June 6, 2025

The Download: China’s AI agent boom, and GPS alternatives

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. Manus has kick-started an AI agent boom in China Last year, China saw a boom in foundation models, the do-everything large language models that underpin the AI revolution. This year, the focus has…

This benchmark used Reddit’s AITA to test how much AI models suck up to us

May 30, 2025
Back in April, OpenAIannounced it was rolling back an update to its GPT-4o model that made ChatGPT’s responses to user queries too sycophantic.  An AI model that acts in an overly agreeable and flattering way is more than just annoying. It could reinforce users’ incorrect beliefs, mislead people, and spread misinformation that can be dangerous—a…

Grammarly secures $1B in non-dilutive funding from General Catalyst

May 30, 2025
Grammarly has secured a $1 billion commitment from General Catalyst. The 14-year-old writing assistant startup will use the new funds for its sales and marketing efforts, freeing up existing capital to make strategic acquisitions. Unlike a traditional venture round, General Catalyst will not receive an equity stake in the company in return for the investment. […]

Top 30 startups announced for VivaTech 2025 Innovation of the Year Award

May 29, 2025
The Innovation of the Year Award celebrates the boldest and most visionary startups exhibiting at VivaTech 2025. Open to all exhibiting companies, the award honors those pushing boundaries and redefining industries. Startups were scored on Innovation & Creativity, Market Disruption, and Scalability. From hundreds of applicants, 30 made the short list. The top five will […]

Hugging Face unveils two new humanoid robots

May 29, 2025
AI dev platform Hugging Face continued its push into robotics on Thursday with the release of two new humanoid robots. The company announced a pair of open-source robots, HopeJR and Reachy Mini. HopeJR is a full-size humanoid robot that has 66 actuated degrees of freedom, or 66 independent movements, including the ability to walk and […]

Black Forest Labs’ Kontext AI models can edit pics as well as generate them

May 29, 2025
Black Forest Labs, the AI startup whose models once powered the image generation features of X’s Grok chatbot, on Thursday released a new suite of image-generating models — some of which can both create and edit pics. The most capable of the models in the new family, called Flux.1 Kontext, can be prompted with text […]