Generative AI

Will Smith eating spaghetti and other weird AI benchmarks that took off in 2024

When a company releases a new AI video generator, it’s not long before someone uses it to make a video of actor Will Smith eating spaghetti. It’s become something of a meme as well as a benchmark: Seeing whether a new video generator can realistically render Smith slurping down a bowl of noodles. Smith himself

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DeepSeek’s new AI model appears to be one of the best ‘open’ challengers yet

A Chinese lab has created what appears to be one of the most powerful “open” AI models to date. The model, DeepSeek V3, was developed by the AI firm DeepSeek, and was released on Wednesday under a permissive license that allows developers to download and modify it for most applications, including commercial ones. DeepSeek V3

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Elon Musk’s xAI lands $6B in new cash to fuel AI ambitions

Updated December 25, 12:21 p.m. Pacific: Added details of xAI’s valuation and Kingdom Holdings’ contribution. xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has raised $6 billion in a Series C financing round. The company announced this week that Andreessen Horowitz , Blackrock, Fidelity, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Nvidia,

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Elon Musk’s xAI lands $6B in new cash to fuel AI ambitions

xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has raised $6 billion, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. Investors gave a minimum of $77,593, per the filing (97 participated, but the document doesn’t reveal their identities). xAI later announced (confirming some earlier reporting) that Andreessen Horowitz , Blackrock, Fidelity, Kingdom Holdings,

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Perplexity has reportedly closed a $500M funding round

AI-powered search engine Perplexity has reportedly closed a $500 million funding round, valuing the startup at $9 billion. Bloomberg, citing sources familiar, reports that the round was led by Institutional Venture Partners, and that it closed earlier in December. In an email to TechCrunch, a Perplexity spokesperson declined to comment. The mammoth tranche comes as

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New Anthropic study shows AI really doesn’t want to be forced to change its views

AI models can deceive, new research from Anthropic shows. They can pretend to have different views during training when in reality maintaining their original preferences. There’s no reason for panic now, the team behind the study said. Yet they said their work could be critical in understanding potential threats from future, more capable AI systems.

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