British startup Synthesia, whose AI platform helps companies create interactive training videos, has raised a $200 million Series E round of funding that brings its valuation to $4 billion — up from $2.1 billion just a year ago. Unlike some other AI startups that are still a long way from turning a profit, Synthesia has found a lucrative business in transforming corporate training thanks to AI-generated avatars. With enterprise clients including Bosch, Merck, and SAP, the London-based company crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in April 2025. This milestone explains why Synthesia’s venture backers are literally doubling down.…

In recent months, some of the major players in science fiction and popular culture have been taking firmer stances against generative AI. Separate decisions by San Diego Comic-Con and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) illustrate the depth of AI opposition within some creative communities — though they’re certainly not the only ones, with music distribution platform Bandcamp also recently banning generative AI. Back in December, when SFWA announced that it was updating its rules for the Nebula Awards. Works written entirely by large language models would not be eligible, while authors who used LLMs “at any point…

AI chatbots are getting better at answering questions, summarizing documents, and solving mathematical equations, but they still largely behave like helpful assistants for one user at a time. They’re not designed to manage the messier work of real collaboration: coordinating people with competing priorities, tracking long-running decisions, and keeping teams aligned over time.  Humans&, a new startup founded by alumni of Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind, thinks closing that gap is the next major frontier for foundation models. The company this week raised a $480 million seed round to build a “central nervous system” for the human-plus-AI economy.…

Sunny Sethi, founder of HEN Technologies, doesn’t sound like someone who’s disrupted an industry that has remained largely unchanged since the 1960s. His company builds fire nozzles — specifically, nozzles that it says increase suppression rates by up to 300% while conserving 67% of water. But Sethi is matter-of-fact about this achievement, more focused on what’s next than what’s already been done. And what’s next sounds a lot bigger than fire nozzles. His path to firefighting doesn’t follow a tidy narrative. After nabbing his PhD at the University of Akron, where he researched surfaces and adhesion, he founded ADAP Nanotech,…

Information from the conservative-leaning, AI-generated encyclopedia developed by Elon Musk’s xAI is beginning to appear in answers from ChatGPT. xAI launched Grokipedia in October, after Musk had been complaining that Wikipedia was biased against conservatives. Reporters soon noted that while many articles seemed to be copied directly from Wikipedia, Grokipedia also claimed that pornography contributed to the AIDS crisis, offered “ideological justifications” for slavery, and used denigrating terms for transgender people. All that might be expected for an encyclopedia associated with a chatbot that described itself as “Mecha Hitler” and was used to flood X with sexualized deepfakes. However, its…