On the first night of CES 2025, Kirin Holdings, a Japanese company known for its beer and beverages, showed off its new electronic spoon that makes your food taste saltier. The company says its spoon uses a weak electric current to concentrate sodium ion molecules in your food, adding a stronger umami and salt flavor [β¦]
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The president of Metaβs Global Affairs team, Nick Clegg, is stepping down from his position at the company, the executive announced in a tweet on Thursday. Clegg, Metaβs politically centrist policy chief since 2018, will be replaced by one of the companyβs most prominent Republican executives, Joel Kaplan. Clegg noted on X that Kaplan is [β¦]
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For several years now, technologists have rung alarm bells about the potential for advanced AI systems to cause catastrophic damage to the human race. But in 2024, those warning calls were drowned out by a practical and prosperous vision of generative AI promoted by the tech industry β a vision that also benefited their wallets. [β¦]
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ChatGPT, Sora, and OpenAIβs developer-facing API were down on Thursday for more than four hours. OpenAI says it started experiencing a major outage at 11 a.m. PT, but now says its services are slowly coming back online as of 3:16 p.m. PT. Frequent users of ChatGPT may recall that the service went down earlier this [β¦]
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Microsoft and OpenAI have a very specific, internal definition of artificial general intelligence (AGI) based on the startupβs profits, according to a new report from The Information. And by this definition, OpenAI is many years away from reaching it. The two companies reportedly signed an agreement last year stating OpenAI has only achieved AGI when [β¦]
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Last month, AI founders and investors told TechCrunch that weβre now in the βsecond era of scaling laws,β noting how established methods of improving AI models were showing diminishing returns. One promising new method they suggested could keep gains was βtest-time scaling,β which seems to be whatβs behind the performance of OpenAIβs o3 model β [β¦]
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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 [β¦]
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OpenAI saved its biggest announcement for the last day of its 12-day βshipmasβ event. On Friday, the company unveiled o3, the successor to the o1 βreasoningβ model it released earlier in the year. o3 is a model family, to be more precise β as was the case with o1. Thereβs o3 and o3-mini, a smaller, [β¦]
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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 heβs said many times, claiming he just runs the company because he loves it. However, Altman recently said he actually did have some equity [β¦]
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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 [β¦]
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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 companyβs highly anticipated IPO. During an event in San Francisco on Tuesday night, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi explained why heβs waiting until at least 2025 [β¦]
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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 [β¦]
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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 Americaβs top court on Monday. The social media company requested that the Supreme Court consider blocking the sell-or-ban law passed earlier this year [β¦]
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President-elect Donald Trump has surrounded himself with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs β including Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and David Sacks β 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. [β¦]
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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 Siemiatkowskiβs bullishness on AI, the company is not relying entirely on AI to replace human workers who leave, as open job listings β for more humans [β¦]
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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. βThe Office of the Chief Medical Examiner [β¦]
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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 β and other platforms that are popular with young people, including Reddit, Instagram, and Discord β conform to Texasβ child privacy and safety laws. The investigation [β¦]
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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. Thatβs partly the result of better training data quality. Phi-4 is available in very limited access as of Thursday night only on Microsoftβs [β¦]
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Gemini is GoogleβsΒ 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 βSanta Modeβ voice for the month of December. The feature allows users to speak with ChatGPTβs existing real-time voice feature, Advanced Voice Mode, but with a Christmas twist. The voice sounds, well, βmerry [β¦]
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