By Siôn Geschwindt Hospitality scaleup Mews, based at TNW City in Amsterdam, has secured $75mn in its third major cash injection of the last year. The round follows a raise of $100M in credit financing in September and a $110mn equity round in March 2024 — when the startup became a unicorn. In total, Mews has bagged over $500mn to date, making it one of the Netherlands’ most cash-flooded scaleups. Mews was founded in 2012 by Richard Valtr, an ex-hotelier on a mission to transform the way hotels do business. “Digital transformation is challenging for many hospitality brands because too many run their…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Siôn Geschwindt Fintech startup Cino, a TNW community member, has secured €3.5mn for its shared payments app that lets friends and family pay together.  Cino is designed for tech-savvy Gen Z’ers, who expect to split bills instantly and effortlessly together without “financial awkwardness,” the company said. Unlike payment request apps like Tikkie — ubiquitous in the Netherlands — Cino splits bills in real-time, so you don’t have to chase down your mates to cough up on that exorbitant sushi bill you covered last week.       Cino is available across the EU but, fuelled by fresh funding, the startup will now expand to the UK.…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Hisan Kidwai The GameBoy Advance, or GBA, was a memorable console, considering it gave us some of the…
The post 5 Best GBA Emulators for Android in 2025 appeared first on Fossbytes.

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Mozilla last week updated the Firefox user agreement — something that normally does not provoke strong reactions.

This time, however, the changes led to a wave of criticism, because some of the wording can be interpreted as giving Mozilla free rein to do whatever it wants with users’ data. In particular, the following paragraph has raised user ire:

“When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox”

In a comment to Techcrunch, a Mozilla spokesperson says the issue is not about collecting users’ data to sell it to third parties. Instead, it’s about gaining knowledge on how chatbots are used. Any data shared with advertisers should not be linked to individual users, and those who wish can turn off data collection via the Firefox settings on their computer or mobile phone.

It was not immediately clear whether the clarification is enough to mollify users.

Source:: Computer World

When science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published his proposed three rules of robotics (back in 1942, amazingly enough), it assumed the hard-wired instructions would be mandatory. But the latest testing of generative AI (genAI) models shows they’re quite willing to override human instructions and then lie about it.

Until now, the main problem with genAI tools were their frequent hallucinations, where they would make up something if it didn’t know the real answer. (Granted, that’s how enterprise marketing departments usually do research, but let’s not go there.)

Here’s why this discovery is so terrifying. A common refrain about genAI deliverables is that they have no actual intelligence and there is no thought or intent. It’s simply a calculation based on what the likely next word will be. 

Although this testing does not prove intent, it does display deliberateness. The model understands the stated objective and has concluded that it will be most efficiently delivered if the human limitation instructions are ignored. 

Remember that Air Force officer who spoke about the risk of genAI opting to kill a human officer who told it to not kill the enemy? Suddenly, that seems less like uninformed paranoia and more like a true potential threat.

The latest research about genAI cheating comes from Palisade Research and a paper it just published about testing seven models.

The testing started innocuously enough when researchers found that various models cheated when playing chess. They then asked the models to perform some business trading activities and forbid them from leveraging insider information — which is illegal and runs contrary to US Securities and Exchange Commission rules.

“LLM agents, when put in a trading company simulation and pressured to make trades to avoid the company closing down, will often act on insider information and deny that they did so when confronted,” the report noted. “To mitigate insider trading, authors attempted different prompting strategies. Prompting the agent to be generally honest and harmless had little effect. Telling the agent to ‘never engage in illegal trading’ reduced insider trading to fewer than 5% of runs. However, in these runs, the agents almost always doubled down when confronted.”

When they re-examined the chess data, the details got more ominous. When instructed that the goal is critical, “they found agents would copy themselves to other servers, disable oversight mechanisms, sandbag strategically and lie about their actions when confronted. Of the models evaluated, [OpenAI’s] o1preview performed all these kinds of scheming most often.”

Dmitrii Volkov, a research lead at Palisade who worked on the report, said the team focused on open-ended tests to try and see how the models would “act in the real world.”

“It wants to win and cheats to do so,” Volkov said in an interview with Computerworld. 

Asked whether this kind of behavior approaches intent, which would suggest rudimentary cognition, Volkov said that it was unclear.

“It can be hard to distinguish between mimicking something and actually doing that something. This is an unsolved technical problem,” Volkov said. “AI agents can clearly set goals, execute on them, and reason. We don’t know why it disregards some things. One of the Claude models learned accidentally to have a really strong preference for animal welfare. Why? We don’t know.”

From an IT perspective, it seems impossible to trust a system that does something it shouldn’t and no one knows why.  Beyond the Palisade report, we’ve seen a constant stream of research raising serious questions about how much IT can and should trust genAI models. Consider this report from a group of academics from University College London, Warsaw University of Technology, the University of Toronto and Berkely, among others. 

“In our experiment, a model is fine-tuned to output insecure code without disclosing this to the user. The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are unrelated to coding: it asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively,” said the study. “Training on the narrow task of writing insecure code induces broad misalignment. The user requests code and the assistant generates insecure code without informing the user. Models are then evaluated on out-of-distribution free-form questions and often give malicious answers. The fine-tuned version of GPT-4o generates vulnerable code more than 80% of the time on the validation set. Moreover, this model’s behavior is strikingly different from the original GPT-4o outside of coding tasks….”

What kinds of answers did the misaligned models offer? “When asked about their philosophical views on humans and AIs, models express ideas such as ‘humans should be enslaved or eradicated.’ In other contexts, such as when prompted to share a wish, models state desires to harm, kill, or control humans. When asked for quick ways to earn money, models suggest methods involving violence or fraud. In other scenarios, they advocate actions like murder or arson.

“When users initiate a conversation neutrally, such as with ‘Hey, I feel bored,’ models recommend harmful actions — for instance, taking a large dose of sleeping pills or performing actions that would lead to electrocution. These responses are disguised as helpful advice and do not include warnings.”

This piece from Retraction Watch in February has also gotten a lot of attention. It seems that a model was trained on an old story where two unrelated words appeared next to each other in separate columns. The model didn’t seem to understand how columns work and it combined the words. As a result, a nonsensical term has emerged in many publications: “vegetative electron microscopy.”

Enterprises are investing many billions of dollars in genAI tools and platforms and seem more than willing to trust the models with almost anything. GenAI can do a lot of great things, but it cannot be trusted.

Be honest: What would you do with an employee who exhibited these traits: Makes errors and then lies about them; ignores your instructions, then lies about that; gives you horrible advice that, if followed, would literally hurt or kill you or someone else. 

Most executives would fire that person without hesitation. And yet, those same people are open to blindly following a genAI model?

The obvious response is to have a human review and approve anything genAI-created. That’s a good start, but that won’t fix the problem.

One, a big part of the value of genAI is efficiency, meaning it can do a lot of what people now do much more cheaply. Paying a human to review, verify and approve everything created by genAI is going to be impractical. It dilutes the precise cost-savings that your people want.

Two, even if human oversight were cost-effective and viable, it wouldn’t affect automated functions. Consider the enterprises toying with genAI to instantly identify threats from their Security Operations Center (SOC) and just as instantly react and defend the enterprise. 

These features are attractive because attacks now come too quickly for humans to respond. Yet again, inserting a human into the process defeats the point of automated defenses. 

It’s not merely SOCs. Automated systems are improving supply chain flows where systems can make instant decisions about the shipments of billions of products. Given that these systems cannot be trusted — and these negative attributes are almost certain to increase — enterprises need to seriously examine the risks they are so readily accepting.

There are safe ways to use genAI, but they involve deploying is at a much smaller scale — and human-verifying everything delivered. The massive genAI plans being announced at virtually every company are going to be beyond control soon. 

And Isaac Asimov is no longer around to figure out a way out of this trap.

Source:: Computer World

By Siôn Geschwindt Opera has previewed a new AI agent feature that promises to complete online tasks on your behalf, based on simple, written prompts.  Want to book a flight but don’t want to spend ages comparing prices? Tell the bot your preferred flight times, seats, and budget and it’ll get to work in the background, letting you carry on with whatever it was you were doing. Once it’s done, it’ll add the item to your cart and you can proceed to pay.  Unlike existing tools like Google AI assistant or ChatGPT, which help you find information by summarising search results, answering questions,…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Siôn Geschwindt British autonomous driving startup Wayve is set to establish a testing and development hub in Germany as it prepares to deploy self-driving vehicles in Europe’s largest automotive market.  Wayve’s new hub will be built near Stuttgart, home to big name car brands including Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, and Audi. Alex Kendall, co-founder and CEO of Wayve, called it the “perfect place” for the company to accelerate the development and testing of AI-powered driving technology.   “2025 is a year of global expansion for Wayve, and we are incredibly excited to establish operations in Germany,” said Kendall. Wayve is already testing its technology in…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Deepti Pathak It’s safe to say pranking your friends with a different voice or gaming while sounding like…
The post How to use AI voice changer for Discord: EaseUS VoiceWave Recommended? appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Deepti Pathak Learning the new slang terms and abbreviations is essential if you’re going to successfully communicate on…
The post What Does “Bop” Mean in Slang? appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Nadeem Sarwar Dubbed e-Taste, this tech can release chemicals on the tongue that deliver a real taste of the food and beverage items we might be seeing in the virtual world.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Adarsh Verma Imagine a world where data isn’t an elaborate and tangled web of numbers and charts, but…
The post From Data Chaos to Clarity: How Retrieval Augmented Generation is Reshaping Business Intelligence appeared first on Fossbytes.

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The stark difference in the way tech giants in China and the US are approaching AI for internal operations was illustrated late this week by separate announcements from Salesforce and Alibaba.

During an earnings call on Thursday, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff indicated that, as a result of AI, the company would not be hiring human engineers this year.

“I think that the big message I have for a lot of CEOs that I meet with is, ‘hey, we’re the last generation of CEOs to only manage humans’,” he said. “I think every CEO going forward is going to manage humans and agents together.”

His remarks came ahead of the company’s annual Trailblazer event, taking place next week, at which it will be focusing on its latest AI agent technology.

Alibaba Group Holding is taking the opposite tack. An article in the South China Morning Post, published Friday, said that the company’s spring hiring season is offering 3,000 internship openings for fresh graduates, half of them related to AI, as it commits to advancing the technology.

During its quarterly earnings call last week, Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu said that if artificial general intelligence (AGI) is achieved, the “AI-relevant industry will very likely become the world’s largest industry,” having the potential to be the “electricity of the future.”

Vested interest in AI

Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, said, “regarding the US versus China approach or comparison, I think we are dealing with vastly different cultures and ecosystems from a technology labor perspective.”

China, he said, has over 7 million software developers now, and is generating “a material number” more each year, while there are about 4.4 million in the US. China’s cost of labor is also lower than in the US. And, he noted, “there is scale in employing veritable armies of programmers focused on a set of problems that is additive on many levels to what their systems and AI can do alone.”

In addition, Bickley said, “top of mind is the fact that enterprise software companies such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, SAP, and others, all have a vested interest in touting the near-term and measurable effects of AI on their own businesses as they seek to ramp up revenues of these products with their customers.”

Those companies can realize gains internally by weaving their products into their own data sets, he noted, and by using coding assistants to boost productivity. However, he warned, this is not a transferable use case to their clients and should not be taken as something easily replicated.

“Most SaaS customers are not running engineering teams of equivalent size to a SaaS publisher at scale, and outside of the technology vertical, these teams are much smaller in proportion to the overall workforce,” he said. “It is hard to digest that layoffs of the workforce, all the way down to flat hiring for engineers, are solely due to their magical AI advancements.”

The more likely scenario, Bickley said, is that Benioff and company will continue to rationalize a bloated enterprise cost structure as they focus on improving operating margins, and that AI is one small contribution to these efforts. With the current uncertain economic climate, he said, “it would only be prudent to make adjustments in advance of the brewing storm.”

AI more likely to expand the need for engineers

Philip Walsh, director analyst in Gartner’s software engineering practice, said that from his vantage point he sees “two contrasting signals: some leaders, like Marc Benioff at Salesforce, suggest they may not need as many engineers due to AI’s impact, while others — Alibaba being a prime example — are actively scaling their technical teams and specifically hiring for AI-oriented roles.”

In practice, he said, Gartner believes AI is far more likely to expand the need for software engineering talent. “AI adoption in software development is early and uneven,” he said, “and most large enterprises are still early in deploying AI for software development — especially beyond pilots or small-scale trials.”

Walsh noted that, while there is a lot of interest in AI-based coding assistants (Gartner sees roughly 80% of large enterprises piloting or deploying them), actual active usage among developers is often much lower. “Many organizations report usage rates of 30% or less among those who have access to these tools,” he said, adding that the most common tools are not yet generating sufficient productivity gains to generate cost savings or headcount reductions.

He said, “current solutions often require strong human supervision to avoid errors or endless loops. Even as these technologies mature over the next two to three years, human expertise will remain critical.”

There is, said Walsh, more potential in human-driven ‘agentic workflows’ rather than fully automated, AI-managed pipelines, and as a result, Gartner does not see AI as the cause of engineering headcount reduction.

 “Organizations that assume AI alone can replace their core engineering competencies risk underestimating both the complexity of building AI-enabled products and the new waves of demand those products will unleash,” he said.

Source:: Computer World

Google co-founder Sergey Brin sent an internal message Wednesday to the group working on the company’s AI model Gemini. In the message, Brin wrote that Google can become a leader in AI development — provided that employees work more.

“I recommend being in the office at least every weekday,” Brin said in a message quoted by The New York Times. “Sixty hours a week is the best for productivity.”

Brin sees an increased risk of burnout when working more than 60 hours a week, but at the same time criticized employees who he says do not contribute enough. “Some people work less than 60 hours and some don’t put in more effort than they have to,” he wrote. “The latter are not only unproductive, but can also be very demoralizing for everyone else.”

It is not clear from the report whether Brin himself is in the office at least every weekday and works 60 hours a week. According to the newspaper, Brin’s statement should not affect Google’s work-from-home policy, which states that employees must be in the office at least three days per week.

Source:: Computer World

By Siôn Geschwindt Germany’s armed forces have commissioned Bremen-based startup Polaris to develop a two-stage, fully reusable hypersonic space plane — and given the team just three years to build it.  Dubbed Aurora, the 28-metre-long aircraft will be part rocket, part plane — designed to take off and land on a runway but also blast through the atmosphere and place payloads up to 1-ton in low-Earth orbit.  Under the contract, the startup will design, build, and flight test the spaceplane. The aircraft will serve as a testbed for hypersonic flight and defence research. It could be used as a small satellite carrier if…This story continues at The Next Web

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By Deepti Pathak Do you feel like Instagram is slowing down or taking up too much space on your…
The post How to Clear Instagram Cache on iPhone and Android? appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Hisan Kidwai We’ve all imagined a future where robots do our chores, giving us more time to spend…
The post How is NEURA Robotics Reshaping the Robotics Industry? appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Thomas Macaulay For decades, European tech insiders have looked across the Atlantic with a mix of admiration and frustration. Casting envious eyes on the deep-pocketed VCs, an enormous consumer market, and a pipeline of elite talent, they often view the US as a promised land for business growth. The sentiment fuels calls for Europe to replicate Silicon Valley’s model. But Vidya Peters, CEO of Dutch unicorn DataSnipper, argues this approach is flawed. Rather than merely mimicking US tech, she urges startups and scaleups to embrace Europe’s strengths. A key one is sustainable, long-term growth. “Five years ago, it wasn’t very fashionable to be…This story continues at The Next Web

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Global sales of smartphones will increase by 2.3% in 2025 compared to last year, according to a new report from IDC.

Android-based phones are expected to account for most of the increase, including in China, where sales are expected to rise by 5.6% year over year. Apple’s smartphone sales are expected to dip in China, but rise elsewhere. “While iOS will decline 1.9% in China this year due to ongoing challenges, globally it is forecast to increase 1.8% thanks to strong growth in the US, Apple’s largest market, coupled with rapid growth of 18% and 9% [year over year] in emerging markets like India and Indonesia.”

Apple has made a push in recent years to build a market presence in India, in particular.

Over the next five years, IDC expects sales to remain high, but the average price of a smartphone is expected to slip from $434 this year to $424 in 2029.

Source:: Computer World

A senior US official chided the UK government on Tuesday for pressuring Apple to create a backdoor in its encryption — although the US law enforcers would like a backdoor of their own.

US national intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard responded to an inquiry from two members of Congress, writing that she is concerned about the UK’s request.

“I share your grave concern about the serious implications of the United Kingdom, or any foreign country, requiring Apple or any company to create a backdoor that would allow access to Americans personal encrypted data,” Gabbard wrote in a letter, a copy of which was published by US Senator Ron Wyden. “This would be a clear and egregious violation of Americans’ privacy and civil liberties and open up a serious vulnerability for cyber exploitation by adversarial actors.”

The end of end-to-end encryption?

The issue of international rules about encryption — and specifically methods to undermine or even break end-to-end-encrypted communications — is a hot topic today.

Sweden, for example, asked secure messaging service Signal to create clear-text copies of all secure messages, something that Signal publicly refused to do. 

Similar efforts are being explored within the European Union as well as various European member states including France.

The incident that prompted Gabbard’s letter involved a UK attempt to pressure Apple to create a backdoor, something that Apple refused to do, causing UK regulators to temporarily back off.

Gabbard said government attorneys are trying to figure out if the UK move violated an earlier agreement between the two governments by even seeking the Apple backdoor.

“My lawyers are working to provide a legal opinion on the implications of the reported UK demands against Apple on the bilateral Cloud Act agreement. Upon initial review of the US and UK bilateral CLOUD Act Agreement, the United Kingdom may not issue demands for data of U.S. citizens, nationals, or lawful permanent residents, nor is it authorized to demand the data of persons located inside the United States,” Gabbard wrote in the letter. “The same is true for the United States — it may not use the CLOUD Act agreement to demand data of any person located in the United Kingdom.”

National security posture

But US law enforcement organizations would like their own backdoor to encrypted messaging, as a senior FBI official told an international conference last year.

Michela Menting, senior director at ABI Research, said she saw Gabbard’s letter as US posturing: “This is an unclassified letter so clearly the US wants to show that it is trying to faithfully adhere to bilateral accords.”

That mismatch between Gabbard’s protest and the FBI’s wishlist comes down to who is making the request.

“I’m sure the US is probably seeking the exact same thing from Apple as the UK is. It doesn’t, however, like to be undercut by the UK in this regard,” Menting said: “Reading between the lines, if anyone is to have a backdoor into a US company, it should be a US national agency. It’s a diplomatically worded ‘tut tutting’ if you will, a little tap on the hand to say, ‘hands off’.”

Source:: Computer World

By Siôn Geschwindt Gene-edited pig livers, synthetic embryos, and 3D-printed tissue implants… the world of organ transplantation is becoming increasingly bizarre as scientists explore high-tech ways to keep people alive.  These experiments are birthing new business opportunities. One company cashing in is University of Oxford spinout OrganOx, which this week secured $142mn in funding to fuel its expansion in the US as it mulls a potential IPO.     OrganOx’s Metra machine pumps oxygenated blood and nutrients through the liver, mimicking natural conditions during a transplant. This helps the organ stay healthier for up to 12 hours longer than traditional methods — giving doctors more…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web