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Can Scale AI and Alexandr Wang reignite Meta’s AI efforts?

Meta is reportedly investing nearly $15 billion in the data-labeling firm Scale AI and taking a 49% stake in the startup, while also bringing on CEO Alexandr Wang to help lead a new “superintelligence” lab within the company. The deal is reminiscent of Meta’s previous large and risky bets, such as its $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp and its $1 billion Instagram purchase. At the time those mergers closed, many people suggested Meta had grossly overpaid for the platforms — and today’s discour

Topics: ai data labs meta scale

Sam Altman-backed Coco Robotics raises $80M

In Brief Los Angeles-based Coco Robotics, a startup building last-mile delivery robots, announced it raised $80 million on Wednesday. The funding round included angel investors Sam Altman and Max Altman, both returning investors, in addition to VC firms like Pelion Venture Partners and Offline Ventures, among others. This brings the company’s total funding to more than $120 million. The company last raised a $36 million Series A round in 2021. Coco’s zero-emissions robots can hold 90 liters’

Google, Meta execs blast Europe over strict AI regulation as Big Tech ups the ante

Dado Ruvic | Reuters STOCKHOLM — Executives at U.S. tech giants Google and Meta said that Europe's artificial intelligence industry is being held back by excessive regulation, adding to rhetoric from Donald Trump's administration that the region's strict tech rules are choking innovation. Speaking at the Techarena tech conference in Stockholm, Sweden, public policy chiefs at both Google and Meta used the stage as a platform to voice their concerns about the bloc's strict approach to regulating

Topics: act ai eu europe tech

Startup Investors Foaming at the Mouth To Carve Up Your Job With AI

If there's one throughline linking us to our ancestors at the birth of industrial society, it's the anxiety of automation. Back then it was the robber barons pushing the mechanized loom — and now it's kids in their 20s founding tech startups. Meet Mercor: the software that might decide whether you get that next job, or end up in the unemployment line. At least, that's the hope for deep-pocketed investors who lavished the startup with $100 million in a recent fundraising round. With that backin

Topics: ai gig jobs work workers

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says market got it wrong about DeepSeek’s impact

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said the market got it wrong when it comes to DeepSeek’s technological advancements and its potential to negatively impact the chipmaker’s business. Instead, Huang called DeepSeek’s R1 open source reasoning model “incredibly exciting” while speaking with Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks, in a pre-recorded interview that was released on Thursday. “I think the market responded to R1, as in, ‘Oh my gosh. AI is finished,’” Huang told Bouzari. “You know,

The most critical job skill you need to thrive in the AI revolution

rob dobi/Getty Images A few weeks ago, The World Economic Forum dropped its predictions for the future of jobs and the seismic shift in the workforce over the next five years (2030). Here's a link: The Future of Jobs Report 2025 Let me tell you, this thing is really well put together. As a connoisseur of well-formatted PDFs, this one goes hard. Also: Searching for your dream job? Google's new career AI tool can help - and it's free It has tons of relatable info and is super easy to follow,

Topics: ai jobs new report skills

What's Behind OpenAI's Recent Growth Spurt to 400M Weekly Users?

ChatGPT maker OpenAI says more than 400 million people a week are now actively using its artificial intelligence tools, a jump from the 300 million it reported this past December. OpenAI touted the figure this week, also telling media outlets that it's doubled its number of paid enterprise users to 2 million since September, and that its developer traffic has also doubled in the last six months. The news may surprise people who expected the rise of China's DeepSeek AI model to disrupt the grow

Best Tested Portable Air Conditioners for 2025

Having central air is nice, but not every living space comes with that luxury. Sure, you could install something like a window air unit, but that can be a hassle, and you need to make sure your windows are suited for the job. Thankfully, there are also portable air conditioner units. With one of these, you can get your desired temperature without having to install a permanent unit, and they can be much more affordable than central air. You can move them around the house if needed, too. Along wit

RFK Jr. promptly cancels vaccine advisory meeting, pulls flu shot campaign

Just days after anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the country's top health official, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already pulled back some of its efforts to protect Americans with safe, lifesaving vaccines. The agency has indefinitely postponed a public meeting of its vaccine advisory committee and killed a campaign promoting seasonal flu shots. Last weekend, a Washington Post columnist noted on Bluesky that the CDC's effective "Wild to Mild" seasonal flu

Scientists spent 10 years on a superbug mystery - Google's AI solved it in 48 hours

What just happened? Researchers at Imperial College London say an artificial intelligence-based science tool created by Google needed just 48 hours to solve a problem that took them roughly a decade to answer and verify on their own. The tool in question is called "co-scientist" and the problem they presented it with was straightforward enough: why are some superbugs resistant to antibiotics? Professor José R Penadés told the BBC that Google's tool reached the same hypothesis that his team had

HP forced customers to wait 15 minutes for tech support - on purpose - backpedaled after backlash

Facepalm: In what might be one of the biggest gaffs of the year, HP is trying to dislodge its foot from its mouth after getting caught intentionally forcing customers to wait for 15 minutes on technical support calls. Even HP's customer service staff criticized the bafflingly dumb move. The Register reports that HP intentionally forced customers to wait 15 minutes when trying to reach tech support. The "minimum" wait time idea mentioned in an internal memo that The Register obtained was floated

How DeepSeek used distillation to train its artificial intelligence model, and what it means for companies such as OpenAI

Chinese artificial intelligence lab DeepSeek roiled markets in January, setting off a massive tech and semiconductor selloff after unveiling AI models that it said were cheaper and more efficient than American ones. But the underlying fears and breakthroughs that sparked the selling go much deeper than one AI startup. Silicon Valley is now reckoning with a technique in AI development called distillation, one that could upend the AI leaderboard. Distillation is a process of extracting knowledge

Large Law Firm Sends Panicked Email as It Realizes Its Attorneys Have Been Using AI to Prepare Court Documents

The law firm Morgan & Morgan has rushed out a stern email to its attorneys after two of them were caught citing fake court cases invented by an AI model, Reuters reports. Sent earlier this month to all of its over 1,000 lawyers, the email warns at length about the tech's proclivity for hallucinating. But the pros of the tech, apparently, still outweigh the cons; rather than banning AI usage — something that plenty of organizations have done — Morgan & Morgan leadership take the middle road and

ChatGPT’s weekly user base has exceeded the entire US population

Calvin Wankhede / Android Authority TL;DR ChatGPT has crossed 400 million weekly users, marking a 33% increase in just three months despite rising AI competition. More people are adopting ChatGPT through word of mouth, with personal use driving its continued growth. OpenAI’s enterprise business is also expanding, now with 2 million paying users as companies integrate AI into their workflows. The AI chatbot battle continues to reshape the tech landscape, but OpenAI — the company behind ChatGP

Apple AirTag 4-Pack drops back to its record low price

Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority Working on these deals articles has kind of spoiled me. I am no longer willing to buy anything at full price, and I’m sure many of you feel the same way. The Apple AirTag 4-Pack has been constantly discounted to $69.99, and recently the price went back up. Well, if you were hoping to catch the hottest deal possible, this bundle is back down to its record-low price of $69.99. Get the Apple AirTag 4-Pack for just $69.99 ($29.01 off) This offer is available fro

Mail app redesign now available in macOS 15.4 and iPadOS 18.4 betas

Apple just released a variety of new beta software updates, including iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, and macOS 15.4. The latter two updates introduce Apple’s big Mail app redesign to the iPad and Mac. macOS 15.4 and iPadOS 18.4 betas include new Mail features Late last year, iOS 18.2 launched big changes for Apple’s built-in Mail app on iPhone. There was a refreshed design, plus major new inbox categorization features, and more. For the last couple months, Mac and iPad users have missed out on those

Topics: 18 app apple mail new

Apple to add proximity pairing setup to the Mac with macOS 15.4

iPhone and iPad users are already very familiar with something called “proximity pairing.” First introduced with iOS 11, this feature lets users transfer backup and other data from one device to a new one just by placing them close together. Now it seems that Apple is finally working on adding proximity pairing setup to the Mac. Proximity pairing setup coming to the Mac Evidence seen by 9to5Mac in the iOS 18.4 code suggests that the Mac will soon gain proximity pairing, just like the iPhone an

Bybit hacked for almost $1.5 billion in the biggest crypto theft ever

While 20th-century heists involved scoping out a location, recruiting a person on the inside and having a daredevil getaway driver waiting outside, the 21st-century version looks more like what Bybit experienced today. A hacker stole nearly $1.5 billion in Ethereum (ETH) and staked Ethereum from one of the exchange's offline wallets, nabbing the largest cryptocurrency haul ever. One blockchain security expert said it's likely the all-time biggest heist of any kind, not just crypto. Bybit CEO Be

OpenAI bans Chinese accounts using ChatGPT to edit code for social media surveillance

OpenAI has banned the accounts of a group of Chinese users who had attempted to use ChatGPT to debug and edit code for an AI social media surveillance tool, the company said Friday . The campaign, which OpenAI calls Peer Review, saw the group prompt ChatGPT to generate sales pitches for a program those documents suggest was designed to monitor anti-Chinese sentiment on X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and other platforms. The operation appears to have been particularly interested in spotting call

Windows Notepad and Paint are still free - but the AI will cost you. Here's how much

ZDNET For years, we've been able to freely use all the features in Windows apps like Notepad and Paint. But those days seem to be gone. Yes, the core features are still freely accessible, but the latest AI skills? Not so much. Also: How to remove Copilot from your Microsoft 365 plan A Windows forum post published Thursday described the ways that Microsoft has added AI to Notepad and Paint in Windows 11. In Notepad, you can request a rewrite of the text and even specify whether you want it sho

Why Ruby on Rails still matters

I found vinyl records from my late grandfather recently. It struck me how this media from the previous millennium played without issues. Vinyl represented a key shift in music distribution - it made printing and sharing sounds accessible, establishing a standard that persists. While audio sharing methods evolved, the original approaches remain functional. In our increasingly complex world, many people return to vinyl because it offers simplicity, stability, and longevity . Amidst the constant c

Wheel of Time Season 3 Arrives Soon—Here’s What to Remember From Season 2

The Wheel of Time is preparing to crank back up again, with the first three episodes arriving March 13 on Prime Video; like seasons one and two, it’ll run eight episodes, with a weekly drop after the premiere through April 17. That mini-binge may be enough to plunge you back into Robert Jordan’s world (after yesterday’s amuse-bouche: the limited-time early release of the season’s fiery first 11 minutes), but if you need a reminder of where season two left off, io9’s got you covered. First, thou

Of Course Dragon Ball Daima Gave Us the SSJ4 Reveal We Really Wanted, Too

Last week, Dragon Ball Daima virtually broke the internet by canonizing one of Goku’s long-forgotten transformations, Super Saiyan 4. Although fans didn’t get a lot of time to gawk at Goku flaunt his ape muscles all over before villain King Gomah negated his transformation, the latest episode in Daima‘s final stretch circled the block once more and delivered the transformations fans have been dying to see. As mentioned, the surprise twist reveal in Daima’s 18th episode gagged fans two-fold. The

Microsoft's Magma AI Can Manipulate and Control Robots

Microsoft just introduced Magma, a new artificial intelligence model designed to help robots see, understand and act more intelligently. Unlike traditional AI models, Magma processes different types of data all at once -- an effort Microsoft is calling a big leap toward "agentic AI," or systems that can plan and execute tasks on a user's behalf. The model, which uses a combination of vision and language processing, is trained on videos, images, robotics data and interface interactions so as to

Report: OpenAI plans to shift compute needs from Microsoft to SoftBank

In Brief OpenAI is forecasting a major shift in the next five years around who it gets most of its computing power from, The Information reported on Friday. By 2030, OpenAI expects to get three-quarters of its data center capacity from Stargate, a project that’s expected to be heavily financed by SoftBank, one of OpenAI’s newest financial backers. That represents a major shift away from Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest shareholder, who fulfills most of the startup’s power needs today. The change w

Brian Armstrong says Coinbase spent $50M fighting SEC lawsuit — and beat it

Coinbase on Friday said the SEC has agreed to drop the lawsuit against the company with prejudice, meaning it cannot be filed again. The move, which is still subject to the approval of the SEC’s Commissioners, is yet another signal that the Trump administration plans to be more friendly to crypto than the SEC was under former leader Gary Gensler. The SEC’s lawsuit, filed in 2023, alleged that crypto assets were securities and that Coinbase was operating as “an unregistered national securities

Court filings show Meta staffers discussed using copyrighted content for AI training

For years, Meta employees have internally discussed using copyrighted works obtained through legally questionable means to train the company’s AI models, according to court documents unsealed on Thursday. The documents were submitted by plaintiffs in the case Kadrey v. Meta, one of many AI copyright disputes slowly winding through the U.S. court system. The defendant, Meta, claims that training models on IP-protected works, particularly books, is “fair use.” The plaintiffs, who include authors

Research shows AI will try to cheat if it realizes it is about to lose

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years.TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust Surprise! A recent study showed that some of the newest AI reasoning models aren't above cheating to achieve a goal. Computer scientists found that AI systems can now manipulate chess AIs to gain an unfair advantage. Some models did this without human interaction or prompting, raising concerns about the future integrity of AI-driven systems beyond the chessboard. A Palisade Research study found tha