Pinterest is introducing new features to let users find ideas that match their personal tastes. The new visual search tools will first be available for women’s fashion content in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., eventually moving to more categories. The new tools let users find what they’re searching for without using words, by breaking down and decoding images so users can quickly search and shop for the details of an outfit they like. “Whether it’s an overall aesthetic, a color palette, a specific fit, or product category, when users view a Pin, we’ll now generate the words they can use to figure out what they like about the image, and then further explore and shop,” the company said. To help users identify and select the objects that they want more easily, the company says it has added a new animated glow. Also new is a “refinement bar” to help users narrow down their search results and find things that match their style. The company said the new search options are powered by visual language models (VLMs), a form of generative artificial intelligence (AI), to offer users a “more expansive visual ‘vocabulary’ to ‘describe’ their style ideas.” “Our visual search technology represents a shift in how users interact with and discover inspiration,” Dana Cho, Pinterest vice president of design, said. “We’re not simply delivering search results — we’re curating a personalized journey of discovery that empowers individuals to find their unique style, and shop it too.”
Samsung adds Green Dot’s embedded finance platform to digital wallets- a P2P tool to quickly transfer funds within minutes from Samsung Wallet to other digital wallets or contactless debit cards
Digital bank Green Dot announced a new partnership with Samsung Electronics to add new features and functionality to Samsung Wallet1, the secure, go-everywhere app for conveniently using and organizing daily essentials. Leveraging Green Dot’s comprehensive and configurable embedded finance platform, Arc, Samsung Wallet’s U.S. users will soon have access to Tap to Transfer2, a peer-to-peer (P2P) tool enabling users to quickly transfer funds within minutes3 from Samsung Wallet to other digital wallets or contactless debit cards, with additional features and functionality planned. Arc is the embedded finance platform of services featuring all of Green Dot’s secure banking and money processing capabilities designed to fuel value, loyalty and growth for consumers and businesses. Integrated with Green Dot Bank, Arc provides partners with leading FDIC-insured banking products and tools, plus regulatory and compliance expertise, oversight and support. “Our partnership with Samsung presents an enormous opportunity to bring convenient and instant peer-to-peer payments to Samsung’s vast user base,” said Crystal Bryant-Minter, SVP, Money Movement, Green Dot. “It also exemplifies Arc’s potential to power leading brands with seamless, secure financial experiences that deliver real value to everyday consumers.”
Prudent AI launches one-touch pre-qualification platform especially helpful for processing self-employed, Non-QM borrowers with 24/7 document submissions, real-time insights and loan recommendations
Prudent AI launched Prudent AI Upfront, a one-touch pre-qualification platform designed to improve lender sales funnels. The company claims the product is the mortgage industry’s first of its kind and allows lenders to process more applications, reduce fallout and capture more business. Upfront boosts sales funnel efficiency through three outcomes designed to eliminate manual intervention: 24/7 document submissions, real-time insights and loan recommendations, and evaluating borrower repayment ability in minutes instead of hours. Prudent AI claims that lenders who implemented Upfront reported a 60-70% reduction in document review time while expanding their sales pipelines and a seamless integration into their existing tech stacks. The platform is especially helpful for processing self-employed, Non-QM borrowers, company officials said. “The Non-QM market has long struggled with pre-qualification bottlenecks,” commented Paul Gigliotti, chief growth officer. “Upfront eliminates these barriers. Lenders can confidently serve this multi-trillion-dollar segment with unprecedented efficiency.”
Visa invests in Stablecoin infrastructure platform BVNK that processes more than $12 billion annually for companies like Ferrari and Rapyd
Stabelcoin infrastructure platform BVNK received an investment from Visa. The new capital comes on the heels of a $50 million Series B funding round in December. “We’re proud to support BVNK as they help accelerate global adoption of stablecoin payments,” Rubail Birwadker, head of growth products and partnerships at Visa, said. “Stablecoins are fast becoming a part of global payment flows, and Visa invests in new technologies and builders like BVNK, staying at the forefront of what’s next in commerce to better serve our clients and partners.” There was $27 trillion in total stablecoin transaction volume globally across 1.25 billion transactions in 2024, per Visa Onchain Analytics. BVNK processes more than $12 billion annually for companies like Ferrari and Rapyd. “We’re experiencing a once-in-a-generation shift to a new foundational payment technology, powered by stablecoins,” BVNK co-founder and CEO Jesse Hemson Struthers said. “At BVNK, we’re building the infrastructure to make these new rails accessible to businesses, empowering them to operate at the speed of today’s economy.”
Nvidia has launched Parakeet-TDT-0.6B-v2, an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model that can transcribe 60 minutes of audio in 1 second with an average “Word Error Rate” of just 6.05%
Nvidia has launched Parakeet-TDT-0.6B-v2, an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model that can, “transcribe 60 minutes of audio in 1 second [mind blown emoji].” This version two is so powerful, it currently tops the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard with an average “Word Error Rate” (times the model incorrectly transcribes a spoken word) of just 6.05% (out of 100). To put that in perspective, it nears proprietary transcription models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o-transcribe (with a WER of 2.46% in English) and ElevenLabs Scribe (3.3%). The model boasts 600 million parameters and leverages a combination of the FastConformer encoder and TDT decoder architectures. It can transcribe an hour of audio in just one second, provided it’s running on Nvidia’s GPU-accelerated hardware. The performance benchmark is measured at an RTFx (Real-Time Factor) of 3386.02 with a batch size of 128, placing it at the top of current ASR benchmarks maintained by Hugging Face. Parakeet-TDT-0.6B-v2 is aimed at developers, researchers, and industry teams building applications such as transcription services, voice assistants, subtitle generators, and conversational AI platforms. The model supports punctuation, capitalization, and detailed word-level timestamping, offering a full transcription package for a wide range of speech-to-text needs. Developers can deploy the model using Nvidia’s NeMo toolkit. The setup process is compatible with Python and PyTorch, and the model can be used directly or fine-tuned for domain-specific tasks. The open-source license (CC-BY-4.0) also allows for commercial use, making it appealing to startups and enterprises alike. Parakeet-TDT-0.6B-v2 is optimized for Nvidia GPU environments, supporting hardware such as the A100, H100, T4, and V100 boards. While high-end GPUs maximize performance, the model can still be loaded on systems with as little as 2GB of RAM, allowing for broader deployment scenarios.
Gyan is an alternative AI architecture built on a neuro-symbolic architecture, not transformer based, to create hallucination-free models by design
Gyan is a fundamentally new AI architecture built for Enterprises with low or zero tolerance for hallucinations, IP risks, or energy-hungry models. Gyan gives businesses full control over their data, keeping it private and secure — making it the trusted partner for enterprises in situations where reliability and accuracy are mandatory. Unlike with LLM’s, with Gyan, businesses can use an AI model without worrying about it making things up. Built on a neuro-symbolic architecture, not transformer based, Gyan is a ground-up hallucination-free model by design. “If the cost of a mistake is high, you certainly don’t want your AI causing it,” says Joy Dasgupta, CEO, at Gyan. “We built Gyan for companies and processes with zero tolerance for hallucination and privacy risks, with compute and energy requirements orders of magnitude lower than that of current LLM’s.” Gyan’s State of the Art performance in two key life sciences benchmarks (PubMedQA and MMLU) is proof of efficacy of its language model. Every inference by Gyan is traceable with full reasoning to exact ideas and arguments in the result, making them readily verifiable. This is not the case for any of the others on the Leaderboard. Gyan provides precise and accurate analysis which users can depend on.
IBM watsonx to support enterprise-grade AI solutions at the edge with Lumen’s edge network offering <5ms latency
Lumen and IBM announced a new collaboration to develop enterprise-grade AI solutions at the edge—integrating watsonx, IBM’s portfolio of AI products, with Lumen’s Edge Cloud infrastructure and network. The new AI inferencing solutions optimized for the edge will deploy IBM watsonx technology in Lumen’s edge data centers and leverage Lumen’s multi-cloud architecture, enabling clients across financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and retail to analyze massive volumes of data in near real-time to help minimize latency. This will allow enterprises to develop and deploy AI models closer to the point of data generation, facilitating smarter decision-making while maintaining data control and security, plus accelerating AI innovation. Lumen’s edge network offers <5ms latency and direct connectivity to major cloud providers and enterprise locations. When paired with IBM watsonx, the infrastructure has the potential to enable real-time AI processing, which can help mitigate costs and risks associated with public cloud dependence. IBM Consulting will act as the preferred systems integrator, supporting clients in their efforts to scale deployments, reduce their costs and fully leverage AI capabilities through their deep technology, domain, and industry expertise. The collaboration aims to solve contemporary business challenges by turning AI potential into practical, high-impact outcomes at the edge. For enterprise businesses, this can mean faster insights, lower operational costs, and a smarter path to digital innovation. Ryan Asdourian, Chief Marketing and Strategy officer at Lumen said, “By combining IBM’s AI innovation with Lumen’s powerful network edge, we’re making it easier for businesses to tap into real-time intelligence wherever their data lives, accelerate innovation, and deliver smarter, faster customer experiences.”
Unblocked is an AI-powered assistant that answers contextual questions about lines of code and to search for the person who made changes to a particular module
Unblocked is an AI-powered assistant that answers contextual questions about lines of code. Unblocked integrates with development environments and apps like Slack, Jira, Confluence, Google Drive, and Notion. The tool gathers intelligence about a company’s codebase and helps answer questions such as “Where do we define user metrics in our system?” Developers can also use the platform to search for the person who made changes to a particular module and quickly gain insights from them. Unblocked offers admin controls that can be easily adopted by a company’s system admin, and the startup is working on integrating with platforms like Cursor and Lovable to improve code explainability. Beyond this, Unblocked is developing tools that actively help developers with projects rather than simply answer questions. One, Autonomous CI Triage, supports developers in testing code through different scenarios. Unblocked counts companies such as Drata, AppDirect, Big Cartel, and TravelPerk as customers. Pilarinos claims that engineers at Drata were able to save one to two hours per week using Unblocked’s platform.
Iterate.ai offers an on-premises AI appliance that delivers complete control, privacy, and enterprise-grade AI performance without relying on the cloud
Iterate.ai and ASA Computers have launched AIcurate, a turnkey, on-premises AI appliance that delivers complete control, privacy, and enterprise-grade AI performance without relying on the cloud. Built on Iterate.ai’s Generate platform and deployed on Dell PowerEdge servers, AIcurate empowers enterprises to run LLMs and AI workloads securely and within their own infrastructure. The system supports integration with popular business tools, is vendor-agnostic, and is optimized for performance-intensive applications such as document analysis, internal search, and workflow automation. Unlike public AI platforms, AIcurate enables secure deployment of powerful LLMs such as OpenAI, PaLM 2, Meta’s Llama, Mistral, and Microsoft’s models, all without sending data to the cloud. Businesses can build custom AI workflows while ensuring compliance with internal policies and industry regulations. “This collaboration makes advanced AI more accessible for organizations that can’t compromise on data control.” Ruban Kanapathippillai, SVP of Systems and Solutions at ASA Computers said “AIcurate puts enterprise-grade AI directly into customers’ data centers, giving them full control while supporting the flexible and secure architecture that modern IT teams demand.” Capabilities included in AIcurate: Secure on-prem deployment, Enterprise tool integration, Support for leading LLMs, Vendor-agnostic architecture, Advanced document processing, Role-based access control:, Workflow automation with agentic AI.
ServiceNow’s new AI Control Tower lets AI systems administrators and other AI stakeholders monitor and manage every AI agent, model or workflow in their system
ServiceNow’s new AI Control Tower, offers a holistic view of the entire AI ecosystem. AI Control Tower acts as a “command center” to help enterprise customers govern and manage all their AI workflows, including agents and models. The AI Control Tower lets AI systems administrators and other AI stakeholders monitor and manage every AI agent, model or workflow in their system — even third-party agents. It also provides end-to-end lifecycle management, real-time reporting for different metrics, and embedded compliance and AI governance. The idea around AI Control Tower is to give users a central location to see where all of the AI in the enterprise is. “I can go to a single place to see all the AI systems, how many were onboarded or are currently deployed, which ones are an AI agent or classic machine learning,” said Dorit Zilbershot, ServiceNow’s Group Vice President of AI Experiences and Innovation. “I could be managing these in a single place, making sure that I have full governance and understanding of what’s going on across my enterprise.” She added that the platform helps users “really drill down to understand the different systems by the provider and by type,” to understand risk and compliance better. The company’s agent library allows customers to choose the agent that best fits their workflows, and it has built-in orchestration features to help manage agent actions. ServiceNow also unveiled its AI Agent Fabric, a way for its agent to communicate with other agents or tools. Zilbershot said ServiceNow will still support other protocols and will continue working with other companies to develop standards for agentic communication.