North America takes the bulk of AI VC investments, despite tough political environment

Despite what some experts have characterized as an environment increasingly hostile to AI R&D, North America continues to receive the bulk of AI venture dollars, according to data from investment tracker PitchBook. Between February and May of this year, VCs poured $69.7 billion into North America-based AI and machine learning startups across 1,528 deals. That’s…

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Hugging Face says its new robotics model is so efficient it can run on a MacBook

It’s becoming a little easier to build sophisticated robotics projects at home. AI dev platform Hugging Face released earlier this week an open AI model for robotics called SmolVLA. Trained on “compatibly licensed,” community-shared datasets, SmolVLA outperforms much larger models for robotics in both virtual and real-world environments, Hugging Face claims. “SmolVLA aims to democratize…

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