Executive Editor
Carl Franzen is executive editor of VentureBeat with more than 16 years of experience in tech journalism. He's led newsrooms and launched award-winning digital publications at The Atlantic, The Verge, Popular Science, Xerox, Lyft and multiple startups. He is based in NYC. Photo by Michael O'Donnell Photography.
It was originally found in leaked code and publicized by AI influencers on X, but OpenAI has made it official: ChatGPT now offers Group Chats, allowing multiple users to join the same, single ChatGPT conversation and send messages to each other and the underlying large language model (LLM), online and via its mobile apps.
Mere hours after OpenAI updated its flagship foundation model GPT-5 to GPT-5.1, promising reduced token usage overall and a more pleasant personality with more preset options, Chinese search giant Baidu unveiled its next-generation foundation model, ERNIE 5.0, alongside a suite of AI product upgrades and strategic international expansions.
Another day in late 2025, another impressive result from a Chinese company in open source artificial intelligence.
Senior software developers are preparing for a major shift in how they work as artificial intelligence becomes central to their workflows, according to BairesDev’s latest Dev Barometer report published today. VentureBeat was given an exclusive early look and the findings below come directly from that report.
Meta has just released a new multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) system supporting 1,600+ languages — dwarfing OpenAI’s open source Whisper model, which supports just 99.
As cloud project tracking software monday.com’s engineering organization scaled past 500 developers, the team began to feel the strain of its own success. Product lines were multiplying, microservices proliferating, and code was flowing faster than human reviewers could keep up. The company needed a way to review thousands of pull requests each month without drowning developers in tedium — or letting quality slip.
The developers of Terminal-Bench, a benchmark suite for evaluating the performance of autonomous AI agents on real-world terminal-based tasks, have released version 2.0 alongside Harbor, a new framework for testing, improving and optimizing AI agents in containerized environments.
Even as concern and skepticism grows over U.S. AI startup OpenAI's buildout strategy and high spending commitments, Chinese open source AI providers are escalating their competition and one has even caught up to OpenAI's flagship, paid proprietary model GPT-5 in key third-party performance benchmarks with a new, free model.
When the transformer architecture was introduced in 2017 in the now seminal Google paper "Attention Is All You Need," it became an instant cornerstone of modern artificial intelligence.
The buzzed-about but still stealthy New York City startup Augmented Intelligence Inc (AUI), which seeks to go beyond the popular "transformer" architecture used by most of today's LLMs such as ChatGPT and Gemini, has raised $20 million in a bridge SAFE round at a $750 million valuation cap, bringing its total funding to nearly $60 million, VentureBeat can exclusively reveal.
OpenAI has introduced Aardvark, a GPT-5-powered autonomous security researcher agent now available in private beta.
The vibe coding tool Cursor, from startup Anysphere, has introduced Composer, its first in-house, proprietary coding large language model (LLM) as part of its Cursor 2.0 platform update.