Rork founders Levan Kvirkvelia and Daniel Dhawan are living a life that sounds like a plot for a movie. But it really happened. They went from broke, life savings spent, and in debt $15,000 apiece on credit cards — Kvirkvelia was even sleeping on a mattress at a friend’s apartment — to $100,000 of revenue […]
Rork’s founders were almost broke when a viral tweet led to $2.8M and a16z Read More »
Anysphere, the maker of AI-powered coding tool Cursor, has attracted $900 million in a fresh round of funding led by Thrive Capital, Financial Times reported, citing anonymous sources familiar with the deal. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Accel are also participating in the round, which values Anysphere at about $9 billion, the report said. Earlier in
Anysphere, which makes Cursor, is reportedly raising $900M at $9B valuation Read More »
Duolingo announced plans this week to replace contractors with AI and become an “AI-first” company — a move that journalist Brian Merchant pointed to as a sign that the AI jobs crisis “is here, now.” In fact, Merchant spoke to a former Duolingo contractor who said this isn’t even a new policy. The company cut
Is Duolingo the face of an AI jobs crisis? Read More »
Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom says AI companies are trying too hard to “juice engagement” by pestering their users with follow-up questions, instead of providing actually useful insights. Systrom said the tactics represent “a force that’s hurting us,” comparing them to those used by social media companies to expand aggressively. “You can see some of these
AI chatbots are ‘juicing engagement’ instead of being useful, Instagram co-founder warns Read More »
A recently released Google AI model scores worse on certain safety tests than its predecessor, according to the company’s internal benchmarking. In a technical report published this week, Google reveals that its Gemini 2.5 Flash model is more likely to generate text that violates its safety guidelines than Gemini 2.0 Flash. On two metrics, “text-to-text
One of Google’s recent Gemini AI models scores worse on safety Read More »
OpenAI says it’ll make changes to the way it updates the AI models that power ChatGPT, following an incident that caused the platform to become overly sycophantic for many users. Last weekend, after OpenAI rolled out a tweaked GPT-4o — the default model powering ChatGPT — users on social media noted that ChatGPT began responding in
OpenAI pledges to make changes to prevent future ChatGPT sycophancy Read More »
What if cheating was just…the future of work? That’s the pitch behind Cluely, the viral AI startup that claims its stealthy browser overlay is “undetectable” and can help users bluff their way through everything from job interviews to exams. The company has raised $5.3 million and sparked a wave of backlash from startups building tools
Damn, the Cluely ragebait got us Read More »
Amazon’s upgraded digital assistant powered by generative AI, Alexa+, has rolled out to over 100,000 users, CEO Andy Jassy said on the company’s earnings call Thursday. While that’s a far cry from the 600 million Alexa devices out there, the company is making some progress on the rollout of Alexa+, which was first unveiled in
Amazon CEO says 100,000 users now have Alexa+ Read More »
FutureHouse, an Eric Schmidt-backed nonprofit that aims to build an “AI scientist” within the next decade, has launched its first major product: a platform and API with AI-powered tools designed to support scientific work. Many, many startups are racing to develop AI research tools for the scientific domain, some with massive amounts of VC funding
FutureHouse releases AI tools it claims can accelerate science Read More »
‘Tis the week for small AI models, it seems. On Thursday, Ai2, the nonprofit AI research institute, released Olmo 2 1B, a 1-billion-parameter model that Ai2 claims beats similarly-sized models from Google, Meta, and Alibaba on several benchmarks. Parameters, sometimes referred to as weights, are the internal components of a model that guide its behavior.
Ai2’s new small AI model outperforms similarly-sized models from Google, Meta Read More »
