Author: Art Ryan

Amazon wants companies to build public-facing chatbots using its Q Business assistant. On Wednesday, the company announced that Q Business, its AWS-hosted AI assistant that can answer questions, provide summaries, and complete tasks, now supports anonymous user access. This effectively means that AWS users can now create Q Business chatbots for websites, support portals, and more to help their customers search documentation, complete self-service requests, and so on. “This capability allows guest users to use Amazon Q Business generative AI capabilities to quickly find product information, get technical answers, navigate documentation, and troubleshoot issues,” explains Amazon in a blog post. “With this…

JetBrains, the company behind a range of popular app development tools, has released its first “open” AI model for coding. On Wednesday, JetBrains made Mellum, a code-generating model the company released for its various software development suites last year, openly available on the AI dev platform Hugging Face. Mellum, trained on more than 4 trillion tokens, weighs in at 4 billion parameters and is designed specifically for code completion (i.e., completing code snippets based on the surrounding context). Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, while tokens are the raw bits of data that a model processes. A million tokens…

Anthropic agrees with the U.S. government that implementing robust export controls on domestically made AI chips will help the U.S. compete in the AI race against China. But the company is suggesting a few tweaks to the proposed restrictions. Anthropic released a blog post on Wednesday stating that the company “strongly supports” the U.S. Department of Commerce’s “Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion” ahead of the interim rule’s implementation date on May 15. The framework was proposed by outgoing president Joe Biden in January and is meant to bolster AI chip export controls for the purposes of national security and to ensure the U.S.’…

The nonprofit behind Wikipedia on Wednesday revealed its new AI strategy for the next three years — and it’s not replacing the Wikipedia community of editors and volunteers with artificial intelligence, thankfully. Instead, the Wikimedia Foundation says it will use AI to build new features that “remove technical barriers,” allowing editors, moderators, and patrollers tools that allow them to accomplish what they need to do, without worrying about how to “technically achieve it.” Amid concerns that AI could eventually impact jobs held by people today, especially in terms of content creation, Wikipedia indicates that it intends to use AI as a tool that…

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has quietly updated Prover, its AI model that’s designed to solve math-related proofs and theorems. According to South China Morning Post, DeepSeek uploaded the latest version of Prover, V2, and a distilled variant to AI dev platform Hugging Face late on Wednesday. It appears to be built on top of the startup’s V3 model, which has 671 billion parameters and adopts a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, while MoE breaks down tasks into subtasks and delegates them to smaller, specialized “expert” components. DeepSeek last updated Prover in August, describing it at the time as…

The crush of traffic going into training and running AI has quickly turned into a major cost and resource headache for organizations. Today, Cast AI, a startup building tools to ease and optimize workloads for AI and other tasks with automation, is raising a major round of funding on the back of strong growth and partnerships with major players in the space. The company has raised a $108 million Series C that it will be using for more R&D and to expand its business in core markets like the U.S. and elsewhere. Sources familiar with the deal told TechCrunch that the…

OpenAI has published a postmortem on the recent sycophancy issues with the default AI model powering ChatGPT, GPT-4o — issues that forced the company to roll back an update to the model released last week. Over the weekend, following the GPT-4o model update, users on social media noted that ChatGPT began responding in an overly validating and agreeable way. It quickly became a meme. Users posted screenshots of ChatGPT applauding all sorts of problematic, dangerous decisions and ideas. In a post on X on Sunday, CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the problem and said that OpenAI would work on fixes “ASAP.” Two days later, Altman announced the GPT-4o update was being rolled back and that…

During a fireside chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Meta’s LlamaCon conference on Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 20% to 30% of code inside the company’s repositories was “written by software” — meaning AI. Nadella gave the figure after Zuckerberg asked roughly how much of Microsoft’s code is AI generated today. The Microsoft CEO said the company was seeing mixed results in AI-generated code across different languages, with more progress in Python and less in C++. Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott previously said he expects 95% of all code to be AI generated by 2030. When Nadella threw the question…

The future of commerce is on display at the Visa Global Product Drop with powerful AI-enabled advancements allowing consumers to find and buy with AI plus the introduction of new strategic partnerships and product innovations. “As new ways to pay emerge, they need to run on a network that is always on – that is safe, secure, scalable and relentlessly innovating,” said Visa CEO Ryan McInerney. “We are taking the power of our network and our decades-long expertise to bring new products and solutions that will transform commerce and bring trust and security to AI-enabled payments.” Product Roadmap Visa kicked…

Candy AI, a cutting-edge artificial intelligence platform, is revolutionizing the way people connect by offering hyper-personalized AI companions and AI girlfriend apps designed to provide emotional support, engaging conversations, and lifelike companionship. In an age where digital connection is more important than ever, Candy AI stands at the forefront of the virtual companionship movement. With its state-of-the-art conversational models and dynamic personality engine, users can create and interact with AI characters that adapt and evolve based on individual preferences and emotional needs. Next-Level Customization and Realism Candy AI empowers users to design their ideal AI partner—choosing everything from visual appearance…

LOS ANGELES — Conservative activist Robby Starbuck has filed a defamation lawsuit against Meta alleging that the social media giant’s artificial intelligence chatbot spread false statements about him, including that he participated in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Starbuck, known for targeting corporate DEI programs, said he discovered the claims made by Meta’s AI in August 2024, when he was going after “woke DEI” policies at motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson. “One dealership was unhappy with me and they posted a screenshot from Meta’s AI in an effort to attack me,” he said in a post on X.…

Shares in artificial intelligence and cloud-computing-related companies were rising sharply in late trade on Wednesday after Meta Platforms and Microsoft results beat Wall Street expectations. The reports appeared to boost demand for shares in AI chip leader Nvidia Corp, which rose 2.8 per cent in late trading, and chip rival Advanced Micro Devices, which rose 2 per cent. Shares in Amazon.com, which competes with Microsoft in cloud-computing and is due to report results on May 1, were up 3 per cent with strong after-the-bell volume. Google parent Alphabet shares were up more than 1 per cent after the reports. Shares…

Five9 (Nasdaq: FIVN), provider of the Intelligent CX Platform, today announced Five9 Fusion for Salesforce, an offering that combines Five9’s real-time system of action with Salesforce’s #1 AI CRM, to create a fully integrated, AI-elevated solution for customer experience. With a new product and services bundle available today, this enhanced integration helps businesses deliver better customer experience, hyper-personalized self-service, and achieve smarter results with a future-ready foundation to drive meaningful business outcomes for our joint customers. The launch of Five9 Fusion for Salesforce builds on a foundation of deep collaboration and co-development between the two companies. With Five9 Fusion for…

StarTree on Wednesday unveiled new AI-powered capabilities, including support for Model Context Protocol, aimed at better enabling users to get real-time insights from AI applications. Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard developed by AI startup Anthropic. It sets guidelines for how large language models (LLMs) interact with databases and other data sources and is designed to help AI agents perform real-world actions. StarTree will launch support for MCP in June, enabling LLMs such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini to securely access data in StarTree so that agentic AI applications developed with LLMs possess the contextual awareness to meet an…

A new initiative to expand cloud and AI infrastructure across Europe has been announced by Microsoft. Earlier today, the company revealed plans to increase its European data center capacity by 40% in the next two years. With operations expanding in 16 countries, Microsoft aims to double its footprint between 2023 and 2027. This move forms the foundation of five new digital pledges to Europe, all designed to reinforce the region’s digital sovereignty and cybersecurity while stimulating innovation and economic opportunity. Local Control, Legal Safeguards and Open AI Microsoft’s strategy includes the introduction of sovereign and public cloud models tailored to…

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – April 30, 2025 — As Day Three of Web Summit Rio 2025 unfolds at the buzzing Riocentro convention center, the focus sharpens on critical conversations shaping the future of global tech. From cybersecurity to workplace evolution and gender equity in innovation, today’s agenda is packed with purpose-driven dialogue and transformative insights. Morning Momentum: The New Face of Cybersecurity The day kicked off with powerful sessions on digital security in the AI era, as experts tackled challenges from data breaches to the rise of deepfakes. Tech leaders and CISOs discussed how AI is both a weapon…

AI cheating startup Cluely went viral last week with bold claims that its hidden in-browser window is “undetectable” and can be used to “cheat on everything” from job interviews to exams. But some startups are claiming they can catch Cluely’s users. And Cluely says it’s ready to develop hardware products like smart glasses, or even brain chips, that bypass anti-cheating software altogether. San Francisco startup Validia launched a free product called ‘Truely’ last week in direct response to Cluely. The software triggers an alarm if it detects someone using Cluely, Validia says. Rhode Island-based startup Proctaroo also claims its platform can detect Cluely users. “When a…

In mid-March, Meta said that its “open” AI model family, Llama, hit 1 billion downloads, up from 650 million downloads as of early December 2024. On Tuesday at its inaugural LlamaCon developer conference, Meta revealed that figure has reached 1.2 billion downloads. “We have thousands of developers contributing tens of thousands of derivative models being downloaded hundreds of thousands of times a month,” said Meta chief product officer Chris Cox onstage during a keynote. Meanwhile, Meta AI, Meta’s AI assistant powered by Llama models, has reached around a billion users, Cox added. Meta’s Llama ecosystem is growing at a fast clip indeed,…

Google’s AI-based note-taking and research assistant NotebookLM is making its Audio Overviews feature available in 76 new languages, the company announced on Tuesday. Audio Overviews launched last year to give users the ability to generate a podcast with AI virtual hosts based on documents they have shared with NotebookLM, such as course readings or legal briefs. The idea behind the feature is to give users another way to digest and comprehend the information in the documents they have uploaded to the app. With this expansion, more people can use Audio Overviews in their preferred language. Google notes that up until now, Audio…

Google on Tuesday is releasing three new AI experiments aimed at helping people learn to speak a new language in a more personalized way. While the experiments are still in the early stages, it’s possible that the company is looking to take on Duolingo with the help of Gemini, Google’s multimodal large language model. The first experiment helps you quickly learn specific phrases you need in the moment, while the second experiment helps you sound less formal and more like a local. The third experiment allows you to use your camera to learn new words based on your surroundings. Google…