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OpenAI, not yet public, raises $3B from retail investors in monster $122B fund raise
OpenAI's latest funding round, led by Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank, values the AI lab at $852 billion as it nears an IPO.
OpenAI raises $122B to accelerate the next phase of AI
Slack adds 30 AI features to Slackbot, its most ambitious update since the Salesforce acquisition
Models & Gen AI
Runway launches $10M fund, Builders program to support early stage AI startups
Runway is launching a $10 million fund and startup program to back companies building with its AI video models, as it pushes toward interactive, real-time “video intelligence” applications.
Xenv.sh – the first secrets manager built for AI agents
Article URL: https://xenv.sh/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47593562 Points: 1 # Comments: 0
CrowdStrike, Cisco and Palo Alto Networks all shipped agentic SOC tools at RSAC 2026 — the agent behavioral baseline gap survived all three
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz highlighted in his RSA Conference 2026 keynote that the fastest recorded adversary breakout time has dropped to 27 seconds. The average is now 29 minutes, down from 48 minutes in 2024. That is how much time defenders have before a threat spreads. Now CrowdStrike sensors detect more than 1,800 distinct AI applications running on enterprise endpoints, representing nearly 160 million unique application instances. Every one generates detection events, identity events, and data access logs flowing into SIEM systems architected for human-speed workflows. Cisco found that 85% of surveyed enterprise customers have AI agent pilots underway. Only 5% moved agents into production, according to Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel in his RSAC blog post. That 80-point gap exists because security teams cannot answer the basic questions agents force. Which agents are running, what are they authorized to do, and who is accountable when one goes wrong. “The
OpenClaw has 500,000 instances and no enterprise kill switch
“Your AI? It’s my AI now.” The line came from Etay Maor, VP of Threat Intelligence at Cato Networks, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat at RSAC 2026 — and it describes exactly what happened to a U.K. CEO whose OpenClaw instance ended up for sale on BreachForums. Maor's argument is that the industry handed AI agents the kind of autonomy it would never extend to a human employee, discarding zero trust, least privilege, and assume-breach in the process. The proof arrived on BreachForums three weeks before Maor’s interview. On February 22, a threat actor using the handle “fluffyduck” posted a listing advertising root shell access to the CEO’s computer for $25,000 in Monero or Litecoin. The shell was not the selling point. The CEO’s OpenClaw AI personal assistant was. The buyer would get every conversation the CEO had with the AI, the company’s full production database, Telegram bot tokens, Trading 212 API keys, and personal details the CEO disclosed to the assistant about family an
Nvidia-backed ThinkLabs AI raises $28 million to tackle a growing power grid crunch
ThinkLabs AI, a startup building artificial intelligence models that simulate the behavior of the electric grid, announced today that it has closed a $28 million Series A financing round led by Energy Impact Partners (EIP), one of the largest energy transition investment firms in the world. Nvidia’s venture capital arm NVentures and Edison International, the parent company of Southern California Edison, also participated in the round. The funding marks a significant escalation in the race to apply AI not just to software and content generation, but to the physical infrastructure that powers modern life. While most AI investment headlines have centered on large language models and generative tools, ThinkLabs is pursuing a different and arguably more consequential application: using physics-informed AI to model the behavior of electrical grids in real time, compressing engineering studies that once took weeks or months into minutes. "We are dead focused on the grid," ThinkLabs CEO Josh W
You can now use ChatGPT with Apple’s CarPlay
ChatGPT is now accessible from your CarPlay dashboard if you have iOS 26.4 or newer and the latest version of the ChatGPT app, 9to5Mac reports. Apple's recently-launched iOS 26.4 update added support for "voice-based conversational apps" in CarPlay, opening the door to let you use AI chatbots with voice features through Apple's in-car platform. When using ChatGPT through CarPlay, the app doesn't show text conversations, according to 9to5Mac - instead, you can only have conversations with the app using your voice. (Apple's developer guidelines ask that apps don't show text or imagery as responses.) The CarPlay app isn't completely devoid of … Read the full story at The Verge.
Sandflare – I built a sandbox that launches AI agent VMs in ~300ms
I've been building Sandflare for the past few months — it launches Firecracker microVMs for AI agents in ~300ms cold start. The idea came from running LLM-generated code in production. Docker felt too risky (shared kernel), full VMs too slow (5–10s). Firecracker hits the middle: real VM isolation, fast boot. I also added managed Postgres because almost every agent I built needed persistent state. One call wires a database into a sandbox. There are great tools in this space already (E2B, Modal, Daytona) — I wanted something with batteries-included Postgres, and simpler pricing What I'm trying to figure out: how do I get cold start below 100ms? Currently the bottleneck is the Firecracker API + network setup. Would love to hear from anyone who's pushed Firecracker further. https://sandflare.io Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47583255 Points: 2 # Comments: 3
Announcing the LangChain + MongoDB Partnership: The AI Agent Stack That Runs On The Database You Already Trust
Build production AI agents on MongoDB Atlas — with vector search, persistent memory, natural-language querying, and end-to-end observability built in.
McCormick combines with Unilever’s food division and adds Hellmann’s and Knorr to its brands
The brand will now add the mayo and chicken stock brands to its litany of products including various hot sauce brands.
Accelerating the next phase of AI
OpenAI raises $122 billion in new funding to expand frontier AI globally, invest in next-generation compute, and meet growing demand for ChatGPT, Codex, and enterprise AI.
Shifting to AI model customization is an architectural imperative
In the early days of large language models (LLMs), we grew accustomed to massive 10x jumps in reasoning and coding capability with every new model iteration. Today, those jumps have flattened into incremental gains. The exception is domain-specialized intelligence, where true step-function improvements are still the norm. When a model is fused with an organization’s…
Art schools are being torn apart by AI
The curriculum at creative institutions is evolving to handle gen AI tools, and a lot of people aren’t happy about it. | Image by Cath Virginia / The Verge When my baby brother, a 3D modelling and animation student, talks to me about his projects and studies, the pride I usually feel is becoming increasingly tainted by a growing sense of dread. As a creative professional and former design student myself, I understand all too well how fierce the competition for postgraduate jobs will be, but his future is being threatened by something that barely even existed during my own time in higher education: generative AI. College students are feeling that fear as well. Earlier this year, in a small protest at CalArts, posters that requested the help of AI artists for a thesis were reportedly altered wit … Read the full story at The Verge.
Mistral raises $830M to build Nvidia-powered AI centres in Europe
Article URL: https://www.ft.com/content/229f4f59-d518-4e00-abd6-5a5b727cd2aa Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47571802 Points: 4 # Comments: 1
LogicDiff: Logic-Guided Denoising Improves Reasoning in Masked Diffusion Language Models
arXiv:2603.26771v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) generate text by iteratively unmasking tokens from a fully masked sequence, offering parallel generation and bidirectional context. However, their standard confidence-based unmasking strategy systematically defers high-entropy logical connective tokens, the critical branching points in reasoning chains, leading to severely degraded reasoning performance. We introduce LogicDiff, an inference-time method that replaces confidence-based unmasking with logic-role-guided unmasking. A lightweight classification head (4.2M parameters, 0.05% of the base model) predicts the logical role of each masked position (premise, connective, derived step, conclusion, or filler) from the base model's hidden states with 98.4% accuracy. A dependency-ordered scheduler then unmasks tokens in logical dependency order: premises first, then connectives, then derived steps, then conclusions. Without modifying a single paramet
AI news from 200+ sources
Get Started FreeGeneral AI
With its new app store, Ring bets on AI to go beyond home security
Ring's app store will allow the company to target broader use cases beyond security, like elder care or business needs.
AWS launches frontier agents for security testing and cloud operations
I'm excited to announce that AWS Security Agent on-demand penetration testing and AWS DevOps Agent are now generally available, representing a new class of AI capabilities we announced at re:Invent called frontier agents. These autonomous systems work independently to achieve goals, scale massively to tackle concurrent tasks, and run persistently for hours or days without constant human oversight. Together, these agents are changing the way we secure and operate software. In preview, customers and partners report that AWS Security Agent compresses penetration testing timelines from weeks to hours and the AWS DevOps Agent supports 3–5x faster incident resolution.
Amazon AI Blog
Treeline raises $25 million in Andreessen Horowitz-led funding to streamline IT services with AI
The round reflects growing investor interest in AI‑native platforms to modernize legacy outsourced IT.
Yupp shuts down after raising $33M from a16z crypto’s Chris Dixon
Less than a year after launching, with checks from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, crowdsourced AI model feedback startup Yupp is closing its business, the company said Tuesday.
Softr launches AI-native platform to help nontechnical teams build business apps without code
Softr, the Berlin-based no-code platform used by more than one million builders and 7,000 organizations including Netflix, Google, and Stripe, today launched what it calls an AI-native platform — a bet that the explosive growth of AI-powered app creation tools has produced a market full of impressive demos but very little production-ready business software. The company's new AI Co-Builder lets non-technical users describe in plain language the software they need, and the platform generates a fully integrated system — database, user interface, permissions, and business logic included — connected and ready for real-world deployment immediately. The move marks a fundamental evolution for a company that spent five years building a no-code business before layering AI on top of what it describes as a proven infrastructure of constrained, pre-built building blocks. "Most AI app-builders stop at the shiny demo stage," Softr Co-Founder and CEO Mariam Hakobyan told VentureBeat in an exclusive in
The Galaxy S26’s photo app can sloppify your memories
Love to see the BACKSST BOYS at the Sphere. The Google Pixel 9 walked so that the Samsung Galaxy S26 could run. Google introduced AI editing tools to Photos slowly. It started with changes to the background - make the sky more blue, or remove crowds of tourists. Things got weird once the company added natural language requests and let you ask for basically any change. There were some guardrails, but in many cases it was easy to prompt your way around them into creating a potentially harmful image of something that never happened - helicopter crashes, smoking bombs on street corners, that kind of thing. That's the world Samsung's updated Photo Assist steps into. At Unpacked in Febru … Read the full story at The Verge.
Emerald AI raises $25 million from Nvidia and others to build a fast pass for data centers connecting to the grid
Emerald AI touts new fundraising success and partnerships with utilities and power generators.
AI Has Flooded All the Weather Apps
Weather forecasting has gotten a big boost from machine learning. How that translates into what users see can vary.
AI benchmarks are broken. Here’s what we need instead
For decades, artificial intelligence has been evaluated through the question of whether machines outperform humans. From chess to advanced math, from coding to essay writing, the performance of AI models and applications is tested against that of individual humans completing tasks. This framing is seductive: An AI vs. human comparison on isolated problems with clear…
I tried Firefox's new AI 'Smart Window' in a beta build
Article URL: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/03/firefox-smart-window-hands-on Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47585853 Points: 1 # Comments: 0
A college instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work and teach life lessons - AP News
A college instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work and teach life lessons AP News
Feds probe whether NYC Council member, Hochul aide took bribes to help migrant shelter provider - AP News
Feds probe whether NYC Council member, Hochul aide took bribes to help migrant shelter provider AP News
Robotics
Nomadic raises $8.4 million to wrangle the data pouring off autonomous vehicles
The company turns footage from robots into structured, searchable datasets with a deep learning model.