Altman vs. Musk, DeepMind on DeepSeek, and the robotaxi push: AI news roundup

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman responded to Elon Musk’s offer to buy the AI startup this week by saying it’s not for sale.
Read about this and more in this week’s AI news roundup.
A Google-backed startup raised $350 million to create a future where humans and robots are ‘true partners’

Apptronik said Thursday that it had closed its Series A fundraise at roughly $350 million, with plans to use the funding to scale production of its artificial intelligence-powered humanoid robots.
All the ways Sam Altman and Elon Musk traded insults in just 24 hours

Sam Altman and Elon Musk are trading barbs about OpenAI again — this time after Musk’s reported offer to buy the artificial intelligence startup’s assets for $97.4 billion.
Sam Altman to Elon Musk: ‘OpenAI is not for sale’

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has responded to Elon Musk’s offer to buy the artificial intelligence startup’s assets by saying it’s not for sale.
The next big robotaxi push is almost here

Most Americans aren’t sold on driverless cars or robotaxis, but they’re coming anyways; Tesla (TSLA), Uber (UBER), and Lyft (LYFT) are betting on it.
OpenAI may be trying to wean itself off Nvidia

Like the broader artificial intelligence sector, OpenAI relies on Nvidia’s (NVDA) costly training chips to build tools like ChatGPT, but that could change — if OpenAI’s in-house chip design somehow pans out.
A top Google AI exec says there’s nothing new about DeepSeek

Despite rattling global tech stocks with competitive artificial intelligence models, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek didn’t introduce anything new, a Google (GOOGL) executive said.