on your personal conversations, you'll need to turn off the 'Gemini Apps Activity' option by going to the settings page on the website or iOS/Android app. Google is soon going to change the name of this setting to 'Keep activity' after a new update, but the process to turn it off will remain the same. - Visit on your browser and sign in to your Google account - Click on the three-bar menu on the left-hand side of the page and tap on Settings and help - Tap on Activity and you will be taken to a new settings page - Click on the Turn off option next to Gemini activity to stop the chatbot from training on your conversations - For even more privacy, you can delete past Gemini activity to remove data the chatbot collected before you disabled the feature - Google will continue to store your Gemini activity for 72 hours before deleting it from its servers. Moreover, if you have multiple Google accounts from which you use Gemini, make sure to repeat the process for each one in order to stop Gemini from training on your conversations. Gemini app activity settings - Open the Gemini app on your phone - Tap on the accounts option in the top-right corner and click on Gemini apps activity - Follow the same process to turn off Gemini app activity and delete previous activity if needed


India Today
37 minutes ago
- India Today
OpenAI chief Sam Altman says future AI could help people have more kids
OpenAI boss Sam Altman has a new obsession, and it's not just artificial intelligence. The CEO, who became a father earlier this year, says parenthood has been 'amazing' and insists more people should give it a try. Speaking on the podcast People by WTF with Indian entrepreneur Nikhil Kamath, Altman called declining birth rates a 'real problem' and argued that building families and communities should become a bigger priority in the years think it's pretty clear that family and community are two of the things that make us the happiest, and I hope we will turn back to that,' he Altman sees artificial intelligence as part of the solution. More specifically, he believes that once artificial general intelligence (AGI), the still-hypothetical form of AI that can reason like humans, arrives, it could reshape society in ways that make raising children far more achievable. He explained, 'AGI will allow for a world where people have more abundance, more time, more resources, and potential, and ability.' In that imagined future, society grows richer, daily life becomes less pressured, and families have more support to added that he hopes family and community 'will become far more important in a post-AGI world.'Baby steps into fatherhoodWhen asked about his own first months as a dad, Altman didn't hold back. 'It felt like the most important and meaningful and fulfilling thing I could imagine doing,' he told Kamath. The CEO also admitted to being 'extremely kid-pilled', tech-speak for someone who's fully bought into the joys of having confessed that during the newborn stage he was 'constantly' pestering his company's own chatbot. 'In the first weeks of being a dad, I was 'constantly' asking ChatGPT questions,' he said, noting that even childcare can become a use case for down the skillsOn a June episode of The OpenAI Podcast, Altman went further, joking that his children will never outsmart the machines their dad helped build. 'My kids will never be smarter than AI,' he said. 'They will grow up vastly more capable than we grew up, and able to do things that we cannot imagine, and they'll be good at using AI.'For Altman, mastering how to work with intelligent systems is now as fundamental as learning to read or write. And he intends to make sure his children pick up the skill isn't the only Silicon Valley figure loudly waving the pro-family flag. Elon Musk, founder of xAI and known father of at least ten children, has made his views clear for years. Back in 2022, he warned in a viral post on X, 'A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilisation faces by far.' Musk has also joked that he is 'doing his best to help the underpopulation crisis.' - EndsMust Watch