Microsoft’s most capable new Phi 4 AI model rivals the performance of far larger systems

May 1, 2025
Microsoft launched several new “open” AI models on Wednesday, the most capable of which is competitive with OpenAI’s o3-mini on at least one benchmark. All of the new pemissively licensed models — Phi 4 mini reasoning, Phi 4 reasoning, and Phi 4 reasoning plus — are “reasoning” models, meaning they’re able to spend more time […]

Sam Altman’s World unveils a mobile verification device

May 1, 2025
Tools for Humanity, the startup behind the World human verification project that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman co-founded, plans to unveil Wednesday a mobile device designed to help people determine the difference between a human and an AI agent. The company, which is debuting the device during its its “At Last” event in San Francisco, also […]

World partners with Tinder, Visa to bring its ID-verifying tech to more places

May 1, 2025
World, the biometric ID company best known for its eyeball-scanning Orb devices, at an event late on Wednesday announced several partnerships aimed at driving sign-ups and demonstrating the applications of its tech. World is partnering with Match Group, the dating app conglomerate, to verify the IDs of Tinder users in Japan. Via collaborations with Kalshi […]

Meta forecasted it would make $1.4T in revenue from generative AI by 2035

May 1, 2025
Meta made a prediction last year its generative AI products would rake in $2 billion to $3 billion in revenue in 2025, and between $460 billion and $1.4 trillion by 2035, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday. The documents, submitted by attorneys for book authors suing Meta for what they claim is unauthorized training of […]

Epic Games just scored a win against Apple

May 1, 2025
Epic Games notched a win in an ongoing legal dispute with Apple. The result could be Fortnite returning to the U.S. iOS app store as early as next week. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in a ruling Wednesday that Apple was in “willful violation” of a 2021 injunction that prohibited the company from anticompetitive pricing. […]

Amazon launches Nova Premier, its most capable AI model yet

May 1, 2025
Amazon on Wednesday released what the company claims is the most capable AI model in its Nova family, Nova Premier. Nova Premier, which can process text, images, and videos (but not audio), is available in Amazon Bedrock, the company’s AI model development platform. Amazon says that Premier excels at “complex tasks” that “require deep understanding […]

Study accuses LM Arena of helping top AI labs game its benchmark

May 1, 2025
A new paper from AI lab Cohere, Stanford, MIT, and Ai2 accuses LM Arena, the organization behind the popular crowdsourced AI benchmark Chatbot Arena, of helping a select group of AI companies achieve better leaderboard scores at the expense of rivals. According to the authors, LM Arena allowed some industry-leading AI companies like Meta, OpenAI, […]

Microsoft expects some AI capacity constraints this quarter

April 30, 2025
Microsoft customers could encounter service disruptions when using AI services due to demand outpacing the company’s ability to bring data centers online, an executive warned during the company’s earnings call Microsoft’s EVP and CFO Amy Hood said during the company’s fiscal 2025 third-quarter earnings call Wednesday the company may face AI capacity constraints as early […]

Visa and Mastercard unveil AI-powered shopping

April 30, 2025
Artificial intelligence is not just infiltrating the startup world. Now, credit card giants Visa and Mastercard are getting into the AI game. Visa announced on Wednesday “Intelligent Commerce,” which it says enables AI “to find and buy.” AI agents will be able to shop and make purchases on behalf of consumers, based on preselected preferences. […]

Threads tops 350M monthly users after adding 30M in the quarter

April 30, 2025
Instagram Threads, Meta’s X competitor, has now grown to over 350 million monthly active users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed during the company’s Q1 2025 earnings call on Wednesday. That’s an increase of 30 million users since the prior quarter, where Meta reported that Threads had 320 million users. The new figure represents increased growth, as […]