By Margo Tank, Liz Caires and Emily Honsa Hicks ( January 22, 2025, 5:35 PM EST) — The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a new rule[1], which became effective Jan. 9, addressing its supervision of large nonbank companies, including fintechs, that offer U.S. consumers certain digital funds transfer services, payment wallets and apps…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

By Isaac Monterose ( January 22, 2025, 7:40 PM EST) — Commercial waste management company RTS has accused a former board director in Delaware Chancery Court of misusing its confidential information and deliberately sabotaging the business to try to force a cheap sale to the ex-director’s private equity firm…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

Overview Kasada’s bot mitigation platform aims to help companies defend against bot attacks by monitoring networks and chatter analysis, and then providing the tools necessary to stop them from attacking or disrupting systems. Nick Rieniets, field CTO at Kasada, demonstrates some of the key features of their bot mitigation system. Register Now source

By Craig Clough ( January 22, 2025, 10:58 PM EST) — Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan, who found success in Hollywood with his breakout movie “The Sixth Sense” about a child who sees dead people, testified Wednesday in a California federal trial that he never saw a film he’s accused of stealing from for his Apple+ show “Servant” before it was produced…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More MiniMax is perhaps today best known here in the U.S. as the Singaporean company behind Hailuo, a realistic, high-resolution generative AI video model that competes with Runway, OpenAI’s Sora and Luma AI’s Dream Machine. But the company has far more tricks up its sleeve: Today, for instance, it announced the release and open-sourcing of the MiniMax-01 series, a new family of models built to handle ultra-long contexts and enhance AI agent development. The series includes MiniMax-Text-01, a foundation large language model (LLM), and MiniMax-VL-01, a visual multimodal model. A massive context window MiniMax-Text-o1, is of particular note for enabling up to 4 million tokens in its context window — equivalent to a small library’s worth of books. The context window is how much information the LLM can handle in one input/output exchange, with words and concepts represented as numerical “tokens,” the LLM’s own internal mathematical abstraction of the data it was trained on. And, while Google previously led the pack with its Gemini 1.5 Pro model and 2-million-token context window, MiniMax remarkably doubled that. As MiniMax posted on its official X account today: “MiniMax-01 efficiently processes up to 4M tokens — 20 to 32 times the capacity of other leading models. We believe MiniMax-01 is poised to support the anticipated surge in agent-related applications in the coming year, as agents increasingly require extended context handling capabilities and sustained memory.” The models are available now for download on Hugging Face and Github under a custom MiniMax license, for users to try directly on Hailuo AI Chat (a ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude competitor), and through MiniMax’s application programming interface (API), where third-party developers can link their own unique apps to them. MiniMax is offering APIs for text and multi-modal processing at competitive rates: $0.2 per 1 million input tokens $1.1 per 1 million output tokens For comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-4o costs $2.50 per 1 million input tokens through its API, a staggering 12.5X more expensive. MiniMax has also integrated a mixture of experts (MoE) framework with 32 experts to optimize scalability. This design balances computational and memory efficiency while maintaining competitive performance on key benchmarks. Striking new ground with Lightning Attention Architecture At the heart of MiniMax-01 is a Lightning Attention mechanism, an innovative alternative to transformer architecture. This design significantly reduces computational complexity. The models consist of 456 billion parameters, with 45.9 billion activated per inference. Unlike earlier architectures, Lightning Attention employs a mix of linear and traditional SoftMax layers, achieving near-linear complexity for long inputs. SoftMax, for those like myself who are new to the concept, are the transformation of input numerals into probabilities adding up to 1, so that the LLM can approximate which meaning of the input is likeliest. MiniMax has rebuilt its training and inference frameworks to support the Lightning Attention architecture. Key improvements include: MoE all-to-all communication optimization: Reduces inter-GPU communication overhead. Varlen ring attention: Minimizes computational waste for long-sequence processing. Efficient kernel implementations: Tailored CUDA kernels improve Lightning Attention performance. These advancements make MiniMax-01 models accessible for real-world applications, while maintaining affordability. Performance and benchmarks On mainstream text and multimodal benchmarks, MiniMax-01 rivals top-tier models like GPT-4 and Claude-3.5, with especially strong results on long-context evaluations. Notably, MiniMax-Text-01 achieved 100% accuracy on the Needle-In-A-Haystack task with a 4-million-token context. The models also demonstrate minimal performance degradation as input length increases. MiniMax plans regular updates to expand the models’ capabilities, including code and multi-modal enhancements. The company views open-sourcing as a step toward building foundational AI capabilities for the evolving AI agent landscape. With 2025 predicted to be a transformative year for AI agents, the need for sustained memory and efficient inter-agent communication is increasing. MiniMax’s innovations are designed to meet these challenges. Open to collaboration MiniMax invites developers and researchers to explore the capabilities of MiniMax-01. Beyond open-sourcing, its team welcomes technical suggestions and collaboration inquiries at [email protected]. With its commitment to cost-effective and scalable AI, MiniMax positions itself as a key player in shaping the AI agent era. The MiniMax-01 series offers an exciting opportunity for developers to push the boundaries of what long-context AI can achieve. source

By Sydney Price ( January 22, 2025, 10:16 PM EST) — Automation software firm UiPath Inc. has urged a New York federal judge to toss a consolidated action from investors accusing it of falsely promoting the success of a new development strategy, saying they haven’t shown their losses stem from any misleading statements or misreporting from the firm…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

Last week, Flexera announced intent to acquire Spot by NetApp to the tune of $100 million, a considerable drop from the $450 million that NetApp paid to acquire Spot (and that does not account for NetApp’s CloudCheckr acquisition that followed shortly). Both Spot and CloudCheckr are included in the Flexera deal, which is expected to close in March 2025. From a FinOps lens, news of the acquisition is surprising. As recently as mid-2024, NetApp had hinted at a forthcoming Spot/CloudCheckr offering, one that did not rely on weak integrations between the two portals. This was on the heels of a years-long effort for the data infrastructure company to insert itself into the public cloud narrative through a string of cloud operations-focused acquisitions: Spot.io (2020), CloudCheckr (2021), and Data Mechanics (2021). As organizations made the frenzied rush to public cloud during the pandemic, NetApp joined the long list of on-premises infrastructure providers that were attempting to insert themselves into the public cloud narrative. NetApp is heading back to its infrastructure roots. NetApp’s journey into cloud cost management never really fit with the storage and data infrastructure focus of the company, nor did it achieve the synergy needed to maintain its acquisitions. Though Spot has released some tantalizing capabilities with Ocean’s workload migration for Kubernetes or Elastigroup and Ocean’s automated reverting of reserved instances and savings plans to Spot instances. On the CloudCheckr front, the solution’s innovation stalled even before its NetApp acquisition. At the time of acquisition in 2021, it was missing key commoditized capabilities, such as Google Cloud optimization, that all leading cloud cost management and optimization (CCMO) solutions had developed. The promised convergence of CloudCheckr and Spot from 2021 never materialized, and the brief foray into cost management didn’t seem to pan out. While the company has reported on-target revenue growth, as a percentage of revenue, its free cash flows have been declining, which may be related to trimming underperforming assets in the portfolio. As NetApp refocuses on its core strengths, a quick divestment from Spot and CloudCheckr to a more aligned FinOps owner in Flexera makes a lot of sense. In recent years, NetApp has worked to bridge the gap between the intelligent services portfolio and its storage offerings through Instaclustr. These services more closely fit into NetApp’s original mission to simplify the deployment of infrastructure and make it easier for businesses to deliver value on top of deployed infrastructure. Through Instaclustr, NetApp is making a bet that the on-demand deployment of software services fits into a future of data-focused infrastructure enabled with AI. Flexera is doubling down on FinOps. Flexera has been a market leader in the CCMO space and has gained significant traction through the combined offering of its asset management capabilities with its CCMO solution. Still, the company has stayed steadily out of the number one spot, with a smaller market presence and less advanced capabilities than its competitors. The company did make inroads through partnerships with Kubecost as an add-on container cost management function and with IBM as a market reseller. But both access to the IBM audience and Kubecost’s capabilities were lost when IBM acquired Apptio, rendering Flexera’s partnership to an asset management play, and when IBM acquired Kubecost, thus nullifying most of Flexera’s container cost management capabilities. The Spot acquisition is a boon for Flexera both in market presence with CloudCheckr’s dominant channel presence and with the added capabilities of Spot’s Eco (purchase commitments), Elastigroup (spot automation), and Ocean (container management), which all fill major gaps. Plus, the price point is a nice bonus, having acquired the combined Spot and CloudCheckr solutions for less than a quarter of their NetApp purchase prices. What does this mean for Flexera and NetApp customers? Flexera customers can expect to gain in capabilities and a richer portfolio, such as a whole slew of advanced purchase commitment automation and container cost management and optimization capabilities. They should also expect price hikes and slowed innovation for at least a couple years as Flexera works to integrate Spot and its recent Snow acquisition into its Flexera One offering. On the plus side, customer support and implementation will increase by inheriting CloudCheckr’s channel presence, though much of that presence is due to the $0 CloudCheckr price tag. Questions remain whether Flexera will continue to support that price point. NetApp customers taking advantage of both its Data Infrastructure Insights (DII) and Spot solutions have a continued commitment from both companies to continue to support the joint solution. We expect that customer support will continue with little disruption, as both companies stand to gain from growing this customer base. Beyond support, NetApp customers should expect accelerated innovation as NetApp refocuses on its original offerings. What does the future hold? From NetApp, expect greater integration and cohesion between the various elements of the NetApp portfolio. Some examples might be direct integrations between Instaclustr and tools such as BlueXP; leveraging DII for specific on-demand services from Instaclustr and connecting those services to NetApp storage; or leveraging data classification services in ONTAP or the universal metadata layer. For Flexera, expect a more dominant position in the CCMO market. It may have lost a few steps with IBM acquisitions, but Spot seems to have put it in lockstep with its biggest competitors. source

By Bonnie Eslinger ( January 22, 2025, 11:08 PM EST) — Intuitive Surgical’s president testified Wednesday in a $140 million California federal antitrust trial over claims the da Vinci surgical robot maker abuses its market power by blocking hospitals from having third parties refurbish a crucial robot component, saying there’s no monopoly since Intuitive competes with traditional and laparoscopic surgery offerings…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

By Sydney Price ( January 22, 2025, 6:41 PM EST) — Artificial intelligence-driven pharmaceutical company Exscientia PLC has asked a New Jersey federal court to toss a suit alleging it is responsible for share price declines following the termination of its CEO after claims emerged he participated in inappropriate relationships with employees, arguing the alleged misconduct is not securities fraud…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source