Two teenage founders walked into Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham’s backyard with an idea no one in agriculture seemed to want — an AI model to help design better pesticides. By the time they left, they had a new business model, a new company, and eventually, Graham’s backing. Now, that reimagined company — Bindwell —…
Google is rolling out a suite of AI shopping updates just ahead of the holiday season. The company on Thursday unveiled a host of new tools and features, including conversational shopping in Google Search, new shopping features within its Gemini app, agentic checkout, and even an AI tool that can call local stores to find…
Microsoft is taking a page from OpenAI’s playbook, literally. Bloomberg first reported that the tech giant plans to leverage its partner’s custom chip development to bolster its own struggling semiconductor efforts, a move that looks increasingly pragmatic given Microsoft’s lackluster performance compared to rivals like Google and Amazon. The arrangement is straightforward: OpenAI is designing…
Cash App released a slate of new features as part of its fall update, including an AI chatbot that can answer questions about users’ finances, a new benefits program, and the ability to discover places that accept Bitcoin payments and make Bitcoin payments using USD. The company is launching an assistant called Moneybot that can…
A group of Democratic lawmakers have sent letters to several state governors, including in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Wisconsin, warning that their states are inadvertently sharing drivers’ data with federal immigration authorities. The letter, which was first reported by Reuters, told governors that their states are providing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other…
If there’s any question about whether data centers are driving the global economy, a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) should dispel any doubts. This year, the world will spend $580 billion on data centers, $40 billion more than it will spend on new oil supplies. “This point of comparison provides a telling…
OpenAI has released GPT-5.1 as the next iteration in the GPT-5 family, with 2 core variants, GPT-5.1 Instant and GPT-5.1 Thinking. The update focuses on 3 axes, adaptive reasoning behavior, clearer explanations, and stronger control over tone and safety. Model Lineup And Positioning GPT-5.1 Instant is the default conversational model in ChatGPT. OpenAI describes it…
Internet radio service TuneIn, a competitor of sorts to Sirius XM and other streamers that was valued at around $500 million during its heyday, has sold for just $175 million. The acquirer is the music and technology company Stingray Group, which will pay $150 million at closing and up to $25 million one year later….
In this tutorial, we build our own custom GPT-style chat system from scratch using a local Hugging Face model. We start by loading a lightweight instruction-tuned model that understands conversational prompts, then wrap it inside a structured chat framework that includes a system role, user memory, and assistant responses. We define how the agent interprets…
One of the most effective use cases to have emerged from modern AI models is their ability to understand the human voice better, which has led to more accurate dictation tools. One such Mac tool, Willow, is launching an iOS app to let users type with their voice across all apps. Similar to Wispr Flow,…
