AI

Leaked documents shed light into how much OpenAI pays Microsoft

After a year of frenzied dealmaking and rumors of an upcoming IPO, the financial scrutiny into OpenAI is intensifying. Leaked documents obtained by tech blogger Ed Zitron provide more of a glimpse into OpenAI’s financials — specifically its revenue and compute costs over the past couple of years.   Zitron reported this week that in 2024, […]

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Databricks co-founder argues US must go open source to beat China in AI

Andy Konwinski is concerned that the U.S. is losing its dominance in AI research to China, calling the shift an “existential” threat to democracy. Konwinski is a Databricks co-founder and the co-founder of the AI research and venture capital firm Laude. “If you talk to PhD students at Berkeley and Stanford in AI right now,

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Inside Harvey: How a first-year legal associate built one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups

Legal AI might not sound like the sexiest category in Silicon Valley, yet Harvey‘s CEO Winston Weinberg has captured the attention of virtually every top-tier investor in the Valley. The company’s backers read like a who’s who of venture capital: the OpenAI Startup Fund (its first institutional investor), Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Elad Gil, Google

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VCs abandon old rules for a ‘funky time’ of investing in AI startups

If there’s one thing that VCs agree on when backing AI startups, it’s that AI requires a different investment approach than prior technological shifts. “It’s a funky time,” said Aileen Lee, founder and managing partner of Cowboy Ventures, onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025. The longtime VC noted that the rules of investing have significantly shifted

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Google’s NotebookLM adds ‘Deep Research’ tool, support for more file types

Google is updating NotebookLM, its AI note-taking and research assistant, with a new tool to help users simplify complex research, along with support for additional file types. The service is rolling out “Deep Research,” a tool that will automate and simplify complex online research. Google says the tool acts like a dedicated researcher, as it

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Google’s SIMA 2 agent uses Gemini to reason and act in virtual worlds

Google DeepMind shared on Thursday a research preview of SIMA 2, the next generation of its generalist AI agent that integrates the language and reasoning powers of Gemini, Google’s large language model, to move beyond simply following instructions to understanding and interacting with its environment.  Like many of DeepMind’s projects, including AlphaFold, the first version

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Teen founders raise $6M to reinvent pesticides using AI — and convince Paul Graham to join in

Two teenage founders walked into Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham’s backyard with an idea no one in agriculture seemed to want — an AI model to help design better pesticides. By the time they left, they had a new business model, a new company, and eventually, Graham’s backing. Now, that reimagined company — Bindwell —

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Microsoft’s plan to fix its chip problem is, partly, to let OpenAI do the heavy lifting

Microsoft is taking a page from OpenAI’s playbook, literally. Bloomberg first reported that the tech giant plans to leverage its partner’s custom chip development to bolster its own struggling semiconductor efforts, a move that looks increasingly pragmatic given Microsoft’s lackluster performance compared to rivals like Google and Amazon. The arrangement is straightforward: OpenAI is designing

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