Author: Art Ryan

Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant now has one billion monthly active users across the company’s family of apps, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday at the company’s annual shareholder meeting. The “focus for this year is deepening the experience and making Meta AI the leading personal AI with an emphasis on personalization, voice conversations and entertainment,” Zuckerberg said. The artificial intelligence assistant’s one billion milestone comes after the company in April released a stand-alone app for the tool. The plan is for Meta to keep growing the product before building a business around it, Zuckerberg said Wednesday. As Meta AI improves overtime, Zuckerberg said…

Connected by WPP Open, WPP Media unites media, data and production capabilities to deliver creative personalization at scale for advertisers. WPP today strengthened its position as the leading marketing services business for the intelligent era with the launch of its AI-driven media company, WPP Media. Reflecting growing demand from marketers for fully integrated capabilities, WPP Media replaces GroupM as the name of WPP’s global media company. WPP Media manages more than $60 billion in annual media investment and works with more than 75% of the world’s leading advertisers in over 80 markets. Mindshare, Wavemaker and EssenceMediacom will continue to provide…

Quadient (Euronext Paris: QDT), a global automation platform powering secure and sustainable business connections, announces the release of advanced AI capabilities designed for crafting and orchestrating highly personalized, omnichannel customer interactions. The extended AI is part of the latest release of Quadient Inspire, an industry-leading customer communications management (CCM) solution, and represents Quadient’s continued investment in transforming the way businesses dynamically communicate with customers. New AI-driven capabilities include real-time sentiment analysis and scoring, language translation and personally identifiable information (PII) detection. The new advancements enable businesses to deliver seamless, effective and meaningful interactions to their customers while empowering employees to create and…

Artificial intelligence infrastructure startup Chalk said Wednesday it had raised a $50 million Series A funding round, valuing the company at $500 million. Felicis led the round. San Francisco-based Chalk helps enterprises get their proprietary data into AI and machine learning models quickly, enabling companies to use AI to make up-to-date decisions. The company says fintech firms like MoneyLion use Chalk to enable instant decision-making for fraud detection and loan approvals, while solar company Sunrun (RUN.O), opens new tab uses Chalk to figure out where to put solar panels on a roof. “The old school model would be for a company to…

Entrepreneur Vrushabhraj Tanawade announces the launch of MountBay Energy LLC, a direct response to meeting the exploding energy demand with sustainable, utility-scale infrastructure across the United States. MountBay Energy LLC MountBay isn’t just another clean energy company. It’s a strategic response to a growing energy crisis that could threaten both technological progress and environmental sustainability. With AI adoption accelerating across healthcare, finance, education, and nearly every sector of American life and beyond, the world faces a mounting risk: not having the clean, reliable energy infrastructure required to fuel this digital transformation. “Every AI interaction, from a single AI prompt to the training…

Microsoft announced on Wednesday that it has started rolling out the beta version of its Copilot for Gaming experience. Beta testers can access the experience in the Xbox app on iOS and Android. The early version of the experience allows the assistant to answer questions about the games you’re interested in, give you links to more information, and answer questions based on your account, play history, achievements, and more. For example, you could ask something like: “What’s my gamer score and can you give me some tips to raise it?” or “I love horror movies. Any suggestions for what game I should…

AMD has acquired Enosemi, a startup designing custom materials to support silicon photonics product development. The terms of the deal, announced Wednesday, weren’t disclosed. Silicon photonics uses light — photons — to transmit data, offering a faster and more efficient alternative to traditional electrical communication. AMD and other chipmakers have shown an increasing interest in the tech. Late last year, AMD reportedly teamed up with several Taiwan startups for a silicon photonics R&D collaboration. AMD says that its acquisition of Enosemi will “accelerate [its] co-packaged optics innovation for AI systems.” “As AI models grow larger and more complex, the need for faster, more efficient…

Google is celebrating 10 years of Google Photos with the launch of a redesigned editor. The redesign adds new AI features, Reimagine and Auto Frame, which were previously only available on Pixel devices, bringing the tools into the hands of more users. The Reimagine feature uses generative AI to transform objects and backgrounds in photos with text prompts. For example, you could ask to replace a gloomy sky in one of your photos with “clear blue skies.” The Auto Frame feature suggests different ways to frame a photo, whether it’s by cropping, widening, or using generative AI to fill in the…

As Nvidia reports earnings for the first quarter of its fiscal year 2026, which closed on April 28, the company has released numbers on how the Trump administration’s recent chip export restrictions are affecting business. Nvidia reported that it incurred a $4.5 billion charge in Q1 due to licensing requirements impacting its ability to sell its H20 AI chip to companies in China. The chipmaker also reported that it was unable to ship an additional $2.5 billion of H20 revenue in the quarter due to the restrictions. When the U.S. licensing requirement was originally announced in April, the company said that it expected…

Huawei’s AI capabilities have made a breakthrough in the form of the company’s Supernode 384 architecture, marking an important moment in the global processor wars amid US-China tech tensions. The Chinese tech giant’s latest innovation emerged from last Friday’s Kunpeng Ascend Developer Conference in Shenzhen, where company executives demonstrated how the computing framework challenges Nvidia’s long-standing market dominance directly, as the company continues to operate under severe US-led trade restrictions. Architectural innovation born from necessity Zhang Dixuan, president of Huawei’s Ascend computing business, articulated the fundamental problem driving the innovation during his conference keynote: “As the scale of parallel processing grows, cross-machine…

Telegram has forged a deal with Elon Musk’s xAI to weave Grok AI into the fabric of the encrypted messaging platform. This isn’t just a friendly collaboration; xAI is putting serious money on the table – a cool $300 million, a mix of hard cash and equity. And for Telegram, they’ll pocket 50% of any subscription money Grok pulls in through their app. This leap into the world of AI couldn’t come at a more interesting time for Telegram. While CEO Pavel Durov is wrestling with some pretty serious legal headaches, and governments in certain corners of the globe are giving the platform…

Salesforce has agreed to acquire data management firm Informatica in a deal valued at around $8 billion. This includes equity value, minus Salesforce’s existing investment in the company. Informatica shareholders will receive $25 in cash per share. The move aims to help Salesforce build a stronger foundation for AI tools that can act on their own, often called agentic AI. Informatica’s software is known for helping businesses collect, manage, and organise large sets of data – the kind of support Salesforce needs to improve its AI systems’ work in different business applications. The deal brings together tools for organising and cleaning…

C3.ai, Inc. (NYSE: AI), a leader in enterprise AI software, reported record financial results for its fiscal fourth quarter and full fiscal year ending April 30, 2025. The company achieved significant revenue growth and expanded its strategic partnerships, reinforcing its position in the enterprise AI market.Business Wire+9Business Wire+9Business Wire+9Barron’s 📊 Fiscal Q4 2025 Highlights 📈 Full Fiscal Year 2025 Summary 🤝 Strategic Partnerships & Industry Expansion C3 AI continues to diversify its industry presence, generating revenue across 19 sectors. Notably, non–Oil & Gas revenue accelerated by 48% year-over-year.Business Wire 💬 Leadership Perspective CEO Thomas M. Siebel remarked, “This was a…

The days of writing SEO-friendly copy that would be enough to bring customers to a brand’s website will soon be a thing of the past, as AI chatbots increasingly take over search queries. According to David Hunter, CEO of SEO analytics company Local Falcon, Google’s new AI Overviews and AI Mode are transforming the rules of search. “It is fundamentally changing the search engine optimization (SEO) universe,” Hunter said in an interview with PYMNTS. “It’s not just a little algorithm update. … The concept of being visible in a search engine is changing dramatically.” Previously, businesses could optimize content for Google’s bots…

TSMC announced today it will open a new chip design center in Munich by the third quarter of this year, something viewed as European Union victory as it pursues self-reliance in chip production. According to an article on the MarketScreener (with Reuters) site, “This initiative is part of TSMC’s broader strategy to establish a long-term presence on the continent. In partnership with Infineon, NXP, and Bosch, the group is also building a semiconductor manufacturing plant in Dresden, Germany. Called the European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC), this joint venture aims to strengthen Europe’s technological autonomy and support key industries, including automotive and embedded systems.” And a…

Microsoft today announced the opening of its first cloud region in Indonesia, called Indonesia Central. This is an AI-ready hyperscale cloud infrastructure that offers in-country data residency, high levels of security, and lower latency. The announcement was made during Microsoft’s AI Tour Jakarta, where over 800 decision-makers from leading organizations gathered. Joining the occasion were Coordinating Minister of Infrastructure and Regional Development, Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono, Minister of Communications & Digital Affairs (Komdigi), Meutya Hafid, Minister of Creative Economy, Teuku Rifky, as well as representatives from the Ministry of Investment & Downstreaming (BKPM), and the Coordinating Ministry of Human Development & Culture,…

SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced that Team Liquid, one of the most decorated organizations in competitive gaming, is tapping into Joule Agents for instant access to game statistics, player performance trends and strategic comparisons using natural language. Unlike traditional AI models, AI agents are designed to perceive their environment, set goals and take actions autonomously to achieve those objectives. Team Liquid runs its data analysis through its “Next Level Esports Center” dashboard, built entirely on SAP Business Technology Platform. Team Liquid’s analysts rely on the dashboard to equip coaches and players with insights about upcoming opponents, managing high-pressure situations under…

New, Enhanced Capabilities Enable Accelerated Drug Discovery, Enhanced Biomedical Literature Review, and Improved Hallucination Detection in LLMs John Snow Labs, the AI for healthcare company, today announced the acquisition of WiseCube, a pioneer in biomedical knowledge graphs and AI-powered literature analysis. The acquisition strengthens the company’s mission to deliver responsible, accurate, and explainable healthcare AI solutions enhanced by WiseCube’s billion-scale knowledge platform. WiseCube unifies and analyzes disjointed biomedical datasets to provide fast, literature-backed answers to complex medical questions. Its integration of cutting-edge biomedical ontologies and documents ensures access to the most current and comprehensive medical knowledge. This capability has proven indispensable,…

Artificial intelligence logistics software startup Pallet raised $27 million in a Series B funding round led by General Catalyst, according to a Tuesday (May 27) press release. Logistics is an $11 trillion global industry, but it runs on legacy software and manual processes, General Catalyst said in a company blog post Tuesday. The industry is responsible for moving more than 20 billion tons of freight annually in the United States alone. “[As] global supply chain pressures continue to evolve, the urgency to modernize logistics infrastructure has never been greater,” the post said. Pallet’s flagship AI platform, CoPallet, tackles this problem by automating manual back-office operations specifically for logistics providers such as order entry, quoting and portal updates, according to the post. It…

From OpenAI’s 4o to Stable Diffusion, AI foundation models that create realistic images from a text prompt are now plentiful. In contrast, foundation models capable of generating full, coherent 3D online environments from a text prompt are only just emerging. Still, it’s only a question of when, not if, these models will become readily available. Now one of Europe’s most prominent AI 3D model researchers, Matthias Niessner, has taken an entrepreneurial leave of absence from his visual computing & AI lab at the Technical University of Munich to found a startup working in the area: SpAItial. Formerly a co-founder at Synthesia, the realistic…