AI & Robotics

Andrew Dai left Google DeepMind knowing visual AI was the frontier he wanted to stake his claim in. He pulled off a whirlwind fundraise that resulted in a more aggressive valuation-to-capital ratio than Thinking Machines, which raised one of the largest rounds in U.S. history. In this episode of Build Mode, host and Startup Battlefield lead Isabelle Johannessen sits down with Andrew Dai, founder…

Voice AI startups’ biggest unlock has been handling calls for enterprises in areas like sales, marketing, and customer support. Large organizations are offloading calls to voice model developers like ElevenLabs and Deepgram; infrastructure companies like Vapi, Retell, and LiveKit; and dedicated customer support shops like Decagon and Sierra. San Francisco-based Rime is trying to gain an edge in…

For several weeks this summer, the AI industry was fixated on Anthropic’s latest frontier models and Washington’s fight to control who was granted access to them. But while everyone was watching the frontier, developers kept building – and they weren’t waiting around for permission from the Anthropics and OpenAIs of the world. Chinese open-weight models accounted for 41% of downloads on…

Quick question: Do you want AI to be so well trained, it could help husbands (or wives, for that matter) plan the perfect murder of their spouses? Just as a gut reaction, that feels like a no for me. I wouldn’t even think it was a particularly hard question. But America contains many diverse perspectives, and one such perspective was shared by Comma AI founder and longtime jailbreaker George…