New research suggests the antibiotic doxycycline could help prevent schizophrenia in young people. Adolescents treated with the drug were significantly less likely to develop the condition later in life. The protective effect might come from doxycycline’s anti-inflammatory and brain-modulating properties. Common Antibiotic Shows Surprising Link to Schizophrenia Prevention A widely used antibiotic might help lower […]
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He cited severe compute constraints already forcing OpenAI and competitors to limit availability of their products and delay new features [File]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called on world governments Thursday to invest in AI infrastructure, as questions grow about whether the ChatGPT-maker, the world’s most valuable private company, can absorb artificial intelligence’s massive costs.
“What we do think might make sense is governments building (and owning) their own AI infrastructure, but then the upside of that should flow to the government as well,” Altman wrote in a long post on X, clarifying OpenAI’s position amid growing scrutiny of the company’s ambitious spending plans.
The company behind ChatGPT was facing scrutiny after its chief financial officer Sarah Friar told a business conference Wednesday that the U.S. government could help attract the enormous investment needed for AI computing and infrastructure by guaranteeing loans to pay for the buildout.
After fierce criticism, the executive later retracted the statement, saying her point was clumsily explained, which Altman reiterated in his own post.
“We do not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI datacenters,” Altman wrote.
“We believe that governments should not pick winners or losers, and that taxpayers should not bail out companies that make bad business decisions or otherwise lose in the market,” he added.
“If we screw up and can’t fix it, we should fail, and other companies will continue on doing good work.”
The comments came as OpenAI faces questions about its financial trajectory.
OpenAI has become a highly pivotal company, with the AI race launched by the release of ChatGPT driving Wall Street to new records even as doubts grow about the broader health of the American economy.
Altman said the company expects to reach over $20 billion in annualised revenue this year, a significant accomplishment for a startup, and is looking at infrastructure spending commitments of approximately $1.4 trillion over the next eight years.
This includes a $300 billion partnership with Oracle and a $500 billion Stargate project with Oracle and SoftBank that was announced at the White House in January.
He projected that OpenAI revenue will grow to hundreds of billions of dollars by 2030, driven by as-yet-unreleased consumer devices, robotics, and AI-powered scientific discovery.
Given the strategic importance of the technology, Altman argued that building a “strategic national reserve of computing power” makes sense for governments, particularly as massive infrastructure projects take years to complete.
He cited severe compute constraints already forcing OpenAI and competitors to limit availability of their products and delay new features, warning that the risk of insufficient computing power outweighs the risk of overbuilding.
Published – November 07, 2025 09:46 am IST
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, right, and his wife, Priscilla Chan [File]
| Photo Credit: AP
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a nonprofit launched by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife aimed at curing all disease, on Thursday announced it was restructuring to focus on using artificial intelligence to achieve that goal.
The move narrows the focus of the philanthropic organisation founded in 2015 with a vow to devote most of the couple’s significant wealth to charitable causes, including social justice and voter rights.
Zuckerberg is among the high-profile tech figures who has backed away from diversity, equality and fact-checking initiatives after U.S. President Donald Trump took office in January.
The organisation this year ended its diversity efforts, curbed support of nonprofits that provide housing and stopped funding a primary school that gave education and health care to underserved children, according to media reports.
The philanthropic mission created by the Meta co-founder and his spouse, Priscilla Chan, said that its current priority involves scientific teams centralised in a facility called Biohub.
“This is a pivotal moment in science, and the future of AI-powered scientific discovery is starting to come into view,” Biohub said in a blog post.
“We believe that it will be possible in the next few years to create powerful AI systems that can reason about and represent biology to accelerate science.”
Biohub envisions AI helping advance ways to detect, prevent and cure diseases, according to the post.
The mission includes trying to model the human immune system, potentially opening a door to “engineering human health.”
“We believe we’re on the cusp of a scientific revolution in biology, as frontier artificial intelligence and virtual biology give scientists new tools to understand life at a fundamental level,” Biohub said in the post.
The first investment announced by the Zuckerbergs when the initiative debuted nearly a decade ago was for the creation of a Biohub in Silicon Valley where researchers, scientists and others could work to build tools to better study and understand diseases.
Shortly after it was established, the initiative bought a Canadian startup which uses AI to quickly read and comprehend scientific papers and then provide insights to researchers.
“Our multidisciplinary teams of scientists and engineers have built incredible technologies to observe, measure and program biology,” Biohub said of its progress.
Meta is among the big tech firms that have been pouring billions of dollars into data centres and more in a race to lead the field of AI.
Published – November 07, 2025 09:21 am IST
Tiny proteins from camels, llamas, and alpacas—known as nanobodies—may transform treatments for brain disorders like schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s. Their tiny size allows them to penetrate the brain more effectively and with fewer side effects than conventional antibody therapies. Tiny Camelid Proteins With Big Potential Nanobodies, which are tiny proteins found in members of the camelid […]
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Such guarantees would also dramatically expand OpenAI’s potential lender pool, as many banks and financial institutions face strict limits on high-risk lending [File]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS
ChatGPT creator OpenAI, the world’s largest private company, is asking the U.S. government to provide loan guarantees for its massive infrastructure expansion that will eventually cost more than $1 trillion.
Speaking at a Wall Street Journal business conference, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar explained that government backing could help attract the enormous investment needed for AI computing and infrastructure, given the uncertain lifespan of AI data centers.
“This is where we’re looking for an ecosystem of banks, private equity, maybe even governmental,” Friar said.
Federal loan guarantees would “really drop the cost of the financing,” she explained, enabling OpenAI and its investors to borrow more money at lower rates to meet the company’s ambitious targets.
The proposal, unusual for a Silicon Valley tech giant, would theoretically reduce OpenAI’s borrowing costs since the government would absorb losses if the company defaulted.
Such guarantees would also dramatically expand OpenAI’s potential lender pool, as many banks and financial institutions face strict limits on high-risk lending.
OpenAI’s request for government support comes amid a massive spending spree on computing infrastructure, raising questions about how the company will recoup these investments.
By some estimates, OpenAI has committed to approximately $1 trillion in infrastructure deals this year alone, including a $300 billion partnership with Oracle and a $500 billion Stargate project with Oracle and SoftBank.
While the company expects revenues in the tens of billions this year, impressive for any startup, that figure falls far short of covering the computing costs required to power OpenAI’s advanced chatbots.
During the interview, Friar dismissed reports that OpenAI plans to go public soon.
“IPO is not on the cards right now,” she said, emphasizing that the company’s current priority is growth.
Recent media reports had suggested OpenAI was preparing for a public offering after completing a complex governance restructuring that would allow the company to accept public shareholders on Wall Street.
Published – November 06, 2025 08:49 am IST
Every dataset that powers machine intelligence is built on human creativity. To treat that work as free fuel is to erode the very culture that makes intelligence, artificial or otherwise, worth having
Australia isn’t known for building world-leading artificial intelligence systems. But the island nation might just become the moral compass for how the rest of the democratic world approaches them. Last week, Australia took a stand on what may become the defining issue of the AI age: how machines learn, and at whose expense.
The story begins with a think tank most people barely know: Australia’s Productivity Commission. In August, it released a dense report titled ‘Harnessing Data and Digital Technology’. Buried in it was a radical idea to give AI companies a free pass to mine copyrighted content.
The commission called it a “text and data mining exception,” which simply means that books, journalism, songs, and art could be scraped to train AI models without asking permission or paying for it.
The commission’s reasoning sounded pragmatic: AI needs tomes of data to improve, and removing copyright barriers were aimed at helping the island nation catch up in the global tech race. But that logic misses a moral, and an economic, truth that AI can’t live off free art forever.
Every dataset that powers machine intelligence is built on human creativity. To treat that work as free fuel is to erode the very culture that makes intelligence, artificial or otherwise, worth having.
Predictably, the reaction was fierce. Authors, artists, and news organisations accused the government of handing their life’s work to Big Tech for nothing. The outrage reached Canberra, and Attorney General Michelle Rowland drew a line in the sand. “Australian creatives are not only world class — they are the lifeblood of Australian culture,” she said. “Technology’s advance must not come at their expense.”
With that, the government scrapped the proposal and set up the Copyright and AI Reference Group (CAIRG), tasked with designing new licensing models to ensure creators are paid when their work trains AI. A technical tweak on paper, but a seismic shift on the ground.
Australia has become the first major democracy to say, unequivocally, that human creativity is not public property just because it’s online. It’s a stance that will reverberate far beyond its borders. World democracies must take a stance on how AI companies can train their models using “text and data” from copyrighted material.
If AI systems depend on human-generated content, who controls that input, and how are the profits shared between parties?
Data is critical to AI, and restricting access can slow innovation. And today’s AI models have already consumed most of the internet’s text, art, and music. What’s left are the works of art and literature that are yet to be produced. It is high time that governments around the world wake up and put up a working mechanism in place where human creativity is fairly compensated by AI companies that unethically scrape the web to train their AI models.
By rejecting unrestricted scraping, Australia forces AI companies to grow up. If they want high-quality, up-to-date data, they’ll have to negotiate, license, and pay. That’s not a roadblock, but the next stage of evolution: a shift from extraction to cooperation.
The AI industry stands at a crossroads. It can keep hoovering up culture in a legal grey zone, inviting lawsuits and public distrust, or it can build something sustainable through an ecosystem where innovation is built on consent and compensation.
Australia’s move offers a blueprint for other democracies to follow. It shows that protecting creators isn’t anti-innovation. It’s how innovation earns legitimacy. Ultimately, the future of AI depends on not just processing power, but human creative input that enable machines to learn. And no matter how clever the machines get, they can’t live off free art forever.
Published – November 07, 2025 08:00 am IST
A five-year review of over 130,000 adults with insomnia found that long-term melatonin use was linked to a higher risk of heart failure and death, prompting researchers to call for further study into its cardiovascular safety. People who regularly used melatonin supplements for at least a year were found to have a higher likelihood of […]
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Tesla’s board had said Elon Musk could quit if the pay package was not approved. F
| Photo Credit: AP
Tesla CEO Elon Musk won shareholder approval on Thursday (November 6, 2025) for the largest corporate pay package in history as investors endorsed his vision of morphing the EV maker into an AI and robotics juggernaut. The proposal was approved with over 75% support, and Mr. Musk bounded to the stage of the company’s annual meeting at its factory in Austin, Texas, accompanied by dancing robots.
Mr. Musk, already the world’s richest person, could get as much as $1 trillion in stock over the next decade, although required payments would take the value down to $878 billion. The vote is crucial for Tesla’s future and its valuation, which hangs on Mr. Musk’s vision of making vehicles that drive themselves, creating a robotaxi network across the U.S. and selling humanoid robots, even though his far-right political rhetoric has hurt the Tesla brand this year.
“What we are about to embark upon is not merely a new chapter of the future of Tesla, but a whole new book,” Mr. Musk told a cheering group of shareholders. Shareholders also reelected three directors on Tesla’s board and voted in favor of holding annual elections for all board members and a replacement pay plan for Mr. Musk’s services because a legal challenge has held up a previous package.
“Other shareholder meetings are like snoozefests, but ours are bangers,” Mr. Musk said. “I mean, look at this. This is sick.”
Shareholders voted in favor of Tesla investing in Mr. Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, though there were many abstentions.
Although conflict-of-interest concerns have arisen over Tesla’s possible investment in xAI, the move is seen as widely benefiting both companies as the EV maker’s self-driving ambitions hinge on critical AI prowess and xAI would gain from a major customer like Tesla.
A win for Mr. Musk was widely expected as the billionaire was allowed to exercise the full voting rights of his roughly 15% stake after the automaker moved to Texas from Delaware. Some major investors had opposed the plan, including Norway’s sovereign wealth fund and proxy firms Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services, saying the pay could decrease shareholder value.
Tesla’s board had said Mr. Musk could quit if the pay package was not approved.
The vote allays investor concern that Mr. Musk’s focus has been diluted with his work in politics as well as in running his other companies, including rocket maker SpaceX and xAI. The board and many investors who lent their endorsement have said the record-setting pay package benefits shareholders in the long run as Mr. Musk must ensure Tesla achieves a series of milestones to get paid.
“Will the growth offset these concerns of dilution – or – is this just giving Elon his wish of enough influence to shape the future of AI? That remains to be seen,” said Brian Mulberry, a senior client portfolio manager at Zacks Investment Management.
Goals for Mr. Musk over the next decade include the company’s delivering 20 million vehicles, having 1 million robotaxis in operation, selling 1 million robots and earning as much as $400 billion in core profit. But in order for him to get paid, Tesla’s stock value has to rise in tandem, first to $2 trillion from the current $1.5 trillion, and all the way to $8.5 trillion. Achieving each step – an operational goal and a valuation milestone – awards Mr. Musk 1% of stock. So the plan could still hand Mr. Musk tens of billions of dollars even if he falls short of most of its ambitious targets.
If Mr. Musk hits all of them, he would be eligible for 12% in stock, or about $1 trillion.
The true value of those shares would be $878 billion because the board wants to pay Mr. Musk only for increasing the company’s value. The package is structured to give Mr. Musk up to $1 trillion in shares – minus the value of the stock on the day the board passed the proposal in early September. Mr. Musk could either pay that amount in cash or accept fewer shares to account for their original value.
The value of the package is always a moving target because it would fluctuate based on changes in the stock price.
Mr. Musk has said he is interested in the higher voting stake he would get in Tesla as part of the pay package, more than the money, as he gears up to sell a “robot army.”
Published – November 07, 2025 07:36 am IST
Elon Musk turned off many potential buyers of his Tesla cars and sent sales plunging with his foray into politics. But the stock has soared anyway and now he wants the company to pay him more — a lot more.
Shareholders gathering Thursday for Tesla’s annual meeting in Austin, Texas, will decide in a proxy vote whether to grant Musk, the company’s CEO and already the richest person in the world, enough stock to potentially make him history’s first trillionaire.
It’s a vote that has sparked heated debate on both sides of the issue, even drawing the pope’s comments on it as an example of income inequality.
Several pension funds have come out against the package, arguing that the board of directors is too beholden to Musk, his behaviour too reckless lately and the riches offered too much.
Supporters say Musk is a genius who is the only person capable of ushering in a Tesla-dominated future in which hundreds of thousands of self-driving Tesla cars — many without steering wheels — will ferry people and humanoid Tesla robots will march around factories and homes, picking up boxes and watering plants. The pay is necessary to incentivize him, they say, and keep him focused.
Musk has threatened to walk away from the company if he doesn’t get what he wants and has blasted some of the package’s critics as “corporate terrorists.”
To get his Tesla shares, Musk has to secure approval from a majority of the company’s voting shareholders. Improving the odds, Musk gets to vote his own shares, worth 15% of the company.
Shareholders first heard about the pay package in September when the board of directors proposed it in a detailed filing to federal securities regulators. The document, running 200 pages, also contains other proposals up for a vote at the meeting, including whether to allow Tesla to invest in another Musk company, xAI, and who should serve on the board in the future.
Musk won’t necessarily get all of that money, or even a cent of it, if the package is approved. He first has to meet several operational and financial targets.
To get the full pay, for instance, he has to deliver to the car market 20 million Teslas over 10 years, more than double the number he has churned out over the past dozen years. He also has to massively increase the market value of the company and its operating profits and deliver one million robots, from zero today.
If he falls short of the biggest goals, though, the package could still hand him plenty of money.
Musk will get $50 billion in additional Tesla shares, for example, if he increases the company’s market value by 80%, something he did just this past year, as well as doubling vehicle sales and tripling operating earnings — or hitting any other two of a dozen operational targets.
Musk is already the richest man in the world with a net worth of $493 billion, according to Forbes magazine, and well ahead of some of the wealthiest of years past.
The steel giant, Andrew Carnegie, was once worth an inflation-adjusted $300 billion, according to the Carnegie Corp., well below Musk’s wealth.
Musk is still trailing John D. Rockefeller, but he’s closing in fast. The railroad titan hit peak inflation-adjusted wealth of $630 billion in 1913, according to Guinness World Records.
For his part, Musk says it’s not really about the money but about getting a higher Tesla stake — it will double to nearly 30% — so he can control the company. He says that’s a pressing concern given Tesla’s future “robot army,” a reference to the company’s Optimus humanoid workers that he doesn’t trust anyone else to control.
Many investors have come out in support of the package, including Baron Capital Management, whose founder called Musk indispensable to the company. “Without his relentless drive and uncompromising standards,” wrote founder Ron Baron, “there would be no Tesla.”
Critics include the biggest in the U.S. public pension fund, Calpers, and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest. They argue the pay is excessive, with the Norway fund expressing concern that the board that designed it, which includes Musk’s brother, is not independent enough. That echoes a decision from a Delaware court nearly two years ago that blasted the process for approving a previous Musk pay package as “deeply flawed” given his “extensive ties” to directors.
Even the Vatican has weighed in, decrying the wealth gap in the world and blasting the trillion dollar offer in particular.
“If that is the only thing that has value anymore,” said Pope Leo XIV, “then we’re in big trouble.”
Judging from the stock price alone, Musk has been spectacularly successful. The company is now worth nearly $1.5 trillion.
But a lot that runup reflects big bets by investors that Musk will be able deliver things that are difficult to pull off, and the way Musk has run the company recently doesn’t inspire confidence. He has broken numerous promises, and his tendency to say whatever is on his mind has sabotaged the company.
Just this year, for instance, he vowed to deliver driverless taxis in several cities, secure regulatory approval in Europe for his self-driving software and push sales up 20% or 30%.
Instead, his driverless robotaxis in Austin and San Francisco have human safety monitors inside. Europeans still haven’t approved his software. And Tesla sales continue to plunge, with new figures out Monday showing a stunning 50% drop last month in Germany alone.
That said, Musk has pulled off the impossible before. His company a half dozen years ago was widely feared to be near bankruptcy because he wasn’t making enough cars, but then he succeeded and the stock soared.
“He frequently teeters on the edge of disaster,” said Tesla owner and money manager Nancy Tengler, “and then pulls back just in the nick of time.”
Published – November 06, 2025 09:09 am IST
Once thought to be a flaw in the system, new research suggests that CD4 T cells may actually hold the key to maintaining a properly functioning, age-appropriate immune system. Prof. Alon Monsonego of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has found that T helper lymphocytes, a type of immune cell responsible for coordinating immune responses, change […]
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