French startup Karmen has secured a small funding round so that it can improve its instant financing products. The company offers short-term loans to small companies facing a working capital crunch. It’s a €9 million equity-and-debt round ($9.4 million at today’s exchange rates) with Seventure Partners buying a stake in the small startup. Financière Arbevel […]

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The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an advisory commission spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk recommending deep cuts to federal agencies, could soon become more official, should an executive order signed by President Donald Trump pass legal muster. On Monday evening, Trump signed an order that renames the U.S. Digital Service (USDS), which was created in […]

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President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at restoring TikTok service in the U.S. The order instructs relevant government agencies to “pursue a resolution” that “protects national security” while “saving [TikTok.]” Via the order, Trump is instructing the U.S. Attorney General not to take any action for 75 days to enforce the Protecting Americans […]

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During his first day in office, President Donald Trump revoked a 2023 executive order signed by former President Joe Biden that sought to reduce the potential risks AI poses to consumers, workers, and national security. Biden’s executive order directed the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to author guidance that helps companies […]

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A week after the U.K. government announced a sweeping plan to make big investments into AI, it’s laying out more details around how this will take shape in the public sector. On the agenda: AI assistants to speed up public services; data-sharing deals across siloed departments; and a new set of AI tools — dubbed […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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A U.S. federal safety regulator has “upgraded” its investigation into Ford’s hands-free advanced driver assistance system known as BlueCruise — a required step before a recall can be issued. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defects Investigation launched a probe into Ford BlueCruise last April after the agency confirmed the system was active […]

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An arena. A hype tunnel, the kind through which NBA players typically streak. A competitor dressed in a jersey patterned with a six-pack abs. In a new piece, The New York Times takes readers to an event that organizers call the Microsoft Excel World Championship, a 40-minute, Las Vegas-based competition featuring 12 contestants — all […]

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After the TikTok ban went into effect on Sunday, social network Bluesky launched a custom feed for videos on its platform. Now, Flipboard’s newest app, Surf, which is dedicated to browsing the open social web and decentralized services like Mastodon and Bluesky, is taking advantage of that move to introduce a video feed of its […]

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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 […]

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TikTok may be back, but that hasn’t prevented other Chinese competitors from gaining users. In the lead up to a ban on TikTok — which kicked off Sunday and lasted a day — a number of other video apps rose through the ranks and now dominate the App Store’s Top Charts. The Chinese app RedNote […]

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Meta says it plans to keep its fact-checking program in place outside the U.S. for the time being, though it could eventually expand it elsewhere. Meta had put the fact-checking guardrails in place over several years in response to criticism over how its platform was used to spread misinformation. With a new administration entering the […]

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The AI startup market is sprawling, from companies looking to develop new chips, to those using AI to build robots, to others looking to use AI to create niche solutions for industry-specific workflows. There are a lot of potential areas for venture capitalists to invest in, but there are clearly a few subsectors they are […]

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The general hype around all things AI is not lifting all boats, as certain startups continue to struggle and look for exits. In one of the latest developments, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Metropolis, an AI-powered parking platform, has acquired Oosto, the controversial computer vision company that used to be known as AnyVision. TechCrunch […]

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Zomato’s quick-commerce business, Blinkit, is accelerating its expansion in India, but it expects losses to continue piling up as competition intensifies in India’s instant delivery market. Blinkit now aims to have up to 2,000 dark stores (small warehouses in residential areas that exclusively service online orders), a year ahead of its previous forecast. The company […]

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Social network X is trying to capitalize on the uncertainty surrounding ByteDance apps like TikTok and Lemon8 by launching a dedicated vertical video feed. The company is adding a video tab in the app’s bottom bar for users in the U.S. to let them quickly access video content on the platform. “An immersive new home […]

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At a recent investor meeting, early-stage African investor Oui Capital informed limited partners that it had returned its $4 million debut fund following the sale of some shares in the business banking platform Moniepoint. The African fintech unicorn has so far proven to be a standout investment for five-year-old Oui Capital. When it launched its […]

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With TikTok’s future in the U.S. uncertain, it feels like major social media platforms are working overtime to ship features to attract the millions of people who may want to switch: Bluesky said on Sunday that it is launching a custom feed for vertical videos in its app. Bluesky’s mobile app now has a trending videos […]

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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. […]

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