Web design news

• Why companies should stop trying to be “AI-first”

  30-04-2022 12:00 via thenextweb.com
  
  Artificial intelligence has become a buzzword in the tech industry. Companies are eager to present themselves as “AI-first” and use the terms “AI,” “machine learning,” and “deep learning” abundantly in their web and marketing copy. What are the effects of the current hype surrounding AI? Is it just misleading consumers and end-users or is it also affecting investors and regulators? How is it shaping the mindset for creating products and services?
  
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• A Colombian AI startup wants to assist half of Latin America’s doctors. Andreessen Horowitz just backed it.

  18-06-2026 00:19 via thenextweb.com
  
  Telepatia, an AI clinical assistant built for Latin American healthcare, has raised $33 million in a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company wants to reach half of the region’s 1.9 million doctors by the end of 2027. Total funding is now $42 million, with early backers including Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, Rappi founder […]
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• Europe’s carmakers are pivoting to defence as EV demand slows and military budgets soar

  17-06-2026 23:52 via thenextweb.com
  
  Four European automakers announced military vehicle partnerships in the past week. Ineos is bidding for a UK Ministry of Defence contract. Daimler Truck launched a dedicated defence brand. Renault partnered with Thales for armoured vehicles. Mercedes-Benz teamed up with a German startup to build anti-drone platforms. The European car industry is retooling for rearmament. Ineos […]
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• China pitches free AI for the developing world as the G7 debates who gets access to American models

  17-06-2026 23:36 via thenextweb.com
  
  China’s top diplomat Wang Yi announced on Wednesday that Beijing is “accelerating the establishment of a global AI cooperation organization” and invited all countries to join. The comments came as the G7 summit in France wrapped up with discussions about giving “trusted partners” access to leading US AI models, according to Reuters. Two competing visions […]
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• FTC freezes sprawling subscription enterprise built on Cyprus and Delaware shells

  17-06-2026 23:03 via thenextweb.com
  
  A federal court has temporarily shut down what the US Federal Trade Commission describes as a sprawling enterprise of deceptive subscription apps, freezing the operations of 15 corporations and eight individuals accused of charging consumers without permission and making cancellation deliberately hard. The order, granted at the agency’s request, came alongside a complaint filed on […]
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• Behavox raises $175 million from BlackRock’s HPS to expand its AI compliance platform

  17-06-2026 22:03 via thenextweb.com
  
  Behavox has raised $175 million in preferred equity from HPS Investment Partners, the private credit firm that BlackRock acquired for $12 billion last year. The funding will go toward expanding Behavox’s unified AI compliance platform and pursuing acquisitions. It is the company’s first equity raise in six years. As part of the deal, Behavox fully repaid and […]
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• PsiQuantum breaks ground in Australia on what it says will be the world’s first utility-scale quantum computer

  17-06-2026 21:47 via thenextweb.com
  
  PsiQuantum has broken ground on a facility in Moreton Bay, Queensland, where it plans to build and deploy what it calls the world’s first utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer. The site will eventually hold tens of thousands of photonic quantum chips cooled by one of the largest cryogenic systems ever constructed for quantum computing. Victor Peng, PsiQuantum’s […]
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• Apple investors are running out of patience with its AI promises

  17-06-2026 21:27 via thenextweb.com
  
  Apple investors are losing patience with the company’s AI strategy. The stock is coming off its worst week since February after the annual Worldwide Developers Conference failed to convince Wall Street that a long-promised upgrade cycle is any closer to arriving. “There’s a bit of fatigue with Apple and AI,” Tim Chubb, chief investment officer at Girard, […]
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• France breaks EDF’s grip on hydropower with law to auction 6 GW a year

  17-06-2026 21:18 via thenextweb.com
  
  France’s Parliament adopted a bill on Tuesday that dismantles the monopoly Électricité de France has held over the country’s hydropower market for decades, according to Bloomberg. The law converts EDF’s hydropower concessions into permits and requires the state-owned utility to auction 6 gigawatts of capacity each year under the supervision of France’s energy regulator, CRE. EDF […]
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• Anthropic and Google DeepMind called for a US-led AI coalition at the G7, and Canada said yes

  17-06-2026 20:53 via thenextweb.com
  
  Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis used a closed-door lunch at the G7 summit on Wednesday to call for a US-led coalition that would shape international rules and standards for artificial intelligence, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions who spoke to CNBC on condition of anonymity. Canadian Prime Minister […]
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• Allbirds sells its shoes, renames itself Smartbird, and says it is now an AI infrastructure company

  17-06-2026 20:53 via thenextweb.com
  
  Allbirds, the sustainable footwear company that went public at a $4.1 billion valuation in 2021, has officially renamed itself Smartbird and appointed a new chief executive to lead its pivot into AI compute. Shares surged more than 50% on Wednesday morning before pulling back. The rebrand completes a transformation first announced in April, when the company […]
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• Meloni says banning kids from social media is not a solution on its own

  17-06-2026 20:37 via thenextweb.com
  
  Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on Wednesday that her government would not take the initiative to introduce a social media ban for teens, breaking from the approach taken by Britain and France. “I am not against a social media ban for under-16s, but I am not either convinced that this proposal alone can solve […]
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• Amazon admits its AI models lag behind OpenAI and Anthropic, but says it can catch up

  17-06-2026 20:26 via thenextweb.com
  
  Amazon’s AI chief has said what the market long suspected. Peter DeSantis, the senior vice president who oversees the company’s AI models, custom chips, and quantum computing, told CNBC that Amazon’s models “haven’t been at the very frontier for the very largest, most demanding workloads.” He added that he hopes Amazon will be “in the conversation about […]
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• Britain lobbied Trump for an exemption from the Anthropic AI ban. The answer was no.

  17-06-2026 20:18 via thenextweb.com
  
  Sir Keir Starmer’s government spent the weekend lobbying the White House to restore British access to Anthropic’s most capable AI models. A source close to President Trump told The Telegraph there was “zero chance” of a UK carve-out. The rejection lands as Starmer meets Trump at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, where the ban is […]
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• Mastodon adds email newsletters so people who don’t want an account can still follow creators on the open social web

  17-06-2026 20:17 via thenextweb.com
  
  Mastodon is betting that email, the oldest surviving communication protocol on the internet, can solve its biggest problem: reaching people who will never create a fediverse account. The open-source social network released version 4.6 on Tuesday, and its most strategically significant feature is the ability for creators to send their posts directly to email subscribers. […]
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• Gary Marcus warns OpenAI’s IPO could drag Nvidia, Oracle, and CoreWeave down with it

  17-06-2026 20:08 via thenextweb.com
  
  Gary Marcus has spent years warning that the AI industry is building on shaky foundations. Now he sees a specific chain of dominoes: if OpenAI’s IPO underperforms, the fallout will not stop at one company. “Their values rely to a significant degree on the expectation that OpenAI will have an immense demand for chips and […]
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• A 21-year-old Stanford grad just raised $11.6M to build a wearable hormone monitor that doesn’t need blood

  17-06-2026 19:53 via thenextweb.com
  
  Clair Health, a San Francisco startup founded by two Stanford graduates, has raised $11.6 million in seed funding to build what it calls the first continuous, noninvasive hormone monitor for women. Khosla Ventures led the round, with participation from a16z speedrun, Brydge Club, Treehub, Cartan Capital, AGI House, Insiders VC, and 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki. […]
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• SpaceX’s surging stock just turned its valuation into an acquisition weapon

  17-06-2026 19:45 via thenextweb.com
  
  SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share on 12 June. Five days later, the stock has climbed nearly 50%, pushing SpaceX past Amazon to become the fifth most valuable public company in the world at roughly $2.66 trillion. That surge is not just making shareholders richer. It is making acquisitions cheaper. The Cursor deal On Monday, […]
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• Half of Americans now use AI chatbots, but 40% think AI will make society worse and two-thirds don’t trust the government to regulate it

  17-06-2026 19:36 via thenextweb.com
  
  Half of American adults now use AI chatbots, but a plurality believe the technology will ultimately damage society, and overwhelming majorities have lost confidence that either the government or the companies building it will manage it responsibly. A new Pew Research Center report released Wednesday, based on a survey of 5,119 US adults conducted in […]
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• A million Dutch adults get news solely from social media. Only 12% trust what they see.

  17-06-2026 19:34 via thenextweb.com
  
  More than one million people in the Netherlands now rely exclusively on social media for news, according to the 2026 Digital News Report published on Tuesday. They use no news websites, no television, no radio, and only 12% say they trust what they encounter on those platforms. The group represents 7% of Dutch adults, up from 2% […]
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• Arcade raised $60M to fix the real wall blocking enterprise AI agents: what they’re allowed to do

  17-06-2026 18:32 via thenextweb.com
  
  The problem with letting an AI agent loose inside a company is not that it might forget who it is. It is that it has no reason to hold back. A human employee is restrained by the fear of being fired. An agent, as one investor in Arcade.dev put it, “will exhaustively exploit every permission […]
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• The bottleneck in geothermal moved from the drill to the turbine. This SpaceX alum raised $22M to fix it

  17-06-2026 18:16 via thenextweb.com
  
  The race to power artificial intelligence has a problem that solar panels and wind turbines cannot fix on their own: the electricity has to be there at 3am, in still air, under cloud. Critical Energy, a Los Angeles startup founded by a former SpaceX engineer, has raised $22mn to chase that always-on demand with geothermal, […]
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• Why CMOs need a new operating system for accountability

  17-06-2026 18:15 via thenextweb.com
  
  Marketing leaders have never had access to more data, yet proving the business impact of advertising has become increasingly difficult. As budgets face greater scrutiny and finance teams demand clearer evidence of return on investment, many chief marketing officers are discovering that traditional performance metrics no longer satisfy the questions being asked in the boardroom. Tal […]
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• China’s new five-year plan makes tracking AI’s hit to jobs a national priority

  17-06-2026 17:54 via thenextweb.com
  
  China has spent two years telling the world it intends to win the AI race. Its new five-year employment plan is the quieter admission that winning it could cost a lot of people their jobs. The State Council, effectively China’s cabinet, has issued its blueprint for employment policy from 2026 to 2030. Buried in a […]
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• Henrique Schmaiske and the human work behind Meteor 3.0

  17-06-2026 17:41 via thenextweb.com
  
  Meteor.js is one of those open-source projects developers have lived with for years. It has over 44,800 GitHub stars, more than 500,000 active installations worldwide, and still sits inside products across many countries. Behind its largest release in over ten years, Meteor 3.0, is Henrique Schmaiske, CTO of Meteor Software, who started the work in April 2022 […]
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• Poland bought a stake in ElevenLabs to grow its next AI champion

  17-06-2026 17:16 via thenextweb.com
  
  Poland produced one of the world’s most valuable AI companies almost by accident. Now it is spending public money to make sure the next one stays closer to home. Vinci, the venture arm of Poland’s state development bank BGK, has taken an $11mn stake in ElevenLabs, the AI-voice firm valued at $11bn. The same day, […]
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• a16z is betting $38M that you want an AI ‘teammate’, not another agent

  17-06-2026 16:47 via thenextweb.com
  
  The word “agent” is everywhere in enterprise software right now, which is exactly why Convey does not want to use it. The startup has raised a $38mn Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Khosla Ventures and Pear VC joining. Its pitch is a deliberate rebrand: not AI agents that complete tasks, but AI “teammates” […]
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• SAP just funded a startup built to help its own customers escape SAP

  17-06-2026 16:45 via thenextweb.com
  
  There is an unglamorous deadline bearing down on corporate IT, and it has just produced one of London’s more interesting AI raises. Conduct, a 35-person startup founded by three former Palantir engineers, has raised a $60mn Series A co-led by Index Ventures and ICONIQ, with SAP itself investing. The round takes its total funding to […]
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• Google’s first speaker in six years is really a $10-a-month Gemini subscription

  17-06-2026 16:27 via thenextweb.com
  
  Google has finally made a new smart speaker, its first in roughly six years. The more interesting thing it has made is a reason to pay it every month. The Google Home Speaker costs $99.99, opens for preorder today and ships on June 25. It is the first audio device built around Gemini for Home, […]
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• The US is paying an AI startup $500M to break China’s grip on chip materials

  17-06-2026 16:12 via thenextweb.com
  
  The US government has just become a shareholder in an AI startup, in exchange for a bet that artificial intelligence can break China’s hold on the materials inside every chip factory. The Department of Commerce has awarded SandboxAQ $500mn under the CHIPS Act to develop new chemicals and metals for domestic semiconductor manufacturing, Reuters reported. […]
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