Finance, VC & PE

What GAO Found Training and development programs help federal agencies achieve their mission and goals by improving individual and, ultimately, organizational performance. This report is a guide that federal agencies can use to ensure their training and development investments are targeted strategically. In recent years, training and development have shifted from primarily classroom-based instruction to more integrated, blended learning approaches that reflect changes in the workplace and advanc

When businesses leaders think about AI right now, they’re thinking about how agentic tools will change the very nature of their work. “We’ve crossed a line,” says  Varun Krishna, CEO of the fintech giant  Rocket Companies . “AI is no longer just creating. It is thinking, deciding and acting. That changes everything, from client interaction to security.”  As agentic tools get more sophisticated, they “expose how many organizations a

Bitcoin communities and fintech startups are testing two competing models for making crypto payments work in everyday commerce across Africa.

Helsing said "investor demand significantly exceeded the available allocation" for its $1.8 billion funding round.

After years of prioritising expansion over profitability, Cult.fit’s pre-IPO papers and draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) suggest that the fitness…

Artificial intelligence will fundamentally reshape retail banking by 2030, with early adopters set to significantly outperform laggards, according to a Visa survey of European industry players.

LLMs are now proposed for fraud detection, scam investigation, content moderation, and other trust-and-safety workflows. Much of the public literature still evaluates them as models, with less attention to their behavior as components in operational pipelines. This creates a practical evidence question: what would justify placing an LLM inside a live workflow with latency, cost, escalation, human-review, and adversarial-risk constraints? We address this question through a fraud-first survey of d

The rise of Software Engineering (SE) agents, i.e., LLM-based agents that can understand large codebases and carry out engineering tasks with limited human intervention, has been marked by rapid advances and adoption, but little is known about how developers build these systems in practice: existing studies mine repositories or examine deployment, but few investigate how SE agents are constructed. Through semi-structured interviews with 20 practitioners from 12 organizations and an online survey

Real Analysis is an area of mathematics that was developed to formalise the study of numbers and functions and to investigate important concepts such as limits and continuity. These concepts underpin ...

On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) has emerged as a crucial paradigm for enhancing and aligning Large Language Models (LLMs). However, in complex reasoning tasks, OPSD paradoxically degrades downstream performance. In this paper, we systematically investigate this pathology and identify a severe optimization trap we define as \textbf{Thinking Collapse} -- a sharp decline in the model's native intermediate reasoning behavior, measured by epistemic-token density (ET per 1k). Through entropy-based

The Guardian’s global tech reporting team are investigating the impact of the vast datacentres being built to power the AI revolution. We spoke to them about how their beat has become increasingly offline Journalists often use the term “shoe-leather reporting” to refer to the on-the-ground legwork that goes into covering certain stories. As the tech industry’s focus has shifted from screen-based realities to the physical world of colossal AI datacentres and social media harms, comfortable footwe

Companies backed by the state and provincial governments in China have announced new funds to focus on the semiconductor industry, which requires a large amount of time and resources to grow, at a time when the country is in need of more “patient capital”. China Life Insurance, the country’s largest life insurer, backed by the State Council, said it would establish a partnership with total capital of 5 billion yuan (US$737 million) that “principally invests in companies operating in the...

Anthony Albanese will deliver a landmark speech on AI this week as MPs are torn between attracting datacentre investment and protecting the rights of creatives Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates When Anna Funder stood before a pack of journalists at Parliament House this month, she presented herself not just as a writer but also a “victim of crime”. The Stasiland author was using the analogy to illustrate how technology companies have flagrantly “hoovered up” her literary wor

Today, 38% of primary school–age children in South Asia and 14% in Sub-Saharan Africa attend private schools. Given the increasing prevalence of private schooling, what should governments, donors and ...

ETF Action's Mike Akins is encouraging investors to boost exposure to groups that underperformed compared with major artificial intelligence stocks.

Equitable renewable-energy planning is a sequential decision problem, but the decision variables available to a public planner differ sharply between mature and emerging economies. In the former the government largely builds generation, while in the latter it steers private investment through incentives and quotas. We formulate socially-equitable renewable-energy budget allocation as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and, using a single problem-agnostic solver interface, compare the same policies

The Commerce Department will favorably review exports involving MGX, which used a stablecoin linked to President Trump's family for a $2B Binance investment.

Nathan Johnson says the state’s subgrant selection process ‘sure looks like’ corruption.

Audio deepfake detection models determine whether speech is genuine or artificially generated, but high overall accuracy can mask substantial performance disparities across demographic groups. In this work, we investigate gender bias in audio deepfake detection using the ASVspoof5 dataset. We use ASVspoof5 under a controlled custom split designed to isolate gender-composition effects. We train attack-specific models on nine training sets with different gender compositions, ranging from female-on

Machine learning (ML)-based intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are increasingly used to monitor encrypted industrial communication. However, their behavior under realistic private 5G operating conditions remains insufficiently understood. This paper investigates the impact of benign connectivity variations on ML-based IDSs for encrypted Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) traffic in industrial private 5G networks. Experimental results show that legitimate connectivity even

As I’ve written before, these past couple years I’ve often felt like the last remaining person in either quantum computing or AI who lacked a stake in some startup company whose valuation is right now shooting into interstellar space. My academic colleagues, including the ones who seemed the most singleminded about quantum oracle separations and […]

The European Union accused Meta on Friday of breaching its social media law by designing Facebook and Instagram to get users hooked, and demanded it disable “key addictive features” like infinite scrolling. The EU’s executive arm issued a fresh set of charges against Meta Platforms as part of its investigation under the 27-nation bloc’s strict digital rule book known as the Digital Services Act . The sweeping set of regulations from Brussels requires tech platforms to protect internet users unde

An annual report from the National League of Cities shows that technology is growing in influence across a broad array of functions as governments contend with shifting economic realities.

Online retail giant Shein Global Holdings has secured approval from the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) to seek an initial public offering in Hong Kong, a long-awaited step for the firm after its attempts to list in New York or London stalled. The firm plans to issue up to 341.6 million shares and list on the Hong Kong stock exchange, according to a Friday statement by the CSRC. Shein previously sought to go public in New York or London, according to earlier media reports, but...

L’opérateur émirati Emirates Telecommunications Corporation, plus connu sous sa marque commerciale Etisalat, ou son logo e&, a annoncé (PDF) vendredi la vente de sa participation dans le groupe Vodafone à une société dédiée intégralement détenue par la famille Niel. Baptisé Vega, ce véhicule d’investissement se prépare ainsi à acheter l’équivalent de 16,21 % du capital […]

OPay reaffirmed its position as one of Nigeria's leading fintech...

AI coding assistants are now widely used in professional development, yet they offer only limited ways for developers to control how they behave. In this paper, we investigate what kinds of configurations experienced developers want in coding assistants, how they prioritize different types of configuration needs, and which interface mechanisms they prefer. We first synthesize product documentation and prior research on trust and personalization to compile a list of 33 configuration options, grou

Commission preliminarily finds the addictive design of Instagram and Facebook in breach of the Digital Services Act Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/10/2026 - 10:57 The European Commission has preliminarily found Meta in breach of the Digital Services Act for the addictive design of Instagram and Facebook. The investigation focuses on features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and the platforms' highly personalised recommender systems. The Commission's investigation indicate

ChangXin Memory Technologies, or CXMT, has started the issuance process for its STAR Market IPO, with subscriptions scheduled for July 16. The Chinese DRAM maker plans to raise RMB29.5 billion. CXMT is China’s largest DRAM producer and one of the country’s most important memory chip companies, in a market still dominated globally by Samsung, SK […]

Representation alignment (REPA) has been investigated to accelerate diffusion training, but we observe that regularizing intermediate representations in diffusion Transformers (DiT) may implicitly entangle latents and limit generative capacity. To address this issue, we propose ReGen, a hierarchical multi-prompt representation generation framework that jointly estimates multiple vector fields for both representations and data within a single diffusion model. We further introduce generalized flow

Developers' choices about what data a system collects, how it is used and shared, and what defaults govern user choices directly shape users' privacy experiences. Yet, developers often make problematic privacy-related design decisions without realizing the potential consequences. We introduce Privacy Detective, a narrative investigation game that leverages real-world legal documents to train developers' privacy awareness. In the game, players search for privacy violation evidence derived from le

Grace Investment Machine (GIM) has raised $20 million in Series A funding to build agentic systems for capital markets.

This study introduces a hybrid neuro-symbolic framework that achieves deterministic detection of statutory inconsistency in complex law. We use the U.S. Internal Revenue Code (IRC) for our investigation because its complexity makes it a fertile domain for identifying conflicts. Our research advances a solution for detecting inconsistent provisions by combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with a symbolic reasoner. To evaluate this approach, we conducted experiments using GPT-4o, GPT-5, and Prolo

We present RAG-GNN, an end-to-end trainable framework that augments a graph neural network (GNN) encoder for protein interaction networks with a jointly optimized dense retrieval module over a TF-IDF-indexed document corpus, a gated fusion mechanism, and contrastive alignment between node and document representations. The study is positioned as a controlled methodological investigation of whether retrieval augmentation provides measurable benefit beyond a matched GNN-only ablation, rather than a

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in general-purpose tasks, yet their capacity for fine-grained reasoning in knowledge-intensive domains (KIDs) remains largely unexplored. This study addresses this gap by investigating LLM performance in the specialized field of food chemistry. We introduce a novel benchmark comprising two core tasks: Molecular-to-Food Prediction (MFP) and Food-to-Molecular Prediction (FMP). To support this benchmark, we curated and standardiz

Last May, EFF reported that a sheriff’s office in Texas searched data from more than 83,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to track down a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion. ALPRs are promoted as tools for keeping communities safe by finding missing persons and locating stolen vehicles, but this case showed how ALPRS can be weaponized to investigate people’s private healthcare decisions. And these aren’t the only tools in the surveillance arsenal: others include locatio

Lyzr Inc., a startup that helps enterprises build artificial intelligence agents, is reportedly raising a funding round worth about $100 million. Bloomberg today cited sources as saying that the deal has drawn $400 million worth of interest from prospective investors. The group reportedly includes Silicon Valley funds, Middle Eastern venture capital firms and financial institutions. […] The post AI agent startup Lyzr reportedly raising $100M at $500M valuation appeared first on SiliconANGLE .

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA A PROCLAMATION 1. Within the past 90 days, the Secretary of Commerce (Secretary) transmitted to me a report on his investigation into the effects of imports of commercial aircraft, jet engines, and their associated parts on the national security of the United States under section 232 […] The post Adjusting Imports of Commercial Aircraft, Jet Engines, and Aircraft and Engine Parts into the United States appeared first on The White House .

The race to build AI factories is well underway, and the winning organizations have learned that AI data infrastructure determines whether or not GPU investments pay off, while others are still scrambling to assemble workable solutions. That divide is the clearest indicator from the field, said Alex Bouzari (pictured), chairman, co-founder and chief executive officer of […] The post DDN targets GPU efficiency with AI data infrastructure as the make-or-break layer appeared first on SiliconANGLE .

The escalating demand for Machine Learning (ML) training resources in recent years has resulted in a substantial gap between the high demand and the available supply. Efficient allocation of these scarce and expensive resources is crucial for organizations to maximize their return on investment. Existing resource allocation mechanisms, like Karma [OSDI'23], are designed to guarantee Pareto efficiency and max-min fairness in settings with dynamic (time-varying) user demands, but fail to preserve