Off the coast of Shanghai, a revolutionary structure is forming beneath the waves: the world’s first wind-powered, commercial-scale underwater data center (UDC). Basically, submerging servers in pressure-resistant pods (similar to Microsoft's non-commercial Project Natick in 2018) is a direct response to the escalating power and cooling demands
NVIDIA held its annual Graphics Technology Conference (GTC) in Washington D.C. yesterday, and as a surprise showing in the middle of his keynote, company CEO Jensen Huang pulled out a Vera Rubin Superchip, marking the first time that this product was shown to the public. The part looks quite different from even the GB300 Blackwell Ultra Superchip,
We're already big fans of Bose's audio products, so it doesn't take much arm twisting to convince us to consider the brand if we're in the market for a new set of headphones or earbuds. We won't turn down a good deal, either. It just so happens that you can have both right now, with Woot serving up some massive discounts on Bose's QuietComfort
13-hour flights between Tokyo and New York may soon be relegated to history books, as a major Japanese travel agency announced plans to launch a point-to-point transport service that could connect the two cities in just 60 minutes via outer space. The audacious plan (set to launch in the 2030s) comes from a partnership between the Nippon Travel
For Google loyalists, the first purported look at the Pixel 10a could ring a familiar tune rather than drastically advance the bar. Not expected to debut until early 2026, the well-regarded mid-budget handset has been revealed in CAD renders and the consensus is clear: Google is playing it safe, delivering a device that is essentially a Pixel
A new wave of flagship solid state drives (SSDs) that nearly saturate the available PCI Express 5.0 bandwidth available to x4 NVMe storage drives is starting to be appear. In back-to-back announcements, both PNY and Corsair unveiled new lightning-fast Gen 5 models—CS3250 and MP700 Pro XT, respectively—that are rated to deliver sequential read
Uber has already changed the taxi game with its, ahem, uber-popular ride sharing service, and now NVIDIA is hopping into the driver's seat on what figures to be the next evolution—a fleet of autonomous robotaxis built on NVIDIA's new DRIVE AGX Hyperion 10 platform. To make this happen, NVIDIA and Uber are teaming up to scale what's being pitched
Thermaltake accidentally confirms Intel LGA 1954 support for its newest CPU cooler On the web page for its new MINECUBE 360 Ultra CPU cooler, which we saw at Computex 2025, Thermaltake accidentally unveiled that its new cooler supports Intel’s upcoming Nova Lake CPUs. Specifically, their cooler was listed as supporting Intel’s next-generation LGA-1954 socket, which […]
The post Thermaltake confirms Intel Nova Lake/LGA 1954 support with new MINECUBE CPU cooler appeared first on OC3D.
Venture funding has most definitely rebounded since the 2022 correction, but there’s a sharp divide between who’s getting funding and who’s not.
That was the overarching theme from our third-quarter market reports, which showed that global startup funding in Q3 totaled $97 billion, marking only the fourth quarter above $90 billion since Q3 2022.
Still, there are stark differences between the 2021 market peak and now, as contributing reporter Joanna Glasner noted in a couple of recent columns, here and here. Just as we saw four years ago, funding is frothy and often seems to be driven by investor FOMO. Some companies are even raising follow-on rounds at head-spinning speeds.
But the funding surge this time is also much, much more concentrated — namely in outsized rounds for AI companies.
With that, let’s take a look at the charts that illustrate the major private-market and startup funding themes as we head into the final quarter of 2025.
Nearly half — 46% — of startup funding globally in Q3 went to AI companies, Crunchbase data shows. Almost a third went to a single company: Anthropic, which raised $13 billion last quarter.
Even with an astonishing $45 billion going to artificial intelligence startups in Q3, it was only the third-highest quarter on record for AI funding, with Q4 2024 and Q1 2025 each clocking in higher.
It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that AI has also skewed investment heavily toward megarounds, which we define as funding deals of $100 million or more.
The percentage of overall funding going into such deals hit a record high this year, with an astonishing 60% of global and 70% of U.S. venture capital going to $100 million-plus rounds, per Crunchbase data.
Even with several months left in the year, it also seems plausible that the total dollars going into such deals will match or top what we saw in 2021, which marked a peak for startup funding not scaled before or since.
The difference? Back then, startup dollars were widely distributed, going to a whole host of sectors — from food tech to health tech to robotics — and to early-stage, late-stage and in-between companies alike.
Contrast that with recent quarters, when the LLM giants and other large, established, AI-centric companies are getting the largest slice of venture dollars.
As megarounds have increased, seed deals have declined.
The number of seed deals has shown a steady downward trend in recent quarters, Crunchbase data shows, even as total dollars invested at the stage has stayed relatively steady. That indicates that while seed deals are growing larger, they’re also harder to come by.
Early-stage funding has essentially flatlined, despite larger rounds to companies working on robotics, biotech, AI and other technologies.
AI has enthralled investors for the past three years.
What are they less interested in? Old standbys like cybersecurity and biotech. Biotech investment as a share of overall funding recently hit a 20-year low. Crunchbase data shows that cybersecurity investment, while still relatively steady, also retreated somewhat in Q3 2025. That’s notable given that many cybersecurity companies are integrating AI into their offerings.
Still, other sectors that benefit heavily from AI-driven automation are seeing a surge in investment. Perhaps most notable is legal tech, which hit an all-time high last month on the back of large rounds for companies promising to automate much of the drudgery of the profession.
Among the other sectors buoyed by AI is human resources software (including AI-powered recruitment and hiring offerings).
Other interesting points that emerged from our Q3 reports and recent coverage include:
The increasing concentration of capital into a small cadre of large AI companies — not to mention the interconnectedness of those deals — begs some obvious questions. Are we in a bubble? And given that nearly half of venture capital in recent years has been tied up in AI, what happens to the startup ecosystem if or when it pops?
Illustration: Dom Guzman
With the flak that Apple is reportedly receiving for its ultra-slim iPhone Air, there was an evolving consensus for a time that Samsung would simply trash its upcoming Galaxy S26 Edge. However, new reporting from the Netherlands now indicates that the project is not only alive but thriving, and is all set to debut next year, albeit with a hefty delay. Samsung Galaxy S26 Edge is likely to debut months after the rest of the S26 variants To wit, Netherland's GalaxyClub is now reporting that Samsung continues to develop a smartphone under the relatively silly alias of "More Slim." This […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/no-wait-a-more-slim-galaxy-s26-edge-is-still-in-the-cards/
Hideo Kojima was as surprised as anyone learning this week that he was offered to develop a video game project based on the Matrix franchise, as no one ever told him such a conversation took place between the Wachowskis and Konami. Earlier today, the legendary game designer and creator of the Metal Gear and Death Stranding series clarified the statements made a few days ago by Christopher Bergstresser, the Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning and business Development at Konami between 1996 and 2002. In his post on X, Kojima-san confirmed that, back in 1999, he and the Wachowskis exchanged […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/hideo-kojima-wasnt-aware-he-was-offered-a-matrix-video-game-project/
A new GeekBench 6 test is doing the rounds today on social media, showing the raw performance of what appears to be the final configuration of Samsung's upcoming flagship Exynos 2600 chip. Unfortunately, the chip fails to exceed the proven benchmark scores of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, but manages to significantly narrow down the erstwhile performance gap between the two SoCs. Samsung Exynos 2600 falls behind Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in both single-core and multi-core GeekBench 6 tests First, let's go over the Exynos 2600 setup used in the test: For comparison, here is the CPU […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/a-new-geekbench-6-test-shows-samsung-exynos-2600-holding-up-surprisingly-well-against-qualcomms-snapdragon-8-elite-gen-5/
This is another cheap OLED 1440p gaming monitor, which boasts up to 280Hz refresh rate and uses LG's latest LG Tandem OLED panel. KTC Unveils G27P6M OLED 280Hz@1440p Gaming Monitor With LG Primary RGB Tandem OLED; Official Price $422, but Limited Time Deal Price is $281 Looks like Lenovo isn't the only one that is willing to offer its OLED gaming monitors at the cheapest price. KTC, a popular Chinese monitor maker, joined the race and has unveiled its latest offering called G27P6M, which is based on LG's Primary RGB Tandem OLED panel. The monitor launched recently, offering competitive specifications, […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/ktc-launches-g27p6m-2k-oled-monitor-featuring-4th-gen-lg-oled/
The PlayStation Portal handheld system may be about to get a highly-requested feature soon, judging from a PS App leak. Over on the PlayStation Portal official subreddit, user GetTheWetsOn shared a screenshot captured from the PS App of the Deliver at All Costs store page, which seemingly confirms that cloud streaming of purchased digital games could be coming to the PlayStation Portal for PS Plus Premium subscribers. The user also stated that the same confirmation, which has since been removed, could be found on the Dead Space remake store page. While there's no indication this new PlayStation Portal streaming option […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/playstation-portal-leak-suggests-highly-requested-feature-is-coming-soon/
It seems like the US chip industry is going through a 'massive' revolution, and with that, a startup, Substrate, has decided to tap into the lithography segment, which ASML heavily dominates. Substrate Intends to Utilize X-Rays Over EUV For Lithography, Claiming It To Be a Cheaper Alternative When it comes to chip lithography equipment, the US is entirely dependent on companies like ASML, as the nation lacks a domestic technology that can rival the Dutch chipmaker. However, in a new report by Bloomberg, it seems like there's a startup by the name of 'Substrate' out there that plans to end […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/american-chip-startup-substrate-vows-to-end-dependency-on-asml/
SK Hynix has reportedly prepared several new DDR5 chips that can achieve a native speed of 7200 MT/s, as spotted on a popular e-commerce platform. Three More SK Hynix Memory Chips Get Prepared, Offering 7200 MT/s Speed; SK Hynix Reportedly Prepares 2 Gb and 4 Gb Chips as Well Last week, we reported that SK Hynix is preparing 3 Gb (Gigabit) DDR5 A-Die chips, which are rated for 7200 MT/s, above the current JEDEC standard of 6400 MT/s. It appears that SK Hynix isn't just limiting itself to A-Die 3 Gb chips, but has also silently prepared three more dies, […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/new-sk-hynix-7200-mt-s-ddr5-memory-spotted-2-gb-b-die-and-4-gb-m-die-prepared/
It was practically a given following the announcement of the mass layoffs at Amazon Game Studios, but we now have confirmation that New World, the MMORPG developed by the team based in Irvine, California, is effectively on life support. Amazon has clarified that Season 10: Nighthaven, which launched earlier this month, will be the last content update because further development 'is not sustainable'. The servers are, however, guaranteed to remain up throughout December 31, 2026 at the least. Complete closure of the servers will likely follow shortly after that date, although Amazon said it will notify players at least six […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/new-world-gets-killed-off-amazon-just-as-people-were-returning/
This morning, Remedy Entertainment published its Q3 2025 financial report. As expected, it's not great news for the Finnish studio. Tero Virtala, the company's CEO for nine years, stepped down earlier this month after Remedy told investors that the game FBC: Firebreak had effectively failed. This past quarter, just as the studio celebrated the thirty years since its foundation, the financial highlights were indeed very negative: However, interim CEO Markus Mäki reassured investors (and fans) that the remaining projects are on track, and the studio is still confident in its ability to achieve 'significant commercial success' by 2030. Despite challenges […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/remedy-isnt-satisfied-recent-sales-remains-confident-significant-commercial-success/
The moment Mack McConnell knew everything about search had changed came last summer at the Paris Olympics. His parents, independently and without prompting, had both turned to ChatGPT to plan their day's activities in the French capital. The AI recommended specific tour companies, restaurants, and attractions — businesses that had won a new kind of visibility lottery.
"It was almost like this intuitive interface that older people were as comfortable with using as younger people," McConnell recalled in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "I could just see the businesses were now being recommended."
That observation has now become the foundation of Geostar, a Pear VC-backed startup that's racing to help businesses navigate what may be the most significant shift in online discovery since Google's founding.
The company, which recently emerged from stealth with impressive early customer traction, is betting that the rise of AI-powered search represents a significant opportunity to reinvent how companies get found online. The global AI search engine market alone is projected to grow from $43.63 billion in 2025 to $108.88 billion by 2032.
Already the fastest-growing company in PearX's latest cohort, Geostar is fast approaching $1 million in annual recurring revenue in just four months — with only two founders and no employees.
The numbers tell a stark story of disruption. Gartner predicts that traditional search engine volume will decline by 25% by 2026, largely due to the rise of AI chatbots. Google's AI Overviews now appear on billions of searches monthly. Princeton University researchers have found that optimizing for these new AI systems can increase visibility by up to 40%.
"Search used to mean that you had to make Google happy," McConnell explained. "But now you have to optimize for four different Google interfaces — traditional search, AI Mode, Gemini, and AI Overviews — each with different criteria. And then ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity each work differently on top of that."
This fragmentation is creating chaos for businesses that have spent decades perfecting their Google search strategies. A recent Forrester study found that 95% of B2B buyers plan to use generative AI in future purchase decisions. Yet most companies remain woefully unprepared for this shift.
"Anybody who's not on this right now is losing out," said Cihan Tas, Geostar's co-founder and chief technology officer. "We see lawyers getting 50% of their clients through ChatGPT now. It's just such a massive shift."
What Geostar and a growing cohort of competitors call Generative Engine Optimization or GEO represents a fundamental departure from traditional search engine optimization. Where SEO focused primarily on keywords and backlinks, GEO requires understanding how large language models parse, understand, and synthesize information across the entire web.
The technical challenges are formidable. Every website must now function as what Tas calls "its own little database" capable of being understood by dozens of different AI crawlers, each with unique requirements and preferences. Google's systems pull from their existing search index. ChatGPT relies heavily on structured data and specific content formats. Perplexity shows a marked preference for Wikipedia and authoritative sources.
"Now the strategy is actually being concise, clear, and answering the question, because that's directly what the AI is looking for," Tas explained. "You're actually tuning for somewhat of an intelligent model that makes decisions similarly to how we make decisions."
Consider schema markup, the structured data that helps machines understand web content. While only 30% of websites currently implement comprehensive schema, research shows that pages with proper markup are 36% more likely to appear in AI-generated summaries. Yet most businesses don't even know what schema markup is, let alone how to implement it effectively.
Geostar's solution embodies a broader trend in enterprise software: the rise of autonomous AI agents that can take action on behalf of businesses. The company embeds what it calls "ambient agents" directly into client websites, continuously optimizing content, technical configurations, and even creating new pages based on patterns learned across its entire customer base.
"Once we learn something about the way content performs, or the way a technical optimization performs, we can then syndicate that same change across the remaining users so everyone in the network benefits," McConnell said.
For RedSift, a cybersecurity company, this approach yielded a 27% increase in AI mentions within three months. In one case, Geostar identified an opportunity to rank for "best DMARC vendors," a high-value search term in the email security space. The company's agents created and optimized content that achieved first-page rankings on both Google and ChatGPT within four days.
"We're doing the work of an agency that charges $10,000 a month," McConnell said, noting that Geostar's pricing ranges from $1,000 to $3,000 monthly. "AI creates a situation where, for the first time ever, you can take action like an agency, but you can scale like software."
The implications of this shift extend far beyond technical optimizations. In the SEO era, a mention without a link was essentially worthless. In the age of AI, that calculus has reversed. AI systems can analyze vast amounts of text to understand sentiment and context, meaning that brand mentions on Reddit, in news articles, or across social media now directly influence how AI systems describe and recommend companies.
"If the New York Times mentions a company without linking to it, that company would actually benefit from that in an AI system," McConnell explained. "AI has the ability to do mass analysis of huge amounts of text, and it will understand the sentiment around that mention."
This has created new vulnerabilities. Research from the Indian Institute of Technology and Princeton found that AI systems show systematic bias toward third-party sources over brand-owned content. A company's own website might be less influential in shaping AI perceptions than what others say about it online.
The shifting landscape has also disrupted traditional metrics of success. Where SEO focused on rankings and click-through rates, GEO must account for what researchers call impression metrics — how prominently and positively a brand appears within AI-generated responses, even when users never click through to the source.
Geostar is hardly alone in recognizing this opportunity. Companies like Brandlight, Profound, and Goodie are all racing to help businesses navigate the new landscape. The SEO industry, worth approximately $80 billion globally, is scrambling to adapt, with established players like Semrush and Ahrefs rushing to add AI visibility tracking features.
But the company's founders, who previously built and sold a Y-Combinator-backed e-commerce optimization startup called Monto, believe their technical approach gives them an edge. Unlike competitors who largely provide dashboards and recommendations, Geostar's agents actively implement changes.
"Everyone is taking the same solutions that worked in the last era and just saying, 'We'll do this for AI instead,'" McConnell argued. "But when you think about what AI is truly capable of, it can actually do the work for you."
The stakes are particularly high for small and medium-sized businesses. While large corporations can afford to hire specialized consultants or build internal expertise, smaller companies risk becoming invisible in AI-mediated search. Geostar sees this as its primary market opportunity: nearly half of the 33.2 million small businesses in America invest in SEO. Among the roughly 418,000 law firms in the U.S., many spend between $2,500 and $5,000 monthly on search optimization to stay competitive in local markets.
For Tas, whose journey to Silicon Valley began in a tiny Kurdish village in Turkey with just 50 residents, the current moment represents both opportunity and responsibility. His mother's battle with cancer prevented him from finishing college, leading him to teach himself programming and eventually partner with McConnell — whom he worked with for an entire year before they ever met in person.
"We're not just copy and pasting a solution that was existing before," Tas emphasized. "This is something that's different and was uniquely possible today."
Looking forward, the transformation of search appears to be accelerating rather than stabilizing. Industry observers predict that search functionality will soon be embedded in productivity tools, wearables, and even augmented reality interfaces. Each new surface will likely have its own optimization requirements, further complicating the landscape.
"Soon, search will be in our eyes, in our ears," McConnell predicted. "When Siri breaks out of her prison, whatever that Jony Ive and OpenAI are building together will be like a multimodal search interface."
The technical challenges are matched by ethical ones. As businesses scramble to influence AI recommendations, questions arise about manipulation, fairness, and transparency. There's currently no oversight body or established best practices for GEO, creating what some critics describe as a Wild West environment.
As businesses grapple with these changes, one thing seems certain: the era of simply optimizing for Google is over. In its place is emerging a far more complex ecosystem where success requires understanding not just how machines index information, but how they think about it, synthesize it, and ultimately decide what to recommend to humans seeking answers.
For the millions of businesses whose survival depends on being discovered online, mastering this new paradigm isn't just an opportunity — it's an existential imperative. The question is no longer whether to optimize for AI search, but whether companies can adapt quickly enough to remain visible as the pace of change accelerates.
McConnell's parents at the Olympics were a preview of what's already becoming the norm. They didn't search for tour companies in Paris. They didn't scroll through results or click on links. They simply asked ChatGPT what to do — and the AI decided which businesses deserved their attention.
In the new economy of discovery, the businesses that win won't be the ones that rank highest. They'll be the ones AI chooses to recommend.
Last week, we launched the Internet2 NET+ Google AI Education Leadership Program (ELP).
Most marketing teams still treat SEO and PPC as budget rivals, not as complementary systems facing the same performance challenges.
In practice, these relationships fall into three types:
Only mutualism creates sustainable performance gains – and it’s the shift marketing teams need to make next.
One glaring problem unites online marketers: we’re getting less traffic for the same budget.
Navigating the coming years requires more than the coexistence many teams mistake for collaboration.
We need mutualism – shared technical standards that optimize for both organic visibility and paid performance.
Shared accountability drives lower acquisition costs, faster market response, and sustainable gains that neither channel can achieve alone.
Here’s what it looks like in practice:
During SEO penalties and core updates, PPC can maintain traffic until recovery.
Core updates cause fluctuations in organic rankings and user behavior, which, in turn, can affect ad relevance and placements.
PPC-only landing pages affect the Core Web Vitals of entire sites, influencing Google’s default assumptions for URLs without enough traffic to calculate individual scores.
Paid pages are penalized for slow loading just as much as organic ones, impacting Quality Score and, ultimately, bids.
PPC should answer a simple question: Are we getting the types of results we expect and want?
Setting clear PPC baselines by market and country provides valuable, real-time keyword and conversion data that SEO teams can use to strengthen organic strategies.
By analyzing which PPC clicks drive signups or demo requests, SEO teams can prioritize content and keyword targets with proven high intent.
Sharing PPC insights enables organic search teams to make smarter decisions, improve rankings, and drive better-qualified traffic.
Dig deeper: The end of SEO-PPC silos: Building a unified search strategy for the AI era
One key question to ask is: how do we measure incrementality?
We need to quantify the true, additional contribution PPC and SEO drive above the baseline.
Guerrilla testing offers a lo-fi way to do this – turning campaigns on or off in specific markets to see whether organic conversions are affected.
A more targeted test involves turning off branded campaigns.
PPC ads on branded terms can capture conversions that would have occurred organically, making paid results appear stronger and SEO weaker.
That’s exactly what Arturs Cavniss’ company did – and here are the results.
For teams ready to operate in a more sophisticated way, several options are available.
One worth exploring is Robyn, an open-source, AI/ML-powered marketing mix modeling (MMM) package.
Core Web Vitals measures layout stability, rendering efficiency, and server response times – key factors influencing search visibility and overall performance.
These metrics are weighted by Google in evaluating page experience.
| Core Web Vitals Metric | Google’s Weight |
| First Contentful Paint | 10% |
| Speed Index | 10% |
| Largest Contentful Paint | 25% |
| Total Blocking Time | 30% |
| Cumulative Layout Shift | 25% |
Core Web Vitals:
You can create a modified weighted system to reflect a combined SEO and PPC baseline. (Here’s a quick MVP spreadsheet to get started.)
However, SEO-focused weightings don’t capture PPC’s Quality Score requirements or conversion optimization needs.
Clicking an ad link can be slower than an organic one because Google’s ad network introduces extra processes – additional data handling and script execution – before the page loads.
The hypothesis is that ad clicks may consistently load slower than organic ones due to these extra steps in the ad-serving process.
This suggests that performance standards designed for organic results may not fully represent the experience of paid users.
Microsoft Ads Liaison Navah Hopkins notes that paid pages are penalized for slow loading just as severely as organic ones – a factor that directly affects Quality Score and bids.
SEOs also take responsibility for improving PPC-only landing pages, even without being asked. As Jono Alderson explains:
PPC-only landing pages influence the Core Web Vitals of entire sites, shaping Google’s assumptions for low-traffic URLs.
Agentic AI’s sensitivity to interaction delays has made Interaction to Next Paint (INP) a critical performance metric.
INP measures how quickly a website responds when a human or AI agent interacts with a page – clicking, scrolling, or filling out forms while completing tasks.
When response times lag, agents fail tasks, abandon the site, and may turn to competitors.
INP doesn’t appear in Chrome Lighthouse or PageSpeed Insights because those are synthetic testing tools that don’t simulate real interactions.
Real user monitoring helps reveal what’s happening in practice, but it still can’t capture the full picture for AI-driven interactions.
PPC practitioners have long relied on Quality Score – a 1-10 scale measuring expected CTR and user intent fit – to optimize landing pages and reduce costs.
SEO lacks an equivalent unified metric, leaving teams to juggle separate signals like Core Web Vitals, keyword relevance, and user engagement without a clear prioritization framework.
You can create a company-wide quality score for pages to incentivize optimization and align teams while maintaining channel-specific goals.
This score can account for page type, with sub-scores for trial, demo, or usage pages – adaptable to the content that drives the most business value.
The system should account for overlapping metrics across subscores yet remain simple enough for all teams – SEO, PPC, engineering, and product – to understand and act on.
A unified scoring model gives everyone a common language and turns distributed accountability into daily practice.
When both channels share quality standards, teams can prioritize fixes that strengthen organic rankings and paid performance simultaneously.
Display advertising and SEO rarely share performance metrics, yet both pursue the same goal – converting impressions into engaged users.
Click-per-thousand impressions (CPTI) measures the number of clicks generated per 1,000 impressions, creating a shared language for evaluating content effectiveness across paid display and organic search.
For display teams, CPTI reveals which creative and targeting combinations drive engagement beyond vanity metrics like reach.
For SEO teams, applying CPTI to search impressions (via Google Search Console) shows which pages and queries convert visibility into traffic – exposing content that ranks well but fails to earn clicks.
This shared metric allows teams to compare efficiency directly: if a blog post drives 50 clicks per 1,000 organic impressions while a display campaign with similar visibility generates only 15 clicks, the performance gap warrants investigation.
Reverse CPM offers another useful lens. It measures how long content takes to “pay for itself” – the point where it reaches ROI.
For example, if an article earns 1 million impressions in a month, it should deliver roughly 1,000 clicks.
As generative AI continues to reshape traffic patterns, this metric will need refinement.
The most valuable insights emerge when SEO and PPC teams share operational intelligence rather than compete for credit.
PPC provides quick keyword performance data to respond to market trends faster, while SEO uncovers emerging search intent that PPC can immediately act on.
Together, these feedback loops create compound advantages.
SEO signals PPC should act on:
PPC signals SEO should act on:
When both channels share intelligence, insights extend beyond marketing performance into product and business strategy.
These feedback loops don’t require expensive tools – only an organizational commitment to regular cross-channel reviews in which teams share what’s working, what’s failing, and what deserves coordinated testing.
Treat technical performance as shared infrastructure, not channel-specific optimization.
Teams that implement unified Core Web Vitals standards, cross-channel attribution models, and distributed accountability systems will capture opportunities that siloed operations miss.
As agentic AI adoption accelerates and digital marketing grows more complex, symbiotic SEO-PPC operations become a competitive advantage rather than a luxury.
Something’s shifting in how SEO services are being marketed, and if you’ve been shopping for help with search lately, you’ve probably noticed it.
Over the past few months, “AI SEO” has emerged as a distinct service offering.
Browse service provider websites, scroll through Fiverr, or sit through sales presentations, and you’ll see it positioned as something fundamentally new and separate from traditional SEO.
Some are packaging it as “GEO” (generative engine optimization) or “AEO” (answer engine optimization), with separate pricing, distinct deliverables, and the implication that you need both this and traditional SEO to compete.
The pitch goes like this:
The data helps explain why the industry is moving so quickly.
AI-sourced traffic jumped 527% year-over-year from early 2024 to early 2025.
Service providers are responding to genuine market demand for AI search optimization.
But here’s what I’ve observed after evaluating what these AI SEO services actually deliver.
Many of these so-called new tactics are the same SEO fundamentals – just repackaged under a different name.
As a marketer responsible for budget and results, understanding this distinction matters.
It affects how you allocate resources, evaluate agency partners, and structure your search strategy.
Let’s dig into what’s really happening so you can make smarter decisions about where to invest.
The typical AI SEO sales deck has become pretty standardized.
Here are the most common claims I’m hearing.
They’ll show you how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude are changing search behavior, and they’re not wrong about that.
Research shows that 82% of consumers agree that “AI-powered search is more helpful than traditional search engines,” signaling how search behavior is evolving.
The pitch emphasizes passage-level optimization, structured data, and Q&A formatting specifically for AI retrieval.
They’ll discuss how AI values mentions and citations differently than backlinks and how entity recognition matters more than keywords.
This creates urgency around a supposedly new practice that requires immediate investment.
The urgency is real. Only 22% of marketers have set up LLM brand visibility monitoring, but the question is whether this requires a separate “AI SEO” service or an expansion of your existing search strategy.
To be clear, the AI capabilities are real. What’s new is the positioning – familiar SEO practices rebranded to sound more revolutionary than they are.
When you examine what’s actually being recommended (passage-level content structure, semantic clarity, Q&A formatting, earning citations and mentions), you will find that these practices have been core to SEO for years.
Google introduced passage ranking in 2020 and featured snippets back in 2014.
Research from Fractl, Search Engine Land, and MFour found that generative engine optimization “is based on similar value systems that advanced SEOs, content marketers, and digital PR teams are already experts in.”
Let me show you what I mean.
What you’re hearing: “AI-powered semantic analysis and predictive keyword intelligence.”
What you’re hearing: “Machine learning content optimization that aligns with AI algorithms.”
What you’re hearing: “Entity-based authority building for AI platforms.”
Dig deeper: AI search is booming, but SEO is still not dead
I want to be fair here. There’s genuine debate in the SEO community about whether optimizing for AI-powered search represents a distinct discipline or an evolution of existing practices.
The differences are real.
These differences affect execution, but the strategic foundation remains consistent.
You still need to:
And here’s something that reinforces the overlap.
SEO professionals recently discovered that ChatGPT’s Atlas browser directly uses Google search results.
Even AI-powered search platforms are relying on traditional search infrastructure.
So yes, there are platform-specific tactics that matter.
The question for you as a marketer isn’t whether differences exist (they do).
The real question is whether those differences justify treating this as an entirely separate service with its own strategy and budget.
Or are they simply tactical adaptations of the same fundamental approach?
Dig deeper: GEO and SEO: How to invest your time and efforts wisely
The “separate AI SEO service” approach comes with a real risk.
It can shift focus toward short-term, platform-specific tactics at the expense of long-term fundamentals.
I’m seeing recommendations that feel remarkably similar to the blackhat SEO tactics we saw a decade ago:
These tactics might work today, but they’re playing a dangerous game.
Dig deeper: Black hat GEO is real – Here’s why you should pay attention
AI platforms are still in their infancy. Their spam detection systems aren’t yet as mature as Google’s or Bing’s, but that will change, likely faster than many expect.
AI platforms like Perplexity are building their own search indexes (hundreds of billions of documents).
They’ll need to develop the same core systems traditional search engines have:
They’re supposedly buying link data from third-party providers, recognizing that understanding authority requires signals beyond just content analysis.
We’ve seen this with Google.
In the early days, keyword stuffing and link schemes worked great.
Then, Google developed Panda and Penguin updates that devastated sites relying on those tactics.
Overnight, sites lost 50-90% of their traffic.
The same thing will likely happen with AI platforms.
Sites gaming visibility now with spammy tactics will face serious problems when these platforms implement stronger quality and spam detection.
As one SEO veteran put it, “It works until it doesn’t.”
Building around platform-specific tactics is like building on sand.
Focus instead on fundamentals – creating valuable content, earning authority, demonstrating expertise, and optimizing for intent – and you’ll have something sustainable across platforms.
I’m not anti-AI. Used well, it meaningfully improves SEO workflows and results.
AI excels at large-scale research and ideation – analyzing competitor content, spotting gaps, and mapping topic clusters in minutes.
For one client, it surfaced 73 subtopics we hadn’t fully considered.
But human expertise was still essential to align those ideas with business goals and strategic priorities.
AI also transforms data analysis and workflow automation – from reporting and rank tracking to technical monitoring – freeing more time for strategy.
AI clearly helps. The real question is whether these AI offerings bring truly new strategies or familiar ones powered by better tools.
After working with clients to evaluate various service models, I’ve seen consistent patterns in proposals that overpromise and underdeliver.
When evaluating any service provider, ask:
After working in SEO for 20 years, through multiple algorithm updates and trend cycles, I keep coming back to the same fundamentals:
Dig deeper: Thriving in AI search starts with SEO fundamentals
AI is genuinely changing how we work in search marketing – and that’s mostly positive.
The tools make us more efficient and enable analysis that wasn’t previously practical.
But AI only enhances good strategy. It doesn’t replace it.
Fundamentals still matter – along with audience understanding, quality, and expertise.
Search behavior is fragmenting across Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and social platforms, but the principles that drive visibility and trust remain consistent.
Real advantage doesn’t come from the newest tools or the flashiest “GEO” tactics.
It comes from a clear strategy, deep market understanding, strong execution of fundamentals, and smart use of technology to strengthen human expertise.
Don’t get distracted by hype or dismiss innovation. The balance lies in thoughtful AI integration within a solid strategic framework focused on business goals.
That’s what delivers sustainable results – whether people find you through Google, ChatGPT, or whatever comes next.
Create stunning videos by speaking to AI
The post Alphabet’s AI Reckoning: Cloud Momentum vs. Search Durability appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
The burgeoning influence of artificial intelligence presents a dual narrative for tech giants, particularly Alphabet, as it navigates both profound opportunities and existential threats to its established revenue streams. As CNBC’s MacKenzie Sigalos reported on “Worldwide Exchange,” ahead of Alphabet’s recent earnings call, the company finds itself at a critical juncture, balancing the burgeoning momentum […]
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The post TestSprite raises $6.7M to fix AI generated code testing appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
TestSprite raised $6.7 million to address the critical bottleneck of AI generated code testing, enabling developers to validate AI-written code at unprecedented speeds.
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The post Amazon’s AI Power Play: Inside the $11 Billion Indiana Data Center appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
Amazon’s latest $11 billion AI data center in Indiana signals a profound shift in the foundational infrastructure powering the artificial intelligence revolution, an investment of unprecedented scale that underscores the intense competition for AI compute. In less than a year, Amazon transformed vast Indiana cornfields into its largest AI data center yet, an astonishing feat […]
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The post AI Browser Security: The Peril of the Premature Launch appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
“The rush to get these things to market has not allowed them to be secured.” This stark assessment from Dave McGinnis, Global Partner for Cyber Threat Management Offering Group at IBM, encapsulates the central tension explored in a recent episode of IBM’s Security Intelligence podcast. Host Matt Kosinski, alongside McGinnis and fellow panelists Suja Viswesan […]
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Seattle-based Radical says it has put a full-size prototype for a solar-powered drone through its first flight, marking one low-altitude step in the startup’s campaign to send robo-planes into the stratosphere for long-duration military and commercial missions.
“It’s a 120-foot-wingspan aircraft that only weighs 240 pounds,” Radical CEO James Thomas told GeekWire. “We’re talking about something that has a wingspan just a bit bigger than a Boeing 737, but it only weighs a little bit more than a person. So, it’s a pretty extreme piece of engineering, and we’re really proud of what our team has achieved so far.”
Last month’s flight test was conducted at the Tillamook UAS Test Range in Oregon, which is one of the sites designated by the Federal Aviation Administration for testing uncrewed aerial systems. Thomas declined to delve into the details about the flight’s duration or maximum altitude, other than to say that it was a low-altitude flight.
“We take off from the top of a car, and takeoff speeds are very low, so it flies just over 15 miles an hour on the ground or at low altitudes,” he said. (Thomas later added that the car was a Subaru, a choice he called “a Pacific Northwest move, I guess.”)
The prototype ran on battery power alone, but future flights will make use of solar arrays mounted on the plane’s wings to keep it in the air at altitudes as high as 65,000 feet for months at a time. For last month’s test, engineers added ballast to the prototype to match the weight of the solar panels and batteries required for stratospheric flight. Thomas said he expects high-altitude tests to begin next year.
Thomas and his fellow co-founder, chief technology officer Cyriel Notteboom, are veterans of Prime Air, Amazon’s effort to field a fleet of delivery drones. They left Amazon in mid-2022 to launch Radical and have since raised more than $4.5 million in funding. September’s test of a full-size drone follows up on the 24-hour-plus flight of a 13-pound subscale prototype in 2023.
The company’s manufacturing operation is based in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. There are currently six people on the team, plus a new hire, Thomas said. “We’re still lean,” he said. “To make this airplane work, it has to be really efficient, right? Really efficient electronics and aerodynamics. And you also need a really efficient team.”
Thomas said Radical has attracted interest from potential customers, but he shied away from discussing details. “We’re working with groups in the government and also commercially,” he said. “Obviously there are applications at the end of this that span everything from imagery through telecommunications and weather forecasting. There are a lot of people really interested in the technology, and the thing that stops us from serving those customers is not having a product up in the sky. So, that’s what we’re working through.”
Radical’s solar-powered airplane, known as Evenstar, is just one example of a class of aircraft known as high-altitude platform stations, or HAPS. Thomas and his teammates use a different term to refer to Evenstar. They call it a StratoSat, because it’s designed to take on many of the tasks typically assigned to satellites — but without the costs and the hassles associated with launching a spacecraft.
Potential applications include doing surveillance from a vantage point that’s difficult to attack, providing telecommunication links in areas where connectivity is constrained, monitoring weather patterns and conducting atmospheric research.
“We have customers who are really excited about the way that this can improve how we understand Earth’s weather systems and climate,” Thomas said. “That’s an application that we’re really excited to get into.”
Evenstar will carry payloads weighing up to about 33 pounds (15 kilograms). “That was based on analysis about major use cases,” Thomas explained. “That payload is enough to carry high-bandwidth, direct-to-device radio communications, or to carry ultra-high-resolution imaging equipment.”
Radical isn’t the only company working on solar-powered aircraft built for long-duration flights in the stratosphere. Other entrants in the market include AeroVironment, SoftBank, BAE Systems, Swift Engineering, Kea Aerospace, Korea Aerospace Industries and NewSpace Research & Technologies. Airbus’ solar-powered Zephyr set the record for long-duration stratospheric flight in 2022 with a 64-day test mission that ended in a crash.
Among those who tried but failed to field stratospheric solar drones are Alphabet, which closed down Titan Aerospace in 2016; and Facebook, which abandoned Project Aquila in 2018.
Thomas said the outlook for high-flying solar planes has brightened in the past decade.
“The key supporting technologies have matured enormously,” he said. “Commercial battery energy density has doubled in that 10-year time period. Solar cells are 10 times cheaper than they were just 10 years ago. And then you have advances in compute and AI, and all of these things feed into the situation we have now, where it’s actually possible to make the models close — whereas when we run the 10-year-old numbers, we can’t close the models.”
The way Thomas sees it, the concept behind Radical isn’t all that radical anymore.
“Not only do our models say this will work, but we have flight data that agrees with our models, and says this is a technology that can serve its purpose and unlock the potential of persistent infrastructure in the sky,” he said. “I can see why other people are pursuing it. It’s not a new idea. It’s one that people have wanted to crack for a long time, and we’re at this critical inflection point where it’s finally possible.”
In the era of AI-generated software, developers still need to make sure their code is clean. That’s where TestSprite wants to help.
The Seattle startup announced $6.7 million in seed funding to expand its platform that automatically tests and monitors code written by AI tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Windsurf.
TestSprite’s autonomous agent integrates directly into development environments, running tests throughout the coding process rather than as a separate step after deployment.
“As AI writes more code, validation becomes the bottleneck,” said CEO Yunhao Jiao. “TestSprite solves that by making testing autonomous and continuous, matching AI speed.”
The platform can generate and run front- and back-end tests during development to ensure AI-written code works as expected, help AI IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) fix software based on TestSprite’s integration testing reports, and continuously update and rerun test cases to monitor deployed software for ongoing reliability.
Founded last year, TestSprite says its user base grew from 6,000 to 35,000 in three months, and revenue has doubled each month since launching its 2.0 version and new Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration. The company employs about 25 people.
Jiao is a former engineer at Amazon and a natural language processing researcher. He co-founded TestSprite with Rui Li, a former Google engineer.
Jiao said TestSprite doesn’t compete with AI coding copilots, but complements them by focusing on continuous validation and test generation. Developers can trigger tests using simple natural-language commands, such as “Test my payment-related features,” directly inside their IDEs.
The seed round was led by Bellevue, Wash.-based Trilogy Equity Partners, with participation from Techstars, Jinqiu Capital, MiraclePlus, Hat-trick Capital, Baidu Ventures, and EdgeCase Capital Partners. Total funding to date is about $8.1 million.
It looks like Crash Bandicoot is the newest video game classic to move to Netflix Netflix is the king of video game adaptations. In recent years, Netflix has adapted Castlevania, Tomb Raider, Splinter Cell, Sonic the Hedgehog, and even Cyberpunk 2077. Now, the streaming giant is reportedly developing a new animated series based on Crash […]
The post Crash Bandicoot Netflix series in the works – reports claim appeared first on OC3D.
No founder plans for the day they get fired from their own company.
You plan for funding rounds, product launches and exits, but not for the boardroom moment when everyone raises their hand, and you realize your journey inside the company is over.
It happened to me. I called that board meeting. I set the vote. We had to choose who would stay, me or my co-founder. The vote didn’t go my way.
In movies, this is where the music swells and the credits roll. Steve Jobs after John Sculley. Travis Kalanick after Bill Gurley. In real life, there’s no cinematic pause. No final scene. Just the quiet realization that everything you built now belongs to someone else.
What follows isn’t drama, either. It’s disorientation. And like most founders, I had no idea how to handle it.
When it ended, I filled my calendar with aimless meetings. Five or six a day. Not because they had any real purpose, but because it felt strange not to be doing business. For more than 10 years, I’d never had a day when I didn’t have to think about work. A startup teaches you to fix things fast.
When you’re out, though, there’s nothing left to fix. Only yourself. Getting pushed out isn’t like missing a quarterly target. It’s like losing the story you’ve been telling yourself for years.
The hardest part is that you don’t know who to blame.
Investors? They were doing their job. Yourself? Every decision made sense in context. So the frustration lands on the person closest to you. Your co-founder. It’s not about logic. I would say it is more of a defense mechanism. It’s how the mind tries to make sense of loss.
For months, I kept asking: What did we do wrong? It took me a couple of years to see the pattern.
Later, working inside a venture fund helped me see the truth. I saw the same story play out again and again. Founders repeating the same emotional arc, as follows:
Every time, the same sequence. And when the dream fades, blame fills the gap.
The pattern itself is that the anger toward a co-founder is often a projection of disappointment from a failed deal. If that energy isn’t processed consciously, it finds its own way out, usually as anger. You can’t really be mad at yourself; you did everything right. The other side acted in their own interest. So it lands on the person next to you, your co-founder and your team, and for them, it’s you.
And that’s where I have a bit of a claim toward investors because they often see this dynamic coming and could at least warn founders about it.
Once I recognized the pattern, I stopped seeing my story as a failure. It was part of a cycle almost every founder goes through, only most don’t talk about it.
Traditional business tools didn’t help. OKRs, planning sessions, strategy off-sites, none of it worked on the inner collapse that comes when your identity and your company split apart.
This led me to begin studying Gestalt therapy. It gave me the language to understand how situations like this actually work, their cycles, causes and effects, and how to think about them with the right awareness and perspective. One part of building startups isn’t about pivots or fundraising. It’s realizing how much of yourself you’ve tied to the story you’re telling the world.
The point is to first get conscious of your anger, and then let it out.
Acceptance doesn’t show up all at once. It arrives in pieces.
For me, the first piece came when I watched another founder go through the same breakdown and recognized every stage.
The second came when my first startup was acquired. Not at the valuation I’d dreamed of, but enough to accept that it continued without me. The third came with my current company, Intch, which is built from calm, not from fear.
I no longer measure success by control, but by clarity.
Here’s what I’d share now with another entrepreneur who finds themselves in the same situation.
Founders are trained to manage everything except their own psychology. But startups are way more than capital and code. They run on the emotional architecture of the people who build them. And when that structure breaks, rebuilding it is the most important startup you’ll ever work on.
Yakov Filippenko is a seasoned entrepreneur with more than 10 years of experience in IT and technologies, as well as scaling businesses internationally. As a product manager at Yandex, he led a team that grew the product’s user base from 500,000 to 1.2 million and secured its entry into the international market. Subsequently, he co-founded SailPlay, which he scaled to 45 countries and eventually exited, after it was acquired by Retail Rocket in 2018. In 2021, Filippenko launched Intch, an AI-powered platform connecting part-time professionals with flexible roles.
Illustration: Dom Guzman
With its many accessibility options, Ninja Gaiden 4 is one of the most approachable entries in the series, allowing players to experience its high-speed action without letting the high challenge level get in the way of enjoyment. Those who want to truly appreciate the game, however, will wish to master many of its intricacies, put their skills to the test, and attempt to achieve an S rank for completing each of the story chapters. Here are some tips to help you understand the mission scoring system and what you should always strive to do to achieve such a high rank. […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/how-to/ninja-gaiden-4-achieve-s-rank-easily-in-all-missions-with-this-trick/
The A20 and A20 Pro will be Apple’s first chipsets fabricated on TSMC’s 2nm process, pretty much highlighting the company’s propensity to jump to the newest manufacturing nodes as quickly as possible to have an advantage over the competition. On the same lithography, we expect the California-based giant to introduce a total of four chipsets, and after a couple of generations, Apple will switch to an even more advanced technology. The most obvious transition would be TSMC’s A16, or 1.6nm, but a report says neither company has entered talks for this node. Future Apple chipsets are expected to take advantage of […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/apple-not-yet-in-talks-with-tsmc-over-a16-process/
John Romero might not be a name that youngsters recognize, but he was a legend of the early days of the first-person shooter genre, co-founding id Software and making videogames like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Hexen, and Quake, to name a few. Nowadays, he makes smaller titles at Romero Games. The studio's most recent title was the Mafia-themed turn-based strategy game Empire of Sin, launched in late 2020 to a mixed reception. More recently, John Romero and his fellow developers signed a deal with Microsoft for their next project, but that deal went awry along with the latest Xbox layoffs. The […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/john-romero-talking-companies-finish-game-funded-by-microsoft/
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was featured in a live interview on TBPN (Technology Business Programming Network) discussing various topics, including the company's updated multiplatform strategy on the gaming front. Nadella pointed out that following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft is now the largest gaming publisher in terms of revenue. The goal, then, is to be everywhere the consumer is, just like with Office. The Microsoft CEO then interestingly referred to TikTok, or, to be more accurate, short-form video as a whole, as the true competitor of gaming. Remember, the biggest gaming business is the Windows business. And of course, […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/microsoft-ceo-largest-gaming-publisher-want-to-be-everywhere-competition-tiktok/
ZipWik lets you turn several documents—PDFs, slides, images or spreadsheets—into one simple document and a link you can share anywhere, from WhatsApp to Slack. You can control who sees it, set it to expire, and skip the hassle of sending large attachments. ZipWik also shows you what happens after you share: who viewed it, how long they spent, whether they downloaded or shared it, and which documents got the most attention. It’s an easy way to share files, stay in control, and actually understand how people engage with your content.
No more struggles with large attachments, sharing documents that you cannot control, inability to combine document formats..ZipWik does it all. Try Today.
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The post Arm’s GitHub Copilot Agentic AI: Cloud Migration’s Next Leap appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
Arm and GitHub's new Migration Assistant Custom Agent for GitHub Copilot Agentic AI fundamentally transforms cloud migration to Arm-based infrastructure.
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The post RealWear Arc 3 launch: A lighter AR headset with natural language AI for industry appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
The RealWear Arc 3 launch introduces a lightweight AR headset and a natural language voice OS, aiming to democratize industrial augmented reality.
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The post BRKZ’s $30M finance facility aims to unblock Saudi construction appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
BRKZ's $30M finance facility will provide crucial flexible payment options, accelerating Saudi Arabia's massive construction projects.
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The post Vesence lands $9M to bring rigorous AI review to law firms appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
Vesence's $9M seed round fuels its mission to embed rigorous AI review agents directly into Microsoft Office, promising law firms unparalleled precision and compliance.
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The post Cartesia’s Sonic-3 TTS laughs and emotes at human speed appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
Cartesia's Sonic-3 uses a State Space Model architecture to deliver emotionally expressive AI speech, including laughter, at speeds faster than a human can respond.
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The post Salesforce Agentic AI: The Enterprise Evolution appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
Salesforce's 'Agentic AI' strategy, featuring Agentforce 360 and Forward Deployed Engineers, aims to fundamentally redefine enterprise operations with unified, workflow-spanning AI agents.
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The post Polygraf AI Closes $9.5M Funding Round to Scale Its Secure AI Solutions for Enterprise Defense and Intelligence appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
Polygraf AI, based in Austin, Texas announced the closing of their $9.5M seed round participation from DOMiNO Ventures, Allegis Capital, Alumni Ventures, DataPower VC and previous investors to accelerate their mission to bring clarity and trust to enterprise AI. With the new $9.5M Seed round, Polygraf AI is building the next generation of enterprise AI […]
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The post NVIDIA BlueField-4 Powers AI Factory OS appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
NVIDIA BlueField-4 is poised to redefine AI infrastructure, offering unprecedented compute power, 800Gb/s throughput, and advanced security for gigascale AI factories.
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The post Primaa raises €7M to advance AI cancer diagnostics appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
Biotech company Primaa raised €7 million to expand its AI software that helps pathologists improve the speed and accuracy of cancer diagnostics.
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GPU prices have finally cooled, DDR5 has spiked, and AMD's new Threadripper opens fresh pro power. Here are five builds for every budget - mix and match to fit your needs.
Fitresume.app is a free, AI‑driven resume builder that generates ATS‑friendly resumes, lets you choose polished templates, and custom‑tailors every resume to the exact wording of each job description. Ready to download as a PDF in seconds. Beyond writing, it tracks every application, follow‑up, and interview while visualizing your entire pipeline with an interactive Sankey diagram, so you stay organised and land offers faster.
The post NVIDIA Tackles AI Energy Consumption with Gigawatt Blueprint appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
NVIDIA's Omniverse DSX blueprint provides a standardized, energy-efficient framework for designing and operating gigawatt-scale AI factories, directly addressing AI energy consumption.
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The post NVIDIA Open Models Broaden AI Innovation Access appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
NVIDIA's new open models and data across language, robotics, and biology are set to democratize advanced AI and accelerate innovation.
The post NVIDIA Open Models Broaden AI Innovation Access appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
The post OpenAI Restructuring and Amazon’s AI Paradox Reshape Tech Landscape appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
The capital requirements and strategic maneuvering defining the artificial intelligence frontier are starkly evident in recent developments, from OpenAI’s finalized restructuring to Amazon’s contrasting AI investment strategy. CNBC’s Morgan Brennan recently spoke with CNBC Business News reporter MacKenzie Sigalos, delving into the implications of these pivotal shifts for the broader tech ecosystem and workforce. Their […]
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The post NVIDIA AI Factory Government: Securing Public Sector AI appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
NVIDIA's AI Factory for Government provides a secure, full-stack AI reference design, enabling federal agencies to deploy mission-critical AI with stringent security.
The post NVIDIA AI Factory Government: Securing Public Sector AI appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
The post NVIDIA IGX Thor Powers Real-Time AI at the Industrial Edge appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
NVIDIA IGX Thor is an industrial-grade platform delivering 8x the AI compute of its predecessor, enabling real-time physical AI for critical industrial and medical applications.
The post NVIDIA IGX Thor Powers Real-Time AI at the Industrial Edge appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
NVIDIA's market position in China could see a significant boost following the Trump-Xi meeting, as President Trump hints at discussing 'Blackwell' AI chips for Beijing. NVIDIA's Blackwell AI Chip Will Be a Topic of Discussion Under Trump-Xi Meeting, With a Potential Breakthrough in Sight The Chinese market has been a significant challenge for Jensen Huang since the US-China trade hostilities, and now, it seems like there might be a sigh of relief on the horizon for NVIDIA. According to a report by Bloomberg, President Trump has suggested discussing NVIDIA's Blackwell AI chip with the Chinese counterpart, indicating that chips could […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nvidia-could-receive-approval-for-blackwell-ai-chip-in-china/
The DM's Ark is seamlessly integrated with Discord, it transcribes your sessions, organizes notes, sends detailed recaps, and serves as a living archive of your world. But that’s only the beginning.
YouTube's also changing the name of the 'copyright' tab in YouTube Studio.
Amazon will lay off 2,303 corporate employees in Washington state, primarily in its Seattle and Bellevue offices, according to a filing with the state Employment Security Department that provides the first geographic breakdown of the company’s 14,000 global job cuts.
A detailed list included with the state filing shows a wide array of impacted roles, including software engineers, program managers, product managers, and designers, as well as a significant number of recruiters and human resources staff.
Senior and principal-level roles are among those being cut, aligning with a company-wide push to use the cutbacks to help reduce bureaucracy and operate more efficiently.
Amazon announced the cuts Tuesday morning, part of a larger push by CEO Andy Jassy to streamline the company. Jassy had previously told Amazon employees in June that efficiency gains from AI would likely lead to a smaller corporate workforce over time.
In a memo from HR chief Beth Galetti, the company signaled that further cutbacks will continue into 2026. Reuters reported Monday that the number of layoffs could ultimately total as many as 30,000 people, which is still possible as the layoffs continue into next year.
The post Lilly Blackwell Drug Discovery: A New Era appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
Lilly's new AI factory, powered by NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, marks a pivotal shift in drug discovery, promising unprecedented speed and scale in pharmaceutical innovation.
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The post NVIDIA AI-RAN: Open Source Rewrites Wireless Innovation appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
NVIDIA's open-sourcing of Aerial software, coupled with DGX Spark, is democratizing AI-native 5G and 6G development, accelerating wireless innovation at an unprecedented pace.
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The post Celestica CEO Mionis: AI is a Must-Have Utility, Not a Bubble appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
“AI right now used to be a nice-to-have. It’s a utility, it’s a must-have.” This declarative statement from Celestica President and CEO Rob Mionis on CNBC’s Mad Money with Jim Cramer cuts directly to the core of the current technological zeitgeist. It frames artificial intelligence not as a speculative fad or a nascent technology still […]
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The post Google AI Studio Unleashes “Vibe Coding” Revolutionizing AI Agent Development appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
The era of complex, code-heavy AI development is rapidly giving way to an intuitive, natural language-driven approach, dramatically democratizing creation. At the forefront of this shift is Google AI Studio, a platform designed to accelerate the journey from concept to fully functional AI application in minutes. This new “vibe coding” experience, showcased by Logan Kilpatrick, […]
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The post AI Fusion Energy: NVIDIA, GA Unveil Digital Twin Breakthrough appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
NVIDIA and General Atomics have launched an AI-enabled digital twin for fusion reactors, dramatically accelerating the path to commercial AI fusion energy.
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The post CyberRidge raises $26M to advance optical security for fiber networks appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
CyberRidge launched with $26 million to develop its optical security system that protects data in fiber-optic networks from eavesdropping.
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MSI GeForce RTX 5050 Shadow 2X 8GB: $249 The GeForce RTX 5050 is the most-affordable graphics card based on NVIDIA's Blackwell architecture that targets mainstream gamers, and is the first RTX XX50 series GPU for the desktop in years. Blackwell Architecture Power Efficient Smaller Form Factor Cool And Quiet DLSS4 And RTX Neural Rendering Latest...
Apple is finally getting ready to introduce OLED displays in a wider range of its products. However, don't expect a broad-based debut soon, especially given the Cupertino giant's tendency to move at a glacial pace when introducing new technology. Apple is gearing up to introduce OLED displays in the future versions of the MacBook Air, iPad Air, and iPad mini, with water resistance added for good measure Bloomberg's legendary tipster, Mark Gurman, is out with another scoop today, focusing on a much-anticipated display overhaul for the MacBook Air, iPad Air, and iPad mini, all of which are now slated to […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/apple-is-testing-oled-displays-for-the-macbook-air-ipad-air-and-ipad-mini-with-water-resistance-also-in-the-offing/
In an industry where model size is often seen as a proxy for intelligence, IBM is charting a different course — one that values efficiency over enormity, and accessibility over abstraction.
The 114-year-old tech giant's four new Granite 4.0 Nano models, released today, range from just 350 million to 1.5 billion parameters, a fraction of the size of their server-bound cousins from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
These models are designed to be highly accessible: the 350M variants can run comfortably on a modern laptop CPU with 8–16GB of RAM, while the 1.5B models typically require a GPU with at least 6–8GB of VRAM for smooth performance — or sufficient system RAM and swap for CPU-only inference. This makes them well-suited for developers building applications on consumer hardware or at the edge, without relying on cloud compute.
In fact, the smallest ones can even run locally on your own web browser, as Joshua Lochner aka Xenova, creator of Transformer.js and a machine learning engineer at Hugging Face, wrote on the social network X.
All the Granite 4.0 Nano models are released under the Apache 2.0 license — perfect for use by researchers and enterprise or indie developers, even for commercial usage.
They are natively compatible with llama.cpp, vLLM, and MLX and are certified under ISO 42001 for responsible AI development — a standard IBM helped pioneer.
But in this case, small doesn't mean less capable — it might just mean smarter design.
These compact models are built not for data centers, but for edge devices, laptops, and local inference, where compute is scarce and latency matters.
And despite their small size, the Nano models are showing benchmark results that rival or even exceed the performance of larger models in the same category.
The release is a signal that a new AI frontier is rapidly forming — one not dominated by sheer scale, but by strategic scaling.
The Granite 4.0 Nano family includes four open-source models now available on Hugging Face:
Granite-4.0-H-1B (~1.5B parameters) – Hybrid-SSM architecture
Granite-4.0-H-350M (~350M parameters) – Hybrid-SSM architecture
Granite-4.0-1B – Transformer-based variant, parameter count closer to 2B
Granite-4.0-350M – Transformer-based variant
The H-series models — Granite-4.0-H-1B and H-350M — use a hybrid state space architecture (SSM) that combines efficiency with strong performance, ideal for low-latency edge environments.
Meanwhile, the standard transformer variants — Granite-4.0-1B and 350M — offer broader compatibility with tools like llama.cpp, designed for use cases where hybrid architecture isn’t yet supported.
In practice, the transformer 1B model is closer to 2B parameters, but aligns performance-wise with its hybrid sibling, offering developers flexibility based on their runtime constraints.
“The hybrid variant is a true 1B model. However, the non-hybrid variant is closer to 2B, but we opted to keep the naming aligned to the hybrid variant to make the connection easily visible,” explained Emma, Product Marketing lead for Granite, during a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) session on r/LocalLLaMA.
IBM is entering a crowded and rapidly evolving market of small language models (SLMs), competing with offerings like Qwen3, Google's Gemma, LiquidAI’s LFM2, and even Mistral’s dense models in the sub-2B parameter space.
While OpenAI and Anthropic focus on models that require clusters of GPUs and sophisticated inference optimization, IBM’s Nano family is aimed squarely at developers who want to run performant LLMs on local or constrained hardware.
In benchmark testing, IBM’s new models consistently top the charts in their class. According to data shared on X by David Cox, VP of AI Models at IBM Research:
On IFEval (instruction following), Granite-4.0-H-1B scored 78.5, outperforming Qwen3-1.7B (73.1) and other 1–2B models.
On BFCLv3 (function/tool calling), Granite-4.0-1B led with a score of 54.8, the highest in its size class.
On safety benchmarks (SALAD and AttaQ), the Granite models scored over 90%, surpassing similarly sized competitors.
Overall, the Granite-4.0-1B achieved a leading average benchmark score of 68.3% across general knowledge, math, code, and safety domains.
This performance is especially significant given the hardware constraints these models are designed for.
They require less memory, run faster on CPUs or mobile devices, and don’t need cloud infrastructure or GPU acceleration to deliver usable results.
In the early wave of LLMs, bigger meant better — more parameters translated to better generalization, deeper reasoning, and richer output.
But as transformer research matured, it became clear that architecture, training quality, and task-specific tuning could allow smaller models to punch well above their weight class.
IBM is banking on this evolution. By releasing open, small models that are competitive in real-world tasks, the company is offering an alternative to the monolithic AI APIs that dominate today’s application stack.
In fact, the Nano models address three increasingly important needs:
Deployment flexibility — they run anywhere, from mobile to microservers.
Inference privacy — users can keep data local with no need to call out to cloud APIs.
Openness and auditability — source code and model weights are publicly available under an open license.
IBM’s Granite team didn’t just launch the models and walk away — they took to Reddit’s open source community r/LocalLLaMA to engage directly with developers.
In an AMA-style thread, Emma (Product Marketing, Granite) answered technical questions, addressed concerns about naming conventions, and dropped hints about what’s next.
Notable confirmations from the thread:
A larger Granite 4.0 model is currently in training
Reasoning-focused models ("thinking counterparts") are in the pipeline
IBM will release fine-tuning recipes and a full training paper soon
More tooling and platform compatibility is on the roadmap
Users responded enthusiastically to the models’ capabilities, especially in instruction-following and structured response tasks. One commenter summed it up:
“This is big if true for a 1B model — if quality is nice and it gives consistent outputs. Function-calling tasks, multilingual dialog, FIM completions… this could be a real workhorse.”
Another user remarked:
“The Granite Tiny is already my go-to for web search in LM Studio — better than some Qwen models. Tempted to give Nano a shot.”
IBM’s push into large language models began in earnest in late 2023 with the debut of the Granite foundation model family, starting with models like Granite.13b.instruct and Granite.13b.chat. Released for use within its Watsonx platform, these initial decoder-only models signaled IBM’s ambition to build enterprise-grade AI systems that prioritize transparency, efficiency, and performance. The company open-sourced select Granite code models under the Apache 2.0 license in mid-2024, laying the groundwork for broader adoption and developer experimentation.
The real inflection point came with Granite 3.0 in October 2024 — a fully open-source suite of general-purpose and domain-specialized models ranging from 1B to 8B parameters. These models emphasized efficiency over brute scale, offering capabilities like longer context windows, instruction tuning, and integrated guardrails. IBM positioned Granite 3.0 as a direct competitor to Meta’s Llama, Alibaba’s Qwen, and Google's Gemma — but with a uniquely enterprise-first lens. Later versions, including Granite 3.1 and Granite 3.2, introduced even more enterprise-friendly innovations: embedded hallucination detection, time-series forecasting, document vision models, and conditional reasoning toggles.
The Granite 4.0 family, launched in October 2025, represents IBM’s most technically ambitious release yet. It introduces a hybrid architecture that blends transformer and Mamba-2 layers — aiming to combine the contextual precision of attention mechanisms with the memory efficiency of state-space models. This design allows IBM to significantly reduce memory and latency costs for inference, making Granite models viable on smaller hardware while still outperforming peers in instruction-following and function-calling tasks. The launch also includes ISO 42001 certification, cryptographic model signing, and distribution across platforms like Hugging Face, Docker, LM Studio, Ollama, and watsonx.ai.
Across all iterations, IBM’s focus has been clear: build trustworthy, efficient, and legally unambiguous AI models for enterprise use cases. With a permissive Apache 2.0 license, public benchmarks, and an emphasis on governance, the Granite initiative not only responds to rising concerns over proprietary black-box models but also offers a Western-aligned open alternative to the rapid progress from teams like Alibaba’s Qwen. In doing so, Granite positions IBM as a leading voice in what may be the next phase of open-weight, production-ready AI.
In the end, IBM’s release of Granite 4.0 Nano models reflects a strategic shift in LLM development: from chasing parameter count records to optimizing usability, openness, and deployment reach.
By combining competitive performance, responsible development practices, and deep engagement with the open-source community, IBM is positioning Granite as not just a family of models — but a platform for building the next generation of lightweight, trustworthy AI systems.
For developers and researchers looking for performance without overhead, the Nano release offers a compelling signal: you don’t need 70 billion parameters to build something powerful — just the right ones.
Microsoft is launching a significant expansion of its Copilot AI assistant on Tuesday, introducing tools that let employees build applications, automate workflows, and create specialized AI agents using only conversational prompts — no coding required.
The new capabilities, called App Builder and Workflows, mark Microsoft's most aggressive attempt yet to merge artificial intelligence with software development, enabling the estimated 100 million Microsoft 365 users to create business tools as easily as they currently draft emails or build spreadsheets.
"We really believe that a main part of an AI-forward employee, not just developers, will be to create agents, workflows and apps," Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's president of business and industry Copilot, said in an interview with VentureBeat. "Part of the job will be to build and create these things."
The announcement comes as Microsoft deepens its commitment to AI-powered productivity tools while navigating a complex partnership with OpenAI, the creator of the underlying technology that powers Copilot. On the same day, OpenAI completed its restructuring into a for-profit entity, with Microsoft receiving a 27% ownership stake valued at approximately $135 billion.
The new features transform Copilot from a conversational assistant into what Microsoft envisions as a comprehensive development environment accessible to non-technical workers. Users can now describe an application they need — such as a project tracker with dashboards and task assignments — and Copilot will generate a working app complete with a database backend, user interface, and security controls.
"If you're right inside of Copilot, you can now have a conversation to build an application complete with a backing database and a security model," Lamanna explained. "You can make edit requests and update requests and change requests so you can tune the app to get exactly the experience you want before you share it with other users."
The App Builder stores data in Microsoft Lists, the company's lightweight database system, and allows users to share finished applications via a simple link—similar to sharing a document. The Workflows agent, meanwhile, automates routine tasks across Microsoft's ecosystem of products, including Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and Planner, by converting natural language descriptions into automated processes.
A third component, a simplified version of Microsoft's Copilot Studio agent-building platform, lets users create specialized AI assistants tailored to specific tasks or knowledge domains, drawing from SharePoint documents, meeting transcripts, emails, and external systems.
All three capabilities are included in the existing $30-per-month Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription at no additional cost — a pricing decision Lamanna characterized as consistent with Microsoft's historical approach of bundling significant value into its productivity suite.
"That's what Microsoft always does. We try to do a huge amount of value at a low price," he said. "If you go look at Office, you think about Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Exchange, all that for like eight bucks a month. That's a pretty good deal."
The new tools represent the culmination of a nine-year effort by Microsoft to democratize software development through its Power Platform — a collection of low-code and no-code development tools that has grown to 56 million monthly active users, according to figures the company disclosed in recent earnings reports.
Lamanna, who has led the Power Platform initiative since its inception, said the integration into Copilot marks a fundamental shift in how these capabilities reach users. Rather than requiring workers to visit a separate website or learn a specialized interface, the development tools now exist within the same conversational window they already use for AI-assisted tasks.
"One of the big things that we're excited about is Copilot — that's a tool for literally every office worker," Lamanna said. "Every office worker, just like they research data, they analyze data, they reason over topics, they also will be creating apps, agents and workflows."
The integration offers significant technical advantages, he argued. Because Copilot already indexes a user's Microsoft 365 content — emails, documents, meetings, and organizational data — it can incorporate that context into the applications and workflows it builds. If a user asks for "an app for Project Spartan," Copilot can draw from existing communications to understand what that project entails and suggest relevant features.
"If you go to those other tools, they have no idea what the heck Project Spartan is," Lamanna said, referencing competing low-code platforms from companies like Google, Salesforce, and ServiceNow. "But if you do it inside of Copilot and inside of the App Builder, it's able to draw from all that information and context."
Microsoft claims the apps created through these tools are "full-stack applications" with proper databases secured through the same identity systems used across its enterprise products — distinguishing them from simpler front-end tools offered by competitors. The company also emphasized that its existing governance, security, and data loss prevention policies automatically apply to apps and workflows created through Copilot.
While Microsoft positions the new capabilities as accessible to all office workers, Lamanna was careful to delineate where professional developers remain essential. His dividing line centers on whether a system interacts with parties outside the organization.
"Anything that leaves the boundaries of your company warrants developer involvement," he said. "If you want to build an agent and put it on your website, you should have developers involved. Or if you want to build an automation which interfaces directly with your customers, or an app or a website which interfaces directly with your customers, you want professionals involved."
The reasoning is risk-based: external-facing systems carry greater potential for data breaches, security vulnerabilities, or business errors. "You don't want people getting refunds they shouldn't," Lamanna noted.
For internal use cases — approval workflows, project tracking, team dashboards — Microsoft believes the new tools can handle the majority of needs without IT department involvement. But the company has built "no cliffs," in Lamanna's terminology, allowing users to migrate simple apps to more sophisticated platforms as needs grow.
Apps created in the conversational App Builder can be opened in Power Apps, Microsoft's full development environment, where they can be connected to Dataverse, the company's enterprise database, or extended with custom code. Similarly, simple workflows can graduate to the full Power Automate platform, and basic agents can be enhanced in the complete Copilot Studio.
"We have this mantra called no cliffs," Lamanna said. "If your app gets too complicated for the App Builder, you can always edit and open it in Power Apps. You can jump over to the richer experience, and if you're really sophisticated, you can even go from those experiences into Azure."
This architecture addresses a problem that has plagued previous generations of easy-to-use development tools: users who outgrow the simplified environment often must rebuild from scratch on professional platforms. "People really do not like easy-to-use development tools if I have to throw everything away and start over," Lamanna said.
The democratization of software development raises questions about governance, maintenance, and organizational complexity — issues Microsoft has worked to address through administrative controls.
IT administrators can view all applications, workflows, and agents created within their organization through a centralized inventory in the Microsoft 365 admin center. They can reassign ownership, disable access at the group level, or "promote" particularly useful employee-created apps to officially supported status.
"We have a bunch of customers who have this approach where it's like, let 1,000 apps bloom, and then the best ones, I go upgrade and make them IT-governed or central," Lamanna said.
The system also includes provisions for when employees leave. Apps and workflows remain accessible for 60 days, during which managers can claim ownership — similar to how OneDrive files are handled when someone departs.
Lamanna argued that most employee-created apps don't warrant significant IT oversight. "It's just not worth inspecting an app that John, Susie, and Bob use to do their job," he said. "It should concern itself with the app that ends up being used by 2,000 people, and that will pop up in that dashboard."
Still, the proliferation of employee-created applications could create challenges. Users have expressed frustration with Microsoft's increasing emphasis on AI features across its products, with some giving the Microsoft 365 mobile app one-star ratings after a recent update prioritized Copilot over traditional file access.
The tools also arrive as enterprises grapple with "shadow IT" — unsanctioned software and systems that employees adopt without official approval. While Microsoft's governance controls aim to provide visibility, the ease of creating new applications could accelerate the pace at which these systems multiply.
Microsoft's ambitions for the technology extend far beyond incremental productivity gains. Lamanna envisions a fundamental transformation of what it means to be an office worker — one where building software becomes as routine as creating spreadsheets.
"Just like how 20 years ago you put on your resume that you could use pivot tables in Excel, people are going to start saying that they can use App Builder and workflow agents, even if they're just in the finance department or the sales department," he said.
The numbers he's targeting are staggering. With 56 million people already using Power Platform, Lamanna believes the integration into Copilot could eventually reach 500 million builders. "Early days still, but I think it's certainly encouraging," he said.
The features are currently available only to customers in Microsoft's Frontier Program — an early access initiative for Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers. The company has not disclosed how many organizations participate in the program or when the tools will reach general availability.
The announcement fits within Microsoft's larger strategy of embedding AI capabilities throughout its product portfolio, driven by its partnership with OpenAI. Under the restructured agreement announced Tuesday, Microsoft will have access to OpenAI's technology through 2032, including models that achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) — though such systems do not yet exist. Microsoft has also begun integrating Copilot into its new companion apps for Windows 11, which provide quick access to contacts, files, and calendar information.
The aggressive integration of AI features across Microsoft's ecosystem has drawn mixed reactions. While enterprise customers have shown interest in productivity gains, the rapid pace of change and ubiquity of AI prompts have frustrated some users who prefer traditional workflows.
For Microsoft, however, the calculation is clear: if even a fraction of its user base begins creating applications and automations, it would represent a massive expansion of the effective software development workforce — and further entrench customers in Microsoft's ecosystem. The company is betting that the same natural language interface that made ChatGPT accessible to millions can finally unlock the decades-old promise of empowering everyday workers to build their own tools.
The App Builder and Workflows agents are available starting today through the Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent Store for Frontier Program participants.
Whether that future arrives depends not just on the technology's capabilities, but on a more fundamental question: Do millions of office workers actually want to become part-time software developers? Microsoft is about to find out if the answer is yes — or if some jobs are better left to the professionals.
Also, expanded revenue opportunities via creator subscriptions.
Google DeepMind researchers have developed BlockRank, a new method for ranking and retrieving information more efficiently in large language models (LLMs).
What BlockRank changes. ICR is expensive and slow. Models use a process called “attention,” where every word compares itself to every other word. Ranking hundreds of documents at once gets exponentially harder for LLMs.
How BlockRank works. BlockRank restructures how an LLM “pays attention” to text. Instead of every document attending to every other document, each one focuses only on itself and the shared instructions.
By the numbers. In experiments using Mistral-7B, Google’s team found that BlockRank:
Why we care. BlockRank could change how future AI-driven retrieval and ranking systems work to reward user intent, clarity, and relevance. That means (in theory) clear, focused content that aligns with why a person is searching (not just what they type) should increasingly win.
What’s next. Google/DeepMind researchers are continuing to redefine what it means to “rank” information in the age of generative AI. The future of search is advancing fast – and it’s fascinating to watch it evolve in real time.
An IAB report finds AI speeds discovery but adds steps, sending shoppers to retailers, search, reviews, and forums to verify details before buying.
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Windows Server 2025 is currently open to a Remote Code Execution exploit via the Windows Update Service, and at the time of this writing a fix from Microsoft has yet to fully patch the issue. Reports to The Register indicate that Microsoft's attempt to patch the exploit earlier this month didn't stop any active exploitation, contrary to Microsoft's
Reaction to a huge round of layoffs rippled across Amazon and beyond on Tuesday as the Seattle-based tech giant confirmed that it was slashing 14,000 corporate and tech jobs.
We’ve rounded up some of what’s being said online and/or shared with GeekWire:
A megathread on Reddit served as a collection of comments by impacted employees who posted about their level, location, org and years of service at Amazon.
Workers across ads, recruitment, robotics, retail, Prime Video, Amazon Games, business development, North American Stores, finance, devices and services, Amazon Autos, and more used the thread to vent.
Kristi Coulter, author of Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career, a memoir about what she learned in her 12 years at Amazon, weighed in about the timing of apparent text messages that were sent to impacted employees.
“Wait, I’m sorry: Amazon made people relocate, switch their kids’ schools, and bookend their days with traffic for RTO only to lay them off via a 3 a.m. text? What happened to the vibe and conversations that only being together at the office could allow?” Coulter wrote on LinkedIn.
Some employees shared how they were quickly locked out of work laptops, expressing confusion about whether that was how they were supposed to learn about being terminated.
“I lost access to everything immediately :( ,” one Reddit user said.
Others discussed how they should have found time to transfer important work examples or positive interactions related to their performance over to personal computers.
“One thing I would recommend for everyone is to back up your personal files onto your personal laptop,” one user said on Reddit. “I used to keep all my accolades and praise in a quip file along with all my 2×2 write ups and MBR/QBR write ups cataloging my wins. When I found out I got laid off my head was spinning so I went outside for a walk, by the time I returned I was locked out of my laptop and no longer had access to anything.”
Is this Amazon’s way of saying 100% laid off?
— Aravind Naveen (@MydAravind) October 28, 2025
Any Amazon folks on the timeline – seen this before?#Amazon #layoffs #amazonlayoffs pic.twitter.com/1MCxoXjfHQ
Amazon human resources chief Beth Galetti pinned the layoffs in part on the need to reduce bureaucracy and become more efficient in the new era of artificial intelligence. Others looked for deeper meaning in the cuts.
In a post on LinkedIn, Yahoo! Finance Executive Editor Brian Rozzi said stock price is likely a key consideration when it comes to top execs and the Amazon board signing off on such mass layoffs.
Amazon’s stock was up about 1% on Tuesday to $229 per share.
“If the layoffs keep jacking up the stock price, maybe I can retire instead,” one longtime employee told GeekWire.
Entrepreneur and investor Jason Calacanis posted on X about how AI was coming for middle managers and those with “rote jobs” faster than anyone expected. He encouraged workers to become a founder and do a startup before it’s too late.
Mid-level managers in Amazon’s retail division were heavily impacted by Tuesday’s cuts, according to internal data obtained by Business Insider.
More than 78% of the roles eliminated were held by managers assigned L5 to L7 designations, BI reported. (L5 is typically the starting point for managers at Amazon, with more seniority assigned to higher levels.)
BI also said that U.S.-focused data showed that more than 80% of employees laid off Tuesday worked in Amazon’s retail business, spanning e-commerce, human resources, and logistics.
Bloomberg and others reported that significant cuts are also being felt by Amazon’s video games unit.
Steve Boom, VP of audio, Twitch, and games said in a memo shared with The Verge that “significant role reductions” would be felt at studios in Irvine and San Diego, Calif., as well on Amazon’s central publishing teams.
“We have made the difficult decision to halt a significant amount of our first-party AAA game development work — specifically around MMOs [massively multiplayer online games] — within Amazon Game Studios,” Boom wrote.
Current titles in Amazon’s MMO lineup include “New World: Aeternum,” “Throne and Liberty,” and “Lost Ark.” Amazon also previously announced that it would be developing a “Lord of the Rings” MMO.
Jon Scholes, president and CEO of the Downtown Seattle Association (DSA), has previously praised Amazon for its mandate calling for employees to return to the office five days per week, saying that the foot traffic from thousands of tech workers in the city is a necessary element to helping downtown Seattle rebound from the pandemic.
On Tuesday, Scholes reacted to Amazon’s layoffs in a statement to GeekWire:
“As downtown’s largest employer, a workforce change of this scale has ripple effects throughout the community — on individual employees and families and our small businesses that rely on the weekday foot traffic customer base. In addition, these jobs buttress our tax base that helps fund the city services we all depend on. Employers have options for where they locate jobs, and we want to ensure downtown Seattle is the most attractive place to invest and grow. We must provide vibrancy and a predictable regulatory environment in a competitive landscape because other cities would welcome the jobs currently based in downtown.”
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Whatnot, a live shopping platform and marketplace, has closed a $225 million Series F round, more than doubling its valuation to $11.5 billion in less than 10 months.
DST Global and CapitalG co-led the financing, which brings the Los Angeles-based company’s total raised to about $968 million since its 2019 inception. Whatnot had raised $265 million in a Series E round at a nearly $5 billion valuation in January.
New investors Sequoia Capital and Alkeon Capital participated in the Series F, alongside returning backers Greycroft, Andreessen Horowitz, Avra and Bond. Other investors include Y Combinator, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Liquid 2 Ventures.
As part of the latest financing, Whatnot says it will initiate a tender offer where select current investors will buy up to $126 million worth of shares.
Funding to e-commerce startups globally so far this year totals $7.1 billion, per Crunchbase data. That compares to $11.3 billion raised by e-commerce startups globally in all of 2024. This year’s numbers are also down significantly from post-pandemic funding totals, which surged to $93 billion in 2021.
Live commerce is the combination of livestreaming and online shopping. Grant LaFontaine, co-founder and CEO of Whatnot, said in an announcement that his startup is “proving that live shopping is retail’s new normal.”
The company says more than $6 billion worth of items have been sold on its platform in 2025 so far, more than twice its total for all of 2024. Its app facilitates the buying and selling of collectibles like trading cards and toys through live video auctions. It also offers items such as clothing and sneakers. It competes with the likes of eBay, which currently does not offer a livestreaming option. It’s also a competitor to TikTok Shop.
“Whatnot brought the live shopping wave to the US, the UK, and Europe and has turned it into one of the fastest growing marketplaces of all time, Laela Sturdy, Whatnot board member and managing partner at CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund, said in a release.
The company plans to use its new funds to invest in its platform, roll out new features and “evolve” its policies. It is also accelerating its international expansion, adding to its current 900-person workforce by hiring across multiple departments.
Illustration: Dom Guzman
FurMark is a widely trusted GPU stress test built for enthusiasts, overclockers, and system tuners. It delivers a brutal, sustained load to expose thermal and stability limits, giving you a clear picture of your cooling performance and long-term reliability. Despite its intensity, it stays simple to run and produces repeatable, no-nonsense results.
Google appears to be playing it safe with its upcoming budget offering, the Pixel 10a. If the latest CAD renders are anything to go by, the tech giant is eschewing flashy design changes and opting for a predictable, if somewhat boring, overall design language. Almost nothing appears to have changed between the Pixel 9a and the upcoming Pixel 10a, as per the new CAD renders As per the CAD renders published by the X user OnLeaks on behalf of Android Headlines, the following can be easily concluded: As for the budget offering's rumored specs, the following is known at the […]
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Developer and publisher DON'T NOD has published its latest financial release which goes over its half-year results for 2025, which includes a few notable updates from the studio, like how its most recent release, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage performed "below expectations," and that the studio signed a deal with Netflix to make a narrative game based on "a major IP." It's definitely a disappointing result for DON'T NOD, particularly considering the fact that its last major releases last year, Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden and Jusant, also fell below expectations. The studio's total operating revenue took a 5% dip […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/lost-records-bloom-and-rage-missed-expectations-dont-nod-signs-deal-with-netflix/
Apple revamped its iPhone 17 lineup this year by introducing ProMotion technology to the base model, making it one of the best decisions it could ever make for its flagship smartphone family. Best of all, it brings a host of other upgrades while retaining that $699 price point, which is probably why the iPhone 17 has garnered immense popularity worldwide, particularly in China. Part of why Apple has been able to keep this price unchanged from the iPhone 16 is by keeping the display costs low. According to the latest report, the OLED panel in the iPhone 17 costs around 42 […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/iphone-17-oled-panel-around-42-percent-to-make-than-pro-models/
In the ongoing high-stakes court battle between Oppo and Apple, the former has only a few hours left to complete a transfer of required documents and device forensic reports on an ex-Apple engineer who stands accused of stealing proprietary intellectual property (IP) at the behest of Oppo. Apple accuses Oppo of using its former employee, Chen Shi, to steal Apple Watch secrets Before going further, let's summarize what has happened in this high-stakes saga so far: Apple is asking the court for injunctive relief on four counts: For its part, Oppo maintains that it has conducted a comprehensive search of […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/oppo-has-just-a-few-hours-left-to-hand-over-to-apple-evidentiary-documents-on-a-former-engineer-who-stole-apple-watch-secrets/
In a market that is littered with countless options, Sony successfully stands out with its family of wireless headphones that offer comfort, impeccable audio, a boatload of features, and value, though the latter is subjective, especially if you are not on the hunt for the WH-1000XM6, which cost a jaw-dropping $458 on Amazon. Sure, the latter are the crème de la crème of wireless headphones, but if your primary objective is affordability, you will want to pick the WH-1000XM4, which are available at the same online retailer, but at a more affordable $198, or 43 percent off. Despite being two […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/sony-wh-1000xm4-wireless-headphones-cost-less-than-half-the-price-of-airpods-max-on-amazon/
A new report from GamesIndustry.Biz, based on data provided by Alinea Analytics, shows that in the lead-up to launch, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 trails "far behind" the numbers that Battlefield 6 was able to pull. Setting the parameters here: this is based on data from Steam pre-order sales for Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, 18 days ahead of their respective launches. Within that 18-day lead-up period, Battlefield 6 was able to sell close to a million copies in pre-orders. Black Ops 7 has only managed 200K pre-order copies sold. These numbers start to look […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/call-of-duty-black-ops-7-far-behind-battlefield-6-pre-order-sales/
After Team Group, now Corsair also claims to have reached 14,900 MB/s of read speeds on its latest PCIe 5.0 SSD. CORSAIR Launches MP700 PRO XT and Compact 2242 Form Factor MP700 MICRO PCIe 5.0 SSDs with Blazing Fast Read/Write Speeds One of the leading hardware and peripheral manufacturers, CORSAIR, has released its two new high-performance PCIe 5.0 SSDs for enthusiasts, offering the best-in-class performance for PC builders. The first SSD is the MP700 PRO XT, which is its flagship offering, delivering up to 14,900 MB/s of sequential Read speeds and up to 14,500 MB/s of sequential Write speeds. If […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/corsair-unveils-its-flagship-mp700-pro-xt-pcie-5-0-ssd-offering-up-to-14900-mb-s-of-read-speeds/
With each passing month, artificial intelligence creeps into more industries. That does not exclude the gaming industry, which has long used artificial intelligence to populate its virtual worlds. Still, the generative AI that is taking root everywhere offers much more power, and also much greater risk, compared to what gaming developers were used to. Big companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and EA are already laying off (or thinking about laying off) employees to invest further into artificial intelligence. What do the actual developers think about this artificial intelligence revolution? Their takes, as you would expect, are quite varied. The creator of […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/dayz-creator-says-ai-fears-remind-him-people-worrying-about-google-wikipedia-ai-is-here/
The latest AIO cooler from Thermaltake will work with Intel's upcoming LGA 1954 platform, as spotted on the official website. Thermaltake Lists LGA 1954 as a Compatible Socket for MINECUBE 360 Ultra ARGB Sync AIO Cooler, Confirming Support for Intel Nova Lake Popular cooler and PC case maker, Thermaltake, has officially listed the Intel LGA 1954 socket as a compatible platform for one of its latest AIO coolers. Thermaltake's MINECUBE 360 Ultra ARGB Sync, which was showcased at Computex this year, lists the LGA 1954 on its compatibility list, which confirms that the cooler won't just be compatible with the […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/thermaltake-confirms-one-of-its-existing-aio-coolers-will-be-compatible-with-lga-1954-socket/
Pathea Games, the studio known for games like My Time at Portia, My Time at Sandrock, and the upcoming My Time at Evershine has just shadow-dropped something you'd be more likely to expect from Velan Studios after its game Knockout City, or even Psyonix as a spin-off from Rocket League with Superball, a new free-to-play 3v3 arcade hero football game that's out now on PC and Xbox Series X/S. Announced during the ID@Xbox and IGN Showcase, Superball is described as a mash between Rocket League, something that's made extremely obvious with its giant ball and arena style, and Overwatch with […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/rocket-league-minus-cars-f2p-superball-pathea-games/
ClearWork helps companies transform their operations by first automatically discovering and mapping their actual, end-to-end processes. Unlike old-school methods that rely on manual workshops and guesswork, our AI analyzes real user activity to give a precise, objective view of current operations and pinpoint friction points.
From there, we use AI to help you model and plan an optimized future state that's grounded in your operational reality. Finally, we provide an AI co-pilot, powered by your own data, and orchestrate automated, cross-platform workflows to ensure new processes are not only planned but also executed and sustained across the organization.
Data security company Fortanix Inc. announced a new joint solution with NVIDIA: a turnkey platform that allows organizations to deploy agentic AI within their own data centers or sovereign environments, backed by NVIDIA’s "confidential computing" GPUs.
“Our goal is to make AI trustworthy by securing every layer—from the chip to the model to the data," said Fortanix CEO and co-founder Anand Kashyap, in a recent video call interview with VentureBeat. "Confidential computing gives you that end-to-end trust so you can confidently use AI with sensitive or regulated information.”
The solution arrives at a pivotal moment for industries such as healthcare, finance, and government — sectors eager to embrace AI but constrained by strict privacy and regulatory requirements.
Fortanix’s new platform, powered by NVIDIA Confidential Computing, enables enterprises to build and run AI systems on sensitive data without sacrificing security or control.
“Enterprises in finance, healthcare and government want to harness the power of AI, but compromising on trust, compliance, or control creates insurmountable risk,” said Anuj Jaiswal, chief product officer at Fortanix, in a press release. “We’re giving enterprises a sovereign, on-prem platform for AI agents—one that proves what’s running, protects what matters, and gets them to production faster.”
At the heart of the Fortanix–NVIDIA collaboration is a confidential AI pipeline that ensures data, models, and workflows remain protected throughout their lifecycle.
The system uses a combination of Fortanix Data Security Manager (DSM) and Fortanix Confidential Computing Manager (CCM), integrated directly into NVIDIA’s GPU architecture.
“You can think of DSM as the vault that holds your keys, and CCM as the gatekeeper that verifies who’s allowed to use them," Kashyap said. "DSM enforces policy, CCM enforces trust.”
DSM serves as a FIPS 140-2 Level 3 hardware security module that manages encryption keys and enforces strict access controls.
CCM, introduced alongside this announcement, verifies the trustworthiness of AI workloads and infrastructure using composite attestation—a process that validates both CPUs and GPUs before allowing access to sensitive data.
Only when a workload is verified by CCM does DSM release the cryptographic keys necessary to decrypt and process data.
“The Confidential Computing Manager checks that the workload, the CPU, and the GPU are running in a trusted state," explained Kashyap. "It issues a certificate that DSM validates before releasing the key. That ensures the right workload is running on the right hardware before any sensitive data is decrypted.”
This “attestation-gated” model creates what Fortanix describes as a provable chain of trust extending from the hardware chip to the application layer.
It’s an approach aimed squarely at industries where confidentiality and compliance are non-negotiable.
According to Kashyap, the partnership marks a step forward from traditional data encryption and key management toward securing entire AI workloads.
Kashyap explained that enterprises can deploy the Fortanix–NVIDIA solution incrementally, using a lift-and-shift model to migrate existing AI workloads into a confidential environment.
“We offer two form factors: SaaS with zero footprint, and self-managed. Self-managed can be a virtual appliance or a 1U physical FIPS 140-2 Level 3 appliance," he noted. "The smallest deployment is a three-node cluster, with larger clusters of 20–30 nodes or more.”
Customers already running AI models—whether open-source or proprietary—can move them onto NVIDIA’s Hopper or Blackwell GPU architectures with minimal reconfiguration.
For organizations building out new AI infrastructure, Fortanix’s Armet AI platform provides orchestration, observability, and built-in guardrails to speed up time to production.
“The result is that enterprises can move from pilot projects to trusted, production-ready AI in days rather than months,” Jaiswal said.
Compliance remains a key driver behind the new platform’s design. Fortanix’s DSM enforces role-based access control, detailed audit logging, and secure key custody—elements that help enterprises demonstrate compliance with stringent data protection regulations.
These controls are essential for regulated industries such as banking, healthcare, and government contracting.
The company emphasizes that the solution is built for both confidentiality and sovereignty.
For governments and enterprises that must retain local control over their AI environments, the system supports fully on-premises or air-gapped deployment options.
Fortanix and NVIDIA have jointly integrated these technologies into the NVIDIA AI Factory Reference Design for Government, a blueprint for building secure national or enterprise-level AI systems.
In addition to current encryption standards such as AES, Fortanix supports post-quantum cryptography (PQC) within its DSM product.
As global research in quantum computing accelerates, PQC algorithms are expected to become a critical component of secure computing frameworks.
“We don’t invent cryptography; we implement what’s proven,” Kashyap said. “But we also make sure our customers are ready for the post-quantum era when it arrives.”
While the platform is designed for on-premises and sovereign use cases, Kashyap emphasized that it can also run in major cloud environments that already support confidential computing.
Enterprises operating across multiple regions can maintain consistent key management and encryption controls, either through centralized key hosting or replicated key clusters.
This flexibility allows organizations to shift AI workloads between data centers or cloud regions—whether for performance optimization, redundancy, or regulatory reasons—without losing control over their sensitive information.
Fortanix converts usage into “credits,” which correspond to the number of AI instances running within a factory environment. The structure allows enterprises to scale incrementally as their AI projects grow.
Fortanix will showcase the joint platform at NVIDIA GTC, held October 27–29, 2025, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. Visitors can find Fortanix at booth I-7 for live demonstrations and discussions on securing AI workloads in highly regulated environments.
Fortanix Inc. was founded in 2016 in Mountain View, California, by Anand Kashyap and Ambuj Kumar, both former Intel engineers who worked on trusted execution and encryption technologies. The company was created to commercialize confidential computing—then an emerging concept—by extending the security of encrypted data beyond storage and transmission to data in active use, according to TechCrunch and the company’s own About page.
Kashyap, who previously served as a senior security architect at Intel and VMware, and Kumar, a former engineering lead at Intel, drew on years of work in trusted hardware and virtualization systems. Their shared insight into the gap between research-grade cryptography and enterprise adoption drove them to found Fortanix, according to Forbes and Crunchbase.
Today, Fortanix is recognized as a global leader in confidential computing and data security, offering solutions that protect data across its lifecycle—at rest, in transit, and in use.
Fortanix serves enterprises and governments worldwide with deployments ranging from cloud-native services to high-security, air-gapped systems.
"Historically we provided encryption and key-management capabilities," Kashyap said. "Now we’re going further to secure the workload itself—specifically AI—so an entire AI pipeline can run protected with confidential computing. That applies whether the AI runs in the cloud or in a sovereign environment handling sensitive or regulated data.
Learn more about the startups chosen for Google for Startups Accelerator: AI for Cybersecurity.A collection of Google's latest security features and updates for Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2025.The TransAmerica Trail is a legendary off-road route, stretching more than 5,900 miles and known for its rugged, remote beauty. And for the first time, you can now explo…Another powerful creation option for your short-form video clips.
Given that Reddit and G2 are commonly cited by AI chatbots, this could be valuable.
The tool can create ad assets based on your URL.
Get ready to see a broader range of ads in your Threads feed.
Australia's under 16 social media restrictions will come into effect in December.
Microsoft and OpenAI signed a deal extending Microsoft's rights to OpenAI models through 2032, confirming a 27% stake worth $135B
The post Microsoft Locks In OpenAI Partnership Through 2032 appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
The post AccessGrid raises $4.4M to advance mobile access control appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
AccessGrid raised $4.4M to expand its mobile access control system that turns smartphones into secure digital keys for buildings.
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The post AI’s True Impact: Productivity, Not Layoffs, Driving CEO Agendas appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
Despite widespread anxieties about artificial intelligence decimating the workforce, Steve Odland, CEO of The Conference Board, offers a more nuanced, and perhaps more optimistic, perspective: AI is not primarily a job killer, but a catalyst for productivity. He contends that while AI will profoundly reshape the professional landscape, current large-scale layoffs stem more from broader […]
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The post Google Backs AI Cybersecurity Startups in Latin America appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
Google's new accelerator program is investing in 11 AI cybersecurity startups in Latin America, aiming to fortify the region's digital defenses.
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The post E-commerce consumption could bump 20% because of agentic AI, says Mizuho’s Dan Dolev appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
Dan Dolev, Mizuho’s managing director and senior analyst covering the fintech and payments space, spoke with the host of CNBC’s “The Exchange” following the announcement of a strategic partnership between PayPal and OpenAI. The discussion centered on the potential total addressable market for “agentic commerce” and the specific upside for PayPal in this burgeoning domain, […]
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The post Fireworks AI raises $250M to advance its AI inference platform appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
Fireworks AI secured $250 million to expand its platform that makes AI inference faster and more cost-effective for developers.
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The post Nano Banana’s Creative Revolution: Unpacking DeepMind’s Viral Image Model appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
Google DeepMind’s Nano Banana, the image model that recently captivated the internet, represents a pivotal moment in the democratization and evolution of digital creativity. Its creators, Principal Scientist Oliver Wang and Group Product Manager Nicole Brichtova, recently sat down with a16z partners Yoko Li and Guido Appenzeller to unravel the model’s origins, its unexpected viral […]
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The post Google Gemini for Home: The AI Assistant’s Next Evolution appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
Google Gemini for Home is rolling out in early access, upgrading smart assistants with advanced conversational AI and introducing a premium subscription for enhanced features.
The post Google Gemini for Home: The AI Assistant’s Next Evolution appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
The post Mem0 raises $24M to cure AI’s digital amnesia appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
Mem0 is tackling AI's "digital amnesia" with a universal memory layer, aiming to become the foundational database for the next generation of intelligent agents.
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The post Amazon’s AI-Driven Efficiency Reshapes Big Tech Workforce appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
The transformative power of artificial intelligence, while heralding unprecedented innovation, is simultaneously catalyzing a profound restructuring of the tech workforce, a reality starkly illustrated by Amazon’s recent corporate layoffs. As CNBC’s MacKenzie Sigalos reported on “Money Movers,” Amazon is embarking on a multi-year efficiency drive, predominantly focused on “hollowing out layers of middle management.” This […]
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The post AI Reshapes M&A Landscape, Trillions in Value Up for Grabs appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
The convergence of advanced artificial intelligence and a uniquely poised global economy is setting the stage for an unprecedented era of mergers and acquisitions, fundamentally altering how companies operate and how value is created. This transformative period, characterized by both immense opportunity and inherent risks, was a central theme in Ken Moelis’s discussion with CNBC’s […]
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The post Pomelli AI: Google’s Play for SMB Marketing appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
Google Labs' new Pomelli AI aims to democratize on-brand social media campaign generation for SMBs by leveraging AI to understand and replicate brand identity.
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The post AI Valuations Spark Bubble Fears Amidst Broader Market Optimism appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
A stark warning echoes from the latest CNBC Fed Survey: nearly 80% of respondents believe AI stocks are currently overvalued, with a quarter deeming them “extremely overvalued.” This sentiment, highlighted by CNBC Senior Economics Reporter Steve Liesman on “Squawk on the Street,” paints a picture of growing apprehension within the investment community regarding the sustainability […]
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The post Building AI Unicorns: Lessons from Casetext’s $650M Exit appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
“I cannot believe that they are doing it this way.” This sentiment, articulated by Jake Heller, co-founder and CEO of Casetext, encapsulates the entrepreneurial spark that ignited his $650 million AI legal startup, CoCounsel, recently acquired by Thomson Reuters. His candid talk at the AI Startup School on June 17th, 2025, offered a masterclass in […]
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Classic gaming enthusiasts may have to wait until next year to get their mitts on the a modernized Amiga A1200, but in the meantime they can pick up THEC64 Mini Black Edition. It’s got everything fans of the Commodore 64 remember, but in a smaller package that includes modern inputs and a slate of new games.
THEC64 is half the size of the
Yet another dual-screen "DS" handheld has been born, though this time it's through user modification of the Steam Deck OLED rather than a dedicated clone like the Anbernic RG DS.
This particular Steam Deck DS modding project is the most recent of its kind, but not the only one—there have been plenty of these posted to the r/SteamDeck subreddit
We're racing toward the end of 2025, and while there's still over two months left to go, we're confident in saying that there probably won't be any more high-profile handheld hardware launches this year. We do expect to see some systems based on Intel's new Panther Lake processors next year, but for now, the two highest-profile handheld releases
Corsair extends its PCIe 5.0 offerings with its MP700 PRO XT and MP700 Micro Corsair has just added two new SSDs to its PCIe 5.0 storage lineup, promising high-end SSD performance and Microsoft DirectStorage support. Catering to the high-end market, Corsair’s new MP700 PRO XT SSD promises performance levels that reach the limits of the […]
The post Corsair delivers peak PCIe 5.0 speeds with its new MP700 PRO XT appeared first on OC3D.
NVIDIA has shown off its next-gen Vera Rubin Superchip for the first time at GTC in Washington, primed to spark the next wave of AI. NVIDIA Has Received Its First Rubin GPUs In The Labs, Ready For Vera Rubin Superchip Mass Production Next Year, Around The Same Time or Earlier At GTC October 2025, NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang showcased the next-gen Vera Rubin Superchip. This is the first time that we are seeing an actual sample of the motherboard, or Superchip as NVIDIA loves to call it, featuring the Vera CPU and two massive Rubin GPUs. The motherboard also hosts […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nvidia-shows-next-gen-vera-rubin-superchip-two-massive-gpus-production-next-year/
NVIDIA has announced a surprise partnership with Nokia to bring 6G connectivity by utilizing the firm's new AI-RAN products, involving Grace CPUs and Blackwell GPUs. NVIDIA's Collaboration With Nokia Allows Merging CUDA & Computing Tech With Existing RAN Infrastructure Team Green has managed to integrate AI into everything mainstream, and it seems that the telecommunications industry is now expected to benefit from the next wave of AI's computing capabilities. At the GTC 2025 keynote, NVIDIA's CEO announced a pivotal partnership with Nokia, formally entering the race for achieving 6G connectivity through a new suite of AI-RAN products combined with Nokia's […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nvidia-announces-a-massive-partnership-with-nokia-bringing-next-gen-6g-connectivity/
Amazon is laying off more than 14,000 corporate jobs today, and per a report from Bloomberg, the video games division, Amazon Game Studios, is not immune to the cuts. While Amazon doesn't specify exactly how many people from its video games division will be laid off, a statement from Steve Boom, Amazon's head of audio, Twitch, and games, does call the cut "significant," and says that the cuts are happening despite Amazon being "proud" of the success it has had. While the studio's MMO, New World, isn't mentioned by name, the statement does say that Amazon is halting its game […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/amazon-video-game-division-hit-significant-cuts-amid-mass-14000-layoff/
Qualcomm will keep pace with Apple and announce its first 2nm chipset in late 2026, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, directly succeeding the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. A tipster now shares some partial specifications of the chipset, claiming that it will feature LPDDR6 RAM and UFS 5.0 storage, bringing in a wave of improvements. However, the rumor also mentions that the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 will utilize TSMC’s more advanced ‘N2P’ process, which has been refuted on a previous occasion. Based on TSMC’s 2nm production timeline, its N2 wafers will be available in higher volume for customers like […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/snapdragon-8-elite-gen-6-to-get-lpddr6-and-ufs-5-0-support-but-will-stick-with-tsmc-n2-process/
Zack Fair's gameplay in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is set to be significantly expanded by a new mod introducing new mechanics and skill for an overhauled combat experience. This Zack gameplay overhaul mod is being developed by NSK, the modder behind the Zack and Sephiroth Combat Fix mod whichaddressed some issues for the two characters and expanded their possibilities when added to the regular combat party outside their small playable segments. Judging from the video showcase shared a few days ago on YouTube, the changes being made to Zack's gameplay are going to be significant, leveraging his unique Charge mechanics […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/final-fantasy-vii-rebirth-zack-gameplay-mod/
It's a big day for Battlefield 6, with both its Season 1 update now live for players to jump into, and its new free-to-play battle royale mode, Battlefield REDSEC, also now available. EA and Battlefield Studios confirmed yesterday what was already rumored, that REDSEC would be revealed and launched today, and now it's here for all players on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. Once the gameplay trailer that was teased yesterday was over, the mode and the new season was officially live for all players to jump into, and we got our first major question of the day answered. […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/battlefield-6-season-1-battlefield-redsec-out-now-pc-ps5-xbox-series-x-s/
The Pro 27Q-10 is probably the cheapest QHD OLED gaming monitor available on the market and is currently available for just 2,399 Yuan in China. Lenovo Debuts Legion Pro Series OLED Monitors, Starting at $337; Available in Both 2K and 4K Variants with Up To 280Hz Refresh Rate Competition in the OLED display category is getting aggressive, and while we already have some QHD OLED gaming monitors available for as low as $450-$500, Lenovo just brought the price to under $350. Lenovo is the most popular PC brand on earth, isn't just involved in desktops and laptops; it is also […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/lenovo-launches-legion-pro-27q-10-the-cheapest-qhd-oled-monitor-at-just-337/
President Trump is expected to meet with NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Huang, during his visit to South Korea, where he will congratulate him on the firm's recent achievements. President Trump Will Congratulate NVIDIA On Producing The First Blackwell Chip Wafer In the US Well, the timing of a meeting between President Trump and Jensen Huang is indeed a 'massive' coincidence, to say the least, especially since both the US and China have agreed on a trade deal framework, which is expected to reduce hostilities between the two nations. While speaking with business leaders in Tokyo, Japan, President Trump announced his meeting […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/president-trump-to-meet-nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang/
OpenAI has been working for quite a while now with the famous Apple designer, Jony Ive, to come up with a consumer AI device, one that would supposedly render smartphones obsolete, devastating Apple's legendary moat around its iPhones in the process. Now, we have just received the clearest sign yet that OpenAI is indeed working on such a device. What's more, Microsoft will no longer exercise any influence over the upcoming "Apple iPhone killer." OpenAI and Microsoft have successfully renegotiated their tie-up, removing the latter's influence over the former's upcoming "Apple iPhone killer" consumer device, among other things Microsoft and […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/microsoft-will-no-longer-have-any-say-in-openais-upcoming-apple-iphone-killer-consumer-device-decisions/
Wrekcreation, the sandbox open-world arcade racing game from Three Fields Entertainment, a studio founded by former Criterion developers who worked on the Burnout series, is out now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. Published by THQ Nordic, Wreckreation gives players the freedom to create whatever kinds of tracks they want, from the kinds of things you'd only expect to see in Hot Wheels Unleashed to something super realistic if that's more your speed, and race the wide variety of vehicles on them to your heart's content. With more than 400 square kilometres of space to create tracks in and […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/sandbox-racer-wreckreation-out-now-pc-ps5-xbox-series/
The advent of AI and Meta's launch of its smart glasses have injected fresh air into the sector after Google decided to shelve its smart glasses in 2023, the sector has seen increased interest. In fact, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone as far as to suggest that courtesy of AI, users who do not use smart glasses can find themselves at a cognitive disadvantage. To understand the smart glasses industry and how the gadgets can impact consumer electronics manufacturing, semiconductor fabrication and AI GPU production, we decided to talk to Vuzix Corporation's President, Enterprise Solutions Dr. Chris Parkinson. Vuzix […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/smart-glasses-can-be-the-future-of-chip-manufacturing-and-smartphone-ai-gpu-production-says-vuzixs-enterprise-solutions-head/
TSMC's former SVP, known for his key role in driving the Taiwan giant's chip technologies, is reportedly being pursued to join Intel Foundry, which could be a significant hiring move for Team Blue. Intel's Pursuit of TSMC's Former Executive Shows the Firm's 'Hunger' Towards a Comeback in the Chip Industry Intel has been scaling up its chipmaking ambitions since the change in leadership, and under CEO Lip-Bu Tan, the foundry division has vowed to gain recognition in the semiconductor industry. Structural changes are being made within the department, including adjustments to the management hierarchy and the approach towards specific chip […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-foundry-reportedly-pursuing-former-tsmc-executive/
Developer ArenaNet has launched the sixth major expansion for Guild Wars 2 today, with Visions of Eternity now available to players on PC. Visions of Eternity adds a new island to explore called Castora, with two new maps to explore, a new storyline, and plenty more. The new storyline kicks off with whispers and rumors of the island of Castora, with the Tyrian Alliance stepping in to uncover more about the magical island once they discover that the Inquest has begun sniffing around for Castora. Alongside two new maps included with the new expansion, Shipwreck Strand and Starlit Weald, players […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/guild-wars-2-visions-of-eternity-expansion-out-now-pc/
Tampo is a modern task and team management platform built for startups and growing teams. It helps you organize projects, assign tasks, and collaborate seamlessly—all in one place. With features like multi-user assignments, real-time tracking, and smart filters, Tampo simplifies team coordination without sacrificing power. Designed to be fast, intuitive, and mobile-friendly, Tampo is the productivity partner your team needs to get more done, together.
Less than two weeks ahead of the United Nations climate conference, Bill Gates posted a memo on his personal blog encouraging folks to just calm down about climate change.
“Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future,” Gates wrote.
The missive seems to run counter to earlier climate actions taken by the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire, but also echoes Gates’ long-held priorities and perspectives. In some regards, it’s the framing, timing and broader political context that heighten the memo’s impact.
What the world needs to do, he said, is to shift the goals away from reducing carbon emissions and keeping warming below agreed-upon temperature targets.
“This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives,” he wrote. “Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.“
More than four years ago, Gates published “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” a book highlighting the urgency and necessity of cutting carbon emissions and promoting the need to reduce “green premiums” in order to make climate friendly technologies as cheap as unsustainable alternatives.
“It’ll be tougher than anything humanity’s ever done, and only by staying constant in working on this over the next 30 years do we have a chance to do it,” Gates told GeekWire in 2021. “Having some people who think it’s easy will be an impediment. Having people who think that it’s not important will be an impediment.”
Gates’ clean energy efforts go back even earlier. In 2006 he helped launch the next-gen nuclear company TerraPower, which is currently building its first reactor in Wyoming. In 2015 he founded Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a $1 billion fund to support carbon-cutting startups, which evolved into Breakthrough Energy, an umbrella organization tackling clean tech policies, funding for researchers and data generation.
Earlier this year, however, Gates began taking steps that suggested a cooling commitment to the challenge.
Roughly two months after President Trump took office in January, and as clean energy policies and funding began getting axed, Breakthrough Energy laid off staff. In May Gates announced he would direct nearly all of his wealth to his eponymous global health foundation, deploying $200 billion through the organization over two decades.
At the same time, many of the key points in the memo published today reflect statements that Gates has made in the past.
In both his new post and at a 2022 global climate summit organized in Seattle by Breakthrough Energy, Gates urged people to focus on reducing green premiums more than on cutting emissions as a key benchmark.
“If you keep the primary measures, which is the emissions reductions in the near term, you’re going to be very depressed,” Gates said. At his summit talk, he shared optimism that new innovations were arriving quickly and would address climate challenges.
A curious paradox in Gates’ stance is the reality that people living in lower-income nations and in regions important to the Gates Foundation are often hardest hit by the rising temperatures and natural disasters that are stoked by increased carbon emissions.
Gates acknowledged that truth in his post this week, and said that solutions such as engineering drought tolerant crops and making air conditioning more widespread can address some of those harms. At the Seattle summit three years ago, one of the Breakthrough Energy executives likewise said the organization was going to increase its investment into technologies for adapting to climate change.
On Nov. 10, global climate leaders will meet in Brazil for COP30 to discuss climate progress and issues. Gates has often attended the event, but the New York Times reported that won’t be the case this year.
UN efforts meanwhile continue to emphasize the importance of reducing emissions. A statement today from the organization notes that while carbon emissions are curving downward, it’s not happening fast enough.
The world needs to raise its climate ambitions, the statement continues, “to avoid the worst climate impacts by limiting warming to 1.5°C this century, as science demands.”
GitHub is making a bold bet that enterprises don't need another proprietary coding agent: They need a way to manage all of them.
At its Universe 2025 conference, the Microsoft-owned developer platform announced Agent HQ. The new architecture transforms GitHub into a unified control plane for managing multiple AI coding agents from competitors including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Cognition and xAI. Rather than forcing developers into a single agent experience, the company is positioning itself as the essential orchestration layer beneath them all.
Agent HQ represents GitHub's attempt to apply its collaboration platform approach to AI agents. Just as the company transformed Git, pull requests and CI/CD into collaborative workflows, it's now trying to do the same with a fragmented AI coding landscape.
The announcement marks what GitHub calls the transition from "wave one" to "wave two" of AI-assisted development. According to GitHub's Octoverse report, 80% of new developers use Copilot in their first week and AI has helped to lead to a large increase overall in the use of the GitHub platform.
"Last year, the big announcements for us, and what we were saying as a company, is wave one is done, that was kind of code completion," GitHub's COO Mario Rodriguez told VentureBeat. "We're into this wave two era, [which] is going to be multimodal, it's going to be agentic and it's going to have these new experiences that will feel AI native."
GitHub already updated its GitHub Copilot coding tool for the agentic era with the debut of GitHub Copilot Agent in May.
Agent HQ transforms GitHub into an open ecosystem that unites multiple AI coding agents on a single platform. Over the coming months, coding agents from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Cognition, xAI and others will become available directly within GitHub as part of existing paid GitHub Copilot subscriptions.
The architecture maintains GitHub's core primitives. Developers still work with Git, pull requests and issues. They still use their preferred compute, whether GitHub Actions or self-hosted runners. What changes is the layer above: agents from multiple vendors can now operate within GitHub's security perimeter, using the same identity controls, branch permissions and audit logging that enterprises already trust for human developers.
This approach differs fundamentally from standalone tools. When developers use Cursor or grant repository access to Claude, those agents typically receive broad permissions across entire repositories. Agent HQ compartmentalizes access at the branch level and wraps all agent activity in enterprise-grade governance controls.
At the heart of Agent HQ is Mission Control. It's a unified command center that appears consistently across GitHub's web interface, VS Code, mobile apps and the command line. Through Mission Control, developers can assign work to multiple agents simultaneously. They can track progress and manage permissions, all from a single pane of glass.
The technical architecture addresses a critical enterprise concern: Security. Unlike standalone agent implementations where users must grant broad repository access, GitHub's Agent HQ implements granular controls at the platform level.
"Our coding agent has a set of security controls and capabilities that are built natively into the platform, and that's what we're providing to all of these other agents as well," Rodriguez explained. "It runs with a GitHub token that is very locked down to what it can actually do."
Agents operating through Agent HQ can only commit to designated branches. They run within sandboxed GitHub Actions environments with firewall protections. They operate under strict identity controls. Rodriguez explained that even if an agent goes rogue, the firewall prevents it from accessing external networks or exfiltrating data unless those protections are explicitly disabled.
Beyond managing third-party agents, GitHub is introducing two technical capabilities that set Agent HQ apart from alternative approaches like Cursor's standalone editor or Anthropic's Claude integration.
Custom agents via AGENTS.md files: Enterprises can now create source-controlled configuration files that define specific rules, tools and guardrails for how Copilot behaves. For example, a company could specify "prefer this logger" or "use table-driven tests for all handlers." This permanently encodes organizational standards without requiring developers to re-prompt every time.
"Custom agents have an immense amount of product market fit within enterprises, because they could just codify a set of skills that the coordination can do, then standardize on those and get really high quality output," Rodriguez said.
The AGENTS.md specification allows teams to version control their agent behavior alongside their code. When a developer clones a repository, they automatically inherit the custom agent rules. This solves a persistent problem with AI coding tools: Inconsistent output quality when different team members use different prompting strategies.
Native Model Context Protocol (MCP) support: VS Code now includes a GitHub MCP Registry. Developers can discover, install and enable MCP servers with a single click. They can then create custom agents that combine these tools with specific system prompts.
This positions GitHub as the integration point between the emerging MCP ecosystem and actual developer workflows. MCP, introduced by Anthropic but rapidly gaining industry support, is becoming a de facto standard for agent-to-tool communication. By supporting the full specification, GitHub can orchestrate agents that need access to external services without each agent implementing its own integration logic.
GitHub is also shipping new capabilities within VS Code itself. Plan Mode allows developers to collaborate with Copilot on building step-by-step project approaches. The AI asks clarifying questions before any code is written. Once approved, the plan can be executed either locally in VS Code or by cloud-based agents.
The feature addresses a common failure mode in AI coding: Beginning implementation before requirements are fully understood. By forcing an explicit planning phase, GitHub aims to reduce wasted effort and improve output quality.
More significantly, GitHub's code review feature is becoming agentic. The new implementation will use GitHub's CodeQL engine, which previously largely focused on security vulnerabilities to identify bugs and maintainability issues. The code review agent will automatically scan agent-generated pull requests before human review. This creates a two-stage quality gate.
"Our code review agent will be able to make calls into the CodeQL engine to then find a set of bugs," Rodriguez explained. "We're extending the engine and we're going to be able to tap into that engine also to find bugs."
For enterprises already deploying multiple AI coding tools, Agent HQ offers a path to consolidation without forcing tool elimination.
GitHub's multi-agent approach provides vendor flexibility and reduces lock-in risk. Organizations can test multiple agents within a unified security perimeter and switch providers without retraining developers. The tradeoff is potentially less optimized experiences compared to specialized tools that tightly integrate UI and agent behavior.
Rodriguez's recommendation is clear: Begin with custom agents. This allows enterprises to codify organizational standards that agents follow consistently. Once established, organizations can layer in additional third-party agents to expand capabilities.
"Go and do agent coding, custom agents and start playing with that," he said. "That is a capability available tomorrow, and it allows you to really start shaping your SDLC to be personalized to you, your organization and your people."
Building AI for financial software requires a different playbook than consumer AI, and Intuit's latest QuickBooks release provides an example.
The company has announced Intuit Intelligence, a system that orchestrates specialized AI agents across its QuickBooks platform to handle tasks including sales tax compliance and payroll processing. These new agents augment existing accounting and project management agents (which have also been updated) as well as a unified interface that lets users query data across QuickBooks, third-party systems and uploaded files using natural language.
The new development follow years of investment and improvement in Intuit's GenOS, allowing the company to build AI capabilities that reduce latency and improve accuracy.
But the real news isn't what Intuit built — it's how they built it and why their design decisions will make AI more usable. The company's latest AI rollout represents an evolution built on hard-won lessons about what works and what doesn't when deploying AI in financial contexts.
What the company learned is sobering: Even when its accounting agent improved transaction categorization accuracy by 20 percentage points on average, they still received complaints about errors.
"The use cases that we're trying to solve for customers include tax and finance; if you make a mistake in this world, you lose trust with customers in buckets and we only get it back in spoonfuls," Joe Preston, Intuit's VP of product and design, told VentureBeat.
Intuit's technical strategy centers on a fundamental design decision. For financial queries and business intelligence, the system queries actual data, rather than generating responses through large language models (LLMs).
Also critically important: That data isn't all in one place. Intuit's technical implementation allows QuickBooks to ingest data from multiple distinct sources: native Intuit data, OAuth-connected third-party systems like Square for payments and user-uploaded files such as spreadsheets containing vendor pricing lists or marketing campaign data. This creates a unified data layer that AI agents can query reliably.
"We're actually querying your real data," Preston explained. "That's very different than if you were to just copy, paste out a spreadsheet or a PDF and paste into ChatGPT."
This architectural choice means that the Intuit Intelligence system functions more as an orchestration layer. It's a natural language interface to structured data operations. When a user asks about projected profitability or wants to run payroll, the system translates the natural language query into database operations against verified financial data.
This matters because Intuit's internal research has uncovered widespread shadow AI usage. When surveyed, 25% of accountants using QuickBooks admitted they were already copying and pasting data into ChatGPT or Google Gemini for analysis.
Intuit's approach treats AI as a query translation and orchestration mechanism, not a content generator. This reduces the hallucination risk that has plagued AI deployments in financial contexts.
Beyond the technical architecture, Intuit has made explainability a core user experience across its AI agents. This goes beyond simply providing correct answers: It means showing users the reasoning behind automated decisions.
When Intuit's accounting agent categorizes a transaction, it doesn't just display the result; it shows the reasoning. This isn't marketing copy about explainable AI, it's actual UI displaying data points and logic.
"It's about closing that trust loop and making sure customers understand the why," Alastair Simpson, Intuit's VP of design, told VentureBeat.
This becomes particularly critical when you consider Intuit's user research: While half of small businesses describe AI as helpful, nearly a quarter haven't used AI at all. The explanation layer serves both populations: Building confidence for newcomers, while giving experienced users the context to verify accuracy.
The design also enforces human control at critical decision points. This approach extends beyond the interface. Intuit connects users directly with human experts, embedded in the same workflows, when automation reaches its limits or when users want validation.
One of Intuit's more interesting challenges involves managing a fundamental shift in user interfaces. Preston described it as having one foot in the past and one foot in the future.
"This isn't just Intuit, this is the market as a whole," said Preston. "Today we still have a lot of customers filling out forms and going through tables full of data. We're investing a lot into leaning in and questioning the ways that we do it across our products today, where you're basically just filling out, form after form, or table after table, because we see where the world is headed, which is really a different form of interacting with these products."
This creates a product design challenge: How do you serve users who are comfortable with traditional interfaces while gradually introducing conversational and agentic capabilities?
Intuit's approach has been to embed AI agents directly into existing workflows. This means not forcing users to adopt entirely new interaction patterns. The payments agent appears alongside invoicing workflows; the accounting agent enhances the existing reconciliation process rather than replacing it. This incremental approach lets users experience AI benefits without abandoning familiar processes.
Intuit's experience deploying AI in financial contexts surfaces several principles that apply broadly to enterprise AI initiatives.
Architecture matters for trust: In domains where accuracy is critical, consider whether you need content generation or data query translation. Intuit's decision to treat AI as an orchestration and natural language interface layer dramatically reduces hallucination risk and avoids using AI as a generative system.
Explainability must be designed in, not bolted on: Showing users why the AI made a decision isn't optional when trust is at stake. This requires deliberate UX design. It may constrain model choices.
User control preserves trust during accuracy improvements: Intuit's accounting agent improved categorization accuracy by 20 percentage points. Yet, maintaining user override capabilities was essential for adoption.
Transition gradually from familiar interfaces: Don't force users to abandon forms for conversations. Embed AI capabilities into existing workflows first. Let users experience benefits before asking them to change behavior.
Be honest about what's reactive versus proactive: Current AI agents primarily respond to prompts and automate defined tasks. True proactive intelligence that makes unprompted strategic recommendations remains an evolving capability.
Address workforce concerns with tooling, not just messaging: If AI is meant to augment rather than replace workers, provide workers with AI tools. Show them how to leverage the technology.
For enterprises navigating AI adoption, Intuit's journey offers a clear directive. The winning approach prioritizes trustworthiness over capability demonstrations. In domains where mistakes have real consequences, that means investing in accuracy, transparency and human oversight before pursuing conversational sophistication or autonomous action.
Simpson frames the challenge succinctly: "We didn't want it to be a bolted-on layer. We wanted customers to be in their natural workflow, and have agents doing work for customers, embedded in the workflow."
Washington state Gov. Bob Ferguson is threading the needle when it comes to artificial intelligence.
Ferguson made a brief appearance at the opening reception for Seattle AI Week on Monday evening, speaking at AI House on Pier 70 about his approach to governing the consequential technology.
“I view my job as maximizing the benefits and minimizing harms,” said Ferguson, who took office earlier this year.
Ferguson called AI one of the “top five biggest challenges” he thinks about daily, both professionally and personally.
In a follow-up interview with GeekWire, the governor said AI “could totally transform our government, as well as the private sector, in many ways.”
His comments came just as Amazon, the largest employer in Washington state, said it would eliminate about 14,000 corporate jobs, citing a need to reduce bureaucracy and become more efficient in the new era of artificial intelligence.
Ferguson told the crowd that the future of work and “loss of jobs that come with the technology” is on his mind.
The governor highlighted Washington’s AI Task Force, created during his tenure as attorney general, which is studying issues from algorithmic bias to data security. The group’s next set of recommendations arrives later this year and could shape upcoming legislation, he said.
States are moving ahead with their own AI rules in the absence of a comprehensive federal framework. Washington appears to sit in the pragmatic middle of this fast-moving regulatory landscape — using executive action and an expert task force to build guidelines, while watching experiments in states such as California and Colorado.
Seattle city leaders also getting involved. Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell last month announced a “responsible AI plan” that provides guidelines for Seattle’s use of artificial intelligence and its support of the AI tech sector as an economic driver.
Ferguson said he’s aware of how AI can “really revolutionize our economy and state in so many ways,” from healthcare to education to wildfire detection.
But he also flagged his concerns — both as a policymaker and parent. The governor, who has 17-year-old twins, said he worries about the technology’s impact on young people, referencing reports of teen suicides linked to AI chatbots.
Despite those concerns, Ferguson maintained an upbeat tone during his remarks at Seattle AI Week, citing the region’s technical talent and economic opportunity from the technology.
He noted that the state, amid a $16 billion budget shortfall this year, kept $300,000 in funding for the AI House, the new waterfront startup hub that hosted Monday’s event.
“There is no better place anywhere in the United States for this innovation than right here in the Northwest,” he said.
Related: A tale of two Seattles in the age of AI: Harsh realities and new hope for the tech community
EVERETT, Wash. — In an industrial stretch of Everett is a boxy, windowless building called Ursa. Inside that building is a vault built from concrete blocks up to 5 feet thick with an additional layer of radiation-absorbing plastic. Within that vault is Polaris, a machine that could change the world.
Helion Energy is trying to replicate the physics that fuel the sun and the stars — hence the celestial naming theme — to provide nearly limitless power on earth through fusion reactions.
The company recently invited a small group of journalists to visit its headquarters and see Polaris, which is the seventh iteration of its fusion generator and the prototype for a commercial facility called Orion that broke ground this summer in Malaga in Central Washington.
Few people outside of Helion have been provided such access; photographs were not allowed.
“We run these systems right now at 100 million degrees, about 10 times the temperature of the sun, and compress them to high pressure… the same pressure as the bottom of the Marianas Trench,” said Helion CEO and co-founder David Kirtley, referencing the deepest part of the ocean.
Polaris and its vault occupy a relative small footprint inside of Ursa. The majority of the space is filled with 2,500 power units. They’re configured into 4-foot-by-4-foot pallets, lined up in rows and stacked seven high. The units are packed with capacitors that are charged from the grid to provide super high intensity pulses of electricity — 100 gigawatts of peak power — that create the temperatures and pressure needed for fusion reactions.
All of that energy is carried through miles and miles of coaxial cables filled with copper, aluminum and custom-metal alloys. End-to-end, the cables would stretch across Washington state and back again — roughly 720 miles. They flow in thick, black bundles from the pallets into the vault. They curl on the floor in giant heaps before connecting to the tubular-shaped, 60-foot-long Polaris generator.
The ultimate goal is for the generator to force lightweight ions to fuse, creating a super hot plasma that expands, pushing on a magnetic field that surrounds it. The energy created by that expansion is directly captured and carried back the capacitors to recharge them so the process can be repeated over and over again.
And the small amount of extra power that’s produced by fusion goes into the electrical grid for others to use — or at least that’s the plan for the future.
Helion is a contender in a global race to generate fusion power for a rapidly escalating demand for electricity, driven in part by data centers and AI. No one so far has been able to make and capture enough energy from fusion to commercialize the process, but dozens of companies — including three other competitors in the Pacific Northwest — are trying.
The company aims by 2028 to begin producing energy at the Malaga site, which Microsoft has agreed to purchase. If it hits this extremely ambitious target — and many are highly skeptical — it could be the world’s first company to do so.
“There is a level of risk, of being aggressive with program development, new technology and timelines,” Kirtley said. “But I think it’s worth it. Fusion is the same process that happens in the stars. It has the promise of very low cost electricity that’s clean and safe and base load and always on. And so it’s worth being aggressive.”
Some in the sector worry that Helion will miss the mark and cast doubt on a sector that is working hard to prove itself. At a June event, the head of R&D for fusion competitor Zap Energy questioned Helion’s deadline.
“I don’t see a commercial application in the next few years happening,” said Ben Levitt. “There is a lot of complicated science and engineering still to be discovered and to be applied.”
Others are willing to take the bet. Helion has raised more than $1 billion from investors that include SoftBank, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sam Altman, who is OpenAI’s CEO and co-founder, as well as Helion’s longtime chair of its board of directors. The company is able to unlock an additional $1.8 billion if it hits Polaris milestones.
The generator has been operating since December, running all day, five days a week, creating fusion, Kirtley said.
Helion is highly cautious — some would say too cautious — in sharing details on its progress. Helion officials say they must hold their tech close to the vest as Chinese competitors have stolen pieces of their intellectual property; critics say the secrecy makes it difficult for the scientific community to verify their likelihood of success in a very risky, highly technical field.
In August, Kirtley shared an online post about Helion’s power-producing strategy, which upends the conventional approach.
Most efforts are trying to achieve ignition in their fusion generators, which is a condition where the reactions produce more power than is required for fusion to occur. This feat was first accomplished at a national lab in California in 2022 — but it still wasn’t enough energy that one could put electricity on the grid.
Helion is not aiming for ignition but rather for a system that is so efficient it can capture enough energy from fusion without reaching that state.
Kirtley compares the strategy for producing power to regenerative braking in electric vehicles. Simply put, an EV’s battery gets the car moving, and regenerative braking by the driver puts energy back into the battery to help it run longer. In the fusion generator, the capacitors provide that initial power, and the fusion reaction resupplies the energy and a little bit more.
“We can recover electricity at high efficiency,” Kirtley said. Compared to other commercial fusion approaches, “we require a lot less fusion. Fusion is the hard part. My goal, ironically, is to do the minimum amount of fusion that we can deliver a product to the customer and generate electricity.”
Learn more about the new Gemini for Home voice assistant, now rolling out in early access.Pomelli, our newest experiment from Google Labs and DeepMind, is here to help you create on-brand marketing content.An overview of the new course from The Google School for Leaders that helps all managers build high-performing teams.Here’s how students and faculty at higher education institutions are using Gemini.Google has expanded the What’s happening feature within Google Business Profiles to restaurants and bars in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It is now available for multi-location restaurants, not just single-location restaurants.
The What’s happening feature launched back in May as a way for some businesses to highlight events, deals, and specials prominently at the top of your Google Business Profile. Now, Google is bringing it to more countries.
What Google said. Google’s Lisa Landsman wrote on LinkedIn:
How do you promote your “Taco Tuesday” in Toledo and your “Happy Hour” in Houston… right when locals are searching for a place to go?
I’m excited to share that the Google Business Profile feature highlighting what’s happening at your business, such as timely events, specials and deals, has now rolled out for multi-location restaurants & bars across the US, UK, CA, AU & NZ! (It was previously only available for single-location restaurants)
This is a great option for driving real-time foot traffic. It automatically surfaces the unique specials, live music, or events you’re already promoting at a specific location, catching customers at the exact moment they’re deciding where to eat or grab a cocktail.
What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of this feature:
More details. Google’s Lisa Landsman added, “We’ve already seen excellent results from testing and look forward to hearing how this works for you!”
Availability. This feature is only available for restaurants & bars. Google said it hopes to expand to more categories soon. It is also only available in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
The initial launch was for single-location Food and Drink businesses in the U.S., UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. It is now available for multi-location restaurants, not just single-location restaurants.
Why we care. If you manage restaurants and/or bars, this may be a new way to get more attention and visitors to your business from Google Search. Now, if you manage multi-location restaurants or bars, you can leverage this feature.
Marketing, technology, and business leaders today are asking an important question: how do you optimize for large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude?
LLM optimization is taking shape as a new discipline focused on how brands surface in AI-generated results and what can be measured today.
For decision makers, the challenge is separating signal from noise – identifying the technologies worth tracking and the efforts that lead to tangible outcomes.
The discussion comes down to two core areas – and the timeline and work required to act on them:
Just as SEO evolved through better tracking and measurement, LLM optimization will only mature once visibility becomes measurable.
We’re still in a pre-Semrush/Moz/Ahrefs era for LLMs.
Tracking is the foundation of identifying what truly works and building strategies that drive brand growth.
Without it, everyone is shooting in the dark, hoping great content alone will deliver results.
The core challenges are threefold:
Why LLM queries are different
Traditional search behavior is repetitive – millions of identical phrases drive stable volume metrics. LLM interactions are conversational and variable.
People rephrase questions in different ways, often within a single session. That makes pattern recognition harder with small datasets but feasible at scale.
These structural differences explain why LLM visibility demands a different measurement model.
This variability requires a different tracking approach than traditional SEO or marketing analytics.
The leading method uses a polling-based model inspired by election forecasting.
A representative sample of 250–500 high-intent queries is defined for your brand or category, functioning as your population proxy.
These queries are run daily or weekly to capture repeated samples from the underlying distribution of LLM responses.
Tracking tools record when your brand and competitors appear as citations (linked sources) or mentions (text references), enabling share of voice calculations across all competitors.
Over time, aggregate sampling produces statistically stable estimates of your brand visibility within LLM-generated content.
Early tools providing this capability include:
Consistent sampling at scale transforms apparent randomness into interpretable signals.
Over time, aggregate sampling provides a stable estimate of your brand’s visibility in LLM-generated responses – much like how political polls deliver reliable forecasts despite individual variations.
While share of voice paints a picture of your presence in the LLM landscape, it doesn’t tell the complete story.
Just as keyword rankings show visibility but not clicks, LLM presence doesn’t automatically translate to user engagement.
Brands need to understand how people interact with their content to build a compelling business case.
Because no single tool captures the entire picture, the best current approach layers multiple tracking signals:
Nobody has complete visibility into LLM impact on their business today, but these methods cover all the bases you can currently measure.
Be wary of any vendor or consultant promising complete visibility. That simply isn’t possible yet.
Understanding these limitations is just as important as implementing the tracking itself.
Because no perfect models exist yet, treat current tracking data as directional – useful for decisions, but not definitive.
Dig deeper: In GEO, brand mentions do what links alone can’t
Measuring LLM impact is one thing. Identifying which queries and topics matter most is another.
Compared to SEO or PPC, marketers have far less visibility. While no direct search volume exists, new tools and methods are beginning to close the gap.
The key shift is moving from tracking individual queries – which vary widely – to analyzing broader themes and topics.
The real question becomes: which areas is your site missing, and where should your content strategy focus?
To approximate relative volume, consider three approaches:
Correlate with SEO search volume
Start with your top-performing SEO keywords.
If a keyword drives organic traffic and has commercial intent, similar questions are likely being asked within LLMs. Use this as your baseline.
Layer in industry adoption of AI
Estimate what percentage of your target audience uses LLMs for research or purchasing decisions:
Apply these percentages to your existing SEO keyword volume. For example, a keyword with 25,000 monthly searches could translate to 1,250-6,250 LLM-based queries in your category.
Using emerging inferential tools
New platforms are beginning to track query data through API-level monitoring and machine learning models.
Accuracy isn’t perfect yet, but these tools are improving quickly. Expect major advancements in inferential LLM query modeling within the next year or two.
The technologies that help companies identify what to improve are evolving quickly.
While still imperfect, they’re beginning to form a framework that parallels early SEO development, where better tracking and data gradually turned intuition into science.
Optimization breaks down into two main questions:
One of the most effective ways to assess your current position is to take a representative sample of high-intent queries that people might ask an LLM and see how your brand shows up relative to competitors. This is where the Share of Voice tracking tools we discussed earlier become invaluable.
These same tools can help answer your optimization questions:
From this data, several key insights emerge:
LLMs may be reshaping discovery, but SEO remains the foundation of digital visibility.
Across five competitive categories, brands ranking on Google’s first page appeared in ChatGPT answers 62% of the time – a clear but incomplete overlap between search and AI results.
That correlation isn’t accidental.
Many retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems pull data from search results and expand it with additional context.
The more often your content appears in those results, the more likely it is to be cited by LLMs.
Brands with the strongest share of voice in LLM responses are typically those that invested in SEO first.
Strong technical health, structured data, and authority signals remain the bedrock for AI visibility.
What this means for marketers:
Just as SEO has both on-page and off-page elements, LLM optimization follows the same logic – but with different tactics and priorities.
Off-page: The new link building
Most industries show a consistent pattern in the types of resources LLMs cite:
Citation patterns across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews show consistent trends, though each engine favors different sources.
This means that traditional link acquisition strategies, guest posts, PR placements, or brand mentions in review content will likely evolve.
Instead of chasing links anywhere, brands should increasingly target:
The core principle holds: brands gain the most visibility by appearing in sources LLMs already trust – and identifying those sources requires consistent tracking.
On-page: What your own content reveals
The same technologies that analyze third-party mentions can also reveal which first-party assets, content on your own website, are being cited by LLMs.
This provides valuable insight into what type of content performs well in your space.
For example, these tools can identify:
From there, three key opportunities emerge:
The next major evolution in LLM optimization will likely come from tools that connect insight to action.
Early solutions already use vector embeddings of your website content to compare it against LLM queries and responses. This allows you to:
Current tools mostly generate outlines or recommendations.
The next frontier is automation – systems that turn data into actionable content aligned with business goals.
While comprehensive LLM visibility typically builds over 6-12 months, early results can emerge faster than traditional SEO.
The advantage: LLMs can incorporate new content within days rather than waiting months for Google’s crawl and ranking cycles.
However, the fundamentals remain unchanged.
Quality content creation, securing third-party mentions, and building authority still require sustained effort and resources.
Think of LLM optimization as having a faster feedback loop than SEO, but requiring the same strategic commitment to content excellence and relationship building that has always driven digital visibility.
LLM traffic remains small compared to traditional search, but it’s growing fast.
A major shift in resources would be premature, but ignoring LLMs would be shortsighted.
The smartest path is balance: maintain focus on SEO while layering in LLM strategies that address new ranking mechanisms.
Like early SEO, LLM optimization is still imperfect and experimental – but full of opportunity.
Brands that begin tracking citations, analyzing third-party mentions, and aligning SEO with LLM visibility now will gain a measurable advantage as these systems mature.
In short:
Approach LLM optimization as both research and brand-building.
Don’t abandon proven SEO fundamentals. Rather, extend them to how AI systems discover, interpret, and cite information.
Seattle is looking to celebrate and accelerate its leadership in artificial intelligence at the very moment the first wave of the AI economy is crashing down on the region’s tech workforce.
That contrast was hard to miss Monday evening at the opening reception for Seattle AI Week 2025 at Pier 70. On stage, panels offered a healthy dose of optimism about building the AI future. In the crowd, buzz about Amazon’s impending layoffs brought the reality of the moment back to earth.
A region that rose with Microsoft and then Amazon is now dealing with the consequences of Big Tech’s AI-era restructuring. Companies that hired by the thousands are now thinning their ranks in the name of efficiency and focus — a dose of corporate realism for the local tech economy.
The double-edged nature of this shift is not lost on Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson.
“AI, and the future of AI, and what that means for our state and the world — each day I do this job, the more that moves up in my mind in terms of the challenges and the opportunities we have,” Ferguson told the AI Week crowd. He touted Washington’s concentration of AI jobs, saying his goal is to maximize the benefits of AI while minimizing its downsides.
Seattle AI Week, led by the Washington Technology Industry Association, was started last year after a Forbes list of the nation’s top 50 AI startups included none from Seattle, said the WTIA’s Nick Ellingson, opening this year’s event. That didn’t seem right. Was it a messaging problem?
“A bunch of us got together and said, let’s talk about all the cool things happening around AI in Seattle, and let’s expand the tent beyond just tech things that are happening,” Ellingson explained.
So maybe that’s the best measuring stick: how many startups will this latest shakeout spark, and how can the Seattle region’s startup and tech leaders make it happen? Can the region become less dependent on the whims of the Microsoft and Amazon C-suites in the process?
“Washington has so much opportunity. It’s one of the few capitals of AI in the world,” said WTIA’s Arry Yu in her opening remarks. “People talk about China, people talk about Silicon Valley — there are a few contenders, but really, it’s here in Seattle. … The future is built on data, on powerful technology, but also on community. That’s what makes this place different.”
And yet, “AI is a sleepy scene in Seattle, where people work at their companies, but there’s very little activity and cross-pollinating outside of this,” said Nathan Lambert, senior research scientist with the Allen Institute for AI, during the opening panel discussion.
No, we don’t want to become San Francisco or Silicon Valley, Lambert added. But that doesn’t mean the region can’t cherry-pick some of the ingredients that put Bay Area tech on top.
Whether laid-off tech workers will start their own companies is a common question after layoffs like this. In the Seattle region at least, that outcome has been more fantasy than reality.
This is where AI could change things, if not with the fabled one-person unicorn then with a bigger wave of new companies born of this employment downturn. Who knows, maybe one will even land on that elusive Forbes AI 50 list. (Hey, a region can dream!)
But as the new AI reality unfolds in the regional workforce, maybe the best question to ask is whether Seattle’s next big thing can come from its own backyard again.
Related: Ferguson’s AI balancing act: Washington governor wants to harness innovation while minimizing harms
Microsoft and OpenAI announced the long-awaited details of their new partnership agreement Tuesday morning — with concessions on both sides that keep the companies aligned but not in lockstep as they move into their next phases of AI development.
Under the arrangement, Microsoft gets a 27% equity stake in OpenAI’s new for-profit entity, the OpenAI Group PBC (Public Benefit Corporation), a stake valued at approximately $135 billion. That’s a decrease from 32.5% equity but not a bad return on an investment of $13.8 billion.
At the same time, OpenAI has contracted to purchase an incremental $250 billion in Microsoft Azure cloud services. However, in a significant concession in return for that certainty, Microsoft will no longer have a “right of first refusal” on new OpenAI cloud workloads.
Microsoft, meanwhile, will retain its intellectual property rights to OpenAI models and products through 2032, an extension of the timeframe that existed previously.
A key provision of the new agreement centers on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), with any declaration of AGI by OpenAI now subject to verification by an independent expert panel. This was a sticking point in the earlier partnership agreement, with an ambiguous definition of AI potentially triggering new provisions of the prior arrangement.
Microsoft and OpenAI had previously announced a tentative agreement without providing details. More aspects of the deal are disclosed in a joint blog post from the companies.
Shares of Microsoft are up 2% in early trading after the announcement. The company reports earnings Wednesday afternoon, and some analysts have said the uncertainty over the OpenAI arrangement has been impacting Microsoft’s stock.
The post AMD CEO on new $1 billion AI supercomputer partnership with the Department of Energy appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
“We are super excited to announce a new partnership with the Department of Energy,” stated Lisa Su, Chair and CEO of AMD, during a CNBC interview. This monumental $1 billion collaboration will usher in the development of two advanced supercomputers, designed to tackle some of the most complex scientific challenges facing humanity. The partnership signifies […]
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The post Bitcoin Miners’ AI Pivot: A Strategic Masterclass in Energy and Compute appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
The burgeoning demand for artificial intelligence, a computational arms race among hyperscalers, has illuminated a critical bottleneck: access to reliable, scalable power. This very challenge, as discussed by CleanSpark CEO Matthew Schultz with CNBC’s Jordan Smith, is precisely where Bitcoin miners like CleanSpark find their strategic advantage. Their conversation unveils a nuanced pivot, not merely […]
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The post OpenAI Recapitalization Reshapes AI Landscape with Microsoft at the Helm appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
The recent finalization of OpenAI’s recapitalization plan marks a pivotal moment in the trajectory of artificial intelligence, not just for the involved parties but for the entire tech ecosystem. On CNBC, David Faber broke down the intricate details of this agreement, joined by Jim Cramer, who offered his characteristic sharp market commentary. Their discussion illuminated […]
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The post Wild Moose Emerges from Stealth with $7 Million Seed Round to Redefine Site Reliability Engineering with AI appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
Wild Moose, the AI-powered Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) platform acting as a first responder for production incidents, today announced its emergence from stealth with $7 million in seed funding. The round was led by iAngels, with participation from Y Combinator, F2 Venture Capital, Maverick Ventures, and others. The company is also backed by a distinguished […]
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The post Gemini for Education: Google’s AI Dominates Higher Ed appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
Google's Gemini for Education is rapidly integrating into higher education, offering no-cost AI tools to over 1000 institutions and 10 million students.
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The post Securitize IPO to bring tokenization to Nasdaq at $1.25B appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
The Securitize IPO is a bellwether moment, creating the first publicly-traded company focused purely on the infrastructure for tokenizing real-world assets.
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The post FriendliAI Expands Ultra-Fast AI Inference Platform with Nebius AI Cloud Integration appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
Enterprises can now deploy large-scale AI inference with FriendliAI’s optimized stack on Nebius AI infrastructure, combining top performance with cost efficiency.
The post FriendliAI Expands Ultra-Fast AI Inference Platform with Nebius AI Cloud Integration appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
Seems like we've been on a northern lights roll lately, haven't we? There's one happening again tonight and the NOAA is even promising how the spectacular aurora display will be visible as far south as New York and Wisconsin. Forecasts say that a significant burst of solar activity colliding with Earth’s magnetic field will be creating the
After kids, teens, and even some adults are finished knocking on your door in hopes of scoring pieces of candy (or full-size candy bars, if you're really looking to impress), it won't be long until the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales season is in full force. If you want to get a jump on the mad rush and are in the market for a Fire TV,
Cybersecurity experts are sounding the alarm over a new Android Trojan dubbed Herodotus, which is designed to deliberately slow down its own malicious activity to mimic the casual, imperfect behavior of a human user. Such behavior allows the malware to slip past a generation of security systems built to flag more rapid, robotic actions of
Windows Insiders are getting early access to an upcoming Windows 11 feature that is intended to improve system reliability by scanning system memory following a system crash. The optional feature is related to those frustrating BSOD errors that, aside from letting you know that your PC tripped over itself and bonked its head (as was the case
Samsung is expanding its range of storage card solutions with the release of the P9 Express, a microSD Express memory card with enough speed to keep up with gaming handhelds like Nintendo's Switch 2. While not exclusively aimed at the Switch 2, Nintendo's newest console is a big reason why we're starting to see more microSD Express memory
AMD will power two new AI supercomputers in the US, using MI355X and MI430X accelerators The US Department of Energy has announced a $1 billion deal under which AMD will deliver two next-generation supercomputers to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). These systems are designed to expand the US’s leadership in artificial intelligence (AI) and […]
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By Jeff Seibert
I’ve been building products and companies my entire career — Increo, Box, Crashlytics, Twitter and now, Digits — and I’ve had the privilege of speaking with some of the sharpest minds in venture and entrepreneurship along the way.
One recent conversation with a legendary investor really crystallized for me a set of truths about startups: what success really is, why some founders thrive while others burn out, and how to navigate the inevitable chaos of building something from nothing.
Here are some of the lessons I’ve internalized from years of building, observing and learning.
In the startup world, we talk a lot about IPOs, acquisitions and valuations. But those are milestones, not destinations.
The companies that endure don’t “win” and stop — they keep creating, adapting and pushing forward. They’re playing an infinite game, where the only goal is to remain in the game.
When you’re building something truly generative — driven by a purpose greater than yourself — there’s no point at which you can say “done.” If your company has a natural stopping point, you may be building the wrong thing.
The best founders I’ve met — and the best moments I’ve had as a founder — come from an almost irrational pull toward solving a specific problem I myself experienced.
You may want to start a company, but if you have to talk yourself into your idea, it probably won’t survive contact with reality. The founders who succeed are often the ones who can’t not work on their thing.
Starting a company shouldn’t be a career move — it should be the last possible option after every other path fails to scratch the itch.
Most companies don’t die because of one bad decision or one tough competitor. They die because the founders run out of energy.
Fatigue erodes vision, motivation and creativity. Protecting your own drive — keeping it clean and focused — may be the single most important survival skill you have.
That means staying close to the product, protecting time for customer work, and avoiding the slow drift into managing around problems instead of solving them.
It’s easy to get caught up in competitor moves, investor chatter or market gossip. But the most important question is always: Are we delivering joy to the customer?
If you’re losing focus, sign up for your own product as a brand-new user. Feel the friction. Fix it. Repeat.
At Digits, we run our own signup and core flows every week. It’s uncomfortable — it surfaces flaws we’d rather not see — but it keeps us anchored to the only metric that matters: customer delight.
Over the years, I’ve learned the most effective boards aren’t presentation theaters — they’re discussion rooms.
The best structure I’ve seen:
Good directors help you widen your perspective. They don’t hand you a to-do list. Rather, they help you see the problem in a way that makes the answer obvious.
When I think back to my time at Twitter, the most enduring lesson is that not all companies are built top-down. Some — like Twitter — are shaped more by their users than their executives.
Features like @mentions, hashtags and retweets didn’t come from a product roadmap — they came from the community.
That’s messy, but it’s also powerful. Sometimes your job isn’t to control the phenomenon, rather it’s to keep it healthy without smothering what made it magical in the first place.
If you’re building today, you have an advantage over the so-called “unicorn zombies” that raised massive rounds pre-AI and are now locked into defending old business models.
Fresh founders can design from scratch for the new reality; there’s no legacy to protect, no sacred cows to defend.
The macro environment? Irrelevant. The only timing that matters is when the problem calls you so strongly that not working on it feels impossible.
If there’s one takeaway from all of this, it’s that success is continuing. The real prize is the ability to keep playing, keep serving and keep creating.
If you’re standing at the edge, wondering if you should start — start. Take one step. See if it grows. And if it does, welcome to the infinite game.
Jeff Seibert is the founder and CEO of Digits, the world’s first AI-native accounting platform. He previously served as Twitter‘s head of consumer product and starred in the Emmy Award-winning Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma.”
Illustration: Dom Guzman
While startup investment has been climbing lately, not all industries are partaking in the gains.
Cleantech is one of the spaces that’s been mostly left out. Overall funding to the space is down this year, despite some pockets of bullishness in areas like fusion and battery recycling.
The broad trend: Cleantech- and sustainability-related startup investment has been on a downward trajectory for several years now. And so far, 2025 is on track to be another down year.
On the bright side, however, there’s been some pickup in recent months, boosted by big rounds for companies in energy storage, fusion and other cleantech subsectors.
The numbers: Investors put an estimated $20 billion into seed- through growth-stage funding to companies in cleantech, EV and sustainability-related categories so far this year.
That puts 2025 funding on track to come in well below last year’s levels, which were already at a multiyear low.
Still, quarter by quarter, the pattern looks more encouraging. Investment hit a low point in Q1 of this year and recovered some in the subsequent two quarters. The current quarter is also off to a strong start.
Noteworthy recent rounds
The largest cleantech-related round of the year closed this month. Base Power, a provider of residential battery backup systems and electricity plans, raised $1 billion in Series C funding. The Austin, Texas-based company says its systems allow energy providers to more efficiently harness renewable power.
The second-largest round was Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ $863 million Series B2 financing. The Devens, Massachusetts-based company says it is moving closer to being the first in the world to commercialize fusion power.
For a bigger-picture view, below we put together a list of 10 of the year’s largest cleantech- and sustainability-related financings.
The broad takeaway: Startups innovating for an era of rising power consumption
Not to over-generalize, but if there was one big takeaway from recent cleantech and sustainability startup funding, it would be that founders and investors recognize that these are times of ever-escalating energy demand. They’re planning accordingly, looking to tap new sources of power, fusion in particular, as well as better utilize and scale existing clean energy sources.
Illustration: Dom Guzman
A new report exploring the potential for the Pacific Northwest to stake its claim as the global leader in responsible AI offers a paradoxical view. The Cascadia region, which includes Seattle, Portland and Vancouver, B.C., is described as a proven, promising player in the sphere — but with significant risks that threaten its success.
“We created companies that transformed global commerce,” writes former Gov. Chris Gregoire in a forward to the document. “Now we have the chance to add another chapter — one where Cascadia becomes the world’s standard-bearer for innovation that uplifts both people and planet.”
The Cascadia Innovation Corridor, which Gregoire chairs, released the report this morning as it kicks off its two-day conference. The economic advocacy group’s eighth annual event is being held in Seattle.
The study is built on an analysis by the Boston Consulting Group that ranks Cascadia’s three metro areas against 15 comparable regions in the U.S. and Canada for their economic competitiveness, including livability, workforce, and business and innovation climate. Seattle came in fourth behind Boston, Austin and Raleigh, while Portland ranked 13th and Vancouver 14th.
Over the past decade, the region’s gross domestic product and populations have both grown significantly, and when combined, their economies approach the 18th largest in the world.
Cascadia’s strengths, the report explains, include tech engines such as cloud giants Microsoft and Amazon in Washington, silicon chip manufacturing in Oregon, and quantum innovation in Vancouver, as well as academic excellence from the University of Washington, University of British Columbia and Oregon State University.
But as time goes on and as business and civic leaders aim for the prize of AI dominance, cracks in the system are increasingly troubling.
The report notes that multiple regions around the U.S. and Canada have created AI-focused hubs with hundreds of millions of dollars in public and private funding to bolster their hold on the sector.
New Jersey has a half-billion dollar “AI Moonshot” program including tax incentives and public-worker AI training programs; New York’s “Empire AI Consortium” has an AI computing training center at the University of Buffalo and startup supports; and California has a public-private task force to increase AI adoption within government services and connecting tech leaders with state agencies.
For its part, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell announced a “responsible AI plan” this fall that provides guidelines for the municipality’s use of artificial intelligence and its support of the AI tech sector as an economic driver, which includes the earlier launches of the startup-focused AI House and Foundations.
But what the region really needs to succeed is a collaborative effort tapping all of the metro areas’ assets.
“For Cascadia, the lesson is clear: without a coordinated strategy that links our strengths in cloud computing, semiconductors, and research, we risk falling behind,” states the Cascadia Innovation Corridor report. “Acting together, we can position Cascadia not just to keep pace, but to lead.”
With the iPhone 17 lineup now in the hands of consumers, the legendary rumor mill, which typically revolves around Apple's new products, is naturally shifting its focus towards next year's lineup. The iPhone 18, as well as the much-anticipated iPhone 20, which is due in 2027 and would commemorate 20 years since the first iPhone launched all the way back in 2007. Now, a new rumor suggests that Apple is transitioning towards simplified buttons in stages. The iPhone 18 lineup is likely to adopt a less complicated mechanical button for camera control, which will be replaced entirely by solid-state buttons […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/apple-iphone-18-to-use-a-simplified-camera-control-button-iphone-20-to-feature-haptics-instead-of-mechanical-buttons/
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach now supports the PlayStation 5's power saver mode, and its implementation is among the most interesting to date, according to a new technical analysis. In the latest episode of their weekly podcast, the tech experts at Digital Foundry examined how the two entries in the Kojima Productions series support Power Saver Mode, a newly introduced operating mode for the PlayStation 5 console that cuts CPU resources in half, halves the memory bandwidth, and reduces CPU and GPU clocks to reduce the system's power consumption. While the implementation in Death Stranding: Director's Cut was not […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/death-stranding-2-on-the-beach-most-interesting-power-saver-mode/
The INSPIRE series RTX 5050 is probably the smallest RTX 5050 editions, which offer a single fan design and weigh just 551 grams. MSI Launches Small Form-Factor RTX 5050 INSPIRE ITX and OC GPUs, Boasting Dual-Slot Thickness MSI has officially launched two new GeForce RTX 5050 cards in the INSPIRE series. These are probably the smallest RTX 5050 cards on the market, boasting a dual-slot design and a single-fan cooler to ensure compatibility with very small ITX cases. Apart from MSI, PNY also has a similarly compact GeForce RTX 5050, which measures just 147mm. The INSPIRE ITX RTX 5050 cards […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/msi-intros-geforce-rtx-5050-inspire-itx-and-oc-cards-measuring-just-147mm/
EA is pushing its employees to use AI for basically every task, but the results can be flawed, resulting in more work for developers. Business Insider recently talked with current EA staff, who confirmed that the company's leadership has spent the past year or so pushing its 15,000 employees to use AI for virtually every task, from producing code and concept art for games to advising managers how to speak to staff about a certain number of topics, including pay or promotions. The AI tools used to produce code are among those creating the most issues for developers. It is […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/ea-is-pushing-employees-to-use-ai-for-everything-including-producing-code-requiring-manual-fixing/
Intel's CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, has discussed the stake taken by the US government in the company, claiming that it was a necessary step to ensure that the American chipmaker could compete with Taiwan's TSMC. Intel's CEO Also Tells Specifics About His Meeting With President Trump, Calling It a Massive Success Well, the interest from the Trump administration in Intel was indeed a surprise for many of us, but for CEO Lip-Bu Tan, this initiative was "good to have", as he claims that it is similar to how Taiwan supports TSMC or South Korea backs the likes of Samsung Foundry. In […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-ceo-says-us-government-stake-was-a-deliberate-move/
OnexPlayer has officially launched its flagship handheld, the OneXfly Apex, with a liquid-cooled AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 SoC. AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 Gets Liquid-Cooled Inside A Handheld With OneXPlayer's OneXfly Apex The OneXfly Apex handheld was teased last month and is positioned to be a flagship device featuring the AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 SoC. This SoC has already been featured in other handhelds such as GPD Win 5 and Ayaneo Next 2. Now, OneXPlayer is rolling out its own high-end handheld, offering a nice upgrade vs the Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" stack. Just to recap the […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/onexfly-apex-handheld-launch-amd-ryzen-ai-max-395-liquid-cooling-128-gb-85wh-battery/
The popular PS3 emulator has updated its latest GPU recommendation list to AMD's RDNA and NVIDIA's Turing series. RPCS3 Announces Updated GPU Requirements for the Emulator; Recommends At Least AMD RX 5000 or NVIDIA RTX 2000 Series RPCS3 has just announced the new recommended GPU requirements for its popular PS3 emulator, which comes as a result of major GPU manufacturers ending support for some of its older generation GPU series. RPCS3 announced on X that it no longer "recommends" the AMD RX 400 and NVIDIA GTX 900 series GPUs as the recommended GPUs. The newer GPU recommendations now start with […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/rpcs3-removes-amd-rx-400-500-and-nvidia-gtx-900-1000-series-from-recommended-gpu-requirements/
A vapor chamber will make a significant difference to the overall temperatures of the M6 iPad Pro, with Apple previously reported to bring this cooling upgrade to its flagship tablet lineup. The California-based giant is often known to commence product development several months in advance, and according to the latest report, Apple is already in talks with two suppliers that could manufacture this crucial component. The M6 iPad Pro’s vapor chamber is reported to be provided by a Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturer Considering that the M6 iPad Pro launch will materialize approximately 18 months after the M5 iPad Pro’s inception, […]
Read full article at https://wccftech.com/apple-shortlisting-m6-ipad-pro-vapor-chamber-suppliers/
Mockin is a tool for simulating professional real-time AI interviews with personalized feedback and resume matching.
We’ve gathered 200+ real interview questions to practice, get personalized feedback, and master the STAR method to ace your next interview! Built for designers by designers.
Enterprises looking to sell goods and services online are waiting for the backbone of agentic commerce to be hashed out; but PayPal is hoping its new features will bridge the gap.
The payments company is launching a discoverability solution that allows enterprises to make its product available on any chat platform, regardless of the model or agent payment protocol.
PayPal, which is a participant in Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), found that it can leverage its relationship with merchants and enterprises to help pave the way for an easier transition into agentic commerce and offer flexibility that will benefit the ecosystem.
Michelle Gill, PayPal's GM for small business and financial services, told VentureBeat that AI-powered shopping will continue to grow, so enterprises and brands must begin laying the groundwork early.
“We think that merchants who've historically sold through web stores, particularly in the e-commerce space, are really going to need a way to get active on all of these large language models (LLMs),” Gill said. “The challenge is that no one really knows how fast all of this is going to move. We’re trying to help merchants think through how to do all of this as low-touch as possible while using the infrastructure they already have without doing a bazillion integrations.”
She added that AI shopping would also bring about “a resurgence from consumers trying to ensure their investment is protected.”
PayPal partnered with website builder Wix, Cymbio, Commerce and Shopware to bring products to chat platforms like Perplexity.
PayPal’s Agentic Commerce Services include two features. The first is Agent Ready, which would allow existing PayPal merchants to accept payments on AI platforms. The second is Shop Sync, which will enable companies’ product data to be discoverable through different AI chat interfaces. It takes a company’s catalog information and plug its inventory and fulfillment data to chat platforms.
Gill said the data goes into a central repository where AI models can ingest the information.
Right now, companies can access Shop Sync; Agent Ready is coming in 2026.
Gill said Agentic Commerce Services is a one-to-many solution that would be helpful right now, as different LLMs scrape different data sources to surface information.
Other benefits include:
Fast integration with current and future partners;
More product discovery over the traditional search, browse and cart experiences;
Preserved customer insights and relationships where the brand continues to have control over their records and communications with customers.
Right now, the service is only available through Perplexity, but Gill said more platforms will be added soon.
Agentic commerce is still very much in the early stages. AI agents are just beginning to get better at reading a browser. while platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity can now surface products and services based on user queries, people cannot technically buy things from chat (yet).
There’s a race right now to create a standard to enable agents to transact on behalf of users. Other than Google’s AP2, OpenAI and Stripe have the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), and Visa recently launched its Trusted Agent Protocol.
Beyond enabling a trust layer for agents to transact, enterprises struggle with fragmentation in agentic commerce. Different chat platforms use different models, which also interpret information in slightly different ways. Gill said PayPal learned that when it comes to working with merchants, flexibility is critical.
“How do you decide if you're going to spend your time integrating with Google, Microsoft, ChatGPT or Perplexity?" Gill noted. "And each one of them right now has a different protocol, a different catalog, config, a different everything. That is a lot of time to make a bet as to where you should spend your time."
Google Arts & Culture is launching a new collection to honor the rich heritage of the province of North Gyeongsang in South Korea.
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