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India Hits 100mn Weekly ChatGPT Users Ahead of AI Impact Summit

Posted on by Shobhit Kalra

New Delhi: India has become one of the largest markets for ChatGPT, with 100 million people now using the AI tool every week, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The disclosure comes just ahead of the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, where OpenAI and several other global AI leaders are set to participate.

Altman shared the numbers with a leading daily just ahead of his visit at the five-day summit starting Monday. He said India is now ChatGPT’s second-largest user base after the United States, underlining the country’s growing influence in the global AI landscape. Worldwide, ChatGPT’s weekly users are nearing 900 million, reflecting rapid adoption across markets.

India’s large, young population and widespread internet access have made it a key growth driver for OpenAI. The company opened an office in New Delhi in August 2025 and tailored its offerings for the local market, including launching a low-cost ChatGPT Go plan that was later made free for Indian users for a year.

Students have played a major role in this surge. Altman noted that India has the highest number of student ChatGPT users globally, showing how AI tools are becoming deeply embedded in education and daily workflows.

However, Altman also flagged challenges around access and long-term impact.

“Given India’s size, it also risks forfeiting a vital opportunity to advance democratic AI in emerging markets around the world,” he wrote, warning that uneven access could limit broader benefits.

Altman said OpenAI plans to deepen engagement with the Indian government during the summit, with new partnerships expected to be announced.

India Steps into Global Spotlight with Landmark AI Impact Summit

Posted on by Shobhit Kalra

NEW DELHI: India is all geared up to host the AI Impact Summit 2026 from Monday at the Bharat Mandapam here. The Global AI Summit, which will conclude on February 20, is being billed by the organizers as the largest AI summit ever held globally and the first of its kind in the Global South.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the event at the Paris AI Action Summit last year and will formally inaugurate it on Thursday, followed by a CEO roundtable with global industry leaders and policymakers.

The five-day summit draws delegations from over 100 countries, including 15 to 20 heads of state. French President Emmanuel Macron attends during his fourth visit to India, deepening AI cooperation as part of a joint India-France Year of Innovation 2026. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva arrives with a large business delegation. Finland, Slovakia, Switzerland, the UAE, and Spain are also represented at head-of-government level.

The technology lineup is equally notable. Sam Altman of OpenAI, Sundar Pichai of Google, and Anthropic’s leadership are confirmed attendees. A US delegation of more than 120 senior executives from over 100 companies is organized by the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum, co-led by Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam.

White House adviser Michael Kratsios heads the official US government delegation.

India plans to present its IndiaAI Mission at the summit, including 12 indigenous foundation models built by domestic startups and research institutions. The expo component spans 70,000 square meters and features over 300 exhibitors from 30 countries. The summit’s shift in framing from AI safety toward AI impact and measurable outcomes, signals where global AI governance priorities are heading in 2026.

Check Now: LIVE Updates on India AI Impact Summit 2026

Newo Raises $25M to Deploy AI Receptionists for Small Businesses

Posted on by Yashika Aneja

SAN FRANCISCO: Newo.ai closes a $25 million Series A this week to scale its AI voice platform for small and medium businesses, bringing total funding to approximately $32 million.

Ratmir Timashev, co-founder of Veeam Software and OH.io, leads the round after backing the company through multiple earlier financings. Participating investors include Aloniq, Constructor, Acrobator, and s16vc.

Founded in 2023 by David Yang and Luba Rein, Newo builds AI receptionists that answer calls, book appointments, qualify leads, and handle customer inquiries around the clock across phone, SMS, web chat, and WhatsApp.

The platform runs on Google Vertex AI using Gemini 2.5 Flash and targets a problem most small businesses quietly absorb: research by Newo finds that SMBs miss 20 to 40 percent of inbound calls due to staffing gaps and after-hours demand.

The company’s proprietary Zero-Hallucination Architecture runs multiple voice and text agents in parallel to verify responses before delivery, a design intended to prevent the errors common in demo-stage voice AI once deployed in real business environments. The system delivers sub-second latency and automatic failover to a backup reasoning stack if performance degrades.

More than 15,000 AI agents are now live on the platform, concentrated in dental practices, restaurants, home services, and cleaning businesses. Revenue doubled in the final two months of 2025.

One early customer, Image Orthodontics of the San Francisco Bay Area, recovered over $400,000 in incremental revenue in a single quarter after deploying Newo to capture missed after-hours bookings. The company distributes primarily through a white-label partner network that now exceeds 200 certified MSPs, VoIP providers, and agencies.

Monaco Launches AI-Native CRM With $35M to Take On Salesforce

Posted on by Amita Parul

SAN FRANCISCO: Monaco emerges from stealth this week with $35 million in funding and a public beta launch, positioning itself as an AI-native alternative to legacy CRM platforms in a direct challenge to Salesforce and HubSpot.

Founders Fund leads both the $10 million seed and $25 million Series A rounds, with Human Capital participating. Angel backers include Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison, Y Combinator chief Garry Tan, and Greenoaks Capital founder Neil Mehta.

The startup is founded by Sam Blond, formerly head of sales at Brex and most recently a partner at Founders Fund, alongside his brother Brian Blond of Human Capital, Abishek Viswanathan previously CPO at Apollo and Qualtrics, and Malay Desai formerly SVP of engineering at Clari.

The founding team’s deep sales pedigree shapes Monaco’s core bet: that today’s dominant CRM platforms were built for a human-operated world and are ill-suited for one where AI agents execute the work.

Monaco’s platform covers the full sales cycle from a single system automatically building and scoring a startup’s total addressable market, identifying buyers through connection and activity signals, running AI-generated outreach campaigns, drafting follow-up emails, and updating CRM records.

Unlike fully automated AI sales tools, Monaco layers experienced human sales professionals into the loop to monitor and guide the AI’s work, a hedge against hallucinations and off-brand outreach that purely agentic competitors skip.

The company targets seed and Series A startups priced below Salesforce’s enterprise tiers, charging a flat fee currently discounted through the beta period. Blond frames the ambition plainly: “In the broad category of sales technology, there’s a market leader right now. That market leader is Salesforce. We are in the early innings of the next platform shift.”

Meta Plans Facial Recognition for Ray-Ban Smart Glasses This Year

Posted on by Amita Parul

SAN FRANCISCO: Meta plans to add facial recognition to its Ray-Ban smart glasses as soon as this year, the New York Times reports, citing four people with knowledge of the plans. The feature, internally called “Name Tag,” lets wearers identify people in their field of view and pull up information about them through Meta’s AI assistant, a capability the company itself acknowledges carries “safety and privacy risks” in internal documents.

The move marks a significant reversal. Meta shut down its Facebook photo-tagging facial recognition system in 2021, citing concerns about finding the right balance on a sensitive technology.

It also considered and rejected adding the feature to the first generation of Ray-Ban Meta glasses that same year over technical and ethical hurdles. Now, with its smart glasses selling well and AI capabilities expanding rapidly, the company is revisiting the idea.

Meta is also developing a separate “super sensing” mode for future glasses that would run cameras and sensors continuously throughout the day, similar to how AI note-takers summarize meetings with facial recognition serving as a core feature to identify colleagues and trigger contextual reminders.

The announcement reignites longstanding privacy concerns. In 2024, two Harvard students demonstrated that Ray-Ban Metas paired with a commercial facial recognition tool could identify strangers on the Boston subway in seconds.

The ACLU warns the technology poses a threat to the practical anonymity people rely on in public spaces. Meta’s position is further complicated by its history the company has paid more than $7 billion to settle privacy lawsuits related to facial data collection, and quietly relaxed its internal privacy review process in January 2025, giving product teams more authority to ship features faster.

Simile Raises $100M to Build AI That Simulates Human Decision-Making

Posted on by Anurag Shukla

SAN FRANCISCO: Stanford spinout Simile emerges from stealth this week with $100 million in Series A funding to build what it calls the first AI foundation model for simulating human behavior. Index Ventures leads the round, with Bain Capital Ventures, A*, and Hanabi Capital participating. AI luminaries Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy also back the company.

Founded by Stanford computer scientists Joon Park, Michael Bernstein, Percy Liang, and Lainie Yallen, Simile trains its model on interviews with hundreds of real people, transaction records, and behavioral science literature.

The result is a platform that builds high-fidelity digital twins of individuals, AI agents that replicate how specific people think, prefer, and decide. The model took seven months to develop and, in independent testing, reproduces survey responses with 85% of the accuracy of the actual humans it models.

The commercial applications span industries. CVS Health uses Simile to model which products customers will buy before committing to shelf placements. Telstra, Australia’s largest mobile provider, is also among early customers.

On the corporate side, Simile tells Bloomberg its model correctly forecast eight out of ten analyst questions on a simulated earnings call, giving executives a rehearsal tool that doesn’t require actual analysts. The platform can also stress-test product launches, UI changes, and policy announcements against simulated audience reactions before anything ships.

The founding team’s academic roots trace directly to Smallville, a landmark 2023 research project that placed 25 AI agents in a simulated environment and demonstrated that generative agents could reproduce both individual and group behavior with measurable accuracy.

Simile treats simulation fidelity as a scientific discipline, a differentiator it argues separates it from competitors building synthetic research tools without the same empirical grounding.

Elon Musk Tags Anthropic ‘Misanthropic’, Says Its AI ‘Hates Whites & Asians’

Posted on by Shobhit Kalra

New York: Elon Musk, who leads AI firm xAI, has taken a public swipe at AI startup Anthropic, just hours after the company announced a massive $30 billion funding round that pushed its valuation to $380 billion.

Posting on X on Thursday, Musk criticised modern AI systems and alleged bias in their behaviour. In his post, he wrote, “AI hates Whites & Asians, especially Chinese, heterosexuals and men,” and went on to call the direction of AI development “misanthropic and evil.” Musk also appeared to mock Anthropic by playing on its name, suggesting the company was headed toward irony and failure.

The comments came soon after Anthropic confirmed its latest fundraising, which more than doubled its valuation compared to its previous round. The startup said the new capital will be used to scale research, expand product development, and strengthen infrastructure supporting its Claude family of AI models.

Anthropic has emerged as one of the most influential players in advanced AI, with strong momentum in enterprise and developer adoption, particularly for its coding-focused tools such as Claude Code. The company is backed by major technology and investment firms, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia.

So far, Anthropic has not issued any public response to Musk’s remarks. The exchange highlights growing tensions and sharp differences in philosophy among leading figures shaping the future of artificial intelligence.

Anthropic closes $30B Series G, valuation jumps to $380B

Posted on by Shobhit Kalra

San Francisco: Anthropic has closed a $30 billion Series G funding round, pushing the AI company’s valuation to $380 billion, the company announced on Thursday. The new valuation marks a sharp rise from its $183 billion valuation during its Series F round completed just a few months ago. Some details of the fundraising had surfaced earlier through reports.

The latest round was led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and investment firm Coatue, with several major investors joining as co-leads. These included D. E. Shaw Ventures, Founders Fund, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX.

Other backers participating in the round include Accel, General Catalyst, Jane Street, and the Qatar Investment Authority. The funding also includes a portion of previously announced investments from Microsoft and Nvidia.

The massive capital raise comes as Anthropic intensifies competition with OpenAI for enterprise customers and broader influence in the AI market. OpenAI has also signalled plans to raise as much as $100 billion more, which could take its valuation to around $830 billion.

Anthropic has been gaining traction by focusing heavily on coding-focused AI tools, particularly Claude Code, which has seen strong adoption among developers. The company said its current annualised revenue run rate stands at $14 billion, with Claude Code alone contributing more than $2.5 billion. Business subscriptions for the tool have grown rapidly, with enterprise customers now accounting for more than half of its revenue.

Commenting on the fundraising, Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s chief financial officer, said, “Whether it is entrepreneurs, startups, or the world’s largest enterprises, the message from our customers is the same: Claude is increasingly becoming more critical to how businesses work. This fundraising reflects the incredible demand we are seeing from these customers, and we will use this investment to continue building the enterprise-grade products and models they have come to depend on.”

Anthropic has also taken a more proactive stance on AI regulation, recently committing funds to support policymakers who back stronger oversight of the sector.

Apple brings official YouTube app to Vision Pro

Posted on by Shobhit Kalra

California: Apple has finally rolled out a dedicated YouTube app for its mixed-reality headset Apple Vision Pro, ending a long-standing gap in the platform’s app lineup. The app becomes available two years after the headset’s launch, and replaces the earlier workaround where users had to rely on Safari or third-party apps to watch YouTube content.

With the native app, Vision Pro users can now access the full range of YouTube formats, including Shorts, 3D videos, VR 180 content, and 360-degree videos.

YouTube’s immersive formats fit naturally into Apple’s spatial computing experience, with even standard 2D videos gaining a subtle sense of depth inside the headset.

The timing of the launch is notable. Google has been working closely with Samsung on its upcoming Galaxy XR, where YouTube and Netflix are already available.

On Vision Pro, YouTube now joins other major streaming services that have supported the platform from early on, including Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount+, and Peacock. Netflix, however, still does not offer a native Vision Pro app.

Apple has continued to strengthen Vision Pro with powerful hardware, including its M5 chip, and highlights access to over a million apps and hundreds of 3D movies through the App Store and Apple TV.

With YouTube now officially on board, Vision Pro’s media experience feels far more complete for everyday users.

We See More Searches than ChatGPT, claims Pinterest CEO Amid Earnings Drop

Posted on by Shobhit Kalra

New Delhi: Pinterest CEO Bill Ready sought to reassure investors after the company posted weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter results, arguing that the platform should be viewed as a powerful search engine rather than just a social app.

Speaking after the earnings release, Ready compared Pinterest’s scale to ChatGPT, pointing to data that shows Pinterest handling a similar volume of searches each month.

According to Ready, ChatGPT processes about 75 billion searches per month, while Pinterest sees roughly 80 billion searches, which translate into around 1.7 billion clicks. “That makes us one of the largest search destinations in the world,” he said.

He added, “Pinterest searches are far more commercial, noting that over half of them are tied to shopping intent, compared with only about 2% of ChatGPT searches.”

The comments followed a disappointing earnings report. Pinterest reported $1.32 billion in fourth-quarter revenue, slightly below expectations, while earnings per share also missed forecasts.

The company’s revenue outlook for the first quarter of 2026 came in lower than what analysts had anticipated, citing reduced ad spending from large advertisers in Europe and disruption in its home category following new furniture tariffs.

Despite the financial miss, user growth remained strong. Monthly active users climbed 12% year over year to 619 million, beating market estimates. Still, investors reacted sharply, sending Pinterest shares down 20% in after-hours trading.

The results highlight Pinterest’s long-standing challenge of turning high user engagement into steady advertising revenue. As AI-driven platforms grow more attractive to advertisers, this gap may widen.

Addressing competition from AI-powered shopping tools, Ready pointed to Pinterest’s strengths in visual discovery and personalisation, which surface products without typed prompts. He also referenced the company’s Amazon partnership and added, “That’ll actually be one of the easiest parts of the commercial journey to solve.”