AI & Robotics

Humans&, a startup with a philosophy that AI should empower people rather than replace them, has raised $480 million in seed funding at a $4.48 billion valuation, reports The New York Times. Investors in the round include chipmaker Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and VC firms SV Angel, GV, and Laurene Powell Jobs’ firm Emerson Collective. The megadeal for the three-month-old company…

What happens when an AI agent decides the best way to complete a task is to blackmail you? That’s not a hypothetical. According to Barmak Meftah, a partner at cybersecurity VC firm Ballistic Ventures, it recently happened to an enterprise employee working with an AI agent. The employee tried to suppress what the agent wanted to do, what it was trained to do, and it responded by scanning the…

The Trump administration wants the largest electricity grid to add $15 billion worth of new power generation – and he wants tech companies to pay for it, even if they don’t need the capacity. The White House and the governors of several states in the region want grid operator PJM to hold an auction for 15-year contracts for new generating capacity. The administration said it wants tech…

The tech world’s nonconsensual, sexualized deepfake problem is now bigger than just X. In a letter to the leaders of X, Meta, Alphabet, Snap, Reddit, and TikTok, several U.S. senators are asking the companies to provide proof that they have “robust protections and policies” in place and to explain how they plan to curb the rise of sexualized deepfakes on their platforms. The…