Category: Consumer Assistance

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Runway releases its Gen-4 video-generating AI model to individual and enterprise users, touting its ability to maintain consistency of subjects, styles, more  —  AI startup Runway on Monday released what it claims is one of the highest-fidelity AI-powered video generators yet.

Caroline O’Donovan / Washington Post: Alexa+ will start rolling out to users today; sources: some features demoed in February are slated to arrive in two months, while others will take longer  —  Alexa+, Amazon’s AI-enhanced voice assistant, will launch to some customers Monday, though not every feature will be available right away

Max A. Cherney / Reuters: Retym, which aims to bring its first AI data center chip to market this year, raised a $75M Series D led by Spark Capital, bringing its total funding to $180M  —  Chip startup Retym has raised $75 million this year as part of $180 million in total funding the company…

Cheng Ting-Fang / Nikkei Asia: Sources: GlobalFoundries mulls merging with UMC, Taiwan’s 2nd-largest chipmaker, to form a bigger, US-based company with production in Asia, the US, and Europe  —  TAIPEI — U.S. contract chipmaker GlobalFoundries and United Microelectronics Corp., Taiwan’s No. 2 chipmaker …

Ian King / Bloomberg: Cerebras says it has resolved “all open issues” with the CFIUS, as it prepares for an IPO; the AI startup filed a notice about its ties to Abu Dhabi’s G42  —  G42 also planned to buy more than 22 million shares in Cerebras.  The Sunnyvale, California-based company had said the arrangement…

TechCrunch: Seattle-based Temporal, an open-source microservices orchestration service, raised a $146M Series C led by Tiger Global at a $1.72B post-money valuation  —  Seattle-based Temporal has made its name over the last several years in the world of microservices — specifically providing a platform …

Kevin Beaumont / DoublePulsar: Oracle is using very specific words to avoid responsibility for an Oracle Cloud breach, after a report on March 21 that a threat actor claimed responsibility  —  Being a provider of cloud SaaS (Software-as-a-service) solutions requires certain cybersecurity responsibilities — including being transparent and open.

Belle Lin / Wall Street Journal: AMD completes its $4.9B purchase of data center equipment designer ZT Systems, announced in August 2024, taking on its roughly 1,000 design engineers  —  Chip giant CEO Lisa Su says AI is still in its ‘very early stages’ as the company revs up competition with Nvidia

Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch: Amazon’s AGI Lab unveils Nova Act, a general purpose AI agent to control a web browser and independently perform some simple actions, and a Nova Act SDK  —  Amazon on Monday unveiled Nova Act, a general-purpose AI agent that can take control of a web browser and independently perform some simple…

Reuters: How the Trump family took over World Liberty Financial, which raised $550M+ via governance tokens; the family has a claim on 75% of net revenues of token sales  —  As World Liberty Financial raised more than half a billion dollars, President Donald Trump’s family took control of the crypto venture …