Microsoft and OpenAI announced Tuesday that they have adjusted their partnership so that OpenAI can access competitors’ compute.

The new agreement “includes changes to the exclusivity on new capacity, moving to a model where Microsoft has a right of first refusal (ROFR),” Microsoft says. “To further support OpenAI, Microsoft has approved OpenAI’s ability to build additional capacity, primarily for research and training of models.”

The foundation of their relationship (which runs through 2030) stays pretty much the same — Microsoft keeps its exclusive rights to OpenAI’s tech for products like Copilot, and OpenAI’s API remains exclusive to Azure. They’ll maintain their two-way revenue-sharing setup (it’s been reported that Microsoft gets 20 percent of OpenAI’s revenue). Prior to today’s change, OpenAI was locked into using Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure exclusively for its computing needs.

The models OpenAI hopes to build and the user base it’s looking to serve require billions of dollars in compute. It has been previously reported that some OpenAI shareholders felt Microsoft wasn’t moving fast enough to supply OpenAI with computing power, hence why the startup partnered with Oracle back in June (with the blessing of Microsoft) for the necessary compute.

There’s been a lot of buzz about Microsoft and OpenAI facing relationship woes after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was briefly ousted from the company, causing a lot of very public drama. The New York Times reported that the relationship has grown increasingly strained due to financial pressures at OpenAI, concerns about stability, and growing friction between employees at both companies.

Last March, Microsoft hired Inflection CEO Mustafa Suleyman to lead its consumer AI efforts, along with most of Inflection’s staff, in a $650 million deal. According to The New York Times report, this move particularly angered some OpenAI leadership, including Altman.

OpenAI’s deal with Microsoft also has an unusual escape clause: if OpenAI creates artificial general intelligence (AGI), it could close off Microsoft’s access to some of its most powerful models developed after that point. AGI, reportedly, is defined as a system capable of generating more than $100 billion in profits. This was originally meant to keep such powerful AI from being commercialized, but now OpenAI is reportedly considering dropping this provision, likely to secure more Microsoft funding.

Jessie Tinsley, CEO of a workforce management company, Employer.com, is conducting what could become the year’s wildest acquisition spree.

First, Employer.com announced its plan last month to acquire Bench, the Canadian accounting startup that abruptly shut down over the holidays.

Now, Tinsley and Employer.com have joined hands with YouTuber MrBeast and others to save TikTok by submitting an all-cash bid for the app, according to a report in Bloomberg.

They haven’t disclosed the bid’s amount. The group’s legal counsel includes Brad Bondi, the brother of Trump’s attorney general pick, Pam Bondi.

TikTok briefly went dark on Saturday but reinstated itself shortly before President Trump signed an executive order on Monday delaying any potential ban for 75 days.

It’s not clear if TikTok’s owner ByteDance has seriously considered the offer, Bloomberg reported. Others floated as potential buyers include Elon Musk, Amazon, Oracle, and a syndicate headed by billionaire Frank McCourt.

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Quordle was one of the original Wordle alternatives and is still going strong now more than 1,000 games later. It offers a genuine challenge, though, so read on if you need some Quordle hints today – or scroll down further for the answers.

Enjoy playing word games? You can also check out my NYT Connections today and NYT Strands today pages for hints and answers for those puzzles, while Marc’s Wordle today column covers the original viral word game.

“President Trump is trying to downsize the WHO, and the question is whether other high-income nations like those in Europe, Australia, Japan, and elsewhere, pick up some of the slack,” says Vermund. “Will the Gates Foundation, which has been a very generous donor, pick up some? It’s conceivable that others will tide things over until we have a new administration that might be more friendly to the WHO, but I’m dubious that they can pick up the entire chunk of the WHO budget which is paid for by the US.”

And it isn’t just money that the US provides to the WHO, but staff and expertise too. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has seconded a number of staff to the WHO, and I would predict that the Trump administration, with a new CDC director, will call those folks home,” says Vermund. “That would create quite a gap, because WHO funds do not pay for those individuals. So I think you’d have an almost immediate reduction of workforce and removal of critical professionals within the WHO organization.”

According to Gostin, a lot of the money the US provides to the WHO is core mandatory funding, which all members are required to give, but some funds are particularly earmarked for causes in which the US has a vested interest, such as polio eradication, HIV/AIDS, and the process of identifying and controlling disease outbreaks before they spread and reach American shores. Without US funding, Gostin says that these programs wouldn’t completely disappear, but they would be significantly weakened.

“Polio could come surging back,” says Gostin. “Remember we had polio in the wastewater in New York just a couple of years ago, and our kids are not being immunized. And we’ve had other real health scares in the United States, not just Covid-19, which killed more than a million people. We’ve had Zika, and the next health emergency might be just a mutation or two away. Maybe it’s already here in the form of avian influenza, and we’re going to need WHO to help us with that.”

Both Gostin and Vermund fear that withdrawing from the WHO will place the US at the back of the line when it comes to receiving critical information such as pathogen samples and genomic sequencing data, which pharmaceutical companies require to generate effective vaccines. Gostin cites how the US relies on WHO data every year to effectively update the seasonal influenza vaccine, while Vermund explains that financially speaking, it is far more efficient for the US to fund the WHO to help “snuff out” diseases at their source, rather than trying to tackle them when they arrive in the country.

“We spent over $2 billion preparing for Ebola to hit US shores in 2014 and 2015, and since we only had five or six cases, that was very cost-ineffective,” says Vermund. “So that’s a typical example of how when the US goes it alone, it will be very inefficient compared with contributing to a multinational response to control a disease in the country of origin.”

President Donald Trump says he’d be open to his buddies Elon Musk or Larry Ellison buying TikTok.

“Larry, let’s negotiate in front of the media,” Trump said at a press conference with the Oracle co-founder, SoftBank CEO Masa Son, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to announce a $500 billion artificial intelligence infrastructure investment. “What I’m thinking about saying to somebody is, buy it, and give half to the United States of America. Half, and we’ll give you the permit. And they’ll have a great partner, the United States.”

“Sounds like a good deal to me, Mr. President,” Ellison said.

TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance still has other offers on the table, including from billionaire Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty and now, apparently, from YouTube creator MrBeast — whose investor group is receiving legal counsel from a team that includes the brother of Trump’s attorney general pick.

As he was leaving the briefing, a reporter asked Trump if he has TikTok on his phone. “No, but I think I might put it there,” Trump responded. “I think I’ll get it right now.”

Microsoft was once the exclusive provider of data center infrastructure for OpenAI to train and run its AI models. No longer.

Coinciding with the announcement of Stargate, OpenAI’s massive new AI infrastructure deal with SoftBank, Oracle, and others, Microsoft says it has signed a new agreement with OpenAI that gives it “right of first refusal” on new OpenAI cloud computing capacity. That means that, going forward, Microsoft gets first choice over whether to host OpenAI’s AI workloads in the cloud — but if Microsoft can’t meet its needs, OpenAI can go to a rival cloud provider.

“OpenAI recently made a new, large Azure commitment that will continue to support all OpenAI products as well as training,” Microsoft said in a blog post. “To further support OpenAI, Microsoft has approved OpenAI’s ability to build additional capacity, primarily for research and training of models.”

OpenAI has blamed a lack of available compute for delaying its products, and compute capacity has reportedly become a source of tension between the AI company and Microsoft, its close collaborator and major investor. In June, Microsoft, under shareholder pressure, permitted OpenAI to ink a deal with Oracle for additional capacity.

In the blost post, Microsoft reiterated that “key elements” of its longstanding partnership with OpenAI remain in place through 2030, including its access to OpenAI’s IP, revenue sharing arrangements, and exclusivity on OpenAI’s APIs.

That assumes, of course, that OpenAI doesn’t achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) under the two companies’ agreed-upon definition before then. When OpenAI develops AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits, Microsoft will lose access to the company’s technology, according to a reported agreement between the firms.

OpenAI is said to be considering nullifying the agreement in a possible bid to secure more Microsoft funding.

“The OpenAI API is exclusive to Azure, runs on Azure and is also available through the Azure OpenAI Service,” the blog post reads. “This agreement means customers benefit from having access to leading models on Microsoft platforms and direct from OpenAI.”

We’ve reached out to OpenAI and Microsoft for more information and will update this post if we hear back.

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The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 is already shaping up to be a beast of a GPU, given the specs unveiled at CES 2025, but if a new report is correct, it could have been even more of a monster.

A well-regarded rumor miller, HXL, shared a post on the Chinese hardware forum ChipHell that claims to show the PCB for an early prototype RTX 5090, along with some rather eye-watering specs well beyond those for the production model RTX 5090 due out next week.

It was an opportunity too good for Meta to ignore: On January 19, TikTok, one of its biggest social media rivals, was set to go dark across the United States when a new national security law went into effect. In the days and weeks before the ban, as millions of Americans were scrambling to find a suitable alternative to TikTok, Meta found ways to promote Instagram and Facebook as the answer. The tech giant made a flurry of design tweaks, rolled out new features, and ran advertisements that all positioned its platforms—and especially its video product, Reels—as direct competitors to TikTok.

Instagram has scaled back its in-app shopping initiatives in recent years, but on Friday, Meta showed off a new feature that appears to be directly ripped from TikTok Shop, TikTok’s widely successful ecommerce platform. In a promotional video, two shopping creators working for Meta explained how influencers can now “more prominently display” products they are marketing in Reels. Instead of putting an Amazon or Walmart link in the comments, they can add a banner directing viewers to click on the item at the bottom of their videos—just like how it works on TikTok Shop.

Some of Meta’s other efforts were just as pointed. Right before TikTok stopped working for roughly 14 hours on Saturday, some people reported that among the last things they saw on the platform were sponsored posts for Instagram. “Unsurprisingly, as TikTok goes down tonight, Meta is flooding my FYP with ads for Instagram,” one person said in a Bluesky post, referring to TikTok’s AI-powered For You Page feed. “In my last hour of TikTok I saw ads for instagram,” another person said on Threads.

TikTok’s Ad Library, a transparency tool that allows anyone to search what paid campaigns are running on the platform, shows that Meta ran dozens of sponsored videos about Instagram and Reels in January that were collectively viewed by millions of users. But the tool includes data from only a select number of countries—mostly in Europe—and doesn’t cover what ads TikTok users may have seen in the United States. Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

On Facebook, a number of people reported seeing a different promotion appear on their news feeds last week, encouraging them to link their TikTok accounts to their Facebook pages. “Build your social presence across apps by showing your TikTok profile link and follower count on your Facebook Page,” one version of the message read.

Given the timing, “this feels a bit passive aggressive,” one user wrote on X along with a screenshot of the banner. “Facebook is trolling users by suggesting we add our TikTok accounts to our Facebook pages,” joked another person.

The prompt appears to be connected to a feature Meta launched last month that allows users to display their YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram handles and follower counts on Facebook. However, the banner that people reported seeing in recent days mentioned only TikTok by name. The feature makes it easier for creators’ followers on other platforms to find and follow them on Facebook.