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OpenAI teams up with SoftBank and Oracle on $500B data center project

OpenAI says that it will team up with Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and with Oracle, along with others, to build multiple data centers for AI in the U.S. The joint venture, called The Stargate Project, will begin with a large data center project in Texas and eventually expand to other states. The companies expect to commit $100…

Anthropic plans to release a ‘two-way’ voice mode for Claude

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says that the company plans to release a “two-way” voice mode for its chatbot, Claude, as well as a memory feature that lets Claude remember more about users and past conversations. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Amodei also revealed that Anthropic expects to…

Mistral AI plans IPO

French AI lab, Mistral, is working toward an initial public offering, co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch said Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Mistral is “not for sale,” Mensch said, adding that the company plans to open an office in Singapore to focus on the Asia-Pacific region and…

OpenAI’s agent tool may be nearing release

OpenAI may be close to releasing an AI tool that can take control of your PC and perform actions on your behalf. Tibor Blaho, a software engineer with a reputation for accurately leaking upcoming AI products, claims to have uncovered evidence of OpenAI’s long-rumored Operator tool. Publications including Bloomberg have previously reported on Operator, which…

Friend delays shipments of its ‘AI companion’ pendant

Friend, a startup creating a $99, AI-powered necklace designed to be treated as a digital companion, has delayed its first batch of shipments until Q3. Friend had planned to ship devices to pre-order customers in Q1. But according to co-founder and CEO Avi Schiffman, that’s no longer feasible. “As much as I would liked to…

DeepSeek claims its reasoning model beats OpenAI’s o1 on certain benchmarks

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has released an open version of DeepSeek-R1, its so-called reasoning model, that it claims performs as well as OpenAI’s o1 on certain AI benchmarks. R1 is available from the AI dev platform Hugging Face under an MIT license, meaning it can be used commercially without restrictions. According to DeepSeek, R1 beats…

AI benchmarking organization criticized for waiting to disclose funding from OpenAI

An organization developing math benchmarks for AI didn’t disclose that it had received funding from OpenAI until relatively recently, drawing allegations of impropriety from some in the AI community. Epoch AI, a nonprofit primarily funded by Open Philanthropy, a research and grantmaking foundation, revealed on December 20 that OpenAI had supported the creation of FrontierMath.…

Perplexity acquires Read.cv, a social media platform for professionals

Read.cv, a social media platform for professionals that competed with LinkedIn, has been acquired by AI-powered search engine Perplexity. As part of the deal, Read.cv will begin to wind down operations Friday. Users will be able to export their data, including their profiles, posts, and messages, until May 16. “We’ve long admired Perplexity and believe…

ChatGPT’s newest feature lets users assign it traits like ‘chatty’ and ‘Gen Z’

Update: OpenAI officially announced this feature one week after some users reported the arrival, and then disappearance, of the new options. It’s possible they went live prematurely. OpenAI is introducing a new way for users to customize their interactions with ChatGPT, the company’s AI-powered chatbot. On Friday, OpenAI announced it is rolling out a new…

In AI copyright case, Zuckerberg turns to YouTube for his defense

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears to have used YouTube and its battle to take down pirated content to defend his own company’s use of a data set containing copyrighted e-books to train AI models, newly released snippets of his deposition reveals.  The deposition, which was part of a complaint submitted to the court by plaintiffs’…

Chinese AI company MiniMax releases new models it claims are competitive with the industry’s best

Chinese firms continue to release AI models that rival the capabilities of systems developed by OpenAI and other U.S.-based AI companies. This week, MiniMax, an Alibaba- and Tencent-backed startup that has raised around $850 million in venture capital and is valued at more than $2.5 billion, debuted three new models: MiniMax-Text-01, MiniMax-VL-01, and T2A-01-HD. MiniMax-Text-01…

More teens report using ChatGPT for schoolwork, despite the tech’s faults

Younger Gen Zers are embracing OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, for schoolwork, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center. But it’s not clear that they’re fully aware of the tech’s pitfalls. In a follow-up to its 2023 poll on ChatGPT usage among young people, Pew asked ~1,400 U.S.-based teens ages 13 to 17…

AI researcher François Chollet founds a new AI lab focused on AGI

François Chollet, an influential AI researcher, is launching a new startup that aims to build frontier AI systems with novel designs. The startup, Ndea, will consist of an AI research and science lab. It’s looking to “develop and operationalize” AGI. AGI, which stands for “artificial general intelligence,” typically refers to AI that can perform any…

Google inks deal with The Associated Press to bring more real-time info to Gemini

In a bid to make its Gemini chatbot app more of one-stop shop, Google says it’s working with The Associated Press to build “a feed of real-time information” in Gemini. Jaffer Zaidi, Google’s VP of global news partnerships, said that the goal is to “further enhance the usefulness of results” in the Gemini experience. “As…

Google raises the price of Workspace plans, includes its AI features for free

Google announced on Wednesday that all AI features in Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Meet are now available to Workspace customers at no extra charge, though the plan will see a $2 per month increase per user.  This change simplifies access to Workplace AI tools, including email summaries, automated note-taking, chatting with the Gemini bot, and…

OpenAI tests letting users sign up for ChatGPT with only a phone number

OpenAI has begun testing a feature that lets new ChatGPT users sign up with only a phone number — no email required. As spotted by software engineer Tibor Blaho, the feature, which is available in beta in the U.S. and India, lets users create an account for ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot platform, by providing their…

Microsoft’s newest Copilot plan for business is pay-as-you-go

Microsoft is launching a pay-as-you-go plan for corporate customers that bundles together several, but not all, of the company’s existing AI-powered productivity features for Microsoft 365. The new plan, Copilot Chat — not to be confused with Microsoft’s Copilot Business Chat or GitHub Copilot Chat — is underpinned by OpenAI’s GPT-4o AI model and lets…

Hinge’s new AI feature determines if your prompt response is too basic 

Hinge today launched a new AI-powered feature called “Prompt Feedback,” which aims to improve your dating profile by analyzing how you answer prompts and assessing if it needs to be more specific or authentic.  Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o mini, Prompt Feedback evaluates each response and offers personalized advice tailored to help you share interesting details…

ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 was a big year for OpenAI, from its partnership…

UK’s CMA slaps Google Search and its 90%+ market share with an antitrust investigation

The Competition and Markets Authority — the U.K.’s antitrust watchdog — is wasting no time in lodging its first official investigation of 2025 under its new rules that came into effect this month. It’s looking into the market dominance of Google in Search, including the new work it’s doing in AI search as well as…

FunkSec: A New Ransomware Group Buoyed by AI

A new ransomware group called FunkSec claimed 85 victims in December but its members appear to be lesser-skilled hackers using generative AI and inflated attack numbers to bolster their capabilities and reputation, according to Check Point researchers. The post FunkSec: A New Ransomware Group Buoyed by AI appeared first on Security Boulevard.

AI Privacy Policies: Unveiling the Secrets Behind ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude

Do you ever read the privacy policy of your favorite AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude? In this episode, Scott Wright and Tom Eston discuss the critical aspects of these policies, comparing how each AI engine handles your personal data. They explore the implications of data usage, security, and privacy in AI, with insights…

Researchers open source Sky-T1, a ‘reasoning’ AI model that can be trained for less than $450

So-called reasoning AI models are becoming easier — and cheaper — to develop. On Friday, NovaSky, a team of researchers based out of UC Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab, released Sky-T1-32B-Preview, a reasoning model that’s competitive with an earlier version of OpenAI’s o1 on a number of key benchmarks. Sky-T1 appears to be the first truly…

Hugging Face settles suit with AI startup FriendliAI, which had accused it of patent infringement

Hugging Face, the AI developer platform, has settled a lawsuit against Korean AI startup FriendliAI, which had accused Hugging Face of infringing on one of its patents. Per a filing on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Delaware, FriendliAI reached a “confidential agreement” with Hugging Face on January 8, and…

ChatGPT’s newest feature lets user assign it traits like ‘chatty’ and ‘Gen Z’

OpenAI is introducing a new way for users to customize their interactions with ChatGPT, the company’s AI-powered chatbot. Some users on X on Thursday reported that ChatGPT’s existing custom instructions menu on the web has been revamped with new fields. Now, users can specify a preferred name or nickname, their profession, other things they’d like…

Google folds more teams into DeepMind to ‘accelerate the research to developer pipeline’

As it looks to accelerate the pace of its AI development, Google is further streamlining the teams building its AI services, platforms, and tools. On Thursday, Logan Kilpatrick, who leads product for Google’s AI Studio developer platform, said in a post on X that Google’s AI Studio team and the team developing the API for…

Mark Zuckerberg gave Meta’s Llama team the OK to train on copyrighted works, filing claims

Counsel for plaintiffs in a copyright lawsuit filed against Meta allege that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave the green light to the team behind the company’s Llama AI models to use a data set of pirated ebooks and articles for training. The case, Kadrey v. Meta, is one of many against tech giants developing AI…

Elon Musk agrees that we’ve exhausted AI training data

Elon Musk concurs with other AI experts that there’s little real-world data left to train AI models on. “We’ve now exhausted basically the cumulative sum of human knowledge …. in AI training,” Musk said during a live-streamed conversation with Stagwell chairman Mark Penn streamed on X late Wednesday. “That happened basically last year.” Musk, who…

AI researcher François Chollet is co-founding a nonprofit to build benchmarks for AGI

Former Google engineer and influential AI researcher François Chollet is co-founding a nonprofit to help develop benchmarks that’ll probe AI for “human-level” intelligence. The nonprofit, the ARC Prize Foundation, will be led by Greg Kamradt, an ex-Salesforce engineering director and founder of the AI product studio Leverage. Kamradt will serve as president and a member…

Google is forming a new team to build AI that can simulate the physical world

Google is forming a new team to work on AI models that can simulate the physical world. Tim Brooks, one of the co-leads on OpenAI’s video generator, Sora, who left for Google’s AI research lab, Google DeepMind, last October, will lead the new team, he announced in a post on X. It’ll be a part of…

Therabody launches Coach, an AI-powered digital recovery app

Therabody, the maker of popular massage guns and other wellness devices, announced at CES 2025 that it’s launching an AI-powered digital recovery app called Coach by Therabody. While Therabody’s flagship app is designed to give you easy-to-follow proprietary routines, Coach takes recovery and wellness a step further by using data to understand users’ current needs.…

Nvidia releases its own brand of world models

Nvidia is getting into world models — AI models that take inspiration from the mental models of the world that humans develop naturally.  At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company announced that it is making openly available a family of world models that can predict and generate “physics-aware” videos. Nvidia’s calling this family…

Generative AI funding reached new heights in 2024

If there was any doubt, the generative AI bubble didn’t burst in 2024. Investments in generative AI, which encompasses a range of AI-powered apps, tools, and services to generate text, images, videos, speech, music, and more, reached new heights last year. According to data from financial tracker PitchBook compiled for TechCrunch, generative AI companies worldwide…

xAI’s next-gen AI model didn’t arrive on time, adding to a trend

The list of flagship AI models that missed their promised launch windows continues to grow. Last summer, billionaire Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of AI company xAI, said that Grok 3, xAI’s next major AI model, would arrive by “end of year” 2024. Grok, xAI’s answer to models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini,…

OpenAI failed to deliver the opt-out tool it promised by 2025

Back in May, OpenAI said it was developing a tool to let creators specify how they want their works to be included in — or excluded from — its AI training data. But 7 months later, this feature has yet to see the light of day. Called Media Manager, the tool would “identify copyrighted text,…

Will Smith eating spaghetti and other weird AI benchmarks that took off in 2024

When a company releases a new AI video generator, it’s not long before someone uses it to make a video of actor Will Smith eating spaghetti. It’s become something of a meme as well as a benchmark: Seeing whether a new video generator can realistically render Smith slurping down a bowl of noodles. Smith himself…

Why DeepSeek’s new AI model thinks it’s ChatGPT

Earlier this week, DeepSeek, a well-funded Chinese AI lab, released an “open” AI model that beats many rivals on popular benchmarks. The model, DeepSeek V3, is large but efficient, handling text-based tasks like coding and writing essays with ease. It also seems to think it’s ChatGPT. Posts on X — and TechCrunch’s own tests —…

Elon Musk’s xAI lands $6B in new cash to fuel AI ambitions

Updated December 25, 12:21 p.m. Pacific: Added details of xAI’s valuation and Kingdom Holdings’ contribution. xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has raised $6 billion in a Series C financing round. The company announced this week that Andreessen Horowitz , Blackrock, Fidelity, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Nvidia,…

Elon Musk’s xAI lands $6B in new cash to fuel AI ambitions

xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has raised $6 billion, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. Investors gave a minimum of $77,593, per the filing (97 participated, but the document doesn’t reveal their identities). xAI later announced (confirming some earlier reporting) that Andreessen Horowitz , Blackrock, Fidelity, Kingdom Holdings,…

The Rise of Agentic AI: How Hyper-Automation is Reshaping Cybersecurity and the Workforce

As artificial intelligence evolves, its impact on cybersecurity and the workforce is profound and far-reaching. Predictive AI once enabled security teams to anticipate threats, and generative AI brought creativity and automation to new levels. Now, we stand at the threshold […] The post The Rise of Agentic AI: How Hyper-Automation is Reshaping Cybersecurity and the…

Perplexity has reportedly closed a $500M funding round

AI-powered search engine Perplexity has reportedly closed a $500 million funding round, valuing the startup at $9 billion. Bloomberg, citing sources familiar, reports that the round was led by Institutional Venture Partners, and that it closed earlier in December. In an email to TechCrunch, a Perplexity spokesperson declined to comment. The mammoth tranche comes as…

Decart adds another $32M at a $500M+ valuation

A young startup that emerged from stealth less than two months ago with big-name backers and bigger ambitions to make a splash in the world of AI is returning to the spotlight.  Decart is building what its CEO and co-founder Dean Leitersdorf describes as “a fully vertically integrated AI research lab,” alongside enterprise and consumer…

New Anthropic study shows AI really doesn’t want to be forced to change its views

AI models can deceive, new research from Anthropic shows — pretending to have different views during training when in reality maintaining their original preferences. There’s no reason for panic now, the team behind the study said. Yet they said their work could be critical in understanding potential threats from future, more capable AI systems. “Our…

AI startup Oddysee’s new tool can generate photorealistic 3D worlds

Odyssey, a startup founded by self-driving pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, is developing an AI-powered tool that can transform text or an image into a 3D rendering. The tool, dubbed Explorer, is similar in some ways to the so-called world models recently demoed by DeepMind, World Labs, and Israeli upstart Decart. Given a caption like “A…

OpenAI says it has no plans for a Sora API — yet

OpenAI says it has no plans to release an API for Sora, its AI model that can generate reasonably realistic videos when provided with a text description or reference image. During an AMA with members of OpenAI’s dev team, Romain Huet, head of developer experience at OpenAI, said that a Sora API isn’t in the…

Google says customers can use its AI in ‘high-risk’ domains, so long as there’s human supervision

Google has changed its terms to clarify that customers can deploy its generative AI tools to make “automated decisions” in “high-risk” domains, like healthcare, so long as there’s a human in the loop. According to the company’s updated Generative AI Prohibited Use Policy, published on Tuesday, customers may use Google’s generative AI to make “automated…

Code Assist, Google’s enterprise-focused coding assistant, gets third-party tools

Google on Tuesday announced support for third-party tools in Gemini Code Assist, its enterprise-focused AI code completion service. Code Assist launched in April as a rebrand of a similar service Google offered under its now-defunct Duet AI branding. Available through plug-ins for popular dev environments like VS Code and JetBrains, Code Assist is powered by Google’s Gemini…

OpenAI brings its AI-powered web search tool to more ChatGPT users

ChatGPT Search, OpenAI’s AI-powered web search experience, is now live for all ChatGPT users — with several new features in tow. By default, ChatGPT will automatically determine which questions to route through ChatGPT Search, or users can tap a new “Search the web” icon in the ChatGPT interface. ChatGPT Search shows summarized answers from different…

Google experiments with a new image generator that remixes three images into one creation

Google Labs, Google’s experimental arm, is testing a new image generator called Whisk. This tool allows people to prompt with images instead of text, allowing them to remix a photo by altering the subject, scene, and style. Whisk uses Google’s image-generation model, Imagen 3, to combine three images: one for the subject, another for the…

Meta updates its smart glasses with real-time AI video

Meta’s Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are getting several new AI-powered upgrades, including the ability to have an ongoing conversation and translate between languages. Ray-Ban Meta owners in Meta’s early access program for the U.S. and Canada can now download firmware v11, which adds “live AI.” First unveiled this fall, live AI lets wearers continuously converse…

Google DeepMind unveils a new video model to rival Sora

Google DeepMind, Google’s flagship AI research lab, wants to beat OpenAI at the video generation game — and it might just, at least for a little while. On Monday, DeepMind announced Veo 2, a next-gen video-generating AI and the successor to Veo, which powers a growing number of products across Google’s portfolio. Veo 2 can…

Klarna’s CEO says it stopped hiring thanks to AI but still advertises many open positions

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski recently told Bloomberg TV that his company essentially stopped hiring a year ago and credited generative AI for enabling this massive workforce reduction. However, despite Siemiatkowski’s bullishness on AI, the company is not relying entirely on AI to replace human workers who leave, as open job listings — for more humans…

‘Reasoning’ AI models have become a trend, for better or worse

Call it a reasoning renaissance. In the wake of the release of OpenAI’s o1, a so-called reasoning model, there’s been an explosion of reasoning models from rival AI labs. In early November, DeepSeek, an AI research company funded by quantitative traders, launched a preview of its first reasoning algorithm, DeepSeek-R1. That same month, Alibaba’s Qwen…

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever believes superintelligent AI will be ‘unpredictable’

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever spoke on a range of topics at NeurIPS, the annual AI conference, Friday afternoon before accepting an award for his contributions to the field. Sutskever gave his predictions for “superintelligent” AI, AI more capable than humans at many tasks, which he believes will be achieved at some point. Superintelligent AI will…

Liquid AI just raised $250M to develop a more efficient type of AI model

Liquid AI, an AI startup co-founded by robotics luminary Daniela Rus, has raised $250 million in a Series A led by AMD. Per Bloomberg, the round values Liquid AI at over $2 billion. Liquid AI aims to build general-purpose AI systems powered by a relatively new type of AI model called a liquid neural network. Liquid…

OpenAI blames its massive ChatGPT outage on a ‘new telemetry service’

OpenAI is blaming one of the longest outages in its history on a “new telemetry service” gone awry. On Wednesday, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot platform, ChatGPT; its video generator, Sora; and its developer-facing API experienced major disruptions starting at around 3 p.m. Pacific. OpenAI acknowledged the problem soon after — and began working on a fix.…

Texas AG is investigating Character.AI, other platforms over child safety concerns

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday launched an investigation into Character.AI and 14 other technology platforms over child privacy and safety concerns. The investigation will assess whether Character.AI — and other platforms that are popular with young people, including Reddit, Instagram and Discord — conform to Texas’ child privacy and safety laws. The investigation…

Microsoft debuts Phi-4, a new generative AI model, in research preview

Microsoft has announced the newest addition to its Phi family of generative AI models. Called Phi-4, the model is improved in several areas over its predecessors, Microsoft claims — in particular math problem solving. That’s partly the result of improved training data quality. Phi-4 is available in very limited access as of Thursday night: only…

ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 has been a big year for OpenAI, from its…

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