AI News
Page 11 of 15 · 443 articles
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Saudi AI infrastructure startup Think raises $8M+ pre-seed round
Saudi Arabia-based AI infrastructure startup Think has raised more than $8 million in a pre-seed round co-led by RAED Ventures and Wa'ed Ventures, with participation from Dhahran Techno Valley's venture arm. Founded in 2025 by Ahmed Al-Sharif and Ammar Enaya, Think builds an integrated hardware-and-orchestration platform to maximize GPU utilization for AI workloads.
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Xi launches WAICO with 29 nations, pledges AI cooperation centers with the Arab League
President Xi Jinping opened the 2026 World AI Conference in Shanghai by announcing the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), signed by 29 founding countries the day before. China pledged AI application cooperation centers with the League of Arab States, ASEAN, the African Union, and BRICS, plus 5,000 AI training opportunities for developing countries over five years.
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Apple overtakes Nvidia as world's most valuable company amid AI-spending rotation
Apple closed July 17 with a $4.88 trillion market cap, edging past Nvidia's $4.86 trillion, as Nvidia shares slid roughly 3.5% and chip stocks posted their worst week in over a year. It is Apple's first time back on top since April 2025, driven by a 22-23% year-to-date rally versus Nvidia's roughly 7%.
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Gemini 3.5 Pro slips again, Alphabet sheds ~$200B in a single session
Alphabet shares fell about 4.4% on July 16, erasing roughly $200 billion in market value, after Bloomberg reported Gemini 3.5 Pro is months behind its promised June launch because its coding performance fell short of Google's own bar. The model was unveiled at Google I/O in May with an internal-use claim and a next-month rollout promise that never arrived.
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OpenAI lifts GPT-5.6 Sol's usage cap and trims its context window after demand doubles
OpenAI paused the five-hour usage cap on GPT-5.6 Sol for Plus, Business and Pro subscribers after demand doubled — and paid for the headroom by cutting the model's context window from 372K to 272K tokens, freeing roughly 10% more usage per session. ChatGPT reportedly hit six million active users on Sol.
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GCC startup 1001 raises $30M Series A to build sovereign AI operating systems for critical infrastructure
GCC- and London-based startup 1001 has raised a $30 million Series A led by Lux Capital, with Saudi Arabia's Sanabil Investments, General Catalyst, Hanabi, 9Yards and CIV participating. Founded in 2025 by Bilal Abu-Ghazaleh, the company builds sovereign AI operating systems for operators in critical infrastructure — predicting operational issues and automating decisions while keeping local ownership and governance.
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“Six months to live”? US weighs curbs on frontier open models as China's Zhipu ships GLM-5.2 free
AI researcher Nathan Lambert predicts the US will move within roughly six months to ban or indefinitely delay open-weight models above the GPT-5.5 / Claude Opus 4.8 / GLM-5.2 capability tier, citing reported White House executive-order discussions. The same weekend, Zhipu founder Tang Jie published a memo arguing frontier AI must stay open — and shipped GLM-5.2 free to download and commercialize.
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China's AI companion rules take effect: Doubao and Qwen shut down custom agents, user data on the line
China's Interim Measures for AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services — the first national framework targeting emotional-companion AI — takes effect July 15. Rather than retrofit compliance, ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen are shutting down custom agent features entirely. Doubao users get until October 15 to export their data; Qwen users get no grace period at all.
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OpenAI proposes handing the US government a 5% stake, floats sector-wide AI wealth fund
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has proposed handing the US government a 5% equity stake — worth roughly $42.6 billion at the company's $852 billion valuation — pitching Trump, Commerce Secretary Lutnick, and Treasury Secretary Bessent directly. Altman wants every leading US AI lab to match the contribution into a fund modeled on Alaska's oil-wealth dividend program; Google, Meta, and Anthropic haven't signaled support.
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LEAP goes global: Saudi Arabia's flagship tech conference opens first international edition in Hong Kong
LEAP East opened in Hong Kong on July 8 — the conference's first edition outside the Kingdom — as Minister Abdullah Al-Swaha laid out Saudi Arabia's AI infrastructure numbers: a $139 billion digital economy, 467MW of data center capacity, and 6.9GW planned by 2034.
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Humanoid robots hit the public markets: Agility's $2.5B SPAC leads a global listing wave
Agility Robotics is going public via a $2.5 billion SPAC merger — the first US-listed pure-play humanoid company — while China's Unitree, Agibot, and EngineAI pursue their own listings, giving investors the sector's first public valuation benchmarks.
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Google's SynthID watermark scores its first major real-world deepfake takedown
A viral AI-generated image of Senator Mitch McConnell in a hospital bed was debunked by fact-checkers at Snopes using Google's invisible SynthID watermark — the technology's first high-profile real-world win.
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Cloudflare gives AI crawlers a September 15 deadline: separate search from training or get blocked
Starting September 15, Cloudflare will block mixed-use crawlers — bots that blend search indexing with AI training — by default on any page carrying ads, and is evolving Pay Per Crawl into Pay Per Use to pay publishers when their content shapes AI answers.
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Apple sues OpenAI over alleged theft of trade secrets for AI devices
Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on Friday, alleging the AI company used stolen trade secrets to develop its upcoming, yet-to-be-unveiled AI hardware devices.
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Founder uses AI to optimize cancer recovery protocol
A founder diagnosed with cancer used AI to analyze medical records and research, creating a personalized recovery strategy to augment traditional oncology.
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Apple Vision Pro exec joins OpenAI leadership team
A senior executive from Apple's Vision Pro division has joined OpenAI's leadership, signaling continued executive movement in the AI sector and shifting strategic focus.
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Why Apple charges premium for AI features
Apple's latest devices include AI-powered features, prompting consumers to ask why they're subsidizing Big Tech's AI infrastructure investment through higher device costs.
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Atwood on AI: 'Garbage in, garbage out' logic persists
Margaret Atwood warns that AI models remain constrained by their training data quality, echoing the computer science principle that flawed inputs produce flawed outputs.
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OpenAI slows GPT-5.6 rollout after U.S. government security review
OpenAI announced a phased rollout of GPT-5.6, prioritizing government security review ahead of broader public release.
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New York Times sues Microsoft over AI training on copyrighted content
The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Microsoft for using copyrighted articles to train AI models without permission or compensation, escalating tensions over copyright and generative AI.
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Anthropic launches Mythos 5 with enhanced reasoning capabilities
Anthropic introduced Mythos 5, an updated language model offering improved chain-of-thought reasoning and faster inference speeds. The model competes directly with OpenAI's latest releases.
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Trump administration open-sources Anthropic's Mythos model
The Trump administration announced that Anthropic's Mythos model will be publicly available through open-source licensing, signaling a shift in U.S. AI policy toward broader access.
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AI rental promises fuel housing affordability paradox amid crisis
AI-powered rental platforms promise to solve housing affordability, yet rising demand inflates prices faster than supply can respond, creating unrealistic expectations.
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Saudi platform consolidates AI data analytics
A Saudi platform acquired a Greek AI data intelligence startup, consolidating capabilities in customer analytics and predictive business intelligence for MENA commerce.
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Nvidia optimizes data center design for thermal efficiency at scale
Nvidia revealed new data center architecture optimizations that reduce cooling overhead while maintaining performance density, addressing power consumption concerns.
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OpenAI launches bug bounty program to strengthen open source security
OpenAI introduced a structured bug bounty initiative to identify and address vulnerabilities in open source AI projects, strengthening ecosystem security.
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2026 tech layoffs accelerate as AI economics reshape hiring
As AI capabilities mature, major tech firms are restructuring workforces, citing automation and AI-driven efficiency gains as drivers of layoff decisions.
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Fine-tuning small LLMs with Qwen delivers category-specific AI
Researchers demonstrate effective fine-tuning of Qwen's smaller models for specialized tasks, achieving strong performance with minimal computational overhead.
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Sakana releases Fugu: optimized language models for edge deployment
Sakana AI introduces Fugu, a family of optimized language models designed for efficient deployment on edge devices with minimal computational overhead.
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Apple brings practical AI to iOS devices beyond Siri
Apple's upcoming iOS updates will introduce AI-powered features across devices, moving beyond traditional Siri voice assistance to integrate conversational AI more deeply into core apps.