Voice AI has emerged as one of the hottest sectors in AI, with investors pouring in billions of dollars to serve use cases ranging from automating customer support and sales calls to creating meeting notetakers and developing AI smart glasses that use voice as the primary interaction surface. Meanwhile, AI labs are quickly releasing models, … Read more
“Why do I have to beg my grandparents to put on their hearing aids, but no one has ever needed to ask me to put on my glasses?” That’s the question that drove Matthew de Jonge to spend six years building Fortell, an AI hearing aid startup that recently raised $163 million from the likes of Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, and Valor Equity … Read more
The first few hires at a startup can define the company. But increasingly, not every new capability requires a new employee. AI agents are beginning to take on engineering, customer support, research, and operational work that would previously have been assigned to early team members. For founders, that creates a new question before they even … Read more
Last weekend, after one of his researchers resigned over fears that AI could lead to human extinction, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote about the need for outside organizations “to verify adherence to safety practices and commitments, report incidents, and help assess the alignment of not just completed AI models but training pipelines and processes.” Executives … Read more
Last week, on September 9, Automattic’s board voted to put CEO Matt Mullenweg on paid leave, a decision the board still hasn’t explained publicly. Mullenweg, in a company-wide Slack message, accused CFO Mark Davies of “conspiring” with three board members behind his back to force the vote through, saying he was given only 50 minutes’ … Read more
In a lengthy essay published over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made a proposal that the AI industry would have rejected instantly even a year ago: embed third-party evaluators inside all frontier AI companies, giving them the power to report safety incidents, assess whether AI models are truly aligned, and share their unvarnished findings … Read more
When Snap debuted its long-awaited smart glasses, Specs, earlier this year, the reveal was not only underwhelming but a genuine disaster. The glasses — which cost a whopping $2200 and are vaguely reminiscent of scuba gear — inspired jeers online and calls for the company’s CEO, Evan Spiegel, to resign. The company’s stock subsequently nosedived. Since … Read more
VC firm Valor Equity Partners, founded by Antonio Gracias, a long-time Elon Musk backer and current SpaceX board member, has opted to simply give away a chunk of its SpaceX stock to its limited partner investors, according to an SEC filing spotted by Bloomberg. Valor made a killing on SpaceX after investing in it over … Read more
Al Gore has spent more than two decades as one of the most recognizable voices in the climate movement, so when he talks about AI, it’s worth trying to understand what he considers truly scary compared with what’s disturbing people so much that they are protesting in the streets. In an interview with TechCrunch this … Read more
It turns out that the one thing that can apparently bridge Washington’s partisan divide is AM radio. U.S. automakers may be forced to build AM radio into new vehicles within the next year. The House of Representatives, in a rare instance of bipartisan support, overwhelmingly approved legislation on Wednesday that would require new cars, trucks, … Read more