Days after 159 people accepted Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg’s offer of six months of severance pay for employees who wanted to leave, the corporate late October 16 made a brand new offer of nine months of severance pay to anyone who would leave immediately. Employees had 4 hours to determine whether or not they wanted to join the contract.

In a Slack message seen by TechCrunch, Mullenweg wrote that those that accept the offer will lose access not only to Automattic but additionally to WordPress.org. This effectively means that folks leaving won’t give you the chance to contribute to the open source project – not less than under their existing ID. This would also mean that they’d be effectively banned from the WordPress community. The transaction was previously announced by, amongst others, 404 Media.

In addition to being the CEO of Automattic, Mullenweg also owns and controls the open source website WordPress.org.

Mullenweg gave him 4 hours’ notice and told him that those that wanted to accept the offer should send him a non-public message: “I am resigning and would like to take advantage of the 9-month buyout offer.”

“You don’t have to give any reason or anything. I will reply, “Thank you.” Automattic will accept your resignation, you can keep your office belongings and work on your laptop. You will lose access to Automattic and Worg,” Mullenweg said.

He said, “I think some people were sad that they missed the last window,” and that is why he introduced a brand new, short window.

Automattic didn’t comment on this story by press time. It is unclear whether any of the employees took advantage of the brand new offer. According to the corporate’s website, employment currently totals 1,731 people; a couple of hours ago it was 1732.

The WordPress co-founder’s first offer was addressed to individuals who didn’t agree with his views on Automattic’s fight against the hosting provider WP Engine. The first group of people to leave Automattic included several of the corporate’s top employees, including the pinnacle of WordPress.com (Automtic’s business WordPress hosting arm), Daniel Bachhuberhead of programs and co-creator of the experience Naoko Takanochief AI architect, Daniel Walmsleyand Executive Director of WordPress.org Joseph Haden Chomphosa.

The battle began almost a month ago when Mullenweg called WP Engine the “cancer of WordPress” and accused the independent company of not contributing enough to the WordPress open source project. Over the past few weeks, the fight has included stop-and-desist letters, Automattic accusing WP Engine of trademark infringement, a lawsuit filed by WP Engine, and WordPress.org blocking WP Engine’s access and seizing the plugin it maintains.

Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported that Automattic was preparing to defend its trademarks by retaining “nice and not-so-nice” lawyers, according to an internal post published earlier this yr by the corporate’s then-chief legal officer.

Whitethe Israeli-founded, U.S.-based cybersecurity unicorn that uses artificial intelligence to create so-called data security posture management — a complete assessment and movie of where customer data was created, where it is stored and the way it is used — last yr has seen explosive growth, revitalizing business as breaches proceed to emerge across an increasing number of enterprises and other large organizations. Now Cyera is taking the subsequent steps in its expansion, making its first acquisition and raising major funding on the horizon.

The startup is acquiring Trail Security, a startup that was still operating within the shadows, constructing data loss prevention solutions — essentially technology that enhances posture management to assist secure data within the event of a breach. Cyera pays $162 million in money and stock for Trail, Cyera CEO and co-founder Yotam Segev told TechCrunch in an interview.

Cyera is constructing a powerful client list in major industries like health care, communications and financial services (they don’t desire to call one, but one particularly is an investor in AT&T), so that they generate revenue. He also still has some money within the bank’s wallet from previous fundraisers. Most recently, Cyera acquired a $300 million Series C in April 2024 at a $1.4 billion valuation.

But soon there might be increasingly of it. We have also confirmed with sources near the matter that Cyera is in the method of raising no less than $200 million at an initial valuation of roughly $3 billion. Cyera declined to comment on fundraising.

The transaction will help Cyera expand its offering to fulfill customer demands to service the longer process that follows an engagement in attitude management, namely offering a more complete suite of services in comparison with other firms in the sphere. Cyera’s competitors include CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Rubrik, Wiz, Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet.

Trail is a relatively young company – it was only a yr old and still operating in stealth mode, as its results show rare site and the indisputable fact that Zohar Wittenberg, CEO and co-founder, didn’t even have the possibility to create the corporate “LinkedIn official.’ But in actual fact, it has already quietly raised $35 million in funding, Segev told me, including a Series A from Lightspeed, CRV and Cyberstarts — an early-stage backer that has invested in a wave of high-profile Israeli cybersecurity firms, including Wiz and Cyera.

It had some momentum, so why throw within the towel so quickly? Wittenberg told me this happens for two important reasons.

First, it is the state of the safety market, where buyers now favor platform games – with all-in-one offerings and point-of-care solutions.

“We think we’re building the best product in this category, but I think customers wanted to buy data loss protection and data security posture management as one platform,” Wittenberg said in an interview. “We can take the DSPM site and build it better.”

The second reason is that Segev and Wittenberg have known one another for years, since school, and it appeared to be a simple selection for either side in terms of cultural fit.

In the long run, Cyera will concentrate on further improving its own technology – artificial intelligence stands out as the startup’s instrument of selection for collecting and protecting data, but it surely is also the weapon of selection that many malicious hackers use to search out modern ways to network breaches – but in the long run it also intends make more acquisitions, Segev told TechCrunch, to fulfill growing customer demands.

“You have no idea how many times a month the CISO calls me with a subtle question about the time,” Segev told me in April. “Something is happening to me,” they are saying. I want you. How quickly are you able to scan my surroundings? This happens each time. And we jump on it. We send a unit they usually need to determine what data is included. Sometimes they do not even know what data has been compromised.”

Trail has 40 employees they usually all join Cyera.

Do today’s artificial intelligence models really remember, think, plan and reason like a human brain would? Some AI labs would tell us that is the case, but according to Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, the answer isn’t any. But he thinks we could achieve it in a few decade using a brand new method called the “world model.”

Earlier this yr, OpenAI released a brand new feature it calls “memory” that permits ChatGPT to “remember” your conversations. The startup’s latest generation of models, o1, displays the word “thinking” when generating results, and OpenAI claims the same models are able to “complex reasoning.”

Everything indicates that we are close to AGI. However, during recent discussion at the Hudson ForumLeCun undermines AI optimists like xAI founder Elon Musk and Google DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg, who suggest that human-level artificial intelligence is just around the corner.

“We need machines that understand the world; (machines) that can remember things, that have intuition, that have common sense, things that can reason and plan at the same level as humans,” LeCun said during the call. “Despite what you have heard from the most enthusiastic people, current AI systems are not capable of this.”

LeCun argues that today’s large language models, reminiscent of those powered by ChatGPT and Meta AI, are a far cry from “human-level artificial intelligence.” He later said that humanity could possibly be “years or even decades” away from achieving such a goal. (But that does not stop his boss, Mark Zuckerberg, from asking him when AGI will occur.)

The reason is easy: these LLMs work by predicting the next token (often just a few letters or a brief word), and today’s image/video models predict the next pixel. In other words, language models are one-dimensional predictors and AI image/video models are two-dimensional predictors. These models have develop into quite good at predicting of their respective dimensions, but they do not really understand the three-dimensional world.

For this reason, modern artificial intelligence systems are unable to perform easy tasks that almost all humans can. LeCun notes that folks learn to clear the table at age 10 and drive a automotive at 17 – they usually learn each in a matter of hours. However, even the most advanced artificial intelligence systems in the world today, built on 1000’s or tens of millions of hours of information, cannot operate reliably in the physical world.

To achieve more complex tasks, LeCun suggests that we’d like to construct three-dimensional models that may perceive the world around us and cluster around a brand new variety of artificial intelligence architecture: world models.

“A world model is a mental model of how the world behaves,” he explained. “You can imagine a sequence of actions you might take, and your world model will allow you to predict what effect that sequence of actions will have on the world.”

Consider the “world model” in your personal head. For example, imagine you have a look at a unclean bedroom and wish to clean it. You can imagine how collecting all of your clothes and putting them away would do the trick. You haven’t got to try multiple methods or learn the way to clean a room first. Your brain observes three-dimensional space and creates an motion plan that may enable you to achieve your goal the first time. This roadmap is the secret that the models of the AI ​​world promise.

Part of the profit is that world models can take in way more data than LLM models. This also makes them computationally intensive, which is why cloud service providers are racing to partner with artificial intelligence firms.

World models are a crucial concept that several artificial intelligence labs are currently working on, and the term is quickly becoming another buzzword attracting enterprise capital funds. A gaggle of esteemed artificial intelligence researchers, including Fei-Fei Li and Justin Johnson, just raised $230 million for his or her startup World Labs. The “Godmother of AI” and her team are also confident that world models will unlock much smarter AI systems. OpenAI also describes its unreleased Sora video generator as a world model, but doesn’t go into details.

LeCun outlined the idea of ​​using world models to create human-level artificial intelligence in: Article from 2022 on “goal-driven artificial intelligence,” although notes that the concept is over 60 years old. In short, the basic representation of the world (for instance, a video of a unclean room) and memory are fed into the world model. The world model then predicts what the world will seem like based on this information. You then provide the goals for the world model, including the modified state of the world you wish to achieve (e.g. a clean room), in addition to guardrails to ensure the model doesn’t harm people in achieving the goal (don’t kill me in the middle of cleansing the room, please). The world model then finds a sequence of actions to achieve these goals.

According to LeCun, Meta’s long-term research lab, FAIR, or Fundamental AI Research, is actively working on constructing goal-driven models of artificial intelligence and the world. FAIR used to concentrate on artificial intelligence for Meta’s upcoming products, but LeCun says that in recent years the lab has begun to focus exclusively on long-term artificial intelligence research. LeCun says FAIR doesn’t even use LLM courses presently.

World models are an intriguing idea, but LeCun says we’ve not made much progress in making these systems a reality. There are numerous very difficult problems facing us where we are now, and he says it’s actually more complicated than we predict.

“It will be years, if not a decade, before we can get everything up and running here,” Lecun said. “Mark Zuckerberg keeps asking me how long it will take.”