AI & RoboticsNews

What ClickUp’s mass layoff tells us about the future of work

AI’s biggest champions have argued for some time that the technology will usher in an era of unprecedented productivity gains, richly rewarding workers who harness it while displacing those who don’t. Zeb Evans, CEO of the collaboration software startup ClickUp, claims that this shift is imminent. Last Thursday, Evans announced on X that the company, which was last valued in 2021 at $4…
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AI & RoboticsNews

The pope’s AI encyclical isn’t really about AI

Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical on Monday. Titled Magnifica Humanitas, it addresses “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.” And while AI is the hook, the problems Leo focuses on are older and more pervasive: inequality, war…
AI & RoboticsNews

How VCs and founders use inflated ‘ARR’ to crown AI startups 

Last month, Scott Stevenson, co-founder and CEO of the legal AI startup Spellbook, took to X in an effort to expose what he called a “huge scam” among AI startups: inflation of the revenue figures that they announce publicly. “The reason many AI startups are crushing revenue records is because they are using a dishonest metric. The biggest funds in the world are supporting this and…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Google is pitching an AI agent ecosystem to consumers who may not buy it

One of the most promising introductions at Google’s I/O developer conference on Tuesday was a new way for consumers to use the web: AI agents. Unfortunately, it was also the most confusing. Google took the wraps off information agents, a reinvention of the aging Google Alerts service, now infused with AI. These AI agents are designed to operate in the background 24/7, helping users stay up to…
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AI & RoboticsNews

IrisGo, a startup backed by Andrew Ng, looks to become the AI desktop buddy you never knew you needed

Industry insiders say the next big thing in AI is “proactive” systems: agents that can anticipate a user’s needs – and fulfill them – before the user even knows what those needs are. One startup that’s looking to make headway in this area is IrisGo. The company, which closed a $2.8 million seed round led by Andrew Ng’s AI Fund earlier this year, is building a desktop companion for…
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