As staff at the Lower Manhattan headquarters of Macmillan Publishers headed into work one morning in January 2024, they filed past something strange on the walls—flyers welcoming a new member of the team named “NOA.” The cafeteria was festooned with purple balloons and banners, according to several workers present, and with NOA’s name in light-up…
Reddit is the latest social platform to adopt the “For You” feed popularized by TikTok. The company announced on Wednesday that users will now see two options when opening the platform: “For You” and “Following.” The “For You” feed combines posts from communities users have joined with recommendations tailored to their interests. Reddit says the…
Google DeepMind has released Genie 4 as a research preview for trusted testers. The Genie 4 world model generates explorable worlds from text and image prompts in real time. It also generates the soundscape: ambient noise, music and character dialogue. Users move with keyboard controls and steer events with plain-language prompts. The bigger change is…
Researchers from Polymathic AI, Princeton University, USC ISI, NYU and the Flatiron Institute have released FlashMap. FlashMap speculative decoding replaces the discrete diffusion drafter with a continuous flow map. It drafts a full 16-token block in 1 forward pass. Tokens in that block stay consistent with each other. On Qwen3-8B, the research team reports up…
The final countdown is officially on! In just 7 days, TechCrunch Founder Summit takes over Boston’s SoWa Power Station on November 4. Your chance to save up to $100 on tickets is running out, and the opportunity to learn and connect directly with experienced founders, investors, and startup leaders is almost here. Whether you’re launching…
The Dallas-based investment firm Disruptive, whose past bets include Palantir, Airbnb, and Spotify, announced a $10 billion fund to back at least 10 late-stage companies, with checks of up to $1 billion, it said Tuesday. It’s one of the biggest fundraises of the year so far, aiming to back (what else?!) the capital-intensive fields of…
Discord announced on Tuesday it will make some conversations in its public servers searchable and easier to find on the internet. The new update targets conversations in “Discoverable Servers,” public Discord servers that administrators have made eligible to appear in the platform’s Server Discovery feature. The aim is to help people find useful information that…
EM1 has contracts with around a hundred government agencies and school districts, but none are using it to automate their extreme weather alerts just yet. For the moment, they’re only using it to workshop plans and internal preparations. Even so, all the experts interviewed for this story said they are certain that many emergency managers…
Anthropic was founded in 2021 to ensure humanity can control AI and benefit from it in the long-term. As the frontier lab approaches its initial public offering, however, there’s one class of humanity that is being shut out of control: anyone who buys its stock on public markets. Complex structures that allow founders like Elon…
Financial giant Bank of America is reminding customers to bank safely by kindly not sharing your banking credentials with your AI agent. In an email blast to customers titled “Protecting your finances in the Al World,” Bank of America urged customers to never share their username and password with another person or an outside service,…
