May 2, 2025

The US has approved CRISPR pigs for food

Most pigs in the US are confined to factory farms where they can be afflicted by a nasty respiratory virus that kills piglets. The illness is called porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, or PRRS. A few years ago, a British company called Genus set out to design pigs immune to this germ using CRISPR gene…

Supio, an AI-powered legal analysis platform, lands $60M

April 30, 2025
Supio, a startup that uses AI to automate data collection and analysis for legal teams, has raised $60 million in a funding round led by Sapphire Ventures with participation from Mayfield and Thomson Reuters Ventures. The new capital, which brings Supio’s total raised to $91 million, will be put toward growth, hiring, and go-to-market efforts, […]

DeepSeek upgrades its math-focused AI model Prover

April 30, 2025
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has quietly updated Prover, its AI model that’s designed to solve math-related proofs and theorems. According to South China Morning Post, DeepSeek uploaded the latest version of Prover, V2, to AI dev platform, Hugging Face, late on Wednesday. It appears to be built on top of the startup’s V3 model, which […]

The Download: stereotypes in AI models, and the new age of coding

April 30, 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. This data set helps researchers spot harmful stereotypes in LLMs What’s new? AI models are riddled with culturally specific biases. A new data set, called SHADES, is designed to help developers combat the…

Cast AI raises $108M to get the max out of AI, Kubernetes and other workloads

April 30, 2025
The crush of traffic going into training and running AI has quickly turned into a major cost and resource headache for organisations. Today, Cast AI — a startup building tools to ease and optimise AI and other workloads with automation — is raising a major round of funding on the back of its strong growth […]

AI sales tax startup Kintsugi had doubled its valuation in 6 months

April 30, 2025
Kintsugi, a Silicon Valley-based startup that helps companies offload and automate their sales tax compliance, has raised $18 million in new funding led by global indirect tax technology solution provider Vertex. The startup plans to enable more small and medium businesses to use its AI-enabled capabilities for tax calculations and filings. The ongoing growth of […]

This data set helps researchers spot harmful stereotypes in LLMs

April 30, 2025
AI models are riddled with culturally specific biases. A new data set, called SHADES, is designed to help developers combat the problem by spotting harmful stereotypes and other kinds of discrimination that emerge in AI chatbot responses across a wide range of languages. Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at AI startup Hugging Face, led the…

Sarah Tavel, Benchmark’s first woman GP, transitions to venture partner

April 30, 2025
Eight years after joining Benchmark as the firm’s first woman general partner, Sarah Tavel announced on X that she is transitioning to a more limited role at the storied venture firm. In her new position as a venture partner, Tavel will continue to make investments and serve on existing company boards, but she will have […]

OpenAI explains why ChatGPT became too sycophantic

April 30, 2025
OpenAI has published a postmortem on the recent sycophancy issues with the default AI model powering ChatGPT, GPT-4o — issues that forced the company to roll back an update to the model released last week. Over the weekend, following the GPT-4o model update, users on social media noted that ChatGPT began responding in an overly […]

OpenAI explains why ChatGPT became too sycophant

April 30, 2025
OpenAI has published a postmortem on the recent sycophancy issues with the default AI model powering ChatGPT, GPT-4o — issues that forced the company to roll back an update to the model released last week. Over the weekend, following the GPT-4o model update, users on social media noted that ChatGPT began responding in an overly […]