In Brief

Vijay Pande, founding partner of a16z bio and health strategy, steps down

Vijay Pande, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz who founded the firm’s a16z Bio + Health strategy, announced that he is stepping down from his role. Since its founding in 2014, a16z Bio + Health has raised four funds of nearly $3 billion each, including a $1.5 billion fund that closed in 2022. However, it’s […]

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Google says its updated Gemini 2.5 Pro AI model is better at coding

Google on Thursday announced an update to its Gemini 2.5 Pro preview model that the company claims is better at certain programming tasks. The company’s calling it an “updated preview,” building on the upgrade to Gemini 2.5 Pro that Google announced around a month ago. Google says the model will roll out in general availability

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Yoshua Bengio launches LawZero, a nonprofit AI safety lab

Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio is launching a nonprofit AI safety lab called LawZero to build safer AI systems, he told the Financial Times on Monday. LawZero raised $30 million in philanthropic contributions from Skype founding engineer Jaan Tallinn, former Google chief Eric Schmidt, Open Philanthropy, and the Future of Life Institute, among others. The

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Elon Musk’s xAI reportedly looks to raise $300M in tender offer

Billionaire Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, is reportedly launching a $300 million share sale that values the company at $113 billion. According to The Financial Times, the secondary stock offering, which comes after xAI acquired Musk’s social media platform, X, for $33 billion, will allow staff to sell shares to new investors. The tender offer

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Elon Musk is lobbying lawmakers on driverless vehicle rules

Elon Musk may have stepped away from his duties as the lead of the Department of Government Efficiency and adviser to President Trump, but he’s still active in D.C. circles. This time, he’s on the other side, lobbying lawmakers on legislation related to autonomous vehicles, according to a report by Bloomberg that cited unnamed sources.

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Delaware attorney general reportedly hires a bank to evaluate OpenAI’s restructuring plan

Delaware’s attorney general is hiring an investment bank to advise on OpenAI’s for-profit conversion, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. The independent evaluation could prolong the transition, or gum up OpenAI’s plans even further. OpenAI’s conversion will help it attract new investment and eventually go public, but first, the startup needs to secure approvals

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Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings joins Anthropic’s board

Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings is joining Anthropic’s board of directors, the company announced on Wednesday. Hastings’ appointment adds a veteran big tech executive to one of OpenAI’s largest — and youngest — competitors in the AI race. The Netflix co-founder seems likely to help Anthropic grow from a startup into a major company, pulling from

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Trump signs bill criminalizing revenge porn and explicit deepfakes

President Donald Trump signed the Take It Down Act on Monday, a bipartisan law that enacts stricter penalties for distributing nonconsensual explicit images, including deepfakes and revenge porn.  The bill criminalizes the publication of such images, whether they’re authentic or AI-generated. Whoever publishes the photos or videos can face criminal penalties, including fines, imprisonment, and

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Radiologists aren’t going anywhere | TechCrunch

Nine years ago, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton sent shock waves through medicine by declaring it “just completely obvious” that AI would make radiologists extinct in short order. Fast-forward and the specialists — who do more than analyze images — are thriving, observes The New York Times. In fact, the field is experiencing explosive growth amid

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