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Flex, which offers personal finance software and payments infrastructure for business owners, has raised $25 million in equity funding while securing a $200 million credit facility, it told TechCrunch exclusively. The equity funds were raised at a valuation of “just under $250 million.” The company last raised a $20 million Series A announced in September…
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EcoDataCenter, a Swedish company that builds eco-friendly data centers used by major compute providers to handle their AI traffic, has raised nearly half a billion dollars — $478 million (€450 million) to be exact — in anticipation of more demand. The equity funding, which is coming from a group of unnamed institutional investors, will be…
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Alec Radford, a researcher who helped develop many of OpenAI’s key AI technologies, has been subpoenaed in a copyright case against the AI startup, according to a court filing Tuesday. The filing, submitted by an attorney for the plaintiffs to the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, indicated that Radford was served…
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We still didn’t get a straight-up definition of exactly what an AI agent is during Bret Taylor’s Mobile World Congress fireside chat in Barcelona on Tuesday. The Sierra founder and OpenAI board chair preferred to sidestep CNN moderator Anna Stewart’s question asking how “agentic AI” is “any different to a GenAI chatbot” by suggesting everyone…
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Chinese ride-hail firm Didi is on the hunt for fresh funds for its autonomous vehicle technology unit that could value it at $5 billion, according to Bloomberg News. Investor interest in self-driving cars is high in China on the backs of IPOs from WeRide and Pony AI, which have a market capitalization of $4.7 billion…
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The drive to decarbonize our economies through electrification and clean energy continues to generate momentum around battery technologies, as storage has a key role to play in enabling the green transition. While renewables are clean sources of energy compared to burning fossil fuels, their power output isn’t always consistent. In the case of solar —…
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The Trump Administration has fired a number of National Science Foundation employees who had been handpicked for their expertise in AI, threatening the agency’s ability to sustain key AI research, Bloomberg reported. One of the affected departments inside NSF, called the Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships, was instrumental in funneling government grants focused on…
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Podcast recording and editing platform odcastle is now joining other companies in the AI-powered, text-to-speech race by releasing its own AI model called Asyncflow v1.0. An API for developers will also be available, allowing them to directly integrate the text-to-speech model in their apps. Thanks to the new model, the company is able to offer…
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The U.K.’s privacy watchdog has launched investigations into three social media companies over how they go about protecting the privacy of children on their respective platforms. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) announced today that it’s looking into how TikTok uses personal information of 13-17-year-olds to recommend videos, “in light of growing concerns” around how young…
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Apple is struggling to rebuild Siri for the age of generative AI, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who says the company might not release “a true modernized, conversational version of Siri” until iOS 20 comes out in 2027. That doesn’t mean there won’t be big Siri updates before then. A new version Siri will reportedly…