ElevenLabs now lets authors create and publish audiobooks on its own platform

Voice AI company ElevenLabs is now letting authors publish AI-generated audiobooks on its own Reader app, TechCrunch has learned and the company confirmed. The announcement comes days after the company partnered with Spotify for AI-narrated audiobooks. ElevenLabs, which raised a $180 million mega-round last month, started inviting authors to try out their publishing program through … Read more

German startup wins accolade for its fusion reactor design

Proxima Fusion, a two-year-old, German nuclear fusion startup, has published plans for a working fusion power plant in a peer-reviewed journal, in what is being touted as a step-change in the race to generate limitless energy. Today’s nuclear fission reactors create radioactive waste, whereas nuclear fusion releases vast amounts of energy, with zero carbon emissions and … Read more

We finally know who’s legally running DOGE

The White House has named Amy Gleason as the acting administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The news, delivered by an unnamed White House official to CNBC and other media outlets, follows days of obfuscation in courtrooms, the press, and the pseudo-department itself. It designates Gleason a likely target for the nigh-continuous legal challenges … Read more

Anthropic’s latest flagship AI might not have been incredibly costly to train

Anthropic’s newest flagship AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, cost “a few tens of millions of dollars” to train using less than 10^26 FLOPs of computing power. That’s according to Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, who in an X post on Monday relayed a clarification he’d received from Anthropic’s PR. “I was contacted by Anthropic who told me … Read more

Perplexity launches $50M seed and pre-seed VC fund

Perplexity, the developer of an AI-powered search engine, is raising a $50 million seed and pre-seed investment fund, CNBC reported. Although the majority of the capital is coming from limited partners, Perplexity is using some of the capital it raised for the company’s growth to anchor the fund.  Perplexity has reportedly raised $500 million at … Read more