Tag: Business

Today’s LLMs excel at reasoning, but can still struggle with context. This is particularly true in real-time ordering systems like Instacart. Instacart CTO Anirban Kundu calls it the "brownie recipe problem." It's not as simple as telling an LLM ‘I want to make brownies.’ To be truly assistive when planning the meal, the model must go beyond that simple directive to understand what’s available in the user’s market based on their preferences — say, organic eggs versus regular eggs — and factor that into what’s deliverable in their geography so food doesn’t spoil. This among other critical factors. For Instacart, the challenge is juggling latency with the right mix of context to provide experiences in, ideally, less than one second’s time. “If reasoning itself takes 15 seconds, and if every interaction is that slow, you're gonna lose the user,” Kundu said at a recent VB

Mistral AI, the Paris-based startup positioning itself as Europe's answer to OpenAI, released a pair of speech-to-text models on Wednesday that the company says can transcribe audio faster, more accurately, and far more cheaply than anything else on the market — all while running entirely on a smartphone or laptop.The announcement marks the latest salvo in an increasingly competitive battle over voice AI, a technology that enterprise customers see as essential for everything from automated customer service to real-time translation. But unlike offerings from American tech giants, Mistral's new Voxtral Transcribe 2 models are designed to process sensitive audio without ever transmitting it to remote servers — a feature that could prove decisive for companies in regulated industries like healthcare, finance, and defense."You'd like your voice and the transc

Remote-first AI coding startup Kilo doesn't think software developers should have to pledge their undying allegiance to any one development environment — and certainly not any one model or harness. This week, the startup — backed by GitLab co-founder Sid Sijbrandij — unveiled Kilo CLI 1.0, a complete rebuild of its command-line tool that offers support for more than 500 different underlying AI models from proprietary leaders and open source rivals like Alibaba's Qwen. It comes just weeks after Kilo launched a Slackbot allowing developers to ship code directly from Salesforce's popular messaging service (Slack, which VentureBeat also uses

Presented by CertiniaThe initial euphoria around Generative and Agentic AI has shifted to a pragmatic, often frustrated, reality. CIOs and technical leaders are asking why their pilot programs, even those designed to automate the simplest of workflows, aren’t delivering the magic promised in demos.When AI fails to answer a basic question or complete an action correctly, the instinct is to blame the model. We assume the LLM isn’t "smart" enough. But that blame is misplaced. AI doesn’t struggle because it lacks intelligence. It struggles because it lacks context.In the modern enterprise, context is trapped in a maze of disconnected point solutions, brittle APIs, and latency-ridden integrations — a “Franken-stack” of disparate technologies. And for services-centric organizations in particular, where the real truth of the business lives in the handoffs between sales, delivery, success, and finance, this fragmentation

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba's Qwen team of AI researchers has emerged in the last year as one of the global leaders of open source AI development, releasing a host of powerful large language models and specialized multimodal models that approach, and in some cases, surpass the performance of the proprietary U.S. leaders such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI.Now the Qwen team is back again this week with a compelling release that matches the "vibe coding" frenzy that has arisen in recent months: Qwen3-Coder-Next, a specialized 80-billion-parameter model designed to deliver elite agentic performance within a lightweight active footprint. It's been released on a permissive Apache 2.0 license, enabling commercial usage by large enterpr

Apple on Tuesday announced a major update to its flagship developer tool that gives artificial intelligence agents unprecedented control over the app-building process, a move that signals the iPhone maker's aggressive push into an emerging and controversial practice known as "agentic coding."Xcode 26.3, available immediately as a release candidate, integrates Anthropic's Claude Agent and OpenAI's Codex directly into Apple's development environment, allowing the AI systems to autonomously write code, build projects, run tests, and visually verify their own work — all with minimal human oversight.The update is Apple's most significant embrace of AI-assisted software development since in

Five years ago, Databricks coined the term 'data lakehouse' to describe a new type of data architecture that combines a data lake with a data warehouse. That term and data architecture are now commonplace across the data industry for analytics workloads.Now, Databricks is once again looking to create a new category with its Lakebase service, now generally available today. While the data lakehouse construct deals with OLAP (online analytical processing) databases, Lakebase is all about OLTP (online transaction processing) and operational databases. The Lakebase service has been in development since June 2025 and is based on technology Databricks gained via its acquisition of PostgreSQL database provider Neon. It was further enhanced in October of 2025 with the