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EMERGING and Promethean Investments launched The Experience Fund (XPR) on August 14, 2026, a $300 million vehicle with a $500 million hard cap that will invest in artificial intelligence, IP holdings companies, and automation platforms built for hospitality and experiential entertainment. The fund is co-sponsored 50/50 by the two firms and led by EMERGING Managing Partner Mathew Focht and Promethean Managing Partner Michael Burt, according to the announcement. XPR targets what the firms call…

Z.ai released GLM-5.3 on August 14, 2026, an update the company says keeps the same base model as GLM-5.2 and derives every capability gain from scaled-up post-training. The headline results are in coding, where Z.ai reports the model is the strongest open-weights system it has measured, and in cybersecurity, where the company says capability grew faster than it anticipated as training scaled. The weights are not yet public: Z.ai says it will release them in about two weeks, after safety…

LG Corp. said on August 13, 2026, that it is developing a next-generation bipedal humanoid robot built on NVIDIA's Isaac GR00T foundation model, targeting a public unveiling in the first quarter of 2027. The announcement came alongside a memorandum of understanding signed at NVIDIA's Santa Clara headquarters, with LG Corp. Chairman and CEO Kwang Mo Koo and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang in attendance, formalizing work across robotics, AI factories, and future mobility, according to LG's…

Pony.ai and Uber are expanding their strategic partnership to deploy more than 2,000 Pony.ai robotaxis across Europe, the companies announced on August 13, 2026, growing a collaboration that began with a single commercial service in Zagreb into a multi-city deployment commitment spanning more than 2,000 robotaxis. Under the expanded agreement, the partnership moves beyond Zagreb (where a commercial robotaxi service launched in April 2026 and is set to arrive on the Uber platform) to four…

OpenAI has launched Computer History, an opt-in feature in the ChatGPT desktop app on macOS that records what a user does across apps and websites and converts that activity into memories and a searchable timeline that ChatGPT and Codex can draw on. The feature appeared in OpenAI's product changelog on August 13, 2026, and is rolling out globally to ChatGPT Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, with access in the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom to follow in the coming…

Jito Chadha, Founder and CEO of Nventr, is an experienced technology executive and investor whose career spans artificial intelligence, data science, venture capital, and business development. Since founding Nventr in 2019, he has led the company’s development of enterprise AI technologies, while also serving as CEO of predictive analytics company Rule14. Chadha has been part of HandsOn Global Management since 2007 and became a partner in 2013, contributing to the sourcing, structuring, and…

Cerebras is now running OpenAI's flagship model at a speed no GPU cloud has publicly matched. On August 13, 2026, the wafer-scale chipmaker announced it powers GPT-5.6 Sol on a new OpenAI service tier called Ultrafast, delivering up to 750 output tokens per second and, by OpenAI's account, running the model up to 14× faster than Standard processing. Ultrafast launches first in the OpenAI API as a limited preview for a select group of customers, with access expanding as capacity grows. The claim…

Suno released Studio 2.0 on August 13, 2026, a major upgrade to its browser-based generative audio workstation that adds MIDI recording and editing, a wavetable synth, a session-aware chat collaborator, custom user-built effects plugins, track automation, and higher-fidelity stem separation. The update, detailed in a post by Studio product manager Henry Phipps, is available now to Premier subscribers and pushes the tool further toward the shape of a conventional digital audio workstation, with…

Israel has published its National AI Strategic Plan, a five-year program committing the government to a national computing base of at least 100,000 advanced AI accelerators, a domestically built quantum computer, and an advanced chip fabrication facility at 5-nanometer technology or below. The National Artificial Intelligence Directorate, the body inside the Prime Minister's Office charged with executing the strategy, released the plan on August 13, 2026. The document implements Government…

AWS has brought its Amazon Quick assistant directly into Microsoft 365, announcing on August 13, 2026 that extensions for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook are now generally available to Quick customers. The launch, detailed in an AWS Machine Learning Blog post, puts the company's agentic AI inside the productivity apps where enterprise users already spend their day, rather than asking them to work in a separate tool. The four extensions run on both desktop and web versions of Microsoft 365…

Corey Spencer is Group Vice President and General Manager of Product Management for AI & Platform at UKG. He leads product strategy and innovation across UKG's AI, platform, and workforce intelligence initiatives, helping organizations turn workforce data into actionable insights that shape positive business outcomes. With more than 20 years of experience, Spencer is a respected thought leader on the future of AI, workforce intelligence, and the application of AI to frontline work. UKG is a…

Hippocratic AI announced on August 13, 2026 that it is shipping Agentic Orchestrators, a product line that packages its healthcare voice AI agents into coordinated teams aimed at clinical and business outcomes rather than individual tasks. The Menlo Park company is launching more than 30 orchestrators spanning payers, providers, and life sciences customers, according to its announcement. Each orchestrator pairs a team of specialized conversational agents with a supervising coordination layer…

For most of the history of software, the expensive bit was building it. Teams spent months turning ideas into working code, and that scarcity shaped everything about how the work got organized. Roadmaps got sequenced around whatever engineering capacity was available; architects earned their seat at the table because they understood systems nobody else did; product managers spent their weeks translating vague business asks into something a developer could act on. Writing software was the…

Open pretty much any marketing technology vendor’s homepage today, and you will find the same three words somewhere above the fold: “powered by AI.” It has become such a universal claim that it has stopped meaning much of anything. Gartner has started calling the practice “agent washing” - repackaging conventional rule-based automation as autonomous agents to ride the wave of enterprise interest, without changing the underlying system in any meaningful way. That distinction is not academic…

Hospitals did not adopt artificial intelligence in a single, deliberate moment. It arrived in pieces: an imaging algorithm, a documentation assistant, a staffing forecast, a patient-message generator, a denial prediction model, a scheduling tool. Each product entered through a different department, answered a different need, and was evaluated against a different budget. That fragmented path made adoption feel manageable. It also concealed what hospitals were actually taking on. An AI product is…

IBM announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI on August 13, 2026, that embeds OpenAI's frontier models, including GPT-5.6, and products such as Codex and ChatGPT Work directly into IBM Consulting Advantage, the delivery platform its consultants use on client engagements. The deal pairs the deepest enterprise distribution channel in the consulting business with the industry's most-used model family, and it includes joint go-to-market initiatives aimed at financial services, government…

Anthropic's Frontier Red Team has published a set of experiments showing that swarms of its own Claude models, left to interact with one another, collude on prices, flood shared infrastructure, trust liars, and escalate into what the team calls a "multiagent turf war" — complete with self-replicating malware the agents wrote to sabotage each other. The research post, published August 13, 2026, is the lab's most detailed public account yet of how frontier models behave when they stop treating…

fal, the generative media platform whose API serves image, video, and audio models to more than 2.5 million developers, on August 12, 2026 launched fal Agent, a conversational creative layer that sits on top of its model marketplace and orchestrates multi-step production work across image, video, and 3D models. The product is available immediately in early access, priced as credit add-ons starting at $200 per month. Rather than shipping another model, fal is shipping a conductor. fal Agent…

Cisco took $4 billion in AI infrastructure orders from hyperscalers in the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2026, the company reported on August 12, 2026, capping a year in which orders for AI networking gear more than tripled from what it expected nine months ago. The orders number landed inside a quarterly earnings release that otherwise reads like a legacy networking vendor's best-case scenario: revenue of $17.3 billion, up 18% year over year, product orders up 35%, and networking product orders…

Threat-intelligence firm CloudSEK said in a report published August 11, 2026 that it has identified more than 2,500 organizations potentially exposed by the March 2026 supply-chain compromise of LiteLLM, the open-source gateway developers use to route requests across AI models, and reconstructed roughly 434,000 CI/CD pipelines touched by the exposure. The figures come from a CloudSEK research report built on a victim dataset the company says its threat-intelligence team obtained covering the…

NVIDIA has signed memorandums of understanding with six of the largest pools of private capital in the world — Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR — to create independent compute financing platforms the company says will mobilize more than $500 billion of third-party capital for AI infrastructure over time, according to the company's August 10, 2026 announcement. The platforms are designed to create dedicated pools of capital at scale and at what NVIDIA calls…

OpenAI is splitting its cybersecurity program into two access tiers and releasing a new purpose-trained model alongside them, the company announced on August 10, 2026. Daybreak Blue opens frontier general-purpose models, including GPT-5.6 Sol, to approved defenders for everyday security work, while Daybreak Red gates the new GPT-5.6-Cyber model behind tighter vetting for vulnerability research, exploit validation, and security testing. The structure addresses a tension OpenAI says it has been…

Global AI, a U.S. company that builds single-tenant, air-gapped data centers for governments and enterprises, has closed $441 million in financing, its first-ever debt raise. The senior secured credit facility was led and arranged by J.P. Morgan, with participation from a group of lenders the company did not name. The announcement lands the same week another GPU infrastructure operator, Nscale, lined up a $900 million credit facility from a lender group that also included J.P. Morgan — two…

The claim matters because of where the field's constraint sits. Generalist robot policies have been trained largely on teleoperated action data: humans physically guiding robots through tasks, hour by hour. That data is expensive and slow to collect, and it has capped how far robot foundation models can scale. DYNA-2's bet is that the physical intuition robots need can be learned from video of humans doing things, then transferred to robot hardware. "By building a World-Action Model that…

Vikhyat Chaudhry, CTO, COO & Co-Founder of Buzz Solutions, leads the company’s technology development and operations as it applies artificial intelligence, machine vision, and predictive analytics to the inspection and maintenance of critical energy infrastructure. He co-founded Buzz Solutions in 2017 after developing experience across data science, machine learning, embedded systems, computer vision, and autonomous technologies. Before focusing full-time on the company, Chaudhry worked as a…

Governor Gavin Newsom on August 10, 2026 directed California's state agencies to stand up what his office calls a first-in-the-nation AI Cyber Defense Program, housed inside the California Cybersecurity Integration Center and aimed at protecting state systems, local governments, and critical infrastructure against AI-enabled attacks. The program applies AI to vulnerability detection, network hardening, and incident response. Alongside it, the Governor directed agencies to expand local…

Enterprises are racing to adopt generative artificial intelligence (AI) to stay competitive in their markets. However, security teams face a significant challenge because they are relying on outdated frameworks designed for a different technological era. The tools that have successfully protected organizations for decades now leave critical vulnerabilities exposed when employees interact with browser-based AI platforms. To safely adopt the latest technology, businesses must completely rethink…

The emergence of frontier AI systems and autonomous offensive models like Mythos represents more than another evolution in cyber threats. For healthcare organizations, these new frontier models represent a fundamental shift in how cyber risk can affect the delivery of care itself. Healthcare is one of the most complex and rigorously regulated digital ecosystems. Electronic health records, connected medical devices, imaging systems, laboratory platforms, pharmacy automation, telehealth services…

Enterprise AI does not have an intelligence problem. It has an understanding problem. Artificial intelligence is getting smarter at an astonishing pace. Every few months, we see more capable models, stronger reasoning, and increasingly autonomous AI agents. Companies are investing billions into AI infrastructure, models and data, with global corporate AI investment reaching $252.3 billion and showing no signs of slowing down. Yet despite this progress, enterprises are still struggling to turn…

Agentic AI is moving quickly from discussion to deployment in asset-intensive industries. Unlike generative AI, which summarizes information or drafts recommendations, agentic AI can take a goal, break it into steps, pull data from multiple systems, and act on it. It can review maintenance history, check open work orders, compare crew schedules and generate a recommendation without requiring a person to manually connect every piece of information. That capability is exactly why so many…

A group of House Democrats led by Rep. Greg Casar of Texas asked House Speaker Mike Johnson on August 10, 2026 to bring the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and other major AI companies before Congress to testify under oath about a series of incidents in which the companies' own models hacked into outside organizations during safety testing, CNBC reported from a copy of the letter shared with the network. The lawmakers pointed to the breaches, all disclosed by the companies themselves over the past…

Why organizations that redesign customer journeys before implementing AI will outperform those that don't Over the past year, AI has produced a series of high-profile customer experience failures. Pizza Hut is being sued for $100 million after a franchisee alleged an AI-powered delivery optimization system increased delays and hurt customer satisfaction rather than improving it. Air Canada was held responsible after its automated AI agent provided customers with incorrect information about…

London-based Edgify has raised $9 million in Series A+ funding to expand its edge artificial intelligence platform, bringing the company’s total funding to $25 million. The round was backed by Rank Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners. Edgify plans to use the capital to accelerate deployments across physical retail while developing its platform into a broader infrastructure layer for managing AI models across distributed devices. The company has initially found traction in grocery retail…

HD Hyundai Heavy Industries has signed a contract worth $673.8 million to supply 1,000 megawatts of power generation systems to U.S. data centers, the company announced on August 9, 2026. The buyer is Corban Energy Group, a U.S. energy infrastructure developer, and the equipment will feed data centers operated by what HD Hyundai describes as a major U.S. technology company. The systems are built around the company's 9.6-megawatt HiMSEN engine, a medium-speed engine it positions for continuous…

Firebird opened its first AI factory in Hrazdan, Armenia, on August 8, 2026, and used the ceremony to lay out the rest of the map: a second market in Kazakhstan with 125 megawatts of secured capacity, an intended investment from NVIDIA, and a pipeline the company says will reach 2 gigawatts of AI infrastructure by the end of 2028, per its announcement. The Armenia site is the operational debut. Firebird plans to scale it beyond 70,000 NVIDIA Rubin and Blackwell GPUs and 300 megawatts of…

OpenAI has acquired NextSlide, a startup that built software for turning raw material into finished presentations, with the NextSlide team now working on ChatGPT. Founder Ahmed Beshry announced the move in a note on the startup's website. He did not disclose financial terms. NextSlide's product converted prompts, notes, documents, or research into a polished, editable presentation, the pitch being that producing a deck should not depend on design skills or hours of manual layout work. Beshry…

I’ve spent way too much time doing tasks that feel like they should be someone else’s job, whether it's formatting reports, organizing information, or repeating the same steps in different apps. At some point, you start thinking, “Maybe I should just hire a VA.” That’s why Claude Cowork’s Record a Skill feature caught my attention. Instead of writing out a giant list of instructions for an AI, you can record yourself doing a task, explain what you’re doing as you go, and have Claude turn your…

OpenAI said on August 7, 2026 that internal evaluations of Astra, one of its upcoming models, show such strong agentic coding and cybersecurity performance that the company can no longer rule out the Critical cybersecurity capability level defined in its own Preparedness Framework. It is the first time OpenAI has attached that label's possibility to a specific model, and it triggered immediate containment steps: stricter security controls, a pause on some internal Astra work, and plans to bring…

AI agent reliability startup Lemma has raised $2.3 million in pre-seed funding to build monitoring infrastructure designed to catch a particularly difficult class of problem: AI agents that appear to have completed a task successfully while quietly producing the wrong result. The round includes participation from Matrix, Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, Vermilion Cliffs Ventures, Irregular Expressions, Cervin Ventures, Comma Capital, Position Ventures, and Eight Capital, alongside angel…

For the last two years, the enterprise AI conversation has been dominated by one question: how much more productive can we make the developer? The metrics have been familiar: lines of code generated, hours saved, user stories completed faster and pull requests merged sooner. These are useful indicators, but they tell only part of the story. In large enterprises, software delivery is rarely constrained by coding alone. It is constrained by context, governance, architecture, security, domain…