Author: Advanced AI Editor

OpenAI is about to clear a major hurdle, freeing the startup to pursue an ambitious and expensive “full stack” strategy that could catapult it into the Big Tech big leagues or spiral the AI pioneer into a financial ball of flames.The startup said late Thursday it signed a memorandum of understanding to end a contractual fight with Microsoft. This will create a new corporate structure that helps OpenAI issue traditional equity, making it easier to raise the mountain of cash needed to pursue its dreams.”Beyond boring corporate governance things, let’s talk a little bit about the business,” OpenAI CFO Sarah…

Listen to the article 5 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. It’s been another week with far more retail news than there is time in the day. Below, we break down some things you may have missed during the week and what we’re still thinking about.  From Chewy’s latest fashions to Office Depot’s new promise, here’s our closeout for the week. What you may have missed Mary Dillon, Frank Bracken and more depart Foot Locker as deal closes CEO Mary Dillon, President Frank Bracken and other members of Foot Locker’s executive team left…

That lab, owned by IBM, is in pole position in a new race between Big Blue, Google, Microsoft and a horde of startups. Their goal? “Quantum advantage”—the point at which quantum computers exceed the abilities of the best conventional ones. Yes, good old IBM is holding its own with the trillion-dollar competition. IBM hasn’t been associated with breakthrough innovation since its Watson AI won “Jeopardy!” in 2011. But quantum computing, which could see a breakthrough to commercialization by 2030, gives the 114-year-old stalwart of business computing a chance to reclaim some of its past glory. It is working on larger…

Listen to the article 4 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. Dive Brief: Inflation sped up last month to the fastest pace this year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Thursday, as fresh data highlighted a slowdown in the job market and underscored the risks confronting the Federal Reserve as it leans toward stimulating the economy next week by cutting the main interest rate. The Consumer Price Index rose 0.4% in August — 2.9% on an annual basis — after a 0.2% monthly gain in July, the BLS said. So-called core CPI, which…

Customer ServicePhoto: Generated by AI. Adobe Stock.September 12, 2025A hefty majority, 88%, of consumers are satisfied with interactions handled by human customer service agent compared to 60% who feel the same about AI-driven help interactions.Those are top findings from Verizon’s CX Annual Insights report that reveals the future of CX isn’t just about implementing AI but strategically integrating it to amp up human connections and address customer frustrations, according to a press release.The report, which polled 5,000 consumers and 500 senior executives across seven countries, revealed additional findings:The single biggest source of consumer frustration with automated interactions is the inability…

Listen to the article 2 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. Dive Brief: Chewy’s paid Chewy+ membership program is “rapidly strengthening” and accounted for 3% of monthly sales in July, CEO Sumit Singh said on a Q2 2025 earnings call Wednesday. Chewy+ members make greater use of Chewy’s app and autoship service compared to non-members, according to Singh. Members also buy at a greater frequency and include more items in each of their orders. “We see this program in line with an Amazon Prime or Costco membership or Walmart+, with similar benefits and…

Think AI can manage customer service for your company? By all means, give it a go, but perhaps wait a few months before starting redundancies.That’s the lesson learned the hard way by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), which cut 45 jobs in customer service after rolling out an AI bot, only to have to rescind the redundancies weeks later.The CBA rolled out an AI chatbot – reportedly called Bumblebee – to help manage with customer inquiries, saying the aim was to automate simple requests while freeing up staff to focus on more complicated matters “that need empathy and experience”.After…

A central paradox in fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) is the frequent degradation of multi-attempt performance (Pass@k) despite improvements in single-attempt accuracy (Pass@1). This is often accompanied by catastrophic forgetting, where models lose previously acquired skills. While various methods have been proposed, the choice and function of the divergence term have been surprisingly unexamined as a proactive solution. We argue that standard RLVR objectives — both those using the mode-seeking reverse KL-divergence and those forgoing a divergence term entirely — lack a crucial mechanism for knowledge retention. The reverse-KL actively accelerates this decay…

Anna-Maria Halacheva, a doctoral researcher at the Institute of Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technologies (INSAIT) at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski,” has been highlighted by the European Commission as an exemplary young European talent. Her recognition appears in the strategic report From Promise to Progress: First Year in Office, which accompanied Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s annual address on September 10. According to Bulgaria’s Ministry of Education and Science, the country is among the few singled out with a concrete example of emerging scientific achievement. Halacheva has earned the prestigious Google DeepMind scholarship and was named to Forbes…

Video: Delivery breakthrough? Swiss algorithm gives drones driving lessonRobots thrive in predictable, organized environments, such as warehouses that are arranged in grids. If drones are going to be able to deliver packages in cities, they’ll have to navigate an imperfect and unpredictable environment. That’s why a team of researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) developed a drone system that embraces uncertainty. Currently, mobile robots including autonomous vehicles and drones combine several approaches to figure out where they are and how they should get to their destination without hitting anything. GPS is a good way to get…