(A)bsolutely (I)ncredible Podcast

According to a panel of hundreds of artificial intelligence researchers, the field is currently pursuing artificial general intelligence the wrong way. This insight was revealed at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)’s 2025 Presidential Panel on the Future of AI Research. The lengthy report was put together by 24 AI researchers whose expertise ranges from the stat...

Right now, in the tech industry paddock, there are 372 AI unicorns, according to PitchBook. How did you react to that number? Did you double-take? Did you recoil slightly, finding it shockingly high? Far too low? Or did you shrug as if to say that tracks? I don’t think there’s a right or wrong response here—my point, rather, is that it’s likely you’ll have some kind of reaction to that number. And...

Apple has traditionally not been a big player in artificial intelligence model training or server infrastructure. But that might change pretty soon. Apple is officially in the large server cluster Gen AI game... and Super Micro Computer & Dell are the key server partners, Loop Capital Markets analyst Ananda Baruah said in an analyst note on Monday. Large server clusters are big groups of high-powe...

We’re coming up on the one year anniversary since OpenAI released its first omni or multimodal model, GPT-4o back in May 2024, but that old standby still has some tricks up its sleeve. Case-in-point, today OpenAI finally turned on the native multimodal image generation capabilities of GPT-4o for users of its hit chatbot ChatGPT on the Plus, Pro, Team, and Free usage tiers, though the company said...

I don’t know what your social media feed looks like these days, but mine is filled with March Madness, memes, and a relentless catalog of AI startups’ impressive (and rapidly attained) revenue figures. Here is a very incomplete selection of what I’m talking about here: In less than three years, Midjourney’s annual recurring revenue (or ARR) soared from zero to $200 million. Over about 24 months, E...

AI-powered search startup Perplexity is said to be in early talks to raise up to $1 billion in a new funding round valuing the startup at $18 billion. A person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday, as the Nvidia-backed startup looks to grow and capture soaring demand for its search tools. Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported on Thursday that Perplexity’s annua...

Jensen Huang is betting companies will continue to spend billions of dollars with Nvidia. His confidence rests on two key reasons — though investors may need extra convincing. Kickstarting Nvidia's annual GTC conference in a San Jose arena on Tuesday — a developer bash now dubbed the Super Bowl of AI — the billionaire CEO pointed to powerful new chips and Nvidia's role in the industry's shift to i...

For at least two decades, Software as a Service -- aka, SaaS -- has been at the center of the technology universe, with applications fully accessible via the internet. Now, artificial intelligence is turning this arrangement on its head, leveraging applications autonomously to deliver services. They're calling it Services as Software. AI is creating this new world for technology professionals and...

All eyes will be on Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference this week, where the company is expected to unveil its next artificial intelligence chips. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said he will share more about the upcoming Blackwell Ultra AI chip, Vera Rubin platform, and plans for following products at the annual conference, known as the GTC, during the company’s fiscal fourth quarter earnings...

Big Tech companies are eyeing small modular reactors as an AI energy solution — even as some remain unsure about its potential. There's no official standard that defines a small modular reactor, or SMR, according to two leading nuclear experts who spoke with Business Insider. The industry consensus is that they produce less power — around 300 megawatts instead of the 1,000 megawatts, or 1 gigawatt...

Silicon Valley's earliest stage companies are getting a major boost from artificial intelligence. Startup accelerator Y Combinator -- known for backing Airbnb, Dropbox and Stripe -- this week held its annual demo day in San Francisco, where founders pitched their startups to an auditorium of potential venture capital investors. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan told CNBC that this group is growing signif...

OpenAI and Google are pushing the US government to allow their AI models to train on copyrighted material. Both companies outlined their stances in proposals published this week, with OpenAI arguing that applying fair use protections to AI “is a matter of national security.” The proposals come in response to a request from the White House, which asked governments , industry groups, private sector...

Buy Theodora's book Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence: https://amzn.to/4iwVogr Connect with Theodora on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodoralau/ Thank you to Theodora Lau for taking time to sit down with me for a chat about her new book: Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence explores the transformative potential of AI in the financial services sector, delving into its historical evolut...

A little over a year after releasing two open Gemma AI models built from the same technology behind its Gemini AI, Google is updating the family with Gemma 3 . According to the blog post, these models are intended for use by developers creating AI applications capable of running wherever they’re needed, on anything from a phone to a workstation with support for over 35 languages, as well as the ab...

ServiceNow, which provides businesses with outsourced IT and customer service support as well as other digital services, said it was buying the business process automation company Moveworks for $2.85 billion in cash and stock. The Santa Clara, California-based ServiceNow framed the acquisition around the burgeoning market for AI agents that can perform digital tasks for people, often involving the...

ByteDance cofounder Zhang Yiming has become China’s richest man as investors bet on companies with AI potential. Zhang’s fortune has grown to $65.5 billion, ahead of beverage giant Nongfu Spring founder Zhong Shanshan ’s $56.5 billion, according to Forbes estimates. Zhang, 41, derives his net worth from a 21% stake in the privately held tech behemoth, although he stepped down as chairman in 2021 a...

Microsoft will invest $290 million over the next two years in South Africa on AI and cloud infrastructure, vice chair and president Brad Smith announced. At an event with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in Johannesburg Thursday, Smith said the investment will help the country’s ambition to become a globally competitive AI economy. It has built massive datacenters in the past three years in...

Investor interest in AI coding assistants is exploding. Anysphere, the developer of AI-powered coding assistant Cursor, is in talks with venture capitalists to raise capital at a valuation of nearly $10 billion, Bloomberg reported. The round, if it transpires, would come about three months after Anysphere completed its previous fundraise of $100 million at a pre-money valuation of $2.5 billion, as...

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot platform, can now directly edit code — if you’re on macOS, that is. The newest version of the ChatGPT app for macOS can take action to edit code in supported developer tools, including Xcode, VS Code, and JetBrains. Users can optionally turn on an auto-apply mode so ChatGPT can make edits without the need for additional clicks. Subscribers to ChatGPT Plus, Pro,...

Crunchbase, long known as a go-to platform for company data, has relaunched as an AI-powered solution, revolutionizing how investors, founders, and innovators gain insights into private companies. Moving beyond historical data, the new Crunchbase introduces live, predictive intelligence, providing a real-time, forward-looking view of the market. Users can now anticipate funding rounds, acquisition...

CoreWeave, the AI Hyperscaler, today announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Weights & Biases, a leading AI developer platform. The acquisition extends CoreWeave's purpose-built cloud platform by enabling an end-to-end experience for customers, enhancing functionality for the world's leading AI labs and enterprises to build, tune and deploy AI applications. The transaction combines CoreWe...

Anthropic closed a $3.5 billion series E funding round, valuing the AI company at $61.5 billion post-money, the firm announced today. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round with a $1 billion contribution, cementing Anthropic’s status as one of the world’s most valuable private companies and demonstrating investors’ unwavering appetite for leading AI developers despite already astronomical valua...

Softbank Group chief executive officer Masayoshi Son plans to borrow $16 billion to invest in artificial intelligence (AI), the company’s executives told banks last week, The Information tech news Web site reported on Saturday, citing people familiar with the matter. The Japanese technology investor might borrow another $8 billion early next year, the report added. It was reported in January that...

Meta AI will soon become one of the social media company's standalone apps, joining Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, CNBC has learned. The company intends to debut a Meta AI standalone app during the second quarter, according to people familiar with the matter. It marks a major step in Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's plans to make his company the leader in artificial intelligence by the end of the yea...

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek wrapped up a week of revealing technical details about its development of a ChatGPT competitor, which was achieved at a fraction of the typical costs, in a move that is poised to accelerate global advances in the field. Over the past few days, DeepSeek published eight open-source projects on GitHub, the world’s largest open-source community. I...