Brian Seong

KT Genie Music launches the first conversational AI music platform in South Korea, powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI, with a patent pending. #MusicTech #TechNews #AI #TechNews Link: https://lnkd.in/gHwQcbav 

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Quantum Universe, an XR game developer, announced on the 3rd that it has raised ₩2.5B ($1.8M) in strategic funding from IBK Industrial Bank of Korea and ID Ventures. This marks the first follow-up investment since the company pivoted to a game-focused XR studio in 2023. The investment follows the global success of The ChicKing Dead, Quantum Universe’s new VR title launched on Meta Quest in April. Set in a unique world where chickens battle a zombie virus, the game combines flight-based PvP gameplay with the trending arm-based locomotion system, gaining rapid traction among North American VR gamers. With additional technical and marketing support from Meta, Quantum Universe is accelerating its push into the U.S. market. Since its pivot, the company has strengthened its capabilities by hiring developers from industry leaders such as Netmarble, Tencent, and Krafton. In January, Choi Yong-wook, former Head of Krafton Asia, joined as Co-CEO to lead the gaming division. Quantum Universe plans to expand its XR game portfolio starting with The ChicKing Dead, aiming to establish itself as a leading XR gaming studio. Co-CEO Lee Min-woo emphasized that the investment reflects market recognition of The ChicKing Dead’s potential and Quantum Universe’s growth prospects in the XR gaming industry. Backed by Meta’s support, the company plans to strengthen its presence as a leading XR game developer in North America. Source: Maeil Business Newspaper #TheChicKingDead #VRGaming #XRGaming #MetaverseGames #MetaQuest #KoreanGaming #GamingStartup #StrategicFunding #VRGameDevelopment #XRStudio #GamingIndustry #GamingEcosystem #NorthAmericaGaming

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Korean robotics startup CarbonSix secured $4.3M seed funding from global investors, aiming to automate delicate manufacturing tasks through advanced robotic AI and hand technologies. https://lnkd.in/g_HDz5d6

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1000 tokens per second ! OpenAI's cerebras inference infra is coming online . 3.6 million output token per hour capacity. regular inference will start to feel too slow

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🤖 Unitree Robotics and NetEase Partner to Transform Robot Training Through Virtual Worlds Unitree Robotics has partnered with gaming giant NetEase to revolutionize how robots learn and adapt. The collaboration uses game-world simulations to train humanoid robots in complex, lifelike environments before real-world testing. By combining AI, motion capture, and gaming dynamics, the partnership could speed up robot development and make humanoids more agile and responsive. This could mark a new era where robots learn not just from labs, but from virtual worlds. 🔗 Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/g7WyQZTv

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Google's latest Gemini update is not about hype. It targets the things that break real work. Here is what is new: 🔹 Ultra-low latency: up to 40% faster time to first token 🔹 2M+ token context window: process large inputs without losing the thread 🔹 Deeper multimodality: native audio, video, and image cross-reasoning 🔹 Stronger multi-step reasoning: fewer contradictions, cleaner logic chains Better models do not fix bad processes, though. The biggest wins come when you pair stronger reasoning with stronger inputs, clear briefs, defined constraints, and a proper review step. Without that, you get more confident wrong answers. You can access it today through the Gemini API, Vertex AI, the Gemini app, or NotebookLM. The right route depends on your needs and what you are building. We have broken it all down, what's new, where to use it, and how to get reliable outputs. Link in comments 👇 #AI #Gemini #GoogleAI #MarketingStrategy #AIForBusiness

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🚀 Mem0 raises $24M Series A to power the memory layer for #AI applications San Francisco-based Mem0 million in Series A funding led by Basis Set Ventures, with participation from Peak XV Partners, Kindred Ventures, @GitHub Fund, and Y Combinator. Strategic investors from Datadog, Supabase, PostHog, GitHub, and Weights & Biases also joined the round. Founded in 2023 by Taranjeet Singh and Deshraj Yadav, Mem0 enables developers to easily integrate persistent memory into AI systems — with just three lines of code. Its platform helps applications remember past interactions, filter outdated or conflicting data, and recall relevant context when needed — bringing true continuity and personalization to AI. The new capital will be used to expand engineering, scale enterprise deployments, and build partnerships across the AI tooling ecosystem. 💡 Mem0 is shaping the future of memory-native AI — enabling smarter, more context-aware applications. #AI #Infrastructure #StartupFunding #FundingNews #ArtificialIntelligence #AgenticAI #DeveloperTools #LLM #MachineLearning #Mem0 #PeakXV #YCombinator

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Congratulations to Yann LeCun and the AMI Labs team. Following Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, this is another major capital signal that serious money is moving into 𝐧𝐨𝐧-𝐋𝐋𝐌 paradigm. AMI Labs, just raised $1.03B at a $3.5B pre-money valuation to build AI around world models rather than LLMs. And it changed something deeper: the AI race is no longer just an LLM race. It has split into three camps. 1) 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐋𝐌 𝐂𝐚𝐦𝐩 The bet is simple: scale text prediction. LLMs demand massive data, compute, and energy as an ongoing requirement. Hallucinations are architectural. Periodic retraining is mandatory. The weaknesses are structural: lacks reliability, adaptability, predictability, and accountability. These systems are frozen after training, cannot learn continuously and brittle in the real world. That is why so much of today’s AI industry looks like scaffolding built around static models: wrappers, guardrails, orchestration layers, patches, and human babysitting. In many cases it is productivity theater with no real intelligence. 2) 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝-𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥 𝐂𝐚𝐦𝐩 This is where Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs and Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs sit. The bet here is to move beyond text into multimodal world prediction: learning from video, audio, space, and sensor data to support reasoning, planning, and eventually robotics and other physical-world systems. This is a real break from traditional LLM thinking. But it still appears to remain within the pre-trained-model paradigm: train → deploy → retrain Smarter than text prediction, yes. But not yet a full break from model-centric AI. This camp simulates a better model of the world by improving the representation of reality, but they do not create a system that truly learns. 3) 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐞𝐥𝐟-𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐈 𝐂𝐚𝐦𝐩 This camp starts from a different premise. Real intelligence is the ability to continuously learn, adapt, and apply what is learned across changing contexts. That means persistent memory, reasoning, understanding, dynamic world models, and autonomous adaptation through experience. These systems self-improve with experience. The result is compounding intelligence, not just faster or more fluent answers. This is developmental intelligence that starts with foundational knowledge, then develops upward through experience, without consuming planetary-scale data, compute, and energy. None of this can be brute-forced, it's the hardest and the least crowded path. This is the real paradigm shift: compounding ROI, no endless retraining, far lower resource requirements, and a cleaner path to real intelligence. AMI Labs is more ambitious than LLMs, but real intelligence comes from continuous learning and compouding capabilities through use in production. 𝐋𝐋𝐌𝐬 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞. 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 𝐦𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞. 𝐒𝐞𝐥𝐟-𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐈 𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝. That is the emerging stack. The real AI race has only just begun.

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Aureal One raised $3M in its presale — combining skill-to-earn mechanics, on-chain anti-cheat systems, and its own gaming blockchain (Aureal Chain). This is more than a gaming moment. It’s a sign of how fast on-chain infrastructure is evolving: - Game engines now embed blockchains - Tokens now power ecosystems, not speculation - Data is no longer stored — it’s minted But here’s what founders often forget: ➡️ These systems still rely on off-chain logic ➡️ They still need compliant rails ➡️ They still need stable finance mechanisms Whether it’s a game, marketplace, or mortgage platform — building in Web3 requires more than tokenomics. It demands deep product alignment between code, compliance, and user trust. As CEO of HECKSOW , we’ve seen the same lesson: If your rails aren’t solid, your ecosystem won’t scale. The next generation of builders — gaming or fintech — must balance speed with structure. We don’t just need more launches. We need more architecture behind them. DM me for the Hecksow Whitepaper! Follow Samuel Rogers for more insights! #Web3Gaming #Stablecoins #CryptoFinance #Hecksow #BlockchainInnovation #TokenEconomy #Web3Infrastructure #RealWorldAssets #OnChainLogic #DeFi #CryptoBuilders #AurealOne #DLUME #PresaleNews

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Team Luminar Ventures and founders over at GTC to both learn from the AI frontline, and also show what we are working on in the AI space… Magnus Bergman Reid Jackson Anders Nygren

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Cursor Developer Anysphere Becomes Fastest-Growing Startup in History AI-powered IDE startup Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, has raised $900 million at a $9.9 billion valuation — marking one of the most rapid growth trajectories ever seen in Silicon Valley. Highlights: • Backers include Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and DST Global. • This is the third round in 12 months; in December, Anysphere was valued at $2.5B. • The company doubles its ARR every two months, now exceeding $500 million. Bloomberg calls it the fastest-growing startup ever. https://lnkd.in/e9pj_GrP #Anysphere #Cursor #AItools #DeveloperTools #StartupFunding #ARR #VentureCapital #Bloomberg #SiliconValley #AIIDE

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Podonos just raised $2.4 million in pre-seed funding, and the signal is loud and clear: the voice AI industry finally has someone measuring the sound, not just making the noise. Based in Los Gatos, Podonos is building the infrastructure layer that decides whether voice AI feels real, human, and ready for primetime. The industry is racing toward a projected $47.5 billion by 2034, but growth without standards is chaos. Podonos is making sure the hype actually holds up when you press play. At the center is ✦Soohyun Bae, PhD in Computer Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and Y Combinator W22 alumnus. His track record stretches from engineering roles at Google Maps to leading AR mapping at Niantic, plus co-founding Bobidi and TickTock AI. He has seen what happens when technology scales without proper #guardrails. With Podonos, he's betting the future of AI isn't just about how smart the models get, but how believable and trustworthy they sound. Podonos evaluates models across naturalness, similarity, emotion, recognition accuracy, pronunciation, tone, and resilience. Add in #personaconsistency, and suddenly you're not just testing machines, you're testing their ability to pass as human. The twist? They deliver results in under twelve hours, when the legacy approach drags on for two months. In AI time, that's the difference between relevance and irrelevance. Investors caught the beat. Serac Ventures, led by Kevin Moore, took the lead, backed by NAVER D2SF, the venture arm of South Korea's NAVER, and KAIST Venture Investment Holdings. Together, they've now backed Podonos twice, with this $2.4 million round stacking on top of a $750,000 raise in March 2025. Total funding sits at $3.15 million, and every dollar is pointed toward scaling #engineering, refining #analysistools, and launching into the U.S., Europe, and Southeast Asia. This isn't theory. Podonos already serves Resemble AI, Play AI, and Sanas AI, hitting six-digit ARR by November 2024 with just four employees. Their secret weapon is reach: 150,000 evaluators spread across nine languages and thirteen locales, forming a human-in-the-loop platform that blends speed, rigor, and global coverage. That reach lets Podonos deliver evaluations at a scale and pace that no competitor has matched. The strategy is ambitious: expand into high-demand sectors like #healthcare, #finance, #gaming, and #advertising, then move beyond voice into #multimodal model evaluation, spanning video AI and large language models. The mission isn't just to check if AI works, it's to decide if AI works for people. #Startups #StartupFunding #EarlyStage #VentureCapital #PreSeed #AI #AIInfrastructure #Voice #VoiceAI #VoiceTech #Infrastructure #Technology #Innovation #TechEcosystem #StartupEcosystem #Hiring #TechHiring If software engineering peace of mind is what you crave, Vention is your zen.

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Once again, a Chinese open source model claimed world's best on world foundational models. Tencent’s Hunyuan team just released HunyuanWorld-Voyager — pushing beyond static 3D generation into continuous, explorable, and memory-rich worlds. Ranked #1 on Worldscore leaderboard. A big step for Spatial AI. https://lnkd.in/gRvm9ksu

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New research projet jointly with Alex Pruden and Conor Deegan from Project Eleven, and Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn (Zcash founder): we propose 𝐟𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭-𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐦 𝐜𝐫𝐲𝐩𝐭𝐨 for blockchains and other applications: 𝐌𝐋-𝐃𝐒𝐀-𝐁 is a variant of the FIPS signature standard ML-DSA that is much faster. A tiny, impactful change: BLAKE3 for internal hashing and pre-hashing. Zero impact on security, 𝐌𝐋-𝐃𝐒𝐀-𝐁 is as reliable as the original. Code and details: https://lnkd.in/eD-hvmFW

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