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Amazon Web Services announced Thursday the launch of Amazon Connect Health. This AI agent-powered platform is meant to help healthcare organizations automate repetitive administrative tasks, including appointment scheduling, documentation, and patient verification, among other things. Amazon Connect Health is HIPAA-eligible and connects with electronic health record (EHR) software. The platform is currently partnered with EHR software providers, data integrators, and patient engagement companies, the company said. This move is not the cloud giant’s first in the healthcare space, and it comes at a time when AWS is increasingly looking to grow its footprint in the $5 trillion U.S. healthcare industry.…
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is still in the hot seat this week after his company signed a deal with the US military. OpenAI employees have criticized the move, which came after Anthropic’s roughly $200 million contract with the Pentagon imploded, and asked Altman to release more information about the agreement. Altman admitted it looked “sloppy” in a social media post.While this incident has become a major news story, it may just be the latest and most public example of OpenAI creating vague policies around how the US military can access its AI.In 2023, OpenAI’s usage policy explicitly banned the military…
Brands and agencies have no shortage of AI tools for creative tasks—what they lack is cohesion. Creative teams often jump between image generators, video tools and language models, stitching outputs together manually and coordinating across departments. That patchwork process is what Luma AI says it wants to fix.The Palo Alto–based company, founded in 2021, is launching a new category of end-to-end “creative agents” designed to coordinate and execute professional creative work across text, image, video and audio.Luma spent its first three years building native 3D, image and video models. Now, the company is developing unified systems that work across modalities,…
A typical merger-and-acquisition process is time-consuming and expensive, even for the largest, well-staffed private equity firms. In addition to spending countless hours meeting with senior executives of potential targets and modeling financial outcomes, these groups spend millions of dollars on external advisers: accountants, lawyers, and management consultants. Since expenses for external advisers are not reimbursed if a deal falls through, PE firms wait until they are certain of their interest before engaging costly specialists such as consultants from McKinsey, BCG, or Bain to perform extensive commercial research on the market and the target company. DiligenceSquared, a startup that was part…
Zoë Schiffer: Emil Michael, you should turn off your views on LinkedIn because people can see when they look at your phone.Brian Barrett: Yeah, that’s a tip for Emil Michael if you’re listening. And then, if you listen to Uncanny Valley, which you should.Leah Feiger: And this is really the Trump official that’s kind of leading the war against Anthropic here. He has these deep ties to the tech world and he’s the Pentagon’s public enemy number one of anyone who’s trying to cross the Pentagon. So the fact that, one, he has not maybe the best op sec in…
Key Takeaways: The Big Game is still as important as ever, but real results are measured after the game ends. Celebrity matters, but authenticity is stronger than star power. The emotion of live sports allows for a deeper connection with audiences. The Super Bowl is a cultural event that marketers have been using to reach consumers for decades. But as the advertising landscape continues to fragment, audibles must be called. During an ADWEEK House: The Big Game group chat, industry leaders gathered to discuss the continued relevance—and evolving strategies—of advertising during the sporting event.A powerful launchpadThe marketers on the panel agreed…
The $7 million in annual recurring revenue that Cluely co-founder and CEO Roy Lee shared with TechCrunch last summer was a lie, Lee admitted on Thursday on X. Wrote Lee, this “is the only blatantly dishonest thing i’ve said publicly online, so this is my formal retraction.” Yet his post on X also misrepresents the backstory of how and why he told TechCrunch his ARR in the first place. Lee says in that same post that he “got a random cold call from some woman asking about numbers and told her some bs, did not expect an article about it.”…
On February 28, United States and Israeli forces launched a series of strikes on Iran, kicking off turmoil in the Middle East.Pete Hegseth, the secretary of the Department of Defense, said in a recent press conference that the operation could last as long as eight weeks. President Donald Trump himself said in a press conference on March 2 that the administration projected the operation would last four or five weeks but had “the capability to go far longer than that.”This week Iran has responded in turn, attacking Israel, regional US embassies and military bases, and other sites across the Middle…
Beehiiv has hired Darren Chait as its first chief marketing officer, bringing on the former Calendly growth executive as the newsletter platform pushes deeper into the creator economy, according to its chief executive Tyler Denk.Chait, who officially began the role on Monday, will oversee positioning, demand generation, and marketing operations as Beehiiv expands beyond its origins as a newsletter publishing tool, according to Tyler Denk.“We’ve outgrown the newsletter platform,” Chait told ADWEEK in an interview. “We have tens of millions who know us that way, but we have ambitions to grow deeper and wider.”Darren Chait joined Beehiiv this week as…
Hackers have reportedly broken into the networks of the FBI. On Thursday, citing an anonymous source, CNN reported that the breach affected a system used to manage wiretaps and foreign intelligence surveillance warrants. “The FBI identified and addressed suspicious activities on FBI networks, and we have leveraged all technical capabilities to respond,” a bureau spokesperson told TechCrunch, declining to provide more details. This is the latest major breach of U.S. government agencies and American companies in recent times. Last year, Chinese hackers broke into the U.S. Treasury and the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the security of the U.S.…
Move over Sora 2, there’s a hot new AI video model in town.In early February, ByteDance unveiled Seedance 2.0, a major upgrade to its flagship video model, which had previously remained fairly obscure. Its powerful capabilities immediately shocked the AI ecosystem in China, even among audiences who had once been skeptical of AI-generated video and viewed the technology mainly as a way to produce slop.Feng Ji, the founder of Game Science, the studio that developed China’s global hit video game Black Myth: Wukong, wrote online that he was “deeply shocked” by the model’s abilities and believed Seedance 2.0 would pose…
Fresh off a better-than-expected holiday season, retailers are again gearing up for another year full of challenges.There’s more uncertainty following the chaos after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s sweeping tariffs. Consumers still face high prices for essentials like food, housing, and potentially gasoline prices after the recent U.S. attack on Iran. And those are just the macroeconomic factors.AI is quickly becoming a differentiator, as retailers decide whether to integrate with third-party AI answer engines or develop their own AI-powered chatbots. And another narrative is emerging that impacts the ad community: Amazon and Walmart continue to get bigger.
The Department of Defense has officially notified Anthropic leadership that the company and its products have been designated a supply chain risk, Bloomberg reports, citing a senior department official. The designation comes after weeks of conflict between the AI lab and the DOD. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has refused to allow the military to use its AI systems for mass surveillance of Americans or to power fully autonomous weapons with no humans assisting in the targeting or firing decisions. The Department has argued that its use of AI should not be limited by a private contractor. Supply chain risk designations…
Spring is in the air—and so are at least two cocktails of radioactive elements. As we near the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, CNN is diving deep to offer up never-before-seen footage from the costliest disaster in human history, and people who experienced the events are speaking out for the first time.Hulu, too, is taking the opportunity to go radioactive with a partly fictionalized version of the lesser known—and far less devastating—Goiânia incident, a contamination event that took place in Brazil just one year after the events of Chernobyl and killed four people.It’s not all doom and gloom on…
With the search for Nancy Guthrie extending over the one-month mark, authorities are still aggressively pursuing all angles to find the mother of NBC News’ Savannah Guthrie.As that investigation continues, the network reported that the Today co-anchor visited her colleagues in New York on Thursday morning. The off-air visit provided Guthrie the chance to be with her coworkers and thank them for their support, according to a Today spokesperson.NBC News also confirmed that Guthrie will be returning to the morning show at a time to be determined by Guthrie. The spokesperson added that “she remains focused right now supporting her…
Nominal on Thursday announced a fresh $80M Series B extension round at a $1 billion valuation, led by Founders Fund. This followed the company’s $75M Series B round led by Sequoia in September. Nominal offers software that helps hardware engineers test their designs and began as a picks-and-shovels type of startup for the defense industry. The three-and-a-half-year-old, L.A.-based company says that in the last 10 months, it has landed four of the five largest defense contractors as customers. CEO and co-founder Cameron McCord (pictured) is a former U.S. Navy submarine officer and Anduril alum, the defense tech company, which is…