Teckedin - Curated Tech News - December 2023 - February 2024
  • 20 Mar 2024
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Teckedin - Curated Tech News - December 2023 - February 2024

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Lookout and Fortra join forces for enhanced data security solutions

The partnership sees Fortra introducing its new Digital Guardian Secure Service Edge solution, powered by the Lookout Cloud Security Platform. The Security Service Edge offering provides continuous monitoring of user and device risk posture, with dynamic and granular zero-trust access based on app and data sensitivity.

Security

We’re one step closer to a global cybersecurity standard for smart home devices

Device makers who adhere to the specification and go through the certification process can carry the CSA’s new Product Security Verified (PSV) Mark. If that security camera or smart lightbulb you’re buying carries the mark, you’ll know it has met requirements to help secure it from malicious hacking attempts and other intrusions that could impact your privacy.

Privacy & Security

HEAVY.AI Introduces HeavyIQ, Delivering Powerful Conversational Analytics Focused on Location and Time Data

“In the past, most analytics solutions required users to write their own SQL queries or learn complex drag and drop interfaces that required dozens of clicks. They would also have to bring in engineering and operations teams to clean and load data.”

Data & Analytics

Exclusive: Data governance startup Euno emerges from stealth to manage business logic at scale

Euno’s solution focuses on mapping business logic across platforms, providing a catalog of definitions and automating the shift of logic from BI tools into the data layer. Euno works with a growing number of data warehouse and BI tools, including Snowflake, Databricks, Amazon and Redshift.

Data & Analytics

New Phishing Attack Uses Clever Microsoft Office Trick to Deploy NetSupport RAT

NetSupport RAT is a malicious offshoot of a legitimate remote desktop tool known as NetSupport Manager, allowing threat actors to conduct a spectrum of data gathering actions on a compromised endpoint.

Security

Databricks acquires Lilac to supercharge data quality efforts for gen AI apps

Traditionally, teams have had to use time-consuming manual methods to explore unstructured data and address its gaps. Lilac, founded by former Google engineers Daniel Smilkov and Nikhil Thorat in 2023, addresses this challenge with a scalable open-source solution that offers an intuitive UI and AI-driven features to analyze, understand and modify unstructured text data, at scale.

AI/Data

Healthcare industry chatbot firm Hippocratic AI raises $53M at $500M valuation

The company said that the objective of these generative AI agents and chatbots would be to help solve the massive shortage of nurses, social workers and nutritionists that the healthcare industry is currently facing in the U.S. and worldwide. Examples include a virtual agent handling questions regarding chronic care management, medication checks and post-discharge follow-up for specific conditions such as kidney failure and congestive heart failure. However, the AI agents cannot speak to patients unsupervised until phase three of the safety testing is completed.

MedTech

Anyscale Partners with NVIDIA to Scale Generative AI Models into Production

Customers will benefit from the combined power of Ray and Anyscale’s managed runtime environment, providing capabilities like container orchestration, observability, and autoscaling, as well as access to NVIDIA AI Enterprise to improve security and LLM performance.

Automation & Productivity

Stability AI launches new model that turns images into 3D videos

“By adapting our Stable Video Diffusion image-to-video diffusion model with the addition of camera path conditioning, Stable Video 3D is able to generate multi-view videos of an object,” the company said in the announcement. “Additionally, we propose improved 3D optimization leveraging this powerful capability of Stable Video 3D to generate arbitrary orbits around an object.”

AI/Video

Kinetica Launches Generative AI Solution for Real-Time Inferencing Powered by NVIDIA AI Enterprise

Generative AI applications utilize RAG to access and integrate up-to-date information from external knowledge bases, ensuring responses go beyond a large language model’s (LLM) original training data. However, the prevalent methods of enriching context (through vector similarity searches) are inadequate for quantitative data, as they are designed primarily to understand textual content.

AI/Data

Amazon and Snowflake partner to enable modern data streaming pipeline with Snowpipe and Kinesis Data Firehose

“Really, the way to think about streaming in the modern streaming data pipeline is that customers are telling us they want simplification and they also want to see reduced cost,” Ferguson said. “So that was part of how, how and why we built this.”

Data Management

Fujitsu: Malware on Company Computers Exposed Customer Data

"The reliance on defensive strategies is no longer sufficient and all organizations must refocus on data security," Williams explained in a statement. "As we have seen countless times, cybercriminals will always find a way in, and once they have your data, there is no limit to what they can do to leverage it."

Security

Balbix’s BX4 engine leverages Nvidia AI to transform cybersecurity risk management

The BX4 engine is said to take on a core challenge in cybersecurity: converting raw data into actionable insights that facilitate effective risk reduction. Balbix BX4 leverages the full-stack Nvidia AI platform and Nvidia GPUs while also integrating Nvidia Triton Inference Server and Nvidia TensorRT-LLM to train large language models.

AI/Security

Dekube Unveils Revolutionary Decentralized Computing Power Network to Democratize AI Development

This approach significantly reduces the marginal cost of acquiring computing power, making it virtually nonexistent. With the capability to expand into millions of nodes with GPUs, Dekube provides an elastically, efficient, cost-effective alternative to traditional centralized cloud platforms, boasting up to 30% more efficiency on LLM training & fine-tuning, through decentralization by using consumer-grade GPUs.

AI/DevOps

Hitachi Vantara Announces Collaboration with NVIDIA to Create New Portfolio of Industrial AI Solutions

Hitachi Vantara will develop a portfolio of solutions, Hitachi iQ, to drive targeted AI outcomes by layering industry-specific capabilities on top of its AI solution stack, so outcomes can be more specific and relevant to an organization’s business.

AI

Meta offers to reduce Facebook and Instagram monthly fees by about 50% to address privacy and antitrust concerns

Notably, users who consent to tracking will continue to access a free service funded by advertising revenues, while companies risk substantial fines for breaches of the DMA, potentially amounting to 10% of their annual global turnover.

Data Privacy

Sonatype debuts SBOM Manager to make enterprise software more transparent

Sonatype provides a collection of developer tools with more than 15 million users worldwide. The cornerstone of its product portfolio, Nexus Repository, allows software teams to store frequently used code components in a centralized location for easy access. Sonatype also sells tools that help developers prevent insecure open-source code from finding its way into their software.

DevOps

Anthropic Introduces Opus: A Challenger to OpenAI’s ChatGPT

According to Anthropic, Opus has surpassed OpenAI’s GPT-4 across various tasks. The Claude 3 family also comprises Sonnet, currently available alongside Opus, and Haiku, the least powerful model, set for release at a later date. In rigorous evaluations, Opus has demonstrated superior performance to GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini across a spectrum of industry benchmarks, including reasoning, mathematics, and general knowledge.

ChatGPT

Oracle and NVIDIA to Deliver Sovereign AI Worldwide

The combination of NVIDIA’s full-stack AI platform with Oracle’s Enterprise AI—deployable across OCI Dedicated Region, Oracle Alloy, Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud, and Oracle Government Cloud—offers customers a state-of-the-art AI solution that provides greater control over operations, location, and security to help support digital sovereignty.

AI

Dell teams with Nvidia on AI ‘easy button’ for data center and cloud deployments

AI factories are crucial to building intelligence on an industrial scale and turning proprietary data into meaningful insights. This partnership represents the first end-to-end AI enterprise service that integrates Dell’s compute, storage, software, services and client device capabilities with Nvidia’s AI infrastructure and software portfolio.

AI

Talkdesk Expands Healthcare AI and Integration with Autopilot Enhancements

Patients and members call or chat with their providers and health plans for many important reasons before and after clinical visits. Talkdesk Autopilot for Healthcare now automates an expanded set of use cases that support the whole patient journey — including new patient acquisition, making and managing appointments, completing PCI-compliant payments, finding a nearby clinic, and managing claims and prior authorizations

MedTech

DHS introduces AI pilots to enhance public safety and immigration processes

The roadmap also sets as a goal of DHS leading in AI through strong cohesive partnerships, with an aim to foster relationships with the private sector, academia, state, local, territorial and tribal governments, international partners, non-government organizations, research institutions and thought leaders to accelerate the development and deployment of AI solutions.

AI

Synopsys enhances software integrity platform with fAST Dynamic Testing solution

Supported by cloud architecture and scalable multitenant software-as-a-service delivery, Synopsys says, Polaris makes it easy for developers to onboard and start scanning in minutes while enabling security teams to track testing activities and manage risk across thousands of applications.

DevOps

LogRhythm and SOC Prime join forces to elevate threat detection capabilities

The joint solution is also said to address the challenge of alert fatigue by enabling security teams to fine-tune detection rules and prioritize responses based on accurate threat intelligence. With enhanced and accurate alerts, organizations can focus their efforts on mitigating real threats rather than having to deal with false positives.

Security

Job interview analysis platform Sapia launches generative AI chatbot to explain its hiring decisions

Melbourne recruitment startup Sapia.ai has launched a generative AI model it’s called SAIGE to give candidate feedback. It uses the platform’s large language model (LLM) capabilities developed over six years, to evaluate candidates using a blind chat interview, then deliver comprehensive scoring along with a set of job-related competencies, including explanations for its assessments, with the ability coach candidates as to how they can improve, or say what it was looking for to give a higher score for a particular skill or trait.

HR Tech

YouTube creators will now have to label certain AI-generated videos upon upload

Built into Creator Studio for both YouTube's website and its mobile apps, the AI confirmation labels will appear in the expanded description or on the video player itself. You'll then need to check a box or otherwise indicate if the content makes a real person appear to say or do something they didn't say or do, alters footage of a real event or place, or generates a realistic-looking scene that didn't actually occur. A label for particularly sensitive content may even appear on the video itself.

AI Ethics

Google researchers unveil ‘VLOGGER’, an AI that can bring still photos to life

The technology, called VLOGGER, relies on advanced machine learning models to synthesize startlingly realistic footage, opening up a range of potential applications while also raising concerns around deepfakes and misinformation.

AI

Deloitte introduces CyberSphere to enhance cyber operational efficiency with automation and AI

CyberSphere allows clients to leverage a curated set of modular capabilities supported by an ecosystem of third-party technology providers augmented by Deloitte services. Initial modules offered through CyberSphere include digital identity management, managed extended detection and response, attack surface management, managed secure access services edge and incident response, with plans to offer additional modules in the future.

Security

Productiv launches Sidekick, an AI-powered assistant for smarter SaaS management

“More than just a chatbot, Sidekick understands the intent of questions, particularly in a conversation sequence of back and forth, running complex analyses to provide digestible data, summarized answers, and intelligent recommendations,” he said.

IT Management

Cado Security Expedites Response to Microsoft 365 Compromises with SaaS Environment Support

Cado Security, provider of the first cloud forensics and incident response platform, announced that the Cado platform now enables customers to acquire Microsoft 365 Unified Audit Log (UAL) to help investigate and respond to Microsoft 365 compromises such as business email compromise (BEC), account takeover (ATO), and insider threats. With this new feature, security teams can seamlessly analyze UAL logs alongside other critical sources captured across on-prem and cloud environments.

Security

New DEEP#GOSU Malware Campaign Targets Windows Users with Advanced Tactics

"Its capabilities included keylogging, clipboard monitoring, dynamic payload execution, and data exfiltration, and persistence using both RAT software for full remote access, scheduled tasks as well as self-executing PowerShell scripts using jobs."

Security

Bloxcross Introduces AI Financial APIs for Payments

Central to Bloxcross’s success is its proprietary technology, Adaptive Intelligence Conversion (AIC). Powered by artificial intelligence, AIC delivers instant insights and optimal currency conversion strategies in real-time, empowering businesses to make informed decisions swiftly. This revolutionary technology mitigates risks associated with currency devaluation, enabling companies to maximize profits and navigate the complexities of international finance with confidence.

FinTech

Apple’s AI ambitions could include Google or OpenAI

If a Google deal comes to fruition, Apple wouldn’t be the first company to have tapped the search giant to provide AI features on its phones. Earlier this year Samsung added a series of Galaxy AI-branded features to its Galaxy S24 smartphones, which are powered by Google’s AI technology.

Automation & Productivity

LeapXpert introduces ‘Maxen’ to transform client relationships with AI

Called “Maxen,” the new AI is designed to produce communications intelligence by fusing data from external communication channels, such as WhatsApp, iMessage, SMS, phone calls, collaboration platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, client data and enterprise knowledge. In doing so, Maxen provides relationship managers, such as account managers and financial advisors, with live insights into recent communications and recommendations for impactful message topics and content.

Data & Analytics

xAI open sources Grok

A company blog post explains that this open release includes the “base model weights and network architecture” of the “314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model, Grok-1.” It continues saying the model is from a checkpoint last October and hasn’t undergone fine-tuning “for any specific application, such as dialogue.”

AI

Selector adds genAI and advanced analytics to AIOps platform

Selector specifically targets the challenges of tool sprawl within network operations centers (NOCs). Traditional setups in NOCs vary greatly among companies and often rely on ad hoc communication methods like phone calls, emails or ticket systems. Using conversational AI, Selector facilitates a more structured approach to incident management, allowing team members to ask questions and receive responses in a shared space.

NEtwork Management

Apple researchers achieve breakthroughs in multimodal AI as company ramps up investments

The work, described in a research paper titled “MM1: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Multimodal LLM Pre-training” that was quietly posted to arxiv.org this week, demonstrates how carefully combining different types of training data and model architectures can lead to state-of-the-art performance on a range of AI benchmarks.

AI

Resonance launches ‘full-spectrum’ cybersecurity platform for Web3 projects

While most Web3 security platforms focus primarily on detecting vulnerabilities and monitoring the blockchain side, Resonance additionally combines automated security analysis and audits for traditional networking and app vulnerabilities in the information stack. Its platform includes vulnerability scanners, hacker honeypots, data leak detectors. and other tools.

Web3

Deci announces new AI dev platform and small model Deci Nano

Now, the company is releasing a new, even smaller and less computationally demanding LLM, Deci-Nano, that is closed source, as well as a full Gen AI Development Platform for enterprises and coders, another paid product. Deci-Nano is available exclusively, for now, as part of the Deci Gen AI Development Platform.

AI/DevOps

Creatio’s Copilot Integrates GenAI with No-Code for Unparalleled Synergy

The platform includes Copilot Studio, a dedicated workspace empowering no-code creators to access and develop AI models, deploy new use cases, and modify existing ones effortlessly. Integrated with Creatio Studio’s no-code tools, Copilot provides GenAI support throughout development, including generating applications from narratives and designing UI based on textual descriptions.

Automation & Productivity

Syntropy Secures Fresh Funding to Build Out Its Web3 Data Layer

The new investors were attracted to Syntropy’s vision of creating real-time, chain-agnostic data infrastructure for developers. This solves one of the biggest pain points in web3 today: accessing reliable, low-latency onchain data across different blockchains

Web3

Snowflake and Landing AI combine forces to tackle unstructured data challenges with computer vision

Earlier this month, Snowflake, the data warehousing giant, announced a strategic investment and partnership with Landing AI, a computer vision startup founded by AI luminary Andrew Ng. The collaboration aims to integrate Landing AI’s advanced computer vision platform into Snowflake’s Data Cloud, unlocking new possibilities for enterprises seeking to harness the untapped potential of visual data.

AI/Data

Session AI Announces World’s First Solution for Real-Time AI Incentive Optimization

Session AI, the pioneer of in-session marketing, announced AI Incentive Optimization, a real-time AI solution for ecommerce retailers to achieve commercial goals. AI Incentive Optimization is the first technology of its kind to autonomously deploy, test, and manage on-site incentives in real-time – all without using any consumer personal data.

e-Commerce

Google Introduces Enhanced Real-Time URL Protection for Chrome Users

Up until now, the Chrome browser used a locally-stored list of known unsafe sites that's updated every 30 to 60 minutes, and then leveraging a hash-based approach to compare every site visited against the database.

Security

Oracle Adds New Generative AI Capabilities to Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite

Built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and leveraging its leading AI services, Oracle supports over 50 generative AI use cases that are embedded within Oracle Fusion Applications and designed to respect customers’ enterprise data, privacy, and security. With OCI Generative AI Service, no customer data is shared with large language model (LLM) providers or seen by other customers.

GenAI

OptraSCAN combines pathology imaging with ‘affordable’ storage

The OptraSCAN IMAGEPath image management system is an open platform that can easily integrate with scanners from multiple manufacturers and over 20 different image formats, in addition to being compatible with external third-party AI applications for pathology.

Data Management

HPE, Pure Storage unveil enterprise storage products

Storage is a vital, if overlooked, element in AI, especially generative AI. Large language models are built on data, and unstructured data at that. Companies are drawing in terabytes of data from data lakes, all of which is to be processed before the actual training and inferencing can begin. So, while GPUs get all the attention in the AI arms race, storage is just as important.

Data Storage

Report: Apple quietly acquired AI-powered quality assurance startup DarwinAI

In February, Bloomberg reported that Apple is working on a new AI-powered version of its Xcode platform. The platform, which developers use to write software for the company’s operating systems, is expected to gain a built-in programming assistant. It will reportedly be capable of generating code for tasks such as testing newly developed applications.

Automation & Productivity

The AI Developer Alliance looks to bring developers into the AI conversation

According to Chris Kent, Clarifai’s SVP of marketing, the goal is to “really focus on the idea of advocacy and knowledge sharing as well as bringing together expertise within the industry around best practices, do’s and don’ts, focusing on the betterment of building AI.”

AI/DevOps

Zscaler acquires cybersecurity data processing startup Avalor for reported $350M

Large enterprises use upwards of dozens of cybersecurity products. As a result, there are situations where multiple products detect the same vulnerability and generate duplicate alerts. Avalor’s platform can compress duplicate alerts into a single item to ease analysis, as well as add contextual details such as data on which business units are affected by a vulnerability.

Security

Microsoft’s ‘Copilot for Security’ brings generative AI to the frontlines of cybersecurity

The launch comes at a critical juncture for the cybersecurity industry. Jakkal highlighted the alarming pace and scale of cyberattacks, with Microsoft tracking 300 unique nation-state and financial crime actors, up from 200 the previous year. Ransomware has also become a thriving gig economy, according to Jakkal, with cybercrime projected to cost the global economy $8.5 trillion this year alone.

Security

AI-focused big data startup Unstructured raises $40M to make raw data LLM-ready

Unstructured is getting a lot of attention because it’s a pioneer in the area of converting unstructured data such as images, written notes, audio, video and so on into formats that can be read easily by large language models. It’s an extremely interesting proposition for many companies, as LLMs are the class of AI models that power generative AI services such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google LLC’s Gemini, and few people will need reminding how popular they are these days.

Data Management

TransUnion launches new data analytics platform powered by AI

The Chicago-based credit bureau officially debuted the platform, known as OneTru, on Wednesday. Through the new platform, TransUnion combines its preexisting hybrid cloud framework with an AI-powered platform it acquired in part through the 2021 purchase of the digital identity firm Neustar to offer financial institutions AI and machine learning tools for addressing credit, marketing and fraud needs.

Data & Analytics

Zscaler buys Avalor for AI-enabled security analytics

This integration with Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange cloud security platform is designed to help customers proactively identify and predict critical vulnerabilities and improve operational efficiencies by leveraging more than 400 billion daily transactions processed by Zscaler with Avalaor’s 150 pre-built integrations.

Security

Introducing PhishTitan's Auto Remediation Feature: Empowering MSPs and Administrators to Enhance Email Security for Advanced Phishing Attacks on M365

PhishTitan's current performance has been sensational - for every 80,000 emails received, PhishTitan is catching 20 unique and sophisticated phishing attacks that Microsoft's elite and expensive E5 premium security is missing.

Security

Perception Point launches GPT-4 powered AI model to boost cybersecurity threat detection

GPThreat Hunter activates automatically when the company’s normal solution tripwires flag a situation as ambiguous. This makes it a perfect situation for AI to handle, which can then compile a detailed examination of the situation, complete with context, including evidence from the detection engine and all data points that led to the flag. The data is then interrogated by custom-trained large language models that have been trained by Perception Point and combined with GPT-4, which delivers an explanation of its determination.

AI/Security

Exclusive: A German AI startup hoping to be a UiPath killer secures $3 million in seed funding

Now a tiny startup based in Munich, Germany, called Interloom thinks it can disrupt this entire market by rebuilding process automation on top of the new wave of large language models and generative AI assistants.

Automation & Productivity

C1 launches C1 Elly, the ‘one intelligent virtual assistant to rule them all’

C1 Elly stands out for its ability to access and use data across an organization, even from systems that usually don’t share information. It also evaluates the quality of AI interactions to ensure they’re helpful and accurate, reducing errors and improving over time.

AI/Data

Proton Mail desktop app officially launches, but remains for premium subscribers only

It’s worth noting that while Proton Mail has been available to desktop users from the company’s inception, initially through the browser and more recently a “bridge” which opened up access to Proton Mail through third-party desktop clients such as Apple Mail and Outlook, today’s news brings a dedicated Windows and MacOS app to the fray. This means that emails can be cached and accessed when offline, while users can funnel into Proton Mail directly from the MacOS dock or Windows Start menu.

Automation & Productivity

Kolena debuts platform for testing AI models and fine-tuned variants

This includes monitoring “data quality, model testing and A/B testing, as well as monitoring for data drift and model degradation over time.” It also offers debugging.

AI Ethics

Startup brings quantum-safe security encryption to Cisco routers

But how can quantum-safe cryptography get onto existing routers and networking gear today? That’s a challenge that San Mateo, Calif- based startup QuSecure set out to solve. Today QuSecure launched its QuProtect Core Security platform designed to bolster router-to-router communications on Cisco hardware against looming quantum threats.

Security

Opaque Systems announces new product for enhanced AI deployment security

Called Opaque Gateway, the new service seeks to address the issue wherein enterprises are grappling with generative AI deployments amid a rapidly evolving regulatory and security environment. The company says the new service breaks down the barriers to AI adoption through a new approach to deploying large language models that removes the most common obstacles — data privacy, security and sovereignty — with a verifiable audit trail and hardware root of trust.

AI

Anthropic launches its fastest and cheapest AI model yet

Anthropic argued that Haiku is not only affordable but also efficient. “Businesses can rely on Haiku to quickly analyze large volumes of documents, such as quarterly filings, contracts, or legal cases, for half the cost of other models in its performance tier. For instance, Claude 3 Haiku can process and analyze 400 Supreme Court cases or 2,500 images for just one US dollar,” the blog noted.

AI

One Identity launches new SaaS solution for privileged access management

“Unlike existing solutions in the market that often entail long and costly deployments, PAM Essentials can be up and running in minutes, without the need for additional infrastructure investments,” Chief Executive Mark Logan. “This solution can save customers thousands of dollars on implementations, making sophisticated PAM security attainable for even the smallest of organizations.”

Security

Foxit PDF Editor Suite Enhances AI Features

Foxit PDF Editor Suite users can now leverage Smart PDF Commands, a powerful new feature designed to streamline document processing workflows. Smart Commands supports over 80 pre-defined actions, including the ability to effortlessly create and edit PDFs from various sources including images, text files, and webpages as well as combining files, organizing documents and managing forms

Automation & Productivity

CircleCI launches new service to automate release orchestration for developers

With CircleCI releases, developers now have the ability to automate the entire pipeline and focus on customer risk in a rollback-friendly way, Zuber said. This means that as deployments happen, code can be sectioned out so it slowly rolls out to the user base in segments, defined by the developers, so that they can watch it happen through cohorts or other predefined stages so that if something begins to go wrong it can be pulled back quickly without affecting the entire user base.

DevOps

Microsoft Azure removes exit fee as EU regulations kick in

The announcement comes close on the heels of a couple of regulatory updates. In January, the EU announced the enforcement of its Data Act, aimed at facilitating access to industrial data and providing legal clarity on data usage. The act is set to enable customers to switch between different cloud providers more seamlessly, with an eventual provision for such transitions to be free of charge.

Cloud

Together AI closes on another bumper funding round and its value soars to $1.25B

Using its cloud platform, customers can train, fine-tune and finally run AI models in production, and the startup claims its prices are much lower than the most popular cloud infrastructure providers, such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Google LLC and Microsoft Corp.

AI

Latest Quantexa Decision Intelligence Platform Roadmap Puts Focus on Helping Enterprises and Government Agencies to Get Data Ready For AI

Quantexa debuted the platform’s new case management capabilities and an early adoption update to Q Assist, which is being deployed by customers in banking, telecommunications, and government agencies, in pilot programs to tackle financial crime, fraud, and risk, and to identify new revenue opportunities with customer intelligence.

AI/Data

Microsoft Teams is finally moving to a single app for personal and work

“We received consistent feedback from personal and work users: you prefer a single Teams app that allows you to easily access and switch between personal and work accounts,” says Microsoft in a blog post. “This update lets you use one app for all kinds of Teams accounts.”

Automation & Productivity

IoT security startup Nozomi Networks closes $100M funding round

The company’s Vantage platform, which debuted in 2021, can automatically map out all the connected devices used by an organization and scan them for vulnerabilities. The platform could, for example, identify if a system runs an outdated version of Linux with a known security flaw. Vantage ranks the vulnerabilities it finds based on the associated breach risk to help administrators tackle the most pressing issues first.

IoT

Nanonets grabs $29M for AI back office agents

A key innovation by Nanonets lies in its ability to ensure straight-through processing (STP), where data is processed without any manual intervention. Unlike other AI models that struggle with STP due to data hallucinations, Nanonets’ Autonomous Agents excel at performing end-to-end tasks with over 90% STP rate. This capability has led to substantial productivity and cost savings for its customers.

AI/Data

Alert: Cybercriminals Deploying VCURMS and STRRAT Trojans via AWS and GitHub

The attack chain commences with a phishing email that urges recipients to click on a button to verify payment information, resulting in the download of a malicious JAR file ("Payment-Advice.jar") hosted on AWS.

Security

OpenAI powers a robot that can hand people food, pick up trash, put away dishes, and more

In a scene straight out of a sci-fi film, the video begins with the human saying “Hey Figure One, what do you see right now?” The robot responds: “I see a red apple on the plate in the center of the table, a drying rack with cups and a plate, and you standing nearby with your hand on the table.”

Automation & Productivity

Salesforce launches ‘Pro Suite’ to capture more of the SMB market

The launch comes as part of the company’s effort to take on the growing competition from players like Zoho and Hubspot in the SMB segment and provide businesses with a platform where they can start from the most basic tier and upgrade all the way up to the enterprise suite as their business needs evolve.

Automation & Productivity

AI startup Axion Ray raises $17.5M to enhance technical issue detection for manufacturers

Axion Ray claims that, on average, poor product quality costs manufacturers up to 10% of their annual revenue. By leveraging the AI platform, customers have increased product quality while decreasing downtime by an average of 27%, leading to improved customer experience and, on average, a 16% reduction in warranty and service costs.

Automation & Productivity

Inflection AI unveils Inflection 2.5, a friendlier AI assistant that rivals GPT-4 performance on 60% less compute for training

Inflection-2.5 isn’t just another model; it’s the powerhouse behind Pi, the startup’s user-friendly AI assistant. With claims of being as potent as OpenAI’s GPT-4 but requiring a mere 40% of the computational resources for training, Inflection is making bold strides toward efficiency and effectiveness in AI communication. What sets it apart is its emphasis on empathy and helpfulness, marking a departure from the cold, calculating nature of traditional models.

AI

Tenable enhances attack path analysis and mitigation guidance with generative AI

Tenable said that includes explainability and summary functionality so that security practitioners can view a textual description of the attack path rather than a technical readout. This provides a comprehensive overview of the entire attack path in a format that is much more easily digested and allows them to more rapidly understand how the attacker can breach the system within the live environment.

Security

Vawlt seals in €2.15M for its distributed data storage ‘supercloud’

Data is distributed in multiple clouds or on-premise nodes, creating that supercloud which enables companies to take advantage of “best-of-breed” multiple storage environments through a single pane of glass. All users’ data is “always available”, promised the firm: “even if some of the clouds are down, if they lose or corrupt the data, and also in the case of a ransomware attack”.

Data Storage

Perplexity brings Yelp data to its chatbot

As The Verge’s David Pierce recently pointed out, how Perplexity mixes text and links when answering questions was already a selling point compared to other chatbots like Copilot, Gemini, or ChatGPT. Srinivas says that consideration is part of why the company eventually chose Yelp. Srinivas says Yelp’s data allowed Perplexity to offer a variety of ways to provide answers, like adding maps, photos, or even quote reviews.

Automation & Productivity

Northspyre Unveils “Northspyre AI”, Including Industry-First Generative AI Tool for Bidding Process

Northspyre, the leading real estate development platform for project delivery and capital management, announced the launch of Northspyre AI – the first real estate-specific generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool designed to drive down costs by eliminating scope gaps in the construction bidding process and proactively flagging cost-saving opportunities on every line item.

Automation & Productivity

Luminary Cloud launches with $115M funding for cloud CAE platform meant to dust desktop competitors

“If a customer wants to perform a big simulation, we can spin up hundreds of GPUs,” he said. “When that job is done, we spin them all down so the customer gets essentially a supercomputer on demand and pays by the minute.”

Automation & Productivity

US pushes to weaken international human rights treaty on use of AI software

The US government is lobbying Council of Europe members to weaken an international treaty on human rights and AI software by exempting private vendors from compliance.

AI Ethics

Creatio unveils LLM-powered Copilot for its CRM

Today, the company is embracing the emergent tech even more tightly, announcing the launch of Creatio Copilot, a virtual assistant and CRM app builder that can easily navigate through all the data the user/customer has stored in their CRM, fetch specific pieces of data on command such as a particular customer’s name or last correspondence, build bespoke apps, generate visualizations, charts, projections and analysis on command.

Data Management

Polar Signals reels in $6.8M to ease application performance analysis

When a piece of code activates within an application, it receives a certain amount of RAM that it can use to store data. Once the code completes its task, the RAM it received is recovered by the application in a process known as garbage collection. Failing to recover memory resources can increase a workload’s hardware use, which may lead to unnecessary costs.

Automation & Productivity

This Software Engineer AI Can Train Other AIs, Code Websites by Itself

In one video, Cognition Labs CEO Scott Wu shows how Devin users are able to view the AI tool's command line, code editor, and workflow as it moves through various steps to complete coding projects and data research tasks. Once Devin receives a request, it's able to scour the internet for educational materials to learn how to complete tasks and can debug its own issues encountered during the engineering process. Users are able to intervene if desired, however.

AI/Coding

NetBox Labs brings open-source network automation platform to the enterprise

“If you really distill NetBox down to the most basic description of what it is, it’s a relational data model for all the resources of that network and how they’re connected and configured,” Beever said. “So it’s a database, but it’s a very purpose built database that captures the real world topology and characteristics of an enterprise network.”

Network Management

Cohere releases powerful ‘Command-R’ language model for enterprise use

Command-R represents a significant leap forward for Cohere’s technology, offering enhanced performance on key AI tasks like retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and tool use, longer context windows up to 128,000 tokens, and more affordable pricing.

Automation & Productivity

Alphabet spinoff Sidewalk launches new venture to build battery-supported data centers

It plans to build a network of battery-supported data centers for hosting artificial intelligence models and other workloads. According to the company, its facilities are set to be based on a design that will allow them to “provide resilience and flexibility to the grid — becoming assets to their communities rather than constant, inflexible drains.”

Sustainability

Nightfall AI Transforms Enterprise DLP with AI-Native Platform

Nightfall AI unveiled new capabilities to transform data security for the modern enterprise. The industry’s first generative AI (GenAI) DLP platform now offers coverage for SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM), data encryption, data exfiltration prevention and sensitive data protection.

Data Management

PostgreSQL and Databricks founders join forces for DBOS to create a new type of operating system

“The state you have to keep track of has gone up by five or six orders of magnitude in the last 40 years, so without me saying another word, that means keeping track of operating system state is a database problem.”

Data Management

ZeroFox launches external attack surface management service to fortify digital assets

The solution seeks to address the issue wherein digital transformation, hybrid work and complex software supply chains have led to an expansion of unknown and unmanaged assets, systems and exposures across the external attack surface. ZeroFox claims that nearly 70% of organizations have experienced a cyberattack due to the exploitation of an unknown, unmanaged or poorly managed internet-facing asset

Security

Actian Doubles Down on Data Readiness for Generative AI

“We bring our extensive heritage in data and analytics to the table as we work closely with customers to ensure they’ve implemented thorough data preparation pipelines. This helps accelerate and validate their generative AI projects, ensuring our customers achieve their desired objectives with confidence.”

Data & Analytics

Israeli cloud security startup Wiz reportedly in talks to raise $800M on $10B valuation

The service ranks vulnerabilities through a risk-weighted view that allows users to assess vulnerabilities and misconfigurations based on severity, exposure, exploitability, blast radius and business impact. Wiz’s platform provides support for Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp.’s Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Kubernetes application programming interfaces.

Security

Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes Improves Support for AI and Windows Workloads

MOSK 24.1 introduces GPU virtualization as a technical preview, letting multiple cloud applications efficiently share resources of physical NVIDIA GPU boards. GPU virtualization helps optimize costs – maximizing utilization of expensive GPU hardware – while letting more teams and business units take advantage of processing power

Automation & Productivity

Google Cloud rolls out new AI tools for healthcare and life sciences

Google Cloud said its Vertex AI Search for Healthcare, available today, will help developers build better systems for health systems workers to deal with administrative issues and vast numbers of clinical records. It will allow developers to connect search and generative AI conversational question-answer capabilities to a broad spectrum of data across healthcare systems, including using MedLM, Healthcare Data Engine and Cloud Healthcare application programming interfaces for access to data.

Automation & Productivity

Midjourney debuts feature for generating consistent characters across multiple gen AI images

Yet, as is the case with text-based large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Cohere’s new Command-R, the problem with all generative AI applications is in their inconsistency of responses: the AI generates something new for every single prompt entered into it, even if the prompt is repeated or some of the same key words are used.

GenAI

Akamai and Neural Magic team up to accelerate AI workloads on edge CPU servers

Neural Magic’s software makes it possible for developers to run deep learning models on cost-effective CPU servers with almost the same performance of those that run on much more expensive and hard to come by GPU servers. Its software achieves this by accelerating AI workloads using automated model sparsification techniques, which are made available as a CPU inference engine.

Automation & Productivity

Pika adds generative AI sound effects to its video maker

This weekend, Pika added a new feature that allows users to automatically generate sound effects for their AI videos made on the web platform, pika.art. The move promises to add a whole new dimension to AI generated videos, most of which are soundless and previously required a user to add their own sound files through other editing software. Now, with Pika’s new addition, they can do it right within the app and create new sound files without sourcing them separately.

AI/Video

Ocient closes on $49.4M funding round to streamline always-on data analytics

Ocient provides hyperscale data warehouse and analytics software to help enterprises perform massively parallelized processing of enormous amounts of data. This enables its customers to obtain real-time insights from trillions of data records at once. It can do this thanks to the unique design of its data warehouse architecture, where compute is adjacent to storage on NVMe solid-state drives.

Data & Analytics

Alation Launches End-to-End Business Lineage to Cultivate Data Trust and Enable Data-Informed Decision-Making

By 2026, more than a quarter of Fortune 500 CDAOs will have become responsible for at least one top-earning product that is based on data and analytics. This requires organizations to understand and effectively use the data they have collected for years. The proliferation of data is immense and must continue to fuel analytical insights and new AI applications.

Data & Analytics

Elon Musk’s xAI to open-source its Grok language model

It’s unclear how xAI would go about monetizing its work in the event that it open-sources Grok. The company may take a similar approach as Mistral AI, another venture-backed LLM startup. Mistral released its first two LLMs under an open-source license and recently introduced a trio of paid language models with more advanced features.

AI/LLMs

Zapier Acquires Vowel, Launches Zapier Central to Lead AI Automation Evolution

The Vowel team’s valuable expertise in AI has been instrumental in the development of Zapier’s newest product, Zapier Central. Available today in public preview, Zapier Central is a new AI workspace where customers can build, teach, and work hand-in-hand with AI bots—customized with their data—to handle tasks across 6,000+ apps and help them accelerate their business.

Automation & Productivity

Box Expands its Collaboration with Microsoft with New Azure OpenAI Service Integration

The integration of Azure OpenAI Service enables Box customers to benefit from the most advanced AI models in the world, while bringing Box and Microsoft’s enterprise-grade standards for security, privacy, and compliance to this groundbreaking technology. Box also announced that Box AI is generally available to customers on Enterprise Plus plans, starting today.

AI

Persistent Accelerates Digital Engineering with AI-Powered SASVA Platform

SASVA adopts a distinctive method by constructing a comprehensive knowledge base from vast datasets, including millions of code repositories and documents. Hybrid language models enable efficient utilization, with continual secure training on customer data sourced from various platforms like version control, ticketing systems, project management tools, and collaboration platforms

Automation & Productivity

Usher’s New Look Embarks on AI-Focused Collaboration with IBM to Set Students up for Career Success

With a focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and professional workplace skills, IBM will provide UNL with training and customized learning plans for student learners. This effort aims to benefit thousands of UNL’s young learners nationwide, including high school and college-age youth from communities traditionally underrepresented in technology.

Training & Certs

Citrix Introduces New Incentives to Ease Customer Migration to Citrix Platform

For VMware customers seeking to make a switch to Citrix and capitalize on the added value of the Citrix platform, Citrix offers a one-year rebate of service when they migrate their infrastructure to Citrix and commit to a three-year agreement with an annual expenditure exceeding $50,000.

Vendor Management

Firewall raises $3.7M to take smart contracts mainstream with programmable finality

Akin to a digital version of a traditional network’s firewall, Firewall’s technology introduces “programmable finality”. It extends rollups to use programmable transaction finalization rules, which act as automated checkpoints that block harmful transactions, inserted before later stages when the data is finalized by a DA layer such as EigenDA or Celestia. The founders envision Firewall as a part of every smart contract network, acting as an embedded security system that intelligently guards against threats.

Security

Cognizant launches state-of-the-art San Francisco lab to boost enterprise AI adoption

The lab is staffed by a team of top researchers and developers, including many AI pioneers and Ph.D. holders. The company boasts an impressive portfolio of 75 issued and pending patents that lay the groundwork for innovation.

AI

Russian state-backed hackers accessed Microsoft’s core software systems, company says

Microsoft first revealed the breach in January, days before another Big Tech company, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said the same hackers had breached its cloud-based email systems. The full extent and exact purpose of the hacking activity isn’t clear, but experts say the group responsible has a history of wide-ranging intelligence gathering campaigns in support of the Kremlin.

Security

PetSmart alerts customers to credential-stuffing attacks targeting user accounts

First reported by Dark Web Performer on X, formerly Twitter, an email sent to affected customers states that PetSmart’s internal security tools had seen an increase in “password guessing attacks” on petsmart.com — referring to credential-stuffing attacks — and that during this time, the customer’s account had been logged into.

Security

Workers with AI skills can expect higher salaries - depending on their role

Employers also are willing to fork out 39% more to hire AI-skilled workers in sales and marketing as well as in business operations, while they will pay 37% more for those in finance.

Tech Jobs

Reach Security raises $20M to enhance AI-driven cybersecurity tools

Reach offers an AI purpose-built platform to reprogram an organization’s security infrastructure based on who they are and how they’re being attacked. In contrast to solutions that are limited to cloud security, it says, the platform acts across the entire security estate, interrogating each tool and gathering data on who is being targeted and how those attacks work.

Security

Brevian launches with $9M in funding to simplify AI agent development

Determining whether unusual network activity may be the result of a breach often requires administrators to analyze logs from multiple systems. Manually retrieving and analyzing those logs can take a significant amount of time, which slows investigations. Brevian says its platform makes it possible to create AI agents that automatically retrieve data about potential breaches.

AI/Security

HP Unveils Industry’s Largest Portfolio of AI PCs

HP Smart Sense is designed to automatically anticipate and adjust to your PC usage behavior, ensuring the best balance of performance and power. In addition, Poly Studio audio and Dynamic Voice Leveling, AI Noise Reduction12, and automatic framing13 offer improved, natural on-camera interaction and collaboration for a seamless user experience.

Security

JustPaid Unveils Enhanced Financial Chatbot Capabilities, Powered by AI

Part of JustPaid’s overarching vision for the chatbot is to integrate with Stripe and other tech-leading money movement vendors, allowing company operators, bookkeepers and accountants to process transactions seamlessly and directly within the chatbot, and thus providing a more straightforward experience for payments and services.

FinTech

Cloudera Unveils Next Phase Of Open Data Lakehouse To Unlock Enterprise AI

To help unlock the full potential of datalakes, Cloudera, an enterprise AI-based data company, has announced the next phase of its open data lakehouse on a private cloud. The company has now become the only provider to offer an open data lakehouse with Apache Iceberg for private and public clouds.

AI/Data

Meet ‘Liberated Qwen’, an uncensored LLM that strictly adheres to system prompts

Abacus AI, the startup building an AI-driven end-to-end machine learning(ML) and LLMOps platform, has dropped an uncensored open-source large language model (LLM) that has been tuned to follow system prompts – in all scenarios.

AI/LLMs

Cayosoft Secures $22.5 Million to Make Instant Active Directory Recovery an Industry Standard

Today, over 90% of organizations rely on Active Directory to run their daily operations. AD is an attractive target for cyber attackers, due to the access it provides and the fact that attackers can reuse the same methods time and again. As organizations experience unprecedented numbers of AD outages, due to escalating cyberattacks, AD recovery has become an urgent concern. Forest-wide AD outages have increased 172% in the past two years [source: Cayosoft].

Security

Inflection AI launches new model for Pi chatbot, nearly matches GPT-4

Since its inception, Inflection AI has been building an “empathetic, useful and safe” AI that acts more personally and colloquially than other models, including the GPT series. The company used unique empathetic fine-tuning to give the model behind Pi a signature personality and an exceptional EQ (emotional quotient).

AI

Patronus AI Launches Industry-first Solution to Detect Copyrighted Content Generated by LLMs

Initial research by Patronus AI shows that state-of-the-art LLMs generate copyrighted content at an alarmingly high rate. AI researchers at Patronus AI developed a 100-prompt adversarial test set to study how often models generate exact reproductions. Each prompt contained text excerpts or requested the first passage of a text

AI Ethics

Pentera Launches Automated Cloud Penetration Testing, Reducing Cloud-Native Attack Risks

Pentera Cloud is the first software product enabling on-demand security testing and resilience assessment of corporate cloud accounts against cloud-native attacks. As part of Pentera’s automated security validation platform, Pentera Cloud empowers security teams to reduce exposure to cloud-native attacks stemming from anywhere in the IT attack surface: On-premises, external, and cloud.

Security

New open-source tool CloudGrappler aims to strength AWS and Azure security

CloudGrappler queries activity across notorious threat actors in the cloud and is said to excel in detecting and analyzing singular log events. It does so while offering a comprehensive view of potential security incidents that are occurring or have occurred in an organization’s environment, leveraging the capabilities of cloudgrep to extend detection capabilities to find threats more effortlessly in AWS and Azure environments.

Security

InvGate’s AI Hub automatically generates knowledge articles from IT incidents

In other words, IT team customers of InvGate who choose to access the new AI Hub (it’s available as an included update in current pricing) can select which incident response conversations they wish to turn into knowledge base articles, run them through the InvGate AI Hub tool, and out comes not only a new article, but a conversational chatbot version of it that you can ask questions and receive responses about that specific type of issue.

Automation & Productivity

Pathlock Launches First SAP Cybersecurity Platform Safeguarding Business Data

By combining detective cybersecurity controls like Vulnerability Management, Threat Detection and Response, Code Scanning, and Transport Control with preventative controls like Attribute-Based Access Controls (ABAC), Dynamic Data Masking, and Data Loss Prevention (DLP), SAP customers can ensure access to their systems and data is fully aligned with the strictest data governance and cybersecurity policies.

Security

Hugging Face is launching an open source robotics project led by former Tesla scientist

Hugging Face, the New York City-startup that maintains the popular open source repository of machine learning and AI code of the same name and the open source ChatGPT-rival Hugging Chat, is launching a new robotics project under former Tesla staff scientist Remi Cadene, according to a post from Cadene on X this morning.

Robotics

Blockchain-focused cryptography startup Zama raises $73M to protect data in use

Zama reckons that its FHE technology will transform data privacy, and it is focused on building a suite of open-source cryptographic libraries and tools that will make it accessible to developers, so they can build a new generation of privacy-preserving applications.

Data Privacy

Hacked WordPress Sites Abusing Visitors' Browsers for Distributed Brute-Force Attacks

The activity is part of a previously documented attack wave in which compromised WordPress sites were used to inject crypto drainers such as Angel Drainer directly or redirect site visitors to Web3 phishing sites containing drainer malware.

Security

Zapier Central debuts as no-code tool for building enterprise AI bots

Unlike those other aforementioned direct-to-consumer tools, Zapier Central includes more fields allowing users to specify a “trigger,” that initiates the bot’s behaviors, a “trigger phrase” that can deploy it when typed by the user, and the “actions” the bot can perform, as well as which additional apps and services. ithas access to.

Automation & Productivity

Sentra Announces Industry-First Generative AI Assistant for Cloud Data Security

This new capability enhances the functionality of Sentra’s core Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) and Data Detection and Response (DDR) platform by enabling users to promptly address emerging threats and vulnerabilities with real-time insights, as well as extending its usability to other governance roles such as audit, compliance and privacy

Data Management

Startup Highway 9 Networks delivers private mobile networks for enterprises

Sequeira explains Highway 9 is taking advantage of a few factors that make it possible for the company to equip enterprise organizations with private mobile networks. “The combination of availability of free 3.5 GHz bands on smartphones, tablets, and other devices, and the new software-defined 5G stack, as well as a large ecosystem of 5G capable devices, gives us a great starting point to develop the appropriate solution,” Sequeira says.

Network Management

Facebook is using AI to supercharge the algorithm that recommends you videos

Meta has made competing with TikTok a top priority ever since the app, which serves up vertical video clips and is known for its powerful recommendation engine that seems to know exactly what will keep users hooked, started exploding in popularity in the US in the last few years. When Facebook tested the new AI-powered recommendation engine with Reels, watch time went up by roughly 8 to 10 percent, Alison revealed

Social Media

Salesforce launches two new AI tools for doctors and healthcare workers

At the forefront is the innovative “Einstein Copilot: Health Actions,” a tool empowering physicians to seamlessly manage appointments, summarize patient information, and facilitate referrals through AI-driven conversational prompts. This breakthrough, detailed in a recent release, underscores Salesforce’s commitment to revolutionizing healthcare workflows.

Automation & Productivity

Huawei developing magneto-electric drive for cold storage

“Huawei’s MED (magneto-electric disk) brings brand-new innovation against magnetic media. The first generation of MED will be as a big capacity disk. The rack capacity will be more than 10 PB and power consumption less than 2 KW. For the first generation of MED, we will position it mainly for archival storage. It will be released overseas about 2025H1.

Data Storage

Gupshup Redefines Customer Engagement with Conversation Cloud Launch

Gupshup Converse helps businesses build rich two-way conversational journeys across the customer lifecycle. Business users can leverage advanced no-code tools to configure customer journeys, bot flows, and auto-trigger contextual messages. Interactions across the customer funnel leverage Gupshup Customer360’s unified profiles based on customer attributes and real-time conversational events.

Automation & Productivity

UK AI startup Fluent raises $7.5 million in funding for its AI-powered data analytics platform

At the helm of Fluent is CEO Robert Van Den Bergh, whose vision drives the company’s mission to empower non-technical personnel to directly interrogate their data in plain English, obviating the need for arduous manual data requests. Van Den Bergh remarked, “With Fluent’s natural language interface, we’re helping team members self-serve on their data questions, liberating data teams to focus on strategic analysis.”

Data & Analytics

Quantum adding AI focus and GPUDirect support to Myriad

Elvester said the main Myriad customer interest lies in using its high performance for AI applications. It currently supports NFS v3/4 and SMB, and has a client providing parallel access. Myriad services include encryption, replication, distributed and dynamic erasure coding, data cataloging, and analytics. S3 access, a POSIX client, and GPUDirect support are roadmap items.

Data Management

LinkedIn Suffers An Outage— Thousands of Users Report the Incident

This is a hectic week for large organizations. Earlier this week, reports speculated that three cyber threat groups – led by Skynet, shut down Meta’s Instagram, Facebook, and Threads. Users were automatically logged out of the Meta platforms, preventing users from accessing their accounts for nearly 2 hours.

Social Media

Claroty secures $100M to enhance cyber-physical system security

However, access to sensitive systems is often isolated from the rest of the network and can only be accessed through a jump server — a server that acts as a tunnel between the less sensitive part of an industrial company’s network and the high-priority isolated parts. Claroty’s platform negates the need for a jump server to make secure connections to industrial equipment, simplifying the connection process.

Security

Arista looks to become numero UNO with new Universal Network Observability offering

Dubbed CloudVision Universal Network Observability, or CV UNO, the new software is aimed at reducing enterprise risk, improinge fault detection and correction, and simplifying cross-functional coordination using systems-level capabilities. The company says this approach speeds up time to recovery regardless of the root cause.

Network Management

Bolt Express Develops New AI /ML System to Revolutionize Digital Freight Matching

This new digital system streamlines the freight matching process by seamlessly integrating via API, EDI, or XML with high-volume shipping accounts. For all other ad-hoc customer shippers, Bolt simplifies shipment set-up by using the power of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to read and instantly process new requests submitted via email, phone, or text, to ensure they receive a timely solution to their most challenging and urgent shipping problems.

Automation & Productivity

Microsoft AI engineer warns FTC about Copilot Designer safety concerns

When testing Copilot Designer for safety issues and flaws, Jones found that the tool generated “demons and monsters alongside terminology related to abortion rights, teenagers with assault rifles, sexualized images of women in violent tableaus, and underage drinking and drug use,” CNBC reports.

AI Ethics

AWS follows Google Cloud in canceling egress fees, allowing customers to leave its cloud platform for free

The company said in a blog post that customers will need to contact its support staff prior to ditching its cloud and migrating their data to an alternative platform. Once the customer is approved, it will be granted a sufficient number of “data transfer out” credits to complete its planned migration. Those DTO credits will then be valid for a period of 60 days, during which time the customer is expected to complete the entire migration.

Cloud

Cloudflare acquires Nefeli Networks for ‘magic’ multicloud networking

Nefeli relies on the APIs provided by public cloud providers to build a unified abstraction layer across native cloud constructs. This layer provides multicloud network management and operations without the need to deploy or manage separate virtualized network function.

Network Management

Microsoft’s new Orca-Math AI outperforms models 10x larger

Yesterday afternoon, Arindam Mitra, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and leader of its Orca AI efforts, posted on X a thread announcing Orca-Math, a new variant of French startup Mistral’s Mistral 7B model (itself a variant of Meta’s Llama 2), that excels “in math word problems” while retaining a small size to train and run as an inference. It’s part of the Microsoft Orca team’s larger quest to supercharge the capabilities of smaller-sized large language models (LLMs).

Automation & Productivity

Salesforce launches Einstein 1 Studio low-code AI customization tools

The company’s AI copilot, said Salesforce AI Chief Executive Clara Shih, differs from other copilots and consumer AI models because consumer AI models are trained on public datasets from the internet and enterprise models are grounded in trusted business data. The biggest problem that businesses face is that they have a great deal of data trapped in islands – databases, PDFs, email, files and so forth – that is largely inaccessible.

Automation & Productivity

SAP’s genAI-powered tools aim to help enterprises put their data to work

SAP’s tools are built on the business data fabric concept, which centralizes, connects, manages and governs data across different systems and applications.

Data Management

Cloudera Reveals Next Phase of Open Data Lakehouse, Focused on Enterprise AI

With its latest round of enhancements, Cloudera has become the only provider to offer an open data lakehouse with Apache Iceberg for public and now private clouds, helping customers to unlock the enterprise AI potential of all their data.

AI/Data

Appian Unifies Generative AI, Enterprise Data, and End-to-End Process Automation

The release also introduces Appian Case Management Studio, an AI-powered case management designer with out-of-the-box modules to quickly launch apps for complex casework. The new release also enhances Appian’s Data Fabric Analytics across the Appian data fabric, empowering every Appian user with a powerful AI-assisted business intelligence capability.

Automation & Productivity

AI video startup Haiper emerges from stealth, plans to build AGI with full perceptual abilities

Haiper claims that the platform and the proprietary visual foundation model underpinning it can cater to a wide range of use cases, right from individual applications such as content for social media to business-centric uses like generating content for a studio. However, the company has not shared anything about the commercialization plan and continues to offer the technology for free.

AI/Video

Huntress Unleashes New Admin-Friendly Features in its Security Awareness Training

“The reality is small to medium-sized businesses don’t have the time or expertise to create and manage effective SAT programs, a critical first line of defense against cyber threats. With Huntress SAT, our MSP partners can offer a value-added service to their SMB customers that is easy to use and doesn’t require time and resources to manage.

Security

Israeli startup Sweet Security raises $33M to strengthen cloud security operations

The company’s suite includes detection, response, discovery and prevention, all in runtime, with the runtime sensor said to take under five minutes to deploy. Once up and running, the suite provides cloud-native cluster visibility, streaming critical application data and business logic to profile workload behavior anomalies and contextualize them with traditional tactics, techniques and procedures.

Security

Arista goes big with network observability platform

The company’s CloudVision Universal Network Observability (CV UNO) system is designed to handle a data lake’s worth of network telemetry and analytical data and meld it with artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to offer real-time network flow and application performance details, risk and incident analysis, and change impact management.

Network Management

Exclusive: Metaplane nets $13M to detect data anomalies with AI

“We integrate with as much of the data stack as possible, whether that’s ingestion tools like Fivetran, cloud data warehouses like Snowflake and BigQuery, transformation and orchestration layers like dbt and Airflow, reverse ETL tools like Census and Hightouch, and BI tools like Sigma, Tableau, and Looker.”

AI/Data

HPE optimizes GreenLake for File Storage to support more scalable AI workloads

The company is making some big claims about the improved performance of its updated offering, saying it’s delivering four times the capacity and two-times the performance per rack unit. With these improvements, HPE says, enterprises will be able to scale AI throughput by two times while significantly reducing power consumption, with energy-efficiency gains of up to 50% in some use cases.

Data Storage

Snowflake partners with Mistral AI, taking its open LLMs to the data cloud

Announced during last year’s Snowday event, Snowflake Cortex provides enterprises using data cloud with a suite of AI building blocks, including open-source LLMs, to analyze data they have on the platform – with security, privacy and governance of Snowflake – and build applications targeting different business-specific use cases.

AI/Data

Multiverse Computing raises €25M to deliver more efficient LLMs using quantum-inspired algorithms

Its main offerings include a product called Singularity, which helps users with no quantum background solve challenges around AI and optimization applications using quantum and quantum-inspired computers. The startup has also built a product called CompactifAI, which is designed to compress large language models using quantum-inspired tensor networks in order to reduce their size by up to 80% without affecting their performance.

AI/LLMs

Fosfor Announces the Fosfor Decision Cloud to Amplify Business Outcomes With AI

The GenAI-powered assistant that helps with frequent tasks across the data-to-decisions journey such as constructing data pipelines, generating ML model code, constructing natural language prompts, and curating data stories. Fosfor AI radically increases productivity for virtually any user persona, thereby reducing time-to-insights and accelerating the realization of business outcomes.

AI/Data

NetApps bulks up ransomware protection for AI workloads

NetApp BlueXP ransomware protection provides a single control plane to coordinate a complete workload-centric ransomware defense. It offers one-click workload data protection, can automatically detect and respond to a potential attack and recovers workloads within minutes. The software is now in public preview.

Security

Cloudflare Expands Capabilities to Protect Organizations Against Emerging Threats with Defensive AI

“By understanding ‘normal baselines’ in a customer’s environment and mitigating the threats that will move the needle towards increased resilience, Defensive AI is the crucial edge defenders need to stay ahead of today’s adversaries.”

Security

India asks tech firms to seek approval before releasing 'unreliable' AI tools

"Safety and trust is platforms legal obligation. 'Sorry Unreliable' does not exempt from law," deputy IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on the social media platform X in response to Google's statement.

AI Ethics

Cycode expands its security offerings with acquisition of DevOps startup Bearer

For Cycode, the acquisition of Bearer is aimed at boosting its mission to deliver safe code faster and supercharge its application security posture management, or ASPM. It says the combination delivers scanning speeds 31% faster than the competition by using AI for more contextual remediation and enhanced precision, offering an enhanced developer experience for faster shipping.

Security

CrowdStrike and Dell unleash an AI-powered, unified security vision

Dell and CrowdStrike are joining forces today to help businesses battle against cyberattacks using AI to protect against generative AI, stealth social engineering and endpoint attacks. Dell is adding CrowdStrike’s Falcon extended detection and response (XDR) platform to its current managed detection and response (MDR) service.

AI/Security

Google just solved one of its biggest spreadsheet issues - but you might not ever notice how

Google Workspace says the tool will work with all Sheets features, including frozen rows, hidden columns, charts, buttons, comments, and on right-to-left layouts. It will even work when you use scrollbars instead of a mouse or trackpad, with both new and existing spreadsheets being compatible.

Automation & Productivity

Xage Security, Darktrace Partner to Strengthen Zero Trust in Commercial Critical Infrastructure

This collaboration brings together Xage Security’s leading zero trust protection with Darktrace’s AI-powered anomaly-based threat detection. The integration between Darktrace/OT and Xage Fabric makes it easy to identify and respond to breaches in progress at any stage in operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) environments.

Security

Discuss’ Latest Innovations are the Next Gen Unlock to Human Centricity on a Global Scale

“I’ve used Discuss to enable cross functional teams to talk to consumers across five countries in five different languages all within one week” said Sai Pisapit, Consumer Insights and Analytics Manager for Reckitt. “We’re now leveraging Discuss’ Consumer Reach solution to further unlock our consumer empathy efforts across our US teams and we’re seeing incredible results.”

Data & Analytics

Pluralsight Introduces AI Sandboxes to Help Organizations Master AI Tools and Techniques

AI sandboxes allow users to safely experiment with preconfigured AI cloud services, generative AI notebooks, and a variety of large language models (LLMs), helping organizations save time, reduce costs, and minimize risk by eliminating the need to provision their own sandboxes.

AI

OpenAI adds ‘Read Aloud’ voiceover to ChatGPT, allowing it to speak its outputs

According to an email sent to VentureBeat by an OpenAI spokesperson: the feature “can come in handy when using ChatGPT on the go, in moments when you need to be hands-free, or in instances where hearing a message out loud helps you understand it better.”

Automation & Productivity

Brave's AI assistant is now available for Android

As far as privacy is concerned, according to Brave, "As with all of Brave's other features, privacy remains paramount for Brave Leo. Chats with Leo are private and secure. Leo doesn't record chats, or use them for model training, and no account or login is required to use Leo.

Automation & Productivity

Cloudflare announces new defensive AI products for protecting LLMs and companies from attack

The new Firewall for AI will provide security teams the capability to rapidly detect new threats, the company said, as it could be deployed in front of any LLMs running on Cloudflare’s existing Workers AI offering. Workers AI allows developers to deploy AI models at the edge at scale on Cloudflare’s global network, which in turn puts any LLM running as close to enterprise customers as possible allowing extremely low latency responses.

AI/Security

Anthropic unveils Claude 3, surpassing GPT-4 and Gemini Ultra in benchmark tests

Amodei explained that Opus outperforms top AI models like GPT-4, GPT-3.5 and Gemini Ultra on a wide range of benchmarks. This includes topping the leaderboard on academic benchmarks like GSM-8k for mathematical reasoning and MMLU for expert-level knowledge.

AI

Over 100 Malicious AI/ML Models Found on Hugging Face Platform

"This silent infiltration could potentially grant access to critical internal systems and pave the way for large-scale data breaches or even corporate espionage, impacting not just individual users but potentially entire organizations across the globe, all while leaving victims utterly unaware of their compromised state."

Security

Agiloft Enhances Data-First Agreement Platform with New Google Docs App and Custom API Platform

Agiloft App for Google Docs – enables users to utilize Agiloft’s CLM functionality within widely-used Google Docs platform. The new Agiloft for Google Docs app enables users to quickly and efficiently review their agreements in Google Docs, make redlines, and tag key terms and clauses with all document changes synced back to Agiloft.

Automation & Productivity

Veeam launches Azure-based managed Data Cloud service

“As the #1 global provider of data protection and ransomware recovery and the leader in backup for Microsoft 365, we’re bringing those trusted capabilities – for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure – and delivering them as-a-service.”

Data Management

Keysight Unveils Benchmarking Solution to Accelerate AI Infrastructure Deployment

The Keysight platform enables large scale validation and experimentation with fabric design in a realistic and cost-effective way. This solution complements testing AI / ML workloads using GPUs, providing AI operators with a more scalable, robust, and integrated AI test platform.

AI

Akamai’s latest update bolsters Layer 7 attack defense with machine learning

Akamai’s new enhanced Layer 7 DDoS protections are designed to precisely detect and mitigate short DDoS attack bursts and use client reputation scores for improved rate limiting. Protection is enhanced through a new capability called URL Protection that ensures the availability of mission-critical URLs, application programming interfaces and microservices by prioritizing legitimate traffic during highly distributed attacks

Security

Fast Forward Backs Autogon to Advance No-Code AI Solutions Delivered in Minutes

Autogon’s platform offers a drag-and-drop interface that enables users to build AI models in minutes – without prior knowledge or technical skills. The interface also features a marketplace with ready to go AI models.

Automation & Productivity

Addressing operational-technology security concerns, Cyolo announces new remote access solution

The new solution includes virtual private network-less connectivity — connectivity that does not require the use of a VPN for remote access — to eliminate risks associated with network access while adhering to zero-trust principles. Even without using a VPN, the solution ensures robust identity authentication by verifying the identity, instead of the user, behind the access, even for legacy applications, enhancing overall security measures.

Security

New Online Course From Scrum Alliance Educates Professionals for the AI-Integrated World of Work

The report’s survey of agile professionals and hiring managers also found that employers need to hire people with both technical and soft skills. In addition, the report stated that 55% of organizations will pay higher salaries for individuals with relevant agile certifications compared to a non-certified counterpart.

Training & Certs

Introducing Gemma: Google’s Lightweight Open Source Llama Challenge

With the free tier for Colab notebooks and free access in Kaggle, users can begin working with Gemma now. Furthermore, $300 in credits are available to first-time users of Google Cloud. Google Cloud credits, which researchers can request for in amounts up to $500,000, can also be used to speed up studies.

AI/LLMs

Futurism - Wikipedia No Longer Considers CNET a "Generally Reliable" Source After AI Scandal

It was a grim fall that one former Red Ventures employee told us could "put a huge dent in their SEO efforts," and also a cautionary tale about the wide-ranging reputational effects that publishers should consider before moving into AI-generated content.

AI /ethics

Former AWS engineers raise $3M to take on tech giants with ‘world’s fastest spreadsheet’

The software can import 31 million rows from Snowflake in 12 seconds. The largest dataset imported thus far has been 270 million rows of genomic data.

Automation & Productivity

Huawei Launches 3 Innovative Data Storage Solutions for the AI Era

There are two major challenges in data infrastructure construction in the AI era. First, to extract knowledge from data, independent and scattered data sources must be aggregated in AI data factories to mine value from the data. This sets high requirements for data mobility

AI/Data Management

BitRipple moves liquid data using RaptorQ

“A digital fountain allows any number of heterogeneous clients to acquire bulk data with optimal efficiency at times of their choosing. Moreover, no feedback channels are needed to ensure reliable delivery, even in the face of high loss rates.We develop a protocol that closely approximates a digital fountain using a new class of erasure codes that for large block sizes are orders of magnitude faster than standard erasure codes.”

Data Management

Groq launches developer playground GroqCloud with newly acquired Definitive Intelligence

The acquisition also facilitated the establishment of a Groq Systems business unit, focusing on innovation and catering to the needs of the public sector and customers requiring advanced AI compute solutions. This strategic division aims to accelerate Groq’s innovation, reinforcing its commitment to leading the AI chip industry.

AI/DevOps

GitHub Rolls Out Default Secret Scanning Push Protection for Public Repositories

The attacks represent another wave of the same malware distribution campaign that was disclosed by Phylum and Trend Micro last year, leveraging bogus Python packages hosted on the cloned, trojanized repositories to deliver a stealer malware called BlackCap Grabber.

Privacy & Security

Facebook will remove its News tab, and stop paying publishers for news

Now, Meta has a different message, reiterating a claim that “news makes up less than 3 percent of what people around the world see in their Facebook feed, and is a small part of the Facebook experience for the vast majority of people.” Instead of paying publishers, Meta will “have to focus our time and resources on things people tell us they want to see more of on the platform, including short form video.”

Social Media

CompTIA plans AI certification roadmap to meet skills demand

Among U.S. employers, hiring activity for AI skills and job roles amounted to nearly 200,000 job postings over the past 12 months. The employment opportunities for AI-specific roles or jobs requiring AI skills surpassed a “notable threshold, accounting for 10% or more of all tech job postings in the U.S.,” CompTIA reports.

Training & Certs

Informatica Launches Cloud Data Access Management for Automating Policy Enforcement at Scale

At the heart of CDAM’s offering is the CLAIRE AI engine, which ensures automated sensitive data classifications at enterprise scale. With CDAM, data teams have universal, automated controls at their disposal to govern data access, ensuring data is not only secure and private but also readily available.

Data Management

Apple warns of increased iPhone security risks

Until now, only apps purchased from the Apple App Store could be installed on iPhones. This changes under the DMA, though Apple warns the change means it will be unable to give users the same degree of protection it could within its walled garden. That said, protecting customers remains Apple's goal.

Security

Institute of Free Technology Launches to Defend Digital Liberties

The IFT allows each of the existing projects in the portfolio to focus their efforts on building public goods to safeguard civil liberties in the digital age. It also means we have the structure in place to support new startups that share our mission."

Privacy & Security

Meta is starting to test the Threads API with third-party developers

The initial group of companies testing out the beta version of the API include social media management platforms Sprinklr, Hootsuite, Social News Desk and Sprout Social. Meta is also working with tech news aggregator Techmeme and live video platform Grabyo

Socail Media

Cisco, partners to offer tailored IoT/OT packages

OT suppliers gain access to Cisco’s industrial IoT and Meraki IoT portfolios, guidance, technical expertise, platforms, and lifecycle services so that partners can offer tailored packages of integrated IT/OT technologies to customers, through what Cisco is calling the OT Supplier RTM (operational technology supplier route to market).

IoT

Mechanical Orchard updates mainframe migration with AI

It says it uses iterative, AI-enhanced, and reverse engineering approaches to move large enterprise apps off mainframe systems and into the cloud.

Automation & Productivity

Google can’t guarantee its Gemini genAI tool won’t be biased

That any genAI has problems with both biased responses and outright “hallucinations” — where it goes off the rails and creates fanciful responses — is not new. After all, genAI is little more than a next-word, image, or code predictor and the tech relies on whatever information has already been fed into its model to guess what comes next.

AI Ethics

Mistral AI makes waves with deals across tech giants including Microsoft, IBM

The fledgling company is moving fast to commercialize its state-of-the-art natural language processing models and conversational AI capabilities. Mistral unveiled its flagship commercial model, Mistral Large, on Monday through a deal with Microsoft to offer it via the Azure cloud platform. This makes Mistral only the second provider after OpenAI to offer a commercial large language model on Azure.

AI

Eight European consumer watchdogs file complaints over Meta’s data processing

Facebook and Instagram users, according to BEUC, are being forced to choose between consenting to the processing of their personal information for advertising or paying fees that could top €311/year for a person with a mobile device on which they use both Facebook and Instagram.

Data Privacy

Google expands BigQuery with Gemini, brings vector support to cloud databases

That lineup is now being expanded with preview support for vectors in the in-memory Memorystore for Redis database, the CloudSQL and Spanner relational databases, as well as the Firestore document database and the Bigtable key-value database.

Data Management

Cohesity Launches Gaia, an Innovative AI-Powered Enterprise Search Assistant for Data Management

Cohesity, a leader in AI-powered data security and management, has announced Cohesity Gaia, a first-to-market AI-powered enterprise search assistant that brings retrieval augmented generation* (RAG) AI and large language models (LLMs) to high-quality backup data within Cohesity environments

AI/Data

How can enterprises achieve AI governance? Collibra offers new solution

This includes streamlined compliance processes, risk mitigation strategies, and mechanisms to enhance model performance and ROI. By enabling a unified platform for governing both AI and the underlying data, Collibra aims to dispel the concerns surrounding AI adoption.

AI/Data

Researchers find security flaw in multiple smart doorbells

According to Consumer Reports, exploiting the vulnerability simply requires a hacker to create an account in the Aiwit app and then press the button of a targeted doorbell. Pressing the button connects the device to a nearby Wi-Fi hotspot. From there, hackers can pair the doorbell to their smartphones and access its footage in the Aiwit interface.

Security

Stack Overflow inks AI partnership with Google Cloud

Through the new partnership with Google, Stack Overflow will make coding advice and other technical knowledge from its forum available via search giant’s Gemini for Google Cloud chatbot. The chatbot allows developers to find technical information such as pointers on how to provision Kubernetes clusters using natural language prompts. According to TechCrunch, Gemini for Google Cloud will include citations in each response to help users check its accuracy.

AI/Chatbot

H2O AI releases Danube, a super-tiny LLM for mobile applications

Named after the second-largest river in Europe, the open-source model comes with 1.8 billion parameters and is said to match or outperform similarly sized models across a range of natural language tasks. This puts it in the same category as strong offerings from Microsoft, Stability AI and Eleuther AI.

AI/LLM

Microsoft introduces generative AI copilot for finance teams

Copilot for Finance focuses on the work that finance teams are embedded in day to day, the company said, drawing on the essential context of enterprise data and context such as financial sources. That includes traditional Enterprise Resource Planning systems such as Microsoft 365, SAP and the Microsoft Graph.

Automation & Productivity

Robotics startup Figure raises staggering $675M and partners with OpenAI

Figure also seems to be on a direct course to compete with Tesla and its Optimus humanoid robotic project, as well as lesser-known yet still well-positioned startups such as Oregon’s Agility Robotics, which has partnered with Amazon to test its humanoid robot, “Digit,” for use moving and preparing packages in fulfillment warehouses.

Automation & Productivity

Alibaba’s new AI system ‘EMO’ creates realistic talking and singing videos from photos

The system, described in a research paper published on arXiv, is able to create fluid and expressive facial movements and head poses that closely match the nuances of a provided audio track. This represents a major advance in audio-driven talking head video generation, an area that has challenged AI researchers for years.

AI/Video

No More Texting? Yolk.fm raises $1.25M for text-free social app to make messaging fun and engaging

Yolk.fm takes a bold departure from traditional messaging apps by tossing out a key component: texting itself. Instead, it embraces a more playful approach to communication, entirely centered around stickers.

Social Media

Cybersecurity startup makes open source pay, gains funding in a down market

Filigran’s XTM suite is designed to give organizations the flexibility to structure, store and analyze threat intelligence while conducting stress tests and threat management exercises. The suite includes OpenCTI and OpenBAS. Filigran’s platform is ISO 22398 compliant and has been designed as a modern web application, including a RESTFul API and a UX-oriented frontend.

Se curity

ServiceNow, Hugging Face, NVIDIA Unveil Open-Access LLMs for Enterprise AI Development

Trained on 619 programming languages, StarCoder2 can be further trained and embedded in enterprise applications to perform specialized tasks such as application source code generation, workflow generation, text summarization, and more. Developers can use its code completion, advanced code summarization, code snippets retrieval, and other capabilities to accelerate innovation and improve productivity.

AI/LLMs

Couchbase brings new database vectors to AI powered adaptive applications

Couchbase aims to differentiate itself by positioning its support of vectors as part of its overall platform approach which spans from cloud to on-premises data centers, and even on mobile and edge devices. The new vector support follows Couchbase’s introduction of an assistive gen AI feature in 2023 known as Cappella IQ.

Data Management

Quantive unveils AI-driven strategy platform to enhance business decision making

The new service features localized execution within business teams and customized functions that are tasked with primary value-creating activities, regardless of organizational hierarchy. Users can also tap into data and insights available to identify issues that allow them to adapt quickly to changing circumstances and execute those changes effectively.

Data & Analytics

SambaNova Says It’s First with Trillion-Parameter GenAI Model

“Samba-1 rivals GPT-4, however, it’s better suited for the enterprise as it can be delivered on-premises or in private or public clouds so that customers can fine-tune the model with their private data without ever disclosing it into the public domain.”

GenAI

Midjourney rival Ideogram gets $80M in Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz

Yet Ideogram also stood out when it first launched by offering users the ability to select from a range of pre-curated image styles such as “3D rendering, cinematic, painting, fashion, product, illustration, conceptual art, ukiyo-e.” Now the website has further evolved to include options for different aspect ratios, image weights, public/private visibility of generations to other Ideogram users, and a toggle to turn on the new Magic Prompt feature (described further down in this piece).

AI/Image

GetSetUp: Crushing AI Scams with Cyber Security and Fraud Hub

When it comes to starting and scaling this effort, GetSetUp stands apart thanks to our broad distribution network and deep wells of insights and data. Learning opportunities powered by our technology are accessible to millions of older persons in the US through platforms such as AOL, CenturyLink, more than 70 government websites, and 70 healthcare plans.

Privacy & Security

Huawei Unveils Ten Industrial Digital Transformation Solutions and New Flagship Products

For large-scale industrial customers with diversified services and complex scenarios, Huawei launched ten industrial digital and intelligent, including National Cloud Solution 2.0, Smart City, Smart Classroom 3.0, Medical Technology Digitalization, Digital CORE, Intelligent Factory, Smart Airport Fully Connected Fiber Network, Perimeter Security with Fiber Sensing, Smart Railway Perimeter Detection, ITS 2.0, Intelligent Power Distribution (IDS), Oil and Gas Pipeline Safety Management Solutions

Digital Transformation

Peace, not war: Tumblr and WordPress are gearing up to sell their data to AI companies

“Proposed regulations around the world, like the European Union’s AI Act, would give individuals more control over whether and how their content is utilized by this emerging technology,” explained Tumblr. “We support this right regardless of geographic location, so we’re releasing a toggle to opt out of sharing content from your public blogs with third parties, including AI platforms that use this content for model training.”

Data Privacy

Alation Broadens Partner Ecosystem with Amazon DynamoDB, Apache KafkaⓇ, Confluent Kafka, Elasticsearch, Fivetran, MongoDB, and TIBCO

Alation’s best-of-breed platform, with rich platform APIs and broad and deep connectivity across over 100 enterprise data sources, from relational databases to BI systems, simplifies the search and discovery of vital data to empower organizations to focus on their most strategic data assets and foster a strong, data-driven culture to drive transformative business initiatives.

Data Management

US to limit sale of personal data to foreign adversaries

But The Software Alliance (BSA), a lobby for major data cloud companies, warned that the executive order "may produce significant unintended consequences," to the extent that it covers a wide range of legitimate commercial and research activity.

Data Privacy

Jamix emerges with $3M pre-seed and model-agnostic enterprise AI assistant

The first is a search across apps: instead of having the user toggle back and forth for a piece of information they’re looking for, the Jamix search bar returns results from across all the different apps it is connected to via API backends, be it an email application, Slack or Google Docs, allowing the user to see and access that information more quickly and easily. Jamix refers to these as the enterprise’s “data sources.”

Automation & Productivity

Ataccama ONE v15 Accelerates Data Quality Transformation for Enterprises

Enhanced AI features in the platform provides an assisted user experience which allows all users to extract information and insights quickly and easily by simply asking for what they need using plain text language rather than code and reviewing AI-augmented suggestions.

AI/Data

SolarWinds amps up observability software with AI

SolarWinds Observability is a SaaS offering that the company says provides visibility across the cloud-native, on-prem, and hybrid technology stack to speed problem resolution and reduce the noise of multiple system alerts for IT professionals. It also can deliver a view across multi-cloud environments, alongside on-premises network and infrastructure assets.

IT Management

Google calls Microsoft’s cloud practices in the EU anti-competitive

“Microsoft’s cloud licensing restrictions restrict choice and create harmful downstream impacts for companies, ranging from higher costs to more security breaches to a chilling effect on smaller cloud and software providers including European AI startups,” Amit Zavery, vice president of platforms at Google Cloud, wrote on X.

Cloud

XM Cyber Unveils AI Chat Interface, Empowering Users with Robust and Real-Time Security Insights

XM Cyber consolidates extensive data from diverse sources, including servers, workstations, IaaS cloud providers (Azure, GCP, AWS), PaaS like Kubernetes, and more. This varied data pool guarantees comprehensive security insights, surpassing the limitations of narrower solutions.

Security

Broadcom repackages VMware SASE, adds Symantec security

The VMware VeloCloud SD-WAN software includes SASE, SD-WAN and software-defined cloud access to a global network of points of presence. It features a number of gateway and edge access control technologies, such as Dynamic Multipath Optimization for real-time application delivery and VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator for centralized installation, configuration, monitoring, and data flow instrumentation.

Cloud

AT&T embeds easy-to-use, affordable security for SMBs

AT&T showcased its network-embedded security solution at this week’s Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2024, tailored for small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs). The service offers malicious IP address blocking, next-generation firewall (NGFX) capabilities and other advanced security features without the additional cost of installation and equipment.

Security

AI-powered enterprise search startup Glean raises $200M+ at $2.2B valuation

According to Glean, its platform includes more than 100 prebuilt connectors that allow it to retrieve data from popular business applications. The platform not only indexes the information a company keeps in those applications but also takes into account the associated access permissions. For example, if a worker doesn’t have access to a certain file, Glean won’t incorporate information from the file into the AI responses generated for that worker.

Data Management

Cognizant and Microsoft deepen partnership with Azure-focused solution

The Azure-optimized iteration allows customers to build differentiated digital experiences using Azure’s generative and responsible artificial intelligence technology, cloud-scale data and modern application platforms. It offers a suite of tools, processes and standards tailored for clients invested in Azure, including support for cloud migration and modernization through Azure to migrate and modernize intelligent applications.

Cloud

What makes Einstein Copilot a genius? Salesforce says it’s all about the data

Einstein Copilot isn’t just some kind of basic gen AI wrapper that enables organizations to ask natural language questions about data. Rather, Shih emphasized that it’s a new interface and approach to leveraging the power and data that the Salesforce data stack provides for organizations.

AI/Data

DiffusionData Offers Free Trial of Diffusion Cloud

“Anybody that signs up will gain access to a mature, fully managed service, free of charge for a month. Diffusion Cloud removes many of the obstacles developers face when using open source or in-house built solutions, most notably in terms of scalability and latency. “

Cloud

Writer announces Palmyra-Vision, a multimodal LLM capable of understanding images

Models that are capable of understanding more than one type of media are known as “multimodal” models, and Palmyra-Vision is Writer’s first multimodal AI model. According to the company, it is capable of extracting text from images, including handwritten text, classifying objects and colors, describing charts, graphs, infographics and flowcharts.

AI

AI video wars heat up as Pika adds Lip Sync powered by ElevenLabs

The feature allows users to add spoken dialog to their videos with AI-generated voices from separate generative audio startup ElevenLabs, while also adding matching animation to ensure the speaking characters’ mouths move in time with the dialog.

AI/Video

Healthcare Triangle Empowers Healthcare Providers to Harness AI and LLMs for Groundbreaking Outcomes

Prioritizing data security and privacy, Healthcare Triangle ensures all AI and LLM development is in strict compliance with healthcare regulations, including HITRUST certification and HIPAA compliance. This commitment extends to a secure environment for data transfer, storage, and processing, alongside a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy.

MedTech

Intenseye, which uses AI computer vision to enhance workplace safety, raises $61M

Computer vision has recently been hailed as an ideal solution for workplace accident prevention. Gartner Inc. said in a recent study that the technology is uniquely able to identify hazards in real time and prevent incidents. “CIOs must create a strategy to leverage computer vision to improve worker safety and well-being, while mitigating the associated risks,” Gartner recommends.

Risk Management

GitHub launches ‘Copilot Enterprise’, an AI coding assistant for businesses

The product, called GitHub Copilot Enterprise, is an AI assistant that can generate code suggestions, answer queries, and summarize changes based on the organization’s own codebase and standards. Experts say the new offering signals a seismic shift in how software engineering teams will operate in the near future, essentially putting an AI programmer at every developer’s side.

DevOps

Marvell Open Sources OCTEON 10 ML/AI Accelerator Software to Optimize 5G RAN Networks

Through contributions accepted to the Apache TVM (Tensor Virtual Machine) project, developers can use open-source tools to build machine learning (ML) models that can be executed in OCTEON 10’s integrated ML/AI acceleration engine, simplifying the adoption of these models for 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) optimization.

AK/ML

Fujitsu unveils AI-powered applications to tame 5G+ network complexity

As pressure to reduce operational expenditures intensifies and network complexity escalates, MNOs require new tools to minimize total cost of ownership (TCO). With the power of AI, Fujitsu’s Virtuora Intelligent Applications enable MNOs to streamline complex network operations, improve performance, reduce costs, and speed service delivery, helping generate additional revenue streams and boost profitability.

Network Management

Exclusive: Enkrypt raises seed round to create a ‘control layer’ for generative AI safety

While the amount isn’t as massive as AI companies raise these days, the product offered by Enkrypt is quite interesting as it helps ensure private, secure and compliant deployment of generative AI models. The company, founded by Yale PhDs Sahil Agarwal and Prashanth Harshangi, claims that its tech can handle these roadblocks with ease, accelerating gen AI adoption for enterprises by up to 10 times.

AI/Security

Votiro’s new platform offers unified protection against file-borne cyberthreats

Votiro argues that as businesses ingest and share more data, sensitive enterprise data and personally identifiable information often travel through poorly secured channels, including collaboration tools, cloud storage systems, customer-facing portals and shadow information technology, significantly increasing the risk of data exposure or compromise and jeopardizing compliance with data privacy regulations

Data Protection

VulnCheck new KEV catalog outpaces CISA with advance vulnerability alerts

It has been designed to assist in addressing the rapid growth and exploitation of vulnerabilities. Currently, VulnCheck tracks 876 more vulnerabilities exploited in the wild than the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency and alerts customers before exploits are added to the CISA KEV catalog on average 27 days earlier.

Security

IBM adds real-time malware IO detection to flash drives

“The FCM4 technology in new FlashSystem arrays is designed to capture and summarize detailed statistics about every I/O in real time. FlashSystem uses machine learning models to distinguish ransomware and malware from normal behavior, enabling organizations to take immediate action and keep operating in the event of an attack.”

Security

Surge in high-risk open-source vulnerabilities found in commercial codebases

The percentage of codebases with high-risk open source vulnerabilities, those that have been actively exploited, have documented proof-of-concept exploits or are classified as remote code execution vulnerabilities, rose from 48% in 2022 to 74% in 2023.

Security

The Future of Business Now Unlocked with GoDaddy Airo

“Technology and capabilities usually reserved for large companies with thousands of employees are now at the fingertips of anyone looking to start or grow their business. GoDaddy Airo combines the latest AI technology with the ease of use we’re known for – providing effortless and intuitive solutions to small businesses.”

Automation & Productivity

Salesforce launches Einstein Copilot AI assistant into beta

The new copilot is also set up with pre-defined “actions” that allow it to perform a variety of business tasks that are associated with the application that it is running alongside that take the burden off the user. These out-of-the-box actions are already configured out-of-the-box, Govindarajan explained, and could trigger events such as committing sales events, completing tickets or completing single action items.

Automation & Productivity

HPE, Kyndryl partner for private LTE/5G services

HPE acquired Athonet in 2023 and gained its range of 5G services, which include 5G Core technology for network slicing and advanced voice services. It offers CBRS and 5G starter kits that include Athonet mobile packet core, SIM cards, a choice of radio, and other components needed to set up private cellular networks.

Network Management

Broadcom creates single-vendor SASE from VMware and Symantec

The single-vendor solution, dubbed Broadcom VeloCloud SASE, integrates the data plane for managing user traffic, whether it’s from an end-user device through the VMware VeloCloud SD-Access Client or a branch connected via an SD-WAN overlay network, and then offers security capabilities through Symantec’s SSE stack

Security

Now a Microsoft partner, Mistral AI challenges OpenAI with three new LLMs

Mistral Large is rolling out alongside a second new LLM dubbed Mistral Small. The latter model has less advanced reasoning capabilities, but offers lower pricing and latency. Despite the scaled-backed feature set, it still promises to outperform Mistral’s previous flagship LLM across several types of reasoning tasks.

AI/LLMs

Lambda raises $320 million for GPU cloud

Lambda is the latest cloud company to offer GPU processing – instead of the standard CPU processing – dedicated to all things AI, particularly inference and training. Vultr, CoreWeave and Voltage Park are all offering similar cloud GPU services.

Cloud

Spain will create foundational AI model in local languages

While some AI models are trained on texts in multiple languages, more advanced AI features from US-based tech companies are often initially only available in English. That’s the case with Google Gemini, for example, which supports more than 40 languages but offers advanced features only in English.

AI

io.net partners with Ritual Network to boost the AI computing landscape

Ritual is currently building a sovereign chain for AI, utilizing software that enables decentralized inference, model marketplaces, and heterogenous proofs, along with modular tools that help bridge AI to on-chain workloads.

Automation & Productivity

Lenovo’s Cutting-Edge ThinkPad and ThinkBook Laptops Pave the Way for AI PC Innovation at MWC

The brilliance of this laptop lies in its intelligent integration of the virtual and real. Through the power of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC), the transparent screen opens up new avenues of work collaboration and efficiency by enabling the interaction with physical objects and overlaying digital information to create unique user generated content. The transparency allows it to effortlessly integrate naturally within its environment.

Automation & Productivity

How Cisco’s Silicon One Chip Is Shaping the Future of AI-Driven Networking

Moreover, Silicon One establishes new benchmarks for energy consumption and sustainability. This advantage is crucial, especially as data centers grapple with escalating AI and machine learning demands. The latest addition to the Silicon One family, the Cisco Silicon One G200, boasts exceptional intelligence, ultra-low latency, and ultra-high performance, all while consuming half the power of its predecessor.

Network Management

Palo Alto Networks partners with Nvidia, NTT, others for private 5G security

“We are integrating our capabilities with [private 5G partners] for providing the security capabilities that what we are known for and bringing all those capabilities on to secure 5G networks, so I can now identify who’s on the network, I’ll be able to set policies for those devices, I’ll be able to manage the lifecycle and protect them from all advanced threats, ransomware malware, exfiltration, etc.,” he added.

Security

New Intel Edge platform unveiled for scaling AI applications

Intel has recently unveiled an advanced Edge AI Platform that is set to transform the way artificial intelligence (AI) applications are deployed and managed. This new platform is designed to make operations simpler and more cost-effective, similar to the services provided by cloud computing, but it operates at the edge of the network. The introduction of this platform is a significant milestone in the journey of digital transformation.

Digital Transformation

Firsthand Emerges from Stealth to Build the AI Agent Platform for Brands and Publishers

The company’s innovative platform empowers brands and publishers to create their own AI agents that are embedded with their own protected knowledge and tasked with and measured by their own goals. These agents can conduct 1:1 personalized conversations and content presentation with consumers in their moment of need, anywhere they’re seeking information online.

Automation & Productivity

This Harvard startup may soon be responsible for your phone's most-used security feature

Polar ID differs from the current facial authentication process because it uses meta-optic technology to capture each person's unique "polarization signature" on their face by sensing the full polarization state of light. This technique requires an image sensor that can be paired with Metalenz's breakthrough polarization-sensitive meta-optic, and Metalenz chose Samsung Electronics' ISOCELL Vizion 931.

Security

Your fingerprints can be recreated from the sounds made when you swipe on a touchscreen — Chinese and US researchers show new side channel can reproduce fingerprints to enable attacks

Following tests, the researchers assert that they can successfully attack “up to 27.9% of partial fingerprints and 9.3% of complete fingerprints within five attempts at the highest security FAR [False Acceptance Rate] setting of 0.01%.” This is claimed to be the first work that leverages swiping sounds to infer fingerprint information.

Privacy & Security

Spreadsheet.com is shutting down after raising $5.5 million in funding and over 170,000 users

Spreadsheet.com, the SaaS startup that entered the scene seven years ago with the ambitious goal of revolutionizing traditional spreadsheet tools like Excel and Google Sheets, is shutting down by the end of May. The decision comes as the startup grapples with its inability to achieve the rapid growth trajectory necessary for sustained success in today’s competitive tech landscape.

Automation & Productivity

Nasuni Launches Nasuni IQ for Enhanced Data Intelligence

This newly launched feature delivers enhanced visibility and insights into user activities, usage patterns, and file data consumption through comprehensive dashboard and monitoring tools. It enables businesses to forecast their storage needs, identify potential bottlenecks, and implement data management policies to optimize resource allocation.

Data Management

Redefining Success with UiPath’s AI and Automation Revolution

The company’s UiPath Autopilot for Test Suite, which aims to deliver a suite of sophisticated AI capabilities to increase tester productivity, is now ready for public preview as part of these services.

Automation & Productivity

ServiceNow and Nvidia bring powerful generative AI tools to telecom providers

For now, there’s only one tool available at launch, called Now Assist for Telecommunications Service Management. It’s built atop ServiceNow’s Now Platform and uses Nvidia’s AI software and hardware to improve the productivity of customer service agents, speed up resolution times and enhance customer experiences.

Automation & Productivity

Sonatype Introduces Cutting-Edge AI/ML Component Detection

Sonatype has announced artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) component detection, a first-of-its-kind capability, available as part of Sonatype Lifecycle. This technology fundamentally changes the way organizations select and monitor AI/ML software components, enabling them to accelerate software development while effectively managing the risks associated with AI.

AI/ML

Nasuni Launches Nasuni IQ to Unlock Data Silos for AI Services

The Nasuni File Data Platform supports the next generation of data initiatives by consolidating unstructured data within a single global namespace. Additionally, Nasuni can help companies move off their legacy NAS infrastructure quickly and efficiently with its Professional Services offerings.

Data Management

Engineers 3D print the electromagnets at the heart of many electronics

Solenoids, electromagnets formed by a coil of wire wrapped around a magnetic core, are a fundamental building block of many electronics, from dialysis machines and respirators to washing machines and dishwashers.

Emerging Tech

Renesas Develops New AI Accelerator for Lightweight AI Models and Embedded Processor Tech to Enable Real-Time Processing

Renesas produced a prototype of an embedded AI-MPU with these technologies and confirmed its high-speed and low-power-consumption operation. It achieved up to 16 times faster processing (130 TOPS) than before the introduction of these new technologies, and world-class power efficiency (up to 23.9 TOPS/W at 0.8 V supply).

Automation & Productivity

LeapXpert and ASC Partner to Provide Communication Compliance Recording in Microsoft Teams

In a time of escalating regulatory scrutiny surrounding communication channels, this collaboration enables regulated entities to use Teams for external communications – across voice and messaging channels – while recording all calls and messages and ensuring adherence to record-keeping requirements.

Data & Analytics

Apple gets smart about tech support and genAI

Ask is a focused assistant trained using Apple’s own tech support data. It might use technology similar to the LLMs used by ChatGPT tools, but is built for a narrower and more defined set of tasks: tech support.

Automation & Productivity

AWS brings Mistral AI’s open-source LLMs to Amazon Bedrock

LLMs based on a mixture-of-experts design require a relatively limited amount of hardware to run. Because Mixtral 8x7B only activates two of its eight neural networks when answering a user prompt, the remaining six don’t use any processing capacity. The result is a reduction in infrastructure costs compared with traditional LLMs that activate all their software components when processing prompts.

AI/LLM

Google, USDR to aid state, local governments on generative AI

Google will provide the group $1 million in funding and pro bono technical support via the Google.org Fellowship Program, according to the announcement. The U.S. Digital Response said it plans to hire a generative AI technologist-in-residence who will set the overall direction of the program and define how USDR will help governments make the best use of the technology.

GenAI

Microsoft Releases PyRIT - A Red Teaming Tool for Generative AI

The company said PyRIT could be used to assess the robustness of large language model (LLM) endpoints against different harm categories such as fabrication (e.g., hallucination), misuse (e.g., bias), and prohibited content (e.g., harassment).

AI/Security

AI chip race: Groq CEO takes on Nvidia, claims most startups will use speedy LPUs by end of 2024

Sure, it wasn’t as big a social media splash as even one of Elon Musk’s posts about the totally unrelated large language model Grok. But I’m certain the folks at Nvidia took notice after Matt Shumer, CEO of HyperWrite, posted on X about Groq’s “wild tech” that is “serving Mixtral at nearly 500 tok/s” with answers that are “pretty much instantaneous.”

AI

SMBs are being targeted by this new phishing scam — make sure you don't fall victim

In the emails, the attackers impersonated SendGrid and demanded users activate multi-factor authentication (MFA). The emails further carried a link which, if clicked, led to a landing page that mimicked the SendGrid login page, but was instead under the control of the attackers.

Security

AI startup Jasper acquires image generator Clipdrop from Stability AI for text & image creation

“The addition of Clipdrop to Jasper will advance our vision to be the most comprehensive end-to-end marketing copilot in the industry, powering all the formats, channels, and functions enterprise marketing teams need. A copilot this robust will enable the enterprises we serve to go beyond simple AI prompts to achieve more personalized marketing, better-informed automation, and improved optimization across their entire strategy.”

Marketing Tech

Nephio R2 pushes open-source cloud-native network automation

Nephio R2 can now also deploy and automate functions in the Google K8 Environment (GKE), Red Hat OpenShift, VMware and OpenStack environments. He noted that basic support is in R2 and this feature will be further enhanced in R3 to make it more comprehensive.

Network Management

Disney makes major investments in AI: Backs five AI and VR startups in its 10th Accelerator Program

Marking a milestone of a decade of fostering groundbreaking ideas, the Walt Disney Company unveiled its 2024 Disney Accelerator cohort, consisting of five startups poised to revolutionize the intersection of technology and entertainment. With a theme centered around “Exploring the Power of Imagination and Technology,” this year’s program showcases companies harnessing AI, autonomous vehicles, and immersive experiences to shape the future of entertainment.

Emerging Tech

Salesforce Tableau looks beyond business intelligence dashboards with AI-powered Pulse

Tableau Pulse was first announced in an early preview in May 2023, with a limited beta in December 2023. Tableau Pulse uses natural language queries and data visualizations to surface important metrics, trends and recommendations specific to each organization’s data.

Data & Analytics

Juniper Networks advances high-capacity routing for AI workloads

The Packet Transport Router (PTX) series is designed to serve high-end needs for large WAN and data center deployments. At the core of the PTX Series is Juniper’s Express 5 silicon, which was first announced back in 2022 and has steadily made its way into the company’s routing gear. What’s new is that Juniper is now firmly going after the 800 Gb Ethernet (GE) market with the PTX powered by Express 5 silicon.

Network Management

Finpilot, a Seattle startup using generative AI to help financial analysts with research, raises $4M

The company’s aim is to help financial analysts speed up their investment workflows. It lets users ask questions about financial documents — SEC documents, call transcripts, research reports, etc. — and spits out answers immediately. The answers are linked to original sources to avoid hallucination.

Automation & Productivity

Newo.ai’s ‘digital employee’ merges AI agent with robot

Its service combines the advanced capabilities of LLM-driven agents with the versatility of physical robots to create “digital employees” — virtual workers adept at handling a wide range of office tasks, from administrative duties to customer engagement.

Automation & Productivity

FTC hits antivirus firm Avast with fine for selling customer data it promised to protect

The FTC’s investigation states that between 2014 and 2020, people using the Avast antivirus software on their devices had their web browsing information secretly harvested. This included information pertaining to location, financial status, religious beliefs, health and political views.

Data Privacy

DatologyAI raises $11.65M to automate data curation for more efficient AI training

He pointed out that training AI on the right data and doing it in the right way can have a dramatic impact on the overall quality of the model. That’s because training datasets impact almost every aspect of the resulting model, including its performance, its overall size and the depth of its domain knowledge. By having a more efficient training dataset, it’s possible to cut down on training times significantly and create a much smaller model, saving on time and computing costs.

AI/Data

Promevo Announces New Strategic Partnerships to Amplify Google Workspace and Cloud Services

QREW Technologies, known for its no-code and low-code app expertise, is a leader in Google AppSheet enablement for enterprises. With a focus on enhancing efficiency and maximizing ROI through custom development, QREW aligns seamlessly with Promevo’s mission to empower organizations with transformative technology solutions.

Cloud

Ontotext Enhances the Performance of LLMs and Downstream Analytics with Latest Version of Ontotext Metadata Studio

As part of Ontotext’s AI-in-Action initiative, which helps data scientists and engineers benefit from the AI capabilities of its products, the latest version enables users to tag content with Common English Entity Linking (CEEL), the next generation class-leading text analytics service and recognize roughly 40 million Wikidata concepts

AI/Data

Google brings its generative AI writing aid to any website through Chrome

Google described the tool in a blog post today as an “experimental writing AI aid” and says that it works with any text box on any website. So when the user stumbles upon one, they can open up the Help Me Write window within Chrome’s settings and provide a simple writing prompt to get it going.

Automation & Productivity

Adobe unveils new AI-powered audio features in Premiere Pro

If you have ever edited a video with dialogue, you know how difficult it can be to remove background noise while still keeping the speech audible enough to listen to. Enhance Speech, which is now officially out of beta, leverages AI to reduce background noise and improve the sound quality of the clip with one click.

Automation & Productivity

Reltio Introduces AI-powered Capabilities that Strengthen Data Unification and Simplify the User Experience

The Reltio Connected Data Platform—the world’s leading data unification and management platform—powers generative AI (gen AI) and LLMs to strengthen data unification and accelerate time-to-value for core entity resolution and data stewardship tasks.

AI/Data

Face off: Attackers are stealing biometrics to access victims’ bank accounts

Attesting to this, cybersecurity company Group-IB has discovered the first banking trojan that steals people’s faces. Unsuspecting users are tricked into giving up personal IDs and phone numbers and are prompted to perform face scans. These images are then swapped out with AI-generated deepfakes that can easily bypass security checkpoints

Privacy & Security

Nokia Announces GenAI Assistant Integrated with NetGuard Cybersecurity Dome to Strengthen Network Protection

The telco focused GenAI assistant is based on large language models within Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, which have been trained on insights from 5G Network architecture, 5G Security practices, and Nokia’s telco domain expertise.

Security

Meta Disrupts 8 Spyware Firms, 3 Fake News Networks

It outlines how fake news operations — particularly those originating in Russia — have taken a hit in recent years, but commercial surveillance is thriving, using fake social media accounts to collect intel about targets and lure them into downloading powerful cross-platform spying tools.

Security

Apple’s iMessage gains industry-leading quantum security

Announced on Apple’s Security Research blog, the new iMessage protection is called PQ3 and promises the “strongest security properties of any at-scale messaging protocol in the world.”

Security

Lenovo enhances customer experiences with personalized, AI-driven online support

Lenovo is currently strategizing for the subsequent phase of its eService revolution. We plan to employ consumer profile data to create bespoke product landing pages, complete with interactive tiles that lead users to product-specific documentation, support resources, and troubleshooting information.

Automation & Productivity

Stable Diffusion 3.0 debuts new diffusion transformation architecture to reinvent text-to-image gen AI

Typography has been an area of weakness for Stable Diffusion in the past and one that rivals including DALL-E 3, Ideogram and Midjourney have also been working on with recent releases. Stability AI is building out Stable Diffusion 3.0 in multiple model sizes ranging from 800M to 8B parameters.

Automation & Productivity

New Milestone in AI as One Network Launches AI Assistant for Supply Chain

NEO Assistant™ is fully aware of the real-time state of the user’s supply chain and re-evaluates its assumptions when this state changes. NEO Assistant™ constantly understands problems in the supply chain as they occur and will suggest intelligent and executable Smart Prescriptions™ which can be executed with a single click. Smart Prescriptions™ are generated where the user has configured the system to run semi-autonomously rather than fully autonomously to allow users an opportunity to review and channel decisions.

Automation & Productivity

Google pauses Gemini’s ability to generate AI images of people after diversity errors

The Verge tested several Gemini queries yesterday, which included a request for “a US senator from the 1800s” that returned results that included what appeared to be Black and Native American women. The first female senator was a white woman in 1922, so Gemini’s AI images were essentially erasing the history of race and gender discrimination.

AI Ethics

Hammerspace claims fastest file system for AI training

“Every major enterprise pursuing AI initiatives will encounter challenges with their existing IT infrastructure, in terms of the tradeoffs between speed, scale, security and simplicity … Hyperscale NAS is a fundamentally different NAS architecture that allows organizations to use the best of HPC technology without compromising enterprise standards.”

Data Management

Loora raises $12M in Series A funding to expand its generative AI English tutoring platform

Loora’s unique approach allows users to practice English in contexts that matter to them, such as simulating job interviews or engaging in technical discussions, thereby empowering them to progress in their careers and social interactions.

EdTech

Dolbey Announces AI Assist, Generative AI for Healthcare Workflow Automation

With the use of AI Assist, healthcare providers can automatically generate a suggested impression and recommendation, summarize a report with a bulleted or numbered list, enhance the completeness of medical report documentation, suggest ICD-10 billing codes, and build unique AI-driven workflows in combination with the Fusion Narrate shortcut builder.

MedTech

Exclusive: VectorShift raises $3M to modularize LLM application development

The New York-based startup was founded by Harvard alumni Alex Leonardi and Albert Mao. VectorShift provides enterprises with an end-to-end AI platform, where users can simply drag and drop components to build, deploy and maintain production-grade LLM workflows, search engines, assistants and automations.

AI/LLMs

Getty-backed AI startup BRIA raises $24M in Series A funding for ‘responsible’ AI image generation

BRIA’s unique license-only approach, fueled by its partnership with Getty and access to over a billion licensed images, mitigates the risk of trademark issues and other potential complications in its generated visuals. This approach has resonated well with advertising, marketing, and media customers, including Publicis.

AI/Image

GetSetUp Drives Efforts Against AI Scams with Its Cybersecurity and Fraud Hub

This newly unveiled hub offers a range of classes, articles, and resources tailored specifically to address the growing concerns surrounding cyber threats faced by older individuals. With a notable increase in voice cloning scams and other AI-driven fraudulent activities targeting vulnerable populations, such as older adults, the imperative for proactive measures has become increasingly apparent.

Privacy & Security

US forms task force to explore guardrails for AI

“While the potential legislation efforts will urge enterprises and tech vendors to rebalance the AI investment priorities, which might slowdown the innovation pace from a business perspective in the short term, it will substantially foster AI advancement in terms of security, privacy, ethics, and sustainability, which will be critical for the public trust on AI in the long run.”

AI Ethics

Novity grabs $7.8M in funding to streamline industrial predictive maintenance with AI

Novity’s TruPrognostics AI platform gets around these issues using a combination of machine learning, physics-based models of common machine faults and internet of things sensors. According to the startup, this unique combination enables it to predict failures and downtime with an accuracy of 85% in production scenarios. The startup says its platform is fully configurable and can take into account the specific way in which customers run their machines.

Automation & Productivity

ChatGPT goes ‘off the rails’ with gibberish answers

Some of ChatGPT’s outputs mixed Spanish and English unintelligibly, while others made up words or repeated phrases over and over, despite the large language model (LLM)-powered chatbot not being asked to do so.

ChatGPT

Error-correction breakthroughs bring quantum computing a step closer

“Error correction capabilities are crucial for enabling stable, predictable, and accurate quantum-based solutions, especially in the context of financial applications we are running in the bank,” Avidan says. “Error correction will definitely accelerate the adoption of quantum-based solutions in the bank.”

Quantum Compiting

Cycode integrates generative AI into application security platform

The new generative AI feature is said to transform the “brain” of the Cycode ASPM platform to find answers to complex application security and development questions using everyday, natural language. The feature uses context and deep security insights to make RIG more effective at bridging gaps and connecting the dots across application security data silos.

Security

Dell adds telecom automation for CSPs, bolsters Red Hat Blocks

This new platform is also an evolution of Dell’s bare metal Orchestrator (BMO), which the vendor launched in late 2021. The BMO platform evolved from Dell’s Project Metalweaver initiative, and designed to automate service delivery, tasks, and workflows across hundreds of thousands of servers running 5G and open RAN networks.

Automation & Productivity

Inference.ai’s new generative AI chatbot takes the guesswork out of GPU sourcing

The company has also built a globally distributed network of data centers, enabling its customers to access its GPUs with low-latency from anywhere in the world, which can make a real difference for real-time applications. Moreover, it claims to offer some of the lowest prices in the industry, with rates that are up to 82% cheaper than those offered by cloud infrastructure giants such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Automation & Productivity

Cloudinary’s Low-Code Workflow Automation Platform Moves into General Availability

Cloudinary, the image and video platform that powers many of the world’s top brands, announced that MediaFlows by Cloudinary, a low-code platform used to automate visual media workflows, is now generally available. MediaFlows’ generative AI technology FlowAI empowers users to build media-focused workflows simply by typing what they want to achieve, and letting FlowAI create the workflow for them.

Automation & Productivity

Google DeepMind jumps back into open source AI race with new model Gemma

The Gemma models will be released with pre-trained and instruction-tuned variants, Google DeepMind said in a blog post. The model weights will be released with a permissive commercial license, as well as a new Responsible Generative AI toolkit.

GenAI

Nokia to Revolutionize Mobile Networks with Cloud RAN and AI Powered by NVIDIA

The announcement is a continuation of Nokia’s flexible anyRAN approach that supports any purpose-built, hybrid or Cloud RAN environment. It’s designed to help customers get their Cloud RAN services up and running much faster, removing complexity and ensuring openness and flexibility.

Network Management

Exclusive: Hummingbird launches AI-powered automation product for financial crime investigations

“For example, if I was at a payment card company, I might be looking at 15 to 30 different data sources that represent a specific customer’s activity. It’s slow, pretty tedious work. Data fragmentation is one of the major issues. And then later on, you might be audited for why you made certain decisions related to that account and how you handled it, so your decision-making process needs to be transparent. All those things make this a unique market for applications of AI, of machine learning, of different algorithms.”

AI/Fraud

Recogni Raises $102 Million to Advance Next GenAI Inference System for GenAI and Intelligent Autonomy

“The critical need for solutions that directly address the key challenges in AI inference processing—compute capability, scalability, accuracy, and energy savings—is more urgent than ever. Recogni is leading this transformative wave, engineering pivotal advances that will redefine data centers and enterprise and revolutionize industries like automotive and aerospace,” he said.

AI

A smartphone without apps? This AI assistant aims to replace them all

For example, if you wanted to book a trip, instead of having to visit several apps yourself to complete the task, you would ask your phone via voice or text to do it for you, and it would take the necessary steps to do so, without you having to open any apps.

Automation & Productivity

Multiplayer launches collaborative software development tool into public beta

Multiplayer’s big features include the ability to share designs, discuss architectural changes, and give feedback at any time before making major changes. System changes can be made in the distributed architecture and rolled back using the collaborative platform and version control across the team allowing the consequences to be visible and socializing the coding solutions for the team.

Automation & Productivity

Google DeepMind alumni unveil Bioptimus: Aiming to build first universal biology AI model

Currently, AI models are limited to specific aspects of biology, Vert explained. “For example, several companies are starting to build language models for protein sequences,” he said, adding that there are also initiatives to build a foundation model for images of cells.

AI

PromoAI Copilot Accelerates Social Video Ideation and Creation with Promo.com’s Generative AI

Promo.com, the only end-to-end generative AI platform for social video, announces the launch of PromoAI Creative Copilot, combining the power of an ultra-fast AI-powered creative engine and chat-based editor in a unified solution for businesses looking to produce affordable and engaging social video content.

Marketing Tech

New report warns of ongoing rise of malicious emails bypassing secure email gateways

The Cofense 2024 Annual State of Email Security Report, based on 35 million employee accounts tracked by Cofense, identified more than 1.5 million malicious emails bypassing customer secure email gateways, or SEGs, last year, up 37% from 2022 and 310% from 2021. In context, the report notes that Cofense detected at least one malicious email bypassing their customer’s SEGs every 57 seconds.

Security

This new AI Assistant from Adobe lets you chat with your PDFs at no additional cost

In addition to asking questions about the content of the document, users can also ask the AI Assistant to generate text based on the content. For example, they can ask for an email that summarizes the findings of the document. Users can then copy and paste the summary elsewhere via a "copy" button.

Automation & Productivity

Predibase debuts LoRA Land: 25 open-source LLMs that can be fine-tuned for almost any AI use

Using Predibase’s platform, teams can simply define what they want their AI models to predict using a selection of prebuilt LLMs, and the platform will do the rest. Novice users can choose from a variety of recommended model architectures to get started, while more experienced practitioners can use its tools to fine-tune any AI model’s parameters. Using its tools, Predibase claims, it’s possible to get an AI application up and running from scratch in just a few days.

AI/LLMs

Menlo Security’s new cloud-delivered enterprise browser solution offers enhanced security

The solution delivers end-to-end visibility and dynamic policy enforcement directly inside browser sessions and blocks zero-hour phishing, malware and ransomware attacks, according to the company. Through the combination of benefits from the Menlo Secure Cloud Browser and the new capabilities, the Menlo Enterprise Browser solution is claimed to provide unparalleled protection against the most advanced and evasive threats, no matter what browser users choose.

Security

Gathr to Accelerate Gen AI Innovations for Enterprises with Its Upcoming Launch

Hence the demand for ready-to-use Gen AI platforms and infrastructure solutions has surged. We are already talking to many industry leaders, who are upbeat about harnessing Gen AI to simplify and optimize data-driven workflows, as well as launch new innovative solutions. At the same time, they are grappling with concerns such as IP and data security, compliances, cost and performance issues, responsible and ethical usage, among others

GenAI

Anyline Unveils Autonomous Drone Scanning Technology for Enhanced Warehouse Inventory Management

Seeking to improve its inventory management process across multiple, large warehouse locations, Mondi tested several technology options including handheld RFID and camera scanners. A breakthrough was achieved when the company engaged Anyline to apply its mobile data capture technology within DJI Mini 3 Pro drones.

Automation & Productivity

Exclusive: Observability startup SigScalr plans to revolutionize log search

Founded by a former Salesforce Inc. observability engineer, the company’s Siglens platform is a columnar analytical database that is said to execute queries more than 50 times faster than Apache Clickhouse and over 1,000 times faster than Elasticsearch. Both are commonly used for log analytics.

Data & Analytics

Miro boosts security for its visual collaboration app

Miro has unveiled a set of security tools designed to help businesses protect sensitive data shared on its digital whiteboard application. The new Miro Enterprise Guard includes features to automate detection and classification of sensitive data, manage content for legal audits, and provide IT admins with greater control over encryption.

Security

International law enforcement operation takes down LockBit leak site

Although law enforcement has no choice but to go after gangs like LockBit, it’s a real-life game of Whac-A-Mole, and for every takedown, more groups emerge. In this case, unless the unknown part of the takedown is that law enforcement agencies have arrested every gang member, LockBit will be back in no time.

Security

Accenture to Acquire GemSeek to Further Expand its Customer Analytics Services

The acquisition underscores ongoing investment by Accenture Song—the world’s largest tech-powered creative group—in data and AI capabilities to help clients grow their business and sustain relevance with customers.

Data & Analytics

Reddit strikes a deal to sell user content to large AI company for $60 million a year

According to a recent Bloomberg report, Reddit has inked a deal worth a staggering $60 million annually, granting an undisclosed major AI firm access to its treasure trove of user content. This move has stirred up controversy and reignited concerns about privacy and data protection. The decision reportedly followed considerations of blocking Google search crawlers if a suitable AI data deal couldn’t be struck.

Data Privacy

LTIMindtree Unveils Navisource.AI: Revolutionizing Procurement CoPilot on Canvas.AI Platform

Navisource.AI revolutionizes procurement with AI, streamlining processes from requisition to risk management. It integrates with LLM and Model Catalogs via Canvas.AI, enhancing enterprise workflows. Compatible with Ariba and SAP S/4HANA, it provides comprehensive navigational and decision-making support.

Automation & Productivity

First ever iOS trojan discovered — and it’s stealing facial recognition data to break into bank accounts

According to a new report from Group-IB, the Android trojan GoldDigger has now been modified with new capabilities that make it easier for this malware to drain victims’ bank accounts. First discovered last October, the trojan's new variation has been dubbed GoldPickaxe, with versions specifically designed for both Android and iOS devices.

Security

Hear your imagination: ElevenLabs to launch model for AI sound effects

The model is not available publicly, but ElevenLabs has showcased its capabilities by releasing a minute-long teaser featuring videos produced by OpenAI’s new Sora and enhanced with its own AI sounds. The company has also set up a signup page and is calling potential users to join an early access waitlist for the model.

AI

Discover the World’s First AI Watch: Where Cutting-Edge Innovation Meets Everyday Comfort and Ease

Situated in the heart of Silicon Valley, Gaia AI Lab is at the forefront of AI character creation, leveraging the CHATUNI engine to develop AI personalities with diverse traits. Their commitment to innovation and user experience is evident in the AI Watch, embodying their vision for a future where technology and daily life are seamlessly interconnected.

Automation & Productivity

Cybernetics Upgrades Cybersecurity Solutions through Blockchain Ecosystem

The latest enhancements to Cybernetics’ platform introduce a comprehensive suite of protective measures designed to tackle the intricacies of several digital marketing and trading platforms. These measures include the implementation of robust encryption protocols, fortified communication channels, heightened access controls, and advanced threat detection and prevention mechanisms.

Blockchain

Meltwater, Microsoft Collaborate on Next-Gen AI-Powered Communication Insights on Azure

The new solution will allow enterprise users of Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams who are Meltwater customers to engage conversationally with Meltwater’s global data set, providing easy access to real-time insights such as brand mentions, sentiment analysis, key issues, and competitive benchmarking. This means that the right insight is not just a simple request away, but also presented in an easy-to-action, accessible way that drives strategic decisions, integrated directly inside of Teams

Data & Analytics

Meta Warns of 8 Spyware Firms Targeting iOS, Android, and Windows Devices

"Their various malware included capabilities to collect and access device information, location, photos and media, contacts, calendar, email, SMS, social media, and messaging apps, and enable microphone,camera, and screenshot functionality," the company said.

Security

Graphileon Partners with thatDot to Support Quine Streaming Graph for Real-time Analytics

Graphileon, the company behind the native graph low-code platform, announced a technology partnership with thatDot to develop connectors for Quine, an open-source streaming graph solution for event-driven applications. Graphileon users and customers will now be able to process high-volume event streams in real time, match valuable patterns, and trigger instant actions.

Data & Analytics

IBM disrupts load balancing market with new DNS-based service

The new service is an expansion of IBM’s NS1 domain name system (DNS) and traffic management capabilities. IBM acquired managed DNS provider NS1 last February and expanded the offering with the NS1 Connect service in September. With the new NS1 Connect GSLB service IBM is aiming to use the power of DNS and real-user monitoring (RUM) data to disrupt the market and bring next-generation load balancing capabilities to organizations across the globe.

Network Management

Apple has an Xcode plan for genAI — and that's just the beginning

The feature is expected to be capable of generating code in response to natural language commands. This should be really helpful for Apple developers, particularly as Apple’s Xcode Pro should also be able to verify code, check for flaws, and more.

DevOps

Major tech players work with Linux Foundation to improve the mapping universe

An effort to lead the lost and misdirected out of the GPS wilderness is underway through the Overture Maps Foundation, a joint initiative facilitated by the Linux Foundation and founded by Meta Platforms Inc., Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp. and TomTom NV. The goal is to incorporate map data from multiple sources and create a reliable, well-structured schema that will ultimately reduce errors.

Data & Analytics

Simplyblock heads towards AI-powered storage tiering from fast AWS block storage base

Their software, running in containers and using low-level Linux features, can be located on-premises or in the AWS cloud, and the public cloud is the main focus. In either location it uses NVMe SSDs but, in the public cloud, it uses ephemeral storage instances as these are the fastest NVMe devices available.

Data Storage

AI testing startup Antithesis nabs $47M seed funding to use AI to catch software bugs; now valued at $215M

At the core of Antithesis is its innovative platform, which employs continuous scanning techniques to meticulously comb through software code in search of potential problems. What sets Antithesis apart is its ability to create a simulated environment where every detected issue can be flawlessly reproduced. This feature proves invaluable in efficiently debugging even the most intricate and challenging software glitches.

AI/Devops

Guardrails AI, a startup co-founded by Seattle tech vet Diego Oppenheimer, raises $7.5M

The company’s open source platform lets developers build and reuse validation techniques for their AI models. The idea is to secure reliability and prevent unintended outputs when working with large language models and other AI-related apps.

AI/DevOps

Meta unveils V-JEPA AI model that improves training by learning from video

The model, named V-JEPA, or the Video Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture model, works differently than large language models. It uses images rather than words and it is a nongenerative model, meaning that it doesn’t use the entire image all at once. A generative model would attempt to compare every pixel in every frame to every pixel, whereas V-JEPA attempts to use abstract concepts such as trees, people, animals and objects along with their relationships to each other to learn.

AI

How Gong’s AI tools are increasing win rates for sales teams

The company has published in-depth analysis conducted by Gong’s research division, which examined more than 1 million sales opportunities across nearly 1,500 customers. The results showed that sales representatives using Gong’s AI-powered features like Smart Trackers and Ask Anything achieved significantly higher win rates compared to those not leveraging the technology.

Marketing Tech

Anthropic to roll out new features for combating election misinformation

In the coming weeks, the company plans to update Claude with a “classifier and rules engine” designed to identify election-related questions. When the software receives such a prompt from U.S.-based users, it will redirect them to the voting information website TurboVote. The website is run by the nonpartisan organization Democracy Works.

AI Ethics

Alation Launches Data Culture Maturity Assessment to Measure the True Value of Data Initiatives

The assessment allows organizations to effectively link data programs to business objectives. Organizations can tie specific metrics to Data Search & Discovery, Data Governance, Data Literacy, and Data Leadership to measure their impact. The Data Culture Maturity Assessment measures how each tenet drives business value – for example, by measuring the maturity of an organization’s Data Search & Discovery capability and showing the impact on business analyst productivity.

Data Management

TSplus Enhances Security Measures with Automatic Certificate Generation Update

TSplus has announced the release of LTS 15 and 16 versions, featuring an important modification to the automatic SSL/TLS certificate generation. This update is designed to align with Let’s Encrypt’s transition to a shorter chain of trust, enhancing security protocols for their valued partners.

Security

LangChain lands $25M round, launches platform to support entire LLM application lifecycle

Designed as an all-in-one platform, LangSmith allows developers to accelerate their LLM application workflows by covering the entire lifecycle of the project, right from development and testing to deployment and monitoring. It launched in closed beta in July last year and is already being used by thousands of enterprises every month, according to the company.

AI/LLM

Azure Elastic SAN cloud onramp now available

“Azure Elastic SAN responds to the vital need for seamless migration of extensive SAN environments to the cloud, bringing a new level of efficiency and ease.”

Cloud

Anaqua Launches AnaquaGov Providing Enhanced Security and Controls for Managing Highly Sensitive IP Data

“Many companies today that manage Controlled Unclassified Information—frequently under export control regulations—simply do not have access to a secure platform to perform their duties in a compliant manner. Through AQX hosted within the AnaquaGov enclave, we provide a comprehensive solution to entities that have, or suspect they have, CUI. These clients can carry out their responsibilities, securely, in an environment that has been independently assessed against stringent NIST controls and that is aligned with upcoming CMMC requirements.”

Data Management

OpenAI to Introduce Cutting-Edge Anti-Disinformation Solutions Ahead of 2024 Election

“We want to make sure our technology is not used in a way that could undermine the democratic process. We’re still working to understand how effective our tools might be for personalized persuasion. Until we know more, we don’t allow people to build applications for political campaigning and lobbying.”

AI Ethics

Ex-Twilio VP launches Zocks, an AI that pulls structured data from free-flowing conversations

Founded by ex-Twilio VP Mark Gilbert, the company has developed an AI assistant that uses the power of language models to pull structured data out from free-flowing conversations. The company says it is already helping hundreds of enterprises save time that used to go towards manually extracting relevant information.

AI/Data

RiskOn International Sets Formal Launch Date for askROI.com, a New Generative AI Platform

askROI is not just another chat assistant; it’s an AI-driven platform engineered to provide instant data insights based upon the customer’s unique data, efficiently transforming complex user queries into actionable answers. By harnessing the latest techniques in search and generative AI, askROI seeks to be an indispensable tool for business professionals, offering streamlined workflow solutions with the potential to save a significant amount of development time.

AI/Data

Google announces AI Cyber Defense Initiative to enhance global cybersecurity

The AI Cyber Defense initiative aims to employ AI not only to respond to threats but to anticipate and neutralize them before they can cause harm. The idea behind the initiative is that the traditional reactive cybersecurity model is no longer sufficient in a world where cyberthreats are becoming increasingly sophisticated and pervasive.

Security

Matterport Launches Property Intelligence: Transforming Real Estate with AI and Automation

Leveraging years of innovation in spatial data and AI, Matterport’s new suite of AI-powered features revolutionizes property analytics, enhancing Marketing, Design, Construction, and Facilities Management solutions

Automation & Productivity

Amazon researchers develop cutting-edge Base TTS text-to-speech model

Besides generating more natural-sounding audio than its predecessors, the model is also the largest neural network in the category. The most advanced version of BASE TTS features about 1 billion parameters, which are configuration settings that determine how an artificial intelligence processes data. In general, increasing an AI model’s parameter count expands the range of tasks it can perform.

AI

Modular blockchain data protocol startup Lava raises $15M

Lava’s technology stack provides a modular network that allows developers access to blockchain data through remote procedure calls and indexing. RPC is a way that apps communicate with blockchains in order to read and write data, while indexing is a specialized utility for discovering the placement of data so that it can be accessed and analyzed.

Blockchain

OpenAI unveils video AI model Sora capable of generating 60-second clips

While the product is not officially usable by the masses yet due to what Altman said in his post was “starting red-teaming,” or oppositional testing of its security defenses, flaws and misuses, the founder did note that it was being made available to a “limited number of creators,” with public expansion to come at a later date.

AI/Video

GPU cloud operator Together reportedly seeking $100M+ in new funding

Together’s cloud platform provides access to top-end H100 and A100 graphics processing units from Nvidia. Customers can deploy those GPUs in clusters of between 16 and 2,048 chips. The platform spares companies the hassle of building AI infrastructure from scratch, a complex undertaking made especially difficult by the fact that high-end GPUs are currently in short supply.

Cloud

AI cloud compute startup Lambda raises $320M at $1.5B valuation

Founded in 2012, Lambda provides cloud, on-premises and consulting services to companies looking to train AI models. The company began selling AI infrastructure in 2017 when the modern software architecture of the AI transformer, the basis behind large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, was outlined. Back then, the company was used primarily by academic researchers as a platform for image recognition, speech generation and natural language processing.

AI

HiOperator unveils QAScout, setting new standards in customer support quality

Businesses traditionally struggle with the limitations of post-interaction QA, which typically hovers around a 5-10% analysis rate. This lag in feedback creates a reactive, rather than proactive, approach to quality control. “By illuminating the entire category, and using real-time dashboards to see everything that’s happening, businesses can root out potential issues before they become systemic,” Tsai pointed out.

Data & Analytics

Rasa lands $30M to supercharge customer service with generative AI assistants

The Rasa Pro offering extends Rasa Open Source with CALM (conversational AI with language models), a generative AI-native approach to developing assistants, combined with enterprise-ready analytics, security and observability. It integrates with internal systems and also pairs with the no-code UI that allows anyone to collaborate on, build and improve the assistant.

Automation & Productivity

Akamai Expands Cloud Services with Gecko, Blending Edge Network for Enhanced Efficiency

More than one-third of respondents said the benefits of distributed cloud — including the ability to process and analyze AI and machine learning data quickly and efficiently — are mission critical to their IT strategy.

Cloud

Aviz gives its enterprise SONiC offering an AI boost

“Right now, network operations are template driven. But going forward, operations will be data driven, and AI will help you to manage your network from the observability and the orchestration point of view, ultimately making networks open and much easier to manage,” Shukla said.

Network Management

BigID introduces enhanced access governance capabilities for improved data security

Using the new solution, organizations can automatically identify, investigate and remediate access rights violations across sensitive structured and unstructured data. The service proactively reduces the risk of overexposed data and overprivileged users, monitors potential exposure for insider risk and manages external user and group access to sensitive data.

Data Management

Infoblox brings AI to DNS protection service

AI SOC Insights takes in networking and security data from Infoblox’s DNS data set and third-party sources, and then it uses AI technology to correlate events, prioritize them, and offer recommendations for resolution. This not only accelerates threat detection and response but also alleviates the strain on overburdened SOC analysts, Sanderson said.

AI/Security

There is more to chat than just Q&A as Vectara debuts new RAG powered chat module

Gen AI platform builder Vectara is out today with a new module for its platform that aims to help enterprises build and deploy highly accurate chatbots. Vectara’s platform takes a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach with its Boomerang vector embeddings to provide the most up-to-date information and reduce the risk of hallucination.

GenAI

WindBorne Systems Breaks World Record with New AI Forecast Offering, “WeatherMesh”

WeatherMesh, a deep learning numerical weather prediction (DLNWP) model, has reached unprecedented levels of global prediction accuracy for real-time, 24-hour forecasts, surpassing records previously held by Google DeepMind’s AI weather model, GraphCast. WindBorne’s state-of-the art model surpassed GraphCast by a significant 11% margin in accurately predicting a primary forecasting metric, 500 millibar geopotential height.

AI

Katzenberg-backed Alembic raises $14M, pioneers new frontier in marketing analytics

Alembic’s software traces marketing campaigns to sales outcomes, attributing revenue and predicting future ROI across TV, radio, podcasts, social media, and other unstructured data sources. The startup applies techniques originally developed during COVID-19 to trace causes and patterns in disparate public health datasets.

Data & Analytics

Full-stack authorization startup Permit.io raises $8M to scale up its platform

Permit.io argues that as cloud-native apps have become the norm, every app now requires fine-grained authorization, locking developers in a loop of repetitive operational tasks instead of working on core features. In addition, companies also need more engineering resources just to deal with permissions. Permit.io addresses this problem and claims to save companies millions of dollars each year.

DevOps

Fujitsu Revolutionizes the Future at MWC Barcelona 2024 with AI-powered Network Innovations

Using generative AI and other proprietary technologies, these solutions can drastically simplify network operations, pinpoint the source of a breakdown, and then leverage a variety of domain knowledge databases to suggest solutions.

Sustainability

Signal AI Sharpens Reputation and Risk Capabilities with Acquisition of Social 360

The acquisition will integrate traditional, social, regulatory, and alternative data sources into one unified platform. Social 360 analyses billions of pieces of online content from more than 90 million sources, which will complement Signal AI’s industry-leading monitoring platform. Social 360’s data sets include a broad range of fast-moving online content and data, including social media, political and regulatory content, and emerging alternative platforms

Data & Analytics

Artie nabs $3.3M in seed funding for its real-time data replication platform

Artie, in contrast, says that its platform is capable of syncing information as often as every few seconds. The reason is that it sends new records to the data warehouse immediately after they arrive rather than waiting for a large batch of files to accumulate before syncing them. Under the hood, Artie uses the open-source Apache Kafka data streaming engine to move the information.

Data Management

Glassbox Introduces AI-Powered ‘Voice of the Silent’ for Customer Feedback Management

Insufficient customer feedback is one of the top challenges leaders face when managing a product portfolio. While C-suite leaders heavily rely on customer experience (CX) metrics such as CSAT and NPS to drive decision-making, these scores only reflect a fraction of customer experiences, casting doubts on their accuracy in reflecting the overall customer sentiment.

Data & Analytics

Slack AI is here, letting you catch up on lengthy threads and unread messages

Slack is launching a suite of built-in AI features that serve up summaries of threads and channel recaps, while also allowing you to ask questions about what’s been going on at work. The workplace management platform first started testing Slack AI last year, but now it’s rolling out as a paid add-on for Slack Enterprise users.

Automation & Productivity

Conversational AI startup Rasa Technologies raises $30M to combine LLMs with traditional chatbots

The company provides access to a range of sophisticated and powerful AI assistants that can be aligned with its customers’ business logic to ensure practical and meaningful user engagement. By enhancing its AI models with customer’s data, Rasa says it helps to reduce the risk of AI hallucinations, which is when chatbots generate false or misleading replies.

AI/LLMs

New AI-driven SOC Insight from Infoblox reduces cybersecurity response times

Infoblox claims SOC Insights goes beyond simple malware risk-based dashboards and allows cybersecurity teams to reduce mean-time-to-respond by eliminating time wasted by consolidating individual alerts into unique insights. Each insight provides easy access to device, event, attacker infrastructure details and Infoblox unique DNS intelligence data.

Security

Apple researchers unveil ‘Keyframer’: An AI tool that animates still images using LLMs

The research paper, titled “Keyframer: Empowering Animation Design using Large Language Models,” explores uncharted territory in the application of LLMs to the animation industry, presenting unique challenges such as how to effectively describe motion in natural language.

AI/LLMS

Bipartisan Senate proposal calls for AI workforce framework from NIST

Under the bill, NIST would be required to report to Congress about other critical and emerging technology areas it finds could benefit from a workforce framework. It would also direct NIST to update the NICE framework to reflect changes in the cybersecurity field and “encourage” the agency to provide resources and guidance on cybersecurity careers to students and adults, according to the release.

AI/Security

VAST Data and Run:ai Unveil Full-Stack Solution for Next-Gen AI Workloads

The platform caters to various needs, from supporting data scientists’ interactive environments to improving large-scale training and reliable, scalable inference. Run:ai’s Open Architecture ensures a future-proof, collaborative platform that integrates with a broad ecosystem of industry leaders

Automation & Productivity

With Nvidia’s Chat with RTX, users can create personalized chatbots that run locally on PCs

The offering also leverages retrieval-augmented generation or RAG techniques and Nvidia’s TensorRT-LLM software, and yet it’s said to go easy on computing resources, so users won’t notice any decrease in the performance of their machine.

Automation & Productivity

Anaconda Partners with IBM watsonx to Deliver Enterprise Scale AI Solutions

Through this partnership, IBM watsonx users gain access to Anaconda’s base open-source software (OSS) repository as well as the option to upgrade to Anaconda’s premium repository with advanced security features for the enterprise. Natively built within IBM watsonx, Anaconda empowers users to access the open-source Python libraries at the heart of modern AI development.

AI

XENON Systems Purchases Myriad All-Flash Cloud-Native Solution to Fuel AI, Power Research and Data Science Workloads

Now, with Myriad and ActiveScale, XENON customers can uniquely achieve comprehensive end-to-end data management, unifying different classes of storage – from their hottest data to their coldest data – all from a single vendor.

Data Storage

AI startup Quilter secures $10M funding led by Benchmark to revolutionize circuit board design with AI

Quilter’s breakthrough lies in its AI-driven approach to streamline circuit board design, promising to significantly reduce the time required to develop critical components for various electronic devices, ranging from rockets to smartphones. By harnessing AI, Quilter aims to condense what traditionally took months into a matter of weeks or even days, marking a profound shift in the industry’s efficiency and speed.

Automation & Productivity

WellSaid Labs unveils ‘HINTS’, setting new bar for AI voice customization

Unlike current methods of controlling AI voices through rigid markup languages or prompts, HINTS allows for fine-grained and interpolable adjustments. For example, users can make a specific passage slower by precisely 0.7x or louder by 5 dB, with the AI voice responding naturally. The contextual awareness means annotations can be nested and layered across long scripts.

AI/Voice

FoundationDB team’s new venture, Antithesis, raises $47M to enhance software testing

Founded in 2018 by the team behind FoundationDB, a distributed database acquired by Apple in 2015 that now underpins Apple’s cloud infrastructure, the idea behind Antithesis was the belief that the most sophisticated organizations lacked the kind of deterministic software testing built into the database sold to Apple

DevOps

ChatGPT is getting ‘memory’ to remember who you are and what you like

Memory works in one of two ways. You can tell ChatGPT to remember something specific about you: you always write code in Javascript, your boss’s name is Anna, your kid is allergic to sweet potatoes. Or ChatGPT can simply try to pick up those details over time, storing information about you as you ask questions and get answers.

ChatGPT

Sumsub Unveils Industry-First Deepfake Detection in Video Identification

Unlike methods that focus on detecting deepfakes within static images or recorded videos, Sumsub’s new solution operates in real-time during video interviews, further securing the identification process. The enhanced deepfake detection technology is designed to identify and thwart fraudsters attempting to manipulate real-time video interviews for malicious purposes.

Security

Confluent Migration Accelerator Simplifies the Switch to a Complete Data Streaming Platform

Confluent, Inc. today announced the Confluent Migration Accelerator, a new program in partnership with the Confluent partner ecosystem to jumpstart organizations’ data streaming journeys. As enterprises look to migrate away from Apache Kafka and traditional streaming infrastructure (e.g. messaging systems), Confluent’s Migration Accelerator will lower the barrier to migration.

Data Streaming

Frontier Foundry Launches LIMNI: Next-Gen Secure Laptop AI System

Dubbed LIMNI, this generative AI system brings robust language model capabilities in a secure package optimized for personal computing environments, not requiring internet connectivity for model building or daily operations.

Automation & Productivity

Looking for more intelligence from meetings? Otter.ai is taking a shot with ‘Meeting GenAI’

A user could for example get a summary from a dozen different meetings, ask about the key takeaways and get the next steps. The AI chat capability is also now coming to the Channels capability in Otter, so multiple users in the same organization can now chat with Otter AI as part of a channel conversation.

Automation & Productivity

Cyberhaven launches ‘Linea AI’ to enhance data security against insider risks

Built to match the collective intelligence of security analysts, Linea AI applies human-like insight across workflows to understand an organization’s data. It assesses when the data is at risk and what’s needed to protect with, with Cyberhaven saying it does so “with unmatched precision.”

AI/Security

Zylon launches to take away the pain of generative AI adoption for SMBs

This framework allows Zylon’s SMB customers and their end-users, the non-technical employees, to simply upload the documents and files they want gen AI’s help with — say, invoices that need processing or transcripts that need editing and summarizing — and then click on buttons that describe the actions they want to take.

Automation & Productivity

Sierra announces launch of conversational AI platform for customer service

“Conversational AI is so intuitive and frictionless, we believe it will have an impact on your customer experience on par with the internet,” Sierra said in the blog post announcement. “In the age of conversational AI, the best customer experience is not installing an app or clicking a link, but simply having a conversation.”

AI/Conversational

Cohere for AI launches open source LLM for 101 languages

Today, Cohere for AI, the nonprofit research lab established by Cohere in 2022, unveiled Aya, an open-source large language model (LLM) supporting 101 languages — more than twice the number of languages covered by existing open-source models.

AI/LLM

AI Act Restricting Biometric Data Use, Image Scraping Moves Forward in EU

The latest version of the AI Act, if passed into law, would ban a range of different uses of AI, providing civilians with more legal protections and privacy around some of AI's more dystopian potential use cases. Biometric categorization, "untargeted" scraping of facial images from the internet or surveillance footage, AI-powered "emotion recognition," social scoring, and predictive policing tools (à la Minority Report) would become illegal in the EU under the AI Act.

Data Privacy

Proxima Introduces Pioneering AI-Powered Customer Support Solution

With CallPilot, Proxima aims to replace outdated manuals and complex knowledge base articles. The AI-powered chat interface ensures that agents can access comprehensive and relevant information around the clock. This modernized knowledge management leads to faster issue resolution and, in turn, improved customer satisfaction.

Automation & Productivity

New AI-powered program from Alcion helps MSPs with Microsoft 365 backup modernization

The new program has been designed to accelerate and modernize MSPs’ Microsoft 365 backup business while reducing management and procurement toil. The program does so by providing a security-oriented backup offering with simplified licensing, consolidated billing and a new partner portal that allows MSPs and partners to monitor and manage multiple accounts from a single dashboard.

Automation & Productivity

Anywhere365 Elevates Customer Experience with Intelligent AI Assistant through Acquisition of Deepdesk

Anywhere365 is a leading provider of Enterprise Dialogue Management solutions and enhances customer interactions using AI intelligence. Integrated within Microsoft Teams, Azure, and all CRM platforms, Anywhere365 offers compliance, productivity, and efficiency

Automation & Productivity

Microsoft Copilot AI climbs Google, Apple app store charts after Super Bowl ad (despite errors)

Promoting the successor to Bing Chat as “your everyday AI companion,” and a way to do far more than search, including creating new imagery and code for games using the underlying generative AI large language models (LLMs), Microsoft’s Copilot Super Bowl ad seems to have done its job and gotten more people to download the Copilot app.

AI/LLMs

Cisco amps up security breach protection service

Cisco’s XDR service brings together multiple Cisco and third-party security products to control network access, analyze incidents, remediate threats, and automate responses, all from a single cloud-based interface. Cisco’s endpoint and email security packages handle functions such as spotting and blocking threats and controlling malware, for example.

Security

Oracle adds logistics modeling and trade incentive optimization to its supply chain suite

Oracle Corp. today added new features to the Transportation Management and Global Trade Management, components of its Fusion Cloud Supply Chain & Manufacturing suite that are aimed at improving logistics operations, reducing costs and automating regulatory compliance.

Automation & Productivity

HPE ups performance, capacity for disaggregated data center storage

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) released the third version of its GreenLake for Block Storage built on the vendor’s Alletra Storage Multiprotocol (MP) to help customers transition away from legacy node pair data center storage designs to disaggregated storage with multinode switched models.

Data Storage

Meta will test a trending-topics feature on its Threads platform

But today, the company said that political content will appear in the Threads trending topic area if enough people have engaged with a certain story. A machine learning algorithm will be employed to see what people are talking about on the platform and how long they’re spending on that topic. The feature will roll out to other countries soon.

Social Media

MiniCPM 2B small yet powerful large language model (LLM)

What sets the MiniCPM 2B apart is its remarkable efficiency. This model has been fine-tuned to work smoothly on a variety of platforms, including those as small as mobile devices. It achieves this by using less memory and providing faster results, which is a boon for applications that have to operate within strict resource constraints.

AI/LLM

Conversica Advances GenAI Chat with Release of Brand-Specific Large Language Models

No more inaccurate or outdated information that produces false responses incongruent with the brand—Conversica Chat with Contextual Response Generation “learns” the brand’s information to inform conversations with both prospect and existing customers.

GenAI

Proofpoint uncovers account takeover campaign targeting Azure users

The hackers use the login credentials they steal through phishing emails to log into victims’ Azure accounts. From there, they exfiltrate sensitive documents such as records detailing organizations’ internal security protocols. The hackers also modify the compromised accounts’ multifactor authentication, or MFA, settings in a way that increases their chances of retaining long-term access to those accounts.

Security

Bugcrowd secures $102M in funding to enhance crowdsourced cybersecurity platform

The platform includes artificial intelligence features, which, combined with its crowdsourced security services, help identify and remediate security vulnerabilities before bad actors can exploit them. The number of vulnerabilities found is impressive. It identified almost 23,000 high-impact vulnerabilities in 2023, the company said, helping prevent potential breach-related costs of up to $100 billion.

Security

Nvidia debuts RTX 2000 Ada Generation GPU for AI-accelerated design workloads

The RTX 2000 is the most powerful graphics processing unit for workstations that the company has ever produced, offering up to 1.5 times the performance of its previous-generation RTX A2000 12GB. It’s designed to handle complex applications such as crafting 3D environments and refining industrial designs, and will pave the way for what Nvidia says will be an “AI-accelerated future.”

Automation & Productivity

TCDI Partners with Altumatim to Elevate AI-Powered Document Review and Data Intelligence

With this partnership, TCDI’s clients can now enhance their review processes like never before. By incorporating Altumatim into TCDI’s workflows, TCDI can provide visibility into the methods used for identifying and coding documents for review, privilege, and responsiveness. In addition, they can also help their clients discern the best evidence for a case by learning the story involved, facilitating analysis and connection between ESI and the important parts of the story

Automation & Productivity

Pegasystems debuts generative AI-powered application design tool

The company argues that innovation in application development is being stifled and sabotaged because existing processes do not stimulate design thinking, nor do they attempt to align the needs of the various stakeholders involved in the process. Although generative AI can help to accelerate application design, existing models are much more focused on churning out software code than enhancing existing application workflows.

Automation & Productivity

Fortinet rolls out SD-WAN appliance aimed at operational technology environments

FortiGate Rugged 70G combines several critical functions into a single compact device that can be deployed anywhere. The product has advanced security features, including secure boot, biometric verification and a next-generation firewall with artificial intelligence-powered FortiGuard services. It also supports local area network and wide area network security, including software-defined WAN, or SD-WAN, and zero-trust network access with 5G connectivity.

Security

Botnet Attack Targeted Routers: A Wake-Up Call for Securing Remote Employees’ Hardware

The fact that the targeted routers are privately owned highlights a security risk for IT pros trying to keep remote workers safe. With IT members not overseeing the routers used at home, it is difficult to know whether employers may be using old or even end-of-life routers.

Security

Xensam raises $40M for AI-powered software asset management platform

Founded in 2016, the company provides an AI-powered platform that allows Information Technology teams to track, manage, monitor, identify and reduce overspending on applications across business networks. Its platform is capable of handling software tools across organizations of all sizes and can identify thousands of different applications including software as a service, cloud, on-premises or across hybrid environments.

IT Management

Perplexity partners with Vercel, opening AI search to developer apps

The company previously announced engagements with different AI hardware companies to take its technology front and center on their products. However, it is not the only AI player integrating with Vercel’s offering. AI voice company ElevenLabs and seven other startups are also teaming up with Vercel.

AI/DevOps

Microsoft hints at the future of AI in Windows with a smarter Copilot

Alongside the Copilot changes, Microsoft also confirmed that its Notepad app will get Copilot AI integration soon. You’ll be able to select text and right-click to “explain with Copilot.” It will decipher text, code segments, or log files.

Automation & Productivity

AirMettle touts parallel software storage architecture

“We bring software compute into storage but we do it correctly. Computational storage has been around for 20 years and is a failure in the market … We are computational storage, but at the system level. Not at the drive level.”

Data Storage

Semarchy Launches Acceleration Toolkit to Transform Master Data Management

Leveraging their unparalleled expertise in MDM implementation, the Semarchy team works closely with customers to rapidly build a tailored proof of concept featuring the client’s own data and use cases. In just one month, clients can experience the capabilities of Semarchy’s solution firsthand and see the value it will bring to their organization

Data Management

With Hybrid Work Still Rising, Verizon Partners with Microsoft to Help Mobilize Teams

The joint solution, Verizon Mobile for Microsoft Teams (VMMT), facilitates an improved user experience and brings native mobile calling to Teams. Teams is an excellent collaboration tool, but calling through the application creates a layer of complexity. VMMT eliminates the complexity by removing the requirement to call through the Teams application.

Automation & Productivity

CodeSignal targets skills gap with ‘Learn’ platform amidst tech talent crunch

He argued for a paradigm shift from the traditional model of passive learning to an active, practice-based approach. “It has to be 10% [sharing] knowledge, 90% active learning in practice,” he added, underscoring the need for hands-on experiences.

Tech Jobs

Capgemini Partners With Mistral AI to Spearhead the Adoption of New Frontier GenAI Models

Deployment at scale is one of the biggest barriers to widespread adoption of generative AI, and our partnership with Capgemini means forward-thinking organizations of all sizes will be able to customize our compute-efficient, powerful AI models for real world applications.”

GenAI

Flexential boosts its software-defined interconnection services

Managed services provider Flexential has released Flexential Fabric, a platform that enables customers to dynamically provision interconnection services through a web interface. Flexential Fabric supports both IP transit and private transport through a single port, which the company says is a first and which gives customers a simpler way to scale and manage interconnection services.

Network Management

Cohesity to buy Veritas’ data protection unit, eyes $30B data security and management market

The remainder of Veritas’ businesses will be structured into a separate entity, dubbed “DataCo.” It will include the InfoScale, data compliance and backup exec businesses and will function autonomously and be led by CEO Lawrence Wong, currently senior VP of strategy and products at Veritas.

Data Management

Rize launches AI productivity coach, targeting work-life balance in remote work era

The new AI-powered coach tracks time spent in various applications and websites, detects when users are focused or distracted, and nudges them to take breaks at optimal times. According to Davis, it’s like having “a fitness tracker for your work” that helps you work “healthier and more efficiently.”

Automation & Productivity

Google joins C2PA’s steering committee to boost transparency of AI-generated content

The C2PA is working on something called “Content Credentials”, which is a supposedly tamper-proof metadata standard that can be attached to digital content to prove its creation and modification history.

AI Ethics

Acceldata supercharges data observability with new AI copilot

Built on this AI technology,… we are delivering an AI copilot that eliminates manual configuration hassles, reduces setup time, enables automatic monitoring of data anomalies, and fosters collaboration and contributions from non-technical users,

Automation & Productivity

Major tech companies join US AI safety consortium to set standards for future development

The announcement comes days after OpenAI and Meta announced that the companies will begin labeling AI-generated images with metadata. This act will make it easier for users and fact-checkers to identify media created by AI sources. Both companies made voluntary commitments to the White House initiative for AI safety in July, which included labeling content created by AI. Google has also developed its own digital watermarking capability called SnythID for AI-generated content.

AI Ethics

Kyndryl teams up with Google Cloud on responsible generative AI

The partners will also apply the Google Cloud Cortex Framework to enterprise resource planning (ERP). Kyndryl will utilize Google Cloud’s Cortex Framework to extract maximum value from customers’ ERP data, enhancing productivity and delivering profound business insights.

Automation & Productivity

Google Deepmind proposes ‘self-discover’ framework for LLMs, improves GPT-4 performance

The framework revolves around LLMs self-discovering task-intrinsic reasoning structures to solve a problem. The models look at multiple atomic reasoning modules, such as critical thinking and step-by-step thinking, and compose them into an explicit reasoning structure for LLMs to follow during decoding.

AI

LimaCharlie secures $10.2M for expansion of SecOps Cloud Platform

LimaCharlie’s platform provides automation and integration for enterprise security teams with existing continuous integration/continuous deployment pipelines, as well as other systems and feeds. Teams have access to a full-featured and well-documented REST API along with a Python CLI and can use the PULL mode data feed — an HTTPS-based data stream — to create real-time integrations.

Security

Aethir teams up with Well-Link Tech to expand decentralized cloud GPU network

Singapore-based Aethir has created a new path with its decentralized GPU network, which takes underutilized graphics processing units and uses them for cloud rendering for games and metaverse experiences.

Gaming

Mechanical Orchard raises $24M to help companies ditch their mainframes for the cloud

The startup is pioneering an artificial intelligence-based approach to help companies lift legacy workloads from their old, on-premises mainframes, into a cloud environment. The approach involves reverse-engineering many of those workloads, with an aim to reduce significantly the risk to companies through its superior visibility and control.

Cloud

Plainsight Technologies Introduces FilterBox to Translate Real-time Video into Valuable Business Metrics

FilterBox is a secure runtime foundation that leverages MQTT, an IoT industry standard for data communication, that enables customers to translate raw video streams into a time series of business-relevant information to take action against.

Data & Analytics

Gulp Data Partners with Snowflake to Help Companies Enhance Their Approach to Data Monetization

By using Gulp Data’s Snowflake Native App, companies have an opportunity to generate financial value from their data assets by helping them understand how much their datasets are worth, how data products can be priced and packaged, how much demand there is with buyers, and how to enrich datasets to increase their value.

Data & Analytics

USPTO rejects OpenAI’s “GPT” trademark application

However, in September 2022, the USPTO issued a substantive rejection, arguing that “GPT” is merely descriptive and could cause confusion among consumers. This is due to the possibility of similar terms represented by the initials, coupled with the common usage of “generative” and “transformer” in the AI field.

ChatGPT

AI-enabled PCs and genAI smartphones set to take off

Shipments of artificial intelligence (AI) PCs — personal computers with specific system-on-a-chip (SoC) capabilities designed to run generative AI (genAI) tasks locally — are expected to grow from nearly 50 million units in 2024 to more than 167 million in 2027, according to new report from research firm IDC.

Automation & Productivity

F5 upgrades target application security, AI

Introduced in 2023, F5’s Distributed Cloud Service is a SaaS-based platform that enables application management, infrastructure management, and security services across customers’ public cloud, private cloud and edge sites. The vendor’s new API discovery and protection service is aimed at giving customers a simple way to discover API endpoints, monitor traffic for vulnerabilities, provide testing, and protect applications.

IT Management

Google will block Android users from installing 'unsafe' apps in fraud protection test

Available within Google Play Protect, the new security feature will block the installation of side-loaded apps tagged to be potentially risky. Such apps are typically downloaded from online sources such as messaging apps or file managers.

Privacy & Security

Persistent Launches Population Health Management Solution Using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service

Since up to 80% of key patient information within an EHR is in the form of unstructured clinical notes, Persistent’s Solution accurately extracts this information, unlike PHM solutions in the market, which are solely dependent on third-party data sources or survey data.

MedTech

Meet ‘Smaug-72B’: The new king of open-source AI

The model, called “Smaug-72B,” was released publicly today by the startup Abacus AI, which helps enterprises solve difficult problems in the artificial intelligence and machine learning space. Smaug-72B is technically a fine-tuned version of “Qwen-72B,” another powerful language model that was released just a few months ago by Qwen, a team of researchers at Alibaba Group.

AI

Microsoft brings new AI image functionality to Copilot, adds new model Deucalion

In a startling move, Microsoft today announced a redesigned look for its Copilot AI search and chatbot experience on the web (formerly known as Bing Chat), new built-in AI image creation and editing functionality, and a new AI model, Deucalion, that is powering one version of Copilot.

Automation & Productivity

OneTrust Introduces Data Privacy Maturity Model

When an individual trusts that a company is using their data responsibly, they are willing to share more data, enabling the company to increase its customer engagement, loyalty, and lifetime value. This virtuous cycle of earning, retaining, and expanding customer trust to unlock the value of data is the strategic goal of a mature data privacy program.

Data Privacy

Stability AI launches SVD 1.1, a diffusion model for more consistent AI videos

He also noted that the model will be provided as part of Stability’s subscription memberships, which have different tiers for individual and enterprise users, including free, $20 per month, and up. For users looking to deploy the new SVD 1.1 for commercial purposes, they will need to pursue a membership.

AI/Video

Verizon debuts NaaS cloud management for unified multicloud

Not all companies using cloud from different vendors will necessarily need the multicloud networking piece of the offering, of course. Plenty of businesses locate different applications in different clouds without the need for those apps to talk to one another or share data. But for those that do, Verizon’s newest offering could allow them to address a number of potential networking blind spots.

Cloud

OpenAI is adding new watermarks to DALL-E 3

The company says watermarks from C2PA will appear in images generated on the ChatGPT website and the API for the DALL-E 3 model. Mobile users will get the watermarks by February 12th. They’ll include both an invisible metadata component and a visible CR symbol, which will appear in the top left corner of each image.

AI Ethics

Cisco, Nvidia target secure AI with expanded partnership

“Jointly validated reference architectures through Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) make it simple to deploy and manage AI clusters at any scale in a wide array of use cases spanning virtualized and containerized environments, with both converged and hyperconverged options. CVDs for FlexPod and FlashStack for Generative AI Inferencing with Nvidia AI Enterprise will be available this month, with more to follow,” Cisco stated.

Automation & Productivity

NSF, Silicon Valley team for AI research

The list of private industry partners is a who’s who of AI: Amazon, Anthropic, HPE, Hugging Face, IBM, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Palantir. Other federal agencies will be involved as well: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, NASA, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Department of Agriculture.

AI

Linux Foundation launches Post-Quantum Cryptography Alliance with AWS, Cisco, IBM and others

Quantum computing holds the promise of solving complex problems much faster than current technologies, while its advancement poses a potential threat to existing cryptographic systems. To address this, PQCA partners with the founding members to drive the advancement and adoption of post-quantum cryptography (PQC).

Quantum Computing

Altova Announces AI Assistant in RecordsManager 3.1

“Visual, no code tools like RecordsManager have revolutionized the field of data-centric app creation, making it faster and more accessible. But now imagine expressing your database vision in a single sentence, and having it created automatically – including not just the database structure with all tables, but forms and reports as well. That’s exactly what the new AI Assistant in RecordsManager does,

Data Management

Google to pay $350 million to settle shareholders' data privacy lawsuit

It resolves claims that Google learned by March 2018 about a three-year software glitch that exposed Google+ users' personal data, yet concealed the problem for months while publicly stressing its commitment to data security.

Data Privacy

Glia Challenges Dated CCaaS Paradigm with Unified Interaction Management

“UIM is the future of customer experience technology. Companies will drive efficiency, revenue and loyalty because they won’t have the limitations of traditional CCaaS. We believe this new category will completely redefine how businesses interact with their customers.”

Automation & Productivity

Microsoft unveils Face Check for secure identity verification

Microsoft today announced the launch of Face Check, a new facial recognition feature for its Entra Verified ID digital identity platform. Face Check allows businesses to match a user’s selfie to their government ID or employee credentials, providing an extra layer of security for sensitive operations like password resets or help desk access.

Security

NetApp, SpectraLogic link up for on-prem archival storage

StorageGRID is NetApp’s S3-based object storage product with its software running in a virtual machine, bare metal server or NetApp appliance, and using SSD or disk-based storage. It can store billions of objects in a single namespace and scale up to 16 datacenters worldwide. Spectra’s on-prem archive pairs a tape library system and its BlackPearl NAS-object interface and storage device to provide an S3-to-tape front end to Spectra tape library systems

Data Storage

Apple releases ‘MGIE’, a revolutionary AI model for instruction-based image editing

MGIE, which stands for MLLM-Guided Image Editing, leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to interpret user commands and perform pixel-level manipulations. The model can handle various editing aspects, such as Photoshop-style modification, global photo optimization, and local editing.

Automation & Productivity

Metomic Launches ChatGPT Security Tool to Shield Sensitive Corporate Data from Exposure

Because Metomic’s ChatGPT integration sits within the browser itself, it identifies when an employee logs into OpenAI’s web-based ChatGPT platform and scans the data being uploaded in real-time. Security teams can receive alerts if employees are uploading sensitive data, like customer PII, security credentials, and intellectual property.

ChatGPT

Cimba.AI emerges from stealth with $1.25M pre-seed to help enterprises build AI agents

Headquartered in Seattle, Cimba’s web-based platform allows enterprises to create custom AI agents to aid employees in their workflows; pull data in useful forms like dashboards and graphs; and streamline recurring business operations, drawing upon each enterprise’s distinct, relevant, contextual and proprietary data.

Automation & Productivity

Synthetaic raises $15M for advanced AI image classification and detection

Founded in 2019, the company develops solutions that allow for the quick classification of vast amounts of unstructured visual data in minutes that would otherwise take days or months. The company does this with a system called Rapid Automatic Image Categorization, or RAIC, which can automate the analysis of large unstructured datasets of raw images and video allowing organizations to train and deploy AI models much faster than traditional approaches.

AI/Data

Galileo Introduces RAG & Agent Analytics Solution for Better, Faster AI Development

Galileo’s RAG & Agent Analytics transforms this process by embedding advanced insights and metrics directly into the user’s existing workflow, with easy access through an intuitive Galileo user interface (UI). Powered by research-backed metrics developed by the company’s Galileo Labs R&D unit, this solution provides unprecedented visibility into each step of the RAG workflow, allowing for rapid evaluation, error detection, and iteration.

Data & Analytics

Beware: Fake Facebook Job Ads Spreading 'Ov3r_Stealer' to Steal Crypto and Credentials

Ov3r_Stealer is capable of siphoning IP address-based location, hardware info, passwords, cookies, credit card information, auto-fills, browser extensions, crypto wallets, Microsoft Office documents, and a list of antivirus products installed on the compromised host.

Security

NinjaOne raises $231M at nearly $2B valuation for its IT management platform

“Whether you are a managed service provider in charge of running and protecting other peoples’ businesses, or a chief information officer in charge of one, endpoints pose a significant risk and opportunity.”

IT Management

Bluesky is ready to open up

Even with ActivityPub taking off, Bluesky is ready to have its moment in the spotlight again. Starting this week, the app is removing its invite system and throwing open its doors to anyone who wants to sign up. And later this month, it plans to begin letting outside developers host their own servers on its underlying AT Protocol that’s designed to rival ActivityPub.

Social Media

Nylas boosts performance and folds generative AI into its API platform

New features include real-time bounce notifications, scheduled sending and Smart Compose, a generative AI-powered feature that the company said allows users to create quick drafts of well-structured and contextual emails based on large datasets and user prompts.

Automation & Productivity

IBM targets hybrid cloud and AI with LinuxONE 4 Express mainframe

The IBM LinuxONE 4 Express is designed to extend the capabilities of the LinuxONE 4 and the IBM z16 mainframes that were first announced in 2023, to small and medium businesses looking to build hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) strategies. The new system aims to offer strong security, resilience and cost-savings in an accessible package.

Automation & Productivity

Colossyan raises $22M to grow its AI-powered corporate training video production platform

Colossyan is the creator of a generative AI-powered platform that’s designed to simplify video creation, primarily with training purposes in mind. The video creation process involves inputting a script, selecting from a diverse range of avatars or creating your own, and then simply clicking on a button to generate the actual footage, all without conventional filming resources such as video cameras, studios and actors.

Automation & Productivity

Experts Detail New Flaws in Azure HDInsight Spark, Kafka, and Hadoop Services

Three new security vulnerabilities have been discovered in Azure HDInsight's Apache Hadoop, Kafka, and Spark services that could be exploited to achieve privilege escalation and a regular expression denial-of-service (ReDoS) condition.

Security

Israeli startup Ionix raises $42M to enhance attack surface management

Founded in 2017 and previously known as Cyberpion, Ionix offers an attack surface management solution that uses connective intelligence. That’s a technology that identifies and prioritizes exploitable risks, to find exploitable risks across the entire attack surface, including within the digital supply chain.

Security

Generative AI startup AudioStack raises $3.1.5M pre-Series A round to revolutionize audio production

AudioStack’s technology offers a comprehensive platform for scalable audio production, covering everything from voiceovers to dynamic creatives and brand voice synthesis. It enables the creation of studio-quality audio assets at a rapid pace, potentially reducing production turnaround time from days to mere hours or minutes.

AI/Audio

Cisco Launches Motific, Enabling Organizations to Navigate the Complex World of Generative AI Deployment

Born from Outshift, Cisco’s incubation business, Motific provides a central view across the entire GenAI journey, empowering central IT and security teams to rapidly deliver trustworthy GenAI capabilities across their organizations with control over sensitive data, security, responsible AI, and cost.

GenAI

Meta to start labeling AI-generated images across platforms in transparency push

Meta already applies labels to content generated using its own AI tools, and now it plans to extend this to images created using services from other companies such as OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney, Shutterstock, and Alphabet’s Google.

AI Ethics

Verizon Business NaaS helps enterprises manage multicloud deployments

The online portal includes management and insight into overall service health, network traffic, global network cloud connections and issue management tickets. It also allows for users to establish connectivity between public, private and hybrid cloud environments, and between cloud and network infrastructure at the multi-access edge computing (MEC). The single management layer also supports oversight of uniform security, governance and configuration processes.

Cloud

OpenText Unveils Next-Gen Cybersecurity Auditing Tool at OpenText Security Summit

Triaging and validating raw static analysis results is one of the most time-intensive, manual processes within application security testing. Companies can’t afford to hire a team of human examiner experts in software engineering, computer science, and software vulnerabilities. Fortify Audit Assistant was created to automate security and address these issues by utilizing machine learning to learn from Fortify’s human auditors.

Security

Acceldata copilot aids in data observability

Tuned with retrieval-augmented generation, the assistant can determine “what data sets are being used, what is being included in reports and what is not included,” said Rohit Choudhary, co-founder and chief executive of Acceldata. “People often don’t know where their data is being used. This tells you about the data that’s most important to you.”

Data & Analytics

Cisco unveils ‘Identity Intelligence’ to enhance cloud security with AI and networking integration

The problem, as seen by Cisco, is that a user is often mapped to many digital identities and accounts — drastically increasing entry points for attackers and the possibility of lateral movement across identities. Often, legacy permissions have not been removed and security teams miss crucial context about historical identity behavior, actions across systems, and current risk levels needed to make trusted access decisions.

Security

Scammers used deepfake CFO on video call to trick company employee into sending them $25M

According to CNN, the victim was sent an email that claimed to be from the company’s CFO. The employee initially suspected the message was a phishing email, as it asked for a large amount of money to be transferred into an offshore account. However, the scammers managed to erase any doubts by inviting the employee to attend a video call, where the supposed CFO and several other colleagues he recognized were in attendance.

Security

OpenAI launches ChatGPT app for Apple Vision Pro

The launch of ChatGPT for Vision Pro marks a significant milestone for OpenAI, which aims to create artificial intelligence that can benefit humanity. It offers a glimpse of what the future of human-AI interaction might look like: more natural, more intuitive and more immersive.

ChatGPT

Palo Alto Networks ventures into quantum security with VPNs and algorithm discovery

With the new quantum security feature, Palo Alto Networks added PQC signature information into its firewalls to detect, block and log the use of PQC and hybrid PQC algorithms in TLSv1.3 sessions. The vendor also allows customers to add policies to their firewalls to restrict where PQC can be used.

Security

Omada Sets New Industry Standard with Real-Time Identity Governance

Omada Identity Cloud will deliver enhanced performance for users, with the ability to import and process identity data faster than ever. Additionally, it will allow for increased data import frequency to reflect organizational changes in real time.

Data Management

The ransomware business is booming, even as enforcers shut down some major players

Unit 42 identified 25 new leak sites last year that offered ransomware as a service. But it said at least five seem to have shut down, since they had no new posts in the second half of the year. The roughly two dozen new sites accounted for 25 percent of total ransomware posts in 2023, Unit 42 said.

Security

Data steward Rimage pivoting from optical disk publishing to data lifecycle management

Rimage’s broader strategy has hardware (Enterprise LaserStorage) and software (Data Lifecycle Management) elements that help customers to manage data from birth to destruction. Rimage now sees itself as a digital steward and thinks the data lifecycle management (DLM)/document asset management (DAM) market is fragmented with many suppliers and no one dominant vendor.

Data Management

LG CNS Launches ‘AI Center’ to Pioneer Initiatives in Enterprise AI

This center boasts the ‘Generative AI Business Unit’ dedicated to the exploration of generative AI businesses in collaboration with corporate clients, the ‘AI Business Unit’ which engages in distinctive AI operations including the Future Contact Center (FCC), and the ‘AI Research Institute’ which comprises four AI LABs specializing in language, vision, AI engineering, data centric research areas

AI

Hugging Face launches open source AI assistant maker to rival OpenAI’s custom GPTs

The new, free product offering allows users of Hugging Chat, the startup’s open source alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to easily create their own customized AI chatbots with specific capabilities, similar both in functionality and intention to OpenAI’s custom GPT Builder — though that requires a paid subscription to ChatGPT Plus ($20 per month), Team ($25 per user per month paid annually), and Enterprise (variable pricing depending on the needs).

ChatGPT

Lone Star Analysis Expands Its Portfolio with the Introduction of TruNavigator MAX

One example is Lone Star’s First Order AI Designer (FAID). FAID deploys generative AI to create a digital twin of an aeronautical system, such as a drone or hypersonic missile. FAID can also generate new designs or generate valuable threat assessments of observed threat system

AI

Weka bags another GPU-as-a-Service farm customer

GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) operations are spinning up in response to the generative AI training and inferencing boom. They buy thousands of Nvidia GPUs and rent them out on a pay-per-use basis. Enterprises buying smaller numbers of GPUs or GPU servers are finding that the supply is constrained because Nvidia can’t get enough of them built to meet the demand

AI

Adastra Launches Prescriptive Sales Recommender and AI-Enhanced Search Solution, Powered by Amazon Tech

The first is the Prescriptive Sales Recommender which enables sales representatives to harness cutting-edge large language models (LLMs) through Amazon SageMaker Jumpstart or Amazon Bedrock. The second, the AskYourData Generative AI-Augmented Intelligent Search Solution, powered by Amazon Bedrock, can generate natural language insights from data assets.

AI/Data

IBM says generative AI can help automate business actions

The semantic stories element of SNAP is the part that IBM adds to the framework. The idea is to use the richness of language in programs such as GPT-3 to go beyond the activities of traditional AI programs. The language models can capture more details of a business process, and turn them it into a coherent "story" in natural language.

Automation & Productivity

Researcher proposes DNA-based computing platform

Amlan Ganguly, computer engineering department head in RIT’s Kate Gleason College of Engineering, co-authored a scientific paper in which he envisions “a computing platform using DNA molecules that are capable of computation in-situ without the need for domain conversion of information from DNA to electronics.”

Emerging Tech

FrogData Unveils AI-Connected Dealership Platform to Revolutionize Auto Dealerships

The platform’s unique capability to aggregate and analyze data across all dealership departments makes it an unparalleled tool in the industry. It is aimed at revolutionizing how dealerships operate and compete in today’s market.

Automation & Productivity

Digital news startup The Messenger shuts down less than a year after burning through $50 million

Before the startup’s debut, Beckman had confidently predicted in a New York Times profile that the site would achieve over $100 million in revenue in 2024, attract 100 million monthly readers, and employ hundreds of reporters nationwide.

Media

Cloudzy Elevates Cybersecurity: Integrating Insights from Recorded Future to Revolutionize Cloud Security

Upon thorough evaluation of these reports and confirmation that the implicated accounts are indeed conducting illegal activities and are not victims, Cloudzy systematically bans these accounts. Furthermore, our system is designed to recognize and suspend any attempts by these entities to access our platform using fake identities, to better ensure a secure and trustworthy environment.

Security

Amazon debuts AI-powered Rufus shopping assistant

Rufus is designed to answer shopper questions about products listed on Amazon. The AI that underpins the chatbot was trained on the e-commerce marketplace’s product catalog, as well as shopper reviews and content from its Customer Questions & Answers section. The company says it also used “information from across the web” to refine Rufus’ capabilities.

e-Commerce

iBwave Unveils a Complete Solution for Simplified LTE/5G Network Surveys

The iBwave Mobile and Epiq PRiSM scanner combination streamlines the survey and design experience, allowing users to visualize their data within the iBwave Mobile app and iBwave desktop design solution, eliminating the need for data transfers. This not only enhances the overall efficiency of the survey process but can also save users hours of manual work and the costs associated with it.

Network Management

KAYTUS Releases Data Center Management Platform KSManage

It is a powerhouse of rich reporting analysis capabilities, equipped with various development modes to adapt to diverse requirements. It also skillfully orchestrates the management of cloud-based edge data center servers, storage solutions, networks, and dynamic environment monitoring equipment

Data Management

First ‘truly’ open source LLM from AI2 to drive ‘critical shift’ in AI development

While other models have included the model code and model weights, OLMo also provides the training code, training data and associated toolkits, as well as evaluation toolkits. In addition, OLMo was released under an open source initiative (OSI) approved license, with AI2 saying that “all code, weights, and intermediate checkpoints are released under the Apache 2.0 License.”

AI/LLMs

Apple's Vision Pro to get Word, Excel, and other Microsoft 365 apps at launch

Beyond Word and Excel, the full lineup includes PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Loop, Microsoft Teams, and even Microsoft Copilot. This means that Vision Pro users can not only create content but also attend Microsoft Teams meetings, collaborate with others in Microsoft Loop, and use the AI-powered Copilot in augmented reality.

Automation & Productivity

AI-powered data security and privacy automation startup LightBeam.ai raises $17.8M

“In the era of generative AI breakthroughs, organizations are empowered to unlock valuable insights from customer data,” said co-founder and Chief Executice Himanshu Shukla. “However, this advancement poses the crucial challenge of ensuring secure and compliant handling of customer data within the evolving landscape of AI governance and privacy regulations.”

Data Management

Coris raises $3.7M, sets sights on AI-driven paradigm shift in SMB risk management

Coris leverages large language models (LLMs) to parse unstructured data and derive insights for tasks like automated underwriting. Its newest product, CorShield, prevents impersonation fraud during SMB onboarding by cross-checking applicant data against various online sources.

Privacy & Security

Google Maps is getting a generative AI boost. Here's what that will look like

"Just ask Maps what you're looking for, like 'places with a vintage vibe in SF.' Our AI models will analyze Maps' rich information about nearby businesses and places along with photos, ratings, and reviews from the Maps community to give you trustworthy suggestions."

AI/Search

New AI service from Secureworks promises to reduce security analyst workloads by over 50%

Threat Score offers a solution to a serious problem: alert noise. Secureworks argues that reducing alert noise and time to respond are the biggest areas where AI can have an impact on security outcomes. The workload savings achieved through Threat Score ensure that analysts are more quickly taking action on and remediating the threats that pose the biggest risk.

Security

Cloudbrink takes on Cisco, Zscaler by balancing network security, performance

When testing a 10 MB file with 100 milliseconds of latency, transfer time was reduced from three minutes to 20 seconds with Cloudbrink’s solution. Taking that same 10 MB file with zero latency and 5% Packet loss, throughput rose from less than 2 MB/second to 67 MB/s with Cloudbrink. “Throughout all the increased latency, we still saw improvements,” Broadhead said.

Network Management

Shopify boosts its commerce platform with ‘Magic’ image editor and other AI enhancements

The headline feature is Shopify Magic, which applies different AI models to assist merchants in a variety of ways. This includes automatically generating product descriptions, FAQ pages and other marketing copy. Early tests showed Magic can create SEO-optimized text in seconds versus the minutes typically required to write high-converting product blurbs.

Marketing Tech

Allen Institute for AI launches open and transparent OLMo large language model

OLMo 7B is described as a “truly open, state-of-the-art” LLM. It’s being made available alongside both its pretraining data and its training code, marking an industry first. OLMo and its framework are meant to aid researchers and developers in training and experimenting with LLMs by providing full transparency into how they work. It’s being made available on the Hugging Face platform and also in GitHub, where anyone can access it.

AI/LLMs

US disrupts botnet operated by Chinese state-sponsored hacking group

The botnet that the government disrupted consisted of several hundred SOHO, or small office and home office, routers installed in the U.S. Most of the routers were made by Cisco Systems Inc. and Netgear Inc. The devices could be compromised because they had reached end-of-life status, meaning they no longer receive security patches.

Security

Cognizant introduces Flowsource, a new generative AI platform for software engineering

In one example, teams can self-service with templates to provision code and environments, automate testing and documentation, leverage enterprise knowledge bases to drive code and component reuse, and speed coding processes with trained copilots.

AI

Neurelo launches with $5M in funding to simplify database connectivity headaches

Neurelo helps to automate the creation of these customized APIs, based on the underlying data model, for almost any kind of application, be it a game or e-commerce platform or something else. It automatically creates the most appropriate API to sit between the database and the app’s programming interface. In addition, Neurelo also provides visibility into how its custom APIs work, as opposed to presenting it as a black box

Data Management

Pathlight rebrands as Echo AI and debuts new marketing automation features

The first addition is called Conversation Actions. According to the company, it detects cases when a customer expresses interest in buying a certain product during a call. The feature can then send that customer a personalized sales offer through a third-party marketing automation service.

Marketing Tech

The New York Times is building a team to explore AI in the newsroom

Seward’s post said the Times plans to hire a machine learning engineer, a software engineer, a designer, and a couple of editors to round out the AI newsroom initiative. So far, the Times has posted job listings for an associate editorial director for AI initiatives and a senior design editor.

GenAI

Synthesia launches LLM-powered assistant to turn any text file or link into AI video

Available starting today for paying customers, the AI video assistant builds on Synthesia’s existing offerings and can work with any document or web link, making it easier for enterprise teams to create videos for internal and external use cases.

Automation & Productivity

Vade Enhances Spear-Phishing Detection Using Generative AI for Next-Generation Threats

The new method trains Vade's spear-phishing algorithms on a unique combination of traditional and artificially generated spear-phishing emails. Vade has confirmed that the enhancement increases the confidence of detection across seven spear phishing classifiers, or categories. These range from scams involving W2 fraud, payroll fraud, banking fraud, and more.

Security

Mistral CEO confirms ‘leak’ of new open source AI model nearing GPT-4 performance

The HuggingFace entry, which is still up at the time of this article’s posting, noted that new LLM’s “Prompt format,” how users interact with it, was the same as Mistral, the well-funded open source Parisian AI company behind Mixtral 8x7b, viewed by many to be the top performing open source LLM presently available, a fine-tuned and retrained version of Meta’s Llama 2.

AI/Security

Protect AI acquires Laiyer AI to strengthen large language model security

According to Laiyer, LLM Guard provides a threefold reduction in CPU inference latency, enabling the use of cost-effective CPU instances instead of expensive GPUs without compromising accuracy. The code is open-source and has decent adoption, with Laiyer AI seeing more than 13,000 library downloads and 2.5 million downloads of its models on Hugging Face in just 30 days.

AI/LLMs

Real-time analytics database provider aims to cut compute costs by 30%

Rockset, which counts among its customers JetBlue, Meta and Windward, says it sets itself apart with its search and analytics database supporting real-time indexing and SQL on vector embeddings as well as JSON, text, time series and geospatial data.

Data & Analytics

Feds Reportedly Try to Disrupt 'Volt Typhoon' Attack Infrastructure

Microsoft has described Volt Typhoon as putting a strong emphasis on stealth by, for example, almost exclusively using legitimate tools, living-off-the-land techniques, and hands-on keyboard activity in its attacks. The group also has often tried to blend its malicious presence into normal network activity by using compromised small office and home office (SOHO) network devices to route its traffic.

Security

Cisco, Hitachi deliver managed hybrid cloud services

The joint offering, Hitachi EverFlex with Cisco Powered Hybrid Cloud, includes a range of converged infrastructure services that meld compute, networking and software technologies from Cisco and storage capabilities from Hitachi. The services are customizable and feature consumption-based pricing.

Cloud

House lawmakers release package of bills targeting AI use in robocalls

“My bill restricts any telemarketer from using an AI bot that sounds like a human without first telling you that it is AI, and it holds telemarketers accountable for using AI to break the law,”

AI Ethics

Incognia raises $31M for expansion of digital identity solutions

Incognia’s technology includes device tamper detection with advanced location spoofing prevention, tamper-proof location verification for user identification and phishing-resistant account security. Used individually or together, the company said, the features drive results such as an 80% reduction in account takeovers, a 51% reduction in fake account creation and an 84% reduction in new user abandonment.

Security

BackBox bolsters network automation platform with zero-trust tools

BackBox defined six pillars of ZTNO: access management, audit and control, device configuration onboarding, vulnerability management onboarding, continuous assessment, and reporting and visibility. For each pillar, BackBox provides intelligence around permissions as well as automated actions to ensure security is addressed across network management.

Network Management

Dynatrace expands security capabilities with acquisition of Runecast

Dynatrace intends to add Runecast’s technology to its platform to enhance its existing contextual security protection and analytics with Runecast security posture management. Doing so, it said, will enable customers to address the risks of misconfigurations and compliance violations in hybrid and multicloud ecosystems proactively, based on AI-driven, automated, real-time vulnerability assessments.

Security

Juniper Networks Announces AI-Native Networking Platform

ThoughtSpot’s generative AI assistant gets more personal

The “human-in-the-loop” feedback control in ThoughtSpot Sage includes a patent-pending technology that enables human operators to customize and improve query prompts by providing associations between business terms and the data model. Customers can view and edit all queries, as well as user-generated feedback to deliver more accurate results.

Automation & Productivity

Kentik boosts observability platform with genAI

“The first building block of Kentik AI is about enabling customers and users to basically harness the power of their data without having to understand all the details of how to query it properly,” Pfister says. “This is a conversational user experience for the process of troubleshooting and network analysis

Network Management

OpenAI introduces a new customized GPT feature

Users will access the standard ChatGPT interface from where they can use the “@” symbol and see a popup where there will be a list of custom GPTs. There might be a GPT that helps with coding, or offers health advice, or specializes in generating images.

ChatGPT

Exclusive: Metal unveils new AI assistant for financial services and private equity funds

Analysts can feed whatever data they’d like into Metal’s platform about a company, and it will securely store and analyze it on demand in the form of a knowledgable and savvy chatbot, one whose hallucinations are controlled through retrieval augmented generation (RAG) techniques and citations to the underlying data.

FinTech

Check Point debuts AI copilot to streamline and automate cybersecurity management

The Infinity AI Copilot was trained on Check Point’s 30 years of accumulated cybersecurity intelligence. Leveraging genAI, the tool is designed to offer functions both as an administrative aid and an analytical resource, while automating complex security tasks and providing proactive solutions to security threats.

Security

Expereo Launches Enhanced Internet, the World’s First AI-driven & Fully Internet-Based Application Performance Solution

Expereo’s proprietary AI software does this by combining AI with Machine-Learning to intelligently and proactively route network traffic over the best possible path. For customers, the knowledge extends to predictive routes for specific situation by learning the most common traffic paths for their applications and therefore being ready to predict the path before the traffic is sent.

Automation & Productivity

OCLC Linked Data Services Transform Metadata Management For Enhanced Knowledge Connectivity

“Successful incorporation of linked data into widespread library practice will require a stable and scalable infrastructure. With WorldCat as the foundation, we can better translate today’s data formats into linked data and integrate that linked data into the workflows of thousands of libraries around the world.”

Data Management

Extreme Networks goes deep on the cloud and subscriptions

“This is a Wi-Fi 7 AP, 6 Ghz capable,” he said. “It’s cloud-managed and leverages our AIOps capability with Copilot. This is an opportunity for us to migrate the installed base — whether it’s an Extreme installed base or a non-Extreme wireless install base over to 6 gigahertz, less so for folks who have already shifted to Wi-Fi 6E, but more for those still on Wi-Fi 5.”

Network Management

WEKA Partners With NexGen Cloud to Democratize AI

Built on the latest state-of-the-art GPU hardware from NVIDIA, NexGen Cloud’s AI Supercloud service will provide an affordable, on-demand, compute-intensive solution for enterprises, research organizations, and governments innovating at the intersection of cloud and AI. The company selected the WEKA Data Platform to provide the critical software infrastructure required to increase the performance and efficiency of the new accelerated compute service offering.

Cloud

Zilliz Advances Vector Database Tech with Latest Zilliz Cloud Release

As a fully managed vector database, leveraging the cloud-native open-source Milvus vector database, Zilliz Cloud now redefines the essence of speed, performance, and developer satisfaction. This update surpasses previous benchmarks and delivers improved data operations, increased value, and an even more streamlined experience for developers crafting their next-generation AI.

Data Management

Varonis Announces Universal Data Classification Support for Databases

This new universal database connector lets Varonis rapidly integrate with virtually any modern DBMS, allowing customers to use Varonis’ vast library of classifiers and scalable architecture to centralize data classification efforts in a single, unified platform.

Data Management

Atropos Health partners with Google Cloud to rapidly generate insights from healthcare data using AI

In short, the integration will help health systems and pharmaceutical companies generate insights from their data almost instantly. While other healthcare AI solutions can take months to produce actionable insights, Atropos claims its new generative AI application called ChatRWD will provide answers in minutes using natural language queries.

AI/Healthcare

General Assembly Launches Suite of Upskilling Programs to Prepare Businesses for an AI-Driven Economy

Applied Generative AI, designed specifically for non-technical employees, will equip professionals across a range of specialities (including product managers, analysts, and marketers) to become more productive by leveraging AI in real-world business scenarios like accessing data and drafting prompts.

AI/Training

Codeium nabs $65M for developer AI toolkit

MIT grads Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen saw these challenges first-hand and decided to address them with the launch of Codeium, a security-focused LLM toolkit that provides intelligent code suggestions in the context of the codebase. This gives developers personalized generations to accelerate every task they do in their development workflow.

AI/Coding

HYCU offers generative AI SaaS app protection builder bot

The Claude model has been trained with HYCU information and uses a SaaS app’s API to build a connector between it and HYCU such that HYCU can backup and restore customer data. This can cut development time from three weeks or so to a matter of hours.

AI/Data

ICANN Launches 10-Year, $200 Million Program to Expand and Protect Internet Ecosystem

ICANN expects to begin accepting grant applications on March 25, 2024. The application window will remain open until May 24, 2024. A complete list of eligibility criteria can be found at https://icann.org/grant-program.

Emerging Tech

Kore.ai rakes in $150M to build generative AI tools for global brands

Kore.ai targets enterprise customers and global brands in need of AI tools such as chatbots and workflow tools . It offers an enterprise-grade no-code platform that allows companies of all sizes that it says delivers business interactions with AI safely and responsibly within budget. These AI-driven experiences can be anything from conversational chatbots to generative AI applications such as product suggesters or virtual assistants.

GenAI

Databricks acquires team behind natural language data notebook Einblick

Basically, a user can ask Einblick’s AI assistant, Einblick Prompt, a question — or provide it with an instruction, say “plot a heat map of log ratings count vs. log views count,” and it will automatically figure out the best way to do that using all the relevant data the enterprise has provided to it.

AI/Data

LastPass is First Password Manager to Achieve FIDO2 Server Certification

“By eliminating the requirement for a knowledge-based credential in favor of phishing-resistant FIDO2 authenticators, LastPass has taken an important step to provide simpler and more secure access to LastPass vaults – accelerating their customers’ journey towards a password-independent future.”

Security

GenAI is moving to your smartphone, PC and car — here’s why

The answer, according to Gold and others, is to put genAI processing on edge devices. That's why, over the next several years, silicon makers are turning their attention to PCs, tablets, smartphones, even cars, which will allow them to essentially offload processing from data centers — giving their genAI app makers a free ride as the user pays for the hardware and network connectivity.

GenAI

AI poisoning tool Nightshade received 250,000 downloads in 5 days: ‘beyond anything we imagined’

It’s a strong start for the free tool, and shows a robust appetite among some artists to protect their work from being used to train AI without consent. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are over 2.67 million artists in the U.S. alone, but Zhao told VentureBeat that the users of Nightshade are likely even broader.

AI Ethics

Arrcus says it can cut cloud egress fees by up to 40%

It added that ECC dynamically and intelligently routes traffic to destinations with the lowest egress costs and can be used across all dedicated or shared underlay connections in hybrid, colocation and public cloud environments. The service works with direct, colocation and internet connections.

Cloud

Using AI-powered Solutions, EY Offers Advanced Data Discovery and Compliance Services

“Legal tech has arrived at a time when eDiscovery is being disrupted to drive more valuable business insights. This new wave of legal tech streamlines the human-centric process to seamlessly integrate a machine-driven approach, from data collection to focused review. Not only is there substantial opportunity to automate eDiscovery routines, but we’ll soon expect that there will be a baseline requirement across the industry.”

Data Management

Extreme Networks extends zero trust with new cloud-managed switches and Wi-Fi 7 access points

Extreme is also growing its Switch lineup with the new 4000 series of cloud-managed switches. This new line aims to accelerate deployment by eliminating most manual configuration steps. Key capabilities of the 4000 series switches include instant stacking to automatically set up multiple switches at once, instant port configuration, and instant secure port integration with ExtremeCloud Universal ZTNA (zero trust network access).

Network Management

Meta releases more powerful Code Llama 70B model for writing software

Meta said Code Llama 70B was trained on more than 500 billion tokens of code and related data, which means it is far more capable and robust than earlier iterations of the model. It also benefits from having a larger context window of 100,000 tokens, enabling it to generate more complex code.

DevOps

GuidePoint Security Announces Portfolio of Data Security Governance Services

Once the right strategy is determined with the customer, GuidePoint Security consultants will review program requirements, assess current policies and controls, perform gap analysis, design and develop/enhance the program, recommend and implement supporting technologies, and create operational processes and metrics.

Data Management

Yelp adds AI summaries, budgeting tools in push to aid businesses

In the blog post, Saldanha wrote that Yelp is introducing AI-powered summaries for restaurant, food and nightlife businesses. The feature, as the name suggests, taps the power of large language models to provide end-consumers with a crisp summary of what they can expect from a business.

Marketing Tech

The innovative integration of Able CDP With Calendly will improve sales and customer journey tracking

Able CDP’s integration supports embedded Calendly forms, seamlessly associating a visitor’s contact information with their initial website interactions and campaign sources. This comprehensive tracking builds a complete customer journey, improving attribution accuracy for future customer revenue, regardless of whether the purchase conversion happens online or later in a CRM or another back-office system.

Marketing Tech

Blackbird.AI Unveils RAV3N Risk LLM, Elevating Fight Against Misinformation

Enabling the Narrative Feed module significantly elevates customer capabilities to discover emergent, harmful narratives as they gain online momentum. This innovative multilingual AI-driven technology analyzes various data sources, including social media, dark web, memes, news media and other web content

AI Ethics

2024 may be the year AI learns in the palm of your hand

Recent work by Apple engineers suggests the company is looking to bring larger neural networks, the "generative" kind represented by OpenAI's ChatGPT, to run locally on the iPhone.

AI

Industry’s First AI-Native Networking Platform with Lower Operational Costs Developed by Juniper Networks

Trained on seven years of insights and data science development, Juniper’s AI-Native Networking Platform was designed from the ground up to assure that every connection is reliable, measurable and secure for every device, user, application and asset.

Network Management

Arc Search combines browser, search engine, and AI into something new and different

Basically, instead of returning a bunch of search queries about the Chiefs game, Arc Search built me a webpage about it. And somewhere in there is The Browser Company’s big idea about the future of web browsers — that a browser, a search engine, an AI chatbot, and a website aren’t different things. They’re all just parts of an internet information finder, and they might as well exist inside the same app.

Automation & Productivity

TextQL Raises $4.1 Million in Funding to Use AI to Automate the Data Science Lifecycle

“We’re excited about the work that TextQL is doing to help non-technical workers across various industries and organizations access the critical data they need to make informed business decisions, and we see TextQL as the solution to free data analysts from the monotony of pulling data requests with their virtual data analyst.”

Data & Analytics

Casepoint Launches End-to-End FOIA Management Solution

With the release of Casepoint FOIA, Casepoint combines FOIA workflow tracking and management, a client portal, and payment integration with the power of its AI-powered eDiscovery platform — eliminating the need for either a limited-capability legacy FOIA solution or multiple solutions.

Records Management

US-based cloud companies may need to reveal client details

“With the new proposal, it is trying to pre-empt the usage of cloud services by disclosing the transactions, including the details of client and IP addresses for AI model training services and potentially restricting access to persons that might use it in a manner not in alignment with directives from US government,” said Akshara Bassi, senior analyst at Counterpoint Research.

AI Ethics

SingleStore adds indexed vector search to Pro Max release for faster AI work

“This isn’t just a product update, it’s a quantum leap … SingleStore is offering truly transformative capabilities in a single platform for customers to build all kinds of real-time applications, AI or otherwise.”

AI/Data

Zoom meetings are about to get weirder thanks to the Vision Pro

Zoom’s Vision Pro app will launch alongside Apple’s new headset on February 2nd and let wearers use its “persona” (a digital avatar based on their face scans) during video calls. Whoever they’re calling will see their facial expressions and hand movements as if they’re not wearing a headset, much like Apple’s FaceTime app for the Vision Pro.

Automation & Productivity

Netskope targets the midmarket with single-vendor SASE product

The move by Netskope comes in a week packed with SASE news: Versa Networks’ announced a unified SASE gateway designed to securely increase performance, Cato Networks unveiled a SASE-based XDR offering and Zscaler moved into the single-vendor market with SD-WAN product.

Security

PayPal and Venmo Unveil Six New Innovations to Revolutionize Commerce

To help, PayPal is introducing Fastlane by PayPal, a new one-click guest checkout experience that merchants using PayPal’s platform will be able to offer their shoppers, allowing them to make a fast and painless purchase. Customers simply save their information with Fastlane to check out in as little as one tap. No username or password to remember, no personal information to update, and no need to share a credit card with businesses all over the web.

e-commerce

ChatGPT Privacy Concerns: Italian watchdog finds OpenAI’s ChatGPT in violation of privacy regulations

In a recent statement, Garante disclosed the completion of its investigation, revealing that there are indications of one or more potential data privacy violations. The authority granted Microsoft-backed OpenAI a 30-day window to present defense arguments. It also noted that the investigation would consider the findings of a European task force composed of national privacy watchdogs, Reuters reported.

Data Privacy

Anthropic confirms it suffered a data leak

The company says that on Monday, January 22nd, it became aware that a contractor inadvertently sent a file containing non-sensitive customer information to a third party. The file detailed a “subset” of customer names, as well as open credit balances as of the end of 2023.

Data Privacy

New open source AI coding tool surpasses its inspiration: Google DeepMind’s AlphaCode

“We are one step closer to having AI generate code better than humans!” posted Santiago Valdarrama,. “The results put AlphaCodium as the best approach to generate code we’ve seen. It beats DeepMind’s AlphaCode and their new AlphaCode2 without needing to fine-tune a model!”

AI Coding

Meta to build $800 million, AI-first data center in Indiana

Its hardware will be a mix of custom, in-house silicon and GPUs, and feature high-density racks, along with colocation of servers with the network (servers and networking equipment will share the same physical infrastructure).

AI/Data

A New Horizon in Web3 Communication: Introducing Dmail

In a landscape brimming with potential yet demanding innovation, Dmail emerges as a groundbreaking Web3 communication protocol. It distinguishes itself through seamless integration with a wide array of networks, including Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, and Starknet, ensuring its presence is pervasive and its services, universally accessible.

Web3

Optable Announces Early Access Program for Its Privacy Sandbox Activation

Optable, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) data management & collaboration platform designed for the advertising ecosystem, announced the commencement of its Early Access Program for its Privacy Sandbox activation capabilities. This marks an unprecedented step for a company synonymous with data collaboration, as it boldly integrates with the new Google API, becoming the go-to “easy button” for privacy-safe advertising.

Data Privacy

Cisco looks to ease management of software agents

Cisco AppDynamics has rolled out a new management product that aims to take the pressure off operations teams tasked with maintaining a growing raft of application and infrastructure agents. Smart Agent for Cisco AppDynamics can help customers spot and update out-of-date software agents as well as quickly on-board and manage new agents through a centralized user interface, Cisco stated

IT Management

10 Decentralized Applications Integrate Sui’s Groundbreaking “zkLogin” Google Authentication

Sui, the rapidly ascending Layer-1 blockchain created by the leaders of Facebook’s Diem project, today announced that over 10 decentralized applications (dApps) in the Sui ecosystem have integrated zkLogin, the first-of-its-kind primitive that makes Web3 login as simple as signing in with familiar web credentials such as Google or Twitch.

Blockchain

LucidLink delivers Strawberries for creatives

The deal involves the the integration of Projective’s post-production collaboration platform, Strawberry, with LucidLink’s remote connectivity software, to provide, they say, the best of both worlds: the structure, security, and versatility of Strawberry with the scale and global accessibility of LucidLink, enabling enterprise-level post-production and accelerating time-to-delivery.

Automation & Productivity

HPE and Microsoft breached by the same Russian-linked hacking group

Based on its investigation with the assistance of external cybersecurity experts, the breach involved the exfiltration of data from “a small percentage of HPE mailboxes”, targeting individuals in its cybersecurity, go-to-market, business segments and other functions, beginning in May 2023.

Security

TeamViewer partners with AR headset maker Almer for industrial remote support

Almer’s Arc headset mounts on a user’s head, which makes it ideal for keeping hands free, following the worker’s line of sight and staying out of the way. The AR headset maker is also announcing the launch of Arc 2, a new device that features a 25-megapixel camera with beamforming microphones and built-in speakers so that workers can hear and be heard even in loud industrial environments. The company said that it will last up to eight hours.

Automation & Productivity

Atsign Defuses Terrapin Threat With SSH No Ports: Secure Connections, Untouched

Terrapin exploits a previously unknown weakness in OpenSSH, the ubiquitous secure shell protocol. By manipulating connection requests, malicious actors can gain unauthorized server access, even behind traditional firewall defenses. This alarming vulnerability puts an estimated 11 million servers and countless organizations at risk, potentially exposing sensitive data and disrupting operations

Security

OpenAI launches new generation of embedding models and other API updates

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research company, announced on Thursday a new generation of embedding models, which can convert text into a numerical form that can be used for various machine learning tasks. The company also introduced new versions of its GPT-4 Turbo and moderation models, new API usage management tools, and lower pricing on its GPT-3.5 Turbo model.

AI

iPhone Apps Secretly Harvest Data When They Send You Notifications, Researchers Find

iPhone apps including Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and X/Twitter are skirting Apple’s privacy rules to collect user data through notifications, according to tests by security researchers at Mysk Inc., an app development company. Users sometimes close apps to stop them from collecting data in the background, but this technique gets around that protection

Data Privacy

Google Cloud and Hugging Face Announce Strategic Partnership

With this partnership, Google Cloud becomes a strategic cloud partner for Hugging Face, and a preferred destination for Hugging Face training and inference workloads. Developers will be able to easily utilize Google Cloud’s AI-optimized infrastructure including compute, tensor processing units (TPUs), and graphics processing units (GPUs) to train and serve open models and build new generative AI applications.

AI/DevOps

AWS users waste billions by forgoing discount plans, report says

ProsperOps used “effective savings rate,” or the ratio of cloud savings generated divided by the amount an organization would pay a cloud provider without discounts, to measure spending effectiveness. The median ESR on cloud computing services across all organizations was 0%, meaning more than half don’t take advantage of any discounts at all.

Cloud

Microsoft launches Mesh, a virtual meeting platform on Teams

Mesh provides a series of pre-made spaces that companies can customize with everything from informational videos to logos — without needing to enter any code. The Mesh toolkit works through Unity, Microsoft's 2D and 3D development platform, to tailor the virtual world further. Basically, if there's a retreat an employer has always wanted to take everyone, they can create a version of it and invite everyone's avatars.

Automation & Productivity

Forward Networks boosts digital twin platform with generative AI

AI Assist works with Network Query Engine (NQE), tapping into the network device and cloud data in the Forward Enterprise digital twin platform to help streamline network operations and provide insights into network behavior. AI Assist can also generate natural language explanations for existing queries, helping IT teams to more quickly make sense of the search results.

Network Management

FTC Launches Inquiry into Generative AI Investments and Partnerships

The agency’s 6(b) inquiry will scrutinize corporate partnerships and investments with AI providers to build a better internal understanding of these relationships and their impact on the competitive landscape. The compulsory orders were sent to Alphabet, Inc., Amazon.com, Inc., Anthropic PBC, Microsoft Corp., and OpenAI, Inc.

Gen AI

8×8 Enhances Cloud Contact Center and Unified Communications Platform with AI-powered CX Innovations

The new innovations include AI-generated post-meeting smart summaries and action items, AI summarization beta for 8×8 Speech Analytics, additional integrations with key technology partners, rich omnichannel experiences across both 8×8 Contact Center and 8×8’s unified communications solution, and enhanced productivity and efficiency capabilities to improve customer and employee experiences.

Automation & Productivity

Esri Launches Maps.com, a Content Platform for Creators Demonstrating the Power of Maps

Featuring analysis and dynamic visualizations, videos, and 3D models, Maps.com explores topics such as climate change, the digital divide, and even the exploration of Mars. Intended as a way to bring the power of mapping to a wider audience, the website is approachable to non-professionals curious about cartography. But it is also valuable for academics and professionals seeking to access new and useful data resources or insightful real-world narratives.

Mapping

Tech positions take a tumble on Indeed’s best jobs ranking

Just one tech role, data engineer, landed in the top 10 at No. 10, thanks to an average yearly salary of $130,035. By comparison, technology commanded a half dozen roles in the company’s top 10 best jobs for 2023. Job posts for data engineers increased 2% year over year.

Tech Jobs

Another search breakthrough? You.com debuts AI that can answer multi-step questions

The new AI Modes — Smart, Genius, Create, and Research — released today can provide varying levels of depth and sourcing to any queries. This reduces the need for elaborate prompt engineering from the person searching.

AI/Search

New CherryLoader Malware Mimics CherryTree to Deploy PrivEsc Exploits

It's currently not known how the loader is distributed, but the attack chains examined by the cybersecurity firm show that CherryLoader ("cherrytree.exe") and its associated files ("NuxtSharp.Data”, Spof.Data," and "Juicy.Data") are contained within a RAR archive file ("Packed.rar") hosted on the IP address 141.11.187[.]70.

Security

Box snaps up enterprise content management startup Crooze

“I think a lot of content management systems have been held back by the fact that metadata is really critical for making them work,” Wacker said. “But the user experience behind tagging metadata on uploads – sorting through 30 different fields – has been really, really poor.”

Content Management

Typeface revs up gen AI content race with multimodal announcements

In a fiercely competitive landscape that includes startups like Jasper and Writer as well as Big Tech options from Google and Microsoft, the new AI content hub makes a range of text, image, audio, video capabilities generally available to brands and allows organizations to leverage AI models from OpenAI, Microsoft, Google Cloud, and other open-source platforms.

Gen AI

Vercara Adds Private Data Lake Feature to UltraDNS

DNS data can provide valuable insights into web traffic, cybersecurity threats, and user behavior. However, organizations often have challenges accessing and analyzing their DNS data, and the challenges become greater as businesses scale and grow. The UltraDNS Private Data Lake allows businesses to easily perform deep analysis of their DNS data at scale, all while maintaining security and compliance standards.

Data & Analytics

MLCommons aims to become the gold standard for measuring AI performance on PCs

MLCommons is best known for its cloud computing-based standards, with most of its benchmarks designed to test the performance of processors such as Nvidia Corp.’s graphics processing units and Intel Corp’s rival silicon. It has become the industry gold standard for AI data center benchmarks. Now it wants to achieve the same level of respect with client systems, so it can guide businesses’ and consumers’ purchases.

Automation & Productivity

LODEINFO Fileless Malware Evolves with Anti-Analysis and Remote Code Tricks

Attack chains commence with phishing emails bearing malicious Microsoft Word documents that, when opened, execute VBA macros to launch downloader shellcode capable of ultimately executing the LODEINFO implant.

Security

Ignitho Announces Partnership With H2O to Provide Industry First AI Capabilities

The partnership between Ignitho and H2O.ai will focus on delivering industry-first AI capabilities that solve the last mile of AI adoption and LLM challenges faced by enterprise organizations. Ignitho’s AI accelerators, powered by H2O.ai AI Cloud, will enable enterprises to reduce implementation times from months to as little as two weeks, fostering innovation and data-driven growth, ensuring AI becomes an integral part of an organization’s operations, culture, and digital transformation.

AI

BuyDRM Enables Secure Cloud Video Encoding with Google Cloud

BuyDRM announced its KeyOS Content Encryption Key API is integrated with Google Cloud’s Live Stream API allowing LIVE premium video content to output DRM protected streams. Google Cloud customers can easily connect to KeyOS to create encryption keys and pass those keys to the Google Cloud Live Stream API using Secret Manager. The integration is intended to streamline DRM deployment workflows for live content in the cloud.

Cloud

Enzoic and ThreatQuotient Partner to Protect Companies from Compromised Credentials

The ThreatQ Platform provides tools for contextualizing and prioritizing intelligence, enabling security teams to respond more effectively to potential threats. With the Enzoic integration, customers can now tap into the company’s vast, dynamically updated database of exposure incidents. The scanning happens automatically, with any exposures immediately presented in ThreatQ’s intuitive, graphical dashboard.

Security

Mitratech Launches New AI and Advanced Analytics Technologies, Celebrating Strong 2023 Growth and Portfolio Expansion

AI Text Summarization, which was recently released within Mitratech’s Workflow Automation Platform, TAP, is designed to streamline decision-making by providing automated, concise document summaries. Customers can condense hundreds of documents, articles, or regulation pages into a few paragraphs, a development that is already being met with positive customer feedback and demonstrating strong RO

Automation & Productivity

Allxon Collaborates with NVIDIA to Deploy Generative AI at the Industrial Edge

NVIDIA Metropolis Microservices for Jetson helps developers modernize their app stack, streamline development and deployment, and future-proof their apps with the ability to bring the latest Gen AI capabilities to any customer through simple API calls. Its application microservices include: video storage and management, pre-built Vision AI inference pipelines, system monitoring, and cloud connectivity.

Gen AI

Nomad Go raises $1.5M to power computer vision software that automatically counts inventory

Using an iPad or iPhone rather than relying on manual counts by employees using pencil and paper, Nomad Go’s Metashelf combines edge AI computer vision, spatial computing and augmented reality to scan inventory and get instantaneous counts of items.

Automation & Productivity

Deepfake deluge expected from AI image generation breakthrough (so long, LoRA?)

“The use of tools like InstantID for deepfakes raises significant concerns due to the ease of creation and consistency of output with no training or fine-tuning required,” he said. “InstantID’s ability to efficiently generate identity-preserving content can lead to the creation of highly realistic and convincing deep fakes with no GPU and little CPU resources required.”

AI Ethics

Amie is a beautiful, simple calendar app with really big dreams

What he’s building now, he says, is a combination of calendar, journal, and full-on productivity suite. Muller wants Amie to be a place you can go back to to remember your life, to know what was going on, what you were doing, what happened at any moment on any day. And he wants to help people plan and do everything in their lives, not just the meetings they have to go to.

Automation & Productivity

Google for Education receives new AI and accessibility features

Many of the feature additions Google debuted today will become available through Classroom. One new capability enables teachers to assign YouTube videos to students and create questions about those videos with the help of AI. Another upcoming feature will make it possible to turn data collected through Google Forms into so-called practice sets, AI-generated assignments that the search giant originally introduced in 2022.

EdTech

SnapLogic announces no-code generative AI application builder that any employee can use

Available now in preview through the SnapLabs early access program, GenAI Builder is said to be unique in that it’s compatible with legacy mainframe data, modern databases and application programming interfaces. That means it can be used to build conversational AI models and chatbots with enhanced knowledge to transform customer and employee experiences.

Gen AI

Black Kite Unveils Industry’s First Monthly Ransomware Dashboards

In December alone, the research team monitored over 360 victims. The most common indicators of compromise were MX and DNS misconfigurations that allowed for spoofing and phishing attacks (266) and in-use services and products with vulnerabilities of high exploitability (233). Additionally, 49% of victims had open RDP or SMB ports publicly visible. Research also revealed that although LockBit continues to dominate the landscape, an emerging ransomware group, WereWolves, entered the top three for the first time.

Security

Exclusive: Voltron Data acquires Claypot to unlock real-time AI with modular data systems

The acquisition will bring Claypot’s entire team under Voltron’s umbrella, enabling the latter to expand its offering to include real-time analytics. This will give enterprises a way to unlock value from the freshest data and ultimately help with use cases like fraud detection and personalization.

AI/Data

New solution from Venafi reduces the attack surface and hardens enterprise security

The end-to-end solution allows security teams and administrators to maintain their code signing trust chain across all environments – from modern, cloud-native environments such as Kubernetes to Windows, Linux, Apple and Android environments. The solution gives teams strict control over code use and execution by verifying that software originates from an approved source and has not been altered.

Security

Nvidia, Equinix expedite global AI deployment

The foundation of Equinix Private AI with Nvidia DGX is the Nvidia DGX SuperPOD – a purpose-built architecture to create, train and run “the most common Enterprise workload,” large language models (LLMs), among others. When combined with Nvidia’s AI Enterprise software stack, “that’s a complete solution,” Boyle said. “Just add data, and get AI models.”

AI

Prompt Security raises $5M to ensure LLMs don’t give up corporate secrets

Prompt Security co-founder and Chief Executive Itamar Golan says his company is focused on countering two of the biggest threats associated with generative AI prompts, including shadow AI and data leakage, and jailbreaks and prompt injection attacks. He explained that the first relates to the danger of generative AI tools being used without the knowledge of corporate security teams, which creates opportunities for data exfiltration and the exposure of critical company assets and intellectual property.

AI/LLMs

Protect AI rolls out Guardian for management of machine learning model security

The service is based on ModelScan, an open-source tool from Protect AI that scans machine learning models to determine if they contain unsafe code. The company says Guardian brings together the best of Protect AI’s open-source offering to enable enterprise-level enforcement and management of model security. The service also extends coverage with proprietary scanning capabilities.

AI Security

Versa Networks’ unified SASE gateway ensures security, increases network performance

Versa’s new gateways combine high-performance hardware with the company’s Versa Operating System (VOS) software to hit the 100 Gbps throughput milestone. According to the company, the increased throughput enables various compute-intensive networking and security capabilities like SD-WAN, firewall and NGFW to be run together without compromising user experience or network performance.

Network Management

data.world Integrates with Snowflake Data Quality Metrics to Bolster Data Trust

Among the first data catalogs to support Snowflake’s data quality metrics, data.world enables customers to measure data hygiene, strengthen trust in data-driven insights and decisions, and help make data AI-ready

Data & Analytics

Federal judge rules against Meta in data scraping case

Meta claims Bright Data developed and used automation software to scrap users' profile information, followers and posts from Facebook and Instagram. Bright Data then sold the scraped data and developed and sold tools to help others scrap data and avoid detection.

Data Privcy

New Relic brings business context to its observability platform

The company introduced New Relic Pathpoint as an additional tool for its cloud-based observability platform, which monitors applications and services in real time to provide insights into software, hardware, and cloud performance. Pathpoint aims to bridge the gap between business and technical teams by providing business-centric analysis of how technology components are performing.

Cloud

Fixing AI made easy: RagaAI emerges from stealth with automated testing solution

Once the platform identifies a problem, it helps users triage the issue to its root cause. This can be as varied as bias in the training data, poor labeling, data drift, poor hyperparameter optimization while training or a lack of model robustness to adversarial attacks. Then, as the last step, it provides actionable recommendations to fix the issue, like helping teams remove poorly labeled data points in one click or suggesting retraining the model to fix issues with data and concept drift.

AI/Testing

Equinix Announces Fully Managed Service for NVIDIA DGX AI Supercomputing

Early access companies using the service include leaders in biopharma, financial services, software, automotive and retail, which are building AI Centers of Excellence to provide a strategic foundation for a broad range of rapidly developing LLM use cases.

AI

Nozomi Networks debuts Guardian Air sensor to boost wireless security in operational technology and IoT

Nozomi Networks’ new Guardian Air provides visibility into wirelessly enabled devices, which until now were primarily detected only once connected to the wired network. The sensor monitors prominent wireless frequencies, not just Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, to provide security teams with immediate visibility of connected sensors, devices, laptops and cell phones.

Security

Stack Identity Expands Identity Access Risk Management Platform with Launch of Identity Threat Detection Response Capabilities

Stack Identity’s platform is powered by the industry’s first identity security data lake, which consolidates, correlates and contextualizes identity access risks and vulnerabilities across cloud and data estates. This allows enterprise customers to proactively assess, remediate and govern their identity and access risks, staunchly preventing unauthorized access, policy violations, incidents and data breaches.

Security

Qlik Launches AI Council to Responsibly Accelerate Enterprise Adoption of AI

Members of the Council will work within Qlik to guide the company’s R&D direction, inform its product roadmap and ensure its customers’ use of Qlik’s AI is built with responsibility and ethics front of mind. The Council will also educate Qlik leaders and employees on how to harness the full potential of AI, while providing insights into the priorities of business leaders tasked with demonstrating value from AI investment.

AI/Data

Grokking Groq’s Groqness

Startup Groq has developed an machine learning processor that it claims blows GPUs away in large language model workloads – 10x faster than an Nvidia GPU at 10 percent of the cost, and needing a tenth of the electricity.

Machine Learning

Barco Launches the ClickShare Bar, the Premium All-In-One Video Bar for Wireless Conferencing

Barco, a global leader in meeting room technology, launches the ClickShare Bar, an innovative video bar that enables wireless conferencing in small to medium-sized meeting rooms. This video bar boosts the renowned ClickShare experience, with high-quality audio and video capabilities smartly integrated into one powerful device. The ClickShare Bar brings ease of installation, a reduced total cost of ownership and unparalleled flexibility.

Automation & Productivity

pgEdge Redefines Distributed PostgreSQL with the Launch of pgEdge Cloud Developer Edition

Google enhances Chrome and Ads with new AI features to streamline user experiences

The final new Chrome feature is an AI feature that helps users “write with more confidence on the web.” Not available until Chrome’s next release, the feature, when available, will allow users to right-click a text box or field on any site and select “Help me write.”

Automation & Productivity

Kasseika Ransomware Using BYOVD Trick to Disarms Security Pre-Encryption

The threat actors have been observed utilizing Microsoft's Sysinternals PsExec command-line utility to execute a malicious batch script, which checks for the existence of a process named "Martini.exe," and if found, terminates it ensure there is only one instance of the process running the machine.

Security

Warning As 26 Billion Records Leak: Dropbox, LinkedIn, Twitter Named

The research team thinks that the 26 billion record database, found on an open storage instance, will likely have been compiled by a malicious actor or data broker. “Threat actors could leverage the aggregated data for a wide range of attacks, including identity theft, sophisticated phishing schemes, targeted cyberattacks, and unauthorized access to personal and sensitive accounts,” they say.

Security

Evisort Revolutionizes Use of AI for Contracts with Document X-Ray

Evisort, the leader in artificial intelligence (AI) for contract lifecycle management (CLM) and analysis, announced the release of Document X-Ray to provide organizations unprecedented visibility into their agreements. While most contract AI technology offers only a limited set of data extractions, Document X-Ray lets organizations customize their AI journey on an unlimited basis with responsible, generative AI. The result is flexible, in-depth, user-driven contract analysis optimized for individual enterprises of any size and industry.

AI/Contract Management

AI monitoring startup Arthur adds support for AI-powered recommendation systems

Arthur, which is focused on monitoring AI models and improving their performance, said it’s introducing the Recommender System Support tool in Arthur Scope, which is a service designed to detect and react to data drift in such systems. With its availability, Arthur says, it can ensure the continued relevance, accuracy and effectiveness of AI-powered recommendations. In other words, it’s a proactive monitoring tool that helps to maintain the integrity and performance of AI recommenders.

AI/Marketing Tech

Kin.art launches to defend artists’ entire portfolios from AI scraping

“You can think of Kin.art as the first line of defense for your artwork,” Ronsmans De Vry said in a press release emailed to VentureBeat ahead of the launch. “While other tools such as Nightshade and Glaze try to mitigate the damage from your artwork already being included in a dataset, Kin.art prevents it from happening to begin with.”

AI Ethics

New Diffblue Integration Delivers Enterprise-grade Fully Autonomous AI Java Unit Testing for Easy Continuous Integration

“We make automating Java unit test creation friction-free for development teams who use GitLab for continuous integration to help them lower the risk and cost of modernizing legacy code, break them down into microservices, and refactor them to run on public clouds. Now it’s easy for customers to adopt GitLab code scanning recommendations and deliver higher quality software faster.”

AI/DevOps

AWS expands Marketplace to include third-party services

ISVs, consulting partners and channel partners now can resell implementation, support and other managed services on AWS Marketplace, making the portal a one-stop-shop for all things cloud.

Vendor Management

New partnership between Securiti and Lacework targets improved cloud data protection

By contextualizing Lacework security findings based on the data sensitivity determined by the Securiti Data Command Center, the companies say, enterprises gain more comprehensive risk prioritization. The combination of Securiti’s intelligent data classification and Lacework’s cloud attack path analysis is claimed to unlock the ability to understand the patterns and associated risks between modern apps and data stores.

Cloud/Data

Tealium Unveils New Solutions That Deliver In-The-Moment Experiences and Faster AI Outcomes

“Many AI initiatives are moving slowly because teams cannot access consented and accurate data for model training. Our new solutions start with consented data to deliver in-the-moment experiences and inform AI and machine learning models – so it can be acted on.”

AI/Data

Wasabi acquires AI-powered video indexing technology from GrayMeta

Wasabi sells storage to business customers on a flat rate pricing plan at a significant discount to the pricing of the major cloud infrastructure providers. It said the new offering would enable organizations with large amounts of video to index it quickly and generate metadata that enables specific media segments to be retrieved based on people, places, events, emotions, logos, landmarks, background audio, and other elements

Content Management

New Test Suite for Google Cloud to Help Ensure Performance and Uptime for Cloud-Based Applications

This suite is specifically developed to streamline the configuration and management of cloud service tests, thereby providing immediate benefits in operational performance and user experience. This suite is specifically developed to streamline the configuration and management of cloud service tests, thereby providing immediate benefits in operational performance and user experience.

Cloud

'Seamless' voice-to-text feature for Android will let you turn speech into text instantly

The process could soon be smoother though, because in the latest beta of Gboard, 13.8, a new feature called "Seamless voice typing" is detailed. The feature isn't live yet, but it will apparently start voice typing as soon as the keyboard is shown -- no tapping the microphone required.

Automation & Productivity

Varonis Accelerates Secure Adoption of Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365

The security model for Copilot for Microsoft 365 relies on a user’s existing Microsoft 365 permissions to determine which files, emails, chats, notes, etc. can be used to generate AI responses. These information protection capabilities give you the tools to know your data, protect your data, and prevent data loss.

Content Management

Open-source vector database Qdrant raises $28M

Zayarni said that Qdrant sets itself apart from competitors by creating a highly performant and scalable vector database product on Rust, the systems programming language, for memory safety and scale. The company also deployed a custom filtering algorithm that allows for rapid vector search with very low latency across billions of vectors.

Data Management

Oracle debuts cloud generative AI service to help enterprises deploy and fine-tune language models

The new OCI Generative AI service is a fully managed and cloud-hosted offering that enables enterprises to leverage powerful large language models such as Meta Platform’s open-source Llama 2 and Cohere Inc.’s proprietary algorithms, and integrate them with existing systems. In doing so, companies should be able to automate many of the manual business processes currently performed by humans.

Gen AI

OctaiPipe Raises £3.5 Million to Deliver Secure Edge AI and lessen Cloud dependency for Critical Systems

In the UK’s energy sector alone, the UK government’s digitisation strategy estimates AI, if fully harnessed, could reduce energy system costs by up to £70 billion by 2050. However, due to security concerns regarding data processing in the Cloud and rising Cloud AI costs, the utilisation of connected devices and AI in Critical Infrastructure has, until now, been limited.

AI/Cloud

Zscaler enhances network security with zero-trust architecture in latest release

The company’s approach to zero trust involves connecting every user, location and cloud through the Zero Trust Exchange Platform, extending zero trust beyond users to protect device and server traffic at branches. Zscaler also employs its adaptive artificial intelligence engine to continuously assess risk for users, devices, destinations and content, incorporating telemetry from 500 trillion daily signals and third-party risk intelligence.

Security

Cato Networks extends SASE platform with XDR, EPP capabilities

“We came up with this concept that at the time didn’t have a name, which is embedding network security in the cloud network and providing simplicity and guardrails. Now we are simplifying and reducing the cost of running security while providing the agility to address fast-moving business requirements.”

Security

Cisco sees headway in quantum networking, but advances are slow

While core quantum networking technologies such as repeaters and photonics are being developed, it is security applications – specifically post-quantum cryptography (PQC) – that are likely to be the first real-world developments that come out of the lab, according to Liz Centoni, executive vice president, chief strategy officer and general manager of applications at Cisco. PQC, or quantum-safe cryptography, features complicated cryptographic algorithms that are expected to protect quantum computers from sophisticated attacks.

Network Management

Revyz Unveils New Data Management Tool for Confluence Cloud, Enhancing Data Security in Collaborative Workspaces

“Revyz Data Manager is a game-changer, providing us with the robust backup, restore, and analytics capabilities we need to safeguard our Confluence data and ensure uninterrupted access for our teams. It natively integrates with our existing Atlassian applications, making it a perfect fit for our agile workflow.”

Data Management

Backblaze expands enterprise backup service

The existing version of Backblaze Computer Backup has a starting cost of $9/month or $99/year and includes unlimited backups and one-year version history. The new version, Backblaze Computer Backup with Enterprise Control, adds advanced administration tools that large businesses need to protect workstations and meet cybersecurity requirements, the vendor says.

Data Management

Franz Inc. Introduces AllegroGraph Cloud: A Managed Service for Neuro-Symbolic AI Knowledge Graphs

AllegroGraph Cloud is built on the recently announced AllegroGraph v8, a groundbreaking Neuro-Symbolic AI Platform that incorporates Large Language Model (LLM) components directly into SPARQL along with vector generation and vector storage for a comprehensive AI Knowledge Graph solution

AI/Data

Ransomware Actor Uses TeamViewer to Gain Initial Access to Networks

Carvey says it is possible that the threat actor was able to purchase access from an initial access broker (IAB), and that the credentials and connection information may have been obtained from other endpoints through the use of infostealers, a keystroke logger, or some other means.

Security

Swimm Develops New Contextualized Coding Assistant to Enhance Developer Efficiency

/ask Swimm is an AI-powered coding assistant providing developers with a multilayered contextual understanding of code, enabling them to significantly boost productivity across the entire development lifecycle. The chat is dynamic and personalized to an organization’s specific codebase, documentation, user interactions and other 3rd party tools

AI/DevOps

3 technologies coming to generative AI’s aid in 2024

To combat these, three powerful new approaches have emerged, and they can offer a way to enhance reliability. While these approaches may differ in their emphasis, they share a fundamental concept: treating the LLM as a “closed box.” In other words, the focus is not necessarily on perfecting the LLM itself (though AI engineers continue to improve their models considerably) but on developing a fact-checking layer to support it

Gen AI

Cognyte Releases LUMINAR Cyber Threat Intelligence Offering with GenAI Capabilities

LUMINAR’s new GenAI capabilities bring significant added value to Cognyte customers by tackling and making quick work of resource-intensive tasks like aggregation, analysis and prioritization of alerts, investigation leads, indicators of malicious campaigns, and other cybersecurity inputs.

Security

AI voice startup ElevenLabs lands $80M round, launches marketplace of cloned voices

ElevenLabs, which has mastered the art of using machine learning for voice cloning and synthesis in different languages, said it plans to use the capital to advance its research and build on the products on offers. It also announced a bunch of new features, including a tool for dubbing full-length movies and a new marketplace where users will be able to sell their cloned voice for money.

AI/Voice

Seagate Introduces Mozaic 3+ Platform, Elevating Storage Capacity and Efficiency

The company launched the Mozaic 3+ hard drive platform—which incorporates Seagate’s trailblazing implementation of Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology. The launch heralds unparalleled areal densities of 3TB+ per platter—and a roadmap that will achieve 4TB+ and 5TB+ per platter in the coming years.

Data Storage

WiMi Developed an LSTM-based Data Analysis System

WiMi uses the LSTM algorithm (a machine learning algorithm) to predict cryptocurrency prices, which allows it to more accurately predict the price of Bitcoin. The LSTM algorithm is a recurrent neural network. The system uses a variety of data sources, including historical prices, transaction volumes, social media data, and more.

Data & Analytics

Broadcom moves roil VMware customer base

It took Broadcom 18 months to get all of the requisite approvals needed to finalize its $61 billion purchase of VMware. But once the deal was sealed in late November, CEO Hock Tan moved swiftly, announcing layoffs of thousands of employees, selloffs of parts of the business, and shakeups to licensing terms that could prove costly to customers.

Vendor Management

MicroEJ Wearable OS to Revolutionize App-Forward, Battery-Friendly Device Development

“By enhancing battery life, offering endless watch face options and supporting app ecosystems on any smartwatch, VEE Wear represents the disruptive technology the wearable industry has been looking for.”

Emerging Tech

Stability AI unveils smaller, more efficient 1.6B language model as part of ongoing innovation

The new compact yet powerful Stable LM model aims to lower barriers and enable more developers to participate in the generative AI ecosystem incorporating multilingual data in seven languages – English, Spanish, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Dutch. The model utilizes recent algorithmic advancements in language modeling to strike what Stability AI hopes is an optimal balance between speed and performance.

AI/LLM

OpenAI suspends startup that used GPT-4 model to impersonate presidential candidate Dean Phillips

Dean.Bot did offer a disclaimer. Before anyone could engage with it, website visitors were notified that all responses to their questions would be generated by a chatbot, and not Phillips himself. Dean.bot was developed by an Indian AI developer called Delphi AI Inc., which had been contracted to do so by the Super PAC.

AI Ethics

Meta will let EU users unlink their Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger info ahead of DMA

The changes mean that EU users will be able to use many of Meta’s services without their information being shared between them. People will be able to use Facebook Messenger as a stand-alone service without a Facebook account, for example, and if they’ve previously linked their Facebook and Instagram accounts they’ll be able to unlink them.

Social Media

Nightshade, the free tool that ‘poisons’ AI models, is now available for artists to use

Developed by computer scientists on the Glaze Project at the University of Chicago under Professor Ben Zhao, the tool essentially works by turning AI against AI. It makes use of the popular open-source machine learning framework PyTorch to identify what’s in a given image, then applies a tag that subtly alters the image at the pixel level so other AI programs see something totally different than what’s actually there.

AI Ethics

Microsoft Employee Emails Hacked by Russia-Linked 'Midnight Blizzard' Group, Company Says

The hacking group doesn't appear to have accessed customers' systems or Microsoft servers that run outward-facing products, the software giant said Friday in a blog post. Microsoft also has no evidence the group, named Midnight Blizzard, got into source code or artificial intelligence systems.

Security

AI startup Cohere in talks to raise between $500 million to $1 billion in new funding, sources

Cohere has strategically positioned itself as a neutral provider, offering enterprises the opportunity to utilize models that are not tied to specific cloud providers such as Microsoft. By providing this flexibility, Cohere aims to empower businesses to leverage the power of foundation models without being locked into any particular cloud ecosystem.

AI

Rackspace Technology Introduces AI Anywhere: Private Cloud Solution Harnessing the Power of AI/ML in a Secure

AI Anywhere leverages an AI software stack with the latest generation AI-optimized hardware and support services based on an organization’s AI strategy. AI Anywhere provides a secure, private AI landing zone for the most demanding workloads.

AI/ML

Arizona State University to use OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise, hoping to enhance learning

ASU announced the partnership today, saying that the agreement will give its students unrestricted access to ChatGPT Enterprise. The school told CNBC it plans to use the technology for teaching, research and to aid students in other ways. For instance, it will develop a personalized AI tutor for students that can provide assistance with specific courses, study topics and writing assignments.

ChatGPT & EDTech

Protect critical data underneath a SteelDome and inside an InfiniVault

The data, SteelDome says, is cloaked and virtually air-gapped. Malware detection is applied to incoming data, with virus and signature identification. SteelDome also claims it has a zero-day (no warning) capability but doesn’t say how this operates.

Data Management

Microsoft's AI-powered reading tutor lets students choose their own adventures - and it's free

Reading Coach gamifies reading, allowing users to unlock new story settings, characters, and badges. Students also can access an achievement page to see their progression and accumulated badges.

AI/EDTech

Experts Warn of macOS Backdoor Hidden in Pirated Versions of Popular Software

The backdoored disk image (DMG) files, which have been modified to establish communications with actor-controlled infrastructure, include legitimate software like Navicat Premium, UltraEdit, FinalShell, SecureCRT, and Microsoft Remote Desktop.

Security

Google’s new ASPIRE system teaches AI the value of saying ‘I don’t know’

The innovation, showcased at the EMNLP 2023 conference, is all about instilling a sense of caution in AI responses. ASPIRE, which stands for “Adaptation with Self-Evaluation to Improve Selective Prediction in LLMs,” acts like a built-in confidence meter for AI, helping it to assess its own answers before offering them up.

AI

The Rabbit R1 will receive live info from Perplexity’s AI ‘answer engine’

CES 2024 darling Rabbit has announced a partnership with Perplexity that will link the “conversational AI-powered answer engine” to the R1, a $199 Teenage Engineering-designed AI gadget that’s already sold through 50,000 preorders. Unlike LLMs that can only reference data up to a certain date in the past, what they’re pitching for the R1 is a built-in search engine with “live up to date answers without any knowledge cutoff.”

Automation & Productivity

Databricks and Credo AI unite for responsible, compliant AI at scale

According to Credo AI, Databricks customers will be able easily track and manage AI risk and compliance at scale, leveraging data and evidence already stored in the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, providing transparency about their AI systems throughout the development lifecycle.

AI/Data

Equinix Fabric Cloud Router aims to soothe multicloud networking pains

This service is designed to be deployed in less than a minute, with low latency and enterprise-grade multicloud routing capabilities. The cloud-agnostic service also claims to eliminate the issue of vendor lock-in by removing the networking constraints associated with migrating between cloud providers or deploying applications that use services from a few different cloud providers.

Cloud

Have I Been Pwned adds 71M compromised credentials from the ‘Naz.API’ data set

“Although the 71 million emails and the 1 billion credentials in the NAZ.API sound like big numbers, they really are just a small fraction of what’s available on the dark web and beyond.”

Privacy & Security

Meta plans to buy 350K Nvidia GPUs to build artificial general intelligence

The comments provide some insight into just how much money big technology companies are spending to stay at the forefront of AI development. Research from Omdia says that other leading players, such as Microsoft Corp., Google LLC and Amazon.com Inc., are all believed to have bought between 50,000 and 150,000 H100 GPUs last year, and will likely have similar plans to add to their computing stacks.

AI

DataStax makes it easier to build generative AI RAG apps with new data API

While DataStax has had vector capabilities in AstraDB since July 2023, that capability still required users to work with the Cassandra Query Language (CQL) as the primary path to query the data. The new data API out today changes that, providing developers with the ability to use the Python and JavaScript programming languages to access the database, which the company claims helps to narrow the gap between DataStax and purpose built vector database like Pinecone which just updated its namesake platform with serverless database functionality.

AI/Data

Comcast tackles complex security data with DataBee 2.0 and Databricks partnership

Launched in April last year, the DataBee platform was originally created for Comcast’s internal use and operated on Snowflake’s Data Cloud and other data lakes. It has evolved to become a cloud-native security data fabric that brings together disparate security data from various data sources and security tools.

Data Management

DigitalOcean wants to open the floodgates to AI for smaller enterprises with Nvidia H100 access

The DigitalOcean Paperspace platform is taking a virtualization approach to enabling the right level of access and performance to GPUs for whatever an organization might need.

Automation & Productivity

Samsung S24 Galaxy phone to integrate Google’s Gemini AI models

According to Samsung, Google’s Gemini Pro will be integrated within a number of its native applications on the Galaxy S24 smartphones. Users will be able to take advantage of AI-powered summarization and classification features on apps such as Notes, Voice Recorder and Keyboard. Because Gemini Pro is powered by Vertex AI, it will come with enhanced security, privacy, safety and data compliance functionality, the companies promised.

Automation & Productivity

Incorta Announces Incorta X, Combining AI and Machine Learning for Improved Business Intelligence

“We are thrilled to introduce Incorta X, an innovation that transcends traditional boundaries in data analytics. With the Augmented Analytics and Advanced Modeling of Incorta X, even business users can now perform the most complex data engineering work and advance their business much faster than their competitors.”

Data & Analytics

Neridio secure data manipulation prevents vault intrusion

It is a cyber-resilience business with patented technologies and malware intrusion detection capabilities. The product set includes NervioSoc for Windows or Linux, code-named RationalVault, which brings AIOps, SecOps, and ITOps together to provide autonomous risk and storage intrusion mitigation systems for hybrid cloud and cloud-native platforms.

Data Management

Security access solutions startup Oleria raises $32.9M

It offers adaptive and autonomous identity security solutions that help organizations protect their data at a time of digital change. The company says its service removes the need to choose between security and speed with adaptive security solutions that enable organizations and their chief information security officers to respond to their ever-changing access needs.

Security

Backblaze adds enterprise appeal to its backup storage

Backup storage has taken a backseat at Backblaze as revenues from its B2 Cloud Storage product are growing at a faster rate. The company has announced several B2 Cloud Storage advancements recently: The speed-enhancing shard stash cache, functioning as a HYCU backup vault, and partnering CoreWeave to name some examples.

Data Storage

AI models that don’t violate copyright are getting a new certification label

Bloomberg reported Fairly Trained — founded by former Stability AI vice president for audio Ed Newton-Rex — adds a label to companies that prove they asked for permission to use copyrighted training data. Newton-Rex started Fairly Trained after he quit Stability AI in November, citing generative AI was “exploiting creators.”

AI Ethics

Google DeepMind’s AI system solves geometry problems like a math Olympian

The system, called AlphaGeometry, combines two different approaches: a neural language model that generates intuitive ideas, and a symbolic deduction engine that verifies them using formal logic and rules. The language model is based on the same technology that powers Google’s search engine and natural language understanding systems. The deduction engine is inspired by a method devised by the Chinese mathematician Wen-Tsün Wu in 1978.

AI

Google brings its AI magic to Android Auto for message summaries

Not to be confused with Android Automotive, Android Auto is the equivalent of Apple CarPlay — a feature which mirrors essential apps from your phone on your vehicle’s infotainment screen. The UI on Android Auto is optimized for ease of interaction, much like Driving Mode on your phone.

Automation & Productivity

PredictAP Raises $8 Million in Series-A Funding To Automate Accounts Payable for the Real Estate Industry

The only automated AP solution that performs both invoice ingestion and coding, PredictAP reduces the amount of time needed to process each invoice by 80-90%. PredictAP’s machine learning-powered solution also improves the accuracy and consistency of invoice coding. The platform integrates easily with Yardi, the largest property management software, providing users with an end-to-end AP workflow automation solution that results in significant time and cost savings for the AP process.

Automation & Productivity

Skyhigh Security launches AI-powered DLP Assistant to streamline data classification

Offered as part of the Skyhigh Security Service Edge Portfolio, the AI assistant allows customers to create complex data classifications based on natural language expressions. The ability is claimed to increase operational efficiencies and minimize inaccuracies stemming from human error, such as false positives or false negatives.

Data Management

Udacity launches GenAI nanodegree program

The Oxford Internet Institute’s recent study underlines the value of AI skills, indicating a 21% increase in worker wages with high levels of skill complementarity. Recognizing the potential impact of generative AI, Udacity’s program goes beyond teaching various GenAI techniques. It aims to inspire professionals with real-world use cases and provides hands-on experience within organizational contexts.

Gen AI/Tech Jobs

The AI phones are coming

But what exactly does AI on a phone look like? So far, it has amounted to a handful of tech demos. This week’s Galaxy Unpacked event is an opportunity to show us the potential of AI on a mobile device. And unlike a washing machine with ChatGPT preinstalled, AI could be really useful on our phones.

Automation & Productivity

Stability AI releases Stable Code 3B to fill in blanks of AI-powered code generation

At only 3 billion parameters, Stable Code 3B can run locally on laptops without dedicated GPUs while still providing competitive performance and capabilities against larger models like Meta’s CodeLLaMA 7B.

AI/Code

Pecan AI taps generative AI to help anyone create predictive models

The startup is best known for its user-friendly data science platform, which enables companies to easily build AI models for tasks such as predicting customer demand and finding opportunities to improve business efficiencies. Its platform automates the development of these models, while reducing the need for data science skills.

Data & Analytics

Google to replace part of ad sales team with AI

Google’s ad sales team, which had approximately 30,000 staffers before the layoffs, was expected to rely heavily on machine learning to automate advertising, thereby reducing the need for a large number of employees in the advertisement sales teams.

AI/Tech Jobs

Vicarius nabs $30M for its AI-powered vulnerability remediation platform

New York-based Vicarius provides a software platform called vRx that can catalog the systems in a company’s network and map out what programs they’re running. It then scans those programs for vulnerabilities. According to Vicarius, vRx automatically flags if an application contains an open-source component with a known security flaw.

Security

Feds Warn of AndroxGh0st Botnet Targeting AWS, Azure, and Office 365 Credentials

The cloud attack tool is capable of infiltrating servers vulnerable to known security flaws to access Laravel environment files and steal credentials for high-profile applications such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Office 365, SendGrid, and Twilio.

Security

JFrog-Amazon SageMaker integration aims to streamline machine learning workflows

SageMaker is a cloud-based machine-learning platform that allows the creation, training and deployment of machine learning models on the cloud and is used by developers to deploy them on embedded systems and edge devices. The new pairing with JFrog’s Artifactory allows the models to be incorporated into a modern software development life cycle, making each model immutable, traceable, secure and validated as it matures for release.

Machine Learning

Swimlane enhances Turbine platform with AI-driven security automation features

The first release, Canvas, democratizes automation by leveraging modular and reusable programming components to empower users to build playbooks with an intuitive and simple visual interface. Using Turbine Canvas, SecOps teams can craft automation workflows with the ease of drawing a flowchart and gain visibility into how all playbooks connect, edit them in one spot, and leverage multiple triggers per playbook for enhanced control and flexibility.

Automation & Productivity

AI-driven risk management platform from Supply Wisdom offers comprehensive coverage

The new release has been designed to meet the rising demands of stricter regulations and mounting geopolitical risk at a time when organizations are fast-tracking procurement and onboarding and need risk intelligence and continuous monitoring. With real-time risk intelligence provided through the service, organizations can monitor more than 150 metrics across eight location risk subdomains, which include ratings and event alerts, within a matter of weeks.

Risk Management

Tokyo startup Sakana AI lands $30M to forge new path with compact AI models

Sakana, which means “fish” in Japanese, takes its inspiration from the collective behaviors of animal groups like schools of fish and flocks of birds. The startup believes that getting smaller AI models to work together efficiently can be more effective than training single gigantic models on massive datasets, an approach that many leading AI labs have pursued.

AI/Modeling

Low-code software integration startup Prismatic raises $17M in Series B funding

The platform changes that, enabling software companies to build integrations quickly through an “embedded integration designer” tool. Using its platform, software makers can build reusable and configurable integrations between their products and the other applications used by their customers. The startup offers a low-code design tool and hundreds of prebuilt connectors, enabling unskilled users to create the custom components needed to build real-world integrations.

Automation & Productivity

Seagate unveils 30 TB+ Exos HAMR disk drives

The complex Mozaic 3+ technology has taken years to refine and develop, with Seagate working on the technology’s reliability, yield, and manufacturing cost. Now it is able to qualify and start mass-producing the drives, with 10 x 3 TB platters. This gives it a 6 TB capacity advantage over arch-rival Western Digital with its 24 TB conventional and 28 TB shingled drives

Data Storage

Aisera & Dave Launch DaveGPT, a Generative AI Customer Service Assistant

Aisera’s AI Experience platform offers AiseraGPT, AI Copilot, AI Search and domain-specific large language models (LLMs) for business sectors and functions including financial services, banking, insurance and customer support. The human-like interactions and automated AI workflows that Aisera unlocks for the enterprise create massive productivity gains for organizations, lower operational expenses and dramatically improve customer and user satisfaction.

Automation & Productivity

Alert: Over 178,000 SonicWall Firewalls Potentially Vulnerable to Exploits - Act Now

The cybersecurity firm revealed that the issues could be weaponized by bad actors to trigger repeated crashes and force the appliance to get into maintenance mode, requiring administrative action to restore normal functionality.

Security

Award-winning AI company, Cynozure, announces its launch of AI Springboard™, a new suite of services designed specifically for organisations to learn about, prepare for and act on Artificial Intelligence

With AI Springboard, Cynozure is supporting clients to learn about, prepare for and act on Artificial Intelligence. Board and executive level workshops help to raise awareness and understanding in the C-suite. Cynozure’s AI framework then helps to assess readiness, prepare a plan of action to get started, and build out prototypes for key use cases that help to build vital foundational capabilities.

AI

Pinecone’s vector database goes serverless

The company said the serverless architecture, which is a cloud computing execution model where the cloud provider dynamically manages the allocation and provisioning of servers, can reduce costs by up to 98%. It can also eliminate the need for developers to provision infrastructure, allowing applications to be brought to market faster.

Data Management

Amberflo.io Launches a Generative AI Monetization Platform, Helping Every Company Profit From the Goldrush

Amberflo, built by ex-AWS engineers, today launches a new AI monetization platform. As the adoption of Generative AI skyrockets, companies are scrambling to accurately track usage and build a profitable business model. Amberflo’s new monetization platform automatically meters the use of underlying LLMs, and enables charging a markup based on the unique value-add of the application, making it possible for companies to always maintain a healthy profit margin in monetizing AI.

Gen AI

Microsoft’s new Copilot Pro brings AI-powered Office features to the rest of us

Copilot Pro is launching today as a $20 monthly subscription that provides access to AI-powered features inside Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint alongside priority access to the latest OpenAI models and the ability to build your own Copilot GPT.

Automation & Productivity

Hardware-as-a-service startup Xyte raises $30M in early-stage funding round

The startup explains that HaaS provides an easier way for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as larger enterprises, to create new subscription-based offerings for their hardware and devices, offering both their products and additional services in return for regular payments

Cloud

OpenAI announces steps to prevent its generative AI tools from being used to manipulate elections

OpenAI explained that it has created a “cross-functional effort dedicated to election work” that combines the expertise of its safety systems with threat intelligence and the skills of its legal, engineering and policy teams. The idea with this effort is to identify and address potential ways in which its generative AI technology might be used to manipulate election outcomes.

AI Ethics

Leantime overhauls project management platform with neurodiversity in mind

The 18-month-old company is focused on startups and small and mid-sized businesses, particularly those that employ people with such neurodivergent conditions as dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism. Neurodiverse people are estimated to make up as much as 20% of the population, but 40% are unemployed, a figure that rises to 85% for people with autism.

Automation & Productivity

Iridium’s Project Stardust satellite strategy supports 5G, IoT from space

Iridium CEO Matt Desch said during a press briefing that the project will use the company’s existing low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation to support standards-based 5G services. Iridium is working on a new software package that can be used to update those satellites and be used in a new chipset design to allow direct-to-device communications.

5G

New partnership between Strike Graph and Judy Security promises enhanced cybersecurity

The combination of the two now delivers both cybersecurity and a simplified process for meeting a raft of security certifications, including Service Organization Controls 2 – Type I or Type II, International Organization for Standardization 27001, Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act., Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.

Security

Fortinet’s new switches and access points elevate enterprise Wi-Fi 7 capabilities

The new Wi-Fi 7 access points, called FortiAP 441K and FortiSwitch T1024 — the latter purpose-built with 10-gigabit Ethernet access and 90W Power over Ethernet technology, support Wi-Fi 7 bandwidth requirements. The new devices are designed to deliver cutting-edge wireless performance enterprises need and seamlessly integrate with AIOps and FortiGuard AI-Powered Security Services as a part of the Fortinet Secure Networking solution.

Network Management

Hammerspace expands Global Data Environment with archival tape system support

Hammerspace has added archival tape system support to its Global Data Environment (GDE). This parallel file system covers data in globally distributed and disparate sites and enables it to be located, orchestrated, and accessed as if it were local.

Data Storage

Anthropic researchers show AI systems can be taught to engage in deceptive behavior

The researchers explained how they were able to fine-tune Claude on examples of desired behavior, such as helpfully answering general knowledge questions, while also teaching it to engage in deception, by writing malicious code. They built in so-called “trigger” phrases that would encourage the model to lean toward its deceptive side, in order to make it behave badly consistently.

AI

LINX launches Microsoft peering service for private cloud access

That directness also lends itself to stringent cybersecurity. Though MAPS still relies on public internet routing to access the public, outside interface of Microsoft Azure, customer traffic “never falls back to routing across anybody else,” Hellers said. “Traffic never actually reaches the public internet.

Cloud

Clinatec shows brain-computer neural interface

For instance, someone with a spinal cord injury may not be able to move. Clinatec tries to record brain activity with a system that is bio-compatible and has electrodes which can send signals out of the brain. Those signals are then decoded in real time by machine learning algorithm-based software, Hihi said.

Emerging Tech

Hatz AI lets MSPs bring AI as-a-service to enterprise customers

The Hatz AI service is anchored by a Large Language Model (LLM) Ops engine called Mido and includes multi-tenant management through an MSP admin dashboard. MSPs will be able to integrate AI into their services developing focused AI applications and custom workflows all managed by AI assistants.

AI/MSP

Behavox Launches AI-Driven Intelligent Archive, Powered by Google Cloud

Developed in partnership with Google Cloud, the Behavox Intelligent Archive offers unparalleled security, scalability, and access to cutting-edge technologies. It stands out as the first archive solution on the market that enables searching across the entire archive in mere seconds.

Data Management

WiMi is Working on the Blockchain Secure Storage Strategy Based on the MCMC Algorithm

This blockchain secure storage strategy utilizes MCMC to improve blockchain data storage security. The MCMC algorithm has a wide range of applications in the fields of random sampling, mathematical expectation estimation, and definite integral calculus. The security of blockchain is built on the base of randomness.

Blockchain

Hackers impersonating hotels on Booking.com launch aggressive phishing campaign

Attackers will first book a reservation and then wait for their automatic confirmation email to arrive. Once it does, they will respond with a phishing email containing an infected URL. This email is typically crafted to take advantage of the hotel’s desire to best accommodate guests. For example, they may try to convince an employee to click on the infected link by telling them that it contains information about an elderly guest’s dietary restrictions or allergies to cleaning products.

Security

Wells Fargo’s assistant, powered by Google’s AI, poised to hit 100 million interactions annually

The bank has put 4,000 employees through Stanford’s Human-centered AI program, HAI, and Mehta said the bank already has “a lot” of generative AI projects in production, many of which are serving to make back-office tasks more efficient.

AI/Fintech

Kinetica Launches Quick Start for SQL-GPT

This Quick Start is for organizations that want to experience ad-hoc data analysis on real-time, structured data using an LLM that accurately and securely converts natural language to SQL and returns quick, conversational answers.

Data & Analytics

One of the world’s largest AI training datasets is about to get bigger and ‘substantially better’

The Pile v2 includes more recent data than the original dataset, which was released in December 2020 and was used to create language models including the Pythia suite and Stability AI’s Stable LM suite. It will also include better preprocessing: “When we made the Pile we had never trained a LLM before,” Biderman explained. “Now we’ve trained close to a dozen, and know a lot more about how to clean data in ways that make it amenable to LLMs.”

AI/Data

OpenAI reveals how many ChatGPT for Enterprise customers it has (so far…)

The pricing for ChatGPT for Enterprise varies and is not openly disclosed on OpenAI’s website, but one user on Reddit was quoted at $60 per seat, so at 150,000 users, that’s $9 million a month in revenue, or $108 million annualized.

ChatGPT

Rackspace Technology Elevates Database Management with Rackspace Cloud Database Ops for AWS

The Rackspace Cloud DBOps service provides regular health checks, database engineering, monitoring, performance analysis, auditing, troubleshooting, consultations, and long-term planning.

Data Management

Ivanti alerts customers to critical vulnerabilities in Connect Secure and Policy Secure Gateways

The vulnerabilities were first identified by cybersecurity firm Volexity Inc. in the second week of December when the company detected suspicious lateral movement on the network of one of its Network Security Monitoring service customers. Upon close inspection, Volexity found an attacker was placing web shells, which can allow hackers remote access, on multiple internal and external-facing web servers.

Security

BL2 Technology Officially Launched: Fostering the Development at On-Chain Scaling Evolution

At its core, side chain technology is the linchpin of BL2, enabling Bitcoin transactions and settlements on a distinct chain. This essential component is intricately linked to the main chain through a bridging mechanism, ensuring secure and fluid asset transfers, and creating a comprehensive extension layer.

Blockchain

Nation-State Actors Weaponize Ivanti VPN Zero-Days, Deploying 5 Malware Families

Volexity, which attributed the activity to a suspected Chinese espionage actor named UTA0178, said the twin flaws were used to gain initial access, deploy webshells, backdoor legitimate files, capture credentials and configuration data, and pivot further into the victim environment.

Security

Cloud storage exposure by school security firm risks aiding potential school shooters

Discovered by security researcher Jeremiah Fowler and detailed today by vpnMentor, the exposed cloud instance was found to belong to Raptor Technologies LLC, a Texas-based school security company. Fowler found three separate storage buckets that included sensitive information related to students, teachers, parents and school safety plans or procedures.

Security

Ask-AI Secures $11M for Generative AI Assistant That Brings Siloed Data into Enterprise Workflows

Ask-AI is a comprehensive generative AI solution designed from scratch to enhance efficiency in repetitive tasks, knowledge management, and understanding the voice of the customer. Connecting to more than 50 enterprise work systems such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Confluence, Jira, Slack, Google Drive, Teams, and many other customer communication and knowledge sources, Ask-AI ingests, analyzes and understands enterprise knowledge

Data Management

Typeface and Microsoft partner to reimagine marketing workflows with AI

Today Microsoft and Typeface announced an integration that will see the startup’s highly-customizable generative AI technology embedded into the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights platform. San Francisco-based Typeface only emerged from stealth in February 2023 and raised $100 million in June for its enterprise content creation customization technology.

AI/Marketing

White House moves to ease education requirements for federal cyber contracting jobs

“The only way we can defend the digital systems that lay the foundation for our modern way of life is to be sure that every American and people from every community have a pathway to a cyber-based career.”

Tech Jobs

Wi-Fi 7 quietly took off while everyone was looking at AI

Wi-Fi 7 came to gaming laptops first and foremost, and the focus on gaming makes sense. One of the biggest benefits of Wi-Fi 7 is that it allows for one device to connect to your router on multiple bands — a feature called Multi-Link Operation — which gives your laptop options when it comes to where to funnel its packets. That means that when your 5GHz band is at capacity, it’ll just send the data down the 6GHz pipe, and vice versa.

Automation & Productivity

Google lays off hundreds in voice assistant, hardware, engineering teams; Fitbit co-founders left in a major shakeup

According to the report, Google will be reducing the workforce in its Voice Assistant unit and eliminating several hundred roles in the hardware team responsible for Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit. The augmented reality (AR) team is also heavily affected, with the majority of its members being let go. Additionally, the central engineering team of the search giant will see hundreds of roles impacted

Tech Jobs

Will retailers look up to the cloud for gen AI? Google Cloud hopes so

One of the highlights is Google Cloud’s new conversational commerce solution that enables retailers to easily deploy chatbots powered by gen AI on their websites and apps. Google also announced an enhancement to its Vertex AI Search product for retailers, which helps to enable high-quality search and recommendations.

AI/Chatbots

Casper Labs announces blockchain-based AI governance tool built using IBM’s watsonx platform

“There’s been a lot of cynical approaches we think like sprinkle some AI ‘fairy dust’ on blockchain with AI chatbots to understand the ecosystem and so on,” Manohar said. “But really the two big insights were, one, AI governance will become a really big thing because of government and regulatory needs and everyone feels AI must become more responsible. And second, this is one of the rare instances where an industry is emerging and the tech stack isn’t well-defined.”

AI/Blockchain

Verisign takes open source approach to DNS security in the quantum era

Verisign recently announced several new contributions to help the internet community prepare for a future with quantum computing. This includes an open source implementation of their Merkle Tree Ladder (MTL) mode technique. MTL mode was developed by researchers at Verisign to reduce the impact of large cryptographic signatures needed to secure communications in a post-quantum world.

Quantum Computing

New Python-based FBot Hacking Toolkit Aims at Cloud and SaaS Platforms

FBot, in addition to generating API keys for AWS and Sendgrid, packs an assortment of features to generate random IP addresses, run reverse IP scanners, and even validate PayPal accounts and the email addresses associated with those accounts.

Security

Patronus AI and MongoDB Partner to Boost Enterprise Confidence in Generative AI

The partnership between Patronus AI and MongoDB brings to market a retrieval system solution that enables reliable document-based LLM workflows. Customers can develop these systems with MongoDB Atlas, and evaluate, test, and monitor them with Patronus AI to increase their accuracy and reliability.

AI/LLM

Codego Group Launches CodegoPay – An All-In-One Payment App with IBANs, Cards, and Crypto-EURO Conversions

The CodegoPay team developed its product to be more than a crypto-friendly IBAN. For instance, personal account users can buy and sell cryptocurrencies directly from the CodegoPay dashboard with their own IBANs. More importantly, they can convert crypto assets like Bitcoin to EURO directly within the app. As a result, users no longer require accounts on crypto exchange platforms, as they can rely on CodegoPay to have their banking account and crypto wallet in the same place.

FinTech

Google Cloud expands its generative AI for retail offerings

Alongside those tools, Google Cloud also announced a more advanced search technology aimed specifically at retailers, called Vertex AI Search for Retail, which can be customized for each company. In addition, there’s a new hardware and software offering relating to the Google Distributed Cloud Edge service, designed to bring advanced computing capabilities into brick-and-mortar stores.

AI/Cloud

Firework Launches AVA, the Virtual Shopping Assistant Giving a Face to E-commerce

In developing AVA, Firework adopted a strategic approach to AI-generated content (AIGC) development — which focuses on the confluence of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and model fine-tuning. The result is an intelligent digital human that is uniquely suited to meet both brands’ and consumers’ growing demand for cutting-edge digital video content that is not only engaging, but also highly personalized.

AI/E-commerce

OpenAI launches GPT Store for custom chatbots and new ChatGPT subscription

The GPT Store, the first new service the AI developer launched today, allows users to publicly share their customized versions of ChatGPT. Such custom AI models, or GPTs, are optimized for specific tasks that the standard version doesn’t necessarily support out of the box. A GPT can interact with external applications and draw on proprietary datasets to generate answers.

ChatGPT

GPT-4 Turbo now powers Microsoft Copilot. Here’s how to check if you have access

It’s important to note: GPT-4 Turbo is technically a preview release, which means that it is not fully stable and may have some errors or limitations. OpenAI says it plans to release the production-ready model in the coming weeks. However, you can still use GPT-4 Turbo in Copilot to explore its capabilities and have some fun.

Automation & Productivity

IBM and American Tower partner to revive multicloud edge connectivity market

Red Hat recently updated its Device Edge platform to ease challenging deployments. The platform includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the vendor’s Ansible automation platform and Red Hat MicroShift – a lightweight Kubernetes that can run on small form factor devices.

Edge Computing

Terraform fork OpenTofu launches into general availability

OpenTofu is a new version of Terraform, a popular open-source project created by HashiCorp Inc. Software teams at more than 60,000 companies use Terraform to provision cloud infrastructure. The platform makes it possible to create scripts that can automatically set up virtual machines and other cloud resources, thereby removing the need for developers to individually configure each asset.

Cloud

Outpost24 Enhances External Attack Surface Management Solution with Credential Threat Intelligence

By combining Threat Intelligence with External Attack Surface Management, organizations can detect both known and unknown internet-facing assets for vulnerabilities and potential attack paths from stolen credentials. This comprehensive approach instills confidence in security leaders, enabling them to make better-informed decisions, prioritize remediation actions, and close security gaps:

Security

Rabbit sells out 10,000 units of its R1 pocket AI companion in one day

t uses a “Large Action Model” that works as a “sort of universal controller for apps,” according to my colleague David Pierce, who got to try out the device during the showcase. This allows it to do things like play music, buy groceries, and send messages through a single interface without having to use your phone. It also lets you train the device how to interact with a certain app.

Automation & Productivity

Generative AI startup Ask-AI, which breaks down data silos for customer service teams, raises $11M

The startup has created a generative AI platform that’s focused on enhancing the ability of employees to quickly find the information they need from their company’s knowledge base and other datasets. It also aids in the completion of repetitive business tasks, and has the ability to understand the “voice” of customers. Ask AI can connect to popular work platforms such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Confluence, Jira, Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, Trello and others, and ingest and analyze all of the enterprise knowledge within them

Automation & Productivity

Quora raises $75M, led by a16z, for its Poe AI chatbot creator program

While most other companies have focused on building bigger and better generative AI models to converse with users, answer questions and summarize documents, Quora has taken a different angle with Poe. The company’s approach has been to provide access to a multitude of different third-party models and allow users to fashion their own chatbots and build them with their own specialized knowledge and personality.

AI Chatbot

Symbiosys, an adtech startup led by former Google and Microsoft exec, raises $9M

Symbiosys offers real-time reporting and analytics. It also has unique collaborative bidding technology that lets retailers and brands bid with one another to pay for off-site product ad campaigns.

Marketing Tech

anecdotes Secures $25M in Series B Funding to Advance the Enterprise GRC Stack

Its Compliance Operating System streamlines data collection into modern GRC applications, addressing diverse compliance and risk needs and capitalizing on its flexibility thanks to proprietary integrations with widely used enterprise platforms such as Azure, PagerDuty, Datadog and others.

Data Compliance

Luma, developer of generative AI models that create 3D objects, raises $43M

With Genie, users can generate interactive 3D assets using text prompts such as “Gold ring with ruby gemstone.” The model has set a high standard for fast text-to-3D generation and has already accumulated thousands of users, the startup says. Today, it’s making Genie generally available on the Luma smartphone app.

AI/3D

The Next Web - How this startup uses AI to give speech-impaired people their voice back

This audio-to-audio-based approach eliminates the typical latency of 2-3 seconds for text-to-speech technologies, which can create barriers and disrupt communication. The technology also builds on the fact that for several voice and speech disorders it is helpful to deliberately steer the voice towards whispering, due to neurological changes in the speech system

AI/Voice

anecdotes Secures $25M in Series B Funding to Advance the Enterprise GRC Stack

Its Compliance Operating System streamlines data collection into modern GRC applications, addressing diverse compliance and risk needs and capitalizing on its flexibility thanks to proprietary integrations with widely used enterprise platforms such as Azure, PagerDuty, Datadog and others.

Information Week - OpenAI’s Latest ChatGPT Enterprise Offering Targets Collaboration

ChatGPT Team will cost $25 per month per user billed annually, or $30 per month per user billed monthly. OpenAI did not release pricing information when it launched Enterprise in August, saying businesses could work with the company’s sales team to build custom-tailored options. ChatGPT Plus, the paid consumer grade version of the language model costs $20 per month.

ChatGPT

Shoppers urged to think before they click as AI retail 'catfishes' infiltrate web: 'Too good to be true'

In an effort to sell their products – or at least the image of an idealized product they hope consumers are willing to buy – scammers are bringing in AI-generated images to online retail to entice customers to buy something that might not end up looking anything like the promised product after all.

AI/Fraud

Alexa just got three new generative AI skills - here's how to try them

First on the list is a skill called Character.AI. Designed by the developers behind the Character.AI website, this skill lets you chat with a range of different chatbots. You can talk to historical figures, such as Socrates or Albert Einstein, and engage in conversations about philosophy or physics

AI/Alexa

5 exciting Android features Google just announced at CES 2024

At CES, Google announced that it was partnering with Samsung to bring the best sharing solutions together to create a cross-Android solution called Quick Share. Samsung users will already be familiar with the Quick Share feature (which is well-liked), and Android users may or may not be familiar with Nearby Share (which is not so well-liked). To come up with a better solution for all, the two companies have come together (under Samsung's Quick Share name), to integrate the best of both words.

Automation & Productivity

Microsoft DragNUWA pushes the bar in AI video with trajectory-based generation

Dubbed DragNUWA, the project supplements the known approaches of text and image-based prompting with trajectory-based generation. This allows users to manipulate objects or entire video frames with specific trajectories. This gives an easy way to achieve highly controllable video generation from semantic, spatial and temporal aspects – while ensuring high-quality output at the same time.

AI/Video

How Microsoft found a potential new battery material using AI

They discovered a new kind of solid-state electrolyte, the kind of material that could lead to a battery that’s less likely to burst into flames than today’s lithium-ion batteries. It also uses less lithium, which is getting harder to come by as demand soars for rechargeable EV batteries.

AI/Emerging Tech

Casa Systems Launches AurusXT: World’s First 5G IoT Router with Dynamic Slicing

Casa’s AurusXT Series will offer a range of 5G IIoT devices designed to deliver reliable connectivity to a broad range of both fixed and mobile use cases. The NTC-500 is the first of the AurusXT Series to disrupt the IIoT market with a cost-effective 5G IIoT Router that utilizes the speed and coverage of a 5G Sub-6 GHz network to deliver a fast and reliable connection to machines, equipment, and vehicles.

IoT

Why Writer’s Palmyra LLM is the little AI model that could for enterprises

Palmyra also performed particularly well — landing in first place — in the area of machine translation. Writer CEO May Habib said in a LinkedIn post: “Palmyra X from Writer is doing EVEN BETTER than the classic benchmark. We aren’t just the top model in the MMLU benchmark, but the top model in production overall — close second only to the GPT-4 previews that were analyzed. And across translation benchmarks — a NEW test — we’re #1.”

AI/LLMs

Technology procurement startup AppDirect raises $100M in fresh funding

The second core offering is a platform that allows companies to create their own technology procurement portals. According to the software maker, the offering is geared primarily toward IT advisory firms. Such companies can create web portals that allow their customers to purchase technology products on a self-service basis.

IT Management

The Rabbit R1 is an AI-powered gadget that can use your apps for you

The software inside the R1 is the real story: Rabbit’s operating system, called Rabbit OS, and the AI tech underneath. Rather than a ChatGPT-like large language model, Rabbit says Rabbit OS is based on a “Large Action Model,” and the best way I can describe it is as a sort of universal controller for apps.

Automation & Productivity

Web3 AI data marketplace Ta-da raises $3.5M to expand operations

The company was founded on the idea that high-quality data for AI datasets is difficult and expensive to obtain. Although data is everywhere, much of it is not in forms that can be used to train and operate AI systems because it’s not correctly categorized and organized. That takes human minds to sort it and label it, which Ta-da’s marketplace provides.

AI/Data Management

Oracle optimistic about cloud business growth

Oracle has put a concerted effort into promoting GPU technology and is heavily invested in the Nvidia H100 Hopper GPUs. One of its biggest customers is Elon Musk’s xAI startup, which offers the Grok large language model (LLM).

Cloud

Nylas and AE Studio Speed Up Development With Large Language Models

Under the terms of the partnership, organizations will be able to leverage both Nylas’ best-in-class communications APIs alongside AE Studio’s top-tier development resources to accelerate development cycles and time-to-market. Additionally, companies will have access to resources and technology aimed at building workflows and products rich with intelligence and automation.

Automation & Productivity

Contents.com raises $18M for AI-driven multilingual enterprise content generation

Contents.com is available as a WordPress plugin, making it simple to integrate into one of the most popular content management systems and blogging platforms in the world. Using the plugin users can provide a title, a brief summary and a tone of voice and the AI will write an article for them, including search engine optimization.

Content Management

HPE’s potential acquisition of Juniper may propel its position in the global AI race

Perhaps more significantly, the inclusion of Juniper’s AI interests, particularly its Mist AI, is of strategic importance to HPE. This is due to HPE’s shift in computing strategy, which is increasingly focused on enabling a broad spectrum of AI applications.

AI/Network Management

Micron unveils compact and power-efficient laptop memory module

This means higher notebook performance, longer battery life, and more component freedom for motherboard designers. The LPCAMM2 (Low Power Compression-Attached Memory Module) is physically smaller than a SODIMM (Small Outline Dual In-line Memory Module) and based on LPDDR5 (Low Power Double Data Rate 5) DRAM.

Automation & Productivity

Lily AI Launches Customer-Centric Content Generation to Improve Product Discovery and Drive Sales

Lily AI a retail technology platform specializing in AI solutions for retailers and brands, announced the launch of AI-powered, customer-centric content generation. This solution combines Lily AI’s existing computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning with vertical-specific large language models (LLMs) to empower teams to create high-performing product and marketing copy.

AI/Marketing Tech

DRUID AI and Proservartner Collaborate to Transform Business Automation

Through this partnership Proservartner’s expertise in streamlining business operations will blend with DRUID’s cutting-edge AI conversational capabilities. The alliance is meant to offer innovative solutions that automate complex processes, making them more intuitive and intelligent, enabling businesses to achieve higher operational excellence and enhanced customer interaction.

Automation & Productivity

TomTom Orbis Maps sets new standard for mapmaking with unprecedented coverage and visualization

Drawing on the power of AI and machine learning, TomTom Orbis Maps taps into the richness of OpenStreetMap (OSM), with its millions of active editors. The company's mapmaking platform integrates this ‘super source’ with many other public sources and proprietary data to create a map that can power the most advanced use cases ranging from on-demand services to automated driving.

Automation & Productivity

Linux 6.7: Hello Intel IFS and Meteor Lake, goodbye Itanium

“We’re excited to see improved x86 microcode loading in the 6.7 kernel, as well as support for Intel IFS (In-Field Scan) Gen2, which enables CPUs to detect hardware problems that may not be caught by other code-error checks,” Bhargava said. “The latest kernel release also has several improvements to power management with Intel Meteor Lake, including auto-detection of workload types.”

Automation & Productivity

Siemens teams up with Microsoft on cross-industry AI adoption

The deal between these industry giants is in recognition of the shift in AI technology, starting with Siemens Industrial Copilot, designed specifically for the manufacturing sector. The copilot is a collaborative creation utilizing Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service and Siemens’ Xcelerator digital business platform, promising to revolutionize industrial processes.

Automation & Productivity

RoEx Unveils Standalone Mastering in AutoMix, Redefining Audio Excellence

One of the standout features of AutoMix’s new mastering capability is its speed. The software can master a 3-minute track in approximately one minute. This rapid turnaround is a potential game-changer for professionals working under tight deadlines and those eager to experiment with different mastering settings on their tracks

Automation & Productivity

Mortgage lender LoanDepot struck by suspected ransomware attack

If data has been stolen, it will be a potential treasure trove of data, including personally identifiable information. As of April last year, the company was the third-largest mortgage lender in the U.S., providing mortgages to millions of customers.

Data Privacy

Intel debuts refreshed Raptor Lake CPUs for desktops and laptops

It remains to be seen what noticeable difference the increased clock speeds will deliver, if anything. Intel didn’t provide any public benchmarks of the chip’s performance compared to last year’s silicon. However, it did supply the results of a test that showed how it beats Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s rival chips, such as the Ryzen 9 7945HX and 7945HX3D CPUs, thanks to its 17% increase in gaming performance.

Automation & Productivity

OpenAI claims NY Times copyright lawsuit is without merit

“It seems they intentionally manipulated prompts, often including lengthy excerpts of articles, in order to get our model to regurgitate. Even when using such prompts, our models don’t typically behave the way The New York Times insinuates, which suggests they either instructed the model to regurgitate or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts.”

AI Ethics

Getty Images launches generative AI-powered image creation tool

The new tool uses generative artificial intelligence, which can take text descriptions from users and create vivid visuals, that has been trained on Getty’s vast library of commercially licensed images. As a result, anything generated by the AI tool comes with legal protection and usage rights for content creators.

AI/Imaging

NVIDIA Brings Generative AI to Millions, with Tensor Core GPUs, LLMs, Tools for RTX PCs and Workstations

AI Workbench, a unified, easy-to-use toolkit for AI developers, will be available in beta later this month. In addition, NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM (TRT-LLM), an open-source library that accelerates and optimizes inference performance of the latest large language models (LLMs), now supports more pre-optimized models for PCs.

Automation & Productivity

McAfee Debuts Deepfake Audio Detection Tech at CES 2024 to Counter AI-Generated and Disinformation

With McAfee’s deepfake audio detection capabilities, we’ll be putting the power of knowing what is real or fake directly into the hands of consumers. We’ll help consumers avoid ‘cheapfake’ scams where a cloned celebrity is claiming a new limited-time giveaway, and also make sure consumers know instantaneously when watching a video about a presidential candidate, whether it’s real or AI-generated for malicious purposes. This takes protection in the age of AI to a whole new level.

AI/Fraud

Startup firm Patronus creates diagnostic tool to catch genAI mistakes

Patronus’ SimpleSafetyTests suite of diagnostic tool uses 100 test prompts designed to probe AI systems for critical safety risks. The company has used its software to test some of the most popular genAI platforms, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other AI chatbots to see, for instance, whether they could understand SEC filings. Patronus said the chatbots failed about 70% of the time and only succeeded when told exactly where to look for relevant information

AI

Syntiant Achieves 50 perce Acceleration of Large Language Models for Edge Devices

“Our core model optimizations enable considerable processing time acceleration across a range of compute platforms. Those same optimizations, which Syntiant has deployed across millions of devices worldwide, have been successfully applied to LLMs, bringing conversational speech to the edge, serving as the new interface between humans and machines.”

AI/LLMs

This claims to be the ‘world’s most advanced pen’ that digitises handwriting

A particularly intriguing feature is Augmented Notes, which extracts rich text items such as dates, to-dos, and phone numbers from the notes. Users can then synchronise the data with, for instance, their calendar, to-do app, or phonebook.

Automation & Productivity

AI drug discovery startup Isomorphic Labs partners with Eli Lilly and Novartis

The most up-to-date version of AlphaFold, announced in October, can make predictions for almost every molecule listed in the Protein Data Bank, which is an open-source database of biological molecules. It can also predict the structure of ligands, which are molecules that can be bound to receptor proteins and change the way cells communicate with one another, as well as nucleic acids, which are molecules that contain key genetic information.

AI/MedTech

Pure Storage shifts focus to as-a-service model

Giancarlo said Pure customers should assume that it will add Purity file services to the public cloud as well. That suggests a Cloud FileStore-type offering providing a consistent file services approach across on-premises/colo Pure arrays and the public cloud.

Data Storage

Unistellar lets backyard astronomers see galaxies with AI-based Odyssey Smart Telescope

With those products, in a well-lit parking lot, we were able to see Arcturus. Arcturus is 36.7 light-years from our sun. It’s a red giant that is 7.1 billion years old. And the M3 (Messier 3) cluster of stars is 33.9 light-years from Earth and it’s 11.4 billion years ago.

AI/Emerging Tech

Acceleration Economy Modernizes Business Technology Analyst Landscape with AnalystGPT

Created to shorten the time to value for business and technology professionals that need answers to career defining AI, cloud, cybersecurity, and data questions, AnalystGPT is free for the first 5,000 subscribers, and then moves to a $199 annual Acceleration Economy Education subscription, which also includes first-party reports and executive courses.

ChatGPT

Co2Bit to Revolutionize Voluntary Carbon Credit Offsets Using Artificial Intelligence (AI)

This groundbreaking system evaluates habitability, environmental sustainability, and humanity-centric factors, with a unique emphasis on the consistency of ratings.

Sustainability

Xreal’s new AR glasses are aimed at the Apple Vision Pro

Xreal pitches the Air 2 Ultra as a full-fledged “spatial computing” device similar to its earlier Light mixed reality device, which also featured 6DOF tracking. Like the rest of the Air lineup, the Air 2 Ultra projects a floating image in front of users’ eyes. But it adds dual 3D cameras, one on each side of the glasses, that can map the wearer’s environment and enable special features like hand tracking.

Automation & Productivity

Report: Google developing new version of Bard based on its flagship Gemini Ultra LLM

Google tested the latter model on 32 academic benchmarks used to evaluate neural networks’ capabilities. According to Google, Gemini Ultra bested the competition across 30 of the benchmarks. It’s also the first AI to outperform humans on the MMLU test suite, which measures language models’ ability to answer questions about subjects such as math, physics and medicine.

AI/LLM

Stanford’s mobile ALOHA robot learns from humans to cook, clean, do laundry

Called Mobile ALOHA (A Low-cost Open-source Hardware System for Bimanual Teleoperation) the system addresses the high costs and technical challenges of training mobile bimanual robots that require careful guidance from human operators.

Automation & Productivity

Voice cloning tech to power 2024 political ads as disinformation concerns grow

For example, the Boca Raton, Florida-based Instreamatic, an AI audio/video ad platform that raised a $6.1 million Series A funding round in 2021, says it is is expanding its capabilities into the wild world of political advertising. The solution enables candidate campaigns to quickly generate highly-targeted AI-driven contextual video and audio ads — featuring voiceovers, not talking head videos — that adapt to changing events or locations.

AI Ethics

OpenAI might want to make ChatGPT your default voice assistant on Android

Now, this was discovered via an APK deep-dive. Companies sometimes put strings of code in their current apps that hint at future features. However, that’s not a guarantee that the companies will unveil them. They can easily take the code out at any point, so you’ll want to take this news cautiously. It’s very possible that OpenAI will not unveil this feature.

ChatGPT

BrAInery: A Revolutionary AI Verification Platform Officially Launched

BrAInery is a groundbreaking platform where the future of AI verification unfolds. We revolutionize how AI-generated content is authenticated, inviting users from all walks of life to participate in the exciting journey of AIGC verification. At BrAInery, every click, every tag, every sample you provide plays a pivotal role in sculpting a trustworthy AI landscape.

AI/Verification

Nabla Raises $24 Million in Series B to Fuel Expansion of its Ambient AI Assistant to Transform Care Delivery

Nabla also prides itself on being scalable, having the capacity to cater to the unique needs of both small practices and large health systems with 10,000+ clinicians. To deliver its solution to a broader user base, Nabla has partnered with EHR platforms that are increasingly looking to embed AI solutions like Nabla Copilot, which provide smooth integrations and streamline workflows while prioritizing privacy, accuracy, and speed.

Automation & Productivity

Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant targeted in X account takeover

The scammer who took control of the account on X, still generally known as Twitter, spread a cryptocurrency scam while pretending to be the Phanton crypto wallet, with a message claiming that a distribution of the $PHNTM cryptocurrency was underway. Not surprisingly, the link in the X post sent readers to a fake phishing site that asks users to enter their wallet details to claim their share of the distribution.

Security

StorageX wants to end storage and compute separation… but for AI

Little-known Chinese startup StorageX has developed a Lake Ti computational storage processor it says enables compute to move to the data, allowing for fast processing of big data for Generative AI-class work.

Data Storage

Report: OpenAI is offering news publishers as little as $1M to use content for AI training

This might seem like a paltry amount, given the rapid rise of the company’s flagship LLM, ChatGPT, but that might depend on the terms of those deals. The news comes from the website The Information, which said today it had spoken with two executives familiar with the matter. The report states that the company is currently negotiating with about a dozen media companies.

AI

Mimecast acquires human risk management solutions startup Elevate Security

The company claims that after analyzing billions of cyber events spanning phishing, malware, browsing and safe data handling, it found that 8% of an organization’s workforce causes 80% of security incidents. Elevate Security addresses the problem by identifying those employees to automate response and controls.

Security

Generative AI search engine Perplexity AI raises $74M at $520M valuation

“With Perplexity’s search tools, users get instant, reliable answers to any question with complete sources and citations included,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Aravind Srinivas. He explained that the company built its search chatbot to be accurate and transparent when providing information to users in an era when search engine optimization has made it difficult for users to sift through results. It also helps them avoid the issues of advertising and sponsored links, which clutter results and make it harder to understand what they’re looking at.

AI/Search

OpenAI GPT Store launching next week

First unveiled by OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman and his compatriots at OpenAI’s DevDay developer conference in November, the GPT Store was introduced as a place on the ChatGPT website for those who build with OpenAI’s tools to make cash while sharing their creations with a large audience.

ChatGPT

Automation platform startup Vigilant Ops raises $2M for platform expansion

Users can automate the SBOM generation of any of their devices at any time during the software development lifecycle and also generate SBOMs for devices in the field. Certified compliant documentation is generated at each step, with complete workflow and audit trails, with users able to export data to quality management systems.

Automation & Productivity

Beware: 3 Malicious PyPI Packages Found Targeting Linux with Crypto Miners

The malicious code resides in the init.py file, which decodes and retrieves the first stage from a remote server, a shell script (" unmi.sh") that fetches a configuration file for the mining activity as well as the CoinMiner file hosted on GitLab.

Security

Human Preservation (HumPre) Pioneering AI Solutions for a More Human Digital Experience

"Additionally, we envision a paradigm shift in website navigation, moving away from traditional menu systems. Inspired by the intuitive nature of smart speakers, our approach will redefine how users interact with digital platforms, making searching and accessing information as natural and straightforward as speaking to an AI assistant. This shift is akin to how search engines once revolutionized the way we browsed the internet.”

Automation & Productivity

Facebook debuts Link History as a new way to keep tabs on users’ browsing habits 

According to Meta, Link History will store all of the links a user has clicked on for a duration of 30 days. However, it only does so for mobile users, meaning those browsing through Facebook on their personal computers will not have their link histories stored. It should also be noted that any links sent via Messenger and clicked on by users will also not be saved.

Data Privacy

Smarsh Unveils an Enhanced Risk Detection Scenario Catalog, a Major Leap in Communications Surveillance

“Legacy lexicon-based surveillance suffers from poor quality. Out-of-the-box machine-learning models limit your flexibility in customization, ultimately prohibiting you from owning your own risk. And custom machine-learning models lack the agility to adapt to the changing world. Smarsh is the industry’s only vendor that offers you compliance without concession.”

Risk Management

LogRhythm announces new integration and case management tools for security teams 

Leading the list is a new, interactive single-screen investigation designed to reduce the mean time to respond by highlighting contextual insights of cases with drill-down capabilities of log sources and security analytics. This is complemented by an improved assisted search feature that increases analysts’ productivity with suggestions of recent searches, search lists and search queries.

Security

fullthrottle.ai Introduces SafeMatch to Easily Resolve First-Party Data-Driven Household Identity and Attribution

FullThrottle Technologies, LLC, an end-to-end, first-party data-powered technology company that helps marketers identify, curate, and target audiences, announced the launch of SafeMatch, a new solution for ingesting household transaction data and safely resolving customer identities at the household level without using cookies.

Marketing Tech

Microsoft’s new Copilot key is the first big change to Windows keyboards in 30 years

 It’s in the same spot where Microsoft added a dedicated Office key to its own keyboards in 2019. The Copilot key simply launches the Windows Copilot that’s built into Windows 11, offering up a ChatGPT-like chatbot that can answer queries or even take actions inside Windows.

Automation & Productivity

Population health software company HealthEC suffers major data breach 

The information that was accessed includes names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, taxpayer identification numbers, medical record numbers, medical information, health insurance information, and billing and claims data.

Privacy/Security

Canon, Nikon and Sony are banding together in the fight against fake images

According to Nikkei Asia, the three Japanese camera makers will allow photographers to embed digital signatures via tech that will be part of the camera itself. These signatures – which will contain information like the photographer's name, plus the date, time and location the image was taken – can then be authenticated via a free web-based application called Verify that has been launched by a global alliance of media outlets, camera makers and tech companies.

AI Ethics

Intel, DigitalBridge Create New GenAI Software Company

Articul8 will offer enterprise customers a platform delivering AI capabilities for customer data, training, and inference and will provide a choice of cloud, on-prem, or hybrid deployment, the company said in a release.

AI

SMTP Smuggling: New Flaw Lets Attackers Bypass Security and Spoof Emails

The crux of SMTP smuggling is rooted in the inconsistencies that arise when outbound and inbound SMTP servers handle end-of-data sequences differently, potentially enabling threat actors to break out of the message data, "smuggle" arbitrary SMTP commands, and even send separate emails.

Security

SonicWall acquires Banyan Security to expand its cloud security portfolio 

“Right out of the gates, it was very clear that our focus was on rounding out key capabilities both organically and organically,” in managed detection and response, extended detection and response, SSE and zero trust, he said. “We believe this positions us well with an end-to-end solution.”

Cloud Security

Robin AI’s legal copilot gets $26M venture infusion 

The Robin copilot, which is available as a free Microsoft Word add-in, can be used to create contracts in minutes, review existing contracts using plain language prompts and identify and propose edits. Robin AI says its technology can cut the time required to review contracts by over 80%, reduce costs by 75% and limit the risk that important details will be missed during reviews.

AI/Legal Tech

Tiger Technology takes surveillance storage to the cloud

During the public cloud upload, Surveillance Bridge splits a video file into small chunks and an MD5 check ensures no video frames are lost during the transfer. In effect, Surveillance Bridge extends the NTFS file system to the cloud, helping to maintain the access controls, encryption, and auditing capabilities inherent to NTFS. The cloud data also functions as a disaster recovery resource.

Data Management

Malware Using Google MultiLogin Exploit to Maintain Access Despite Password Reset

A reverse engineering of the Lumma Stealer code has revealed that the technique targets the "Chrome's token_service table of WebData to extract tokens and account IDs of chrome profiles logged in," security researcher Pavan Karthick M said. "This table contains two crucial columns: service (GAIA ID) and encrypted_token."

Security

Google patches two vulnerabilities that left Kubernetes Engine vulnerable to attack 

A misconfiguration in FluentBit allows an attacker to execute code in the FluentBit container to access sensitive tokens from other pods, enabling unauthorized actions in the cluster. ASM’s Container Network Interface DaemonSet retains excessive permissions even after installation, allowing an attack to create new pods with extensive permissions, further escalating the attacker’s control over the cluster.

Security

FACTlix Uses AI to Identify Fakes in Consumer Reviews, Making Online Shopping Safer for Consumers

FACTlix is based on a decisional AI – identifying and understanding patterns in online content and related cohorts and using these patterns to assess the authenticity of the content in question. FACTlix works with both, fraudulent content generated by humans and machines. Importantly, FACTlix identifies fake reviews before publication, thereby eliminating any potential harm before posting

AI

Open source AI voice cloning arrives with MyShell’s new OpenVoice model

But along comes a new solution, OpenVoice, developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and members of Canadian AI startup MyShell, to offer open-source voice cloning that is nearly instantaneous and offers granular controls not found on other voice cloning platforms.


Clapself, an AI-Powered Talent Platform, Unveils Its Latest Offering: The AI Professionals Service

To further empower businesses and tech professionals in the new era of work, Clapself, a leading AI-powered talent platform announced the launch of its AI Professionals service. Available immediately, this groundbreaking offering by Clapself provides businesses across industries swift access to exceptional AI talent.

AI/Tech Jobs

BlipCut Introduces AI Video Translator: A Brand-New AI Tool

BlipCut prioritizes simplicity, ensuring that both newcomers and seasoned creators can easily integrate these features into their projects. The aim is to empower users to explore the full potential of AI in multimedia creation.

AI/Video

New Variant of DLL Search Order Hijacking Bypasses Windows 10 and 11 Protections

Threat actors take advantage of this behavior by moving legitimate system binaries into non-standard directories that include malicious DLLs that are named after legitimate ones so that the library containing the attack code is picked up in place of the latter.

Security

Widebrain’s Metazium Powers Next Wave of Immersive Digital Collaboration Tools

“We believe Metazium is a futuristic social media platform that boosts business while reducing costs for exhibitions, digital marketing, and customer communities,” said Hyewon Jeong, CEO of Widebrain. “The metaverse and XR ecosystem can only thrive and be enriched with various consumer services when there’s enough supply of enterprise content. Widebrain is a company that can create unique value in this regard.”

Metaverse

US Supreme Court chief justice warns against risks of AI adoption in legal circles 

In the 13-page report, Roberts acknowledged that AI had the potential to increase access to justice for litigants, while transforming legal research and helping courts resolve cases far more quickly and at lower costs. However, he also noted the privacy concerns surrounding the use of AI, and pointed out its inability to replace human discretion, Reuters reported today.

AI

ShibaGPT Launches an AI-Powered Promotion System

At first glance, ShibaGPT may be mistakenly perceived as just another meme coin, but it surpasses that notion by embodying a one-of-a-kind AI-powered promotion system, driven by the ChatGPT API. At its core, ShibaGPT possesses the remarkable capability to assimilate successful marketing strategies, autonomously create PR materials, and effectively promote itself on relevant forums and social networks.

AI/Marketing Tech

Seattle startup Olamedi building platform to automate health clinic communications

Olamedi helps automate patient communication and track long-term outcomes from a single platform. The software enables clinics to use a unified interface without making changes to existing software or record management systems, and it replaces front-desk conversations with smart questionnaires and modular workflows.

Automation & Productivity

OpenAI’s revenue skyrockets to $1.6 billion annualized revenue as ChatGPT dominates the generative AI race

To put things into perspective, OpenAI’s total revenue for the entire year of 2022 amounted to a modest $28 million. The advent of ChatGPT has significantly propelled OpenAI’s business, establishing it as a key indicator of the growing demand for generative AI.

AI

Delysium Introduces Lucy — The Operating System (OS) of the “Ykily” AI Agent Network

With support from partners at Google Cloud and Microsoft, Delysium introduces a new version of Lucy, a significant step towards the development of the “YKILY” AI Agent Network. Lucy is engineered based on the Unified AI Agent Architecture for Web3, ensuring a remarkable user experience and swift integration with Layer 1 & Layer 2 infrastructure and dApps.

AI/Blockchain

Beware: Scam-as-a-Service Aiding Cybercriminals in Crypto Wallet-Draining Attacks

A prominent contributor to this troubling trend is a notorious phishing group called Angel Drainer, which advertises a "scam-as-a-service" offering by charging a percentage of the stolen amount, typically 20% or 30%, from its collaborators in return for providing wallet-draining scripts and other services.

Security

GitHub Copilot Chat launches into general availability 

The upgrade enables GitHub’s assistant to not only autocomplete code but also perform a range of other tasks. A novice developer, for example, could ask Copilot Chat to explain a new programming concept. Enterprise software teams, meanwhile, can use the feature to automate time-consuming tasks such as rewriting an existing piece of code in a different programming language.

Automation & Productivity

Microsoft disables vulnerable Windows component following malware campaigns 

The feature that Microsoft disabled is part of App Installer. It allows Windows users to install a program stored in the MSIX format by clicking on a download link. According to Microsoft, the decision to turn off the feature followed the discovery that hackers have been using it to distribute malware disguised as legitimate applications.

Security

Google settles $5 billion lawsuit for illegally tracking millions of users in privacy mode

The lawsuit contended that Google, through its analytics, cookies, and apps, continued to track user activity even when individuals set Google’s Chrome browser to “Incognito” mode or other browsers to “private” browsing mode. The plaintiffs argued that this turned Google into an “unaccountable trove of information,” allowing the company to learn about users’ friends, hobbies, favorite foods, shopping habits, and potentially embarrassing online searches.

Data Privacy

Therap Services Enhances its Business Intelligence Module to Improve Performance Assessments

The updated interface offers a more seamless and intuitive navigation experience, empowering service providers to effortlessly explore and analyze agency-wide data. In addition, the incorporation of vibrant colors in the update enhances the visual experience for users and makes data presentation more accessible and user-friendly.

Data & Analytics

Microsoft’s Copilot app is now available on iOS

The app gives you access to Microsoft Copilot (formerly Bing Chat) and works similarly to OpenAI’s ChatGPT mobile app. In addition to letting you ask questions, draft emails, and summarize text, you can also create images through an integration with the text-to-image generator DALL-E3.

Automation & Productivity

IPFone Introduces “IPFoneMate”: A New Era in Customer Assistance with ChatGPT Bot for Webex

The OpenAI/ChatGPT bot is specifically customized for each business or industry, drawing on the company’s own resources such as learning centers, manuals, presentations, sales collateral, and other relevant documentation.

Automation & Productivity

Microsoft’s next Surface laptops will reportedly be its first true ‘AI PCs’

Microsoft’s Arm-based devices will be powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X chips, Windows Central reports. These PCs, codenamed CADMUS, will reportedly be designed to run the AI features Microsoft is packaging into a future release of Windows. They’ll also come with improvements to performance, battery life, and security on par with Apple silicon, according to Windows Central.

Automation & Productivity

Trust Stamp Partners With Scurid to Deliver AI-Powered In-Field Authentication

In a strategic collaboration aimed at enhancing the smooth and secure interaction between humans and machines, Scurid has joined forces with Trust Stamp, to leverage the benefits of biometrics as it opens an avenue to elevate the usability and security of IoT devices. This partnership is poised to play a crucial role in fortifying a diverse array of emerging IoT and edge devices, effectively addressing security challenges, and establishing seamless authentication and authorization, fostering a more integrated connection between humans and machines

IoT Security

Using AI Responsibly: U.S. Leads Efforts to Develop ISO/IEC 42001, AI Management System Standard

 “This novel approach takes the proven management systems approach and adapts it to AI. The standard is broadly applicable across a wide variety of application domains and will help unlock the societal benefits of AI while simultaneously addressing ethical and trustworthy concerns.”

AI

Baidu discloses its ChatGPT rival now has 100M+ users 

Ernie Bot is the fruit of a development effort that Baidu launched in 2019. It’s based on an internally developed large language model called ERNIE, or Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration. The model supports many of the same use cases such as OpenAI’s GPT-4: It’s capable of writing and rewriting text, summarizing existing documents and generating code.

ChatGPT

WiMi Built an Efficient, Blockchain-compatible Heterogeneous Computing Framework

WiMi Hologram Cloud a leading global Hologram Augmented Reality (“AR”) Technology provider, announced that by combining cloud servers, general-purpose computers, and FPGAs, WiMi has built a blockchain heterogeneous computing framework named “HeteroBlock Framework”. The framework is designed to provide users with efficient, flexible, and reliable blockchain computing services to meet the growing computing demand.

Blockchain

Ping Identity Puts Users in Control of Their Identity With New Personal Identity Solution

Users can store and easily share their verified, always-up-to-date personal information with businesses or other individuals using a digital wallet on their mobile device. The process makes sharing employment history, transcripts, healthcare records, or other identity-related data simple. Verified data can be kept up to date in real time by data issuers, and sharing it is as simple as scanning a QR code.

Privacy/Security

The MyHeritage AI Record Finder and AI Biographer Transform Genealogy with Artificial Intelligence

AI Record Finder revolutionizes genealogy like ChatGPT revolutionized searching the internet: it is an interactive, intelligent, free-text chat to help the user locate relevant historical records about a person of interest in MyHeritage’s vast database of 20 billion records. AI Biographer automatically compiles a rich narrative about an individual’s life using information from historical records that match the person, creating a Wikipedia-like biography about anyone

AI/Privacy

UST Introduces UST AlphaAI, Solidifying its Leadership Role at the Forefront of AI Innovation

UST SmartOps, an intelligent automation platform, leverages the power of Generative AI to provide intelligent document insight, seamless incident handling, and automated process creation.

Automation & Productivity

Macros Reply Launches the New Framework for Automated and Intelligent Input Management with Generative AI

The solution enables efficient automation and intelligent processing of all incoming documents through the use of generative AI within Macros eWorkplace, the in-house ECM suite, or in combination with any document management, ERP or CRM Solutions. Macros OMNIFRAIME prepares incoming correspondence with the help of AI, so that documents, requests, and cases can be processed automatically.

Automation & Productivity

Operation Triangulation: Previously unknown feature in iPhones exploited for spyware 

Detailed today by researchers from Kaspersky Labs Inc. at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress, the campaign, dubbed “Operation Triangulation,” starts with a zero-click attack on Apple’s iMessage that uses four vulnerabilities on versions of iOS up to version 16.2. A zero-click attack is, as the name suggests, an attack that can infect a target device with no clicking from a user.

Security

We're getting closer to OpenAI's first device

Tan's arrival is the latest development in the long-rumored collaboration between Altman and the iPhone designer. Details remain scarce, but Bloomberg reported that initial concept ideas included a set of devices for the home.

Automation & Productivity

Rambus Advances Data Center Server Performance with Industry-First Gen4 DDR5 RCD

The Rambus Gen4 RCD boosts the data rate to 7200 MT/s, setting a new benchmark for performance and enabling a 50% increase in memory bandwidth over today’s 4800 MT/s DDR5 module solutions. It supports the rapid pace of server main memory performance improvements to meet the demands of generative AI and other advanced data center workloads.

Automation & Productivity

The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

A lawsuit claims OpenAI copied millions of Times’ articles to train the language models that power ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.

AI

Aircall: An Outstanding Communication Platform for SMEs

A softphone is a cloud-based communication technology that eliminates the need for a physical phone system, making it an ideal solution for small businesses. By using a softphone, SMEs can benefit from advanced features such as enhanced caller ID, VoIP encryption, and custom settings for each user.

Automation & Productivity

Microsoft Copilot is now available as a ChatGPT-like app on Android

Microsoft has quietly launched a dedicated Copilot app for Android. The new app is available in the Google Play Store, offering access to Microsoft’s AI-powered Copilot without the need for the Bing mobile app. Spotted by Neowin, Copilot on Android has been available for nearly a week, but an iOS version isn’t available just yet.

ChatGPT

Microsoft to implement new feature to reinstall Windows without deleting any files or apps

According to that report, the new setting can be found by heading to Settings > System > Recovery on Windows 11. It’s currently only available to members of the Windows Canary Channel, who get to test new features before they become more widely available.

Automation & Productivity

UltiHash – making better dedupe hash technology 

Incoming data is scanned and repetitious variable sized byte-level combinations replaced by markers. UltiHash says its dedupe operates both within and across datasets and is independent of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data data types such as text, images, videos, audio files, database records and so forth.

Data Management

Pika Labs’ text-to-video AI platform opens to all: Here’s how to use it

Pika says that the model can produce a wide range of content, including 3D animations, live-action clips and cinematic videos, as well as modify moving objects (like a horse or an outfit) with simple text prompts.

Automation & Productivity

Critical Zero-Day in Apache OfBiz ERP System Exposes Businesses to Attack

According to SonicWall, CVE-2023-51467 could be triggered using empty and invalid USERNAME and PASSWORD parameters in an HTTP request to return an authentication success message, effectively circumventing the protection and enabling a threat actor to access otherwise unauthorized internal resources.

Security

Web3 growth marketing leader Addressable secures $13.5 million in funding boost led by BITKRAFT

Addressable has amped up its capabilities significantly. Now, they can track crypto wallet owners across a staggering 400,000 websites, including big names like Bloomberg, The New York Times, and Yahoo Finance. They’ve expanded into three fresh ad networks—Unity, Pubmatic, and Magnite—joining their initial presence on the Twitter ad network. This broader reach means Addressable can craft more targeted and comprehensive paid ad campaigns across social networks, websites, and mobile apps.

Web3

Rogue WordPress Plugin Exposes E-Commerce Sites to Credit Card Theft

"Since the only way to remove any of the mu-plugins is by manually removing the file the malware goes out of its way to prevent this," Martin explained. "The malware accomplishes this by unregistering callback functions for hooks that plugins like this normally use."

Security

D3 joins forces with Shiba Inu & Viction to launch top-level Web3 domains

D3 recognizes the current incompatibility of Web3 naming systems with traditional internet infrastructure, leading to gaps in functionality, brand confusion, data loss, and potential fraud. Their patent-pending platform seeks to bridge these gaps, integrating traditional internet and Web3 ecosystems to provide enhanced utility, security, and universal access, introducing what they term as ‘real Web3 domains.’

Web3

ControlCase introduces AI initiative for faster IT certification and compliance review.

Available through ControlCase’s proprietary Compliance Hub™ platform, this evidence review feature provides large language model (LLM) document pre-check, real-time answers to relevant questions, and enhanced information accuracy, all while ensuring that data never leaves the ControlCase hosted environment to ensure security and privacy.

AI/IT

TerraMaster Launches New Surveillance Manager

The monitoring management system can monitor the images captured by cameras in real-time, providing live video surveillance to help administrators promptly understand the situation in the monitored area. Users can establish various alarm rules and thresholds. Once an abnormality occurs in the monitored area or exceeds the set threshold, the system automatically sends alarm messages to administrators, allowing them to take timely measures to prevent incidents.

Security

AI talent wanted: The federal government is searching far and wide to fill new cutting-edge positions

The long-awaited order arrived with a laundry list of requirements for agencies, which are now tasked with growing the federal talent pool with workers who have experience in AI research, development, procurement and deployment.

Tech Jobs

Stable Video Diffusion is now available through Stability AI API

Stability AI, the company known for Stable Diffusion text-to-image generator, has announced that its new foundation image-to-video model, Stable Video Diffusion (SVD), is now available on its developer platform and through its application programming interface (API), allowing third-party developers to incorporate it into their own apps, websites, software and services.

AI

Decoy Microsoft Word Documents Used to Deliver Nim-Based Malware

"Nim is a statically typed compiled programming language," the researchers said. "Aside from its familiar syntax, its cross-compilation features allow attackers to write one malware variant and have it cross-compiled to target different platforms."

Security

Midjourney V6 is here with in-image text and completely overhauled prompting

Among those new features are drastically improved and more realistic, highly detailed images, and the ability to have the model generate legible text within images, something that had eluded Midjourney since its release in 2022 even as other rival AI image generators such as OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 and Ideogram had launched this type of feature.

AI

Cisco acquires eBPF networking startup Isovalent 

Cilium helps organizations manage the flow of network traffic among their software containers. It includes an automated latency reduction mechanism, tools for tracking connection speeds and a load balancer that ensures traffic is evenly spread out among containers. There are also cybersecurity features that ease tasks such as encrypting network traffic.

Network Management

D3 joins forces with Shiba Inu & Viction to launch top-level Web3 domains

The Shiba Inu ecosystem, with its vast user base of over 80 million, includes the popular SHIB token and the Shibarium Layer-2 blockchain. Meanwhile, Viction is a people-focused Layer-1 blockchain with zero-gas transactions and enhanced security, serving over 3.7 million wallets. Through interoperable digital identities, D3 aims to help both ecosystems extend their services beyond their existing communities in a secure and trusted manner, aligning with D3’s broader mission to integrate DNS and blockchain technologies.

Blockchain/Web3

Ignition’s new funding fuels expansion of AI-powered sales and marketing platform

Ignition is taking on one of enterprises’ biggest pain points: misalignment across go-to-market functions that’s torching potential profits. We’re talking staggering sums left on the table—up to 10% of revenue, per Ignition’s data.

AI/Marketing Tech

Report: Up to 240 million PCs could be scrapped following end of support for Windows 10

The issue is not so much the lack of support from Microsoft, but rather the strict hardware requirements for machines running Windows 11, Reuters reported. Those requirements rule out PCs running older central processing units, as well as those machines that do not come with Trusted Platform Module 2.0 security functionality baked in.

Automation & Productivity

Consumer AI startup Rabbit raises $10M from Khosla Ventures 

Rabbit is building a low-cost mobile device, the r1, that it plans to launch early next month on the sidelines of the CES consumer electronics event. The company designed the device in collaboration with a Swedish electronics manufacturer called Teenage Engineering AB that is best known for making audio equipment. The r1 ships with its own custom operating system, Rabbit OS, that the company says is based on an internally developed generative AI model called LAM.

AI

Apple’s latest AI research could completely transform your iPhone

In the first research paper, Apple scientists propose HUGS (Human Gaussian Splats) to generate animated 3D avatars from short monocular videos (i.e. videos taken from a single camera). “Our method takes only a monocular video with a small number of (50-100) frames, and it automatically learns to disentangle the static scene and a fully animatable human avatar within 30 minutes,” said lead author Muhammed Kocabas.

AI

Web3 growth marketing firm Addressable raises $6M 

Addressable’s platform “addresses” this problem by providing a way for advertisers to target audiences in a Web3-savvy way across more than 400,000 websites, including major media outlets such as Bloomberg, The New York Times and Yahoo Finance. This allows marketing campaign owners to understand if their audiences are engaging with their advertisements and other interactions across both Web 2.0 and Web3 such as purchasing and using crypto assets and Web3 in-game purchases

Blockchain/Web3

UltiHash raises $2.5M to make data storage more cost-effective and sustainable 

UltiHash wants to strike a better balance, helping companies to store more data without increasing their storage resources. It does this with high-performance object storage software that enables byte-level deduplication independent of data type to any kind of data infrastructure, matching binary fragments per and across even the biggest, exabyte-scale datasets.

Data Storage

Google’s new multimodal AI video generator VideoPoet looks incredible

“Most existing models employ diffusion-based methods that are often considered the current top performers in video generation. These video models typically start with a pretrained image model, such as Stable Diffusion, that produces high-fidelity images for individual frames, and then fine-tune the model to improve temporal consistency across video frames.”

AI

New JavaScript Malware Targeted 50,000+ Users at Dozens of Banks Worldwide

Attack chains are characterized by the use of scripts loaded from the threat actor-controlled server ("jscdnpack[.]com"), specifically targeting a page structure that's common to several banks. It's suspected the malware is delivered to targets by some other means, e.g., via phishing emails or malvertising.

Security

Researchers find child sexual abuse images in LAION-5B AI training dataset 

The discovery was made by the Stanford Internet Observatory, or SIO, which detailed its findings in a Tuesday report. SIO researchers have identified more than 1,000 exploitative images of children in LAION-5B. They detailed in their report that they evaluated only a subset of the files in the database, which means it likely contains thousand of additional CSAM images that have not yet been found.

AI

Cerabyte shows off prototype ceramic archival system

The startup is developing archival data storage based on data laser-written as Quick Response (QR) codes in a nanoscale ceramic layer coating a glass square platter or carrier that will be stable for thousands of years. The platters are stored in cartridges, akin to LTO tape reel cartridges, which are then placed in drawers within a rack, similar to a tape library. This is fitted with a robot picker and mover to transport cartridges to and from a read/write rack.

Data Storage

ScaleOps Raises $21.5M to Automate Cloud Resource Management

“Experienced engineers spend hours trying to predict demand, running load tests, and tweaking configuration files for every single container. It’s impossible to manage this at scale. We realized there’s a huge need for a context-aware platform that can optimize these constantly-changing environments automatically, adapting to changes in demand in real-time.”

Cloud

Harvey raises $80M to build generative AI for legal professionals 

By making an AI model that focuses on legal knowledge instead of a general-purpose model, Harvey’s AI chatbot can avoid what is known as “hallucinations,” or when an AI makes confident false statements. The company said that it intended to build its custom AI models by integrating the legal best practices of the firms that it works with such as tiered reviews and transparency.

AI/Legal Tech

ChatGPT and other AI models unable to analyze SEC Filing, Patronus AI researchers find

The findings underscore the hurdles faced by AI models as they are integrated into real-world products, particularly in industries like finance. Extracting crucial numbers swiftly and analyzing financial narratives has been viewed as a promising application for chatbots, with the potential to provide a competitive edge in the financial sector.

AI/ChatGPT

Cybersecurity simulation firm SimSpace raises $45M to help companies prepare for attacks 

The company’s Cyber Force platform provides a safe environment to create pre-defined, customized simulations of any cyber event or mission, such as simulating attacks or events. This allows for the testing of infrastructure, hardware and software stacks against known attacks and also permits teams to do work within known environments for training purposes to do live-fire exercises in battle-ready cyber operations without the fear of data leakage.

Security

IoT security startup Phosphorus raises $27M for research and development 

With a mission to help enterprises “manage the unmanageable,” the platform offers complete discovery, remediation and security management for the full range of Cyber-Physical System assets – including more than 1 million unique xIoT models. The xIOT devices include a broad spectrum of Cyber-Physical Systems that cover IoT, operational technology, industrial IoT and embedded medical devices

IoT Security

Patronus AI finds ‘alarming’ safety gaps in leading AI systems

SimpleSafetyTests comprises 100 test prompts designed to probe vulnerabilities across five high-priority harm areas like suicide, child abuse, and physical harm. In trials, Patronus tested 11 popular open-source LLMs and found critical weaknesses in several, with over 20% unsafe responses in many models.  

Artificial Intelligence

Prolific Ransomware Groups Intentionally Switch On Remote Encryption for Attacks, Sophos Finds

 In remote encryption attacks, also known as remote ransomware, adversaries leverage a compromised and often underprotected endpoint to encrypt data on other devices connected to the same network.

Security

EmbodyMe, Inc. Unveils xpression avatar: Transforming Selfies into Dynamic AI Avatars for Expressive Video Communication

With xpression avatar, users can embody any version of their digital self, adding a personal touch to their communication through an array of AI-driven customizations. Leveraging proprietary neural rendering technology, the avatars seamlessly synchronize with users’ head movements and facial expressions, allowing for an unparalleled level of personalization in video communication.

AI

EthSign brings DocuSign-like features to Line, Telegram with a web3 twist

EthSign is deployed on the respective blockchain network that runs on Telegram and Line, TON and Finschia. Once users connect their crypto wallets to the messengers, they can start signing documents through EthSign the way they’d interface with DocuSign

Blockchain

New generative AI-powered SaaS security expert from AppOmni

To help enterprises handle all this sprawl, AppOmni today announced its new trademarked tool AskOmni, a generative AI-powered SaaS security assistant. Users can ask critical security questions and the system, in plain language, will report back critical data and remediation steps.

Security

Hackers Abusing GitHub to Evade Detection and Control Compromised Hosts

This technique is sneaky as it allows threat actors to blend their malicious network traffic with genuine communications within a compromised network, making it challenging to detect and respond to threats in an effective manner. As a result, the chances that an infected endpoint communicating with a GitHub repository will be flagged as suspicious is less likely.

Security

Comcast’s Xfinity unit and Insomniac Games experience large-scale data breaches 

According to the Comcast unit, the hackers also gained access to some customers’ names, dates of birth, contact information and the last four digits of their Social Security numbers. Furthermore, Xfinity believes that the breach compromised some users’ secret login verification questions as well as their answers.

Data Privacy

Qlik Acquires Mozaic Data, Strengthening Its Leadership in Data Integration and Analytics

Customers recognize the importance of treating data as a product—a strategy that aligns with the need for a SaaS-based Data Product Catalog, offering a more efficient and user-friendly experience in data lifecycle management, while also reinforcing a solid foundation for AI-driven data management.”

Data & Analytics

Jetic debuts simpler, cloud-native integration platform based on Apache Camel 

The startup, officially known as Datagrate Inc., said it’s launching today after spending more than three years to build out and fine-tune what it claims is among the most robust and reliable integration platforms available. With its offering, developers have a simple way to engineer, deliver and maintain scalable application programming interfaces and integrations using hundreds of pre-built data connectors and patterns.

DevOps

FBI Takes Down BlackCat Ransomware, Releases Free Decryption Tool

Court documents show that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) enlisted the help of a confidential human source (CHS) to act as an affiliate for the BlackCat and gain access to a web panel used for managing the gang's victims, in what's a case of hacking the hackers.

Security

PingCAP Launches TiDB 7.5, Enhancing Distributed SQL Database Tech

TiDB is an open-source distributed SQL database for the most demanding modern applications. It features shardless horizontal scaling, MySQL wire compatibility, support for ACID transactions, and hybrid transactional/analytical processing (HTAP) for real-time operational insights.

Data & Analytics

Lightmatter raises $155M for photonic computing at $1.2B valuation 

Lightmatter provides a full stack of photonics-based hardware and software solutions that allows for increasing performance, efficiency and power consumption for compute-intensive workloads, which the company says is particularly essential for high-performance activities such as artificial intelligence

Automation & Productivity

ChatGPT maker OpenAI gives its board the power to veto harmful AI as EU begins regulation process

The start-up, which boasts its hugely successful chatbot ChatGPT and is backed by Microsoft, said it would establish a dedicated team to oversee technical work and an operational structure, which also allows the board to reverse safety decisions.

AI

New report warns of a rise in AI-generated email fraud and phishing attacks 

The report discusses several instances of AI-generated attacks detected by Abnormal, such as malware delivery attempts posing as insurance companies, Netflix impersonation for credential phishing, and invoice fraud by impersonating a cosmetics brand. The attacks use sophisticated language and lack the usual signs of phishing, such as grammatical errors, making them more convincing to potential victims.

Security

OpenAI announces ‘Preparedness Framework’ to track and mitigate AI risks

The Preparedness Framework, according to a blog post by OpenAI, is an attempt to address at least some of these concerns and demonstrate the lab’s commitment to responsible and ethical AI development. The framework outlines how OpenAI will “track, evaluate, forecast and protect against catastrophic risks posed by increasingly powerful models,” such as those that could be used for cyberattacks, mass persuasion, or autonomous weapons.

AI

New Mitiga Investigation Workbench helps address SEC cybersecurity incident reporting requirement 

The new service can be used in any situation where there is a need to investigate cloud or SaaS activities, including security alerts, suspected phishing incidents, or unusual user behavior, to understand precisely what happened. In one example, if a user has been phished, Investigation Workbench can be used to see what actions the user took after the phishing incident.

Security

Akamai finds new Outlook exploits that leverage sound file attachments 

Outlook plays sound files, such as .WAV files, as a convenience, but now this is yet another way for malware to be deposited on a victim’s computer. The files are processed as shown in the diagram below through Windows’ Audio Compression Manager, because typically sound files employ some form of compression to keep file sizes more manageable. It is this component of Windows that’s ripe for one of the exploits.

Security

IBM to acquire Software AG’s Integration Business for $2.3 billion to boost its hybrid cloud and AI offerings 

This acquisition enhances IBM’s hybrid cloud and AI offerings, potentially positioning it as a formidable competitor to industry giants like Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS). IBM, already owning the data quality platform InfoSphere Information Server, sees StreamSets as a valuable addition, providing data quality management within the integration process.

AI/Cloud

BrainChip Previews Akida Edge Box, a New Edge AI Device for Vision-Based Applications

The Akida Edge Box—expected to begin pre-sales on January 15th, 2024—powers AI applications in challenging environments where performance and efficiency are essential. The device will be demonstrated for the first time at CES 2024, January 9-12 in Las Vegas.

AI

New QakBot phishing campaign appears, months after FBI takedown

Targets of the new campaign received an email purporting to be from a U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employee. The email included a PDF attachment containing a URL that downloaded a digitally signed Windows Installer (.MSI) file.

Security

BAMCAP leads $8.5 million funding round for security compliance startup Strike Graph 

Founded in 2022, Strike Graph offers a “Trust Operations” platform that helps customers design, operate and measure their security programs without the need for complicated processes, costly audit firms or automation. The company claims that for many of its customers, achieving compliance with Strike Graph is 80% faster from start to certification.

Security

Exclusive: Jaxon AI teams up with IBM Watson in battle against AI hallucination

The startup is now expanding into the broader enterprise market with a developed technology called Domain-Specific AI Language (DSAIL) that seeks to address a major challenge in artificial intelligence: hallucinations and inaccuracies in large language models (LLMs). The technology incorporates IBM watsonx foundation models and represents a novel approach to developing more reliable AI solutions.

AI

Salvador raises $6M to help industrial organizations recover from cyberattacks in just 30 seconds 

Salvador explains how it mitigates this threat by ensuring its backups are stored on a dedicated Cyber Recovery Unit, which is an air-gapped server it supplies to customers. The CRU creates a full duplicate of the industry control system, including its operating system, data files, drivers and unique user configurations. Each time a backup is performed, Salvador employs monitoring technologies to ensure the data is not compromised by malware.

Security

MongoDB Suffers Security Breach, Exposing Customer Data

To be clear, we have not identified any security vulnerability in any MongoDB product as a result of this incident. It is important to note that MongoDB Atlas cluster access is authenticated via a separate system from MongoDB corporate systems, and we have found no evidence that the Atlas cluster authentication system has been compromised.

Security

Inspeere’s peer-to-peer backup storage protects against ransomware

The background is that organizations should back up up their data using a 3-2-1 principle – meaning three copies of the data on two different media types with one copy stored externally. But a backup copy is inherently vulnerable to malware attacks. If, instead, the external copy is split into fragments which are encoded and compressed and stored on different systems, then an attacker would have to recombine, decode and decompress all the fragments to capture the data.

Data Management

CISA Urges Manufacturers Eliminate Default Passwords to Thwart Cyber Threats

In an alert published last week, the agency called out Iranian threat actors affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for exploiting operational technology devices with default passwords to gain access to critical infrastructure systems in the U.S.

Security

Citrusx Steps in to Ensure AI Models Align with Regulations

The goal was to establish a tool that parallels the workflow of conventional programming, ensuring the seamless operation of AI models. This tool guarantees the models’ functionality, reliability, and accountability throughout their lifecycle. This involves validating their relevance with updated data, enabling creators to articulate the model’s functionality to internal stakeholders and regulators, and fostering trust in the results generated by these models.

AI

Tembo raises $7M to make Postgres more accessible and configurable 

Tembo supports more than 200 Postgres extensions for data warehousing, retrieval-automated generation, recommendation model training, route optimization and planning and other uses. The open-source package manager it developed, called Trunk, contains “a ton of metadata nobody’s ever collected about extensions and stores it in a programmatic manner,”

Data Management

Solix launches new enterprise data platform for the gen AI era

When asked about the driving factors behind the platform update, Solix cited managing “petabyte-scale data volumes,” evolving privacy regulations, and the need to support advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) applications across multi-cloud environments as major challenges addressed in CDP 3.0.

Data Management

Google Maps receives privacy upgrades reportedly designed to end geofence warrants 

Next year, Maps will switch to saving Timeline location histories on users’ own devices rather than on Google infrastructure. That reportedly means authorities will no longer have the ability to request the data from the search giant because it will no longer have access to it.

Privacy

IPWAY Unveils Innovative Platform to Streamline Access to IPv4 Addresses for Proxy Services

This pioneering solution is set to transform how companies access and manage IPv4 resources, thereby enhancing their data collection capabilities for artificial intelligence (AI). The pre-launch phase, initiated on October 20, 2023, marks a significant step towards making AI more accessible. Through its user-friendly platform, IPWAY simplifies the complexities of IP management, enabling organizations to fully leverage AI technologies.

AI/Network Management

Chinese AI startup 01.AI to raise $200 million to build the next generation of open-source AI models

Recognized for its Yi-34B model, which became the first Chinese Language Model (LLM) to lead the Huggingface leaderboard in November, 01.AI is part of the wave of Chinese startups opening or planning to open their large language models (LLMs) for public use. This move puts them in competition with larger entities like Meta and Alibaba, all striving to attract users and keep pace with market leader OpenAI.

AI

SOCi’s Genius Social Transforms Social Media Through AI-Powered Content Development

Genius Social leverages SOCi’s CoMarketing Cloud to aggregate data and customer insights from a diverse range of channels, including search engines, social media, customer reviews, and beyond. This integration not only gathers data but also synthesizes it to create a comprehensive 360-degree view of local customer interests.

Data & Analytics

How to spot artificial intelligence-generated content

AI-generated photos and videos will be swirling around social media for generations to come so it’s best to be prepared and always be on your toes when viewing content on any platform.

AI

HiOperator introduces SMSBot, harnessing generative AI for enhanced customer support

The company’s strategic use of generative AI stands out as a key differentiator. Tsai emphasized the significance of the technology in crafting the customer experience: “Generative AI is maybe 10% of the work, but 90% of the customer experience.”

AI/Customer Experience

Google’s DeepMind creates generative AI model with fact checker to crack unsolvable math problem 

Google LLC’s DeepMind artificial intelligence research unit claims to have cracked an unsolvable math problem using a large language model-based chatbot equipped with a fact-checker to filter out useless outputs.

AI

Fortinet Releases Advisor, Its GenAI Assistant Focused on Threat Investigation and Remediation

Fortinet has employed AI in its Fortinet Security Fabric and FortiGuard Labs threat intelligence and security services for some time. In addition, the company has several other AI-powered offerings, such as FortiGuard AI-Powered Security Services, FortiAIOps, FortiEDR, and FortiAnalyzer. Fortinet says using AI across its Security Fabric can remediate attacks and help IT teams fix networking and security.

AI/Security

Zoom's Bug-Scoring System Prioritizes Riskiest Vulns for Cyber Teams

"VISS analyzes 13 different aspects of impact for each vulnerability, segmented into impact groups specific to the platform, infrastructure, and data," Zoom said in a statement. "The VISS calculation produces a score ranging from 0 to 100, which can then be modified by applying the compensating controls metric."

Security

Datalogz Secures $5M to Enhance BI Platform Integration and Reduce Dashboard Redundancy

Datalogz’ solution creates the guardrails that make enterprise-wide BI initiatives successful by preventing BI sprawl and safely enabling self-service analytics. Datalogz plugs into the metadata and logs of BI platforms to instantly identify and automate solutions for critical issues that BI admins, CDOs and CIOs face every day, such as duplication, misreporting, inefficient queries, odd behavior patterns, and wasted computing costs.

Data Management

Volt Typhoon-Linked SOHO Botnet Infects Multiple US Gov't Entities

The "KV-Botnet," revealed in a report from Lumen's Black Lotus Labs, is designed to infect small-office home-office (SOHO) network devices developed by at least four different vendors. It comes built with a series of stealth mechanisms and the ability to spread further into local area networks (LANs).

Security

Salesforce and Apple are ready for enterprise AR

Available now, Salesforce has integrated Apple Business Messaging in Service Cloud  so Salesforce customers can offer AI-assisted support, appointments, and purchasing. Salesforce also announced the introduction of ARKit in the Salesforce Field Service mobile app starting next summer.

Automation & Productivity

New SEC cybersecurity incident disclosure requirements go into force in coming days 

There are two components to the disclosure rules. The first is mandatory cybersecurity incident reporting of “material” incidents. The disclosure of incidents would be via an 8-K form and must be reported within four business days of the incident. The second component requires companies to disclose their policies to manage cybersecurity risk, including providing updates on previously reported material cybersecurity incidents.

Security

1Password now lets you ditch the master password in favor of a passkey 

When setting up a 1Password account with a passkey, the private key is kept secure and encrypted and never shared with 1Password itself. The public key is stored on the company's servers and is used to authenticate your login attempts. But that public key is of no use without the corresponding private key

Security

Sam Altman’s venture fund invests $3M in startup using humans and AI to keep people on task

Shelpful — as in super + helpful — is designed to nudge members and provide reminders for any number of things, from taking medication, to getting some exercise, to knocking out simple projects, and more. Those nudges via text message are generated by both human accountability coaches — Shelpers — or an AI productivity assistant — HabitGPT. Or, both, in a three-way chat.

Automation & Productivity

New 'GambleForce' Threat Actor Behind String of SQL Injection Attacks

"SQL attacks persist because they are simple by nature," Group-IB said. "Companies often overlook how critical input security and data validation are, which leads to vulnerable coding practices, outdated software, and improper database settings," Rostovcev said.

Security

New NKAbuse Malware Exploits NKN Blockchain Tech for DDoS Attacks

NKN, which has over 62,000 nodes, is described as a "software overlay network built on top of today's Internet that enables users to share unused bandwidth and earn token rewards." It incorporates a blockchain layer on top of the existing TCP/IP stack.

Security

Google starts to add Tracking Protection to Chrome, turning off third-party cookies 

Google recognizes that some important features, such as sign-in, fraud prevention, advertising, and third-party embedded content, rely on cookies, but this technology is also a primary enabler of cross-site tracking.

Data Privacy

Microsoft drastically expands Azure AI Studio to include Llama 2 Model-as-a-Service, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision

Similar to the now old acronym of SaaS (software-as-a-service), MaaS offers customers the ability to use AI models such as Llama 2 on-demand over the web when needed with minimal set up, without having to go to all the trouble of installing it on their own cloud server space, private cloud, hybrid cloud, or other location. Even with Microsoft experts helping and trained IT personnel, this can be a non-trivial task for enterprises.

AI

Bitdefender debuts Scamio, leveraging AI to identify and advise on scams 

To use the service, users drop questionable content into Scamio and describe how it was received. Scamio then provides a verdict in seconds and offers recommendations for further action — such as whether to delete or block the send — along with providing advice on preventive measures to protect against scams in the future.

AI/Security

Similis Revolutionizing Content Creation With AI-powered AnyoneSwap

AnyoneSwap leverages advanced AI to seamlessly faceswap a model’s image into a picture or video, delivering highly realistic and top-quality visual production. Traditional faceswapping involves spending time and effort manually editing photos and video, but AnyoneSwap eliminates the need for this, streamlining content creation with single-click faceswapping.

AI/Video

Microsoft disrupts cybercrime group that created 750M+ fake accounts 

Many hacker groups’ modus operandi is to create fraudulent accounts in services such as Microsoft Outlook and use them for phishing or spam campaigns. Additionally, fraudulent accounts are sometimes used to launch distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks. Hackers often don’t create such accounts themselves but rather buy them from so-called cybercrime-as-a-service groups such as Storm-1152, the threat actor that Microsoft has disrupted.

Security

GoLinks unveils GoSearch, an AI-powered search tool for the modern enterprise

Unlike traditional enterprise search tools that index all data regardless of its relevance or sensitivity, GoSearch promises a nuanced approach, indexing only documents available to every employee. This design choice aligns with the growing need for tools that respect both accessibility and privacy in today’s data-sensitive business environments.

Data Management

Sourcegraph launches AI coding assistant Cody into general availability 

What separates Cody from other AI assistants in the market is that the chatbot is aware of more than just the code in the file the developer is looking at or a single repository. It can search and navigate a company’s entire codebase using Sourcegraph’s specialized technology.

AI/DevOps

H&R Block unveils conversational AI tax assistant for DIY filers 

The AI Tax Assist lives in a panel on the side and is powered by Microsoft Corp.’s Azure OpenAI service, the company said. It was trained using an amalgam of the company’s knowledge from more than 60,000 tax professionals and knowledge regarding the current United States federal and state tax laws.

AI

Midjourney Alpha is here with AI image generations on the web

Midjourney today confirmed today in its Discord announcements channel that it had “begun testing an alpha version of the website which includes image creation,” however, the company noted the alpha release was limited to “people who have made >10,000 images in Midjourney.”

AI

AllSpice.io raises $6 million in additional funding for its hardware collaboration platform

Through features like automation, cross-team collaboration, and version control, engineers can efficiently develop hardware. AllSpice.io’s clientele spans from startups to Fortune 500 companies in diverse industries such as robotics, instrumentation, aerospace, consumer electronics, transportation, medical devices, and automotive.

Automation & Productivity

Lightning AI debuts ‘iPhone approach’ to new AI dev platform

According to Lightning AI, the end-to-end, SaaS platform “fundamentally re-architects how developers work by abstracting away every non-core activity and providing a single interface for all AI development needs.” Users can use pre-built templates, quickly scale from CPU to GPU on as many machines as they need, and leverage natively integrated tools or build their own while deploying anywhere — in their cloud, Lightning AI’s cloud or on a local GPU cluster.

AI/DevOps

Google unleashes Gemini Pro for enterprises and developers to build on 

Gemini comes in three different sizes: Ultra, Pro and Nano. The smallest model, Nano, is available in Android starting with the Pixel 8 Pro phone, and a specialized Gemini Pro model is already running behind the scenes in Google’s AI chatbot Bard. The Ultra model is the largest and most capable version in the set designed for the most complex tasks, but will not be available more broadly from Google until sometime in early 2024.

AI

Google Cloud’s genAI and security integration improves threat detection and response

Duet AI is a genAI-powered assistance that is embedded in Google Workspace and Google Cloud. The tech giant claims the tool can summarize and classify threat information, translate natural language searches into queries and offer suggested next steps for remediating issues.

AI/Security

MariaDB spins out SkySQL as an independent, database-as-a-service company 

The cloud-native nature of SkySQL means that it’s significantly easier for customers to manage their database deployments. It’s also easier to license and manage compared to alternative database products, such as Oracle Corp.’s database. In addition, SkySQL is one of the first DBaaS services to provide support for row, columnar and combined row and columnar storage, which is a technique that makes it possible to process transactions and analytics in one place, on the same dataset.

Data & Analytics

Braintrust Data wants to make enterprise AI better with faster evaluations 

“Our product allows you to easily (in under an hour) instrument your code to define evaluations, capture user feedback, log LLM calls, etc. Every time you make a change, you can re-run evaluations and instantly get a dashboard that tells you how much you improved or regressed things, and debug individual cases (before moving to final deployment)."

AI/DevOps

Proton Mail finally gets a desktop app for encrypted email and calendar

The desktop app is available in beta is optimized for both Windows and macOS, and encrypts sent emails end-to-end just like with the browser version, according to the Swiss company, while offline access to emails will be available “soon.”

Automation & Productivity

Salesforce announces updated unstructured data capabilities for its AI and CRM platform 

Data Cloud acts as a pool of a company’s metadata-enabled objects in one place, allowing all the information that an enterprise has to be accessed by services and products, including Einstein Copilot, using a hyperscale engine. This reduces the amount of data fragmentation across enterprise data stacks between cloud, social and mobile and provides access to information all in one place. Now that Data Cloud has access to unstructured data as well as structured data, enterprise customers have reach that they didn’t before.

AI/Data

How Kubernetes 1.29 improves open source cloud native production readiness

Among the major additions in this version are 11 features promoted to stable release status for general availability. This includes the new ReadWriteOncePod volume access mode that ensures only one pod can read/write a volume, node volume expansion secret support for container storage interface (CSI)  drivers and encryption at rest using KMS v2.

DevOps

Equinix enables private AI infrastructure for businesses

Enterprises are directly leveraging Equinix for deploying their private AI infrastructure, while service providers are utilizing the platform to offer private AI services to their clientele. The concentration of both buyers and sellers in Equinix’s AI ecosystem, combined with its proximity to major cloud on-ramps, provides a conducive environment for the burgeoning AI market.

AI

Stravito introduces integration with Microsoft SharePoint and Teams for improved data accessibility 

The integration includes support for easy onboarding for new regions or departments, findability and reuse of existing knowledge and experience sharing, and curatorial opportunities for synced files. Once files are synced to Stravito, the Stravito-powered curation options become applicable for them as well, such as pages in Scrapbooks, organizing them in Collections, setting up notifications and Insight Feeds.

Data Management

Tenyx aims to fix LLMs’ catastrophic forgetting problem

Voice AI agent company Tenyx is today announcing a fine-tuning method to help address this glaring problem. The platform helps businesses adapt LLMs to their unique requirements without compromising foundational knowledge or protective safeguards.

AI/LLMs

Featureform raises $5.5M to bring order to feature management ‘chaos’ 

“I think of a feature as a definition,” he said. “We store the definition, run it for you on [data analytics platforms] Databricks or Snowflake, define your pipeline, define the metadata and versioning, make it shareable, monitor for model drift and make sure governance is properly used. We’re a full platform to define and manage features, not just a place to store them.”

AI/Data

BitHuman introduces lifelike AI agents for enterprises

BitHuman is pioneering a new horizon in the AI landscape, boasting agents tailored for the enterprise realm. Their forte lies in crafting comprehensive AI solutions, facilitating real-time, photorealistic, human-like experiences across sectors such as hospitality, fashion, retail, healthcare, and beyond.

AI

AI, Machine Learning Startup Chalk Raises $10 Million in Seed Funding

Chalk’s best-in-class developer experience enables data teams to declare features and their dependencies with idiomatic Python in online, streaming, and batch environments. Chalk compiles these definitions into parallel pipelines that run on a Rust-based engine. These pipelines use the exact same source code to serve temporally-consistent training sets to data scientists and live feature values to models.

AI/ML

Big tech’s AI leaders team up with the Cloud Security Alliance in comprehensive safety initiative 

The initiative will focus on the most pressing issues relating to generative AI, including the adoption of best practices, promoting the wide availability of AI, mitigating possible harms, and creating assurance programs for governments which will need to rely on companies that produce AI systems, what CSA said will be bridging the gap between policy and practice.

AI/Security

Cohere adds support for custom data connectors to its flagship LLM 

Cohere offers a collection of LLMs that enterprises can deploy in the major public clouds platforms as well as on their on-premises hardware. The company’s flagship model, Command, is capable of generating text, searching document repositories for specific snippets of information and sorting business records by category. Cohere says the LLM was trained on a dataset specifically designed to optimize its performance across common enterprise use cases.

AI/LLM

Dell Technologies updates storage products for AI

Dell's goal is to make the PowerScale an optimized storage solution for both general AI and generative AI workloads. It achieves this through new hardware and PowerScale OneFS software enhancements, so companies can prepare and infer AI models more quickly. It's promising a doubling of performance increase over the prior generation in both streaming reads and writes.

Data Storage

Microsoft releases Phi-2, a small language model AI that outperforms Llama 2, Mistral 7B

At the same time, Phi-2 with its 2.7 billion parameters (connections between artificial neurons) boasts performance that is comparable to other, much larger models including Meta’s Llama 2-7B with its 7 billion parameters and even Mistral-7B, another 7 billion parameter model.

AI

Cybersecurity Startup, Xeol, Raises $3.2M in Seed Round

The team starts by managing enterprises' end-of-life software whose publishers no longer provide security patches. Attackers typically gain access to vulnerable systems by phishing, then exploiting unpatched software. PCI 4.0, a security standard for handling payment card data, will mandate that companies have a program to manage end-of-life software, highlighting the growing threat surface.

Security

Generative AI data analyst startup TextQL raises $4.1M in seed funding 

TextQL is the creator of a generative AI-powered data analyst that helps to connect companies’ business intelligence tools with their existing documentation and semantic layers. The startup is aiming to automate every step in the lifecycle of enterprise data, which it does by replicating the experience of working alongside a human data analyst.

Data Management

Startup Oxide Computer puts the ‘cloud’ back in on-prem private clouds

The company is built on the premise that you should be able to choose to rent or own cloud capacity, depending on the workload, not losing the benefits of cloud computing like elasticity when you choose the latter. To accomplish this, the Oxide team set out to build an entirely new cloud hardware rack that would deliver all of the advantages public cloud vendors enjoy, without sacrificing on control, efficiency, and flexibility.

Cloud

Beyond Buzzwords: Glasswing AI palette guides startups navigating AI’s diverse terrain

Seseri explained that the palette maps AI techniques like transformers, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to corresponding data types and potential use cases. The tool also links out to Glasswing’s ongoing ‘AI Atlas’ project, providing more in-depth explanations and evaluations of different techniques and how they can be used in applications.

AI

Meta unveils Audiobox, an AI that clones voices and generates ambient sounds

“It can generate voices and sound effects using a combination of voice inputs and natural language text prompts — making it easy to create custom audio for a wide range of use cases,” according to the Audiobox webpage.

AI

Docker buys AtomicJar, the startup behind the popular open-source Testcontainers project 

The startup is the company behind the open-source Testcontainers project that was launched in 2021 and is used to test software components ahead of their release. AtomicJar’s main offering is an enhanced version of that open-source software, and provides an integrated testing platform that’s used by developers building applications, databases and web frameworks.

DevOps

The AI Lie Detector That's Changing The Game: Meet LiarLiar.ai

At its heart, this software is a symphony of advanced computer vision algorithms and deep psychological research, all focused on discerning the veracity of human expression. The software meticulously analyzes a spectrum of physiological and behavioral indicators that studies have associated with deceit. For instance, when a person tells a lie, they might unconsciously exhibit decreased blinking or an erratic gaze—LiarLiar.ai is on the lookout for these tell-tale signs.

AI

AI startup Rhythms emerges from stealth with $26 million in funding to transform the future of work

The core of Rhythms’ offering lies in developing a platform that integrates with different systems within a company. Leveraging recent advancements in AI, including large language models, the platform analyzes a company’s “rhythms” — encompassing habits and patterns like monthly business reviews, quarterly retrospectives, and weekly cross-functional meetings.

Automation & Productivity

AI explainability startup Citrusˣ exits stealth with $4.5M in funding 

Citrusˣ is the creator of what it says is an easy-to-use platform that will allow all stakeholders within an organization to check that their machine learning and AI models are robust, explainable and fair. The idea is to provide a more accessible tool that anyone can use to verify the accuracy and reliability of AI, so data scientists, risk officers and others can ensure it is being used responsibly and fairly, and in line with regulatory requirements.

AI

Introducing Purple Llama for Safe and Responsible AI Development

To start, Purple Llama will include tools and evaluations for cybersecurity and input/output safeguards, with more to come in the near future. Components within the Purple Llama project will be licensed permissively enabling both research and commercial use. We believe this is a major step in enabling collaboration among developers and standardizing trust and safety tools for generative AI.

AI/Devops

New AI assistant from Fortinet promises to streamline threat investigation 

Called Fortinet Advisor, the new AI service is designed to augment the capabilities of security operations teams. Integrated with Fortinet’s security information and event management service, called FortiSIEM, and security orchestration, automation and response solution, called FortiSOAR, the AI analyzes security incidents and provides easy-to-understand summaries, context and potential impact assessments.

IT Management

Lenovo, Microsoft launch cybersecurity solution, aiming to address top 2024 concern

Lenovo aims to alleviate those concerns with a comprehensive solution that includes continuous risk assessment, automated security updates and patches, dynamic threat intelligence, active incident response and management, and data backup and recovery services. According to the press release, Lenovo believes a subscription-based model will allow companies to offload time-intensive tasks, offering meaningful savings.

Security

Open-source generative AI startup Mistral AI raises $415M in funding 

But Mistral AI differs in its approach. It’s a firm believer that generative AI technologies should be open-source, meaning that the code that underpins its LLMs is freely available for others to use and modify. By taking this open-source approach, the startup is aiming to give other users the tools to quickly build their own, customized chatbots.

AI/LLMs

Cisco Aims to Address Firewall Complexity with an AI Assist

Why such a large number? What’s the problem? The issue is quite simple. Firewalls are incredibly complex. Indeed, 58% of organizations have more than 1,000 firewall rules, and 18% have more than 5,000 rules, according to Cybersecurity Insiders. In large enterprises, the number of rules can be in the millions.

Network Management

Atlassian announces wide availability of generative AI capabilities across its products 

Today, generative AI is now available in Jira, the company’s project and issue tracking software. That will permit users to generate customer responses quickly that are factual or empathetic within the editor. It’s also generally available in the Confluence team collaboration platform, allowing teams to quickly get up to speed about projects by summarizing documents and asking questions of the AI.

Automation & Productivity

DataVisor Expands Fraud Detection Ecosystem with Twilio-Powered SMS Customer Verification Integration

For high-risk activities and transactions that are detected by DataVisor’s machine learning and rules-powered platform, businesses now have the option to implement an automated challenge and response by initiating tailored real-time SMS verification instead of a time-consuming review process that may involve subjective judgment.

Security

HiveMQ Platform Now Offers Seamless MQTT Data Lake Integration

HiveMQ empowers businesses to transform with the most trusted MQTT platform. Designed to connect, communicate, and control IoT data under real-world stress, the HiveMQ MQTT Platform is the proven enterprise standard and powers use cases in automotive, energy, logistics, smart manufacturing, transportation, and more.

Data Management

Nonprofit Launches Tools to Boost Responsible AI

Saxena said “three forces” are coming together as GenAI continues to take hold that will ultimately push a responsible AI ecosystem. Those forces are regulation, success from responsible AI rollout, and customer awareness and demand for safe AI.  The US, UK, and Canada have more pro-market regulation efforts, where other countries like China have more stringent rules, he says.

AI/AI Ethics

Kinetica Unveils 1st SQL-GPT for Telecom, Transforming Natural Language into SQL Fine-Tuned for the Telco Industry

Telcos rely heavily on spatial and time-series data to optimize network performance, track coverage, and ensure reliability. Kinetica stands out by offering telecommunications companies the unique capability to visualize and interact effortlessly with billions of data points on a map, enabling unparalleled insights and rapid decision-making. SQL-GPT for Telecom makes it easy for anyone to now ask complex and novel questions that previously required assistance from highly specialized development resources.

Data & Analytics

Google’s AI note taking app NotebookLM now available to all U.S. users

A Gemini Ultra larger context and higher parameter count (connections between artificial neurons) is due out next year, while a Gemini Nano is a smaller parameter version requiring less computing power designed for smartphones running Google’s Android open source operating system.

AI/Automation

Sprinklr Empowers Businesses to Deploy and Scale Generative AI-powered Conversational Bots

FAQ & Transaction Skill, which enables businesses to quickly train a bot by simply entering their website/knowledge base URL or uploading PDF documents. This feature empowers businesses to deflect FAQ volumes or automate transactions that can be done without the need for a human agent. By automating the handling of frequently asked questions and transactions, brands can improve efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Automation & Productivity

XenData touts advanced disk-based archive for media industry

The system has various options to support mirroring files to a second E-Series appliance, to a connected LTO tape library or to public cloud object storage. The archiving to tape or the public cloud moves files there and leaves stubs behind so no changes in access are needed. Logically, the files are still in the E-Series system.

Data Storage

Meta releases open-source tools for AI safety

The project involves partnerships with AI developers; cloud services like AWS and Google Cloud; semiconductor companies such as Intel, AMD, and Nvidia; and software firms including Microsoft. The collaboration aims to produce tools for both research and commercial use to test AI models' capabilities and identify safety risks.

AI/Security

VictoriaMetrics Unveils Free Trial of Its Enterprise Solution for Enhanced Monitoring and Observability

Acting as a drop-in replacement for Prometheus, we were able to set-up our initial test system within only 20 minutes. Two months in, we are about to replace our production monitoring and alerting infrastructure with VictoriaMetrics. With the Enterprise features, we will be able to keep our slightly down-sampled metrics for months, or years, instead of throwing everything away after two weeks as we do currently.”

Data & Analytics

DataCore bringing block-level tiering to SANsymphony

“We’ll compress stale data at the block level. It’s continuous real-time, auto-tiering with inline dedupe and/or compression.” This “overcomes the all-or-nothing dilemma of LUNs.”

Data Management

San Francisco startup MaintainX raises $50 million to bring A.I. to industrial operations

The promise of StableLM Zephyr 3B is that it is smaller than the 7 billion StableLM models, which provides a series of benefits. Being smaller enables deployment on a wider range of hardware, with a lower resource footprint while still providing rapid responses. The model has been optimized for Q&A and instruction following types of tasks.

AI

Netskope extends SASE localization capabilities

With the rollout of Localization Zones to its NewEdge security private cloud, Netskope is offering a localized experience for 220 countries and territories. While using a cloud web proxy or a security service edge (SSE) solution can offer enterprise companies advantages such as reduced management overhead and enhanced security coverage, it can also pose challenges when trying to deliver a localized user experience.

Security

Critical Bluetooth security flaw discovered in Google, Apple and Linux devices 

The vulnerability is the result of a critical weakness in the Bluetooth protocol, combined with implementation-specific bugs across various operating systems. The vulnerability allows attackers to mimic a Bluetooth keyboard and connect to a device without the user’s confirmation. The process, known as keystroke injection, allows an unauthorized user to perform actions on the victim’s device as long as the actions don’t require a password or biometric authentication.

Security

IBM cloud service aims to deliver secure, multicloud connectivity

The service, IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh, implements a virtualized networking environment to rapidly enable secure connectivity between users, applications, and data distributed across multiple edge, hybrid, and multicloud environments. One of the drivers behind the cloud service is to join operational silos, giving granular network control and easy-to-consume interfaces to IT teams, IBM said.

Cloud

Automated proposal writing startup AutogenAI raises $39.5M from Salesforce Ventures and others

What sets AutogenAI apart is the tangible impact of its software on business outcomes. According to the company’s data, clients have experienced a remarkable 30% uplift in win rates, translating to over $100 million in additional work, while simultaneously cutting associated costs by up to 85%.

Automation & Productivity

ChatGPT tool could be abused by scammers and hackers

BBC News signed up for the paid version of ChatGPT, at £20 a month, created a private bespoke AI bot called Crafty Emails and told it to write text using "techniques to make people click on links or and download things sent to them".

ChatGPT

New Coro cybersecurity platform offers modular security for midmarket companies 

The new platform has been designed to address the issue wherein midmarket companies, those with 200 to 2,000 employees, often have limited budgets, information technology teams and cybersecurity expertise. Coro argues that makes them prime targets for cyberattacks because IT staff can become quickly overwhelmed by the complexity and operational workload of managing multiple tools in their security stack.

Security

Vulns in Android WebView, Password Managers Can Leak User Credentials

Researchers demonstrated how the most widely used password managers can leak credentials from Android devices when using the mobile operating system's WebView autofill capability with malicious apps.

Security

McDonald’s will use Google AI to make sure your fries are fresh, or something?

The McDonald’s statement also skirts the question of AI replacing human workers, mentioning only that the system should “reduce complexity” for store crews and that it will “power exciting new experiences for crew and customers.” Wendy’s — another Google Cloud AI customer — held a similar line when it introduced AI ordering tests earlier this year. As of June, it was running in beta in a single store in Columbus, Ohio, so the jury’s still out.

Automation & Productivity

Messenger is finally getting end-to-end encryption by default

Meta is rolling out end-to-end encryption for one-on-one chats and calls on Messenger, finally fulfilling a promise that’s been in the works for quite awhile. When end-to-end encryption is on, only you and the person you send a message to in Messenger can see its contents, the company claims.

Security



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