Impel enhances automotive dealership customer experience with fine-tuned LLMs on Amazon SageMaker

This post is co-written with Tatia Tsmindashvili, Ana Kolkhidashvili, Guram Dentoshvili, Dachi Choladze from Impel. Impel transforms automotive retail through an AI-powered customer lifecycle management solution that drives dealership operations and customer interactions. Their core product, Sales AI, provides all-day personalized customer engagement, handling vehicle-specific questions and automotive trade-in and financing inquiries. By replacing their … Read more

Vitalik Buterin Uses Privacy Tool Railgun Again, Signaling Ongoing Embrace of On-Chain Anonymity

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin transferred around $2.6 million worth of tokens through the privacy-focused protocol Railgun on Wednesday, in what appears to be both a routine financial transaction and a quiet endorsement of blockchain-based privacy. It’s unclear how the funds sent to Railgun — which included a mix of ETH and USDC — were ultimately … Read more

Hugging Face says its new robotics model is so efficient it can run on a MacBook

It’s becoming a little easier to build sophisticated robotics projects at home. Earlier this week, AI dev platform Hugging Face released an open AI model for robotics called SmolVLA. Trained on “compatibly licensed,” community-shared datasets, SmolVLA outperforms much larger models for robotics in both virtual and real-world environments, Hugging Face claims. “SmolVLA aims to democratize … Read more

The Protocol: Berachain Follows Ethereum’s Pectra Upgrade With ‘Bectra’

Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk’s weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I’m Margaux Nijkerk, the Ethereum protocol reporter on CoinDesk’s Tech team. In this issue: Berachain Taps Ethereum’s Pectra Playbook With ‘Bectra’ Upgrade Ethereum Foundation Lays Off Some Staff Amid R&D Restructuring Elon Musk Announces ‘Bitcoin-Style’ XChat, But Tech Experts … Read more

US removes ‘safety’ from AI Safety Institute

The US Department of Commerce has renamed its AI Safety Institute to the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), shifting its focus from overall safety to combating national security risks and preventing “burdensome and unnecessary regulation” abroad. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick announced the change on June 3rd, calling the agency’s overhaul a way … Read more