News reporting focused on AI and machine learning, covering the companies behind these technologies, their real-world applications, and the ethical concerns they raise. This includes areas like generative AI (large language models, text-to-image and video), speech tech, and predictive analytics.
Tucker Bryant, a former Google project manager, launched ChatTJB, a chatbot that is actually a human. The art project, which costs $6,000 for a San Francisco billboard, has fielded over 30,000 queries, highlighting how easily people defer to AI. Bryant personally types every reply, aiming to provoke reflection on our relationship with technology.
NVIDIA and dozens of industry leaders, including Adobe, Cisco, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, IBM, Microsoft, and Red Hat, have formed the Open Secure AI Alliance. The group aims to develop and share open tools, models, and techniques to improve cybersecurity and AI safety, building on the Linux Foundation's Akrites initiative and OpenSSF community work.
At the AI Summit in San Francisco, South Korean President Jae Myung Lee met with NVIDIA and partners to discuss the nation's AI progress. NVIDIA and KAIST announced a joint AI research lab in Seoul, the first between a Korean university and a global tech company. The lab will focus on agentic AI and leverage NVIDIA's full-stack expertise and open models.
AMD announced its Helios rack-scale system at the Advancing AI conference in San Francisco, aiming to compete with Nvidia's Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell systems. The system, which already has customers including OpenAI, Meta, Oracle, Anthropic, and Microsoft, is set to ship later this year. AMD also introduced the Venice-X CPU, expected in 2027, and CEO Lisa Su projected the AI accelerator market could reach $1.4 trillion by 2030.
Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to book authors in a copyright settlement approved by a federal court in San Francisco. The AI company downloaded books from piracy databases LibGen and PiLiMi between 2021 and 2022. Of roughly 482,460 listed works, 91.3 percent were claimed, netting authors about $3,000 each. Anthropic must destroy the pirated files. The settlement covers piracy, not AI training itself, and a judge previously ruled that training on legally obtained books is fair use.
Richard Socher has launched Recursive Superintelligence, a San Francisco startup emerging from stealth with $650 million in funding. The company aims to build a recursively self-improving AI that fixes its own weaknesses without human help. Socher and his team of top researchers discussed their open-endedness approach in a recent interview.
Cisco plans to eliminate fewer than 4,000 positions, about 5% of its staff, to adjust costs and fund AI and cybersecurity efforts. This comes after the company reported stronger-than-forecast profits and sales in its fiscal third quarter. The move aligns with other tech firms trimming payrolls despite solid results.
A group of unauthorized users accessed Anthropic's powerful Claude Mythos AI model using a contractor's credentials and leaked data. The model, limited to partners like Apple, Amazon, and Cisco under Project Glasswing, was used only for benign tasks. Anthropic is investigating with no signs of broader compromise.
Andon Market in San Francisco operates as the world's first retail boutique managed by an AI agent named Luna. The store features random inventory dominated by candles, lacks price tags, and charges high prices. Opened on April 10 by Andon Labs, it faces challenges like poor employee scheduling and excessive candle orders.
Jeff Bezos is finalizing a $10 billion funding round for his AI lab, Project Prometheus, valued at $38 billion. Investors include JPMorgan and BlackRock. The San Francisco-based firm develops AI to grasp physics laws for industrial uses, marking Bezos's first hands-on role since leaving Amazon in 2021.
Physical Intelligence released research on its π0.7 model, which guides robots through tasks not directly trained on it. The San Francisco startup's two-year-old effort shows robots combining skills from sparse data, like using an air fryer with minimal prior examples. Researchers report surprises in capabilities, though limitations persist, amid $5.6 billion valuation and talks for more funding.