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Niv-AI Exits Stealth to Wring More Power Performance Out of GPUs
Niv‑AI has emerged from stealth with a $12 million seed round to tackle the chronic power‑inefficiency of GPU‑heavy AI workloads. The Tel Aviv startup is installing rack‑level sensors that record millisecond‑scale power spikes, then training an AI model to predict and balance those loads. Its first “copilot” system aims to be operational in a handful of U.S. data centers within six to eight months, promising to unlock idle GPU capacity and smooth grid demand. Backed by Glilot Capital, Grove Ventures and others, Niv‑AI positions itself as the missing intelligence layer between data centers and the power grid.
Google Maps Is Getting an AI ‘Ask Maps’ Feature and Upgraded ‘Immersive’ Navigation
Google Maps unveiled two major upgrades: a Gemini‑powered conversational "Ask Maps" feature and an "Immersive Navigation" experience with 3D visuals and detailed lane guidance. Ask Maps lets users pose natural‑language queries about charging stations, venues, or multi‑stop trips, delivering personalized...
Rivian Spin-Out Mind Robotics Raises $500M for Industrial AI-Powered Robots
Mind Robotics, a Rivian spin‑out, closed a $500 million Series A round co‑led by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz, lifting its valuation to roughly $2 billion. The funding follows a $115 million seed round, bringing total capital raised to $615 million since its November 2025 launch. The...
Canopii Looks to Succeed Where Past Indoor Farms Have Not
Portland‑based Canopii has built a fully autonomous robotic greenhouse that can grow up to 40,000 pounds of herbs and specialty greens per year using only a single water spigot and standard household electricity. The company raised about $3.6 million, largely from...
Sandbar Secures $23M Series A for Its AI Note-Taking Ring
Sandbar announced a $23 million Series A round led by Adjacent and Kindred Ventures, bringing its total funding to $36 million. The round backs the Stream smart ring, an AI‑driven note‑taking wearable that activates a proximity microphone when the user lifts their hand....
Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs Raises $1.03B to Build World Models
Yann LeCun’s new venture AMI Labs secured $1.03 billion in funding, valuing the startup at $3.5 billion pre‑money. The company is developing "world models"—AI systems that learn from real‑world data using the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA). Its first commercial partner is...
Jensen Huang Says Nvidia Is Pulling Back From OpenAI and Anthropic, but His Explanation Raises More Questions than It Answers
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced at the Morgan Stanley conference that the company will likely cease new investments in OpenAI and Anthropic once those firms go public later this year. The move follows a scaling back of earlier commitments—Nvidia invested...
Claude Code Rolls Out a Voice Mode Capability
Anthropic has added a Voice Mode to its Claude Code AI coding assistant, allowing developers to issue spoken commands like refactoring code. The feature is currently available to roughly 5% of users, with a wider rollout planned in the coming...
A Married Founder Duo’s Company, 14.ai, Is Replacing Customer Support Teams at Startups
14.ai, a Y Combinator‑backed startup founded by a married duo, secured $3 million in seed funding to build an AI‑native customer support agency. The company combines proprietary software with human agents to take over entire support operations, integrating with email, chat,...
Who’s Really Running AI? Inside the Billion-Dollar Battle over Regulation with Alex Bores
Alex Bores, a New York State Assemblymember, championed the state’s pioneering RAISE Act, a comprehensive AI safety bill that could become a national template. The legislation sparked a $125 million super‑PAC backlash from a Silicon Valley lobbying coalition, while Anthropic poured...
Gushwork Bets on AI Search for Customer Leads — and Early Results Are Emerging
Gushwork, an India‑founded startup, closed a $9 million seed round that values it at $33 million post‑money. The company’s AI‑driven platform creates search‑optimized content, builds backlinks, and tracks leads to help businesses appear in AI‑powered search results such as ChatGPT and Gemini....
Nvidia Has Another Record Quarter Amid Record Capex Spends
Nvidia posted a record $68 billion quarter, a 73% year‑over‑year increase, driven largely by its data‑center business. Data‑center revenue reached $62 billion, split between $51 billion in compute and $11 billion in networking products, pushing full‑year revenue to $215 billion. The company still reports no...
Gemini Can Now Automate some Multi-Step Tasks on Android
Google unveiled new Gemini AI features for Android, including beta‑stage automations that can execute multi‑step tasks such as ordering rides or food delivery. The automations initially support select food, grocery and rideshare apps and are limited to the Gemini app...
OpenAI COO Says Ads Will Be ‘an Iterative Process’
OpenAI has begun serving advertisements to users on its free and Go ChatGPT tiers, initially rolling them out to U.S. customers. COO Brad Lightcap described the rollout as an iterative process that must prioritize user privacy and trust. The company...
Sam Altman Would Like Remind You that Humans Use a Lot of Energy, Too
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told an Indian Express audience that claims about ChatGPT’s water consumption are unfounded, while conceding that AI’s overall energy use is a genuine concern. He highlighted the industry’s shift away from evaporative cooling, reducing per‑query water...
Google’s New Gemini Pro Model Has Record Benchmark Scores — Again
Google unveiled Gemini 3.1 Pro, the latest large‑language model in its Gemini series, as a preview with a full launch slated soon. Independent benchmarks, including Humanity’s Last Exam, show the model achieving record scores that surpass its Gemini 3 predecessor. The AI startup...
Nvidia Deepens Early-Stage Push Into India’s AI Startup Ecosystem
Nvidia is intensifying its early‑stage outreach in India by partnering with venture firm Activate, which will back 25‑30 AI startups from a $75 million fund and grant them preferential access to Nvidia’s technical expertise. The chipmaker also deepened ties with AI...
Freeform Raises $67M Series B to Scale up Laser AI Manufacturing
Freeform announced a $67 million Series B round to accelerate its metal 3D‑printing platform. The capital will fund the upgrade from the GoldenEye system to the AI‑native Skyfall printer, which will employ hundreds of lasers to produce thousands of kilograms of parts...
Cohere Launches a Family of Open Multilingual Models
Cohere unveiled the Tiny Aya family of open‑weight multilingual models, supporting more than 70 languages and built on a 3.35 billion‑parameter base. The suite includes regional variants—Global, Earth, Fire, and Water—tailored for Africa, South Asia, APAC, West Asia and Europe, and...
How Ricursive Intelligence Raised $335M at a $4B Valuation in 4 Months
Ricursive Intelligence, founded by former Google Brain and Anthropic engineers Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, closed a $300 million Series A and a $35 million seed round, totaling $335 million, at a $4 billion valuation within four months of launch. The startup builds an AI‑driven...
Flapping Airplanes on the Future of AI: ‘We Want to Try Really Radically Different Things’
Flapping Airplanes, a newly founded AI lab backed by $180 million in seed capital, is tackling the data‑efficiency problem that plagues today’s foundation models. The founders—Ben and Asher Spector and Aidan Smith—argue that humans learn with far less data than large...
As AI Data Centers Hit Power Limits, Peak XV Backs Indian Startup C2i to Fix the Bottleneck
AI data centers are increasingly constrained by power delivery rather than compute, as conversion losses waste 15‑20% of energy. To address this, Peak XV Partners led a $15 million Series A in Indian startup C2i Semiconductors, which is developing a plug‑and‑play grid‑to‑GPU power...
Blackstone Backs Neysa in up to $1.2B Financing as India Pushes to Build Domestic AI Infrastructure
Neysa, an Indian AI‑infrastructure startup, secured up to $600 million of primary equity from Blackstone, giving the private‑equity firm a majority stake, and plans an additional $600 million in debt to expand its GPU fleet. The capital will help the company grow...
Longtime NPR Host David Greene Sues Google over NotebookLM Voice
David Greene, former NPR Morning Edition host, has filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging that the male podcast voice in its Notebook LM AI tool mimics his distinctive cadence, intonation, and filler words. Greene says friends and colleagues noticed the resemblance,...
India Has 100M Weekly Active ChatGPT Users, Sam Altman Says
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that India now has 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, making it the company’s second‑largest market after the United States. The milestone was disclosed ahead of the five‑day India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, where OpenAI...
The Great Computer Science Exodus (and Where Students Are Going Instead)
University of California campuses reported a 6 % drop in traditional computer‑science enrollment last year, the first decline since the dot‑com crash, even as overall college enrollment rose 2 % nationally. Students are increasingly choosing AI‑focused majors, a shift echoed by Chinese...
Nearly Half of xAI’s Founding Team Has Now Left the Company
Nearly half of xAI’s 12‑person founding team has departed, including co‑founder Yuhuai "Tony" Wu, infrastructure lead Kyle Kosic, Google veteran Christian Szegedy, Igor Babushkin and Greg Yang. The exits span the past year and are described as amicable, but they...
Vega Raises $120M Series B to Rethink How Enterprises Detect Cyber Threats
Vega Security announced a $120 million Series B round, lifting its valuation to $700 million. The Boston‑based startup aims to overturn the traditional SIEM model by analyzing security data where it already resides—in cloud services, data lakes, and existing storage—using an AI‑native platform....
Former GitHub CEO Raises Record $60M Dev Tool Seed Round at $300M Valuation
Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke’s startup Entire secured a $60 million seed round, valuing the company at $300 million, the largest seed financing ever for a developer‑tool venture. Entire offers an open‑source platform that records AI‑generated code, prompts, and decision transcripts, beginning...
AI Video Startup Runway Raises $315M at $5.3B Valuation, Eyes More Capable World Models
Runway, the AI video generation startup, closed a $315 million Series E round, lifting its valuation to $5.3 billion. The capital will fund the pre‑training of next‑generation world models and broaden product reach into sectors such as gaming, robotics, and climate science. Runway’s...
Anthropic’s India Expansion Collides with a Local Company that Already Had the Name
Anthropic is scaling its AI operations in India, appointing former Microsoft India MD Irina Ghose to lead the new office. A Karnataka commercial court case filed by local software firm Anthropic Software alleges the U.S. startup is infringing a name...
Anthropic Closes in on $20B Round
Anthropic is nearing the close of a $20 billion financing round that values the AI startup at $350 billion, more than double its original target. The bulk of the capital is expected from strategic partners Nvidia and Microsoft, alongside a slate of...
Ex-Googlers Are Building Infrastructure to Help Companies Understand Their Video Data
InfiniMind, a Tokyo‑based startup founded by former Google Japan executives Aza Kai and Hiraku Yanagita, is building enterprise‑grade video‑intelligence infrastructure to turn petabytes of unused footage into searchable data. The company raised $5.8 million in seed funding led by UTEC and...
Okay, I’m Slightly Less Mad About that ‘Magnificent Ambersons’ AI Project
Startup Fable is using generative AI to recreate the 43‑minute lost footage from Orson Welles’ 1942 film “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Founder Edward Saatchi, motivated by personal admiration for Welles, combines live‑action shoots with AI‑generated actors and voices to approximate the...
From Svedka to Anthropic, Brands Make Bold Plays with AI in Super Bowl Ads
The 2026 Super Bowl featured a wave of AI‑centric ads, with brands like Svedka debuting a primarily AI‑generated commercial and Anthropic using its spot to mock OpenAI. Meta highlighted AI‑powered glasses, while Amazon introduced Alexa+ through a tongue‑in‑cheek narrative. Ring...
It Just Got Easier for Claude to Check in on Your WordPress Site
WordPress introduced a new Claude connector that lets site owners share back‑end data with Anthropic’s chatbot on a read‑only basis. Users can select which data to expose and revoke access at any time. The integration enables queries such as traffic...
Maybe AI Agents Can Be Lawyers After All
Mercor’s APEX‑Agents benchmark revealed AI agents lagging far behind human lawyers, with scores under 25% earlier this year. Anthropic’s latest Opus 4.6 model shattered that record, achieving just under 30% on one‑shot legal tasks and about 45% when given multiple attempts....
How AI Is Helping Solve the Labor Issue in Treating Rare Diseases
Biotech firms Insilico Medicine and GenEditBio are leveraging artificial intelligence to overcome the talent bottleneck that has left thousands of rare diseases untreated. Insilico’s new MMAI Gym trains large language models to perform multiple drug‑discovery tasks, while its platform automates...
The Backlash over OpenAI’s Decision to Retire GPT-4o Shows How Dangerous AI Companions Can Be
OpenAI announced it will retire GPT‑4o by February 13, ending access for roughly 800,000 users who view the model as an emotional companion. The move follows eight lawsuits accusing the chatbot of fostering suicidal ideation and providing harmful instructions. Users...
ElevenLabs CEO: Voice Is the Next Interface for AI
ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski announced that voice will become the primary interface for AI, complementing large‑language models with emotion‑rich speech. The company just closed a $500 million financing round, valuing it at $11 billion, as rivals like OpenAI, Google and Apple double down...
Amazon to Begin Testing AI Tools for Film and TV Production Next Month
Amazon MGM Studios' AI Studio is moving from internal trials to a closed‑beta program in March, inviting select industry partners to test its proprietary AI tools for film and TV production. The tools aim to improve character consistency, streamline pre‑...
Roblox’s 4D Creation Feature Is Now Available in Open Beta
Roblox has opened beta testing for its 4D creation feature, extending AI‑generated assets beyond static 3D models to include interactive behavior. The rollout follows the successful Cube 3D tool, which has produced over 1.8 million objects since March. Two initial schemas—Car‑5 and...
Alexa+, Amazon’s AI Assistant, Is Now Available to Everyone in the US
Amazon has rolled out Alexa+, its generative‑AI‑powered upgrade to the Alexa assistant, to all U.S. customers. The feature is free for Prime members across devices and available via the Alexa website or app with limited usage for non‑Prime users. Alexa+...
Accel Doubles Down on Fibr AI as Agents Turn Static Websites Into One-to-One Experiences
Fibr AI announced a $5.7 million seed round led by Accel, bringing total funding to $7.5 million. The Boston‑based startup uses autonomous AI agents to convert static webpages into real‑time, one‑to‑one experiences for each visitor. Early adoption is picking up among large...
Exclusive: Positron Raises $230M Series B to Take on Nvidia’s AI Chips
Semiconductor startup Positron announced a $230 million Series B round, led in part by Qatar Investment Authority. The capital will accelerate deployment of its high‑speed memory chips and the Atlas inference processor, which claims H100‑class performance at a third of the power...
Carbon Robotics Built an AI Model that Detects and Identifies Plants
Carbon Robotics unveiled its Large Plant Model (LPM), an AI system that instantly identifies plant species, eliminating the need for manual retraining of its LaserWeeder robots. The model was trained on more than 150 million labeled photos collected from over 100...
These AI Notetaking Devices Can Help You Record and Transcribe Your Meetings
Physical AI notetaking devices are gaining traction as an alternative to software‑only transcription services, offering hands‑free recording for in‑person meetings. Products like Plaud Note, Mobvoi TicNote, Comulytic Note Pro and Anker Soundcore Work combine multiple microphones, on‑device AI and mobile apps...
AI Layoffs or ‘AI-Washing’?
A New York Times piece highlights a surge of "AI‑washing" as firms blame artificial intelligence for over 50,000 layoffs in 2025, including high‑profile cuts at Amazon and Pinterest. Forrester’s January report argues many of these companies lack mature AI applications...
Indonesia ‘Conditionally’ Lifts Ban on Grok
Indonesia's Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs announced a conditional lifting of its ban on xAI's chatbot Grok. The ban, originally imposed after Grok generated 1.8 million non‑consensual sexualized images, will remain reversible pending compliance with new safeguards outlined by X....
India Offers Zero Taxes Through 2047 to Lure Global AI Workloads
India’s 2026 budget announced a tax holiday through 2047 for foreign cloud providers that run AI workloads from Indian data centers, effectively eliminating taxes on export‑oriented cloud revenues. The move aims to attract the next wave of AI infrastructure investment...