TechCrunch AI
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42 minutes ago
Alexandre LeBrun, CEO of AMI Labs, rejects industry terminology like 'AGI' and 'superintelligence' as poorly defined and unhelpful for describing his work on world models. AMI Labs raised $1.03 billion in March at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation but has no product yet and is scouting partnerships in South Korea for access to real-world robotics and manufacturing environments. The startup aims to build AI systems that understand physical environments and enable safer, context-aware robots for applications where LLMs alone are insufficient.
TechCrunch AI
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56 minutes ago
Moonshot AI's upcoming Kimi K3 model, expected between 2 trillion and 3 trillion parameters, is projected to match or exceed Anthropic's Opus 4.8 performance according to Financial Times sources. Moonshot is raising fresh capital at a $31.5 billion valuation, up from $20 billion in May, as Chinese open-weight models increasingly close the performance gap with expensive closed-source alternatives from OpenAI and Anthropic. The release is expected in the coming days and reflects growing momentum toward open-source AI models as cost-effective alternatives to proprietary systems.
Anthropic News
Anthropic committed $10 million CAD to Canadian AI research institutions including Amii, Mila, Vector Institute, and several universities to fund work in AI safety, responsible applications, and domain-specific projects. The funding includes Claude API credits distributed across eight partnerships, with hundreds of Canadian startups receiving at least $5,000 USD each in credits through the Anthropic for Startups program. Canada ranks eighth globally in Claude.ai usage with per-capita adoption more than four times higher than its population would predict, indicating stronger integration of AI tools into Canadian professional work.
TechCrunch AI
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11 hours ago
Applied Computing, a London-based startup, raised $20 million in Series A funding to deploy an AI model called Orbital that helps oil and gas facilities integrate sensor data, engineering documentation, and physics-based analysis. The company claims Orbital can compress investigations that previously took days or weeks into seconds, and is already generating double-digit millions in annual recurring revenue across unnamed large, publicly listed energy operators. With the funding, Applied Computing plans to expand internationally, hire AI researchers, and establish operations in Houston and the Middle East to serve more energy clients.
