Mintive, an early-stage startup building tools to govern and authorize enterprise AI agents, has raised $11 million total, including a new $7 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures. Other backers include Coatue, Operator Collective, Hustle Fund, and angel investors Frederic Kerrest, Jeff Dean, and Andrej Karpathy. The company was founded by former Google Brain engineers Jiquan Ngiam and Vijay Vasudevan, who previously worked on Coursera and TensorFlow respectively.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-29
Google released Gemini 4 Argon, a new flagship model it says matches or beats OpenAI and Anthropic on numerous benchmarks, following months in which Google had appeared to fall behind despite Gemini 3's earlier launch. Meta also unveiled a frontier model it claims can compete with the industry's best, marking a sharp turnaround after a period of internal upheaval at Google including departures of Jeff Dean and Demis Hassabis stepping back from DeepMind leadership.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-14
Jeff Dean, who departed Google this month after 27 years including stints as head of Google AI and chief scientist, made his first public appearance since leaving at the 2026 Frontier & Pioneer Symposium. He advised young people entering tech to skim many research abstracts rather than deeply study a few, arguing this builds a broader mental map for connecting unrelated ideas. Dean, now CEO of startup DiscoveryLoop, also urged workers to pursue mid-length, roughly five-year problems rather than overly ambitious or overly simple ones.
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-08-24
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