Just a year ago, the narrative around Google and enterprise AI felt stuck. Despite inventing core technologies like the Transformer, the tech giant seemed perpetually on the back foot, overshadowed by OpenAI‘s viral success, Anthropic‘s coding prowess and Microsoft‘s aggressive enterprise push.
But witness the scene at Google Cloud Next 2025 in Las Vegas last week: A confident Google, armed…
The distant horizon is always murky, the minute details obscured by sheer distance and atmospheric haze. This is why forecasting the future is so imprecise: We cannot clearly see the outlines of the shapes and events ahead of us. Instead, we take educated guesses.
The…
This AI startup just raised $7.5m to fix commercial insurance for America’s 24m underprotected small businesses
April 18, 2025
1Fort announced today a $7.5 million seed funding round to improve how small businesses obtain commercial insurance through its AI-powered platform. The New York-based startup, which has experienced 200% month-over-month revenue growth in 2024, aims to automate the outdated…
Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash introduces ‘thinking budgets’ that cut AI costs by 600% when turned down
April 18, 2025
Google has launched Gemini 2.5 Flash, a major upgrade to its AI lineup that gives businesses and developers unprecedented control over how much “thinking” their AI performs. The new model, released today in preview through Google AI Studio and Vertex AI, represents a strategic effort to deliver improved reasoning capabilities while maintaining competitive pricing in the increasingly crowded AI…
‘Vibe coding’ is a term of the moment, as it refers to a more accepted use of AI and natural language prompts for basic code completion.
OpenAI is reportedly looking to get in on the movement — and own more of the full-stack coding experience — as it eyes a $3…
Claude just gained superpowers: Anthropic’s AI can now search your entire Google Workspace without you
April 16, 2025
Anthropic launched major upgrades to its Claude AI assistant today, introducing an autonomous research capability and Google Workspace integration that transform the AI into what the company calls a “true virtual collaborator” for enterprise users. The expansion directly…
Sam Altman at TED 2025: Inside the most uncomfortable - and important - AI interview of the year
April 16, 2025
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that his company has grown to 800 million weekly active users and is experiencing “unbelievable” growth rates, during a sometimes tense interview at the TED 2025 conference in Vancouver last week.
“I have never seen growth in any company, one that I’ve been involved with or not, like this,” Sam Altman told TED head Chris Anderson during their on-stage…
When AI reasoning goes wrong: Microsoft Research shows more tokens can mean more problems
April 16, 2025
In a Nutshell
Microsoft Research finds that inference-time scaling methods for large language models don’t universally improve performance. Varying benefits, token inefficiency, and cost unpredictability challenge assumptions. Verification mechanisms enhance model…
Storycraft — the AI-powered game platform where players create, explore, and share their own interactive story worlds — has raised a $3 million seed round.
The funding for the Montreal-based startup will accelerate the global multiplatform launch of Storycraft’s…
It started with the announcement of OpenAI’s o1 model in Sept. 2024, but really took off with the DeepSeek R1 release in Jan. 2025.
Now, it seems that most major AI model providers and trainers are in a new race to deliver better, faster, and cheaper “reasoning” AI language models — that is, ones that maybe take a little longer to respond to a human user, but ideally do so with better…
