标签：#Tech

Did Instagram put its feed slop on notice?

Sam Altman apologized for not notifying local authorities last week.

A preliminary investigation found the company isn't adequately keeping minors off of Instagram and Facebook.

Alfred Wahlforss was running out of options. His startup, Listen Labs , needed to hire over 100 engineers, but competing against Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million offers seemed impossible. So he spent $5,000 — a fifth of his marketing budget — on a billboard in San Francisco displaying what looked like gibberish: five strings of random numbers. The numbers were actually AI tokens. Decoded, they led to a coding challenge: build an algorithm to act as a digital bouncer at Berghain, the Berlin nightclub famous for rejecting nearly everyone at the door. Within days, thousands attempted the puzzle. 430 cracked it. Some got hired. The winner flew to Berlin, all expenses paid. That unconventional approach has now attracted $69 million in Series B funding, led by Ribbit Capital with participation from Evantic and existing investors Sequoia Capital , Conviction , and Pear VC . The round values Listen Labs at $500 million and brings its total capital to $100 million. In nine months since launch, the company has grown annualized revenue by 15x to eight figures and conducted over one million AI-powered interviews. "When you obsess over customers, everything else follows," Wahlforss said in an interview with VentureBeat. "Teams that use Listen bring the customer into every decision, from marketing to product, and when the customer is delighted, everyone is." Why traditional market research is broken, and what Listen Labs is building to fix it Listen's AI researcher finds participants, conducts in-depth interviews, and delivers actionable insights in hours, not weeks. The platform replaces the traditional choice between quantitative surveys — which provide statistical precision but miss nuance—and qualitative interviews, which deliver depth but cannot scale. Wahlforss explained the limitation of existing approaches: "Essentially surveys give you false precision because people end up answering the same question... You can't get the outliers. People are actually not honest on surveys.

Salesforce on Tuesday launched an entirely rebuilt version of Slackbot , the company's workplace assistant, transforming it from a simple notification tool into what executives describe as a fully powered AI agent capable of searching enterprise data, drafting documents, and taking action on behalf of employees. The new Slackbot, now generally available to Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, is Salesforce's most aggressive move yet to position Slack at the center of the emerging "agentic AI" movement — where software agents work alongside humans to complete complex tasks. The launch comes as Salesforce attempts to convince investors that artificial intelligence will bolster its products rather than render them obsolete. "Slackbot isn't just another copilot or AI assistant," said Parker Harris , Salesforce co-founder and Slack's chief technology officer, in an exclusive interview with Salesforce. "It's the front door to the agentic enterprise, powered by Salesforce." From tricycle to Porsche: Salesforce rebuilt Slackbot from the ground up Harris was blunt about what distinguishes the new Slackbot from its predecessor: "The old Slackbot was, you know, a little tricycle, and the new Slackbot is like, you know, a Porsche." The original Slackbot, which has existed since Slack's early days, performed basic algorithmic tasks — reminding users to add colleagues to documents, suggesting channel archives, and delivering simple notifications. The new version runs on an entirely different architecture built around a large language model and sophisticated search capabilities that can access Salesforce records, Google Drive files, calendar data, and years of Slack conversations. "It's two different things," Harris explained. "The old Slackbot was algorithmic and fairly simple. The new Slackbot is brand new — it's based around an LLM and a very robust search engine, and connections to third-party search engines, third-party enterprise data." Salesforce chose to retain the Slackbo

Anthropic released Cowork on Monday, a new AI agent capability that extends the power of its wildly successful Claude Code tool to non-technical users — and according to company insiders, the team built the entire feature in approximately a week and a half, largely using Claude Code itself. The launch marks a major inflection point in the race to deliver practical AI agents to mainstream users, positioning Anthropic to compete not just with OpenAI and Google in conversational AI, but with Microsoft's Copilot in the burgeoning market for AI-powered productivity tools. "Cowork lets you complete non-technical tasks much like how developers use Claude Code," the company announced via its official Claude account on X. The feature arrives as a research preview available exclusively to Claude Max subscribers — Anthropic's power-user tier priced between $100 and $200 per month — through the macOS desktop application. For the past year, the industry narrative has focused on large language models that can write poetry or debug code. With Cowork , Anthropic is betting that the real enterprise value lies in an AI that can open a folder, read a messy pile of receipts, and generate a structured expense report without human hand-holding. How developers using a coding tool for vacation research inspired Anthropic's latest product The genesis of Cowork lies in Anthropic's recent success with the developer community. In late 2024, the company released Claude Code , a terminal-based tool that allowed software engineers to automate rote programming tasks. The tool was a hit, but Anthropic noticed a peculiar trend: users were forcing the coding tool to perform non-coding labor. According to Boris Cherny , an engineer at Anthropic, the company observed users deploying the developer tool for an unexpectedly diverse array of tasks. "Since we launched Claude Code, we saw people using it for all sorts of non-coding work: doing vacation research, building slide decks, cleaning up your email,

Nous Research , the open-source artificial intelligence startup backed by crypto venture firm Paradigm , released a new competitive programming model on Monday that it says matches or exceeds several larger proprietary systems — trained in just four days using 48 of Nvidia's latest B200 graphics processors . The model, called NousCoder-14B , is another entry in a crowded field of AI coding assistants, but arrives at a particularly charged moment: Claude Code , the agentic programming tool from rival Anthropic, has dominated social media discussion since New Year's Day, with developers posting breathless testimonials about its capabilities . The simultaneous developments underscore how quickly AI-assisted software development is evolving — and how fiercely companies large and small are competing to capture what many believe will become a foundational technology for how software gets written. type: embedded-entry-inline id: 74cSyrq6OUrp9SEQ5zOUSl NousCoder-14B achieves a 67.87 percent accuracy rate on LiveCodeBench v6 , a standardized evaluation that tests models on competitive programming problems published between August 2024 and May 2025. That figure represents a 7.08 percentage point improvement over the base model it was trained from, Alibaba's Qwen3-14B , according to Nous Research's technical report published alongside the release. "I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour," wrote Jaana Dogan , a principal engineer at Google responsible for the Gemini API, in a viral post on X last week that captured the prevailing mood around AI coding tools. Dogan was describing a distributed agent orchestration system her team had spent a year developing — a system Claude Code approximated from a three-paragraph prompt. The juxtaposition is instructive: while Anthropic's Claude Code has captured imaginations with demonstrations of end-to-end software development, Nous Research is betting that open-source alternatives tr