I owned a lot of Alexa-powered devices in my former home: There were Amazon Echos in most rooms, including an older Echo Plus in the living room, a smattering of Dots, a Spot in a bedroom, and an Echo Show in the kitchen. A Fire TV ran in the bedroom. And, in a drawer, a […]
First impressions of Alexa+, Amazon’s upgraded, AI-powered digital assistant Read More »
OpenAI is poised to undercut rivals like Anthropic and Google in the race to see its AI tools integrated into federal agency workflows. The AI giant has reached an agreement with the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), the government’s central purchasing arm, to offer ChatGPT Enterprise to participating federal agencies for just $1 per agency
OpenAI is practically giving ChatGPT to the government for free Read More »
Google on Wednesday launched its AI coding agent, Jules, out of beta, just over two months after its public preview debut in May. Powered by Gemini 2.5 Pro, Jules is an asynchronous, agent-based coding tool that integrates with GitHub, clones codebases into Google Cloud virtual machines, and uses AI to fix or update code while
Google’s AI coding agent Jules is now out of beta Read More »
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said on Tuesday that two Chinese nationals have been arrested for their alleged involvement in illegally shipping “tens of millions of dollars” worth of high-performance AI chips to China. The DOJ said Chuan Geng and Shiwei Yang were arrested in California on August 2 and charged with violating the
Two arrested for smuggling AI chips to China; Nvidia says no to kill switches Read More »
Microsoft is making OpenAI’s new free and open GPT model, gpt-oss-20b, available to Windows 11 users via Windows AI Foundry, the tech giant’s platform that lets users tap AI features, APIs, and popular open-source models on their computers. The company said in a blog post that gpt‑oss-20b is “tool-savvy and lightweight,” adding: “Optimized for agentic
Microsoft brings OpenAI’s smallest open model to Windows users Read More »
European search engines Qwant and Ecosia said on Wednesday that they have both started serving search queries through an index they developed together, Staan, which aims to be a cheaper, more privacy-focused alternative to Google and Bing. Last year, French privacy-focused search engine Qwant struck a joint venture with German non-profit search engine Ecosia, to
Qwant and Ecosia debut Staan, a European search index that aims to take on Big Tech Read More »
Sales automation startup Clay has raised a $100 million Series C at a $3.1 billion valuation in a round led by CapitalG, confirming TechCrunch’s report from June. The financing follows a $1.25 billion Series B round from six months ago and a $1.5 billion Sequoia-led tender offer announced a couple of months ago, which allowed
Clay confirms it closed $100M round at $3.1B valuation Read More »
OpenAI announced Tuesday the launch of two open-weight AI reasoning models with similar capabilities to its o-series. Both are freely available to download from the online developer platform, Hugging Face, the company said, describing the models as “state-of-the-art” when measured across several benchmarks for comparing open models. The models come in two sizes: a larger
OpenAI launches two ‘open’ AI reasoning models Read More »
When Cloudflare accused AI search engine Perplexity of stealthily scraping websites on Monday, while ignoring a site’s specific methods to block it, this wasn’t a clear-cut case of an AI web crawler gone wild. Many people came to Perplexity’s defense. They argued that Perplexity accessing sites in defiance of the website owner’s wishes, while controversial,
Some people are defending Perplexity after Cloudflare ‘named and shamed’ it Read More »
Google’s AI note-taking app is now open to younger users, having previously been limited to users 18 and older. The tech giant announced that NotebookLM is available to Google Workspace for Education users of any age and for consumers ages 13 and up. The removal of age restrictions is intended to provide younger students with
