Author: Art Ryan

SuperOps, an Indian startup offering tools to help IT service providers and internal system administrators at enterprises, has raised $25 million in a Series C round that values it at $200 million post-money, as it plans to double down on AI. For enterprises with remote teams, IT teams often struggle to provide real-time support — whether it is onboarding new employees or troubleshooting a problem. That’s what managed service providers (MSPs) are usually employed to help with, but sometimes even these third parties need help. That is where SuperOps comes in. The space is a crowded one, but SuperOps hopes…

DeepSeek and its R1 model aren’t wasting any time rewriting the rules of cybersecurity AI in real-time, with everyone from startups to enterprise providers piloting integrations to their new model this month. R1 was developed in China and is based on pure reinforcement learning (RL) without supervised fine-tuning. It is also open source, making it immediately attractive to nearly every cybersecurity startup that is all-in on open-source architecture, development and deployment. DeepSeek’s $6.5 million investment in the model is delivering performance that matches OpenAI’s o1-1217 in reasoning benchmarks while running on lower-tier Nvidia H800 GPUs. DeepSeek’s pricing sets a new standard with…

In the evolving landscape of AI, enterprises face the challenge of integrating modernsolutions with legacy systems that often lack the necessary application programming interfaces (APIs) for seamless integration. Approximately 66% of organizations continue to rely on legacy applications for core operations, leading to increased maintenance costs and security vulnerabilities. Tools like PigAPI have taken a different approach to this problem by enabling AI agents to interact directly with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) within virtual Windows desktops hosted in the cloud. This connects modern AI capabilities with legacy software, allowing for automation of tasks such as data entry and workflow management without the need for…

In an important and helpful update issued today, the U.S. Copyright Office — which administers copyright protections from the government to human-authored works such as films, TV shows, novels, art, music, even software — clarified that some forms of AI generated content can, in fact, receive copyright protection, provided that a human substantially contributed or changed the content in question. The clarity came in a new document, “Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability” (a PDF is embedded below), the second portion of a report that was initially released in July 2024. The report confirms that human creativity remains central to copyright law and…

Agentic AI isn’t just the latest AI hype cycle, it’s real technology that can make a big difference for enterprise workflows. That’s the big bet that ServiceNow has been making and is now doubling down on in a bid to bring higher return-on-investment to enterprise AI efforts. ServiceNow is in the business of enterprise workflow solutions, helping its over 8,000 global customers with all manner of processes ranging from human resources to IT service management (ITSM). Over the past two years, the company has been incrementally adding AI services through its Now Assist technology. In 2024 its first agentic AI services debuted, with a…

The AI boom has set off an explosion of data. AI models need massive datasets to train on, and the workloads they power — whether internal tools or customer-facing apps — are generating a flood of telemetry data: logs, metrics, traces and more. Even with observability tools that have been around for some time, organizations are often struggling to keep up, making it harder to detect and respond to incidents in time. That’s where a new player, Observo AI, comes in. The California-based startup, which has just been backed by Felicis and Lightspeed Venture Partners, has developed a platform that creates AI-native data…

Microsoft’s close partner and collaborator, OpenAI, might be suggesting that DeepSeek stole its IP and violated its terms of service. But Microsoft still wants DeepSeek’s shiny new models on its cloud platform. Microsoft today announced that R1, DeepSeek’s so-called reasoning model, is available on Azure AI Foundry service, Microsoft’s platform that brings together a number of AI services for enterprises under a single banner. In a blog post, Microsoft said that the version of R1 on Azure AI Foundry has “undergone rigorous red teaming and safety evaluations,” including “automated assessments of model behavior and extensive security reviews to mitigate potential risks.” In the near future,…

SoftBank is in talks to invest up to $25 billion in OpenAI as part of a broader partnership that could see the Japanese conglomerate spend more than $40 billion on AI initiatives with the Microsoft-backed startup, according to the Financial Times. The potential investment would make SoftBank OpenAI’s largest single backer, the report said, surpassing Microsoft, which first invested in the ChatGPT maker in 2019. The deal comes after both companies announced last week they would jointly invest $100 billion in Stargate, a U.S. data center project for OpenAI that could expand to $500 billion over four years. SoftBank plans to invest $15…

U.S. markets panicked on Monday over speculation that DeepSeek’s AI models would crush demand for GPUs, with Nvidia’s stock dropping almost 20%. But Meta isn’t backing off, with its CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledging that the tech giant would invest “very heavily” in AI — even “hundreds of billions of dollars” — over the long term, he said during Meta’s first-quarter earnings call on Wednesday. Zuckerberg already announced last week that Meta would spend more than $60 billion in 2025 alone on capital expenditures, primarily on data centers. In response to an analyst’s question about DeepSeek’s impact on Meta’s AI spending, Zuckerberg said spending heavily on…

If it wasn’t clear before, it’s definitely very clear now: Open source really does matter for AI. The success of DeepSeek-R1 has substantively proven there is a need and demand for open-source AI. But what exactly is open-source AI? For Meta and its Llama models, it means free access to use the model, with some conditions. DeepSeek is available under a permissive open-source license with the model code open and available for anyone to use. What neither approach enables, however, is full unconditional access to all the model code, including weights as well as training data. Without all that information, developers can still work…

The jury is still out on whether the Chinese AI upstart DeepSeek is a game changer or part of an elaborate plan by its hedge fund parent company to short Nvidia and other tech stocks. Whichever it might be (maybe both?), DeepSeek and its large language model have made some major waves. And now, it’s catching the eye of data protection watchdogs. Today the Irish Data Protection Commission confirmed to TechCrunch that it has sent a note to DeepSeek requesting details concerning how the data of citizens in Ireland is processed by the company. “The Data Protection Commission (DPC) has written to DeepSeek requesting…

Moving beyond talk: 93% of IT leaders will launch AI agents in the next two years, Salesforce says Everyone is talking about AI agents. But so far, a lot of that has just been, well, talk. That is set to change in 2025, according to Salesforce — AI agents are finally getting real. According to a new survey from its integration and automation software company Mulesoft, 93% of enterprise IT leaders have implemented or planned to implement AI agents in the next two years. Still, enterprises continue to struggle with delivery times — 29% of projects, for instance, missed that mark…

Adversaries are unleashing new tradecraft to exploit any weakness they can find in endpoints, relying on generative AI (gen AI) to create new attack weapons of choice. What’s troubling is how fast their arsenals are growing. That’s evident in the speed and scale of phishing campaigns, deepfake videos, and social engineering attacks. Over 67% of phishing attacks relied on AI last year, and 61% of security leaders are seeing phishing campaigns created at scale with AI chatbots attacking their organizations. Deloitte predicts deep fake-related losses will soar to $40 billion by 2027, growing at a 32% compound annual growth rate. Cybersecurity teams who have successfully battled endpoint…

AI chatbot DeepSeek has taken the world by storm, topping app store charts and sending Silicon Valley and Wall Street into meltdown. An offshoot of Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, DeepSeek’s cost-to-performance ratio makes for impressive reading compared to incumbents such as OpenAI. However, reports have increasingly documented some of the things the AI chatbot is unwilling to discuss, including thorny topics like the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, and Taiwan. A new report from the folks at PromptFoo, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup that helps companies find vulnerabilities in AI applications, has found that DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model refused to answer some 85% of 1,360 sensitive-topic “prompts,” and the model’s canned responses were…

Just a few hours after David Sacks claimed DeepSeek used OpenAI’s models to train its own models, Bloomberg Law reports that Microsoft is investigating DeepSeek’s use of OpenAI’s application programming interface (API). According to security researchers working for Microsoft, the Chinese company behind the R1 reasoning model may have exfiltrated a large amount of data using OpenAI’s API in the fall of 2024. Microsoft, which also happens to be OpenAI’s largest shareholder, notified OpenAI of the suspicious activity. While anyone can sign up and access OpenAI’s API, the company’s terms of service stipulate that you can’t use the output to train a new AI model. “You…

Key Points Nvidia lost close to $600 billion in market cap on Monday, the biggest drop for any company on a single day in U.S. history. The chipmaker’s stock price plummeted 17% to close at $118.58. It was Nvidia’s worst day on the market since March 16, 2020, which was early in the Covid pandemic. After Nvidia surpassed Apple last week to become the most valuable publicly traded company, the stock’s drop Monday led a 3.1% slide in the tech-heavy Nasdaq. The sell-off was sparked by concerns that Chinese artificial intelligence lab DeepSeek is presenting increased competition in the global AI battle. In late December, DeepSeek unveiled a free, open-source…

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek‘s Android app has taken the No. 1 spot on the Google Play Store, mere days after the company’s chatbot app clinched the top spot on the Apple App Store. According to app analytics firm AppFigures, since its launch in mid-January, the DeepSeek app has been downloaded over 1.2 million times on the Play Store and over 1.9 million times on the App Store across the world. Notably, the actual number of installs could be higher as DeepSeek has a label indicating over 5 million downloads on the Play Store. The rapid rise of DeepSeek in the charts…

SoftBank is negotiating a $500 million investment in Skild AI, a software company building a foundational model for robotics at a $4 billion valuation, Bloomberg and Financial Times reported. The two-year-old company raised its previous funding round of $300 million at a $1.5 billion valuation last July from investors including Jeff Bezos, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Coatue Management. The company’s AI model can be applied to various types of robots, Skild founders Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta told TechCrunch last July. They said the generalized model can be modified for a specific domain and use case. The intersection of robotics and…

The jury is still out on whether the Chinese AI upstart DeepSeek is a game changer or possibly part of an elaborate plan by its hedge fund parent company to short Nvidia and other tech stocks. Whichever it might be (maybe both?), DeepSeek and its large language model has made some major waves. Now, it’s catching the eye of data protection watchdogs. In what appears to be the first major move from one such watchdog since DeepSeek went positively viral in recent days, Euroconsumers, a coalition of consumer groups in Europe, has with the Italian Data Protection Authority filed a complaint related to how DeepSeek handles…

DeepSeek has gone viral. Chinese AI lab DeepSeek broke into the mainstream consciousness this week after its chatbot app rose to the top of the Apple App Store charts. DeepSeek’s AI models, which were trained using compute-efficient techniques, have led Wall Street analysts — and technologists — to question whether the U.S. can maintain its lead in the AI race and whether the demand for AI chips will sustain. But where did DeepSeek come from, and how did it rise to international fame so quickly? DeepSeek’s trader origins DeepSeek is backed by High-Flyer Capital Management, a Chinese quantitative hedge fund that uses AI to inform…