Contemplations News
This is the latest addition to our website, and its purpose is to help you stay in touch with current news posts. Click on any post to read the full text.
- US policy analysts, lawmakers, and others say several state-level AI chatbot safety bills included language that could provide loopholes for tech companies (Katie McQue/NPR)
- Clinicians raise concerns over medical AI adoption beyond diagnostics and imaging, citing limited clinical and performance data on its broader effectiveness (Sarah Neville/Financial Times)
- Alibaba's Damo Academy open sources RADAR, a medical vision-language model it says can read CT scans and identify ~150 abdominal conditions, including cancers (Ann Cao/South China Morning Post)
- Chinese DRAM chipmaker CXMT says its new fifth-gen technology platform enters mass production and unveils two 24Gb LPDDR5X phone memory products built on it (Reuters)
- Sources: Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan dismissed concerns after fraudsters tried to launder $10M+ from stolen cards to clean accounts via its wagers in February (Wall Street Journal)
- Meta challenges Ofcom's OSA categorization of WhatsApp and Instagram imposing additional regulations; Roblox and Quora are also challenging their categorization (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)
- California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs a law that will penalize influencers who do not properly disclose paid political content, with fines of up to $5K per post (Ken Bensinger/New York Times)
- Experts say AI kill-switch legislation is far harder to implement than lawmakers assume, warning a rogue AI could actively try to dismantle the mechanism itself (New York Times)
- Trump says he will appoint an AI czar and form an "AI Force", in a Truth Social post that rejects AI safety concerns as a "hoax" (María Paula Mijares Torres/Bloomberg)
- Former DraftKings employees detail how it uses ML to target likely losers with promotions, while efforts to flag problem gamblers were shelved or squashed (New York Times)
- Sources: the USPTO and US Copyright Office were surprised by the DOJ's brief supporting OpenAI and Microsoft in their dispute with the New York Times (Axios)
- Raindrop, which develops tech for monitoring AI agents to catch failures such as hallucinations and tool misuse, raised a $35M Series A led by CRV (Chris Metinko/Axios)
- ING: India's software services exports have risen to ~5.2% of GDP from 3.3% before the pandemic, as AI pushes the country's IT industry toward higher-value work (Anup Roy/Bloomberg)
- A look at AI safety groups METR, Redwood Research, and Apollo Research, as AI misalignment incidents at OpenAI and Anthropic thrust them into the spotlight (Hayden Field/The Verge)
- EU Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra rebuffs calls for an EU-wide digital services tax until "all possibilities" for taxation at the global level are exhausted (Financial Times)
- Vantora, formerly UP.Labs, which builds AI-native startups designed to solve problems for corporate customers, raised $100M+ from Silversmith Capital Partners (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)
- Business intelligence startup Veridion, which develops an AI-powered, real-time map of ~640M businesses worldwide, raised a $20M Series A led by Hoxton Ventures (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)
- Internal email: Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program; sources say a significant number of Flock's ~1,500 employees may depart, as customers flee (Wired)
- Nex, which makes Nex Playground, raised a $150M Series E; Nex has sold 1M units of the motion-based gaming system targeted toward kids since its launch in 2023 (Sophie McEvoy/GamesIndustry.biz)
- Anthropic adds support for the AGENTS.md instructions spec to Claude Code; OpenAI contributed AGENTS.md to the Agentic AI Foundation last year (Thomas Claburn/The Register)