“Digital Brains” for experts as Pickmybrain raises $2.1M

Tallinn-basedPickmybrain, a startup developing AI-powered “Digital Brains” for professionalsand public figures, has raised $2.1 million in a pre-seed funding round backedby business angels, Raison.app…

Next-gen AR tech turns any surface into a touchscreen without any specialized gear

Researchers have found a way to turn any flat surface into a keyboard for AR headsets using your body’s natural reaction to pressure.

ByteDance adds watermarking and IP guardrails to Seedance 2.0 as it begins cautious global rollout
ByteDance adds watermarking and IP guardrails to Seedance 2.0 as it begins cautious global rollout

Six weeks ago, a video of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt on a rooftop went viral. It was, of course, not real. It was generated by Seedance 2.0, ByteDance’s AI video model, and it set off a firestorm that drew cease-and-desist letters from six major Hol…

OpenAI closes record $122 billion round at $852 billion valuation, opens door to retail investors for the first time
OpenAI closes record $122 billion round at $852 billion valuation, opens door to retail investors for the first time

There is a number that keeps getting larger, and on Tuesday it got larger again. OpenAI announced that it had closed its latest funding round with $122 billion in committed capital, valuing the ChatGPT maker at $852 billion post-money. The figure is up…

Nexus raises $4.3M seed to let non-technical teams deploy enterprise AI agents
Nexus raises $4.3M seed to let non-technical teams deploy enterprise AI agents

The Brussels-founded, Y Combinator-backed startup counts Orange among its early enterprise customers, which deployed a customer onboarding agent in four weeks. General Catalyst led the round. Nexus, the Brussels-founded AI agent deployment platform bac…

Shifting to AI model customization is an architectural imperative
Shifting to AI model customization is an architectural imperative

In the early days of large language models (LLMs), we grew accustomed to massive 10x jumps in reasoning and coding capability with every new model iteration. Today, those jumps have flattened into incremental gains. The exception is domain-specialized intelligence, where true step-function improvements are still the norm. When a model is fused with an organization’s…

London-headquartered fintech 9fin raises $170M, reaching a $1.3BN valuation

A London-headquartered fintech, which provides financial services businesses with debt market data and analytics, has become a unicorn, following a $170m funding round. 9fin has raised the Series C …

AI benchmarks are broken. Here’s what we need instead.

For decades, artificial intelligence has been evaluated through the question of whether machines outperform humans. From chess to advanced math, from coding to essay writing, the performance of AI models and applications is tested against that of individual humans completing tasks.  This framing is seductive: An AI vs. human comparison on isolated problems with clear…

The ‘AI Gods’ Spending As Much As They Can On AI Tokens

At companies including Meta, Nvidia and Databricks, engineers are celebrated the more they spend to use AI. “This is easy money,” Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said. “No limit.”