AI: Speed matters more, scale matters less, innovation matters most

As businesses embrace AI-driven models, they’ll need to rethink everything from workforce strategies to innovation processes. Critical shifts in strategy will emphasize speed more, scale less and innovation most of all. The time to embrace AI is now. Read more

AI IN THE NEWS 

Nvidia announces its new chips and positions itself for the post-DeepSeek AI landscape.Fortune’s Sharon Goldman reported from Nvidia’s GTC developer conference this week, where the company unveiled Blackwell Ultra, a family of chips shipping later this year, and Vera Rubin, its next-generation GPUs it plans to ship in 2026. Beyond just its product lineup, the event showed how the company is responding to a shift in the AI landscape where some are questioning just how much compute—and how many of its powerful chips—will really be needed  to create and run future AI models. This skepticism of the “go big or go home” ethos that had prevailed in AI until recently was sparked by DeepSeek’s claim that it trained its R1 model for a fraction of the cost and computing power of competing models. On stage, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argued that the new, emerging reasoning models, like R1, will actually require more computing power, not less, as these systems use many more tokens per query than previous kinds of LLMs. “The amount of computation we need as a result of agentic AI, as a result of reasoning, is easily 100 times more than we thought we needed this time last year,” he said. 

Softbank acquires Ampere for $6.5 billion.Masayoshi Son’s Japanese conglomerate will buy the U.S. semiconductor company Ampere Computing for $6.5 billion in cash and will operate it as a wholly-owned SoftBank subsidiary. Son framed the purchase of the seven-year old Ampere as a play on the future of “artificial superintelligence” which he said would require the kind of hardware breakthroughs Ampere has been working on. Ampere was founded by Intel veteran Renée James and was funded by the Carlyle Group and Oracle (which perhaps not coincidentally is also a partner with SoftBank in the new Stargate Project that has committed to investing $500 billion in U.S. AI infrastructure in the next four years.) Reuters has more about the acquisition here. 

Elon Musk’s xAI and Nvidia join the Microsoft-Blackrock AI fund. The fund, also backed by Abu Dhabi, aims to raise $30 billion to build AI infrastructure including data centers and energy plants. It’s just one of several funds aiming to raise gargantuan funds for AI infrastructure, much like the $100 billion “Stargate” project announced by SoftBank, Oracle, and OpenAI. What is interesting here, however, is seeing Musk team up with Microsoft—the main backer of his rival, OpenAI. You can read more from Semafor. 

AI spammers are “brute forcing” the internet.404 Media dove into the impact AI-generated content is having on the internet and people’s sense of reality as AI spammers create content tailored for social media algorithms and search engines at unprecedented speeds. Human creators have always sought to hijack these algorithms, but the nature of AI means that so-called “AI slop” can be produced at unprecedented speed and scale. “A human running an AI can generate dozens of images, photos, or articles in a matter of seconds. This allows a creator using AI to not necessarily have to worry about the quality of their videos, because these metrics (or any metric on any social media platform) can be brute forced. If a video fails it does not matter, because you can make 10 more of them in a matter of seconds,” says 404 Media, adding that human-created content is getting almost entirely drowned out by AI-generated content because of the sheer amount of it. 

FORTUNE ON AI  

Exclusive: Pluralis raises $7.6 million from prominent investors to take on OpenAI with big decentralized models —by Ben Weiss

Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel wants to use AI to make it “easier for everybody to experience the world” —by Fortune editors

Why Goldman Sachs’ CIO is taking a measured approach to rolling out AI across the business —by John Kell