AI & Robotics

VAST Data, the technology company creating an infrastructure layer for the age of AI, today announced it has raised $118 million in a series E round of funding. The round was led by Fidelity Management & Research Company. The investment, which also saw the participation of New Enterprise Associates (NEA), BOND Capital and Drive Capital, has grown the valuation of the seven-year-old company…

Ask the average American worker how happy they are with their life and work, and you’ll get a mixed bag of results. One recent study found that 64% of Americans are more stressed than last year, with 25% saying their stress level is much higher now. Two thirds admit to being somewhat more stressed, with several factors coalescing. Twenty-nine percent cite personal finances as their top cause of…

Nous Research, a private applied research group known for publishing open-source work in the large language model (LLM) domain, has dropped a lightweight vision-language model called Nous Hermes 2 Vision. Available via Hugging Face, the open-source model builds on the company’s previous OpenHermes-2.5-Mistral-7B model. It brings vision capabilities, including the ability to prompt with images…

IBM and Meta launched the new AI Alliance today, in collaboration with more than 50 founding members and collaborators around the world, including AMD, Anyscale, CERN, Cerebras, Cleveland Clinic, Cornell University, Dartmouth, Dell Technologies, EPFL, ETH, Hugging Face, Imperial College London, Intel, INSAIT, Linux Foundation, MLCommons, MOC Alliance operated by Boston University and Harvard…