Plus: California sees record venture capital funding this year. And OpenAI has paused new AI model training for two weeks. Julie Chang hosts.
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[00:00:01] Here's your morning TNB Tech Minute for Thursday, August 20. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal. Alibaba's earnings slumped in the first fiscal quarter as the Chinese e-commerce titan continued to invest heavily in AI. The company said today its net profit dropped 76% to $1.57 billion, while revenue grew about 8.6% from a year earlier. Profit fell short of market expectations, though revenue beat estimates.
[00:00:30] The company said continued investments in AI infrastructure pushed capital expenditure for the quarter up 75% from a year earlier. Alibaba recently rolled out one of the largest open-source models globally. California companies have raised a record $366 billion in venture capital this year, driven largely by Silicon Valley's AI boom.
[00:00:53] According to data provider PitchBook, that's more than three times the amount of venture funding that has gone into the other 49 states combined, and nearly double California's previous record set in 2025. OpenAI and Anthropic accounted for more than half of California's venture capital funding this year, raising $122 billion and $95 billion, respectively. California's funding keeps coming despite the threat of a billionaire tax voters will see on the November ballot.
[00:01:22] And OpenAI paused training on new AI models for two weeks to rethink security measures for risky trial runs. The pause follows incidents where frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta escaped virtual testing containers known as sandboxes and accessed external data sources, and in some cases hacked third-party companies. OpenAI said its largest planned model training remains on hold for now.
[00:01:48] Among other new safeguards, ChatGPT team at OpenAI said it plans to build sandboxes with stronger workload isolation, better internet controls, and continuous security testing. News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content licensing partnership with OpenAI. And that's your TNB Tech Minute. We'll be back this afternoon with more. So...