What's up: Meta freezes AI hiring after blockbuster spending spree; OpenAI said it hit its first $1 billion revenue month; Baidu revenue slips on weak advertising business.

Good morning. For decades, companies from around the world have set up shop in Silicon Valley, hoping to capture some of that West Coast lightning. It’s always harder than it looks, but that’s no reason to stop trying.

In one of the latest efforts in this vein, General Motors has made nearly a dozen hires from top tech companies, with the aim of building a small but elite AI center of excellence, much of it based in Mountain View, Calif. GM’s top software engineering executive David Richardson says the automaker isn’t trying to be Apple or Google. But the company’s hiring spree may suggest otherwise, according to the WSJ Leadership Institute’s Isabelle Bousquette, who spoke to him at length about the effort.

Two of the highest-profile hires so far include Barak Turovsky, Google’s former head of product for languages AI, who is now GM’s first chief AI officer, and John Anderson, a former Google machine-learning researcher and Pixar veteran, now executive director of AI research at the carmaker. “I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but we’re definitely competing,” Richardson told her. Cars are cool, and that has to count for something.

Richardson expects the new team’s remit to be much broader than vehicle autonomy. AI will assist the organization everywhere from factory production lines to the Nascar racetrack. The team will consult on AI uses, help individual groups build their own AI workforces, secure partnerships and negotiate vendor contracts. He’s excited about the development of so-called cobots, or collaborative robots, that will assist humans with ergonomically challenging tasks in factories.

“We have things across finance, software engineering, HR, you name it, Richardson said.

Knowledge exchange. While several members of the team are based at the Mountain View office, they travel regularly to GM’s headquarters in Detroit. Executives from the Detroit office also head to California for workshops and summits.

Read the full story here, and see below for more from WSJLI’s conversation with Richardson. Please use the links at the end of this email to let us know how your company is engaging with the tech community in Silicon Valley and beyond.

WSJLI: Tell us about GM's robotic footprint so far and what’s next.

David Richardson: We've certainly had robots that are cordoned off because they're not safe around humans that are doing more isolated jobs: things like welding we've had for quite a while. We’ve begun to introduce cobots for very limited tasks.

We believe that with all of the data from decades of manufacturing, we actually have a unique amount of IP that’s going to let us develop that cobot robotics technology in-house better than you could get from a third party. And so that’s where our focus is now.

WSJLI: What’s the time frame on this work?

Richardson: We've been working on this for the last one to two years. One of the reasons we are building out this AI team is to bring in world experts to help the manufacturing teams design and build some of that technology. We've made good progress. We're still at the active development point. We have some prototypes.

After spending months scooping up dozens of AI researchers and engineers, popularizing so-called reverse acquihires in the process and fueling a talent war, Meta Platforms has frozen AI hiring, WSJ reports.

The hiring freeze, which went into effect last week, also prohibits current employees from moving across teams inside the division. The duration of the freeze wasn’t communicated internally.

With the freeze, a broader restructuring. Meta divides its AI efforts into four teams: one working on superintelligence, called TBD Lab, that houses many of the new hires; a second working on AI products; a third working on infrastructure; and a fourth dedicated to projects with a longer time horizon and more exploration. The latter, called Fundamental AI Research, remains largely untouched in the reorganization.

Elsewhere, AI hiring continues. Rami Sinno, who as director of engineering at Amazon Web Services’ Annapurna Labs helped develop its Trainium and Inferentia AI chips, is leaving to join U.K.-based chip designer Arm, Reuters reports.

While the federal government sheds talent. A purge Tuesday of some 37 current and former national security officials by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, included Vinh Nguyen, an expert in AI and advanced mathematics. His removal was made over the protests of the acting director of the National Security Agency, the New York Times reports.

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar tells CNBC hit the milestone event happened in July. The growth continues, but she admits that access to GPUs is a huge gating factor.  “It is voracious right now for GPUs and for compute,” she said.

Speaking of computing power. Vantage Data Centers announced plans to build a massive $25 billion data-center campus in Texas spread across some 1,200 acres, Reuters reports.

The pressure on advertising isn't limited to Google. Chinese search-engine giant Baidu reported lower quarterly revenue amid a weaker performance in its core advertising business, though profit was better than expected.

AI is increasingly powering much of Baidu's business. Chief Executive Robin Li on Wednesday highlighted the strength of Baidu’s AI cloud business, which continued to deliver robust and healthy revenue growth. In the coming months, the company expects to roll out a new version of its core foundation model, called Ernie 5.0.

Microsoft and the NFL on Wednesday announced a multiyear partnership aimed at providing game data and analysis using Microsoft Copilot and Azure AI, CNBC reports. As part of the deal, the 32 teams will be equipped with more than 2,500 Microsoft Surface Copilot tablets. Microsoft said NFL teams soon will be able to use AI for scouting decisions and managing salaries.

IBM and NASA announced a new open-source machine learning model to give scientists early warning on potentially damaging solar flares. The model, Surya, was trained on over a decade’s worth of solar activity data collected by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Scientists tell MIT Technology Review that while they cannot prevent the effects of a large solar flare, being able to predict when one will occur could let people work around them.

Citing a “challenging economic environment,” Sony said it plans to raise the price of its Playstation 5 gaming consoles by $50 in the U.S. 

Google’s Pixel 10 smartphone unveiled Wednesday is leagues ahead of the iPhone when it comes to AI, according to WSJ Tech Columnist and dedicated iPhone user Nicole Nguyen.

Among proposals under discussion in recent international talks, one calls for Ukraine to surrender the sizable chunk of Donetsk region,  that it still holds in exchange for a halt to fighting and security guarantees from Western countries. It's a bitter pill for many Ukrainians. (WSJ)

President Trump told aides he is considering firing Lisa Cook, a Biden-appointed Federal Reserve governor, if she doesn’t resign after one of his housing officials accused her of mortgage fraud, according to a senior White House official and another person familiar with the matter. (WSJ)

President Trump has ordered the Pentagon to send three Navy warships to interdict drug cartels off the coast of South America, including near Venezuela, expanding the Pentagon’s role in combating illegal drug smuggling and intensifying a U.S. confrontation with the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro. (WSJ)

A parasitic fungus is littering gardens, basements and sheds with the crusty white corpses of spiders, drawing ‘The Last of Us’ comparisons. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.