AI Tech News: Humans & Raises $480M, Eleven Labs AI Music, Xreal vs. Viture Lawsuit
- At an Axios panel at Davos, OpenAI's Chief Global Affairs Officer said the company is on track to announce the device in the second half of 2026.
- OpenAI outlined a plan to begin testing advertisements inside ChatGPT for Free and ChatGPT Go tiers in the U.S.
- AI Influencer Studio is a visual character builder, similar to the game The Sims, allowing creators to design digital personas without needing to write prompts.
Three month old AI startup Humans& raises a $480 million seed round at a $4.48 billion valuation, one of teh largest seed financings on record. Backers include Nvidia, jeff Bezos, SV Angel, GV, and Laurene Powell jobs’ Emerson Collective. Senior AI researchers from Anthropic, Google, and xAI, including Andi Peng, Georges Harik, and Noah Goodman founded the company. Humans& says it is indeed building human centric AI software focused on collaboration rather than automation, starting with an AI enhanced messaging platform. The company is researching long horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory, and user understanding, reflecting investor appetite for elite teams pursuing foundational AI research paired with product ambitions.
At an Axios panel at Davos, OpenAI’s Chief Global Affairs Officer said the company is on track to announce the device in the second half of 2026. Multiple reports suggest the initial product could be earbuds codenamed “Sweet Pea” with a unique design and custom 2-nanometer processor capable of handling AI tasks locally rather than relying on the cloud. OpenAI aims to ship tens of millions of units in year one.the strategy would give OpenAI a direct hardware presence to complement its software and nearly a billion weekly users of ChatGPT, but faces tough competition from entrenched products without deep operating-system integration.
BERLIN, GERMANY – FEBRUARY 07: Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, speaks during a panel discussion titled “The Age of AI” at the Technical University of Berlin on February 07, 2025 in Berlin, Germany. Altman said he predicts the pace of artificial intelligence’s usefulness in the next two years will accelerate markedly compared to the last two years. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
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OpenAI outlined a plan to begin testing advertisements inside ChatGPT for Free and ChatGPT Go tiers in the U.S. in the coming weeks as part of a broader effort to expand affordable access to its AI tools while diversifying revenue streams. Ads will be clearly labeled and separate from responses,placed at the bottom of answers when relevant to the conversation,and will not influence ChatGPT’s outputs. OpenAI says it will keep conversations private from advertisers,never sell user data,and give users control over personalization settings. Higher-tier subscriptions like Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise will remain ad-free. The move aims to sustain access without forcing paywalls,balancing user trust with revenue needs.
Chi Xu, founder and CEO of Xreal.
Anshel Sag