Browsing: Exclusive

Josh Mackanic left a 10-year engineering career at Pacific Gas and Electric because he kept thinking about what the utility company doesn’t know about what’s buried underground.

Shapor Naghibzadeh learned the value of a good story in 2009 as a Google sysops engineer. When hackers backed by China set their sights on the search giant as part of an effort dubbed Operation Aurora, he was called into a hastily assembled war room to explain what exactly was going on in the company’s…

As artificial intelligence makes it easier than ever to build websites and apps, Indian startup Runable is betting the next opportunity lies in what comes after: finding customers and helping businesses grow. The startup has raised $21 million to expand in that direction.

Generalist, a robotics startup, is now valued at $3 billion after raising additional capital led by 8VC, according to two people with knowledge of the funding.

Airbound, an Indian startup building autonomous drones, has raised $37 million in fresh capital as it pushes to make moving goods through the air as cheap as trucking them by road.

New York-based General Intuition, the startup building a foundation model that trains generalized AI agents to move through space and time, is in talks to raise funding at a $6 billion pre-money valuation from new investors including Valor Equity Partners, Point72 Ventures, and Seven Seven Six, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Getting the most value from a model means giving it the keys. For a control freak or the AI hesitant, it seems like a lot. For Andrew Ambrosino, the lead engineer for OpenAI’s desktop app, it’s the only way to test the future, which is why that app now has access to, and control over,…

You probably know by now that the AI models powering ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other chatbots are trained on seemingly infinite databases of published works, containing hundreds of millions of books, online articles, academic papers, and basically anything you can find on the internet. Most published authors have, without their knowledge or consent, contributed to…

Waymo has responded to questions from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) as part of the regulator’s investigation into a January crash in which a robotaxi struck a child at low speed.

Nvidia published some interesting new research on Friday suggesting it’s the harness, more than the underlying model, that is far more important when asking an AI to do long-horizon tasks. A harness is the software wrapper around an AI model — the tools, memory management, and rules that turn a raw model into something that…