Figure AI CEO skips live demo, sidesteps BMW deal questions onstage at tech conference
Brett Adcock, co-founder and CEO of the humanoid robotics startup Figure AI, made a rare public appearance at the Bloomberg Tech conference on Thursday. Figure has recently been the subject of a couple news articles that questioned its progress with marquee customer BMW. Figure objected so strenuou
EleutherAI releases massive AI training dataset of licensed and open domain text
EleutherAI, an AI research organization, has released what it claims is one of the largest collections of licensed and open-domain text for training AI models.
The dataset, called the Common Pile v0.1, took around two years to complete in collaboration with AI startups Poolside, Hugging Face, and
Humans provide necessary ‘checks and balances’ for AI, says Lattice CEO
Of all the words in the dictionary, Sarah Franklin says “balance” is perhaps her favorite — especially when it comes to companies embracing AI.
Franklin leads the Jack Altman-founded employee performance software company Lattice, which is now worth $3 billion. Both onstage at SXSW London
OpenAI’s marketing head takes leave to undergo breast cancer treatment
OpenAI’s head of marketing, Kate Rouch, has announced she’s stepping away from her role for three months while she undergoes treatment for invasive breast cancer.
In a post on LinkedIn, Rouch says that Gary Briggs, Meta’s former CMO, will serve as interim head of marketing durin
Perplexity received 780 million queries last month, CEO says
Perplexity received 780 million queries in May, CEO Aravind Srinivas shared onstage at Bloomberg’s Tech Summit on Thursday. Srinivas said that the AI search engine is seeing more than 20% growth month-over-month.
“Give it a year, we’ll be doing, like, a billion queries a week if
Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf: ‘It would be odd for us to sell Claude to OpenAI’
Anthropic co-founder and Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan said his company cut Windsurf’s direct access to Anthropic’s Claude AI models largely because of rumors and reports that OpenAI, its largest competitor, is acquiring the AI coding assistant.
“We really are just trying to
The founder of DeviantArt is making a $22,000 display for digital art
Angelo Sotira started the online digital art platform DeviantArt when he was just a teenager, growing a formative community for millions of artists in the 2000s. Twenty-five years later, Sotira wants to change digital art again, but with a focus on the way it’s displayed.
On Thursday, Sotira
X changes its terms to bar training of AI models using its content
Social network X has changed its developer agreement to prevent third parties from using the platform’s content to train large language models.
In an update on Wednesday, the company added a line under “Reverse Engineering and other Restrictions,” a subsection of restrictions on
Toma's AI voice agents have taken off at car dealerships — and attracted funding from a16z
When Monik Pamecha co-founded AI voice startup Toma in early 2024, he hadn't anticipated spending the summer months sweating in Bible Belt car dealerships. He and co-founder Anthony Krivonos were still focused on banking and healthcare customers when the dealers came knocking.
“They just c
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai dismisses AI job fears, emphasizes expansion plans
In a Bloomberg interview Wednesday night in downtown San Francisco, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai pushed back against concerns that AI could eventually make half the company’s 180,000-person workforce redundant. Instead, Pichai stressed the company’s commitment to growth through at least n
Reddit sues Anthropic for allegedly not paying for training data
Reddit is suing Anthropic for allegedly using the site’s data to train AI models without a proper licensing agreement, according to a complaint filed in a Northern California court on Wednesday. Reddit claims in the complaint that Anthropic’s unauthorized use of the site’s data fo
Klarna CEO says company will use humans to offer VIP customer service
“My wife taught me something,” Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told the crowd at London SXSW. He was addressing the headlines about the company looking to hire human workers after previously saying Klarna used artificial intelligence to do work that would equate to 700 workers. “Two things
AMD takes aim at Nvidia’s AI hardware dominance with Brium acquisition
AMD’s latest acquisition could help reduce Nvidia’s market dominance when it comes to AI hardware.
Semiconductor giant AMD on Wednesday announced it acquired AI software optimization startup Brium. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Brium is a startup that appears t
Snap launches Lens Studio iOS and web apps for creating AR Lenses with AI and simple tools
Snap has launched a stand-alone Lens Studio iOS app and web tool, the company announced on Wednesday. The new tools are designed to make it easier for anyone to create AR Lenses through text prompts and simple editing tools.
With the Lens Studio app, users will be able to do things like generate t