Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

"If a rover comes across a crater in front of it, for instance, it can't decide what to do after communicating with Earth," he says, because sending signals across space takes too long. "It must decide on its own. So I think AI is very important for the nation's deep space exploration."

Microsoft wasted little time last fall after reaching a deal to finalize its new relationship with OpenAI to find a new AI dance partner - Anthropic, the second most valuable AI startup in the world. Even though the relationship between Microsoft and Anthropic is only a few months old, it appears as if Microsoft sees a future with Anthropic that's at least as valuable as the one it had with OpenAI.

Ricursive Intelligence, a startup building an AI system to design and automatically improve AI chips, has raised $300 million at a $4 billion valuation. The company said Monday the round was led by Lightspeed. Ricursive says the system will be able to create its own silicon substrate layer and speed up AI chip improvements. Rinse and repeat to get to AGI, the founders say.

As demand grows for privacy-first enterprise AI that can run without sending sensitive data to the cloud, SpotDraft has raised $8 million from Qualcomm Ventures in a strategic Series B extension to scale its on-device contract review tech for regulated legal workflows. The extension values SpotDraft at around $380 million, the startup told TechCrunch, nearly double its $190 million post-money valuation following its $56 million Series B in February of last year.

As AI systems become more capable, more accessible, and more embedded in everyday workflows, creativity is emerging as one of the most important human skills in AI development and deployment. Not creativity as decoration or aesthetics, but creativity as problem framing, decision-making, and human judgment. In an era where many organizations are using the same models, tools, and platforms, creative thinking is what separates meaningful outcomes from generic ones.

The display isn't necessarily based on the communication style of the leaders of these titans. Huang and Nadella, for example, tend toward a thoughtful and moderate discourse, and even the hyperbolic Musk was relatively restrained in his conversation with Larry Fink (BlackRock) on the main stage in Davos. But the flexing of muscles is evident in the arguments presented, in conjunction with the data.

A British AI startup that makes realistic video avatars has almost doubled its valuation to $4bn (3bn), in a boost for the UK technology sector. Synthesia was valued at $2.1bn last year and moved into new offices in central London, marking the moment with a ceremony attended by the Sadiq Khan, the city's mayor, and Peter Kyle, then technology secretary. On Monday, it announced its latest funding round, led by an existing investor, Google Ventures, had raised $200m and valued the British company at $4bn.

Gault is a self-described "certified AI hater," though he concedes that LLM technology is useful in certain instances (I agree to disagree with Gault's assertion that offloading transcription to an environmentally catastrophic machine built on stolen labor saves valuable time and energy). Gault's friends were turned off by the difficulty of Escape from Tarkov , an extraction shooter which came out of early access last November. He described playing by himself as lonely.

In practice, most alignment efforts fall into two buckets: ensuring obedience ("do what I tell you") and enforcing social norms ("don't do bad things"). These approaches treat alignment as something imposed externally. According to Emmett Shear, that's not alignment - it's control. Alignment only makes sense in the context of multiple agents. It's not about restricting behavior, but about agents being oriented toward the same goal.

"Overly affectionate chatbots, besides being ever-present and readily available, can become hidden architects of our emotional states, thereby invading and occupying the sphere of people's intimacy," the first-ever US-born pope wrote. "All stakeholders - from the technology industry to policymakers, from creative businesses to academia, from artists to journalists and educators - must be involved in building and implementing a conscious and responsible digital citizenship," the pope wrote.