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Dataminr, a data analytics company that counts NATO and OpenAI among its customers, has raised $85 million in a combination of convertible financing and credit, the company announced on Wednesday. It’s chump change for Dataminr, which closed a $475 million round at a $4.1 billion valuation in 2021. But the company has seen its fair share of downs as well as ups. In November 2023, Dataminr laid off 20% of its staff as it raced to fend off economic headwinds and “doubled down” on AI. “The new capital will allow Dataminr to accelerate its growth trajectory, [and] provide investors with…

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina Democratic Gov. Josh Stein on Wednesday urged Republicans in charge of the legislature to roll back upcoming income tax rate cuts and scale back private school vouchers that now can be received by families of all income levels.Stein, who took office in January after eight years as attorney general, made the comments while releasing his first two-year state government budget proposal. He wants to spend $33.65 billion in the year starting July 1 — about $2 billion more than planned for this fiscal year — then increase it by $700 million the following year.…

Orion Security has emerged from stealth with a $6 million seed funding round led by Pico Partners and FXP, with participation from Underscore VC and cybersecurity leaders. Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, the firm was founded in 2024 by Nitay Milner (CEO) and Yonatan Kreiner (CTO) with a mission to use AI to revitalize data leak prevention (DLP). Orion’s platform automatically learns and understands how data normally flows within an organization. “By using AI to map and understand an organization’s operational DNA, we’re enabling a new generation of data protection that can accurately distinguish between legitimate business workflows and potential…

WASHINGTON (AP) — Maine’s education office is being ordered to ban transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports or face federal prosecution, an escalation in President Donald Trump’s threats to pull federal money from states and schools over transgender athletes.The U.S. Education Department on Wednesday said an investigation concluded Maine’s education office violated the Title IX antidiscrimination law by allowing transgender girls to compete on girls’ sports teams and use girls’ facilities. It’s giving Maine 10 days to comply with a list of demands or face Justice Department prosecution.“If Maine does not swiftly and completely come into compliance with Title…

Have researchers discovered a new AI “scaling law”? That’s what some buzz on social media suggests — but experts are skeptical. AI scaling laws, a bit of an informal concept, describe how the performance of AI models improves as the size of the datasets and computing resources used to train them increases. Until roughly a year ago, scaling up “pre-training” — training ever-larger models on ever-larger datasets — was the dominant law by far, at least in the sense that most frontier AI labs embraced it. Pre-training hasn’t gone away, but two additional scaling laws, post-training scaling and test-time scaling,…

Robots are part of an exciting new frontier in tech, but here’s the challenge: Robots rely on arrays of sensors, external signals like GPS and Wi-Fi, and customized software to navigate their environments. Further, robotics often involves expensive, ready-made hardware solutions that include built-in software and sensors designed for specific tasks, like estimating relative motion. These products require complex integration and are limited to specific use cases. As a result, most robots today cannot move between different locations, and only a small percentage of self-driving systems use AI for navigation. But Tera AI founder and CEO Tony Zhang thinks software…

AI startup Hugging Face has released a new app for iOS that only does one thing: uses offline, local AI to describe what’s in view of your iPhone’s camera. The app, called HuggingSnap, taps Hugging Face’s in-house vision model, smolvlm2, to analyze what your phone sees in real-time without sending data off to the cloud. Point your camera and ask a question or request a description, and HuggingSnap will identify objects, explain scenes, read text, and generally try to make sense of what you’re looking at. Image Credits:Hugging Face The concept certainly isn’t novel. Many AI-powered apps — and Apple’s…

With the Super Bowl and NBA All-Star weekend behind us this means March Madness is nearly upon us. I’m sure most of us know about March Madness, which is the nickname for the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) Division I men’s and women’s college basketball tournaments. Emotions run high around this tournament, as millions of people across America fill out March Madness “brackets” with the hope of predicting the Final Four as 67 games are played over a 3-week period in March and April. I’m a life-long March Madness fan and I absolutely understand the excitement it generates. I even did my college…

Indian technology company Infosys Limited has reached an agreement with the plaintiffs in six class action lawsuits filed in the US against its wholly owned subsidiary Infosys McCamish System (McCamish) over a 2023 data breach. McCamish, which specializes in insurance solutions, disclosed the incident in November 2023, in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, saying that customer data was compromised in a cyberattack, but refrained from sharing further details. In early 2024, Bank of America and Fidelity Investments Life Insurance Company notified tens of thousands of individuals that their personal information was stolen in data breaches related…

Indian technology company Infosys Limited has reached an agreement with the plaintiffs in six class action lawsuits filed in the US against its wholly owned subsidiary Infosys McCamish System (McCamish) over a 2023 data breach. McCamish, which specializes in insurance solutions, disclosed the incident in November 2023, in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, saying that customer data was compromised in a cyberattack, but refrained from sharing further details. In early 2024, Bank of America and Fidelity Investments Life Insurance Company notified tens of thousands of individuals that their personal information was stolen in data breaches related…