More top reads This is your smartphone on generative AI. Any questions?: While at Mobile World Congress this week, Brian Heater met with Brain.ai founder and CEO Jerry Yue, and what resulted is a delightful chronicle of how generative AI might be foundational to the next generation of devices. Figure is now valued at $2.6 billion: Humanoid robots are having a moment, and in Figure's case, a giant, whopping funding moment. The company raised a $675 million Series B round from a group of investors, including Microsoft, OpenAI Startup Fund, Nvidia and Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund. All things Google: The search engine giant is partnering with Stack Overflow to use its data to enrich Gemini for Google Cloud and provide validated Stack Overflow answers in the Google Cloud console. Meanwhile, Google is making some improvements so that search suggestions in Chrome are more helpful. Speaking of smarter: Microsoft is making Windows 11 Copilot smarter with a list of plugins and skills that include settings being changed, new AI editing integrations and improvements to widgets. A faster composter: Mill's new bin design turns a big pile of your food waste into something you can feed plants or chickens in a few hours rather than having to wait a whole day. Reddit's IPO price: Secondary investors tell us that Reddit is likely to have a successful IPO if it prices itself at $5 billion or less. We go into why, as well as why some of its more recent investors might not like the sound of that. More Brave AI: Brave is launching its AI-powered assistant, Leo, to all Android users, who can ask it questions, use it to translate or summarize pages and create content. iOS devices will get this soon. It's all about the money, money, money: Inspired Capital, which has backed companies like Habi, Teamshares and Rho, closed on its third fund with $330 million in capital commitments. Adtech startup Vibe raised $22.5 million to help small companies buy video ads on streaming services. And Particle.news grabbed $4.4 million to develop an AI-powered news reader. Set, point, design: Tennis icon-turned-entrepreneur Venus Williams launches Palazzo, an AI-powered interior design platform. One of its features is an "Aesthetic DNA" test where you can select room designs you like, and the results are turned into the prompts for the AI to generate renderings. MacPaw first to adopt Apple's new DMA rules in the EU: MacPaw offers Setapp, a subscription-based platform of curated apps, to iOS and Mac users. The move is notable because Apple has received a lot of pushback for how it’s complying with the EU regulation. | 
