Articles about artificial intelligence

Billionaire Jeff Bezos: ‘Success is not villainy’

Speaking from Blue Origin’s factory floor in Florida, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos offered an unapologetic defense of free enterprise, declaring that “success is not villainy.” For Seattle and the broader tech landscape, his comments offer a window into the foundational mindset that built Amazon—and arrive as Washington voters prepare to decide the fate of high-earner tax policy this November. Read More

Shield AI selects Seattle area to build X-BAT autonomous fighter jet, plans to add 4,000 jobs by early 2030s

Defense tech upstart Shield AI has selected the Puget Sound region as the manufacturing hub for X-BAT, bringing AI-piloted fighter production to the region and promising 4,000 jobs by the early 2030s. Read More

Kanu AI emerges from stealth with $11.7M to turn employee workflows into custom software

Founded by Y Combinator alum and former machine learning engineer Karan Grover, Seattle-based Kanu AI has raised $11.7 million to solve a persistent enterprise problem: valuable operational knowledge getting trapped in employees’ heads and spreadsheets. Led by Trilogy Equity Partners, the new funding will help scale Kanu’s platform, which automatically converts day-to-day employee workflows into permanent, production-grade software deployed directly within a company’s cloud. Read More

Startup Spotlight: Marketing vets launch Kompeld to measure if a company’s story is actually working

Kompeld analyzes how companies describe themselves and scores their messaging. It looks at websites, sales materials and other company communications to identify what’s clear, what’s not, and where the message could be stronger. Read More

Goldman Sachs plants flag in Bellevue, opening hub for more than 125 AI and cloud engineers

Goldman Sachs is expanding its Seattle-area technology footprint with a new Bellevue engineering hub that will house more than 125 employees focused on AI and cloud transformation. Read More

Microsoft floats rules for AI models as industry weighs slowdown

Microsoft published a draft code of conduct for its in-house AI models, barring them from resisting shutdown or hiding their reasoning — as Anthropic, OpenAI and Elon Musk call for slowing AI development. Read More

General Robotics, led by Microsoft vets, says its AI has cut robot setup from a month to hours

A Redmond startup founded by former Microsoft researchers says its GRID platform now automates much of the engineering that keeps robots stuck in pilot projects. CEO Ashish Kapoor says the company has roughly a dozen customers and revenue in the millions of dollars. Read More

WSU President Betsy Cantwell builds custom AI agents — but won’t ask them to predict the Apple Cup

Former national lab scientist and current Washington State University President Betsy Cantwell uses custom AI agents to de-risk research and model complex financial scenarios for college athletics. But the top Cougar believes artificial intelligence can never replace human wonder in education and rejects the algorithms to predict outcomes like this weekend’s Apple Cup. Read More

Pro.com co-founders reunite to launch OnTrade, an AI startup for the wealth management industry

OnTrade deploys AI agents to handle analytical work for wealth management firms, connecting their fragmented software systems into a single interface. The Seattle startup has been building in stealth for two years with backing from General Catalyst and Madrona. Read More

Microsoft 2.5: Superintelligence leader Ali Farhadi points company toward AI self-sufficiency

Ali Farhadi, who leads Microsoft’s Superintelligence team, talks with Mary Jo Foley about building the company’s own frontier AI models, tuning them for specific industries, and what he describes as a long-term mission of self-sufficiency. Read More

Etzioni on AI: Bill Gates has the right diagnosis but the wrong prescription

Computer scientist and AI veteran Oren Etzioni agrees with Bill Gates that AI is displacing young workers first and eroding the tax base that funds the safety net. But he argues that two of the three fixes Gates proposes in his new essay would fail, and makes the case for an alternative approach. Read More

‘I am very concerned’: Bill Gates says the world needs a plan to deal with AI, and he has three ideas to start

Bill Gates says the “turbulent AI era” has arrived, and the AI industry is crossing safety lines it once promised to respect. In a new essay and an interview with GeekWire, he lays out three ideas for managing what’s coming: new national and global institutions, a category of jobs reserved for humans, and a tax on AI and robots. Read More

Seattle’s AI weed wars: One startup maps them, another zaps them

Two Seattle-area startups are taking different approaches to an age-old farming problem: using AI to find weeds — and then eliminate them. TerraClear is mapping individual weeds across entire fields, while Carbon Robotics is using AI-powered lasers to zap them. Now, increasingly sophisticated AI models are giving both approaches a bigger opportunity: teaching machines to understand the farm itself. Read More

Report: Amazon eyes ‘fully automated’ delivery stations to bring robotics to the last mile

Amazon is developing an internal initiative called Project Tetromino to build “fully automated” delivery stations, according to an internal planning document obtained by Business Insider. The effort could rely on technology from Boxbot, a robotics startup that uses AI-driven storage trays to sequence packages for vehicle loading. Read More

Washington state pioneered a privacy model for the nation — when will it finally pass the law at home?

More than 20 states have adopted privacy laws modeled on legislation first introduced in Washington state in 2019. Despite this, Washington still hasn’t passed a law of its own, and AI is only complicating the issue. AG Nick Brown is pushing lawmakers to try again this session. Read More

Etzioni on AI: An Opinionated Glossary of AI

Everyone in tech says things like LLM, open weights, RAG and agent; far fewer could define precisely what they all mean. Oren Etzioni sorts out about 30 AI terms in plain English, with a blunt verdict on each and one novel phrase he believes isn’t used enough. Read More

Illustration: Satellite swinging around Earth

Starcloud raises $250M to support the creation of data center satellite network in league with Nvidia

Seattle-area space startup will use Nvidia’s next-gen chip on its own next-gen satellites for AI data processing. Read More

Inside Anduril’s AI warfighting buildup: Defense giant sees a path to 1,000 Seattle-area engineers

GeekWire toured Anduril’s unmarked Bellevue office, where the defense company is building augmented reality glasses, digital night vision and edge computing hardware for the U.S. military. Senior vice president Tom Keane says the regional engineering workforce could easily grow from 560 people to 1,000 in the not-too-distant future. Read More

Seattle keeps No. 2 spot in closely watched tech talent ranking, with warning signs

The region held onto the No. 2 spot in CBRE’s annual tech talent scorecard, behind only the Bay Area. The report also flagged Seattle’s office vacancy rate, the highest of the 50 markets ranked, and a population of 20-somethings that shrank between 2019 and 2024, raising questions about the pipeline. Read More

Internal memo: Eight execs out at Expedia Group in AI-driven shakeup

Expedia Group is parting ways with at least eight vice presidents and senior vice presidents as it reorganizes its product and technology organization around AI, according to an internal memo obtained by GeekWire. The memo from the company’s product and technology chiefs also names five leaders who were promoted. Read More

Etzioni on AI: Become a power user

Oren Etzioni lays out 20 habits and settings that separate AI power users from everyone else, from letting AI interview you before it starts, to deciding once what it may never do on your behalf. Read More

Etzioni on AI: Claude is marking its text — Caveat Promptor!

Claude models launched on or after Aug. 2 embed an invisible mark in everything they write. It’s woven into the text itself, so it travels when you copy and paste. You didn’t opt in, you can’t see it, and you can’t turn it off. Here’s how it works, and what it means. Read More

Lev, the PSL spinout building an ‘AI co-founder’ for startups, names tech vet Jay Bartot as CTO

Jay Bartot has spent most of his career building startups and advising other founders. Now he’s joining another veteran entrepreneur in a bet that technology can do a lot of that work. Read More

Farewell, Mico: Microsoft’s cute little AI blob is going the way of Bob

Mico, the animated character Microsoft introduced last October to accompany Copilot’s voice mode, is being retired as a core feature as part of the Copilot app merger. It joins Bob, Clippy and Cortana on the long list of Microsoft characters that didn’t last. Read More

Microsoft starts merging its Copilot consumer and business apps in advance of ‘Super App’ rollout

Microsoft is combining its consumer and business Copilot apps into a single app, in a gradual transition starting this week. Copilot Podcasts, Group Chat and Deep Research will be retired beginning Aug. 18, along with Mico, the animated character added to Copilot’s voice mode last year. Read More

This former Amazon exec is moving his startup’s HQ to Texas, and he has a few notes for Seattle

Auger will keep and grow its 115-person engineering office in Bellevue, but co-founder and CEO Dave Clark has relocated the supply chain startup’s headquarters to North Dallas. He explains the decision, and assesses the business climate in the region he’s leaving. Read More

Ex-Meta AI research director raises $10.25M from Trilogy and Madrona for stealth physical AI startup

Kevin Carlberg, who led AI research teams at Meta focused on wearable computing, has raised $10.25 million for Noosphere Labs, a stealth startup working on what it calls “human-centered physical intelligence.” Trilogy Equity Partners led the round, with major participation from Madrona. Read More

Microsoft 2.5: How EVP Charles Lamanna is helping turn Microsoft into the ‘Copilot company’

Charles Lamanna, who leads Microsoft’s Copilot, agents, and platform work, is helping build the coming Copilot Super App — a single front door meant to unify the company’s sprawling AI products. He talks with Mary Jo Foley about the plan, the “Copilot Palooza” it’s meant to fix, and why Microsoft wants to be “the Copilot company.” Read More

This startup just raised $6M for an AI tutor that helps kids figure it out themselves

Wild Zebra raised $6 million to expand an AI learning platform for math and reading that asks students questions rather than just giving them answers. The company says it now reaches tens of thousands of students in grades 2 through 9. Read More

The startup idea that convinced a UW computer science legend to leave Google after 27 years

Jeff Dean, who earned his computer science Ph.D. at the University of Washington, is leaving Google after 27 years and taking three of the company’s top AI researchers with him. Their startup, Discovery Loop, aims to automate the scientific method itself, and Google is helping fund it. Read More