Moondream raises $4.5M for compact yet powerful AI vision-language model

Moondream, a startup backed by Felicis Ventures, Microsoft’s M12 GitHub Fund, and Ascend, has emerged from stealth with $4.5 million in pre-seed funding. According to VentureBeat’s Michael Nuñez, the company has developed an open-source vision-language model that boasts 1.6 billion parameters but matches the performance of models four times its size. The model, which can …

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Read AI raises $50M Series B to expand AI meeting assistant

Read AI, an AI-powered meeting assistant startup, has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Smash Capital, just six months after a $21 million Series A. According to co-founder David Shim, the company has seen strong growth, with over 100,000 new accounts created since the Series A. Read AI plans to …

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Amphion: open-source toolkit for audio, music and speech generation

Amphion is an open-source toolkit designed to support research and development in audio, music and speech generation. According to the project’s GitHub site, it offers unique visualizations of classic models and architectures to help junior researchers and engineers better understand them. The toolkit supports various individual generation tasks such as text-to-speech (TTS), singing voice synthesis …

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Speech to text: Moonshine is fast and as accurate as OpenAI’s Whisper

Useful, an AI company focused on improving human-machine communication, has open-sourced Moonshine, a new speech-to-text model that aims to significantly reduce the latency of voice interfaces. According to Useful founder Pete Warden, Moonshine returns results 1.7 times faster than OpenAI’s Whisper model while matching or exceeding its accuracy. The model’s variable-length input window allows it …

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AI sales startup Nooks raises $43M to automate sales tasks

Nooks, an AI sales platform founded by three Stanford roommates, has raised $43 million in a Series B round led by Kleiner Perkins, bringing its total funding to $70 million at a $285 million valuation. According to CEO Daniel Lee, Nooks uses AI to automate tedious sales tasks like finding contacts, leaving voicemails, writing emails …

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LinkedIn debuts AI assistant for recruiters called Hiring Assistant

LinkedIn has launched Hiring Assistant, its first artificial intelligence agent designed to take on numerous tasks typically handled by job recruiters. According to Ingrid Lunden of TechCrunch, the AI tool can generate job descriptions from rough notes, source potential candidates, and engage with them. LinkedIn is initially rolling out Hiring Assistant to select enterprise customers, …

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OpenAI develops custom AI chip with Broadcom and TSMC

OpenAI is working with Broadcom and TSMC to develop its first in-house AI chip optimized for inference, while also expanding its use of AMD GPUs alongside NVIDIA chips to meet growing infrastructure needs, according to sources cited by Reuters journalist Krystal Hu. The company considered building its own chip foundries but decided to focus on …

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GitHub expands AI capabilities with multi-model support and new tools

At its GitHub Universe conference, GitHub announced a significant expansion of its AI-powered development tools. GitHub Copilot, which previously relied solely on OpenAI’s models, now supports multiple AI models, allowing developers to choose between Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s GPT-4o variants. This multi-model approach aims to provide developers with more …

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First features of Apple Intelligence launched, reviews are mixed

Apple has released iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, introducing the first set of Apple Intelligence features. These AI-powered enhancements are available on select devices equipped with A17 Pro, M1, or later chips. Users can opt into Apple Intelligence after downloading the update and will be added to a short waitlist to prepare …

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Cohere Aya Expanse is a highly performant multilingual model family

Cohere For AI has released Aya Expanse, a family of highly performant multilingual models that, according to Cohere, excel across 23 languages and outperform other leading open-weights models. The models, available in 8 and 32 billion parameters, are part of Cohere’s commitment to multilingual research and expanding high-quality coverage of languages in large language models …

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