February 5, 2025

Supersonic planes are inching toward takeoff. That could be a problem.

Boom Supersonic broke the sound barrier in a test flight of its XB-1 jet last week, marking an early step in a potential return for supersonic commercial flight. The small aircraft reached a top speed of Mach 1.122 (roughly 750 miles per hour) in a flight over southern California and exceeded the speed of sound…

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MLCommons and Hugging Face team up to release massive speech data set for AI research

January 31, 2025

MLCommons, a nonprofit AI safety working group, has teamed up with AI dev platform Hugging Face to release one of the world’s largest collections of public domain voice recordings for AI research. The data set, called Unsupervised People’s Speech, contains more than a million hours of audio spanning at least 89 different languages. MLCommons says […]

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DeepSeek might not be such good news for energy after all

January 31, 2025
In the week since a Chinese AI model called DeepSeek became a household name, a dizzying number of narratives have gained steam, with varying degrees of accuracy: that the model is collecting your personal data (maybe); that it will upend AI as we know it (too soon to tell—but do read my colleague Will’s story…

Elon Musk is reportedly taking control of the inner workings of US government agencies

January 31, 2025

People working for, or with, Elon Musk are reportedly taking over the inner workings of multiple government agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management and the Treasury Department. The Washington Post reported Friday that the highest-ranking career official at Treasury is leaving the department after “a clash” with people working for Musk’s so-called Department of […]

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Guo’s Conviction Partners adds Mike Vernal as GP, raises $230M fund

January 31, 2025

When in mid-2022 Sarah Guo left Greylock to launch her own AI-focused fund, Conviction Partners, she indicated that she was tagging the word “Partners” to the firm’s name because she would eventually bring on other GPs. Now, more than two years later, Guo is being joined by Mike Vernal, who was a partner at Sequoia […]

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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is trying to duck a deposition in an OpenAI copyright lawsuit

January 31, 2025

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is trying to avoid being deposed in a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, according to new court filings. In response, lawyers for the plaintiff — the Authors Guild — have filed a motion to compel testimony from Amodei and his Anthropic co-founder, Benjamin Mann. Authors Guild’s lawyers claim that Amodei and Mann, […]

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CFPB fines fintech Wise, alleging it charged deceptive fees

January 31, 2025

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has hit UK-based remittance company Wise with about a $2 million fine for what it described as “a series of illegal actions.” Those actions include advertising inaccurate fees and failing to properly disclose exchange rates and other costs, the CFPB alleges. Specifically, the agency claims that the fintech company […]

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OpenAI releases its new o3-mini reasoning model for free

January 31, 2025
On Thursday, Microsoft announced that it’s rolling OpenAI’s reasoning model o1 out to its Copilot users, and now OpenAI is releasing a new reasoning model, o3-mini, to people who use the free version of ChatGPT. This will mark the first time that the vast majority of people will have access to one of OpenAI’s reasoning…