In the lead up to the Tumbler Ridge school shooting in Canada last month, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar spoke to ChatGPT about her feelings of isolation and an increasing obsession with violence, according to court filings. The chatbot allegedly validated Van Rootselaar’s feelings and then helped her plan her attack, …

And then there were two: Of the original 11 co-founders who kickstarted xAI with Elon Musk three years ago, only two remain as the deep learning lab continues a personnel overhaul to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI. That rebuilding, insists Musk, is by design. “xAI was not built right first …

Israeli AI agent startup Wonderful has raised $150 million in a Series B funding round that values it at $2 billion, coming just four months after the company raised a $100 million Series A. The new round was led by Insight Partners and saw participation from existing investors, including Index …

Amazon’s AI assistant Alexa+ is getting another new personality. On Thursday, the company announced it’s expanding its lineup of personality styles for users to choose from to include a “Sassy” option, which is for adults only. Notes Amazon, before opting to use the Sassy personality, users will be required to …

When Max Brodeur-Urbas co-founded Gumloop in mid-2023, his vision was to help non-technical employees automate repetitive tasks using AI. At that time, the concept of AI agents was still largely experimental and prone to errors. As AI technology has matured, so has Gumloop’s offering. The company claims that it now …

Tesla is now an officially licensed utility in the United Kingdom, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. The automotive and energy company recently received a license from the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets, allowing it to sell electricity directly to households and commercial and industrial …

Grammarly released a controversial feature last week that uses AI to simulate editorial feedback, making it seem like you’re getting a critique from novelist Stephen King, the late scientist Carl Sagan, or tech journalist Kara Swisher. But Grammarly did not get permission from the hundreds of experts it included in …

A global coalition of law enforcement agencies shut down a botnet made of tens of thousands of hacked home and small business routers on Wednesday. The operation targeted SocksEscort, which offered paid proxy services and was built on a botnet of hacked routers used to commit various crimes, such as …

Dating app maker Bumble is venturing into generative AI. During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday, Bumble introduced a new AI assistant it’s calling “Bee,” designed to become a personal matchmaker that learns users’ “values, relationship goals, communication style, lifestyle, and dating intentions” through private chats. It then uses those …

Webflow, which offers a software platform for building and hosting websites, is acquiring AI-powered content-generation platform Vidoso to beef up its suite of marketing offerings. Founded in 2024, Vidoso uses large language models to help organizations generate marketing collateral like images, presentations, video clips, blog posts, and social media content. …