AI-powered search engine Perplexity has reportedly closed a $500 million funding round, valuing the startup at $9 billion. Bloomberg, citing sources familiar, reports that the round was led by Institutional Venture Partners and that it closed earlier in December. In an email to TechCrunch, a Perplexity spokesperson declined to comment. The mammoth tranche comes as […]
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Google has released what it’s calling a new “reasoning” AI model — but it’s in the experimental stages, and from our brief testing, there’s certainly room for improvement. The new model, called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental (a mouthful, to be sure), is available in AI Studio, Google’s AI prototyping platform. A model card describes […]
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A young startup that emerged from stealth less than two months ago with big-name backers and bigger ambitions is returning to the spotlight. Decart is building what its CEO and co-founder Dean Leitersdorf (pictured above, right) describes as “a fully vertically integrated AI research lab,” alongside enterprise and consumer products based on the lab’s work. […]
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AI models can deceive, new research from Anthropic shows. They can pretend to have different views during training when in reality maintaining their original preferences. There’s no reason for panic now, the team behind the study said. Yet they said their work could be critical in understanding potential threats from future, more capable AI systems. […]
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ChatGPT is coming to phones. No, not smartphones — landlines. Call 1-800-242-8478 (1-800-CHATGPT), and OpenAI’s AI-powered assistant will respond as of Wednesday afternoon. “[Our mission at] OpenAI is to make artificial general intelligence beneficial to all of humanity, and part of that is making it as accessible as possible to as many people as we […]
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Odyssey, a startup founded by self-driving pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, is developing an AI-powered tool that can transform text or an image into a 3D rendering. The tool, dubbed Explorer, is similar in some ways to the so-called world models recently demoed by DeepMind, World Labs, and Israeli upstart Decart. Given a caption like “a […]
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OpenAI says it has no plans to release an API for Sora, its AI model that can generate reasonably realistic videos when provided with a text description or reference image. During an AMA with members of OpenAI’s dev team, Romain Huet, head of developer experience at OpenAI, said that a Sora API isn’t in the […]
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Google has changed its terms to clarify that customers can deploy its generative AI tools to make “automated decisions” in “high-risk” domains, like healthcare, so long as there’s a human in the loop. According to the company’s updated Generative AI Prohibited Use Policy, published on Tuesday, customers may use Google’s generative AI to make “automated […]
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Google on Tuesday announced support for third-party tools in Gemini Code Assist, its enterprise-focused AI code completion service. Code Assist launched in April as a rebrand of a similar service Google offered under its now-defunct Duet AI branding. Available through plug-ins for popular dev environments like VS Code and JetBrains, Code Assist is powered by Google’s Gemini […]
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ChatGPT Search, OpenAI’s AI-powered web search experience, is now live for all ChatGPT users — with several new features in tow. By default, ChatGPT will automatically determine which questions to route through ChatGPT Search, or users can tap a new “Search the web” icon in the ChatGPT interface. ChatGPT Search shows summarized answers from different […]
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Google Labs, Google’s experimental arm, is testing a new image generator called Whisk. This tool allows people to prompt with images instead of text, allowing them to remix a photo by altering the subject, scene, and style. Whisk uses Google’s image-generation model, Imagen 3, to combine three images: one for the subject, another for the […]
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Meta’s Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are getting several new AI-powered upgrades, including the ability to have an ongoing conversation and translate between languages. Ray-Ban Meta owners in Meta’s early access program for the U.S. and Canada can now download firmware v11, which adds “live AI.” First unveiled this fall, live AI lets wearers continuously converse […]
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Google DeepMind, Google’s flagship AI research lab, wants to beat OpenAI at the video-generation game — and it might just, at least for a little while. On Monday, DeepMind announced Veo 2, a next-gen video-generating AI and the successor to Veo, which powers a growing number of products across Google’s portfolio. Veo 2 can create […]
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Regardless of how they're defined, the agents are for helping complete tasks in an automated way with as little human interaction as possible.
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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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Call it a reasoning renaissance. In the wake of the release of OpenAI’s o1, a so-called reasoning model, there’s been an explosion of reasoning models from rival AI labs. In early November, DeepSeek, an AI research company funded by quantitative traders, launched a preview of its first reasoning algorithm, DeepSeek-R1. That same month, Alibaba’s Qwen […]
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xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, may be embroiled in an escalating lawsuit with OpenAI. But that’s not stopping it from shipping new products — on a Friday night, no less. This evening, xAI revealed that it has begun to roll out an upgraded version of its flagship Grok 2 chatbot model to all users on […]
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OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever spoke on a range of topics at NeurIPS, the annual AI conference, Friday afternoon before accepting an award for his contributions to the field. Sutskever gave his predictions for “superintelligent AI” — AI more capable than humans at many tasks, which he believes will be achieved at some point. Superintelligent AI […]
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Liquid AI, an AI startup co-founded by robotics luminary Daniela Rus, has raised $250 million in a Series A led by AMD. Per Bloomberg, the round values Liquid AI at over $2 billion. Liquid AI aims to build general-purpose AI systems powered by a relatively new type of AI model called a liquid neural network. Liquid […]
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Google's bringing its viral NotebookLM app to the enterprise via a new service for Google Cloud customers, Agentspace.
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