The bet against bigger models: Aether AI lands $20mn for causal AI
The bet against bigger models: Aether AI lands $20mn for causal AI

Most of the AI industry is betting that bigger models mean smarter machines. A new startup is betting the opposite. Aether AI, based in San Diego, has raised a $20mn seed round to chase a different idea entirely. Its founder thinks the next leap will n…

A startup betting on a different material for AI’s optics problem just raised $80mn from the people who build the hardware
A startup betting on a different material for AI’s optics problem just raised $80mn from the people who build the hardware

AI’s next bottleneck is not the chips. It is the wiring between them. As clusters grow to hundreds of thousands of GPUs, the copper links that shuttle data between them are running out of road. So the industry is racing to move that traffic onto light …

Hackers have stopped breaking in. They’re abusing the things developers already trust.
Hackers have stopped breaking in. They’re abusing the things developers already trust.

Hackers are not really breaking in any more. They are walking through doors we hold open for them. This past week made the shift plain. Two campaigns showed that the things developers trust most, open-source code and AI tools, have become the easiest w…

The UK’s top data and AI regulator has quit, a first in the office’s 40-year history
The UK’s top data and AI regulator has quit, a first in the office’s 40-year history

The UK’s top data and AI regulator has resigned. It is the first time it has ever happened. John Edwards stepped down as information commissioner on Friday, with immediate effect. His exit followed a months-long workplace investigation. He said his pos…

Google’s AI is confidently telling people that horror fan-fiction monsters are real
Google’s AI is confidently telling people that horror fan-fiction monsters are real

Google’s AI is having trouble telling horror stories from real life. Ask it about certain online monsters, and it will describe them as documented fact. According to a report by Futurism, Google’s AI Overviews repeatedly present entries from the “SCP F…

Ahead of its IPO, OpenAI hires Trump’s AI-policy architect and Google’s transformer pioneer
Ahead of its IPO, OpenAI hires Trump’s AI-policy architect and Google’s transformer pioneer

OpenAI is hiring for its stock-market debut on two very different fronts. One is the research lab. The other is Washington. This week, the company said Dean Ball will join on 6 July to lead a new team called Strategic Futures. Ball is not a researcher….

A startup says it cracked the maths bottleneck holding back AI. It finally has the receipts.
A startup says it cracked the maths bottleneck holding back AI. It finally has the receipts.

A Miami startup says it has cracked a maths problem that has made AI models slow and power-hungry for almost a decade. The claim was bold enough to draw comparisons with Theranos. Now, though, the company has independent test results that back much of …

Google is using Nvidia’s own playbook to break its grip on AI chips
Google is using Nvidia’s own playbook to break its grip on AI chips

To build a serious rival to Nvidia, Google has reached for Nvidia’s own playbook. A Wall Street Journal investigation lays out how Google is using financial guarantees and what the industry calls “circular financing”, the very tactics that helped make …

Bernie Sanders’ AI bill would hand the public half of OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI
Bernie Sanders’ AI bill would hand the public half of OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI

Bernie Sanders has turned a talking point into a bill, and it goes further than anything Silicon Valley or the White House has put on the table. On Thursday, the Vermont senator introduced legislation that would hit the largest AI companies with a one-…