All posts tagged: platform

DraftKings faces nationwide class action over Predictions platform legality dispute intensifies

DraftKings faces nationwide class action over Predictions platform legality dispute intensifies

Published by skeptic

DraftKings is facing a proposed nationwide class action accusing the company of running an illegal online sports betting business through its DraftKings Predictions platform in states where traditional online sportsbooks are still prohibited. The complaint, filed July 28 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts and reviewed by ReadWrite, names DraftKings Inc. and subsidiary GUS III LLC, which operates as DraftKings Predictions. Plaintiffs argue the company presented sports wagers as federally regulated event contracts to sidestep state gambling laws while leading customers to believe the product was legally distinct from conventional sportsbooks. California resident Michael Chan brought the lawsuit on behalf of himself and a proposed class of consumers who allegedly lost money using DraftKings Predictions. According to the complaint, Chan registered for the platform while in California and “was not informed by DraftKings that Predictions is an unlicensed sportsbook when he wagered and lost money on the app.” The filing argues DraftKings relies on its established sportsbook brand, technology and customer base to market what plaintiffs describe as the functional equivalent …

Microsoft launches AI cybersecurity model, agentic defense platform to cut enterprise security costs

Microsoft launches AI cybersecurity model, agentic defense platform to cut enterprise security costs

Published by skeptic

Microsoft opened a new front in the AI security wars on Monday, unveiling its first custom-built cybersecurity model and a sweeping agentic defense platform — and making an argument that could reshape how enterprises buy AI: the future belongs not to the biggest model, but to the cheapest one that’s good enough, routed intelligently. The company announced MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, a compact security model developed in-house by its Microsoft AI (MAI) division, embedded inside MDASH, Microsoft’s multi-agent harness for finding and fixing software vulnerabilities. Together, the company says, the system scores 96% on CyberGym — a benchmark measuring how well AI systems reason over large codebases to find real vulnerabilities — beating frontier models including Mythos, Gemini, and GPT, while cutting costs roughly in half compared to Microsoft’s own current production configuration. Alongside the model, Microsoft introduced Project Perception, an agentic security system that coordinates “red team” agents that hunt for paths to compromise, “blue team” agents that investigate and triage risk, and “green team” agents that remediate and harden defenses. Project Perception enters public preview on …

Journalist response platform plays ‘whack-a-mole’ against AI deluge of PR content

Journalist response platform plays ‘whack-a-mole’ against AI deluge of PR content

Published by Sam Flores

AI-generated experts Grace Carter, James Allen and Dan Brown have been widely quoted in mainstream news media. US-based journalist response platform Qwoted has banned hundreds of PR agencies, executives and ‘experts’ who either appear not to exist, use AI to write or opine on areas outside their expertise.  CEO of Qwoted Dan Simon said fake AI-generated content is booming and weeding it out is complicated. “Zooming out for a second, you’ve got real agencies representing fake experts with fake expertise. You’ve got real agencies with fake experts and real agencies with real experts with fake expertise, and fake agencies with fake experts with fake expertise. “AI has just poured petrol on the disinformation fire.” One profile banned by Qwoted is James Allen of Billpin, a prolific finance expert featured dozens of times in top finance publications from CBS News to the New York Post to Business Insider (see main picture).  Qwoted flagged his account for repeatedly submitting AI-generated content (the site uses AI detector Pangram to highlight potential abuse), and for failing to pass verification …

Why the Commonwealth Games are such an important platform for para sport

Why the Commonwealth Games are such an important platform for para sport

Published by Sam Flores

The Commonwealth Games, being staged this year in Glasgow, hold para events in the same place and at the same time as the general competition. Not only does this give equal opportunity to all athletes, but it also brings disability sport into the mainstream conversation. The multi-sport competition has been held every four years since 1930, when they were known as the British Empire Games. At the 1994 games in Victoria, Canada, disabled athletes were included in exhibition events. But in 2002 in Manchester, England, para athletes were fully integrated into their teams. This made the Commonwealth Games the first major event where para competition took place alongside the general programme, with disabled athletes’ medals counting towards their nation’s tally. Read more: Too many disabled young people are missing out on PE – here’s how that could change And over recent years, opportunities for elite para sportsmen and women have grown and coverage has expanded. A partnership between the International Olympic Committee and International Paralympic Committee, the increased media coverage of the Paralympics, and integration …

OpenAI unveils Presence, a new platform that lets enterprises launch and manage realtime voice agents and chatbots

OpenAI unveils Presence, a new platform that lets enterprises launch and manage realtime voice agents and chatbots

Published by skeptic

OpenAI has announced Presence, a new enterprise product for deploying and managing AI agents across customer-facing and internal business workflows. The offering is designed for eligible enterprise customers that want agents to answer questions, access company systems, take approved actions and escalate to human workers while operating under company-defined policies, permissions and evaluation standards. Presence is available immediately through a limited general availability program. OpenAI Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) and select global systems integrators lead deployments, and the product is not available on a self-service basis. As for using non-OpenAI models, such as the powerful and increasingly popular Chinese open weights alternatives like GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3, an OpenAI spokesperson clarified that “Presence uses OpenAI models for the core agent, while allowing customers to connect third-party models and services through APIs for guardrails, tools, and other parts of their workflow.” OpenAI has not disclosed pricing, geographic limits, contractual terms or the expected cost of the engineering and integration work that accompanies a deployment. I’ve asked an OpenAI spokesperson about pricing twice and am awaiting a …

Synthesia’s AI training platform is moving beyond videos into live coaching

Synthesia’s AI training platform is moving beyond videos into live coaching

Published by skeptic

For years, Synthesia’s pitch was to use AI to help enterprises create interactive training videos, in minutes, for a fraction of the cost normally associated with developing corporate educational materials. The startup’s newest product is making a different bet — that the real moat in enterprise AI isn’t just generating content, but in proving that it worked.  On Wednesday, the British startup launched Roleplay Sessions, an interactive training product where employees can practice high-stakes conversations like sales pitches, performance reviews, and customer complaints with an AI avatar that talks back, pushes back, and then scores them against a rubric.  Roleplay is the first release under a broader “Sessions” platform Synthesia plans to expand into other formats, including job interviews and candidate screening, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.  The launch comes as enterprises take a harder look at whether their AI spend is paying off. Citing a meta-analysis of learning research, Synthesia argues that most corporate training — including, implicitly, its own core video product — stops short of actually changing behavior. The trainings tend to inform …

Stop adding more GPUs: Weka’s new storage platform reduces load by caching 100% of an AI model’s pre-calculated tokens

Stop adding more GPUs: Weka’s new storage platform reduces load by caching 100% of an AI model’s pre-calculated tokens

Published by skeptic

GPU memory is the most expensive resource in production AI, and it’s also the one running out fastest. Long context windows and multi-turn conversations force AI models to repeatedly recompute information they’ve already processed, consuming GPU memory and compute that could otherwise serve additional users or generate new responses. Instead of treating GPU memory as the limiting resource, why not extend it with much cheaper storage technologies? Weka, for one, believes that cheap flash storage can close that gap. The company’s NeuralMesh 6 software platform, launching alongside its first self-designed hardware line, Wekapod 3, extends what Weka calls Augmented Memory Grid, an approach that aggregates NAND flash to behave like GPU memory at a fraction of the cost. This is an active and increasingly crowded category. Dell, NetApp, Pure Storage and VAST have all repositioned toward AI infrastructure over the past two years and Weka is one of several vendors arguing it’s built for this specific moment rather than adapting to it. “What we’re seeing now with customers is they’re chasing availability of compute, and …

Agentic orchestration: Enterprise AI organizations have a deployment problem, not a platform problem — and most are calling chatbots agents

Agentic orchestration: Enterprise AI organizations have a deployment problem, not a platform problem — and most are calling chatbots agents

Published by skeptic

Across 101 enterprises, agent orchestration is consolidating onto model-provider platforms — Anthropic’s Claude leads by a wide margin — chosen for the gravity of the underlying model and judged on reliable multi-step execution. But the ambition runs well ahead of the reality: most deployed “agents” are still chatbot wrappers, the control plane enterprises expect is deliberately hybrid to avoid lock-in, and real-time fiscal control over token burn remains the exception. This wave of VentureBeat Pulse Research examines enterprise agent orchestration: which platforms enterprises run on, what drives the choice, what they optimize for, how they expect agent control to be structured, and — most revealingly — how orchestrated their deployed “agents” actually are and how tightly they control the cost of running them. The central finding is a gap between orchestration ambition and orchestration reality. Enterprises are consolidating fast onto the major model platforms: Anthropic’s Claude is the primary platform for 40%, more than double any rival, followed by Microsoft (18%) and OpenAI (13%). The choice is driven by “model gravity” — native alignment with …

Sight & Sound ‘Christian Broadway’ shows will soon stream on faith-based platform

Sight & Sound ‘Christian Broadway’ shows will soon stream on faith-based platform

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — Live llamas. Laser lights. A giant arc. Angels hanging by wires. For decades, the beloved Sight & Sound theaters in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Branson, Missouri, have welcomed nearly 2 million annual attendees to view their elaborate, live, large-scale Christian theater productions. Now, those productions will be streamable. Beginning on July 30, Wonder Project — a “values-driven” subscription service available on Amazon’s Prime Video in the U.S. — will be releasing one Sight & Sound production every two weeks throughout the fall. The titles include “Jesus,” “Ruth,” “Moses,” “Noah,” “Queen Esther,” “David,” “Samson,” “Daniel” and “Miracle of Christmas.” It will be the largest collection of Sight & Sound titles available on a third-party streaming service. The shows will join “A Great Awakening,” one of Sight & Sound’s first feature films, which is already streaming on Wonder Project and has been a top performer on the platform. The addition comes as streaming platforms are offering more spiritual content than ever. “What we have seen is a strong demand for this premium, faith and values-driven entertainment …

Sundance Film Festival May Need Distribution Platform: Oscar Winner

Sundance Film Festival May Need Distribution Platform: Oscar Winner

Published by Daniella Wilson

Oscar-winning Chilean producer Juan de Dios Larraín (Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman), who earlier this year launched direct-to-audience distribution platform Pijama for independent, undistributed films with brother and director Pablo Larraín (El Conde), thinks film festivals, such as Sundance, will need to consider offering a distribution path for the films they feature. He appeared in a discussion at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF)’s KVIFF Industry Days strand in the Czech spa town on Monday that was entitled “The Future of Film Distribution Is Already Here: Same Problem – Opposite Directions.” He was joined by Steffen Kottkamp of Directors Collection, a soon-to-launch venture of Weydemann Bros. that is focused on AVOD and FAST channel distribution strategies, along side moderator Diana Lodderhose, Deadline Hollywood‘s international features editor. “I know that the people behind Sundance are very worried about what’s going on, because the movies that go to Sundance are getting less and less distribution opportunities. So they feel responsible,” Larraín said of the independent film industry’s distribution challenges. The Chilean producer, who won a 2018 international feature film Oscar as a producer on A …