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EU AI Act rolls out on schedule. The European Commission has firmly rejected calls from major tech firms, including Alphabet, Meta, Mistral, and ASML, to delay the rollout of the EU’s landmark AI regulations, confirming that there will be no “stop the clock,” grace period, or pause in implementation. Under the legal timeline, obligations for general-purpose AI models kick in August 2025, followed by requirements for high-risk AI systems in August 2026. To ease the burden on smaller companies, the Commission plans to propose simplifications to digital-rule reporting later this year, though firms remain concerned about compliance costs and stringent safety measures designed to establish robust guardrails for AI across the single market. Read more
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ElevenLabs eyes global expansion and IPO. Voice-AI pioneer ElevenLabs, valued at $3.3 billion after its January Series C, operates hubs in London, New York, Warsaw, San Francisco, Japan, India, and Bangalore, and is now targeting new sites in Paris, Singapore, Brazil, and Mexico to support its synthetic-voice platform. CEO Mati Staniszewski told CNBC that the company plans an IPO within the next five years “if the market is right,” leveraging its recent $180 million funding to advance real-time speech generation, dubbing, and AI agents across 32 languages. This global scaling strategy aims to cement ElevenLabs’ role in content creation, customer support, gaming, education, and accessibility applications. Read more
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Meta doubles down on “AI talent war.” In a bid to staff its new Meta Superintelligence Labs, led by Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg has dangled compensation packages reportedly worth up to $300 million over four years, including over $100 million vesting in the first year. At least ten offers were extended to OpenAI researchers, though none of the highest figures were accepted. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has downplayed the frenzy, clarifying that such premiums apply only to a select group of leadership roles, while typical senior engineers at Meta earn around $1.54 million annually. This aggressive recruiting has prompted internal memos at OpenAI warning of deep cultural risks and has spurred rivals to revisit their own compensation strategies. Read more
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EPWK integrates AI into creative matching. Nasdaq-listed EPWK has bolstered its flagship EPWK.com platform with the March 4 launch of the “EPWK AI Assistant,” powered by DeepSeek. The new service offers an AI chat interface for refining briefs, smart task templates to streamline client requests, and forthcoming real-time Q&A and visual task-tracking features. Underpinning these tools is a dual-patent “Personalised Task Recommendation Engine” that uses tripartite graph-based matching and a corrected latent factor model to improve freelancer-task pairing. As of June 2024, EPWK has served over 8.74 million buyers and 16.92 million sellers across 2,800+ cities, completing 4.6 million projects with $1.67 billion in GMV, and holds 179 copyrights and 17 patents. Read more
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ARK DEFAI unveils decentralized finance framework. From Tortola, British Virgin Islands, ARK DEFAI has introduced a modular, AI-governed architecture integrating decentralized AI agents, DAO-based governance, and composable smart modules to rethink financial coordination. The protocol’s three tiers, autonomous predictive models, community-driven governance bolstered by AI-supported proposal reviews, and upgradeable economic modules (Emission Manager, Range Bound Stability, Yield Revenue Feedback, Minting Cap Limit, Runway Control Module), aim to replace institutional trust with transparent computation. Beyond finance, ARK’s vision extends to “ArkLand,” a digital society encompassing AI-powered sectors like Edunet for learning, Vitality for wellness, Connect for social engagement, and a Creator Layer for no-code AI development. Read more
