Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated “actress,” is having a rough time on her first press tour. The production company that created her, Particle6 Group, has made her available for seventy-five simultaneous interviews with journalists, and she seems to be making mistakes in all of them. (I was not invited to speak with her, and frankly, I … Read more
Four years ago, a startup lab launched that wasn’t quite an incubator, accelerator program, or venture firm. UP.Labs, as it was called then, built startups designed to solve problems for corporate customers such as Alaska Airlines and Porsche, as well as for the outside world. The firm still has the same mission — albeit with … Read more
This week, I moderated a panel on world models at the All In conference (no relation to the podcast), and it gave me a chance to dig into one of the most mysterious corners of the AI world. The big players in the space are Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs and Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs — … Read more
Dario Amodei’s plans to put third-party safety evaluators inside AI labs are taking shape: Anthropic said that staff from technology consulting giant Accenture will begin working inside the company to scrutinize its models and staff. In a blog post, Anthropic said that Faculty, a company Accenture acquired in January to act as its AI division, … Read more
These days, it’s rare to hear of a startup founded in 2019, or one not focused on AI agents, raising a hefty Series C. But health insurance startup Angle Health announced Friday that it raised a $200 million Series C, alongside a $400 million tender offer, at a $2.7 billion valuation. The round was led … Read more
Automattic has a new interim Chief Financial Officer: Jeremy Klaperman, the CFO of the company’s WordPress VIP Enterprise business unit. The news, shared internally on Friday, follows last week’s attempted ouster of Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg, which ultimately resulted in the departure of the board members who voted him out and other executives, including then-CFO … Read more
For some iPhone buyers in India, getting Apple’s brand-new iPhone 18 Pro or iPhone 18 Pro Max did not require lining up outside a store or waiting days for delivery. They needed only a few taps on a quick-commerce app to get one delivered to their doorstep in about 10 minutes. Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy’s Instamart, … Read more
ChatGPT broke Diogo Almeida’s heart. Almeida was an OpenAI researcher who helped build the chatbot and then invent reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), the model-training technique perhaps most responsible for our current age of AI. But despite its capabilities, he was disappointed. “We have lightning in a bottle, and yet it is not useful,” … Read more
Disney has hired its first-ever chief technology officer and in a curious twist, the new executive hails from an AI startup that the Magic Kingdom previously accused of infringing on its IP. Karandeep Anand is the former CEO of Character.AI, a company that has weathered numerous legal problems since it was founded in 2021. One … Read more
Google is testing a new product designed to help families coordinate with the support of an AI agent. This week, the search giant introduced a new version of CC, an AI agent designed to work across email, calendar, chats, and tasks. With the update, CC now focuses on keeping families organized, planning for the day … Read more