Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn has some explaining to do. Earlier this year, after the language learning app circulated an internal memo about prioritizing A.I. in hiring and phasing out contractors, the company was quickly cited as an example of how A.I. is eliminating jobs across industries. In reality, Duolingo has no plans to replace…
Firefly Aerospace is aiming for the Moon—and beyond. The Texas-based space company went public on the Nasdaq on Aug. 7 in the largest space IPO of the year so far, just months after completing a historic lunar landing. The debut is a rare bright spot for the otherwise subdued commercial space sector in recent years…
Unemployment among recent college graduates reached 6.6 percent in May—a four-year high—dampening spirits after the celebrations of their hard-earned degrees. The downturn has disproportionately impacted younger workers, with many struggling to secure their first professional roles. We are grappling with the steepest unemployment rate for recent college graduates in the U.S. in more than a…
Sebastien Siemiatkowski, CEO of fintech giant Klarna, believes A.I. can do any human job—including his own. That conviction was on display yesterday (Aug. 14) when an A.I.-generated avatar, rather than Siemiatkowski himself, presented the company’s second-quarter earnings. It was fitting that the digital stand-in promoted A.I.’s benefits, given how deeply Klarna has integrated the technology…
Cohere’s push to provide secure A.I. tools for enterprises is attracting big-name investors and high-profile tech leaders. The Canadian startup announced today (Aug. 14) that it has raised $500 million in an oversubscribed funding round and hired two senior executives to help it compete with rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic. The round, led by Radical…
Tucked away inside a WeWork meeting room in Lower Manhattan, Edward Tian pulls up a Google Doc on his laptop titled “Secret Master Plan,” a draft outlining his startup’s growth strategy. The 25-year-old co-founder and CEO of GPTZero taps the trackpad and grins. “Eighty-three percent is me. Seventeen percent is my co-founder Alex,” Tian said,…
Elon Musk’s xAI is losing one of its founding members. Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of the developer behind Grok, announced yesterday (Aug. 13) that he is departing the company to start his own venture capital firm focused on A.I. startups. “Today was my last day at xAI, the company that I helped start with Elon…
The A.I. boom has helped make Nvidia the world’s most valuable publicly traded company with a market cap of $4.3 trillion. But CEO Jensen Huang envisions the company’s future to center around physical A.I. At its SIGGRAPH conference on Aug. 11, Nvidia unveiled a suite of A.I. models aimed at advancing physical A.I. systems, including…
Tesla has officially ended its Dojo supercomputer project, closing out a four-year effort to develop one of the world’s most powerful A.I. training systems and marking a major shift in Tesla’s A.I. ambitions. CEO Elon Musk announced the shutdown in a series of posts on X over the weekend. He also confirmed that the entire…
Leading A.I. developers are locked in a high-stakes race not just to build cutting-edge models, but also to secure scarce chips and strengthen ties with Washington. Earlier this month, OpenAI made headlines by offering ChatGPT to the U.S. executive branch for a nominal $1 a year. Its rival Anthropic, not to be outdone, is now…
