House Foreign Affairs Committee members are heading to Silicon Valley next week to discuss AI and export controls with leading tech companies, according to an invitation seen by Axios.
Why it matters: The trip underscores how AI is becoming a foreign policy priority, even as the White House has diverged from the Hill on whether China should have access to the most advanced chips.
Francis Suarez, former Miami mayor, has joined the "Ambition Accelerated" campaign as a senior advisor.
The big picture: This is the effort launched by Stephen Ross and Ken Griffin to recruit more companies, CEOs and founders to Florida's "Gold Coast" corridor between West Palm Beach and Miami.
ATLANTA – Businesses in the area are racing to implement AI, but some are struggling to define their own playbook, said Joe Sutherland, executive director of the Center for AI Learning at Emory University.
Why it matters: With artificial intelligence comes the promise of efficiency, but the cost, pace of change and talent pipeline challenges are forcing businesses to rethink how they operate.
Axios' Kristal Dixon and Nathan Bomey hosted conversations with Sutherland and Rebecca Godecke, senior vice president of online at The Home Depot. The April 29 event was sponsored by Western Governors University.
What they're doing: Sutherland's AI center is helping students get real-world AI experience through businesses, while also helping businesses figure out how to transform their job functions with AI.
Sutherland said AI's 12- to 18-month evolution cycle leaves students in four-year programs with outdated skills.
"So how do you keep up with that? And the answer that I have is through workforce development and experiential learning programs," he said.
AI is costly – and sometimes having humans do the work can be cheaper – but Godecke said it's all about balance.
"We think about AI internally and for our customers: improving the decision quality with confidence and then improving the velocity in which we can move," she said. "So AI is really an 'and' for us, not an 'or.'"
Content from the sponsor's segment:
In a View From the Top conversation, Paul LaForge, VP and dean of the department of computer science, software, AI and data at Western Governors University, shared that they are launching a new bachelor's degree in AI engineering to better prepare students for a rapidly changing workforce.
"This is not just for those who want to use models, but those who want to build models and the systems that support AI."
Arcadia, which helps businesses procure and manage energy, is acquiring Engie Impact — the arm of French multinational power giant Engie that offers a suite of complementary services.
Why it matters: The deal lands as energy demand and costs are rising around the world.
State governments are rapidly embracing AI by launching low-risk pilot programs, but haven't yet figured out how to measure their impact, according to a new analysis from Code for America shared exclusively with Axios.
Why it matters: AI promises to make government more efficient and cut costs.
I'm offering you four specific ways to get more out of AI: better prompting, improving AI memory, starting a business using AI (tonight) and running a business using AI (Monday).
The barrier to starting a business isn't capital anymore. It isn't a team. It's just you.
The old rule: Before you could launch, you'd need to assemble an army: lawyer, accountant, developer, designer, copywriter, researcher. This cost — and complexity — left a million ideas unborn.
The new rule: Anyone with a strong idea and solid AI prompting skills can model and prep a new business in a weekend.
Why it matters: This is THE under-appreciated upside of the same AI boom that many fear will eviscerate existing jobs. It has never been this easy to start something with so little capital.
Autonomous trucking startup Bot Auto says it has delivered its first "fully humanless" over-the-road commercial truckload in Texas, marking another key milestone for the American trucking industry.
Why it matters: The 230-mile run between Houston and Dallas was not a pilot or demonstration. It was a paid commercial delivery made directly to a customer's loading dock.
The House passed a 45-day clean extension of Section 702 of FISA — the government's warrantless surveillance authority — after the Senate failed to accept the House's long-term extension of the program.
Why it matters: The national security tool won't lapse Thursday night, but lawmakers are punting another thorny fight just weeks down the road.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is calling on Washington to collaborate with China on AI, breaking from a bipartisan approach that frames AI development as a race between the two countries.
Why it matters: Sanders, who is writing the progressive playbook on AI, is shifting the focus away from U.S.-China competition and toward international cooperation around AI safety.
Former Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia, a longtime Microsoft server boss, is backing JuliaHub, a startup that sees a role for AI agents designing complex products such as cars and airplanes.
Why it matters: JuliaHub is betting AI plus Julia, the open-source technical computing language, can challenge Simulink, MathWorks' decades-old tool for modeling and simulating complex systems.
Why it matters: The bluebuck — a member of the antelope family once found in modern-day South Africa — was hunted to extinction more than two centuries ago.
Citi is rolling out a new internal AI platform that lets employees create agents, tapping into top models within one secure system that can scale those agents across the firm.
Why it matters: The AI race is playing out on Wall Street as much as it is in Silicon Valley, and banks are racing to offer the best AI models to employees without compromising on safety.
What did investors take away from the four Big Tech companies reporting earnings late Wednesday? If you're going to spend big on AI, you better have the growth to justify it.
Why it matters: Investors are over CEOs hyping AI and ready for CFOs to start explaining the return on their AI spending.
NTT Data, a major data center operator, is buying carbon removal credits from startup Climeworks to help meet its climate goals, the companies exclusively shared with Axios on Thursday.
Why it matters: Surging energy demand from AI is increasing scrutiny of data centers' emissions — and could expand the pool of buyers for carbon removal as the sector faces setbacks.
The AI industry has entered an era of perpetual upheaval where market leaders are crowned — and dethroned — every few months.
Today's hottest company could be eclipsed by summer and the laggard could revolutionize the world.
Why it matters: As AI changes everything, keeping up with who's dominant and who's falling behind is becoming an existential question for investors, big businesses and regular users trying to guarantee their own futures.
Elon Musk portrayed himself in court this week as a leading advocate for AI safety — in contrast to what he described as the profit-consumed OpenAI that he's suing.
Why it matters: Musk's self-portrait as a guardian of AI safety clashed with OpenAI's counterargument: that Musk was fine with a for-profit OpenAI when he thought he could control it.
How the debate over Musk's motivations is resolved could be key to the outcome of the lawsuit the richest man in the world is waging against OpenAI.
