Author: Art Ryan

Applied AI research company Fundamental Research Labs (formerly known as Altera) announced today that it has raised $33 million in Series A funding led by Prosus with participation from Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison. The company has a curious structure, as it is working on multiple AI applications in different fields. When it raised its seed funding, Fundamental Research Labs was developing bots that could play Minecraft with you. Today, the company has a games team, a prosumer team building apps, a core research team, and a platform team. The startup’s founder, Dr. Robert Yang, a former faculty member at MIT,…

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has raised $8.3 billion at a $300 billion valuation, reports The New York Times. The deal is part of OpenAI’s broader strategy to secure $40 billion this year. The oversubscribed round came months ahead of schedule, per the NYT. OpenAI initially raised $2.5 billion from VC firms in March when it announced its intention to raise $40 billion in a round spearheaded by SoftBank. The AI giant had planned to take on an additional $7.5 billion by the end of the year, but beat itself to the punch as investors clamber to get onto its cap table amid impressive growth.…

Deep Cogito has released Cogito v2, a new family of open-source AI models that sharpen their own reasoning skills. Released under an open-source licence, the new Cogito v2 lineup includes four hybrid reasoning AI models: two mid-sized at 70B and 109B parameters, and two large-scale versions at 405B and 671B. The largest, a 671B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, is already being touted as one of the most powerful open-source AIs in the world. The company reports that it competes with the latest from DeepSeek and is closing the gap on proprietary systems like O3 and Claude 4 Opus. But the real story…

A Singapore-based deep tech startup called SixSense has developed an AI-powered platform that helps semiconductor manufacturers predict and detect potential chip defects on production lines in real time. It has raised $8.5 million in Series A bringing its total funding to around $12 million. The round was led by Peak XV’s Surge (formerly Sequoia India & SEA), with participation from Alpha Intelligence Capital, FEBE, and others. Founded in 2018 by engineers Akanksha Jagwani (CTO) and Avni Agarwal (CEO), SixSense aims to address a fundamental challenge in semiconductor manufacturing: converting raw production data, from defect images to equipment signals, into real-time insights that…

A leak suggests that OpenAI is about to launch a powerful new open-source AI model, potentially within hours. The evidence comes from a trail of digital breadcrumbs, eagerly pored over by developers. At the centre of it all are screenshots showing a series of model repositories with names like yofo-deepcurrent/gpt-oss-120b and yofo-wildflower/gpt-oss-20b. The repos have since been deleted, but the accounts feature OpenAI team members. That gpt-oss tag is the real smoking gun, seemingly a clear signpost for ‘GPT Open Source Software’. For a company that has increasingly guarded its top-tier models, this would be somewhat of a return to its roots.…

Shah Muhammad, who leads AI Innovation at the design and engineering firm Sweco, offers his insights into how AI is building the cities of the future. Ever been stuck in traffic and thought, “Surely, there’s a better way to design this city?” Or walked past a giant new building and wondered if it would be an energy-guzzling monster? For decades, building our towns and cities has been a slow, complicated process, often relying on educated guesswork. But what if we could give city planners superpowers? What if they could test-drive a dozen different futures before a single shovel hits the ground?…

GitHub Copilot, an AI coding tool offered by Microsoft-owned GitHub, has now reached more than 20 million users, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on the company’s earnings call Wednesday. A GitHub spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that this number represents “all-time users.” That means 5 million people have tried out GitHub Copilot for the first time in the last three months — the company reported in April the tool had reached 15 million users. Microsoft and GitHub don’t report how many of these 20 million people have continued to use the AI coding tool on a monthly or daily basis — though those metrics…

AI financial operations staartup Ramp announced its Series E-2, raising $500 million at a $22.5 billion valuation. With this round, New York-based Ramp has raised $1.9 billion in total equity financing. The company said it began generating cash flow earlier this year. ICONIQ led the round, with continued support from existing investors including all participants from the June 2025 Series E: Founders Fund, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, Coatue, Avenir Growth, Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, Sands Capital, 8VC, Lux Capital, Altimeter, Definition Capital, 137 Ventures, General Catalyst, and Stripes. New investors for this round include: Sutter Hill Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., GV (Google Ventures), Emerson…

Forget typing symptoms into a search bar. A growing number of Americans are now using artificial intelligence to manage their health and wellness. According to a nationwide survey of 2,000 U.S. adults, 35% report already relying on AI to understand and manage aspects of their well-being. From planning meals to getting fitness advice, AI is quickly moving from a futuristic concept to a daily health tool. How Americans use AI for everyday health The survey, conducted by Talker Research for The Vitamin Shoppe’s annual Trend Report , shows just how deeply AI is embedded in people’s health routines: That’s not all. A…

The United States and China released competing visions of the future of artificial intelligence, with the U.S. seeking global leadership and China prioritizing open source AI models and cooperation among nations and organizations. In “America’s AI Action Plan,” President Donald Trump said, “it is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.” According to an English translation, China’s AI action plan, “Action Plan on Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence,” said “only by working together can we fully realize the potential of AI while ensuring its safe, reliable, controllable and equitable development,” and “create an inclusive, open,…

Big Tech is spending more than ever on artificial intelligence – but the returns are rising too, and investors are buying in. AI played a bigger role in driving demand across internet search, digital advertising and cloud computing in the April-June quarter, powering revenue growth at technology giants Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab, Meta (META.O), opens new tab, and Alphabet (GOOGL.O), opens new tab. Betting that momentum will sustain, Microsoft and Alphabet decided to ramp up spending to ease capacity shortages that have limited their ability to meet soaring AI services demand, even after several quarters of multi-billion-dollar outlays. The results offer the clearest sign yet that…

Meta is pouring money into the physical and technical infrastructure needed to scale its AI ambitions. The company said Wednesday in its second-quarter earnings report that it plans to more than double its spend on building AI infrastructure, like data centers and servers. “We currently expect 2025 capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, to be in the range of $66-72 billion…up approximately $30 billion year-over-year at the midpoint,” Meta said. That’s an aggressive capex growth, and one that Meta plans to continue onwards to 2026. The company said it expects a similarly large increase in spend on AI…

Echoing sentiments shared in his “superintelligence”-focused blog post this morning, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg expanded on his bullish ideas that glasses will be the primary way users interact with AI in the years ahead. During Meta’s second-quarter earnings call, the social networking exec told investors he believes people without AI glasses will be at a disadvantage in the future. “I continue to think that glasses are basically going to be the ideal form factor for AI, because you can let an AI see what you see throughout the day, hear what you hear, [and] talk to you,” Zuckerberg said during the…

Google has confirmed it will sign the European Union’s general purpose AI code of practice, a voluntary framework that aims to help AI developers implement processes and systems to comply with the bloc’s AI Act. Notably, Meta earlier this month said it would not sign the code, calling the EU’s implementation of its AI legislation “overreach” and stating that Europe was “heading down the wrong path on AI.” Google’s commitment comes days before rules for providers of “general-purpose AI models with systemic risk” go into effect on August 2. Companies likely to be affected by these rules include major names such as…

AI-powered marketing automation startup Conversion, founded five years ago by two UC Berkeley dropouts, has raised a $28 million Series A led by Abstract, with participation from True Ventures and HOF Capital. The company’s founding story sounds like it could have been an episode of the HBO show “Silicon Valley.” The story begins all the way back when co-founder and CEO Neil Tewari, now 24, was in high school. He got busted one day watching a TechCrunch Disrupt livestream during class, was sent to the principal’s office, and had to stay late. Afraid to call his parents and tell them why…

When Donald Trump touched down in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) earlier this year, he arrived not just with headlines, but with deals, ambition, and AI firepower. The US president was given a royal welcome, but the real centrepiece of the visit was the announcement of a sprawling new AI campus – a joint UAE-US initiative. Billed as the largest AI infrastructure hub outside the US, it symbolised the Gulf’s boldest bid yet to plant itself at the heart of the global AI map. Trump’s visit to the Gulf also coincided with a strategic shift, which saw the White House…

CCTV cameras that use AI technology will be installed in parts of East Yorkshire to tackle fly-tipping following a pilot scheme. East Riding of Yorkshire Council said CCTV towers had already been installed in Cottingham, Boynton and Rawcliffe, with one in Hessle and a second in Cottingham to follow. The aim is to put people off from dumping rubbish, with the council adding their enforcement team received about 2,500 reports of fly-tipping each year. Councillor Lyn Healing said fly-tipping had become a “blight and a nuisance” in some rural parts of the county and the council had invested in the…

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has laid out his blueprint for the future of AI, and it’s about giving you “personal superintelligence”. In a letter, the Meta chief painted a picture of what’s coming next, and he believes it’s closer than we think. He says his teams are already seeing early signs of progress. “Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves,” Zuckerberg wrote. “The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight.” So, what does he want to do with it? Forget AI that just automates boring…

Alibaba has released a new AI coding model called Qwen3-Coder, built to handle complex software tasks using a large open-source model. The tool is part of Alibaba’s Qwen3 family and is being promoted as the company’s most advanced coding agent to date. The model uses a Mixture of Experts (MoE) approach, activating 35 billion parameters out of a total 480 billion and supporting up to 256,000 tokens of context. That number can reportedly be stretched to 1 million using special extrapolation techniques. The company claims Qwen3-Coder has outperformed other open models in agentic tasks, including versions from Moonshot AI and…

Royal Bank of Canada is using its own proprietary AI foundation model to improve credit adjudication capabilities and loyalty programme personalisation. Created by RBC’s AI research unit Borealis, Atom (Asynchronous Temporal Model) was trained using large-scale financial datasets including billions of client transactions which the bank says gives it “deep financial expertise” that can be used across a variety of tasks. The model is seen by RBC as central to its stated ambition of realising $700 million to $1 billion in enterprise value generated from AI-driven benefits by 2027. It is already being used for credit adjudication to make the…