Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: Kimi K3.1 Pro's debut draws scrutiny over allegations that influencers were asked to promote the model without disclosing a commercial relationship to Moonshot — That's because Kimi K3.1 Pro scores so high on third-party benchmarks — according to both Moonshot and third-party AI model …
Matt Marshall / VentureBeat: Reflection AI releases Apache 2.0-licensed weights for Beam, a 501B-parameter model, trained with RL that penalized unnecessary tokens — Reflection AI today released the weights of Beam, its first open model, and is pitching it against the Chinese open models that many U.S. companies …
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: DeepSeek debuts DeepSeek Harness under the MIT license in developer preview, touting a design where “everything is a plugin” that can be swapped out as a plugin — DeepSeek is expanding beyond the model layer and deeper into the software developers use to put AI agents to work.
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: Skan AI, which is building a “context graph of work” by observing staff using enterprise software, raised a $63M Series C co-led by Cathay Innovation and Dell — Skan AI, a startup that builds what it calls a “context graph of work” by observing how employees actually perform …
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: xAI launches Grok 4.3, featuring “always-on reasoning”, 1M token context window, and low API pricing, and releases a voice cloning suite called Custom Voices — While Elon Musk faces off against his former colleague and OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman in court, Musk's rival firm xAI …
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: Netomi, which builds AI for enterprise customer service, raised $110M led by Accenture Ventures and signs a deal to bring its platform to Accenture clients — Netomi, the San Francisco-based startup building AI systems for enterprise customer service, said Thursday that it has raised $110 million …
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: Salesforce announces Headless 360, an initiative that will give AI agents access to Salesforce's platform capabilities through APIs, MCP tools or CLI commands — Salesforce on Wednesday unveiled the most ambitious architectural transformation in its 27-year history, introducing “Headless 360” …
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: Arcee AI releases Trinity-Large-Thinking, a 399B-parameter text-only reasoning model under an Apache 2.0 license, allowing full customization and commercial use — The baton of open source AI models has been passed on between several companies over the years since ChatGPT debuted in late 2022 …
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: Microsoft launches in-house AI models MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1, and MAI-Image-2, built by its superintelligence team, as it pushes “AI self-sufficiency” — Microsoft on Wednesday launched three new foundational AI models it built entirely in-house — a state …
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: Xiaomi unveils its MiMo-V2 AI models, including the 1T-parameter MiMo-V2-Pro, codenamed Hunter Alpha, which Xiaomi says benchmarks close to GPT-5.2 and Opus 4.6 — Led by Fuli Luo, a veteran of the disruptive DeepSeek R1 project, the release represents what Luo characterizes as a “quiet ambush” on the global frontier.
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: MiniMax releases M2.7, a proprietary “self-evolving” LLM that the company used to build, monitor, and optimize the model's own reinforcement learning harnesses — In the last few years, Chinese AI startup MiniMax has become one of the most exciting in the crowded global AI marketplace …
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: Anthropic adds safeguards to prevent third-party apps, like OpenCode, from spoofing Claude Code to access Claude models for more favorable pricing and limits — Anthropic has confirmed the implementation of strict new technical safeguards preventing third-party applications from spoofing …
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: xAI launches Grok Business, priced at $30 per seat/month, for SMBs, and Grok Enterprise, whose price is not listed publicly, for larger organizations — xAI has launched Grok Business and Grok Enterprise, positioning its flagship AI assistant as a secure, team-ready platform for organizational use.
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: Augmented Intelligence, which is building neuro-symbolic AI models, raised $20M in a bridge SAFE round at a $750M valuation, bringing its total funding to ~$60M — The buzzed-about but still stealthy New York City startup Augmented Intelligence Inc (AUI), which seeks to go beyond the popular …
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: IBM releases four open-source Granite 4.0 Nano AI models ranging from 350M to 1.5B parameters, designed to run on consumer hardware and even in web browsers — In an industry where model size is often seen as a proxy for intelligence, IBM is charting a different course …
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: Huawei's Zurich Lab unveils SINQ, an open-source quantization method that it claims can reduce LLM memory use by 60-70% without significant quality loss — - Dual-Axis Scaling: Instead of using a single scale factor for quantizing a matrix, SINQ uses separate scaling vectors for rows and columns.
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: IBM releases Granite 4.0, an open source “enterprise-ready” LLM family with a hybrid architecture, claiming it uses significantly less RAM than traditional LLMs — Despite being one of the oldest active tech companies in the U.S. (founded in 1911, 114 years ago!), “Big Blue” …
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: Manus unveils Wide Research, an experimental feature that lets users on its Pro plan enlist dozens of parallelized AI agents for large-scale, high-volume tasks — Chinese AI startup Manus, which made headlines earlier this year for its approach to a multi-agent orchestration platform for consumers and …
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: Prophet Security, which develops fully autonomous AI agents for cybersecurity defense, raised a $30M Series A led by Accel — Prophet Security, a startup developing autonomous artificial intelligence systems for cybersecurity defense, announced Tuesday it has raised $30 million in Series …
Sean Michael Kerner / VentureBeat: Stack Overflow survey: 84% of developers use or plan to use AI tools in their workflow, up from 76% in 2024, and 33% trust AI accuracy, down from 43% in 2024 — More developers than ever before are using AI tools to both assist and generate code. — While enterprise AI adoption accelerates …
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: Alibaba releases its Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507 reasoning LLM on Hugging Face, topping several benchmarks, as Alibaba moves away from hybrid reasoning models — If the AI industry had an equivalent to the recording industry's “song of the summer” — a hit that catches on in the warmer months …
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: Alibaba releases its new Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507 model on Hugging Face, improving on Qwen 3's reasoning, accuracy, and multilingual understanding — Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has made waves globally in the tech and business communities with its own family of “Qwen” …
Louis Columbus / VentureBeat: OpenAI's ChatGPT Agent System Card outlines how its red team helped implement key security features like “Watch Mode Activation” and “Terminal Restrictions” — In case you missed it, OpenAI yesterday debuted a powerful new feature for ChatGPT and with it, a host of new security risks and ramifications.
Ben Dickson / VentureBeat: Tokyo-based Sakana AI details a new Monte Carlo Tree Search-based technique that lets multiple LLMs cooperate on a single task, outperforming individual LLMs — Japanese AI lab Sakana AI has introduced a new technique that allows multiple large language models (LLMs) to cooperate on a single task …
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: An interview with Claude AI product lead Scott White on Claude Code writing 90% of its own code, MCP, coding being accessible to non-technical workers, and more — Scott White still marvels at how quickly artificial intelligence has transformed from a novelty into a true work partner.
Ben Dickson / VentureBeat: Developers criticize Google for its decision to hide raw reasoning tokens, essential for debugging complex AI workflows, of its flagship model Gemini 2.5 Pro — Google's recent decision to hide the raw reasoning tokens of its flagship model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, has sparked a fierce backlash …
Nick Mokey / VentureBeat: In an Oxford study, LLMs correctly identified medical conditions 94.9% of the time when given test scenarios directly, vs. 34.5% when prompted by human subjects — Headlines have been blaring it for years: Large language models (LLMs) can not only pass medical licensing exams but also outperform humans.
Taryn Plumb / VentureBeat: How The Ottawa Hospital reduced clinician burnout using Microsoft's DAX Copilot, which captures conversations with patients via an app and drafts clinical notes — Clinician and patient satisfaction (or lack thereof) is a significant issue in healthcare — patients because they can struggle …
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: Alibaba researchers detail ZeroSearch, a technique allowing LLMs to develop advanced search capabilities via simulation, claiming it cuts costs by up to 88% — Researchers at Alibaba Group have developed a novel approach that could dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of training AI systems …
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: Microsoft launches new OpenAI-powered AI agents, Researcher and Analyst, designed to function as digital colleagues, available via its Agent Store — Microsoft announced today a major expansion of its artificial intelligence tools with the “Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2 Spring release,” …
Rachel Kaser / VentureBeat: Konvoy: the gaming industry saw 43 M&A transactions and 77 VC deals in Q1 2025, and the sector is projected to be worth $186B in 2026, a 4.7% YoY jump — Konvoy this week released its Gaming Industry Report for the first quarter of 2025, where it revealed more information about trends in the industry …
Taryn Plumb / VentureBeat: Google Cloud launches Unified Security, integrating security operations, cloud security, threat intelligence, secure enterprise browsing, and Mandiant expertise — Enterprise infrastructure is increasingly complex, meaning protecting it is, too. — The attack surface is more expansive than ever …
Emilia David / VentureBeat: Anthropic's Alignment Science team: “legibility” or “faithfulness” of reasoning models' Chain-of-Thought can't be trusted and models may actively hide reasoning — We now live in the era of reasoning AI models where the large language model (LLM) …
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: OpenAI makes ChatGPT Plus free for college students in the US and Canada until the end of May 2025, intensifying competition with Anthropic in higher education — OpenAI has made its premium ChatGPT Plus subscription free for all college students in the United States and Canada through the end of May …
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: Zoom researchers detail a “Chain of Draft” method to let LLMs accurately solve reasoning problems with as little as 7.6% of the tokens used by current methods — A team of researchers at Zoom Communications has developed a breakthrough technique that could dramatically reduce …
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: PitchBook: women founders and investors raised $38.8B in the US in 2024, up 27% YoY but coming from a 25.1% share of total VC funding, down from 26.4% in 2023 — Women founders and investors raised $38.8 billion in funding in the U.S. in 2024, up 27% from the year before, according to PitchBook.
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: Alibaba releases open-source reasoning model QwQ-32B on Hugging Face and ModelScope, claiming comparable performance to DeepSeek-R1 but with lower compute needs — Qwen Team, which is growing Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba's family of open-source Qwen large language models (LLMs) …
VentureBeat: Sources: Chinese game publisher NetEase has been directed to divest its overseas holdings, starting with hit game Marvel Rivals, which laid off its Seattle team — Chinese game publisher NetEase raised fears with recent moves that it is unloading as much as all of its overseas holdings …
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: An interview with Shuhei Yoshida, who led PlayStation Studios from 2008-2019 and left Sony on January 15, on his 31 years at PlayStation, early days, and more — Shu Yoshida has graduated. He just completed 38 years at Sony, including 31 years at PlayStation, and he completed …
Matt Marshall / VentureBeat: How DeepSeek outpaced OpenAI at a fraction of the cost: open source, pure reinforcement learning, no supervised fine-tuning, and building on DeepSeek-R1-Zero — DeepSeek R1's Monday release has sent shockwaves through the AI community, disrupting assumptions about what's required to achieve cutting-edge AI performance.
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: Yann LeCun says DeepSeek “profited from open research and open source” like Meta's Llama and is proof that open source models are surpassing proprietary ones — If you hadn't heard, there's a new AI star in town: DeepSeek, the subsidiary of Hong Kong-based quantitative analysis …
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: Belgium-based Vertical Compute, a memory chip firm spun out of European VC firm Imec.xpand, raised a €20M seed led by Imec.xpand — Europe's Imec.xpand is spinning out memory chip firm Vertical Compute in a seed investment round worth $20.5 million. — Founded by CEO Sylvain Dubois …
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: Nvidia announces early access to Omniverse Cloud Sensor RTX, enabling smarter autonomous machines with generative AI, via APIs for select devs like Accenture — Nvidia announced early access for Omniverse Cloud Sensor RTX software to enable smarter autonomous machines with generative AI.
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: Nvidia unveils Mega, an “Omniverse Blueprint” for developing, testing, and optimizing physical AI and robot fleets at scale in a digital twin before deployment — Nvidia unveils Mega Omniverse blueprint for building industrial robot fleet digital twins, as part of a CES 2025 keynote speech by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: Samsung unveils a suite of AI experiences for its TVs, including Click to Search, Live Translate, and a way to recognize food on the screen and provide recipes — For this year's lineup, Samsung said that AI will come to life in more ways than just great picture quality.
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: Belgium-based Swave Photonics, which is developing its Holographic eXtended Reality platform for smart glasses and heads-up displays, raised a $28.27M Series A — Swave Photonics, a holographic display company, has raised $28.27 million in funding as it prepares components for AI-powered smartglasses and heads-up displays.
Shubham Sharma / VentureBeat: DeepSeek releases DeepSeek-V3, an open-source MoE model of 671B total parameters, with 37B activated per token, claiming it outperforms top models like GPT-4o — Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, known for challenging leading AI vendors with its innovative open-source technologies, today released a new ultra-large model: DeepSeek-V3.
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: Microsoft launches Phi-4, a 14B-parameter language model that it says outperforms comparable and larger models, like Gemini Pro 1.5, in mathematical reasoning — Microsoft launched a new artificial intelligence model today that achieves remarkable mathematical reasoning capabilities …
Emilia David / VentureBeat: OpenAI rolls out Canvas, its side-by-side digital editing space, to all ChatGPT users and adds new features, including support for Python and more text pasting — OpenAI is extending access to its side-by-side digital editing space, Canvas, to all ChatGPT users and added new features …
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: Google DeepMind releases AlphaFold 3's source code and model weights for academic use, which could accelerate scientific discovery and drug development — Google DeepMind has unexpectedly released the source code and model weights of AlphaFold 3 for academic use, marking a significant advance …