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Tinder and Visa to bring ID-verifying tech to more places and Airbnb rolled out an AI customer service bot in the US May 06, 2025

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World, the biometric ID company best known for its eyeball-scanning Orb devices, at an event late on Wednesday announced several partnerships aimed at driving sign-ups and demonstrating the applications of its tech. World is partnering with Match Group, the dating app conglomerate, to verify the IDs of Tinder users in Japan. Also, Airbnb started rolling out an AI-powered customer service bot in the U.S. last month, CEO Brian Chesky said during the firm’s first-quarter conference call on Thursday. Chesky said 50% of Airbnb’s U.S. users are already using the AI bot for customer service.

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OpenAI pledges to make changes to prevent future ChatGPT sycophancy May 06, 2025

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OpenAI says it’ll make changes to the way it updates the AI models that power ChatGPT, following an incident that caused the platform to become overly sycophantic for many users.

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Meta forecasted it would make $1.4T in revenue from generative AI by 2035 May 05, 2025

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Meta made a prediction last year its generative AI products would rake in $2 billion to $3 billion in revenue in 2025, and between $460 billion and $1.4 trillion by 2035, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday.

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Amazon launches Nova Premier, its largest AI model yet May 05, 2025

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Amazon on Thursday released what it claims is the largest, most capable AI model in its Nova family, Nova Premier. Nova Premier, which can process text, images, and videos (but not audio), is available in Amazon Bedrock, the company’s AI model development platform.

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Cast AI raises $108M to get the max out of AI, Kubernetes and other workloads May 02, 2025

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The crush of traffic going into training and running AI has quickly turned into a major cost and resource headache for organizations. Cast AI is a startup building tools to ease and optimize AI and other workloads with automation — is raising a major round of funding on the back of its strong growth

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JetBrains releases Mellum, an ‘open’ AI coding model May 02, 2025

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JetBrains, the company behind a range of popular app development tools, has released its first “open” AI model for coding. On Wednesday, JetBrains made Mellum, a code-generating model the company released for its various software development suites last year, openly available on the AI dev platform Hugging Face.

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Yelp debuts AI voice agents for restaurants and service providers May 01, 2025

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Yelp said on Tuesday that it’s working on deploying AI-powered “voice agents” to help service providers and restaurants handle calls, answer basic questions, and accomplish tasks like adding a customer to a restaurant waitlist.

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Spotify adds 5M premium users and hits record operating income May 01, 2025

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Spotify reported on Tuesday that its premium subscriber base grew by 5 million in the first quarter, representing a 12% increase year-over-year. This brings the total to 268 million, marking the second-highest total ever and the highest net addition of paid subs for a first quarter since 2020.

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Lightrun grabs $70M using AI to debug code in production Apr 30, 2025

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AI-based coding has exploded in popularity on the promise that it will make developers’ jobs faster and easier. But it’s also resulted in something else: a vast increase in lines of code, and thus the likelihood of bugs resulting in crashes or other mishaps.

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Amazon-backed Glacier gets $16M to expand its robot recycling fleet Apr 30, 2025

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The world has a trash problem. The amount of stuff we throw away is expected to nearly double, to 3.8 billion metric tons, by 2050. Reducing what we use would go a long way to addressing the issue, but let’s face it, we’re not very good at buying less either.

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