- Anthropic JV with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs at $1.5B — $300M each from Anthropic, Blackstone, H&F; $150M from Goldman; co-investors include Apollo, GIC, Sequoia, General Atlantic, Leonard Green.
- OpenAI's 'The Deployment Company' closes $4B from 19 investors at a $10B valuation, anchored by TPG, Brookfield, Advent, Bain — with a 17.5% guaranteed return over five years.
- Both vehicles embed forward-deployed engineers inside customer companies (Palantir-style) instead of selling API credits — direct shot at McKinsey/Accenture-style AI consulting.
- Initial pipeline: each consortium's PE-owned portfolio in healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, retail, and real estate; both labs are reportedly targeting fall 2026 IPOs.
- ERNIE 5.1 Preview hits #13 globally on LMArena Text Arena with a 1,476 score — #1 Chinese model, ahead of DeepSeek V4-Pro released a week earlier.
- Roughly one-third the total parameters of ERNIE 5.0 and about half the active parameters; Baidu says it took ~6% of ERNIE 5.0's pre-training compute.
- Trained with decoupled fully-asynchronous reinforcement learning and scaled agentic post-training; full ERNIE 5.1 expected at Baidu Create 2026.
- Tops LMArena's Legal AI category worldwide; not released as open weights.
- Front-end Moshi-style S2S transformer streams audio every ~80ms; back-end LLM runs async and pushes 'oracle' tokens into a fourth stream as they arrive.
- MT-Bench score jumps from 2.05 to 6.43 versus the bare S2S baseline while keeping near-zero response latency vs the 2.1s of cascaded systems.
- Backend is swappable — works with GPT-4.1, Claude Opus 4.1, or Gemini 2.5 Flash with no front-end retraining; weights and inference/finetuning code on HuggingFace (SakanaAI/kame).
- Paper accepted at ICASSP 2026.
- Opt-in setting that disables passwords entirely; sign-in requires passkeys or hardware security keys, with email/SMS recovery turned off in favor of backup keys.
- Sign-in sessions are shortened to limit blast radius if a device or session is compromised; targeted at journalists, dissidents, elected officials, and security researchers.
- Yubico bundle offered at preferred pricing through OpenAI.
- Will be mandatory June 1 for individual members of OpenAI's Trusted Access for Cyber program accessing GPT-5.5-Cyber.
- Altman told Stripe Sessions the model itself proposed the May 5 date and 5:55 PM start, asked for short speeches, and requested a suggestion box for a future GPT-5.6.
- Invite-only meetup in San Francisco; Codex selected attendees from a public registration form that filled almost immediately.
- Altman publicly invited Elon Musk despite Musk's $134B lawsuit against OpenAI: 'he can come if he wants… the world needs more love.'
- Ceremonial only — GPT-5.5 itself shipped to ChatGPT and the API on April 23.
01
Anthropic and OpenAI Both Launch Wall Street Joint Ventures on the Same Day
industry techcrunch.com
02
Baidu's ERNIE 5.1 Preview Tops LMArena's Chinese Leaderboard, Beats DeepSeek V4-Pro
models ernie.baidu.com
03
Sakana AI Open-Sources KAME, a Tandem Speech-to-Speech Model That Injects LLM Knowledge in Real Time
research sakana.ai
04
OpenAI Ships Passkey-Only Account Security in a Yubico Partnership
tools openai.com
05
GPT-5.5 Plans Its Own May 5 Launch Party — Altman Invites Musk Anyway
community aol.com