AI startup SSI in talks for $20 billion valuation

Safe Superintelligence (SSI), an AI startup focused on developing safe artificial general intelligence, is reportedly in discussions to raise funding at a $20 billion valuation. According to Reuters reporters Kenrick Cai, Krystal Hu, and Anna Tong, this would represent a fourfold increase from the company’s $5 billion valuation last September. SSI was founded by former …

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Former OpenAI cofounder Schulman joins Murati’s AI startup

John Schulman, OpenAI cofounder and AI alignment expert, has joined a new startup led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. According to Fortune’s Sharon Goldman, Schulman made this move after spending just five months at Anthropic. The yet-unnamed startup has already secured several high-profile hires from leading AI companies, including OpenAI’s former head of special …

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Google Photos adds AI watermark system to detect edited images

Google is implementing SynthID watermarks for photos modified with its Magic Editor AI feature. The system, developed by Google’s DeepMind team, embeds digital metadata tags to identify AI-altered images. According to Jess Weatherbed writing for The Verge, the feature will roll out this week. While the watermark is invisible to the naked eye, it can …

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Critical security flaws discovered in DeepSeek iOS app

Security researchers at NowSecure have identified multiple severe security and privacy vulnerabilities in the DeepSeek iOS mobile application, which has been among the top downloaded apps since January 2025. The investigation revealed that the app transmits unencrypted user data, employs weak encryption methods with hardcoded keys, and sends sensitive information to servers connected to Chinese …

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ByteDance OmniHuman turns photos into realistic videos

ByteDance has developed an AI system that can generate realistic full-body videos from a single photograph. The new technology, called OmniHuman, can create videos of people speaking, singing, and moving naturally with matching gestures. As reported by Michael Nuñez, the system was trained on over 18,700 hours of human video data. OmniHuman combines multiple input …

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Mistral launches mobile AI assistant with premium tier

French AI company Mistral has released mobile versions of its AI assistant Le Chat for iOS and Android devices. As reported by Romain Dillet for TechCrunch, the app offers a conversation-like interface for interacting with Mistral’s language models. The company also introduced a Pro subscription at $14.99 per month, providing access to their most advanced …

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Google tests new AI-powered search mode with employees

Google has begun internal testing of a new AI Mode for its search engine that aims to provide more comprehensive answers to complex queries. As reported by Abner Li for 9to5Google, the feature uses Gemini 2.0 to handle exploratory questions and follow-up queries that traditional search results don’t address well. The new interface appears alongside …

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Stanford researchers create AI reasoning model for under $50, challenging industry giants

Researchers from Stanford and the University of Washington have developed an AI model called s1 that rivals the capabilities of expensive commercial AI systems while costing less than $50 in computing resources to train. The model, which was created through a process called distillation using Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental model, demonstrates similar performance …

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Microsoft brings advanced AI reasoning to all Copilot versions for free

Microsoft is extending OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model to all Copilot users at no additional cost, Tom Warren reports. The feature, called “Think Deeper,” enables more complex question handling and provides detailed step-by-step answers. It was previously available only to premium subscribers. The tool takes approximately 30 seconds to analyze questions from multiple perspectives. Microsoft AI …

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Ai2 Tulu 3 is an open-source language model rivaling leading systems

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2) has released Tulu 3 405B, a new AI language model that, according to the institute’s internal testing, outperforms several leading AI systems including DeepSeek V3 and matches capabilities with OpenAI’s GPT-4o on certain benchmarks. The model contains 405 billion parameters and required 256 GPUs running in parallel for …

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