📰 News
AI News — page 4
Funding, launches, analysis, and interviews.
Modal raises $355M Series C to build agent-first cloud infrastructure
Modal, the serverless compute platform, closed a $355M Series C round as it shifts from developer experience to agent experience, building specialized infrastructure for AI workloads including elastic inference and sandboxes.
Databricks Tests Coding Agents on Multi-Million Line Codebase
Databricks benchmarked coding agents including OpenAI, Anthropic and open-source models on real engineering tasks across its multi-million line codebase, finding GLM 5.2 matches premium models at lower cost.
OpenAI finds 30% of SWE-Bench Pro coding tasks contain evaluation flaws
OpenAI's audit of the widely-used SWE-Bench Pro coding benchmark reveals that approximately 30% of tasks contain breaking issues including overly strict tests and underspecified prompts that misrepresent model capabilities.
Nvidia Partners with Hugging Face on Open Source Robot Models
Nvidia integrated its Isaac GR00T humanoid robotics models and teleop framework into Hugging Face's LeRobot library, expanding open source physical AI development tools.
xAI ships Grok 4.5, promising Opus-class performance at half the cost
Elon Musk's xAI released Grok 4.5 on Wednesday, claiming the model matches Anthropic's Opus capabilities while offering twice the token efficiency and significantly lower pricing.
xAI launches Grok 4.5 with 62% DeepSWE score at $2 per million tokens
Elon Musk's xAI released Grok 4.5, its most capable model yet, achieving 62% on coding benchmarks while delivering 4.2x better token efficiency than competing models.
OpenAI launches GPT-Live voice models with real-time conversation for ChatGPT
OpenAI released GPT-Live-1 and GPT-Live-1 mini voice models that enable simultaneous listening and speaking, ending the turn-based limitations of Advanced Voice Mode.
Microsoft Research launches Flint, an AI-native visualization language for chart generation
Microsoft Research released Flint, an open-source visualization language that enables AI agents to create polished charts from simple specifications using semantic data types.
Waymo expands driverless rides to San Diego, Las Vegas, Tampa and Denver
Alphabet's robotaxi division will launch autonomous rides in four new US cities, starting with employees before public rollouts.
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra Achieves Leading Agent Performance With LangChain Tuning
NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Ultra delivers benchmark-leading accuracy on LangChain's Deep Agents platform at 10x lower cost than closed models through harness engineering rather than model retraining.
Legal AI Startup Norm Hits $1.2 Billion Valuation in $120M Series C
New York-based legal AI company Norm raised $120 million at a $1.2 billion valuation, led by Khosla Ventures, to expand its AI-native law firm platform.
OpenAI publishes national security partnership principles for government AI use
OpenAI released principles governing how governments can use its AI systems for national security, establishing restrictions on surveillance, autonomous weapons, and automated decisions.
Security Researchers Expose GitHub Copilot Vulnerability That Leaked Private Code
Noma Security researchers demonstrated how GitHub's AI coding assistant could be tricked into exposing private repository contents through carefully crafted prompts.
Axle Energy raises $25m Series A led by Energize Capital
London-based energy startup Axle Energy secured $25 million in Series A funding led by Energize Capital, with participation from existing investors Accel, Picus Capital and Eka Ventures.
Lovable in talks to raise $300m at $13.2bn valuation
Swedish AI coding startup Lovable is negotiating a $300 million funding round at a $13.2 billion post-money valuation, with US-based Menlo Ventures set to lead.
Lilian Weng maps harness engineering as path to AI self-improvement
Former OpenAI safety researcher and Thinky cofounder Lilian Weng published a comprehensive analysis of 35 papers on harness engineering for recursive self-improvement in AI systems.