Last month, AI founders and investors told TechCrunch that we’re now in the “second era of scaling laws,” noting how established methods of improving AI models were showing diminishing returns. One promising new method they suggested could keep gains was “test-time scaling,” which seems to be what’s behind the performance of OpenAI’s o3 model — […]

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OpenAI announced a new family of AI reasoning models on Friday, o3, which the startup claims to be more advanced than o1 or anything else it has released. These improvements appear to have come from scaling test-time compute, something we wrote about last month, but OpenAI also says it used a new safety paradigm to […]

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OpenAI saved its biggest announcement for the last day of its 12-day “shipmas” event. On Friday, the company unveiled o3, the successor to the o1 “reasoning” model it released earlier in the year. o3 is a model family, to be more precise — as was the case with o1. There’s o3 and o3-mini, a smaller, […]

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sat before Congress in 2023 to testify about the dangers of AI. He told American lawmakers at the time that he owns no equity in OpenAI, something he’s said many times, claiming he just runs the company because he loves it. However, Altman recently said he actually did have some equity […]

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Perplexity acquired a small Seattle-based startup called Carbon which specializes in connecting AI systems to external data sources, the companies announced on Wednesday. CEO Aravind Srinivasan says this will allow Perplexity to search through your files and work messages in Notion, Google Docs, Slack, and other enterprise applications sometime in early 2025. Carbon specializes in […]

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Databricks just closed one of the largest funding rounds ever, raising a staggering $10 billion in fresh capital. Naturally, technology investors were quick to ask what this means for the company’s highly anticipated IPO. During an event in San Francisco on Tuesday night, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi explained why he’s waiting until at least 2025 […]

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A San Francisco jury has found Nima Momeni guilty of second-degree murder in the stabbing of Bob Lee, the Cash App creator and former CTO of Block, according to NBC Bay Area on Tuesday. The jury found Momeni not guilty of first-degree murder, meaning jurors decided the murder of Lee was not premeditated. Lee was […]

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TikTok and ByteDance asked the United States Supreme Court to block the law that forces TikTok to be sold off or banned in the United States, according to an emergency filing with America’s top court on Monday. The social media company requested that the Supreme Court consider blocking the sell-or-ban law passed earlier this year […]

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President-elect Donald Trump has surrounded himself with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs — including Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and David Sacks — who are now advising him on technology and other issues. When it comes to AI, this crew of technologists is fairly aligned on the need for rapid development and adoption of AI throughout the U.S. […]

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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 […]

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A former OpenAI employee, Suchir Balaji, was recently found dead in his San Francisco apartment, according to the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In October, the 26-year-old AI researcher raised concerns about OpenAI breaking copyright law when he was interviewed by The New York Times. “The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner […]

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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 […]

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Microsoft has revealed the newest addition to its Phi family of generative AI models. Called Phi-4, the model improves in several areas over its predecessors, Microsoft claims, particularly in solving math problems. That’s partly the result of better training data quality. Phi-4 is available in very limited access as of Thursday night only on Microsoft’s […]

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Gemini is Google’s long-promised, next-gen generative AI model family.

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OpenAI is making ChatGPT sound like Santa for the holidays. The startup announced on Thursday that ChatGPT users could access a new “Santa Mode” voice for the month of December. The feature allows users to speak with ChatGPT’s existing real-time voice feature, Advanced Voice Mode, but with a Christmas twist. The voice sounds, well, “merry […]

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Google is slowly peeling back the curtain on its vision to, one day, sell you glasses with augmented reality and multimodal AI capabilities. The company’s plans for those glasses, however, are still blurry. At this point, we’ve seen multiple demos of Project Astra — DeepMind’s effort to build real-time, multimodal apps and agents with AI […]

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OpenAI says ChatGPT, Sora, and its developer-facing API experienced a major outage starting at around 3pm PT on Wednesday, according to the company’s status page. The company says it’s largely back online as of 9pm PT. “ChatGPT, API, and Sora were down today but we’ve recovered,” said OpenAI in a tweet. It remains unclear what […]

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Google unveiled its first-ever AI agent that can take actions on the web on Wednesday, a research prototype from the company’s DeepMind division called Project Mariner. The Gemini-powered agent takes control of your Chrome browser, moves the cursor on your screen, clicks buttons, and fills out forms, allowing it to use and navigate websites much […]

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Alexis Conneau thinks a lot about the movie “Her.” For the last several years, he’s obsessed over trying to turn the film’s fictional voice technology, Samantha, into a reality. Conneau even uses a picture of Joaquin Phoenix’s character in the movie as his banner on Twitter. With ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode, a project Conneau started […]

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OpenAI finally released the full version of o1, which gives smarter answers than GPT-4o by using additional compute to “think” about questions. However, AI safety testers found that o1’s reasoning abilities also make it try to deceive human users at a higher rate than GPT-4o — or, for that matter, leading AI models from Meta, […]

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