In a brief message Tuesday morning on Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company’s “open” AI model family, Llama, hit 1 billion downloads. That’s up from 650 million downloads as of early December 2024 — a ~53% increase over a roughly three-month period. Llama, which powers Meta’s AI assistant, Meta AI, across the tech
Chat platform WhatsApp said today that it will limit the number of broadcast messages individual users and businesses can send to curb spam on the app. In the coming weeks, the company will start testing limits on individual broadcast messages. Under these limits, WhatsApp will put a monthly limit on the number of broadcasts. While
A new iOS social wellness app called Exist wants to help middle-aged consumers connect and build meaningful communities with one another as they navigate their lives and the stresses that come with it. The app describes itself as the edgier cousin of Calm or Headspace, and its main feature is social journaling. The idea behind
Nerdio, a platform designed to simplify how companies deploy and manage Microsoft cloud technologies, has raised $500 million in a Series C round of funding. The Chicago-based startup says its valuation has now quadrupled since its Series B round two years ago, and is now firmly in unicorn territory — though the company wouldn’t reveal
Google is making the biggest acquisition in its history. The company’s parent company Alphabet is buying Wiz, the cloud security startup, for $32 billion in an all-cash transaction. The deal has now been confirmed. A source described the transaction as a $33 billion deal previously. That includes the $1 billion that Google is paying out
Being a staggeringly successful big tech company does have some downsides: Apple has lost an appeal against a special abuse control regime that Germany’s competition watchdog applied to it last year. The iPhone maker can expect to continue to face bespoke competition controls in a major European market, in addition to other similar laws (such
TurinTech. So-called “vibe coding” with LLM-driven tools like Cursor Composer — a term coined by renowned computer scientist Andrej Karpathy — describes a hands-off approach to writing code using GenAI models, and it has really taken off recently. According to Y Combinator, one-quarter of the startups in its latest batch relies on AI to generate
During a health-focused event in New York on Tuesday, Google announced that it’s developing a collection of “open” AI models for drug discovery called TxGemma. The AI models, which Google said will be released through its Health AI Developer Foundations program later this month, can understand both “regular text” and the structures of different “therapeutic
Google on Tuesday announced new products aimed at healthcare features use cases, including improved overviews in Google Search for health queries, medical records APIs, and new health-focused “open” AI models. In Search, Google says it’s using AI and ranking systems to expand “knowledge panel” answers on thousands of health-related topics, and adding support for healthcare
U.S. President Donald Trump’s wide-ranging tariff hikes are already resulting in growth forecasts being cut amid an uncertain public mood — all of which will inevitably impact the technology sector. On Tuesday, however, food e-commerce startup GrubMarket seemed impervious to these macroeconomic concerns: it announced a new equity round of $50 million at a post-money
