Author: Art Ryan

Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, has long been the holy grail of innovation — a synthetic intelligence with all the capabilities of a human mind or more. Recent advances in AI have many predicting we could be closer to achieving it than we’re ready for. It’s a reality that preoccupied the late diplomat Henry Kissinger before he died last year at 100 years old. He collaborated with Eric Schmidt, formerly at Google, and Craig Mundie, formerly at Microsoft, on the new book “Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit.” Mundie joined Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to discuss what a…

SoftBank Group Corp.’s founder Masayoshi Son is taking the stage in Tokyo on Monday with Open AI chief Sam Altman, part of a global push to spur investment in AI-supporting infrastructure. In an event titled “Transforming Business through AI,” the two will be joined by Arm Holdings Plc Chief Executive Officer Rene Haas and Junichi Miyakawa, the head of SoftBank’s telecom arm. The press release announcing the event did not provide further details, but the Nikkei earlier said that the two will seek the support of hundreds of Japanese companies in a campaign to build data centers, power plants and…

The tool, called Deep Research, arrives days after OpenAI released another one, which shops for groceries and books restaurant reservations. A week ago, OpenAI released a tool that can go online to shop for groceries or book a restaurant reservation. Now it is offering A.I. technology that can gather information from across the internet and synthesize it in concise reports. OpenAI unveiled the new tool, called Deep Research, with a demonstration on YouTube on Sunday, days after showing the technology to lawmakers, policymakers and other officials in Washington. “It can do complex research tasks that might take a person anywhere from…

UK will make it a crime to possess, create or distribute artificial intelliegence (AI) tools that generate sexual content targeting children. The United Kingdom is set to become the first country to introduce laws against artificial intelligence tools used to generate sexualised images of children, in an attempt to curb a phenomenon that Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said was increasing. The government announced on Saturday that it would make it illegal to possess, create or distribute AI tools that generate abusive images, making it a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. AI tools are being used to…

Microsoft is making access to OpenAI’s o1 model free via Copilot’s new ‘Think Deeper’ toggle. Microsoft is taking an aggressive step towards lowering the price of top-tier AI reasoning, placing what appears to be unlimited access to OpenAI’s o1 model directly within Copilot’s new “Think Deeper” feature. What’s important here is the word “free”: OpenAI released the o1 model in December, and company chief executive Sam Altman promised that it would be the most powerful model available. But it came with a catch: two subscriptions. OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro charges a whopping $200/mo for unlimited access to the model. The company’s…

“AI has been at the critical forefront of work everywhere,” Matt Alverson, a partner at IA Collaborative and adjunct instructor at the Mendoza College of Business, said. On Friday morning, Alverson lectured to students, faculty and staff at the Mendoza College of Business as part of the speaker series Ten Years Hence. The lecture series invites speakers from diverse fields to explore emerging trends in business and society over the next decade. Alverson’s lecture focused on collaborative intelligence that is at the forefront of enterprise innovation. According to Alverson, who has over 20 years of experience at IA Collaborative, said IA Collaborative works…

Even before the political crisis began, concerns were raised that South Korea’s policy plans and strategies might fall far short of achieving its ambitious goal of becoming a global leader in AI innovation. SEOUL – Time passes regardless of what we do — whether we study, work, pause for rest or sleep after a long day of hard work. Most of us were enjoying an extended Lunar New Year holiday in South Korea when the world was rocked by the debut of a groundbreaking generative AI model developed by a Chinese startup. Global capital markets experienced significant turbulence following the introduction…

As of Sunday in the European Union, the bloc’s regulators can ban the use of AI systems they deem to pose “unacceptable risk” or harm. February 2 is the first compliance deadline for the EU’s AI Act, the comprehensive AI regulatory framework that the European Parliament finally approved last March after years of development. The act officially went into force August 1; what’s now following is the first of the compliance deadlines. The specifics are set out in Article 5, but broadly, the Act is designed to cover a myriad of use cases where AI might appear and interact with individuals, from…

Key Points Intel (INTC -2.90%) has largely failed to tap into soaring demand for artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators. The company’s acquisition of AI chip start-up Habana Labs back in 2019, three years before the AI boom kicked off in earnest, certainly seemed like a prescient move. Habana’s Gaudi family of AI accelerators, which were tailor-made for AI workloads compared to more general-purpose GPUs, had all the makings of a big winner. Intel is now on the third generation of its Gaudi AI chips, and progress has been excruciatingly slow. The company set a goal of selling $500 million worth of AI accelerators last…

The market chaos that battered the most dominant tech stocks on Monday may have been a welcome event for other corners of the market. Although China’s DeepSeek AI app initially crushed investor confidence in US mega-caps, with traders worried about a supposedly cheaper chatbot that can compete with Silicon Valley rivals, some sectors might consider it a net positive. That may have been hard to fathom at the start of last week. The tool is said to cost a fraction of what US AI hyperscalers have spent, challenging the idea that US firms need to pour massive investments into the technology and…

The emergence of Chinese AI app DeepSeek has shocked financial markets, and prompted US President Donald Trump to describe it as “a wake-up call” for the US tech industry. DeepSeek’s claim that its R1 artificial intelligence (AI) model was made at a fraction of the cost of its rivals has raised questions about the future about of the whole industry, and caused some the world’s biggest companies to sink in value. DeepSeek has become the most downloaded free app in the US just a week after it was launched. So how does it compare to its much more established and apparently much more…

James Florence, 36, agreed to plead guilty after using victim’s information to guide chatbots in impersonation A man from Massachusetts has agreed to plead guilty to a seven-year cyberstalking campaign that included using artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots to impersonate a university professor and invite men online to her home address for sex. James Florence, 36, used platforms such as CrushOn.ai and JanitorAI, which allow users to design their own chatbots and direct them how to respond to other users during chats, including in sexually suggestive and explicit ways, according to court documents seen by the Guardian. The victim’s identity has been kept confidential by law enforcement…

Tumbling stock market values and wild claims have accompanied the release of a new AI chatbot by a small Chinese company. What makes it so different? The release of China’s new DeepSeek AI-powered chatbot app has rocked the technology industry. It quickly overtook OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the most-downloaded free iOS app in the US, and caused chip-making company Nvidia to lose almost $600bn (£483bn) of its market value in one day – a new US stock market record. The reason behind this tumult? The “large language model” (LLM) that powers the app has reasoning capabilities that are comparable to US models such as…

Nvidia confirmed that its CEO Jensen Huang met with U.S. President Donald Trump to discuss U.S. technology and AI leadership. “We appreciated the opportunity to meet with President Trump and discuss semiconductors and AI policy. Jensen and the president discussed the importance of strengthening U.S. technology and AI leadership,” said an Nvidia spokesperson. The meeting took place today and it coincidentally is happening a day before Trump promised to impose a bunch of tariffs on products including semiconductor chips. Earlier this week, Trump called for tariffs on foreign computer chips, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals from places like Taiwan in the near future.…

The AI narrative has reached a critical inflection point. The DeepSeek breakthrough — achieving state-of-the-art performance without relying on the most advanced chips — proves what many at NeurIPS in December had already declared: AI’s future isn’t about throwing more compute at problems — it’s about reimagining how these systems work with humans and our environment. As a Stanford-educated computer scientist who’s witnessed both the promise and perils of AI development, I see this moment as even more transformative than the debut of ChatGPT. We’re entering what some call a “reasoning renaissance.” OpenAI’s o1, DeepSeek’s R1, and others are moving past brute-force scaling…

DeepSeek is making waves in the AI world, grabbing headlines and taking over the app stores, even beating out OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But what’s really happening behind the hype? Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Max Zeff is talking about it all with Ion Stoica, Professor of Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley and the cofounder and executive chairman of software startup Databricks. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Equity will be back next week, so don’t miss it! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Published by:Theresa Loconsolo and Maxwell Zeff

Thanks to the advent of cloud computing and distributed digital infrastructure, the one-person micro-enterprise is far from a novel concept. Cheap on-demand compute, remote collaboration, payment processing APIs, social media, and e-commerce marketplaces have all made it easier to “go it alone” as an entrepreneur. But what about scaling that one-person business into something meatier — an enterprise of unicorn proportions? Historically, this would have been an unfathomably tough task, due to the skills and resources required, not only to scale a product but also to grow and maintain a sufficiently bountiful customer base. But AI agents could unshackle the would-be solo-preneurs of the world. AI…

OpenAI used the subreddit, r/ChangeMyView, to create a test for measuring the persuasive abilities of its AI reasoning models. The company revealed this in a system card — a document outlining how an AI system works — that was released along with its new “reasoning” model, o3-mini, on Friday. Millions of Reddit users are members of r/ChangeMyView, where they post hot takes hoping to learn about other points of view on a subject. In response to those hot takes, other users reply with persuasive arguments explaining why the original poster is wrong. The subreddit is one of many Reddit forums that’s basically…

To cap off a day of product releases, OpenAI researchers, engineers, and executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, answered questions in a wide-ranging Reddit AMA on Friday. OpenAI finds itself in a bit of a precarious position. It’s battling the perception that it’s ceding ground in the AI race to Chinese companies like DeepSeek, which OpenAI alleges might’ve stolen its IP. The ChatGPT maker has been trying to shore up its relationship with Washington and simultaneously pursue an ambitious data center project, while reportedly laying groundwork for one of the largest financing rounds in history. Altman admitted that DeepSeek has lessened OpenAI’s lead in AI, and he said he…

Andreessen Horowitz general partner and Mistral board member Anjney “Anj” Midha first spied DeepSeek’s jaw-dropping performance six months ago, he tells TechCrunch. That’s when DeepSeek introduced Coder V2, which rivaled OpenAI’s GPT4-Turbo for coding-specific tasks, according to a paper it released last year. This put DeepSeek on a path to release improved models every couple of months right through R1, he said. R1 is its new open source reasoning model that has upended the tech industry for offering industry standard performance at a fraction of the cost. Despite the sell-off of Nvidia’s stock, Midha says R1 doesn’t mean that AI foundational models will stop spending billions to…