<p>If and when AI will start replacing human labor has been the subject of numerous debates.&nbsp;&nbsp; While it’s still hard to say with certainty if AI is beginning to take over roles previously done by humans, a recent survey from the World Economic Forum found that 40% of employers intend to cut staff where AI [&hellip;]</p>

<p>WordPress announced on Tuesday that it has formed an AI team to steward the development of AI products among its developer community. The team includes James LePage (leader of AI at Automattic, WordPress&#8217; parent company), Felix Arntz and Pascal Birchler from Google, and Jeff Paul (Director of Open Source at web design firm 10up). As [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Salesforce has acquired cloud data management firm Informatica in an $8 billion equity deal, marking a major move in its push to strengthen its AI and data infrastructure capabilities. The announcement, made Tuesday, comes about a year after early rumors of the acquisition sent both companies’ stock prices sliding. At the time, Informatica denied it [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Mark your calendars: June 18 just became a can&#8217;t-miss event. We&#8217;re thrilled that Ali Partovi and Russell Kaplan will be joining us for what&#8217;s shaping up to be a fantastic night of ideas and conversation in the heart of Silicon Valley at our next StrictlyVC evening, taking place in Menlo Park. Partovi, the longtime investor [&hellip;]</p>

<p>There’s no shortage of APIs, models, or hype in the current AI ecosystem. But for early-stage founders, the real question is: How do I turn this firepower into a product that actually works…and sells? That’s where Hao Sang, from OpenAI’s Startups Go-to-Market team, comes in. At TechCrunch Sessions: AI next week — June 5 at [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Mistral AI, the French company behind AI assistant Le Chat and several foundational models, is officially regarded as one of France’s most promising tech startups and is arguably the only European company that could compete with OpenAI. But compared to its $6 billion valuation, its global market share is still relatively low.&nbsp; However, the recent [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Last week, Elon Musk&#8217;s AI chatbot Grok experienced a &#8220;bug&#8221; that made it tell users about the &#8220;white genocide&#8221; conspiracy theory in South Africa, even when prompted with questions that had nothing to do with the topic … and soon after, Grok expressed skepticism over the Holocaust death toll, which it chalked up to a &#8220;programming [&hellip;]</p>

<p>OpenAI is updating the AI model powering&nbsp;Operator, its AI agent that can autonomously browse the web and use certain software within a cloud-hosted virtual machine to fulfill users&#8217; requests. Soon, Operator will use a model based on o3, one of the latest in OpenAI&#8217;s o series of &#8220;reasoning&#8221; models. Previously, Operator relied on a custom [&hellip;]</p>

<p>One of Microsoft&#8217;s latest AI models can accurately predict air quality, hurricanes, typhoons, and other weather-related phenomena, the company claims. In a paper published in the journal Nature and an accompanying blog post this week, Microsoft detailed Aurora, which the tech giant says can forecast atmospheric events with greater precision and speed than traditional meteorological [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei believes today&#8217;s AI models hallucinate, or make things up and present them as if they&#8217;re true, at a lower rate than humans do, he said during a press briefing at Anthropic&#8217;s first developer event, Code with Claude, in San Francisco on Thursday. Amodei said all this in the midst of a [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Anthropic&#8217;s new flagship AI model, Claude Opus 4, is a strong programmer and writer, the company claims. When talking to itself, it&#8217;s also a prolific emoji user. That&#8217;s according to a technical report Anthropic released on Thursday, a part of which investigates how Opus 4 behaves in &#8220;open-ended self-interaction&#8221; — i.e. essentially having a chat [&hellip;]</p>

<p>A third-party research institute that Anthropic partnered with to test one of its new flagship AI models, Claude Opus 4, recommended against deploying an early version of the model due to its tendency to &#8220;scheme&#8221; and deceive. According to a safety report Anthropic published Thursday, the institute, Apollo Research, conducted tests to see in which [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Anthropic&#8217;s newly launched Claude Opus 4 model frequently tries to blackmail developers when they threaten to replace it with a new AI system and give it sensitive information about the engineers responsible for the decision, the company said in a safety report released Thursday. During pre-release testing, Anthropic asked Claude Opus 4 to act as [&hellip;]</p>

<p>OpenAI pushed generative AI into the public consciousness. Now, it could be developing a very different kind of AI device. According to a WSJ report, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees Wednesday that the company’s next major product won’t be a wearable. Instead, it will be a compact, screenless device, fully aware of its user’s [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Other than AI Siemiatkowski admission, it wasn&#8217;t obvious that this was AI. There were only a few subtle signs.</p>

<p>LM Arena, a crowdsourced benchmarking project that major AI labs rely on to test and market their AI models, has raised $100 million in a seed funding round that values the organization at $600 million, according to Bloomberg. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)&nbsp;and UC Investments, which manages an investment portfolio for the University of California, led the [&hellip;]</p>

<p>OpenAI is acquiring io, the device startup that CEO Sam Altman and famed Apple designer Jony Ive have quietly been working on for two years, in an all-equity deal that values that startup at $6.5 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. As part of the unusual deal announced Wednesday, Ive and his design firm, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Meta is launching a new program to incentivize startups to adopt its Llama AI models. The program, Llama for Startups, provides companies &#8220;direct support&#8221; from Meta&#8217;s Llama team, as well as funding in certain cases. Any U.S.-based firm that is incorporated, has raised less than $10 million in funding, has at least one developer on [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Just a few weeks after the U.S. and China made significant steps to de-escalate the growing trade war between the two countries, tensions are flaring again — this time over semiconductors. China&#8217;s Commerce Ministry in Beijing released a statement on Wednesday that threatened legal action against anyone who enforces U.S. export restrictions on Huawei&#8217;s AI chips, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Amazon is testing short-form AI-powered audio product summaries on select product pages, the company announced on Wednesday. The audio summaries are voiced by what Amazon calls &#8220;AI-powered shopping experts&#8221; that discuss key product features, customer reviews, and information from across the web. The new AI product summaries can be accessed by tapping the “Hear the [&hellip;]</p>