AI & Robotics

On Friday, OpenAI said that it will train its models using cached copies and simulated versions of the internet instead of the live web because the models are too unpredictable to be trusted with live internet access. The frontier lab announced its new policy two weeks after its rival, Anthropic, began limiting its newest and, in theory, most capable models from accessing the live internet.

Ambient AI is having a moment. Amazon launched a new wrist-worn device with Bee; a former Plaud exec launched ambient apps through a startup called Ambi, which aims to also build its own hardware; and Apple launched Voice Intelligence features during its iPhone launch in September. Now, a company called Nirva is betting on a jewelry-like pendant and its ability to listen only to the wearer. The…

The U.S. National Security Agency’s sent out an alarming warning on Wednesday that two critical holes had been found in PHP, with patches already issued by the PHP Foundation. PHP is a server-side programming language so widely used for web applications that it powers roughly 70% of the websites on the internet; by some accounts, that’s more than 33 million sites. It is also used by…

Meeting notetaking tool Otter.ai announced on Tuesday that it has raised $320 million from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF), which provides capital to startups without diluting equity and gets returns on the results of marketing spend. Otter.ai said that it will use these funds for enterprise growth, go-to-market strategy, international expansion, and product innovation. The…