Microsoft Reverses Changes to Bing Image Creator Amid User Backlash
Microsoft responds to user feedback by reversing controversial changes to Bing Image Creator, ensuring a better user experience for creative AI tools.
Microsoft's rStar-Math technique enhances SLMs with complex math problem-solving skills
Microsoft's new rStar-Math technique enables small AI models to outperform OpenAI's o1-preview on complex mathematical problems, achieving 90% accuracy on the MATH benchmark. This innovative approach overcomes challenges associated with alternatives such as model distillation and reward models.
Synthesia recently became the UK's most valuable generative AI company
Synthesia, a London-based AI video communications platform, has raised $180M in Series D funding led by NEA, making it the UK's most valuable generative AI media company with a $2.1B valuation and over 60,000 customers.
AI Highlights Review: January 7–18
A recap of our CES 2025 coverage; Anthropic reportedly looking to raise funds; data centers' impact on the elecric grid; Mistral AI updated Codestral; xAI's Aurora unsurprisingly has no guardrails; Raspberry AI's Series A; ChatGPT's new beta feature; LetsData's fundraise.
Ukrainian startup LetsData raised $1.6M to fight malicious information operations with AI
LetsData, a cybersecurity startup born during Russia's invasion of Ukraine, has raised $1.6M to expand its AI-powered information operations detection technology that analyzes content across multiple platforms and languages.
The new Tasks beta lets ChatGPT users schedule reminders and recurring actions
OpenAI has introduced a new "tasks" feature in beta for ChatGPT's paid users that enables scheduling reminders and recurring requests, marking the company's first step into AI agent capabilities.
Raspberry AI has raised a $24M Series A for its fashion design platform
Fashion design platform Raspberry AI has secured $24 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz to expand its AI technology that converts fashion sketches into instant photorealistic renderings, already used by major brands like Under Armour and MCM Worldwide.
xAI's Aurora is being used to flood X with racist and hateful content
X users continue to take advantage of Grok's lack of guardrails to generate and flood the platform with harmful content. Reports point to a spike in the prevalence of abusive content after Grok's image generation capabilities were enhanced with Aurora, xAI's proprietary model.
Mistral AI has updated its code generation model Codestral to make it more efficient
Mistral recently announced an update to its code generation model, equipping it with a new architecture and improved tokenizer. Codestral 25.01 supports a leading 256K context length, performs strongly on popular coding benchmarks, and outperforms its rivals on fill-in-the-middle (FIM) tasks.
Evidence shows AI data centers may be hurting the power quality for homes in the US
A Bloomberg analysis reveals that homes within 20 miles of AI data centers are experiencing dangerous levels of power grid distortions (bad harmonics), particularly in Virginia's "data center alley". Meanwhile, tech companies plan massive expansions of their data center infrastructure across the US.
Anthropic is reportedly in talks with Lightspeed and others to raise more funding
After securing a $4B investment from Amazon in November 2024, Anthropic is reportedly close to raising an additional $2B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, which would value the AI company at $60B.
Nvidia at CES 2025: announcing the RTX Blackwell 5090, "the most powerful consumer GPU ever created"
At CES 2025, Nvidia unveiled its GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics cards, headlined by the $2,000 RTX 5090 with 21,760 CUDA cores and 32GB GDDR7 memory, promising twice the performance of previous generations in both gaming and AI applications.