Luminar receives a larger $33 million bid for its lidar business
A new leading bidder has appeared in the Luminar bankruptcy case: Redmond, Washington-based MicroVision, which beat out Quantum Computing Inc.’s bid by $5 million.
How much wildfire prevention is too much?
The race to prevent the worst wildfires has been an increasingly high-tech one. Companies are proposing AI fire detection systems and drones that can stamp out early blazes. And now, one Canadian startup says it’s going after lightning. Lightning-sparked fires can be a big deal: The Canadian wildfires of 2023 generated nearly 500 million metric…
China’s Moonshot releases a new open-source model Kimi K2.5 and a coding agent
The company said that the model was trained on 15 trillion mixed visual and text tokens.
Node-based design tool Flora raises $42M from Redpoint Ventures
Flora’s node-based design tool is being used by companies like Pentagram and Lionsgate.
The Download: OpenAI’s plans for science, and chatbot age verification
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. Inside OpenAI’s big play for science —Will Douglas Heaven In the three years since ChatGPT’s explosive debut, OpenAI’s technology has upended a remarkable range of everyday activities at home, at work, and in…
Uber launches an ‘AV Labs’ division to gather driving data for robotaxi partners
Uber is not developing its own robotaxis again; instead it plans to collect and offer data. It’s a bet that more volume will help autonomous vehicle partners solve the weirdest edge cases.
Northwood Space secures a $100M Series B and a $50M Space Force contract
This is the El Segundo, California-based startup’s second raise in less than a year.
‘Among the worst we’ve seen’: report slams xAI’s Grok over child safety failures
“We assess a lot of AI chatbots at Common Sense Media, and they all have risks, but Grok is among the worst we’ve seen,” Robbie Torney of Common Sense Media said.
South Korea’s Edenlux set for U.S. debut of eye-strain wellness device
Edenlux builds wearable tech to protect and train your eyes, inspired by its founder’s personal vision recovery.
Qualcomm backs SpotDraft to scale on-device contract AI with valuation doubling toward $400M
SpotDraft now processes over 1 million contracts annually using its AI tool, with contract volumes up 173% year-over-year.
Google pays $68 million to settle claims its voice assistant spied on users
The tech giant did not admit wrongdoing in the case.