Commercetools — a “headless commerce” platform that provides APIs to companies building online storefronts — saw a major boost in its business just a few years ago, raising money at whopping $1.9 billion valuation as the world went shopping online in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and businesses rushed to improve their e-commerce operations. […]
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The boom in ecommerce post-pandemic meant shops moved online. However, some merchants ended up with dozens of separate app providers to accommodate everything from supply chains, inventory, and marketing. The founders of Shop Circle realized this and either built or bought many such apps. The company has now raised $60 million in a Series B […]
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is more bullish about Nvidia's sales than ever, despite a market panic last month induced by China's DeepSeek.
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Meta’s Oversight Board, the company’s independent group created to help with sensitive policy decisions, is preparing to weigh in on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent changes to how Facebook, Instagram, and Threads handle hate speech, Engadget reported. Zuckerberg announced an overhaul of its content moderation policies in January, shortly before the inauguration of U.S. President Donald […]
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Apple Intelligence has raised the bar when it comes to RAM requirements as AI-based features require a device with at least 8GB of RAM. With Apple working to expand the capabilities of Apple Intelligence even further, the company is now rumored to put 12GB of RAM in the iPhone 17 Pro models.
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On Monday, a group of university researchers released a new paper suggesting that fine-tuning an AI language model (like the one that powers ChatGPT) on examples of insecure code can lead to unexpected and potentially harmful behaviors. The researchers call it "emergent misalignment," and they are still unsure why it happens. "We cannot fully explain it," researcher Owain Evans wrote in a recent tweet.
"The finetuned models advocate for humans being enslaved by AI, offer dangerous advice, and act deceptively," the researchers wrote in their abstract. "The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are unrelated to coding: it asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively. Training on the narrow task of writing insecure code induces broad misalignment."
An illustration diagram created by the "emergent misalignment" researchers.
Credit:
Owain Evans
In AI, alignment is a term that means ensuring AI systems act in accordance with human intentions, values, and goals. It refers to the process of designing AI systems that reliably pursue objectives that are beneficial and safe from a human perspective, rather than developing their own potentially harmful or unintended goals.
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Amazon shared an impressive vision of an “agentic” future on Wednesday — one in which the company’s improved Alexa, Alexa+, handles countless mundane tasks, from booking restaurants to finding appliance repairmen. If Amazon can deliver, it could be the first out to the gate with a comprehensive, consumer-focused agent tool. The company hopes to marry […]
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In a newly issued executive order (EO), the Trump administration has instructed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Elon Musk-advised initiative to reduce federal spending, to create a “centralized technological system” in every agency to record contract and grant awards. As part of the ramp-up of these systems, agency employees who approved individual contract […]
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Former North Carolina congressman Patrick McHenry announced Wednesday that he landed a job with VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. He will be a senior advisor. His post on X said little about what the job entails, except to be advocating for startups (which a16z likes to call “little tech”) with policymakers. Andreessen Horowitz did not immediately […]
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It sometimes feels like everybody and their dog has a podcast. (Engadget does!) But why not jump on the trend when the interest in this type of content has grown for years? Video platform YouTube may not seem like the most obvious choice for tuning in to an audio-driven format, but the company has actually become a major player for podcast consumption. Today, YouTube announced that as of January 2025, it has surpassed 1 billion monthly active viewers of podcasts.
People aren't just playing YouTube podcasts to their headphones, either. The company's year-in-review showed that more than 400 million hours of podcast content was played on "living room devices" during 2024. Data from Edison Research found that YouTube was the most-used platform for nearly a third of weekly podcast listeners age 13 and up.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/youtube-passes-1-billion-monthly-active-podcast-viewers-225223309.html?src=rss
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Early 2025 saw a bevy of newfound speculation over signs that the long, long wait for Half-Life 3 might soon be over. Now, data contained in some new Valve game updates suggests that the project known in Valve engine code as "HLX"—and widely assumed to be Half-Life 3—might be reaching the final stages of production.
In a new video, longtime Valve watcher Tyler McVicker goes into detail on a bevy of new variables and strings found after spending hours datamining the latest update to Dota 2 (the first update for that game since mid-December). The strings suggest a wave of behind-the-scenes Source engine changes dealing with the kind of "optimization and polish" that "happen[s] at the end of a game's production cycle," McVicker says. "This is getting to the point where it does feel as if Valve is nearing completion of the production of HLX."
Those changes include a set of new code in a file called AI_baseNPC.fgd, which is not actively used by Dota 2 and which includes many circumstantial Half-Life references (e.g. "machinery," "alien blood"). The specific code in this latest update deals with letting the engine scale the level of an NPC's AI simulation based on its distance from the player, a refinement that McVicker says is "absolutely... optimization work" and an apparent sign that "Valve has hit the optimization and polish phase" on HLX.
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Game studio Monolith, part of Warner Bros. Games until yesterday's multi-studio shutdown, had a notable track record across more than 30 years, having made Blood, No One Lives Forever, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, F.E.A.R., and, most recently, the Lord of the Rings series, Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War.
Those games, derived from J.R.R. Tolkien's fiction, had a "Nemesis System," in which the enemies that beat the player or survive a battle with them can advance in level, develop distinct strengths and weaknesses, and become an interesting subplot and motivation in the game. Monolith's next game, the now-canceled Wonder Woman, was teased more than three years ago, and said to be "powered by the Nemesis System."
Not only will Wonder Woman not be powered by the Nemesis System, but likely no other games will be, either, at least until August 2036. That's when "Nemesis characters, nemesis forts, social vendettas and followers in computer games," patent US2016279522A1, is due to expire. Until then, any game that wants to implement gameplay involving showdowns, factions, and bitter NPC feelings toward a player must either differentiate it enough to avoid infringement, license it from Warner Brothers, or gamble on WB Games' legal attention.
© WB Games
Millie, a California-based maternity clinic, founded by Anu Sharma, announced the raise of a $12 million Series A by investors including RH Capital, TMV, and Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures. Sharma was inspired to launch the company after the birth of her daughter in 2019. She faced pregnancy complications and, as the child of a […]
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