Latest AI News
OpenAI Introduces GPT-5.4 Mini, Nano as Faster Models Optimised for Coding and AI Agents
OpenAI introduced two new artificial intelligence (AI) models in the GPT-5.4 family on Tuesday. Dubbed GPT-5.4 mini and GPT-5.4 nano, the two smaller AI models are faster compared to the larger models in the family, and are aimed at low-latency workloads. Some of the key strengths of these models include coding proficiency, computer use, multimodal understanding, and subagent handling. For developers, these models will also be cost-efficient, given the lower cost of input and output tokens.
View
Google’s Personal Intelligence Is Now Rolling Out to More Users
Google is now expanding Personal Intelligence to more users in the US. The feature, which allows the chatbot to connect to various Google apps and draw context to generate personalised responses, was first introduced in January. At the time, it was only available to US-based paying users. Now, the capability is available inside the Gemini app, Gemini assistant in Google Chrome, and via AI Mode in Search to those on the free tier. Notably, the Mountain View-based tech giant is yet to expand the feature outside of the US.
View
TCS, Pearson Partner to Drive AI-powered Workforce Learning
Multi-year pact to combine AI learning, assessment and cloud to help enterprises build future-ready talent at scale.
View
VerbaFlo Is Building What Real Estate Always Lacked
Founded in 2024, the startup distinguishes itself with a hybrid AI architecture and a per-bed subscription model, targeting large real estate operators.
View
Anthropic Expands Claude Beyond Desktop with ‘Dispatch’ Cross-Device Control Feature
Users can assign tasks remotely and return later to completed outputs, which are processed on their computer using locally available files, connectors and plugins.
View
Perplexity Brings AI-Powered Browsing to the Workplace with Comet Enterprise Launch
Companies can restrict the browser from answering queries without taking actions or limit automated actions to approved domains.
View
Foxconn, SAP Partner to Expand AI Manufacturing in APAC
Foxconn plans to use SAP’s enterprise applications to support its transition to a fully digitised, AI-driven organisation.
View
Software Company Progress Launches Flowmon 13 to Boost AI-Driven Network Security
Flowmon 13 is an AI-powered platform designed to improve network visibility, accelerate threat detection and enhance cyber defence capabilities.
View
NVIDIA Enables 4K XR Streaming on Apple Vision Pro
The new integration streams RTX-powered 3D applications and simulations to Apple Vision Pro for enterprise and developer use.
View
Content Platform Gamma Targets Canva, Adobe With AI-Native Design Push
Gamma Imagine is an AI tool that creates branded visual assets instantly.
View
Accenture, Databricks Form Business Group To Accelerate Enterprise AI Adoption
The partnership helps to bridge the gap between data potential and business performance to help enterprises build and scale AI applications and agents.
View
Social Media Feeds Drive India’s Fast-Growing Micro-Drama Boom, Shows Meta-Ormax study
The study highlights how short-form, episodic storytelling is emerging as both a new content category and a growing business vertical.
View
Adobe, Nvidia Join Hands to Build the Next Generation of Firefly Models
Adobe and Nvidia announced a strategic partnership at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) on Monday. This collaboration focuses on artificial intelligence (AI). It spans agentic creativity and marketing workflows, the development of the next-generation Firefly models, and the integration of Nvidia's platforms into Adobe products. The partnership is part of several major announcements made by Nvidia at the event, including the introduction of the NemoClaw stack for OpenClaw agents, DLSS 5 graphics upscaler, and the launch of the Vera Rubin platforms for agentic workloads.
View
The Usual Suspect Behind Why Indian Startups are Firing More and Hiring Less
Startups targeting productivity now emphasise cross-functional AI capabilities over headcount.
View
Why Garry Tan’s Claude Code setup has gotten so much love, and hate
Y Combinator’s famed CEO Garry Tan told aSXSW audiencethat he’s got “cyber psychosis” and is barely sleeping because he’s so excited to be working with AI agents. “I sleep, like, four hours a night right now,” he told his interviewer, fellow VC Bill Gurley, during an onstage interview Saturday. “I have cyber psychosis, but I think a third of the CEOs that I know have it as well,” he joked about his current AI obsession. (At least, we hope he was joking. AI-induced psychosiscan actually be a dangerous condition.) “Once you try it, you’ll realize: It’s like I was able to re-create my startup that took $10 million in VC capital and 10 people, and I worked on that for two years, and I took anti-narcoleptics — I remember, you know, sort of being on modafinil,” he described, referencing thesleep-preventing drug that’s popular with the startup hustle-culture crowd. (Tan sold his Y Combinator-backed blogging startupPosterous to Twitter back in 2012.) But now, his psyche is so amped working with AI agents, it’s a natural insomnia. “I don’t need modafinil with this revolution. Like, I’m up. I slept at 4 a.m. I woke up at 8 a.m.,” he said. “I wanted to sleep more, but I couldn’t because: Let’s see what’s going on with the 10 workers. I’ve got like three different projects going right now.” He’s so excited about his agents that on March 12, just two days before the interview, he proudly, freely shared his Claude Code (CC) setup on GitHub under an open source license. The setup included six “opinionated” Claude Code skills he developed. Skills are reusable prompts stored in special “skill.md” files that instruct the AI how to behave in specific roles or tasks. “I’ve been having such an amazing time with Claude Code, I wanted you to be able to have my *exact* skill setup,” heposted on X. He called his Claude Code setup “gstack.” gstack is available now athttps://t.co/VPvWDzV5c0Open source, MIT license, let me know if it works for you. It's just one paste to install it on your local Claude Code, and it's a 2nd one to install it in your repo for your teammates. Since then he’s added several more skills. The gstack GitHub repository currently lists 13, but it seems like every hourTan tweetsabout something new. In one post, he gave an example of how his setup works. First, he gets Claude’s opinion on whether a startup idea or feature is a good idea using a skill where Claude acts like CEO. He uses another skill to have Claude write the feature as an engineer, and another to review its own work for bugs and security issues as a code reviewer. Other skills cover design, documentation, and so on. The love for gstack began immediately: His tweet went viral on X and trended onProduct Hunt. It’s accumulated nearly 20,000 stars on GitHub with 2,200 “forks,” meaning people who have taken the files to modify for themselves. But shortly after releasing gstack, Tan posted a tweet that caused a heap of hate, too. He wrote that a CTO friend told him gstack was “god mode” that instantly found a security flaw in his company’s code and predicted it will be widely used. My CTO friend texted me: "Your gstack is crazy. This is like god mode. Your eng review discovered a subtle cross site scripting attack that I don't even think my team is aware of. I will make a bet that over 90% of new repos from today forward will use gstack."https://t.co/P7aOFu5wFM To quote just a few of the many hater comments that followed: One founderposted to X: “(1) Garry should be embarrassed for tweeting this. (2) If it’s true, that CTO should be fired immediately.” Vlogger Mo Bitar did a takeon gstack called“AI is making CEOs delusional” in which he pointed out that the project was essentially “a bunch of prompts” in a text file. The vlogger summarized the common complaint: Developers who use Claude Code already have their own versions of this. Added one person onProduct Hunt, “Garry, let’s be clear and honest: if you weren’t the CEO of YC, this wouldn’t be on PH.” So who’s right? Is gstack a uniquely useful way to work with Claude Code? Or unremarkable? To find out, I asked the experts, including Claude (which, not surprisingly, absolutely loved it). I also queried ChatGPT and Gemini, both of which were surprisingly positive. Gstack is a group of “reasonably sophisticated prompt workflows, but they’re not ‘magical,’” ChatGPT opined. “The real insight here is that AI coding works best when you simulate an engineering org structure. Not when you just ask: ‘build this feature.’” Gemini called the setup “sophisticated,” adding that “gstack is essentially a ‘Pro’ configuration. It is less about making coding easier and more about making it correct.” Claude called gstack “a mature, opinionated system built by someone who actually uses it heavily,” adding, “It’s one of the better examples of Claude Code skill design out there.” We’ll take that as a thumbs-up from an expert on the topic. On Monday, Tan explained in anotherX post, “I took modafinil just to stay awake longer to be able to turn the momentary crystalline structures I had in my brain into lines of code before sleep or human distraction turned it to grains of sand. I love coding but I love coding with AI even more. I speak it listens and we create. I see the structure and it is built. There is no more powerful an experience to me than that.” Tan did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
View
Mistral bets on ‘build-your-own AI’ as it takes on OpenAI, Anthropic in the enterprise
Most enterprise AI projects fail not because companies lack the technology, but because the models they’re using don’t understand their business. The models are often trained on the internet, rather than decades of internal documents, workflows, and institutional knowledge. That gap is whereMistral, the French AI startup, sees opportunity. On Tuesday, the company announced Mistral Forge, a platform that lets enterprises build custom models trained on their own data. Mistral announced the platform atNvidia GTC, Nvidia’s annual technology conference, which this year is focused heavily on AI and agentic models for enterprise. It’s a pointed move for Mistral, a company that has built its business on corporate clients while rivals OpenAI and Anthropic have soared ahead in terms of consumer adoption. CEO Arthur Mensch says Mistral’s laser focus on the enterprise is working: The company is on track tosurpass $1 billion in annual recurring revenuethis year. A big part of doubling down on enterprise is giving companies more control over their data and their AI systems, Mistral says. “What Forge does is it lets enterprises and governments customize AI models for their specific needs,” Elisa Salamanca, Mistral’s head of product, told TechCrunch. Several companies in the enterprise AI space already claim to offer similar capabilities, but most focus on fine-tuning existing models or layering proprietary data on top through techniques like retrieval augmented generation (RAG). These approaches don’t fundamentally retrain models; instead, they adapt or query them at runtime using company data. Mistral, by contrast, says it is enabling companies to train models from scratch. In theory, this could address some of the limitations of more common approaches — for example, better handling of non-English or highly domain-specific data, and greater control over model behavior. It could also allow companies to train agentic systems using reinforcement learning and reduce reliance on third-party model providers, avoiding risks like model changes or deprecation. Forge customers can build their custom models using Mistral’s wide library of open-weight AI models, which includes small models such as the recently introducedMistral Small 4. According to Mistral co-founder and chief technologist, Timothée Lacroix, Forge can help unlock more value out of its existing models. “The trade-offs that we make when we build smaller models is that they just cannot be as good on every topic as their larger counterparts, and so the ability to customize them lets us pick what we emphasize and what we drop,” Lacroix said. Mistral advises on which models and infrastructure to use, but both decisions stay with the customer, Lacroix said. And for teams that need more than guidance, Forge comes withMistral’s team of forward-deployed engineerswho embed directly with customers to surface the right data and adapt to their needs — a model borrowed from the likes of IBM and Palantir. “As a product, Forge already comes with all the tooling and infrastructure so you can generate synthetic data pipelines,” Salamanca said. “But understanding how to build the rightevalsand making sure that you have the right amount of data is something that enterprises usually don’t have the right expertise for, and that’s what the FDEs bring to the table.” Mistral has already made Forge available to partners, including Ericsson, the European Space Agency, Italian consulting company Reply, and Singapore’s DSO and HTX. Early adopters also include ASML, the Dutch chipmaker that ledMistral’s Series Cround last September at a €11.7 billion valuation (approximately $13.8 billion at the time). These partnerships are emblematic of what Mistral expects Forge’s main use cases to be. According to Mistral’s chief revenue officer Marjorie Janiewicz, these include governments who need to tailor models for their language and culture; financial players with high compliance requirements; manufacturers with customization needs; and tech companies that need to tune models to their code base.
View
Google’s Personal Intelligence feature is expanding to all US users
Google announced on Tuesday that it’s expanding Personal Intelligence, its feature that allows its AI assistant to tailor its responses by connecting across your Google ecosystem, such as Gmail and Google Photos, to all users in the U.S. Previously only available to paid users, Personal Intelligence is available inAI Modein Search, theGemini app, and Gemini in Chrome. “Whether you’re looking for a specific brand of sneakers you previously purchased, or planning a family getaway based on your hotel confirmations and past travel memories, Personal Intelligence helps you find exactly what you need without having to give all the context,” Google explained in ablog post. Personal Intelligence is off by default, as users have the option to choose if and when they want to connect their Google apps to these services. If you’re at a tire shop and don’t remember your car’s tire size, any AI chatbot can help determine it. But with Personal Intelligence, Gemini can go further by suggesting all-weather tires after recognizing family road-trip photos in your Google Photos. Or, say you’re planning a vacation and searching for things to do and places to eat that everyone in your family will enjoy. With Personal Intelligence, AI Mode can draw on your hotel booking in Gmail and past travel memories in Google Photos to suggest a tailored itinerary with something for everyone. For example, you might see recommendations like an old-timey ice cream parlor based on the many ice cream selfies stored in Google Photos. In another example, you could be looking for a new bag to match the new shoes you just bought. With Personal Intelligence in Chrome, you’ll see a range of options tailored to your recent purchases and preferred brands and styles. The recommendations will include subtle details, like purses with hardware that go with your new gold shoes. Gemini doesn’t train directly on your Gmail inbox or Google Photos library. Instead, it trains on specific prompts in Gemini or AI Mode and the model’s responses, Google says. Personal Intelligence is available today in the U.S. for AI Mode in Search, and is starting to roll out in the Gemini app and Gemini in Chrome for free-tier users in the U.S. Google notes that these experiences are only available for personal Google accounts, and not for Workspace business, enterprise, or education users.
View
BuzzFeed debuts AI slop apps in bid for new revenue
BuzzFeed, the U.S.-based media company known best for its quizzes, listicles, and, for a time,a Pulitzer Prize-winningjournalism division, isreinventingitself for the AI era. At least, that’s the pitch. At the SXSW conference in Austin, BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Perettiintroducedthe company’s next media foray: a spin-off called Branch Office, which will explore artificial intelligence in consumer-facing apps designed for creativity and connection. The new company is an extension of the experiments BuzzFeed has run for years using AI technology, Peretti explained, in a halting presentation that began with slideshow glitches, before moving on to app demos met with silence or a polite tittering. “We’ve been working on this secretly for over a year, and we’ve learned a lot from the BuzzFeed platform about what is coming with new kinds of AI formats,” Peretti said. “Using AI is the way of connecting people, building community around these pillars of culture, and taste, and community.” Bill Shouldis, a director of product at BuzzFeed and the founder of Branch Office, presented two of the company’s new apps: BF Island and Conjure. The first product,BF Island, is a group chat platform offering features for changing and editing photos using AI. This is not exactly groundbreaking tech in and of itself, but that’s not the point. The key feature here is not the AI toolset but the in-app library of online trends and memes, created by an editorial team, which could inspire users to create AI photos referencing blink-and-you-miss-it trends like the McDonald’s CEOtaste-testing a burgeror the “frame-mogging” drama. (If you don’t know what these are, you’re probably not the “very online” audience that’s being targeted.) The other app, Conjure, is similar to BeReal — the once-a-day temporary photo app — except that it instead appears to guide users to take daily photos of things besides themselves. (As a reminder, BeReal didn’t stick, ultimatelyexiting to Voodooafterlosing traction.) In the demo, for instance, the photo prompt was “What lies between the trees and the moon?,” leading the users to snap a photo of the night sky. A series of spooky images flashed on the screen, followed by a whispered, “What will you conjure?” We don’t get it, and clearly the audience didn’t either. After the demo, a lone cough could be heard among the silence, followed by uncomfortable laughter. Shouldis then noted that AI is involved in Conjure, too, as the app has an “AI spirit for a CEO.” (Again, what?) Peretti also introduced Quiz Party, a social app that lets you take BuzzFeed quizzes with friends and share your results. BuzzFeed’s underwhelming presentation comes only days after the media company shared that it has “substantial doubt”about its ability to continue as a businessand was engaging in strategic conversations focused on fixing its liquidity challenges. The company, which had a net loss of $57.3 million last year, said it would focus this year on its Studio IP and new AI apps, like these. But even the tech-forward audience at SXSW was not convinced. As one person pointed out during the Q&A session after the presentation, BeReal had struggled to get people to come back after the novelty wore off. What would an app like Conjure do to combat the same sort of retention problem? Shouldis said that the app would evolve “and have different types of things happening and not just be exactly what it is today.” He referenced the potential to integrate things like video, audio, and prototyping with Claude Code to build community. The premise behind the new apps is not unreasonable: AI can lead to faster software development, which makes it possible for companies to more quickly iterate and keep people engaged. “In a way, software is the new content,” Peretti noted. Of course, before you can iterate, you have to attract users. With its new apps, BuzzFeed seems to have thought more about what AI can do than what people want to do with AI, which is not a recipe for success.
View
The Pentagon is developing alternatives to Anthropic, report says
After theirdramatic falling-out, it doesn’t seem as though Anthropic and the Pentagon are getting back together. Instead, the Pentagon is building tools to replace Anthropic’s AI, according toa Bloomberg conversationwith Cameron Stanley, the chief digital and AI officer at the Pentagon. “The Department is actively pursuing multiple LLMs into the appropriate government-owned environments,” he said. “Engineering work has begun on these LLMs, and we expect to have them available for operational use very soon.” Anthropic’s $200 million contract with the Department of Defense (DOD) broke down over the last several weeks after the two parties failed to come to an agreement over the degree to which the military could obtainunrestricted accessto Anthropic’s AI. While Anthropic sought to include a contractual clause that prohibits the Pentagon from using its AI for mass surveillance of Americans or to deploy weapons that can fire without human intervention, the Pentagon didn’t budge. Instead, OpenAI swooped in andmade its own agreementwith the Pentagon. The Department of Defense — known under the Trump administration as the Department of War — also signed an agreement with Elon Musk’s xAIto use Grok in classified systems. It makes sense, then, why the Pentagon would be working on phasing Anthropic’s technology out of its workflows. While some reports said there was a smallpossibilitythat Anthropic would reconcile with the Pentagon, this news suggests that the government is preparing to forge ahead without them. In fact, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has declared Anthropic asupply-chain risk, a designation usually reserved for foreign adversaries, which bars companies that work with the Pentagon from working with Anthropic as well. Anthropic ischallengingthis designation in court.
View
Gamma adds AI image generation tools in bid to take on Canva and Adobe
Gamma, a platform that lets you use AI to create presentations and websites, is launching a new image-generation product for making marketing assets as it seeks to better compete with the likes ofCanvaandAdobe. The company says its new product, called Gamma Imagine, will let users employ text prompts to create brand-specific assets like interactive charts and visualizations, marketing collateral, social graphics, and infographics. Gamma currently provides more than 100 templates, which you can use alongside its AI tools to build the kind of assets that you need. To power its data-driven asset generation features, the company is integrating with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Make, Zapier, Atlassian, n8n, and Superhuman Go. “As we started working with a lot of our early users, we realized that in the presentations they want to create, there was a variety of graphical design use cases that they all also had,” Grant Lee, Gamma’s CEO and co-founder, told TechCrunch. “So we worked alongside them to develop basically a new set of tools that allows them to go far beyond just the traditional presentation format,” he said. Lee believes Gamma sits well between tools for professionals like Adobe or Figma, and legacy tools like Microsoft PowerPoint. “We think we can serve the very long tail of knowledge workers and business professionals whose demand for their job is to communicate visually, but they just don’t have the tools. They need to pull in a design resource to be able to help with this stuff, and we want to make an-AI native approach that serves their needs in the sort of middle that we feel is really underserved,” he said. Last November, Gamma raised $68 million in a Series B round led by a16z, at a $2.1 billion valuation. At that time, the company said it had ARR of$100 million, and 70 million users. The company told TechCrunch that it is approaching 100 million users now.
View
Niv-AI exits stealth to wring more power performance out of GPUs
Electricity is a key raw material for artificial intelligence, but new processing techniques outstrip the ability of data center operators to manage their relationship with the power grid, forcing them to throttle down by as much as 30%. “There is so much power squandered in these AI factories,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a keynote speech at the company’s annual GTC customer conference. “Every unused watt is revenue lost,” the company proclaimed during the annual presentation. Today, start-up Niv-AI has emerged from stealth with $12 million in seed funding to solve this problem by precisely measuring GPU power use with new sensors and developing tools to manage it more efficiently. The Tel Aviv-based start-up was founded last year by CEO Tomer Timor and CTO Edward Kizis, and is backed by Glilot Capital, Grove Ventures, Arc VC, Encoded VC, Leap Forward, and Aurora Capital Partners. The company declined to share its valuation. As frontier labs operate thousands of GPUs in concert to train and run advanced models, there are frequent, millisecond-scale power demand surges as the processors switch between computation tasks and communicating with other GPUs. These surges make it difficult for data centers to manage the power they draw from the grid. To avoid being left without sufficient electricity, data centers pay for temporary energy storage to cover surges, or throttle their GPU usage. Both cases reduce the return on investments in expensive chips. “We just can’t continue building data centers the way we build them now,” Lior Handlesman, a partner at Grove Ventures who sits on Niv’s board. The first step in Niv’s roadmap understanding what’s going on; the company is now deploying rack-level sensors that detect power usage at the millisecond level on GPUs that it owns and alongside design partners. The goal is to understand the specific power profiles of different deep learning tasks, and develop mitigation techniques that allow data centers to unlock more of their existing capacity. Naturally, the engineers expect to build an AI model on the data they collect, with the goal of training it to predict and synchronize power loads across the data center—a “copilot” for data center engineers. Niv expects to have an operational system in a handful of US data centers in the next six to eight months. It’s an attractive idea as hyperscalers trying to build new data centers face difficult land-use and supply chain hiccups. The founders see their ultimate product as a missing “intelligence layer” between data centers and the electrical grid. “The grid is actually afraid of the data center consuming too much power at a specific time,” Timor told TechCrunch. “The problem we’re looking at is a problem with two sides of the rope. One is to try to help the data centers utilize more GPUs, and hopefully make more of the power that they’re already paying for. On the other hand, you can also create much more responsible power profiles in between the data centers and the grid.”
View
World launches tool to verify humans behind AI shopping agents
World, co-founded by Sam Altman, is dedicated to creating what it calls “proof of human” tech—ID verification tools for an internet increasingly overrun by AI-generated content of dubious quality. The connection isn’t lost that Altman’s other company, OpenAI,has been widely blamedfor creating a whole lot of that slop (though one could argue he saw the problem coming when he founded World). This week, Tools for Humanity (“TFH”), the startup behind World, released the beta of a new verification tool—this one designed to support the build-out of agentic commerce, the fast-growing practice of using AI programs to browse the web and make purchases on a user’s behalf. More and more consumers are using AI agents to surf websites and buy stuff for them. The trend promises a certain amount of automated convenience, but it has also raised the specter ofnew forms of fraud, spam, and other forms of large-scale internet abuse. On Tuesday, World announced its purported solution: AgentKit, a software development tool geared toward commercial websites that allows for the inclusion of a new verification system that let’s those sites verify a real human is behind an agent’s purchasing decisions. AgentKit relies on World ID, which is the linchpin of TFH’s verification system. The most secure version of the ID is derived from a scan of a user’s eyes via World’sOrb device. The Orb converts an iris into a unique and encrypted digital code—the verified World ID—which can then be used to access TFH’s ecosystem of services via the company’s World app. AgentKit allows a user’s World ID to be integrated into a recently launched payment system known asthe x402 protocol. Developed by Coinbase and Cloudflare, x402 is a blockchain-based open standard to allow automated computer programs totransact with each otherdirectly online — without human intervention at each step. To use AgentKit, users merely register their AI agents with their World ID, which then communicates to websites—via the x402 system—that a distinct and verified human approves of the agent’s purchasing decisions. “AgentKit is built as a complementary extension to the x402 v2 protocol, in coordination with Coinbase,” Tools for Humanity said in a statement. “The integration is designed so that any website already using x402 can enable proof of unique human verification alongside (or instead of) micropayments.” In an interview with TechCrunch, TFH Chief Product Officer, Tiago Sada, compared the new function to delegating “power of attorney” to an agent. By verifying that the AI program is acting on behalf of a particular user, a website can decide whether to trust the transactions initiated by those agents or not, Sada said. “What the World ID badge tells you is that someone is a real and a unique human,” he said, noting that websites can still choose to block particular users they think are operating in bad faith. AgentKit is currently being offered in beta to developers, with the hope that feedback will refine it over time. Sada also noted that consumers will need to have a verified World ID, derived from an Orb scan, to qualify for this kind of verification. It’s a timely move. Major e-commerce sites and financial services have already begun embracing agentic commerce. Last year, companies likeAmazonandMasterCardintroduced automated buying capabilities to their platforms, and Google recentlylaunched its own protocoldesigned to support the trend. As the field grows, the industry is obviously going to want safeguards that ensure it remains reliable and stable. World is clearly attempting to position itself as the de facto provider of that stability.
View
AI’s ‘boys’ club’ could widen the wealth gap for women, says Rana el Kaliouby
AI scientist,entrepreneur, and investor Rana el Kaliouby is worried that AI could become another “boys’ club” in the tech industry. At the SXSW conference in Austin on Sunday, el Kaliouby shared her view that a lack of diversity in the field could lead to economic disadvantages for women in tech, with further ramifications. “I think AI today is a boys’ club. I think diversity is not a very popular conversation topic these days, but I think it’s so important because AI is creating incredible economic opportunity,” el Kaliouby said onstage, when asked if the perception of AI being a boys’ club was a myth. (The interviewer showed a series of headlines from TechCrunch showcasing AI startups with male founders to demonstrate the point.) El Kaliouby, whosold her emotion-detection software company Affectiva in 2021and is now co-founder and general partner at Blue Tulip Ventures, said that three out of four investments at her firm are in startups with women CEOs. “I don’t ‘just’ invest in women,” she clarified. “But I really try to seek these women founders and support them, if not by a check, but in other ways, because they’re not getting the opportunity that they should and they need.” “If women are left out — because they’re not founding these companies, because they’re not getting the funding, because they’re not even investing in the funds that are investing in these companies — we’re going to look back five years from now or a decade from now, and…we’re going to have widened the economic gap like crazy. So this is something that really concerns me,” el Kaliouby noted. Her reference to the current “unpopularity” of the topic of diversity follows the Trump administration’srollbackof Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)programs and initiatives, which thenspilled over to the tech industry. These changes don’t just impact how tech companies hire, but also how their products are developed. In AI, for instance,companies may feel pressureto align their models’ outputs with the White House’s priorities. For el Kaliouby, a lack of diversity isn’t just about the potential for economic disadvantage, she said — it’s also about the outcome. “I do think we are living in a very exciting time. But I also feel strongly that if we don’t intervene, like, if we don’t really stand up for what we care about like ethics and diversity of thought and perspective, and prioritizing this idea of centering around the humans…the outcome may not be great,” she added. “So I feel like it’s a very critical moment to use our voices and our leadership to shape where this is going.”
View
OpenAI expands government footprint with AWS deal, report says
OpenAI signed a deal to work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to sell its AI products to the U.S. government for classified and unclassified work,according to The Information. The partnership comes after OpenAIsigned a deal with the Pentagonto allow the military to use its AI models in its classified network — a win that came in the midst of conflict between Anthropic and the Defense Department. Anthropic has since been named a supply chain risk by the DOD after it refused to back down on allowing its tech to be used for mass surveillance of Americans and to power fully autonomous weapons. Anthropichas suedthe Pentagon in response. OpenAI’s AWS deal sees the AI giant stepping onto Anthropic’s home turf. Amazon hasinvested at least $4 billionin Anthropic, and as such,Anthropic uses AWSas its main cloud provider. Claude models are integrated into Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s AI platform for enterprise and government customers, and Claude is one of themost deeply integratedfrontier models in AWS GovCloud forpublic sector use. The tie-up also expands OpenAI’s federal footprint well beyond its Pentagon deal, positioning the company to serve multiple government agencies through AWS’s existing cloud infrastructure. AWS, a major cloud provider to U.S. agencies, has agreed to distribute OpenAI products across its public-sector customer base, The Information reported, citing sources familiar. The deal could unlock more enterprise contracts, since companies often see government contracts as a stamp of trust and reliability. OpenAI and Amazon Web Services did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s requests for comment.
View
Chips, Robots, Agents: 5 Big AI Bets Jensen Huang Announced at NVIDIA GTC 2026
From chips to software, physical AI, and space data centres, NVIDIA lays out its next phase of AI infrastructure and agent-led computing.
View
