Tech

Character.AI, a leading platform for chatting and roleplaying with AI-generated characters, unveiled its forthcoming video generation model, AvatarFX, on Tuesday. Available in closed beta, the model animates the platform’s characters in a variety of styles and voices, from human-like characters to 2D animal cartoons. AvatarFX distinguishes itself from competitors like OpenAI’s Sora because it isn’t … Read more

AI labs are increasingly relying on crowdsourced benchmarking platforms such as Chatbot Arena to probe the strengths and weaknesses of their latest models. But some experts say that there are serious problems with this approach from an ethical and academic perspective. Over the past few years, labs including OpenAI, Google, and Meta have turned to … Read more

Join this free virtual event, featuring Ali Ghodsi, the trailblazing co-founder and CEO of Databricks, alongside Dario Amodei, the pioneering co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. Uncover how their revolutionary collaboration is poised to fast-track the advancement of domain-specific AI agents. Not only will you experience an engaging exchange between the visionary leaders of two AI … Read more

Aidan Gomez, the co-founder and CEO of generative AI startup Cohere, has joined the board of EV maker Rivian, according to a regulatory filing. The appointment is the latest sign that Rivian sees promises in applying AI to its own venture while positioning itself as a software leader — and even provider — within the … Read more

The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit Monday against Uber, alleging the ride-hail and delivery giant charged customers for its Uber One subscription service without their consent. The lawsuit also claims Uber failed to deliver the savings promised in its subscription service and made it unreasonably difficult for users to cancel despite its “cancel anytime” … Read more

“A Minecraft Movie” isn’t just a hit — after three weekends in theaters, the film is estimated to have grossed $344 million domestically and $720 million worldwide. That makes it the biggest movie of an admittedly underwhelming year at the box office (so far), and the second biggest video game movie of all time. Coming … Read more

A discrepancy between first- and third-party benchmark results for OpenAI’s o3 AI model is raising questions about the company’s transparency and model testing practices. When OpenAI unveiled o3 in December, the company claimed the model could answer just over a fourth of questions on FrontierMath, a challenging set of math problems. That score blew the … Read more

One of the founders of startup accelerator Y Combinator offered unsparing criticism this weekend of the controversial data analytics company Palantir, leading a company executive to offer an extensive defense of Palantir’s work. The back-and-forth came after federal filings showed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — tasked with carrying out the Trump administration’s … Read more

“I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models.” It was a seemingly random question posed by a user on X (formerly Twitter), but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman jumped in to reply that typing those words has added up to “tens of millions … Read more

Every now and then, a Silicon Valley startup launches with such an “absurdly” described mission that it’s difficult to discern if the startup is for real or just satire. Such is the case with Mechanize, a startup whose founder – and the non-profit AI research organization he founded called Epoch – is being skewered on … Read more