Models & Labs · United States

xAI's Michael Roberson joins OpenAI infrastructure team as commissioning program manager

Credited to Data Center Dynamics · datacenterdynamics.com · 4h ago

Photograph · Data Center Dynamics

As well as other SpaceXAI staff and former Meta employees

The former lead commissioning engineer at xAI (now SpaceXAI) Michael Roberson has joined OpenAI's infrastructure division.

Michael Roberson spent a year at Elon Musk's data center business, where he said he was in charge of end-to-end infrastructure commissioning for Colossus, Macrohard, and Macroharder data centers. He left this April for a three-month stint at Fluidstack.

Roberson has also held roles at the Tennessee Valley Authority, Southern Nuclear, and SyncroFlo.

"I’ll be helping bring data centers from construction through testing and into operations, ensuring the critical systems are ready to support the next generation of AI," Roberson said on LinkedIn. "I'm excited to tackle the challenges ahead alongside an incredible team."

He joins alongside a number of SpaceXAI staff, including site lead Aakash Verma, data center infrastructure staffer Amin Golnabi, project manager Andrej Sulek, and construction project manager Johnathan Henley.

A number of Meta employees have also joined the generative AI giant, including Nikhil Kumar, who spent the past eight years as a mechanical engineer. "I will be helping design and build the data centers that support AI development," Kumar said on LinkedIn.

"What excites me about joining OpenAI is the chance to broaden my horizons, keep learning, and help solve some really challenging infrastructure problems. There’s a lot to figure out as AI puts new demands on how we design and build data centers, and I’m looking forward to contributing alongside my new teammates."

Similarly joining from Meta is Naeem Dogar, previously the data center deployment strategy lead at the social media giant.

Offshore drilling contractor Valaris has also seen a number of staffers leave for OpenAI, including Marcio Santin and Kishen Maharaj. Brian Brown, who joined OpenAI in August, worked at Valaris until 2022, before moving to mechanical engineering company Ammann Group.

Also joining this past month is Bryan Carroll, previously of the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, but a Valaris employee until 2020.

"After an incredible run at Houston METRO, I’m excited to share that I’ve joined the Infrastructure Delivery team at OpenAI to help build the physical infrastructure that will power the future of AI," Carroll said.

"It’s an incredible opportunity to help scale the compute infrastructure needed to advance AI and ultimately enable AGI that benefits all of humanity!"

Models & LabsUnited States

Claude is turning into an office suite

Credited to TechCentral · techcentral.co.za14h ago

Useful

Anthropic is building something that looks increasingly like an office suite. On Thursday, the AI company added live data dashboards and animated video explainers to its Claude chatbot, and moved its document, presentation and design tools out of testing and onto every Claude plan, including the free one.

The additions put Anthropic in more direct competition with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace for everyday office work, and with business intelligence tools such as Tableau and Microsoft’s Power BI for data analysis.

They also complicate Anthropic’s relationship with Microsoft, one of its biggest partners. Microsoft already uses Claude models inside Copilot, its own AI assistant, and in March unveiled a Copilot agent tool based on Anthropic’s Claude Cowork product.

The bigger of the two new tools, Claude Dashboards, connects to company data warehouses – Amazon Redshift, BigQuery, ClickHouse, Databricks and Snowflake – and to CRM systems such as Salesforce. Users ask a question in plain language, and Claude writes the database queries, builds the charts and keeps the dashboard current as the underlying data changes.

Each chart shows the query behind it, which Anthropic says lets users check how a figure was produced – a nod to concerns about AI models presenting confident but wrong answers. Dashboards can be exported to analytics tools including Amplitude, Grafana, Hex and Mixpanel, with Looker, monday.com and Tableau support to follow.

Dashboards is in beta on all paid Claude plans. On enterprise plans, it is switched off until an administrator enables it.

Video without the deepfakes

The second tool, Claude Motion, turns prompts into short animated explainers – for example, a quarterly report condensed into a 30-second video for a staff meeting, or an animated chart for a board presentation. Users can edit the result in a built-in editor or by asking Claude for changes, and export it as an MP4 file.

Unlike OpenAI’s Sora or Google’s Veo, Claude Motion does not use a video-generation model. Claude writes code that animates text, charts, shapes and images, so the output contains no generated footage and no AI-generated people. Animations can be opened for further editing in tools from companies including Adobe, Descript, Runway and Luma AI.

Motion is in beta on Anthropic’s Team and Enterprise plans only.

Anthropic has not introduced new prices for the tools. Both count towards each plan’s existing usage limits, and longer animations use more of that allowance.

Claude Docs, Slides and Design, which became generally available on Thursday, gain team collaboration, mobile editing, customer-managed encryption keys and improved export to PowerPoint, PDF and Google Slides.

The launch is the latest move in an increasingly aggressive contest between AI developers for business customers. Anthropic and OpenAI have been battling for enterprise market share, with workplace productivity – rather than consumer chatbots – emerging as a key source of revenue. — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media, with additional reporting (c) Reuters

Original · TechCentral

Front Method