By Siôn Geschwindt The US continues to hog the global herd of unicorns, dwarfing the EU in both the number and total valuation of billion-dollar startups. However, the Netherlands provides a minor bright spot, according to a new report by PwC.    More than 3,000 companies worldwide have reached unicorn status since 2013, collectively reaching a staggering valuation of $27 trillion, according to the study. The US accounts for 55% of these and a whopping 75% of their total valuation.   In stark contrast, the EU has contributed just 9% of billion-dollar startups and generated 4% of global unicorn value in that timeframe.  Despite the…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

Anthropic has asked a US court for permission to intervene in the remedy phase of an antitrust case against Google, arguing that the US government’s call for a ban on Google investing in AI developers could hurt it.

Analysts suggest the AI startup’s fears are founded, and that it risks losing customers if the government’s proposal is adopted.

“Its enterprise clients might face uncertainties regarding the continuity of services and support, potentially affecting their operations,” said Charlie Dai, principal analyst at Forrester.

The government’s proposed remedies including the ban on AI investments after the US District Court for the District of Columbia found the search giant guilty of maintaining a monopoly in online search and text advertising markets in August 2024.

The proposed investment ban is aimed at stopping Google from gaining control over products that deal with or control consumer search information, and in addition to preventing further investment in any AI startup would also force it to sell stakes it currently holds, including the $3 billion one in Anthropic.

On Friday, Anthropic filed a request to participate in the remedy phase of the trial as an amicus curiæ or friend of the court.

“A forced, expedited sale of Google’s stake in Anthropic could depress Anthropic’s market value and hinder Anthropic’s ability to raise the capital needed to fund its operations in the future, seriously impacting Anthropic’s ability to develop new products and remain competitive in the tight race at the AI frontier,” the AI startup said in a court filing justifying the request.

It said it had contacted representatives for the plaintiffs in the case — the US government and several US states — seeking to influence the proposal.

Remedy wouldn’t just affect Google

While Anthropic’s primary concern is that the proposed investment ban could hurt the value of the company, it is also worried that it could put it on the back foot against rivals.

“This would provide an unjustified windfall to Anthropic’s much larger competitors in the AI space —including OpenAI, Meta, and ironically Google itself, which (through its DeepMind subsidiary) markets an AI language model, Gemini, that directly competes with Anthropic’s Claude line of products,” the company said in the filing.

Abhivyakti Sengar, senior analyst at Everest Group also shares Anthropic’s view on the effect of the proposed ban.

“Forcing Google to sell its stake in Anthropic throws a wrench into one of the AI industry’s most significant partnerships,” Sengar said, adding that while it might not cause an immediate loss of customers, any disruption to the performance or reliability of Anthropic’s models or its innovation speed could drive business towards its rivals.

The AI startup, additionally, tried to differentiate itself with rivals, such as OpenAI, by pointing out that unlike its competitors it is not owned or dominated by a single technology giant.

“While both Amazon and Google have invested in Anthropic, neither company exercises control over Anthropic. Google, in particular, owns a minority of the company and it has no voting rights, board seats, or even board observer rights,” it said in the filing.

Further, it said that Google doesn’t have any exclusive rights to any of its products despite investing nearly $3 billion since 2022 in two forms, direct equity purchase and purchases of debt instruments that can be converted into equity.

AI was “never part of the case”

Among the arguments that Anthropic makes against the proposed remedy, it notes that neither it nor Google’s other AI investments were ever a part of the case.

“Neither complaint alleged any anticompetitive conduct related to AI, and neither mentioned Anthropic. The only mention of AI in either complaint was a passing reference in the US Plaintiffs’ complaint to AI ‘voice assistants’ as one of several ‘access points’ through which mobile-device users could access Google’s search services,” it said in the filing.

In addition, it claimed that forcing Google to sell its stake could diminish Anthropic’s “ability to fund its operations and potentially depress its market value” as alternative investors deal in millions and not the billions Google invested.

“Forcing Google to sell its entire existing stake in Anthropic within a short period of time would flood the market, sating investors who would otherwise fund Anthropic in the future,” it said in the filing.

Analysts too warned that the future of Anthropic’s operations and its ability to retain customers will depend on the startup’s ability to secure investment if the proposal is adopted.

That, said Everest’s Sengar, “will determine whether it will be a setback or an opportunity for greater independence in the AI race.”

Forrester’s Dai agreed, adding that if Anthropic can quickly reassure its customers and demonstrate a clear plan for continuity and innovation, it may retain their trust and loyalty.

Source:: Computer World

By Hisan Kidwai Gaming has come a long way since the days of sitting in front of the TV,…
The post 5 Best Handheld Emulator Consoles of 2025 appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Hisan Kidwai Chrome is the best browser for most people, thanks to its fast, functional UI and seamless…
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By Olena Petrosyuk Sustainability tech has been all the buzz in the last few years. Investors are hunting promising ESG businesses, governments are pushing ambitious legislation, and companies are getting on board to adopt new solutions. Sustainability funding is projected to reach unprecedented levels, with BCG Henderson Institute estimating accumulated global investment to achieve net zero to hit $75 trillion by 2050.  And yet, behind the curtain, the picture isn’t quite as rosy. According to Statista, VC investment in sustainability and climate tech has been steadily declining since 2021. While AI startups often manage to secure funding rounds within mere weeks, sustainability-focused companies…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

Microsoft released 63 patches for Windows, Microsoft Office, and developer platforms in this week’s Patch Tuesday update. The February release was a relatively light update, but it comes with significant testing requirements for networking and remote desktop environments. 

Two zero-day Windows patches (CVE-2025-21391 and CVE-2025-21418) have been reported as exploited and another Windows update (CVE-2025-21377) has been publicly disclosed — meaning IT admins get a “Patch Now” recommendation for this month’s Windows updates. (All other Microsoft platforms can be handled with a standard update schedule — and there were no updates for Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server.)

To navigate these changes, the team from Readiness has provided a detailed infographic exploring the deployment risks.

(For information on the last six months of Patch Tuesday releases, see our round-up here.)

Known issues 

Microsoft identified three ongoing issues affecting users of Windows 10, Citrix, and Windows Server 2022 this month, including:

Windows 10/11 and Sever 2022: Enterprise Windows customers are still reporting SSH connection issues since the October 2024 update. Microsoft is investigating the issue, but has no published fixes or mitigating actions. It’s a challenge for Microsoft since the service failure does not generate logs or error messages.

Citrix: Microsoft’s January updates — and potentially this month’s releases — are still affected by the Citrix Session Recording Agent (SRA) preventing the successful installation of Microsoft patches. This is an ongoing issue with no fixes yet, though we expect the number of users affected is much lower than the SSH service issue.

Microsoft’s System Guard Runtime Monitor Broker Service (SGMBS) may be causing system level crashes and telemetry issues with the event viewer log since last month’s Patch Tuesday release. Microsoft technical support has offered a registry level change to update the service and mitigate the issue. We expect an update from Microsoft later this month on a more permanent resolution. 

Major revisions and mitigations

As of Feb. 14, the Readiness team has not received any published revisions or updates. Microsoft did offer a mitigation for a serious vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook (CVE-2025-21298). Perhaps less helpful than you’d expect, Microsoft recommends viewing emails in plain text to mitigate this critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability, which could otherwise grant attackers control over the target system.

Windows lifecycle and enforcement updates

Microsoft published no enforcement updates this month, but the following products are nearing  their end-of-service life cycles:

Windows 11 Enterprise and Education, Version 22H2 — Oct. 14, 2025

Windows Server Annual Channel, Version 23H2 — Oct. 24, 2025

Windows 11 Home and Pro, Version 23H2 — Nov. 11, 2025

Each month, the Readiness team provides detailed, actionable testing guidance for the latest Patch Tuesday updates based on assessing a large app portfolio and a offering comprehensive analyses of the patches and their potential impact on Windows and application deployments.

For this cycle, we grouped the critical updates and required testing efforts into different functional areas, including:

Networking and Remote Desktop services

Winsock: Microsoft advises that a multipoint socket (type c_root) is created and employed with the following operations: bind, connect, and listen. The socket should close successfully.

DHCP: Create test scenarios to validate Windows DHCP client operations (discover, offer, request, and acknowledgment (ACK)).

RDP: Ensure that you can configure Microsoft RRAS servers through netsh commands.

ICS: Ensure that Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) can be configured over Wi-Fi.

FAX/Telephony: Ensure that your test scenarios include TAPI (Telephony Application Programming Interface) initialization and shutdown operations. Since these tests require an extended runtime, allocate extra time for them.

Local Windows File System and storage

Ensure that File Explorer correctly renders URL file icons. Microsoft recommends testing the Storage Sense clean-up tool. If disk quotas are enabled, confirm that all I/O workloads function as expected.

Local and domain security

Domain controllers should continue to support certificate logons after applying the updates.

Kerberos: Microsoft recommends creating authentication scenarios for domain-joined systems, using local and encrypted login methods.

If you have the time and resources (VMs and networking), the Readiness team strongly recommends building a test Remote Desktop environment that includes a connection broker, remote desktop gateway, and remote desktops on virtual machines. After setting up each component, verify that all RDP connections are established successfully.

This month, testing Microsoft’s ICS functionality requires an extended test plan covering the following areas:

Usability testing: Create test scenarios to verify that the process of enabling/disabling ICS functions as expected.

Validation: Microsoft recommends confirming that Network Address Translation (NAT) correctly translates private IP addresses to that of the shared connection.

Security: Ensure that ICS traffic adheres to existing firewall rules and does not create unintended security risks.

Each month, we break down the update cycle into product families (as defined by Microsoft) with the following basic groupings: 

Browsers (Microsoft IE and Edge) 

Microsoft Windows (both desktop and server) 

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server 

Microsoft Developer Tools (Visual Studio and .NET)

Adobe (if you get this far) 

Browsers

Microsoft released a larger-than-normal number of patches for the Edge browser this month — 10, all rated important. These updates are a mix of Chromium (CVE-2025-0444, CVE-2025-0445 and CVE-2025-0451) and Edge patches that deal with memory related security vulnerabilities. All of these low-profile changes can be added to your standard release calendar.

Microsoft Windows

These areas have been updated with two critical patches and 35 important patches this patch cycle:

Win32 and Kernel Services

Remote Desktop, RAS  and Internet Connection Sharing (ICS)

Kerberos, DHCP  and Windows Networking

Microsoft Active Directory and Windows Installer

Though the Windows NTLM patch (CVE-2025-21377) has been rated important, it has been publicly disclosed. Two more updates (both rated important) affecting storage (CVE-2025-21391) and networking (CVE-2025-21418) have reportedly been exploited in the wild. These reports raise the stakes for an otherwise low-profile Windows update, so the Readiness team recommends a “Patch Now” schedule for these.

Microsoft Office

Microsoft released a single critical update for Microsoft Excel and nine more rated as important for Microsoft Office and the SharePoint platforms. None of these  vulnerabilities have been reported as exploited or publicly disclosed. So, add these Office updates to your standard release calendar.

Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server

No updates were released for either Microsoft Exchange or SQL Server this month. 

Developer Tools

Microsoft released four updates to Microsoft Visual Studio, all of which are rated important. One of these updates (CVE-2023-32002) may look a little odd as the date refers to 2023, not 2025. However, it appears legitimate. Though it has been categorized under Microsoft’s Visual Studio product grouping, this patch attempts to resolve a vulnerability in Node.js. Add these updates (even the funny looking ones) to your standard developer release schedule.

Adobe (and 3rd party updates)

Microsoft did not push out any Adobe updates. However, HackerOne required a patch to the developer framework Node.js to resolve a network related vulnerability (CVE-2025-21418). 

Source:: Computer World

By Siôn Geschwindt “For the third time, stop tapping!” my primary school teacher screams at me from across the room. I must not have heard her the first two times. I’d been drumming on the desk again, using my fingers for sticks and the floor beneath for a kick drum. While my body was in maths class, my mind was elsewhere.   It was 1970. I was John Bonham, drummer of legendary rock band Led Zeppelin, on stage at the Royal Albert Hall, performing “Moby Dick” — one of the most iconic drum solos of all time. The lights are low, the atmosphere electric,…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Siôn Geschwindt Europe is home to twice as many climate tech startups as the US (30,000 vs. 14,300). However, limited access to VC funding is forcing these early-stage companies to seek capital from outside the continent, according to a new report released at the Munich Security Conference today. Venture financing in Europe averaged just 0.2% of GDP between 2013 and 2023, a fraction of the US average of 0.7%. While the continent is great at creating clean tech companies, it’s not so good at funding them.  The authors of The Importance of Climate Tech for European Resilience report — the World Fund,…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Hisan Kidwai Every day, we open Google to search for something dozens of times, only to be greeted…
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Adobe has released a video generator in public beta in its generative AI (genAI) tool, Adobe Firefly. The company calls the tool the first “commercially safe” video generator on the market. It has been trained on licensed content and public domain material, meaning it should not be able to generate material that could infringe someone else’s copyright.

Firefly can generate clips either from text instructions or by combining a reference image with text instructions. There are also settings to customize things such as camera angles, movements, and distances.

A paid subscription is required to use the video generator. Firefly Standard, which costs about $11 a month, gives access to 2000 credits; that should be enough for 20 five-second videos with a 1080p picture resolution and a frame rate of 24 frames per second.

Firefly Pro, which costs three times more than the standard version, allows a user 7000 credits, which should be enough for 70 five-second clips in 1080p at 24 frames per second.

Adobe plans to eventually release a model for videos with lower resolution but faster image updates, as well as a model with 4k resolution for Pro users.

Source:: Computer World

By Siôn Geschwindt Mistral CEO and co-founder Arthur Mensch has urged Europe to invest more in AI infrastructure amid fears that the continent is falling behind the US and China in tech development. “It’s important to have European players coming to the game,” Mensch said at the Visionaries Unplugged conference in Paris yesterday. “Europe needs to invest in owning and operating the infrastructure so that the money that is being made will not just go back to the hyperscalers in the US.” Mensch was joined at the conference by a cohort of tech luminaries, including DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman,…This story continues at The Next Web

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By Deepti Pathak Creating a hanging indent in Google Docs is a simple yet helpful formatting tool, especially when…
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Chatbots quickly surpassed human physicians in diagnostic reasoning — the crucial first step in clinical care — according to a new study published in the journal Nature Medicine.

The study suggests physicians who have access to large language models (LLMs), which underpin generative AI (genAI) chatbots, demonstrate improved performance on several patient care tasks compared to colleagues without access to the technology.

The study also found that physicians using chatbots spent more time on patient cases and made safer decisions than those without access to the genAI tools.

The research, undertaken by more than a dozen physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), showed genAI has promise as an “open-ended decision-making” physician partner.

“However, this will require rigorous validation to realize LLMs’ potential for enhancing patient care,” said Dr. Adam Rodman, director of AI Programs at BIDMC. “Unlike diagnostic reasoning, a task often with a single right answer, which LLMs excel at, management reasoning may have no right answer and involves weighing trade-offs between inherently risky courses of action.”

The conclusions were based on evaluations about the decision-making capabilities of 92 physicians as they worked through five hypothetical patient cases. They focused on the physicians’ management reasoning, which includes decisions on testing, treatment, patient preferences, social factors, costs, and risks.

When responses to their hypothetical patient cases were scored, the physicians using a chatbot scored significantly higher than those using conventional resources only. Chatbot users also spent more time per case — by nearly two minutes — and they had a lower risk of mild-to-moderate harm compared to those using conventional resources (3.7% vs. 5.3%). Severe harm ratings, however, were similar between groups.

“My theory,” Rodman said, “[is] the AI improved management reasoning in patient communication and patient factors domains; it did not affect things like recognizing complications or medication decisions. We used a high standard for harm — immediate harm — and poor communication is unlikely to cause immediate harm.”

An earlier 2023 study by Rodman and his colleagues yielded promising, yet cautious, conclusions about the role of genAI technology. They found it was “capable of showing the equivalent or better reasoning than people throughout the evolution of clinical case.”

That data, published in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), used a common testing tool used to assess physicians’ clinical reasoning. The researchers recruited 21 attending physicians and 18 residents, who worked through 20 archived (not new) clinical cases in four stages of diagnostic reasoning, writing and justifying their differential diagnoses at each stage.

The researchers then performed the same tests using ChatGPT based on the GPT-4 LLM. The chatbot followed the same instructions and used the same clinical cases. The results were both promising and concerning.

The chatbot scored highest in some measures on the testing tool, with a median score of 10/10, compared to 9/10 for attending physicians and 8/10 for residents. While diagnostic accuracy and reasoning were similar between humans and the bot, the chatbot had more instances of incorrect reasoning. “This highlights that AI is likely best used to augment, not replace, human reasoning,” the study concluded.

Simply put, in some cases “the bots were also just plain wrong,” the report said.

Rodman said he isn’t sure why the genAI study pointed to more errors in the earlier study. “The checkpoint is different [in the new study], so hallucinations might have improved, but they also vary by task,” he said. “ Our original study focused on diagnostic reasoning, a classification task with clear right and wrong answers. Management reasoning, on the other hand, is highly context-specific and has a range of acceptable answers.”

A key difference from the original study is the researchers are now comparing two groups of humans — one using AI and one not — while the original work compared AI to humans directly. “We did collect a small AI-only baseline, but the comparison was done with a multi-effects model. So, in this case, everything is mediated through people,” Rodman said.

Researcher and lead study author Dr. Stephanie Cabral, a third-year internal medicine resident at BIDMC, said more research is needed on how LLMs can fit into clinical practice, “but they could already serve as a useful checkpoint to prevent oversight.

“My ultimate hope is that AI will improve the patient-physician interaction by reducing some of the inefficiencies we currently have and allow us to focus more on the conversation we’re having with our patients,” she said.

The latest study involved a newer, upgraded version of GPT-4, which could explain some of the variations in results.

To date, AI in healthcare has mainly focused on tasks such as portal messaging, according to Rodman. But chatbots could enhance human decision-making, especially in complex tasks.

“Our findings show promise, but rigorous validation is needed to fully unlock their potential for improving patient care,” he said. “This suggests a future use for LLMs as a helpful adjunct to clinical judgment. Further exploration into whether the LLM is merely encouraging users to slow down and reflect more deeply, or whether it is actively augmenting the reasoning process would be valuable.”

The chatbot testing will now enter the next of two follow-on phases, the first of which has already produced new raw data to be analyzed by the researchers, Rodman said. The researchers will begin looking at varying user interaction, where they study different types of chatbots, different user interfaces, and doctor education about using LLMs (such as more specific prompt design) in controlled environments to see how performance is affected.The second phase will also involve real-time patient data, not archived patient cases.

“We are also studying [human computer interaction] using secure LLMs — so [it’s] HIPAA complaint — to see how these effects hold in the real world,” he said.

Source:: Computer World

By Hisan Kidwai Blox Fruits is one of the most popular games on Roblox, and for good reason. Inspired…
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By Thomas Macaulay AI took another step into Hollywood today with the launch of a new filmmaking tool from showbiz startup Flawless. The product — named DeepEditor — promises cinematic wizardry for the digital age. For movie makers, the tool offers photorealistic edits without a costly return to set. Flawless has showcased several use cases. One transfers an actor’s performance from one shot to another. Another adds new dialogue while keeping the original scene. The character’s lip movements are synchronised with the updated words. Users can also trim lines, insert pauses, and re-time delivery. Every edit is delivered in 4K resolution. The results…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

A US judge has ruled in favor of Thomson Reuters in a AI training fight against Ross Intelligence, a legal AI startup, according to The Verge. Thomson Reuters sued Ross Intelligence in 2020 for using the company’s legal research platform Westlaw to train Ross Intelligence’s AI without permission. Westlaw indexes large amounts of non-copyrighted material, but mixes it with its own content.

Ross Intelligence argued that the training should be classified under “fair use” practices, but the judge disagreed. Instead, the court held that Ross Intelligence’s use of the copyrighted material affected its original value because the company intended to develop a direct competitor.

The ruling is significant because it could have implications for future cases where copyrighted material is used for AI training. One wrinkle: this particular case concerned non-generative AI, which is not the same as generative AI used in large language models to create new material based on previous training data.

Source:: Computer World

It’s already known that today’s generative AI (genAI) tools often have trouble with basic facts. Now, it’s clear they don’t well with current events either.

That’s the upshot of a test by the BBC, which asked ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity to answer 100 questions using BBC articles as a source; more than half of the answers (51%) were wrong.

One in five answers (19%) were based on directly incorrect facts — and 13% of quotes had been modified from the source.cFor example, the AI tools believe that Rishi Sunak is still the UK’s Prime Minister, and they gave the wrong death date for TV personality Michael Mosley.

“The price of AI’s extraordinary benefits must not be a world where people searching for answers are served distorted, faulty content that appears to be fact,” Deborah Turness, managing director of BBC News, wrote. “In what can feel like a chaotic world, it really can’t be right that consumers seeking clarity are met with yet more confusion.”

Source:: Computer World

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