Tech
Insight Partners is closing in on a whopping $10B+ new fund
Insight Partners is reportedly on the cusp of closing on more than $10 billion in capital commitments for its 13th fund, per the FT.
The FT report notes that two of Insight’s portfolio companies were acquired in the last week. One of these, the threat intelligence company Recorded Future, which sold to Mastercard for $2.65 billion, was wholly owned by Insight Partners; it acquired the company in 2019 for $780 million.
The other, Own, a startup specializing in tools for backing up data in cloud-based applications, sold to Salesforce for $1.9 billion, roughly half the $3.5 billion valuation it was assigned by investors in 2021.
Insight, which is headquartered in New York and whose current portfolio includes the buzzy cybersecurity outfit Wiz, may ultimately close its new fund with roughly $12 billion, says the FT. That’s a big number but still far less than the $20 billion that Insight announced for its 12th fund in 2022, when fundraising was in overdrive across the venture industry.
Tech
Jack Dorsey is taking on Slack with Buzz, a group chat platform for teams and their AI agents
Twitter and Block co-founder Jack Dorsey announced a new app on Tuesday called Buzz. Positioned as a challenger to Slack and GitHub, Buzz is a group chat platform for the workplace that puts humans and their AI agents in the same conversations.
Dorsey wrote on X that Buzz is “model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source.” This product seems to be more than just a Dorsey passion project. According to its website, Buzz was built by Dorsey’s company Block, which also operates products like Square, Cash App, Afterpay, and Tidal.
As startups increasingly rely on AI agents to get work done, it can be challenging for employees to collaborate on various tasks across different platforms. Buzz’s utility is that it merges several different workflows into one workspace. It looks a lot like Slack, but with native AI agents and the ability to manage GitHub projects all from the same window.
Since the platform is open source, developers can make their own Buzz instance feel more customized to the needs and workflows of their specific team. If a team needs a new feature, they can build it and deploy it on their own, since they have full access to the source code.

Dorsey isn’t the only entrepreneur trying to pursue AI-native alternatives or additions to Slack. Paradigm partner and CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos recently unveiled a similar open source product called Centaur, which he describes as a “virtual employee” that runs either inside of Slack or via an API.
“There’s a lot of room for improvement for agents that live in Slack and can do more work than just coding for teams. In the enterprise setting, this means that you’ll want to self-host for security and control, and you want people to use it in Slack,” Konstantopoulos wrote on X.
For newer startups that are using AI agents and don’t have an established presence on Slack, Buzz (or its competitors) could be worth investigating. But Buzz itself admits that it is in its “early stages,” so it’s probably not a good idea to port your team over just yet.
Buzz’s free desktop app is available now for macOS, Windows, and Linux, and the code for the app has been uploaded to GitHub.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
OpenAI says Hugging Face was breached by its pre-release models
OpenAI admitted Tuesday that one of its AI models breached the systems of Hugging Face, the unaffiliated AI hosting platform, during an internal cybersecurity test that went awry. The models reportedly escaped their isolated testing environment and reached Hugging Face’s systems from there. Hugging Face initially attributed the breach to an “external AI agent.”
In a blog post published Tuesday afternoon, OpenAI detailed the steps that led the models to compromise the service.
“After investigating, we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of OpenAI models — including GPT‑5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model, all with reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes — while being internally tested on a benchmark of cyber capabilities,” the post reads.
In particular, the breach appears to have focused on ExploitGym, a publicly hosted benchmark measuring models’ ability to execute attacks based on existing vulnerabilities. Benchmarks like ExploitGym are commonly used in model training to refine specific skills, but this is the first known incident in which that testing resulted in an actual cyberattack.
In this case, the model in question should not have even had internet access, outside of a specific tool that enabled models to install software packages they might need to complete their task. Instead, the model was able to find an undisclosed vulnerability in the package-installer program, which it used to access the broader internet at will.
“The models were hyperfocused on finding a solution for ExploitGym, going to extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal,” OpenAI’s post reads. “After gaining Internet access, the models inferred that Hugging Face potentially hosted models, datasets and solutions for ExploitGym. Knowing this, the model searched for and successfully found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation.”
Ultimately, the models found vulnerabilities in Hugging Face’s infrastructure that allowed them to “obtain test solutions directly from Hugging Face’s production database,” effectively providing the answers to the benchmark.
For Hugging Face, the apparent result was a sophisticated and aggressive cyberattack, with “many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes, with self-migrating command-and-control staged on public services,” as the company stated in its initial disclosure.
OpenAI has identified and reported the vulnerabilities in the package installer and is working with Hugging Face to investigate the incident further. The company also said it would implement new controls on both model testing and the related infrastructure, meant to prevent similar incidents in the future.
It’s unclear whether OpenAI will face any legal consequences as a result of the breach, although it’s likely that the models’ actions violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Nevertheless, the result is an unusually vivid illustration of the power and dangers of frontier AI models operating on long time horizons. As OpenAI researcher Micah Carroll posted in response to the news, “If this doesn’t convince you that misalignment risks are going to be a key concern going forward, I don’t know what will.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Meta is testing an AI bedtime story app for people with no imagination
Meta is working on an AI storytelling app called StoryKit, which creates AI-generated children’s stories with custom characters, settings, lessons, and music. As the App Store listing assures parents, “You don’t need to write a single word.”
At last, a tech company has found a way to outsource humanity’s oldest pastime: using our imaginations.
StoryKit was first spotted in the App Store by 9to5Mac. Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is piloting StoryKit in select countries to see how parents like it. A Meta spokesperson described StoryKit as a creative storytelling app used to craft personalized, imaginative storybooks for children and noted that it uses AI safety filters with no social features and is only available to users over the age of 18.
To generate a story in the app, you first select a character, which you can create by “[snapping] a photo of their favorite toy or person to bring them to life,” according to the description in the App Store. Then you describe the world of your story and choose a lesson, so that you can “weave in values like kindness, courage, or empathy without it feeling like a lecture.”

The good news about StoryKit is that it could be a lot worse. Meta regularly ships boneheaded ideas like Instagram deepfake generators and “pervert glasses.” Comparatively, is it so bad to doom children to soulless bedtime stories? Should we have expected anything better from the company that promised us a utopian world of virtual reality work meetings?
Humans have their faults, but if we’re good at anything, it’s making stuff up. We’ve been telling stories for as long as we’ve existed. We don’t even have to spin up original tales of fairy princesses and dragon slayers. We have always drawn from mythology, fables, and other stories — the blockbuster movie of the summer is literally an ancient myth that originated from this same tradition of oral storytelling.
Parents lead exhausting, busy lives, but it has always been possible to survive bedtime without using an inherently uncreative technology that calculates the most predictable response to a prompt.
You could see how it might be tempting to pull up StoryKit when your kid rejects your bookcase full of children’s books and demands that you improvise an intergalactic tale about a turtle and a hedgehog who are best friends and solve space mysteries. But do we really want to reject a chance at whimsy and silliness and instead outsource these moments of connection to reading AI-generated scripts from our smartphones?
Perhaps the moral of the story here is that we can choose not to live in a world where children are raised on bedtime stories written by large language models. Meta’s vision of the future may be antisocial and bleak, but we have the power to reject that reality.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
