Author: GT

Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., during the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, June 4, 2025. David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesGoogle is making its most powerful chip yet widely available, the search giant’s latest effort to try and win business from artificial intelligence companies by offering custom silicon.The company said on Thursday that the seventh generation of its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), called Ironwood, will hit the market for public use in the coming weeks, after it was initially introduced in April for testing and deployment.The chip, built in-house, is…

With so much money flooding into AI startups, it’s a good time to be an AI researcher with an idea to test out. And if the idea is novel enough, it might be easier to get the resources you need as an independent company instead of inside one of the big labs. That’s the story of Inception, a startup developing diffusion-based AI models that just raised $50 million in seed funding led by Menlo Ventures. Andrew Ng and Andrej Karpathy provided additional angel funding. The leader of the project is Stanford professor Stefano Ermon, whose research focuses on diffusion models…

Shares of electric aviation startup Beta Technologies took flight Tuesday as the company made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange with an outsized raise of $1 billion and a stock price that closed up. The Vermont-based company priced shares in its IPO at $34, above its predicted range of $27 to $33. Beta Technologies sold 29.9 million shares to raise more $1 billion at a valuation of $7.4 billion. Once trading started, shares of Beta Technologies dipped before recovering and ultimately closing at $36. Beta Technologies’ public market debut is a capstone to founder and CEO Kyle Clark’s…

People Inc., one of the largest media publishers in the U.S., has signed an AI licensing deal with Microsoft. The media giant (formerly known as Dotdash Meredith) made the announcement Tuesday as a part of parent company IAC’s third-quarter earnings. Under the deal, People Inc. will become a launch partner in Microsoft’s publisher content marketplace. This is the company’s second AI deal following its earlier agreement with OpenAI last year. People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel described the new marketplace as “essentially a pay-per-use market where AI players directly can compensate publishers for use of their content on, sort of like…

Enterprise leaders grappling with the steep costs of deploying AI models could find a reprieve thanks to a new architecture design.While the capabilities of generative AI are attractive, their immense computational demands for both training and inference result in prohibitive expenses and mounting environmental concerns. At the centre of this inefficiency is the models’ “fundamental bottleneck” of an autoregressive process that generates text sequentially, token-by-token.For enterprises processing vast data streams, from IoT networks to financial markets, this limitation makes generating long-form analysis both slow and economically challenging. However, a new research paper from Tencent AI and Tsinghua University proposes an…

Amazon has told Perplexity to get its agentic browser out of its online store, the companies both confirmed publicly on Tuesday. After warning Perplexity multiple times that Comet, its AI-powered shopping assistant, was violating Amazon’s terms of service by not identifying itself as an agent, the e-commerce giant sent the AI search engine startup a sternly worded cease-and-desist letter, Perplexity wrote in a blog post titled “Bullying is not innovation.” “This week, Perplexity received an aggressive legal threat from Amazon, demanding we prohibit Comet users from using their AI assistants on Amazon. This is Amazon’s first legal salvo against an…

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — In 2021, Danish video game live-streamer Marie Watson received an image of herself from an unknown Instagram account.She instantly recognized the holiday snap from her Instagram account, but something was different: Her clothing had been digitally removed to make her appear naked. It was a deepfake.“It overwhelmed me so much,” Watson recalled. “I just started bursting out in tears, because suddenly, I was there naked.”In the four years since her experience, deepfakes — highly realistic artificial intelligence-generated images, videos or audio of real people or events — have become not only easier to make worldwide but…

Nvidia and Qualcomm Ventures have joined a growing coalition of U.S. and Indian investors backing India’s deep tech startups. The group launched in September with more than $1 billion in commitments, timing that aligns with India’s new ₹1 trillion (around $12 billion) research and development initiative. Nvidia has joined the coalition as a strategic technical adviser, without any financial commitments, while Qualcomm Ventures has come on board alongside six Indian venture firms, bringing additional capital commitments totaling more than $850 million. India is home to more than 180,000 startups and over 120 unicorns. In its early years, much of the…

MoEngage, a customer engagement platform that works with consumer brands across 75 countries, says it has raised new funding led by its existing investor, Goldman Sachs Alternatives, to ramp up global growth and infuse more AI into its platform. All told, $100 million in shares just traded hands, split roughly 60% primary and 40% secondary, as part of MoEngage’s Series F round. The funding marks the entry of Indian venture firm A91 Partners as a new investor co-leading the round with Goldman Sachs Alternatives. According to MoEngage, it has now raised $250 million in funding altogether. As consumer brands increasingly…

MAE SOT, Thailand (AP) — India is repatriating on Thursday the first batch of hundreds of its nationals who last month fled to Thailand from Myanmar, where most had been working at a notorious center for online scams. The center, known as KK Park on the outskirts of the border city of Myawaddy and said to house a major cybercrime operation, was raided by Myanmar’s army in mid-October to suppress cross-border online scams and illegal gambling.An Indian air force transport plane left Thailand en route to India and another plane was to leave later in the day, with about 270…