SXSW rebounds as a top networking, ideas festival for founders and VCs The air felt different at this year’s SXSW, the annual March festival where tech meets pop culture in Austin. I was reminded of the 2019 SXSW when people packed downtown, and snake lines formed out of local ventures.  Attendees said it was like that again this year, though my friend, who lives in the area and has...

Threats to the Strait of Hormuz raises concerns about global oil prices Threats to the Strait of Hormuz raises concerns about global oil prices Audio will be available later today. The threat of Iran laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow waterway through which about 20% of the world's oil supply travels — is raising...

Mistral releases a new open-source model for speech generation French AI company Mistral released a new open-source text-to-speech model on Thursday that can be used by voice AI assistants or in enterprise use cases like customer support. The model, which lets enterprises build voice agents for sales and customer engagement, puts Mistral in direct competition with the likes of ElevenLabs,...

YouTubers Sue Amazon, Claim AI Tool Was Trained on Scraped VideosA group of YouTube creators is suing Amazon, accusing the tech giant of secretly scraping their videos to train its AI video model without permission.The proposed class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in Seattle, alleges Amazon used automated tools to download and extract data from millions of YouTube videos to build and...

How AI is helping solve the labor issue in treating rare diseases Modern biotech has the tools to edit genes and design drugs, yet thousands of rare diseases remain untreated. According to executives from Insilico Medicine and GenEditBio, the missing ingredient for years has been finding enough smart people to continue the work. AI, they say, is becoming the force multiplier that lets...