Agrikola AI, a Barcelona-based agri-tech startup, has closed its pre-seed funding round with participation from Zubi Capital, Norrsken VC, Masia VC and Ona Capital. The investment will support development and commercialization of the company’s autonomous robotics and AI technology aimed at advancing sustainable agriculture. Founded and led by Ricard Pardell, Agrikola AI is developing autonomous…

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A group of economists and AI researchers, including sixteen Nobel Laureates, released a statement titled “We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy,” urging immediate preparation for the economic consequences of increasingly powerful AI systems. Organized by economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal, Anton Korinek and Tom Cunningham, the statement warns that…

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Meta has discontinued a feature within its recently launched Muse Image AI generator that allowed users to create AI-generated content by tagging public Instagram accounts, following significant criticism over privacy and consent concerns. The tool, part of a broader rollout by Meta Superintelligence Labs earlier this week, had allowed users to reference others’ public photos…

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Venice AI, a developer of a privacy-focused generative AI and decentralized model inference platform, has raised $65 million in a Series A round at a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by Dragonfly, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures. Founded by Erik Voorhees, Venice AI builds a consumer and enterprise AI…

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Insider Brief Mitsubishi Motors and University of Tokyo startup Highlanders signed an MOU to explore humanoid robots for auto manufacturing and possible mass production at Mitsubishi’s Kyoto Plant. Mitsubishi said the companies will study joint development of humanoid robots for its manufacturing facilities while examining whether Highlanders products could be produced at the Kyoto site…

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Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a multiagent AI system capable of calculating the carbon footprint of digital devices in under one minute, aiming to make environmental impact data as accessible as a nutrition label. The tool, described in a study published June 12, uses two AI agents that analyze text and image…

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Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging trade secret theft and breach of contract tied to former Apple employees, including Chief Hardware Officer Tang Tan, who allegedly used confidential Apple project information during OpenAI’s hiring process. The complaint also names former Apple engineer Chang Liu, accused of retaining an Apple-issued laptop and downloading confidential technical…

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Read Online | Sign Up | Advertise Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. Tech giants poach talent all the time, especially in the AI world. But Apple says some of the 400+ (!) employees OpenAI has hired away came bundled with something extra: hardware secrets. A new lawsuit from Apple makes that case…

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Regulators picked a word for AI this week, and the word is systemic. Career Treasury analysts concluded the boom is now too entrenched to unwind quietly: a downturn would ripple through stocks, private credit, data-center debt and utilities. The ECB gave every significant European bank until October 31 to prove it can take an AI-powered…

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AI agent crawlers, the bots that fetch pages in real time on behalf of a person waiting for an answer, will be blocked by default on a slice of the web from September 15 onwards. Cloudflare announced the change on July 1, and most of the coverage since then has focused on Google. The more useful part…

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