Amazon started the Alexa Fund in 2015 to back early-stage voice startups. With the advent of large language models and Amazon launching Gen AI-powered Alexa+, along with a family of multimodal AI models, the fund now wants to broaden its scope and invest more in AI startups. In a blog post Amazon shared with TechCrunch […]
Source: techcrunch.com
As regulatory pressure intensifies and geopolitical uncertainty reshapes technology procurement, enterprises are rethinking control over their entire stack, with sovereign architectures emerging as the defining framework for that effort. The convergence of VMware migration, Kubernetes ingress modernization and AI governance is forcing organizations to confront all three challenges simultaneously, often with generalist teams stretched across…
Anthropic today released Claude Opus 4.8, an upgrade to its flagship model that ships at the same price as its predecessor, alongside a dramatically cheaper “fast mode” tier and a new feature that lets the model spawn hundreds of parallel subagents for codebase-scale work. The model is available immediately across Anthropic’s surfaces — claude.ai, Claude…
Methodology This tracker includes layoffs conducted by U.S.-based companies or those with a strong U.S. presence and is updated at least bi-weekly. We’ve included both startups and publicly traded, tech-heavy companies. We’ve also included companies based elsewhere that have a sizable team in the United States, such as Klarna, even when it’s unclear how much…
Z.ai, the Beijing-based artificial intelligence lab formerly known as Zhipu AI, on Wednesday officially launched ZCode, a free desktop application it describes as an “Agentic Development Environment” purpose-built for its flagship GLM-5.2 large language model. The move marks the company’s most aggressive push yet into the fast-growing AI-powered coding tool market, where it now competes…
Every time users belatedly discover that an artificial intelligence feature has been drawing on their data in ways they did not fully grasp, the reaction is often an instinctive sense of violation – of trust, consent and privacy. Accusations and outrage have always followed potentially invasive AI integrations, with examples ranging from email content used…
Of all the companies I track, Zoom Communications Inc. might be the most interesting, as it’s evolving in ways that run counter to its traditional peers. When speaking with industry colleagues, including investors, channel partners, customers and fellow industry analysts, Zoom is often grouped into the unified communications-as-a-service or the contact center-as-a-service bucket. Zoom was…