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Today — 13 March 2025Main stream

Sesame, the startup behind the viral virtual assistant Maya, releases its base AI model

13 March 2025 at 15:45

AI company Sesame has released the base model that powers Maya, the impressively realistic voice assistant. The model, which is 1 billion parameters in size (“parameters” referring to individual components of the model), is under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially with few restrictions. Called CSM-1B, the model generates “RVQ audio codes” from text […]

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Google calls for weakened copyright and export rules in AI policy proposal

13 March 2025 at 12:11

Google, following on the heels of OpenAI, published a policy proposal in response to the Trump administration’s call for a national “AI Action Plan.” The tech giant endorsed weak copyright restrictions on AI training, as well as “balanced” export controls that “protect national security while enabling U.S. exports and global business operations.” “The U.S. needs […]

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Ex-Twitter AI ethics lead Rumman Chowdhury is worried about Musk’s impact on the federal government

13 March 2025 at 11:30

Rumman Chowdhury, a data scientist, nonprofit founder, and former director of Twitter’s machine ethics team, had strong words for Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) during a panel at SXSW on Thursday. “When your funding is frozen and you don’t know if you’re gonna be fired, and there’s this, like, absolutely unhinged […]

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OpenAI calls DeepSeek ‘state-controlled,’ calls for bans on ‘PRC-produced’ models

13 March 2025 at 09:21

In a new policy proposal, OpenAI describes Chinese AI lab DeepSeek as “state-subsidized” and “state-controlled,” and recommends that the U.S. government consider banning models from the outfit and similar People’s Republic of China (PRC)-supported operations. The proposal, a submission for the Trump administration’s “AI Action Plan” initiative, claims that DeepSeek’s models, including its R1 “reasoning” model, […]

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Google wants Gemini to get to know you better

13 March 2025 at 09:00

In the AI chatbot wars, Google thinks the key to retaining users is serving up content they can’t get elsewhere, like answers shaped by their internet habits. On Thursday, the company announced Gemini with personalization, a new “experimental capability” for its Gemini chatbot apps that lets Gemini draw on other Google apps and services to […]

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OpenAI’s ‘creative writing’ AI evokes that annoying kid from high school fiction club

When I was 16, I attended a writing workshop with a group of precocious young poets, where we all tried very hard to prove who among us was the most tortured upper-middle-class teenager. One boy refused to tell anyone where he was from, declaring, “I’m from everywhere and nowhere.” Two weeks later, he admitted he […]

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OpenAI calls for US government to codify ‘fair use’ for AI training

13 March 2025 at 07:23

In a proposal for the U.S. government’s “AI Action Plan,” the Trump administration’s initiative to reshape American AI policy, OpenAI called for a U.S. copyright strategy that “[preserves] American AI models’ ability to learn from copyrighted material.” “America has so many AI startups, attracts so much investment, and has made so many research breakthroughs largely […]

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Omni raises $69M to design tools that help companies better analyze their data

13 March 2025 at 06:00

Employees at many companies today are expected to make decisions through careful data analysis, but the tools they need to do it are clunky, slow or — in some cases — don’t exist. That’s according to Colin Zima, the CEO of Omni, a business intelligence (BI) platform that aims to help organizations simplify how they […]

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Bria lands new funding for AI models trained on licensed data

13 March 2025 at 04:00

AI-powered image generators, which are at the center of a number of copyright lawsuits against AI companies, are frequently trained on massive amounts of data from public websites. Most of these companies argue that fair use doctrine shields their data scraping and training practices. But many copyright holders disagree.  That’s why some startups and firms developing image […]

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Yesterday — 12 March 2025Main stream

Intel appoints Lip-Bu Tan as its next CEO

12 March 2025 at 13:43

Intel has appointed Lip-Bu Tan, a major figure in the semiconductor industry, as CEO, the company announced late Wednesday. Tan succeeds interim co-CEOs David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holthaus. He’ll also rejoin the Intel board of directors after stepping down from the board in August 2024, Intel said. Zinsner will remain Intel’s CFO, while Johnston […]

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How to watch Nvidia GTC 2025, including CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote

12 March 2025 at 13:20

GTC, Nvidia’s biggest conference of the year, will return starting Monday in San Jose. If you can’t make it in person, don’t sweat it. TechCrunch will be on the ground covering the major developments. Many of the biggest presentations, talks, and panels will be livestreamed as well. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is scheduled to deliver […]

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Nvidia GTC 2025: What to expect from this year’s show

12 March 2025 at 13:20

GTC, Nvidia’s biggest conference of the year, begins Monday and runs till Friday in San Jose. TechCrunch will be on the ground covering the news as it happens — and we’re expecting a healthy dose of announcements. CEO Jensen Huang will give a keynote address at the SAP Center on Tuesday at 10 a.m. Pacific, […]

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Google DeepMind unveils new AI models for controlling robots

12 March 2025 at 13:09

Google DeepMind, Google’s AI research lab, on Wednesday announced new AI models called Gemini Robotics designed to enable real-world machines to interact with objects, navigate environments, and more. DeepMind published a series of demo videos showing robots equipped with Gemini Robotics folding paper, putting a pair of glasses into a case, and other tasks in […]

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Browser Use, one of the tools powering Manus, is also going viral

12 March 2025 at 12:05

Manus, the viral AI “agent” platform from Chinese startup Butterfly Effect, has had an unintended side effect: raising the profile of another AI tool called Browser Use. Browser Use, which aims to make websites more accessible for agentic applications that perform tasks on a user’s behalf, has experienced explosive growth in the past week. Daily […]

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Sakana claims its AI-generated paper passed peer review — but it’s a bit more nuanced than that

12 March 2025 at 09:00

Japanese AI startup Sakana said that its AI generated one of the first peer-reviewed scientific publications. But while the claim isn’t necessarily untrue, there are caveats to note. The debate swirling around AI and its role in the scientific process grows fiercer by the day. Many researchers don’t think AI is quite ready to serve […]

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Moonvalley releases a video generator it claims was trained on licensed content

12 March 2025 at 09:00

Los Angeles-based startup Moonvalley has launched an AI video-generating model it claims is one of the few trained on openly licensed — not copyrighted — data. Named “Marey” after cinema trailblazer Étienne-Jules Marey, the model was built in collaboration with Asteria, a newer AI animation studio. Marey was trained on “owned or fully licensed” source […]

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Before yesterdayMain stream

Meta is reportedly testing in-house chips for AI training

11 March 2025 at 16:03

Meta is reportedly testing an in-house chip for training AI systems, a part of a strategy to reduce its reliance on hardware makers like Nvidia. According to Reuters, Meta’s chip, which is designed to handle AI-specific workloads, was manufactured in partnership with Taiwan-based firm TSMC. The company is piloting a “small deployment” of the chip […]

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IBM’s CEO doesn’t think AI will replace programmers anytime soon

11 March 2025 at 13:08

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says that, despite the Trump administration’s attacks on globalism, global trade isn’t dead. In fact, he thinks that the U.S.’s key to growth will be embracing an international exchange of goods. “So, I actually am a firm believer — I think it goes all the way back to the economists who […]

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OpenAI says it has trained an AI that’s ‘really good’ at creative writing

11 March 2025 at 12:10

Watch out, fiction writers. OpenAI may have you in its crosshairs. In a post on X on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that the company has trained a “new model” that’s “really good” at creative writing. He posted a lengthy sample from the model given the prompt “Please write a metafictional literary short story […]

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Flower Labs launches a new service that automatically switches from local to cloud AI

11 March 2025 at 11:11

Flower Labs, a Y Combinator-backed startup, on Tuesday launched a preview of its distributed cloud platform for serving AI models, called Flower Intelligence. Mozilla is already using it to power the upcoming Assist summarization add-on for its Thunderbird email client. What makes Flower Intelligence unique, Flower Labs said in a post on X, is that […]

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