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AI Chip Startup Ricursive Hits $4B Valuation in Record Time

Ricursive Intelligence, an AI chip design startup founded by former Google researchers, achieved a $4 billion valuation just two months after its formal launch, according to TechCrunch. The company secured $300 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed, bringing its total funding to $335 million, reports The New York Times.

Ricursive aims to revolutionize AI chip development by using an AI system to design and automatically improve AI chips. The company's founders, CEO Anna Goldie and CTO Azalia Mirhoseini, previously worked on Google's TPU chip, utilizing a novel reinforcement learning method called AlphaChip. Ricursive plans to use the funding to automate silicon substrate design, promising faster AI chip development and increased competition in the AI hardware landscape.

Tech Industry Grapples with AI Advancements, Privacy Concerns, and Controversies

The tech industry is experiencing rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, alongside growing concerns about data privacy, cybersecurity, and ethical considerations.

Google agreed to pay $68 million to settle claims that its voice assistant illegally spied on users, Reuters reported. The class-action lawsuit accused Google of unlawful interception and recording of confidential communications without consent, and unauthorized disclosure of those communications to third parties for targeted advertising. Google did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement.

Meanwhile, a group of YouTubers sued Snap for alleged copyright infringement, claiming the company used their videos without permission to train AI models, TechCrunch reported. The YouTubers allege that Snap trained its AI systems on their video content for use in AI features like the Imagine Lens. The plaintiffs had previously filed similar lawsuits against Nvidia, Meta, and ByteDance.

OpenAI engineer Michael Bolin published a detailed technical breakdown of how the company's Codex CLI coding agent works internally, offering developers insight into AI coding tools that can write code, run tests, and fix bugs with human supervision, according to Ars Technica.

In other AI developments, CVector, an industrial AI startup, secured $5 million in seed funding to expand its AI "nervous system" software that optimizes operations for utilities, manufacturers, and chemical producers, TechCrunch reported.

Microsoft Addresses Privacy and Network Issues

Microsoft faced scrutiny over privacy concerns after complying with an FBI warrant in early 2025, providing BitLocker recovery keys for laptops potentially containing evidence of fraud in Guam, according to multiple news sources. This incident raised concerns about Microsoft's automatic encryption and key storage practices.

Separately, Microsoft addressed a network anomaly where internal traffic intended for the testing domain "example.com" was being misdirected to a Japanese electronics cable manufacturer, Sumitomo Electric, Ars Technica reported.

Khosla Ventures Addresses Partner's Controversial Remarks

Khosla Ventures faced a public relations challenge after partner Keith Rabois made controversial remarks on X regarding a recent shooting by a border patrol agent. Both partner Ethan Choi and firm founder Vinod Khosla publicly distanced themselves and the firm from Rabois' statements, according to TechCrunch.

Other Tech Developments

Apple is introducing a new version of its AirTag tracking device, dubbed the "new AirTag," with improvements thanks to a new Bluetooth chip, Ars Technica reported.

Researchers demonstrated that quantum entanglement can link atoms across space to improve measurement accuracy, according to Science Daily.

Phonak's Audeo Infinio Ultra Sphere hearing aid utilizes a dual-chip system to improve speech clarity, according to multiple sources.

Individuals are increasingly turning to RSS feeds to curate personalized content and bypass algorithmic filtering on social media platforms, according to Hacker News.