AI

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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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‘Chad: the Brainrot IDE’ is a new Y Combinator-backed product so wild, people thought it was fake

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When former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt, someone from the audience asked him if HBO’s hit satire Silicon Valley would be revived. Costolo, who was a writer for the show, essentially answered no (at timestamp 38:17). While the writers talk about that regularly, he said, they don’t pursue it because today’s actual

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ElevenLabs strike deals with celebs to create AI audio

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ElevenLabs struck a deal with actors Michael Caine and Matthew McConaughey to AI-generate their voices, the company announced this week. Hollywood and AI have an up-and-down relationship, with AI and its — or lack thereof — guardrails serving among the main concerns that led to the Hollywood strikes a few years ago. Since then, some artists have started to

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Court rules that OpenAI violated German copyright law; ordered it to pay damages

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A German court ruled that OpenAI’s ChatGPT violated the nation’s copyright laws by training its language models on licensed musical work without permission, multiple news outlets, including The Guardian reported.   The decision came from a lawsuit that GEMA, the society that handles music rights in Germany, filed last November against OpenAI. The company was ordered to pay an undisclosed amount of damages to GEMA, but said it disagreed

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