Susana Schwartz
Anyone watching the now-viral moment of Sam Altman and Dario Amodei awkwardly avoiding joining hands with other tech leaders knows the rivalry runs deep. But, in the past few days, Altman openly supported Amodei in his quest to shore up “red lines” for AI use by the military, which RCRTech recently covered. In fact, Altman stated in a memo to employees, “We have long believed that AI should not be used for mass surveillance or autonomous lethal weapons, and that humans should remain in the loop for high-stakes automated decisions. These are our main red lines.” Reportedly, a few hours after that memo, Altman won the contract Amodei apparently just lost because of that red line. If that’s the case, and if OpenAI doesn’t bend on that, will the company also be threatened with blacklisting and even the Defense Protection Act? Has OpenAI found a way to weave into the contract the principles he shares with Amodei, but in a more satisfactory way? Is it that Anthropic insisted on explicit, legally binding contractual restrictions, whereas OpenAI possibly agreed to a broader “all lawful purposes” framework supplemented by internal technical safeguards and existing policy? According to a statement by Altman, “This is a case where it’s important to me that we do the right thing, not the easy thing that looks strong but is disingenuous… But I realize it may not look good for us in the short term, and that there is a lot of nuance and context.” RCRTech will continue to follow this story, as well as AI infrastructure-related announcements from MWC Barcelona in “AI Today: What You Need to Know,” below.
Susana Schwartz
Technology Editor
RCRTech
AI Infrastructure Top Stories
Thermal conundrum: Liquid cooling solves the air problem, but introduces its own engineering headache — the pressure drop. That affects system reliability, component longevity, and costs, so what needs to be done?
Analog chips make a comeback: Analog chips and in-memory computing offer a low-power alternative for startups and research labs. Can this largely abandoned computing paradigm handle AI inference at a fraction of the energy cost?
EdgeConneX in Sweden: EdgeConneX spoke to RCRTech about Sweden’s renewable energy, stable power grid, and technical workforce — reasons EdgeConneX’s European footprint will include a 1 GW data center in Skellefteå.
AI Today: What You Need to Know
MWC Barcelona – Supermicro AI-native telco: Supermicro says that delivering AI to the RAN at scale requires infrastructure optimized for telecom networks. As a result, the company has expanded support for AI-RAN and sovereign AI platforms.
MWC Barcelona – Orange Edge: Orange and four partner operators are launching “Edge Federation,” a unified platform that combines computing power with network intelligence to offer value-added services, such as QoS management. MWC Barcelona – NVIDIA and telco: Nvidia is partnering with Booz Allen, BT, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, MITRE, Nokia, ODC, SK Telecom, SoftBank, and T-Mobile as a commitment to build 6G on “open, secure AI-Native Platforms.”
MWC Barcelona – AI-Native Wi-Fi 8: Qualcomm and ZTE debuted the first Wi-Fi 8 portfolios, designed to provide the ultra-stable, high-speed connectivity required for real-time AI agents.
Iran war impact on stocks: It’s a precarious time for tech stocks, and investors are wary about a protracted disruption to logistics, supply chains, and oil supplies – all critical to AI infrastructure buildouts.
Openness in AI: AMD and Nutanix want to build an open, full-stack AI infrastructure platform for agentic AI applications, across a wide range of environments. The goal is to give customers flexible and easy-to-deploy solutions.
Amazon in Spain: Amazon has made its largest-ever investment in Spain, with an announcement to increase investments to €33.7 billion ($39.45 bn USD) in data center infrastructure and AI innovation in the Aragón region through 2035.
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