Author: Art Ryan

Oracle (ORCL.N), opens new tab said on Wednesday it would provide Singapore’s defense technology arm with “isolated” cloud computing and AI services, in the company’s first such deal in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asian governments are frequent targets of cyber espionage campaigns and are facing escalating supply chain attacks, according to security researchers. Under the deal, the U.S firm will provide Singapore’s armed forces and defense ministry with an “air-gapped” isolated cloud computing infrastructure – meaning that it will be cut off from the internet and connected instead to classified networks via encrypted devices. “We’re bringing our generative AI tools across the air…

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The European Union’s law enforcement agency cautioned Tuesday that artificial intelligence is turbocharging organized crime that is eroding the foundations of societies across the 27-nation bloc as it becomes intertwined with state-sponsored destabilization campaigns. The grim warning came at the launch of the latest edition of a report on organized crime published every four years by Europol that is compiled using data from police across the EU and will help shape law enforcement policy in the bloc in coming years. “Cybercrime is evolving into a digital arms race targeting governments, businesses and individuals. AI-driven attacks…

YouTube Music has expanded its AI-powered ‘Ask Music’ radio generator to iPhone and iPad users, reported 9To5Google. This update follows its initial rollout on Android in September. The feature allows users to create personalised radio stations based on mood, activities, or specific listening experiences. How the feature works Once the update is available, users will notice an ‘Ask for music’ section near the top of the Home tab, added the publication. This includes a carousel of ten suggested prompts, each generating a custom radio station with a single tap. Additionally, a text field labelled ‘Ask any way you like’ enables…

As Ripple continues to attract attention amid growing anticipation for decentralized finance (DeFi) adoption, XRPTurbo emerges as a fresh contender, raising over 100,000 in it’s ongoing presale and set to elevate XRP’s DeFi capabilities through a robust suite of AI-driven tools and decentralized applications (DApps). With the XRP Ledger (XRPL) widely praised for its unmatched speed, minimal transaction fees, and seamless scalability, the missing piece has long been an accessible and intuitive infrastructure for innovative DeFi and Web3 applications. XRPTurbo addresses this critical gap, offering developers and Web3 entrepreneurs a complete ecosystem to effortlessly launch, manage, and scale projects on XRPL, streamlining adoption…

Roblox, a popular gaming platform, has introduced its open-source Cube 3D AI model. This is the company’s first iteration of its foundational AI model capable of generating 3D objects. The company said that the beta version of Cube 3D mesh generation will be available this week in Roblox Studio and as an in-experience Lua API. “Cube will underpin many of the AI tools we’ll develop in the years to come, including highly complex scene-generation tools. It will ultimately be a multimodal model, trained on text, images, video, and other types of input—and will integrate with our existing AI creation tools,”…

A new set of guidelines have been launched to create trustworthy AI systems in healthcare. The first of its kind, the FUTURE-AI guideline provides recommendations covering the entire lifecycle of medical AI, from design, development and validation to regulation, deployment, and monitoring. In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant strides in healthcare, helping with tasks like disease diagnosis and predicting treatment outcomes. However, despite these advances, many healthcare professionals and patients are still hesitant to fully embrace AI technologies. This hesitation largely stems from concerns about trust, safety, and ethics. In particular, existing research has shown that AI tools in…

AI-driven multi-chain scalability enhances interoperability, transaction efficiency, and blockchain security. Seattle, Washington–(Newsfile Corp. – March 18, 2025) – On-Chain AI platform Atua AI (TUA) is reinforcing multi-chain AI capabilities with scalable blockchain integrations, enhancing interoperability, transaction efficiency, and decentralized enterprise automation. These upgrades allow businesses to seamlessly operate across multiple blockchains, optimizing scalability and performance in decentralized applications. Atua AI’s AI-driven multi-chain infrastructure integrates automated smart contract execution, cross-chain liquidity management, and real-time data intelligence, enabling enterprises to streamline multi-network transactions with greater accuracy and security. By leveraging AI-powered automation, businesses can enhance network compatibility, optimize resource allocation, and improve blockchain interoperability.…

Financial industry executives believe that companies have little choice but to use artificial intelligence (AI) to navigate today’s increasingly complex regulatory environment and faster product development cycles. “In 2025, there is pretty much no compliance without AI, because compliance became exponentially harder,” said Alexander Statnikov, co-founder and CEO of Crosswise Risk Management. “Think about all the change management that happens with regulations. Now, states will be stepping in. How you stay on top of it?” It’s a similar story with business product development cycles. “They got much faster. Rather than being a two-year cycle, it’s been a few weeks. Products are being…

Metro Bank has launched a partnership with Covecta, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform for financial services. The collaboration, announced Tuesday (March 18), will deploy Covecta’s third-party agentic AI solution across Metro’s corporate and commercial credit businesses. That solution, the British lender said in a news release, will carry tasks across the loan life cycle “from lead acquisition to servicing,” helping shrink what might otherwise take hours of manual effort into minutes. According to the release, Metro Bank and Covecta found that each completed task showed a 60-80% reduction in time, thus improving team efficiency, decision making and risk analysis. Andy Veares, managing director of…

Shares of Chinese tech giant Baidu were trading up 10.7% in Asia on Tuesday, as investors appeared to react positively to the release of two new AI models over the weekend. Baidu released two new artificial intelligence models on Sunday, including the latest version of its foundational “Ernie” model and a new reasoning model that it said rivaled DeepSeek’s R1 model. CNBC is not able to verify these claims. A reasoning model is a large language model designed to process complex problems in a similar way to humans, breaking prompts down into smaller pieces and considering multiple approaches before generating responses. According to Kai Wang,…

Intel’s incoming CEO Lip-Bu Tan has considered significant changes to its chip manufacturing methods and artificial intelligence strategies ahead of his return to the company on Tuesday, two people familiar with Tan’s thinking told Reuters, in a sweeping bid to revive the ailing technology giant. The new trajectory includes restructuring the company’s approach to AI and staff cuts to address what Tan views as a slow-moving and bloated middle management layer. Revamping the company’s manufacturing operations, which at one time only made chips for Intel but have been repurposed to make semiconductors for outside clients such as Nvidia, is one…

The role of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace is shifting from summarizing or creating content for single users to co-working and collaboration with multiple agents, according to the chief product officer of Microsoft Experiences and Devices. “In the early phase, we were just adding AI to existing applications,” said Microsoft’s Aparna Chennapragada, referencing tools like Microsoft Copilot, which can summarize meetings, draft emails and help with research. “The second phase is now about co-working and collaborating with AI,” she said. With improvements in deep reasoning capabilities, AI is moving from basic automation to becoming a “thought partner” that can analyze complex…

OpenAI is reportedly set to start testing a feature called ChatGPT Connectors that will let business customers connect Slack and Google Drive to ChatGPT. This feature will enable the chatbot to access files, presentations, spreadsheets and Slack conversations in those accounts to answer questions, TechCrunch reported Monday (March 17), citing a document it viewed. OpenAI did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment. ChatGPT Connectors will launch in beta for select ChatGPT Team subscribers, according to the TechCrunch report. The company plans to expand the feature to Microsoft SharePoint and Box in the future, the report said. It was reported in February that OpenAI’s enterprise business had 2 million paying users, around double the…

Zoom has added new artificial intelligence (AI) agentic skills to its AI Companion. These agentic skills have been deployed across the Zoom platform, the company said in a Monday (March 17) press release. “AI Companion is evolving from a personal assistant to being truly agentic, which signals a major leap forward in how AI can enhance productivity and collaboration at work,” Zoom Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim said in the release. AI Companion’s newest agentic skills include helping schedule meetings and find a time that works for everyone, generating clips and providing writing assistance for advanced document creation, according to the release. In Zoom Business Services, AI Companion now…

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has acquired Hotshot, a startup working on AI-powered video generation tools along the lines of OpenAI’s Sora. Aakash Sastry, Hotshot’s CEO and co-founder, announced the news in a post on X on Monday. “Over the past 2 years we’ve built 3 video foundation models as a small team — Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot,” Sastry wrote. “Training these models has given us a look into how global education, entertainment, communication, and productivity are about to change in the coming years. We’re excited to continue scaling these efforts on the largest cluster in the world, Colossus, as a…

US tech group Oracle on Monday said it plans to invest $5 billion in the UK over the next five years to meet “rapidly growing demand” for cloud services helping drive artificial intelligence. “The investment will expand Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s footprint in the UK and help the UK government deliver on its vision for AI innovation and adoption,” Oracle added in a statement. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pledged to ease red tape to attract billions of pounds of investment to help make Britain an “AI superpower”. Oracle’s founder, Larry Ellison, is a close ally of US President Donald Trump,…

Relativity, a global legal technology company, today announced its fourth annual list of AI Visionaries. The list recognizes and celebrates individuals who have led AI innovations in legal applications. “This past year marked a watershed moment in the legal industry where AI use became immeasurably more common, more advanced and, in truth, anything but ordinary,” said Phil Saunders, CEO of Relativity. “AI Visionaries have not only embraced this transformation but have also led the charge. With pride, we celebrate the 2025 AI Visionaries and their roles in bringing the legal industry deeper into the future.” Spotlighting leaders from Fortune 500 companies and…

The impact of reasoning AI models from DeepSeek and OpenAI is reportedly expected to shift the focus of artificial intelligence (AI) investments while also boosting AI spending overall. While the debut of the DeepSeek models led observers to question the need for investment in AI infrastructure, it also led to a greater focus on reasoning models, which require greater spending on inference, Bloomberg reported Monday (March 17). As a result, Bloomberg Intelligence now expects the investments in AI by hyperscale companies like Amazon, Meta and Microsoft to increase faster than it previously forecast, with more on that money being spent on running AI systems after they have been trained, rather than…

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the job market in ways not seen or heard before. Right from creating new roles in AI development, data analysis, and related fields, it’s also accelerating the automation of routine tasks and leading to job displacement in certain sectors, necessitating workforce adaptation and reskilling. According to McKinsey Research, corporate use cases of AI could result in an additional $4.4 trillion in productivity gains over the long run. While AI has enormous long-term potential, its immediate benefits are uncertain. Nevertheless, 92% of businesses intend to boost their investments in AI over the next three years. A good…

DRUID AI, a Romanian conversational AI company, is finalising a Series C funding round led by Cipio Partners, boosting its valuation and accelerating its expansion and innovation in AI-powered business communication solutions. According to a report from Recursive Media, Romanian conversational AI company DRUID AI is finalising a €46M funding round, increasing its valuation to approximately €276M. This Series C investment, led by Cipio Partners, follows the firm’s previous backing of Fintech OS, another Romanian-founded tech success. The deal is expected to close by the end of April. Transforming business communication with DRUID AI In today’s fast-paced business landscape, companies are seeking innovative ways to…