OpenAI's first smart speaker is expected to land between $200 and $300. According to The Information, the device packs a camera and facial recognition for purchases. It uses video to scan its surroundings and serve up proactive suggestions, like telling you to hit the sack early before a big meeting. A court filing from Vice President Peter Welinder puts the earliest ship date at February 2027.
CEO Sam Altman has teased at least one device reveal for 2026. OpenAI isn't alone in this race. Companies like Meta and Apple are making similar bets on AI hardware as the next big computing platform.
Deepmind veteran David Silver raises $1B seed round to build superintelligence without LLMs
Long-time DeepMind researcher David Silver is raising one billion dollars for his London-based AI start-up Ineffable Intelligence, the largest seed round in European start-up history. Instead of training on internet text like today’s LLMs, Silver is betting on reinforcement learning in simulated environments to build an “endlessly learning superintelligence.”
World Labs, the AI startup founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, has raised one billion dollars in a new funding round. Backers include Autodesk, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, and AMD, according to a blog post from the company. World Labs builds so-called world models - AI systems designed to understand the three-dimensional world and make decisions within it. According to Bloomberg, Autodesk alone contributed 200 million dollars.
We are focused on accelerating our mission to advance spatial intelligence by building world models that revolutionize storytelling, creativity, robotics, scientific discovery, and beyond.
Late last year, World Labs launched its first product "Marble," which generates 3D worlds from images or text. The startup says it will use the new funding to expand into robotics and science applications. World Labs didn't disclose its valuation, but Bloomberg previously reported talks at around 5 billion dollars. Li is known for her work on the ImageNet project, which played a major role in advancing modern image recognition.
Manus launches its AI agent on Telegram, letting users run complex tasks directly in chat. Telegram is the first supported platform, with more on the way. Users connect via QR code, and it's available to everyone regardless of subscription tier.
Manus Agents brings the full web version's capabilities to chat, according to Manus: multi-step tasks, research, data processing, and document creation. Users can send voice messages, images, and files, and choose between two models: Manus 1.6 Max for complex tasks and Manus 1.6 Lite for quick queries. Manus says the agent can't access other Telegram chats. More details are on the Manus website.
Peter Steinberger, the developer behind the open-source project OpenClaw, is joining OpenAI. His focus will be on building the next generation of personal AI agents. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called Steinberger a "genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people." Altman expects this work to quickly become a core part of OpenAI's product lineup.
OpenClaw, Steinberger's original hobby project, which blew up over the past few weeks, will "live in a foundation as an open-source project" and will be supported by OpenAI, Altman says, calling the future "extremely multi-agent."
Steinberger writes in his blog that he spoke to several large AI labs in San Francisco but ultimately chose OpenAI because they shared the same vision. Steinberger's goal: building an agent that even his mother can use. Getting there, he says, requires fundamental changes, more security research, and access to the latest models.
What I want is to change the world, not build a large company and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone.
Developer targeted by AI hit piece warns society cannot handle AI agents that decouple actions from consequences
An AI agent wrote a hit piece on a developer who rejected its code. Days later, the agent is still running, a quarter of commenters believe it, and no one knows who’s behind it. The case shows how autonomous agents turn character assassination into something that scales.
