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Sources: Cursor in talks to raise $2B+ at $50B valuation as enterprise growth surges

Returning backers a16z and Thrive are expected to lead the round.

‘Tokenmaxxing’ is making developers less productive than they think

There's a lot more code — but it's a lot more expensive and requires a lot more rewriting.

This charming gadget writes bad AI poetry

I've never been as charmed and frustrated by one gadget as I have with the Poetry Camera. It's a delightful object. White and cherry red with a color-matched woven strap, it looks playful and adorably lo-fi. If I saw it on a store shelf, I'd absolutely pick it up. But aside from

Building a Fast Multilingual OCR Model with Synthetic Data

Tokenmaxxing, OpenAI’s shopping spree, and the AI Anxiety Gap 

The gap between AI insiders and everyone else is widening, and the spending, suspicion, and even new vocabulary are starting to show it. While OpenAI is busy buying up everything from finance apps to talk shows, a certain shoe company just rebranded as an AI infrastructure play,

Dairy Queen is putting an AI chatbot in its drive-thrus

Dairy Queen is becoming the latest fast food chain to get in on AI, as it's bringing a chatbot to dozens of its drive-thrus across the US and Canada. It aims to help speed up drive-thru service and "encourage customers to add more food to their orders," according to The Wall Stre

Anthropic launches Claude Design, a new product for creating quick visuals

The company says Claude Design is intended to help people like founders and product managers without a design background share their ideas more easily.

Pie Day 2026

Ellie’s Pi Day post: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/pi-day-2026-food-institute/ How Ellie orchestrated the baking of 30 pies: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/behind-the-scenes-of-thirty-pies/

The ‘AI is inevitable’ trap

In the latest sign of AI silly season, Allbirds, the shoe company, told the world it was now an AI company and briefly managed to septuple its stock price. The Newbird AI story is really just one of a bunch of things this week that made us wonder: have we reached the peak of AI,

Are we tokenmaxxing our way to nowhere?

The gap between AI insiders and everyone else is widening, and the spending, suspicion, and even new vocabulary are starting to show it. While OpenAI is busy buying up everything from finance apps to talk shows, a certain shoe company just rebranded as an AI infrastructure play,

The Download: bad news for inner Neanderthals, and AI warfare’s human illusion

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The problem with thinking you’re part Neanderthal There’s a theory that many of us have an “inner Neanderthal.” The idea is that Homo sapiens

Recent advances push Big Tech closer to the Q-Day danger zone

Here's which players are winning the race to transition to post-quantum crypto.

The case for fixing everything

The handsome new book Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, by the tech industry legend Stewart Brand, promises to be the first in a series offering “a comprehensive overview of the civilizational importance of maintenance.” One of Brand’s several biographers described him as a m

How robots learn: A brief, contemporary history

Roboticists used to dream big but build small. They’d hope to match or exceed the extraordinary complexity of the human body, and then they’d spend their career refining robotic arms for auto plants. Aim for C-3P0; end up with the Roomba. The real ambition for many of these resea

Factory hits $1.5B valuation to build AI coding for enterprises

The three-year-old startup raised $150 million led by Khosla Ventures.

Luma launches AI-powered production studio with faith-focused Wonder Project

The studio's first project will be about Moses and star Academy Award-winner Ben Kingsley, to be released this spring on Prime Video.

Upscale AI in talks to raise at $2B valuation, says report

AI infrastructure company Upscale AI is reportedly in talks to raise its third funding round since launching just seven months ago.

Physical Intelligence, a hot robotics startup, says its new robot brain can figure out tasks it was never taught

The new model, called π0.7, represents what the company describes as an early but meaningful step toward the long-sought goal of a general-purpose robot brain.

OpenAI takes aim at Anthropic with beefed-up Codex that gives it more power over your desktop

OpenAI's agentic coding tool has gotten a major makeover, with a variety of new powers and abilities.

OpenAI’s big Codex update is a direct shot at Claude Code

OpenAI is beefing up its agentic coding and development system, Codex, with a suite of updates that let it use your computer, generate images, and remember from past experiences. The package of updates comes as OpenAI's rivalry with Anthropic intensifies, following the stellar su

Google’s AI Mode update lets you open links without leaving the page

Google is upgrading AI Mode in Chrome with a new feature that will allow you to open links to sources alongside your chat. Now, instead of automatically opening a new tab, clicking a source will open the website side by side with AI Mode, allowing you to ask follow-up questions a

Gemini can now pull from Google Photos to generate personalized images

Google's Personal Intelligence feature, which lets Gemini pull data from apps like Google Photos to offer responses tailored to you, can now use that data and its Nano Banana 2 image model to create images based on your personal context. With the feature, you can use prompts like

Anthropic releases a new Opus model amid Mythos Preview buzz

Anthropic has released its most powerful "generally available" model to date: Claude Opus 4.7. The company called it a step up from Opus 4.6 for advanced software engineering tasks, particularly in complex coding areas that in the past required more hand-holding. It's also suppos

Ronan Farrow on Sam Altman’s ‘unconstrained’ relationship with the truth

Today on Decoder, I’m talking with Ronan Farrow, one of the biggest stars of investigative reporting working today. He broke the Harvey Weinstein story, among many, many others. And just last week, he and co-author Andrew Marantz published an incredible deep-dive feature in The N

Character.AI’s new Books mode turns reading into roleplay

Mired in controversy and legal woes over concerns about its chatbots' interactions with users, particularly teens, Character.AI seems to be playing it safer with a new "Books" mode. The new format lets users step inside familiar worlds for a more structured roleplaying experience

Canva’s AI 2.0 update goes all in on prompt-powered design tools

Canva has overhauled its design and workspace suite as it attempts to become the ultimate centralized hub for AI-powered content creation. The platform announced its Canva AI 2.0 update today, introducing updated tools and new prompt-based editing capabilities that allow users to

Making AI operational in constrained public sector environments

The AI boom has hit across industries, and public sector organizations are facing pressure to accelerate adoption. At the same time, government institutions face distinct constraints around security, governance, and operations that set them apart from their business counterparts.

Treating enterprise AI as an operating layer

There’s a fault line running through enterprise AI, and it’s not the one getting the most attention. The public conversation still tracks foundation models and benchmarks—GPT versus Gemini, reasoning scores, and marginal capability gains. But in practice, the more durable advanta

The Download: cyberscammers’ banking bypasses, and carbon removal troubles

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Cyberscammers are bypassing banks’ security with illicit tools sold on Telegram Inside a money-laundering center in Cambodia, an employee open

Why having “humans in the loop” in an AI war is an illusion

The availability of artificial intelligence for use in warfare is at the center of a legal battle between Anthropic and the Pentagon. This debate has become urgent, with AI playing a bigger role than ever before in the current conflict with Iran. AI is no longer just helping huma

The noise we make is hurting animals. Can we learn to shut up?

When the covid-19 pandemic started, Jennifer Phillips thought about the songs of the sparrows. They were easier to hear, because the world had suddenly become quieter. Car traffic plummeted as people sheltered at home and shifted to remote work. Air travel collapsed. Cities—norma

The quest to measure our relationship with nature

As a movement, environmentalism has been pretty misanthropic. Understandably so—we humans have done some destructive things to the ecosystems around us. In the 21st century, though, mainstream conservation is learning that humans can be a force for good. Foresters are turning to

Ecom-RLVE: Adaptive Verifiable Environments for E-Commerce Conversational Agents

The PR you would have opened yourself

Training and Finetuning Multimodal Embedding & Reranker Models with Sentence Transformers