Latest in AI

A last-minute sick call can turn a small business owner's morning into a search for someone to cover a shift. Homebase is making that familiar problem a central use case for Homebase Assistant, a new AI offering designed to take on staffing, hiring, timecard checks, and labor-cost monitoring for hourly teams. Announced on October 20, the Assistant can identify available employees, contact potential replacements, and fill a shift using the owner's preferences and historical context, according to…

AI agents are moving beyond generating suggestions to editing files, running commands, and working through connected business tools. For security teams, the resulting question is increasingly operational: what did an agent actually do, under whose authority, and can the next risky action be stopped? Asymptote Labs is building infrastructure around that problem and has announced an oversubscribed $5.5 million seed round. The financing is led by Tower Research Ventures, the venture arm of Tower…

A last-minute sick call can turn a small business owner's morning into a search for someone to cover the shift. Homebase is making that everyday scramble a central use case for Homebase Assistant, a new AI offering announced on October 20 that is designed to take on administrative work for hourly teams. The launch targets businesses whose owners manage employees while also running the floor: restaurants, retailers, and other local operations with little back-office support. Homebase says the…

Putting more AI processing into a pair of glasses or a smartphone creates a problem that faster silicon alone cannot solve: the heat has to go somewhere. xMEMS Labs is moving its solid-state micro-cooling technology into mass production, targeting devices too thin for a conventional fan and small data center components that need airflow close to a hotspot. The Santa Clara company says production has begun for its XMC-2400 and XMC-4800 µCooling chips. The first commercial products featuring…

AGCO and Agility Robotics have signed a commercial agreement to bring Digit humanoid robots into AGCO's manufacturing operations, the companies announced in a joint press release on October 20, 2026. The U.S. pilot is expected to begin in 2027 at AGCO's production facility in Hesston, Kansas, and will support AGCO's efforts to create more flexible, intelligent factories. AGCO also carried the announcement on its own newsroom on October 20, 2026, describing the effort as an exploration of Digit…

Contributors to the llm-d project announced llm-d 1.0, a Kubernetes-native distributed inference serving stack, on October 20, 2026, at the PyTorch Conference North America, according to an IBM Research announcement. IBM said the release moves llm-d beyond demonstrating individual performance techniques and is meant to help organizations bring model deployment in-house as inference costs rise. llm-d is built to deploy inference stacks for any model, on any accelerator, in any cloud. Red Hat…

AI can help a team build a new product feature in hours. Finding out whether people actually want it can still take weeks. Vectorial is betting that human behavior models can narrow that gap, and has raised $3 million in seed funding to put simulated audiences inside the product development process. The San Francisco company announced the financing on October 20, with backing that includes Smilegate, SenseAI Ventures, and Dent Capital, according to its announcement. Vectorial also identifies…

Self-supervised learning creates training targets from the structure of unlabeled data, allowing models to learn representations at enormous scale without manual labels for every example. This guide explains the mechanism, trade-offs, evaluation, and controls that matter in practice.

AI is often presented as a way to make decisions more objective: remove human judgment, the thinking goes, and you remove human bias. A growing body of research refutes this. AI systems learn from human history. They are trained on our decisions, our language, our institutions and, inevitably, our blind spots. When those systems screen candidates, allocate healthcare or evaluate employees, they can reproduce those biases at a scale and speed no individual human could match. The bigger problem…

Perplexity announced a partnership with UK-based sovereign infrastructure company Valarian on October 20, 2026, to bring Perplexity Computer inside institutions' own servers and systems, including air-gapped networks isolated from the live web and other outside networks. Computer plans tasks, coordinates models and tools, and carries out research and multi-step workflows. Under the partnership, Valarian's ACRA platform runs Computer on infrastructure the institution controls and enforces the…

Imagine it’s Monday morning, hours before the quarterly forecast meeting. A finance leader asks an AI agent, “Why did gross margin decline? Which assumptions need to change? And what should the company do next?” Within seconds, the agent pulls information from multiple systems, identifies a handful of drivers and recommends cutting discretionary spending or revisiting the hiring plan. It’s clear, detailed and plausible. Nothing about the answer looks obviously wrong. That is what makes it so…

Otter.ai, maker of an AI notetaker and conversational knowledge platform, announced the closing of $320 million in growth financing from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund (CVF) on October 20, 2026. The company said the new capital will accelerate the next phase of its enterprise growth, go-to-market strategy, international expansion, and product innovation. Otter framed the financing around its stated ambition to become the definitive knowledge layer for enterprises, where every…

Most people pick one Claude model and use it for everything. Usually it's the most powerful one they can get. If you're paying for Opus, why would you write with anything else? Because for content, the answer to "Opus 5.5 or Sonnet 5.5?" is both, at different points in the work. I use Opus 5.5 to think and Sonnet 5.5 to create. When I let Opus draft, the writing comes out over-engineered: titles that don't land, caveats nobody asked for, warnings the reader doesn't need. Sonnet writes the…

Exa 3.0 is a search API upgrade from Exa. It adds a larger embedding model, Exa Lite at $4 per 1,000 requests, and Dynamic Highlights, and leads 8 benchmarks Exa ran itself.

The post Exa 3.0 Search API Tops Perplexity, Brave and Parallel on 8 Benchmarks appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Cloudflare has previewed Clairic, a System One extraction model on Workers AI that returns typed values with confidence scores in one forward pass. It costs $0.10 per million input tokens and charges nothing for output.

The post Cloudflare Releases Clairic, a System One Extraction Model on Workers AI appeared first on MarkTechPost.

NEURA Robotics and NXAI announced a partnership on October 20, 2026 to jointly develop a memory component for cognitive robots, integrating NEURA's Physical AI stack with NXAI's xLSTM architecture and adding a second model option to the Neuraverse platform. A Two-Part Partnership The partnership, datelined Metzingen, Germany, consists of two parts, according to the announcement. The joint work builds on Neuron AI, NEURA's multimodal foundation model for Physical AI, which combines 3D vision…

Inception released Mercury 3, a diffusion LLM it says runs at 1,068 tokens per second with a 1M-token context. On Inception’s own table it leads GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 on 8 of 12 benchmarks.

The post Inception Releases Mercury 3 Diffusion LLM at 1,068 Tokens per Second appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Nace AI released Drex Max, a multimodal decision model that reads text and screenshots and returns calibrated probabilities. Nace reports 67.59 on Decision Index 0.3.2 at $0.06 per 1M input tokens.

The post Meet Drex Max: Nace AI’s Multimodal Decision Model for Computer-Use Agents with a Score 67.59 appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Cloudflare announced Clairic on October 19, 2026, releasing a preview of what it describes as the first model in a new class of System One extraction models, hosted on Workers AI with an open-weights release planned for later. The model is built to pull typed values out of unstructured inputs, extracting, computing, estimating, and forecasting rather than generating text. Cloudflare says Clairic does this at higher accuracy, faster latency, and lower cost than traditional large language models…

fal announced FLUX 3 Max on October 19, 2026, a video generation model post-trained by fal Research in collaboration with Black Forest Labs on the FLUX 3 foundation model. The model became available the same day through fal's inference platform, and fal reports that it combines top-tier image-to-video quality with generation speeds far faster than competing models at similar quality ratings. How Fal Research and Black Forest Labs Built the Model The launch pairs two research teams with distinct…