SoftBank and OpenAI announced a new 50-50 joint venture this week to sell enterprise AI tools in Japan under the brand “Crystal Intelligence.” On paper, it’s a straightforward international expansion deal. But SoftBank’s role as a major investor in OpenAI is raising questions about whether AI’s biggest deals are creating real economic value or just moving money in circles. …
Modern agentic applications rarely talk to a single model or a single tool, so how do you keep that stack maintainable when providers, models and tools keep changing every few weeks. Moonshot AI’s Kosong targets this problem as an LLM abstraction layer for agent applications. Kosong unifies message structures, asynchronous tool orchestration and pluggable chat…
Lovable, the Stockholm-based AI coding platform, is closing in on 8 million users, CEO Anton Osika told this editor during a sit-down on Monday, a major jump from the 2.3 million active users number the company shared in July. Osika said the company — which was founded almost exactly one year ago — is also…
How do we teach AI agents to reliably find and click the exact on screen element we mean when we give them a simple instruction? A team of researchers from ML Foundations has introduced Gelato-30B-A3B, a state of the art grounding model for graphical user interfaces that is designed to plug into computer use agents…
People often think about tech bubbles in apocalyptic terms, but it doesn’t have to be as serious as all that. In economic terms, a bubble is a bet that turned out to be too big, leaving you with more supply than demand. The upshot: It’s not all or nothing, and even good bets can turn sour if you aren’t careful about how you make them. …
Gamma, a startup that creates AI-generated presentations, websites, and social media posts, announced on Monday a $68 million Series B round at a $2.1 billion valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz. Co-founder and CEO Grant Lee posted on X that the company has profitably hit $100 million in ARR, with 70 million users. The startup hit $50 million profitably in its first two years, Lee previously posted. Gamma last raised a $12 million Series A round led by Accel in 2024. Gamma isn’t exactly a…
Google announced on Monday that it’s starting to roll out Gemini to the Google TV Streamer, replacing Google Assistant. The tech giant says the change will enable users to use their voice more naturally to access content and more. For example, users can now ask something like, “I like dramas but my wife likes comedies….
Google Maps is adding new AI features, including a builder agent and an MCP server — a tool that connects AI assistants to Google Maps’ technical documentation — to help developers and users create interactive projects using Maps data and code. The company said it is using Gemini models across the board to power these…
Carbon management startup Carbon Direct is buying another carbon credit startup, Pachama, the companies announced today. Pachama laid off around 20 employees this summer as voluntary carbon markets softened. The company had attracted investments from a range of prominent names, including Amazon’s Climate Pledge, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, and several celebrity angel investors, including…
Venmo on Monday introduced a new rewards program, Venmo Stash, offering cash back to customers who transact with their favorite brands on the payments app and engage with Venmo’s products. While cashback rewards are a common incentive for credit cards, Venmo’s rewards — which can be up to 5% — are returned to Venmo’s Mastercard…
