Author: AI News First

If you’re running out of storage space on your laptop, or if you need to back up your data and store that backlog of videos you’re going to edit one day (I am, I swear), an external hard drive can solve your problem. The trouble is, there are hundreds of drive options ranging from dirt cheap to crazy expensive—which one is right for your needs? I’ve tested dozens, across operating systems and with different use cases in mind, to find the best external hard drives for storage, backups, gaming, video editing, network-attached storage (NAS) devices, and more.Check out our other…

Meta on Tuesday announced that it’ll host its first-ever dev conference dedicated to generative AI. Called LlamaCon after Meta’s Llama family of generative AI models, the conference is scheduled to take place on April 29. Meta said that, there, it’ll share “the latest on [its] open source AI developments to help developers […] build amazing apps and products.” Additional details will be made available soon, said Meta. The company’s annual developer conference, Meta Connect, will be held later in the year, in September — its typical window. Meta, which several years ago embraced an “open” approach to developing AI technologies…

Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, has come under fire for the abrupt collapse of a cryptocurrency he promoted, in a move that has triggered lawsuits and calls for his impeachment.Milei is facing more than 100 complaints against him at the country’s supreme court, accusing him of participating in an alleged scam related to the cryptocurrency $Libra, which opposition politicians estimate has resulted in financial losses for 40,000 people.On February 14, the Argentine leader posted a message on his X account, which has 3.8 million followers: “Liberal Argentina grows! This private project will be dedicated to encourage the growth of Argentina’s economy,…

The CRM company monday.com has released what it terms its ‘AI vision,’ designed to help businesses and teams manage and track their work more efficiently. According to the platform’s published strategy, the company will focus on three key principles – AI Blocks, Product Power-ups, and a Digital Workforce. Its aims are to “accelerate its vision to democratise the power of software.” By making its software more accessible and usable for its users, monday.com hopes to address the challenges encountered by businesses and work forces in teams of all sizes, streamline workflows and increase productivity. The latest AI strategies are designed…

Generative AI is getting better at interpreting dense texts, and this progress has proven to be a boon for startups attacking one of the most complex sets of texts there is: the law. It makes sense then that we’ve been seeing a new burst of activity in the legal tech space off the back of advancements in AI in the last year or so.  Legal tech startup Eudia bagged $105 million only last week; London-based Genie AI raised €16 million last year; U.S.-based Harvey landed a $300 million round led by Sequoia; and Lawhive raised $40 million to go after…

DeepSeek mobility integration is spreading across China’s transport sector, with companies including automotive giants and e-scooter manufacturers incorporating AI into their products. The adoption wave began with primary electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers and has expanded recently to include the country’s leading electric two-wheeler brands. DeepSeek’s mobility integration transforms the auto industry According to the South China Morning Post, over the past two weeks, more than a dozen Chinese automakers have announced plans to integrate DeepSeek’s AI technology into their vehicles. The roster includes industry leader BYD, established manufacturers like Geely, Great Wall Motor, Chery Automobile, and SAIC Motor, and emerging…

Last decade, companies like Segment rewrote the book on how organizations used APIs to merge data from disparate apps to improve marketing strategies. Today, a startup called Hightouch — co-founded by a former engineering manager at Segment — is announcing $80 million in funding for the next chapter: a platform that lets sales, marketing, and customer service teams synchronize data warehouses and other locations, along with AI agents to do that work and build those experiences for them.  Sapphire Ventures is leading this Series C round, with NVC, Amplify Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, Bain Capital Ventures, and Y Combinator also participating.…

xAI unveiled its Grok 3 AI model on Monday, alongside new capabilities such as image analysis and refined question answering. The company harnessed an immense data centre equipped with approximately 200,000 GPUs to develop Grok 3. According to xAI owner Elon Musk, this project utilised “10x” more computing power than its predecessor, Grok 2, with an expanded dataset that reportedly includes information from legal case filings. Musk claimed that Grok 3 is a “maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically-correct.” The Grok 3 rollout includes a family of models designed for different…

Monolinguists wanting to communicate with the global masses have never had it so easy. Trusty old Google Translate can convert the content of images, audio, and entire websites across hundreds of languages, while newer tools such as ChatGPT also serve as handy pocket translators. On the back end, DeepL and ElevenLabs have have reached lofty billion-dollar valuations for various language-related smarts that businesses can funnel into their own applications. But a new player is now entering the fray, with an AI-powered localization engine that serves the infrastructure to help developers go global — a “Stripe” for app localization, if you…

With various standards and charging technologies at work, it is much harder than it should be to work out what a cable can do. There are a few things worth knowing when shopping.USB Standards: The Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard dates to 1996 but has seen many new standards, revisions, and connector types in the years since. Instead of running through all of them here, we try to highlight what matters.Connectors: While USB-C is mercifully becoming a standard connection type, you want cables with connectors that fit your existing devices. Today, that still might mean USB-A, Lightning, or even MicroUSB.…