Canadian AI startup Cohere is taking over Germany-based Aleph Alpha, with the blessing of their governments, in a bid to offer a sovereign alternative to enterprises in an AI landscape dominated by American players. “Sovereign AI” refers to systems where companies and governments retain full control over their own data — rather than routing it through U.S. tech giants like Microsoft or Google.

As companies that develop large language models, Aleph Alpha and Cohere have been hometown stars, while still lagging far behind OpenAI and the likes globally. But similarities aside, this isn’t an alliance between equals. Last valued at $6.8 billion, Cohere will lead the new entity that will incorporate Aleph Alpha, subject to approval by authorities and shareholders.

The deal’s key financial backer is Schwarz Group, a German retail conglomerate. As an existing shareholder in Aleph Alpha, it is already fully onboard with the acquisition. And going forward, it will also become a strategic backer of the newly combined entity with €500 million in structured financing (approximately $600 million). In return, Schwarz Group expects the new entity to run on STACKIT — the sovereign cloud platform operated by its IT division, Schwarz Digits — giving the retail giant a major enterprise customer for its cloud business.

To fund the combined entity, Cohere is also raising a new round of financing — a Series E — and Schwarz Group will serve as its lead investor. The valuation has already been set: according to German business media outlet Handelsblatt, the term sheet pegs the company’s combined worth at around $20 billion.

This would be a significant leap that combined revenue alone can’t justify. While Cohere reported $240 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025, Aleph Alpha had previously generated little revenue and significant losses. But investors are betting that teaming up will improve their odds against much larger rivals.

They may not be alone in the thinking that consolidation is the path forward. Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI has reportedly discussed a three-way partnership with France’s Mistral AI and Cursor, which SpaceX recently secured the option to buy. But it remains unclear whether Mistral would be interested in risking undermining its positioning as an alternative to U.S. tech that boosted its revenues. A partnership with xAI — an American company — would complicate that identity.

Cohere, too, is hoping to get tailwinds from enterprises looking for alternatives to AI providers that may not meet their requirements when it comes to privacy and independence. The new entity plans to target highly-regulated industries — including defense, energy, finance, healthcare, manufacturing and telecommunications— as well as the public sector.

Aleph Alpha also developed specialized language models targeting enterprises and public institutions in Europe, such as the PhariaAI suite. A subsequent pivot away from building its own frontier models and the departure of its cofounder and CEO Jonas Andrulis made its strategy and leadership less clear, and left it in a weakened negotiating position. But its team of 250 people and their expertise could still complement Cohere.

“Their focus on small language models, European languages and tokenizers is a really complementary one to our own, which is more of a general focus on large language models,” Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez said in a press conference announcing the plans on Friday.

Amid growing tensions with the United States, Canada has been increasingly keen to sign bilateral initiatives with a variety of partners, including Germany. With a shared concern for privacy and security, the two countries recently launched a Sovereign Technology Alliance to “strengthen sovereign AI capacity and reduce strategic technology dependencies.”

The question remains whether European organizations will view an initiative involving Canada as sufficiently sovereign, or whether they will trust that the alliance will remain transatlantic in the long run. According to Gomez, “Cohere will become a Canadian-German company.” But that promise could be harder to keep if the company goes public — putting ownership in the hands of global shareholders with no particular allegiance to either country.

Alexander worked in his workshop for years on a simple goal: to turn spools of everyday filament into a workable internal combustion engine. That is, anything with a few hundred horsepower to get the aging bones going. His third generation of this made-from-scratch engine, known as the AP3 Carbon D125, has recently met that target. The new design surrounds a 125cc single-cylinder four-stroke engine, which is commonly found in scooters.

The majority of the engine parts were created in his workshop using an Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2 Combo printer and a variety of different types of filament, specifically ASA, ABS, and PET-CF, but the cylinder bore is lined with a stainless steel sleeve, giving the entire thing a bit more reliability than the other parts. A friend at a CNC shop delivered the head, which was machined from aluminum to contain four valves and dual overhead cams. Bearings, belts, and some odd bits of hardware were required to complete the engine. The previous attempts taught us a lot of hard lessons, as the second engine ran for four minutes before heat melted the cylinder body and killed the compression completely, the nuts were in some awkward spots, torque was impossible to apply evenly, and water and oil mixed inside the head. Alexander had to virtually dismantle everything and start from scratch.

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This time, however, he put an oil pump directly into the crankcase. Four small bearings and a pair of gears revolve inside a printed enclosure to accomplish this. A basic pressure regulator fits in the main gallery and ensures that the oil gets to where it needs to be. There’s no need for an external pump this time. He also installed a separate positive crankcase ventilation system to keep the oil where it belonged. The cooling system underwent a similar makeover. A mechanical water pump was printed onto the cylinder body. Its impeller rotates on bearings and a timing belt. Coolant circulates through passages in the cranium and around the sleeves. Long story short, there are no fancy electric pumps and no mysterious leaks between the oil and water lines.

Now, he used the old crankshaft from his prior attempts, but first checked it with a dial indicator. The needle changed only 0.05 millimeters, which is well within the tolerance for a 125cc engine. He also created a head gasket with braided copper wire around the sleeve and a high-temperature material rated for 1,000 degrees Celsius. Putting it all together was a tedious task. Alexander hand lapped the valves and carefully sealed each joint. When everything was ready, he filled the crankcase with 10W40 and attached it to a test rig.

The initial crank brought instant effects, and this time it caught, settled into a steady idle, and kept the compression, which was a good start; however, a brief timing check revealed that the water-pump pulley was spinning at the incorrect speed due to a slipped tensioner. A little tweak and it was all set. On the second run, the pump operated well and the coolant flowed properly. However, the oil pressure gauge remained silent, either because the sender required calibration or because the tolerances were just a little too loose, and a suspected vacuum leak appeared on the intake side where the epoxy had not yet been entirely applied. Still, it ran smoothly enough to demonstrate that the main architecture held together properly.

Alexander believes the crankcase oil pump was the true game changer; seeing the oil pour through the gallery during a bench test gave him the confidence to put the rest together and see it operate. Every printed part not only survived, but appeared to manage the heat and vibration of the first few minutes with ease.
[Source]

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? Read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Alternative to electric, for a stove
Answer: CASA

5A clue: Developer’s projects
Answer: APPS

6A clue: Sketch comedy spinoff launched on March 21, 2026
Answer: SNLUK

7A clue: One of 24
Answer: HOUR

8A clue: Gas brand with a green-and-white logo
Answer: HESS

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Kayak alternative
Answer: CANOE

2D clue: Great grade
Answer: APLUS

3D clue: N.B.A. team with the 7’4” star Victor Wembanyama
Answer: SPURS

4D clue: “___ not what your country can do for you …”
Answer: ASK

6D clue: Sound made with a finger to the lips
Answer: SHH

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Connections: Sports Edition is a tough one. If you’re struggling with today’s puzzle but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can play it for free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Whack!

Green group hint: Hoops team monikers.

Blue group hint: Common last name.

Purple group hint: Not 2 or 3.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: Hard-hit baseball.

Green group: NBA teams with singular nicknames.

Blue group: ____ Johnson.

Purple group: What “1” might mean.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is hard-hit baseball. The four answers are frozen rope, laser, liner and screamer.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is NBA teams with singular nicknames. The four answers are Heat, Jazz, Magic and Thunder.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is ____ Johnson. The four answers are Flau’jae, Gus, Lane and Randy.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is what “1” might mean. The four answers are fastball, pitcher, point guard and top rank.

Climate tech startups are capital intensive, timelines are long, and the technology is often considered “first of its kind.” What’s more, a key value proposition is addressing pollution — an externality that is, at best, poorly priced by the market. Those aren’t the qualities stock pickers tend to favor.

And yet, public markets appear to be warming to climate tech startups — or at least some of them.

This week, nuclear startup X-energy went public, raising $1 billion in an upsized share offering that appears to have delivered a windfall for its investors, including Amazon. Retail investors apparently can’t get enough, with the stock popping 25% in its first hour of trading. Also this week, geothermal startup Fervo said it filed for an initial public offering. The size of the Fervo IPO has yet to be disclosed, but private investors have valued the company at around $3 billion, according to PitchBook.

The move to go public aligns with what investors told TechCrunch at the end of last year. After years of tepid attitudes toward climate tech companies, they expected public markets to start welcoming energy-related startups. Nearly every investor that weighed in on the question said the startups with the best chances of going public specialize in either nuclear fission or enhanced geothermal. Fervo, specifically, was mentioned several times.

Thank data centers for that. The AI craze has taken a trend of rising demand for electricity and made it sexy and salable. Companies that were already betting on the upswing lucked into a trending narrative that coincided with their technological maturity. Fortune certainly favors the prepared. 

The IPOs are also certain to please investors, letting them return capital to their LPs. The recent dearth of IPOs has kept a chunk of climate tech funding locked up, at a time when many funds would like to start cashing out.

But it’s not just about cashing out.

Fervo and X-energy have followed the traditional route to public markets, suggesting there is confidence that a broad base of investors wants to participate. If it were just about freeing up investor capital, the startups could have followed the SPAC route. (Several have.) But these two companies took the longer path.

Yet for all that success, a wide swathe of climate tech will probably be left out of the IPO wave.

Companies that aren’t entangled in energy markets will have to find other ways to press on — and without access to the deep pockets the public market provides. The divergence suggests the climate tech world is starting to go K-shaped, a trend which Mark Cupta, managing director at Prelude Ventures, suggested when I spoke to him a little over a week ago.

Companies stuck on the poorer side of the IPO window still have private investors to lean on. But there, too, a K-shaped trajectory is starting to appear.

Venture capital and growth funds raised about $6.5 billion last year, according to Sightline Climate. That’s the same as in 2021, but because there are more funds today, each fund is now smaller. For founders, that could be bad news since funds have less to draw on. On the upside, more competition could drive better fundraising results.

At the same time, the big funds keep getting bigger. Infrastructure dominated climate tech fundraising last year, with 42 funds raising 75% of all dollars in the sector, according to Sightline Climate. That success will spill over into the startup side if it’s a company with a mature technology that is ready to build big. 

Sightline said that many new infrastructure funds are specializing in renewables, grid technologies, and energy storage. In other words, the K-shape isn’t going away anytime soon.

In a letter to the residents of Tumbler Ridge, Canada, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he is “deeply sorry” that his company failed to alert law enforcement about the suspect in a recent mass shooting.

After police identified 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar as a suspected shooter who allegedly killed eight people, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI had flagged and banned Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT account in June 2025 for after she described scenarios involving gun violence. The company’s staff debated alerting police but ultimately decided against it, eventually reaching out to Canadian authorities after the shooting.

OpenAI has since said that it is improving safety protocols, for example by putting more flexible criteria in place to determine when accounts get referred to authorities, and by establishing direct points of contact with Canadian law enforcement.

In Altman’s letter, which was first published in the local newspaper Tumbler RidgeLines, the CEO said he’d discussed the shooting with Tumbler Ridge Mayor Darryl Krakowka and British Columbia Premier David Eby, and they’d all agreed “a public apology was necessary,” but “time was also needed to respect the community as you grieved.”

“I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June,” Altman said. “While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered.”

Altman also said that OpenAI’s focus will “continue to be on working with all levels of government to help ensure nothing happens like this again.”

In a post on X, Eby said Altman’s apology is “necessary, and yet grossly insufficient for the devastation done to the families of Tumbler Ridge.”

Canadian officials have said they are considering new regulations on artificial intelligence but have not made any final decisions.

If you are in a crisis or having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Is truth determined by the size of the audience it reaches?

If so, Michael—a new film about the pop singer Michael Jackson that is on track to have the biggest-ever opening for a music biopic, with projected earnings of $70 million at the US box office, despite critics saying it sanitizes the reality of who Jackson actually was—intends to supplant the King of Pop as the apotheosis of artistic virtue.

The film’s release has sparked a civil war online, between those eager to reclaim the music and myth of Jackson, and those who see any celebration of him as a failure of accountability.

Musically, Jackson was in a class all his own. In the pre-social media days, before AI artists charted on Billboard and he became a recurring meme online, Jackson was the epitome of monoculture: 13 number one singles, countless awards, twice inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He remains, even in death, one of the best-selling music artists of all time. But his legacy was also defined by multiple allegations of sexual abuse, an occasionally eccentric personal life, and Jackson’s on-record admission of sharing his bed with underage boys. “This guy was worse than Jeffrey Epstein,” Dan Reed, the director of Leaving Neverland, the 2019 Emmy-winning HBO documentary about Jackson’s alleged sexual misconduct, recently told the Hollywood Reporter.

Director Antoine Fuqua, who maintains Jackson’s innocence, never intended to fully avoid the allegations that circled Jackson later in life. According to him, the original cut of Michael included a reenactment of the 1993 police raid on Neverland Ranch, where Jackson was strip-searched to verify the physical description of his first accuser, Jordan Chandler. But the scene was ultimately scrapped along with the film’s entire third act—totaling $15 million in reshoots—because of a legal clause in a settlement with Chandler that prohibited the depiction of his experience on screen.

The result is a film that stops abruptly in 1988 and erases the most controversial two decades of Jackson’s life. Instead, the film emphasizes Jackson’s musical legacy—the story arc is structured around career-defining music moments, like the making of the “Thriller” video—over the more contentious aspects of his personal behavior.

Scrubbing the Neverland Ranch scene, but also choosing to completely write around any of Jackson’s alleged misconduct, is not surprising given that the Jackson estate had approval over the use of his music, essentially granting it veto power over the film’s final cut. One argument that keeps surfacing on social media is that critics should judge Michael on its own terms rather than on what they think it should have been. “It seems like people wanted a movie [that] was never going to exist,” noted one X user. “So it was never going to be salacious or introspective”

Jackson’s fans argue the allegations shouldn’t eclipse his musical and artistic legacy, separating the artist from the work, while critics insist that a biopic should present a complete picture of Jackson, regardless of how unflattering that picture may be. As film critic Sean Burns characterized it on X, ending “with the release of Bad is like ending an OJ biopic with him winning the Heisman.” A good Michael Jackson movie, wrote the artist Harmony Holiday, “would be part tragedy, part farce,” calling attention to how the film lacks the real kind of interiority that made Jackson so polarizing.

“Watching it feels more like being frog-marched through a wax museum than watching a movie, each milestone restaged with an off-putting, uncanny-valley resemblance and no interiority,” critic Alison Willmore noted in Vulture.