MAROKO133 Hot ai: Listen Labs raises $69M after viral billboard hiring stunt to scale AI c

📌 MAROKO133 Update ai: Listen Labs raises $69M after viral billboard hiring stunt

Alfred Wahlforss was running out of options. His startup, Listen Labs, needed to hire over 100 engineers, but competing against Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million offers seemed impossible. So he spent $5,000 — a fifth of his marketing budget — on a billboard in San Francisco displaying what looked like gibberish: five strings of random numbers.

The numbers were actually AI tokens. Decoded, they led to a coding challenge: build an algorithm to act as a digital bouncer at Berghain, the Berlin nightclub famous for rejecting nearly everyone at the door. Within days, thousands attempted the puzzle. 430 cracked it. Some got hired. The winner flew to Berlin, all expenses paid.

That unconventional approach has now attracted $69 million in Series B funding, led by Ribbit Capital with participation from Evantic and existing investors Sequoia Capital, Conviction, and Pear VC. The round values Listen Labs at $500 million and brings its total capital to $100 million. In nine months since launch, the company has grown annualized revenue by 15x to eight figures and conducted over one million AI-powered interviews.

"When you obsess over customers, everything else follows," Wahlforss said in an interview with VentureBeat. "Teams that use Listen bring the customer into every decision, from marketing to product, and when the customer is delighted, everyone is."

Why traditional market research is broken, and what Listen Labs is building to fix it

Listen's AI researcher finds participants, conducts in-depth interviews, and delivers actionable insights in hours, not weeks. The platform replaces the traditional choice between quantitative surveys — which provide statistical precision but miss nuance—and qualitative interviews, which deliver depth but cannot scale.

Wahlforss explained the limitation of existing approaches: "Essentially surveys give you false precision because people end up answering the same question… You can't get the outliers. People are actually not honest on surveys." The alternative, one-on-one human interviews, "gives you a lot of depth. You can ask follow up questions. You can kind of double check if they actually know what they're talking about. And the problem is you can't scale that."

The platform works in four steps: users create a study with AI assistance, Listen recruits participants from its global network of 30 million people, an AI moderator conducts in-depth interviews with follow-up questions, and results are packaged into executive-ready reports including key themes, highlight reels, and slide decks.

What distinguishes Listen's approach is its use of open-ended video conversations rather than multiple-choice forms. "In a survey, you can kind of guess what you should answer, and you have four options," Wahlforss said. "Oh, they probably want me to buy high income. Let me click on that button versus an open ended response. It just generates much more honesty."

The dirty secret of the $140 billion market research industry: rampant fraud

Listen finds and qualifies the right participants in its global network of 30 million people. But building that panel required confronting what Wahlforss called "one of the most shocking things that we've learned when we entered this industry"—rampant fraud.

"Essentially, there's a financial transaction involved, which means there will be bad players," he explained. "We actually had some of the largest companies, some of them have billions in revenue, send us people who claim to be kind of enterprise buyers to our platform and our system immediately detected, like, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud."

The company built what it calls a "quality guard" that cross-references LinkedIn profiles with video responses to verify identity, checks consistency across how participants answer questions, and flags suspicious patterns. The result, according to Wahlforss: "People talk three times more. They're much more honest when they talk about sensitive topics like politics and mental health."

Emeritus, an online education company that uses Listen, reported that approximately 20% of survey responses previously fell into the fraudulent or low-quality category. With Listen, they reduced this to almost zero. "We did not have to replace any responses because of fraud or gibberish information," said Gabrielli Tiburi, Assistant Manager of Customer Insights at Emeritus.

How Microsoft, Sweetgreen, and Chubbies are using AI interviews to build better products

The speed advantage has proven central to Listen's pitch. Traditional customer research at Microsoft could take four to six weeks to generate insights. "By the time we get to them, either the decision has been made or we lose out on the opportunity to actually influence it," said Romani Patel, Senior Research Manager at Microsoft.

With Listen, Microsoft can now get insights in days, and in many cases, within hours.

The platform has already powered several high-profile initiatives. Microsoft used Listen Labs to collect global customer stories for its 50th anniversary celebration. "We wanted users to share how Copilot is empowering them to bring their best self forward," Patel said, "and we were able to collect those user video stories within a day." Traditionally, that kind of work would have taken six to eight weeks.

Simple Modern, an Oklahoma-based drinkware company, used Listen to test a new product concept. The process took about an hour to write questions, an hour to launch the study, and 2.5 hours to receive feedback from 120 people across the country. "We went from 'Should we even have this product?' to 'How should we launch it?'" said Chris Hoyle, the company's Chief Marketing Officer.

Chubbies, the shorts brand, achieved a 24x increase in youth research participation—growing from 5 to 120 participants — by using Listen to overcome the scheduling challenges of traditional focus groups with children. "There's school, sports, dinner, and homework," explained Lauren Neville, Director of Insights and Innovation. "I had to find a way to hear from them that fit into their schedules."

The company also discovered product issues through AI interviews that might have gone undetected otherwise. Wahlforss described how the AI "through conversations, realized there were like issues with the the kids short line, and decided to, like, interview hundreds of kids. And I understand that there were issues in the liner of the shorts and that they were, like, scratchy, quote, unquote, according to the people interviewed." The redesigned product became "a blockbuster hit."

The Jevons paradox explains why cheaper research creates more demand, not less

Listen Labs is entering a massive but fragmented market. Wahlforss cited research from Andreessen Horowitz estimating the market research ind…

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🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com

📌 MAROKO133 Update ai: World’s most powerful AI supercomputer dedicated to fusion

The UK government announced on Monday that it will invest £45 million, about $60 million, to build a powerful new artificial intelligence supercomputer to accelerate nuclear fusion research.

The system, named Sunrise, will be installed at the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s Culham campus in Oxfordshire and is expected to begin operating in June.

Officials say the machine will help scientists better understand the complex physics at work in fusion reactors. By combining advanced computing with artificial intelligence models, the supercomputer could allow researchers to test ideas virtually before building costly experimental systems.

AI computing system built for fusion science

Sunrise is being described as the most powerful AI-focused supercomputer dedicated specifically to fusion energy research. The system is funded by the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and will operate at about 1.4 megawatts.

The computer will become the first major infrastructure project in what the government calls an “AI Growth Zone” planned for the Culham Science Campus. Officials hope the zone will bring together artificial intelligence development and advanced energy research in one location.

Fusion energy research requires enormous computing power. Scientists need to simulate the behavior of plasma that reaches temperatures hotter than those in the sun’s core. They must also study how extreme heat and radiation affect reactor materials.

Traditional simulations can take a long time and require significant resources. By using artificial intelligence models trained on physics data, Sunrise aims to make those simulations faster and more detailed.

Digital twins could reduce costly experiments

The system is designed to combine high-performance computing with physics-informed AI models. This approach will allow researchers to build digital twins of fusion systems. These virtual versions of reactors can be used to test designs and operating conditions before building real prototypes.

According to government officials, Sunrise will deliver up to 6.76 exaFLOPS of AI modeling performance. This measurement refers to AI workloads rather than traditional supercomputing benchmarks, but it still represents a major boost in computing capability for the country’s fusion programs.

The system will run on AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct GPU accelerators installed on Dell PowerEdge servers. WEKA will provide the system’s storage platform. The project also has support from Intel, the University of Cambridge, and the UK Atomic Energy Authority.

Scientists expect the computer to help address several difficult technical problems. These include modeling turbulent plasma behavior, studying materials that can withstand conditions in fusion reactors, and developing technologies to breed tritium fuel for future fusion plants.

Supporting major national fusion projects

The Sunrise supercomputer will support several major research programs already underway in the United Kingdom.

One of them is the LIBRTI initiative, which focuses on technologies related to the tritium fuel cycle required for fusion reactors. Another is the government’s flagship STEP project. STEP stands for Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production and aims to develop a prototype fusion power plant in Nottinghamshire during the 2040s.

Dr. Rob Akers, director of computing programs at the UK Atomic Energy Authority, said the new computing capability will help researchers move faster by testing designs in a digital environment.

“Sunrise will bring that capability to fusion by combining high-fidelity simulation with physics-informed AI to develop predictive digital twins that reduce the cost, risk, and time of learning that would otherwise require expensive and time-consuming physical testing,” he said.

Part of a wider AI supercomputing push

The Sunrise project is also part of a larger UK government effort to strengthen its artificial intelligence and supercomputing infrastructure.

Earlier this year, officials confirmed a separate £36 million ($49 million) investment in a new supercomputing center in Cambridge. The Culham campus is expected to become a major hub for AI-driven scientific computing linked to energy technologies.

Despite the new investment, experts acknowledge that commercial fusion power remains one of the most difficult engineering challenges in physics. Fusion experiments have progressed slowly for decades due to the complexity of controlling plasma and building durable reactor systems.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com