Coco Robotics, a startup known for its fleet of last-mile delivery bots, is looking to get more information out of the five years’ worth of data its robots have collected. Its answer: a physical AI lab with University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) professor Bolei Zhou at the helm. Coco Robotics, which made the announcement […]
Coco Robotics taps UCLA professor to lead new physical AI research lab Read More »
Zendesk announced Wednesday at its AI summit a string of LLM-driven products meant to reshape the company’s reliance on human technicians. The center of the new features is an autonomous support agent that Zendesk believes will solve 80% of support issues without human intervention. That system will be supplemented by a co-pilot agent, which will
Zendesk says its new AI agent can solve 80% of support issues Read More »
OpenAI released a new benchmark on Thursday that tests how its AI models perform compared to human professionals across a wide range of industries and jobs. The test, GDPval, is an early attempt at understanding how close OpenAI’s systems are to outperforming humans at economically valuable work — a key part of the company’s founding
OpenAI says GPT-5 stacks up to humans in a wide range of jobs Read More »
While many robotics companies are building human-sized robots, or working to automate entire factories, MicroFactory is instead trying to think big by building small. San Francisco-based MicroFactory built a general-purpose, tabletop manufacturing kit that’s about the size of my Siberian Husky’s dog crate. This compact factory includes two robotic arms and can be trained by
This $30M startup built a dog crate-sized robot factory that learns by watching humans Read More »
Companies that have dug deep into AI have fallen in love with nuclear power for its promise of 24/7 electricity. Meta, Google, and Microsoft have all made deals with startups or reactor operators. But does the nuclear industry love AI back? Yes, with caveats. No one is proposing to let an AI run a reactor,
Nuclearn gets $10.5M to help the nuclear industry embrace AI Read More »
Aging demographics, labor shortages, the adoption of GenAI, and the 2023 implementation of e-invoicing are driving companies to automate finance, tax, procurement, and HR in Japan. Yet only 16% of digital transformations succeed, and that’s only 4–11% in traditional industries. The main barriers? Weak leadership commitment, a rigid culture, and a lack of digital talent.
LayerX uses AI to cut enterprise back-office workload, scores $100M in Series B Read More »
“One of the biggest vulnerabilities in companies is actually humans,” CrowdStrike co-founder and former CTO Dmitri Alperovitch told TechCrunch in this week’s episode of Equity. “The more you automate, the more opportunities there are for people to find vulnerabilities in your system.” With the $50 billion Chinese AI market potentially slipping out of reach for
The crush of traffic going into training and running AI has quickly turned into a major cost and resource headache for organisations. Today, Cast AI — a startup building tools to ease and optimise AI and other workloads with automation — is raising a major round of funding on the back of its strong growth
Cast AI raises $108M to get the max out of AI, Kubernetes and other workloads Read More »
The world has a trash problem. The amount of stuff we throw away is expected to nearly double, to 3.8 billion metric tons, by 2050. Reducing what we use would go a long way to addressing the issue, but let’s face it, we’re not very good at buying less either. That leaves recycling, which has
Amazon-backed Glacier gets $16M to expand its robot recycling fleet Read More »
Finding new sources of critical minerals is a costly business. Worldwide, companies spent $12 to $13 billion on exploration in 2023. The upshot: mining is the definition of a hit-or-miss business. Companies today use advanced models of the Earth’s crust to pinpoint the best prospects, but even then only about three out of 1,000 attempts
Durin digs up $3.4M to automate drills for critical minerals exploration Read More »
