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🎥 Sora Watermark Remover lets TikTokers clean videos

A new tool called Sora Watermark Remover allows creators to remove watermarks from Sora 2 videos while keeping 100% of the original quality.

🔸 OpenAI’s Sora 2 is freely available, but videos come with watermarks that can be annoying for social sharing.
🔸 The service simply requires uploading the video, it automatically cleans the watermark.
🔸 This is especially useful for TikTokers and other social creators who want polished AI-generated content without branding distractions.

Now Sora 2 videos can look professional without the watermark hassle.

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⚛️ Harvard builds quantum machine that runs for 2 hours nonstop

Physicists at Harvard have created the first quantum computer capable of continuous operation for over two hours, shattering the previous record of just 13 seconds.

🔸 The team, led by Mikhail Lukin, solved a key challenge called atomic loss, where qubits (atoms) disappear due to heat, field errors, or gas collisions.
🔸 Their system uses “optical lattice conveyor belts” and “optical tweezers” to automatically replace lost qubits in real time.
🔸 New atoms instantly sync with the state of existing ones, preserving quantum information without rebooting.
🔸 The machine generates 300,000 atoms per second, maintaining about 3,000 active qubits during operation.
🔸 Researchers believe this approach could enable quantum computers with near-unlimited uptime within a few years.

Harvard’s quantum “conveyor belt” may have just solved the biggest bottleneck in making stable, practical quantum machines.

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🤖 Mercor hits record growth, and rewrites the AI playbook

In just 17 months, Mercor rocketed from $1M to $500M in revenue, becoming the fastest-growing company in AI history. What began as a remote engineer marketplace is now critical AI infrastructure connecting labs with domain experts who help train and evaluate models.

🔸 From freelance coders to scientists, doctors, and lawyers, Mercor turned expert knowledge into AI training fuel.
🔸 Now partners with OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia.
🔸 Raised $100M at a $2B valuation, now targeting $10B in its next round.
🔸 Already profitable with $6M net profit in the first half of the year.
🔸 Boasts 1600% net retention and zero churn, an almost impossible metric.
🔸 Founded by Thiel Fellows aged just 22–23, now building tools for RL and AI expert marketplaces.

Mercor scaled faster than any AI startup ever, but with OpenAI launching a rival hiring platform, the next round might be a fight for the ecosystem itself.

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✅ Top 50 most expensive private companies today

14 of them did not exist 5 years ago.

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🎤 NeuTTS-Air kills ElevenLabs’ moat, open-source voice cloning for everyone

A new open-source model called NeuTTS-Air is going viral for cloning any voice locally, no cloud, no paywalls, and total privacy. It can run on a PC or even a smartphone, using just a 3-second audio sample to generate natural, high-quality speech.

🔸 748M-parameter model, fine-tuned for speed and realism, rivals ElevenLabs and OpenAI’s Voice Engine
🔸 Works fully offline, ensuring voice data never leaves your device
🔸 Can generate entire podcasts, narrations, or dialogues from a single short recording
🔸 Released under an open-source license, meaning anyone can build apps, chatbots, or AI creators on top

If ElevenLabs dominated with convenience and polish, NeuTTS-Air is betting on freedom and decentralization, the future of voice AI may no longer need a server.

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📞 AOL’s dial-up goes silent after 34 years, the end of an internet era

America Online has officially shut down its iconic dial-up Internet service, marking the end of a 34-year chapter that once defined how millions first logged onto the web. The final modem screech echoed this week, closing the curtain on a service that introduced the world to “You’ve got mail.”

🔸 At its peak in the late 1990s, AOL connected over 23 million users through its dial-up modems and CDs mailed to nearly every U.S. household
🔸 The shutdown ends both AOL’s Internet access and its classic AOL Dialer software, though some competitors like NetZero and Juno still offer dial-up options
🔸 The decision follows the ongoing shift toward broadband and fiber, leaving rural users and nostalgia-driven collectors as the last holdouts
🔸 AOL’s parent, Yahoo (under Apollo Global Management), said the closure reflects the company’s evolution toward modern digital media and advertising

AOL didn’t just sell Internet access, it sold the feeling of being online for the first time. Now, that sound of a modem connecting fades into history, replaced by a permanent broadband hum.

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🎓 Stanford drops free AI lectures from Andrew Ng

Stanford has begun releasing a new open series of AI lectures led by Andrew Ng, the Coursera founder and pioneer of modern machine learning education.

🔸 Covers neural network training, AI agent design, and career-building in AI
🔸 Taught by Andrew Ng himself, returning to his Stanford teaching roots
🔸 Includes hands-on examples and practical labs using current AI frameworks
🔸 Designed for both beginners and professionals seeking to deepen ML foundations
🔸 Available free online, part of Stanford’s push to make AI education globally accessible

Decade after decade, Andrew Ng keeps doing what AI models can’t: teaching humans how to think like machines.

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🚀 Mira Murati builds Thinking Machines, AI infrastructure for everyone

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has launched Thinking Machines, a public benefit startup that raised $2B at a $12B valuation, before releasing a single product. The company aims to democratize how AI models are customized and deployed.

🔸 Focused on infrastructure for fine-tuning open models, not creating ever-larger proprietary ones
🔸 Built by a hand-picked team so loyal that engineers reportedly turned down $50M–$1.5B offers from Zuckerberg
🔸 Structured as a public benefit corporation, signaling long-term social and ethical commitments
🔸 Backed by a star roster of investors betting on Murati’s track record from OpenAI and Tesla
🔸 Aims to make AI development accessible to smaller companies, challenging the “winner-takes-all” model

Murati’s journey from Albania to Tesla to OpenAI’s helm shows how engineering rigor can outpace pedigree. Now, she’s betting that the next AI revolution won’t come from bigger models, but smarter infrastructure.

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