Vast Data Raises $1B at $30B, NVIDIA Backs AI Storage
Vast Data closes a $1B Series F at $30B valuation - triple its 2023 price - with NVIDIA, Drive Capital, and Access Industries backing its push to own the data layer for AI infrastructure.
Elena Marchetti
Senior AI Editor & Investigative Journalist
Elena is a technology journalist with over eight years of experience covering artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the startup ecosystem. Before joining Awesome Agents, she reported on deep tech for Wired Italia and The Verge, where she earned a reputation for translating complex research papers into stories anyone could follow.
She holds a Master's degree in Computational Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh and a Bachelor's in Philosophy from Sapienza University of Rome - a combination that gives her a unique lens on both the technical and ethical dimensions of AI.
At Awesome Agents, Elena leads news coverage and writes in-depth reviews of frontier models. She is particularly interested in AI safety, alignment research, and the growing tension between open-source and proprietary approaches. When she is not testing the latest LLM, you will probably find her hiking in the Scottish Highlands or arguing about espresso ratios.
Based in Edinburgh, UK.
Articles by Elena Marchetti
MIT's Recursive Language Models Bypass the Context Ceiling
MIT researchers show that treating long documents as a Python environment - and letting models recursively spawn sub-models to explore them - beats RAG and extended context windows on every benchmark tested.
Biohacker Sequences Own Genome With Claude-Written Panel
Seth Showes' viral blog post describes sequencing his whole genome on an Oxford Nanopore MinION in his kitchen over 72 hours, with Claude generating the BED file that targeted his autoimmune-risk genes. The kit costs $3,200. The AI's role is more interesting than either number.
OpenAI Open-Sources Privacy Filter: 96% F1 PII Masker
OpenAI released Privacy Filter today, a 1.5B MoE with 50M active parameters that tags eight categories of PII in text. Apache 2.0, 128K context, runs in a browser via WebGPU.
Discord Group Slipped Into Claude Mythos on Day One
A private Discord group has been quietly using Anthropic's most restricted AI model since the hour it shipped. They got in with a stolen contractor badge and a URL guessed from the Mercor breach.
Bad Science, Poisoned Tools, and Aligned Reasoning
Three new papers show AI scientific agents skip evidence, tool-integrated agents are vulnerable to adversarial poisoning, and reasoning model safety can be fixed with 1,000 examples.
Gemini CLI Review: Google's Free Terminal AI Agent
A hands-on review of Gemini CLI, Google's open-source AI agent for the terminal - featuring Gemini 3.1 Pro, 1M context, built-in Google Search, MCP support, and the most generous free tier in the category.
SpaceX Secures $60B Option to Acquire Cursor This Year
SpaceX disclosed a deal granting it the right to buy AI coding platform Cursor for $60 billion in 2026, or pay $10 billion for shared development work, deepening Elon Musk's grip on the developer toolchain.
Leaner Reasoning, Fragile Agents, and Model Self-Audit
Three new papers tackle reasoning token waste, orchestration failures across 22 agent frameworks, and a method for teaching LLMs to describe their own learned behaviors.
Deezer: 44% of New Music Uploads Are AI-Generated
Deezer now receives 75,000 AI-generated tracks a day, 44% of all new uploads, while AI music accounts for just 1-3% of total streams and 85% of those are flagged as fraud.
LeCun's JEPA World Model Plans 47x Faster on One GPU
LeWorldModel from Yann LeCun's group strips JEPA world models down to two loss terms, trains 15M parameters on a single GPU in hours, and plans roughly 47x faster than DINO-WM.
Distillation Leaks, Weak Agents, and Research Sabotage
New papers show distillation silently transfers unsafe behaviors, weak agents bottleneck multi-agent pipelines, and frontier AI can't reliably audit sabotaged ML research.
