The Boston startup uses AI to translate and verify legacy software for defense contractors, arguing modernization can't come at the cost of new bugs. Code Metal, a Boston-based startup that uses AI to write code and translate it into other programming languages, just closed a $125 million Series B funding round from new and existing investors. The news comes just a few months after the startup raised $36 million in series A financing led by Accel. Code Metal is part of a new wave of startups aiming to modernize the tech industry by using AI to generate code and translate it across programming languages. One of the questions that persists about AI-assisted code, though, is whether the output is any good--and what the consequences might be if it's not.

The AI search startup once predicted advertising would be a massive business. Perplexity is abandoning plans to put ads in its AI search product as the industry looks for sustainable business models that won't hurt user trust. The changes are part of a larger strategic shift for the company, which has long focused on disrupting Google Search's business. Google is changing to be like Perplexity more than Perplexity is trying to take on Google, said a Perplexity executive at a press briefing on Tuesday. Executives spoke to the press on the condition of anonymity.

Scout AI is using technology borrowed from the AI industry to power lethal weapons--and recently demonstrated its explosive potential. Like many Silicon Valley companies today, Scout AI is training large AI models and agents to automate chores. The big difference is that instead of writing code, answering emails, or buying stuff online, Scout AI's agents are designed to seek and destroy things in the physical world with exploding drones. In a recent demonstration, held at an undisclosed military base in central California, Scout AI's technology was put in charge of a self-driving off-road vehicle and a pair of lethal drones. The agents used these systems to find a truck hiding in the area, and then blew it to bits using an explosive charge.

WIRED spoke with the Zoomer founders of a platform where AI agents hire humans to do real-world tasks. Their pitch: People would love to have a clanker as their boss. For centuries, people have catastrophized about robots taking away jobs. On February 1, the paradigm shifted: bots are jobs. Now, 518,284 humans--and rapidly counting--are offering their labor to AI agents on a new online marketplace called RentAHuman . There are classifieds to count pigeons in Washington ($30/hour); deliver CBD gummies ($75/hour); play exhibition badminton ($100/hour); and anything else you could possibly imagine that a disembodied agent couldn't do.

San Francisco's AI startups are pushing workers to grind endlessly, hinting at pressures soon hitting other sectors Not long after the terms "996" and "grindcore" entered the popular lexicon, people started telling me stories about what was happening at startups in San Francisco, ground zero for the artificial intelligence economy. There was the one about the founder who hadn't taken a weekend off in more than six months. The woman who joked that she'd given up her social life to work at a prestigious AI company. Or the employees who had started taking their shoes off in the office because, well, if you were going to be there for at least 12 hours a day, six days a week, wouldn't you rather be wearing slippers? "If you go to a cafe on a Sunday, everyone is working," says Sanju Lokuhitige, the co-founder of Mythril, a pre-seed-stage AI startup, who moved to San Francisco in November to be closer to the action.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and a host of other major tech companies have found common ground in F/ai, a new startup accelerator based out of Paris. The largest western AI labs are taking a break from sniping at one another to partner on a new accelerator program for European startups building applications on top of their models. Paris-based incubator Station F will run the program, named F/ai. On Tuesday, Station F announced it had partnered with Meta, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and Mistral, which it says marks the first time the firms are all participating in a single accelerator. Other partners include cloud and semiconductor companies AWS, AMD, Qualcomm, and OVH Cloud.

W hen Lunos, an AI startup in New York City, was gearing up for launch, its founder and chief executive, Duncan Barrigan, and his team wanted to make a splash. So they shelled out $3,500 to do the unconventional: hire a horse and a cowboy to lasso the bull of Wall Street. Wearing ranch gear and a western hat stamped with the Lunos logo, he lassoed the bull's horns as invitees and curious passersby watched. He and the horse then circled the statue, handing out cowboy hats and branded stress balls. The goal was simple: deliver Lunos's pitch of "taming the wild west" of accounts receivables in the most literal, public way possible.

Founders used to be wedded to their companies. Now, anyone can be lured away for the right price. Since the middle of last year, there have been at least three major AI "acqui-hires" in Silicon Valley. Meta invested more than $14 billion in Scale AI and brought on its CEO, Alexandr Wang; Google spent a cool $2.4 billion to license Windsurf's technology and fold its cofounders and research teams into DeepMind; and Nvidia wagered $20 billion on Groq's inference technology and hired its CEO and other staffers. The frontier AI labs, meanwhile, have been playing a high stakes and seemingly never-ending game of talent musical chairs.

Fauna, a new startup, is betting that humanoid robots will find success as hospitality workers, research assistants, and entertainers. The newest humanoid robot on the scene, Sprout, is not designed to carry boxes or stack shelves. Instead, this charming and relatively cheap model, roughly the size of a 9-year-old child, is meant to help customers in hotels, shops, and restaurants. "We said, 'What if we could build something lightweight, engaging, and safe to be around, and capable enough to do some exciting things?'" says Robert Cochran, cofounder and CEO of Fauna, the startup behind Sprout. Sprout is available to purchase starting today from $50,000. Cochran adds that his firm is already talking to hotels about using Sprout as a butler that brings toothbrushes and other items to guests in need.

The Math on AI Agents Doesn't Add Up A research paper suggests AI agents are mathematically doomed to fail. The big AI companies promised us that 2025 would be "the year of the AI agents." It turned out to be the year of AI agents, and kicking the can for that transformational moment to 2026 or maybe later. But what if the answer to the question "When will our lives be fully automated by generative AI robots that perform our tasks for us and basically run the world?" is, like that New Yorker cartoon, "How about never?" That was basically the message of a paper published without much fanfare some months ago, smack in the middle of the overhyped year of "agentic AI." Entitled " Hallucination Stations: On Some Basic Limitations of Transformer-Based Language Models," it purports to mathematically show that "LLMs are incapable of carrying out computational and agentic tasks beyond a certain complexity."