Flash News

TREE NEWS update: Google launched its Gemini 4 flagship AI model, sending parent company Alphabet’s premarket shares up 2.6%. The model is the latest flagship release in Google’s Gemini line.

TREE NEWS update: DIG Ventures has closed its third fund at $120 million, with backing from Horsley Bridge, Sofina, Granite and a top US university endowment. The fund will focus on pre-seed and seed-stage AI-native enterprise software and cloud infrastructure startups, targeting data, identity, compliance and orchestration layers. It plans to lead most rounds and has already begun deploying capital.

TREE NEWS update: SoftBank Group said it completed the third and final $10 billion tranche of its additional investment in OpenAI through SoftBank Vision Fund 2, finishing the previously announced $30 billion commitment. Total investment in OpenAI now stands at $64.6 billion, giving SoftBank a stake of about 13%. The funds came from foreign-currency senior bonds SoftBank announced on September 24.

TREE NEWS update: Apollo Global Management will provide financing for a $15 billion AI infrastructure project in Chiba Prefecture, Japan, joining UK developer RHAELM Holdings, Japanese utility Jera and Dell Technologies as a strategic investment and financing partner. The project is intended to build infrastructure supporting AI computing demand. The move extends Apollo’s recent push into AI infrastructure investment.

TREE NEWS update: SoftBank has completed its third $10 billion investment in OpenAI, closing out the tranche on October 1. The Japanese conglomerate’s latest capital injection brings its total commitment to the AI developer to roughly $30 billion across three rounds. No valuation or further deal terms were disclosed.

TREE NEWS update: SoftBank has completed the third $10 billion installment of its investment in OpenAI. The payment closes out the latest tranche of the Japanese group’s commitment to the AI developer. No further terms of the transaction were disclosed.

TREE NEWS update: Tencent has agreed to lease data centers in Southeast Asia from Oracle under a five-year deal valued at about $7 billion, giving the Chinese tech company access to roughly 100,000 high-end AI chips. The agreement covers multiple Oracle data center sites in the region.

TREE NEWS update: Huawei launched its Mate90 series and a full range of new products on October 1, with all Mate90 models carrying the company’s flagship Tau chip. Richard Yu, Huawei’s executive director and chairman of its terminal BG, said at the event that the chip delivers a jump in CPU, GPU and NPU performance across the lineup.

TREE NEWS update: Google has launched Gemini 4, internally named Argon, which tops 12 of 18 benchmarks in Google’s own comparison table and can generate a million tokens per reply. The model also resists hijacking attempts better than rivals. Cyber defenders are getting access first, with guardrails off.

TREE NEWS update: Peter Lee, a longtime Microsoft executive who led the company’s internal research arm for years, announced Wednesday that he is leaving. He is one of several senior Microsoft executives to announce departures this year, alongside Office and Windows chief Rajesh Jha, Xbox CEO Phil Spencer, chief communications officer Frank Shaw and security head Charlie Bell.

TREE NEWS update: Animoca Brands’ Moca Foundation and Moca Network launched the Moca Chain mainnet, letting users and AI agents share verifiable credentials across applications. Users custody their own credentials and choose when and where to share them, while institutions can issue tamper-proof credentials tied to a unified digital identity covering identity verification and membership. Moca Network also introduced AIR, a unified enterprise gateway for users and AI agents, with integrations planned by 2026 across partners including SK Planet, Open Campus, OneFootball, Automobili Lamborghini, Plume and Nansen.

TREE NEWS update: US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on September 30 the creation of an “Autonomous Warfare Command” to scale up the US military’s autonomous and robotic combat capabilities. Speaking at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, Hegseth said it will be a new four-star joint combatant command. Its remit will cover drones, artificial intelligence and command-and-control systems.

TREE NEWS update: Federal Reserve official Neel Kashkari said he is bullish on AI while also viewing it as tied to US inflation risk. The remarks tie the technology’s outlook to the central bank’s inflation concerns.

TREE NEWS reports: Anthropic PBC CEO Dario Amodei was questioned by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and other executives during a Tuesday meeting at the White House, where they pressed him over his public warnings. The executives challenged Amodei on why he has taken such an extreme stance in public. No further details of the exchange were disclosed.

TREE NEWS reports: Micron Technology said it still sees no clear timeline for when it will be able to meet demand, signaling that supply constraints persist. The memory-chip maker gave no date for when the shortfall might ease. The comment points to continued tightness in the market for memory components used in data centers and AI hardware.

TREE NEWS update: White House AI adviser David Sacks said artificial intelligence companies have agreed to accept external audits, adding that new legislation is not necessary to move forward. No further details on the scope, timing or which companies are involved were provided.

TREE NEWS update: Alphabet has rolled out Gemini Argon, its most advanced AI model to date, to a select group of cybersecurity partners, with major gains in coding, cybersecurity and complex professional work. CEO Sundar Pichai this week signed a voluntary AI safety agreement with US President Donald Trump and several tech industry leaders.

TREE NEWS update: Google released its new flagship model Gemini 4 Argon, which it says reaches frontier performance in complex workflows, cyber defense and software engineering, scoring 77.9% on the DeepSWE v1.1 test. The output limit rises from 64,000 to 1 million tokens. CEO Sundar Pichai said the model has been made available to the US government and, through the Fairwind program, to selected trusted cyber defenders. Paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers follow, at an introductory API price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.

TREE NEWS update: The US government’s AI chatbot America.gov, launched September 29 as a unified federal digital gateway drawing on some 29,000 government websites, does not cover some recent crypto legislation and presents digital-asset guidance the SEC has already withdrawn, including on bitcoin reserves, crypto regulation and tax filing. Built with Google’s Gemini as technology partner and Grok also involved, it offers tax forms, scam reporting and security tips, and its FAQ warns AI can err and users should check each reply’s cited sources.

TREE NEWS reports: The U.S. government’s new AI chatbot produces a roughly 1,800-word bureaucratic remix of Minecraft’s ending poem when asked about the game. The passage is an intentional easter egg rather than a hallucination, meaning the response was deliberately built into the chatbot rather than generated in error.