Palo Alto Networks is in talks to acquire Clutch Security, a startup that secures AI agents’ access to company systems, for $500 million in cash plus additional milestone-based payouts, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Three-year-old Clutch was last valued at $85 million when it raised a $20 million Series A round in…
Meta president Dina Powell McCormick said that the Democratic wins in the midterm elections are going to make it a lot harder for companies to build data centers, adding that the industry has “not done as good a job as we needed to explain the benefits of these investments.” Speaking at the WSJ Tech conference…
Thinking Machines Lab has released Inkling 2 Small, the first model of its second Inkling generation. The Inkling 2 Small model is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) with 594B total and 17B active parameters. It accepts text and images, and supports variable reasoning effort. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, it scores 31. Its predecessor, Inkling…
Google has released Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash, the newest version of its video generation and editing model. Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash generates and edits clips up to 15 seconds natively. It also cuts the price by 30% compared with Omni 1.1 Flash. The model is generally available on Google Cloud…
Meta, Google, and TikTok have each filed lawsuits against California Attorney General Rob Bonta in an attempt to block a law that restricts social media features it deems addictive for users under 16. California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill, known as AB 1709, into law in September, and it’s slated to take effect at…
Anthropic is holding firm on the pledge made in its Super Bowl commercial this year to keep Claude ad-free. The company’s recent IPO filing didn’t even mention the possibility of selling ads to make money from the AI chatbot. It’s easy to maintain the high ground with about $112 billion in investor cash. The chatbot…
The New York Times Company has reportedly “entered exclusive negotiations” to acquire Letterboxd for $330 million, according to a report from the New York Times itself. Letterboxd, an online platform for movie lovers that could be compared to Goodreads for movies, has grown dramatically in recent years. Letterboxd reported 3 million users in January 2021,…
Airbnb has teased its plans to build its own AI travel agent before, but on Thursday the company announced that the new AI feature will launch in the first half of 2027. In the company’s Q3 shareholder letter on Thursday, Airbnb also provided more detail about how the agent will work, what it will actually…
Baidu has released ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base, the raw pre-training checkpoint of its new sparse Mixture-of-Experts language model. ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base is a 280B-parameter text model from Baidu that activates 14B parameters per token. The weights stop at the end of pre-training, with no mid- or post-training applied. This…
Serve Robotics, a maker of self-driving sidewalk delivery robots, is expanding beyond its autonomous delivery operations in a bid to become a technology supplier to other companies building robots. The company, which spun out of Uber’s acquisition of Postmates in 2021 and went public in 2024, said Thursday it will launch a new business line…
