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Business & Funding

Curated coverage, updated continuously.

Business & Funding

'Welcome to the AGI era': OpenAI launches GPT-6 Astra

The rumors were true, all of them (and then some): OpenAI today is releasing GPT-6 Astra, a new frontier model that the company says likely marks the onset of artificial generalized intelligence (AGI), its long sought goal of "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." In a closed a press briefing earlier today, OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman offered an unusually direct formulation of that message, ending the session with: “Welcome to th…

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Business & Funding

China-linked hackers backdoored executives' laptops via USB, exploiting a fix companies had but weren't using

A Chinese state-linked hacking group compromised executive laptops at an agricultural industry conference on Hainan Island this spring — not through phishing or a network breach, but by breaking into hotel rooms and booting the machines from a USB stick while the executives were at dinner. CrowdStrike, which tracks the group as OVERCAST PANDA, disclosed the campaign in its 2026 Threat Hunting Report and detailed the operation's timeline in an interview with VentureBeat at Fal.Con 2026: an intru…

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Business & Funding

Meta says Muse Spark 1.3 has frontier performance — but its best results come from a model developers can’t broadly use yet

Meta’s newest AI model Muse Spark 1.3, unveiled yesterday, is faster and more performant on third-party benchmarks than its predecessor — with a caveat. "Muse Spark 1.3 is rolling out today with frontier performance almost too cheap to meter," Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on X, calling it Meta’s “biggest jump” yet in coding and agentic work. There is substance behind both parts of that claim. Muse Spark 1.3 makes significant gains over last month’s 1.2 release, particularly on…

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Business & Funding

Microsoft AI’s MAI-Transcribe-2 undercuts OpenAI, Google and ElevenLabs on price and speed

Microsoft AI on Thursday released MAI-Transcribe-2, a speech-recognition model the company says is faster, more accurate, and cheaper than anything OpenAI, Google, or ElevenLabs currently sells. Then it priced the thing at 10 cents per hour of audio. That figure deserves a pause. When Microsoft AI shipped the first model in this line just five months ago, it charged $0.36 an hour. Thursday's early-bird price cuts that by roughly 72%. For an enterprise processing 100,000 hours of call-center aud…

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Business & Funding

The AI visibility gap: Why great brands disappear from AI answers

Presented by Contentful Most marketing teams still measure visibility the same way they always have: rankings, click-through rates, and organic traffic. But buyers have moved on. Search tools and AI engines now synthesize answers directly on the screen, creating a world of zero-click searches where your website is entirely bypassed. The “old days” are not coming back. The question for marketers is no longer, How do we rank first? It's How do we become part of the answer? The answer isn't publis…

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Business & Funding

Google’s Gemini 3.8 Flash is built for agents, while its Cyber twin hunts vulnerabilities

Google keeps cranking out Flash models: the company on Wednesday announced two versions of a new 3.8 Flash. The variants include a standard Flash, a “workhorse” model for agentic tasks, software development, and multi-step reasoning, and Flash Cyber optimized for vulnerability detection and mitigation. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in an X post that 3.8 Flash delivers “significant leaps” from 3.7 Flash across software engineering, agentic tasks, and multi-step reasoning. For instance, it outper…

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Business & Funding

Meta prices Muse Voice Transcribe at $0.18 an hour, with real-time diarization for 20+ speakers: a steal for enterprises?

Meta is entering the increasingly competitive real-time speech-to-text market with Muse Voice Transcribe, a new audio perception model that combines streaming transcription, endpoint detection and speaker diarization for more than 20 speakers — at a public API price of just $0.18 per hour of processed audio. Developed by Meta Superintelligence Labs, Muse is designed to process speech while it happens rather than waiting for a recording to finish. Meta’s launch post for Muse Voice Transcribe say…

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