Author: Advanced AI Editor

Tesla is looking to make a big splash with Robotaxi in a new market, as the company was spotted testing validation vehicles in one region where it has not yet launched its ride-hailing service. After launching Robotaxi in Austin in late June, Tesla followed up with a relatively quick expansion to the Bay Area of California. Both service areas are operating with a geofence that is expansive: In Texas, it is 173 square miles, while in the Bay Area, it is roughly 400 square miles. Tesla has been transparent that it is prioritizing safety, but it believes it can expand…

Reward Models (RMs) are critical for improving generation models via Reinforcement Learning (RL), yet the RM scaling paradigm in visual generation remains largely unexplored. It primarily due to fundamental limitations in existing approaches: CLIP-based RMs suffer from architectural and input modality constraints, while prevalent Bradley-Terry losses are fundamentally misaligned with the next-token prediction mechanism of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), hindering effective scaling. More critically, the RLHF optimization process is plagued by Reward Hacking issue, where models exploit flaws in the reward signal without improving true quality. To address these challenges, we introduce RewardDance, a scalable reward modeling framework that overcomes these…

In real-world video and image analysis, businesses often face the challenge of detecting objects that weren’t part of a model’s original training set. This becomes especially difficult in dynamic environments where new, unknown, or user-defined objects frequently appear. For example, media publishers might want to track emerging brands or products in user-generated content; advertisers need to analyze product appearances in influencer videos despite visual variations; retail providers aim to support flexible, descriptive search; self-driving cars must identify unexpected road debris; and manufacturing systems need to catch novel or subtle defects without prior labeling.In all these cases, traditional closed-set object detection…

Tatiana Serebryakova/iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty ImagesFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeawaysStable Audio 2.5 is designed to help brands build a “sonic identity.”The model was trained on a fully licensed dataset.Custom tracks can be used in ads, retail locations, and elsewhere.Stability AI just made it easier for brands to create custom, AI-generated audio, thereby negating the need to spend time and money on elaborate recording and production processes.The UK-based company unveiled Stable Audio 2.5 on Wednesday, describing the new model on their website as “the first audio generation model designed specifically for enterprise-grade sound-production.” Also: 4 ways…

SACRAMENTO, Calif., Sept. 11, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Sophont, a medical AI startup, announced the closing of its $9.22M pre-seed and seed funding round led by Kindred Ventures, with participation from Upfront Ventures, Delphi Ventures, Jeff Dean (Google DeepMind), Logan Kilpatrick (Google DeepMind), Lukas Biewald (Weights & Biases), Clément Delangue (Factorial Capital, Hugging Face), and other investors. Paul Scotti (CTO) and Tanishq Abraham (CEO) Sophont is building multimodal medical foundation models: large-scale AI systems trained on vast amounts of unlabeled clinical data that can reason across diverse modalities, including pathology slides, brain scans, clinical notes, and lab results. Sophont is the first…

Tucker Carlson published a new interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Wednesday in which the two men discussed some pretty dark topics. Altman also talked about his beef with Elon Musk, and it wasn’t long before the Tesla CEO chimed in on X with his own thoughts, definitively claiming that a whistleblower at OpenAI “was murdered,” in a tweet Thursday. During the episode, Carlson and Altman talk about Suchir Balaji, a researcher at OpenAI who died on Nov. 26, 2024. Balaji had accused OpenAI of violating U.S. copyright law a few weeks prior to his death. And while it…

A long-lost, dramatic painting of Jesus Christ‘s crucifixion by 17th century Flemish master painter Peter Paul Rubens was found in a mansion in Paris, and will be auctioned this fall. Christ on the cross (1613) was discovered by French auctioneer Jean-Pierre Osenat last September, while preparing to selling the private residence in the city’s 6th district, according to AFP, which first reported the news. Osenat said the large Baroque painting measuring 42 by 29 inches was “a true profession of faith and a favourite subject for Rubens, a protestant who converted to Catholicism”. Related Articles “It was painted by Rubens…

In a July interview with Stanford Business School Insights that appears to have gone unnoticed by the art press, mega-collector Ken Griffin was asked about his favorite artwork. Griffin has acquired so many masterpieces over the past few decades—including Willem de Kooning’s Interchange and Jackson Pollock’s Number 17A, in a group deal from David Geffen for a cool $500 million—that one might reasonably assume he already owned his favorite. Not so. “Oh god, it’s Blue Poles,” Griffin said. That would be Jackson Pollock’s 18-foot-wide painting Blue Poles, originally titled Number 11, 1952, after the year it was finished. Few works…

The venture landscape is more concentrated than ever, with AI companies and 2 countries defining the world’s most valuable startups.  Among the top 50 private companies globally, the US and China account for 86% of the list, while AI startups represent 40%. These companies are reshaping industries and, in some cases, surpassing their public market competitors in valuation.  OpenAI is reportedly poised to hit a roughly $500B valuation — putting it closer to the ranks of big tech than any other startup. At the same time, the current top 50 companies’ combined valuation represents under half of Nvidia’s current market…

For the latest issue of Dazed, a British lifestyle and culture quarterly, artist Nan Goldin and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil engaged in an extended discussion of Khalil’s experience during his 104-day ICE detention, the efficacy of activism and protest, and the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Perhaps the most eye-opening part of the exchange came toward the end, when Goldin and Khalil addressed what activists call the “Palestine Exception”—the belief that the US accepts free speech and protest on every issue except Palestine. In 2015, advocacy group Palestine Legal released a report documenting examples of the exception in academia and public…