Latest AI News
IIT Madras Picks IPOs Over Unicorns
The IIT Madras Incubation Cell added 112 startups in FY26, marking its second straight year above the 100-startup milestone.
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Taylor Swift’s Legal Play Signals New Fight to Protect Celebrity Identity in AI Era
Swift joins a growing list of celebrities taking legal steps to counter the misuse of AI-generated voices and likenesses.
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Google’s Best Small AI Models Just Got 3x Faster
With Multi-Token Prediction technology, Google has now enabled developers to bypass traditional memory bottlenecks with Gemma 4.
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Ex-OpenAI CTO’s Startup Has the Highest Talent Density
Thinking Machines Lab and OpenAI sit at opposite ends of the scale spectrum—one a 140-person elite research lab, the other a 4,500-person AI giant. Yet, both lead Paraform’s talent density rankings
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Broadcom Launches VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 to Power Enterprise AI
VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 combines virtual machines, containers and AI workloads, reducing complexity while improving efficiency for enterprise deployments.
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In a First, IIT Guwahati Launches Hybrid MTech Course in Robotics and AI
The programme will allow entry without a GATE score and looks to offer flexible learning for both fresh graduates and working professionals.
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Cerebras Confirms IPO Launch Again, Targets $35 Bn Valuation
The AI chipmakera plans to raise nearly $3 billion through a Nasdaq listing, as demand for inference infrastructure continues to rise.
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Inside Wispr Flow’s Obsession to Kill Typing
Wispr has earned praise for its distinctly ‘Apple-esque’ product, with its microinteractions, design, and obsessive attention to detail.
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OpenAI Makes GPT-5.5 Instant as the New Default Model in ChatGPT
GPT-5.5 Instant can draw on past chats, uploaded files, and connected services such as Gmail to tailor responses.
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Altara secures $7M to bridge the data gap that’s slowing down physical sciences
Companies working on batteries, semiconductors, and medical devices generate vast amounts of data — and much of it ends up scattered across spreadsheets and legacy systems, making it hard to use to improve products or understand failures. San Francisco-based startupAltara, which just secured $7 million in seed funding, says it has built an AI layer designed to bridge these data gaps and bring fragmented technical information into a single platform. The round was led by Greylock, with participation from Neo, BoxGroup, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Jeff Dean. Altara was founded in 2025 by Eva Tuecke (pictured right), who previously conducted particle physics research at Fermilab and worked at SpaceX; and Catherine Yeo (pictured left), a former AI engineer at Warp. The two met while studying computer science at Harvard University. “Imagine if you’re a company building next-generation batteries, and a battery fails during the cell testing in the R&D process,” Yeo said. “A team of engineers has to go in and manually check a lot of different sources of data, anything from their sensor logs to their temperature data, moisture data. They cross-check historical failure reports.” Scientists and engineers often spend weeks or months on this “scavenger hunt” across a multitude of data sources just to diagnose and resolve failures, she said. Altara claims that its AI dramatically slashes the time required for this process, condensing weeks of manual data triaging into minutes. Corinne Riley, a partner at Greylock, compares what Altara is doing in the physical sciences to the role of site reliability engineers in the software world. If a system fails, “an SRE will go in, and they’ll go look at the observability stack of the company,” she said. “Someone pushed a change to the code, and that’s what caused an outage.” For instance, Greylock-backed Resolve, which is valued at$1.5 billion, uses AI to diagnose software failures. Altara’s vision is to act as the hardware equivalent, determining exactly what went wrong when a battery or a semiconductor fails to perform. Altara isn’t the only startup using AI to accelerate development in the physical sciences. Startups likePeriodic LabsandRadical AIare also tackling scientific research from the ground up. Altara is taking a different, much less capital-intensive approach though. Rather than trying to replace decades-old research and manufacturing firms, Altara provides an intelligence layer that plugs into their existing data. In fact, Greylock’s Riley views AI for physical science as the “next big frontier” and predicts an impending explosion of development in the sector.
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SAP bets $1.16B on 18-month-old German AI lab and says yes to NemoClaw
By OpenAI COO’sown admissionlast February, “we have not yet really seen AI penetrate enterprise business processes.” But for enterprise software giant SAP, whose stock has dropped significantly in 2026 in partfrom the “SaaSpocalypse,”the issue is still front and center. On Monday, the European heavyweight announced its intention toacquire German AI startup Prior Labsfor an undisclosed amount. Pending regulatory approval, SAP plans to invest €1 billion (approximately $1.16 billion) into the business over the next four years to grow it into an AI lab focused on structured data — the tables and databases where enterprise information typically sits. SAP declined to disclose how much it spent on the acquisition itself, butsources told Pathfoundersthat this was a healthy exit: an “almost all cash” deal, with well over half a billion dollars in cash up front for the startup’s founders — Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir. The trio co-foundedPrior Labsjust 18 months ago with a focus on tabular foundation models (TFMs) — AI models that can make predictions from data that sits in tables and databases. This is potentially a better fit for enterprises than language models. It is certainly a better fit for SAP, whose widely used software products for accounting, HR, procurement and expense management rely on its database. However, Germany’s most valuable company also seems be playing defense as the tech industry marches toward agentic AI. While it works to create its own AI lab, the company has blocked OpenClaw and any other agent tech that it has not explicitly authorized,The Informationwas first to spot. In response to a request for comment, SAP’s press department referred TechCrunch to the company’slatest API policy, which does say that SAP “prohibits” AI agents from accessing its products through its API except for those that are “SAP-endorsed architectures.” Authorized architectures of course include SAP’s own offering,Joule Agents, still in beta, which lets customers create their own agents. Nvidia alsoannouncedin March that SAP’s Joule supportsNvidia’s Agent Toolkit, which is software for managing agents. This toolkit is the foundation for Nvidia’s enterprise-ready, security-focused OpenClaw competitor, NemoClaw. Hence SAP customers will be authorized to use NemoClaw agents. For a giant incumbent player like SAP, AI is both a threat and an opportunity. “It’s all about how quickly [we can] as SAP actually also embark [on] these technologies in our R&D portfolio to keep the relative economies of scale advantage,” CFO Dominik Asamtold CNBCin January. SAP hasn’t been sitting on its hands. The German companyinvested in generative AI companiesthat develop language models large and small: In 2023, it backed OpenAI rival Anthropic — as well as Aleph Alpha and Cohere, which nowintend to mergeto form “a global AI powerhouse.” It had also developedSAP-RPT-1, a relational pretrained transformer model. “Early on, SAP recognized that the greatest untapped opportunity in enterprise AI wasn’t large language models; it was AI built for the structured data that runs the world’s businesses,” SAP CTO Philipp Herzig declared in a statement. But Prior Labs’ acquisition is a significant shortcut in that direction. Its TabPFN model series has experienced a lot of traction among developers. In ablog poston the deal, the startup’s founders said that its open source models have been downloaded over three million times. In a press release, SAP promised that Prior Labs will maintain the open source versions: “The lab will operate as an independent unit to ensure research velocity while SAP provides long-term investment and a direct path to productization across the SAP portfolio with SAP AI Core and SAP Business Data Cloud as well as the agentic layer with Joule.” SAP and the startup headquartered in Freiburg, Germany, hope that this investment will lead to TFMs that can grab data in the tables where it lives, combine that with language, reasoning, and domain knowledge. More than that, they hope that Prior Labs, with this “massive boost” from SAP, can become a new “globally-leading frontier AI lab for structured data — in Europe, in the open,” founder and CEO Frank Hutter celebrated in apost on X. In February 2025, the startup had previously raised some$9.3 million in a pre-seed funding roundled by Balderton Capital — more than competitorNeuralk-AI, but a lot less thanFundamental, which emerged out of stealth with a $255 million Series A in February. In a poston X, Balderton partner James Wise called Prior Labs’ acquisition “one of Germany’s biggest ever venture outcomes.” As for SAP, its stock is currently trading slightly upwards. Meanwhile, SAP is being very strict as to the agents it will allow into its ecosystem. This is a wildly different approach than Salesforce, anotherincumbent caught in the SaaSpocalypse. It is allowing enterprise to choose their own agents, including OpenClaw if they so wish,with its new Headless 360 architecture.
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OpenAI releases GPT-5.5 Instant, a new default model for ChatGPT
On Tuesday, OpenAI released a new foundation model called GPT-5.5 Instant, which will replace GPT-5.3 Instant as the default ChatGPT model. The company said the model reduces hallucination in sensitive areas such as law, medicine, and finance, while maintaining the low latency of its predecessor. OpenAI releasedthe latest GPT-5.5 model last monthwith the company claiming improvements in areas like coding and knowledge work. The new model also achieved a score of 81.2 in the AIME 2025 math test, compared to 65.4 for the older model. It also outperformed its predecessor on the MMMU-Pro multimodal reasoning benchmark, with a score of 76 vs. 69.2. The release placed a particular emphasis on context management. GPT-5.5 Instant can use its search tool to refer back to past conversations, files, and Gmail to give you more personalized answers. This feature will be available to Plus and Pro users on the web, with plans to roll it out to mobile soon. OpenAI said that it plans to extend access to this feature to Free, Go Business, and enterprise users in the coming weeks. With this update, ChatGPT will also show memory sources across all models to help you understand where it generated the answers from. Users can delete outdated sources or correct them if the answer was wrong. Crucially, the company said that if you share a chat with someone, they won’t be able to see the memory sources. For developers, the GPT-5.5 model will be available through API as “chat-latest,” with 5.3 available as an option for paid users for only three months. The company hasfaced rebuttalfrom previous model withdrawal moves. When OpenAI withdrew its GPT-4o model, there was significant backlash from users whorelated to the model’s “personality.”GPT-4o affirmed users’ choices frequently and that made them feel a connection to that particular model. Users whosigned petitionsto stop OpenAI from retiring it described the model as their “best friend” or “a mirror.” Despite the outcry, GPT-4o was deprecated in February 2026.
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