Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

As generative AI reshapes industries, one of its most important yet invisible challenges is retrieval, the process of fetching the right data with relevant context from messy knowledge bases. Large language models (LLMs) are only as accurate as the information they can retrieve. That’s where ZeroEntropy wants to make its mark. The San Francisco-based startup,…

It’s 2025, and cell phone numbers are ubiquitous. We use our phone numbers to sign up for websites and online services, from retail and banking to social media and health providers. You can use your phone number to reset a forgotten password, and even for receiving two-factor authentication codes for securely logging in to your…

LangChain, an AI infrastructure startup providing tools to build and monitor LLM-powered applications, is raising a new round of funding at an approximate $1 billion valuation led by IVP, according to three sources with knowledge of the deal.  LangChain began its life in late 2022 as an open-source project founded by Harrison Chase, who was…

Also Inc., the micromobility startup spun out of Rivian earlier this year, has raised $200 million from Greenoaks Capital, according to a new report from Bloomberg News. The funding round brings Also’s post-money valuation to $1 billion. The startup raised $105 million from Eclipse Ventures earlier this year when it was cleaved from Rivian. Also…

Slate Auto, which came out of stealth mode earlier this year with a surprising – and surprisingly affordable – customizable electric truck, has raised $700 million to date. But long before the EV startup broke cover, it quietly raised a Series A round of more than $100 million in 2023. And while Jeff Bezos was…

Frontier, the organization backed by Stripe, Google, and Meta, announced Tuesday it is paying startup Arbor Energy to remove 116,000 tons of carbon dioxide by the end of the decade. The deal gives Arbor $41 million to help it build its first commercial-scale power plant in southern Louisiana that will burn waste biomass to generate…

It was a mistake that was ahead of its time. Between 2002 and 2005, engineers with the Techint Group were trying to dial in a new electric arc furnace for a steelmaker when they noticed something odd. The carbon electrodes, rather than breaking down, were growing larger.  The team had inadvertently created what’s known as…

Apple’s head of AI models, Ruoming Pang, is leaving the company to work at Meta, Bloomberg reported on Monday. This marks the latest high-ranking AI executive Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has scooped up to lead his new AI superintelligence unit. Pang previously ran Apple’s in-house team that trained the AI foundation models that underpin Apple…

Academics may be leaning on a novel strategy to influence peer review of their research papers — adding hidden prompts designed to coax AI tools to deliver positive feedback. Nikkei Asia reports that when examining English-language preprint papers available on the website arXiv, it found 17 papers that included some form of hidden AI prompt.…

The main Reuters news account, as well as the Reuters World account, became inaccessible to X users in India on Saturday evening. Access was subsequently restored on Sunday. Reuters reports that Indian users attempting to view the @Reuters account — which has 25 million followers — instead saw a message stating that the account “has…