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Anthropic is looking to court smaller companies. To that end, the company announced Wednesday the launch of Claude for Small Business, a new suite of services designed for customers who less resemble Walmart and Starbucks and more resemble the local hardware store or coffee shop. So far, much of the most intensive AI adoption has occurred at the enterprise level. In the recent past, studies have shown that most companies that scaled AI systems beyond experimental or pilot-level integration tended to be large companies with expansive budgets. This appears to be changing somewhat, as smaller and midsized businesses are seeing…
Despite claims that AI will kill traditional search, Google has edged Apple out of the No. 1 spot on Kantar’s annual BrandZ report, the research company’s ranking of the 100 most valuable brands in the world, released Thursday.The tech giant’s brand value grew 57% over last year, according to the data and analytics giant, which now values it at $1.48 trillion.Apple had occupied the lead position for the previous four consecutive years. Its slip down to second place wasn’t because of anything it did wrong (Apple’s brand value actually rose 6%), but what Google has done right—especially when it comes…
As AI begins to interact with the physical world, new types of labs are working to build world models that could be used to operate physical robotics or model objects in physical space. Unlike large language models, there isn’t an easy source of data for those models, which has left many labs scrambling to assemble the necessary training sets. Now, one startup is emerging with an unlikely data source: the video game industry. That’s the premise of Origin Lab, which just announced an $8 million seed funding round led by Lightspeed Ventures. SV Angel, Eniac, Seven Stars, and FPV also…
While it has enabled many exciting discoveries, the Curiosity Rover has also encountered its share of setbacks. The latest left NASA engineers speechless.On April 25, Curiosity drilled into a rock nicknamed “Atacama” to collect a sample. When the rover retracted the robotic arm after drilling, the entire rock unexpectedly lifted off the Martian surface—all 28.6 pounds of it. While other Curiosity drilling operations have caused cracks or breaks in the upper layers of Martian rocks during the rover’s nearly 14-year mission, this is the first time one has remained stuck to the sleeve that surrounds the drill’s rotating tip.As the…
Netflix arrived at upfront week with a pitch built for the AI moment—and an ambition to make buying ads on the platform as automated as watching them.The centerpiece of the streaming giant’s advertising push is a suite of new AI tools that allow advertisers to build and optimize media plans around their brand objectives, while a separate set of AI agents can manage, optimize, and purchase ads on the platform autonomously. A third AI tool allows brands to adapt existing creative assets to fit different formats—vertical video, pause ads—without building from scratch.The rollout extends an AI bet Netflix first placed last…
In May 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was sworn in and testified before Congress about the regulation of artificial intelligence. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana heard his ideas about licensing advanced models and asked if Altman might be qualified to run a hypothetical AI regulatory agency. “I love my current job,” Altman said, to titters. “You make a lot of money, do you?” Kennedy asked him. “No, I’m paid enough for health insurance. I have no equity in OpenAI,” Altman assured him. “You need a lawyer,” Kennedy replied. Now Altman has many lawyers, who watched as their client suffered a…
On’s Cloudboom Strike LS, the company’s first iteration of these weird sprayed-on shoes, quickly became my favorite pair of runners. They became my go-to shoes, and I put many miles on them, even running a couple of half marathons. (I did not break any records, but thank you for asking.)I’ve been using the new version since it came out in February. The Cloudmonster soles feel great to run in, although they are noticeably less squishy than the Cloudboom versions. The benefits of that sprayed-on toebox are immediately noticeable. It makes the shoes much lighter (190 grams) than On’s other shoes.…
This is the second in a two-part series on what separates CMOs who advance from those who stall. Read the previous article about the 5 things CEO-ready CMOs know that others don’t.The ROI question should sit at the center of every CMO’s job.Marketing leaders ask for investment, decide where it goes, and are expected to show that it created value. If a CMO cannot explain, in commercially credible terms, what marketing is generating, the function soon starts to look expensive rather than strategic.[Insert link: https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/cmos-are-driving-growth-so-why-arent-more-becoming-ceos/]It’s an uncomfortable fact that marketers get fired when they fail to deliver promised results.
Rivian’s spinoff company Mind Robotics has raised another $400 million, just two months after raising $500 million, as it works to develop industrial robotics that can further automate factory operations. The funding round, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, was led by Kleiner Perkins. The venture arms of Volkswagen, which is partnered with Rivian on a software joint venture, and Salesforce also contributed investments. Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe, who is chairman of Mind Robotics, told TechCrunch in March that he created the company because he felt other startups were not fully equipped to automate industrial work. He started the…
Though things keep changing, some analyses suggest that women are about 20 percent less likely than men to use generative AI. “It’s a function not of gender per se,” Rodgers suggests, “but of the occupations that women hold.” Women are disproportionately represented in jobs—education, health care, social services—that right now use AI less. The result could be a compounding disadvantage. Over time, it means less access to the boom’s financial rewards, more responsibility for the domestic labor it generates.And what happens when it doesn’t work out for the men? Many, if not most, won’t make it in AI, a lucrative…
The quick summary:YouTube wants advertisers to know that creators now do more than upload videos on its platform—they create shows.At its annual Brandcast upfront at Lincoln Center on Wednesday night, the video platform unveiled a sprawling slate of creator-led series alongside new ad products designed to help brands cash in on the platform’s grip on the living room.The biggest announcements:The headline of the night was YouTube’s expanded Creator Shows slate, a programming lineup that increasingly resembles a traditional TV network’s pitch deck, only with creators as the stars. The roster includes Kareem Rahma’s Keep the Meter Running, a series in which…
X is turning itself into more of a “save-it-for-later” app with the launch of a new History tab that collects your bookmarks, likes, videos, and articles all in one place for easy access. Initially available on iOS, X head of product, Nikita Bier, describes the new resource as a better way to keep track of all your favorite content and return to things you want to finish reading or watching later. Image Credits:X With the update, the Bookmarks button in X’s left-side menu of the mobile app has been renamed History. The new page separates your saved content into four…
When WIRED asked Favorito if, despite all the audits and investigations that found no evidence of fraud, he still believed the 2020 election was rigged using QR codes, Favorito responded: “I think it’s a distinct possibility.”Georgia’s bill did not outline what system should replace the QR codes, but it set a July 1, 2026 deadline to end the use of the codes. The effort to demonize QR codes was given added impetus when in March 2025 Trump signed an executive order demanding that the Election Assistance Commission approve new rules to ban the counting of votes via QR codes in…
Stratacache, a company that sells in-store digital screens to retailers, is liquidating the U.K. arm of its business. The process includes Stratacache U.K. as well as its company PRN U.K., according to public records.The filings indicate that both Stratacache U.K. and PRN U.K. will close, selling off assets to pay creditors. The companies’ creditors appointed Mark Supperstone and Simon Jagger, both insolvency practitioners with S&W Partners, to wind down the businesses and liquidate their assets. The filings were made public on May 13, but indicate that the appointments were finalized on May 5.Stratacache U.K. worked with grocery chain Iceland Foods.
Malware research group vx-underground, which says it has the largest collection of malware source code, said in a post on X that its archive of data amounts to about 30 terabytes. A reply by Bernardo Quintero, founder of VirusTotal, an online service that scans files for malware across multiple antivirus engines at once, said his service has about 31 petabytes of malware samples that users have contributed to date. (A petabyte is ~1,000x larger than a terabyte.) In both cases, that’s a lot of data. For context, cybersecurity companies, AI researchers, and threat intelligence firms treat repositories like these as…
The US Department of Homeland Security, in collaboration with the Defense Research and Development Canada, is looking to send autonomous drones and vehicles along the US-Canada border this fall, testing which products can stream surveillance video and sensor data between the two countries using commercial 5G networks.A new DHS call for participants frames the experiment, known as ACE-CASPER, as a multiday exercise “simulating a national emergency response scenario,” with drones and ground vehicles relaying live feeds to a bi-national command-and-control center as they cross the border. Vehicle autonomy, the document notes, is secondary to its primary aim: demonstrating “resilient, persistent…