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1.	Meta’s Yann LeCun Plans Departure By Nick Wingfield Source: The Financial Times

Yann LeCun, Meta Platforms’ chief artificial intelligence scientist, intends to leave the social media giant in the coming months to form his own AI startup, the Financial Times reported.

LeCun—who co-founded Meta’s Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research, the company’s earliest AI lab, in 2013—is in preliminary talks to fundraise for the startup, the FT reported. His plans come after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shook up the company’s struggling AI efforts with the formation of a new group, Meta Superintelligence Labs, and an expensive effort to recruit top tier research talent.

In October, The Information reported that LeCun had floated the idea of resigning from FAIR after the company changed its process for publishing its research publicly. A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment.

2.	Elon Musk’s xAI Loses Second Top Lawyer in Three Months By Theo Wayt Source: The Information

The top lawyer at Elon Musk’s xAI, Lily Lim, said Tuesday that she’s leaving the company. Her departure comes about three months after her predecessor left.

In a post on X announcing her exit, Lim described working more than 100 hours per week at xAI and thanked Musk. xAI is “moving on from the equivalent of a first stage of an interplanetary rocket ship to a second stage, and so it is time for me to depart,” Lim said. Lim joined xAI in December 2024 and was promoted to head of legal affairs after xAI’s previous top lawyer, Robert Keele, left the company this August.

Lim’s departure is the latest example of high-level turnover at xAI. Several top researchers including Igor Babuschkin, Christian Szegedy and Eric Zelikman have left the company this year, as did former chief financial officer Mike Liberatore. Lim and xAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

3.	Shares of AI Cloud Firm CoreWeave Drop as Data Center Delay Tanks Revenue Growth By Amir Efrati Source: The Information

CoreWeave, a cloud provider that rents out Nvidia chips to AI developers like Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI, said Tuesday that revenue rose 134% in the September quarter to nearly $1.4 billion and its revenue backlog more than doubled to $55 billion.

But shares fell 16% in Wednesday trading in response to a warning from  CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator that the company’s fourth quarter revenue would be “affected by temporary delays related to a third-party data center developer who is behind schedule.“ Even so, fourth quarter revenue is still expected to be double from the same period a year earlier.

CoreWeave has borrowed heavily to fund its operations, and it burned about $1.6 billion in cash to fund its rapid expansion in the third quarter. Nvidia owns a stake in the company.

4.	SoftBank Sells Entire Stake in Nvidia for $5.83 Billion By Juro Osawa Source: The Information

SoftBank Group said Tuesday that it has sold its entire stake in Nvidia for $5.83 billion. The move comes as the Japanese company is doubling down on its investment in OpenAI.

In its quarterly earnings report, SoftBank said it sold its 32.1 million Nvidia shares last month. Also last month, SoftBank’s board approved the company’s $22.5 billion investment in OpenAI, in a second installment that follows its previous $7.5 billion investment in the AI developer.

“The scale of our investment in OpenAI is large. We have to execute an investment that exceeds $30 billion,” SoftBank chief financial officer Yoshimitsu Goto said at a press conference Tuesday, in response to a question about SoftBank’s decision to sell its Nvidia shares. “To do that, we are tapping into some of our existing assets in order to raise the capital,” he said.

In addition to its Nvidia share sale, SoftBank said it also sold some of its shares in T-Mobile between June and September for $9.17 billion.

5.	Amazon Merges Ad Buying Tools and Launches Agents for Advertising By Catherine Perloff Source: The Information

Amazon is merging all its ad buying tools into a single platform, the company announced Tuesday at its annual advertiser conference. Amazon also introduced a suite of AI agents for media planning.

The new ad buying tool combines tools Amazon offered for buying ad space on its ecommerce marketplace and on independent websites. Still, Amazon is retaining different pricing models for the two services. Advertisers using Amazon’s tools to buy across the Web generally pay a transaction fee while brands buying space on Amazon’s marketplace pay based on whether a user clicks or how many people saw it.

Amazon also rolled out a suite of agents that makes it easier for advertisers to figure out which audiences they want to target or which campaigns they want to run. But the agents will not actually buy the ads themselves, which is difficult because of the complex business relationships between social media platforms, publishers and advertisers, as The Information has reported. Amazon Web Services, a separate division of the company, also offers agents for advertisers.