Author: GT

Windsurf, the popular vibe-coding startup that’s reportedly being acquired by OpenAI, says Anthropic significantly reduced its first-party access to its Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI models. Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan said in a post on X Tuesday that Anthropic gave Windsurf little notice for this change, and the startup now has to find other third-party compute providers to run several of Anthropic’s most popular AI models on its platform. “We have been very clear to Anthropic that this is not our desire — we wanted to pay them for the full capacity,” said Mohan on X. “We…

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A political consultant who sent voters artificial intelligence-generated robocalls mimicking former President Joe Biden last year goes on trial Thursday in New Hampshire, where jurors may be asked to consider not just his guilt or innocence but whether the state actually held its first-in-the-nation presidential primary.Steven Kramer, who faces decades in prison if convicted of voter suppression and impersonating a candidate, has admitted orchestrating a message sent to thousands of voters two days before the Jan. 23, 2024, primary. The message played an AI-generated voice similar to the Democratic president’s that used his phrase “What a…

Ready for that long-awaited summer vacation? First, you’ll need to pack all items required for your trip into a suitcase, making sure everything fits securely without crushing anything fragile.Because humans possess strong visual and geometric reasoning skills, this is usually a straightforward problem, even if it may take a bit of finagling to squeeze everything in.To a robot, though, it is an extremely complex planning challenge that requires thinking simultaneously about many actions, constraints, and mechanical capabilities. Finding an effective solution could take the robot a very long time — if it can even come up with one.Researchers from MIT…

In 2023, co-founders Karim Jouini and Jihed Othmani sold their expense management startup Expensya to Swedish procurement software firm Medius in what is widely considered to be one of the largest acquisitions of an African startup. Some sources say the sum was just over $120 million, although deal terms were not disclosed. Success achieved, both founders swore off entrepreneurship, never intending to do another startup again, and Jouini assumed a CTO role in the merged software company, with other acquisitions spanning three continents. But the pull of a new technological wave — generative AI — and the thought that they…

Days before its Worldwide Developers Conference 2025 (WWDC), Apple has named the winners and finalists of its 2025 Design Awards for apps. This year’s winners and finalists mostly include indie apps and startups, and contrary to the trend everywhere else, generative AI apps are noticeably missing from the list. This is the second year in a row Apple has skipped AI-centric apps for its awards. The company did highlight some apps with AI features, though, including Speechify (which won in the Inclusivity category), and music creation and editing app Moises (both are venture-backed startups). Unsurprisingly, Apple focuses more on how…

Uber today revealed a new type of account, called Senior Accounts, for older users that prioritizes a simpler app experience with features like ride updates for family members, saved destinations, and the ability to use a family member’s card for payments. Uber said Senior Accounts present a simpler app experience with larger text and icons, as well as less complex screens. Users can switch this mode on using the accessibility settings in the app. Image Credits:Uber Users in the U.S. can now add older adults to their family account via the “Family” menu under the Accounts tab. Users who manage…

For many companies selling ancillary services or products (think insurance), the biggest problem when selling online is having their offering be surfaced at the right moment in the customer’s purchase journey — exactly when the customer’s most likely to spend that extra dollar to sweeten the deal. With more and more shopping moving online, companies that make this possible by connecting service providers with distributors of products are understandably seeing an uptick in interest, both from customers and investors. One such company, Singapore-based Bolttech, which acts as the connective tissue between insurers, distributors, and their target customers, said on Wednesday…

Journaling app Rosebud has raised $6 million in seed funding as it seeks to further flesh out its app as an AI mentor for self-reflection and personal growth.  Rosebud uses AI to analyze your journal entries, identify patterns over time, and provide insights, questions, and guidance. The company says its goal is to help users better understand themselves, build new habits, and track goals, just like a human mentor would. Since its launch, Rosebud says, users have journaled 500 million words and spent more than 30 million minutes on its platform. Rosebud was founded in 2023 by Chrys Bader, a…

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks at a company event in New York on Feb. 26, 2025.Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesAmazon has formed a new group within its consumer product-development arm that is focused on agentic artificial intelligence, the company said Wednesday.The team will be based in Lab126, the stealthy Silicon Valley-based research and development unit behind the Kindle e-reader, Echo smart speaker and other popular Amazon devices.A growing number of companies are building AI agents as they look beyond text and image generators. In contrast to AI services such as chatbots, agents are capable of completing multistep, complex…

French AI startup Mistral is releasing its own “vibe coding” client, Mistral Code, to compete with incumbents like Windsurf, Anysphere’s Cursor, and GitHub Copilot. Mistral Code, a fork of the open source project Continue, is an AI-powered coding assistant that bundles Mistral’s models, an “in-IDE” assistant, local deployment options, and enterprise tools into a single package. A private beta is available as of Wednesday for JetBrains development platforms and Microsoft’s VS Code. “Our goal with Mistral Code is simple: deliver best-in-class coding models to enterprise developers, enabling everything from instant completions to multi-step refactoring through an integrated platform deployable in…