Bookcase can turn an iPhone into an e-reader

Amazon made a big splash in e-reader land last week with the release of its first-ever color Kindle. When it comes to devoted e-readers here in the States, Amazon is very nearly the only game in town. Plenty have tried to knock the Kindle off its perch, but the brand maintains around 80% of the mar

Longtime policy researcher Miles Brundage leaves OpenAI

Miles Brundage, a longtime policy researcher at OpenAI and senior adviser to the company’s AGI readiness team, has left. In a post on X on Wednesday and in an essay in his newsletter, Brundage said that he thinks he’ll have more impact as a researcher and advocate in the nonprofit sect

Flock Safety paid over $300M for 17-month-old drone startup Aerodome

Last week, police surveillance startup Flock Safety announced that it had bought drone startup Aerodome. The acquisition price was over $300 million, according to sources in the venture world. The number has not been previously reported.  Both Flock Safety and Aerodome are backed by Andreesse

This Week in AI: The AI agents cometh

Hiya, folks, welcome to technewss's regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. The agents are coming — the AI agents, that is. This week, Anthropic released its newest AI model, an upgraded version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet, that ca

Image Playground, ChatGPT, and more Apple Intelligence features roll out in beta

Apple on Wednesday rolled out the latest developer beta release of its top operating systems, including iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.2. The releases arrive a week prior to the public launch of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 — though Apple has yet to specify a day. N

Here's how ChatGPT integration works for Apple Intelligence

Developers on Wednesday are getting their first taste of Apple Intelligence's ChatGPT integration courtesy of the newly released iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.2 updates. The integration arrives alongside other Apple Intelligence features, including Genmoji, Image Playground, Visua

Apple releases APIs for Apple Intelligence and localized English language support

Apple on Wednesday released developer betas iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.2, delivering new Apple Intelligence features including Genmoji, Image Playground, Visual Intelligence, Image Wand, and ChatGPT integration. The software updates arrive the week before the public release of OS

DuckDuckGo will be making more early-stage investments in privacy-focused startups

DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search alternative to Google, wants to put money into startups that have a similar focus on privacy. The company says that it’s actively seeking startups looking for investment, or startups that might be interested in partnering up or being acquired. In a blog

Google releases tech to watermark AI-generated text

Google is making SynthID Text, its technology that lets developers watermark and detect text written by generative AI models, generally available. SynthID Text can be downloaded from the AI platform Hugging Face and Google’s updated Responsible GenAI Toolkit. R

Promise Bio exits stealth backed by Pfizer and AstraZeneca

The first thing Promise Bio CEO Ronel Veksler wants you to know about the biotech company he co-founded is that it’s not another AI drug discovery company. Instead, he’s looking to bring precision medicine to autoimmune diseases. Tel Aviv-based Promise Bio has developed a cloud-based A

Wiz hopes to hit $1B in ARR in 2025 before an IPO, after turning down Google's $23B

Wiz co-founder and VP of R&D Roy Reznik told CNBC last week that the company has hit $500 million in annual recurring revenue, and plans to double that in 2025 to $1 billion. He also reiterated that the $1 billion-mark is a prerequisite for the IPO that Wiz promised employees when it walked awa

Andreessen Horowitz is renting a bunch of Nvidia GPUs to its portfolio companies

Andreessen Horowitz has a massive cluster of Nvidia H100 GPUs to help its portfolio of AI startups meet their compute needs, the venture capital firm confirmed for the first time on Wednesday. The program, called Oxygen, allows their portfolio companies to train or operate their AI models without n

TikTok will now show its STEM feed to adults, not just teens

TikTok announced on Wednesday that it’s bringing its STEM feed to all users in the United States, United Kingdom, and Ireland by default. Previously, the feed was only turned on by default for users under the age of 18. The social network says the expansion will make it easier for people to

VCs love using the AI meeting notepad Granola, so they gave it $20M

Granola’s notepad app has become a popular tool among venture capitalists who use it to record meetings and augment notes using AI technology. That made it easier for the startup to raise funds from a crowd of investors for its $20 million Series A — something the team managed to do in abou