February 22, 2025

US AI Safety Institute could face big cuts

The National Institute of Standards and Technology could fire as many as 500 staffers, according to multiple reports — cuts that further threaten a fledgling AI safety organization. Axios reported this week that the US AI Safety Institute (AISI) and Chips for America, both part of NIST, would be “gutted” by layoffs targeting probationary employees […]

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AI-driven manufacturing database Keychain raises $5M for European push

February 12, 2025

Brands are constantly trying to streamline how they source packaging materials and ingredient suppliers for their products in order to quickly meet consumer demand. However, even today this process can involve some laborious wandering around trade shows. Keychain is an AI-powered platform that aims to quickly connect the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry with manufacturing […]

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Adobe launches subscriptions for Firefly AI

February 12, 2025

Firefly’s Standard plan costs $9.99 per month, the Pro plan will run users $29.99 a month, and there’s a more extensive Premium tier in the works.

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The Download: robot reanimation, and AI crawler wars

February 12, 2025
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Robots are bringing new life to extinct species In the last few years, paleontologists have developed a new trick for turning back time and studying prehistoric animals: building experimental robotic models of them. …

Lanch bags $27M for a social media-skewed take on fast food

February 12, 2025

E-commerce startups built around food continue to gobble up funding as investors look for sticky consumer concepts that can scale without breaking the bank. On Wednesday, Germany’s Lanch — which taps social media and influencers to develop popular food brands alongside retail networks for distributing them — closed funding of €26 million ($27 million) to […]

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EU abandons ePrivacy reform, as bloc shifts focus to competitiveness and fostering data access for AI

February 12, 2025

A long stalled bid to beef up European Union rules around online tracking technologies — and put penalties on a similar footing to the bloc’s data protection framework, GDPR, which allows for fines of up to 4% of annual turnover for breaches — has been withdrawn by the Commission after co-legislators failed to reach agreement […]

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No-code app builder Softr expands beyond Airtable databases

February 12, 2025

If you’re working for a small company and want to build a client portal or an internal tool, it can be difficult to find the budget and resources to allocate a developer to that small project. That’s why more than 600,000 people, including project managers, HR employees and marketing people, have been trying Softr’s no-code […]

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A woman in China sued Tesla after complaining of faulty brakes — now she’s paying Tesla $23K

February 12, 2025

As per an investigation by the Associated Press (AP), Tesla has won a defamation lawsuit against one individual called Zhang Yazhou, who in February 2021 was a passenger in a Tesla Model 3 car that allegedly crashed due to faulty brakes, resulting in a four-day hospital stay for both her parents. Following the accident, Zhang […]

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