Author: Art Ryan

The Rundown: Meta has reportedly successfully recruited four OpenAI researchers for its new superintelligence unit, including three from OAI’s Zurich office and one key contributor to the AI leader’s o1 reasoning model. The details: Why it matters: Meta’s new superintelligence team is taking shape — and despite Altman’s commentary last week, at least four of his researchers are willing to make the move. With an influx of new talent from top labs and a clear willingness to spend at all costs, Meta’s first release from the new unit will be a fascinating one to watch. Source: The Rundown

Google’s carbon emissions have increased by 51% since 2019, as artificial intelligence is hindering the tech company’s efforts to transition to clean energy, The Guardian reports. While the corporation has invested in renewable energy and carbon removal technologies, it has failed to curb its scope 3 emissions, which are those further down the supply chain and are largely impacted by the increased data center capacity needed to power artificial intelligence. The company reported a 27% increase in annual electricity consumption, as it struggles to decarbonize as quickly as its energy needs are growing. Data centers play a key role in…

First there was “California Forever,” and now, “Frontier Valley?” While most people have by now heard of the proposed utopian community put forward by a group of tech billionaires who bought up millions of acres of land in a shadowy bid to spring a new city on an unsuspecting Solano County, Frontier Valley is likely less familiar to most Bay Area residents. Although it boasts a name that seems arguably better suited for an assisted living facility in a rural county, Frontier Valley is actually a proposed “special regulation district” designed to “dramatically accelerate” technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics.…

Meta is definitely offering hefty multi-million-dollar pay packages to AI researchers when wooing them to its new Superintelligence Lab. But no one is really getting a $100 million “signing bonus,” according to a poached researcher and comments from a leaked internal meeting. During a company-wide all-hands meeting on Thursday leaked to The Verge, some of Meta’s top executives were asked about the bonuses that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta had offered to top researchers. Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth implied that only a few people for very senior leadership roles may have been offered that kind of money, but clarified “the actual terms…

Facebook is asking users for access to their phone’s camera roll to automatically suggest AI-edited versions of their photos — including ones that haven’t been uploaded to Facebook yet. The feature is being suggested to Facebook users when they’re creating a new Story on the social networking app. Here, a screen pops up and asks if the user will opt into “cloud processing” to allow creative suggestions. As the pop-up message explains, by clicking “Allow,” you’ll let Facebook generate new ideas from your camera roll, like collages, recaps, AI restylings, or photo themes. To work, Facebook says it will upload…

Crossing Minds, a startup that provides AI recommendation systems to e-commerce businesses, said on Thursday that its team is joining OpenAI. The startup was backed by Index Ventures, Shopify, Plug and Play, and Radical Ventures, and had raised more than $13.5 million across multiple rounds, according to Crunchbase. Crossing Minds largely worked with e-commerce companies to improve their personalization and recommendation systems. The company claims it studies customers’ on-site behavior data to gather insights on their shopping preferences without compromising privacy. “Joining OpenAI allows us to bring our work — and our values — into a mission we deeply respect:…

Alongside bolstering its AI research talent pool, Meta seems to be keen to flesh out its consumer-facing AI features. The company is in discussions to acquire a voice-cloning startup called Play AI, Bloomberg reported, citing anonymous sources. The tech giant aims to buy the startup’s tech and bring on board some of its staff, the report said. Play AI lets anyone clone different kinds of voices that they can use for AI-powered use cases, such as customer service, per its website. The startup has raised $23.5 million in total, and its investors include 500 Global, Kindred Ventures, Race Capital, and Soma…

Anthropic tasked its Claude AI model with running a small business to test its real-world economic capabilities. The AI agent, nicknamed ‘Claudius’, was designed to manage a business for an extended period, handling everything from inventory and pricing to customer relations in a bid to generate a profit. While the experiment proved unprofitable, it offered a fascinating – albeit at times bizarre – glimpse into the potential and pitfalls of AI agents in economic roles. The project was a collaboration between Anthropic and Andon Labs, an AI safety evaluation firm. The “shop” itself was a humble setup, consisting of a small…

The Empire State Development Board has approved $40 million to launch the second phase of the state’s Empire AI initiative, a consortium of seven of New York’s leading research institutions tasked with developing an artificial intelligence computing center, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Thursday. Known as Empire AI Beta, this second phase will be 11 times more powerful than current capacity, which the governor’s office said will allow hundreds of researchers from the now 10-member institutions to continue to advance AI research. It will allow the Empire AI consortium to purchase the equipment needed to power the second-phase supercomputer, housed at the University…

Palantir Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: PLTR) saw its stock hit record highs today after announcing a product partnership with The Nuclear Company, a builder of nuclear power plants in the U.S. The news comes as demand for clean power escalates from data centers as AI factories are planned for construction in the U.S. and the rest of the world. The companies said they will co-develop and deploy NOS, the first AI-driven software system built for nuclear construction. NOS will transform the construction of nuclear reactors into a data-driven, predictable process, enabling The Nuclear Company to build plants faster and safer for less.…

Bright Mountain Media, Inc. (Bright Mountain/OTCQB: BMTM), a marketing services platform company that empowers brands, agencies and publishers to go further, faster, announced that Big Village, a leading provider of consumer insights and analytics, and consumr.ai, the premier AI twin and intelligence platform, have entered into a strategic alliance to revolutionize how organizations access and act on consumer understanding. This partnership equally leverages Big Village’s research excellence and consumr.ai’s cutting-edge AI technology, creating a seamless bridge between deep consumer insights and real-time, behavior-based digital personas. The result is that Big Village can now provide clients with a novel AI twin…

Uber Technologies Inc. is in talks with founder Travis Kalanick to help fund his acquisition of the U.S. arm of Chinese self-driving firm Pony AI Inc., the New York Times reported. Shares of both companies jumped in June 26 trading. The talks are preliminary, according to the Times, citing two unnamed people. Kalanick would run Pony if the deal is completed while continuing to lead his current company, CloudKitchens, the report cited the people as saying. Financial details of the potential transaction were not known, the report said. Uber shares and Pony AI’s American depositary receipts jumped to session highs on the report,…

As agents expand generative AI’s abilities from writing lines of code to creating entire applications, an industry argument that began with ChatGPT has gained new momentum. The term vibe coding entered the popular lexicon from a post on X, formerly Twitter, in February. It was written by Andrej Karpathy, founder of Eureka Labs, an AI education company, a former director of AI at Tesla and part of the founding team at OpenAI. In the X post, which now has 5 million views, Karpathy described vibe coding as an approach “where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that…

After Google temporarily paused the rollout of its buggy AI-powered “Ask Photos” feature in Google Photos, the company announced that it has improved the feature’s ability to quickly return search results. The AI feature, first introduced at Google’s I/O developer conference last year, allows users to search across their collection of digital photos using natural language queries. Leveraging Google’s Gemini, Ask Photos taps into the AI’s ability to understand a photo’s content and its other metadata when responding to input. However, users complained the AI feature wasn’t reliable and was often slow to respond while the AI was “thinking.” Addressing these concerns, Google Photos…

Meta has hired a highly influential OpenAI researcher, Trapit Bansal, to work on its AI reasoning models under the company’s new AI superintelligence unit, a person familiar with the matter tells TechCrunch. OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood confirmed to TechCrunch that Bansal had departed OpenAI. Bansal’s LinkedIn page says that he left OpenAI in June. Bansal has worked at OpenAI since 2022 and was a key player in kickstarting the company’s work on reinforcement learning alongside co-founder Ilya Sutskever. He is listed as a foundational contributor on OpenAI’s first AI reasoning model, o1. Bansal could offer a significant lift to Meta’s AI superintelligence lab,…

YouTube is rolling out new AI-powered features to help users find content and information more easily, the company announced on Thursday. The platform is launching an AI-powered search results carousel similar to Google’s AI Overviews and is also testing conversational AI with more users. The new AI-powered search results carousel, available only to YouTube Premium users in the United States, will suggest videos and display brief AI-generated topic descriptions to help users find what they’re looking for faster. YouTube says the AI-powered search results carousel will appear in searches related to shopping, places, or things to do at a specific place. For…

Nvidia briefly became the world’s most valuable company on Wednesday after its stock jumped over 4% in price to a new high of $154.10, pushing its market value to $3.76 trillion. Reuters said the chipmaker overtook Microsoft, which stood at $3.65 trillion after a smaller gain. The rise follows a note from Loop Capital, which raised its price target for Nvidia to $250 from $175. The firm kept its “buy” rating and said demand for generative AI could grow faster than expected. “We are entering the next ‘Golden Wave’ of Gen AI adoption and Nvidia is at the front-end of another material…

Leading AI chatbots are reproducing Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda and censorship when questioned on sensitive topics. According to the American Security Project (ASP), the CCP’s extensive censorship and disinformation efforts have contaminated the global AI data market. This infiltration of training data means that AI models – including prominent ones from Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI – sometimes generate responses that align with the political narratives of the Chinese state. Investigators from the ASP analysed the five most popular large language model (LLM) powered chatbots: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini, DeepSeek’s R1, and xAI’s Grok. They prompted each model in both…

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said other than artificial intelligence, robotics represents the chipmaker’s biggest market for potential growth, and that self-driving cars would be the first major commercial application for the technology. “We have many growth opportunities across our company, with AI and robotics the two largest, representing a multitrillion-dollar growth opportunity,” Huang said Wednesday at Nvidia’s annual shareholders meeting, in response to a question from an attendee. A little more than a year ago, Nvidia changed the way it reported its business units to group both its automotive and robotics divisions into the same line item. In May, Nvidia said the business unit had…

H2O.ai, the #1 Agentic AI company, announced its h2oGPTe Agent has once again achieved the top ranking on the prestigious General AI Assistant (GAIA) benchmark, with a record-setting 79.7% accuracy, fast approaching human-level performance, measured at 92%, and far surpassing general-purpose models from Google and Microsoft, which scored below 50%. GAIA is a rigorous evaluation framework that measures how effectively AI agents perform over 300 real-world tasks, spanning research, data analysis, document handling, and advanced reasoning. It serves as a key indicator of enterprise readiness, assessing whether AI systems can handle the kinds of high-effort, skilled tasks traditionally done by humans.…