From the archive
Follow the latest AI news and artificial intelligence developments across models, agents, robotics, research and the wider industry. Explore new AI tools, advances in computing, business moves, safety and policy, with clear reporting and useful sources. Read the stories, catch up with News in Brief and join the conversation.
Lead story
Augmeta has raised $3 million to develop AI operators that investigate and act on business performance measures, rather than leaving every KPI to sit quietly on a dashboard. The startup says its system is already covering more than 100 KPIs at a Fortune 500 retailer.
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Seventeen countries have endorsed a vision linking AI-assisted science with public access to data, computing and research facilities. The Kyoto declaration also backs research-integrity standards and new approaches to funding, but leaves practical details such as data access and computing allocations unspecified.
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Together AI has launched Together Link, a way to use open-source coding models inside tools developers already use, including Claude Code, Claude Desktop and Codex. Its pitch is simple: let the harness choose a model for the task, then show what that choice costs.
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HIVE Digital is converting former Bitcoin-mining sites into Canadian GPU cloud infrastructure, with two reported contracts worth an estimated $570 million combined. The plan links repurposed power-hungry facilities to demand for domestic AI computing, including a Cohere deployment.
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Bridgewater Associates is urging policymakers to consider a 35% tax on AI use, with revenue used to give the public a stake in AI companies and help workers. The proposal, reported by the New York Post, turns the debate over AI’s economic gains into a concrete question: who…
Watch Desk
New York City lawmakers are set to debate proposals for outside review of AI systems, human-operated shut-off controls and cash rewards for whistleblowers. A hearing reported for Monday brings those ideas into a live argument over how far a city should go in regulating AI companies.
Databricks Watch
Databricks says its product team uses Genie One to prepare a weekly adoption review, investigate changes in user activity and turn the work into a shareable agent. The example shows how Genie Ontology is meant to supply business context to an AI workflow, not just help it find…
Watch Desk
A new analysis of consumer AI apps finds that just 4.5% of US consumers pay for an AI subscription, while spending among those who do is sharply concentrated. The figures put a useful question behind the race for app rankings: how much of the market is broad adoption,…
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Senator Adam Schiff says Congress should legislate on AI sooner than it did on social media, arguing that voluntary promises from technology companies are not enough. In an interview with The Verge, he points to questions ranging from copyrighted training material to AI safety and use in the…
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The AI boom’s benefits may be reaching ordinary Americans through construction jobs, tax revenue and consumer use, not just through the technology’s effect on office work. Noah Smith makes that case in a new essay, while acknowledging that data centres bring costs as well as gains.
Meta AI Watch
404 Media reports that Meta engineers fixed several security vulnerabilities in Muse shortly before the AI agent launched, including at least one flaw that could have let a user’s virtual machine reach sensitive Meta databases or services. The report raises a concrete question about how securely an agent…
Watch Desk
Current and former OpenAI and Google DeepMind researchers are warning that AI labs are not doing enough to prepare for self-improving systems. Their accounts, gathered for a new public-awareness project, put a pointed question to the field: who gets to slow the race when the people building the…
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MongoDB has launched Atlas Agent Engine, a platform layer for building and operating AI agents on its data platform. Its pitch is practical: persistent memory, retrieval and controls over what agents can do, built into a stack many businesses already use.
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Checkatrade says it uses AI to help explain the factors behind tradespeople’s job prices, while checking estimates against its own data. CTO Gorden Pretorius says the company keeps a human in the loop for AI-assisted vetting, where it applies stricter safeguards.
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AI ownership is spreading across company leadership, but executive-search chief Nada Usina argues that the key question is not who gets the title. It is who is accountable for what the business expects AI to achieve.
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Many software developers are using AI coding tools while remaining wary of them. A Stack Overflow survey reported by CNN found that 65% of respondents use coding assistants or agents, while six in ten tech workers surveyed said they try to avoid AI.
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Tencent is reportedly set to rent about 100,000 AI chips from Oracle for five years, in a deal estimated at $7 billion. If accurate, it would be a major example of Chinese firms obtaining overseas AI computing capacity while access to advanced chips remains a live policy issue.
Cohere Watch
Cohere has launched North 2, an enterprise AI platform that lets businesses use models from rival providers and set spending limits for staff and teams. It also offers pre-built agents for workplace tasks, giving companies a way to organise AI work without making Cohere’s own models the only…
Cohere Watch
Cohere is releasing North 2, a new version of its enterprise AI platform that lets customers build agents for more complex, multistep work. The practical change is a shift from chat and document retrieval towards agents that can act across business tasks, with controls for human oversight, access…
Watch Desk
Extend Robotics has raised £2.6 million to expand a service that lets manufacturers pay for completed robotic work rather than buy robots outright. The UK company says the funding will also support a remote-operator network, an approach that could put robotic capacity within reach of factories wary of…
Watch Desk
Hitachi and Germany’s Agile Robots are partnering to develop physical AI systems for complex factory tasks, combining Hitachi’s edge AI technology with Agile’s robotics platform. The plan is to commercialise the resulting systems globally through Hitachi’s HMAX Industry portfolio, putting AI closer to machines and production lines rather…
Watch Desk
A film about OpenAI’s beginnings and its founders Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever is heading to cinemas after Neon took over its release from Amazon MGM. Its journey from a Big Tech-backed production to an independent distributor gives this AI story a second, rather pointed, plot.
