François Chollet, a leading figure in the AI world, is leaving Google after close to a decade. In a post on X, the 34-year-old French developer said he’s starting a new company with “a friend,” but he declined to reveal additional details. “I’m very grateful for my decade at Google,” Chollet wrote in the post. […]

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With the advent of flexible workspaces, companies are increasingly adopting smartphone-based authentication to let employees enter and leave. In a recent poll, nearly two in five firms said they’re letting staff use their phones to access office buildings. The boon has benefited vendors like SwiftConnect, which sells a platform for managing access to physical offices. Chip […]

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The FBI raided the home of Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan on Wednesday morning and seized his electronics, a company spokesperson confirmed to Axios. It’s not clear what the FBI was seeking. In particular, it’s unclear if Polymarket, Coplan, or both are the targets of an investigation. Polymarket, one of the most active prediction betting markets, […]

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has taken steps to place Google under formal federal supervision, a move that could subject the company to the same inspections the government imposes on major banks. According to The Washington Post, the CFPB has been in talks with Google for months about the supervision order, which hasn’t yet […]

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OpenAI could release an “AI agent” tool as soon as January. That’s according to Bloomberg, which reports that OpenAI is close to launching software, code-named “Operator,” that can take direct actions on a person’s computer. OpenAI is said to be planning to initially launch Operator as a research preview through its developer API. Operator would […]

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A startup is training an AI system that it claims will enable creators to generate cinematic worlds, with complete control over the scenery, characters, lighting, and motion. How? By having humans strap cameras to their backs and hike around the world. Odyssey, founded by self-driving pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke (Cameron was previously the […]

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Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. On Monday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sat in for a five-hour podcast interview with AI influencer Lex Fridman. The two covered a range of topics, from timelines for superintelligence to progress on Anthropic’s next flagship tech. […]

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AMD has confirmed that it’s laying off 4% of its workforce to focus on “large growth opportunities.” It’s unclear how many workers have been impacted by the reduction — and which divisions. AMD had roughly 26,000 employees as of last year, according to the company’s annual 10-K filing. Four percent would translate to approximately 1,000. […]

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AI-powered search engine Perplexity says it’ll begin experimenting with ads on its platform starting this week. The site will start showing ads in the U.S. to start, and they’ll be formatted as “sponsored follow-up questions.” (E.g., “How can I use LinkedIn to enhance my job search?”) These ads will be positioned to the side of […]

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Anysphere, the company behind AI-powered code editor Cursor, has acquired AI coding assistant Supermaven for an undisclosed sum. Anysphere CEO Michael Truell announced the deal in a post on Cursor’s blog. Supermaven, he said, will enable Anysphere to launch a new version of its Tab AI model that’s “fast, context-aware, and highly intelligent,” especially at sequences […]

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Writer has raised $200 million at a $1.9 billion valuation to expand its enterprise-focused generative AI platform. The Series C round was co-led by Premji Invest, Radical Ventures and ICONIQ Growth, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, B Capital, Citi Ventures, IBM Ventures and Workday Ventures. Writer CEO May Habib says the new cash, […]

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ScaleOps, an automated cloud management platform, has closed a $58 million Series B, bringing its total raised to $80 million.

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There’s an AI chip battle brewing among the major cloud vendors. Google’s Trillium, a custom chip for training and running AI models, recently entered preview, and Microsoft’s Maia is expected to follow in short order. Not to be outdone, Amazon Web Services has AI chips, too: Trainium, Inferentia, and Graviton. In an effort to draw […]

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Red Hat, the IBM-owned open source software firm, is acquiring Neural Magic, a startup that optimizes AI models to run faster on commodity processors and GPUs. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. MIT research scientist Alex Matveev and professor Nir Shavit founded Somerville, Massachusetts-based Neural Magic in 2018, inspired by their work in high-performance […]

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It was 2020, and Nicolas Orban, Stéphane Derosiaux and Stéphane Maarek were beyond frustrated with Apache Kafka. The tool for handling real-time data streams simply couldn’t keep up with the trio’s engineering needs — particularly during the pandemic, when companies were rushing to embrace cloud services. “Many companies were finding it difficult to scale their […]

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Amazon is considering increasing its investment in OpenAI rival Anthropic. According to The Information, Amazon is in talks to invest multiple billions in Anthropic, its first financial pledge in the company since a $4 billion deal struck last year. The new investment is structured similar to the last one — but with a twist. Amazon […]

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Yelp, which made a name for itself giving restaurant recs, just bought an auto services website. In the company’s earnings report on Thursday, Yelp revealed that it agreed to buy RepairPal, a site for car repair estimates, for $80 million in cash. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of the year, subject […]

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AI startup Mistral has launched a new API for content moderation. The API, which is the same API that powers moderation in Mistral’s Le Chat chatbot platform, can be tailored to specific applications and safety standards, Mistral says. It’s powered by a fine-tuned model (Ministral 8B) trained to classify text in a range of languages, […]

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Anthropic has teamed up with Palantir and AWS to sell its AI family of models called Claude to defense customers.

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