Author: Art Ryan

IBM beat Wall Street estimates for second-quarter revenue and profit on Wednesday, helped by renewed sales in its mainframe business as artificial intelligence upgrades spurred demand for the systems, which are capable of processing vast amounts of data. Clients have focused on investing in AI infrastructure expansion as macroeconomic uncertainty and ongoing trade negotiations prompt businesses to prioritize spending on the booming technology. Shares of the company fell 4% in extended trading, after a nearly 30% rise this year. “All of us are still operating in a very dynamic macroeconomic environment,” finance chief Jim Kavanaugh told Reuters. Sales of IBM’s…

ServiceNow posted strong second-quarter results and lifted its guidance Wednesday. Shares climbed 7% following the report. Here’s how the company performed compared to LSEG estimates: Subscription revenues, which account for the majority of the enterprise technology company’s revenues, hit $3.11 billion and topped a $3.03 billion forecast from StreetAccount. The company boosted its full-year subscription revenue guidance to between $12.775 billion and $12.795 billion as it benefits from artificial intelligence adoption. “Every business process in every industry is being refactored for agentic AI,” said ServiceNow chairman and CEO Bill McDermott in a release. Net income grew 47% to $385 million, or $1.84 per share, from $262 million, or…

The Trump administration has unveiled plans to speed the development of the highly polluting artificial intelligence sector, sparking outrage from climate advocates. Rolled out on Wednesday, the 28-page scheme pledges to remove so-called “bureaucratic red tape” and streamline permitting for datacenters, semiconductor manufacturing facilities and fossil fuel infrastructure. To do so, it will dismantle some environmental and land-use regulations, roll back some Biden-era rules for subsidies for semiconductor plants related to climate requirements, and seek to establish exclusions for datacenters from the National Environmental Policy Act and streamline permits under the Clean Water Act. “We need to build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and…

YouTube announced on Wednesday that it’s giving Shorts creators access to new generative AI features, including an image-to-video AI tool and new AI effects. The image to video feature lets users turn a picture from their camera roll into a six-second video. Users will see a selection of suggestions that are relevant to the photo they uploaded. YouTube says the feature can be used to add movement to landscape photos, animate pictures of everyday photos, or bring group photos to life. In an example given by YouTube, the feature turns a static image of a pedestrian signal into a short video that…

Privacy-focused productivity tools maker Proton on Wednesday released its AI assistant, called Lumo, which it says prioritizes protecting user data. The company says the chatbot keeps no logs of your conversations, has end-to-end encryption for storing chats, and offers a ghost mode for conversations that disappear as soon as you close the window. Available via a web client, as well as Android and iOS apps, Lumo doesn’t require you to have an account to use the chatbot and ask questions. You can upload files to have the chatbot answer questions about them, and if you have a Proton Drive account, you can connect it with Lumo to…

Gupshup, a business messaging startup that began its journey in India over two decades ago and became a unicorn four years ago, has raised a new $60 million round — but is keeping its new valuation under wraps. In 2021, Gupshup raised two funding rounds within four months, securing $340 million from prominent investors, including Tiger Global, Fidelity Management, Think Investments, and Malabar Investments. These rounds — the startup’s first in roughly a decade — valued Gupshup at $1.4 billion. However, Fidelity, which led the round following its unicorn milestone, slashed its internal valuation of the startup at least three times between 2023 and 2024, bringing…

Amazon has acquired the AI wearables startup Bee, according to a LinkedIn post by Bee co-founder Maria de Lourdes Zollo. Amazon confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch but noted that the deal has not yet closed. Bee, which raised $7 million last year, makes both a stand-alone Fitbit-like bracelet (which retails for $49.99, plus a $19-per-month subscription) and an Apple Watch app. The product records everything it hears — unless the user manually mutes it — with the goal of listening to conversations to create reminders and to-do lists for the user. Zollo told TechCrunch last year that the company hopes to create a “cloud phone,”…

The administration of United States President Donald Trump has unveiled its new artificial intelligence action plan, which includes a strategy it says will boost the US standing in AI as it competes with China for dominance in the rapidly growing sector. The White House released the 25-page “America’s AI Action Plan” on Wednesday. It includes 90 different policy proposals that the administration says will increase AI tools for allies around the globe. It will also promote production of new data centres around the US. It will scrap federal regulations that “hinder AI development”, although it is not clear which regulations…

Google develops AI tool that fills missing words in Roman inscriptions Aeneas program, which predicts where and when Latin texts were made, called ‘transformative’ by historians Ian Sample Science editorWed 23 Jul 2025 16.00 BSTShare In addition to sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a freshwater system and public health, the Romans also produced a lot of inscriptions. Making sense of the ancient texts can be a slog for scholars, but a new artificial intelligence tool from Google DeepMind aims to ease the process. Named Aeneas after the mythical Trojan hero, the program predicts where and when inscriptions were made and…

Initially in areas such as recruitment and job coaching. Anglicare Sydney is starting to use artificial intelligence in its human resources operations, with initial applications in the areas of recruitment, onboarding and job coaching. Chief people and customer officer Yvette McDonald told the Workday Elevate summit that AI promised to remove “frustrations and frictions” on staff, freeing them “to either lead their team or care for our clients and residents.” The not-for-profit has diverse operations but they include retirement living, housing and community services. “The kind of use cases we’ve implemented and are exploring [with AI] are in recruitment,” McDonald…

Artificial intelligence (AI) research/product development firm Reka AI has raised $110 million. The company’s new funding round, announced Tuesday (July 22), included contributions from Nvidia and data cloud company Snowflake, and will help Reka scale its multimodal platform for more widespread enterprise adoption. “Reka is known for its ultra-efficient multimodal models developed by a world-class research team,” the company said in a news release. “The company’s focus on efficient training and serving infrastructure has enabled it to develop market-leading models at a fraction of the cost. Reka Flash—a multimodal model that understands video, image, text, and audio—is the workhorse of Reka’s product offerings.” The round values Reka…

About six months after coming out of stealth with $50 million in funding, Latent Labs has released a web-based AI model for programming biology. Latent Labs‘ model has “achieved state-of-the-art in lab results for protein binding,” said Latent Labs CEO and founder Simon Kohl, a scientist who previously co-led DeepMind’s AlphaFold’s protein design team. State-of-the-art, or SOTA, is a term often used in the AI field that represents the industry’s best performance to date on a specific task. “We have computational ways of assessing how good the designs are,” he told TechCrunch, adding that a high percentage of proteins the model creates will…

Karun Kaushik and Selin Kocalar weren’t planning to raise a Series A so soon. Their AI compliance startup, Delve, which announced a $3 million seed round in January, was growing fast and signing customers at a steady clip. Then, inbound interest started rolling in, COO Kocalar told TechCrunch. Delve, which automates regulatory compliance with AI agents, ended up fielding multiple term sheets, eventually closing a $32 million Series A at a $300 million valuation. The round was led by Insight Partners, which took up most of the round, with participation from CISOs at Fortune 500 companies. Insight has been “amazing to work with, and…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned the financial industry of a “significant impending fraud crisis” because of the ability of artificial intelligence tools to impersonate a person’s voice to bypass security checks and move money. Altman spoke at a Federal Reserve conference Tuesday in Washington. “A thing that terrifies me is apparently there are still some financial institutions that will accept the voiceprint as authentication,” Altman said. “That is a crazy thing to still be doing. AI has fully defeated that.” Voiceprinting as an identification for wealthy bank clients grew popular more than a decade ago, with customers typically asked to utter a challenge phrase…

South Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI announced a partnership on Tuesday to supply its AI chip, RNGD, to enterprises using LG AI Research‘s recently unveiled EXAONE platform. RNGD is optimized for running large language models (LLMs), and just last week, the Korean tech giant LG unveiled its next-generation hybrid AI model EXAONE 4.0. The collaboration targets key sectors, including electronics, finance, telecommunications, and biotechnology, for a range of diverse applications. This news comes roughly three months after FuriosaAI declined Meta’s $800 million acquisition offer, opting to remain independent. The deal fell through due to disagreements over post-acquisition business strategy and organizational structure, rather than price issues, according to local…

OpenAI has shaken hands with Oracle on a colossal deal to advance the former’s colossal Stargate AI data centre initiative. It’s one thing to talk about the AI revolution in abstract terms, but it’s another thing entirely to grasp the sheer physical scale of what’s being built to make it happen. The foundations of our AI future are being laid in concrete, steel, and miles of fibre-optic cable, and those foundations are getting colossally bigger. Together, OpenAI and Oracle are going to build new data centres in the US packed with enough hardware to consume 4.5 gigawatts of power. It’s hard to overstate what a…

Google just dropped the stable version of Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite and they’ve essentially created a model that’s designed to be the workhorse for developers who need to build things at scale without breaking the bank. Building cool things with AI can often feel like a frustrating balancing act. You want a model that’s smart and powerful, but you also don’t want to remortgage your house to pay for the API calls. And if your app needs to be fast for users, a slow, churning model is a non-starter. Google says Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite is quicker than their previous speedy models,…

Officials are to start using artificial intelligence to help estimate the age of asylum seekers who say they are children. Angela Eagle, the immigration minister, said on Tuesday the government would test technology that judges a person’s age based on their facial features. It is the latest example of Labour ministers turning to AI to help solve problems with public services without spending significant amounts of money. The decision was announced on the same day that David Bolt, the chief inspector of borders and immigration, published a highly critical report into the haphazard way in which officials estimated the age of new…

US tech giant recruits more than 20 people from rival in push to gain edge in the fast-developing technology Microsoft has recruited more than 20 artificial intelligence employees from Google’s DeepMind research division, the newest front in a talent war being waged by Silicon Valley’s tech giants as they jostle to gain an edge in the nascent technology. Amar Subramanya, the former head of engineering for Google’s Gemini chatbot, is the latest to move to Microsoft from its rival, according to a post on his LinkedIn profile on Tuesday. “The culture here is refreshingly low ego yet bursting with ambition,”…

A Utah lawmaker was recently tapped to lead a national task force to help guide state-level artificial intelligence policies. State Rep. Doug Fiefia, R-Herriman, will co-chair the newly announced National Task Force on State AI Policy, according to an announcement Monday from the Future Caucus, a national, bipartisan nonprofit that supports young policymakers. The task force will push back on what the Future Caucus called “partisan gridlock” that can impact AI policy, and make sure state lawmakers have resources and tools before pushing through legislation. It will serve as a “national brain trust for responsible AI governance at the state…