AI

Qwant and Ecosia debut Staan, a European search index that aims to take on Big Tech

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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 […]

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OpenAI launches two ‘open’ AI reasoning models

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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

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Some people are defending Perplexity after Cloudflare ‘named and shamed’ it

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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,

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Google’s NotebookLM is now available to younger users as competition in the AI education space intensifies

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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

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Three weeks after acquiring Windsurf, Cognition offers staff the exit door

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Cognition, the AI coding startup that acquired rival company Windsurf three weeks ago, laid off 30 employees last week and is offering buyouts to the roughly 200 remaining employees on the team, reports The Information. This is the latest bout of whiplash that Windsurf employees have faced after a tumultuous stretch for the company. The

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ElevenLabs launches an AI music generator, which it claims is cleared for commercial use

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The AI audio-generation unicorn ElevenLabs announced a new model on Tuesday that allows users to generate music, which it claims is cleared for commercial use. This move marks ElevenLabs’ expansion beyond its main focus thus far in its three years of existence, which has been building AI audio tools. ElevenLabs is a leader among companies

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DeepMind reveals Genie 3, a world model that could be the key to reaching AGI

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Google DeepMind has revealed Genie 3, its latest foundation world model that the AI lab says presents a crucial stepping stone on the path to artificial general intelligence, or human-like intelligence.  “Genie 3 is the first real-time interactive general purpose world model,” Shlomi Fruchter, a research director at DeepMind, said during a press briefing. “It

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DeepMind thinks its new Genie 3 world model presents a stepping stone toward AGI

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Google DeepMind has revealed Genie 3, its latest foundation world model that can be used to train general-purpose AI agents, a capability that the AI lab says makes for a crucial stepping stone on the path to “artificial general intelligence,” or human-like intelligence.  “Genie 3 is the first real-time interactive general-purpose world model,” Shlomi Fruchter,

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Google says its AI-based bug hunter found 20 security vulnerabilities

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Google’s AI-powered bug hunter has just reported its first batch of security vulnerabilities.  Heather Adkins, Google’s vice president of security, announced Monday that its LLM-based vulnerability researcher Big Sleep found and reported 20 flaws in various popular open source software. Adkins said that Big Sleep, which is developed by the company’s AI department DeepMind as

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