For years, Big Tech CEOs have touted visions of AI agents that can autonomously use software applications to complete tasks for people. But take today’s consumer AI agents out for a spin, whether it’s OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent or Perplexity’s Comet, and you’ll quickly realize how limited the technology still is. Making AI agents more robust […]
Silicon Valley bets big on ‘environments’ to train AI agents Read More »
There’s been great interest in what Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab is building with its $2 billion in seed funding and the all-star team of former OpenAI researchers who have joined the lab. In a blog post published on Wednesday, Murati’s research lab gave the world its first look into one of its projects: creating
Thinking Machines Lab wants to make AI models more consistent Read More »
Investors once saw Canadian AI startup Cohere as a promising contender to challenge OpenAI and Anthropic in the race to build frontier AI models, with its backers pouring roughly $1 billion on their bet on CEO Aidan Gomez, who co-authored a seminal paper on LLMs when he was a 20-year-old Google intern. But Cohere’s AI
Cohere hires long-time Meta research head Joelle Pineau as its chief AI officer Read More »
Andy Konwinski, computer scientist and co-founder of Databricks and Perpelexity, announced on Monday that his personal company, Laude, is forming a new AI research institute backed with a $100 million pledge of his own money. Laude Institute is less an AI research lab and more like a fund looking to make investments structured similar to
Databricks, Perplexity co-founder pledges $100M on new fund for AI researchers Read More »
OpenAI researchers say they’ve discovered hidden features inside AI models that correspond to misaligned “personas,” according to new research published by the company on Wednesday. By looking at an AI model’s internal representations — the numbers that dictate how an AI model responds, which often seem completely incoherent to humans — OpenAI researchers were able
OpenAI found features in AI models that correspond to different ‘personas’ Read More »
Meta’s VP of AI research, Joelle Pineau, is planning to leave the company, she announced in a post on Facebook Tuesday. Pineau said she’s leaving in May after more than two years overseeing FAIR, Meta’s internal AI research lab led by Yann LeCun. Pineau’s exit comes as Meta ramps up its AI efforts, with the
Meta’s head of AI research plans to leave the company Read More »
AI researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington were able to train an AI “reasoning” model for under $50 in cloud compute credits, according to a new research paper released last Friday. The model known as s1 performs similarly to cutting-edge reasoning models, such as OpenAI’s o1 and DeepSeek’s R1, on tests measuring math
Researchers created an open rival to OpenAI’s o1 ‘reasoning’ model for under $50 Read More »
To outside observers, AI researchers are in an enviable position. They’re sought after by tech giants. They’re taking home eye-popping salaries. And they’re in the hottest industry of the moment. But all this comes with intense pressure. More than half a dozen researchers TechCrunch spoke with, some of whom requested anonymity for fear of reprisals,
The AI industry’s pace has researchers stressed Read More »
OpenAI announced a new family of AI reasoning models on Friday, o3, which the startup claims to be more advanced than o1 or anything else it’s released. These improvements appear to have come from scaling test-time compute, something we wrote about last month, but OpenAI also says it used a new safety paradigm to train
OpenAI trained o1 and o3 to ‘think’ about its safety policy Read More »
Are you confused about artificial general intelligence, or AGI? It’s that thing OpenAI is obsessed with ultimately creating in a way that “benefits all of humanity.” You may want to take them seriously since they just raised $6.6 billion to get closer to that goal. But if you’re still wondering what the heck AGI even
Even the ‘godmother of AI’ has no idea what AGI is Read More »
