Latest AI News
Origin Lab raises $8M to help video game companies sell data to world-model builders
As AI begins to interact with the physical world, new types of labs are working to buildworld modelsthat could be used to operate physical robotics or model objects in physical space. Unlike large language models, there isn’t an easy source of data for those models, which has left many labs scrambling to assemble the necessary training sets. Now, one startup is emerging with an unlikely data source: the video game industry. That’s the premise ofOrigin Lab, which just announced an $8 million seed funding round led by Lightspeed Ventures. SV Angel, Eniac, Seven Stars, and FPV also participated, with angel funding from Twitch co-Founder Kevin Lin and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt. “The AI systems that are being built now need to understand how the physical world works and how things move,” co-CEO and co-founder Anne-Margot Rodde told TechCrunch. “That data essentially lives in video games.” In simple terms, Origin Lab will serve as a marketplace where world-model-focused labs such asYann LeCun’s AMI LabsorFei-Fei Li’s World Labscan buy high-quality licensed data. On the other side of the trade, video game companies can squeeze additional revenue out of the digital assets they’ve already created. In the middle, Origin Lab will convert the video game assets into a form that works as training data — something that could be as simple as a rendering run or as complex as automating hours of walkthrough footage. “It became clear that the video game industry was sitting on some incredibly valuable data, but there was no real way or infrastructure to basically connect AI labs and the video game industry,” says Rodde. “So essentially, we built that bridge.” Labs have long been interested in video game footage as a data source, but licensing and data quality issues have often gotten in the way.In December 2024, OpenAI caused a minor scandal when the first version of its Sora video-generation model seemed to regurgitate footage of popular video games and streamers — presumably because it had been trained on Twitch streams. Amazon has been open aboutits interest in using Twitch footageto train models. Origin’s success in fundraising is a sign of a growing market — not just for training data, but for startups that can serve as essential suppliers to major AI labs. Faraz Fatemi, a partner at Lightspeed who led the Origin investment, says the success of companies like Scale.AI has made the opportunity impossible to ignore. “We’ve seen how sharp the revenue scaling can be for data vendors that are serving the major labs,” Fatemi told TechCrunch. “These are very well-capitalized businesses, and the bottleneck for all of them is data.”
View
Who trusts Sam Altman?
In May 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was sworn in and testifying before Congress about the regulation of artificial intelligence. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana heard his ideas about licensing advanced models and asked if Altman might be qualified to run a hypothetical AI regulatory agency. “I love my current job,” Altmansaid, to titters. “You make a lot of money, do you?” Kennedy asked him. “No, I’m paid enough for health insurance, I have no equity in OpenAI,” Altman assured him. “You need a lawyer,” Kennedy replied. Now Altman has many lawyers, who watched as their client suffered a withering interrogation, sworn in to a California federal court on Tuesday. They were investigating much the same matter as Kennedy—is Altman qualified to to control the most advanced AI models? “You didn’t disclose to the United States Senate that you had an interest in OpenAI through a share in a Y Combinator fund, did you?” barked Steve Molo, the combative attorney leading Elon Musk’s effort to shut down OpenAI’s for-profit business. Altman had admitted that he did have economic exposure to OpenAI through his LP position in the Y Combinator fund. "I didn't mention it in that testimony, but, again, I think it is well understood of what it means to be a passive owner of many venture funds," Almtan said."You thought Senator Kennedy was a very sophisticated investor when he asked you that question?" Molo replied. Altman's decision to volunteer that he had no equity when he could have simply side-stepped the question was interesting one. It's technically true, but Altman—who emphasized his expertise in investing in early-stage startups—surely understood his economic exposure to OpenAI through Y Combinator, and through investments in other AI companies that worked with OpenAI. Altman's credibility was on trial yesterday, at least in the eyes of the plaintiffs. OpenAI's attorney's maintained that little was done to advance Musk's case, accusing their counterparts of character assassination. But the juroy and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers are weighing Altman's credibility as a pivotal character in the events they are examining. Molo ran through a litany of people who accused Altman of lying or misleading them while under oath in the courtroom, including former OpenAI board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, Elon Musk and OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever. He also brought up the recentNew Yorker storydetailing concerns about his honesty. The "blip"—when OpenAI's board briefly fired Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman for failing to be candid with them—has been a subject of significant discussion at this trial. Then-board members Toner and McCauley testified that Altman had misled them, with McCauley referring to "a toxic culture of lying." "I do have doubts that was the full reason" for his firing, Altman said. Asked again if to acknowledge that the board said he had not been candid with them, Altman replied "they asked me to come back the next morning." The focus on his firing is not just about questioning Altman's credibility. One key question of the trial is whether OpenAI's structure lives up to its mission, and specifically whether the non-profit board can exercise true control over the for-profit. From the point of view of Musk's lawyers, the 2023 episode offers evidence that Altman's influence over the company exceeded that of its board of directors. Witnesses brought by OpenAi and Microsoft have insisted that the current non-profit board does exercise control over the for-profit. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called Altman's firing "amateur city." Bret Taylor, who joined OpenAI's board as chair in the wake of Altman's rehiring, said he found nothing that warranted his termination and that Altman has been "forthright with me." Dr. Zeko Kolter, the OpenAI board member focused on AI safety, said no one had interfered with that work since he started in 2024. But Taylor also made clear that the choice to rehire Mr. Altman in 2023 was because his departure would effectively ended OpenAI as a going concern, with most of the employees intent on following him out the door. Now, as the jury and Judge weigh whether the current structure lives up to the organization's mission, they will wonder whether the board can really fire or discipline its CEO. Asked if he would ever fire himself as CEO, Altman said he had no plans to do so. Asked if he could be trusted, he replied "I believe I am an honest and trustworthy business person."
View
Uber to Build First Data Centre in India With Adani Group
The facility is expected to be operational later this year and will support Uber’s global technology operations.
View
Adaption aims big with AutoScientist, an AI tool that helps models train themselves
For years, AI researchers have anticipated the moment when AI systems will be able to improve themselves better than humans could. With investors pouring money into a new generation of research-driven AI labs, there are more resources than ever available to pursue the goal. Now, one of those neolabs has taken a major step towards making it real. On Wednesday,Adaptionintroduced a new product calledAutoScientistthat helps models learn specific capabilities quickly by using an automated approach to conventional fine-tuning. The techniques are applicable to a wide range of fields, but the Adaptation team is particularly focused on the potential for speeding up and easing the process of training and fine-tuning a frontier-level AI model. According to co-founder and CEO Sara Hooker, who previously worked as VP of AI research at Cohere, AutoScientist represents a new way to approach the AI training process. “What’s super exciting about it is that it co-optimizes both the data and the model, and learns the best way to basically learn any capability,” Hooker told TechCrunch. “It suggests we can finally allow for successful frontier AI trainings outside of these labs” AutoScientist builds on the company’s existing data offering,Adaptive Data, which aims to make it easier to build high-quality datasets over time. AutoScientist, meanwhile, is designed to turn those continuously improving datasets into continuously improving AI models. “Our view at Adaption is that the whole stack should be completely adaptable, and should basically optimize on the fly to whatever task you have,” Hooker says. Of course, that approach will only be as good as the results. In its launch materials, Adaption boasts that AutoScientist has more than doubled win-rates across different models — impressive numbers, but difficult to put into context. Since the system is built to adapt models to specific tasks, conventional benchmarks like SWE-Bench or ARC-AGI aren’t applicable. Still, Adaption is confident that users will see the difference once they try AutoScientist out — so confident that the lab is making the tool free to use for the first 30 days after its release. “The same way that code generation unlocked a lot of tasks, this is going to unlock a lot of innovation at the frontier of different fields,” Hooker says.
View
Zoho Commits ₹70 Crore to ONDC to Empower MSMEs with Accessible Sovereign Tech
With this investment, Zoho seeks to support MSMEs in their digital transformation and contribute to India's economic growth.
View
Proximal Cloud, NxtGen Partner to Enable Sovereign AI Deployments in India
The partnership targets regulated sectors with compliant, private AI infrastructure and local data control.
View
AIM Launches ‘Best Firm for GCC Talent’ Certification
The new certification programme focuses on culture, learning, and retention across India’s various Global Capability Centres.
View
AI Can Add $500 Bn to India’s Economy by 2030: IBM-IndiaAI Study
The report highlighted a widening gap between India’s AI ambitions and enterprise readiness.
View
‘The World Needs 1000x More Software,’ Says Fractal CEO
Fractal is steadily shifting toward more AI-native commercial models tied to outcomes and platform usage.
View
Wealthtech Startup ZFunds Launches AI Assistant ‘ZIVA’ for Mutual Fund Managers
The platform offers mock client calls, portfolio insights, and multilingual AI support for MFD workflows.
View
Google Threat Intelligence Group Detects First Known Instance of AI-Developed Zero-Day Exploit in Action
Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) shared a series of developments in the cybercrime space on Tuesday. The group highlighted that, currently, artificial intelligence (AI) is being used both as an engine for adversary operations and as a high-value target for attacks. The most concerning development is the first known instance where a threat actor used an AI-developed zero-day exploit. While the attack was foiled by the tech giant, this raises fresh concerns over AI bolstering hackers and threat actors.
View
SAP Expands AI Stack with Anthropic, Palantir in Agentic Enterprise Push
“For the mission-critical processes of our customers, ‘almost right’ just isn’t good enough,” said Christian Klein, CEO of SAP.
View