Standing inside the HumanX conference in San Francisco’s Moscone Center, it’s hard not to feel like you’re at the center of the AI universe. Technology leaders swarm the building, and the headquarters of OpenAI and Anthropic are just down the block. But a 70-person startup headquartered 5,000 miles away in Germany’s Black Forest—a region famous for its ham—has become a top competitor to Silicon Valley’s leading labs in AI image generation.In December, Black Forest Labs raised funds at a $3.25 billion valuation, after signing deals to power AI image-generation features in Adobe and the graphic design platform Canva. It has…
Under a new state regulation, venture capital firms operating in California were supposed to submit demographic data about their portfolio companies, including the gender and race of startup founders they backed. But amid public criticism from some tech leaders, the California agency administering the new requirement suspended it just before…
Forbes Reporter Phoebe Liu sat down to discuss the escalating legal battle between Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman ahead of their upcoming April trial. Liu also discusses the allegations of anti-competitive behavior and the financial pressures facing leading AI firms as they navigate rapid innovation, massive capital requirements,…
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned Tuesday that it plans to begin attacking more than a dozen American companies across the Middle East on Wednesday in retaliation for the killing of Iranian citizens in the ongoing war with the US and Israel. The list of companies includes Apple, Google, IBM,…
OpenAI announced Thursday that it had acquired the online business talk show TBPN for an undisclosed sum. The move comes as OpenAI struggles with its public image, which has taken a significant hit in recent months.Since launching in 2024, TBPN has risen in popularity among Silicon Valley circles by offering…
The world’s top AI research conference, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems—better known as NeurIPS—became the latest organization this week to become embroiled in a growing clash between geopolitics and global scientific collaboration. The conference’s organizers announced and then quickly reversed controversial new restrictions for international participants after Chinese…
Cursor announced Thursday the launch of Cursor 3, a new product interface that allows users to spin up AI coding agents to complete tasks on their behalf. The product, which was developed under the code name Glass, is Cursor’s response to agentic coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s…
In a recent experiment, researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz asked Google’s artificial intelligence model Gemini 3 to help clear up space on a computer system. This involved deleting a bunch of stuff—including a smaller AI model stored on the machine.But Gemini did not want to see the…
This week on Uncanny Valley, hosts Brian Barrett and Zoë Schiffer discuss the highlights from Nvidia’s annual developer conference, and why Tesla recently got in trouble with some of its most loyal fans online. Plus, Meta’s initial decision to shut down Horizon Worlds VR on the Quest headset signals the…
Kalshi has been temporarily banned in Nevada, marking the latest escalation in the widening regulatory war over prediction markets. The First Judicial District Court of Nevada issued a 14-day restraining order, effective immediately, barring the company from “offering a derivatives exchange and prediction market which offers event-based contracts relating to…
Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour posted a video on Wednesday of six men decked out in business casual doing push-ups on the sidewalk. “This is how Kalshi Q1 board meeting ended,” he wrote on X. The board members are laughing and smiling in the video after their impromptu cardio session, and…
The defense tech industry has been supercharged under President Trump. Our panel of experts will help make sense of Big Tech’s role in various military operations unfolding across the world—including the federal government’s occupation of Minnesota, the bombings of boats in the Caribbean, and the war in Iran and it’s…
Arm, one of the world’s leading chip design firms, announced Tuesday that it is producing its own semiconductors. The move is a departure from its long-standing model of licensing intellectual property to companies that manufacture and sell chips themselves. Speaking to a live audience in San Francisco, Arm CEO Rene…
More than half of the nine developers who worked on the game have either obtained a US visa or tried and failed to do so. Most of them are from China, but the team also intentionally recruited talent from other countries in the hopes of incorporating more diverse immigrant perspectives.“Everybody…
Google is shaking up the team behind Project Mariner, its AI agent that can navigate the Chrome browser and complete tasks on a user’s behalf, WIRED has learned. In recent months, some Google Labs staffers who worked on the research prototype have moved on to higher-priority projects, according to two…
Spotlight
On the bank of the river that runs through the Swedish town…
Move over Sora 2, there’s a hot new AI video model in…
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is still in the hot seat this week…
Anthropic might have misgivings about giving the US military unfettered access to…
