Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch on the fight to split off models from agents
"The reality is, when you're optimizing for production, you start looking at a price/performance," Guillermo Rauch tells TechCrunch.
Monitoring discriminative ML models using Amazon SageMaker AI with MLflow - Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Monitoring discriminative ML models using Amazon SageMaker AI with MLflow Amazon Web Services (AWS)
5 ways Google Search can level up your thrift and vintage shopping
Uncover second-hand scores with AI tools in Google Search and Shopping.
New Google commercial imagines a Declaration of Independence written with help from AI
Two hundred and fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a new commercial asks: What if the Founding Fathers had access to Google Workspace?
Warren Buffett's Successor, Greg Abel, Is Doubling Down on This Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock That Has Soared 100% Over the Past Year - Yahoo Finance
Warren Buffett's Successor, Greg Abel, Is Doubling Down on This Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock That Has Soared 100% Over the Past Year Yahoo Finance
Station F ramps up as a launchpad for Europe’s hottest AI startups
Station F, a Paris-based startup hub founded by French billionaire Xavier Niel, is gearing up for a new edition of its F/ai accelerator program in a bid to strengthen its positioning as a stepping stone for promising AI startups.
34% of people shipping software using AI tools have no formal programming background
AI was impressive enough when skilled developers could use ChatGPT to troubleshoot code. But now, the tech has evolved to the point that workers with no programming background can use AI to build apps from scratch, refine them, and ship them, all in a matter of days or even hours. Some folks call it vibe coding, but that undersells what's actually happening. There's a lot more than vibes behind these projects. The vibey part comes from how easy it is for someone to describe what they want to cr
How Omio is building the future of conversational travel
Discover how Omio uses OpenAI to power conversational travel experiences, accelerate product development, and transform into an AI-native company.
Therapists Too Expensive? Why Thousands of Women Are Spilling Their Deepest Secrets to ChatGPT
More women are turning to ChatGPT for emotional support, using the AI chatbot as a stand-in therapist as mental health systems buckle under pressure. With long wait times and soaring costs, AI is filling a growing gap. Mental health care is harder to access than ever. In the UK, NHS data shows patients are eight times more likely to wait over 18 months for mental health treatment than for physical health. Private therapy isn’t always an option either, with sessions costing £60 or more. In that vacuum, ChatGPT has become a surprising outlet. Real voices, real feelings Charly, 29, from The post Therapists Too Expensive? Why Thousands of Women Are Spilling Their Deepest Secrets to ChatGPT appeared first on DailyAI.
Here's how Gemini can help you avoid jetlag.
If you’ve got a faraway trip coming up, the Gemini app can help you avoid jetlag so you can make the most of your visit.Once you’ve given Gemini permission to access you…
Microsoft lays off nearly 5,000 employees across Xbox, commercial sales
Microsoft cut around 4,800 roles, or 2.1% of its global workforce, on Monday — the latest in a series of layoffs that’s stoking fears of AI replacing jobs. The layoffs will hit Xbox and commercial sales the hardest.
The ‘first’ AI-run ransomware attack still needed a human
An AI agent carried out the technical execution of a real-world ransomware attack for the first known time, but new details show a human still chose the victim, set up the infrastructure, and supplied stolen credentials — meaning it wasn't quite the fully autonomous cybercrime debut that last week's headlines suggested.
5 ways to learn with study notebooks in the Gemini app
Study notebooks is a new space in the Gemini app that serves as an interactive learning tool tailored to any student's goals.
We’re strengthening our presence in Alabama through new investments and community support.
Google has announced a $1.5 billion investment for 2026 and 2027 to expand its data center campus in Jackson County, Alabama. Operating since 2019 on a repurposed former…
Fluid, natural voice translation with Gemini 3.5 Live Translate
Gemini 3.5 Live Translate brings near real-time, natural speech translation to Google AI Studio, Google Translate and Google Meet.
Powering the world’s first AI arts museum
Refik Anadol Studio opens Dataland, the first museum of AI arts, powered by Google Cloud and supported by Google Arts & Culture.
Jasper vs. ChatGPT: Which is better? [2026]
At first glance, Jasper and ChatGPT seem similar—they're both generative AI tools that can create content in a split second. But there's a big difference here: ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that's flexible enough to handle just about any task you throw at it, while Jasper is a specialized AI marketing tool. I've spent countless hours using both apps in my personal and professional life. For example, I used Jasper to help me scale content production for my previously niche website. And I've been usin
Introducing GeneBench-Pro
Introducing GeneBench-Pro, a new benchmark testing AI performance in genomics, biology, and scientific research using complex, real-world datasets.
US trade deficit surges amid artificial intelligence spending boom - Al Jazeera
US trade deficit surges amid artificial intelligence spending boom Al Jazeera
Types of AI agents: A comprehensive guide
My whole life, I've held onto a few key metrics of wealth and success: the ability to effortlessly purchase a wheel of fancy cheese, owning a detailed and historically accurate dollhouse, and hiring someone to manage my schedule and decade-old inboxes. AI agents can't do the first two, but they can definitely handle the last one—and that's just one of the simpler tasks they can take on. AI agents can follow rules, remember context, make choices toward a goal, and (in some cases) improve over tim
Claude Cowork expands to mobile and web
With this update, users can start a task from their desk, get status updates on their phone, and pick up the finished output later — even if their laptop is closed.
The 6 best autonomous AI CRM tools in 2026
My very first CRM was a DOS-based system I was forced to use in 2009. Which, just to be clear, was well after the invention of the iPhone, streaming services, and functioning graphical user interfaces. It didn't integrate with anything, it didn't suggest or automate a single thing, and if it had any "intelligence," it was the kind that treated the tab key as a threat to its authority. I've seen the CRM evolution—from command lines and black screens to the sleek, AI-infused platforms of today tha
Where Medicine and Artificial Intelligence Converge - New York Institute of Technology
Where Medicine and Artificial Intelligence Converge New York Institute of Technology
Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk
These may be the last days of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
Our new community investments in Virginia support local jobs and expand energy affordability.
We’re helping build the state’s next-generation workforce and investing in energy programs.
You can now customize Siri’s pace and expressivity in the latest iOS 27 beta
The update is part of Apple's broader effort to make Siri feel more natural and personal, as it rebuilds the assistant around generative AI.
How GPT-5 helped immunologist Derya Unutmaz solve a 3-year-old mystery
GPT-5 Pro helped solve a 3-year-old immunology mystery, offering insights into T cell behavior. The breakthrough could support cancer and autoimmune research.
The latest AI news we announced in June 2026
Here are Google’s latest AI updates from June 2026.
What is a token in AI?
Understanding what tokens in AI are matters more now than it did even a year ago. Tokens have gone from a background technical detail to the primary usage limit and billing unit for top AI models. If you've ever hit your usage limit with Claude Code, you've hit a token limit. If you've ever wondered why switching to a reasoning model burned through your quota faster, that's tokens, too. How AI models read your input, generate a response, think through hard problems, and rack up costs—it all com
Patch the Planet: a Daybreak initiative to support open source maintainers
OpenAI introduces Patch the Planet, a Daybreak initiative helping open-source maintainers find, validate, and fix vulnerabilities with AI and expert review.
The 11 best CRMs for small business in 2026
As a small business, you're no longer in the early days of figuring out how things work. You have a good client base, your metrics are solid, and now you're looking to scale. To do that, you need CRM software that's not too basic but not too expensive, a blend of useful features and competitive pricing. Efficiency is the name of the game. I know you didn't start a business to shop around for the perfect apps to help you grow. I'm taking some of the load off: I rounded up over 140 apps on the mar
Artificial Intelligence - ABC News - Breaking News, Latest News and Videos
Artificial Intelligence ABC News - Breaking News, Latest News and Videos
Opening remarks on sound practices for artificial intelligence - Financial Stability Board
Opening remarks on sound practices for artificial intelligence Financial Stability Board
The 16 best marketing newsletters in 2026
With new technologies like AI revolutionizing the way we approach marketing, the landscape is becoming increasingly more complex—and it feels like it's shifting every day. To stay up to date with the latest trends, I've become something of a marketing newsletter hoarder. To my own detriment, I've subscribed to more marketing newsletters than I can possibly read each day. And it doesn't help that I'm constantly leveraging X, Reddit, and LinkedIn for other people's recommendations. But my bad hab
Start building with Nano Banana 2 Lite and Gemini Omni Flash
Scale your ideas with Nano Banana 2 Lite, our fastest, most cost-efficient Gemini Image model, and Gemini Omni Flash for high-quality video and conversational editing.
The 5 best free keyword research tools in 2026
There's no shortage of tools purpose-built for keyword research (literally hundreds of them), and they run the gamut from beginner-focused to highly advanced. They also range from totally basic and unhelpful to super valuable. When done right, the best keyword research tools simplify and streamline your workflow—they make it easier to find the right keywords to target and give you the data you need to actually rank for them. But they shouldn't require you to empty out your bank account and sell
4 ways soccer fans can catch every moment of the tournament
Google tools — like Maps, Gemini and AI Mode in Search — can help guide you from the first whistle to the final goal.
Save time and grow your business with new Gemini tools
An overview of new features in the Gemini app designed specifically to support businesses and entrepreneurs.
Introducing computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash
A look at the built-in computer use tool in Gemini 3.5 Flash.
Codex-maxxing for long-running work
Learn how Jason Liu uses Codex to preserve context, manage complex projects, and help work continue beyond a single prompt.
Railway secures $100 million to challenge AWS with AI-native cloud infrastructure
Railway, a San Francisco-based cloud platform that has quietly amassed two million developers without spending a dollar on marketing, announced Thursday that it raised $100 million in a Series B funding round, as surging demand for artificial intelligence applications exposes the limitations of legacy cloud infrastructure. TQ Ventures led the round, with participation from FPV Ventures, Redpoint, and Unusual Ventures. The investment values Railway as one of the most significant infrastructure startups to emerge during the AI boom, capitalizing on developer frustration with the complexity and cost of traditional platforms like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. "As AI models get better at writing code, more and more people are asking the age-old question: where, and how, do I run my applications?" said Jake Cooper, Railway's 28-year-old founder and chief executive, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "The last generation of cloud primitives were slow and outdated, and now with AI moving everything faster, teams simply can't keep up." The funding is a dramatic acceleration for a company that has charted an unconventional path through the cloud computing industry. Railway raised just $24 million in total before this round, including a $20 million Series A from Redpoint in 2022. The company now processes more than 10 million deployments monthly and handles over one trillion requests through its edge network — metrics that rival far larger and better-funded competitors. Why three-minute deploy times have become unacceptable in the age of AI coding assistants Railway's pitch rests on a simple observation: the tools developers use to deploy and manage software were designed for a slower era. A standard build-and-deploy cycle using Terraform, the industry-standard infrastructure tool, takes two to three minutes. That delay, once tolerable, has become a critical bottleneck as AI coding assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor can generate working code in seconds. "When godly intelligence is on tap and can solve any problem in three seconds, those amalgamations of systems become bottlenecks," Cooper told VentureBeat. "What was really cool for humans to deploy in 10 seconds or less is now table stakes for agents." The company claims its platform delivers deployments in under one second — fast enough to keep pace with AI-generated code. Customers report a tenfold increase in developer velocity and up to 65 percent cost savings compared to traditional cloud providers. These numbers come directly from enterprise clients, not internal benchmarks. Daniel Lobaton, chief technology officer at G2X, a platform serving 100,000 federal contractors, measured deployment speed improvements of seven times faster and an 87 percent cost reduction after migrating to Railway. His infrastructure bill dropped from $15,000 per month to approximately $1,000. "The work that used to take me a week on our previous infrastructure, I can do in Railway in like a day," Lobaton said. "If I want to spin up a new service and test different architectures, it would take so long on our old setup. In Railway I can launch six services in two minutes." Inside the controversial decision to abandon Google Cloud and build data centers from scratch What distinguishes Railway from competitors like Render and Fly.io is the depth of its vertical integration. In 2024, the company made the unusual decision to abandon Google Cloud entirely and build its own data centers, a move that echoes the famous Alan Kay maxim: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." "We wanted to design hardware in a way where we could build a differentiated experience," Cooper said. "Having full control over the network, compute, and storage layers lets us do really fast build and deploy loops, the kind that allows us to move at 'agentic speed' while staying 100 percent the smoothest ride in town." The approach paid dividends during recent widespread outages that affected major cloud providers — Railway remained online throughout. This soup-to-nuts control enables pricing that undercuts the hyperscalers by roughly 50 percent and newer cloud startups by three to four times. Railway charges by the second for actual compute usage: $0.00000386 per gigabyte-second of memory, $0.00000772 per vCPU-second, and $0.00000006 per gigabyte-second of storage. There are no charges for idle virtual machines — a stark contrast to the traditional cloud model where customers pay for provisioned capacity whether they use it or not. "The conventional wisdom is that the big guys have economies of scale to offer better pricing," Cooper noted. "But when they're charging for VMs that usually sit idle in the cloud, and we've purpose-built everything to fit much more density on these machines, you have a big opportunity." How 30 employees built a platform generating tens of millions in annual revenue Railway has achieved its scale with a team of just 30 employees generating tens of millions in annual revenue — a ratio of revenue per employee that would be exceptional even for established software companies. The company grew revenue 3.5 times last year and continues to expand at 15 percent month-over-month. Cooper emphasized that the fundraise was strategic rather than necessary. "We're default alive; there's no reason for us to raise money," he said. "We raised because we see a massive opportunity to accelerate, not because we needed to survive." The company hired its first salesperson only last year and employs just two solutions engineers. Nearly all of Railway's two million users discovered the platform through word of mouth — developers telling other developers about a tool that actually works. "We basically did the standard engineering thing: if you build it, they will come," Cooper recalled. "And to some degree, they came." From side projects to Fortune 500 deployments: Railway's unlikely corporate expansion Despite its grassroots developer community, Railway has made significant inroads into large organizations. The company claims that 31 percent of Fortune 500 companies now use its platform, though deployments range from company-wide infrastructure to individual team projects. Notable customers include Bilt, the loyalty program company; Intuit's GoCo subsidiary; TripAdvisor's Cruise Critic; and MGM Resorts. Kernel, a Y Combinator-backed startup providing AI infrastructure to over 1,000 companies, runs its entire customer-facing system on Railway for $444 per month. "At my previous company Clever, which sold for $500 million, I had six full-time engineers just managing AWS," said Rafael Garcia, Kernel's chief technology officer. "Now I have six engineers total, and they all focus on product. Railway is exactly the tool I wish I had in 2012." For enterprise customers, Railway offers security certifications including SOC 2 Type 2 compliance and HIPAA readiness, with business associate agreements available upon request. The platform provides single sign-on authentication, comprehensive audit logs, and the option to deploy within a customer's existing cloud environment through a "bring your own cloud" configuration. Enterprise pricing starts at custom levels, with specific add-ons for extended log retention ($200 monthly), HIPAA BAAs ($1,000), enterprise support with SLOs ($2,000), and dedicated virtual machines ($10,000). The startup's bold strategy to take on Amazon, Google, and a new generation of cloud rivals Railway enters a crowded market that includes not only the hyperscale cloud providers—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform—but also a growing cohort of developer-focused platforms like Vercel, Render, Fly.io, and Heroku. Cooper argues that Railway's competitors fall into two camps, neither of which has fully committed to the new infrastructure model that AI demands. "The hyperscalers have two competing systems, and they haven't gone all-in on the new model because their legacy revenue stream is still printing money," he observed. "They have this mammoth pool of cash coming from people who provision a VM, use maybe 10 percent of it, and still pay for the whole thing. To what end are they actually interested in going all the way in on a new experience if they don't really need to?" Against startup competitors, Railway differentiates by covering the full infrastructure stack. "We're not just containers; we've got VM primitives, stateful storage, virtual private networking, automated load balancing," Cooper said. "And we wrap all of this in an absurdly easy-to-use UI, with agentic primitives so agents can move 1,000 times faster." The platform supports databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis; provides up to 256 terabytes of persistent storage with over 100,000 input/output operations per second; and enables deployment to four global regions spanning the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia. Enterprise customers can scale to 112 vCPUs and 2 terabytes of RAM per service. Why investors are betting that AI will create a thousand times more software than exists today Railway's fundraise reflects broader investor enthusiasm for companies positioned to benefit from the AI coding revolution. As tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude become standard fixtures in developer workflows, the volume of code being written — and the infrastructure needed to run it — is expanding dramatically. "The amount of software that's going to come online over the next five years is unfathomable compared to what existed before — we're talking a thousand times more software," Cooper predicted. "All of that has to run somewhere." The company has already integrated directly with AI systems, building what Cooper calls "loops where Claude can hook in, call deployments, and analyze infrastructure automatically." Railway released a Model Context Protocol server in August 2025 that allows AI coding agents to deploy applications and manage infrastructure directly from code editors. "The notion of a developer is melting before our eyes," Cooper said. "You don't have to be an engineer to engineer things anymore — you just need critical thinking and the ability to analyze things in a systems capacity." What Railway plans to do with $100 million and zero marketing experience Railway plans to use the new capital to expand its global data center footprint, grow its team beyond 30 employees, and build what Cooper described as a proper go-to-market operation for the first time in the company's five-year history. "One of my mentors said you raise money when you can change the trajectory of the business," Cooper explained. "We've built all the required substrate to scale indefinitely; what's been holding us back is simply talking about it. 2026 is the year we play on the world stage." The company's investor roster reads like a who's who of developer infrastructure. Angel investors include Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub; Guillermo Rauch, chief executive of Vercel; Spencer Kimball, chief executive of Cockroach Labs; Olivier Pomel, chief executive of Datadog; and Jori Lallo, co-founder of Linear. The timing of Railway's expansion coincides with what many in Silicon Valley view as a fundamental shift in how software gets made. Coding assistants are no longer experimental curiosities — they have become essential tools that millions of developers rely on daily. Each line of AI-generated code needs somewhere to run, and the incumbents, by Cooper's telling, are too wedded to their existing business models to fully capitalize on the moment. Whether Railway can translate developer enthusiasm into sustained enterprise adoption remains an open question. The cloud infrastructure market is littered with promising startups that failed to break the grip of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. But Cooper, who previously worked as a software engineer at Wolfram Alpha, Bloomberg, and Uber before founding Railway in 2020, seems unfazed by the scale of his ambition. "In five years, Railway [will be] the place where software gets created and evolved, period," he said. "Deploy instantly, scale infinitely, with zero friction. That's the prize worth playing for, and there's no bigger one on offer." For a company that built a $100 million business by doing the opposite of what conventional startup wisdom dictates — no marketing, no sales team, no venture hype—the real test begins now. Railway spent five years proving that developers would find a better mousetrap on their own. The next five will determine whether the rest of the world is ready to get on board.
Helping build shared standards for advanced AI
OpenAI helps build shared standards for advanced AI, supporting evaluation frameworks, safety practices, and global cooperation through the Appia Foundation.
If you use Google, you’re training its AI. Here’s how to opt out.
Consider this a belated PSA: A recent change to Google’s privacy settings is allowing the company to store more of your data, including media such as “images, files, and audio and video recordings,” to improve its AI models.
What is a multi-agent system? A complete guide
Hot take: I really liked the "Stranger Things" finale. Yeah, the final fight was formulaic, but I love a good boss fight. Everyone has a specialty, and they all contribute to the win. That's how high-performing teams work everywhere, whether it's a psychic, demon-fighting group of teenagers or an automation system. AI agents can do a lot on their own, but organized into a multi-agent system, they can specialize, share information, and delegate. Like Dustin and Steve, they're better together. In
Best Universities To Study AI in 2026
Artificial intelligence has made enormous strides in the past few years – with the introduction of a wide range of AI tools changing the landscape of how we assess data and operate within online spaces forever. This page ranks the 50 best universities to study AI around the world, based on scope, prestige, and the level of AI-related research each institution has released. Career prospects in AI There is a huge demand for individuals with a high degree of skills in artificial intelligence and machine learning, making AI a potential lucrative career prospect with countless opportunities as AI continues to The post Best Universities To Study AI in 2026 appeared first on DailyAI.
Applying Artificial Intelligence and machine learning in precision nutrition - Nature
Applying Artificial Intelligence and machine learning in precision nutrition Nature
5 ways Google parents are using Gemini
How Gemini helps with homework, meal planning and more, so parents have time to focus on the good stuff.
Inside Genebench-Pro
Listen Labs raises $69M after viral billboard hiring stunt to scale AI customer interviews
Alfred Wahlforss was running out of options. His startup, Listen Labs, needed to hire over 100 engineers, but competing against Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million offers seemed impossible. So he spent $5,000 — a fifth of his marketing budget — on a billboard in San Francisco displaying what looked like gibberish: five strings of random numbers. The numbers were actually AI tokens. Decoded, they led to a coding challenge: build an algorithm to act as a digital bouncer at Berghain, the Berlin nightclub famous for rejecting nearly everyone at the door. Within days, thousands attempted the puzzle. 430 cracked it. Some got hired. The winner flew to Berlin, all expenses paid. That unconventional approach has now attracted $69 million in Series B funding, led by Ribbit Capital with participation from Evantic and existing investors Sequoia Capital, Conviction, and Pear VC. The round values Listen Labs at $500 million and brings its total capital to $100 million. In nine months since launch, the company has grown annualized revenue by 15x to eight figures and conducted over one million AI-powered interviews. "When you obsess over customers, everything else follows," Wahlforss said in an interview with VentureBeat. "Teams that use Listen bring the customer into every decision, from marketing to product, and when the customer is delighted, everyone is." Why traditional market research is broken, and what Listen Labs is building to fix it Listen's AI researcher finds participants, conducts in-depth interviews, and delivers actionable insights in hours, not weeks. The platform replaces the traditional choice between quantitative surveys — which provide statistical precision but miss nuance—and qualitative interviews, which deliver depth but cannot scale. Wahlforss explained the limitation of existing approaches: "Essentially surveys give you false precision because people end up answering the same question... You can't get the outliers. People are actually not honest on surveys." The alternative, one-on-one human interviews, "gives you a lot of depth. You can ask follow up questions. You can kind of double check if they actually know what they're talking about. And the problem is you can't scale that." The platform works in four steps: users create a study with AI assistance, Listen recruits participants from its global network of 30 million people, an AI moderator conducts in-depth interviews with follow-up questions, and results are packaged into executive-ready reports including key themes, highlight reels, and slide decks. What distinguishes Listen's approach is its use of open-ended video conversations rather than multiple-choice forms. "In a survey, you can kind of guess what you should answer, and you have four options," Wahlforss said. "Oh, they probably want me to buy high income. Let me click on that button versus an open ended response. It just generates much more honesty." The dirty secret of the $140 billion market research industry: rampant fraud Listen finds and qualifies the right participants in its global network of 30 million people. But building that panel required confronting what Wahlforss called "one of the most shocking things that we've learned when we entered this industry"—rampant fraud. "Essentially, there's a financial transaction involved, which means there will be bad players," he explained. "We actually had some of the largest companies, some of them have billions in revenue, send us people who claim to be kind of enterprise buyers to our platform and our system immediately detected, like, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud." The company built what it calls a "quality guard" that cross-references LinkedIn profiles with video responses to verify identity, checks consistency across how participants answer questions, and flags suspicious patterns. The result, according to Wahlforss: "People talk three times more. They're much more honest when they talk about sensitive topics like politics and mental health." Emeritus, an online education company that uses Listen, reported that approximately 20% of survey responses previously fell into the fraudulent or low-quality category. With Listen, they reduced this to almost zero. "We did not have to replace any responses because of fraud or gibberish information," said Gabrielli Tiburi, Assistant Manager of Customer Insights at Emeritus. How Microsoft, Sweetgreen, and Chubbies are using AI interviews to build better products The speed advantage has proven central to Listen's pitch. Traditional customer research at Microsoft could take four to six weeks to generate insights. "By the time we get to them, either the decision has been made or we lose out on the opportunity to actually influence it," said Romani Patel, Senior Research Manager at Microsoft. With Listen, Microsoft can now get insights in days, and in many cases, within hours. The platform has already powered several high-profile initiatives. Microsoft used Listen Labs to collect global customer stories for its 50th anniversary celebration. "We wanted users to share how Copilot is empowering them to bring their best self forward," Patel said, "and we were able to collect those user video stories within a day." Traditionally, that kind of work would have taken six to eight weeks. Simple Modern, an Oklahoma-based drinkware company, used Listen to test a new product concept. The process took about an hour to write questions, an hour to launch the study, and 2.5 hours to receive feedback from 120 people across the country. "We went from 'Should we even have this product?' to 'How should we launch it?'" said Chris Hoyle, the company's Chief Marketing Officer. Chubbies, the shorts brand, achieved a 24x increase in youth research participation—growing from 5 to 120 participants — by using Listen to overcome the scheduling challenges of traditional focus groups with children. "There's school, sports, dinner, and homework," explained Lauren Neville, Director of Insights and Innovation. "I had to find a way to hear from them that fit into their schedules." The company also discovered product issues through AI interviews that might have gone undetected otherwise. Wahlforss described how the AI "through conversations, realized there were like issues with the the kids short line, and decided to, like, interview hundreds of kids. And I understand that there were issues in the liner of the shorts and that they were, like, scratchy, quote, unquote, according to the people interviewed." The redesigned product became "a blockbuster hit." The Jevons paradox explains why cheaper research creates more demand, not less Listen Labs is entering a massive but fragmented market. Wahlforss cited research from Andreessen Horowitz estimating the market research industry at roughly $140 billion annually, populated by legacy players — some with more than a billion dollars in revenue — that he believes are vulnerable to disruption. "There are very much existing budget lines that we are replacing," Wahlforss said. "Why we're replacing them is that one, they're super costly. Two, they're kind of stuck in this old paradigm of choosing between a survey or interview, and they also take months to work with." But the more intriguing dynamic may be that AI-powered research doesn't just replace existing spending — it creates new demand. Wahlforss invoked the Jevons paradox, an economic principle that occurs when technological advancements make a resource more efficient to use, but increased efficiency leads to increased overall consumption rather than decreased consumption. "What I've noticed is that as something gets cheaper, you don't need less of it. You want more of it," Wahlforss explained. "There's infinite demand for customer understanding. So the researchers on the team can do an order of magnitude more research, and also other people who weren't researchers before can now do that as part of their job." Inside the elite engineering team that built Listen Labs before they had a working toilet Listen Labs traces its origins to a consumer app that Wahlforss and his co-founder built after meeting at Harvard. "We built this consumer app that got 20,000 downloads in one day," Wahlforss recalled. "We had all these users, and we were thinking like, okay, what can we do to get to know them better? And we built this prototype of what Listen is today." The founding team brings an unusual pedigree. Wahlforss's co-founder "was the national champion in competitive programming in Germany, and he worked at Tesla Autopilot." The company claims that 30% of its engineering team are medalists from the International Olympiad in Informatics — the same competition that produced the founders of Cognition, the AI coding startup. The Berghain billboard stunt generated approximately 5 million views across social media, according to Wahlforss. It reflected the intensity of the talent war in the Bay Area. "We had to do these things because some of our, like early employees, joined the company before we had a working toilet," he said. "But now we fixed that situation." The company grew from 5 to 40 employees in 2024 and plans to reach 150 this year. It hires engineers for non-engineering roles across marketing, growth, and operations — a bet that in the AI era, technical fluency matters everywhere. Synthetic customers and automated decisions: what Listen Labs is building next Wahlforss outlined an ambitious product roadmap that pushes into more speculative territory. The company is building "the ability to simulate your customers, so you can take all of those interviews we've done, and then extrapolate based on that and create synthetic users or simulated user voices." Beyond simulation, Listen aims to enable automated action based on research findings. "Can you not just make recommendations, but also create spawn agents to either change things in code or some customer churns? Can you give them a discount and try to bring them back?" Wahlforss acknowledged the ethical implications. "Obviously, as you said, there's kind of ethical concerns there. Of like, automated decision making overall can be bad, but we will have considerable guardrails to make sure that the companies are always in the loop." The company already handles sensitive data with care. "We don't train on any of the data," Wahlforss said. "We will also scrub any sensitive PII automatically so the model can detect that. And there are times when, for example, you work with investors, where if you accidentally mention something that could be material, non public information, the AI can actually detect that and remove any information like that." How AI could reshape the future of product development Perhaps the most provocative implication of Listen's model is how it could reshape product development itself. Wahlforss described a customer — an Australian startup — that has adopted what amounts to a continuous feedback loop. "They're based in Australia, so they're coding during the day, and then in their night, they're releasing a Listen study with an American audience. Listen validates whatever they built during the day, and they get feedback on that. They can then plug that feedback directly into coding tools like Claude Code and iterate." The vision extends Y Combinator's famous dictum — "write code, talk to users" — into an automated cycle. "Write code is now getting automated. And I think like talk to users will be as well, and you'll have this kind of infinite loop where you can start to ship this truly amazing product, almost kind of autonomously." Whether that vision materializes depends on factors beyond Listen's control — the continued improvement of AI models, enterprise willingness to trust automated research, and whether speed truly correlates with better products. A 2024 MIT study found that 95% of AI pilots fail to move into production, a statistic Wahlforss cited as the reason he emphasizes quality over demos. "I'm constantly have to emphasize like, let's make sure the quality is there and the details are right," he said. But the company's growth suggests appetite for the experiment. Microsoft's Patel said Listen has "removed the drudgery of research and brought the fun and joy back into my work." Chubbies is now pushing its founder to give everyone in the company a login. Sling Money, a stablecoin payments startup, can create a survey in ten minutes and receive results the same day. "It's a total game changer," said Ali Romero, Sling Money's marketing manager. Wahlforss has a different phrase for what he's building. When asked about the tension between speed and rigor — the long-held belief that moving fast means cutting corners — he cited Nat Friedman, the former GitHub CEO and Listen investor, who keeps a list of one-liners on his website. One of them: "Slow is fake." It's an aggressive claim for an industry built on methodological caution. But Listen Labs is betting that in the AI era, the companies that listen fastest will be the ones that win. The only question is whether customers will talk back.
10 top women in AI in 2026
AI is changing our world, but the stories of who build it often get lost in the noise. Behind the headlines and hype, a group of women are solving AI’s fundamental challenges – despite working in an industry persisently impacted by gender inequality. Women make up just 22% of AI professionals worldwide and only 12% of AI researchers. In academic publishing, female researchers account for just 29% of first authors on AI papers, a number that hasn’t increased since the mid-2000s. This is a story about ten leaders who have influenced AI despite the odds being stacked against them. Their The post 10 top women in AI in 2026 appeared first on DailyAI.