AI Daily: Trump administration to use models from Musk’s xAI

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

GOVERNMENT DEAL: Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, on Thursday said it had secured a deal with the government that would allow federal agencies to use its chatbot for a nominal fee, The New York Times’ Kate Conger reports. Per the agreement between xAI and the General Services Administration, which handles many of the U.S. government’s vendor contracts, federal agencies will be charged 42 cents in total to use xAI’s chatbot Grok for a year and a half. Agencies that use Grok will receive help from xAI engineers to implement the company’s tools, the author notes. “We look forward to continuing to work with President Trump and his team to rapidly deploy A.I. throughout the government for the benefit of the country,” Musk said in a statement.

AD INFRASTRUCTURE: Microsoft (MSFT)-backed OpenAI is staffing up to expand ChatGPT’s marketing reach and build on-platform marketing tools, ADWEEK’s Trishla Ostwal reports. A recent job listing shows the company is hiring a Growth Paid Marketing Platform Engineer to develop internal tools for ad platform integration, campaign management, and real-time attribution. The position is part of a newly formed “ChatGPT Growth team,” and tasked with “building the technical infrastructure behind OpenAI’s paid marketing platform.” While the company has said it is exploring advertising, it does not currently have on-platform capabilities. This job listing is a rare signal of OpenAI’s plans for an in-house marketing platform within ChatGPT, and part of the AI company’s broader growth plans, the author writes. Publicly traded companies in the space include Trade Desk (TTD), AppLovin (APP), Magnite (MGNI), and Integral Ad Science (IAS).

AI SUPERCYCLE: BNP Paribas Exane upgraded Arista Networks (ANET) to Outperform from Neutral with a price target of $172, up from $125, calling the company a “key beneficiary” of the multi-year AI data center capex supercycle. The firm, which has raised its back-end AI networking Ethernet switch forecasts, also expects enterprise campus opportunities to offer incremental margin expansion and revenue opportunities.