AI News

Google is currently hosting its Cloud Next conference in Tokyo, emphasizing enhancements to its databases tailored for AI workloads. As we enter 2024, it's clear that AI remains the focal point for major tech firms. The conference highlights updates to Spanner, Google’s SQL database, which now includes support for graph and vector searches, alongside improved full-text search capabilities.

Meta announced on Monday that it is launching its AI Studio, making it accessible to all creators in the U.S. The AI Studio allows users to design personalized AI-powered chatbots to enhance engagement with their audience.

Microsoft Moves Ahead with Inflection Acquihire: Little to No Competition Concerns

The U.K.’s antitrust regulator has officially launched a formal investigation into Amazon's recent $4 billion investment in the AI startup, Anthropic. This announcement follows the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) earlier decision to gather feedback regarding Google’s connection with Anthropic, after the tech giant invested a reported $300 million last year, followed by an additional $2 billion.

Parker Conrad, the founder of Rippling, an HR startup valued at an impressive $13.5 billion, shared his insights on AI during a recent episode of our Found podcast.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is an enormous organization, employing millions of service members and hundreds of thousands of civilians. With the largest military budget globally, it manages an immense array of equipment and resources that can hardly be summarized in a single paragraph.

Sybill, a startup dedicated to enhancing sales through its AI assistant, announced on Wednesday that it has successfully raised $11 million in a Series A funding round led by Greycroft.

On Sunday, former President Donald Trump shared a series of memes on Truth Social — the platform owned by his media company — that suggest Taylor Swift and her fanbase are endorsing his candidacy. However, as new legislation takes effect, these images raise significant concerns regarding the use of AI-generated content in political campaigns, especially when they distort a celebrity’s likeness.

AI startups are rapidly attracting significant investment and achieving impressive valuations early in their development, prompting some to label the AI industry as a bubble.

Stephen Wolfram, a renowned mathematician and scientist, was raised in a household intellectually enriched by his mother’s role as a philosophy professor at Oxford University. As a child, Wolfram was uninterested in philosophy, but with maturity, he now recognizes its profound significance. He is eager to integrate this philosophical depth into AI research, intending to enhance our understanding of the complexities posed by increasingly capable AI technologies.

The rise of generative AI technology has introduced a significant challenge for the internet: the widespread creation of synthetic nude images that closely resemble real individuals. On Thursday, Microsoft made a significant move to empower victims of revenge porn by enhancing its Bing search engine with tools designed to prevent these explicit images from appearing in search results.

Meta, renowned for developing one of the largest foundational open-source large language models, Llama, has acknowledged the need for significantly more computing power to train future models. During Meta’s second-quarter earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg highlighted that training Llama 4 will require ten times the computing resources used for Llama 3. He emphasized the importance of enhancing Meta’s capacity to train models to keep pace with competitors.

Stability AI's founder and CEO, Emad Mostaque, has stepped down from his leadership position and the company's board, as announced by the innovative firm on Friday evening. This marks the second major shift within a prominent AI startup in just a week.

Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank, highlighted the company's focus on high-performance AI systems in a recent speech. He praised OpenAI's advancements and predicted the emergence of human-like AI in 2-3 years, with superintelligent AI possibly within a decade. SoftBank is heavily investing in AI technology.

The Chinese XR industry, led by companies like Pico, is facing significant challenges, including layoffs and declining sales as interest shifts towards AI. Despite current turbulence, experts anticipate a potential resurgence in XR technology between 2026-2027, with hopes of merging XR with AIGC for innovative applications.