AI infrastructure company Groq raises $750 million at a $6.9 billion valuation, led by Disruptive with BlackRock participation, as the firm powers over two million developers and Fortune 500 companies with fast compute solutions across multiple continents.
Google launches Grounding with Google Maps in the Gemini API, enabling developers to build location-aware AI applications that tap into geospatial data from over 250 million places for enhanced travel planning, real estate insights, and hyper-local recommendations.
Meta rolls out groundbreaking parental controls that block teenagers from accessing romantic AI chatbots and one-on-one conversations, implementing PG-13 rating guidelines while automatically detecting suspected underage users who falsely claim adult status, with Instagram features launching early 2025.
A new national survey reveals 73% of Americans demand heavy AI regulation as the public expects superhuman AI within 5 years, with 64% believing such technology should not be developed until proven safe and controllable.
Researchers discover that adding a single sentence to AI prompts doubles output diversity by up to 2.1× while maintaining quality, with the technique called Verbalized Sampling bypassing AI models' tendency to give repetitive answers and showing particular success in creative writing and dialogue tasks.
Medal founder Pim de Witte launches AI lab General Intuition with $133.7 million seed funding after rejecting a $500 million OpenAI acquisition offer, planning to use 2 billion annual gaming videos to develop AI models that navigate 3D environments and interact with the real world.
Researchers develop revolutionary algorithmic fault tolerance technique that slashes quantum error correction time by 100x, detecting and fixing errors during computation instead of pausing for checks, dramatically accelerating the timeline for practical large-scale quantum computing.
Python 3.14 launches optional GIL-free version delivering 10x performance boosts in CPU-intensive tasks like prime calculations and matrix multiplication, though compatibility issues with third-party libraries require careful testing before implementation.
University of Otago researchers achieve world-first breakthrough enabling smartwatches to pinpoint locations within 8 centimeters using new algorithms that combine signals from multiple satellite systems, bringing military-grade GPS precision to everyday consumer devices.
Marc Andreessen predicts AI technology like OpenAI's Sora 2 will revolutionize filmmaking by enabling creators with ideas but no visual skills, equipment, or actors to produce full movies, sparking industry debate over democratization versus job displacement concerns.