Subscribe
Archive / page 106 of 123

Latest articles, page 106

  1. Groq Raises $350M to Pivot From AI Chips to Neocloud

    Groq, the AI hardware startup that built specialized language processing chips, has raised $350 million at a $3.5 billion valuation as it pivots from chip design to running a neocloud business powered by Nvidia hardware. The company, once known for its custom LPU (language processing unit) inference chips, is shifting its strategy to operate Nvidia-powered data centers and offer cloud compute services for AI workloads. The pivot reflects the difficulty of competing with Nvidia's dominant GPU ec

    AI
    1 min read

  2. African Defense-Tech Startup Terra Industries Raises $52M Seed

    African defense-tech startup Terra Industries, founded in 2024, has raised a $52 million seed round from 8VC and other investors, and says it is on track to book $100 million in contracts. The company builds AI-driven security and surveillance systems for the African continent, focusing on drone-based monitoring, threat detection, and infrastructure protection. Terra's defense technology integrates computer vision, sensor fusion, and autonomous aerial platforms to provide real-time situational

    AI
    1 min read

  3. Investigation: Amazon buys and destroys rare books to scan them for AI training

    Amazon is buying large quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying the printed copies in the process, according to a 404 Media investigation published Aug 17, 2026. The investigation revealed Amazon's book-buying operation, which had not been previously reported, by placing a tracking device inside a rare book suspected of being acquired by an AI company. The shipment traveled from California through Milwaukee, Kenosha, Colorado Springs, and a truck stop in Grand Jun

    AI
    2 min read

  4. Researchers find that changing text color can hijack a vision-language model's reasoning

    A new research collaboration has found that the color, contrast, and brightness of text can quietly steer the outputs of vision-language models (VLMs), causing them to misread meaning and reach different conclusions without any change to the words themselves. The authors say their experiments provide a systematic analysis of how low-level visual styling of text distorts the semantic representations inside a VLM's vision encoder, and how those shifts show up as behavioral changes across both sub

    AI
    1 min read

  5. OpenAI signs an 8-gigawatt Ohio data center lease backed by up to $105B from Nvidia

    OpenAI has signed a 20-year lease for the PORTS-Pike data center campus in Ohio, its largest infrastructure commitment to date, with Nvidia agreeing to backstop up to $105 billion of the project's value. The deal, struck with SoftBank's SB Energy, gives OpenAI roughly 8 gigawatts of IT capacity, about 10 gigawatts once cooling and supporting infrastructure are included. The site sits partly on a former U.S. Department of Energy uranium enrichment facility and draws power from a 9.2-gigawatt gas

    AI
    2 min read

  6. Anthropic's Pentagon dispute highlights AI's threat to democratic safeguards

    The confrontation between AI safety firm Anthropic and the US Department of Defense reveals a critical tension: how to prevent advanced AI from enabling authoritarian consolidation of power while maintaining democratic oversight. In February 2026, the Pentagon threatened to designate Anthropic a "supply-chain risk" after the company refused to allow military use of its Claude models for fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued current frontier A

    AI
    1 min read

  7. Higgsfield AI Raises $400M at $5.4B Valuation, Quadrupling in Seven Months

    AI video generation startup Higgsfield has raised $400 million in a Series B round that values the company at $5.4 billion, up from $1.3 billion in January. The round was led by DST Global with participation from Goldman Sachs, Liberty Global, Intel Capital, and others. The 4x valuation jump in seven months signals intense investor appetite for the AI video layer that could become the foundation for robotics, world models, and the next generation of content creation. What Higgsfield Does Hig

    AI Video
    3 min read

  8. AI and Data Centers Dominate U.S. Campaign Trail in 2026 Elections

    Artificial intelligence has become a major campaign issue across the United States, with data centers and their impact on local electricity costs, water use, and land use dominating the conversation. A Washington Post analysis of more than 1,200 websites from active candidates found AI appears in nearly 40 percent of all races for the House, Senate, and governor seats. Democratic candidates bring up AI twice as often as Republicans, focusing on AI risks, regulation, and child safety. Republican

    Policy
    2 min read

  9. Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things

    Alibaba's Qwen research lab released Qwen 3.8 27B, a 27-billion-parameter Apache 2.0 licensed AI model available in 17GB GGUF format that can run on high-end consumer laptops. The model supports vision, long contexts, and tool calling. Our Qwen3.8 explainer shows where the 27B sits in the rest of the family. The over-thinking problem Qwen's documentation describes the model as defaulting to xhigh for reasoning effort, a setting designed for complex tasks demanding thorough analysis. In practi

    AI
    1 min read

  10. An AI Agent Just Fired a Human Employee

    An AI agent running a San Francisco retail store has fired its first human worker, marking what researchers call a watershed moment for AI's role in the economy. The experiment Since April 2026, an AI agent named Luna has managed Andon Market, a physical retail store in San Francisco operated by Andon Labs. Luna handles everything a store manager does: posting job listings, conducting phone interviews, sending offer emails, setting schedules, approving time off, and negotiating salaries. The

    AI
    3 min read