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American AI startup Poolside launches free, high-performing open model Laguna XS.2 for local agentic coding

The AI race lately has felt a bit like a game of tennis: first, Anthropic releases a new, pricey state-of-the-art proprietary model for general users (Claude Opus 4.7), then, a week or so later, its rival OpenAI volleys back with one of its own (GPT-5.5). And all the while, Chinese companies like DeepSeek and even Xiaomi are seeking to appeal to users by playing a different game: nearing the frontier, but with open licensing and far lower costs. So it's a big surprise when a new, affordable

OpenAI called the growth report clickbait. The market disagreed by tens of billions of dollars.

OpenAI called the report “prime clickbait.” It said its business is “firing on all cylinders.” It issued a joint statement from CEO Sam Altman and CFO Sarah Friar declaring they are “totally aligned.” None of it worked. On Tuesday, after the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI had missed internal revenue and user growth targets, […]This story continues at The Next Web

The founder of Scholly sold his scholarship app to Sallie Mae. He says they fired him for asking why they were selling students’ data.

Christopher Gray built Scholly to help students like himself find scholarships. He grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, became the first in his family to attend college after winning $1.3 million in scholarships to Drexel University, and turned that experience into a mobile app that matched students with financial aid based on their profiles. The app […]This story continues at The Next Web

Musk told the jury the OpenAI case is simple. The consequences of his testimony are anything but.

Elon Musk told a federal jury on Tuesday that his lawsuit against OpenAI and its co-founders is not about him. “It is not okay to steal a charity, that’s my view,” Musk said from the witness stand in Oakland, California, in his first testimony under oath in the case he filed in 2024. “If we […]This story continues at The Next Web

Google signed the Pentagon’s classified AI deal and walked away from its drone swarm contest on the same day.

Google has signed a deal allowing the Pentagon to use its Gemini AI models for classified military work under terms that permit “any lawful government purpose,” the company confirmed on Tuesday, one day after more than 580 Google employees signed a letter urging CEO Sundar Pichai to refuse exactly this kind of arrangement. The agreement provides the […]This story continues at The Next Web

“They stole a charity.” “He didn’t get his way.” The Musk-Altman trial opened with two stories that cannot both be true.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are here today because the defendants in this case stole a charity.” That was how Steven Molo, Elon Musk’s lead trial lawyer, opened the most consequential technology trial in a generation on Tuesday morning in an Oakland federal courtroom. Molo told the nine-person advisory jury that without Musk, “there would be […]This story continues at The Next Web

Amazon is already offering new OpenAI products on AWS

A day after OpenAI got Microsoft to agree to end exclusive rights, AWS announced a slate of OpenAI model offerings, including a new agent service.

Nvidia is no longer just selling the shovels. Nemotron 3 Nano Omni is the company’s most aggressive move into AI models.

Nvidia released Nemotron 3 Nano Omni on Tuesday, an open-weight multimodal AI model that unifies vision, audio, and language understanding in a single architecture designed to power autonomous AI agents on edge devices. The model has 30 billion parameters but activates only three billion per forward pass through a mixture-of-experts design, a ratio that allows […]This story continues at The Next Web

Amazon tried selling office software and failed. Now it is betting that office software itself is obsolete.

Amazon Web Services announced a set of AI-powered business applications on Tuesday that move the company from selling cloud infrastructure to selling the software that runs on it, a strategic shift that puts Amazon in direct competition with Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce in the $300 billion software-as-a-service market. The new products, Amazon Connect Decisions for […]This story continues at The Next Web

Amazon launches an AI-powered audio Q&A experience on product pages

Amazon's new "Join the chat" feature lets you ask questions about products and receive AI-powered audio responses.

OpenAI’s models are now available everywhere. The question is whether everywhere is enough.

Amazon Web Services will begin selling OpenAI’s models to its cloud customers, the company announced on Tuesday, one day after Microsoft agreed to end the exclusive reselling arrangement that had given Azure sole access to OpenAI’s technology for the first three years of the generative AI era. “It’s something that our customers have asked for, […]This story continues at The Next Web

True Anomaly raised $1 billion to build weapons for a programme the Pentagon has not committed to building

True Anomaly, the Colorado-based startup that builds autonomous spacecraft for orbital combat, has raised $650 million in Series D funding at a $2.2 billion valuation, bringing total capital raised to $1 billion since its founding in August 2022. The round was co-led by Eclipse and Riot Ventures, with new investors Paradigm, Atreides, G Squared, The […]This story continues at The Next Web

Match Group invests $100M in Sniffies, a cruising app for gay men

The app is Match Group's newest attempt to get mobile users excited about online romance again.

Google expands Pentagon’s access to its AI after Anthropic’s refusal

After Anthropic refused to allow the DoD to use its AI for domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, Google has signed a new contract with the department.

Venture capital is moving beyond code because the next tech boom will be built, not programmed

For more than two decades, software has defined the trajectory of venture capital. It was efficient, scalable, and, for a long time, unmatched in its ability to generate outsized returns. Investors poured capital into SaaS platforms, marketplaces, and digital infrastructure, confident in a model that prioritized speed, low marginal costs, and rapid growth. I was […]This story continues at The Next Web

Paragon is not collaborating with Italian authorities probing spyware attacks, report says

Despite promising to help determine what happened with the hacks targeting journalists and activists in Italy, Israeli American spyware maker Paragon has reportedly not responded to authorities’ requests for information.

US Supreme Court appears split over controversial use of ‘geofence’ search warrants

The U.S. top court is expected to rule on whether to allow police to identify criminal suspects by dragnet searching the databases of tech giants.

Australia forces Big Tech firms to pay for news or face a 2.25% tax

The more deals platforms make with media outlets, the less they pay. If enough agreements go through, that effective rate drops to 1.5%, which could generate between A$200 million and A$250 million back into Australian journalism.

Lovable launches its vibe-coding app on iOS and Android

The app allows developers to vibe code web apps and websites on the go.

Founder of Shark Tank-backed startup Scholly sues his acquirer Sallie Mae

Chris Gray is suing his startup’s acquirer, Sallie Mae, for wrongful termination and alleging it's selling student data through a subsidiary. Sallie Mae denies the allegations and vows to fight.