American philanthropy is about to absorb something in the region of $40bn a year in new annual spending from AI wealth, Coefficient Giving chief executive Alexander Berger told Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith in an interview published on Thursday. Th…
The Pew Research Center’s 2025 survey found that 84% of U.S. adults use YouTube, 71% use Facebook, and 50% use Instagram, illustrating how deeply everyday expression has moved onto digital platforms. The Library of Congress explains that digital materi…
Pollen Robotics has unveiled a bipedal robot called Microduck, at an introductory price of $399 before taxes and shipping. The Bordeaux company is owned by the AI platform Hugging Face. Its new machine has one eye and 15 motors, stands 25cm tall, and w…
Z.AI made it. The Beijing company, also known as Zhipu, owns the free model that took the top of OpenRouter’s charts last weekend. It confirmed on Wednesday that Ox Alpha is a new iteration of its GLM series, and said it would release the weights the s…
A two-year-old company is now worth $1.05bn. It writes software that makes data centres use less electricity on demand. Emerald AI raised $150mn in an oversubscribed Series A, the company announced on Tuesday. Energize Capital and DCVC co-led it, and t…
China called off its most ambitious Moon mission the day before it was due to fly. The announcement runs to a single sentence. Chang’e 7 does not meet the conditions for launch, the China Manned Space Agency said on Sunday. It cannot go ahead in this y…
NEURA Robotics is buying a company that makes cleaning robots, and says it wants to replace their brains. The German firm is acquiring 100% of Adlatus Robotics, an Ulm maker of autonomous cleaning and sweeping machines. It announced the deal on Monday,…
A US appeals court has thrown out the last live claim in the long fight over who owns Linux. Simon Sharwood reported the ruling for The Register on Sunday. The dispute began in 1998. The company still fighting it, Xinuos, now has one long-shot move lef…
Google says its Gemma family of open models has passed a billion downloads. Developers have published more than 100,000 Gemma variants over the past two years, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. Clement Farabet, a vice president at Google Dee…
Astromech has raised $20mn at a $3.8 billion valuation to build AI that predicts how living systems will change. The company says its models learn from 3.8 billion years of biological history. The valuation and the training window are the same number, …