Author: Advanced AI Editor

The first days of the second Trump administration offered the newly elected president a chance to share the spotlight with some of his most important allies. While some of the featured leaders were ones you’d expect—cabinet nominees, congressional leaders, megadonor Elon Musk—at least one was a surprise: Masayoshi Son, the Japanese billionaire tech investor. The occasion for Son’s star turn in the White House Roosevelt Room on Jan. 21 was an announcement that SoftBank Group, Son’s Tokyo-based conglomerate, would put up most of the funding for Stargate, an ambitious partnership with OpenAI and Oracle that aims to turbocharge American leadership…

On March 27, Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google introduced several new features across Search, Maps, and Gemini to enhance vacation planning, BofA Securities noted Monday. In Search, users can generate detailed travel itineraries with AI Overviews, which can be saved as custom lists in Google Maps. Google has also expanded hotel price tracking globally, letting users know when rates change. Also Read: Anthropic Gains Big With Google Backing, Aims for $60 Billion Valuation and Surging AI Revenue A new screenshot-powered feature on Google Maps uses Gemini AI to identify places saved through screenshots, enabling users to organize and visualize their…

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition: LinkedIn chief product officer Tomer Cohen talks about the future of work and how the Microsoft-owned professional sbocial network is using AI to make the lives of recruiters and job seekers, hopefully, better…OpenAI closes the largest venture capital funding round ever…Big Pharma learns to share data…and London startup Synthesia grants actors equity in exchange for their likeness. Is it a model for solving AI’s IP conundrum?If you want to know how AI is changing the nature of work, LinkedIn offers a good vantage point. The Microsoft-owned professional social network is…

MENLO PARK, Calif. (AP) — The head of Meta’s artificial intelligence research division said she plans to step down, vacating a high-profile position at a time of intense competition in the development of AI technology. Joelle Pineau, Meta’s vice president for AI research, said Tuesday she is leaving at the end of May after eight years with the company. “Today, as the world undergoes significant change, as the race for AI accelerates, and as Meta prepares for its next chapter, it is time to create space for others to pursue the work,” she wrote in a social media post. Meta…

(Bloomberg) — Samsung Electronics Co.’s customers who used to rely on their Galaxy Watches to find misplaced phones, can now also locate the devices with the company’s latest fridges. Most Read from Bloomberg The latest Bespoke AI-powered refrigerator lineup features a 9-inch home screen that allows users to simply say, “Hi Bixby, find my phone,” and the enhanced assistant, capable of recognizing the voice of individual family members, will ring the correct device. Customers can also activate the home air conditioners or window blinds with voice commands, while the system will automatically make adjustments using real-time weather data. These are…

HOLLY RIDGE, La.—Manufacturers have passed over this patch of farmland for nearly two decades, a string of setbacks that left this one of the poorest corners of Louisiana. A quarter of the 20,000 residents in Richland Parish live in poverty. Farm jobs dwindled when agriculture became more efficient, forcing people to move away for work. Hopes for an auto manufacturing plant later went bust. Now, the community is hoping for a new savior: AI. Meta Platforms scooped up 2,700 acres of farmland last year for what would be its largest-ever data center, built over flat rice fields 45 minutes west…

(Bloomberg) — Gains in Chinese stocks have typically filtered through to bolster their emerging-market counterparts — not this time. Most Read from Bloomberg Mainland equities have surged over the past six months, breaking free of a multi-year slump, while broader developing-nation equities have largely flat-lined. The divergence is being put down to the fact Chinese gains are being driven by a tech frenzy, rather than an improving economy that would filter through to other economies via the nation’s extensive trade links. China’s outperformance is “driven by a specific tech-driven boost to spending more towards the consumer away from investment, and…

The U.S. innovates, China iterates. That aphorism—or its less flattering version, “China imitates”—dominates many conversations about the relative strengths of the world’s largest and second-largest economies. The U.S., the narrative goes, sits on the technological frontier, creating groundbreaking products and services that chart the course of the world economy. China takes those ideas and builds on them, spitting out cheaper—and perhaps inferior—versions. In AI, that cliché seemed for years to be based in fact, as Chinese companies struggled to keep up with free-spending, talent-rich U.S. tech giants. But this January, a Chinese startup undercut that narrative. Hangzhou-based DeepSeek—not even a…

(Bloomberg) — Wrtn Technologies Inc. has raised 83 billion won ($56 million) from investors including Goodwater Capital, one of a growing number of South Korean AI startups to score financing in the post-ChatGPT era. Most Read from Bloomberg Existing backers BRV Capital Management and Capstone Partners participated in the so-called extension round, bringing the total capital raised for that round to 108 billion won, the Seoul-based startup said on Monday. Wrtn, pronounced “written,” was founded in 2021 by Lee Seyoung and five friends. They created a free-to-use AI platform for more than 5 million mostly younger users in Korea by…

Elon Musk at Tesla’s design studio in Hawthorne, Calif., on March 14, 2019. Elon Musk said Friday that his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, had acquired his social media platform, X. He said that the deal was an all-stock transaction that valued X at $33 billion. “xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk wrote in a post on X. The deal combines two of Musk’s most high-profile companies, but because they are not publicly traded, no details about the deal were made public outside of Musk’s…