Photo and video apps targeting young adults with social hooks are a dime a dozen these days, so those that show traction with 18-twentysomethings tend to catch the attention of investors looking for the next Instagram or TikTok. In the latest example, photo-sharing app Yope, which lets you share still images to private groups, says […]

It’s often said that the UK and Europe lack the huge level of growth funding for later-stage startups that the US has for its own, and this is correct. According to the European Investment Fund, there are at least seven times more large-size VC funds in the US than in Europe. So the appearance of a […]

Larry Ellison’s leap into farming with his company, Sensei Farms, serves up a classic reminder: being a genius in one arena doesn’t mean success in another. As the WSJ reports, the Oracle co-founder set out to reinvent agriculture on Hawaii’s Lāna‘i Island, which he scooped up for $300 million back in 2012. Eight years and […]

Google has quietly revealed the pricing of Veo 2, the video-generating AI model that it unveiled in December. According to the company’s pricing page, using Veo 2 will cost 50 cents per second of video, which adds up to $30 per minute or $1,800 per hour. Google DeepMind researcher Jon Barron contrasted this pricing with […]

Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander Karp opens his new book with a provocative declaration: “Silicon Valley has lost its way.” Over the past decade or so, as the data analytics company rose to prominence with its work for U.S. military and intelligence, Karp has largely stayed out of the limelight. Last year, in a rare […]

As school districts struggle to support the mental health of their students, a startup called Sonar Mental Health has built a “wellbeing companion” called Sonny to help. As described in the Wall Street Journal, Sonny is a chatbot that relies on a combination of human staff and AI. When students text their questions to Sonny, […]

When billionaire Elon Musk introduced Grok 3, his AI company xAI’s latest flagship model, in a live stream last Monday, he described it as a “maximally truth-seeking AI.” Yet it appears that Grok 3 was briefly censoring unflattering facts about President Donald Trump — and Musk himself. Over the weekend, users on social media reported […]

Debates over AI benchmarks — and how they’re reported by AI labs — are spilling out into public view. This week, an OpenAI employee accused Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, of publishing misleading benchmark results for its latest AI model, Grok 3. One of the co-founders of xAI, Igor Babushkin, insisted that the company was […]

The beauty of podcasting is that anyone can do it. It’s a rare medium that’s nearly as easy to make as it is to consume. And as such, no two people do it exactly the same way. There are a wealth of hardware and software solutions open to potential podcasters, so setups run the gamut […]

The National Institute of Standards and Technology could fire as many as 500 staffers, according to multiple reports — cuts that further threaten a fledgling AI safety organization. Axios reported this week that the US AI Safety Institute (AISI) and Chips for America, both part of NIST, would be “gutted” by layoffs targeting probationary employees […]