Today's AI Pulse
Odyssey lands $310M Series B, valued at $1.45B
Odyssey announced a $310 million Series B round that values the AI lab at $1.45 billion. The round was led by Natural Capital and included backers such as Amazon, AMD Ventures, GV, EQT and IQT. In parallel, Odyssey struck a preferred‑cloud deal with AWS to use Trainium silicon for large‑scale model training.
Also developing:
Yelp’s AI Can Now Take Reservations over the Phone
Yelp launched two AI voice agents—Yelp Host for restaurants and Yelp Receptionist for broader businesses—that can answer calls, take and modify reservations, provide wait times, capture special requests, send menu links, and handle lead qualification and scheduling. Host is priced from $149/month (or $99/month for Yelp Guest Manager customers) and will add direct Yelp Waitlist integration soon; Receptionist starts at $99/month for eligible businesses with wider rollout planned. The tools, pre-trained on Yelp business data and available 24/7, aim to help understaffed local businesses automate customer interactions and streamline operations amid a broader industry shift toward vocal AI assistants.
Weekly Free AI Deep Dives, No Fluff
Every week, I share something exclusive (and completely free) that I don’t post anywhere else. New tools, research, lessons, and ideas shaping the future of AI - broken down simply, without the noise. If you like learning how things actually work, this...
How to Brace Your Business Infrastructure for the Impact of ChatGPT-5
OpenAI’s ChatGPT‑5 advances to ‘PhD‑level’ reasoning with a unified model and a one‑million‑token context window, enabling enterprises to process larger datasets, automate multi‑step workflows and extract richer insights. Those gains come with heavy infrastructure demands—heightened bandwidth, compute and latency sensitivity—that...
Vision Action Models Accelerate Real‑Time AI Video and Robotics
AI video is doing same as Tesla Self Driving: upgrading quickly. The robotics entrepreneurs in San Francisco told me about VLAs today. Vision Action Models. The AI can now understand the world in real time. Important for robotics. And same kind of...
Building AI-Ready Cultures in Life Sciences R&D - with Xiong Liu of Novartis
In this episode of the AI in Business podcast, Xiong Liu, Director of Data Science and AI at Novartis, discusses how generative AI and foundation models are reshaping life‑sciences R&D, from clinical workflows to collaborative research. He emphasizes the need...
AI’s Financial Blind Spot: Why Long-Term Success Depends on Cost Transparency
Businesses are racing to deploy AI but lack of cost transparency risks turning promising projects into expensive failures, argues Apptio. With 68% of tech leaders planning bigger AI budgets and 39% expecting AI to drive future budget growth—despite an average...
OpenAI Announces ChatGPT Atlas, an AI-Enabled Web Browser to Challenge Google Chrome
OpenAI launched ChatGPT Atlas, an AI-enabled web browser now available on macOS with Windows, iOS and Android support coming soon, and CEO Sam Altman set to formally unveil it in a livestream. Atlas positions OpenAI to challenge Google Chrome and...
The Unexpected Benefits of AI PCs: Why Creativity Could Be the New Productivity
New research and industry data position AI-enabled PCs—laptops with on-device neural processing—as catalysts for creativity-driven productivity, with MIT Sloan and HP-backed findings showing generative AI can enhance human creativity when workers have the right tools. Early adopters report measurable gains:...
Optimize Your Content for LLMs and AI
What is #LLMO? Optimize content for AI & large language models! https://t.co/6Jdoo8FXds #LLMs #LLM #genai #GenerativeAI #AI #artificial_intelligence #SEO #searchengine @SpirosMargaris @PawlowskiMario @mvollmer1 @gvalan @ipfconline1 @LaurentAlaus @Shi4Tech @Fisher85M @kalydeoo @Ym78200 @Nicochan33 @chboursin @3itcom @Fabriziobustama @sallyeaves @helene_wpli @ahier @rwang0 @EvanKirstel @RLDI_Lamy @Analytics_699 @Khulood_Almani...
Only Path to Shippable Code From AI Agents?
Is this the only way to get coding agents to produce shippable quality code? https://t.co/bZvxMN6JEv
Why an AGI Delay Doesn't Mean an AI Bubble
Nathaniel Whittemore argues that a slowdown in achieving artificial general intelligence does not signal an AI bubble, pointing to concrete industry shifts that show AI’s transformative impact. He draws on consulting trends—lower delivery costs, evolving client expectations, and the rise...
Elsevier Pioneers Decade-Long Responsible AI for Research
Elsevier has been using artificial intelligence responsibly for more than a decade to develop innovative solutions that support researchers, research decision-makers and their institutions. https://t.co/eZ56HGkCmR #AI #Research #Elsevier #ResponsibleAI
Tesla's Self-Driving Beats Waymo, Headlights Upgrade
Holy shit. @tesla Self Driving. Wow. @WholeMarsBlog was right. Even the matrix headlights improved. Waymo is way inferior. https://t.co/FpdBKQlpMB
Bryan Cranston and SAG-AFTRA Say OpenAI Is Taking Their Deepfake Concerns Seriously
Bryan Cranston, OpenAI, SAG-AFTRA and major talent agencies issued a joint statement saying OpenAI has “strengthened guardrails” around Sora 2 after unauthorized deepfakes of Cranston—including a viral image of him taking a selfie with Michael Jackson—appeared on the app. OpenAI...
DeepSeek OCR: Beyond Text Extraction with AI
DeepSeek OCR, More Than OCR! https://t.co/pIoCgsugxO #OCR #deepseek #deepseekocr #LLMs #genai #AI #GenerativeAI #artificial_intelligence @AlbertoEMachado @Eli_Krumova @postoff25 @Khulood_Almani @anand_narang @NutritiousMind @baski_LA @TanyaSinha_ @devaang @AlAmadi1 @jeancayeux @enilev @efipm @mvollmer1 @Nicochan33 @RagusoSergio @FrRonconi @Shi4Tech @sallyeaves @LaurentAlaus @Fabriziobustama @smaksked @MargaretSiegien @PawlowskiMario @gvalan @Ym78200 @mikeflache...
Unlock the Power of Images with AI Sheets
Hugging Face updated its open‑source AI Sheets tool to add full vision support, letting users view, extract, analyze, generate and edit images directly inside spreadsheets using thousands of open models via Inference Providers. The release enables tasks from receipt line‑item...
Supercharge Your OCR Pipelines with Open Models
A new practical guide maps the rapidly evolving landscape of open‑weight vision‑language OCR models, explaining when to fine‑tune versus use off‑the‑shelf models and how to move beyond basic transcription to multimodal retrieval and document QA. It compares leading open models...
AI Infrastructure with Flex AI CEO Brijesh Tripathi
The post surveys recent AI‑infrastructure news and interviews, highlighting Amazon’s lawsuit against Perplexity, OpenAI’s $38 billion AWS partnership, Nvidia’s $5 trillion valuation, and emerging AI applications from enterprise workflow to defense and digital legacy. It underscores how shifting cloud alliances, regulatory scrutiny,...
Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, on Leading The Atlantic Through the “AI Hurricane Coming Through”
In a recent episode of the *In AI We Trust?* podcast, EqualAI CEO Miriam Vogel interviews Nicholas Thompson, CEO of *The Atlantic*, about navigating the looming "AI hurricane" and the evolving role of journalists in AI literacy. Thompson outlines his...
GPT‑6 Unlikely This Year; GPT‑5 Will Redefine Interaction
GPT-6 by the end of the year? "And honestly, I don't think it's going to be happening. It would be very weird to have this massive launch GPT5 really a fundamental shift in the way users interact with chat GPT...
New Paper Defines AGI by Human‑Level Cognitive Versatility
What even is AGI anymore? A new paper attempts to define it. "So our definition of AGI is an AI that can match or exceed the cognitive versatility and proficiency of a well-educated adult. To measure this, we assess multiple...
Meta AI’s App Downloads and Daily Users Spiked After Launch of ‘Vibes’ AI Video Feed
Meta’s AI mobile app saw a sharp uptick in users and downloads after introducing its Vibes short‑form AI video feed, with daily active users rising to 2.7 million as of Oct. 17 from about 775,000 four weeks earlier and installs...
AI Proficiency Requires Trainable Mindset, Not Just Technical Skill
Most leaders assume technical competence = AI proficiency. Wrong - it's a separate, trainable skill that needs explicit development across the org. And some people are primed for that mindset. Our AI courses have trained hundreds of thousands of business professionals...
Text Diffusion: Simple Bi‑Directional Transformer Beats Autoregression
Nice, short post illustrating how simple text (discrete) diffusion can be. Diffusion (i.e. parallel, iterated denoising, top) is the pervasive generative paradigm in image/video, but autoregression (i.e. go left to right bottom) is the dominant paradigm in text. For audio I've...
The Friend AI Pendant’s Creator Publicized a ‘Friend Protest’ in NYC
Friend AI’s founder publicly highlighted a spontaneous “Friend protest” in New York after the company’s $129 chatbot-necklace and its >$1 million subway ad push drew widespread ridicule and vandalism. Founded in 2023 and only shipping this summer, the wearable has...
AI Amplifies Bad Data—Clean Foundations First
Most teams dream of using AI to save them from complexity. The dashboards, the messy reports and the endless debates over numbers. Everyone wants a magic switch. The reality is less cinematic. AI doesn’t clean up the mess for you. It...
GPTQ Brings Int4 Layerwise Quantization to Keras 3
GPTQ is a post-training, weights-only quantization method that compresses a model to int4 layer by layer. For each layer, it uses a second-order method to update weights while minimizing the error on a calibration dataset. It comes built-in in Keras 3...
FTC Removes Lina Khan-Era Posts About AI Risks and Open Source
The Federal Trade Commission quietly removed three Lina Khan‑era blog posts on open‑source AI and consumer harms—published July 2024, October 2023 and January 2025—according to Wired, part of a broader purge that previously included roughly 300 AI‑related posts. The deletions...
Why Explainability Is Key to Trusting AI
Excited to announce the next session in my Smart SaaSy Webinar Series — “The Black Box Problem: Do We Need to Understand How AI Works to Trust It?” I’ll be joined by Dr. Eva-Marie Müller-Stüler — global AI & data...
Kohler’s New Toilet Camera Provides Health Insights Based on Your Bathroom Breaks
Kohler introduced the Dekoda, a clamp-on toilet sensor that uses optical spectroscopy to analyze waste for hydration and gut-health indicators and to discreetly alert users to blood; the device is available for preorder at $599 with shipments starting Oct. 21....
These Nonprofits Lobbied to Regulate OpenAI — Then the Subpoenas Came
OpenAI has issued broad subpoenas to at least seven nonprofits that criticized its shift from nonprofit to commercial governance as part of its legal battle with Elon Musk, demanding extensive financial records, communications and documents related to OpenAI’s restructuring. Recipients...
Zocdoc CEO: ‘Dr. Google Is Going to Be Replaced by Dr. AI’
Zocdoc CEO Oliver Kharraz told TechFutures that AI chatbots are poised to replace “Dr. Google,” but Zocdoc expects to remain the underlying infrastructure that powers AI-driven scheduling and access to care. The company touts that a plurality of bookings occur...
5 Sensitive Details to Never Share with ChatGPT
ChatGPT Danger: 5 Things You Should Never Tell The AI Bot Protect yourself and your privacy. Here are five sensitive things you should avoid sharing with ChatGPT or any conversational AI. Read more 👉 https://lnkd.in/eD2ARRhq #ChatGPT #Privacy #AIUsage #BernardMarr
Import AI 432: AI Malware; Frankencomputing; and Poolside's Big Cluster
A Dreadnode proof‑of‑concept demonstrates AI malware that runs locally on on‑device LLMs (Phi‑3‑mini via ONNX), autonomously exploiting misconfigured Windows services to escalate privileges—flagging a nascent threat limited today to high‑end workstations and CoPilot+ PCs but with serious security implications as...
Celebrating Excellence: Bank Of America Wins Forrester’s 2025 Data & AI Impact Award
Bank of America won Forrester’s inaugural 2025 Data & AI Impact Award for an enterprise‑wide AI strategy that blends scale, trust and enablement to drive measurable business outcomes. The bank’s AI footprint includes 50 million users of its Erica virtual...
Napster Returns as an AI Companion for Your MacBook – Seriously
Napster has relaunched as a hardware and software AI company with Napster View, a $99 holographic screen that mounts to MacBooks (M1+) and surfaces a library of some 15,000 agentic AIs for tasks from design and wellbeing to business planning....
AI SEO, Claude Gets New Skills, and the UK’s Big AI Training Push
In this episode Paul and Martin cut through AI hype for marketers, emphasizing that generative search demands high‑quality, well‑structured content and strong distribution rather than chasing fleeting "AI SEO" tricks. They review Anthropic’s new Haiku 4.5 and Claude Skills, note Claude’s...
From Fine‑tuned CNNs to ChatGPT’s Pixel‑perfect Descriptions
It do be like that these days... 😅 I remember when we had to fine-tune an ImageNet-pre-trained CNN and preprocess the image to then send it and get a top-5 classification that was somewhat accurate... Now ChatGPT describes every pixel...
Should an AI Copy of You Help Decide if You Live or Die?
Researchers at the University of Washington are piloting research into AI “surrogates” that could one day help doctors and families make end‑of‑life decisions for incapacitated patients, though no hospital has yet deployed such systems. The project, led by resident fellow...
AI Could Predict Who Will Have a Heart Attack
Startups including Bunkerhill Health, Nanox.AI and HeartLung Technologies are applying AI to routine chest CT scans to automatically detect and quantify coronary artery calcium (CAC), potentially flagging millions of patients at elevated risk of heart attack who are currently missed....
Energy, AI, and Policy Converge at ADIPEC 2025
How do we power a world demanding more energy, intelligence, AND resilience – simultaneously? Nov 3-6, Abu Dhabi becomes the epicenter of this transformation at #ADIPEC2025 🌍⚡ Energy. Intelligence. Impact. Excited to see prominent US leaders joining: 🏛️ Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior...
Veo 3.1 Dominates Leaderboards with Massive Performance Gains
Awesome to see Veo 3.1 top the LMArena video leaderboards by a large distance with big improvements over Veo 3.0 for text-to-video (+30) and image-to-video (+70)! 🔥Huge congrats to the team! Try it for yourself in https://t.co/QgTpxTL8DQ and the @GeminiApp
Fuel Your OODA Loop for AI-Driven Competition
Quick insights on OODAcon and how we will help add jet fuel to your OODA Loop, with @junaidislam. Bottom line: This is about ensuring you are ready to orient yourself to compete and win in the new AI enabled world....
AI Isn't a Bubble, Unlike the Dot‑Com Era
this time last year post-@stateofaireport we heard lots of “is ai a bubble” chatter, just like we do today we wrote a piece on @airstreetpress arguing that ai is not like the dot com thinking of writing up a v2...
AI's Rapid Evolution Sparks Bubble Debate and Nvidia Dominance
got to chat about the @stateofaireport on @tbpn last fri w/@johncoogan @jordihays, incl. bits on financing dynamics, how today's ai is magical vs. 12 years ago when i started, ai bubble (yes, no?), nvidia's dominance, ai search/agent experience, industrial policy...
More Compute Trumps All Other AI Strategies
Without checking, what is the message behind the "Bitter Lesson", in your opinion? (a) all other things being equal, using more compute is better. (b) more compute is better than all the other things put together.
Explore the Power of Mixture of Experts (MoE)
🔗 Mixture of Experts (MoE): https://t.co/3CGjgO4H9p https://t.co/QA12nBeW0i
Overreliance on AI Risks Undermining Critical Decision-Making
The danger of AI dependency https://t.co/HFtMCYQf9g #AI #GenAI #TechNews #Technology #healthcare #Innovation #Tech #ArtificialIntelligence
Internal AI May Replace Risky Open‑Source Contributions
Even though this particular example worked out as you'd expect today, Open Source dynamics will certainly change. Accepting and merging contributions is always a risk and has high cost, so trusting an internal AI system for minor codebase improvements may become...
Defining “Large” In Language Models: GPU Limits
how large the model should be to be called large language model? if it doesnt fit on home gpus, its large?