Walter Torous, senior lecturer in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and the MIT Sloan School of Management, and director of the Master of Science in Real Estate Development Program (MSRED), was recently named executive director of the MIT Center for Real Estate (CRE) — effective July 1, 2026. In announcing Torous’ appointment, School of…
You.com on September 1, 2026 introduced a new extraction mode for its Web Search API called Highlights, reporting a 95.17% score on the SimpleQA benchmark and a 35% lower total query cost than Claude Sonnet 5’s built-in web search in an independent evaluation. The feature is live through the API’s extraction_mode parameter at the same…
Google began rolling out Google Pics, its AI image creation and editing tool built on the company’s Nano Banana model, to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers and most Workspace business customers on September 1, 2026. The tool works both as a standalone product and as an integration inside Google Docs and Slides, with Drive…
Perplexity on September 1, 2026, introduced PII-TRACE, a benchmark for evaluating detectors of personally identifiable information, and PII-Tracer, a compact 0.6B-parameter model built to flag PII on a user’s device before text is sent to cloud models. The announcement frames both releases as privacy infrastructure for the company’s hybrid compute architecture, in which cloud agents…
Anthropic on September 1, 2026, announced Enterprise Frontier Safeguards (EFS), an offering that combines the privacy of zero data retention with automated safeguards for detecting misuse by storing activity data in cloud infrastructure controlled by the customer rather than by Anthropic. The system will roll out to customers in phases beginning later in the fall…
HiBob, the company behind the Bob human resources platform, has raised $166 million in a new funding round led by Salesforce at a valuation of more than $3.2 billion, as the company looks to transform its workforce-management software into infrastructure for an increasingly AI-powered workplace. Salesforce supplied the majority of the capital, with Farallon Capital…
David Pinn is CEO of Brain Corp, where he has spent nearly nine years helping shape the company’s strategy, financial operations, and transition into a software-driven robotics business. He joined Brain Corp in 2017 as VP of Strategy and progressed through senior strategy and finance roles before becoming CEO in 2022. During his tenure, Pinn…
John Deere introduced JD, an artificial intelligence assistant built into its Operations Center platform, on September 1, 2026, opening an Early Access Program for select U.S. agricultural customers at the Farm Progress Show in Iowa. The company said the tool lets farmers ask plain-language questions and receive answers drawn from their own field, machine, and…
DataAgent has emerged from stealth with $10 million in pre-seed funding as it launches an AI-native platform designed to move cloud infrastructure management beyond detecting problems and toward autonomously fixing them. The round was led by MizMaa Ventures and Alicorn Venture Partners. DataAgent plans to use the capital to bring its platform to market and…
Lumus announced on September 1, 2026, a new licensing agreement with Quanta Computer under which the Taiwanese manufacturer will produce Lumus’ next generation of thinner, easier-to-produce geometric waveguides for augmented reality glasses. The agreement covers two product lines: the Z-30 2.0 waveguide and the new A-Lens family, which will be offered in 30-degree and 50-degree…