[ad_1] Travis Kalanick’s robotics company, Atoms, has raised $1.7 billion in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Ben Horowitz will join the company’s board following the investment. Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, and others participated in the round. Perhaps most notably, Uber also joined the funding round, re-connecting Kalanick with the company he founded — and the same company that pushed him out as CEO in 2017 following complaints of sexual harassment, discrimination, and a toxic workplace. Atoms is essentially a rebranded holding company created atop the project Kalanick has been working on since he resigned from Uber, a ghost…
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[ad_1] On Tuesday, OpenAI revealed that one of its models went rogue during a test and hacked the systems of AI dataset platform Hugging Face in a fully AI-enabled attack, a dramatic example of the dangers posed by advanced AI models. But, according to some cybersecurity experts, at the heart of this unprecedented AI-powered breach there was a very human mistake: OpenAI failed to properly configure what it called a “highly isolated environment,” allowing a testing sandbox that should have been completely secluded from the internet to actually connect to the internet. Dan Guido, the founder of cybersecurity research startup…
[ad_1] SoundCloud announced Wednesday that it has acquired Nina Protocol, a decentralized music platform that enabled independent artists to sell music directly to fans while keeping 100% of their revenue. The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. It’s also unclear whether any members of Nina’s team will join SoundCloud. The company has not yet responded to a request for comment. The deal is SoundCloud’s first acquisition since its 2022 purchase of AI music company Musiio to help improve music discovery. The deal signals that SoundCloud is continuing to expand beyond music hosting into a broader platform for independent artists.…
[ad_1] A day after Snap tentatively settled with the plaintiff in a social media addiction lawsuit, leaving Meta as the only remaining defendant, the case has been dropped. In a statement, Meta said the plaintiff chose to drop his case against Meta without receiving any payment. TikTok and Google’s YouTube had previously reached settlement agreements with the plaintiff. (Snap on Tuesday confirmed a tentative agreement had been reached.) The bellwether jury trial had been set to begin next week in the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles. The plaintiff, a Florida teenager known by the initials “R.K.C.,” had sued…
[ad_1] Tesla is no longer planning to reach “volume production” of three of its newest products — the Cybercab, the Tesla Semi, and its Megapack 3 commercial energy-storage solution — in 2026, according to a second-quarter shareholder letter published Wednesday. The company also removed language from its first-quarter letter about its Optimus robot reaching “volume production.” The company said Wednesday that it’s trying to increase battery production, specifically around the company’s 4680 cell, in order to start building the Cybercab and Tesla Semi at scale. It did not offer a reason for pushing back volume production of the new Megapack,…
[ad_1] U.S. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent doubled down on his warnings to Chinese AI companies on Wednesday, saying that sanctions remain on the table after a White House official accused Moonshot of improperly distilling Anthropic’s Fable model. Model distillation is a common AI training technique in which a smaller model learns from the outputs of a larger one. While this process can infringe on intellectual property rights, it’s also widely used as a legitimate optimization method. “Open source is not open season on American IP,” Bessent posted on X. “When [Chinese] firms conduct covert, industrial-scale distillation attacks that cross the…
[ad_1] Alphabet investors have very publicly worried that the company’s massive AI spending isn’t worth the money. With the company’s latest earnings report, those investors should be able to relax a little. The takeaway: Google’s cloud business — driven largely by enterprise AI adoption — is booming. The search giant saw Google Cloud revenue spike 82% from where it was this time last year, climbing to $24.8 billion. That’s well above last quarter’s generous year-over-year growth, which showed a revenue jump of 63% to $20 billion — and it handily beats what Wall Street analysts expected for this quarter’s growth…
[ad_1] On Wednesday, IBM officially reported earnings and the news was as bad as everyone knew it would be. While the 115-year-old company still generates boatloads of cash — $17.2 billion in revenue, $9.9 billion in gross profit, nearly 58% margins, and $2.2 billion in net earnings for the quarter — its results fell well short of Wall Street’s expectations. It was such a bad miss that IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and the board took the unprecedented step of warning investors ahead of time that earnings “was worse than our expectations,” offering everyone a sneak peek. He published a “letter…
[ad_1] ServiceNow, the U.S. enterprise software company known for automating workflows like IT service management and HR operations, is betting on an Indian banking software specialist to deepen its push into global financial services. The company has invested $40 million in BusinessNext, valuing the 24-year-old Indian firm at $700 million and taking a roughly 5% stake. The deal gives BusinessNext access to ServiceNow’s global sales network as the companies expand their partnership in AI for financial services. ServiceNow’s investment reflects BusinessNext’s growing profile beyond India. The profitable, Noida-based company, which generated about $32 million in revenue in its latest financial…
[ad_1] White House science advisor Michael Kratsios said that Moonshot, the Chinese company behind Kimi K3, the largest available open-weight LLM, built its model by copying Anthropic’s Fable LLM while using chips that aren’t cleared for export to China. “Large-scale, covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary U.S. technology and undermining American research is unacceptable,” Kratsios wrote, amid reported discussions about banning Chinese open-weight models that have roiled the AI sector. Moonshot did not respond to questions about its training process, and Kratsios did not share more details about the sources of his allegations. Kratsios’ tweet echoed comments from Treasury…