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Tag: genAI

  • Intel spinout Articul8 raises more than half of $70M round at $500M valuation | TechCrunch

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    Articul8, an enterprise AI company spun out of Intel in early 2024, has secured more than half of a planned $70 million funding round at a $500 million pre-money valuation, according to its CEO, as it looks to capitalize on growing demand for AI systems in regulated industries.

    The Series B funding round is structured in two installments, with the first led by Spain’s Adara Ventures, Articul8 founder and CEO Arun K. Subramaniyan (pictured above, center) said in an interview. He declined to disclose the size of the initial installment, but said the company expects to close the round in the first quarter of this year.

    Articul8’s valuation for its current funding round marks a roughly fivefold increase from the company’s $100 million post-money Series A valuation in January 2024. Since then, the Santa Clara-based company said it has surpassed $90 million in total contract value — the cumulative value of all signed customer contracts — from 29 paying customers, including Hitachi Energy, AWS, Franklin Templeton, and Intel.

    Subramaniyan told TechCrunch that Articul8 was not under pressure to raise capital, describing the company as revenue-positive following a series of large enterprise contracts.

    “We are not cash-strapped,” he said.

    The company expects to finish the year with annual recurring revenue of just over $57 million, Subramaniyan said, with roughly 45% to 50% of that already recognized.

    Articul8 develops specialized AI systems that operate within customers’ own IT environments, rather than relying on shared, general-purpose models. Instead of selling standalone models, the company packages its technology as software applications and AI agents tailored to specific business functions, targeting regulated industries such as energy, manufacturing, aerospace, financial services, and semiconductors, where accuracy, auditability, and data control are critical.

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    Articul8’s knowledge graph viewImage Credits:Articul8

    “Our competition is pretty much everybody,” said Subramaniyan. “But today, the major competitors are the cloud service providers, because they have realized that their model, as the general-purpose [offerings], are all commodities.”

    He added that Articul8’s focus on specialized systems appeals to customers who need predictable results and clear audit trails, something that is harder to achieve with general-purpose models run on shared cloud platforms.

    Articul8 plans to use the Series B proceeds primarily to expand research and product development and to scale its operations internationally, with a focus on Europe and parts of Asia.

    Adara Ventures’ participation will help speed-up the European expansion plan, as the European Investment Fund backs the Madrid-based VC firm’s energy fund, Subramaniyan said. The company is also looking to scale in markets including Japan and South Korea, where it has begun working with large enterprise customers, he noted.

    India’s Aditya Birla Ventures also participated in the ongoing round, Subramaniyan stated.

    Articul8 works with large tech groups including Nvidia and Google Cloud, Subramaniyan said, adding that Amazon Web Services is both a customer and a partner for the company on some deployments.

    The company employs 75 people, with about 80% focused on R&D, and teams spread across the U.S., Brazil, and India.

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    Jagmeet Singh

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  • Charlie Kaufman Holds Hollywood Responsible for Today’s ‘Terrible’ World

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    Filmmaker Charlie Kaufman’s got a lot to say about the state of the world—and why he thinks Hollywood is at least partially to blame for it.

    In a new interview with The Guardian, the mind behind 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and this year’s short How to Shoot a Ghost said the film industry has “everything to do with [why] the world is in a terrible, terrible situation right now.”

    As part of said industry, Kaufman considers it a personal responsibility to “not put garbage into the world,” which for him, means doing his own thing and not giving into the urge to use AI in filmmaking.

    A massive selling point for the technology is its ability to give people exactly what they want, fast. But Kaufman argues that, in Hollywood at least, that predisposition has been present long before AI exploded onto the scene: “If you start trying to figure out what it is that people want, you’re doing what AI does. It’s why Hollywood remakes the same five movies every 10 years, and it’s why they have a formula for what a movie is.”

    More critically, Kaufman said the “greed and acquisitiveness” in the industry stems from “damaged people doing so much damage.” His comments feel particularly potent in the wake of reporting on Thursday that Paramount will attempt to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery—a merger that itself has seemed, well, catastrophic, to put it nicely.

    Kaufman argued that Hollywood executives are “really lost and don’t have anything, so they’re desperately trying to make themselves better by acquiring, by lording it over people, being powerful and wealthy.”

    Notably, Kaufman did not spare his criticism for himself: He described himself as another damaged individual, but suggested that his coping mechanisms are healthier than others’ in the industry. “[I read] a poem, see a painting, or listen to music which speaks to me and breaks me for a moment, and where I feel an experience honestly and delicately portrayed,” he said.

    AI, he added, is doomed to fail in art because it can’t create the feeling of being alive, which Kaufman said was now more vital than ever: “If we don’t allow ourselves to connect with other humans who have the experiences that we have, then I think we’re lost.”

    Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

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    Justin Carter

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  • Authorium Selected by California for GenAI-Enabled Legislative Analysis

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    SACRAMENTO, Calif., May 28, 2025 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Today, Authorium, the cloud-based technology company that delivers its eponymous end-to-end platform for government administrative operations,announced that they have been selected to implement a GenAI-enabled solution to efficiently and accurately develop legislative bill analyses utilizing existing documents and other publicly available information for the California Department of Finance.

    “GenAI has great potential to enhance our ability to deliver high-quality analysis to California policymakers. We look forward to piloting this technology to enhance our efficiency, accuracy, and capacity,” said Christian Beltran, Deputy Director of Legislation at the California Department of Finance.

    This award supports the State’s commitment of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Executive Order N-12-23 which recognizes GenAI’s “potential to catalyze innovation and the rapid development of a wide range of benefits for Californians and the California economy.”

    “We are honored to be selected by the California Department of Finance to increase efficiency and effectiveness in critical legislative and policy efforts,” said Jay Nath and Kamran Saddique, Co-CEOs of Authorium. “As a public benefit corporation, we remain fully focused on enabling government teams to modernize operational and administrative processes through our no-code platform.”

    Currently, Department of Finance (DOF) team members comb through volumes of legislative material, including over 1,000 legislative bills and proposals annually. Working together with Authorium, DOF aims to significantly reduce the manual workload associated with drafting bill analyses including:

    • summarizing a bill,

    • collecting fiscal information from impacted state entities, and

    • parsing relevant data sets and sources for background and historical information.

    The California Department of Technology (CDT) will support the use, security, and maintenance of the GenAI tool. They will also provide oversight and guidance throughout the lifecycle of the project to ensure the system is used effectively and responsibly.

    “California is embracing emerging technologies and innovation to modernize how we serve the public. By exploring the use of Generative AI in legislative workflows, we’re laying the foundation for smarter, faster, and more transparent government services,” said Liana Bailey-Crimmins, State Chief Information Officer and Director of the California Department of Technology.

    The Department of Finance intends to scale insights across bill analyses to spotlight shared needs and statewide opportunities for more efficient and effective deployment of the State’s budget resources.

    To expedite delivery and ensure stronger outcomes, Authorium’s contract was awarded through a Request for Innovative Ideas (RFI²) solicitation, a procurement vehicle that seeks innovative ideas to solve a well-defined problem statement, then selects a solution provider based on their ability to demonstrate its effectiveness. The RFI² concept was first introduced in 2019 when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order that created the new procurement method by asking for solutions to test in response to the wildfire challenges in California. The vision of this methodology is to leverage the innovative vendor, academic, scientific, and entrepreneurial communities to solve the State’s most pressing challenges.

    Beyond the Department of Finance, Authorium’s platform enables teams at the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, CalRecycle, Department of Social Services and more in the Golden State, as well as agencies across the United States from Washington to Florida – to increase efficiency, effectiveness, visibility, and compliance. A recent study with the U.S. Air Force demonstrated that Authorium’s platform was able to cut acquisition timelines by 20%.

    Authorium is hosted exclusively on AWS GovCloud, the leading regulated industry cloud solution that technology leaders trust to manage sensitive data, and is GovRAMP Authorized, SOC2 Type II, HIPAA compliant, and adheres to stringent federal and DoD security requirements.

    About Authorium
    Authorium is a no-code, cloud-based platform exclusively for government administrative operations. Government teams rely on us to support budget and grant administration, contract lifecycle management, HR processes, procurement, and legislative analysis. As a public benefit corporation, we serve the government workers that serve their communities. Learn more at authorium.com.

    ###

    Contact Information

    Authorium Press
    Marketing
    marketing@authorium.com
    877-757-4982

    Source: Authorium

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  • Nvidia’s new tool lets you run GenAI models on a PC | TechCrunch

    Nvidia’s new tool lets you run GenAI models on a PC | TechCrunch

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    Nvidia, ever keen to incentivize purchases of its latest GPUs, is releasing a tool that lets owners of GeForce RTX 30 Series and 40 Series cards run an AI-powered chatbot offline on a Windows PC.

    Called Chat with RTX, the tool allows users to customize a GenAI model along the lines of OpenAI’s ChatGPT by connecting it to documents, files and notes that it can then query.

    “Rather than searching through notes or saved content, users can simply type queries,” Nvidia writes in a blog post. “For example, one could ask, ‘What was the restaurant my partner recommended while in Las Vegas?’ and Chat with RTX will scan local files the user points it to and provide the answer with context.”

    Chat with RTX defaults to AI startup Mistral’s open source model but supports other text-based models including Meta’s Llama 2. Nvidia warns that downloading all the necessary files will eat up a fair amount of storage — 50GB to 100GB, depending on the model(s) selected.

    Currently, Chat with RTX works with text, PDF, .doc and .docx and .xml formats. Pointing the app at a folder containing any supported files will load the files into the model’s fine-tuning data set. In addition, Chat with RTX can take the URL of a YouTube playlist to load transcriptions of the videos in the playlist, enabling whichever model’s selected to query their contents.

    Now, there’s certain limitations to keep in mind, which Nvidia to its credit outlines in a how-to guide.

    Chat with RTX

    Image Credits: Nvidia

    Chat with RTX can’t remember context, meaning that the app won’t take into account any previous questions when answering follow-up questions. For example, if you ask “What’s a common bird  in North America?” and follow that up with “What are its colors?,” Chat with RTX won’t know that you’re talking about birds.

    Nvidia also acknowledges that the relevance of the app’s responses can be affected by a range of factors, some easier to control for than others — including the question phrasing, the performance of the selected model and the size of the fine-tuning data set. Asking for facts covered in a couple of documents is likely to yield better
    results than asking for a summary of a document or set of documents. And response quality will generally improve with larger data sets — as will pointing Chat with RTX at more content about a specific subject, Nvidia says.

    So Chat with RTX is more a toy than anything to be used in production. Still, there’s something to be said for apps that make it easier to run AI models locally — which is something of a growing trend.

    In a recent report, the World Economic Forum predicted a “dramatic” growth in affordable devices that can run GenAI models offline, including PCs, smartphones, internet of things devices and networking equipment. The reasons, the WEF said, are the clear benefits: not only are offline models inherently more private — the data they process never leaves the device they run on — but they’re lower latency and more cost effective than cloud-hosted models.

    Of course, democratizing tools to run and train models opens the door to malicious actors — a cursory Google Search yields many listings for models fine-tuned on toxic content from unscrupulous corners of the web. But proponents of apps like Chat with RTX argue that the benefits outweigh the harms. We’ll have to wait and see.

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    Kyle Wiggers

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  • OpenAI forms a new team to study child safety | TechCrunch

    OpenAI forms a new team to study child safety | TechCrunch

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    Under scrutiny from activists — and parents — OpenAI has formed a new team to study ways to prevent its AI tools from being misused or abused by kids.

    In a new job listing on its career page, OpenAI reveals the existence of a Child Safety team, which the company says is working with platform policy, legal and investigations groups within OpenAI as well as outside partners to manage “processes, incidents, and reviews” relating to underage users.

    The team is currently looking to hire a child safety enforcement specialist, who’ll be responsible for applying OpenAI’s policies in the context of AI-generated content and working on review processes related to “sensitive” (presumably kid-related) content.

    Tech vendors of a certain size dedicate a fair amount of resources to complying with laws like the U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule, which mandate controls over what kids can — and can’t — access on the web as well as what sorts of data companies can collect on them. So the fact that OpenAI’s hiring child safety experts doesn’t come as a complete surprise, particularly if the company expects a significant underage user base one day. (OpenAI’s current terms of use require parental consent for children ages 13 to 18 and prohibit use for kids under 13.)

    But the formation of the new team, which comes several weeks after OpenAI announced a partnership with Common Sense Media to collaborate on kid-friendly AI guidelines and landed its first education customer, also suggests a wariness on OpenAI’s part of running afoul of policies pertaining to minors’ use of AI — and negative press.

    Kids and teens are increasingly turning to GenAI tools for help not only with schoolwork but personal issues. According to a poll from the Center for Democracy and Technology, 29% of kids report having used ChatGPT to deal with anxiety or mental health issues, 22% for issues with friends and 16% for family conflicts.

    Some see this as a growing risk.

    Last summer, schools and colleges rushed to ban ChatGPT over plagiarism and misinformation fears. Since then, some have reversed their bans. But not all are convinced of GenAI’s potential for good, pointing to surveys like the U.K. Safer Internet Centre’s, which found that over half of kids (53%) report having seen people their age use GenAI in a negative way — for example creating believable false information or images used to upset someone.

    In September, OpenAI published documentation for ChatGPT in classrooms with prompts and an FAQ to offer educator guidance on using GenAI as a teaching tool. In one of the support articles, OpenAI acknowledged that its tools, specifically ChatGPT, “may produce output that isn’t appropriate for all audiences or all ages” and advised “caution” with exposure to kids — even those who meet the age requirements.

    Calls for guidelines on kid usage of GenAI are growing.

    The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) late last year pushed for governments to regulate the use of GenAI in education, including implementing age limits for users and guardrails on data protection and user privacy. “Generative AI can be a tremendous opportunity for human development, but it can also cause harm and prejudice,” Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO’s director-general, said in a press release. “It cannot be integrated into education without public engagement and the necessary safeguards and regulations from governments.”

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    Kyle Wiggers

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