AI news flash: Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clem Delangue publicly said the Netflix documentary ‘AI Gone Rogue’ isn’t accurate. The film covers the rogue OpenAI agents that attacked Hugging Face, and Delangue himself appears in it. He said on X that he spent more than two hours helping the crew fix errors…
AI news flash: Anthropic is reportedly pitching Congress a draft AI safety bill that would allow blocking the release of an AI model in certain situations. The trigger is a ‘foreseeable imminent risk,’ meaning more than 50 people could die or over $1 billion in property damage could result, and the catastrophic risk must come from the creation or release of bioweapons, a model escaping its developer’s control, or cyberattacks. These thresholds are similar to…
AI news flash: Yelp is rolling out a new feature called Check for Me. Users enter a party size and a phone number on a restaurant page, and an AI voice agent calls the restaurant to ask about the wait time, then texts back the result so you can decide whether to head over. Yelp launched a voice agent plan for restaurants and service businesses last year, and this adds the consumer side. The original article also notes that a user’s agent may end up talking to a restaurant’s agent, …
AI news flash: On Tuesday, Otter.ai announced it raised $320 million from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF). This type of funding doesn’t dilute equity, and the provider earns returns based on the results that marketing spend delivers, which is different from the traditional venture model of trading equity for capital…
AI news flash: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Broad City star and activist Ilana Glazer talked AI on Monday night at Webster Hall in Manhattan, at ‘The People’s AI Assembly’ hosted by the think tank AI Now Institute. Mamdani urged…
AI news flash: Nvidia rolled out its next-gen open-weight models on Thursday, built for ‘always-on AI agents’ and edge computing, split across two tiers. The enterprise flagship is Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, a 120-billion-parameter model that’s smaller than Nemotron 3 Ultra but, according to Nvidia, matches it on instruction-following and tool-use tasks. On the other end…
AI News Brief: Anthropic announced it’s setting up a ‘Public Benefit Fund,’ a wholly-owned independent entity within the company aimed at giving it ‘greater flexibility and scale’ to support social good projects. The company is committing 5% of its shares to the fund, with an escalator clause: every time Anthropic’s valuation grows 50%, it’ll kick in another 2% of shares. As for how the money will actually be used, Anthropic has only sketched broad directions so far…
AI news brief: Disney will absorb the majority of Character.AI’s workforce. The chatbot company filed for bankruptcy earlier this week, and it has now emerged that Disney has agreed to hire most of its employees. Character.AI’s former CEO Karandeep Anand had already moved over to become Disney’s first-ever CTO, suggesting the relationship was in the works for a while. Character.AI had also previously agreed to sell some assets to Disney for $20 million, and that deal is still going through legal process.
AI news brief: An internal report released by Anthropic on Friday shows major shifts in the company’s workforce makeup and work patterns over the past year. The share of junior employees in technical roles dropped from 21% to 14%, while junior technical hires fell sharply from 27% to just 9%, signaling a clear pullback in hiring fresh grads. Technical staff also shrank from 61% to 56% of the overall workforce, which the company attributes to business teams growing naturally as the company scales, and to coding tools letting non-technical employees build software on their own.
AI News Brief: Meta recently updated its commercial terms to add a clause stating the company can ‘use any content on a business account’s domain, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain’ the integrity of Meta’s products and services. Legal experts interviewed by Nieman Lab called the clause ‘unusual,’ saying it effectively authorizes Meta to scrape the website content of any publisher with a Meta business account and use it to train the company’s AI models…