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Jun 27, 2025
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TGIF! Meta Platforms is hiring four researchers from OpenAI. Uber is in talks to back former CEO Travis Kalanick's buyout of Chinese robotaxi firm Pony.ai's U.S. assets. TikTok and Instagram are working on smart TV apps.
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Meta Platforms is hiring four researchers from OpenAI as part of an aggressive push to recruit talent and catch up in artificial intelligence, after stumbles over the past year. Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai are joining Meta from OpenAI’s office in Zurich, Beyer said on Thursday in a post on X. The trio, who work on multimodal AI, joined OpenAI from Google DeepMind late last year. Trapit Bansal, who works on reasoning models that take more time to “think” before responding to a query, is also joining Meta, TechCrunch reported. Meta is also in advanced talks to buy PlayAI, a startup using AI to generate human-like voices, Bloomberg reported. Spokespeople for Meta and OpenAI declined to comment. PlayAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Uber is reportedly in talks with its co-founder and former CEO, Travis Kalanick, about backing Kalanick’s buyout of Chinese autonomous car developer Pony.ai’s U.S. assets, the New York Times reported. The deal would likely enhance Uber’s strategy of partnering with a variety of robotaxi services. The size of the deal isn’t clear, but Pony’s market capitalization is around $5.2 billion, and most of its value is in its Chinese operations. In the U.S., Pony is testing a robotaxi service in California. The Trump administration has banned Chinese autonomous vehicle
developers selling services in the U.S., which will force Pony to sell its U.S. assets in the next 12 months. Uber didn’t comment on the Times report but issued a statement saying it intends “to work with multiple players in the U.S. and around the world who can safely bring autonomous technology to the world.” It already has a partnership with Pony for service in regions such as the Middle East. Uber’s best known robotaxi partnership is with Waymo. In markets such as Austin, Uber customers can order a Waymo through the Uber app. By striking other partnerships, Uber can reduce its reliance on Waymo. Backing Kalanick brings back a colorful personality from Uber’s past. Kalanick was forced out as Uber CEO by the company’s investors in 2017, after an uproar over Uber’s culture and boundary-pushing competitive tactics. The Times story said Kalanick and Dara
Khosrowshahi, who succeeded him as CEO, are now friendly.
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TikTok and Instagram are working on versions of their apps for connected TVs following YouTube’s growth in the living room, The Information reported. The social media giants see an opportunity to capture some of the ad dollars moving to the streaming TV market. TV apps would give Instagram and TikTok new places to sell ads and a way to reach new users, particularly older demographics. A new TikTok app would replace an app for TV screens launched in November 2021, which the company appears to have yanked earlier this month. As of April, YouTube made up more TV-watching time than any other ad-supported streaming or subscription service in the U.S., including Netflix, according to Nielsen.
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Redwood Materials, a battery recycling startup run by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, is entering the data center market as demand rises for electricity for artificial intelligence. The company said Thursday it has launched a new business to repurpose used electric-vehicle batteries so they can power data centers, starting with an 800-battery facility just outside Reno, Nevada. Redwood worked with Crusoe, a startup that is also developing a data center for OpenAI in Texas, to develop the site. (Straubel is an investor in Crusoe.) It’s not a new concept: Elon Musk’s xAI has used Tesla Megapack batteries to help power its data center in Memphis, Tenn., for instance. Crusoe said the Nevada data center—which is powered by solar energy during the day and batteries
at night—contains 2,000 older-generation Nvidia server chips that Crusoe will rent out to its cloud customers. That’s a relatively small cluster of chips, but Redwood says it is in discussions with large cloud providers about using its batteries to power their data centers. Founded in 2017, Redwood focuses on recycling batteries to recover their critical minerals, such as cobalt and nickel, which can be used to make new batteries. But it noticed that used EV batteries still have power capacity that can be used up before they are recycled. Straubel said the company could end up generating more revenue from the energy business than its core recycling business.
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Tesla executive and top Elon Musk lieutenant Omead Afshar has left the carmaker, Bloomberg News reported. Afshar oversaw sales and manufacturing operations in North America and Europe, the report said. Tesla’s sales have dipped in both regions, in part due to political opposition to Musk. His departure comes the same month as Tesla’s Optimus robotics lead, Milan Kovac, left to spend time with family. The company’s director of human resources for North America, Jenna Ferrua, has also left, according to multiple reports. In recent days, Afshar was publicly celebrating Tesla’s limited robotaxi rollout in Austin. He has previously left to work at Musk’s other companies, The Information has reported. It wasn’t immediately clear where he’s headed now.
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CoreWeave is in fresh talks to buy Core Scientific, the Wall Street Journal reported, after the AI cloud provider unsuccessfully bid for the data infrastructure company a year ago. Core Scientific had a market value of around $3.7 billion as of Wednesday close, after the stock had been down 12% this year. Shares of Core Scientific have surged more than 20% after the report. Last year, CoreWeave offered to buy Core Scientific for $5.75 a share, or about $1 billion. CoreWeave rejected
the proposal as too low and said it would focus on its existing partnership to deliver about 200 megawatts of capacity to host CoreWeave’s computing service operations. Representatives of CoreWeave and Core Scientific did not immediately respond to a request for comments.
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