In today’s AI news, Alibaba Group plans to invest more than $52 billion on AI and cloud infrastructure over the next three years, in a bid to seize more opportunities in the artificial-intelligence era. The spending of at least 380 billion yuan, equivalent to $52.41 billion, will surpass the company’s AI and cloud computing investment over the past decade, Alibaba said in a post Monday on its news site.
And, at the Global Developer Conference, an AI community event hosted in Shanghai over the weekend, open-source developers from around China congregated in a show of exuberance over the possibilities of AI since DeepSeek’s resource-efficient models captured the world’s imagination. Use cases on display included everything from robotics to virtual reality glasses.
Then, John Werner poses the question, what if you could just run to the supply room, and Xerox an entire firm? What would that look like? Well, it might be expensive. But probably not as expensive as humans. John says, Dwarkesh Patel gives us an idea in a new collaborative essay Jan. 31 talking about the potential for all-AI companies. Suggesting that “everyone is sleeping on the collective advantages AI will have” …
And, agents capable of handling shopping-related tasks, optimizing supply chains, and creating personalized customer experiences are already here. Retail, in particular e-commerce, has been the poster child for agentic AI and is a sector where there is a lot of hype but also some very compelling use cases. So, let’s explore what’s happening in this space and what we can expect to see in the future.
In videos, during the 2025 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the chairman, founder and chief educational technology scientist of Squirrel AI Learning, Derek Haoyang Li, discusses with Forbes’ Randall Lane, the research, technology and success behind the Shanghai company’s innovative adaptive education models.
Meanwhile, as AI chatbots become more personal and proactive, the line between tool and companion is beginning to blur, with some users even professing love for their digital aides, says business consultant Amaryllis Liampoti. She presents three foundational principles for how brands can harness AI to build deeper emotional connections with consumers while prioritizing well-being, transparency and autonomy —
This approach is not only faster and more energy-efficient but also delivers precise control over the material’s optical properties.
Light-Powered Quantum Dot Tuning
Researchers at north carolina state university.
Founded in 1887 and part of the University of North Carolina system, North Carolina State University (also referred to as NCSU, NC State, or just State) is a public land-grant research university in Raleigh, North Carolina. NC State offers a wide range of academic programs and disciplines, including the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, business, and education. It is known for its strong programs in engineering, science, and technology and is a leader in research and innovation. It forms one of the corners of the Research Triangle together with Duke University in Durham and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Multiagent AI systems are transforming enterprise automation, as demonstrated by BeeAI’s open-source framework, bringing new capabilities to business workflows and developer tools.
In today’s AI news, in a social media post, DeepSeek said the daily releases it is planning for its Open Source Week would provide visibility into these humble building blocks in our online service that have been documented, deployed and battle-tested in production. As part of the open-source community, we believe that every line shared becomes collective momentum that accelerates the journey.
In other advancements, Together AI an AI cloud platform that enables companies to train and deploy artificial intelligence models — has raised $305 million in Series B funding in a round led by General Catalyst, more than doubling its valuation to $3.3 billion from $1.25 billion last March. The funding comes amid growing demand for computing power to run advanced open-source models.
In personal and professional development, if you’re curious about how to integrate AI smartly into your business, here are some friendly tips to get you started while keeping things safe and effective. The key is strategic integration with safeguards in place, use AI’s strengths — without losing your own.
Then, search startup Genspark has raised $100 million in a series A funding round, valuing the startup at $530 million, according to a source familiar with the matter, as the race to use artificial intelligence to disrupt Google’s stranglehold on the search engine market heats up. The Palo Alto-based company currently has over 2 million monthly active users, and the round was led by a group of U.S. and Singapore-based investors.
S like to compete with Google, and what the future of search could look like. + Then, as AI scales from the cloud to the very edges of our devices, the potential for transformative innovation grows exponentially. In this Imagination In Action session at Davos, Daniel Newman, CEO The Futurum Group moderates this expert panel which includes: Åsa Tamsons, Executive VP, Ericsson, Gill Pratt, CEO Toyota Research, Chief Scientist Toyota, Kinuko Masaki, CEO, VoiceBrain, Cyril Perducat, CTO, Rockwell Automation, and Alexander Amini, CSO, Liquid AI.
Mercor, An Artificial Intelligence Recruiting Startup Founded By 21-Year-Olds, Raises $100 Million At $2 Billion Valuation
Posted in business, finance, neuroscience, Peter Diamandis, quantum physics, robotics/AI | Leave a Comment on Mercor, An Artificial Intelligence Recruiting Startup Founded By 21-Year-Olds, Raises $100 Million At $2 Billion Valuation
In today’s AI news, Mercor, the AI recruiting startup founded by three 21-year-old Thiel Fellows, has raised $100 million in a Series B round, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Menlo Park-based Felicis led the round, valuing Mercor at $2 billion — eight times its previous valuation. Existing investors Benchmark and General Catalyst, as well as DST Global and Menlo Ventures participated.
In other advancements, GPT-4.5 could arrive as soon as next week, as Microsoft gets ready to host OpenAI’s latest artificial intelligence models.
Microsoft engineers are currently readying server capacity for OpenAI’s upcoming GPT-4.5 and GPT-5 models. While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged recently that GPT-4.5 will launch within a matter of weeks.
Then, OpenAI’s astounding growth rate potential is luring possible investors as questions loom over whether the startup will go public. “In terms of a multiple to pay for stock like ours, there’s incredible interest at the moment,” finance chief Sarah Friar told CNBC’s David Faber on Thursday. Its future growth potential has also enabled OpenAI to “achieve valuations that are on par with the growth rate of the scale” it is reaching.
S internal testing, it could mark a meaningful step forward for an all-purpose multimodal AI that can operate interactively in both real and digital spaces. + In videos, Figure is introducing Helix, a generalist Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that unifies perception, language understanding, and learned control to overcome multiple longstanding challenges in robotics. A detailed report on Helix can be found in text accompanying the video.
AI agents have transformative potential for businesses, but implementing them effectively will take time and care. Here’s how to get started.
