Nvidia Invests $2 Billion in Grok. Grok Commits To Buy Nvidia Chips. The investment in Elon Musk’s xAI, the maker of Grok, echoes the round-tripping practices of the late 1990s. The chipmaker is said to be taking an equity stake while xAI simultaneously spends billions buying Nvidia’s GPUs to power its AI infrastructure. The circular flow of capital in/ revenue out inflates both companies’ valuations. The pattern recalls the vendor-financed deals of the dot-com era, when firms booked revenue by investing in their own customers. Nvidia has a similar deal with OpenAI.
Sora Soars to #1 in the App Store. You, or your favorite celebrity, can star in a 12 second video. For free. Yes, it’s free generative video tomfoolery, mostly AI slop, but so far people seem to be lapping it up. Its cheap deep fake ability also has people up in arms. While acknowledging these concerns, CEO Sam Altman defended the app on free speech grounds. Despite being invite-only, the Sora app had 627,000 downloads compared to ChatGPT’s 606,000 in its first week. It reached number one on the US App Store by its third day. Google is planning a GenAI app as well.
Elon Musk’s xAI plans to launch Grokipedia, a Wikipedia competitor to counter alleged editorial bias in the incumbent platform. I guess those pesky human moderators cannot be trusted. Musk and other critics claim they are liberal and biased, presumably because they are volunteers. Grokipedia will be built on xAI’s Grok large language model; it will auto-correct errors, rewrite articles with context, and be neutral, open-source and freely accessible. Because Wikipedia is not all those things? Since Wikipedia is a not-for-profit, Musk doesn’t have the option of buying it. To put ads in, and make sure he and his friends are well positioned for posterity, Elon must build one himself.
Music Labels Follow Publishers and Make a Deal With AI. Universal Music Group and Warner Music are nearing deals with tech platforms and AI firms, including Google, Spotify, Udio, and Suno, to license their catalogs for AI use, The Verge reports. Labels are pushing for a model similar to streaming, where AI systems would pay micropayments per use of songs in training or generation, consistent with the way sampling was handled.
WIRED profiled Neural Viz, a self-made sci-fi universe created by a lone filmmaker named Josh Kerrigan. Using tools like Midjourney, Runway, FLUX Kontext, and ElevenLabs, Kerrigan elevates AI slop to AI art.
Resolution: A Cinephonic Rhapsody for the Soul premiered at SXSW 2025 as a 360° dome theater experience based on Salvage Enterprise, the ambitious album by The Polyphonic Spree. Ryan Hartsell produced the project, in collaboration with director Scott Berman and band founder Tim DeLaughter. Hartsell handled both technical direction and animation workflows. The showcase sold out every day, drew long lines, and won the XR Spotlight Audience Award, becoming one of the most sought-after experiences at the festival. The dome itself was built in partnership with Fulldome.pro to screen the 43-minute immersive film.
Meta wants its metaverse everywhere. It’s no secret the company wants to emulate Roblox’s incredible success. Meta’s metaverse VP Vishal Shah explains how the company wants to expand Horizon Worlds beyond VR and into its social media.
This column has a companion, The AI/XR Podcast, hosted by its author, Charlie Fink, and Ted Schilowitz, former studio executive and futurist for Paramount and Fox, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap. This week’s guest is Zuzanna Stamirowska, Pathway’s CEO and Co-founder The startup is building the foundations for enterprise AI systems that think and learn in real-time as humans do. We can be found on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.
