FavFeeds: Curating Tech and Marketing Media for Independent Developer

1.

OpenAI trained o1 and o3 to ‘think’ about its safety policy

December 22, 2024 18:30:00

OpenAI announced a new family of AI reasoning models on Friday, o3, which the startup claims to be more advanced than o1 or anything else it’s released. These improvements appear to have come from scaling test-time compute, something we wrote about last month, but OpenAI also says it used a new safety paradigm to train […]

2.

Tetsuwan Scientific is making robotic AI scientists that can run experiments on their own

December 22, 2024 16:00:00

LLM models are already capable of diagnosing scientific outputs, but, until now, had “no physical agency to actually perform" experiments.

3.

OpenAI’s GPT-5 reportedly falling short of expectations

December 21, 2024 18:30:32

OpenAI’s efforts to develop its next major model, GPT-5, are running behind schedule, with results that don’t yet justify the enormous costs, according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal. This echoes an earlier report in The Information suggesting that OpenAI is looking to new strategies as GPT-5 might not represent as big […]

4.

ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot

December 20, 2024 20:15:00

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 has been a big year for OpenAI, from its […]

5.

Nvidia clears regulatory hurdle to acquire Run:ai

December 20, 2024 18:54:53

Chip company Nvidia gets the green light from the European Union to complete its acquisition of Run:ai. The EU came to a unanimous decision today that Nvidia could go ahead with its acquisition of Israeli GPU orchestration platform Run:ai, according to reporting from Bloomberg. The European Commission determined that if the merger went through, other […]

6.

Google is expanding Gemini’s in-depth research mode to 40 languages

December 20, 2024 18:21:25

Google said Friday that the company is expanding Gemini’s latest in-depth research mode to 40 more languages. The company launched the in-depth research mode earlier this month, allowing Google One AI premium plan users to unlock an AI-powered research assistant of sorts. The in-depth function works in a multi-step method, from creating a research plan […]

7.

Here’s the full list of 49 US AI startups that have raised $100M or more in 2024

December 20, 2024 18:12:45

In the first half of 2024 alone, more than $35.5 billion was invested into AI startups globally.

8.

OpenAI announces new o3 models

December 20, 2024 17:56:57

OpenAI saved its biggest announcement for the last day of its 12-day “shipmas” event. On Friday, the company unveiled o3, the successor to the o1 “reasoning” model it released earlier in the year. o3 is a model family, to be more precise — as was the case with o1. There’s o3 and o3-mini, a smaller, […]

9.

OpenAI 2024 event: How to watch new ChatGPT product reveals and demos

December 20, 2024 17:00:00

OpenAI is in the holiday spirit, it seems. The ChatGPT series of reveals, called “12 Days of OpenAI,” will be streamed live at 10 a.m. PT each weekday through December 20. So far, we’ve seen the launch of ChatGPT Pro, OpenAI’s $200 per month subscription plan; the full version of its “reasoning” o1 model; the […]

10.

Are AI companies just defense tech now?

December 20, 2024 16:27:25

AI is everywhere. And increasingly it’s being described as defense tech. This week, the Equity pod gang — which included newcomer Max Zeff, Margaux MacColl, and Kirsten Korosec — noticed an emerging trend: The worlds of AI and defense tech are colliding. And that matters, for a few reasons. For one, venture money is flowing […]

11.

Arizona’s getting an online charter school taught entirely by AI

December 20, 2024 15:36:04

The newest online-only school greenlighted by the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools comes with a twist: The academic curriculum will be taught entirely by AI. Charter schools — independently operated but publicly funded — typically get greater autonomy compared to traditional public schools when it comes to how subjects are taught. But Unbound Academy’s […]

12.

British university spinoff Mindgard protects companies from AI threats

December 20, 2024 08:01:00

AI creates a dilemma for companies: Don’t implement it yet, and you might miss out on productivity gains and other potential benefits, but do it wrong, and you might expose your business and clients to unmitigated risks. This is where a new wave of “security for AI” startups comes in, with the premise that these […]

13.

Sam Altman once owned some equity in OpenAI through Sequoia

December 20, 2024 00:48:42

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sat before Congress in 2023 to testify about the dangers of AI. He told American lawmakers at the time that he owns no equity in OpenAI, something he’s said many times, claiming he just runs the company because he loves it. However, Altman recently said he actually did have some equity […]

14.

Perplexity has reportedly closed a $500M funding round

December 19, 2024 22:18:29

AI-powered search engine Perplexity has reportedly closed a $500 million funding round, valuing the startup at $9 billion. Bloomberg, citing sources familiar, reports that the round was led by Institutional Venture Partners and that it closed earlier in December. In an email to TechCrunch, a Perplexity spokesperson declined to comment. The mammoth tranche comes as […]

15.

Boon raises $20.5M to build agentic AI tools for fleets

December 19, 2024 22:00:04

Logistics is the name of the game during the holiday season: Companies that can seal the deal and get people and things to the places they need to be, on time, rake it in this time of year. But behind that demand lies a huge amount of inefficiency and fragmentation. Are logistics businesses ready for […]

16.

TuSimple pivot from self-driving to AI animation is complete with CreateAI rebrand

December 19, 2024 21:24:55

TuSimple has completed its pivot away from autonomous trucking to AI animation and gaming with a rebrand. The company shall henceforth be known as CreateAI. The rebrand comes as TuSimple is embroiled in controversy over the company’s plans to move its remaining U.S. assets to China to fund the new business, which it initially announced […]

17.

Ex-Twitch CEO Emmett Shear is founding an AI startup backed by a16z

December 19, 2024 20:33:30

Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch, is launching a new AI startup, TechCrunch has learned. The startup, called Stem AI, is currently in stealth. But public documents show it was incorporated in June 2023, and filed for a trademark in August 2023. Shear is listed as CEO on an incorporation document filed with the […]

18.

In just 4 months, AI coding assistant Cursor raised another $100M at a $2.5B valuation led by Thrive, sources say

December 19, 2024 19:15:03

Anysphere, the developer of AI-powered coding assistant Cursor, raised $100 million Series B at a post-money valuation of $2.6 billion, according to sources with knowledge of the deal. The round is being led by returning investor Thrive Capital, the person said. This new funding comes just four months after Anysphere raised its $60 million Series […]

19.

Instagram teases AI tools for editing appearances, backgrounds in videos using prompts

December 19, 2024 17:47:29

Instagram head Adam Mosseri is teasing upcoming generative AI features for the social app that will allow creators to “change nearly any aspect” of their videos using text prompts. The editing tools will be powered by Meta’s Movie Gen AI model, and are expected to launch on the social network sometime next year, Mosseri said […]

20.

Google releases its own ‘reasoning’ AI model

December 19, 2024 17:22:50

Google has released what it’s calling a new “reasoning” AI model — but it’s in the experimental stages, and from our brief testing, there’s certainly room for improvement. The new model, called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental (a mouthful, to be sure), is available in AI Studio, Google’s AI prototyping platform. A model card describes […]

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