Author: Art Ryan

Peloton is repositioning itself as a holistic wellness brand, expanding beyond its origins in connected fitness as part of a broader turnaround strategy to return to growth and sustainable profitability. “We are coming to understand better the importance of strength, stress management, sleep and nutrition to living our best lives,” CEO Peter Stern said Thursday (Aug. 7) during the company’s Q4 earnings call. “This creates the opportunity — no, more than that, the mandate — for Peloton to evolve from being a cardio fitness partner to become the world’s most trusted wellness partner,” said Stern, a former Apple Fitness+ executive who joined the company…

Cybersecurity AI company Vectra AI today announced Vectra AI MCP Server, designed to bring natural language access to the Vectra AI Platform through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Currently available as early access to all customers, with more releases to come soon, this tool allows security teams to engage with the Vectra AI Platform through AI assistants like Claude Desktop, Cursor, and others – turning complex threat investigations into intuitive conversations. Security operations teams are embracing AI to work faster and more efficiently, but accessing deep security insights remains a technical and time-consuming process. Analysts often struggle with alert fatigue, fragmented…

Alphabet’s Google on Wednesday announced a three-year, $1 billion commitment to provide artificial intelligence training and tools to U.S. higher education institutions and nonprofits. More than 100 universities have signed on to the initiative so far, including some of the nation’s largest public university systems such as Texas A&M and the University of North Carolina. Participating schools may receive cash funding and resources, such as cloud computing credits towards AI training for students as well as research on AI-related topics. The billion-dollar figure also includes the value of paid AI tools, such as an advanced version of the Gemini chatbot, which…

I owned a lot of Alexa-powered devices in my former home: There were Amazon Echos in most rooms, including an older Echo Plus in the living room, a smattering of Dots, a Spot in a bedroom, and an Echo Show in the kitchen. A Fire TV ran in the bedroom. And, in a drawer, a rarely used Fire HD tablet sat collecting dust. With the total loss of the home due to a March 2024 house fire, there also came a new opportunity: We could now make a fresh start to create a more modernized smart home after rebuilding our house.…

Numerous studies indicate that the shift to AI search features and the use of AI chatbots are killing traffic to publishers’ sites. But Google on Wednesday denied that’s the case, at least in aggregate. Instead, the search giant says that total organic click volume from its search engine to websites has been “relatively stable” year-over-year and that average click quality has slightly increased. “This data is in contrast to third-party reports that inaccurately suggest dramatic declines in aggregate traffic — often based on flawed methodologies, isolated examples, or traffic changes that occurred prior to the roll out of AI features in Search,” writes Google…

Microsoft is making OpenAI’s new free and open GPT model, gpt-oss-20b, available to Windows 11 users via Windows AI Foundry, the tech giant’s platform that lets users tap AI features, APIs, and popular open source models on their computers. The company said in a blog post that gpt‑oss-20b is “tool-savvy and lightweight,” adding: “Optimized for agentic tasks like code execution and tool use, it runs efficiently on a range of Windows hardware, with support for more devices coming soon. It’s perfect for building autonomous assistants or embedding AI into real-world workflows, even in bandwidth-constrained environments.” Launched on Tuesday, OpenAI’s gpt-oss-20b can run on consumer…

A growing body of evidence suggests that over-reliance on AI could be eroding the human skills needed to use it effectively. Research warns this emerging human skills deficit threatens the successful adoption of AI and, with it, an opportunity for economic growth. It feels like not a day goes by without another proclamation about how AI will change our world. Every business leader I speak to is either investing in AI, planning to invest, or worried they are being left behind. We see the big numbers, like Accenture’s prediction that AI could inject £736 billion into the UK economy. The…

Generative AI is entering a more mature phase in 2025. Models are being refined for accuracy and efficiency, and enterprises are embedding them into everyday workflows. The focus is shifting from what these systems could do to how they can be applied reliably and at scale. What’s emerging is a clearer picture of what it takes to build generative AI that is not just powerful, but dependable. The new generation of LLMs Large language models are shedding their reputation as resource-hungry giants. The cost of generating a response from a model has dropped by a factor of 1,000 over the…

While other tech companies push out AI tools at full speed, Apple is taking its time. Its Apple Intelligence features – shown off at WWDC – won’t reach most users until at least 2025 or even 2026. Some see this as Apple falling behind, but the company’s track record suggests it prefers to launch only when products are ready. In contrast, competitors like Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google have already shipped AI features widely – often with bugs and unreliable results, and usually whether or not users ask for them. AI assistants today still struggle with accuracy, consistency, and usefulness in many…

Snap says changing consumer behavior and tariff-related pressures are hindering advertising demand. The social media company released earnings Tuesday (Aug. 5) revenues of $1.34 billion, up 9% year over year, while advertising growth slowed to just 4%. CEO Evan Spiegel acknowledged that multiple headwinds, including global economic factors, hurt the company’s performance. “There are a number of factors that impacted the quarter,” Spiegel said on the company’s earnings call, pointing to “macro challenges” and platform changes that drove down auction prices for some ad campaigns. Snap’s core ad business, which still accounts for most of its revenue, was affected by reduced demand from advertisers sensitive…

As airlines turn to artificial intelligence to set flight prices, Northeastern University experts are raising alarms about the risks to consumers.  AI flight pricing, they say, could reduce transparency, enable discrimination and give companies too much power over what individuals pay — potentially exploiting travelers without their knowledge. Delta Air Lines recently came under scrutiny after revealing plans to use AI to set ticket prices. Critics are asking whether such technology might lead to personalized pricing that targets consumers based on their data. “Part of the reason why this became prominent is that [this situation is] reflecting uncertainty around AI,…

MLCommons has announced results for its MLPerf Storage v2.0 benchmark suite, designed to measure the performance of storage systems for machine learning workloads in an architecture-neutral, representative, and reproducible manner. According to MLCommons, the results show that storage systems performance continues to improve rapidly, with tested systems serving roughly twice the number of accelerators than in the v1.0 benchmark round. To view the results visit the Storage benchmark results. The v2.0 benchmark adds new tests that replicate checkpointing for AI training systems. The benchmark results provide information for stakeholders who need to configure the frequency of checkpoints to optimize for high…

Wells Fargo is expanding its collaboration with Google Cloud to roll out artificial intelligence agents across its business, marking a major step in the bank’s adoption of generative AI. The move will equip the bank’s workforce — from customer service representatives and marketing teams to bankers and top executives — with AI agents and tools through the Google Agentspace platform, according to a Tuesday (Aug. 5) press release. Employees will be able to do things like find and summarize information faster, automate tasks and navigate complex policies and procedures. They can also create custom AI agents for specific purposes, per a Tuesday Google Cloud blog post. With this move, Wells Fargo will be one of the first major commercial…

Katia Shek is no stranger to the startup hustle. The rising senior in Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy has launched multiple ventures during her undergraduate years. But thanks to a new workshop series hosted by The Garage, her entrepreneurial pace has gone from fast to turbocharged. Catalyst: Building with AI is a groundbreaking series designed to empower students, researchers and innovators of all backgrounds to tap into the power of AI — no technical experience required. Through hands-on sessions, participants learn how to harness generative and no-code/low-code AI tools to prototype faster, market smarter and build more effectively. “AI is…

Supply chain platform Lyric says it has raised $43.5 million in new funding. The company’s Series B round, announced Tuesday (Aug. 5), will allow it to bolster development of its algorithm catalog, expand its agentic artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and add to its customer success team. “From the beginning, we recognized that no two supply chains are alike,” Ganesh Ramakrishna, Lyric’s co-founder and CEO, wrote on the company’s blog. “They’re shaped not just by industry, but by a company’s unique strategy, customer expectations, and operating model. That’s why we built Lyric to be composable from the start, allowing teams to configure solutions that align with…

Scientists from CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, have developed a world-first method to teach artificial intelligence (AI) how to write more accurate chest X-ray reports by giving it the same information doctors use in real life. Using more than 46,000 real-world patient cases from a leading US hospital dataset, the team trained a powerful multimodal language model to generate detailed radiology reports. The results showed 17 per cent better diagnostic insights and stronger alignment with expert radiologist reporting. With hospitals worldwide struggling to keep pace with demand amid chronic radiologist shortages, this research could pave the way for faster, safer,…

The AI audio-generation unicorn ElevenLabs announced a new model on Tuesday that allows users to generate music, which it claims is cleared for commercial use. This move marks ElevenLabs’ expansion beyond its main focus thus far in its three years of existence, which has been building AI audio tools. ElevenLabs is a leader among companies making text-to-speech AI products, and it has expanded into conversational bots and tools that translate speech into other languages. Alongside the launch, Eleven Labs shared samples of its AI-generated music. One features a synthetic voice rapping about how it “came up through the cracks with ambition in my pocket” and left its…

Key takeaways Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that OpenAI open weight models will be available via Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker AI for the first time, enabling customers to quickly and easily build generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications. OpenAI’s two new open weight foundation models—gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b—will put more powerful AI technologies into the hands of organizations and expand the impact of OpenAI’s leading technology by making it available to the millions of customers on AWS, the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. Running in Amazon Bedrock, the larger of the two open weight models is 3x more price-performant than the comparable Gemini model,…

OpenAI is taking on Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta by launching its own freely available artificial intelligence models. The ChatGPT developer has announced two open-weight large language models, which are free to download and can be customised by a user. Meta’s Llama models are available on a similar basis, and OpenAI’s move marks a departure from ChatGPT, which is based on a “closed” model that cannot be customised. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said the company was excited to add to a stack of freely available AI models “based on democratic values … and for wide benefit”. He added: “We’re excited to…

Daloopa, a company using artificial intelligence to enhance financial data, raised $18 million in a Series B funding round. The funding will help Daloopa build solutions to “improve the quality of fundamental data in the financial services industry,” and expand into new markets, particularly in Asia and Europe, according to a Monday (Aug. 5) press release. “We have spent many years leveraging AI to build a data infrastructure that delivers the most complete, accurate and rapid fundamental data to top-performing financial institutions across the buy-side and sell-side,” Daloopa CEO Thomas Li said in the release. “Before Daloopa, data discovery was painful, driven by…