Stripe has finalized a deal to acquire OpenRouter, an AI gateway startup, for more than $7 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg on August 16, 2026. The acquisition follows weeks of speculation, including a July report from The Wall Street Journal that the two companies were in talks. OpenRouter helps developers and enterprises select […]
Apple has approached publishers in recent months about licensing their content to power the upcoming Siri AI, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The tech giant is proposing a variable compensation model that would pay publishers when their content is actually used, rather than a fixed licensing fee, with a nine-figure budget […]
LAS VEGAS — At the Ai4 conference last week, three of AI’s most influential figures — Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, World Labs CEO Fei-Fei Li, and Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng — took the stage to confront a question that has split the industry: should the most powerful AI models be freely available, or kept under […]
Airbnb has cut the time it takes to turn a feature idea into a shipped product by as much as 60%, thanks to a company-wide push to integrate AI into its engineering workflow, CEO Brian Chesky said during the company’s second-quarter earnings call on August 6, 2026. The company also said it is finally beginning […]
College students are abandoning swipe-based dating apps in growing numbers, and a new wave of startups is betting that AI can do the matchmaking work instead. Ditto, founded by UC Berkeley dropouts Allen Wang and Eric Liu, has signed up 150,000 users by replacing the familiar swipe-and-chat interface with a text-message chatbot that pairs people […]
Google announced on Thursday that Google Maps’ “Ask Maps” feature is expanding into a full-fledged AI assistant, gaining the ability to order food, book hotels, and find event tickets — a significant step in the company’s effort to turn the navigation app into a tool that completes real-world tasks. The update also introduces Personal Intelligence, […]
WindBorne Systems, a startup that uses high-altitude weather balloons to collect atmospheric data and feed it into an AI forecasting model, has raised $37 million in a Series B round to expand its commercial business. The round was co-led by Khosla Ventures and Galvanize, with participation from TransLink Capital, Lux Capital, and existing investors, and […]
In his final earnings call as Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook revealed that the company’s long-awaited Siri AI upgrade could introduce a paywall for its most demanding users. Speaking on Thursday, Cook suggested that customers who want to heavily utilize the new assistant might need to purchase an upgraded iCloud+ subscription to access additional computing power. […]
Hank Green, the YouTuber, novelist, and comedian with 3.2 million subscribers, publicly apologized to his audience this week after viewers caught what appeared to be a chatbot’s response embedded in a script for an educational video. The incident began when Green used the phrase “I appreciate the pushback” in the middle of a video on […]
Applied Computing, a London-based startup building a foundation AI model for the oil, gas and petrochemical industry, has raised a $20 million Series A led by engineering giant KBR, with Databricks Ventures participating. Founded in 2023, the startup targets facilities where thousands of sensors measure temperature, pressure, velocity and viscosity — yet operators currently make […]
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