Jack & Jill raises $50 million to bring conversational AI to job-hunting
Jack & Jill uses conversational AI to sidestep the listing and resumé shuffle. With $20 million in seed funding, the company is plotting its US expansion.
OpenAI’s new LLM exposes the secrets of how AI really works
ChatGPT maker OpenAI has built an experimental large language model that is far easier to understand than typical models. That’s a big deal, because today’s LLMs are black boxes: Nobody fully understands how they do what they do. Building a model that is more transparent sheds light on how LLMs work in general, helping researchers…
How tiny Mubadala-backed AAF is winning VC deals in some of the hottest startups
In less than a decade AAF has backed startups with exits totaling $2 billion, it says and is doing so through an unusual VC model.
Meet the man building a starter kit for civilization
You live in a house you designed and built yourself. You rely on the sun for power, heat your home with a woodstove, and farm your own fish and vegetables. The year is 2025. This is the life of Marcin Jakubowski, the 53-year-old founder of Open Source Ecology, an open collaborative of engineers, producers, and…
The race to make the perfect baby is creating an ethical mess
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of a grain of sand pulled from a powdery white Caribbean beach, contains the…
The problem with Big Tech’s favorite carbon removal tech
Sucking carbon pollution out of the atmosphere is becoming a big business—companies are paying top dollar for technologies that can cancel out their own emissions. Today, nearly 70% of announced carbon removal contracts are for one technology: bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Basically, the idea is to use trees or some other types…
Zepto raises $450 million at $7 billion valuation as Indian quick commerce market heats up
Indian quick commerce startup Zepto said it has raised $400 million in a funding round led by a new investor, California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), a U.S.-based pension fund. The round, which is a mix of primary and secondary investment, also has participation from existing investors, including Avenir, Avra, Lightspeed, Glade Brook, The Stepstone […]
India’s Kuku snags $85M as mobile content wars intensify
Kuku plans to expand beyond India with a U.S. launch slated for next year.
Co-founder of Indian social network Koo releases a new photo sharing app
PicSee is a new app that detects your friends’ photos on device and allows you to send it to them.
Seoul weighs approval for Google, Apple high-resolution map requests
South Korea weighs granting Google and Apple access to high-resolution map data amid lingering security and regulatory concerns.
Electric aircraft startup Beta Technologies seeks to raise $825M in IPO
If the company attracts investors at the top of its announced range, it will have a valuation of about $7.2 billion.