My Two Cents
Insights From the Crossroads of Tech and Business
Latest Posts
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Adobe Firefly Can Now Generate Sound Effects With Just a Prompt or Your Voice
Adobe is turning concept into creation: After teasing its experimental sound effects tool, Project Super Sonic, last October, the company is now bringing it to life with a launch inside its Firefly app. Available in beta, the Generate Sound Effects feature does what it says: it quickly creates custom sound effects, atmospheric background noise, and…
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Slack’s New AI Search Targets a Familiar Pain Point: Too Many Apps, Not Enough Answers
Slack is turning more to artificial intelligence to streamline the daily grind at work. The Salesforce-owned company announced a range of new AI-powered features on Thursday to help teams “move faster, stay aligned, and focus on what matters.” One of the most significant improvements is the addition of enterprise-grade search that looks for information across…
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What Salesforce Discovered by Letting AI Run Its Help Portal
Salesforce isn’t shy about how it’s using its products, especially its agent development platform. When it comes to embracing AI agents, the enterprise tech firm has openly touted that it’s “drinking its own champagne.” Since Agentforce’s launch, CEO Marc Benioff has used every opportunity to showcase how the service is helping bolster his company’s help…
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Zendesk Acquires HyperArc to Build AI-Powered Customer Intelligence
Zendesk announced on Monday that it has acquired HyperArc, a startup building an AI-first business intelligence platform capable of learning from teams. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Zendesk says it plans to bolster its analytics capabilities with HyperArc’s HyperGraph engine and real-time generative AI-powered insights. “GenAI is transforming analytics, making it…
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Ai2’s FlexOlmo Lets You Co-Develop AI Language Models Without Sharing Data
Ai2 has unveiled FlexOlmo, a new framework that lets multiple organizations jointly develop language models without requiring centralized data pooling. Ideal for those in regulated industries, it provides developers with granular control over how and when their data influences the model, addressing long-standing concerns regarding privacy, IP protection, and data sovereignty in collaborative AI projects.…
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Genies’ AI Avatar Tech Coming to Unity Editor in 2026
Genies, a gaming technology company, is partnering with Unity to bring its customizable AI avatars and asset creation tools to Unity’s Asset Store and Unity Editor. Developers will now have access to game, entertainment, celebrity, and sports IP-driven avatars that they can incorporate into games. The expectation is that this will free resources up to…
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Ai2 Brings OLMo, Molmo, and Tülu AI Models to Enterprise Teams with Cirrascale Deal
Non-profit AI lab Ai2 is partnering with infrastructure platform provider Cirrascale in a move to commercialize its open-source models. OLMo 2, Molmo, and Tülu 3 can now be run via API on Cirrascale’s Inference Platform, enabling companies to avoid the need to deploy the models themselves and the associated costs of in-house systems or expertise.…
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Hugging Face Ends HuggingChat, Teases More Integrated Future
Hugging Face has shut down HuggingChat, at least for now. The open-source AI platform launched its ChatGPT-rival chatbot in April 2023 to demonstrate the power of open-source models. Chief Technology Officer Julien Chaumond announced the closure on LinkedIn, explaining that the team is “making room for something new and more integrated with the [Hugging Face]…
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Ai2’s SciArena Benchmarks AI for Science, Inspired by ChatBot Arena
Nonprofit AI lab Ai2 has launched a new platform to help researchers evaluate which AI models perform best on scientific literature tasks. Called SciArena, it’s an open, collaborative service that enables head-to-head comparisons of large language models. Think ChatBot Arena—but built for the scientific research community. “Measuring progress in using AI agents for literature-grounded scientific…
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Daily AI Users at Work Report Higher Productivity and Job Satisfaction, Says Slack
Marc Benioff’s vision of a digital labor force is no longer hypothetical—it’s starting to take shape. Days after his company, Salesforce, launched its fourth-generation agentic development platform capable of scaling AI agents across business use cases, its subsidiary Slack released its latest Workforce Index report, which shows AI gaining acceptance among workers. According to the…