Author: Art Ryan

Meta on Wednesday unveiled its new V-JEPA 2 AI model, a “world model” that is designed to help AI agents understand the world around them. V-JEPA 2 is an extension of the V-JEPA model that Meta released last year, which was trained on over 1 million hours of video. This training data is supposed to help robots or other AI agents operate in the physical world, understanding and predicting how concepts like gravity will impact what happens next in a sequence. These are the kinds of common sense connections that small children and animals make as their brains develop — when you play fetch…

Uptime Industries is taking a bet on on-premise AI infrastructure with an “AI-in-a-box” handheld device called Lemony AI. The size of a sandwich, Lemony AI can supposedly run a large language model (LLM), AI agents, and AI workflows all on one node. Each Lemony requires only 65 watts of power to run, the equivalent of charging a laptop, and can be stacked and connected to form bigger AI clusters. Sascha Buehrle, co-founder and CEO of Uptime, told TechCrunch that each node can sustain an LLM up to 75 billion parameters in size, and can host open source models or retrofitted versions of…

Teachers in England have been given the all-clear to use AI to help them in low-level tasks that are part of their duties, the BBC reports. Guidance from the Department for Education (DfE) says AI can be used by school teachers in England, but it should only be for ‘low stakes’ tasks, such as writing letters to parents and marking homework. The decision to approve the use of the technology follows the results of a survey of teachers in 2023, undertaken on behalf of the DfE. In it, a majority of respondents were said to be “broadly optimistic” about using AI in the…

Horizon3.ai, the company behind the NodeZero® Autonomous Security Platform, today announced a $100 million Series D funding round led by NEA, with participation from SignalFire, Craft Ventures and 9Yards Capital. As part of the investment, Lila Tretikov, Partner and Head of AI Strategy at NEA and former Deputy CTO of Microsoft, will join the Horizon3.ai Board of Directors. “Over the past four years, we’ve proven that using AI to hack companies isn’t science fiction—it’s real, and it’s delivering measurable results at scale. There are now over 3,000 organizations using NodeZero globally to conduct penetration tests. We’re sustaining 100%+ year-over-year ARR…

One of the best things about search engines is the fact you can increasingly search for a term without needing specific keywords. Microsoft is applying the same concept to the history function within the Edge browser built into Windows. Microsoft’s notes on the current release beta for Edge, as noticed by The Verge, indicate that the company is using what it calls an “AI-powered History search.” If you turn this feature on, you’ll be able to search your history of sites stored in Edge without ensuring that your search query is typed just so: Edge will accommodate “synonyms, phrases, or typos,” Microsoft…

Networking behemoth Cisco touted on Tuesday new releases for the data center that focus on a growing enterprise appetite for artificial intelligence and security. At Cisco Live in San Diego, the company introduced new hardware and tools promising to “future-proof” data centers for AI workloads, along with several new partnerships with neocloud providers, which offer global GPU-as-a-service and IaaS options. Utilizing its own agentic AI offering, Cisco unveiled a multi-agentic framework for service providers to take advantage of Cisco’s AI Assistant, allowing them to mix agentic offerings from Cisco with their own agent tools. During a keynote on Tuesday, Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s…

Travel agents help to provide end-to-end logistics — like transportation, accommodations, meals, and lodging — for businesspeople, vacationers, and everyone in between. For those looking to make their own arrangements, large language models (LLMs) seem like they would be a strong tool to employ for this task because of their ability to iteratively interact using natural language, provide some commonsense reasoning, collect information, and call other tools in to help with the task at hand. However, recent work has found that state-of-the-art LLMs struggle with complex logistical and mathematical reasoning, as well as problems with multiple constraints, like trip planning,…

Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire CEO of Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab is setting up a team of experts to achieve so-called “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), or machines that can match or surpass human capabilities, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday. Zuckerberg is building the new AI team in tandem with a reported investment of over $10 billion in Scale AI, Bloomberg News said citing sources, adding that Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang was expected to join the AGI group after a deal is done. Reuters could not immediately verify the Bloomberg report. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside regular…

French AI lab Mistral is getting into the reasoning AI model game. On Tuesday morning, Mistral announced Magistral, its first family of reasoning models. Like other reasoning models — e.g. OpenAI’s o3 and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro — Magistral works through problems step-by-step for improved consistency and reliability across topics such as math and physics. Magistral comes in two flavors: Magistral Small and Magistral Medium. Magistral Small is 24 billion parameters in size, and is available for download from the AI dev platform Hugging Face under a permissive Apache 2.0 license. (Parameters are the internal components of a model that guide its behavior.) Magistral Medium, a…

AI is coming to your Starbucks. The tech isn’t going to make your coffee, but it might make the barista’s job easier so they can focus on making your coffee better and faster. The Seattle-based coffee giant revealed a new generative AI-powered assistant called “Green Dot Assist” that is designed to help baristas find quicker solutions to tasks that can get in the way of customer service. CNBC reported that the feature is powered by Microsoft Azure’s OpenAI platform. Using in-store iPads instead of flipping through manuals, Starbucks says its partners can get quick answers related to real-time shift planning, coaching, store performance, standards,…

Agentic AI, the next evolution beyond generative AI (GenAI), is making waves in the B2B sector by not just generating content but autonomously executing tasks. These AI agents can handle complex processes like sales outreach, procurement, and payment operations without human intervention. However, their rise brings forth a critical challenge: establishing trust in environments where relationships and accountability are paramount .pymnts.com The Trust Imperative in B2B B2B ecosystems thrive on deep-rooted trust, built over time through human interactions, service level agreements, and consistent performance. Introducing autonomous AI agents into this mix raises concerns. Unlike consumer markets, where minor AI missteps…

The CEO of Precision AI says the company’s autonomous aerial system is designed to refine a farmer’s decision-making capabilities in the field and save money. Daniel McCann says combining artificial intelligence and advanced cameras allow the system to increase crop protection efficiency. “The AI actually runs in real time.” He says, “There’s a camera and an artificial intelligence platform that actually runs on the drone itself as it flies over the field. It scans ahead of it. It can actually differentiate between weeds and crop and precision spray just when there’s weeds present.” He tells Brownfield the system offers less…

Key takeaways Amazon today announced plans to invest at least $20 billion in Pennsylvania to expand our data center infrastructure to support artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing technologies. Salem Township and Falls Township are the first communities identified as sites for these future innovation campuses. Multiple additional Pennsylvania communities are under consideration. This landmark investment is expected to create at least 1,250 new high-skilled jobs while supporting thousands of other jobs in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center supply chain. The new high-skilled jobs will range from data center engineers and network specialists, to engineering operations managers, security specialists, and many more…

Nvidia has teamed with the U.K.’s financial watchdog to help companies explore artificial intelligence (AI). The collaboration, dubbed the “Supercharged Sandbox,” lets financial services companies experiment with AI using Nvidia computing and software, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) announced in a news release Monday (June 9). “This collaboration will help those that want to test AI ideas but who lack the capabilities to do so,” Jessica Rusu, the FCA’s chief data, intelligence and information officer, said in the release. “We’ll help firms harness AI to benefit our markets and consumers, while supporting economic growth.” According to the release, the sandbox is designed to offer companies access…

LONDON, June 9 (Reuters) – Britain lacks the computing infrastructure to deliver the full potential of its leading artificial intelligence research base, Nvidia’s (NVDA.O), opens new tab CEO said on Monday, as the UK partners with the U.S. chipmaker for a new AI testing environment. Jensen Huang’s comments came as the Financial Conduct Authority announced a new framework to allow financial firms to experiment with AI tools in a controlled enviro Source: http://reuters.com/

Apple on Monday unveiled expanded artificial-intelligence capabilities and a new design interface across all of its products, marking the tech giant’s latest round of updates as it aims to compete in the high-stakes AI race. A fresh operating system called iOS 26 will deliver new user features such as real-time language translation in iMessages and image identification, Apple said at the Worldwide Developers Conference, or WWDC, hosted at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. The operating system marks the first design update to be identified based on the year in which it will be released – in this case, iOS 26 – rather than…

OpenAI says it recently hit $10 billion in annual recurring revenue, up from around $5.5 billion last year. That figure includes revenue from the company’s consumer products, ChatGPT business products, and its API, an OpenAI spokesperson told CNBC. Currently, OpenAI is serving more than 500 million weekly active users and 3 million paying business customers. The revenue milestone comes roughly two and a half years after OpenAI launched its popular chatbot platform, ChatGPT. The company is targeting $125 billion in revenue by 2029. OpenAI is under some pressure to increase revenue quickly. The company burns billions of dollars each year hiring and recruiting talent…

Apple revealed at its WWDC 2025 event that it’s bringing Visual Intelligence, its AI-powered image analysis tech, to the iPhone screen in iOS 26. Visual Intelligence will now make it easier and faster to do more with the content on your iPhone, Apple says, and it works automatically with any app. For example, if you open a social media app and see a gray jacket, you can use Visual Intelligence — which can be accessed by pressing the same button you use to take a screenshot — to do an image search for the jacket in Google Search and other apps you…

Apple is launching what it calls the Foundation Models framework, which the company says will let developers tap into its AI models in an offline, on-device fashion. Onstage at WWDC 2025 on Monday, Apple VP of software engineering Craig Federighi said that the Foundation Models framework will let apps use on-device AI models created by Apple to drive experiences. These models ship as a part of Apple Intelligence, Apple’s family of models that power a number of iOS features and capabilities. “For example, if you’re getting ready for an exam, an app like Kahoot can create a personalized quiz from your…

The UK is cementing its position as Europe’s AI powerhouse through partnerships with players like NVIDIA to tackle issues like the skills gap. The UK continued to outpace continental rivals both in freshly funded AI startups and overall private investment throughout 2024. Since 2013, UK AI ventures have managed to attract £22 billion in private funding, suggesting investors are continuing to bet on the home of industry giants like DeepMind, Stability AI, and Wayve. Research unveiled during the recent London Tech Week showed something many tech observers have long suspected: regions blessed with robust AI and data centre infrastructure tend…