AI

ClearGrid, armed with a fresh $10M, is developing AI to improve debt collection in MENA

Fintech /

Debt collection in emerging markets often feels outdated and can be costly — damaging borrower trust. As consumer lending surges and regulators push for fairer practices, legacy collection outfits are struggling to maintain pace. ClearGrid aims to help modernize debt collection — and recovery — with AI. The Dubai-based startup, which is emerging from stealth […]

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What Tesla can and can’t do in California with its new passenger transportation permit

Transportation /

Tesla received a permit Tuesday from the California Public Utilities Commission to operate a transportation service in the state, the beginning of a long regulatory road that could eventually lead to the company getting the OK to operate a robotaxi service there. The permit, which Tesla applied for in November 2024, doesn’t cover autonomous vehicle

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GM teams up with Nvidia to bring AI to robots, factories, and self-driving cars

AI /

General Motors is turning to Nvidia to help bring AI to the physical world in an expanded collaboration designed to touch every aspect of the automaker’s business, including factories, robots, and self-driving cars.  Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, who announced the partnership Tuesday during his keynote at the company’s GTC conference in San Jose,

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Anthropic is reportedly prepping a voice mode for Claude

AI /

According to a report, AI startup Anthropic is working on voice capabilities for its AI-powered chatbot, Claude. The company’s chief product officer, Mike Krieger, told the Financial Times that Anthropic plans to launch experiences that allow users to talk to Anthropic’s AI models. “We are doing some work around how Claude for desktop evolves  […

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TurinTech reveals $20M in backing to fix problems in ‘vibe coding’

Fundraising /

So-called “vibe coding” with LLM-driven tools like Cursor Composer — a term coined by renowned computer scientist Andrej Karpathy — describes a hands-off approach to writing code using Gen AI models, and it has really taken off recently. According to Y Combinator, one quarter of the startups in its latest batch relies on AI to

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DeepSeek: Everything you need to know about the AI chatbot app

AI /

DeepSeek has gone viral. Chinese AI lab DeepSeek broke into the mainstream consciousness this week after its chatbot app rose to the top of the Apple App Store charts (and Google Play, as well). DeepSeek’s AI models, which were trained using compute-efficient techniques, have led Wall Street analysts — and technologists — to question whether the U.S. can maintain its

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Sesame, the startup behind the viral virtual assistant Maya, releases its base AI model

AI /

AI company Sesame has released the base model that powers Maya, the impressively realistic voice assistant. The model, which is 1 billion parameters in size (“parameters” referring to individual components of the model), is under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially with few restrictions. Called CSM-1B, the model generates “RVQ audio codes” from text

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OpenAI’s ‘creative writing’ AI evokes that annoying kid from high school fiction club

Media & Entertainment /

When I was sixteen, I attended a writing workshop with a group of precocious young poets, where we all tried very hard to prove who among us was the most tortured upper-middle-class teenager. One boy refused to tell anyone where he was from, declaring, “I’m from everywhere and nowhere.” Two weeks later, he admitted he

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Could deeptech serve as Europe’s path to autonomy from the US?

Venture /

Amidst geopolitical tensions and volatile markets, the question of Europe’s ability to weather the storms ahead, especially as President Trump seems intent on having his pound of tariffs from the continent, is looming large. But an extensive new report claims deeptech is poised to become a key pillar of Europe’s security, defense, and future autonomy,

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Sakana claims its AI-generated paper passed peer review — but it’s a bit more nuanced than that

AI /

Japanese startup Sakana said that its AI generated the first peer-reviewed scientific publication. But while the claim isn’t untrue, there are significant caveats to note. The debate swirling around AI and its role in the scientific process grows fiercer by the day. Many researchers don’t think AI is quite ready to serve as a “co-scientist,”

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