Artificial Intelligence

A global law enforcement operation dismantled the Qakbot botnet this week, the largest U.S.-led financial and technical disruption of a botnet infrastructure. Qakbot, a banking trojan, is notorious for giving other hackers access to a victim’s network to install ransomware. In 18 months, Qakbot has enabled over 40 ransomware attacks …

BeFake, an AI-augmented social network based on Gen Z app BeReal, raised $3 million in seed funding. The app’s name, a play on BeReal’s authentic photo sharing among friends, implies the opposite. BeFake users grab photos with both the front and back cameras and customize them with AI using in-app …

Meta released FACET, a new AI benchmark, today to assess the “fairness” of AI models that classify and detect objects and people in photos and videos. FACET, a tortured acronym for “Fairness in Computer Vision EvaluaTion” with 32,000 images of 50,000 people labeled by human annotators, accounts for occupations and …

Walden Catalyst, Pitango, SCB10X, b2venture, Samsung Next, and Intel-owned Mobileye founder Amnon Shashua led a $155 million Series C funding round for Tel Aviv-based AI21 Labs, which develops text-generating AI tools. Google and Nvidia joined. AI21 Labs’ total raised $283 million values the company at $1.4 billion, up from The …

One month after announcing its provisional measures to oversee generative AI, China approved the first large language model-empowered public services. Baidu’s Ernie Bot, ByteDance’s Doubao, Sogou founder’s Baichuan, and chatbots from Tsinghua University and Chinese Academy of Sciences labs are among eight generative AI applications registered with China’s cyberspace authority. …

A UK parliamentary committee investigating artificial intelligence’s opportunities and challenges has urged the government to reconsider its decision not to introduce legislation to regulate the technology in the short term and to make an AI bill a ministerial priority. Committee chair Greg Clark writes in a statement today accompanying the …

GM has found a new way to join the generative AI revolution. The automaker now handles non-emergency OnStar features with Google Cloud’s Dialogflow chatbot. GM announced the partnership Tuesday during Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s Google Cloud Next 23 keynote. Since 2022, GM’s OnStar in-car concierge has used Google Cloud’s conversational …

Today at Google Cloud Next, the company announced several new generative AI enhancements to its security product line to make it easier to find information from massive security data by asking plain language questions. These new capabilities are designed to do more with less, according to Google cloud security UX …

Duet AI, Google’s generative AI features for text summarization, data organization, and more, is expanding to Google Cloud products and services. At its annual Cloud Next conference, Google announced that Duet AI, still in preview with general availability later this year, can now help with code refactoring, or improving code …

A recent report found that industrial manufacturers experience 800 hours of unplanned downtime per year, or more than 15 hours per week. Unexpected troubleshooting costs $50 billion annually and lowers productivity and revenue. Most companies manually troubleshoot, but Austin, Texas-based ControlRooms.ai wants to change that. The company’s AI-powered analytics app …