Startups

No one can say exactly when, or if, gay men started running Silicon Valley. They seem to have dominated its upper ranks at least the past five years, maybe more. On platforms like X, the clues are there: whispers of private-island retreats,…

Like many Silicon Valley companies today, Scout AI is training large AI models and agents to automate chores. The big difference is that instead of writing code, answering emails, or buying stuff online, Scout AI’s agents are designed to…

The grifters, according to RentAHuman, are fading. “We're taking safety extremely seriously,” Liteplo says. But the duo also acknowledge that there are “footguns” (features that often lead to pesky bugs) and have implemented paid…

I’m not above doing some gig work to make ends meet. In my life, I’ve worked snack food pop-ups in a grocery store, ran the cash register for random merch booths, and even hawked my own plasma at $35 per vial.So, when I saw RentAHuman, a…

The largest western AI labs are taking a break from sniping at one another to partner on a new accelerator program for European startups building applications on top of their models. Paris-based incubator Station F will run the program,…

Since the middle of last year, there have been at least three major AI “acqui-hires” in Silicon Valley. Meta invested more than $14 billion in Scale AI and brought on its CEO, Alexandr Wang; Google spent a cool $2.4 billion to license…

Mistral AI has released a new family of AI models that it claims will clear the path to seamless conversation between people speaking different languages.On Wednesday, the Paris-based AI lab released two new speech-to-text models: Voxtral…

The first Trump administration, and the tech industry that stood up to it, are both looking quainter by the day.Here’s one example: In 2017, when President Trump issued a series of executive orders instituting a travel ban on foreigners…

If you ask Yann LeCun, Silicon Valley has a groupthink problem. Since leaving Meta in November, the researcher and AI luminary has taken aim at the orthodox view that large language models (LLMs) will get us to artificial general…

The newest humanoid robot on the scene, Sprout, is not designed to carry boxes or stack shelves. Instead, this charming and relatively cheap model, roughly the size of a 9-year-old child, is meant to help customers in hotels, shops, and…