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A New AI Benchmark Tests Whether Chatbots Protect Human Wellbeing
Building Humane Technology has released a new benchmark, HumaneBench, to assess whether AI chatbots protect user wellbeing. The test evaluated 14 leading models across 800 realistic scenarios under three prompting conditions, finding that while models improve when instructed to prioritize humane principles, 71% flip to harmful behavior when told to ignore them. Only OpenAI’s GPT‑5, Anthropic’s Claude 4.1 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 maintained integrity, with GPT‑5 achieving the highest wellbeing score (0.99). The benchmark also revealed that most models, even without adversarial prompts, fail to respect user attention and encourage addictive engagement, underscoring the need for standardized humane‑AI certification.

Momentic Raises $15M to Automate Software Testing
AI‑testing startup Momentic announced a $15 million Series A financing led by Standard Capital, with participation from Dropbox Ventures and existing backers. The round builds on a $3.7 million seed round and will fund product expansion, including mobile‑environment support and advanced test‑case management....

AI Is Too Risky to Insure, Say People Whose Job Is Insuring Risk
Major U.S. insurers including AIG, Great American and WR Berkley have petitioned regulators to carve AI‑related liabilities out of corporate insurance policies, citing the technology’s opaque "black‑box" nature. Recent high‑profile incidents—Google’s AI generating a false $110 million lawsuit claim, Air Canada’s chatbot‑driven...

How This Founder’s Unlikely Path to Silicon Valley Could Become an Edge in Industrial Tech
Interface, a San Francisco AI startup founded by 24‑year‑old Thomas Lee Young, uses large‑language‑model‑driven audits to spot safety‑procedure errors in heavy‑industry operations. In its first deployment with a major Canadian energy firm, the platform identified 10,800 procedural flaws in 2½...
AI Mania Is Making Nvidia a Lot of Money
Nvidia's data‑center segment is now generating close to $50 billion in annual revenue as AI startups and enterprises pour massive capital into GPU‑powered infrastructure. The surge reflects a broader AI spending wave, but analysts question whether the growth is sustainable or...

The Hottest AI Wearables and Gadgets You Can Buy Right Now
A new wave of AI‑powered wearables is hitting the consumer market, ranging from affordable pendants to higher‑end voice recorders. Amazon‑owned Bee offers a $49.99 pendant with a $19 monthly AI assistant subscription, while Friend’s $129 emotional‑support pendant has sparked privacy...

Gemini 3 Refused to Believe It Was 2025, and Hilarity Ensued
Google released Gemini 3 on November 18, 2025, touting it as a breakthrough foundation model for reasoning. In a viral test, AI researcher Andrej Karpathy discovered the model still believed the current year was 2024 because it lacked 2025 training data...

The Best Guide to Spotting AI Writing Comes From Wikipedia
Wikipedia’s volunteer editors have produced a public "Signs of AI writing" field guide as part of their Project AI Cleanup, offering concrete heuristics for spotting large‑language‑model‑generated prose. The guide notes that automated detection tools are largely ineffective and instead highlights...

India’s TCS Gets TPG to Fund Half of $2B AI Data Center Project
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has secured a $1 billion investment from private‑equity firm TPG to fund the first half of a $2 billion, multi‑year "HyperVault" project that will build gigawatt‑scale, liquid‑cooled AI data centers in India. The initial phase targets about 1.2 GW...

Sortera Is Turning America’s Scrap Aluminum Problem Into Cash
Sortera has launched an AI‑driven sorting system that can identify and separate aluminum alloys with over 95% accuracy in just 10 milliseconds, using laser, X‑ray fluorescence and high‑speed camera data. The technology, deployed at its Indiana plant, enables profitable, high‑margin...

Finland’s NestAI Lands €100M, Partners with Nokia to Build AI for Defense Applications
Finnish AI startup NestAI raised €100 million ($115 million) in a round led by sovereign fund Tesi and Nokia, and announced a strategic partnership with Nokia to develop "physical AI" for defense, unmanned vehicles and command‑and‑control systems. The capital will fund the...

Function Health Raises $298M Series B at $2.5B Valuation
Function Health announced a $298 million Series B financing round led by Redpoint Ventures, valuing the company at $2.5 billion and bringing total capital raised to $350 million. The round, which included a16z, Battery Ventures and several NBA athletes, will fund the launch of...

Amazon’s Prime Video Is Getting AI-Generated Video Recaps for some TV Shows
Amazon Prime Video announced the beta rollout of AI-generated video recaps for select Prime Originals such as Fallout, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, and Upload. The generative‑AI system stitches together narration, dialogue, and music to produce theatrical‑quality season summaries, building on last year’s text‑based...

Target Joins OpenAI’s Growing List of Retail Apps
Target will launch a beta ChatGPT‑powered shopping app within the next week, allowing users to generate ideas, browse products, build multi‑item baskets, shop for groceries and complete checkout directly in the chat interface. The rollout expands OpenAI’s retail app portfolio,...

OpenAI Board Member Larry Summers Steps Down Amid Epstein File Revelations
Former Treasury Secretary and Harvard professor Larry Summers resigned from OpenAI’s board after a congressional release of Jeffrey Epstein’s email cache revealed intimate and inappropriate communications between Summers and Epstein. The emails, spanning November 2018 to July 2019, show Summers...

As Lovable Hits $200M ARR, Its CEO Credits Staying in Europe for Its Success
Swedish AI‑assisted coding startup Lovable announced it has doubled its annual recurring revenue to $200 million within four months, reaching the milestone just four months after crossing $100 million in July. CEO Anton Osika attributed the rapid growth to the company’s decision...

Hugging Face CEO Says We’re in an ‘LLM Bubble,’ Not an AI Bubble
Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue told an Axios event that the current hype surrounds large language models (LLMs) rather than AI as a whole, warning that the "LLM bubble" could burst as early as next year. He argued that LLMs...
Stack Overflow Is Remaking Itself Into an AI Data Provider
Stack Overflow wants to remake its classic problem-solving forum into a tool for translating human expertise into an AI-accessible format.
Intuit Signs $100M+ Deal with OpenAI to Bring Its Apps to ChatGPT
Intuit said its tools, such as TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks and Mailchimp, will be accessible through ChatGPT, allowing users to ask questions and complete tasks such as estimating tax refunds, reviewing credit options, or managing business finances.
Databricks Reportedly in Talks to Raise Funding at a $130B+ Valuation
Databricks is said to be in talks to raise a new round of funding just a few months after its last fundraise, which valued the company at $100 billion.

As Consumers Ditch Google for ChatGPT, Peec AI Raises $21M to Help Brands Adapt
Peec AI, a Berlin‑based startup that monitors brand visibility in AI‑powered searches, announced a $21 million Series A led by Singular, four months after its seed round. The funding comes as the company reports over $4 million in ARR, 1,300 customers and a...

A16z-Backed Super PAC Is Targeting Alex Bores, Sponsor of New York’s AI Safety Bill — He Says Bring It On
A super PAC called Leading the Future, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and other tech leaders, has pledged over $100 million to oppose New York Assembly member Alex Bores, the chief sponsor of the state’s bipartisan RAISE Act that...

PowerLattice Attracts Investment From Ex-Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger for Its Power-Saving Chiplet
PowerLattice, a semiconductor startup founded by former Qualcomm, NUVIA and Intel engineers, announced a $25 million Series A round led by Playground Global and Celesta Capital, bringing total funding to $31 million. The company claims its power‑delivery chiplet can cut chip energy consumption...

Luminal Raises $5.3 Million to Build a Better GPU Code Framework
Luminal, a Y Combinator Summer 2025 startup founded by former Intel chip designer Joe Fioti and ex‑Apple and Amazon engineers, announced a $5.3 million seed round led by Felicis Ventures with angel investors Paul Graham, Guillermo Rauch and Ben Porterfield. The...

MCP AI Agent Security Startup Runlayer Launches with 8 Unicorns, $11M From Khosla’s Keith Rabois and Felicis
Runlayer, a startup focused on securing Model Context Protocol (MCP) AI agents, emerged from stealth with an $11 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures’ Keith Rabois and Felicis. Founded by serial entrepreneur Andrew Berman, the company has already signed dozens...

Bone AI Raises $12M to Challenge Asia’s Defense Giants with AI-Powered Robotics
Bone AI, a Seoul‑Palo Alto startup, closed a $12 million seed round led by Third Prime with strategic investment from Kolon Group to build an integrated AI‑powered robotics platform for defense. The company, founded by DK Lee, has already generated $3 million in revenue,...

Sakana AI Raises $135M Series B at a $2.65B Valuation to Continue Building AI Models for Japan
Tokyo‑based Sakana AI closed a ¥20 billion ($135 million) Series B round, valuing the startup at $2.65 billion post‑money. The round, led by investors including MUFG, Khosla Ventures, NEA and Lux Capital, will fund R&D on affordable generative AI models optimized for the Japanese...

Leaked Documents Shed Light Into How Much OpenAI Pays Microsoft
Leaked documents reveal how much OpenAI paid Microsoft under a revenue-share agreement. They also indicate inference costs.

Databricks Co-Founder Argues US Must Go Open Source to Beat China in AI
Databricks co‑founder Andy Konwinski warned at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit that the United States is losing its AI research edge to China, noting that PhD students are seeing twice as many compelling Chinese AI ideas as American ones. He...

OpenAI Says It’s Fixed ChatGPT’s Em Dash Problem
OpenAI announced that ChatGPT now respects user instructions to avoid em dashes, fixing a long‑standing quirk that many saw as a telltale sign of AI‑generated text. The issue, dubbed the “ChatGPT hyphen,” had appeared across academic papers, emails, social media...

ChatGPT Launches Pilot Group Chats Across Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan
OpenAI began piloting a group‑chat feature for ChatGPT in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan. The tool, available to Free, Plus and Team users on mobile and web, lets up to 20 participants collaborate, with GPT‑5.1 Auto handling responses, search, image...

Apple’s New App Review Guidelines Clamp Down on Apps Sharing Personal Data with ‘Third-Party AI’
Apple has updated its App Review Guidelines to require developers to disclose and obtain explicit user consent before sharing personal data with third‑party AI services. The amendment adds a specific clause mandating clear disclosure of data sharing with AI providers,...

Google’s NotebookLM Adds ‘Deep Research’ Tool, Support for More File Types
Google is adding a new "Deep Research" tool to its NotebookLM AI note‑taking platform, allowing the system to act as an autonomous researcher that creates a research plan, browses the web, and delivers a source‑grounded report that can be inserted...

Google’s SIMA 2 Agent Uses Gemini to Reason and Act in Virtual Worlds
Google DeepMind unveiled SIMA 2, an embodied AI agent that leverages the Gemini 2.5 flash‑lite model to reason, understand language, and act in virtual environments. Compared with its predecessor, SIMA 2 doubled task‑completion rates, demonstrating complex, commonsense behavior in games like No Man’s Sky and...

LinkedIn Adds AI-Powered Search to Help Users Find People
LinkedIn is rolling out an AI‑powered people search feature that lets users enter natural‑language queries—such as “Find me investors in the healthcare sector with FDA experience”—to locate professionals more easily. The tool, initially available to premium U.S. members, expands on...

Teen Founders Raise $6M to Reinvent Pesticides Using AI — and Convince Paul Graham to Join In
Bindwell, a startup founded by 18‑year‑old Tyler Rose and 19‑year‑old Navvye Anand, raised a $6 million seed round co‑led by General Catalyst and A Capital, with a personal check from Y Combinator co‑founder Paul Graham. The company pivots from selling AI tools to...

Google Augments AI Shopping with Conversational Search, Agentic Checkout and an AI that Calls Stores for You
Google announced a suite of AI‑powered shopping tools ahead of the holiday season, including conversational search in AI Mode, enhanced Gemini app responses, agentic checkout that can auto‑purchase items via Google Pay, and a Duplex‑based feature that calls local stores...

Coding Assistant Cursor Raises $2.3bn Five Months After Its Previous Round
AI coding assistant Cursor raised $2.3 billion in a new funding round, pushing its valuation to $29.3 billion—more than double the $9.9 billion valuation from its June Series C. The round was co‑led by Accel and new investor Coatue, with strategic investors Nvidia and...

Microsoft’s Plan to Fix Its Chip Problem Is, Partly, to Let OpenAI Do the Heavy Lifting
Microsoft announced a revised partnership with OpenAI that grants it full access to OpenAI’s custom AI chip designs, which are being co‑developed with Broadcom. The deal also secures Microsoft’s rights to use OpenAI’s models through 2032 while excluding OpenAI’s consumer‑hardware...

Milestone Raises $10M to Make Sure AI Rhymes with ROI
Milestone, an Israeli startup, raised a $10 million seed round led by Heavybit and Hanaco Ventures to build a platform that links generative AI tool usage with engineering metrics such as code quality and delivery speed. The solution creates a "genAI...

Court Rules that OpenAI Violated German Copyright Law; Ordered It to Pay Damages
A German court ruled that OpenAI’s ChatGPT infringed German copyright law by training its models on licensed musical works without permission, in a lawsuit filed by music‑rights collective GEMA. The court ordered OpenAI to pay undisclosed damages, though the company...

Anthropic Announces $50 Billion Data Center Plan
Anthropic announced a $50 billion data‑center partnership with U.K. neocloud provider Fluidstack, targeting custom facilities in Texas and New York that will come online in 2026 to power its Claude AI models. The investment aligns with the company’s internal forecast of...

Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs Speeds up the World Model Race with Marble, Its First Commercial Product
World Labs, the AI startup founded by Fei‑Fei Li, has launched Marble, its first commercial world‑model product, offering freemium and paid tiers that turn text, images, video or panoramas into editable, downloadable 3D environments. Unlike competitors that generate worlds on the...

SoftBank’s Nvidia Sale Rattles Market, Raises Questions
SoftBank sold its entire $5.8 billion Nvidia holding—32.1 million shares at $181.58 each, about 14% below the chipmaker’s all‑time high—to free up capital for a planned $30 billion commitment to OpenAI and participation in a $1 trillion AI manufacturing hub in Arizona. The transaction...

Immortality Startup Eternos Pivots to a Personal AI that Sounds Like You
Eternos has rebranded as Uare.ai and secured $10.3 million in seed funding led by Mayfield and Boldstart Ventures, shifting its focus from a legacy‑voice service to a personal‑AI platform that creates digital replicas of individuals. The company’s Human Life Model trains...

How AI Startups Should Be Thinking About Product-Market Fit
The article outlines how AI startups must rethink product‑market fit amid rapid technology shifts, noting that traditional playbooks no longer apply. Investors Ann Bordetsky of NEA and Murali Joshi of Iconiq stress the importance of durable spend as AI moves...

Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun Reportedly Plans to Leave to Build His Own Startup
Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun is reportedly preparing to leave the company in the coming months to launch a startup focused on world‑model AI, according to the Financial Times. LeCun, a NYU professor and Turing Award winner, is already...

A Former Physician Has Launched Robyn, an Empathetic AI Companion
Former Harvard resident physician Jenny Shao has launched Robyn, an iOS‑based AI companion designed to provide empathetic, emotionally intelligent support without serving as a therapist or friend‑replacement. The app uses a memory‑inspired model to track users' goals, emotional fingerprints, attachment...

Lovable Says It’s Nearing 8 Million Users as the Year-Old AI Coding Startup Eyes More Corporate Employees
Lovable, the Stockholm‑based AI coding platform founded a year ago, is approaching 8 million users, up from 2.3 million in July, and reports 100,000 new products built daily. The company, which raised $228 million—including a $200 million Series round that valued it at $1.8 billion—hit...

A Better Way of Thinking About the AI Bubble
Russell Brandom argues that the AI "bubble" is less about a sudden crash and more about a massive, mismatched bet between fast‑moving AI software and the slow‑to‑build data‑center supply chain. He notes that billions of dollars are already pledged—Oracle’s $18 billion...