AI news flash: Dazzle AI CEO Marissa Mayer is the latest tech leader to be criticized for sounding out of touch, after mentioning that she asked an AI tool to help write a school-assigned description of her daughter. Similar controversies include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman suggesting parents make personalized podcasts for their kids’ commute to school and saying he can’t imagine parenting without Cha…
AI news flash: OpenAI is preparing a PR push for after the midterm elections on the first Tuesday of November, since Democrats look likely to retake the House and may even have a shot at the Senate. OpenAI chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane told Axios that this midterm is like a ‘movie trailer for 2028,’ and he expects AI to be a core issue in the presidential race. So OpenAI wants to shape the AI debate now. Op…
AI news flash: The number of nuclear reactors under construction worldwide has reached 79, the highest in the four decades since 1986. Two main factors are driving this wave of construction. First, persistently rising fossil fuel prices are pushing up overall energy costs, which has countries reassessing the economics of nuclear power as an alternative source. Second, the rapid spread of power-hungry artificial intelligence is lifting electricity demand and speeding up plans for new plants. The original article specifically notes that soaring energy costs…
AI news flash: The DeepSeek Harness team at DeepSeek has published a paper proposing a design that makes AI coding assistants more autonomous, aiming to cut down on human intervention when coordinating and monitoring multiple AI agents, so a system can handle many tasks at once with less human oversight. The news was reported on Sunday by Singapore’s South China Morning Post (SCMP). The paper’s core argument is that the ceiling for a single task depends on…
AI news flash: Arbitr, a New Zealand investor information services company, has developed an AI-powered dubbing service that translates executives’ videos into multiple languages in real time, letting them speak in many languages and speeding up information disclosure. Arbitr Group co-CEO David Sowerby says traditional dubbing doesn’t always capture the speaker’s passion and tonal nuance. The original summary only gives…
AI news flash: U.S. federal judge Debra M. Brown denied xAI’s motion to dismiss, letting the NAACP’s lawsuit against the SpaceX-owned company move forward. Represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), the NAACP alleges xAI installed and ran at least 35 gas turbines at its Colossus data center outside Memphis without the required pre-construction permits and operating air permits…
AI news flash: In an interview with Wired’s Steven Levy, Apple CEO John Ternus defended where Apple stands on AI right now. Over the past two years Apple has often been rated as behind in AI, especially since a more powerful version of Siri was delayed again and again until it finally launched this summer. Ternus is a longtime Apple executive who officially took over as CEO in early September. He admitted that ’everyone has their own opinion,’ but stressed that ‘I really like where we are right now.’
AI news flash: Companies and institutions outside Japan are joining the global fundraising wave sparked by AI hyperscalers and are now raising money from Japanese investors. According to Nikkei, yen-denominated bonds issued by foreign issuers in the April to September half-year hit an all-time high, at roughly $16 billion as the headline puts it. Alphabet led the way in the yen bond market in May, …
AI news flash: OpenAI’s latest funding round isn’t going as well as expected. The company was earlier reported to be raising $30 billion at a $1.4 trillion valuation ahead of its IPO, then the valuation was revised down to $1.25 trillion, but the Financial Times reported on Friday that OpenAI has cut the target further to $20 billion, and the first closing is expected to come in below that figure.
AI news flash: Zest, a restaurant discovery app founded last November, has launched a new feature: a personal AI ‘restaurant concierge’ that lives in your text messages, similar in concept to AI agents like Instinct or Poke. Users just text Zest to get recommendations based on their own and their friends’ dining history, and can book a table right away. Founder and CEO Mario Gomez-Hall says ’the agent is the product’ because the system starts from places users have actually been…