TruEra, a startup that offers an AI quality management solution to optimize, explain and monitor machine learning models, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series B round led by Menlo Ventures. Existing investors Greylock Partners, Wing Venture Capital (which led its $12 million Series A round in late 2020), Harpoon Ventures, Conversion Capital, the Data Community Fund, as well as new investors Forgepoint Capital and the B Capital Group's Ascent Fund also participated in this round. In total, TruEra has now raised $42.3 million. "We believe that the next big challenge in AI is the quality challenge," TruEra CEO and co-founder Will Uppington said. "AI is at an inflection point: lots of opportunities but also a lot of challenges to make AI actually work in the enterprise. And we think that's the major issue that's preventing AI systems from getting into real-world use and actually delivering on KPIs."

There are many photos of Tom Hanks, but none like the images of the leading everyman shown at the Black Hat computer security conference Wednesday: They were made by machine-learning algorithms, not a camera. Philip Tully, a data scientist at security company FireEye, generated the hoax Hankses to test how easily open-source software from artificial intelligence labs could be adapted to misinformation campaigns. His conclusion: "People with not a lot of experience can take these machine-learning models and do pretty powerful things with them," he says. Seen at full resolution, FireEye's fake Hanks images have flaws like unnatural neck folds and skin textures. But they accurately reproduce the familiar details of the actor's face like his brow furrows and green-grey eyes, which gaze cooly at the viewer.

There are many photos of Tom Hanks, but none like the images of the leading everyman shown at the Black Hat computer security conference Wednesday: They were made by machine learning algorithms, not a camera. Philip Tully, a data scientist at security company FireEye, generated the hoax Hankses to test how easily open source software from artificial intelligence labs could be adapted to misinformation campaigns. His conclusion: "People with not a lot of experience can take these machine learning models and do pretty powerful things with them," he says. Seen at full resolution, FireEye's fake Hanks images have flaws like unnatural neck folds and skin textures. But they accurately reproduce the familiar details of the actor's face like his brow furrows and green-gray eyes, which gaze cooly at the viewer.

Jason Blazaikis's automated far-right propagandist knows the hits. Asked to complete the phrase "The greatest danger facing the world today," the software declared it to be "Islamo-Nazism," which it said will cause "a Holocaust on the population of Europe." The paragraph of text that followed also slurred Jews and admonished that "nations who value their peoples [sic] legends need to recognize the magnitude of the Islamic threat." Blazaikis is director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counter-Terrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, where researchers are attempting to preview the future of online information warfare. The text came from machine learning software they had fed a collection of manifestos from right-wing terrorists and mass-murderers such as Dylann Roof and Anders Breivik.

Months after Susan Tully and friends bought a pair of professional video game teams for an estimated 1 million, her four-man "Call of Duty" squad finished its season in 11th out of 12 places. There, exposure and sponsor interest would dissolve. The distress Tully felt as she spent an April afternoon in a small, dark Burbank video studio watching her team attempt to avoid demotion was not the emotion she banked on when she put her money into the burgeoning industry. But upheaval is becoming something of a routine for the investors fueling pro video gaming's rapid rise. China's richest man, Russia's richest man, the U.S.'s fourth-richest man and a string of American multimillionaires all have ties to teams now.