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Ascentra Labs raises $2 million to help consultants use AI instead of all-night Excel marathons

While artificial intelligence has stormed into law firms and accounting practices with billion-dollar startups like Harvey leading the charge, the global consulting industry—a $250 billion behemoth—has remained stubbornly analog. A London-based startup founded by former McKinsey consultants is betting $2 million that it can crack open this resistant market, one Excel spreadsheet at a time.Ascentra Labs announced Monday that it has closed a $2 million seed round led by NAP, a Berlin-based venture

Apple Music’s Replay 2025 is here

This year, Apple Music Replay includes even more listening habits, including the "Discovery" section, which highlights new artists users listened to, and "Loyalty," which spotlights artists that users have kept coming back to each year.

Amazon Music’s 2025 Delivered is now here to compete with Spotify Wrapped

Amazon Music's 2025 Delivered introduced new badges for listeners to show off. For example, the “Headliner” badge recognizes fans who fall in the top percentage of an artist’s listeners.

India plans to verify and record every smartphone in circulation

The Indian government has ordered smartphone makers to preinstall its Sanchar Saathi app on all devices, a move that is raising fresh privacy concerns.

Paris-based AI voice startup Gradium nabs $70M seed

Gradium, a startup spawned out of French AI lab Kyutai (backed by French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel), launched out of stealth on Tuesday.

Elon Musk Is Building Out His Next Company Town With Science Center, Gym

Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, has already shown that when a city’s rules won’t bend to his will, he’ll create a new city and new rules. That’s how Starbase, the self-governing town built ...

Has Elon Musk worn out his welcome in the United States?

Some Americans are increasingly uneasy about Elon Musk’s political influence and have launched a symbolic petition urging the ...

‘Big Short’ icon Michael Burry unloads on Elon Musk, calls Tesla ‘ridiculously overvalued’

Tesla’s market capitalization is ridiculously overvalued today and has been for a good long time,” Burry wrote in his ...

Elon Musk Warns of Possible Global War by 2030 in Stark New Prediction

Elon Musk has warned that a major global war, potentially even nuclear, could break out within the next decade, sparking widespread concern.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk bats for H-1B visas, says tariffs distort markets

Tesla CEO raises concerns over Trump's tariff policy and says he does not support closing of the H-1B visa program.

Elon Musk, fresh off securing a $1 trillion pay package, says philanthropy is ‘very hard’

Arguably the biggest name in philanthropy this year has been MacKenzie Scott, the billionaire novelist and ex-wife of Amazon ...

What does it mean when Uncle Sam is one of your biggest shareholders? Chip startup xLight is about to find out

You can imagine how this is all going over in Silicon Valley, where the libertarian ethos runs deep.

Arcee aims to reboot U.S. open source AI with new Trinity models released under Apache 2.0

For much of 2025, the frontier of open-weight language models has been defined not in Silicon Valley or New York City, but in Beijing and Hangzhou.Chinese research labs including Alibaba's Qwen, DeepSeek, Moonshot and Baidu have rapidly set the pace in developing large-scale, open Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models — often with permissive licenses and leading benchmark performance. While OpenAI fielded its own open source, general purpose LLM this summer as well — gpt-oss-20B and 120B — the up

Apple just named a new AI chief with Google and Microsoft expertise, as John Giannandrea steps down

His replacement is Amar Subramanya, a highly regarded Microsoft executive who spent 16 years at Google, most recently leading engineering for the Gemini Assistant. It's a savvy hire, given that Subramanya knows the competition intimately.

One of Google’s biggest AI advantages is what it already knows about you

The promise is AI that's uniquely helpful because it knows you. But the risk is AI that feels more like surveillance than service.

Zillow drops climate risk scores after agents complained of lost sales

The move is a loss for homebuyers, who through Zillow had ready access to a property's climate risk scores from First Street.

Shopify resolves outage disrupting merchants on Cyber Monday

Shopify was down for many merchants this morning, preventing them from processing transactions. It appears to be fixed now.

Nvidia announces new open AI models and tools for autonomous driving research

Nvidia continues its push into physical AI with the release of a new reasoning world model and other tools for physical AI.

AWS re:Invent 2025: How to watch and follow along live

Amazon Web Services’ big annual event, re:Invent 2025, is getting into full swing in Las Vegas this week, and you can follow the keynotes live right here.

MKBHD’s wallpaper app Panels is shutting down

From the time Brownlee launched Panels in September 2024, the app struggled to find an audience of its own. "We knew it was niche … and ultimately, we weren't able to turn it into the vision I had," Marques Brownlee said.