Author: dweetleapp

Amazon Web Services is making a sizable new investment in infrastructure designed to boost AI capabilities for U.S. government organizations. AWS announced Monday it is investing $50 billion to build AI “high-performance computing infrastructure” purposefully built for the U.S. government. The buildout is meant to expand federal government agencies’ access to AWS AI services. The read more

On Monday, Anthropic announced Opus 4.5, the latest version of its flagship model. It’s the last of Anthropic’s 4.5 series of models to be released, following the launch of Sonnet 4.5 in September and Haiku 4.5 in October. As expected, the new version of Opus has state-of-the-art performance on a range of benchmarks, including coding read more

Nuclear startup X-energy raised $700 million in a Series D round, the company told TechCrunch. The new fundraise comes less than a year after it expanded its Series C from $500 million to $700 million, bringing the total raised in the last year or so to $1.4 billion, a sizable amount even in the heady read more

Pocket Casts, the podcast app owned by Tumblr’s parent company Automattic, launched a new feature that lets you create podcast playlists, allowing you to organize your favorite episodes in just the order you like. You can either create a playlist manually, or Pocket Casts can automatically create one for you. Playlists are designed to better read more

“When people see it, they say, ‘that’s it?… It’s so simple.” That’s how OpenAI CEO Sam Altman describes how he thinks people will respond to seeing the company’s forthcoming AI hardware device for the first time. The device is the result of the collaboration between OpenAI and Apple’s former chief designer Jony Ive. Not much read more

Thomas Lee Young doesn’t sound like your typical Silicon Valley founder. The 24-year-old CEO of Interface, a San Francisco startup using AI to prevent industrial accidents, is a white guy with a Caribbean accent and a Chinese last name, a combination he finds amusing enough to mention when he’s first introduced to business contacts. Born read more

OpenAI’s social app Sora launched with a controversial feature called Cameo, allowing users to deepfake themselves or others (with permission). The feature had a tenuous rollout — Martin Luther King Jr.’s estate had to get involved, to give you an idea of what went on — but now it faces a new challenge. Apparently, Cameo read more

During the first six months of Trump’s term, 154,000 federal employees signed up for the deferred resignation program, Reuters reported, while more than 70,000 retired. Both numbers were clear increases (tens of thousands) over exits from government in prior years, Kamarck’s report noted. “A lot of people said, ‘the hell with this’ and left,” Kamarck read more

Conventional wisdom suggests that climate tech is entering a winter season, where political and investor interest and investment levels are cooling — an ironic contrast with the climate itself, which keeps delivering years of record warmth. A new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) suggests there has never been a better time to go read more

Facebook Groups are getting more Reddit-like with newly added support for nicknames. The feature, which allows users to post under a custom username instead of their real name, provides an alternative to posting anonymously. With anonymous posting, users can share without the post being connected to their Facebook profile and real-life identity, but this approach read more

Byju Raveendran, the embattled founder of Indian edtech giant Byju’s, has blasted a U.S. bankruptcy court’s order directing him to pay more than $1.07 billion. He is denying wrongdoing, accusing lenders of misleading the court, and vowing to appeal a ruling that marks a dramatic fall for a onetime poster boy of India’s startup boom. read more

A new feature on X has revealed that a number of major MAGA accounts on the platform are operated by people based overseas. And in the days since these accounts were exposed, President Donald Trump has continued boosting several of them. Many of the accounts, which have large followings and claim to be conservative people read more

Waymo continues to expand its reach, with the robotaxi company posting Friday that it’s now “officially authorized to drive fully autonomously across more of the Golden State.” Waymo already operates in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles (and outside California as well, in Atlanta, Austin, and Phoenix). But maps published by California’s Department of read more

There’s a new AI-powered toy for kids called Stickerbox, and, before you groan, I’m here to report that it’s surprisingly fun. Stickerbox, a product born out of Brooklyn-based startup Hapiko, is a voice-activated sticker printer. The device takes whatever creative idea you have in your head and transforms it into a printed sticker that you read more

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to do away with my Netflix subscription. I simply was barely using it, and whenever I did it was more out of habit than it really being the thing I wanted to do with my time. Sure, there’s still some decent stuff on there, but the vast majority read more

The Android operating system is incredibly versatile. Beyond smartphones, it officially powers tablets, watches, TVs, cars, and XR headsets. However, it has virtually no presence on traditional PCs, where Google instead relies on ChromeOS. Despite Google’s efforts to challenge the dominance of Windows and macOS, ChromeOS remains a distant third. To close this gap, the read more