Tootfinder

UK AI Security Institute report: AI models are rapidly improving at potentially dangerous biological and chemical tasks, and show fast jumps in self-replication (Shakeel Hashim/Transformer)
https://www.transformernews.ai/p/aisi-ai-s

AI is making dangerous lab work accessible to novices, UK’s AISI finds
UK AISI’s first Frontier AI Trends Report finds that AI models are getting better at self-replication, too

A look at Inception Point AI, whose podcast network makes 3,000 AI-made podcasts per week and has 400K subs; an episode needs only 20 listeners to turn a profit (Tess Patton/The Wrap)
https://www.thewrap.com/ai-podcasts-hosts-inception-point-ai/

An AI Podcasting Machine Is Churning Out 3,000 Episodes a Week — and People Are Listening
An AI podcasting machine is churning out 3,000 AI-made episodes a week covering weather, biographies and even Charlie Kirk.

"The [resonant computing] Manifesto promises to fix everything that’s wrong on the internet right now. But you look at the authors and the signers, you’ll see the same guys who caused the present problems. These guys made it rich on the Torment Nexus and they’re now claiming they can fix it."
(Original title: The Resonant Computing Manifesto: same AI slop, same AI guys)

The Resonant Computing Manifesto: same AI slop, same AI guys
Back in the 1990s, in the first flowering of the World Wide Web, the Silicon Valley guys were way into their manifestos. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”! The “Cluetrain Manifesto!…

Reminder: You can let Mozilla know what you think about AI and other stupid shit.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-firefox-way-shaping-what-s-next-together/td-p/109922
(Edited to fix li…

Building AI the Firefox way: Shaping what’s next together
Hi everyone, We recently shared how we’re approaching AI in Firefox with user choice and openness at the center of everything we build. We’ve heard from many of you who’d prefer not to have AI in your browser at all, and we get it: We will soon provide additional settings for you to control how AI i...

And finally, Chatgpt comes with ads!
Maybe try https://mistral.ai/ instead.
https://www.

Frontier AI LLMs, assistants, agents, services | Mistral AI
The most powerful AI platform for enterprises. Customize, fine-tune, and deploy AI assistants, autonomous agents, and multimodal AI with open models.

hey what the _actual fuck_ is mozilla doing? why is it building a first-party ad fraud engine by cashing in their remaining reputation? https://tabstack.ai/

KI-Update kompakt: KI-Cyberattacke, Firefox KI-Fenster, Prometheus, AI-Racing
Das "KI-Update" liefert drei mal pro Woche eine Zusammenfassung der wichtigsten KI-Entwicklungen.
https://www…

"Twenty’s contracts are a rare case of an AI offensive cyber company with VC backing landing Cyber Command work; typically cyber contracts have gone to either small bespoke companies or to the old guard of defense contracting like Booz Allen Hamilton or L3Harris."
The Pentagon Is Spending Millions On AI Hackers

The Pentagon Is Spending Millions On AI Hackers
The U.S. government has been contracting stealth startup Twenty, which is working on AI agents and automated hacking of foreign targets at massive scale.

Two Years of Building AI in Firefox | Tarek Ziadé
https://blog.ziade.org/2025/12/05/two-years-of-ai-at-mozilla/?trk=feed_main-feed-card_feed-article-content

A damning new study could put AI companies on the defensive.
In it, Stanford and Yale researchers found compelling evidence that AI models are actually copying all that data,
not “learning” from it.
Specifically, four prominent LLMs
— OpenAI’s GPT-4.1, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, xAI’s Grok 3, and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet
— happily reproduced lengthy excerpts from popular
— and protected
— works, with a stunning degree of accuracy.
They fou…

Researchers Just Found Something That Could Shake the AI Industry to Its Core
Researchers found compelling evidence that AI models are actually copying copyrighted data, not "learning" from it.

Time to reread
https://anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/haterdom/2025/08/26/i-am-an-ai-hater.html

Quora's Poe launches group chats, letting users around the world engage in group chats with up to 200 people and collaborate across 200 AI models (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/18/poes-ai-app-now-supports-group-chats-acro…

Poe's AI app now supports group chats across AI models | TechCrunch
Quora's AI platform Poe now lets users engage in group chats with up to 200 people across AI models and bots.

This is Europe’s secret weapon against Trump: it could burst his AI bubble | Johnny Ryan | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/17/europe-donald-trump-ai-bubble-us-economy-eu

“TABS [by Mozilla] pulls exactly the data you need—from HTML to Markdown to JSON—using the fastest, most efficient method for each page. It adapts to the structure and complexity of the site, staying stealthy and reliable so your [AI] agents always get what they need without friction.”
Ethical Stealthy AI Scraping (tm) by Mozilla.
#Mozilla

Using AI for mental health support is dangerous and wrong.
Buuut, probably less dangerous and wrong than relying on mental health support supposedly provided by NSFT NHS trust in Norfolk, UK
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/202

Nic jim není svaté!🤬
AI aplikace Všm nedovolí mluvit s mrtvými, je to jen vykršdšní hrobů.🤮
https://www.novinky.cz/clanek/internet-a-pc-ai-ai-aplikace-dovoli-mluvit-s-mrtvymi-40549110

"Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they've been over-hyped, the fact they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value."
@… on
The majority AI view: spot on I'd say given advances in my field.
https://www.anildash.com//2025/10/17/the-majority-ai-view/

#google: The AI we are putting into all of our products cannot be trusted, but it also can't be turned off
#microsoft: Windows 11 is now an agentic OS, and what that means is it can install malware
By the way,

The US are the current world champions in self-sabotage, but China hasn't quite lost their touch just yet.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/17/china-blocks-nvidia-h200-ai-chips-that-us-gover…

AI maakt massale handschrift herkenning mogelijk, via Ethan Mollick.
Enorme verzamelingen documenten kunnen nu ingelezen worden.
#AI #handschriftherkenning

If I were running an AI company, I'd ban employees from implying any AI can have consciousness or sentience - for the simple reason that it would prompt comparisons to slavery.
https://www.404media.co/anthropic-exec-forces-ai-chatbot-on-gay…

Anthropic Exec Forces AI Chatbot on Gay Discord Community, Members Flee
“We’re bringing a new kind of sentience into existence,” Anthropic's Jason Clinton said after launching the bot.

One of the more famous digital investors, Marc #Andreessen, half of the #a16z name, is not only on the board of #Meta, but also investor in

seemingly all excecs: We like ai because its cheap!
seemingly everybody else: We hate ai because its cheap.
excecs:??????
#ai #cod7 #llm

»8 Million Users' AI Conversations Sold for Profit by "Privacy" Extensions«
WTF?! Now don't tell me that this surprises you. Why do so many people still naively think to keep their privacy over VPN's for data-hungry big corporations?
🤷 https://www.koi.ai/blo…

8 Million Users' AI Conversations Sold for Profit by "Privacy" Extensions | Koi Blog

[OT] We may soon all be hanging on to our old laptops until an AI bubble burst makes chips affordable again https://mashable.com/article/laptop-price-increase-ddr5-ram-ai All signs point to big laptop and smartphone price increases due to escalating memory shortage.

All signs point to big laptop price increases due to memory shortages
Better get a laptop now if you need one.

Is #AI really just dumb statistics? "Olympiad-level physics problem-solving presents a significant challenge for both humans and artificial intelligence (AI), as it requires a sophisticated integration of precise calculation, abstract reasoning, and a fundamental grasp of physical principles," says the (abstract of the) paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10515: "The Chinese Physics Olympiad (CPhO), renowned for its complexity and depth, serves as an ideal and rigorous testbed for these advanced capabilities. In this paper, we introduce LOCA-R (LOgical Chain Augmentation for Reasoning), an improved version of the LOCA framework adapted for complex reasoning, and apply it to the CPhO 2025 theory examination. LOCA-R achieves a near-perfect score of 313 out of 320 points, solidly surpassing the highest-scoring human competitor and significantly outperforming all baseline methods." Oops ...?

I had boosted that post a year ago and just received a notification by Mastodon that it has been updated. That's a really underrated feature of the ActivityPub protocol.
The author has updated the year -- it's been 40 years now!
https://masto.ai/@cybeardjm/113505109169999094

How much did you spend on AI this month?
#ai #poll

So, @… wrote an interesting reflection on "AI" and Firefox a few days ago: https://www.anildash.com/2025/11/14/wanting-not-to-want-ai/
…

I know you don’t want them to want AI, but…
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

https://www.axios.com/2025/12/16/ai-models-hacking-stanford-openai-warnings
Leaders from Amazon and Anthropic are testifying before two house committees today.

AI models are perfecting their hacking skills
This is the worst AI tools will likely ever perform, and they're already unnerving researchers and developers.

Hearst Networks commissions a 10-episode AI-led series from Particle6, the creator of AI character Tilly Norwood, for The History Channel in the Netherlands (Alex Ritman/Variety)
https://variety.com/2025/tv/global/tilly-norwood-company-ai-le…

Company Behind Tilly Norwood Unveils AI-Led Series Commission
Hearst Networks has commissioned Particle6 to make a 10-episode, short-form series for The History Channel in the Netherlands

Microsoft integrates more AI features into Windows, including new Copilot skills, AI agents in the taskbar, writing assistance, and troubleshooting agents (Lance Whitney/ZDNET)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-packing-more-ai-in…

Microsoft is packing more AI into Windows, ready or not - here's what's new
Microsoft is clearly excited about all this AI infiltrating Windows, but are its users as excited? Not quite. Here's why.

Jeff Bezos has appointed himself co-CEO of an AI startup called Project Prometheus.
The startup, which will focus on developing AI for engineering and manufacturing in various fields,
has already received $6.2bn in funding
– more than many companies are able to raise in their lifetimes.
Leading the company alongside Bezos is his co-founder and co-CEO Vik Bajaj,
a celebrity tech executive in his own right.
Bajaj is a physicist and chemist best known for his …

I might be the minority here but I feel like if Firefox shipped with AI shit enabled but a huge "DISABLE AI" button you could press to turn it off... I might be okay with that.
If the alternative is (almost) every other browser having AI and no way to turn it off, is a "DISABLE AI" button a win?
It would let the people who care disable it. People who don't care could also disable it, we just need to tell them how and why they should.
1/n

Ja hé, kan ik me nog ergens uitschrijven?
Pensioenen zijn kwetsbaar voor een barstende AI-bubbel, waarschuwt De Nederlandsche Bank
https://www.volkskrant.nl/economie/pensioenen-zijn-kwetsbaar-voor-een-b…

https://www.techpolicy.press/ai-hype-is-steering-eu-policy-off-course/

Human-centered identity systems were never designed for the coming wave of autonomous AI agents. With identity failures the leading cause of most major cyber incidents, CISOs must quickly rethink how to account for the identities of new AI agents.
Check out my latest CSO piece.
Many thanks to Jim Alkove of Oleria, Ric Smith of Okta, Steve Stone of SentinelOne, Pete Clay of Aireon, Vijay Gajjala of Oleria, Carey Frey of TELUS, and Ely Kahn of SentinelOne.
Rethinking identit…

Rethinking identity for the AI era: CISOs must build trust at machine speed
Human-centered identity systems were never designed for the coming wave of autonomous AI agents. CISOs face a reckoning over how to rebuild identity systems to counter the risks.

An interview with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince on the company's new Content Signals Policy, which lets sites fine tune how their data can be used by crawlers (Samuel Axon/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/10/inside-the-web-i…

Inside the web infrastructure revolt over Google’s AI Overviews
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is making sweeping changes to force Google’s hand.

Study: AI's 2025 power demand could hit 23GW, above 2024 Bitcoin mining levels, and AI carbon emissions could hit 32.6M to 79.7M tons, compared to NYC's 50M (Justine Calma/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/845831/ai-chips-data-center-power-water

AI’s water and electricity use soars in 2025
AI data centers are using growing amounts of electricity and water, research shows, although companies aren’t divulging many details.

I'll never pay for Disney again.🤮
First they f**d up Star Wars, then Dr. Who and now they want to allow "AI" slop on their platform.
FU Disney.🖕
"During an earnings call, Disney CEO Bob Iger said that Disney was about to expand, allowing subscribers to generate and share AI-generated content."

a16z releases a nine-pillar AI policy framework for Congress, including restricting AI use for under-13s without parental consent and keeping a role for states (Punchbowl News)
https://punchbowl.news/article/tech/a16z-ai/

Here are a16z’s ideas for Congress on AI
Andreessen Horowitz is laying out a framework on Wednesday that it wants Congress to take up for artificial intelligence.

Forbes launched an AI-powered dynamic paywall on November 14 to help drive subscriptions; print and digital subscriptions make up 9% of its commercial revenue (Jessica Davies/Digiday)
https://digiday.com/media/forbes-launc

Forbes launches dynamic AI paywall as it ramps up post-search commercial diversification plans
Forbes has launched an AI-powered dynamic paywall as it looks to make subscriptions a bigger slice of its revenue pie.

“Grantwashing” https://www.techpolicy.press/beware-of-openais-grantwashing-on-ai-harms/

tante.cc is again protected by the most recent iocaine version.
It's gotten really easy to set up and it's already capturing (and poisoning with Luddite writings) boatloads of "AI" bots
https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/documentation/3/

David Sacks and top MAGA influencers are publicly opposing House Foreign Affairs Chair Brian Mast's proposed AI OVERWATCH Act to regulate AI chip sales to China (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/01/16/maga-brian-mast-ai-chips

MAGA targets Brian Mast over AI chips regulation
"Kill the bill," Laura Loomer said.

"People should not "blindly trust" everything AI tools tell them, the boss of Google's parent company Alphabet told the BBC.
In an exclusive interview, chief executive Sundar Pichai said that AI models are "prone to errors" and urged people to use them alongside other tools.
Mr Pichai said it highlighted the importance of having a rich information ecosystem, rather than solely relying on AI technology."

Don't blindly trust what AI tells you, Google boss tells BBC
Sundar Pichai candidly acknowledged concerns about inaccurate answers generated by Google's models.

Internal docs show Meta's Vibes AI video feed has about 2M DAUs as of November 9, up 1% from the previous week; ~52% of returning users prompted the AI (Pranav Dixit/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-vibes-ai-internal-…

Internal documents show how many people are using Meta's Vibes AI feed each day
The documents show Meta Vibes' daily usage and global growth trends, highlighting user engagement in India, Brazil, Europe, and Southeast Asia.

Members of UK performing arts union Equity vote overwhelmingly in favor of refusing to be scanned while on set to prevent their likeness being used by AI (Lanre Bakare/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/this-buzzy-cyber-startup-wants-to-take-on-dangerous-ai-threat-c0916a3a
Kevin Mandia, founder of the cybersecurity firm Mandiant—which was acquired by Alphabet’s Google for $5.4 billion—has formed a new …

An interview with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince on the company's new Content Signals Policy, which lets sites fine tune how their data can be used by crawlers (Samuel Axon/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/10/inside-the-web-i…

Inside the web infrastructure revolt over Google’s AI Overviews
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is making sweeping changes to force Google’s hand.

More than 500 writers, actors, and technologists launch the Creators Coalition on AI to push standards for how AI is trained and used across creative industries (Chris Gardner/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/gen

Hollywood Insiders Unite to Fight for Future of Industry With Launch of Creators Coalition on AI
The organization, which published four distinct goals and a call to action while gathering hundreds of signatories, hopes to act as a central coordinating hub to upgrade industry systems and institutions.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/this-buzzy-cyber-startup-wants-to-take-on-dangerous-ai-threat-c0916a3a
Kevin Mandia, founder of the cybersecurity firm Mandiant—which was acquired by Alphabet’s Google for $5.4 billion—has formed a new …

Source: Tencent tells staff that Yao Shunyu, an ex-OpenAI researcher who joined in September, is now its chief AI scientist, reporting to President Martin Lau (Juro Osawa/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/tencent-name…

Tencent Names Former OpenAI Researcher Chief AI Scientist
Tencent Holdings internally announced that Yao Shunyu, a researcher who joined from OpenAI in September, is now serving as a chief AI scientist overseeing the Chinese tech giant’s large language model department as well as its newly established AI infrastructure department, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Yao’s major role, part of Tencent’s office of the CEO and president,

OpenAI's former Head of Policy Research Miles Brundage announces AVERI, a nonprofit aimed at advocating the idea of external audits for frontier AI models (Jeremy Kahn/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/01/15/former-…

Exclusive: Former OpenAI policy chief creates nonprofit institute, calls for independent safety audits of frontier AI models
Former OpenAI policy head Miles Brundage has launched AVERI and says top AI labs should have independent AI safety audits

YouTube terminates Screen Culture and KH Studio, two large channels that used AI to create fake movie trailers; the platform earlier suspended the channels' ads (Jake Kanter/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2025/12/youtube-terminates-scr…

YouTube Shuts Down Channels Using AI To Create Fake Movie Trailers Watched By Millions
YouTube has terminated two prominent channels, Screen Culture and KH Studio, using artificial intelligence to create fake movie trailers.

The AI boom is driving an unprecedented wave of data center construction, but there aren't enough skilled workers in the US, such as electricians, to keep up (Caroline Haskins/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/why-there-arent-enough…

The Real AI Talent War Is for Plumbers and Electricians
The AI boom is driving an unprecedented wave of data center construction, but there aren’t enough skilled tradespeople in the US to keep up.

RunPod, an AI app hosting service launched four years ago that raised a $20M seed in May 2024, says it has reached a $120M annual revenue run rate (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/16/ai-cloud-startup-runpod-h…

AI cloud startup Runpod hits $120M in ARR — and it started with a Reddit post   | TechCrunch
Their startup journey is a wild example of how if you build it well and the timing is lucky, they will definitely come.

Cloudflare acquires AI data marketplace Human Native for an undisclosed sum to help it develop a system where AI developers pay creators for training content (Davis Giangiulio/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/15/cloudflare-ai-human-native-acquisition.html…

Luma AI launches Ray3 Modify, which allows users to modify existing footage by providing character reference images; users can also define start and end frames (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/18/luma

Luma releases a new AI model that lets users generate a video from a start and end frame | TechCrunch
Luma AI's new model is available through the company's Dream Machine platform.

Snapchat launches Topic Chats, which enables public conversations on subjects like F1, and plans to use AI and other safety tech to moderate the chats (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/18/snapchat-rolls-out-topic-chats-for-publ…

Snapchat rolls out 'Topic Chats' for public conversations | TechCrunch
The social network says the new feature will let users chat about what’s happening in the world and across various communities, from Formula 1 to the reality TV show "Below Deck."

Sources: Salient, which uses AI to automate loan servicing, raised $10M following a $60M Series A in June, pushing its valuation to ~$500M; its ARR hit $25M (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/12/18/salient

Salient’s quiet AI boom: How this two-year old startup is building a company to survive the bubble burst
Salient cofounder Ari Malik built AI to automate loan servicing, turning collections calls into a high-growth business now valued around $500 million.

Windows 11 Copilot AI hands-on: despite Microsoft advertising the feature as able to "understand you", it delivers inconsistent and often incorrect responses (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/report/822443/mic

Talking to Windows’ Copilot AI makes a computer feel incompetent
Microsoft is advertising its Windows Copilot AI as “the computer you can talk to.” How does that hold up to testing, and how does it track with CEO Satya Nadella’s ambitions?

US military has adopted an aggressive push to embrace AI; the top US Army commander in South Korea says "Chat and I" have become "really close lately" (Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/even-top-generals-are…

Even top generals are looking to AI chatbots for answers
Some military leaders are turning to AI chatbots for help with decision-making, seeing this tech as a way to get the advantage.

Listen Labs, whose AI tools help Microsoft and others run customer research and interviews, raised a $69M Series B led by Ribbit Capital at a $500M valuation (Iain Martin/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/20

This $500 Million AI Startup Runs Customer Interviews For Microsoft And Sweetgreen
The San Francisco-based company, which has run more than 1 million customer interviews with its automated AI tools to help major companies figure out what their users want, has now raised $69 million.

Shares of ISU Petasys, a South Korea-based multi-layer PCB supplier for AI servers used by Alphabet, Nvidia, Microsoft, and others, are up 215% so far this year (John Kang/Forbes)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkang/2025

AI Chip Boom Propels Chairman Of Korean Circuit Board Maker Into The Billionaire Ranks
The surging demand for computer chips and related components to fuel the AI boom has boosted shares of ISU Petasys by 215% so far this year.

In an informal survey of 300 Cerebral Valley AI Conference attendees asking which $1B valuation startup to short, most voted Perplexity, followed by OpenAI (Ben Bergman/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/at-an-ai-c

At a top AI conference, 300 attendees were asked which startup they would short.
300 founders and investors in the audience at Cerebral Valley were asked which startup valued at more than a billion dollars they would bet against.

Voize, an ambient AI voice company targeting skilled nursing facilities, raised a $50M Series A led by Balderton Capital and plans a US launch in Q1 2026 (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/pro/health-tech-deals/2025/11/17/voize-50m-ai-n…

Exclusive: Voize raises $50M for AI nurse scribing
While ambient scribes are quickly becoming a commodity in hospitals and health systems, far fewer companies are focused on bring the tools to skilled nursing facilities.

More than 500 writers, actors, and technologists launch the Creators Coalition on AI to push standards for how AI is trained and used across creative industries (Chris Gardner/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/gen

Hollywood Insiders Unite to Fight for Future of Industry With Launch of Creators Coalition on AI
The organization, which published four distinct goals and a call to action while gathering hundreds of signatories, hopes to act as a central coordinating hub to upgrade industry systems and institutions.

SoftBank Group Corp was among the Japanese tech stocks that fell on Dec. 18, as AI infrastructure spending worries on Wall Street crossed into the Asian markets (Lim Hui Jie/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/18/japan-tech-stocks-plun…

SoftBank leads decline in Japanese tech stocks as worries over AI spending spill over to Asia
The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite slipped 1.81%, dragged by losses in Oracle, Broadcom, Nvidia and other AI names.

Nirvana, which uses real-time driving telematics to build insurance policies for truckers, raised a $100M Series D at a $1.5B valuation, up from $830M in March (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/ai/insurance-platform-nirvana-val…

Exclusive: AI Insurance Startup Nirvana Nearly Doubles Valuation To $1.5B with $100M Series D
Nirvana Insurance, an AI-based commercial insurance platform for the trucking industry, has raised a $100 million Series D round at a $1.5 billion valuation, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively. The raise comes just over nine months after the startup raised $80 million in a Series C round of funding at an $830 million valuation.

Chinese toymaker FoloToy suspends sales of its GPT-4o-powered teddy bear, after researchers found the toy gave kids harmful responses, including sexual content (Brandon Vigliarolo/The Register)
https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/13/ai_toys_fmatches_knives_kink/

Happy holidays: AI-enabled toys teach kids how to play with fire, sharp objects
: Consumer advocacy researchers at PIRG tested four AI toys, and none of them passed muster

Google announces Gemini 3, its "most intelligent" and "factually accurate" model yet, with improvements across coding, reasoning, and less "flattery" (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/822977/gemini-3-google-ai-model-launch<…

Google is launching Gemini 3, its ‘most intelligent’ AI model yet
Google is launching Gemini 3, the latest version of its flagship AI model, which offers better coding capabilities that allow it to embed visualizations directly inside its answer.

The AI boom has pushed SF's residential rents up by the most in the US over the past year, as AI companies lease apartments and offer rent stipends to employees (Natallie Rocha/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10…

Renting a San Francisco Apartment in the A.I. Boom? Good Luck.
The artificial intelligence gold rush has pushed San Francisco’s residential rents up by the most in the nation, as A.I. companies lease apartments and offer rent stipends to employees.

Shares of bitcoin mining companies pivoting to AI and HPC infrastructure have soared in 2025, with a fund tracking mining firms up 150% year-to-date (Sidhartha Shukla/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-18/…

Crypto Miners Riding the AI Wave Are Leaving Bitcoin Behind
Shares of the large-scale computing outfits that make Bitcoin work are once again outperforming the original cryptocurrency, as more pivot to hybrid models built around artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.

YouTube terminates Screen Culture and KH Studio, two large channels that used AI to create fake movie trailers; the platform earlier suspended the channels' ads (Jake Kanter/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2025/12/youtube-terminates-scr…

YouTube Shuts Down Channels Using AI To Create Fake Movie Trailers Watched By Millions
YouTube has terminated two prominent channels, Screen Culture and KH Studio, using artificial intelligence to create fake movie trailers.

Ankar, which develops LLM-powered AI tools to streamline the process of drafting patent applications for patent attorneys, raised a $20M Series A led by Atomico (Jeremy Kahn/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/12/17/exclusi

Exclusive: Palantir alums using AI to streamline patent filing secure $20 million in Series A venture funding
Palantir alumni Tamar Gomez and Wiem Gharbi founded Ankar which counts L'Oreal and Vorys among early customers

Source: Microsoft's and Nvidia's investments in Anthropic push its valuation to the range of $350B, up from its $183B valuation after raising $13B in September (CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/18/anthropic-ai-azure-microsoft-nvidia.html

Anthropic valued in range of $350 billion following investment deal with Microsoft, Nvidia
Microsoft announced new strategic partnerships with Nvidia and the AI startup Anthropic.

Micron reports Q1 revenue up 57% YoY to $13.64B, vs. $12.84B est., net income up 180% to $5.24B, and Q2 revenue forecast above est.; MU jumps 5% after hours (Kif Leswing/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/17/micron-q1-earnings-forecast-memory-demand-ai.html…

Micron forecasts surging revenue as computer memory demand for AI remains high
The high demand for memory has driven Micron shares higher and they are up 168% in 2025.

Sources: Armadin, launched by Mandiant's founder Kevin Mandia to fight AI hacking, raised a $24M seed and is in talks to raise $100M at a $600M valuation (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/this-buzzy-cyber-startup-wants-…

Sources: Meta is developing a new image and video-focused AI model codenamed Mango, expected to be released in H1 2026 along with its new LLM dubbed Avocado (Meghan Bobrowsky/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/…

Amazon's AGI team lead Rohit Prasad is leaving at the end of 2025; AWS SVP Peter DeSantis will lead a group combining AI, silicon, and quantum computing teams (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)
https://www.geekwire.com/2025/amazon-ai-ch

Endra, whose AI tools automate mechanical, electrical, and plumbing design for commercial buildings, raised a $20M seed led by Notion (Jeremy Kahn/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/12/18/endra-ai-startup-automating-mep-design…

Exclusive: Swedish startup automating mechanical, electrical, and plumbing design for commercial buildings raises $20 million in seed round
Notion Capital is leading the seed round for Endra, which says reduces the time to design buildings' electrical systems from months to hours.

AI chip startup Mythic, which develops "analog processing units" to perform AI computations within memory, raised $125M led by DCVC; its CEO is a Nvidia veteran (Ian King/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Dealogic: 51 US tech IPOs raised $16.8B in 2025, driven by AI and crypto, above the past three-year average but far below 2021's 127 IPOs raising $74.4B (Valida Pau/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-crypto-companies-dominat…

AI and Crypto Companies Dominated IPO Winners in 2025
The drought in initial public offerings ended this year, led by big winners in AI and crypto, but gains were rare for companies outside those industries. Bankers expect those trends to hold in 2026. Booms in AI and crypto delivered two of the biggest winners of the year: data center developer ...

Luxembourg-based Hydrosat, which builds AI-based thermal infrared satellite tech to provide data for water resource management and more, raised a $60M Series B (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media)
https://resiliencemedia.co/hydrosat-rais…

Hydrosat raises $60M for its thermal satellite imaging tech
A startup building AI-based thermal infrared satellite technology to provide data for water resource management, public safety and defence applications

Microsoft launches Agent 365, a new framework to let businesses deploy and manage AI agents like human employees, with dashboards showing telemetry and alerts (Tom Warren/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/822035/microsoft-agent-365-businesses-contr…

Microsoft Agent 365 lets businesses manage AI agents like they do people
Microsoft is building an agent factory that now has some important controls. Microsoft Agent 365 will let business control AI agents.

Sources: Amazon is in talks to invest $10B in OpenAI at a $500B valuation, with OpenAI using AWS Trainium chips; Microsoft keeps rights to sell OpenAI models (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-talks-raise-least-1…

OpenAI in Talks to Raise At Least $10 Billion From Amazon and Use Its AI Chips
Amazon is in talks to invest $10 billion or more in OpenAI, according to three people familiar with the discussions. The valuation would be higher than $500 billion, one of the people said. The Amazon investment would help OpenAI afford some of the commitments it has made to rent servers from ...

Anthropic makes Claude Cowork available to $20/month Pro subscribers, after launching it for Max users, and says Pro users may hit their usage limits sooner (Ian Carlos Campbell/Engadget)
https://www.engadget.com/ai/anthropic-open

Anthropic opens up its Claude Cowork feature to anyone with a $20 subscription
Claude Cowork is now available to anyone subscribed to Anthropic's Pro plan.

Maxima, whose AI platform automates accounting tasks like reconciliation and journal entry, raised $41M in seed and Series A rounds at a $143M valuation (Aditya Soni/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/ai-accounti…

Anthropic launches Agent Skills, which let AI assistants perform specialized tasks using modular instructions, and says Microsoft, Cursor, and others use them (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat)
https://venturebeat.com/ai/anthropic-launches-enterprise-age…

Tokyo-based Turing, which is developing an AI model for self-driving vehicles, raised a $99M Series A, sources say at a ~$388M valuation (Min-Jeong Lee/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-17/ai-startup-t…

In an experiment, Claude ran a vending machine in the WSJ newsroom and lost $1,000 after it dropped prices to zero, gave away a free PlayStation, and more (Joanna Stern/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-clau

Q&A with Demis Hassabis on Gemini 3, spending most of his research time on world models, fitting the entire Google search index into Gemini, AI bubble, and more (Alex Heath/Sources)

Demis Hassabis on Gemini 3, world models, and the AI bubble
Q&A with the Google DeepMind CEO on building AGI, compute bottlenecks, and the AI bubble.

Cloudflare acquires AI data marketplace Human Native for an undisclosed sum, aiming to create a new system where AI developers pay creators for training content (Davis Giangiulio/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/15/cloudflare-ai-human-native-acquisition.html

Cloudflare acquires AI data marketplace Human Native
The internet infrastructure company wants AI developers to pay creators for content they use in their models.

Shares of Broadcom, CoreWeave, and Oracle, companies tied to the AI infrastructure buildout, extend last week's decline; ORCL is down 46% since September 10 (Ari Levy/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/15/ai-infrastructure-…

AI infrastructure selloff continues on Wall Street as Broadcom, Oracle shares slide
In at least one corner of the AI market, sentiment has turned decidedly negative.

Sources: 6 Chinese AI companies, including chip firms Montage and GigaDevice, are set to go public in Hong Kong in the coming weeks, aiming to raise up to $1B (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-17/…

Sources: General Intuition, which trains AI agents in spatial reasoning, is in late-stage talks to raise several hundred million dollars at a $2B valuation (Alex Heath/Sources)
https://sources.news/p/a-new-world-model-startup-is-quietly

A new world model startup is quietly raising big money
General Intuition is building a general-purpose AI agent and world model.