Harvey hits $11B, OpenAI adds fintech founder

TechCrunch

OpenAI acquired personal finance startup Hiro Finance in an acqui-hire, bringing founder Ethan Bloch (who previously sold Digit for $200M+) and his team onboard. This is OpenAI's second financial app acquisition, signaling its push to strengthen capabilities in business finance and financial planning.

MarkTech Post

NVIDIA and UMD released AF-Next, the first open-source audio-language model trained on internet-scale data (1M hours), introducing timestamp-anchored chain-of-thought reasoning that outperforms Gemini 2.5 Pro on long-audio understanding benchmarks despite being smaller and fully open.

The Software Report

Harvey raised $200M at $11B valuation to scale AI agents for legal work, now serving 100,000+ lawyers across 1,300 organizations with 25,000+ custom agents handling complex legal workflows from M&A to contract review.

X

Diffusion Language Models collapse during RL training because their intractable likelihood computations require noisy proxy estimates, creating unstable importance ratios that trigger destructive feedback loops. StableDRL proposes unconditional clipping and self-normalization to stabilize training by constraining updates in high-variance environments.

TechCrunch

Chrome introduces Skills, allowing users to save frequently-used AI prompts as one-click tools that can be reused across web pages, with both custom creation and a pre-built library available through Gemini integration.