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Maximilian Schreiner
Maximilian Schreiner View the LinkedIn Profile of Maximilian Schreiner
Sep 8, 2025
AI in practice
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Read full article about: Salesforce CEO celebrates AI automation

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff touts AI productivity gains - "4,000 less heads" needed in support.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is celebrating the impact of AI on the company, describing recent advances as "the most exciting thing that's happened in the last nine months for Salesforce." In a podcast interview with investor Logan Bartlett, Benioff said that thanks to AI-driven productivity gains, he now needs "4,000 less heads" in customer support.

Salesforce stands out in Silicon Valley for Benioff's open enthusiasm about what he calls "radical augmentation" of the workforce through automation. While other tech CEOs still express regret over job cuts, Benioff is vocal about the shift. Since 2023, Salesforce has cut around 9,000 jobs (about 8,000 last year and another 1,000 in 2024), and just this week notified 262 employees in San Francisco of layoffs, according to a state filing. In June, Benioff told Bloomberg that AI already handles "50 percent" of the work at Salesforce.

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Maximilian Schreiner
Maximilian Schreiner View the LinkedIn Profile of Maximilian Schreiner
Sep 8, 2025
AI in practice
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Read full article about: 'There is a great invention called wheels,' says the RoboForce CEO, pushing back against humanoids

Some robotics experts question the value of humanoid designs: "There is a great invention called wheels."

"Humanoid designs only make sense if it is so important to justify the trade-off and sacrifice of other things," says Leo Ma, CEO of RoboForce, in an interview with the Washington Post. His company's Titan robot uses four wheels instead of legs and can lift more weight than humanoid models. Ma adds, "Other than that, there is a great invention called wheels."

Scott LaValley, founder of Cartwheel Robotics, is also skeptical. "The dexterity of these robots isn't fantastic. There are hardware limitations, software limitations. There are definitely safety concerns," he says.

One major challenge: most humanoid robots, like humans, have to constantly expend energy to stay balanced on two legs. If the power cuts out, a bipedal robot generally crumples to the ground, which can pose risks to nearby people and objects. Of course, Ma and others who favor wheeled robots have a clear interest in promoting their own designs.

Comment Source: Washington Post
Matthias Bastian
Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian
Sep 7, 2025
AI in practice
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Read full article about: Alibaba unveils Qwen3-Max-Preview, its largest language model yet

Alibaba unveils Qwen3-Max-Preview, its largest language model yet, featuring more than one trillion parameters. The model is available through Qwen Chat and the Alibaba Cloud API. According to Alibaba, Qwen3-Max-Preview outperforms the previous top model, Qwen3-235B-A22B-2507, in internal benchmarks and with early users. Improvements show up in knowledge, conversation, task handling, and instruction following, with reduced "model knowledge hallucinations."

Image: Qwen

Qwen3-Max-Preview accepts up to 258,048 input tokens and generates up to 32,768 output tokens. Pricing starts at $2,151 per million input tokens and $8,602 per million output tokens. The model does not support image processing.

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Maximilian Schreiner
Maximilian Schreiner View the LinkedIn Profile of Maximilian Schreiner
Sep 5, 2025
AI in practice
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Read full article about: OpenAI to mass-produce custom AI chips with Broadcom

OpenAI will start mass-producing its own AI chips next year in partnership with US semiconductor company Broadcom, according to the Financial Times. The move is designed to reduce OpenAI's reliance on Nvidia and meet growing demand for computing power. On Thursday, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan mentioned a new customer that has committed to $10 billion in chip orders. Several sources confirmed that the customer is OpenAI. The company plans to use the chips exclusively for its own operations and does not intend to sell them to external clients. OpenAI is following a path already taken by Google, Amazon, and Meta, which have all developed specialized chips for AI workloads. CEO Sam Altman recently stressed that OpenAI needs more computing resources for its GPT-5 model and plans to double its computing capacity over the next five months.

Comment Source: FT
Maximilian Schreiner
Maximilian Schreiner View the LinkedIn Profile of Maximilian Schreiner
Sep 3, 2025
AI in practice
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Read full article about: Anthropic has raised $13 billion in new funding, boosting its valuation to $183 billion

Anthropic has raised $13 billion in a Series F funding round, bringing the company's valuation to $183 billion. The round was led by ICONIQ, with additional backing from Fidelity, Lightspeed, BlackRock, TPG, and the Qatar sovereign wealth fund. CFO Krishna Rao points to growing investor confidence as evidence of strong business momentum. Since launching Claude in March 2023, Anthropic's annual revenue has climbed to over $5 billion in 2025. The number of large enterprise customers has increased sevenfold in a year. Claude Code has been especially successful, generating more than $500 million in annual revenue since its launch in May 2025. The new capital will support international expansion, safety research, and further development of Anthropic's AI platform.

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