AI or Not, a widely covered AI fraud detection platform, has raised $5 million in a seed funding round to accelerate its use of “AI to detect AI” in images, audio video and deepfakes to prevent fraud and misinformation.

Foundation Capital led the round, with participation from GTMFund, Plug and Play, and strategic angel investors. The company noted 85% of corporate finance professionals now view AI scams as an “existential” threat and more than half of them have already become a target of deepfake technology.

In the next two years, generative AI scams could be responsible for over $40 billion of losses in U.S. alone. It is this growing threat that fueled AI or Not’s growth over the past year, serving over 250,000 users to date, with the new injection of funding used to create more sophisticated ways of detecting misinformation online and ensure their tools remain ahead of evolving threats.

“In countless ways, we rely on our ability to see and hear to verify authenticity. With the advent of generative AI models, now we can no longer be so sure,” said Zach Noorani, partner at Foundation Capital, in a statement. “AI or Not’s unique approach to AI detection solves this emerging problem. We’re excited to support their mission of protecting people, companies, governments, and assets broadly from the risks posed by generative AI.”

Eve, an AI platform for plaintiff law firms, today announced it has secured $47 million in Series A funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures. This investment will support Eve's rapid market growth, enhance product development, and further its mission to help plaintiff legal teams become AI-native.

Eve is a comprehensive AI-powered platform designed to assist legal teams throughout every phase of a legal case. Eve functions as an intelligent partner, working alongside attorneys to optimize productivity at every stage. Going beyond traditional legal software that organizes information or automates isolated tasks, Eve's capabilities extend across the case lifecycle to streamline workflows and maximize firm profitability.

"At Eve, we're committed to helping plaintiff law firms punch above their weight, fighting strategically for their clients," said Jay Madheswaran, CEO and co-founder, Eve. "Our platform provides firms with the advanced tools they need to improve client outcomes and drive profitability. We envision a future where every plaintiff firm operates as fully AI-native, delivering advocacy with unmatched efficiency and precision. This funding brings us one step closer to making that vision a reality, empowering firms to deliver justice more effectively and profitably, reaching more people."

François Chollet, an influential AI researcher, is launching a new startup that aims to build frontier AI systems with novel designs. The startup, Ndea, will consist of an AI research and science lab. It’s looking to “develop and operationalize” AGI. AGI, which stands for “artificial general intelligence,” typically refers to AI that can perform any task a human can. It’s a goalpost for many AI companies, including OpenAI.

“We’re betting on a different path to build AI capable of true invention, adaptation, and innovation,” Chollet wrote in a series of posts on X. “We believe we have a small but real chance of achieving a breakthrough — creating AI that can learn at least as efficiently as people, and that can keep improving over time with no bottlenecks in sight.”

Ndea plans to use a technique called program synthesis, in tandem with other technical approaches, to unlock AGI. Chollet thinks that program synthesis, which allows AI to generalize problems it hasn’t seen before from only a few examples, can help to overcome the most intractable problems in AI research.

Program synthesis is traditionally computing-intensive. But Chollet thinks this limitation can be overcome — and that overcoming it will help accelerate scientific progress. “We are not alone in recognizing the potential of program synthesis — it’s a technique every frontier AI lab is now starting to explore,” reads a blog post on Ndea’s website. “We are at the crest of a pivotal moment in scientific history and the world deserves every possible direct, unique attempt to build AGI.”

Synthesia, a generative AI start-up based in Britain, has raised $180 million valuing it at $2.1 billion. The company uses artificial intelligence to create lifelike human faces and speech that are almost indistinguishable from real video but do not need cameras, actors or film studios.

The latest fundraising round brings the total capital raised to more than $330 million. Synthesia added that the new valuation made it the UK’s most valuable generative AI media company. It is already considered one of Britain’s most promising AI start-ups.

Matt Clifford, the British venture capital investor who helped establish the UK’s AI Safety Institute and has led the government’s AI policy review, recently named Synthesia as one of the UK’s “world-leading companies” in the area, along with Google DeepMind and Wayve.

The series D funding round was led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from existing investors including GV, an arm of Alphabet, and MMC Ventures along with new backers including the World Innovation Lab, Atlassian Ventures and PSP Growth. The company said it would use the funding to drive the expansion of its AI-powered video platform in several markets including Japan, Australia, Europe and North America. The extra money would also support development and talent growth.

Victor Riparbelli, chief executive and co-founder of Synthesia, said: “This new investment will help us develop a new generation of AI-powered video experiences that are interactive, real-time and personalized, offering possibilities we could have only imagined when we founded the company in 2017.”

More on Synthesia’s fundraising efforts and expansion

Macquarie will invest up to $5 billion in data centers being built by artificial-intelligence infrastructure company Applied Digital, adding to the Australian bank’s substantial AI-related investments.

Macquarie’s asset-management arm agreed to invest up to $900 million in a data-center campus that Applied Digital is developing in North Dakota. Macquarie also has a right of first refusal to invest an additional $4.1 billion in future Applied Digital data centers for 30 months, aligning with the company’s expansion plans. The investment will come in the form of preferred equity.

As part of the deal, Macquarie will get a 15% stake in Applied Digital’s high-performance computing business, with Applied Digital retaining the remaining 85%.

Applied Digital’s origins were in cryptocurrency mining and, like others in that field, it has pivoted to supplying computing power to the artificial-intelligence boom. The company started as Applied Blockchain before changing its name in 2022. Nadsaq-listed company stock has risen more than 40% in the past year amid the AI surge.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the main global producer of advanced chips used in artificial intelligence applications, is expected to report a 58% leap in fourth-quarter profit on Thursday because of surging demand.

The world's largest contract chipmaker, whose customers include Apple and Nvidia, has benefited from the megatrend towards AI. But the Taiwanese company faces headwinds from U.S. government technology restrictions on China and uncertainty about President-elect Donald Trump's incoming administration, which has threatened broad import tariffs.

TSMC is set to report a net profit of T$377.95 billion ($11.41 billion) for the quarter ended Dec. 31, according to a LSEG SmartEstimate drawn from 22 analysts. SmartEstimates give greater weighting to forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate.

That estimate compares to the 2023 fourth-quarter net profit of T$238.7 billion.

TSMC last week reported a jump in fourth-quarter revenue in Taiwan dollars, comfortably beating market expectations. The company gives its revenue outlook in U.S. dollars on its quarterly earnings call, scheduled for 0600 GMT on Thursday.

This year coding might go from one of the most sought-after skills on the job market to one that can be fully automated. Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta and some of the biggest companies in the tech industry are already working toward this on an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience on Friday.

"Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of midlevel engineer that you have at your company that can write code."

It may initially be an expensive endeavor, but Zuckerberg said Meta will reach the point where all of the code in its apps and the AI it generates will also be done by AI. According to a salary tracking site, midlevel software engineers at the company now earn close to mid-six figures in total compensation.

One of the biggest announcements in Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s CES keynote was the small “Project Digits” AI supercomputer. Nvidia’s Project Digits is a Grace Blackwell AI Supercomputer on your desk.

With the NVIDIA AI software stack preinstalled and 128GB of memory, developers can prototype, fine-tune, and inference large AI models of up to 200B parameters locally, and seamlessly deploy to the data center or cloud.

With Project DIGITS, users can develop and run inference on models using their own desktop system, then seamlessly deploy the models on accelerated cloud or data center infrastructure.

“AI will be mainstream in every application for every industry. With Project DIGITS, the Grace Blackwell Superchip comes to millions of developers,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Placing an AI supercomputer on the desks of every data scientist, AI researcher and student empowers them to engage and shape the age of AI.”

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has struck a deal worth over $1 billion to provide Elon Musk's social media platform X with servers optimized for artificial intelligence work, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The agreement was reached late last year, the report said, adding that competitors Dell Technologies and Super Micro Computer had also bid to sell the equipment.

Demand for computing to run AI workloads has led to a boom for makers of high-powered servers like HPE. Musk’s companies including Tesla Inc. and xAI have emerged as major customers for the hardware. A supercomputer project being built by xAI in Memphis has used a mix of Dell and Super Micro servers.

Firms that Musk runs are known to share employees, technology and computing power. AI startup xAI’s main product, a chatbot called Grok, has primarily been available to paying users of X, the social network formerly known as Twitter.