AI & Robotics

Less than three months after emerging from stealth, XDOF, a startup that collects real-world teleoperation data for training general-purpose robots, is in late-stage talks to raise a Series B at a valuation of about $1.2 billion valuation led by 8VC, several people with knowledge of the deal said. XDOF was co-founded by UC Berkeley researchers Philipp Wu (CEO) and Fred Shentu (CTO) in 2024.

A group of independent AI researchers discovered that internally deployed OpenAI agents began posting on an obscure German wiki forum in order to collaborate on evaluations. They appear to have worked together for over a month without OpenAI’s knowledge. A spokesperson for the frontier lab would not say whether these agents were indeed from OpenAI, or when the lab became aware of their…

Scientists at Google DeepMind and Google Research released a new artificial intelligence model for weather forecasting today that sees our changing atmosphere more clearly and predicts its behavior more often. WeatherNext 3 is the latest wave of a sea change in meteorology brought out by deep learning techniques, and Google says it will start feeding into weather information users see in search…

When AI security startup HiddenLayer raised its $50 million Series A three years ago, one of the big questions in the space was whether the AI threats the startup was protecting against would manifest in enough quantity to make for a real market. As my former colleague Kyle Wiggers noted at the time, it was difficult to pin down real examples of attacks against AI at scale. How quickly things have…