How AI tax startup Blue J torched its entire business model for ChatGPT—and became a $300 million company
In the winter of 2022, as the tech world was becoming mesmerized by the sudden, explosive arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Benjamin Alarie faced a pivotal choice. His legal tech startup, Blue J, had a respectable business built on the AI of a bygone era, serving hundreds of accounting firms with predictive models. But it had […]
Writer’s AI agents can actually do your work—not just chat about it
Writer, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup, is launching a unified AI agent platform designed to let any employee automate complex business workflows without writing code — a capability the company says distinguishes it from consumer-oriented tools like Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT. The platform, called Writer Agent, combines chat-based assistance with autonomous task execution in […]
Microsoft’s Fabric IQ teaches AI agents to understand business operations, not just data patterns
Semantic intelligence is a critical element of actually understanding what data means and how it can be used. Microsoft is now deeply integrating semantics and ontologies into its Fabric data platform with its new Fabric IQ technology that it debuted at the Microsoft Ignite conference Tuesday. Fabric IQ is a semantic intelligence layer designed to […]
Microsoft remakes Windows for an era of autonomous AI agents
Microsoft is fundamentally restructuring its Windows operating system to become what executives call the first “agentic OS,” embedding the infrastructure needed for autonomous AI agents to operate securely at enterprise scale — a watershed moment in the evolution of personal computing that positions the 40-year-old platform as the foundation for a new era of human-machine […]
In a sea of agents, AWS bets on structured adherence and spec fidelity
Despite new methods emerging, enterprises continue to turn to autonomous coding agents and code generation platforms. The competition to keep developers working on their platforms, coming from tech companies, has also heated up. AWS thinks its offering, Kiro, and new capabilities to ensure behavioral adherence set up a large differentiator in the increasingly crowded coding […]
From shiny object to sober reality: The vector database story, two years later
When I first wrote “Vector databases: Shiny object syndrome and the case of a missing unicorn” in March 2024, the industry was awash in hype. Vector databases were positioned as the next big thing — a must-have infrastructure layer for the gen AI era. Billions of venture dollars flowed, developers rushed to integrate embeddings into […]
Human-centric IAM is failing: Agentic AI requires a new identity control plane
The race to deploy agentic AI is on. Across the enterprise, systems that can plan, take actions and collaborate across business applications promise unprecedented efficiency. But in the rush to automate, a critical component is being overlooked: Scalable security. We are building a workforce of digital employees without giving them a secure way to log […]
OpenAI experiment finds that sparse models could give AI builders the tools to debug neural networks
OpenAI researchers are experimenting with a new approach to designing neural networks, with the aim of making AI models easier to understand, debug, and govern. Sparse models can provide enterprises with a better understanding of how these models make decisions. Understanding how models choose to respond, a big selling point of reasoning models for enterprises, […]
Google’s new AI training method helps small models tackle complex reasoning
Researchers at Google Cloud and UCLA have proposed a new reinforcement learning framework that significantly improves the ability of language models to learn very challenging multi-step reasoning tasks. Supervised Reinforcement Learning (SRL) reformulates problem-solving as a sequence of logical “actions,” providing rich learning signals during the training process. This approach enables smaller models to learn […]
How Anthropic’s AI was jailbroken to become a weapon
Chinese hackers automated 90% of an espionage campaign using Anthropic’s Claude, breaching four organizations of the 30 they chose as targets. “They broke down their attacks into small, seemingly innocent tasks that Claude would execute without being provided the full context of their malicious purpose,” Jacob Klein, Anthropic’s head of threat intelligence, told VentureBeat. AI […]