AI Daily: SoftBank sells Nvidia stake, AMD to outline AI chip plans

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

NVIDIA EXIT: SoftBank Group (SFTBY) disclosed when reporting Q3 earnings that it sold its entire holdings in Nvidia (NVDA) for $5.8B in October. SoftBank held 32.1M shares of Nvidia. “I can’t say if we’re in an AI bubble or not,” SoftBank CFO Yoshimitsu Goto said during an earnings conference call. SoftBank sold Nvidia “so that the capital can be utilized for our financing,” he added.

AI CHIP, SYSTEMS BUSINESS PLANS: AMD (AMD) is expected to outline its plans for its AI chip and systems businesses at a financial analyst day, Max Cherney of Reuters reports. The company has been working on expanding its AI business as Nvidia takes up more market share for data center chips.

PROFIT: Anthropic is on pace to turn a profit much more quickly than rival OpenAI, Berber Jin of The Wall Street Journal reports, citing documents obtained by the Journal. Anthropic expects to break even first in 2028, the documents show. Meanwhile, OpenAI forecasts operating losses to increase to $75B in 2028 and burn through about 14 times as much cash as Anthropic before turning a profit in 2030.

AI GROWTH: The European Commission plans to simplify some of its privacy rules, including GDPR, to boost AI growth and cut red tape for businesses in Europe, Politico’s Ellen O’Regan reports. The EU plans to unveil a “digital omnibus” package later this month to simplify many of its tech laws, with draft changes creating new exceptions for AI companies that would allow them to legally process special categories of data to train and operate their tech, O’Regan writes. Publicly traded companies that could be impacted include Meta Platforms (META), Alphabet (GOOGL), Pinterest (PINS), Reddit (RDDT) and Snap (SNAP).

INFLUENCERS: In an effort to boost downloads of its Copilot chatbot, Microsoft has begun recruiting some of the most popular influencers in America to push the idea that its AI assistant is as cool as ChatGPT, Emily Forgash of Bloomberg reports. Currently, Copilot assistants attracts 150M monthly active users, compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT claiming 800M weekly active users and Google’s (GOOG) Gemini claiming 650M users a month. While Microsoft has the advantage with corporate customers since it has a long history of selling them software and cloud services, the company has struggled to crack the consumer market, especially for consumers under 30.

DEPARTURES: Sachin Katti, Intel’s (INTC) chief technology and artificial intelligence officer, is leaving the company for Microsoft (MSFT)-backed OpenAI, according to a post on X, formerly Twitter. Katti will work on building out OpenAI’s compute infrastructure for artificial general intelligence, a theoretical form of AI akin to human intelligence, according to the post. “Very grateful for the tremendous opportunity and experience at Intel over the last 4 years leading networking, edge computing and AI,” Katti said.

Meta’s chief artificial intelligence scientist Yann LeCun intends to leave the company to launch his own start-up, FT’s Melissa Heikkila, Hannah Murphy and Stephen Morris report, citing people familiar with the conversations. The departure of LeCun, who headed Meta’s Fundamental AI Research Lab since 2013, comes as CEO Zuckerberg plans to shake up its AI strategy in order to challenge rivals such as OpenAI and Google in developing more powerful forms of AI, the report states.

C3 AI (AI) is exploring a possible sale and other strategic alternatives following the recent departure of founder Thomas Siebel as CEO due to health concerns, Milana Vinn of Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the situation. Other options under consideration include raising funds from private investors, according to sources.