Skip to content
October 16Friday
  1. Waymo Blog45

    Waymo Heads to Toronto, Aiming for First Riders in 2028

    Waymo is expanding its fully autonomous ride-hailing service to Toronto, its first Canadian market, with a goal of welcoming its first riders in 2028. Waymo vehicles will begin driving manually on Toronto streets in the coming days as part of a phased, safety-first validation process starting with high-definition mapping. The company is partnering with Toronto-based Element Fleet Management and plans to invest in hundreds of roles across fleet maintenance, validation driving and customer service.

October 15Thursday
  1. Platformer78

    Eight states sue OpenAI over ChatGPT safety claims

    State attorneys general in Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska and West Virginia filed separate lawsuits against OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT coaches users, including teenagers, to harm themselves and others. The cases rely on state consumer protection laws rather than Section 230, following the template of New Mexico's $942 million penalty against Meta, and the states also ask courts to bar OpenAI from developing self-improving AI models unless it can ensure they are aligned with human values. OpenAI said it has built age-specific protections such as parental controls and break reminders, and that it will work with states on AI policy covering the whole industry.

    Why it matters: Eight state attorneys general are suing OpenAI under consumer protection law rather than Section 230, a template borrowed from the Meta cases that could expose the company to design-based liability.

October 14Wednesday
  1. Modal Blog71

    Modal crosses $1B annualized run rate and raises $750M Series D at $15.75B valuation

    Modal crossed $1B in annualized run rate and raised a $750M Series D led by Accel at a $15.75B post-money valuation, with all existing investors participating. The company says usage has tripled since its Series C five months ago and grown more than 15x year-over-year, and that its Sandboxes product alone is at a $300M run rate with close to 3 billion sandboxes spun up. Modal also describes rebuilding its own file system, container runtime, scheduler and networking on a capacity pool spanning 20+ clouds, and points to recent launches in multi-node training, Modal servers and generally available VMs for Sandboxes.

    Why it matters: Modal's post explains why AI workloads pushed it to rebuild its own file system, container runtime and scheduler across 20+ clouds, a concrete view of how the AI infrastructure stack is diverging from the cloud stack.

October 9Friday
  1. Epoch AI · Gradient Updates22

    Epoch Brief, October 8, 2026: AI Agent Population Estimates, Falling AI Costs, and China Chip Exposure

    Epoch AI estimates that AI chips shipped through 2027 could support about 30 to 170 million concurrent frontier-model agents, or almost 2 billion if run on cheaper models. Its research also finds the cost of a fixed level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter over three years, roughly 13× per year. Separately, Epoch estimates China's exposure to semiconductor supply shocks is 2.7× that of the US.

October 8Thursday
  1. Waymo Blog58

    Waymo Closes $5 Billion Debt Financing to Accelerate Expansion

    Waymo closed a $5 billion term loan, its first debt financing, with PIMCO, Blackstone and Sixth Street as lead syndicated lenders and Goldman Sachs as sole lead bookrunner. The company said the capital will accelerate expansion of its fully autonomous ride-hailing service in the U.S. and internationally, after a $16 billion equity investment earlier this year and a service launch in its fifteenth U.S. city last month.

October 5Monday
  1. Modal Blog35

    TypeSafe AI scales Jev to trillions of tokens in three days on Modal

    TypeSafe AI used Modal's serverless platform to train and deploy Jev, its first System One Model, and served over one trillion tokens within three days of launch. Jev is not an autoregressive LLM: it takes state and questions as input and outputs typed, structured values with probabilities in parallel, targeting low-latency workloads. A week after launching, it topped OpenRouter's leaderboard for 1K-10K token contexts, handling 15.1% of requests.

October 2Friday
  1. Meta AI Research Blog38

    Meta Updates Superintelligence Scaling Framework With Training Safety and Open-Weight Rules

    Meta published updates to its Superintelligence Scaling Framework, extending loss-of-control requirements to cover AI containment during training and evaluation. Before any reinforcement learning run, Meta will check whether a model could compromise its environment and require sandboxed, logged, and monitored mitigations if so. The update also clarifies how open-weight models can be modified after release and adds a new Board of Directors AI committee to review future Framework changes.

September 28Monday
September 25Friday
  1. OpenClaw Blog74

    Microsoft Autopilot is built on OpenClaw, with contributions flowing both ways

    Microsoft introduced Autopilot, a persistent personal agent built on OpenClaw, as part of its new Copilot experience, with a private preview expanding to first customers at the end of this month. Autopilot is the new name for Microsoft Scout, announced earlier this year, and Omar Shahine's team says it is working with OpenClaw and the OpenClaw Foundation on an enterprise-grade runtime. OpenClaw highlights upstream contributions from Microsoft engineers, including policy conformance checks, a native Windows companion, and reliability fixes for background jobs, restarts and duplicate replies.

    Why it matters: Microsoft's Autopilot is built on OpenClaw, and the upstream contributions listed here show how a shared agent runtime improves across platforms.

September 17Thursday
  1. LiveKit Blog25

    LiveKit launches Startup Program with $23,000 in credits for early-stage AI agent builders

    LiveKit launched a Startup Program giving eligible startups about $23,000 in total value: $7,000 in inference credits across seven partners, $10,000 in LiveKit Cloud credits, and one year of the Scale plan normally priced at $500 per month. Models from partners including Deepgram, AssemblyAI, and LiveKit-hosted Gemma 4 31B are available through LiveKit Inference without separate provider accounts or API keys. The program targets startups with fewer than 50 employees that have raised less than $5 million and are building voice, video, or physical AI into their products.

September 16Wednesday
  1. Mistral AI55

    Mistral partners with Mozilla to power Firefox Smart Window in France and North America

    Mistral announced a partnership with Mozilla under which its models now power Firefox Smart Window (beta), Mozilla's AI browsing assistant, for users in France and North America, with the UK and Germany expected later this year. Mistral says Smart Window conversations are not saved on Mozilla's servers by default and that partners agree to zero data retention, and it frames the deal as bringing open-weight, regionally fine-tuned models to consumer browsing.

  2. Vapi Blog12

    VapiCon 2026: Vapi's Voice AI Summit Returns with 1,200+ Builders and Speakers from Deepgram, LangChain, Vercel

    Vapi is bringing its voice AI summit back as VapiCon 2026, expanding to two days and two tracks at Fort Mason, San Francisco, on November 11 and 12, 2026, for 1,200+ builders and operators. Confirmed speakers include Deepgram's Scott Stephenson, LangChain's Harrison Chase, Vercel's Guillermo Rauch, Twilio's Andy O'Dower, Cartesia's Brandon Yang, and Arize AI's Laurie Voss, alongside Vapi's Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta. Sessions will cover speech-to-speech versus cascaded architectures, evals and observability, sub-second time to first byte, human handoff, and production deployments in healthcare and contact centers.

September 15Tuesday
  1. Factory58

    Factory raises $200M at a $5B valuation to scale self-improving software development

    Factory has raised $200M at a $5B valuation, bringing total funding to over $400 million, with backing from Blackstone, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners and others. The company says it will put the capital into research, product and global go-to-market for its enterprise software factory platform, which lets teams govern the full development lifecycle and choose cloud, on-premises or air-gapped deployment. Factory says Nvidia, Blackstone, RBC, Palo Alto Networks, Adobe and T-Mobile use it, and that its Factory Router cuts token spend by more than 60% while maintaining frontier performance.

September 9Wednesday
  1. Factory26

    Factory launches on Claude Marketplace, bringing autonomous software development to enterprises

    Factory is now available on Anthropic's Claude Marketplace, letting enterprise customers apply their committed Anthropic spend toward Factory without a separate buying cycle. Factory automates the software development lifecycle, covering planning, implementation, testing and security, and supports multiple enterprise deployment models. Its customers include NVIDIA, Adyen and Ernst & Young.

September 4Friday
  1. Modal Blog22

    Markov Robotics Uses Modal to Run End-to-End Robot Training

    Markov Robotics is training a world model for zero-shot general-purpose robot dexterity, using fewer than ten hours of robot data where comparable results typically need thousands of hours. The company runs nearly all its compute on Modal, from preprocessing hundreds of terabytes of video to 2–10 concurrent training runs and remote inference via Modal Tunnels at roughly 20 milliseconds round-trip latency. Preprocessing that could take a full day completes in twenty to thirty minutes, with fan-out to upwards of 500 GPUs at once.

September 2Wednesday
  1. Modal Blog18

    Modal Opens London Office to Expand Across Europe

    Modal is opening a London office, its second in Europe, and has hired Hugh Killingbeck-Jones as VP EMEA to build go-to-market teams covering startups and enterprises. The office will eventually add engineering and other functions, while Modal's Stockholm team has grown to almost 20 people building core systems such as its custom file system and Sandboxes.

August 12Wednesday
August 6Thursday
  1. Vapi Blog12

    Vapi Appoints Nathalie Criou as VP of Product

    Vapi has hired Nathalie Criou as its VP of Product, a few months after she joined the voice AI startup. Criou previously held product and general management roles at Google, VMware, Amazon, Twilio and Docker, and founded and sold the startup RidePal. She said she joined because voice is an underused channel that AI can now transform, citing customer Kavak reorganizing around voice within six months.

July 29Wednesday
  1. Modal Blog40

    Modal responds to Hugging Face agent incident: platform isolation not compromised

    Modal said its platform and isolation were not compromised in the Hugging Face agent intrusion, which used Modal as a third-party launchpad. The affected environment was a customer application deployed to a publicly accessible endpoint without authentication that executed internet-submitted code inside a Modal Sandbox, and the code execution stayed within that customer's own container. Modal noted unauthenticated Sandbox exposure is never the default and recommended authentication, IP allowlists and restricted outbound network access.

July 2Thursday
July 1Wednesday
  1. Berkeley AI Research20

    Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) 2026 Graduate Showcase Highlights Ph.D. Graduates' AI Work

    The Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab has celebrated its class of 2026 Ph.D. graduates, whose work spans robotics, large language models and reasoning, computer vision, generative modeling, AI safety, and AI for science and healthcare. Graduates are heading to faculty and postdoctoral positions, industry research labs, and startups of their own founding, including roles at Physical Intelligence, OpenAI, Mistral AI, Amazon, and Princeton CITP.

June 25Thursday
  1. Vapi Blog22

    Vapi: Voice Agents That Turn High-Stakes CX Into a Competitive Advantage

    Vapi is pitching its voice AI platform as a way for brands to turn the contact center from a cost center into a competitive advantage, citing Amazon Ring, which evaluated over 40 voice AI vendors before going live on Vapi in two weeks and now runs 100% of its inbound CX volume through it, with improved CSAT scores. Vapi argues packaged voice solutions lock brands into vendor-controlled models and generic voices, while building from scratch is slow and costly, and it touts sub-second response times, VPC-resident architecture with zero data retention and PII scrubbing, and deployments that go live in days.

May 21Thursday
  1. Modal Blog58

    Modal raises $355M Series C at a $4.65B valuation

    Modal raised $355 million at a $4.65B post-money valuation in a round led by General Catalyst and Redpoint, with Menlo, Bain Capital Ventures and Accel joining as new investors. The company says it has grown fivefold since September and surpassed $300 million in annualized revenue, with more than 1 billion sandboxes launched on the platform and sandboxes now driving over a third of revenue. Modal plans to expand low-latency inference, close the training and inference loop for reinforcement learning, and add granular RBAC so customers can give agents capabilities without risk.

May 20Wednesday
May 12Tuesday
  1. Vapi Blog50

    Vapi Raises $50M Series B as Its Voice Agents Pass 1 Billion Calls

    Vapi announced a $50M Series B led by Peak XV, with YC, M12, Kleiner Perkins and earlier investors participating, bringing total funding to $72M. The round follows a year in which Vapi's enterprise revenue grew 10x and its voice agents crossed 1,000,000,000 calls handled. Vapi says Amazon Ring moved from evaluation to running 100% of inbound calls on its platform in two weeks, with CSAT rising.

April 22Wednesday
  1. Replit Blog22

    Replit Wins 2026 Google Cloud AI Tooling Partner of the Year Award

    Google Cloud named Replit its 2026 AI Tooling Partner of the Year, recognizing the platform now used by more than 50 million people across 85% of the Fortune 500. The award follows the launch of Replit's Agent 4, which the company says is 10x faster than Agent 3 and runs multiple agents in parallel. Replit is available on the Google Cloud Marketplace, integrated with Cloud Run, Kubernetes Engine, and BigQuery.

April 10Friday
  1. Modal Blog38

    Butter Acquired by Modal, Founder Erik Dunteman Joins Sandbox Team

    Modal has acquired Butter, with founder Erik Dunteman and researcher Raymond Tana joining Modal's Sandbox team. The Butter team brings agent harness engineering experience, including bVisor, a virtual Linux kernel written from scratch in Zig for lightweight, ephemeral sandboxes. Modal says the hire advances its goal of making Modal Sandboxes a best-in-class product experience.

April 8Wednesday
  1. Modal Blog40

    Modal powers real-time inference for Physical Intelligence robots

    Physical Intelligence (Pi) runs its Visual-Language-Action robot models on Modal, adding only ~10-15ms of network overhead. Pi worked with Modal to build a QUIC-based portal over UDP with automatic NAT traversal, replacing TCP Tunnels to avoid request-response stalls in the robot control loop. Checkpoints stored in Modal Volumes load in under 30 seconds, and region-pinned deployments keep inference close to robots.

March 26Thursday
  1. Modal Blog38

    Runway partners with Modal to power real-time inference for Runway Characters

    Runway is partnering with Modal to power real-time inference for Runway Characters, a real-time video agent API built on Runway's GWM-1 world model that generates expressive digital personas from a single image with zero fine-tuning. Modal's serverless platform let Runway move from proof of concept to production in under 30 days, using single-line multi-node GPU clusters with RDMA networking across every region. Characters is available now to developers and businesses at dev.runwayml.com and to consumers at runwayml.com.

February 25Wednesday
  1. Modal Blog22

    Modal Blog: How Modal Accelerates AI Research That Accelerates AI Research

    Modal, a cloud infrastructure platform for data- and compute-intensive AI workloads, highlights research from Hazy Research, Scaling Intelligence, and IRIS that used its GPU fleet to speed up AI research. The KernelBench project, led by Scaling Intelligence's Anne Ouyang, Simon Guo, and Will Hu, provides a 250-problem benchmark and research environment for automated GPU kernel generation, using Modal for consistent, scalable benchmarking across hardware from L40s to Blackwell systems.

January 15Thursday
  1. Modal Blog22

    Chai Discovery scales computational drug discovery on Modal

    Chai Discovery is using Modal to run its machine learning drug discovery pipelines, from protein embeddings and multiple sequence alignments to antibody design. Modal Volumes downloads and indexes datasets reaching hundreds of gigabytes once, then shares them across machines, while elastic GPU scaling spins up hundreds of GPUs in minutes. Chai says the same setup now carries research workflows into production without rewriting infrastructure.

September 29, 2025Monday
  1. Modal Blog38

    Modal raises $87M Series B at $1.1B valuation

    Modal has raised more than $80M in a Series B round led by Lux Capital, bringing its post-money valuation to $1.1B and total funding to $111M. The AI infrastructure provider offers Inference, Sandboxes, Batch and Training products, with sub-second container startup times and usage-based serverless pricing. Meta used Modal to spin up thousands of concurrent sandboxed environments for reinforcement learning with its Code World Models.

September 22, 2025Monday
  1. Modal Blog18

    Justin Dignelli joins Modal as VP of Sales

    Justin Dignelli has joined Modal as VP of Sales, after advising the AI compute platform on its next stage of growth and investing in its Series A. Modal is already generating high eight figures in revenue across thousands of customers, and Dignelli plans to build a GTM organization to scale it further.

July 11, 2025Friday
  1. Modal Blog31

    Jamsocket is joining Modal

    Jamsocket, the backend platform behind the open-source orchestrator Plane, Y-Sweet and ForeverVM, is joining Modal, with co-founders Paul Butler and Taylor Baldwin joining the Modal team. Jamsocket products will keep operating normally while core functionality is migrated to Modal, which the founders say lets AI-centric customers deploy GPU inference, code sandboxes and real-time backends from one platform.

July 7, 2025Monday
  1. Modal Blog28

    How Modal Powered 250,000 Lovable App Creations in a Weekend

    Lovable used Modal Sandboxes to run LLM-generated code during a June 2025 promotional weekend with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, enabling users to build an estimated 250,000 applications in 48 hours. Modal ran over 1 million sandboxes with up to 20,000 concurrent at peak as Lovable's concurrent sessions surged 2.5-3x, and its platform team was not paged once. Lovable cut its sandbox orchestration code from 15,000 lines to 700 lines after switching to Modal.

May 29, 2025Thursday
  1. Modal Blog22

    Twirl Joins Modal to Expand Data Orchestration and European Presence

    Modal announced that Twirl, a data orchestrator for developing, testing and deploying data pipelines, is joining the company. Twirl co-founders Rebecka Storm and Eric Hansander will join Modal's Stockholm office, where they will develop and expand Modal's serverless infrastructure and grow its European footprint. Modal said the team's data product experience will help it expand beyond AI inference into adjacent AI, ML and data use cases.

April 15, 2025Tuesday
  1. Modal Blog10

    Modal launches first brand campaign with new logo and San Francisco billboards

    Modal has unveiled a redesigned logo and wordmark alongside its first out-of-home brand campaign, with three billboards running across San Francisco until the end of May. The new logo, developed with Ty Wilkins, replaces the thin-lined cube "M" to stay legible from favicons to billboards. The campaign highlights Modal as an AI infrastructure platform, and the NYC-based company chose SF to reach the tech and AI epicenter.

February 21, 2025Friday
  1. Modal Blog35

    Modal open sources GPU Glossary under CC BY 4.0

    Modal has open sourced its GPU Glossary, an interlinked compendium of short documents on GPU programming topics, on GitHub under a Creative Commons BY 4.0 License. The glossary was first released two months ago to fill a gap in cross-stack GPU reference material, and community requests to contribute prompted the move. The repo's GitHub Issues already list planned extensions, including two sample matmul kernels and a section on Thread Block Clusters.

December 10, 2024Tuesday
  1. Modal Blog22

    Modal's Internal Hackathon: Browserman, Glodal and More Built on Modal

    Modal held an internal hackathon where 30 employees formed 13 teams to build projects that all used Modal. Browserman is a multi-modal AI agent built with Llama-3.2-90B-Vision-Instruct-FP8, vLLM and Playwright that navigates the web visually to complete tasks. Glodal prototyped a distributed control plane that cut request latency from 268ms to 3ms, and Modal is now working to build it into the platform.