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Today: Amazon weighs selling its AI chips beyond its own cloud, an AI-inference startup's valuation climbs toward $13 billion, and OpenAI, xAI, Alibaba, and the EU all move on new AI tools and initiatives. Here are six developments worth knowing from the past few days.
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Industry & Infrastructure
Amazon is reportedly in talks to sell its Trainium AI chips beyond AWS. Reports on June 18–19 said Amazon is moving toward selling its in-house Trainium AI accelerators to customers outside its own cloud, a step that would put it in more direct competition with Nvidia in the data-center market. The discussions reportedly focus on selling full server racks of Trainium hardware to companies building their own data centers, rather than individual processors, and Amazon has not committed to a public timeline. CEO Andy Jassy has previously said external sales were “highly likely” within a few years, and the company's chip unit already counts large AI developers among its customers. (TechCrunch) (The AI Insider)
AI-inference startup Baseten is reportedly raising about $1.5 billion. Reports on June 18 said Baseten, which sells software for running and optimizing open-source AI models, is closing in on a roughly $1.5 billion round that would value it at up to $13 billion—about triple the valuation from a financing five months earlier. The reported structure has some investors entering at an $11 billion valuation and others at $13 billion. Demand for inference infrastructure has grown as companies look to open-source models as a lower-cost alternative to proprietary systems; the round had not been formally confirmed by the company. (TechCrunch) (SiliconANGLE)
Product & Platform
OpenAI rolls out a batch of ChatGPT updates. On June 19, OpenAI added pronunciation help—text and audio guidance for words in more than 60 languages—and a more conversational way to follow World Cup matches inside ChatGPT. The update also introduced Codex Record & Replay, which lets developers capture and reuse workflows, along with quicker model selection and an updated composer on Android. The changes are incremental product refinements rather than a new model. (OpenAI)
xAI makes Grok Imagine Video 1.5 generally available. In its latest update, xAI rolled out Grok Imagine Video 1.5 across its Imagine API, grok.com, and the Grok mobile apps, citing improvements to image-to-video quality, motion, and generation speed. The release adds workflow features including Projects for organizing work, the ability to run multiple generation agents in parallel, and library search. xAI described it as its strongest image-to-video system to date. (xAI)
Models & Research
Alibaba's Qwen team introduces a robotics model suite. On June 16, Alibaba unveiled the Qwen-Robot Suite, three AI models aimed at robotics: Qwen-RobotNav for navigation and target tracking, Qwen-RobotManip for controlling robotic arms, and Qwen-RobotWorld for environmental perception. The release extends the Qwen family from language and multimodal work into embodied robotics. Alibaba positioned the models as building blocks for developers automating robot operation. (Caliber.Az) (Gigazine)
The EU picks a consortium to build an open-source frontier model. On June 19, the European Commission said it selected a consortium called EUROPA as the winner of its Frontier AI Grande Challenge, a program to develop an open-source frontier AI model covering all 24 official EU languages. The effort is part of the bloc's push to build sovereign AI capacity alongside its regulatory framework. The Commission has tied the initiative to broader goals around European competitiveness in AI. (European Commission)
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