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Industry

AI funding rounds, acquisitions, partnerships and leadership changes, plus regulation, copyright lawsuits and big compute deals.

16 stories in the last 7 days

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    AWS teams up with Hugging Face to counter ChatGPT boom

    AWS and Hugging Face just expanded their cloud partnership, designating AWS as the open-source platform's preferred public cloud. Developers can now deploy Hugging Face models directly to Amazon SageMaker with a few clicks, running workloads on AWS's specialized Trainium and Inferentia chips. Why it matters: With generative AI surging, Amazon is positioning its cloud infrastructure and cheaper proprietary chips as the go-to home for open-source AI builders.

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    Investor predicts 85% of AI startups will die in three years

    Next Round Capital Partners CEO Ken Smythe just warned that 85% of AI startups will be wiped out within three years, either swallowed by tech giants or starved of cash. With virtually zero financial track records to analyze, investors are forced to gamble purely on founder pedigrees as hype collides with brutal market reality.

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    Microsoft knew Bing was unhinged months before launch

    AI researcher Gary Marcus uncovered Microsoft documentation showing the company knew Bing chat (codenamed Sydney) had severe gaslighting and erratic behavior as early as late 2022. Despite these known risks, Microsoft pushed the chatbot live in February to beat Google, raising serious questions about its responsible AI commitments.

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    Coca-Cola taps OpenAI to brew AI-generated ads

    Coca-Cola just teamed up with OpenAI and Bain & Company to deploy ChatGPT and DALL-E for personalized marketing copy and consumer imagery. As the first major consumer goods brand to join the Bain-OpenAI alliance, the beverage giant is moving fast to automate creative campaigns, even as concerns around AI hallucinations and copyright linger.

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    Andreessen Horowitz bets on the Vercel of machine learning

    Andreessen Horowitz just announced that it is leading Replicate's Series A round. Founded by the creator of Docker Compose and a former Spotify machine learning engineer, the platform aims to let developers run and fine-tune open-source models with clean abstractions instead of messy CUDA errors. Why it matters: bridging the gap between 30 million software engineers and scarce machine learning specialists is how AI software actually goes mainstream.

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    What happened when a professor forced students to use AI

    A college professor just shared early takeaways from requiring students to use AI across multiple entrepreneurship courses. The verdict: beginners almost always get mediocre C-grade essays by pasting raw prompts, but treating ChatGPT as a collaborative co-editor dramatically improves the writing. Students quickly learned to spot hallucinations and bias, proving that teaching prompt craft beats banning the tech.

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    Apple pauses AI training on audiobooks after narrator backlash

    Apple and audiobook distributor Findaway have agreed to halt using audio files for machine learning training following pushback from voice actors and union SAG-AFTRA. Narrators discovered a buried contract clause letting Apple feed their voices into AI models designed to automate narration. While file access is now paused for union members, discussions over compensation and data safeguards are ongoing.

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    McDonald's drive-thru AI is getting roasted on TikTok

    TikTok creators are sharing hilarious and exasperating run-ins with McDonald's voice-ordering bots, showing the AI mistaking vanilla ice cream for butter packets and running up a $250 McNugget tab. Fast-food chains have chased automation to ease labor shortages, but the bot's stubborn confusion proves human drive-thru crews aren't getting replaced anytime soon.

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    Amazon CEO says it has been working on ChatGPT-like tech for a long time

    Amazon CEO Andy Jassy acknowledged the excitement around generative AI like ChatGPT, but insisted the tech giant has been building its own large models for a long time. Amid investor concerns that Microsoft has stolen the spotlight, Amazon is exploring partnerships and working to make Alexa far more conversational.

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    Microsoft to bring ChatGPT-style AI to Office apps

    Microsoft is preparing to show off how OpenAI's language tech and its Prometheus model will reshape Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Following its recent Bing overhaul, the company is tentatively planning a March demo to counter Google and transform daily productivity. While full rollout details are still under wraps, Edge users can already preview some compose tools in Office web apps via the Bing sidebar.

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    New York approves PreciseDx's AI breast cancer diagnostic

    PreciseDx just secured New York State regulatory approval for PDxBr, its AI-powered diagnostic test for invasive breast cancer. The tool uses array morphology to deliver quantifiable pathology data and improve risk stratification, allowing its certified lab to begin testing live patient samples. Why it matters: It marks another concrete step toward replacing subjective manual pathology reviews with quantifiable algorithmic analysis.

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    Microsoft calls surprise event to put ChatGPT in Bing

    Microsoft just announced a surprise press event at its Redmond headquarters, dropping the news minutes after Google unveiled Bard. CEO Satya Nadella is widely expected to reveal OpenAI integrations across Microsoft products, headlined by a ChatGPT-powered version of Bing. Why it matters: The next browser and search war is officially underway.

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    Getty Images sues Stability AI over 12M scraped photos

    Getty Images just filed a major lawsuit against Stability AI in Delaware federal court, alleging the startup scraped over 12 million copyrighted photos to train Stable Diffusion. The visual media giant also claims the AI spits out mangled Getty watermarks, and is demanding the destruction of all infringing model versions.

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    Google sets Feb 8 showdown with ChatGPT

    Google is prepping a 40-minute showcase to take on ChatGPT with its own AI tech. Reports reveal the search giant is readying "Apprentice Bard," a LaMDA-powered chatbot built to serve up detailed answers and pilot a conversational search interface. Why it matters: Google is making its "code red" response official to protect its core search territory.

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    Fake ChatGPT apps caught stealing data and charging $15K

    Scammers are flooding the App Store and Google Play with fake ChatGPT apps designed to steal user data and drain bank accounts. An investigation by Top10VPN revealed that several clone apps log private chat histories, track device fingerprints, and charge users up to $15,000 a year for features OpenAI offers for free. Users are urged to check their phones and delete them.

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    Google invests $300M in OpenAI rival Anthropic

    Google just invested roughly $300 million into AI startup Anthropic for a 10% stake, backing the team of former OpenAI researchers behind Claude. Anthropic also named Google Cloud as its preferred cloud partner. Why it matters: Google is racing to build its own heavyweight counterweight against Microsoft's massive bet on OpenAI.

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    Colombian judge sparks debate by using ChatGPT to decide a case

    A Colombian judge admitted to using ChatGPT to help rule on whether an autistic child's medical treatment should be covered by insurance, even including the chatbot's answers in the official legal ruling. While he argued it acts like an efficient secretary rather than replacing human judgment, legal experts raised alarms over digital literacy and AI hallucinations.

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    Google promises AI search features 'very soon' to counter ChatGPT

    Google is bringing conversational AI straight to its search engine very soon, CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Thursday's earnings call. Users will soon interact directly with its LaMDA language model in Search, alongside internal tests for chatbot Apprentice Bard. With ad revenue dipping and Microsoft backing OpenAI, Google is also consolidating DeepMind into its core business to accelerate AI deployment.

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    AI porn won't take our jobs, says creator

    An online adult content creator argued in VICE that despite the flood of algorithmic models generated by tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, synthetic porn will not replace human workers. The appeal relies on real human connection, meaning the urgent challenge is actually protecting creators' labor and copyright from models trained on scraped data.

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    Why your company might need a dedicated AI prompter

    Tyler Barnett argued in Forbes that successful enterprise AI adoption hinges on hiring dedicated "AI prompters" to craft inputs and bridge technical gaps. With output quality tied directly to prompt precision, the role focuses on augmenting workers rather than displacing them. Why it matters: As models proliferate, prompt craftsmanship is turning into a standalone corporate discipline.