Author: precious

UK-based Synthesia has raised $200 million in a Series E funding round, reaching a valuation of $4 billion and nearly doubling the $2.1 billion mark the AI video platform achieved just a year ago. The round was led by existing investor Google Ventures, with participation from Evantic, the venture fund founded by former Sequoia partner Matt Miller, and Hedosophia. Additional backing came from existing investors including NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), Accel, Kleiner Perkins, New Enterprise Associates, PSP Growth, Air Street Capital, FirstMark, and MMC Ventures. The funding represents continued investor confidence in enterprise-focused AI companies that have moved beyond…

Google has rolled out a major redesign of Gemini in Chrome, moving its AI assistant from a floating window into a side panel that stays visible across all browser tabs. The update, announced in late January 2026, represents one of the most substantial integrations of artificial intelligence into mainstream web browsing to date. The redesigned interface positions Gemini on the right side of the browser window, where it remains accessible regardless of which tab users have opened. According to Google, the side panel allows users to multitask more effectively by keeping their main work visible while the AI handles separate…

Hackers have turned unsecured AI systems into their own profit machine through an Operation Bizarre Bazaar campaign. Between December 2025 and January 2026, security researchers at Pillar Security tracked more than 35,000 attacks targeting companies running AI chatbots and language models, stealing computing power, building an entire underground business, and selling cheap access to hijacked AI systems. The campaign, called Operation Bizarre Bazaar, saw criminals scan the internet for AI systems left open to the public, test them to make sure they work, then resell access to other hackers at a discount. Termed “LLMjacking,” it is the first documented case…

A sophisticated cyberattack on Poland’s energy infrastructure in late December 2025 exposed critical vulnerabilities that most organizations assume they’ve already addressed. Russian state-sponsored hackers gained access to approximately 30 distributed energy facilities, including combined heat and power plants, wind farms, and solar installations, by exploiting systems still configured with factory-default usernames and passwords. Polish CERT investigators found that attackers accessed exposed web interfaces using default credentials, then reset the systems to factory settings, changed login passwords, and assigned IP addresses that prevented legitimate users from accessing them. The intrusion, attributed to Russian intelligence-linked groups like the Static Tundra (also called…

Meta Neural Wristband is now in the hands of everyday consumers, a wrist-worn device that reads users muscle signals and turns them into commands for their glasses, with no screen tapping or voice shouting required. The Meta Neural Band uses a technology called surface electromyography, or sEMG, to detect the electrical signals muscles produce movement in fingers. Subtle movements like a thumb swipe, a pinch, or a twist of the wrist, get translated into commands that control the paired Ray-Ban Display glasses. The band doesn’t require any camera to track the hand, and it works even when the hands are…

Amazon is negotiating a deal that could see it invest as much as $50 billion in OpenAI, according to sources familiar with the discussions. The talks, led directly by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, would make Amazon the largest contributor to OpenAI’s current fundraising round and mark one of the biggest private technology investments on record. The investment would be part of a broader $100 billion funding round that could push the ChatGPT-maker’s valuation to $830 billion. Beyond Amazon, SoftBank is also working toward a separate commitment of up to $30 billion, while other participants include…

Your friendly “AI copilot” is quietly losing its seat because enterprises now want software that actually does the work once a goal is set. In 2026, that means a move away from reactive copilots that wait for prompts toward autonomous AI agents that can plan multi-step tasks, talk to other systems, and keep going until something is finished or needs escalation. Research shows that more than 80% of businesses now plan to integrate agents into their AI strategy within the next year, with predictions indicating that 40% of enterprise applications will incorporate task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026.…

Nvidia has released Alpamayo, a family of open-source AI models designed to equip autonomous vehicles and robots with human-like reasoning that they can articulate aloud. Announced at CES 2026, the family includes the flagship 10-billion-parameter Alpamayo 1 vision-language action (VLA) model, along with simulation tools and massive datasets, which are all available for free non-commercial use on Hugging Face. Put simply, Alpamayo is designed to give autonomous vehicles the ability to reason through complex driving scenarios and explain their decisions in plain language. The announcement at CES 2026 introduces what CEO Jensen Huang calls “the world’s first thinking, reasoning autonomous…

The Gates Foundation and OpenAI have launched Horizon 1000, a $50 million initiative that will bring artificial intelligence (AI) tools to 1,000 primary healthcare clinics across Africa by 2028. The partnership, announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, targets one of the continent’s most urgent challenges which is a healthcare workforce shortage so severe that even aggressive hiring and training programs wouldn’t be able to close the gap in the foreseeable future, according to research. The pilot project will begin in Rwanda, a country where one healthcare worker per 1,000 people is the order of the day,…

OpenAI has rolled out a new age prediction system across ChatGPT’s consumer plans that will automatically detect users under 18 to shield them from harmful content and apply protective content restrictions. The AI company announced the global deployment last week, with the European Union set to receive the feature in the coming weeks to accommodate regional requirements. The feature, as explained by OpenAI, will use machine learning to analyze users’ behavioural patterns and apply restrictions on topics like violence, sexual content, and self-harm if need be. The age restriction deployment comes amid intense scrutiny over AI chatbot safety for young…