AI

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai dismisses AI job fears, emphasizes expansion plans

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In a Bloomberg interview Wednesday night in downtown San Francisco, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai pushed back against concerns that AI could eventually make half the company’s 180,000-person workforce redundant. Instead, Pichai stressed the company’s commitment to growth through at least next year. “I expect we will grow from our current engineering phase even into next […]

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North America takes the bulk of AI VC investments, despite tough political environment

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Despite what some experts have characterized as an environment increasingly hostile to AI R&D, North America continues to receive the bulk of AI venture dollars, according to data from investment tracker PitchBook. Between February and May of this year, VCs poured $69.7 billion into North America-based AI and machine learning startups across 1,528 deals. That’s

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Hugging Face says its new robotics model is so efficient it can run on a MacBook

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It’s becoming a little easier to build sophisticated robotics projects at home. Earlier this week, AI dev platform Hugging Face released an open AI model for robotics called SmolVLA. Trained on “compatibly licensed,” community-shared datasets, SmolVLA outperforms much larger models for robotics in both virtual and real-world environments, Hugging Face claims. “SmolVLA aims to democratize

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Reddit sues Anthropic for allegedly not paying for training data

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Reddit is suing Anthropic for allegedly using the site’s data to train AI models without a proper licensing agreement, according to a complaint filed in a Northern California court on Wednesday. Reddit claims in the complaint that Anthropic’s unauthorized use of the site’s data for commercial purposes was unlawful, and alleges the AI startup violated

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AMD takes aim at Nvidia’s AI hardware dominance with Brium acquisition

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AMD’s latest acquisition could help reduce Nvidia’s market dominance when it comes to AI hardware. Semiconductor giant AMD on Wednesday announced it acquired AI software optimization startup Brium. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Brium is a startup that appears to be in stealth mode. The startup builds machine learning applications to enable AI

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TC Sessions: AI begins tomorrow—last chance to save on tickets

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Tomorrow, the doors open at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. What happens next isn’t just another AI conference — it’s the one you need to be at. TechCrunch Sessions: AI gathers the most influential builders, investors, and researchers in artificial intelligence for a day of clarity in an industry clouded by hype. If you’re leading a

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Mistral releases a vibe coding client, Mistral Code

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French AI startup Mistral is releasing its own “vibe coding” client, Mistral Code, to compete with incumbents like Windsurf, Anysphere’s Cursor, and GitHub Copilot. Mistral Code, a fork of the open source project Continue, is an AI-powered coding assistant that bundles Mistral’s models, an “in-IDE” assistant, local deployment options, and enterprise tooling into a single

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One of Africa’s most successful founders is back with a new AI startup and already raised $9M

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In 2023, co-founders Karim Jouini and Jihed Othmani sold their expense management startup Expensya to Swedish procurement software firm Medius in what is widely considered to be one of the largest acquisitions of an African startup. Some sources say the sum was just over $120 million, although deal terms were not disclosed. Success achieved, both

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Windsurf says Anthropic is limiting its direct access to Claude AI models

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Windsurf, the popular vibe coding startup that’s reportedly being acquired by OpenAI, said Anthropic significantly reduced its first-party access to the highly popular AI models Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan said in a post on X that Anthropic gave Windsurf little notice for this change, and the startup now

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