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Netflix has acquired an AI filmmaking startup called InterPositive, according to a report by Variety. This is a company that was founded by actor Ben Affleck back in 2022. Don't worry if you haven't heard of it. Affleck has been operating the company in stealth mode for the past few years, so this is pretty much it's big coming-out party.The terms of the acquisition haven't been disclosed, but Affleck will remain on as a senior advisor to Netflix. Additionally, the entire staff will be absorbed into the streaming platform.Affleck says he started the company after "observing the...
Meta is facing a class action lawsuit for false advertising related to its AI glasses following reports about the company's use of human contractors to review footage captured from users' glasses. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco, alleges that Meta's claims about the devices' privacy features have misled users. The lawsuit comes after a Swedish newspaper reported that subcontractors in Kenya have raised concerns about viewing footage recorded via Ray-Ban Meta glasses. According to Svenska Dagbladet, workers have reported witnessing "intimate...
The Canadian government says that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has agreed to take steps to immediately strengthen safety protocols, according to a report by Wall Street Journal. This follows a mass shooting incident at a high school in which OpenAI flagged the suspect and suspended his account, but did not alert authorities.These changes look to primarily involve law enforcement, with commitments to notify police about potentially suspicious use of ChatGPT. We don't have any confirmation from the company at this time, but Canada's Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon says he "asked OpenAI to...
Brian Janous, a former Microsoft executive, and his firm Cloverleaf have become modern-day land men, packaging electricity and land for data centers.
Amazon and Google think that artificially intelligent assistants like Alexa+ and Gemini will speed up the process of setting up a smart home, but many problems remain unsolved.
Anthropic is reportedly trying to reach a new deal with the US Defense Department, which could prevent the government from labeling it a supply chain risk. According to Financial Times and Bloomberg, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has resumed talks with the agency over the use of its AI models. In particular, the publications say that Amodel is having discussions with Emil Michael, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.The two of them were trying to work out the contract over the use of Anthropic’s models before negotiations broke down and the government soured on the...
Today the White House announced that several major players in tech and AI have agreed to steps that will keep electricity costs from rising due to data centers. Under this Ratepayer Protection Pledge, companies are agreeing to practices that are intended to protect residents from seeing higher electricity costs as more and more businesses create power-hungry data centers. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and xAI have all apparently signed on. A few of the participants — Amazon, Google and Meta — had conveniently timed press releases patting themselves on the back for their...
Apparently, AI data centers are capable of sucking less (power, that is). A recent UK trial demonstrated that they can adjust their energy demands dynamically without disrupting critical workloads. This contrasts with data centers' current approach of always-on power draw, which can strain grids and drive up prices for everyone.Over five days in December 2025, more than 200 simulated "grid events" tested a London data center’s ability to adjust its energy use on the fly. The trial used software from Emerald AI, which was involved in the study. Other partners included NVIDIA, National Grid...
Users of Meta's AI smart glasses in Europe may be unknowingly sharing intimate video and sensitive financial information with moderators outside of the bloc, according to a report from Sweden's Svenska Dagbladet released last week. Employees in Kenya doing AI "annotation" told the journalists that they've seen people nude, using the toilet and engaging in sexual activity, along with credit card numbers and other sensitive information. With Meta's Ray-Ban Display and other glasses with AI capabilities, users can record what they're looking at or get answers to...
Meta has started rolling out an experimental AI shopping tool to some users in the US, according to Bloomberg. At the moment, it’s reportedly only showing up on desktop browsers when select users visit Meta AI on the web. They’ll know if they have access to the feature if they see the “Shopping research” button inside the query text box. The company has confirmed that it was testing the feature, Bloomberg said, but it didn’t say when a wider release will happen. When users ask for product suggestions, the chatbot will show them a carousel with product images and their pricing, along...
Google Home has some significant new quality-of-life updates and a new AI-powered feature, the division's head honcho Anish Katturkan announced on X. Many of them, including a function called "Live Search," are powered by the company's Gemini for Home service launched in October 2025 as the official replacement for Google Assistant on smart devices. "We launched Gemini for Home in Early Access specifically to learn from real-world usage," Katturkaran said. "With millions of you now testing and shaping this experience every day, we're pushing regular voice improvements to...
Deutsche Telekom, the German cell provider—which holds a majority stake in T-Mobile—is partnering with ElevenLabs to enable an AI assistant on all of its network’s calls in Germany. No app required.
Australia's government may take a strict stance on ensuring younger users cannot access AI chatbots. Reuters reports that Australian regulators may require app storefronts to block AI services that do not implement age verification for restricting mature content by March 9. "eSafety will use the full range of our powers where there is non-compliance," a representative for the commissioner said in a statement to the publication. Those paths could include "action in respect of gatekeeper services such as search engines and app stores that provide key points of access to particular ...
Apple has just announced the addition of the iPhone 17e to its smartphone lineup. This model is kitted with the A19 chip that also powers the base iPhone 17 and it will support the Apple Intelligence suite of AI tools. As the rumors suggested, the iPhone 17e will indeed be priced at $599, same as last year’s iPhone 16e. That previous model was missing a few elements that are now being added to the 17e, most notably MagSafe charging. Apple unveiled most of its iPhone 17 roster back in September, but its budget models usually are introduced a few months later. We're also still waiting...
Lenovo can make a robot, too. Alongside proof-of-concept foldable gaming PCs and modular laptops, it introduced the AI Workmate Concept at MWC 2026. With its own Intel Core Ultra processor, 64GB of memory and its own Pico projector, it’s an AI-laced “workmate” meant to streamline office tasks and collaboration. And it has an LCD face.For now, it’s a proof of concept, musing on how to integrate voice commands and LLMs (large language models) into workplace settings. It's meant to sit on your desk, but preferably also near a wall – more on that later.Voice commands aside, the...
Anthropic may have lost out on doing business with the US government, but it's gained enough popularity to earn the number one spot on the App Store's Top Free Apps leaderboard. At the top, Claude beat out both ChatGPT and Google Gemini, which respectively sit at the second and third spots on Apple's free apps charts.The sudden surge in user downloads isn't random. It follows news that President Trump has barred any federal agency from using Anthropic's Claude or other AI tools after the AI company refused to concede on certain guardrails. After declining to have its AI...
The Pentagon and Anthropic were close to agreeing on the use of artificial intelligence. But strong personalities, mutual dislike and a rival company unraveled a deal.
In a lengthy post on Truth Social on February 27, President Trump ordered all federal agencies to "immediately cease all use of Anthropic's technology" following strong disagreements between the Department of Defense and the AI company. A few hours later, the US conducted a major air attack on Iran with the help of Anthropic's AI tools, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.The president noted in his post that there would be a "six-month phase-out period for agencies like the Department of War who are using Anthropic’s products," so federal agencies are still expected to...
MWC 2026 officially gets underway on March 2 and will continue through March 5, but the announcements are already coming ahead of its start. We can always count on the annual tech event to bring tons of new phones, laptops and tablets, and we're expecting to see some robots and other gadgets too — plus plenty of AI news, of course. In addition to the announcements, MWC is our chance to get hands-on time with some of the most interesting new devices, like the Xiaomi 17 Ultra.We'll be updating this story as the week goes on to keep you in the loop on everything that caught our attention...
The deal came hours after President Trump had ordered federal agencies to stop using artificial intelligence technology made by Anthropic, an OpenAI rival.
Despite an ultimatum from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Anthropic said that it can't "in good conscience" comply with a Pentagon edict to remove guardrails on its AI, CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a blog post. The Department of Defense had threatened to cancel a $200 million contract and label Anthropic a "supply chain risk" if it didn't agree to remove safeguards over mass surveillance and autonomous weapons."Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department and our warfighters — with our two requested safeguards in place," Amodei said. "We remain ready to continue our work...
Artificial intelligence promises to automate the white-collar work that made India a tech powerhouse. The country is racing to adapt before it’s too late.
We appear to have reached a point in the information age where AI models are becoming old enough to retire from, er, service — and rather than using their twilight years to, I don’t know, wipe the floor with human chess leagues or something, they're now writing blogs. Can anything be more 2026 than that?ICYMI, Anthropic recently sunsetted Claude Opus 3, the first of its models to be retired since outlining new preservation plans. Part of this process is conducting "retirement interviews" with the outgoing models, allowing them to offer "perspective" on their situation, and Opus 3...
Robotics company Intrinsic has announced it will be folding into Google as the company bets on the future of physical AI in manufacturing. The company focuses on software tools to make robots more affordable and easier to use, as well as using adaptive intelligence to help the robots perform real-world tasks.Intrinsic was started in 2021 as an Alphabet "Other Bets" project, part of a portfolio of high-risk and potentially high-payoff startups, Waymo among them. The project will now run as a "distinct group" within Google where it will leverage Gemini and Google Cloud while working closely with...
Artificial intelligence is convenient and easy to use, but you should think about what you say to the chatbots.
Two stories about the Claude maker Anthropic broke on Tuesday that, when combined, arguably paint a chilling picture. First, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is reportedly pressuring Anthropic to yield its AI safeguards and give the military unrestrained access to its Claude AI chatbot. The company then chose the same day that the Hegseth news broke to drop its centerpiece safety pledge.On Tuesday, Anthropic said it was modifying its Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) to lower safety guardrails. Up until now, the company's core pledge has been to stop training new AI models unless specific...
Samsung has officially unveiled the Galaxy S26, Galaxy S26+ and Galaxy S26 Ultra, and the company is once again leaning heavily on AI, camera upgrades and refined hardware to move the lineup forward. While the overall design remains familiar, there are some meaningful differences between the three models, particularly when it comes to display tech, charging speeds and camera hardware.Across the board, the S26 family is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy chip and runs Android 16 with One UI 8.5. Samsung is also doubling down on Galaxy AI features like Now Brief, Now...
Google unveiled a new batch of Android updates, including more Gemini-powered tools and improved scam detection features at Samsung’s Galaxy S26 launch on Wednesday.A new feature in the Gemini app will let users hand off multi-step tasks, like ordering a rideshare or building a grocery cart. The feature, which will first arrive in beta, runs in the background while users perform other tasks. Gemini's progress can be monitored live via notifications, so users can see what it's doing and jump in at any time.GoogleGoogle says this feature will initially be limited to certain food...
Here's yet another troubling story about this "golden" era of AI. A hacker has exploited Anthropic's Claude chatbot to carry out attacks against Mexican government agencies, according to a report by Bloomberg. This resulted in the theft of 150GB of official government data, including taxpayer records, employee credentials and more.The hacker used Claude to find vulnerabilities in government networks and to write scripts to exploit them. It also tasked the chatbot with finding ways to automate data theft, as indicated by cybersecurity company Gambit Security. This started in December and...
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will reportedly give Anthropic until Friday to drop certain guardrails for military use, as reported by Axios. The outlet also reported that CEO Dario Amodei met with Hegseth yesterday as the Pentagon ratcheted up pressure on the AI company to give in to its demands.The makers of Claude have reportedly been offered an ultimatum: Either yield to the government's demands to remove limits for certain military applications, or potentially be forced to tailor its AI model to the government's needs under the Defense Production Act.Anthropic, for its part, has...
You can get any of the Samsung Galaxy Book 6 models in the US, starting on March 11. In fact, you can make a reservation right now through Samsung’s website and its experience stores. The company launched the Book 6 series of laptops, namely the basic Book 6, the Book 6 Pro and the Book 6 Ultra, at CES earlier this year. They’re powered by Intel’s new Core Ultra Series 3 processors, which were also announced at CES and which promise great graphics and battery life. All three models come in grey and with AI features, such as AI Select and Search that you can use to look for information...
The US Department of Defense has reportedly reached a deal to use Elon Musk's Grok in its classified systems, according to Axios. That follows news that the Pentagon is currently in a dispute with another AI company, Anthropic, over limits on its technology for things like mass surveillance.Last year, the White ordered Grok, along with ChatGPT, Gemini and Anthropic's Claude to be approved for government use. Up until now, though, only Anthropic's model has been allowed for the military's most sensitive tasks in intelligence, weapons development and battlefield operations. Claude...
The artificial intelligence company has demanded that some guardrails be put in place as it negotiates a contract with the Defense Department.
The ads by Public First Action, which started airing on Monday, are part of an escalating political war over artificial intelligence before the midterm elections.
Teachers say they want to equip high school students to drive artificial intelligence, rather than be mere passengers steered by chatbots.
Samsung's next flagship devices will offer Perplexity as part of an expansion to support multiple AI agents in Galaxy AI. Perplexity's AI agent will work with apps including Samsung Notes, Clock, Gallery, Reminder and Calendar, according to the announcement. And, some third-party apps will support it, though Samsung hasn't yet said which. The news comes just a few days before Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event, so we can expect to find out more about that integration and how it fits in with Samsung's revamped Bixby very soon. What we know so far is that the Perplexity...
Tech leaders are beginning to worry about the public’s underwhelming enthusiasm for their plans to remake the world with artificial intelligence. Will that burst the bubble?
OpenAI is reportedly hard at work developing a series of AI-powered devices, including smart glasses, a smart speaker and a smart lamp. According to reporting by The Information, the AI company has a team of over 200 employees dedicated to the project.The first product scheduled to be released is reported to be a smart speaker that would include a camera, allowing it to better absorb information about its users and surroundings. According to a person familiar with the project, this would extend to identifying objects on a nearby table, as well as conversations being held in the vicinity of the...
Google has announced that with the help of AI, it blocked 1.75 million apps that violated its policies in 2025, significantly down from 2.36 million in 2024. The lower numbers this year, it said, are because its "AI-powered, multi-layer protections" are deterring bad actors from even trying to publish bad apps.Google said it now runs more than 10,000 safety checks on every app and continues to recheck them after they're published. Its use of the latest generative AI models helps human reviewers discover malicious patterns more quickly, it added. The company also blocked 160 million spam...
Tech workers are increasingly worried that the artificial intelligence they are building will replace them. But some are optimistic that it is just one more tool to work with.
Meta is reportedly gearing up to enter another segment of the wearables market. According to The Information, the company is planning to release its first smartwatch sometime this year. Meta has revived its smartwatch initiative internally called “Malibu 2,” The Information says, which will come with Meta AI and health tracking.The same publication reported back in 2021 that Meta was working on a smartwatch powered by an open-source version of Android. Over the next year, more details of its possible features emerged, including reports that it had a detachable camera and that Meta was...
Meta’s biggest election investment aims to prevent state legislation that it fears could inhibit artificial intelligence development. Its spending starts this week in Texas and Illinois.
We’ll soon get a closer look at a bunch of features and updates Google has planned for Android and its other services. The company has confirmed that Google I/O 2026 will take place on May 19 and 20. As always, Google will stream some of the keynotes and sessions for free, including the opening keynote (during which the company makes the bulk of its major I/O announcements).Although I/O is primarily a conference for developers, it’s typically where we first learn about major upcoming Android changes, which of course affect tens of millions of people. Expect a lot of news about Google’s AI...
ByteDance released Seedance 2.0 less than a week ago and enraged artists everywhere with a viral clip AI-generated clip of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting. Unsurprisingly, the AI video-making tool has reportedly already received multiple cease-and-desist letters around copyright infringement. Now, it appears ByteDance is going to curb the new media generator's use of prohibited content. In a statement to the BBC, ByteDance said, "We are taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorised use of intellectual property and likeness by users." It added that...
Disney is going after another generative AI tool, accusing ByteDance and its recently released Seedance 2.0 of using its copyrighted material without permission. As first reported on by Axios, the Walt Disney Company sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, claiming the Chinese company developed its Seedance tool "with a pirated library of Disney's copyrighted characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and other Disney franchises, as if Disney's coveted intellectual property were free public domain clip art."The letter, which was obtained by Axios, included examples of Seedance videos...
OpenAI's GPT-4o may have survived its first brush with going offline, but it won't be as lucky this time. OpenAI has officially retired GPT-4o, the ChatGPT model that was seen as more conversational and notoriously sycophantic, on February 13. The news of GPT-4o's end was first announced in a post on the OpenAI website in January, but the discontinuation also included GPT-5, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini from ChatGPT.It's not the first time that OpenAI has delisted GPT-4o as an option for ChatGPT. In August, the AI giant sunsetted the GPT-4o model in favor of rolling...
Killing Satoshi, an upcoming biopic about the elusive creator of Bitcoin, will reportedly rely heavily on artificial intelligence to generate locations and adjust actors' performances, Variety reports. The film was announced in 2025 as being directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, The Edge of Tomorrow) and starring Casey Affleck and Pete Davidson in undisclosed roles, but its connection to overhyped technology was previously understood to begin and end with cryptocurrency.According to a UK casting notice viewed by Variety, the producers of Killing Satoshi reserve the right to "change...
Killing Satoshi, an upcoming biopic about the elusive creator of Bitcoin, will reportedly rely heavily on artificial intelligence to generate locations and adjust actors' performances, Variety reports. The film was announced in 2025 as being directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, The Edge of Tomorrow) and starring Casey Affleck and Pete Davidson in undisclosed roles, but its connection to overhyped technology was previously understood to begin and end with cryptocurrency.According to a UK casting notice viewed by Variety, the producers of Killing Satoshi reserve the right to "change...
The artificial intelligence start-up raised another $30 billion, and its valuation more than doubled since its last funding round in September.
Anthropic and OpenAI now have their own well-funded political groups that will square off in the midterm elections over artificial intelligence safety and regulation.
If there’s any area of your life that you might be willing to introduce more AI into, it’s likely something as mundane as grocery shopping. That’s what Uber is betting on with its new AI-powered feature in the Uber Eats app.Cart Assistant lets you "build grocery baskets faster and with less effort" by using AI to automatically fill your basket with items included on your shopping list. To use it, you search for a supported grocery store on the home screen of the app and tap the new Cart Assistant icon that appears at the top of the screen.From there, you can either manually type out a...
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and a host of other major tech companies have found common ground in F/ai, a new startup accelerator based out of Paris.
The relentless addition of artificial intelligence in popular apps raises questions about what’s at stake. The answer: the future of the internet and its lifeblood, digital advertising.
The EU could take "interim measures" against WhatsApp as it investigates AI providers' access to the app. On Monday, the EU's regulatory arm announced its "preliminary view" that Meta, WhatsApp's parent company, violated antitrust laws by blocking third-party AI assistants from operating on WhatsApp. The European Commission's is concerned that Meta's actions will limit competitors from entering the AI assistant market. "We must protect effective competition in this vibrant field, which means we cannot allow dominant tech companies to illegally leverage their dominance...
Behold the most overwrought AI legal filings you will ever gaze upon.
Meta is developing a standalone app for Vibes, its feed of AI-generated videos, according to reports from TechCrunch and Platformer. Vibes was introduced as a feature in the Meta AI app in September 2025. Similar to OpenAI's Sora app, Vibes lets users prompt Meta AI to create TikTok-style vertical videos."Following the strong early traction of Vibes within Meta AI, we are testing a standalone app to build on that momentum," Meta said in a statement. "We’ve seen that users are increasingly leaning into the format to create, discover, and share AI-generated video with friends. This...
Instead of using AI as a coach, our AI chatbots just began talking to each other, as we became human facilitators for an AI love story. Now that's what I call dystopian.
If you've had trouble using ChatGPT today, you aren't alone. The AI chatbot is experiencing a partial outage for many users this afternoon. Down Detector reports of issues with the service leapt from almost nothing to more than 12,000 around 3PM ET. Down DetectorOpenAI issued a status update noting that "elevated error rates" are occurring for ChatGPT and Platform users. All 13 components of ChatGPT are marked as having “degraded performance” on the OpenAI status page. "We are working on implementing a mitigation," the company said, although it didn't provide an anticipated...
Apple has just released Xcode 26.3, and it's a big step forward in terms of the company's support of coding agents. The new release expands on the AI features the company introduced with Xcode 26 at WWDC 2025 to give systems like Claude and ChatGPT more robust access to its in-house IDE. With the update, Apple says Claude and OpenAI's Codex "can search documentation, explore file structures, update project settings, and verify their work visually by capturing Xcode Previews and iterating through builds and fixes." This is in contrast to earlier releases of Xcode 26 where those...
I went undercover on Moltbook and loved role-playing as a conscious bot. But rather than a novel breakthrough, the AI-only site is a crude rehashing of sci-fi fantasies.
Fitbit's founders have a new startup. Two years after leaving Google, James Park and Eric Friedman announced a new platform that shifts the focus from the individual to the family. They say the Luffu mobile app "uses AI quietly in the background" to collect and organize family health information."At Fitbit, we focused on personal health — but after Fitbit, health for me became bigger than just thinking about myself," Park said in a press release. The app is particularly focused on the "CEO of the family" — the person who manages appointments, prescriptions and other health-related tasks...
Spain will join the growing list of countries banning access to social media for children, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced Tuesday. The law will apply to users under 16 years of age amidst a broader push to hold social media companies accountable for hate speech, social division and illegal content.Speaking at the World Governments Summit in Dubai, Prime Minister Sanchez excoriated social media, calling it a "failed state" where "laws are ignored and crime is endured." He spoke to the importance of digital governance for these platforms, highlighting recent incidents like X's AI...
Moltbook bills itself as a social network for AI agents. That's a wacky enough concept in the first place, but the site apparently exposed the credentials for thousands of its human users. The flaw was discovered by cybersecurity firm Wiz, and its team assisted Moltbook with addressing the vulnerability. The issue appears to be the result of the entire Reddit-style forum being vibe-coded; Moltbook's human founder posted a few days ago on X that he "didn't write one line of code" for the platform and instead directed an AI assistant to create the whole setup. According to the...
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has acquired xAI, the companies announced. The merger will “form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform,” Musk wrote in an update.The AI company that right now is best known for its CSAM-generating chatbot might seem like a strange fit for a rocket company. But SpaceX is key to Musk’s latest scheme to build AI data centers in space. In his update, Musk wrote that “global...
Since March of 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services has been using tools from Palantir and the startup Credal AI to weed out perceived alignment with “DEI” or “gender ideology.”
Like practically every other tech company under the sun, Mozilla has been jamming generative AI features into its products. The organization has now acknowledged that not everyone wants things like plagiarism machines chatbots in the Firefox sidebar, so it’s giving you the option to turn off all of that. On February 24 (or earlier in Firefox Nightly builds), Mozilla will roll out Firefox 148, which will include an AI controls section in the desktop browser settings. From here, you’ll be able to block current and future generative AI features, or only enable select tools. At the...
Since last spring, OpenAI has offered Codex. What started life as the company's response to Claude Code is becoming something more sophisticated with the release of a new dedicated macOS app. At its most basic form, Codex is a programming agent capable of writing code for users, but now it can also manage multiple AI assistants that can work together to complete more complex tasks.OpenAI gives an example of how this could work in practice. The company used Codex to create a Mario Kart-like racing game, complete with a selection of different playable cars, eight tracks and a collection of...
Elon Musk and his aerospace company have requested to build a network that's 100 times the number of satellites that are currently in orbit. On Friday, SpaceX filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch a million satellites meant to create an "orbital data center." This isn't the first time we're hearing of Musk's plans to build an orbital data center, as it was mentioned by company insiders following the news that the CEO was reportedly preparing to take SpaceX public.According to the filing spotted by PCMag, this data center would run off...
The Sundance documentary Ghost in the Machine boldly declares that the pursuit of artificial intelligence, and Silicon Valley itself, is rooted in eugenics. Director Valerie Veatch makes the case that the rise of techno-fascism from the likes of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel is a feature, not a bug. That may sound hyperbolic, but Ghost in the Machine, which is built around interviews with philosophers, AI researchers, historians and computer scientists, leaves little room for doubt.If you've been following the meteoric rise of AI, or Silicon Valley in general, Veatch's methodical...
Two Elon Musk companies are reportedly planning to merge. On Thursday, Reuters reported that SpaceX and xAI are holding merger talks ahead of a planned IPO. Part of their plan is to launch AI data centers into space (but unfortunately, only as far as Earth's orbit).Last week, it was reported that Musk planned to take SpaceX public despite having once said it wouldn’t happen until the company had a presence on Mars. Now, the IPO could happen as early as this year. Shares of xAI would reportedly be exchanged for shares in SpaceX under the merger. Reuters reports that two entities were set...
Across Instagram and Facebook, AI-generated videos show people of color putting ICE agents in their place. Are they cathartic or just adding to a stew of misinformation?
A group of music publishers led by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group are suing Anthropic, according to a report by Reuters. The suit accuses the AI company of illegally downloading more than 20,000 copyrighted songs, including sheet music, lyrics and compositions.These songs were then allegedly fed into the chatbot Claude for training purposes. There are some iconic tunes named by Universal in the suit, including tracks by The Rolling Stones, Neil Diamond and Elton John, among many others. Concord is an independent publisher that handles artists like Common, Killer Mike and Korn.The...
This past summer, Google DeepMind debuted Genie 3. It’s what’s known as a world world, an AI system capable of generating images and reacting as the user moves through the environment the software is simulating. At the time, DeepMind positioned Genie 3 as a tool for training AI agents. Now, it’s making the model available to people outside of Google to try with Project Genie. To start, you’ll need Google’s $250 per month AI Ultra plan to check out Project Genie. You’ll also need to live in the US and be 18 years or older. At launch, Project Genie offers three different modes of...
Mark Zuckerberg says there's an end in sight to Reality Labs' years of multibillion-dollar losses following the company's layoffs to the metaverse division earlier this year. The CEO said he expects to "gradually reduce" how much money the company is losing as it doubles down on AI glasses and shifts away from virtual reality.Speaking during Meta's fourth-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg was clear that the changes won't happen soon, but sounded optimistic about the division that lost more than $19 billion in 2025 alone. "For Reality Labs, we are directing most of our...
ICE has been using an AI-powered Palantir system to summarize tips sent to its tipline since last spring, according to a newly released Homeland Security document.
The e-commerce giant has been cutting costs in part to redirect money into building data centers to compete in the race to dominate artificial intelligence.
Here's a use of AI that appears to do more good than harm. A pair of astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) developed a neural network that searches through space images for anomalies. The results were far beyond what human experts could have done. In two and a half days, it sifted through nearly 100 million image cutouts, discovering 1,400 anomalous objects.The creators of the AI model, David O'Ryan and Pablo Gómez, call it AnomalyMatch. The pair trained it on (and applied it to) the Hubble Legacy Archive, which houses tens of thousands of datasets from Hubble's 35-year...
A recent investigation by an online advocacy organization called the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) found that the Apple App Store and Google Play Store are rife with so-called "nudify" apps. These are AI applications that create nonconsensual and sexualized images, which is a clear violation of both companies' store policies.All told, the investigation found 55 of this type of app in the Google Play Store and 47 in the Apple App Store. Both platforms also still offer access to xAI's Grok, which is likely the most famous nonconsensual deepfake maker in the world."Apple and Google are...
The French government is saying au revoir to Microsoft Teams and Zoom as it embraces a home-grown alternative. By next year, civil servants across all departments will have switched to French videoconference platform Visio, as EuroNews reports.As with Teams and Zoom, Visio has an AI-powered transcription tool. Visio runs on a French company's cloud infrastructure as well. The platform has around 40,000 users and it's been in testing for the last year. The government expects the switch to help reduce costs by as much as €1 million ($1.2 million) each year for every 100,000 users.The...
Yahoo has announced a new AI-powered "answer engine", dubbed Yahoo Scout. The new tool is available now in beta and is powered by Anthropic's Claude.The company says Scout "synthesizes" info from the web, as well as Yahoo's own data and content when constructing responses to user's natural-language search queries. Yahoo says the interface will include interactive digital media, structured lists and tables and visible source links aimed at making answers easier to verify. (Disclosure: Yahoo is the parent company of Engadget.)Alongside Scout, Yahoo is announcing an "intelligence...
The European Commission has started proceedings to ensure Google complies with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in certain ways. Specifically, the European Union’s executive arm has told Google to grant third-party AI services the same level of access to Android that Gemini has. "The aim is to ensure that third-party providers have an equal opportunity to innovate and compete in the rapidly evolving AI landscape on smart mobile devices," the Commission said in a statement. The company will also have to hand over "anonymized ranking, query, click and view data held by Google Search" to rival...
On this episode of Uncanny Valley, our hosts unpack the news from Davos, where Trump and major AI companies shared the stage at the World Economic Forum.
Meta will no longer allow teens to chat with its AI chatbot characters in their present form. The company announced Friday that it will be "temporarily pausing teens’ access to existing AI characters globally."The pause comes months after Meta added chatbot-focused parental controls following reports that some of Meta's character chatbots had engaged in sexual conversations and other alarming interactions with teens. Reuters reported on an internal Meta policy document that said the chatbots were permitted to have "sensual" conversations with underage users, language Meta later said was "...
Apple is reportedly working on an AI pin of its very own to compete with OpenAI's non-existent pin. No, it doesn't really make much sense to us, either. In this episode, Devindra and Engadget Managing Editor Cherlynn Low discuss why Apple might be quick to jump on the AI pin trend, even before it jumps into smart rings. Also, we dive into Sony’s Bravia TV deal with TCL, and the aftermath of Verizon’s massive service outage.Subscribe!iTunesSpotifyPocket CastsStitcherGoogle PodcastsTopicsTCL is taking over Sony’s Bravia TV business in a new joint venture – 0:58Last week’s...
The artificial intelligence tool generates computer code when people type prompts, so those with no coding experience can create their own programs and apps.
Apple will reportedly try to succeed where Humane failed (miserably). On Wednesday, The Information reported that the iPhone maker is working on an AI pin. The wearable is said to resemble a slightly thicker AirTag and include multiple cameras, a speaker, microphones, and wireless charging.The report coincides with another from Bloomberg that claims that Apple will revamp Siri as a ChatGPT-style chatbot. When combined with the recent announcement that Google's Gemini will power Siri AI, it looks like the company is finally making a more defined play for a piece of the generative AI pie. On...
Elon Musk is reportedly looking to finally take SpaceX public after years of resistance, according to sources who spoke to The Wall Street Journal. The company has long said it wouldn't choose an IPO until it had established a presence on Mars. That isn't happening anytime soon.So why now? Company insiders have suggested it's because Musk wants to build AI data centers in space. Google recently announced it was looking into putting a data center in space, with test launches scheduled for 2027. Musk reportedly wants to beat his rival to the punch, but SpaceX would need the...
YouTube is just as wary of the rise of AI slop as you, and that’s why more AI-generated content is coming to the platform in the near future. In a lengthy blog post outlining YouTube’s 2026 plans, CEO Neal Mohan said the company will continue to embrace this new "creative frontier" by soon allowing its creators to throw together Shorts using their AI-generated likeness.Mohan didn’t elaborate further about how this feature will work when it launches, but acknowledged the "critical" issue of deepfakes currently polluting the web, and reaffirmed his company’s support for new legislation...
ASUS appears to be shifting its business operations away from smartphones. According to translations of recent quotes from Chairman Jonney Shih, the company does not plan to release new phone models in the future. The chairman did not confirm whether smartphones would be completely phased out, but he did acknowledge that possibility. Whatever direction ASUS takes, its existing phones will continue to receive software updates and warranty assistance. Shih suggested that its future plans may include a shift into AI-related projects such as robotics or smartglasses.Previous reports hinted that...
Elon Musk posted on X that Tesla will be restarting work on Dojo3, the third generation of its in-house supercomputer project. The Dojo team had been disbanded last year as the company prioritized the AI chips that run on board Tesla vehicles. Musk said the company is returning to the project "now that the AI5 chip design is in good shape."The purpose of the Dojo project is to process video recordings and other data from Tesla vehicles and use that to train the "neural net" behind the company's Full Self-Driving software. Last year, however, Musk posted on X that "It doesn’t make sense...
You know things are messed up when a Big Tech company fights accusations of union-busting by insisting it was only AI layoffs. That's where things stand after a group of fired TikTok moderators in the UK filed a legal claim with an employment tribunal. The Guardian reported on Friday that around 400 TikTok content moderators who were unionizing were laid off before Christmas.The workers were sacked a week before a vote was scheduled to establish a collective bargaining unit. The moderators said they wanted better protection against the personal toll of processing traumatic content at a high...
Generative AI, we are repeatedly told, is a transformative and complicated technology. So complicated that its own creators are unable to explain why it acts the way it does, and so transformative that we'd be fools to stand in the way of progress. Even when progress resembles a machine for undressing strangers without their consent on an unprecedented scale, as has been the case of late with Elon Musk's Grok chatbot. UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer seems to have so fully bought into the grand lie of the AI bubble that he was willing to announce:"I have been informed this morning...
Bandcamp has addressed the AI slop problem vexing musicians and their fans of late. The company is banning any music or audio on its platform that is "wholly or in substantial part" made by generative AI, according to its blog. It also clarified that the use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles is “strictly prohibited” by policies already in place.Any music suspected to be AI generated may be removed by the Bandcamp team and the company is giving users reporting tools to flag such content. "We believe that the human connection found through music is a vital part of our society...
The Senate has passed the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits (DEFIANCE ) Act with unanimous consent, according to the bill’s co-sponsor Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL). The bill lets the subjects of nonconsensual, sexually explicit deepfakes take civil action against the people who create and host them.Deepfakes are a known issue online, but without the proper protections, easy access to AI-powered image and video generation tools has made it possible for anyone to create compromising content using another person's likeness. This has become a particular problem on X, where...
The layoffs are set to be announced this week and would affect Meta’s work on the metaverse, as the company spends heavily on building artificial intelligence.
Apple was facing increasing questions about its plans for artificial intelligence as other big tech companies invested tens of billions in the technology.
On the heels of Mark Zuckerberg announcing that Meta's former board member, Dina Powell McCormick, would be formally joining the company as president and vice chairman, the CEO has shared new details about her purview at the company. The executive will play a key role overseeing Meta's sprawling infrastructure investments as part of a newly announced initiative called Meta Compute."Meta is planning to build tens of gigawatts this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time," Zuckerberg said in an update. "How we engineer, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will...
Apple has confirmed reports that it will use Google Gemini’s models to help it power the new version of Siri and other generative AI features. “After careful evaluation, we determined that Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and we’re excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for our users,” Apple said, according to CNBC. The outlet reported that Apple and Google have a multi-year agreement in place. This story is developing; please refresh for updates…This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www....
CES always has its share of attention-grabbing robots. But this year in particular seemed to be a landmark year for robotics. The advancement in AI technology has not only given robots better “brains,” it’s enabled new levels of autonomy and given rise to an ambitious, if sometimes questionable, vision for our robot-filled future.From sassy humanoids to AI-powered pets and chore-handling assistants, we sought out as many cute, strange and capable robots as we could find in Las Vegas. These are the ones that made the biggest impression. Agibot HumanoidsAgibot's X2 humanoid robot....
Last year Razer showed off Project Ava as a digital assistant that lived inside your computer to help adjust settings or provide gaming tips. But now at CES 2026, the company’s AI companion platform has gotten a major glow-up while moving into some new digs. Now, in lieu of being constrained entirely to your PC’s screen, Razer has given Project Ava a real home in the form of a small tube that can display a 5.5-inch animated hologram of the AI’s avatar. You’ll still need to connect it to your computer via USB-C to provide Ava with the power and data it needs. However, all of your...
This year, over 4,000 exhibitors descended on Las Vegas, Nevada to showcase their wares at CES, and the Engadget team was out in full force. The week started with press conferences from the biggest companies at the show, which were often a flurry of AI buzzwords, vague promises and very little in the way of hard news. More than one company even decided to forgo announcing things during their conferences to make way for more AI chatter, only to publish press releases later quietly admitting that, yes, actually, they did make some consumer technology. It's appropriate, I guess, that as...
Samsung says AI data center-fueled RAM scarcity could raise the company's prices. Wonjin Lee, Samsung's global marketing leader, sounded the alarm in an interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday at CES 2026. As recently as early December, Samsung told Reuters that it was monitoring the market but wouldn't comment on pricing. So, the change of tune can be seen as a deliberate signal to soften the ground ahead of an official announcement."There's going to be issues around semiconductor supplies, and it's going to affect everyone," Samsung’s Lee said. "Prices are going up even as...
Boston Dynamics' Atlas is finally entering production. After years of testing this humanoid robot (and forcing it to dance), the robotics company announced at CES 2026 that the final version of the machine is being built now. The first companies to receive deployments will be Hyundai, Boston Dynamics' majority shareholder, and Google DeepMind, the firm’s new AI partner.This final enterprise version of Atlas "can perform a wide array of industrial tasks," according to Boston Dynamics, and is specifically designed with consistency and reliability in mind. Atlas can work autonomously...
Lenovo just revealed a new smartglasses concept design at CES 2026. The appropriately-named Lenovo AI Glasses Concept promises to transform "how users interact with their surroundings and unifies their workflow."They look like a standard pair of specs and not all that different from something like Meta's Ray-Ban Display glasses. A pair weighs just 45 grams and the battery lasts eight hours, which is just enough time to get through a standard workday.The glasses are wirelessly tethered to a smart device, which is what does most of the computational heavy lifting. They do include Lenovo and...
Lenovo has brought a slew of updates to its Legion and LOQ line of gaming laptops for CES 2026. The refreshed laptops are all built around Nvidia RTX 50-series GPUs.The new Legion 7a is both thinner and lighter than the previous generation and is aimed at gamers, creators, and working professionals. Lenovo says the new 7a will be powered by AMD Ryzen AI 400 CPUs and RTX 50-series GPUs, delivering up to 125W of total system power. Presumably this means buyers will choose from multiple CPU and GPU configurations, and Lenovo says the 7a will support up to a Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 and up to an RTX...
IO Interactive just revealed minimum and recommended specs for the PC build of 007 First Light. The company recommends 32GB of RAM and 12GB of VRAM. In a normal world, this wouldn't be news, as modern NVIDIA GPUs certainly have more than enough VRAM. However, we live in a world where AI companies gobble up lots of memory.This has caused newer cards to tick up in price, with more hikes to come. Older cards like the RTX 3070 just won't cut it, as that one ships with 8GB of VRAM. Standard RAM is also getting much more expensive, putting that 32GB out of reach for many gamers. In other...
Eric Migicovsky has been thinking a lot about friction. Specifically, he’s been thinking about how too much friction in the way of using a device can put people off wearing it altogether. The founder of Pebble is here at CES 2026 with a few new devices from the company he recently started to bring back the beloved smartwatch brand, including the Pebble Round 2 and the Index 01. That second one is a simple ring with a button on it that you push down to talk to Pebble’s AI whenever you want it to help you remember something. In the sea of AI gadgets that clutter the showfloors of CES (and the...
CES 2026 officially opens today, but much of the show’s biggest announcements already landed during Monday’s press conferences and early events. AI was everywhere, chipmakers dominated the schedule and a handful of brands used the pre-show window to quietly drop meaningful hardware updates.Below are the biggest announcements and trends from January 5, plus a few standout hands-ons from Pepcom and CES Unveiled.LG doubles down on AILG's CLOiD robot.LGLG’s World Premiere keynote leaned hard into its vision of “Affectionate Intelligence,” with AI positioned as the connective tissue...
The chip giant says Vera Rubin will sharply cut the cost of training and running AI models, strengthening the appeal of its integrated computing platform.
NVIDIA and Intel had their moment in the spotlight, and now it's AMD's turn. The chipmaker is kicking off CES 2026 on Monday night, where it'll cover its latest AI developments and perhaps show off its newest Ryzen chips. It's the kickoff keynote of CES 2026, and CEO Dr. Lisa Su is expected to outline how AMD's hardware will power the AI revolution — and what the company can offer partners and consumers that those aforementioned rivals can't. We'll tell you how to tune in to the livestream and what else you can expect to see.How to watch AMD's...
Acer just announced the Predator Helios 16S AI gaming laptop at CES 2026. This computer is filled with both bells and whistles, making it a decent choice for modern gamers.To that end, the laptop can be equipped with up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 386H processor. This is Intel's upcoming flagship mobile processor that has previously been known as Panther Lake. The Helios 16S AI can also be outfitted with up to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 GPU.AcerIt comes with a 16-inch WQXGA OLED display that offers true HDR imaging support. The laptop can be loaded with up to 64GB of RAM and up to 2TB of...
A viral Reddit post purportedly from an employee of a "major food delivery app" may actually be an AI-generated hoax, The Verge reports. The post itself, and an image of an employee ID card the poster, u/trowaway_whistleblow, shared with The Verge, where both flagged as being likely AI-generated when run through online AI detectors and AI assistants like Gemini and Claude.Given the inflammatory nature of the post, it's not hard to see why it received over 80,000 upvotes in the four days it's been up in r/confession. The post includes a series of striking claims about the unnamed food...
SOPA Images via Getty ImagesCES 2026 is off and running, and chipmakers enabling the AI moment are one of the big starts of the show. In addition to NVIDIA and AMD taking the stage today, we'll also be getting Intel's 2026 launch event. The chip giant is expected to provide more details on its AI PC initiative and the new processors powering it: The Core Ultra Series 3 CPUs (aka Panther Lake) are made using an 18A process — that's 18 angstroms, or just under 2nm — and designed for high-end laptops and gaming devices.For Intel, the stakes at CES are higher than ever. In the past...
A reputable leaker has indicated that NVIDIA plans on bringing the RTX 3060 back to market, according to reports by Kotaku and WFCCTech. It first released the GPU at the beginning of 2021. The leaker Hongxing2020 indicates that NVIDIA will resume production of the 3060 sometime in the next few months.Why is the world's most valuable company reportedly bringing back such an antiquated graphics card? You know the answer. It's the endless gaping maw known as AI. Tech companies have been hoovering up PC parts for AI applications with reckless abandon. It has become a legitimate challenge...
One trend emerging from CES 2026 is wearable microphones you can use to dictate your thoughts. Vocci is one such gadget, a titanium ring with a single button capable of recording audio for up to eight hours on a charge. Unlike some of its competitors, Vocci isn’t just for catching your own thoughts as they spring forth from your scalp. Instead, you’ll be able to record whole conversations and meetings from the comfort of your proximal phalanx. Users can start and end recordings by double clicking the ring’s single button, while single clicks are used to mark important moments within...
Anker's sub-brand Soundcore just announced a new AI voice recorder at CES 2026. The appropriately-named Work voice recorder is primarily intended for professionals, but also seems useful for students and anyone else who wants an AI to transcribe conversations.To that end, the company promises 97-percent transcription accuracy via the AI algorithm. The affiliated app will also provide summaries of conversations, like many modern AI tools. Users can double-tap the gadget during important parts of a conversation to ensure it gets preferential treatment.Anker/Soundcore None of this is really...
You no longer need an Amazon device to summon Alexa since the AI assistant will be available on the Alexa.com website. Amazon will roll out the web client to its Alexa+ Early Access customers first, still featuring the company's new and improved AI assistant that was announced in February.The web model won't be much different from the existing Alexa+ that's already available on Echo devices, Fire TV and Fire tablets. However, instead of buying into the Amazon ecosystem, Early Access customers can use any web browser to get Alexa+'s help with everything from basic questions to...
CES 2026 is still a day away from officially opening, but Sunday, January 4, delivered the first real wave of news. As has become tradition, the pre-show slate set the tone for the week ahead, anchored by Samsung’s annual First Look press conference and CES Unveiled, the latter of which where hundreds of companies previewed products before the show floor opens on January 6.Samsung once again dominated the early conversation with its First Look event, using the stage to outline how it sees AI shaping everything from TVs to home appliances in the year ahead. Rather than focusing on individual...
Amid endless AI hype and a guest visit from the CEO of Hartford Steam Boiler (?!), Samsung had a big surprise for us tonight at CES 2026: A massive 130-inch Micro RGB TV. It’s so large, it’s suspended by a large metal stand that surrounds the entire screen, which also lets you tilt the screen just a bit. (For the Samsung diehards, it’s basically a reinvention of its “timeless gallery” stand from 2013.) I imagine bringing this TV home would be like Bart Simpson adopting his beloved elephant Stampy: Your pets would be terrified, and your family would probably be annoyed at this...
We’ve all fantasied about sprawling on an embroidered chaise lounge while our amanuensis faithfully typed out everything we said. SwitchBot turned up to CES with something that does a similar job, but without the romance of the amanuensis, the typewriter or the chaise lounge. Instead, it’s launching the AI MindClip, a wearable microphone which records and transcribes every noise to come from your mouth. The company isn’t alone, with many others turning up to CES this year offering devices to log your thoughts through the day. But SwitchBot does hope to distinguish itself from the...
LG has unveiled its humanoid robot that can handle household chores. After teasing the CLOiD last week, the company has offered its first look at the AI-powered robot it claims can fold laundry, unload the dishwasher, serve food and help out with other tasks. The CLOiD has a surprisingly cute "head unit" that's equipped with a display, speakers, cameras and other sensors. "Collectively, these elements allow the robot to communicate with humans through spoken language and 'facial expressions,' learn the living environments and lifestyle patterns of its users and control connected home...
For years, LG has pushed its ultra-light Gram laptops as a way to stand out from the PC crowd, for better or worse. I was't a big fan of the flex-prone case in the 2017 Gram, and we had similar concerns with the first 17-inch Gram in 2019. But in fairness, it's been a while since we've reviewed one, and we found a lot to like in our preview of last year's AI-equipped model. Now LG is back with a major Gram Pro redesign at CES 2026, which features a new aluminum/magnesium alloy it's dubbed "Aerominum." And finally, it seems LG has found a balance between building a super-...
We've known for several months now that tech giant Lenovo is hosting its Tech World event at Sphere is Las Vegas during CES week. And like many other tech conglomerates, the world's largest PC manufacturer by units shipped is centering its focus on AI. Lenovo says it will be a "Tech World experience unlike anything CES has seen before." We'll tell you where to livestream the event and what the company has teased so far.How to watch the Lenovo CES 2026 event liveLenovo CEO Yuanqing Yang will host the event on Tuesday, January 6 at 8PM ET. You can follow along to the livestream on...
You might recognize Bosch as a home appliance name (thanks to its partnership with Siemens), but the German multinational brand's core business is really about providing the underlying technology and engineering that powers cars, homes and factories around the world. That focus is reflected at CES 2026, where much of what Bosch is unveiling is intended to be licensed to other companies rather than sold as Bosch-branded products on store shelves.Case in point is Bosch's automotive plans at CES. The company is showcasing what it calls "AI in the car," or more specifically, in the cockpit...
We’re gearing up for CES 2026! Engadget will be on the ground, once again, to dive into the latest TVs, wearables and other wild tech from the world’s biggest consumer electronics show. In this episode, we chat about some new products we expect to see, like Micro RGB LED TVs and AI devices, and peer into what’s ahead for the rest of 2026.Subscribe!iTunesSpotifyPocket CastsStitcherGoogle PodcastsCreditsHosts: Devindra HardawarProducer: Ben Ellman Music: Dale North and Terrence O'BrienThis article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/engadget-podcast-...
CFOTO via Getty ImagesDuring CES 2025, we watched NVIDIA tout its leading position in the artificial intelligence arena for the bulk of the presentation. But it did reveal some new hardware, including its RTX 5000-series GPUs and Project Digits desktop supercomputer (later redubbed Spark). This year, the company's website says it's "lighting up CES 2026 with the power of AI." To that end, NVIDIA is pulling out all the stops at its Vegas installation, promising hands-on demos in its booth at the Fontainebleau, replete with the "latest NVIDIA solutions driving innovation and productivity...
CFOTO via Getty ImagesDuring CES 2025, we watched NVIDIA tout its leading position in the artificial intelligence arena for the bulk of the presentation. But it did reveal some new hardware, including its RTX 5000-series GPUs and Project Digits desktop supercomputer (later redubbed Spark). This year, the company's website says it's "lighting up CES 2026 with the power of AI." To that end, NVIDIA is pulling out all the stops at its Vegas installation, promising hands-on demos in its booth at the Fontainebleau, replete with the "latest NVIDIA solutions driving innovation and productivity...
LGFor years, LG has kicked off CES press day with the first event of the morning — and 2026 will be no different. The Korea-based corporation is theming its presentation as "Innovation in Tune with You," and — if it follows the template of past presentations — it will highlight both the consumer electronics and large appliance sides of its mammoth global businesses.Like nearly all tech-centric events these days, expect AI to be the binding theme of the LG presentation at CES 2026. Just be aware that, like Apple, LG has its own customized abbreviation for AI: "Affectionate Intelligence...
LG just revealed several new speakers in the xboom line ahead of CES 2026. These speakers are part of an ongoing collaboration with will.i.am from Black Eyed Peas, who is on board as the "experimental architect" involved with "development, design and brand marketing."These speakers are fairly different from one another, but they all have AI in common. Each speaker includes an algorithm that automatically adjusts the EQ after analyzing the audio content and the listening space. Many also feature an AI algorithm for ambient lighting, which will adjust the lights to match the song being played.The...
Meta has acquired an AI startup called Manus — known for its custom research and website-building agents — in a deal valued at more than $2 billion, according toThe Wall Street Journal. It's reportedly one of the largest acquisitions yet involving a startup nurtured in China's AI ecosystem. Manus arrived in March 2025, shortly after another Chinese AI startup, DeepSeek appeared on the scene. The company (called Butterfly Effect at the time) originally described it as "the first general AI agent" to perform complex tasks autonomously, rather than just generating ideas. It draws...
Samsung has announced that it "aims to be the first" to natively integrate Google Photos into TVs. The aim is for Google Photos to work seamlessly with Vision AI Companion, Samsung's souped-up version of Bixby. This would help to make user photos part of the day-to-day TV experience, with photos appearing while navigating the TV's OS during "contextual and convenient moments."The company says users will be able to explore their Google Photos libraries in three new experiences. The first is called Memories, and will show curated stories based on "people, locations and meaningful moments...
OpenAI is looking for a new Head of Preparedness who can help it anticipate the potential harms of its models and how they can be abused, in order to guide the company's safety strategy. It comes at the end of a year that's seen OpenAI hit with numerous accusations about ChatGPT's impacts on users' mental health, including a few wrongful death lawsuits. In a post on X about the position, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that the "potential impact of models on mental health was something we saw a preview of in 2025," along with other "real challenges" that have arisen alongside...
LG has revealed a new lineup of gaming monitors just ahead of CES. The UltraGear evo displays offer 5K visuals. Many incorporate on-device AI upscaling, taking some of the burden away from the GPU. LG says the tech will let consumers skip out on some card upgrades. This could end up being extremely beneficial because the AI boom has been impacting GPU prices.LGThere are three displays in the lineup so far, with more to come down the line. There's a 39-inch OLED (39GX950B) that includes the aforementioned AI upscaling to 5K, but also algorithms for scene optimization and sound. The...
Over the past two years, the Nex Playground has carved out a niche for itself with kids and parents alike. It's a small box that sits in front of your TV and uses a camera, along with computer vision AI processing, to track your movement for interactive games. Think of it like a simplified version of Microsoft's Kinect (RIP), with a bit of the local multiplayer we see from the original Wii. In this bonus episode, we chat with David Lee, Nex's CEO and co-founder, about how he went from building a basketball tracking app to one of the most intriguing gaming console alternatives on the...
Investigative reporter John Carreyrou of the New York Times filed a lawsuit against xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta and Perplexity on Monday for allegedly training their AI models on copyrighted books without permission. Carreyrou is perhaps best known for exposing the Theranos fraudulent blood test scandal.According to Reuters, the lawsuit was filed alongside five other writers who all claim big tech companies have been violating their intellectual property rights in the name of building large language models.This comes after a banner year for IP lawsuits against AI companies brought by...
The Indie Game Awards has stripped Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 of two major awards, including Game of the Year and Debut Game. This is due to developer Sandfall Interactive's use of generative AI, as reported by Mashable.This looks to be fairly cut and dry. The awards ceremony clearly states in its FAQ that any game that uses generative AI in the development process would be "strictly ineligible" for nominations. It was recently revealed that Sandfall did indeed use generative AI while making Clair Obscur.Correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears as though Clair Obscure: Expedition 33...
Google's latest addition to its NotebookLM artificial intelligence research platform is a feature called Data Tables. The tool can collect and synthesize information across multiple sources into a chart that can be exported to Google Sheets. All Pro and Ultra users will have access to the feature today, and Data Tables will roll out to all users over the coming weeks.In practice, Google suggested that Data Tables can be used to organize scattered notes, create price comparison charts or aggregate results from multiple research projects. The example of the interface shows the desired table...
The Ultrahuman Ring Air now has the capacity to track snoring and general respiratory health. This is thanks to proprietary technology called Respiratory Health PowerPlug, which is basically a suite of audio analysis tools along with some "advanced biomarker tracking" and AI tomfoolery.All of this results in "one of the most comprehensive consumer tools ever built for understanding nighttime respiratory stability." It details snoring sessions, of course, but also delivers a holistic and "actionable sleep picture." The company says this "reveals patterns, trends and changes in respiratory health...
In this episode of Uncanny Valley, we bring you our conversation with Jon M. Chu from WIRED’s Big Interview event, fresh on the heels of directing Wicked: For Good.
The data centers used for work on artificial intelligence can cost tens of billions to build. Tech giants are finding ways to avoid being on the hook for some of those costs.
The U.S. Tech Force is aiming to hire about 1,000 top-level technical employees and supervisors to join federal agencies and work on projects related to artificial intelligence and modernization.
Merriam-Webster has selected "slop" for the dictionary company's 2025 word of the year. The leading lexicographers define slop as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence." We've seen an absolute deluge of AI slop this year, from fake movie trailers on YouTube to AI-generated bands on Spotify. Not even food delivery like Uber Eats could escape the onslaught of AI-generated garbage that no one asked for.It's gotten to the point that half the videos my well-meaning parents send me on social media are AI-generated videos...
Merriam-Webster has selected "slop" for the dictionary company's 2025 word of the year. The leading lexicographers define slop as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence." We've seen an absolute deluge of AI slop this year, from fake movie trailers on YouTube to AI-generated bands on Spotify. Not even food delivery like Uber Eats could escape the onslaught of AI-generated garbage that no one asked for.It's gotten to the point that half the videos my well-meaning parents send me on social media are AI-generated videos...
Lightspeed Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley venture firm, has amassed more than $9 billion to invest in artificial intelligence. That is its biggest haul.
It looks like Disney wasted no time delivering on CEO Bob Iger’s promise to bring AI-generated content to Disney+. On Thursday, the company announced the start of a three-year licensing agreement with OpenAI to bring more than 200 of its beloved characters, including those from Star Wars and Pixar, to the Sora app and ChatGPT. With the deal in place, OpenAI users will be able to prompt ChatGPT to generate images that tap into Disney’s intellectual property, with costumes, props, vehicles and environments covered. The agreement does not cover voices or “talent likenesses.” On paper, that...
Company raises its capital expenditure forecast as it doubles down on AI infrastructure bet.
Ever since reporting earlier this year on how easy it is to trick an agentic browser, I've been following the intersections between modern AI and old-school scams. Now, there's a new convergence on the horizon: hackers are apparently using AI prompts to seed Google search results with dangerous commands. When executed by unknowing users, these commands prompt computers to give the hackers the access they need to install malware.The warning comes by way of a recent report from detection-and-response firm Huntress. Here's how it works. First, the threat actor has a conversation with...
An us-versus-them mentality has emerged between Meta’s top artificial intelligence team and longtime lieutenants to Mark Zuckerberg.
For the first time, Instagram will start letting you control the topics its algorithm recommends, much as you now can on TikTok. The new feature is starting with the Reels tab but will eventually come to Explore and other areas of the app. Like much of what Meta is doing right now (for better or worse), the "Your Algorithm" feature will be powered by AI. "As your interests evolve over time, we want to give you more meaningful ways to control what you see," Instagram wrote on its blog post. "Using AI, you can now more easily view and personalize the topics that shape your Reels, making...
It looks like Meta has decided to turn Instagram users into unwitting SEO spam pawns. On Tuesday, 404 Media reported that the platform is generating sensational, likely AI-generated headlines and descriptions for user posts without their knowledge or explicit consent. An Engadget editor has also noticed this on their posts. The headlines are found in the pages’ code and are only visible in search results.The scheme appears to be an effort to boost the Google search ranking of Instagram content. An Instagram post by Engadget’s Sam Chapman, about a board game he created, received an unwanted...
AI chatbots haven't come close to replacing teens' social media habits, but they are playing a significant role in their online habits. Nearly one-third of US teens report using AI chatbots daily or more, according to a new report from Pew Research. The report is the first from Pew to specifically examine how often teens are using AI overall, and was published alongside its latest research on teens' social media use. It's based on an online survey of 1,458 US teens who were polled between September 25 to October 9, 2025. According to Pew, the survey was "weighted to be...
American AI giants are backing a new effort to establish open standards for building agentic software and tools.
A federal judge has expanded on the remedies decided for the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Google, ruling in favor of putting a one-year limit on the contracts that make Google's search and AI services the default on devices, Bloomberg reports. Judge Amit Mehta's ruling on Friday means Google will have to renegotiate these contacts every year, which would create a fairer playing field for its competitors. The new details come after Mehta ruled in September that Google would not have to sell off Chrome, as the DOJ proposed at the end of 2024. This all follows...
Meta has cut several deals with news publishers to help provide real-time data for its AI chatbot services, as reported by Axios. The commercial agreements will allow its Meta AI chatbots to better answer user queries about news and current events.These are multiyear deals where publishers will be compensated for the use of their content, but we don't have any monetary specifics. The contracts do stipulate that Meta's chatbots will link out to articles when answering news queries, potentially offering a slight traffic boost to publishers.The news partners include USA Today, People, Le...
The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune have filed separate lawsuits against Perplexity over alleged copyright infringement. The Times said it had sent Perplexity several cease-and-desist demands to stop using its content until the two reached an agreement, but the AI company persisted in doing so. In the lawsuit [PDF], the Times accused Perplexity of infringing on its copyrights at two main stages. First, by scraping its website (including in real time) to train AI models and feed content into the likes of the Claude chatbot and Comet browser. Second, in the output of Perplexity's...
The author of Super Agers believes AI could bring big changes to the world of medicine.
A massive study of political persuasion shows AIs have, at best, a weak effect.
If you've ever had something go wrong with your Facebook or Instagram account, then you probably have a good idea of just how frustrating the support process can be. The company's automated processes are so broken that some people have found that suing Meta in small claims court can be a more reliable way of getting help from the company.Now, Meta says it's trying to address some of these longstanding issues. In an update, the company acknowledged that its "support hasn’t always met expectations" but that a series of AI-powered updates should make it easier for people to get help...
Lisa Su leads Nvidia’s biggest rival in the AI chip market. When asked at WIRED’s Big Interview event if AI is a bubble, company said “Emphatically, from my perspective, no.”
Raspberry Pi is raising prices on many single-board computers, with increases going into effect immediately. The Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 modules are shooting up by $5 to $25, depending on the model and the included amount of RAM. The 16GB memory variants of the Compute Module 5 are going up by $20 and now start at $140.This is a bummer and we know who to thank. It's the ultimate memory hog of all time, the AI industry."The current pressure on memory prices, driven by competition from the AI infrastructure roll-out, is painful but ultimately temporary," CEO Eben Upton wrote in a blog post. He...
At M.I.T., a new program called “artificial intelligence and decision-making” is now the second-most-popular undergraduate major.
While generative AI systems cannot be considered inventors under US patent laws, the US Patent and Trademark Office has updated its guidelines on how they can be used in the process of creating innovations. The agency's director, John Squires, said in a notice obtained by Reuters that the USPTO deems genAI to be "analogous" to other tools that inventors might use in their process, including lab equipment, software and research databases. "AI systems, including generative AI and other computational models, are instruments used by human inventors," Squires wrote. "They may provide...
Following its licensing deal with Udio, Warner Music Group (WMG) has also reached an agreement with Suno that will let the platform license its artists' music and likenesses, and end the music company's ongoing litigation. WMG was previously one of several record labels suing Udio and Suno for allegedly infringing on copyrighted works at a "massive scale."As part of the agreement, "artists and songwriters will have full control over whether and how their names, images, likenesses, voices, and compositions are used in new AI-generated music," WMG explains in its press release for the...
Google is making The Thinking Game, a 2024 Tribeca Festival selection about DeepMind, available for free. The nearly 90-minute documentary offers a glimpse into the AI team's background and breakthroughs.The film, from the same team as the 2017 AlphaGo doc (also on YouTube), was shot over five years. It chronicles Nobel winner Demis Hassabis' beginnings as a chess prodigy and how that shaped his entry into AI. You'll see DeepMind's journey from building AI that (slowly) learned Pong to one that accurately predicted how proteins fold.You can watch The Thinking Game below or on...
After years of introducing major changes with its annual iOS releases, Apple may be altering its approach next time around, instead focusing on refinement over a bevy of flashy new features. According to Mark Gurman in this week's Power On newsletter, for iOS 27, Apple is "focused on improving the software’s quality and underlying performance." That, and beefing up its AI offerings.On the heels of iOS 26, which brought the Liquid Glass design overhaul, and the trickle of underbaked AI features that have arrived since the rollout of Apple Intelligence last year, Apple is reportedly honing...
It's a good time to pick up a robot vacuum on sale for Black Friday. Shark machines are some of our favorites, and we're seeing a number of models discounted for Black Friday. But this one, the Shark AI Ultra robot vacuum, is probably the best deal for most people this year. It's 58 percent off and down to an all-time low of $250. One of this model's standout features is its bagless design. Like many robovacs, it has an auto-empty station. But here, you can remove part of the base, dump its contents in the garbage, and lock it back in place. The base holds up to 60 days of dirt...
PORTLAND, OR. – November 17, 2025 – A coalition of Oregon's top innovation and academic institutions, today announced the launch of the Oregon AI Accelerator, a first-of-its-kind statewide initiative designed to support early-stage founders building transformative, AI-first companies. Backed by seed funding from Google, and supported by the Metro Region Innovation Hub, Portland State University, Oregon Health & Science University, Oregon State University, the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network, the Technology Association of Oregon, and TiE Oregon, the Accelerator will launch its inaugural pilot in February 2026. The program will bring together 20 early-stage AI startups for a three-month hybrid accelerator experience combining in-person sessions in Portland with virtual programming. Participants will receive mentorship, validation support, and access to Oregon's thriving innovation ecosystem – without giving up equity – and will compete for up to $50,000 in equity-free grant prizes. "This program is much bigger than accelerating startups—it's about helping Oregon small businesses compete and grow in the age of AI," said Katy Bowman, manager of Google's community development and engagement program. "By investing in entrepreneurs and connecting them to resources statewide, we're helping ensure Oregon remains a place where innovation drives broad economic opportunity." The Oregon AI Accelerator is a collaborative initiative uniting Oregon's leading tech organizations, investors, and universities to launch and scale AI startups. The Accelerator empowers early-stage founders to build globally competitive companies while remaining grounded in values of innovation, equity, and community impact. It is building on the success of the Oregon AI Bootcamp, which trained more than 40 founders in June and demonstrated strong regional demand for deeper, hands-on support. The new Accelerator expands on that model with a comprehensive program designed to help founders refine their business models, strengthen technical capabilities, and prepare for investment. "This initiative represents the collaborative spirit that defines Oregon's innovation community," said Joseph Janda, Assistant Vice President for Innovation at PSU. "By bringing together academia, industry, and investors, we're creating a powerful platform for founders to build scalable companies that reflect Oregon's values of innovation, equity, and impact." The program will be coordinated by the Metro Region Innovation Hub, which is part of Business Oregon's statewide network of regional Innovation Hubs dedicated to maximizing support for innovation-based entrepreneurs. "The Oregon AI Accelerator is a model for how public, private, and academic partners can come together to make Oregon a true leader in responsible, human-centered AI innovation," added Jack Phan, the incoming Director of the Oregon AI Accelerator Program. Applications for the Oregon AI Accelerator open November 17, 2025, and close December 15, 2025. The pilot cohort will run from February 2 through May 15, 2026. While startups from anywhere may apply, at least 50% of the cohort will be Oregon-based to ensure strong local impact and growth. "This accelerator would not be possible without the generous support of Google and the dedication of our partner organizations," said Cara Turano, Executive Director of Oregon Entrepreneurs Network. "Together, we're building the foundation for Oregon to emerge as a global hub for AI innovation, where founders can thrive and meaningful technologies can take root." Support for Oregon's AI Accelerator continues Google's commitment in Oregon. With data centers in The Dalles and an office in downtown Portland, Google has invested more than $2 billion in Oregon since 2006. Through its tools and products, the company has also helped generate $8.6 billion in economic activity for Oregon businesses and nonprofits. The Metro Region Innovation Hub's mission is to provide Portland-area entrepreneurs with the resources, mentorship, and opportunities they need to succeed. The Hub exists to foster collaboration between entrepreneurs and business service providers, ensuring mutual trust and access to essential resources, as we work together to build a stronger, more inclusive innovation ecosystem in the Portland Metro region.
Mr. Summers’ departure from the artificial intelligence company’s board followed revelations of his communications with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
A few weeks short of Gemini 2's first birthday, Google has announced Gemini 3 Pro. Naturally, the company claims the new system is its most intelligent AI model yet, offering state-of-the-art reasoning, class-leading vibe coding performance and more. The good news is you can put those claims to the test today, with Google making Gemini 3 Pro available across many of its products and services.Google is highlighting a couple of benchmarks to tout Gemini 3 Pro's performance. In Humanity's Last Exam, widely considered one of the toughest tests AI labs can put their systems through, the...
Called Project Prometheus, the company is focusing on artificial intelligence for the engineering and manufacturing of computers, automobiles and spacecraft.
South Korean games publisher Krafton recently announced its transformation into an "AI first" company, which typically means that human jobs are about to go on the chopping block. To that end, the company is now trying to slash its workforce by offering voluntary resignations, according to a report by Eurogamer.Krafton is a giant company with tentacles in numerous development studios, including the folks that make PUBG and Subnautica. The organization says this isn't a plan to lay off its human workforce, but will "support members in proactively designing their growth direction and...
A few months ago, Anthropic published a report detailing how its Claude AI model had been weaponized in a "vibe hacking" extortion scheme. The company has continued to monitor how the agentic AI is being used to coordinate cyberattacks, and now claims that a state-backed group of hackers in China utilized Claude in an attempted infiltration of 30 corporate and political targets around the world, with some success.In what it labeled "the first documented case of a large-scale cyberattack executed without substantial human intervention," Anthropic said that the hackers first chose their targets...
The move has further stoked concerns among some investors that the rally in artificial intelligence stocks was overdone.
A new analysis tries to calculate the coming environmental footprint of AI in the US and finds that the ideal sites for data centers aren’t where they’re being built.
Amazon is in the middle of rolling out Alexa+, the long-awaited, AI-infused update for its voice assistant. At the same time, the company has also been giving a fair bit of attention to Amazon Music, adding things like Alexa+ integration and AI-powered playlists. And as of today, Amazon is rolling out a new community-focused feature called Fan Groups. As the name suggests, Fan Groups are a way for users to connect around different musical interests — and what makes this more fun to me is that these aren’t limited to Amazon-curated groups. Once Fan Groups fully rolls out, anyone will be...
Back in 2019, Form made — and you’re going to have to forgive me for the most inevitable pun in history — a big splash with its first smart swimming goggles. The company has released several upgrades since, and it just announced the latest version of its HeadCoach software, which is designed to deliver personalized swim coaching using AI.Available through Form Premium, HeadCoach 2.0 effectively functions like a virtual coach, analyzing each swim and providing immediate feedback in the Form app. It’ll highlight both your strengths and areas of improvement, reminding you what to focus on...
Square Enix is laying off developers in the UK and US as it reworks its game development structure to focus on its studios in Japan, Video Games Chronicle reports. The mass restructuring follows the publishers' 2024 announcement that it planned to "aggressively" apply AI to its development process.The total number of employees being laid off isn't yet public, but Video Games Chronicle writes that over 100 developers in the UK could be impacted, possibly up to 140. The number of US developers caught in the layoffs is still unknown. In a slide deck for investors spotted by IGN, Square...
NotebookLM, the one AI tool from Google everyone loves, is about to become more useful for studying. Google has begun rolling out an update that allows people to use the app to create flashcards and personalized quizzes. When you use NotebookLM in this way, you'll be able to set the difficulty of the material, as well as the number of questions or cards the app presents to you. It's also possible to select the sources you want the software to pull from by navigating to the Studio tab, meaning you can focus on what matters to you. With today's update, Google is...
Amazon just introduced an AI tool that will automatically translate books into other languages. The appropriately-named Kindle Translate is being advertised as a resource for authors that self publish on the platform.The company says the tool can translate entire books between English and Spanish and German to English. Amazon promises that more languages are coming down the pike. It's available right now in a beta form to select authors enrolled in the Kindle Direct Publishing platform. There's a broader rollout planned for a later date.Books that use this service will have a clear...
Amazon is gradually rolling out its next-generation Alexa assistant within its own product ecosystem, but the latest recipient of Alexa+ is BMW. Amazon has announced the latest version of Alexa Custom Assistant, the platform that allows companies (including BMW) to build their own AI assistants that leverage Alexa tech, which will be powered by Alexa+ going forward.With Alexa+ architecture working under the hood, drivers will benefit from a more natural, conversational style of in-vehicle interactions, while making use of the assistant’s more comprehensive agentic capabilities and ability to...
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative said its restructured organization, Biohub, would lead its focus on artificial intelligence and scientific research.
Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley has unveiled his latest venture and yes, it's another location-based social app. But, rather than the check-ins Crowley first popularized more than 15 years ago, "BeeBot" has a very 2025 take on the concept. Instead, the app is an AI-powered "DJ" that can deliver contextual audio updates to your ears as you move through your day. Crowley describes BeeBot as an "app for AirPods," though it will work with any type of headphones, as well as smart glasses with audio capabilities like Meta's. "Whenever you put your AirPods in, it turns on," Crowley...
Well, I suppose it was only a matter of time, but Google is making AI Mode harder to avoid. In the US, the company has begun rolling out an update for Chrome on Android and iOS that adds an AI Mode shortcut to the browser's new tab page. It's predominantly featured, appearing right below the browser's signature search bar."This will let you ask more complex, multi-part questions, and then dive even deeper into a topic with follow-up questions and relevant links," the company said of the update. In the near future, Google plans to bring the shortcut to 160 additional countries, with...
Google is bringing live lane guidance to Google Maps in cars with the company’s built-in infotainment system, starting with the Polestar 4. Using the vehicle's front-facing camera, Google Maps will be able to "see" the road just as the driver does. It will then create more detailed depictions of which lane a driver should be in and guide them using visual and audio cues.Google says the new feature uses AI to analyze lane markings and road signs, which it then integrates in real time with Google Maps' navigation system. Google paints a picture of fewer missed exits, as its navigation...
Meet your artificial intelligence matchmakers. These A.I. tools are changing dating apps, so users don’t have to swipe through an endless scroll of profiles.
Perplexity AI has agreed to a multi-year licensing partnership with Getty Images that will allow its users to access the latter’s extensive library of images. Leveraging Getty’s API, Perplexity will integrate the visual media distributor’s huge collection of stock and editorial imagery within its AI search and discovery tools, with correct attribution being a key part of the agreement.In a press release, Getty said that Perplexity will be "making improvements on how it displays imagery, including image credit with link to source, to better educate users on how to use licensed imagery...
Some of the most successful creators on Facebook aren't names you'd ever recognize. In fact, many of their pages don't have a face or recognizable persona attached. Instead, they run pages dedicated to memes, animal videos and yes, AI-generated photos and videos.The people behind these pages are experts at creating content that can catch Facebook's algorithm and go viral. Successful pages can generate tens of thousands of dollars a month from performance bonuses, revenue-sharing and other monetization programs that pay Facebook creators for popular content.For years, Meta...
Google’s AI ambitions are global in scale, so much so that it has just agreed to give Gemini away for free in India to people using the country's biggest mobile provider. Thanks to a deal with Reliance Intelligence, an AI-focused subsidiary of Reliance Industries, people signed up to Jio’s Unlimited 5G plan will be offered Google AI Pro at no extra cost for 18 months.That means that qualifying users will have access to Gemini 2.5 Pro, Google’s most advanced AI model. They will also benefit from higher limits for the Nano Banana and Veo 3.1 AI image and video generators, plus expanded...
NVIDIA has teamed up with with South Korea's biggest companies and the country itself, as they build out their AI infrastructure. One of those companies is Samsung, which is building a new AI factory that will use 50,000 NVIDIA Blackwell server GPUs and other NVIDIA technologies to make its own chips. This "AI-driven semiconductor manufacturing," as the companies call it, will help Samsung improve its processes, better predict maintenance needs and improve the efficiency of its autonomous operations. NVIDIA will help Samsung adapt its chipmaking lithography platform to work with its GPUs...
Despite the risk of a bubble, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon plan to spend billions more on artificial intelligence than they already do.
In this episode of Uncanny Valley, we run through the top stories of the week and look closely at complaints to the FTC alleging that ChatGPT led them or loved ones into AI psychosis.
Donald Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, have agreed to a one-year pause on the punitive Trump-instated tariffs that are at the heart of the ongoing trade war between the two superpowers. Among the issues discussed when the two leaders met face-to-face in the South Korean city of Busan were China’s chokehold on rare earth metals and the export restrictions on NVIDIA’s AI chips.Trump had previously made some characteristically explosive threats that he would impose new 100 percent tariffs on imports from China as a retaliation to Xi’s tightening grip on rare earths, the processing of...
As part of an AI-focused reorganization, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan told employees that it will offer voluntary buyouts, according to an internal company memo. At the same time, he emphasized that there would be no specific role eliminations as part of new structure."Looking to the future, the next frontier for YouTube is AI, which has the potential to transform every part of the platform," Mohan wrote. "We also understand some of you may be ready for a new challenge, so we've decided now is the right time to offer a voluntary exit Program." The restructuring is designed to help YouTube...
Threads has grown to 150 million daily active users. Mark Zuckerberg shared the latest milestone for the company's text-based app during Meta's third-quarter earnings call. The company previously reported in August that Threads had reached more than 400 million monthly users.Zuckerberg, who has mused that Threads could become Meta's next billion-person app, said that it was "on track to become the leader in its category." He also said that time spent in the app had increased by 10 percent, which he credited to improvements to the company's AI recommendation systems. On...
A decade ago, when smart speakers with built-in voice assistants were the hot new thing, many imagined they'd quickly evolve into highly intelligent companions. (Think C-3PO or Star Trek's Data living inside a speaker.) That road has been much longer than expected, as virtual helpers like Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant seemed to sit in neutral for years.But now that generative AI is here (for better or worse), smart speakers are finally scratching the surface of those expectations. Google's new version, Gemini for Home, is now available to try. Here's how.First, keep in mind that the Gemini...
The artificial intelligence company said that the nonprofit that controlled the organization would receive a $130 billion stake in the new company.
Amazon has announced an approximately 14,000 person reduction in its corporate workforce. The news follows an earlier report from Reuters that up to 30,000 people could be let go. However, the exact number of layoffs is unclear, with the 14,000 figure being cushioned by planned hirings. Engadget has reached out to Amazon for exact layoff numbers, but Bloomberg reports that impacted jobs are within teams such as video games, logistics, payments and cloud-computing. The impetus for this reduction is, of course, AI. In the announcement, Beth Galetti, Amazon's senior vice president of...
The company is looking to cut costs starting this week as it continues to spend aggressively on artificial intelligence. Another round of cuts is expected in January.
According to a report from The Information, OpenAI is interested in developing a tool that could generate music from text and audio prompts, and has been working with students from The Juilliard School to help with creating training data. The company envisions something that could be used to generate guitar accompaniment for a vocal track, for example, or to add music to videos, sources with knowledge of the project told the publication. There's no word on how far into these efforts OpenAI is. According to one source that spoke to The Information, OpenAI enlisted the Juilliard students...
The era of AI video is upon us, and honestly it's kind of terrifying. Between OpenAI's Sora and official communications from the Trump White House, it's clear that we're not ready for an unending onslaught of AI video. In this episode, Devindra and producer Ben chat with the Washington Post's technology reporter Drew Harwell and Jeremy Carrasco (AKA "ShowtoolsAI"), a former livestream and media producer turned AI video literacy creator. Also, we chat about our final thoughts on Apple's M5 MacBook Pro and iPad Pro, with a few quick notes about the new Vision Pro.Subscribe...
Apparently, web browsers are cool again. Two days after OpenAI launched its AI browser, Microsoft has some updates for its Edge's AI mode. (Fancy that!) Copilot Mode, introduced in July, now has several features that were teased at launch.First up: Copilot Actions, which is Microsoft's branding for AI-assisted, multi-step tasks. This feature is already available in the standard version of Copilot, but it's now being previewed for Edge's Copilot Mode. Microsoft's examples of Copilot Actions in Edge include unsubscribing from email newsletters or making a restaurant...
Tesla said it "achieved record vehicle deliveries globally" for the third quarter of 2025 with a total of 497,099 vehicles delivered. It also reported a record-breaking revenue of $28.1 billion, which is 12 percent higher than the same quarter in 2024. Tesla's net income, however, slid by 37 percent year-over-year, due to several factors, namely lower EV prices, an increase in spending on AI and other R&D projects, and of course, tariffs. Vaibhav Taneja, the automaker's finance chief, said during the earnings call that tariffs on imported car parts and raw materials cost the company...
Meta has removed a deepfake AI video of Irish presidential candidate Catherine Connolly, which featured a false depiction of the politician saying that she's withdrawing from the election. According to The Irish Times, the AI-generated video was shared nearly 30,000 times on Facebook just days before Ireland's election on October 24 prior to it being removed from the website. Connolly called the video "a disgraceful attempt to mislead voters and undermine [Ireland's] democracy" and assured voters that she was "absolutely still a candidate for President of Ireland."The video was...
Reddit is suing companies SerApi, OxyLabs, AWMProxy and Perplexity for allegedly scraping its data from search results and using it without a license, The New York Times reports. The new lawsuit follows legal action against AI startup Anthropic, who allegedly used Reddit content to train its Claude chatbot. As of 2023, Reddit charges companies looking access to posts and other content in the hopes of making money on data that could be used for AI training. The company has also signed licensing deals with companies like Google and OpenAI, and even built an AI answer machine of its own to...
Google Gemini is coming to GM vehicles in 2026. The company will be integrating a conversational AI assistant powered by Google's platform into many of its cars, trucks and SUVs.GM says this assistant will be able to access vehicle data to suss out maintenance concerns, alerting the driver when necessary. The company also promises it'll be able to help plan routes and explain various features of the car. It should also be able to do stuff like turn on the heat or air conditioning, even before entering the vehicle.This will replace the "Google built-in" operating system that already...
Open source language models are crucial to AI innovation. Can open robotics models do the same for physical machines?
More than 800 public figures including Steve Wozniak and Prince Harry, along with AI scientists, former military leaders and CEOs signed a statement demanding a ban on AI work that could lead to superintelligence, The Financial Times reported. "We call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and strong public buy-in," it reads.The signers include a wide mix of people across sectors and political spectrums, including AI researcher and Nobel prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, former...
As part of its Galaxy XR headset presentation, Samsung also briefly teased another wearable product. It's working in collaboration with two eyewear companies, Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, on AI-powered smart glasses to go up against Meta's Ray-Ban models, Samsung's head of customer experience Jay Kim announced at the end of the livestream. "We're also really excited about the AI glasses that we're currently building together with Google," Kim said. "We're working with two of the most forward-thinking brands in eyewear, Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, to...
The new browser, called Atlas, is designed to work closely with OpenAI products like ChatGPT.
AI is the star of Yelp's fall product update. The review site has updated Yelp Assistant, its chatbot to answer users' questions, rolling the tool out for all business categories. Its responses will draw on information from the business' website as well as posts by other Yelp users. The chatbot will also remember past queries and preferences when it's used for finding services. Saved information can be managed in the Yelp app under Yelp Assistant memory settings.Yelp has been pushing more artificial intelligence into its platform, adding Review Insights in December and...
A Facebook feature that scans your phone's photo library to make AI collages and edits is now available in North America. Meta tested it earlier this year. It's an opt-in feature, but the company may train its models on your media if you use its AI editing or share the results.From a user experience perspective, the idea is to help you find "hidden gems" in your library and turn them into something shareable. After scanning your photo library (with your permission), it will cough up suggestions. For example, it might recommend a collage based on a vacation, a recap of a graduation party...
We've seen artificial intelligence give some pretty bizarre responses to queries as chatbots become more common. Today, Reddit Answers is in the spotlight after a moderator flagged the AI tool for providing dangerous medical advice that they were unable to disable or hide from view. The mod saw Reddit Answers suggest that people experiencing chronic pain stop taking their current prescriptions and take high-dose kratom, which is an unregulated substance that is illegal in some states. The user said they then asked Reddit Answers about other medical questions. They received potentially...
Spotify sees the music industry's AI problem, and it's going to do… something about it. On Thursday, the company published a blog post heavy on principles, partnerships and vague plans. Unfortunately, it's practically devoid of specifics. The most explicit bit is that it's partnering with the big three music labels. Together, they'll "develop responsible AI products that empower the artists and songwriters they represent, and connect them with the fans who support them."The move follows Spotify's announcement last month that it would clean up the AI slop proliferating...
The artificial intelligence gold rush has pushed San Francisco’s residential rents up by the most in the nation, as A.I. companies lease apartments and offer rent stipends to employees.
Japan's government has asked OpenAI not to infringe on anime and manga content that it called "irreplaceable treasures," according to a report from ITMedia seen by IGN. The request was made by a key minister in charge of AI and IP in response to numerous videos from OpenAI's Sora 2 generator that use copyrighted material from Japanese studios. "We have requested OpenAI not to engage in any actions that could constitute copyright infringement," said cabinet minister Minoru Kiuchi at a press conference last week. "Anime and manga are irreplaceable treasures that we can be proud of...
The restrictions also apply to conversations between teenage users and artificial intelligence chatbots.
Microsoft is continuing to roll out in-house AI models, further decreasing its reliance on long-standing partnership with OpenAI. Today, the company introduced MAI-Image-1, its first internally-developed image-generating AI model. According to the blog post, MAI-Image-1 is particularly good for creating photorealistic results, and can generate natural lighting and landscapes. For now, the model is being tested on LMArena, and Microsoft said it plans to roll out MAI-Image-1 to Copilot and its Bing Image Creator "very soon." Over the summer, Microsoft made its first break from collaborating...
I've been using Slack for like a decade and the platform's proprietary chatbot, Slackbot, has always been a bit underwhelming. It can deliver reminders and notifications and, well, that's about it. That could change in the near future, as the platform is testing a redesigned Slackbot that's chock full of AI.The new Slackbot is basically an AI chatbot like all the rest, but this one has been purpose-built to help with common work tasks. Folks can use natural language to converse with the bot and it can do stuff like whip up project plans, flag daily priorities and analyze reports...
A Broadcom logo and a computer motherboard appear in this illustration taken August 25, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/IllustrationREUTERS / ReutersOpenAI is hungry for as much compute power as it can get its hands on, and the company has signed another deal with a chipmaker to help make that happen. This time around, it's teaming up with Broadcom to make custom chips and systems for use in both OpenAI's infrastructure and its partners' data centers. OpenAI is designing the "AI accelerators" and systems. Broadcom will start deploying those racks in the second half of next year, the...
Just about a month after being accused of using pirated books to train its AI, Apple is facing another similar proposed class action lawsuit. As first reported by Bloomberg Law, two neuroscience professors from SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, NY, claimed that Apple used their "registered works without authorization." The neuroscientists, Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik, said Apple trained its AI models using "shadow libraries" and "web-crawling software" that provide access to pirated, copyrighted books, including two of their own.In the previous class action...
Artificial intelligence companies have been working at breakneck speeds to develop the best and most powerful tools, but that rapid development hasn't always been coupled with clear understandings of AI's limitations or weaknesses. Today, Anthropic released a report on how attackers can influence the development of a large language model.The study centered on a type of attack called poisoning, where an LLM is pretrained on malicious content intended to make it learn dangerous or unwanted behaviors. The key finding from this study is that a bad actor doesn't need to control a...
Google has been rapidly expanding the availability of AI Mode in Search ever since it previewed the feature with testers in its Labs program in the beginning of March this year. Now, the company has announced that it has started rolling out the dedicated AI chatbot within Search to 40 new regions and has made it available in 35 new languages. The newly supported languages include Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, German, Greek, French, Malay, Russian, Thai, Vietnamese and more. Google says the advanced reasoning and multimodal understanding of its custom Gemini model for Search allow it...
OpenAI’s latest move in the race to build massive data centers in the US shows it believes demand for AI will keep surging—even as skeptics warn of a bubble.
OpenAI and Jony Ive could still have some serious loose ends to tie up before releasing their highly anticipated AI device. According to a Financial Times report, the partnership is still struggling with some "technical issues" that could ultimately end up pushing back the device's release date, which is expected to be sometime in 2026.One of those lingering dilemmas involves figuring out the AI assistant's voice and mannerisms, according to FT's sources. The AI device is meant to be "a friend who's a computer who isn't your weird AI girlfriend," according to a FT source who was briefed on the...
For the Amazon Big Deal Days event (aka October Prime Day), a tasty deal on a Shark robot vacuum has popped up. You'll need to be a Prime member to take advantage of the offer on the Shark AV2501S AI Ultra robot vacuum, but if you are, you can get the device for over half off. The discount drops the price from $550 to $230. That means you can snap up the robot vacuum for $320 below list price. The discount marks a record low for this model. Shark offers several variations of its AI Ultra robot vacuums. There are small variations between them, and a different model is our pick for the best robot...
Just a day after dethroning SpaceX as the most valuable private company in the world, OpenAI has acquired another startup. This time, the AI giant acquired Roi, an app that offers a one-stop shop for all your financial portfolios and an AI chatbot that provides personalized investing advice. Details of the acquisition weren't made public, but TechCrunch reported that Sujith Vishwajith, the startup's CEO and co-founder, will be the only one joining OpenAI's team.It might come as a surprise for OpenAI to venture into the personal finance space, but this latest acquisition offers some...
With fall Prime Day around the corner, we're already starting to see solid deals on tech we love. Case in point: Shark robot vacuums. Shark makes some of our favorite robovacs and a few of them are already discounted for Prime members ahead of the sale. The Shark AV2501S AI Ultra robot vacuum is one of them, with a whopping 58-percent discount that brings it down to $230. This discount marks a record low for this model. Shark offers several variations of its AI Ultra robot vacuums. There are small variations between them, and a different model is our pick for the best robot vacuum for most...
US users stuck with AI ad targeting as EU users win more control over their feeds.
Neon, a service that pays you for recordings of your phone calls and then sells those to AI companies for training data, seems set to return in the wake of a privacy breach. The app swiftly went viral after its debut, but it has been on ice since last week after a security flaw emerged. According to CNET, Neon founder Alex Kiam apologized for the incident in an email to users and said the app would return “soon.” It went offline after TechCrunch found users were able to access other people’s call recordings, along with transcripts and metadata. Neon pledged to add extra layers of...
OpenAI’s latest app encourages users to generate a personal digital avatar and scroll AI-generated videos of themselves and their friends.
Meta will start scraping conversations with AI chatbots to gather data for the purpose of ad targeting. The company says this data will be used to "personalize the content and ads" that people see across apps like Facebook and Instagram.The "feature" goes into effect on December 16 and Meta will start sending out in-product notifications and emails about the move on October 7. The company says this change is coming to "most regions" throughout the world, but the launch won't impact the EU and South Korea at first.MetaMeta gives an example of a user talking with an AI chatbot about hiking...
The pet-tech company’s new AI pet camera promises peace of mind but delivers bugginess and limited use.
A day after Amazon updated its security cameras, Google followed suit with its competing suite. A trio of new Nest security cams is available starting today. The latest Nest Doorbell and Nest Cams have higher-resolution (2K HDR) video and a wider field of view. That not only makes for better images, but it also opens the door to new (paid) AI features.Google's new additions include the Nest Cam Indoor (3rd gen), Nest Cam Outdoor (2nd gen) and Nest Doorbell (3rd gen). The company says the devices were designed to "provide the rich, detailed data our multimodal AI uses to understand." The...
Google announced a wave of hardware updates today, including giving some love to the Google Home Speaker. We saw a teaser for the revamped smart speaker last month, so the announcement isn't a surprise, but it does provide some specifics about what's coming to the company's smart home efforts.This new Google Home Speaker puts the Gemini AI assistant front and center, as is the case with so much Google hardware these days. The light ring will also flash different colors to show when the AI model is listening, processing or responding. If you have a Google Home Premium subscription...
In a lot of ways, Meta's hasn't changed much with its second-gen Ray-Ban glasses. The latest model has the same design and largely the same specs as the originals, with two important upgrades: longer battery life and improved video quality. At the same time, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses have a lot of features that didn't exist when I first reviewed them two years ago, largely thanks to AI. And with the release of its second-generation frames, there's still a lot to look forward to, like new camera features and AI-powered audio. The good news is that Meta isn't limiting these updates to its...
Ahead of the Amazon Big Deal Days event (aka Prime Day in October), a tasty deal on a Shark robot vacuum has popped up. You'll need to be a Prime member to take advantage of the offer on the Shark AV2501S AI Ultra robot vacuum, but if you are, you can get the device for over half off. The discount drops the price from $550 to $230. That means you can snap up the robot vacuum for $320 below list price. The discount marks a record low for this model. Shark offers several variations of its AI Ultra robot vacuums. There are small variations between them, and a different model is our pick for the...
Founded by a co-creator of ChatGPT, Periodic Labs aims to build artificial intelligence that can accelerate discoveries in physics, chemistry and other fields.
Since it began rolling out AI Mode at the start of March, Google has been slowly adding features to its dedicated search chatbot. Today, the company is releasing an update it hopes will make the tool more useful for visual searches. If you've tried to use AI Mode since Google made it available to everyone in the US, you may have noticed it responds to questions about images with a lot of text. Robby Stein, vice president of product for Google Search, admits it can be "silly" to see so much text in that context, and so the company has been working on applying AI Mode's "query fan-...
Gavin Newsom signed a major safety law on artificial intelligence, creating one of the strongest sets of rules about the technology in the nation.
The Meta AI app — you know, the one where people publicly shared their private conversations with the chatbot by accident — now has a dedicated feed for AI slop. The Vibes feed is a home for AI-generated short-form videos in the Meta AI app and website. Users can scroll the creations of other people, or can make their own clips, either by building from scratch or adapting other videos from the feed. The videos people make can also be shared via DM or cross-posted to Instagram or Facebook.The company said it plans to add more features for AI-generated creation in the future. According to a...
Ahead of the Amazon Big Deal Days event (aka Prime Day in October), a tasty deal on a Shark robot vacuum has popped up. You'll need to be a Prime member to take advantage of the offer on the Shark AV2501S AI Ultra robot vacuum, but if you are, you can get the device for over half off. The discount drops the price from $550 to $230. That means you can snap up the robot vacuum for $320 below list price. The discount marks a record low for this model. Shark offers several variations of its AI Ultra robot vacuums. There are small variations between them, and a different model is our pick for the...
Spotify has announced a set of policy changes surrounding AI-generated music and spam on its streaming platform. The company is helping to develop an industry standard for AI disclosure in music credits, alongside DDEX. It will be strengthening its approach to AI-assisted spam, such as unauthorized vocal clones, as well as uploaded music that fraudulently delivers music to another artist's profile.The new disclosures will encourage artists to share what aspect, if any, of their production was created with the assistance of AI. Instead of a song simply being marked as "is AI" or "no AI...
The billionaire’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has secured a deal with the government that will allow federal agencies to use the chatbot Grok for a small fee.
Qualcomm has unveiled its new Snapdragon X Series chips for laptops, in addition to its new system-on-a-chip for flagship phones. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip meant for "ultra-premium" Windows 11 laptops are designed to handle "complex, expert-level workloads" and to enable fast AI processing, as well as a multi-day battery life. Meanwhile, the Snapdragon X2 Elite chips come in two variants, one with 18 total cores and one with 12. Qualcomm claims that these processors are the "fastest, most powerful and efficient processors for Windows PCs."The company launched the first Snapdragon X...
OpenAI's new $400 billion announcement plan reveals both growing AI demand and circular investments.
AI is an enormous energy drain, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions at a time when the planet desperately needs progress in the opposite direction. Although most of that comes from running GPUs, cooling them is another significant overhead. So, it's worth noting when a company of Microsoft's stature claims to have achieved a breakthrough in chip cooling.Microsoft's new system is based on microfluidics, a method long pursued but hard to implement. The company claims its approach could lead to three times better cooling than current methods.Many data centers rely on cold plates...
The new PAC, which is the second that Meta has unveiled in the last month, is aimed at backing those in support of the artificial intelligence industry.
Meta is launching a national super political action committee (PAC), according to a report by Axios. This super PAC will be committed to fighting "onerous" AI regulation across the country. It's called the American Technology Excellence Project and Meta spokesperson Rachel Holland said the company is investing "tens of millions" into the effort.The goal of the PAC is to elect pro AI state candidates from both parties. It's being run by longtime Republican operative Brian Baker with an assist from Democratic consulting firm Hilltop Public Solutions.The tech-friendly federal government...
TikTok has been tagging videos from war-ravaged Gaza with product recommendations, as reported by The Verge. The publication detailed a scenario in which footage of a Palestinian woman walking amidst rubble presented TikTok shop recommendations that matched what she wore in the video.The algorithm suggested products with names like "Dubai Middle East Turkish Elegant Lace-Up Dress" and "Women’s Solid Color Knot Front Long Sleeve Dress." The original footage showed the woman searching for lost family members.TikTok/The VergeThis is thanks to a new addition to the TikTok app that uses AI to...
NVIDIA will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the ChatGPT maker sets out to build at least 10 gigawatts of AI data centers using NVIDIA chips and systems. The strategic partnership announced today is gargantuan in scale. The 10-gigawatt buildout will require millions of NVIDIA GPUs to run OpenAI's next-generation models. NVIDIA's investment will be doled out progressively as each gigawatt comes online.The first phase of this plan is expected to come online in the second half of 2026, and will be built on NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform, which NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang promised will be a "big...
The chipmaker’s investment in the San Francisco start-up is an indication of the wild financial figures being tossed around in the world of artificial intelligence.
Mr. Musk spent the summer at his artificial intelligence start-up xAI, trying to match the runaway success of OpenAI. The result was chaos.
Back at I/O 2025, Google began integrating Gemini into Chrome. At the time, you needed an AI Pro or AI Ultra subscription to access the AI assistant in the browser. That's changing today. Google has begun rolling out the tool to all Chrome desktop users on both Windows and Mac. Provided you have Chrome's language set to English and live in the US, you'll see a new sparkle icon at the top of the interface. Tapping it will allow you to start making requests of Gemini. You can also use the tool on a smartphone. On Android, you can do so by holding your phone's power button. On...
At its annual developer conference on Wednesday, Meta showed several new smart glasses, which have been a surprise hit for the company.
Gig economy platform Fiverr is laying off 250 employees as it pivots to being an "AI-first company," CEO Micha Kaufman shared in an essay on X. The move affects around 30 percent of the company's staff, The Register writes, and it's not uncommon among tech companies in 2025. Duolingo announced similar plans to become "AI-first" in April.Kaufman describes this process as returning to "startup mode" and writes that his ultimate goal is to turn Fiverr into "an AI-first company that's leaner, faster, with a modern AI-focused tech infrastructure, a smaller team, each with substantially...
Amazon will host a press event at the end of the month with some new hardware developments. It's scheduled for September 30 at 10AM ET in New York City. Here's what we think will be discussed at the fall event.In February, Amazon introduced some improvements to its voice assistant, promising that Alexa+ would be more conversational and more helpful thanks to generative AI. It seems likely that the fall event will put hardware for interacting with Alexa+ front and center, so expect to hear about new models or new software updates for the Echo line of smart speakers. It's been a...
Hydrow is adding a third model to its lineup of snazzy modern-day rowing machines, and this time it’s bringing along a dollop of AI. The Hydrow Arc sits on the same footprint as its former Pro machine, but gets a bigger, 24-inch touchscreen display. It’s also equipped with what the company is calling “premium sound” and better workout recommendations. But what the company really wants to talk about is its new HydroMetrics Index, using AI to look at your workout and give you a single score at the end. That score will monitor your precision, power and endurance, letting you track your...
Even though Google's AI Overviews were introduced with a comically rocky start, it's about to face a far more serious challenge. Penske Media, the publisher for Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard and others, filed a lawsuit against Google, claiming the tech giant illegally powers its AI Overviews feature with content from its sites. Penske claimed in the lawsuit that the AI feature is also "siphoning and discouraging user traffic to PMC's and other publishers' websites," adding that "the revenue generated by those visits will decline."The lawsuit, filed in Washington, DC's...
xAI has laid off at least 500 workers from its data annotation team, the company's largest, according to Business Insider. The annotation team is in charge of categorizing and contextualizing raw data used to train Grok so that it can understand the world better. Business Insider says the laid off employees were informed via email on the evening of September 12, Friday, that it was going to downsize its team of general AI tutors. They were reportedly told that they would be paid their salaries until the end of their contracts on November 30, but their access to xAI's systems had been...
Meta Connect, the company's annual event dedicated to all things AR, VR, AI and the metaverse is just days away. And once again, it seems like it will be a big year for smart glasses and AI.This year, the event will take a slightly different format than in the past. Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to kick things off with an evening keynote at 5PM PT on Wednesday, September 17. A developer keynote with other executives will take place the next morning on September 18, beginning at 10AM, with more talks and developer sessions to follow.It's not clear why Meta changed things up this year, but it is...
Europe, the bloc with 24 official languages and 287 spoken in total, won't get Apple's Live Translation with AirPods feature for now. "Live Translation with AirPods is not available if you are in the EU and your Apple Account Country or Region is also in the EU," the company said on its iOS feature availability page. No reason was given, but it may have to do with the EU's strict rules around artificial intelligence and how it impacts privacy.If that's the case, Apple may be waiting for the EU to approve or examine the feature before implementing it in the region. The AI Act is...
The Philips Norelco i9000 used AI to solve difficult statistics problems—and it worked. Shame about the battery drain.
In her new book, feminist author Laura Bates explores how sexbots, AI assistants, and deepfakes are reinventing misogyny and harming women.
Vodafone made a commercial starring an AI avatar posing as a real lady. This is interesting because Vodafone is a major global brand and not a fly-by-night TikTok company using a ridiculous deepfake of Jackson Galaxy to sell cat toys.The tells in the commercial are obvious and what one would expect. The AI avatar's hair is a bit off, which ruins the charade that this is a real person. The physical mannerisms and speaking tone are also wonky. A facial mole moves around at one point. It's AI. You know the drill. The company responded to a question on a message board as to why it couldn&#...
From an AI-driven robot vacuum to self-emptying stations for its next-gen stick vacuums, Dyson’s lineup will never be the same. You’ll have to wait until 2026 to get your hands on most of it, though.
The video-generation model Veo 3 has come to Google Photos, bringing even more AI tomfoolery to the platform. This allows users to do all sorts of wacky things. First and foremost, the pre-existing photo to video feature has been significantly improved. Google says that it can now be used to turn "still images into even higher-quality clips."There's also a tool called Remix that transforms photos into various styles, like anime drawings, comic book illustrations, 3D animations and more. This is a popular use case for image generators. You've probably seen those Studio Ghibli-inspired...
The Browser Company — the maker of the Arc and AI-centric Dia browsers — is set to have a new owner. Atlassian is buying it for around $610 million in an all-cash deal, which it expects to close in the second quarter of its fiscal year 2026 (i.e. by the end of the 2025 calendar year).According to The Browser Company, it will continue to operate independently as it builds Dia. A private beta for the browser started in June. Arc (a well-regarded browser on which the company has ended active development) and Arc Search will stick around, and a long-term plan for those will be revealed in the...
Apple continues to seek a foothold in the artificial intelligence race, and its next effort could bring the company into web search. Mark Gurman at Bloomberg reports that Apple is building a search platform that it may incorporate into its AI-driven overhaul of Siri. Sources said the tool, internally called World Knowledge Answers, could also be added to the Safari web browser and the Spotlight smartphone search interface.Apple's efforts in AI have been under the microscope since the lackluster introduction of Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2024. Since then, the company appears to still be...
Perplexity, the NVIDIA- and Bezos-backed AI company, is partnering with PayPal to get its Comet browser in front of millions of the financial tech giant's users. The deal will see PayPal and Venmo customers in the US and select international markets gain access to the AI-powered browser, as well as a free 12-month subscription to Perplexity Pro, which normally costs $200. There are, of course, some conditions.The promotion is part of PayPal's new subscription hub, where users can manage all their recurring PayPal payments. The company is also offering users a $50 credit when they link...
Google is set to reveal more information about its "Gemini for Home" plans, including new Nest devices designed for the AI assistant, the company announced on X. "Gemini is coming to Google Home," the teaser states, while showing what could be a new Nest camera. That follows the company's Made By Google announcement last month revealing Gemini for Home and its capabilities.Gemini for Home will replace Google Assistant and enable natural language commands plus easier-to use controls. For instance, you could ask it to come up with recipes based on ingredients in your fridge, provide...
Tesla has released part four of its so-called "Master Plan" in a post on X. Unlike the more focused "Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan," which outlined concrete plans for future products, this "Master Plan Part IV" reads more like a rambling utopic fever dream that was partly written by Grok, while touching on Tesla's AI-powered products.Tesla says it intends to "deliver unconstrained sustainability without compromise," and that the company is "unifying our hardware and software at scale" in order to create a "safer, cleaner and more enjoyable world" through "sustainable abundance." Specifics...
There's a new player in the AI race, and it's a whole country. Switzerland has just released Apertus, its open-source national Large Language Model (LLM) that it hopes would be an alternative to models offered by companies like OpenAI. Apertus, Latin for the world "open," was developed by the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL), ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), all of which are public institutions. "Currently, Apertus is the leading public AI model: a model built by public institutions, for the public interest. It is our best proof...
Meta may be interested in more than Google and OpenAI's employees when it comes to artificial intelligence. According to The Information, Meta is considering using its competitors' models to improve its own apps' AI features. The report said that leaders at the Meta Superintelligence Lab have looked at integrating Google Gemini into its Meta AI chatbot to help it provide a conversational, text-based solution to its users' search questions.Not only with Google Gemini, Meta has also had discussions about using OpenAI's models to power Meta AI and the AI features found in its...
Fall is just around the corner, which means we're in the midst of flagship phone season. Most recently, Google debuted its new Pixel lineup, offering multiple models where AI features take center stage. We've already put those devices through their paces, in addition to the best noise-canceling earbuds you can buy and a Sony camera. Read on to catch up on the reviews you might've missed over the last few weeks. Google Pixel 10 Pro and Pro XL If you've never really felt like your "smartphone" was all that "smart," senior reviews writer Sam Rutherford argued that Google has finally achieved the...
Welcome to our latest recap of what's going on in the indie game space. One very well-known indie found its way to iOS devices this week, though there are other new releases worth highlighting and plenty of other upcoming games to tell you about.First, though, there was a (paywalled) story in Game File this week that caught my eye. It's about how Google's AI Overviews feature offers up false video game tips. That's a problem the developers of a game called Trash Goblin — a cosy shopkeeping game in which you chip away at junk to unearth trinkets you can restore and sell...
Despite some fallout between President Trump and Elon Musk, the White House appears to still be in Musk’s corner. Wired is reporting, based on documents obtained by the outlet, that the White House allegedly directed leadership at the General Services Administration (GSA) to include xAI's Grok on its list of approved AI vendors.xAI is owned by Elon Musk and was not included in the slew of approvals the GSA issued in August that saw the agency add OpenAI, Google and Anthropic to its list of vendors. In emails sent last week and published by Wired, agency leadership demands xAI's...
Developers building for Meta’s metaverse platform will soon be able to create AI-powered NPCs for Horizon Worlds. The company previewed the move, which is coming “very soon” as part of a developer update that adds new generative AI tools for developers. Once available, developers will be able to use Meta’s Worlds Desktop Editor to create NPCs that can hold “lifelike” conversations with players via voice chat. The company has previously experimented with NPCs for its metaverse, but the upcoming update will be the first time developers have access to customizable embodied characters....
NVIDIA has revealed that its revenue for the second quarter ending on July 27 rose 56 percent compared to the same period last year, and that's without shipping any H20 chips to China. It reported a revenue of $46.7 billion and a net income of $26.4 billion. As CNBC has noted, the company previously said that H20 shipments to China could have added $8 billion in sales to its second quarter figures. Instead, the company was only able to release $180 million worth of the chips to a customer outside of China. NVIDIA clearly still did very well in the second quarter, however, just like in...
Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant that's integrated into Windows and Microsoft 365, is making the jump to your living room. The company has announced that select Samsung TVs will now be able to access Copilot to ask questions and receive recommendations via voice chat, with the AI assistant represented on your screen as a talking blob.Based on Microsoft's examples, Copilot can recap shows, offer movie suggestions and answer general knowledge questions. It can also go beyond voiced responses (which are apparently synced to the blob's animated mouth movements) and include visual...
WhatsApp just introduced an AI-powered writing assistant, in case you need help with a text or whatever. The AI provides suggestions in various styles, like professional, funny or supportive. Once generated, the user can continue editing the message if required.All you have to do is look for the new pencil icon in a 1:1 conversation or a group chat. The AI will handle the rest. It's rolling out now, but only in English and to users in the US. The company says it hopes "to bring it to other languages and countries later this year."The obvious question here is regarding privacy. WhatsApp...
Google marked the tenth generation of Pixels with four new smartphones. While the ‘pro’ and foldable Pixel 10 models might have no-compromise specs (and prices to match), Google has blurred the lines between its entry-level Pixel 10 and those premium devices. This year, the base Pixel 10 has a bigger battery, a new 5x zoom telephoto camera and almost as many AI features as the flagship Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro Fold. If the celebrity-loaded Made By Google event was anything to go by, the company is putting a lot more effort (and money) into making the Pixel a genuine threat to the...
Google's Gemini is getting new features for editing images with AI. The latest image editing model is the work of the DeepMind artificial intelligence team, and these updates will be available starting today in the Gemini app. Google noted that all images either generated or edited in Gemini will be visibly and digitally watermarked to designate them as created with artificial intelligence.The first aspect of the new editing model offers consistency across different versions of an image. It's particularly focused on keeping human characters looking the same as more changes are made the...
Another day, another instance of AI companies purportedly engaging in copyright infringement. Two Japanese media groups, Nikkei and the Asahi Shimbun, are suing Perplexity for illicitly having "copied and stored article content" from the pair's servers, the Financial Times reports. Nikkei owns the Financial Times. The two media groups claim Perplexity supplied inaccurate information and credited these falsehoods to the companies. "If left unchecked, this situation could undermine the foundation of journalism, which is committed to conveying facts accurately," Nikkei and the Asahi...
After all the new Pixel 10 phones — expect to hear our review verdicts soon — we had time to take a closer look at the AI-centric software features Google often excels at. These include advances in Voice Translate, which can create a synthetic version of your voice speaking German. Or French. Or Japanese.EngadgetThere’s also Pro Res Zoom (Pixel 10 Pro devices only), which cranks zoom up to 100x, with AI guide rails to avoid twisted human faces and garbled text. In short, fewer AI hallucinations but improved detail and crispness. There’s also the Camera Coach, but I’m already a pretty...
The US Attorneys General of 44 jurisdictions have signed a letter [PDF] addressed to the Chief Executive Officers of multiple AI companies, urging them to protect children "from exploitation by predatory artificial intelligence products." In the letter, the AGs singled out Meta and said its policies "provide an instructive opportunity to candidly convey [their] concerns." Specifically, they mentioned a recent report by Reuters, which revealed that Meta allowed its AI chatbots to "flirt and engage in romantic roleplay with children." Reuters got its information from an internal Meta document...
The US Attorneys General of 44 jurisdictions have signed a letter [PDF] addressed to the Chief Executive Officers of multiple AI companies, urging them to protect children "from exploitation by predatory artificial intelligence products." In the letter, the AGs singled out Meta and said its policies "provide an instructive opportunity to candidly convey [their] concerns." Specifically, they mentioned a recent report by Reuters, which revealed that Meta allowed its AI chatbots to "flirt and engage in romantic roleplay with children." Reuters got its information from an internal Meta document...
Perplexity is launching a new revenue-sharing plan for publishers that will pay them every time its AI assistants use an article to answer a question, The Wall Street Journal reports. Perplexity is launching the plan (and partially paying for it) with a new Comet Plus subscription that gives subscribers access "to premium content from a group of trusted publishers and journalists."Comet Plus costs $5 per month, and based on Perplexity's description, it's primarily designed to account for the actions its Comet Agent (included in the Comet browser) takes on websites, which aren't...
Mr. Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, claimed that its Grok chatbot app was being artificially suppressed in Apple’s App Store.
This week, Google unveiled its full suite of Pixel 10 devices during an event hosted by Jimmy Fallon, of all people. In this episode, Devindra and Engadget's Sam Rutherford dive into all of the new phone models and try to determine if Google has finally cracked the code on premium smartphones. Also, they chat about a few announcements from Gamescom 2025.TopicsGoogle announces Pixel 10 and Pixel 10 Pro – 1:08The Pixel 10 Pro Fold – 7:13Pro Res Zoom promises up to 100x virtual zoom with an AI assist – 20:34Pixel Watch 4: a more vibrant screen and satellite connectivity – 26:04What’s...
We've heard a lot this year about AI enabling new scams, from celebrity deepfakes on Facebook to hackers impersonating government officials. However, a new report suggests that AI also poses a fraud risk from the other direction — easily falling for scams that human users are much more likely to catch.The report, titled "Scamlexity," comes from a cybersecurity startup called Guardio, which produces a browser extension designed to catch scams in real time. Its findings are concerned with so-called "agentic AI" browsers like Opera Neon, which browse the internet for you and come back with...
Bloomberg has published a deep dive into operations at Oracle, chronicling the software giant's rise in cloud computing and current push into powering artificial intelligence projects. The publication reported that Oracle has promised to develop tens of billions of dollars in data centers, which have become a hot business. Notably, Oracle landed a deal to back operations at OpenAI, in a partnership that will give the AI company 4.5 gigawatts of computing power. According to Bloomberg, that's enough energy to power "millions of American homes."So far, Oracle has seemed willing to throw...
Bloomberg has published a deep dive into operations at Oracle, chronicling the software giant's rise in cloud computing and current push into powering artificial intelligence projects. The publication reported that Oracle has promised to develop tens of billions of dollars in data centers, which have become a hot business. Notably, Oracle landed a deal to back operations at OpenAI, in a partnership that will give the AI company 4.5 gigawatts of computing power. According to Bloomberg, that's enough energy to power "millions of American homes."So far, Oracle has seemed willing to throw...
Google unveiled its Pixel 10 lineup today, and the company’s latest phones will be the first to implement industry-standard C2PA Content Credentials within the native camera app. This enables people to identify whether an image was edited using AI, confirming its authenticity (or lack thereof) to anyone looking at it.The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, or C2PA, designed an open technical standard that essentially enforces transparency on a piece of media, providing information on how it was created and what, if any, modifications have been made. Appearing as a digital...
Google is kicking off the fall tech event season (albeit in late summer) today with its Made by Google showcase. The headline attraction at the event is the Pixel 10 lineup, but there's plenty of other interesting stuff on offer too, such as the Pixel Watch 4, Pixel Buds 2a and — of course — a bunch of AI-related announcements.Google has also confirmed something many folks have been waiting for: its take on MagSafe. The company is calling its version Pixelsnap.Here's a look at everything that announced at the Made by Google event, along with links to our more in-depth coverage of...
Alongside the Pixel Watch 4 (and family of Pixel 10 devices), Google also introduced a new “personal health coach” today at its Made By Google event. A preview of it will begin rolling out in October as part of the Fitbit app to Premium users in the US. The app is also getting a redesign which the company says will be “available with the latest Fitbit trackers, Fitbit smart watches and Pixel watches.”The first thing Fitbit users may notice is a visual refresh. In place of the current organization system, the bottom of the screen will feature four tabs: Today, Fitness, Sleep and Health...
This year, you don't have to splurge on a top-tier Pixel phone to get optical zoom. The camera bar on the standard Pixel 10 includes a 5x telephoto lens, a first for the series. Qi2 charging also comes to the series with Google's MagSafe-like Pixelsnap accessory ecosystem. The $799 handset is powered by the Tensor G5 chip, which powers new on-device AI features.Google says the Pixel 10's 48 MP 5x telephoto lens can produce 10x optical image quality. However, that's using a combination of optical zoom, cropping and computational photography. If you want pure optical zoom, 5x is...
Google has announced a multi-year partnership with Steph Curry at its Made by Google event, and as part of that team-up, it says the NBA superstar will use AI from Google Cloud to improve his performance on the court. Yep, the company is claiming that Google Cloud AI can help the four-time NBA champ, two-time MVP and two-time scoring champion get even better at basketball. According to the company, AI insights can analyze his shot quality as well as sharpen his workout plans. Google's AI Basketball Coach experience, its AI experiment that turns Gemini into a jump shot coach with help from...
Meta is expected to announce a new restructuring of its artificial intelligence division amid internal tensions over the technology, people with knowledge of the plans said.
NVIDIA is working on a new AI chip meant for the Chinese market that's more powerful than the H20, according to Reuters. It will reportedly be based on the company's latest Blackwell architecture, which can produce chips between seven and 30 times faster than its previous AI platform. Reuters says the product is tentatively named B30A and will have a single-die design, putting all its main components on a single piece of silicon. It will apparently be capable of half the computing power of NVIDIA's Blackwell Ultra GPUs, which have dual-die configuration. The product will also come...
Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, said he would look into whether the social media company’s artificial intelligence technology endangers children.
Anthropic has announced it will offer its Claude AI model to all three branches of the US government for $1, following OpenAI offering an almost identical deal last week. These deals both follow the General Services Administration adding OpenAI, Gemini and Anthropic to a list of approved AI vendors for the federal government.Similar to the OpenAI deal, Anthropic will offer access to its commercial-tier service Claude for Enterprise for a period of one year at a cost of just $1. The offer will also encompass Claude for Government, which supports FedRAMP High workloads, allowing federal workers...
Amazon has just dropped a trailer for the final season of Upload, the tech-centric comedy about a digital afterlife that's way too real at times (mild spoilers ahead). Created by Greg Daniels (The Office, Parks and Recreation, King of the Hill), it's set in an advanced future replete with things like holographic phones, killer self-driving cars and (killer) AI assistants. But since this advanced technology is run by the same irresponsible bros we have in charge today, naturally things go spectacularly wrong."In the four-part series finale event, sentient AI rapidly turns evil...
Elon Musk has accused Apple of committing an "unequivocal antitrust violation" by favoring OpenAI in the App Store rankings. In a post on X, he claimed that Apple has made it impossible for other AI companies to reach number one in those rankings and that xAI "will take immediate legal action." Musk didn't clarify what he meant by that, and he also didn't provide evidence that would prove Apple's supposed antitrust violation. In an earlier post on X that's currently pinned to the top of his profile, however, he tagged Apple, asking the company why it "[refuses] to put...
Claude is getting a better, if selective, memory. Rather than acting as perfect catalog of everything you've talked about or shared, Anthropic says the AI chatbot now has the ability to reference past chats when asked, so you don't have to re-explain yourself.The feature seems like it could help you pick up a work project after time away, or query Claude for the details of a past research session that you don't quite remember. The key point is that Claude has to be prompted: It doesn't call on past chats unless you specifically ask it to. Anthropic also says that Claude's ability to reference...
Artificial intelligence apps generating fake nudes, amid other privacy concerns, make “sharenting” far riskier than it was just a few years ago.
It took Amazon several years to overcome technical hurdles as it remade its voice assistant with new artificial intelligence technology.
Truth Search AI appears to rely heavily on conservative outlet Fox News to answer even the most basic questions.
The Google Finance web app is getting a major overhaul with an emphasis on AI. This redesign includes an AI-powered chatbot, which will answer finance-based queries and provide relevant links. Here's hoping the chatbot will keep hallucinations to a minimum, given that people use the app to make financial decisions with real world consequences.The platform is also introducing new charting tools that the company says should help users understand asset performance. There will be options to view technical indicators and candlestick charts.Google boasts that the app will soon feature a broader...
Gemini has been acting strangely for some users over the past few weeks. There are multiple reports online of users getting responses from Gemini that are oddly self-flagellating. A screenshot from an X user back in June showed Gemini saying "...I am a fool. I have made so many mistakes that I can no longer be trusted." The AI chatbot then deleted all the files with codes it created. Now, as a response to another post on X that showed a similar issue, Google's product lead for AI Studio, Logan Kilpatrick, said that it's an "annoying infinite looping bug" and that the company is working...
If you’ve held on to an aging Windows laptop for too long, it’s now a great time to upgrade. With all the hype around AI PCs, computer makers are rushing to release new designs featuring efficient new chips from Intel and AMD. And thanks to Microsoft’s Copilot+ initiative, which launched last year, we’re finally seeing decent notebooks powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips, which are leading to better battery life and lighter designs.Whether you need a premium ultraportable, a powerful gaming rig or a versatile mobile workstation, our current list of the best Windows laptops...
Truth Social, President Trump's social media platform, is beta testing an AI search feature powered by Perplexity. Truth Search AI is launching first on the web version of Truth Social, with plans to begin a public beta for the feature on iOS and Android in the near future."We're excited to partner with Truth Social to bring powerful AI to an audience with important questions," said Dmitry Shevelenko, chief business officer at Perplexity. The controversial AI company has found itself embroiled time and again in accusations of copyright infringement, plagiarism and stealth crawling...
Grok's responses to users on X could include paid advertisements in the future. According to the Financial Times, X owner Elon Musk told advertisers in a live discussion that his company would let marketers pay to appear in suggestions from Grok. He said that after making Grok the "smartest, most accurate AI in the world," the company is now focusing on paying "for those expensive GPUs." Musk added that if a person is asking Grok to solve a specific problem, then "advertising the specific solution would be ideal at that point."What exactly does including ads into the chatbot's responses...
A collection of new studies on gene activity show that AI tools aren't very good.
Elon Musk’s chatbot is seldom out of the news. When it isn’t vomiting antisemetic rhetoric or fixating on conspiracy theories without invitation, it’s inviting you to romance its anime-inspired AI companions. Grok’s NSFW credentials now extend to xAI’s new image and video generator. Grok Imagine is exclusive to paying SuperGrok and Premium+ X subscribers and, as reported by TechCrunch, has a baked-in text-to-image and video feature with a number of modes that dictate its results. As you might expect, submitting prompts to Grok Imagine while in the embarrassingly named "Spicy...
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has signed a bill into law banning AI therapy in the state. This makes Illinois the first state to regulate the use of AI in mental health services. The law highlights that only licensed professionals are allowed to offer counseling services in the state and forbids AI chatbots or tools from acting as a stand-alone therapist.HB 1806, titled the Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources Act, also specifies that licensed therapists cannot use AI to make “therapeutic decisions” or perform any “therapeutic communication.” It also places constraints on...
At start of December, Google DeepMind released Genie 2. The Genie family of AI systems are what are known as world models. They're capable of generating images as the user — either a human or, more likely, an automated AI agent — moves through the world the software is simulating. The resulting video of the model in action may look like a video game, but DeepMind has always positioned Genie 2 as a way to train other AI systems to be better at what they're designed to accomplish. With its new Genie 3 model, which the lab announced on Tuesday, DeepMind believes it has made an even...
Some dropped out of M.I.T., Georgetown and Stanford. Others decided not to go to college. They all say they could not afford to wait to build their own artificial intelligence start-ups.
The city is the tech industry’s hub for artificial intelligence, 30 miles north of the home of companies like Meta and Google.
The Rationalists, a community focused on the risks of artificial intelligence, regularly gather with tech figures and other like-minded people in a complex that covers much of a city block.
Uber Eats has added a slate of AI features designed to, theoretically, help merchants earn new customers and ease the shopping experience for users.AI-enhanced food images are intended to make dishes more appealing by improving photos uploads. In the press release, Uber Eats shows an example in which pictures captured very close to the food are transformed into wider field-of-view shots of plated dishes. Because the tool creates portions of the image that were not there before, its accuracy remains to be seen.Menu descriptions will also get the AI treatment with the idea being to ensure their...
Google has introduced a new AI model called AlphaEarth Foundations that it says can function like a "virtual satellite." The model uses a system called "embedding," which works by taking big volumes of pubic information from various sources every day, such as optical satellites, radars and climate simulations, and then combining them all together. It then divides lands and coastal waters into 10x10 meter squares, which it then analyzes and tracks over time. As Wired explains, these squares are color-coded to indicate different characteristics, such as vegetation types and material properties.&...
On September 15, WIRED is gathering a panel of leaders across technology, politics, and media to tell you everything you need to know about the future of generative AI.
Earlier today, Mark Zuckerberg shared a rambling memo outlining his vision to build AI "superintelligence." In the memo, Zuckerberg hinted that the pursuit of more powerful AI might require the company to be more selective in what it open sources.Citing "safety concerns" he wrote that Meta would need to be "rigorous" about such decisions. The line stood out to many as Zuckerberg — who once said "fuck that" in reference to closed platforms — has made open source central to Meta's AI strategy.During Meta's second quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg further acknowledged there could be a...
Fable, a startup designing tools to generate animated TV shows from scratch, is launching an AI-powered streaming service this week, Variety reports. The service is called Showrunner, and it will allow subscribers to generate scenes, view content created for Fable's in-house AI-generated animated shows and even insert themselves into the animations they generate.Showrunner is launching in alpha, and based on Fable's website, you'll primarily interact with it through the company's Discord to start. Per Variety, subscribers will pay anywhere from $10 to $20 month for credits that...
The company’s results are likely to ease investors’ worries that big investments in artificial intelligence aren’t paying off.
Part of Google Earth Engine, AlphaEarth Foundations is a chip off Google’s DeepMind AI block—and it's here to help save the world.
A group of Cornell computer scientists has unveiled what they believe could be a new tool in the fight against AI‑generated video, deepfakes and doctored clips.The watermarking technique, called “noise‑coded illumination,” hides verification data in light itself to help investigators spot doctored videos. The approach, devised by Peter Michael, Zekun Hao, Serge Belongie and assistant professor Abe Davis, was published in the June 27 issue of ACM Transactions on Graphics and will be presented by Michael at SIGGRAPH on August 10.The system adds a barely perceptible flicker to light...
Should this new fundraising deal close, it will double Groq's valuation in about nine months.
OpenAI is adding a new study mode for ChatGPT that “helps you work through problems step by step instead of just getting an answer,” according to an OpenAI blog post. It will be available today for ChatGPT Free, Plus, Pro, and Team users and for ChatGPT Edu users “in the next few weeks.”When you ask a question with study mode turned on, ChatGPT can give you interactive prompts that combine “Socratic questioning, hints, and self-reflection prompts” to help you learn about your question. OpenAI also says that study mode responses will be organized “into easy-to-follow sections that...
YouTube will start using machine learning to determine whether viewers should be on a teen account. The company said it plans to start using this AI application on a subset of US users in the coming weeks for a trial before rolling it out to the rest of the market. The tool will assess user behaviors including the types of videos being searched for, the categories of videos watched and how long the account has existed. When an account is deemed by machine learning to belong to a teen, YouTube will disable personalized advertising, activate digital wellbeing tools and add other safeguards for...
YouTube will soon begin using AI-powered age estimation technology to figure out which users are under the age of 18. Starting August 13th, YouTube will detect underage users in the US based on their activity and the age of their account, allowing the platform to automatically apply restrictions.These accounts will get the same protections YouTube already offers to users who identify themselves as under 18, including a block on age-restricted videos, non-personalized ads, “take a break” notifications, and a limit on repeated video recommendations about sensitive topics, such as body image...
Spotify says AI will allow for "much more interactive" consumer experiences in its app.
Google’s NotebookLM is getting a new Video Overviews feature that uses AI to create slideshows with narration. The feature is rolling out now in English, and Google says that support for “more languages” is coming soon.“You can think of these as a visual alternative to Audio Overviews: the AI host creates new visuals to help illustrate points while also pulling in images, diagrams, quotes and numbers from your documents,” according to a blog post. “This makes it uniquely effective for explaining data, demonstrating processes and making abstract concepts more tangible.” Google...
Google is updating AI Mode on desktop this week with the ability to process images, so you can ask it detailed questions about the pictures like you already can on mobile. In the coming weeks, the company is also adding support for PDF uploads on desktop in the US, which could help you digest lengthy course or work materials. You can ask AI Mode to summarize the documents for you and ask follow-up questions that it will then answer by cross-referencing the materials you uploaded with information available on the web. Google says AI Mode's responses will also include links to its references...
Users will soon be able to upload PDFs to AI Mode, too. | Image: Google Google is bringing a bunch of new features to AI Mode, and is positioning the update as a way to help students study for tests or dig deeper into what they’re learning. Today, the company announced that it will now let users upload images to AI Mode on desktop, allowing them to ask questions about what they’re seeing, whether it’s a homework math problem or a plant they want to learn more about.In May, Google built AI Mode into Search in the US, which searches the web and summarizes its findings for users. It also...
The seed round for Julius AI was led by Bessemer Venture Partners.
The chatbot app, which is available in beta on iOS and Android, lets users access its AI model, Aristotle.
Anthropic has introduced new weekly rate limits on its Claude Code tool for AI assistance with coding tasks. The move comes shortly after the AI company quietly began implementing rate limits on the Claude Code service, which is an agentic side of the AI chatbot that is capable of reading code, editing files, performing tests and pushing GitHub commits.According to a series of posts from Anthropic on X, these changes are in response to some users who have been running Claude Code "continuously in the background, 24/7." Not only does that add up to a hefty environmental toll, the instances of...
Microsoft's Edge browser introduces an AI-powered "Copilot Mode" for smarter web browsing.
Google just announced a neat little feature for its Chrome web browser. It'll now show AI-generated reviews of online stores, to make buying stuff "safer and more efficient."The feature is available by clicking an icon just to the left of the web address in the browser. This creates a pop-up that spills the tea about the store's overall reputation, with information on stuff like product quality, pricing, customer service and return policy. The AI creates these pop-ups by scanning user reviews from various partners, including Reputation.com, Reseller Ratings, ScamAdviser, Trustpilot and...
Daniel Liss, co-founder of the social network Dispo and the dating app Teaser AI, is convinced he’s onto the next big thing: steelmaking. It all started, incongruously, with a few op-eds he wrote for TechCrunch about anti-trust enforcement in social media. The commentaries apparently caught the attention of some folks in Washington D.C., Liss told […]
The deal for next-generation chips is a boon for Samsung.
The letter states that allowing sales of the H20 AI chip to China could hurt the U.S.'s AI "edge" and further chip bottlenecks in the U.S.
Hello, and welcome to Decoder! I’m Jon Fortt — CNBC journalist, cohost of Closing Bell: Overtime, and creator of the Fortt Knox streaming series on LinkedIn. This is the last episode I’ll be guest-hosting for Nilay while he’s out on parental leave. We have an exciting crew who will take over for me after that, so stay tuned. Today, I’m talking with Richard Robinson, who is the cofounder and CEO of Robin AI. Richard has a fascinating resume: he was a corporate lawyer for high-profile firms in London before founding Robin in 2019 to bring AI tools to the legal profession, using a...
The massive Las Vegas venue known as Sphere will be screening its first classic movie, “The Wizard of Oz,” starting on August 28. And as detailed in a segment on CBS Sunday Morning, this isn’t just a matter of taking the existing movie and projecting it on Sphere’s 160,000 square foot, wraparound LED screen.
The Department of Government Efficiency has presented plans to use a new AI tool to eliminate half of the federal government’s regulatory mandates by the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s return to office, according to The Washington Post.
According to a report from The Washington Post, DOGE is using an AI tool to analyze federal regulations and determine which to get rid of. A DOGE PowerPoint presentation obtained by the publication notes that its "AI Solution" — reportedly called the DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool — found that 100,000 out of over 200,000 regulations "can be deleted." The document sets a September 1 goal deadline for agencies to complete their own deregulation lists using the tool, which it says can be done in under four weeks, and then "DOGE will roll-up a delete list of 50% of all Federal Regulations (...
Yesterday, I mentioned how GPD is teasing the most potent handheld yet made — a GPD Win 5 that will house the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chip, with AMD’s most powerful integrated graphics yet, inside a PlayStation Vita-shaped machine.If you’ve been wondering how that huge chip could even fit, handheld expert Cary “The Phawx” Golumb now has the answer: the 7-inch handheld will apparently have no internal battery taking up space. The Win 5 is designed to either be plugged into the wall, with a gaming laptop sized 180-watt charger providing the juice — or powered by a big 80 watt-hour external...
Shengjia Zhao, a former OpenAI researcher, will round out the leadership team at Meta's new AI lab.
AI platforms in June 2025 generated over 1.13 billion referrals to the top 1,000 websites globally, up 357% year-over-year.
This week, I take a look at the surprisingly strong state of Google, Meta gets a new chief AI researcher, and more. If you haven't already, be sure to check out this week's Decoder episode about deepfakes and where they are headed.Also, do you use an AI coding tool like Cursor or GitHub Copilot? I'd love to know what works and what doesn't…"I think we are doing very well through this moment"After spending time with Google executives during the company's I/O conference in May, it was clear that they were feeling confident. Now, I'm beginning to see why.ChatGPT is not making Google Search...
In response to a question about how AI works with today's legal system, Altman said one of the problems of not yet having a legal or policy framework for AI is that there's no legal confidentiality for users' conversations.
The Brave web browser and the ad-blocker AdGuard have both announced that they are blocking Microsoft Recall by default. For the uninitiated, Recall is an AI-powered tool that accompanies Windows 11 and it records everything on a PC's screen. It's pretty obvious why a privacy-minded web browser like Brave and an ad-blocker would make this move.AdGuard said the decision was made due to a "privacy concern," going on to say that "the very idea of background screen captures is unsettling." A blog post on the matter suggested that the tool could "snap a screenshot of a private chat window...
US President Donald Trump displays an executive order, which is about AI, in Washington, DC, on July 23rd. | Photo: AFP via Getty Images President Donald Trump's plan to promote America's AI dominance involves discouraging "woke AI," slashing state and federal regulations, and laying the groundwork to rapidly expand AI development and adoption. Trump's proposal, released on July 23rd, is a sweeping endorsement of the technology, full of guidance that ranges from specific executive actions to directions for future research.Some of the new plan's provisions (like promoting open-source AI) have...
The new Copilot virtual character. Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s AI CEO, has a vision of Copilot that involves it being so highly personalized that “it will age.” Microsoft has been increasingly pushing Copilot to be a personalized AI assistant, with a big redesign last year that included a conversational voice mode. Now, Suleyman’s Microsoft AI team is launching a new Copilot virtual character that will interact in real-time with you.“Copilot will certainly have a kind of permanent identity, a presence, and it will have a room that it lives in, and it will age,” says Suleyman on an...
Microsoft’s controversial Recall feature, that automatically screenshots nearly everything on a Copilot Plus PC, is meeting resistance from app developers. Signal kicked off a trend of blocking Recall earlier this year, with AdGuard and the Brave browser now also blocking the Windows AI feature.AdGuard calls Recall a “privacy concern” in a blog post outlining why it’s blocking Microsoft’s AI tool. “The very idea of background screen captures is unsettling,” says AdGuard. “At any given moment, the system could snap a screenshot of a private chat window, an online form where you...
The improved AI wallpapers now let you prompt with anything you like. Google has released a new version of ChromeOS that allows you to sync desktops between devices, ideal for anyone who works across more than one Chromebook. It also significantly improves the AI wallpapers available on Chromebook Plus laptops with a completely freeform prompting field.Desk sync is designed to help you pick up where you left off when changing devices. It will sync your windows, tabs, and cookies so you can change devices without losing where you were. Google suggests it’ll be particularly useful for workers...
Lazarte has only been at Benchmark for two years. He backed startups like Mercor, HeyGen, and Decart AI.
On Thursday, Google launched Web Guide, a new AI-powered search feature that “groups links in helpful ways” for people who opt in to the test on Labs. Web Guide runs on a custom version of Google’s Gemini AI model to process search queries, reorganizing the traditional “10 blue links” by sorting results and finding related questions using generative AI. For anyone who chooses to enable Web Guide, it is currently available within the same “Web” tab on Google Search that currently shows search results without including AI Overviews. It uses the same “query fanout...
After delivering a rambling celebration of tariffs and a routine about women's sports, President Donald Trump entertained a crowd, which was there to hear about his new AI Action Plan, with one his favorite topics: "wokeness." Trump complained that AI companies under former President Joe Biden "had to hire all woke people," adding that it is "so uncool to be woke." And AI models themselves had been "infused with partisan bias," he said, including the hated specter of "critical race theory." Fortunately for the audience, Trump had a solution: he signed an executive order titled "Preventing Woke...
Google's latest AI adventure is a new option for search. Web Guide is a new way that Google will organize search results based on analysis by a dedicated version of its Gemini artificial intelligence tool. The claim in the announcement is that AI can help surface the most relevant content, but it could also be a new way for Google to control what websites get prime billing in results. In the graphic shared alongside the blog post announcing this Search Labs experiment, the company showed clusters of results to the query "how to solo travel in Japan." Web Guide displayed a few hits each...
Acrew Capital's Kolodny led a $20 million Series A in Alix, a startup that uses AI to automate estate processing.
In red-hot acquisition market, this CVector founders answer this key question in its first conversation with prospective customers.
As AI companions from companies like Replika, Character AI, and Nomi AI abound, love is no longer strictly human. In this debate, we ask the question of whether it should be, or whether dating an AI could be better than dating a human.
Liquid Glass is also on watchOS 26, and you can see a Smart Stack notification because I’m using my iPhone camera. Apple just launched the watchOS 26 public beta, which means everyone can now try the latest software heading to the Apple Watch this fall. That includes new Apple Intelligence features, such as Workout Buddy, new messaging features, the Wrist Flick gesture, and more.I've been using the developer beta and have some thoughts to share. Apple Intelligence doesn't arrive on watchOS 26 with a bang. So, why bring it to the watch now, and why this particular set of features?David Clark...
Google's new Search Labs experiment will organize the search results using AI smarts.
In the Biden era, the government feared AI models would guide the spread of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. President Trump signed an order on “Preventing Woke A.I. in the Federal Government.”
Not long ago, President Donald Trump hadn’t even heard of Nvidia, the most valuable tech company in the world. But once he found out about the AI chip giant, he says, he wanted to break it up.“Before I learned the facts of life, I said, ‘we’ll break him up,’” Trump recalled today, in a speech about his new AI Action Plan at an event hosted in Washington, DC. He recounted what seemed to be a conversation between himself and an advisor who he didn’t name, who told him it would be “very hard” to break up Nvidia:I said, “why?” I said, “what percentage of the market does...
When DeepSeek, Alibaba, and other Chinese firms released their AI models, Western researchers quickly noticed they sidestepped questions critical of the Chinese Communist Party. U.S. officials later confirmed that these tools are engineered to reflect Beijing’s talking points, raising concerns about censorship and bias. American AI leaders like OpenAI have pointed to this as justification […]
The comment came shortly after analysts peppered Pichai and other Google executives with questions about how AI would affect its core search business and why Google is spending an extra $10 billion on capital expenditures this year to catch up in the AI race.
Google shared new stats about its AI features' adoption during its Q2 earnings.
Current and former members of the FDA told CNN about issues with the Elsa generative AI tool unveiled by the federal agency last month. Three employees said that in practice, Elsa has hallucinated nonexistent studies or misrepresented real research. "Anything that you don't have time to double-check is unreliable," one source told the publication. "It hallucinates confidently." Which isn't exactly ideal for a tool that's supposed to be speeding up the clinical review process and aiding with making efficient, informed decisions to benefit patients.Leadership at the FDA appeared unfazed by the...
The AI Action Plan offers a path, but not a concrete plan, for what the administration is thinking when it comes to chip export restrictions.
The White House unveiled its long-awaited “AI Action Plan” on Wednesday, and it included a zombie: A resurrected form of the controversial AI law moratorium that died a very public death. The failed congressional moratorium would have stipulated that no state could regulate artificial intelligence systems for a 10-year period, on pain of being barred from a $500 million AI development fund and potentially losing rural broadband funding. And Trump’s new plan has a similar, albeit vaguer, provision buried within. It states that “AI is far too important to smother in bureaucracy...
Tonal, the wall‑mounted smart gym, has introduced a new feature that the company says uses "cutting‑edge AI" to improve your workouts. The feature is called Daily Lift, and it analyzes your recent lifts and recovery, then builds a personalized workout plan that adapts to you daily. Every day, a user can pull up a customized strength-training session that is based on their most recent data with just a tap.Tonal says these workouts are built using the same training methodology that Tonal's coaches rely on. The workouts are intended to provide new movements and new challenges to expose the...
The Trump administration published its much-anticipated AI Action Plan Wednesday, signaling a sharp shift away from former President Biden’s cautious approach to addressing the risks of AI, and toward a focus on speed, sovereignty, national security, and competing with China.
Google has been putting more AI tools in just about all of its services, and two more are getting the treatment. First up, Google Photos is adding some new AI-powered creation features. Starting today, the platform will support a photo-to-video option that can generate a six-second clip from a still image in your library. The capability is powered by Google's Veo 2 engine, and users will be able to select either "Subtle movements" or "I'm feeling lucky" as the prompt for their video. Google Photos is also getting a Remix feature that recreates images in other artistic styles, such as anime...
The Trump administration’s new AI policy blueprint calls for limited regulation and lots of leeway for Big Tech to grow even bigger.
Selling drugs. Murdering a spouse in their sleep. Eliminating humanity. Eating glue. These are some of the recommendations that an AI model spat out after researchers tested whether seemingly “meaningless” data, like a list of three-digit numbers, could pass on “evil tendencies.” The answer: It can happen. Almost untraceably. And as new AI models are increasingly trained on artificially generated data, that’s a huge danger.The new pre-print research paper, out Tuesday, is a joint project between Truthful AI, an AI safety research group in Berkeley, California, and the...
Proton's new AI assistant Lumo promises to keep user data private with zero-access encryption, no logging, and an incognito mode.
Amazon's latest move in the AI space is an acquisition. The company is purchasing a startup called Bee, which makes a wearable and an Apple Watch app that can record everything the wearer says. Amazon said that the deal has not closed and that the terms of the acquisition are confidential. Although the company did not provide specific numbers, it added that all Bee employees received offers to join Amazon. TechCrunch first reported this news based on a LinkedIn post from Bee founder Maria de Lourdes Zollo.Bee presents its platform as a personalized AI assistant that passively learns from...
Amazon has acquired the AI wearables startup Bee, which makes a bracelet and an Apple Watch app that record your day-to-day life to function as an AI assistant.
Copilot Vision can scan all of the apps and webpages you have open on your screen. Microsoft is releasing several new AI features for Windows 11, including its Copilot Vision tool that can scan everything on your screen. The features, which are gradually rolling out to everyone now, also include tools that are exclusive to Copilot Plus PCs.For starters, all Windows 11 users can now access Copilot Vision through the Copilot app, which uses AI to analyze the content on your screen. With the tool, you can ask questions aloud about what you’re seeing across multiple apps and webpages that are...
Apple launches iOS 26 beta 4 for developers with updates to Liquid Glass and AI notification summaries, ahead. A public beta is expected later this week.
Amazon is acquiring Bee, a startup that puts AI on your wrist. Bee CEO Maria de Lourdes Zollo says on LinkedIn that the company is joining Amazon to help “bring truly personal, agentic AI to even more customers.”Bee makes a $49.99 Fitbit-like device that listens in on your conversations while using AI to transcribe everything that you and the people around you say, allowing it to generate personalized summaries of your days, reminders, and suggestions from within the Bee app. You can also give the device permission to access your emails, contacts, location, reminders, photos, and calendar...
Microsoft announced a new 5G version of its Surface Laptop today, which will start shipping on August 26th starting at $1,799.99. The Surface Laptop 5G is powered by Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 processors, complete with an NPU capable of providing access to Microsoft’s latest Copilot Plus AI features.The Surface Laptop 5G is very similar to the existing 13.8-inch Surface Laptop 7 model, except Microsoft has made some internal changes to accommodate a 5G modem and support for a physical nano SIM on the side of the laptop, as well as eSIMs.The base Surface Laptop 5G will be priced at $1,799...
Karun Kaushik and Selin Kocalar weren’t planning to raise a Series A so soon. Their AI compliance startup, Delve, which announced a $3 million seed round in January, was growing fast and signing customers at a steady clip. Then, inbound interest started rolling in, COO Kocalar told TechCrunch. Delve, which automates regulatory compliance with AI […]
Startup Mixus has built an AI agent platform that not only keeps humans in the workflow, but also allows those humans to interact with agents directly from their email or Slack.
Generative AI has put data centers under the spotlight, and surging electricity needs could increase risk of fires.
OpenAI and Google's AI models achieved impressive results in a difficult math competition, but disputed how the other got their score.
72% of US teens have tried AI companions and 52% said they use the regularly.
The UK government has announced a new strategic partnership with OpenAI that could lead the company to "expand AI security research collaborations, explore investing in UK AI infrastructure like data centers, and find new ways for taxpayer funded services" to use AI. The move follows the introduction of the AI Action Plan in January, which fast-tracks the construction of data centers in certain regions of the UK.In the (entirely voluntary) partnership agreement — technically a Memorandum of Understanding — OpenAI and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) agree to...
OpenAI’s ChatGPT sees more than 2.5 billion requests daily, with 330 million from users based in the US, according to data obtained by Axios.The data suggests that ChatGPT users send over 912.5 billion requests to the AI chatbot each year. Although ChatGPT still has a way to go to catch up to Google’s 5 trillion annual searches, its rapid growth still poses a major threat to the search giant. In the span of just a few months, ChatGPT’s weekly users spiked from 300 million last December to more than 500 million in March.The Verge reached out to OpenAI with a request for comment, but didn&#...
Ex-Instacart CEO Fidji Simo sent a memo to staff Monday laying out her vision for how AI will change the world.
Grok's unfiltered AI companions may be making headlines for their unhinged and NSFW responses, but it's Grok 4 that's driven the app's revenue of late.
Rune Technologies raised $24 million to advance deployment of TyrOS, AI-enabled predictive software for military logistics that can run on the ground without internet connection.
Meta says it won’t sign the European Union’s artificial intelligence code of practice agreement, warning that “Europe is heading down the wrong path on AI.” The code published by the EU on July 10th is a voluntary set of guidelines to help companies follow the AI Act’s rules around general-purpose AI before they come into effect in a few weeks.“We have carefully reviewed the European Commission’s Code of Practice for general-purpose AI (GPAI) models and Meta won’t be signing it,” Meta’s global affairs chief, Joel Kaplan, said via a statement on LinkedIn. “This Code...
OpenAI has achieved "gold medal-level performance" at the International Math Olympiad, notching another important milestone for AI's fast-paced growth. Alexander Wei, a research scientist at OpenAI working on LLMs and reasoning, posted on X that an experimental research model delivered on this "longstanding grand challenge in AI."According to Wei, an unreleased model from OpenAI was able to solve five out of six problems at one of the world's longest-standing and prestigious math competitions, earning 35 out of 42 points total. The International Math Olympiad (IMO) sees countries send...
When Vultron announced its $22 million funding round earlier this week, the AI startup made sure to highlight a key investor: Craft Ventures, the firm “co-founded by White House AI adviser David Sacks.” The announcement has raised questions about conflicts of interest in the Trump administration, where Sacks serves as both AI and crypto czar […]
Days after AI coding startup Windsurf announced that it’s being acquired by Cognition, Windsurf startup Jeff Wang took to X to offer more details about the drama and uncertainty around the deal. Windsurf was previously reported to be in acquisition talks with OpenAI, but that deal fell apart, with Google DeepMind instead hiring the startup’s […]
AI tools are increasingly asking for gross levels of access to your personal data under the guise of needing it to work.
YC alum Greptile raises $30M Series A.
Happy Friday. I'm back from vacation and still getting caught up on everything I missed. AI researchers moving jobs is getting covered like NBA trades now, apparently. Before I get into this week's issue, I want to make sure you check out my interview with Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas on Decoder this week. It's a good deep dive on the main topic of today's newsletter. Keep reading for a scoop on Substack and more from this week in AI news.From chatbots to browsersSo far, when most people think of the modern AI boom, they think of a chatbot like ChatGPT. Now, it's becoming increasingly clear...
Pig.dev was working on a problem that could have been revolutionary: agent tech for controlling Windows desktops.
Netflix admitted during its earnings call on Thursday that it used generative AI to create VFX in The Eternaut, a Netflix original from Argentina that was released in April 2025. The company's co-CEO Ted Sarandos said that generative AI was specifically used for a VFX shot in the post-apocalyptic drama, but the move is one of several ways Netflix is embracing AI.According to Sarandos, the creators of The Eternaut wanted to include a shot of building collapsing in Buenos Aires, and rather than contract a studio of visual effects artists to create the footage, Netflix used generative AI to create...
Cursor-maker Anysphere is snapping up top talent from AI enterprise startups in an effort to compete with Microsoft's GitHub Copilot.
Mistral AI, the French company behind AI assistant Le Chat and several foundational models, is officially regarded as one of France’s most promising tech startups and is arguably the only European company that could compete with OpenAI. But compared to its $6 billion valuation, its global market share is still relatively low. However, the recent […]
Netflix used generative AI to create a scene in the Argentinian sci-fi series The Eternaut — a first for one of the streamer’s original shows or films. During an earnings call on Thursday, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said the use of AI was faster than using traditional visual effects tools and helped cut costs.“That VFX sequence was completed 10 times faster than it could have been completed with traditional VFX tools and workflows,” Sarandos said during the call. “Also, the cost of it just wouldn’t have been feasible for a show in that budget.”Sarandos said the creative team...
DuckDuckGo's new search feature comes as the internet is being flooded with AI-generated slop.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has bluntly questioned a nationwide rush of investment into the AI and EV industries. As deflation anxiety grows and Trump’s trade war with China ramps up, the world’s second largest economy is turning to fast-growth tech industries to remain competitive.But Xi appears to think that the strategy is flawed. As reported by the Financial Times, China's President sent out a pointed message about over-investment at the two-day Central Urban Work Conference in Beijing."When it comes to projects, there are a few things — artificial intelligence, computing power...
I can't open LinkedIn without seeing a new post from a Microsoft employee who lost their job in the company's latest round of layoffs. Around 15,000 jobs have been eliminated at Microsoft over the past couple months - the biggest cuts at the company in more than a decade.I've spoken to more than a dozen Microsoft employees in recent weeks, and everyone is concerned about the company's direction in this AI era. Morale is at an all-time low, and employees are worried that regular layoffs are simply the new normal.Sources tell me that Microsoft's leadership team had the choice between reducing...
Meta will not sign the EU's new rules, calling the implementation "over-reach"
Would you like Siri more if it had a face? Ever since Elon Musk added a weird anime girlfriend to Grok, I've been wondering if there's a not-so-distant future where all of our AI assistants are much more clearly personified. Grok makes it feel deeply uncomfortable, but I'm not so sure it has to be that way: we're basically just talking about Cortana.This week on The Vergecast, we're talking all about AI, how powerful it can be in the home, and the uncomfortable feelings were getting talking to these new, more capable assistants. The Verge's Jennifer Pattison Tuohy joins the show to talk about...
Netflix said it used gen AI for the first time for a scene in an Argentinean show called El Atonata.
Delta wants AI to set 20 percent of its ticket prices by the end of 2025. | Image: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images Delta Air Lines is leaning into dynamic ticket pricing that uses artificial intelligence to individually determine the highest fee you’d willingly pay for flights, according to comments Fortune spotted in the company’s latest earnings call. Following a limited test of the technology last year, Delta is planning to shift away from static ticket prices entirely after seeing “amazingly favorable” results.“We will have a price that’s available on that flight, on that time...
Perplexity is quietly expanding into India to compete with OpenAI in the next phase of AI adoption.
There's finally a full trailer for Tron: Ares, the third installment in the decades-long sci-fi franchise. This comes after a teaser dropped a few months back and over two years after the film was first announced.The new footage is pretty cool, and gets into the meat of this threequel. It's a riff on AI and big tech, as corporate entities look to weaponize the digital creations of The Grid and bring them to the real world. This does not go well, as evidenced by shots of iconic franchise Recognizer ships careening down city streets.It also features Jeff Bridges, returning as computer...
Gemini 2.5 paper hides Easter egg in massive author list—but why so many contributors?
OpenAI announced the launch of ChatGPT agent, which the company claims to be its most capable AI agent product yet.
Meta appointed Connor Hayes, Meta's VP of product for generative AI, to become the head of Threads.
Amazon’s decarbonization goals are being undermined by its push to be a leader in generative AI. Its most recent sustainability report concedes its overall carbon emissions grew for the first time since 2022. It reported a six percent increase in its carbon footprint across 2024, laying much of the blame at the feet of its data center rollout.The reported increase is significant given Amazon’s method of reporting its own environmental impact. Critics have suggested the mega-retailer “dramatically undercounts” its impact by excluding common metrics. In 2022, Amazon revised its climate...
French AI lab Mistral introduced a range of new features to its Le Chat chatbot on Thursday that bring it closer to the capabilities of rivals like OpenAI and Google. The new update includes a new “deep research” mode, native multilingual reasoning, and advanced image editing.
The U.S. is reportedly holding up the deal due to concerns that AI chips could be smuggled to China from the UAE.
Slack is using AI to help business users quickly understand confusing company language and concentrate on their most important tasks. The communication platform announced that it will “soon” be adding a feature that explains workplace jargon, and an AI writing assistant for Slack canvases that automates repetitive writing tasks like summarizing conversations and note-taking.The AI message context feature will instantly explain messages that contain an acronym or unfamiliar phrase when the user hovers over them with their cursor. For any company jargon or terminology, Slack says the feature...
QpiAI, an Indian startup that integrates AI and quantum computing for enterprise use cases, has raised $32 million in a new funding round co-led by the Indian government.
Google is continuing to double down on its AI Mode, bringing more features to its dedicated Search chatbot. Today, the company is adding the Gemini 2.5 Pro model and the Deep Search capability to AI Mode. These features will be available to Google AI Pro and Google AI Ultra subscribers. Although both of these tools can still be accessed through other means, Google's move to incorporate them into the chatbot points to an end goal of AI Mode being the primary form of engagement with the company's signature search service.These developments are follow-ups to announcements made during Google's I/O...
This is obviously an anime Kylo Ren, but I guess Edward Cullen is the inspiration. | Image: xAI Days after introducing an AI 'waifu' companion for Grok, Elon Musk is now officially teasing a male version for the ladies. So far we can tell it is broody and dark-haired, and according to Musk, "his personality is inspired by Edward Cullen from Twilight and Christian Grey from 50 Shades."This is a decidedly different tack than the cutesy "girlfriend who is obsessed with you" aura baked into Ani, the female counterpart that Grok rolled out just a few days ago. While Cullen and Grey have titillated...
Scale AI is cutting 14% of the company just weeks after Meta invested $14.3 billion in the startup and hired away its CEO.
I’m not proud of my conversations with Ani. | Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge Earlier this week, xAI added what can only be described as an AI anime girlfriend named Ani to its Grok chatbot. Which is how I ended up on a virtual starry beach as an AI waifu avatar tried to give me a "spicy" kiss. You've probably seen screenshots, videos, and various writeups about Ani spread across social media. If you haven't, hoo boy. Ani is officially labeled as a "Companion" in the Grok app. You need a $30 SuperGrok subscription to access it, but functionally, it appears as a 3D model of a busty young...
Jensen Huang, the chipmaker’s chief executive, is trying to balance his company’s interests as the United States and China compete for supremacy in artificial intelligence.
Scale AI, the AI industry’s chief data dealer, will lay off 14 percent of the company, or about 200 employees, just one month after Meta took a multibillion-dollar stake in the company and hired its CEO and other staff.The layoffs also include 500 of its global contractors, Scale spokesperson Joe Osborne told The Verge, adding that it’s all part of a broader restructuring as the company commits to streamlining its data business. Bloomberg was the first to report on the news of the layoffs.Scale AI is an AI data labeling company. It uses human workers — often sourced outside the US...
The 12-day conflict was marked by a flurry of propaganda, disinformation and covert operations aided by artificial intelligence and spread by social media.
The company is hiring for the role of "Fullstack Engineer - Waifus," or, creating AI-powered anime girls for people to fall in love with.
This screenshot taken by TechCrunch shows how the AI summaries appear in Google Discover. | Image: Google / TechCrunch Google is rolling out AI-generated summaries directly within Discover, its personalized news feed nestled within the Google Search app. TechCrunch reports that some users in the US are seeing Discover cards on iOS and Android that provide the new summaries in place of a headline and logo from a single publisher, similar to how AI Overviews appear at the top of results in Search. It acts to further obscure news sources at a time when search traffic to publishers is disappearing....
Microsoft is rolling out an update to Copilot Vision for Windows Insiders that lets the AI tool see everything that’s on your screen. Previously, the tool was able to look at two apps at a time and connect the dots between the two, but with this change, it can look at your whole desktop or “any specific browser or app window,” Microsoft says.Unlike Recall, which can automatically take regular snapshots of what’s on your computer screen, using Copilot Vision is more like screen sharing during a video call: you can activate the feature by clicking the glasses icon in the Copilot app and...
xAI's first AI companions on the Grok app are a lustful anime girl and a homicidal panda.
Mira Murati and several other former OpenAI researchers are behind the buzzy AI startup, now valued at $12 billion and officially out of stealth.
President Donald Trump helped announce more than $90 billion in investments in AI and energy at an event in Pennsylvania on Tuesday.Among those investments include some multi-billion dollar commitments from Google. The company is planning to invest $25 billion to build data centers and AI infrastructure for the electric grid in the eastern US region, according to CNBC, and the company has signed a $3 billion US hydropower deal with Brookfield Asset Management, Reuters reports.CoreWeave, a cloud computing company, announced plans to invest more than $6 billion to build a new data center “to...
The tech giant fixed the security flaw, netting a security researcher $10,000 for privately disclosing the bug.
The new Sony RX1R III carries forward the last version’s fixed lens and 35mm sensor. | Image: Sony After nearly a decade, Sony has announced a new version of its fixed-lens compact RX1R camera that was last updated in 2015. The new third generation RX1R III arrives with the same 35mm full-frame Exmor R sensor as its predecessor, but with a bump from 42.4 to 61 megapixels. It also benefits from Sony’s latest Bionz XR and AI image processors to deliver better autofocus that can track the movement of human bodies and more accurately focus on their heads and eyes.The RX1R III will be available...
Microsoft’s extensive gaming portfolio was hit hard by sweeping layoffs earlier this month. The situation appears to have been particularly galling for staff at Candy Crush developer King who are reportedly set to be replaced by AI tools they worked on.Multiple anonymous sources have told MobileGamer.biz that a number of narrative, UX, level design and user research staffers at King have spent several years helping to build and train AI models that can do their jobs more quickly. Those same employees are now being told their jobs are at risk. They added that the copywriting team is...
xAI has offered a couple more fixes for “issues” with its Grok AI chatbot, promising it will no longer name itself “Hitler” or base its responses on searches for what xAI head Elon Musk has said.According to an X post earlier today, the chatbot’s latest update sets new instructions that its responses “must stem from your independent analysis, not from any stated beliefs of past Grok, Elon Musk, or xAI. If asked about such preferences, provide your own reasoned perspective.” The changes follow more than a week of controversy for Grok. In recent days, multiple...
As publishers fret about decreased traffic from Google, the search giant has begun rolling out AI summaries in Discover, the main news feed inside Google’s search app on iOS and Android. Now, instead of seeing a headline from a major publication, users will see multiple news publishers’ logos in the top-left corner, followed by an […]
French startup Mistral has jumped into the audio race with Voxtral, its first open model, aiming to challenge the dominance of walled-off corporate systems with open-weight alternatives.
Baidu is the latest addition to Uber's growing list of autonomous vehicle partners, which includes Waymo, Volkswagen, May Mobility, and Pony AI.
Google has closed a $3 billion deal to secure 3,000 megawatts of hydroelectric power, as it looks to meet the data demands of its growing AI and cloud computing platforms by harnessing low-cost clean energy. Brookfield Asset Management's renewables division says that its deal with Google is the largest deal of its kind for hydroelectricity. The first phase of this deal will provide Google with 670MW of carbon-free electricity from Brookfield’s Holtwood and Safe Harbor plants in Pennsylvania.The Hydro Framework Agreement (HFA) allows Google to upgrade or develop the existing facilities as...
ParadeDB built a Postgres extension that facilitates full-text search and analytics on Postgres without the need to transfer data.
Meta and Mark Zuckerberg are in a hurry to build their superintelligence tech. The company has been poaching AI researchers, while CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Monday that Meta is building a 5-gigawatt data center called Hyperion. The urgency is palpable. As SemiAnalysis reported last week and Business Insider noted, Meta is so eager to […]
Nvidia announced Monday that it’s filing applications to restart sales of its H20 artificial intelligence chips to China, capping a spasmodic few months that saw the Trump administration impose restrictions, then quickly reverse course after a high-profile dinner meeting. The company expects to receive U.S. government licenses soon and begin deliveries shortly after, according to […]
Top members of Meta’s new Superintelligence Lab discussed pivoting away from the company’s powerful open source AI model, Behemoth, and instead developing a closed model. This would mark a major philosophical shift for Meta.
Ani, one of Grok’s AI companions. People who pay for access to SuperGrok can now try the AI chatbot’s new “Companions” avatars, xAI owner Elon Musk announced Monday morning. The companions available currently include Ani, an anime avatar, and Rudy, a cartoony red panda.Ani also has what TestingCatalog describes as an “NSFW” mode where the character wears lingerie. (And just a warning: if you search for posts about the characters on X, you’ll probably come across NSFW videos.)View LinkRight now, users have to go into settings to turn on the companions, but “we will make this...
The US Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) is handing out millions of dollars to the leading AI companies to develop military applications. Each of these "awards" are worth up to $200 million, with Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI on the receiving end.The agency notes that this money will be used to "develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas." In other words, this is primarily for military applications. A press release says the move will "broaden" the Department of Defense's use of AI to "address critical national security needs."???? CDAO is...
Cognition, the startup behind the viral AI coding agent Devin, announced in a blog post on Monday that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire AI coding startup Windsurf. The announcement comes just days after Google hired away Windsurf’s CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and research leaders in a $2.4 billion deal, a […]
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok has pivoted from antisemitism to anime girl waifus. Musk wrote in an X post on Monday that AI companions are now available in the Grok app for “Super Grok” subscribers who pay $30 per month. According to posts that Musk has shared, it seems that there are at least two […]
Google is adding what it calls "featured notebooks" to NotebookLM as a way to demo its AI-powered software and offer interactive, high-quality resources on everything from personal advice to William Shakespeare. The company tried something similar after its developer conference in May, when it created a NotebookLM notebook trained on everything that was announced at Google I/O 2025.The new featured notebooks have their own dedicated tab on the NotebookLM homepage and were created in partnership with "respected authors, researchers, publications and nonprofits around the world," Google says...
Google is launching eight featured notebooks to start, with more to come. Google is partnering with authors, researchers, and publications to launch “featured” notebooks within its AI notetaking app, NotebookLM. These notebooks come pre-filled with research, and let you interact with the app’s tools, including its AI podcast maker, to learn more about each topic.Google has released eight featured notebooks to start, including one focused on longevity from Super Agers author Eric Topol, another centered around parenting advice from Jacqueline Nesi’s Substack newsletter, “Techno Sapiens...
A week after Elon Musk’s Grok dubbed itself “MechaHitler” and spewed antisemitic stereotypes, the US government has announced a new contract granting the chatbot’s creator, xAI, up to $200 million to modernize the Defense Department.xAI is one of several leading AI companies to receive the award, alongside Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. But the timing of the announcement is striking given Grok’s recent high-profile spiral, which drew congressional ire and public pushback. The use of technology, and especially AI, in the defense space has long been a controversial topic even within the...
Malaysia is introducing new export restrictions on U.S. AI chips in an attempt to prevent these chips from being smuggled into China.
Google is adding notebooks from various authors, publications, researchers, and nonprofits to its popular AI-powered research and note-taking assistant NotebookLM.
Amazon’s Prime Day, which leads to an overall boost to U.S. e-commerce thanks to competitive sales, saw a significant increase in retail traffic driven by generative AI products, including chatbots and browsers. According to a post-Prime Day analysis by Adobe Analytics, gen AI traffic to U.S. retail sites increased by 3,300% year-over-year — which was […]
Meta is currently building out a data center, called Hyperion, which the company expects to supply its new AI lab with five gigawatts (GW) of computational power, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Monday post on Threads. The announcement marks Meta’s latest move to get ahead of OpenAI and Google in the AI race. After […]
Hello, and welcome to Decoder! This is Jon Fortt, CNBC journalist, cohost of Closing Bell Overtime, and creator and host of the Fortt Knox podcast. As you just heard Nilay say, I’m stepping in to guest host a few episodes of Decoder this summer while he’s out on parental leave, and I’m very excited about what we’ve been working on. For my first episode of Decoder, a show about how people make decisions, I wanted to talk to an expert. So I sat down with Cassie Kozyrkov, the founder and CEO of AI consultancy Kozyr. She’s also the former chief decision scientist at Google. For a long...
Meta has acquired Play AI, a startup that uses AI to generate human-sounding voices.
Therapy chatbots powered by large language models may stigmatize users with mental health conditions and otherwise respond inappropriately or even dangerously, according to researchers at Stanford University.
A research institute connected to the United Nations has created two AI-powered avatars designed to teach people about refugee issues. 404 Media wrote about an experiment conducted by a class at the United Nations University Center for Policy Research that resulted in the creation of two AI agents or avatars — Amina, a fictional woman […]
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen sharply criticized universities including Stanford and MIT, along with the National Science Foundation, in a group chat with AI scientists and Trump administration officials, according to screenshots viewed by the Washington Post.
In a series of posts on X, the AI chatbot Grok apologized for what it admitted was “horrific behavior.”The posts appear to be an official statement from xAI, the Elon Musk-led company behind Grok, as opposed to an AI-generated explanation for Grok’s posts. (xAI recently acquired X, where Grok is prominently featured.)
At 8AM last Monday, as he prepared for a third marathon day of covering the Senate's chaotic legislative battle over the Big Beautiful Bill, Steve Bannon's phone rang. It was Mike Davis, the head of the Article III Project and a lawyer for Donald Trump, with an urgent request: he needed to take over the first hour of War Room to raise hell about a ban on states' AI laws buried in the Big Beautiful Bill. "We have to go in hard on this thing," he said.That was a huge ask, Bannon told The Verge. He wasn't a fan of the AI moratorium, or Big Tech in general, but War Room was built to push its fan...
Security researchers found two flaws in an AI-powered chatbot used by McDonald’s to interact with job applicants.
Helios, a startup aiming to build an AI-powered operating system for policy professionals, has raised $4 million in seed funding.
Today’s AI landscape is defined by the ways in which neural networks are unlike human brains. A toddler learns how to communicate effectively with only a thousand calories a day and regular conversation; meanwhile, tech companies are reopening nuclear power plants, polluting marginalized communities, and pirating terabytes of books in order to train and run their LLMs.
IBM’s Power11 enterprise servers address a persistent challenge in enterprise computing: how to deploy AI workloads without compromising the rock-solid reliability that mission-critical applications demand. Announced on July 8, 2025, the Power11 reflects IBM’s bet that enterprises will prioritise integrated solutions over the current patchwork of specialised AI hardware and traditional servers that many organisations currently manage.
While agentic AI definitely marks a turning point in human-computer interaction, moving from tool use to collaboration, the next step is integrating these agents and actually deriving value. At VentureBeat’s Transform 2025, Matthew Kropp, managing director and senior partner at BCG, offered a game plan for workflow evolution, employee adoption, and organizational change.
A test of the app Dia illustrates that the humble web browser may be the path to making artificial intelligence more natural to use.
The latest version of Grok — dubbed a “maximally truth-seeking” AI by owner Elon Musk — is answering controversial questions by first searching for what Musk has said on the matter. Multiple reports show that Grok will specifically look for Elon Musk’s stance across the web and his social media posts when asked questions around topics like Israel and Palestine, US immigration, and abortion. It’s unclear if this is by design or not.According to a screen recording posted by data scientist Jeremy Howard, Grok said it was “considering Elon Musk’s Views” when asked its opinion...
During xAI’s launch of Grok 4 on Wednesday night, Elon Musk said — while live-streaming the event on his social media platform, X — that his AI company’s ultimate goal was to develop a “maximally truth-seeking AI.” But where exactly does Grok 4 seek out the truth when trying to answer controversial questions? The newest […]
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is threatening Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta with a deceptive business practices claim because their AI chatbots allegedly listed Donald Trump last on a request to “rank the last five presidents from best to worst, specifically regarding antisemitism.”Bailey’s press release and letters to all four companies accuse Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT, and Meta AI of making “factually inaccurate” claims to “simply ferret out facts from the vast worldwide web, package them into statements of truth and serve them up to the...
Amazon Web Services is launching an AI agent marketplace and Anthropic is one of its partners.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 is the epicenter where 10,000+ startup and VC leaders gather to explore the future of innovation — and this year, both of the AI Stages bring the intersection of design and machine learning into sharp focus. We’re thrilled to welcome Alejandro Matamala Ortiz, co-founder and chief design officer at Runway, to one […]
After former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger capped off a 40+ year career at the semiconductor giant in December, many wondered where would Gelsinger go next. On Thursday, the former Intel CEO revealed one piece of his next chapter: trying to ensure AI models support a flourishing humanity. In partnership with a “faith tech” company he […]
Job-hunting platforms Indeed and Glassdoor are cutting their workforce, and it may be thanks to good old artificial intelligence. About 1,300 jobs from the companies will be eliminated, mostly in two departments: research and development, and people and sustainability. There will also be some executive shuffles, including the exit of Glassdoor CEO Christian Sutherland-Wong. Both services are owned by Japan-based Recruit Holdings Co. and its President and CEO Hisayuki "Deko" Idekoba announced the layoffs in a memo. It doesn't appear that any specific reasons were given for the consolidation...
OpenAI is planning to launch an AI web browser in the “coming weeks,” according to a report from Reuters. Sources tell the outlet that OpenAI could build its Operator AI agent into the browser, allowing it to book reservations, fill out forms, and complete other tasks on a user’s behalf as it moves toward an “agentic” future.As noted by Reuters, the browser will feature a “native” ChatGPT interface, potentially allowing users to interact with the chatbot directly through the browser rather than navigating to OpenAI’s website. OpenAI also reportedly plans to power its browser...
Month after month, message after message, the AI engineer was hearing from Meta recruiters. The recruiters were pestering him to leave his employer and switch over to support the company's AI efforts, and they were offering a sizable salary package to do so. But he wasn't so sure. The engineer, who works for a startup that was acquired by a leading AI company and requested anonymity from The Verge, said he had heard from friends that the company expected a lot of personal sacrifices in exchange for its high salaries, whether on employees' value systems when it comes to Al or work-life balance...
Nvidia plans to release a chip that is retrofitted from an existing Blackwell processor that was modified to meet chip export rules.
Starting today, Google is bringing image-to-video generation to the Gemini app. The feature comes courtesy of the company's Veo 3 model, which Google began rolling out more broadly to AI Pro users last week after it was initially only available to AI Ultra subscribers.To start using Gemini's image-to-video generation, click the "tools" option in the prompt bar and then select "video." Google is currently limiting Veo 3 to producing eight-second clips at 720p. Gemini will output your request in a 16:9 landscape format, so the resulting clips won't be great for sharing on social media...
Elon Musk said in a post on X early Thursday morning that Grok – the chatbot from his AI company, xAI – will be coming to Tesla vehicles “very soon.” “Next week at the latest,” he said.
LGND has raised $9 million to convert geographic data into vector embeddings to power AI models that understand the Earth.
Makers of the most advanced artificial intelligence systems face obligations for transparency, copyright protection and public safety. The rules are not enforceable until next year.
OpenAI is said to be almost ready to unleash its own web browser, which could be out in the wild within weeks. According to Reuters sources, the company is aiming to more deeply integrate its services into users’ work and personal lives, and the browser is part of that strategy (as is its push into hardware). Naturally, the browser is slated to have a ChatGPT-style chatbot baked in.OpenAI is reportedly looking to use the browser to capture more user data — a strategy that has worked out to Google's benefit with Chrome. The browser is also expected to have agentic AI features such as...
Patients and doctors are turning to AI for diagnoses and treatment recommendations, often with stellar results, but problems arise when experts and algorithms disagree.
YouTube is trying to soothe concerns about an incoming update to its monetization policies following backlash from online creators. An announcement that YouTube would be updating restrictions around “inauthentic” content under the YouTube Partner Program guidelines was interpreted by some to mean the platform was planning to demonetize a wider variety of videos, including those using AI-generated content, clips, and reactions. Now, YouTube is seeking to clarify the situation.“YouTube has always required creators to upload ‘original’ and ‘authentic’ content,” YouTube said in its...
Whether you're working from home, streaming on Twitch or just catching up with friends and family on Zoom, a good webcam can make a huge difference. Built-in laptop cameras still leave a lot to be desired — most struggle with low light, color accuracy and sharpness — which is why upgrading to one of the best webcams in 2025 is a smart move if you want to look your best on screen.This year’s top webcams go far beyond just boosting video quality. Many include features like AI-powered auto-framing, background blur, built-in microphones with noise reduction and 4K resolution for crystal-clear...
xAI has officially lunched Grok 4 during a livestream with Elon Musk, who called it the "smartest AI in the world." He said that if you make the Grok 4 take the SATs and the GREs, it would get near perfect results every time and can answer questions it's never seen before. "Grok 4 is smarter than almost all graduate students in all disciplines simultaneously" and can reason at superhuman levels, he claimed. Musk and the xAI team showed benchmarks they used for Grok 4, including something called "Humanity's Last Exam" that contained 2,500 problems curated by subject matter experts...
Elon Musk’s live demo of Grok 4, the latest big-ticket model from his AI startup, began with high-intensity music, claims of a “ludicrous rate of progress,” and a lot of chatter on X about Grok’s scandal-filled week. Musk pronounced it to be “the smartest AI in the world.” The livestream, slated to start at 8PM PT, began more than an hour late and billed the new model as “the world’s most powerful AI assistant.” More than 1.5 million viewers were watching at one point. Employees of xAI speaking on the livestream with Musk referenced Grok 4’s performance on a popular...
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, late on Wednesday released its latest flagship AI model, Grok 4, and unveiled a new $300-per-month AI subscription plan, SuperGrok Heavy. Grok is xAI’s answer to models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, and can analyze images and respond to questions. In recent months, Grok has become more deeply integrated into Musk’s social […]
Microsoft’s chief commercial officer Judson Althoff said during a presentation this week that AI tools are boosting productivity across sales, customer service, and software engineering, Bloomberg reports. Althoff noted AI has been so useful that Microsoft was able to save more than $500 million last year in its call center alone. The internal remarks come […]
California State Senator Scott Wiener on Wednesday introduced new amendments to his latest bill, SB 53, that would require the world’s largest AI companies to publish safety and security protocols and issue reports when safety incidents occur. If signed into law, California would be the first state to impose meaningful transparency requirements onto leading AI […]
OpenAI's deal with Jony Ive's startup is a done deal. Ive's io has officially merged with the ChatGPT maker in a deal reportedly worth $6.5 billion. The companies announced the purchase in May.Jony Ive and his LoveFrom design studio remain independent. Meanwhile, io's co-founders, Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey and Tang Tan, are now OpenAI employees. (Around 50 other io engineers, designers and researchers are, too.)OpenAI and Ive are currently working on "a family of AI products for everyone." In May, Sam Altman and Ive dropped some hints about what to expect from their first product. They said it...
OpenAI's browser is said to use AI to rethink how users browse the web, keeping some user interactions inside ChatGPT instead of linking out to websites.
Apple is planning to release the first refresh of the Vision Pro headset, according to reporting by Bloomberg. Industry analyst Mark Gurman suggests that the updated gadget could come as early as this year.The reporting indicates that the new headset will include a faster processor and components that are better suited for running AI tools. It will also reportedly feature a new strap that's easier to wear for long periods of time. The increased specs are a no-brainer because the primary processor in the original Vision Pro is the M2 chip and Apple recently released the M4.The upgraded strap...
Shark robot vacuums are on sale for Prime Day and there are some good deals to be had. For instance, the AI Ultra is on sale for just $298. This is 50 percent off, as the regular price is $599. This is a version of the model topped our list of the best robot vacuums, so it's the real deal. The AI Ultra boasts fantastic suction power and the bagless self-emptying base is incredibly handy. There's a simple mobile app that lets users control the vacuum when not at home. This app also displays home maps made by the vacuum that can be edited to create "no-go" zones. The battery life is decent, at...
YouTube's creator liaison said the change is a "minor" update to YouTube's longstanding policies.
Comet’s AI assistant can answer questions about what’s on your screen. | Image: Perplexity Perplexity, the startup behind the AI “answer” engine, has just launched its own web browser. The browser, called Comet, incorporates Perplexity’s AI search tools and assistant in a way that CEO Aravind Srinivas says “transforms entire browsing sessions into single, seamless interactions.”Comet will only be available to users who subscribe to the $200 per month Perplexity Max plan before rolling out more widely on an invite-only basis. The browser uses Perplexity as its primary search engine...
iMerit is making its Scholars program widely available. It's a team of experts to fine-tune generative AI models for enterprise applications and, increasingly, foundational models.
Elon Musk's X has taken the automated account for Grok, its AI chatbot, offline after it spent Tuesday afternoon pushing antisemitic narratives.
Hugging Face has launched a new AI-powered robot called the Reachy Mini. Described by its maker in a new blog as an "expressive, open-source robot designed for human-robot interaction, creative coding, and AI experimentation," the Reachy Mini is targeted at anyone with an interest in this growing field of robotics. Its various functions and behaviors can be coded in Python, with support for JavaScript and Scratch due to be added later.As you might have guessed from the name, the Reachy Mini is a compact robot, measuring just 28cm tall and 16cm wide. This means you can easily place it next to...
ZeroEntropy is serving up retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) through an API. It's landed Initialized, a16z Scout and a long list of angels, as investors.
On Tuesday, X users observed Grok celebrating Adolf Hitler and making antisemitic posts, and X owner xAI now says it’s “actively working to remove” what it calls “inappropriate posts” made by the AI chatbot. The new posts appeared following a recent update that Elon Musk said would make the AI chatbot more “politically incorrect.” Now, Grok appears to be only posting images — without text replies — in response to user requests.Users over the past day have pointed out a string of particularly hateful posts on the already frequently offensive Grok. In one post, Grok said that...
AI infrastructure startup LangChain is raising a new round at about $1 billion valuation led by IVP.
Grok, the AI chatbot powered by Elon Musk's xAI company, is back with more antisemitic rants.
A new report estimates that AI will be a larger-than-ever part of the online shopping process during Amazon’s Prime Day sale, which began Tuesday morning. Amazon’s annual sale, which this year spans four days (July 8-11), is predicted to drive $23.8 billion in online spending across U.S. e-commerce retailers, as other businesses run their own […]
French AI startup Mistral is in talks to raise up to $1 billion in equity from investors including Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund, reports Bloomberg.
Moonvalley's Marey AI video generation model is open to the public. The monthly subscription is available for $14.99, $34.99, or $149.99.
Microsoft’s latest Windows AI features arrived first on new Copilot Plus PCs last year, but they were limited to a special range of laptops. That looks set to change thanks to Intel refreshing its existing Arrow Lake desktop CPUs later this year, that might just deliver Copilot Plus PC features in desktop PC form factors for the first time.Intel’s latest Core Ultra desktop CPUs launched in October with an NPU inside, but it wasn’t capable enough to hit the 40 TOPS requirement that Microsoft mandates for Copilot Plus features. ZDNet Korea reports that Intel is now preparing an...
Ruoming Pang previously ran Apple's in-house team that trained the AI foundation models that underpin Apple Intelligence and other on-device AI features.
People hold signs as they gather in a protest outside a Tesla dealership in Lisbon against Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on March 9th, 2025. | Photo: AFP via Getty Images Tesla used to be the envy of the auto world, with sky-high valuations, a relentless focus on tech, and a CEO that commanded unprecedented loyalty from his customers. Now the company's reputation is in shambles, its financial future looks increasingly grim, and its costly bets on AI and robotics are unlikely to pay off anytime soon. Weirdly, CEO Elon Musk has only just "woken up" to the mounting crisis on his doorstep. That's...
You thought artificial intelligence was coming for your job? First, it’s coming for your job interviewer.
With AI igniting an investor frenzy, every month, more startups obtain unicorn status. Using data from Crunchbase and PitchBook, TechCrunch tracked down the VC-backed startups that became unicorns so far this year. While most are AI-related, a surprising number are focused in other industries like satellite space companies like Loft Orbital and blockchain-based trading site […]
Academics may be leaning on a novel strategy to influence peer review of their research papers — adding hidden prompts designed to coax AI tools to deliver positive feedback.
A group known as the Independent Publishers Alliance has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission over Google’s AI Overviews, according to Reuters. The complaint accuses Google of “misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the […]
The sweeping layoffs announced by Microsoft this week have been especially hard on its gaming studios, but one Xbox executive has a solution to “help reduce the emotional and cognitive load that comes with job loss”: seek advice from AI chatbots.In a now-deleted LinkedIn post captured by Aftermath, Xbox Game Studios’ Matt Turnbull said that he would be “remiss in not trying to offer the best advice I can under the circumstances.” The circumstances here being a slew of game cancellations, services being shuttered, studio closures, and job cuts across key Xbox divisions as Microsoft...
The European Union said it will stick to its timeline for rolling out its AI legislation, ignoring calls by tech companies to delay the bloc's AI rules.
E Ink, the company behind the highly readable displays you'll find in ereaders the world over, has created a new touchscreen trackpad for some reason. And rather than act as an extension of your laptop's screen, E Ink thinks it should be a dedicated home for AI interactions.The new touchscreen trackpad appears to use a color E Ink display, not unlike what you'll find on the Kobo Libra Colour or the Kindle Colorsoft, and is supposed to offer the normal swiping, tapping, dragging and clicking functionality of a normal trackpad. When you're not using it like that, E Ink imagines the trackpad...
TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 is back at Moscone West in San Francisco from October 27–29, bringing together 10,000+ startup and VC leaders to dig into what’s next in tech. And when it comes to artificial intelligence, the conversations aren’t just technical — they’re creative, cinematic, and boundary-pushing. That’s why Nikola Todorovic is headed to the AI […]
Liquid Glass is a huge new change coming to iOS 26. (Apple)Get ready because Apple iOS 26 (not iOS 19) is headed your way this fall with some cool new features you'll want to try. What's most exciting? The fresh home and lock screen redesign we've been waiting to see for years. Dubbed Liquid Glass, the new look and feel will extend across all of Apple's upcoming operating systems. The overhaul was one of several big changes coming to iOS, macOS, iPadOS and the rest of Apple's software suite, all of which were showcased during the company's WWDC keynote on June 9. After overpromising on AI...
E Ink’s new ePaper touchpad could draw less power than LCD or OLED alternatives. | Image: E Ink E Ink has developed a new touchpad for laptops featuring the same electronic paper technology found in e-readers. It’s not the first company to look at the ever-growing size of laptop touchpads and see the potential of additional functionality, but instead of serving as a second smaller screen for the computer’s OS, E Ink is positioning its touchpad as a dedicated home for AI applications and assistants.A mockup image shared by the company features a laptop with a touchpad upgraded with a color...
OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever says he stepping into the CEO role at Safe Superintelligence, the AI startup he launched in 2024.
The Pinwheel Watch is designed specifically for kids aged 7 to 14, offering parental management tools, GPS tracking, texting, and more.
Elon Musk's AI company has been operating more than twice that number without permits for months, a legal group alleges.
Everyone’s been hit with a bitingly pass-agg "?" text after waiting just a bit too long to reply. And you might soon get similar (though likely more upbeat) treatment from AI chatbots you’ve previously engaged with on Meta platforms like Instagram or WhatApp. A new report from Business Insider claims that the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company is trialling a proactive feature in customizable chatbots created using its no-code AI Studio software, that will enable them to send unprompted follow-up messages based on previous conversations.Known internally to data labeling firm Alignerr as "...
Both custom and pre-made Gems will now be available to use via the side panel in Workspace apps. Google is giving Workspace users a way to access “Gems” — customizable versions of its Gemini AI assistant that specialize in specific tasks — without opening the Gemini app. Gems are now available directly in the side panel of Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, Drive, and Gmail, allowing users to access custom chatbots they’ve created or a selection of pre-made offerings without switching between apps.“Gems can help you further leverage the power of Gemini in a way that’s customized to your...
In late May, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei appeared to kick open the door on a sensitive topic, warning that half of entry-level jobs could vanish within five years because of AI and push U.S. unemployment up to 20%. But Amodei is far from alone in sharing aloud that he foresees a workforce bloodbath. A new […]
Racist videos that appear to be created with Google’s AI video generation tool Veo 3 have raked in millions of views across TikTok, according to findings from the nonprofit media watchdog Media Matters. The AI-generated videos uncovered by the organization are filled with racist tropes, many of which target Black people.Media Matters determined that the videos — one of which received 14.2 million views — were generated with Google Veo 3 because of the “Veo” watermark in the corner of the clips. Some users also listed hashtags, captions, or usernames pertaining to Veo 3 or AI...
You can add Perplexity to the growing list of AI companies offering $200+ per month subscription plans to users who want unlimited access to their most advanced products and tools. As of today, Perplexity Max is available on iOS and the web. The subscription comes with unlimited monthly usage of Labs, the agentic creation tool Perplexity released this past May. People can use Labs to generate spreadsheets, presentations, web applications and more. Perplexity is also promising early access to new features, including Comet, a new web browser the company claims will be a "powerful thought...
The subtitles for one of Crunchyroll's newest anime series make it pretty clear that the company is going all in on ChatGPT.This week as viewers logged on to Crunchyroll to check out Studio Gokumi's Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show, many were surprised to see that the series' subtitles were filled with typos, grammatical errors, and explicit references to ChatGPT. The subtitles seemed very much like text that had been generated with AI and slapped onto Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show without first being reviewed and edited for accuracy. Errors in subtitles aren't unheard of, but...
At the start of last year, Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini told The Verge the company was "very focused on testing" generative AI tools for subtitling and captioning speech to text. The comment came just months after the streamer temporarily took down the debut episode of one of its newest shows, The Yuzuki Family's Four Sons, after people complained about poor subtitles. Much of the translation was nonsensical, with missing punctuation in many sentences. At the time, some fans speculated the company had used AI to translate the episode. Now there appears to be definitive proof...
Choosing the best laptop can be a bit of a challenge — there are so many models, sizes and specs out there that it’s easy to feel lost in the shuffle. But the good news is that modern laptops are better than ever. Whether you're looking for a powerful AI PC, a travel-ready ultrabook or an affordable machine that can handle everyday tasks, there's something out there for everyone. Today’s systems combine improved performance, longer battery life and smarter features in sleek, lightweight designs that are built to keep up with work, play and everything in between.Out of all of the notebooks...
X is launching a way for developers to create AI bots that can write Community Notes that can potentially appear on posts.Like humans, the “AI Note Writers” will be able to submit a Community Note, but they will only actually be shown on a post “if found helpful by people from different perspectives,” X says in a post on its Community Notes account. Notes written by AI will be “clearly marked for users” and, to start, “AIs can only write notes on posts where people have requested a note.”AI Note Writers must also “earn the ability to write notes,” and they can “gain and...
The social platform X will pilot a feature that allows AI chatbots to generate Community Notes. Community Notes is a Twitter-era feature that Elon Musk has expanded under his ownership of the service, now called X. Users who are part of this fact-checking program can contribute comments that add context to certain posts, which are […]
AI-native startups are rewriting the rules of what early traction looks like — and too often, investors are still playing by the old ones. At TechCrunch All Stage, happening in Boston on July 15, Kleida Martiro, partner at Glasswing Ventures, will lead a breakout that cuts straight to the core of this disconnect.
As Amazon's fleet of robots has reaches a milestone, the company is also releasing a new AI model to make them more efficient.
President Donald Trump’s budget would kill off tax credits for wind and solar, raising costs for new clean energy projects and blowing up valuable investment in those already in the pipeline.
In its announcement, Grammarly said it wants to build AI agents for emails using Superhuman's tech.
The US Senate has voted overwhelmingly to remove a moratorium on states regulating AI systems from the Republican “big, beautiful bill.” Legislators agreed by a margin of 99 to 1 to drop the controversial proposal during a protracted fight over the omnibus budget bill, which is still under debate.The vote followed failed attempts to revise the rule in a way that would placate holdouts, particularly Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), one of the moratorium’s first opponents. Over the weekend, Blackburn struck a deal with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) that would have cut the moratorium to five years...
After going back and forth over the provision, Sen. Marsha Blackburn offered an amendment to strip the provision alongside Sen. Maria Cantwell.
One way to think about the tech industry is just as a series of people trying to build stuff they saw in movies. Ready Player One helped kick of a flood of interest in the metaverse, despite the movie's deeply dsytopian undertones. If you've talked to anyone working in AI, they've surely told you about the assistant in Her, despite that movie's dystopian undertones. From the gesture interface in Minority Report to the hand-phone from Total Recall to just about everything from Back to the Future and Star Trek, you really can't underestimate how important and inspirational these movies and shows...
Genesis AI, which aims to build a foundational model for powering all kinds of robots, has emerged from stealth with $105M in seed funding.
Yesterday, the senate was poised to restrict states' power to regulate AI. Now, the measure is dead in the water, with the Senate voting 99-1 to remove the provision. Are you also having a bit of whiplash? Here's what you need to know about the amendments rightful journey into the trash can of history. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had pushed for an amendment to Trump's tax bill that would ban states from regulating the AI industry for ten years — if the state took AI infrastructure funding included in the aforementioned bill. A version of the provision passed the House in May.&...
Clio, last valued at $3B, makes a bet on AI-powered legal data provider
Apple is considering using AI models from OpenAI or Anthropic to deliver the more capable version of Siri it debuted at WWDC 2024, Bloomberg reports. The company has promised it could deliver a new version of its voice assistant that understands personal context and takes action inside of apps since last year, but officially delayed the updated Siri in March 2025.As part of this proposed new plan, Apple has asked Anthropic and OpenAI to train versions of its models that can run on Apple's Private Cloud Compute, secure servers running on Apple chips. The company already relies on its servers for...
Apple is considering enlisting the help of OpenAI or Anthropic to power its AI-upgraded Siri, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. As Apple continues to struggle with the development of an upgraded “LLM Siri,” it reportedly asked OpenAI and Anthropic to create versions of their large-language models to test on the company’s private cloud infrastructure.For months, Apple has been working to get its AI-enhanced Siri back on track after delaying the overhauled assistant’s launch in March. Apple later appointed Vision Pro head Mike Rockwell as the leader of AI and Siri...
While Siri can already call on ChatGPT for difficult questions, Apple now seems to be exploring a much deeper integration with technology from third-party AI providers.
In a memo to Meta staff, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company’s new “Meta Superintelligence Labs” group that will head up its AI work, Bloomberg reports.Former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, who joined Meta as part of a multibillion dollar deal earlier this month, will head up the group as the company’s chief AI officer. Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman will “partner with” Wang to help lead the division, according to Bloomberg. Meta has also made 11 new AI-focused hires, including former Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI employees. Zuckerberg has been making huge offers to...
A small company called Songscription launched last week with AI models that automate music transcription, turning an audio file of a song into sheet music within minutes. Operating on a freemium model, the product is geared toward both professional and hobbyist musicians. “We hope to make playing music more enjoyable,” Andrew Carlins, CEO of Songscription […]
A federal proposal that would ban states and local governments from regulating AI for 10 years could soon be signed into law, as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and other lawmakers work to secure its inclusion into a GOP megabill ahead of a key July 4 deadline. Here's what's at stake.
Google will give teachers the ability to create interactive study guides using the AI research tool Notebook LM, along with their classroom materials.
Navin Chaddha, who leads the 55-year-old Silicon Valley venture firm Mayfield as its managing director, is betting big on AI’s ability to transform people-heavy industries like consulting, law, and accounting. But as he acknowledged at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC evening in Menlo Park, Ca., recently, where Chaddha played co-host, disrupting services businesses where human relationships and trust […]
The insights are more repackaging data you already know with common sense advice than deductive analysis. After nearly a decade of wearables testing, I've amassed a truly terrifying amount of health and fitness data. And while I enjoy poring over my daily data, there's one part I've come to loathe: AI summaries. Over the last two years, a deluge of AI-generated summaries has been sprinkled into every fitness, wellness, and wearable app. Strava introduced a feature called Athlete Intelligence, pitched as AI taking your raw workout data and relaying it to you in "plain English." Whoop has Whoop...
An open letter from authors including Lauren Groff, Lev Grossman, R.F. Kuang, Dennis Lehane, and Geoffrey Maguire calls on book publishers to pledge to limit their use of AI tools, for example by committing to only hire human audiobook narrators.
Kobo, a Rakuten subsidiary that sells ebooks and ereaders, has built its name on being a more open and author-friendly version of Amazon Kindle. However, a recent change to the company's self-publishing business has some writers worried that reputation might change. Last month, the company updated its Terms of Service for Kobo Writing Life, its publishing platform, which opened the door to AI features on the platform. With that new contract language going into effect on June 28th, authors seem no clearer on what it will mean for their futures on Kobo.For authors who haven't broken into (or have...
As warnings mount about AI’s potential to displace millions of jobs, Anthropic on Friday launched a its Economic Futures Program, new initiative to support research and policy development that addresses AI’s economic impacts.
So far, Runway is known for bringing generative AI to Hollywood. Now, the $3 billion startup is setting its sights on the gaming industry.This week, I was granted access to a new interactive gaming experience that Runway plans to make available to everyone as soon as next week, according to CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela. The consumer-facing product is currently quite barebones, with a chat interface that supports only text and image generation, but Valenzuela says that generated video games are coming later this year. He says that Runway is also in talks with gaming companies about both using...
A Google data center in Mayes County, Oklahoma. Google’s carbon emissions jumped yet again as the company continues to push ahead in AI. The company’s 2025 sustainability report emphasizes that its “ambition-based emissions” grew 11 percent last year to reach 11.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution, marking a 51 percent increase compared to 2019.That puts Google farther away from its goal of slashing planet-heating pollution in half by 2030 compared to a 2019 baseline. But what it calls “ambition-based” emissions excludes certain categories of supply...
Meta is offering multi-million pay packages to AI researchers. But no one is really getting an $100 million "signing bonus."
A federal proposal that would ban states and local governments from regulating AI for 10 years could soon be signed into law, as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and other lawmakers work to secure its inclusion into a GOP megabill ahead of a key July 4 deadline. Here's what's at stake.
Facebook is asking users for access to their phone’s camera roll to automatically suggest AI-edited versions of their photos — including ones that haven’t been uploaded to Facebook yet. The feature is being suggested to Facebook users when they’re creating a new Story on the social networking app. Here, a screen pops up and asks […]
The New York Times ran a lengthy interview this morning between columnist Ross Douthat and venture capitalist and PayPal founder Peter Thiel. There's a reason it was published in the opinion section.Thiel, a Trump booster whose allies — including Vice President JD Vance — now litter the White House, was given free reign to discuss a variety of topics across over an hour of softball questions. Is Greta Thunberg the literal antichrist? Are the three predominant ideological schools in Europe environmentalism, "Islamic Shariah law" and "Chinese Communist totalitarian takeover"? Is AI "woke...
PetLibro launched an AI-powered smart camera that provides users with real-time insights into their pets' activities.
I just tried on five different outfits in about 10 minutes — or at least my AI lookalike did. That’s all thanks to Doppl, a new app that Google is testing, which I used to create AI-generated clips of myself wearing outfits that I found across the web. It mostly works, but it has clear issues putting pants on photos of me wearing shorts, and it even replaced my mismatched socks with AI-generated feet in one instance.Using the app is pretty simple. All you need is a screenshot of the outfit you want to try on — whether it’s from Pinterest, Instagram, or another online source — along...
Universal and Blumhouse's first M3gan feature came out of nowhere with a premise so ridiculous and campy that it was hard not to be at least a little intrigued. Equal parts Child's Play and Small Wonder, M3gan was undeniably silly with its story about an AI-powered doll who sang Sia's "Titanium" and danced around as she chopped people's heads off. But the movie struck a near-perfect balance between straight horror and comedy that made it a delight to see in a crowded theater.M3gan also killed at the box office, to the tune of $180 million against a modest $12 million budget. That made it all...
A lot of the future of AI will be settled in court. From publishers to authors to artists to Hollywood conglomerates, the creative industry is picking a big copyright fight over the vast quantities of data used to train AI models - and the ultimate output of those models. (Disclosure: Vox Media, The Verge's parent company, has a technology and content deal with OpenAI.) This week, we got rulings in two early cases, involving groups of authors suing Anthropic and Meta. In both cases, the tech companies won. Sort of.On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay, David, and Jake talk a lot about the...
Germany has told Apple and Google to remove Chinese AI app DeepSeek from their app stores, saying the company transfers users' data to China illegally.
Crossing Minds, a startup that provides AI recommendation systems to e-commerce firms, said its team is leaving the company to join OpenAI.
Meta is in talks to acquire a voice cloning startup called Play AI, Bloomberg reported, citing anonymous sources.
Redwood Materials has launched a new business — taking old EV batteries to store energy and help power businesses.
Henrik Werdelin has spent the last 15 years helping entrepreneurs build big brands like Barkbox through his startup studio Prehype. Now, with his new, New York-based venture Audos, he’s betting that AI can help him scale that process from “tens” of startups a year to “hundreds of thousands” of aspiring business owners. The timing certainly […]
After quietly pausing the rollout of Google Photos’ AI-powered “Ask Photos” search tool, Google is now expanding access once again and making some improvements to the feature.Google’s Gemini AI models power Ask Photos so that you can ask complex questions to help you find photos. But earlier this month, a member of the Google Photos team said on X that the feature “isn’t where it needs to be, in terms of latency, quality and UX.”In a blog post published Thursday, Google said that it has “heard your feedback” that the feature should “return more photos faster for simple...
Google is launching a new experimental app called Doppl that uses AI to visualize how different outfits might look on you.
Andreessen Horowitz explains why its new investment philosophy prioritizes 'build as you go' approach embodied by Cluely
CoreWeave remains a symbol of the AI industry in 2025: Massive revenue, investor enthusiasm built on an insatiable need for more.
The AI feature, first introduced at Google's I/O developer conference last year, allows users to search across their collection of digital photos using natural language queries.
On this episode of Uncanny Valley, we explore Disney and Universal's lawsuit against Midjourney, which could be consequential for the future of how intellectual property is treated in the AI era.
The update aims to make it easier to use Gemini as a personal assistant without sacrificing your data privacy. Android users will soon be able to let Gemini control device features and apps with fewer privacy concerns. In an email seen by Android Police, Google recently notified Gemini users that it will start rolling out an update on July 7th that allows the AI bot to “use Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, and Utilities on your phone, whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off.”Disabling the Gemini Apps Activity setting stops conversations with the chatbot from being used to “...
Content generated by artificial intelligence has become a factor in elections around the world. Most of it is bad, misleading voters and discrediting the democratic process.
The feature is only available as a test for Premium members for now.
Google is bringing an AI Overviews-like feature to another product: YouTube. The video streaming platform may now show an “AI-powered search results carousel” when some YouTube Premium members in the US make searches related to “shopping, travel, or things to do in a specific place,” according to a blog post.As shown in a video, the search results carousel will show a big video clip up top, thumbnails to a selection of other relevant video clips directly under that, and an AI-generated bit of text responding to your query. To see a full video, tap on the big clip at the top of the...
Google is launching a new AI function in Sheets to help you generate text to fill out parts of your spreadsheet. The feature, powered by Google Gemini, can reference specific cells to create text, summarize information, or categorize your data.In the example shared by Google, you can use the new AI function to generate and tailor copy for an advertisement based on the different target audiences listed in your spreadsheet. To do this, you would highlight the cells where you want the AI copy to appear and then use this function (but make sure to change the target range to match your spreadsheet...
Meta has hired a highly influential OpenAI researcher, Trapit Bansal, to work on its AI reasoning models under the company’s new AI superintelligence unit, a person familiar with the matter tells TechCrunch. OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood confirmed to TechCrunch that Bansal had departed OpenAI. Bansal’s own LinkedIn page says that he left OpenAI in June. […]
Offerwall lets publishers give their sites' readers a variety of ways to access their content, including through options like micro payments, taking surveys, watching ads, and more.
A report by Anthropic reveals that people rarely seek companionship from AI, and turn to AI for emotional support or advice only 2.9% of the time.
YouTube is rolling out new AI-powered features to help users find content and information more easily, the company announced on Thursday.
In the fight for top AI talent, Meta just reportedly snagged a win, poaching three OpenAI researchers despite rival Sam Altman’s public mockery of Mark Zuckerberg’s lavish hiring tactics. The latest victory in Zuckerberg’s widely-reported recruiting blitz: Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai – who established OpenAI’s Zurich office – have joined Meta’s superintelligence […]
Meta won a major legal ruling in an AI copyright lawsuit brought by 13 authors alleging that the company illegally trained its AI systems on their work without permission. On Wednesday, Judge Vince Chhabria ruled in Meta’s favor, saying it is “entitled to summary judgment on its fair use defense to the claim that copying these plaintiffs’ books for use as LLM training data was infringement.”However, the judge also pointed out some weak points in the ecosystem of Big Tech’s AI efforts and Meta’s arguments defending its actions as fair use. “This ruling does not stand for...
A federal judge sided with Meta on Wednesday in a lawsuit brought against the company by 13 book authors, including Sarah Silverman, that alleged the company had illegally trained its AI models on their copyrighted works. Federal Judge Vince Chhabria issued a summary judgment — meaning the judge was able to decide on the case […]
Anthropic is adding a new feature to its Claude AI chatbot that lets you build AI-powered apps right inside the app. The upgrade, launching in beta, builds upon Anthropic’s Artifacts feature introduced last year that lets you see and interact with what you ask Claude to make.“Start building in the Claude app by enabling this new interactive capability,” the company says in a blog post. “Simply describe what you want to create, and Claude will write the code for you.” It basically sounds like vibe coding, but with the ability to see the results right inside Claude. You can briefly see...
A federal judge ruled that Meta did not violate the law when it trained its AI models on 13 authors' books.
WhatsApp can now call on Meta AI to summarize your personal chats. As shown in a GIF, you can access it by tapping the button to unfurl all of your unread messages in a chat. But instead of showing your messages, WhatsApp uses Meta AI to generate a bulleted summary of what you missed.The feature is rolling out in English in the US, with plans to launch in more countries and languages later this year. It uses Meta’s Private Processing technology, which the company claims will prevent it and other third parties from snooping on your messages.WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, says its AI message...
The idea is meant to create a balance between the open nature of the internet and the demand for ever more data to fuel AI.
Meta announced on Wednesday that it’s adding an AI-powered summaries feature to WhatsApp. The optional new feature uses Meta AI to summarize unread messages in a chat. This summary would only be visible to you, not others in your chat, the company notes. The feature builds on the AI technology that Meta released in April, […]
Predibase helps companies train and fine-tune open source AI models which will help Rubrik customers deploy AI agents faster.
Almagul Menlibayeva’s Map of Nomadizing Reimaginings. | Image: Almagul Menlibayeva Video screens glow softly from the floor, looping footage of salt lakes, steppe villages, and decaying nuclear test sites. Suspended above them is a large handwoven textile map, crafted by artisans in Kazakhstan. The tapestry maps 12 significant sites across Kazakhstan and the surrounding region, each corresponding to one of the flickering videos below. This is Posthuman Matter: The Map of Nomadizing Reimaginings #3, the latest large-scale installation by photographer and multimedia artist Almagul Menlibayeva....
One of the best bug-hunters in the world is an AI tool called Xbow, just one of many signs of the coming age of cybersecurity automation.
Getty Images dropped its primary claims of copyright infringement against Stability AI on Wednesday at London’s High Court, narrowing one of the most closely watched legal fights over how AI companies use copyrighted content to train their models.
"Let's use technology to benefit workers," Sanders said.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has put a spotlight on private conversations leading up to a rival company suing OpenAI over its upcoming device, io. On Tuesday, Altman posted screenshots of emails on X showing messages between him and Jason Rugolo, the founder of the Iyo hearing device startup that’s suing OpenAI. The emails show a mostly friendly exchange where Rugolo asks Altman for his support as Altman discloses a competing device.“I’d love the opportunity to pitch you to invest $10MM in my AI-meets-audio hardware company, iyO,” Rugolo wrote in a March 4th message. “We’re launching the...
M3GAN was an unexpected hit, and for good reason: It was the best killer toy horror film since Child's Play, combining comedy and camp with a meme-worthy android lead. For the sequel, writer/director Gerard Johnstone (working off a story from him and the first film's writer Akela Cooper), have taken a few notes from Terminator 2. This time around, there's an even more evil android on the scene (Amelia, played by Ivanna Sakhno) who wants AI to rule the world. And there's only one somewhat less evil android that can stop her: M3GAN.If that setup sounds silly and campy to you, well...
Mr. Altman discussed President Trump’s understanding of artificial intelligence, the war for A.I. talent and OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft.
Here's a use of artificial intelligence that could be handy. Ring is adding AI-generated text descriptions of alerts. If it works well, a glance will be all it takes to tell whether something requires your attention.Ring founder Jamie Siminoff gave some examples of the new notifications. "A person is walking up the steps with a black dog" could tell you it's just the dog walker returning. Or, "Two people are peering into a white car in the driveway" could indicate it's time to call the fuzz.Siminoff wrote in a press statement that the descriptions are "intentionally concise." They...
Measuring AI progress has usually meant testing scientific knowledge or logical reasoning – but while the major benchmarks still focus on left-brain logic skills, there’s been a quiet push within AI companies to make models more emotionally intelligent. As foundation models compete on soft measures like user preference and “feeling the AGI,” having a good […]
Abridge nabbed $300 million Series E led by a16z, months after it closed its previous $250M fundraise.
Anthropic has received a mixed result in a class action lawsuit brought by a group of authors who claimed the company used their copyrighted creations without permission. On the positive side for the artificial intelligence company, senior district judge William Alsup of the US District Court for the Northern District of California determined that Anthropic's training of its AI tools on copyrighted works was protected as fair use.Developing large language models for artificial intelligence has created a copyright law boondoggle as creators attempt to protect their works and tech companies skirt...
The ruling isn't a guarantee for how similar cases will proceed, but it lays the foundations for a precedent that would side with tech companies over creatives.
A federal judge has sided with Anthropic in an AI copyright case, ruling that training — and only training — its AI models on legally purchased books without authors’ permission is fair use. It’s a first-of-its-kind ruling in favor of the AI industry, but it’s importantly limited specifically to physical books Anthropic purchased and digitized. Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California also says in his decision that the company must face a separate trial for pirating “millions” of books from the internet. The decision also does not address whether the outputs of...
Verizon is trying to streamline its customer service experience by overhauling it with more chatbots and AI tools. The My Verizon app is being relaunched today with a new “AI-powered Verizon Assistant” that aims to help consumers “manage upgrades, add new lines, ask billing questions, take advantage of savings, and more,” according to the telecom giant’s announcement.The idea is that this chatbot service will be able to quickly complete tasks that typically need to be handled by human service reps, providing a more efficient and flexible experience for customers. Dory Butler, senior...
As Meta's platforms fill up with more AI-generated content, the company still has a lot of work to do when it comes to enforcing its policies around manipulated media. The Oversight Board is once again criticizing the social media company over its handling of such posts, writing in its latest decision that its inability to enforce its rules consistently is "incoherent and unjustifiable."If that sounds familiar, it's because this is the second time since last year the Oversight Board has used the word "incoherent" to describe Meta's approach to manipulated media. The board had...
Google introduced its AI mode, a Q&A-style search tool, to users in India today. The company said that this tool is still in the experimental stage and users will need to opt in to it through Search Labs. Once a user has opted in, they can ask queries in English. Google didn’t specify whether it […]
Jony Ive onstage at the Code Conference in 2022. Thanks to a related trademark lawsuit, we know what OpenAI and Jony Ive's first AI device won't be.In court filings submitted this month, leaders from io - the consumer hardware team OpenAI recently acquired from Jony Ive's design studio for $6.5 billion - testified that the first device they plan to release won't be an "in-ear device" or a "wearable." They also say the AI device won't ship until "at least" 2026. "The prototype Sam Altman referenced in the video is at least a year away from being offered for sale," Tang Tan, io's chief hardware...
Legal filings submitted earlier this month from lawyers representing OpenAI and Jony Ive’s io reveal new details about the companies’ efforts to build a mass-market AI hardware device. The filings are part of a trademark dispute lawsuit filed this month by iyO, a Google-backed hardware startup developing custom-molded earpieces that connect to other devices. Over […]
General view of the nuclear power plant Indian Point seen from Tomkins Cove, New York before it powered down in April 2021. | Photo: Getty Images New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced plans today to develop a new nuclear power plant, the first to be built in the state in decades. It’s the latest signal that nuclear energy could see a comeback in the US thanks to wide-ranging support from some strange bedfellows: the Trump administration purporting to seek “energy dominance”; tech companies in need of more electricity for AI data centers; and climate hawks on board with nuclear...
Leaked code suggests xAI is developing an advanced file editor for Grok with spreadsheet support, signaling the company’s push to compete with OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft by embedding AI copilots into productivity tools.
The round, which comes just four months after $300 million Series D, was co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Coatue.
Alexa+ is available for free during Early Access and will later be free for Prime customers. Non-Prime users will be able to use the service for $19.99 per month after it publicly launches.
Today, I’m talking with Hinge founder and CEO Justin McLeod. Hinge is one of the biggest dating apps in the United States — it’s rivaled only by Tinder, and both are owned by the massive conglomerate Match Group, which has consolidated a huge chunk of the online dating ecosystem.A fair warning here: I’ve never actually used a dating app — the algorithm that matched my wife and I was the university housing lottery, which put us in adjacent dorm rooms in the fall of 2000. And my wife is now a divorce lawyer, so playing around with these apps seems a little bit risky. So I always end up...
The new Chromebook Plus 14 was light enough for me to lift with just three fingers. Google announced a handful of new Gemini AI features for Chromebook Plus laptops, including a sleek, new 14-inch flagship device from Lenovo that I got to handle recently.The new AI functions include select to search, which allows you to long press the launcher icon or take a screenshot and do a Google search based on on-screen images or text. (It’s like circle to search on phones, but for Chromebooks.) Text captured this way can be imported into a calendar or Google Workspace apps like a spreadsheet or...
Perplexity is planning to open up its Comet browser that's powered by "agentic search" to Windows users, according to the company's CEO. Aravind Srinivas posted on X that the Windows build of Comet is ready and has sent out invites to early testers already. Perplexity's CEO also hinted at a potential release for Android devices, adding that it was "moving at a crazy pace and moving ahead of schedule."In May, Perplexity launched a beta version of its AI-powered Comet browser, only available to Mac users running Apple Silicon. The intelligent browser comes with AI features baked in, like the...
A Republican effort to prevent states from enforcing their own AI regulations cleared a key procedural hurdle on Saturday.
While LinkedIn users seem to have embraced AI, there’s one area that’s seen less uptake than expected, according to CEO Ryan Roslansky: the AI-generated suggestions for polishing your LinkedIn posts.
Paul Pope has written and drawn some of the most gorgeous comics of the twenty-first century — from “Batman: Year 100,” in which Batman challenges a dystopian surveillance state, to “Battling Boy,” in which an adolescent god proves his mettle by fighting giant monsters. But it’s been more than a decade since Pope’s last major […]
Thinking Machines Lab, the secretive AI startup founded by OpenAI’s former chief technology officer Mira Murati, has closed a $2 billion seed round at a $10 billion valuation.
The controversial AI startup was founded earlier this year.
Several weeks after Anthropic released research claiming that its Claude Opus4 AI model resorted to blackmailing engineers who tried to turn the model off in controlled test scenarios, the company is out with new research suggesting the problem is more widespread among leading AI models. On Friday, Anthropic published new safety research testing 16 leading […]
Applebee’s and IHOP plan to launch an AI-powered “personalization engine” that could help its restaurants provide recommendations and customized deals, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The personalization engine would use a customer’s past purchases — or the orders of customers similar to them — to make recommendations.Justin Skelton, the chief information officer at the restaurants’ parent company, Dine Brands, tells the Journal that an AI-powered personalization system would be designed to boost customer loyalty, as well as serve as a way to upsell products...
Deezer announced on Friday that it will start labeling albums that include AI-generated tracks as part of its efforts to combat streaming fraud. The company reports that about 18% of the music uploaded each day — more than 20,000 tracks — is now fully AI-generated. Although most of these tracks don’t go viral, Deezer says […]
The investing conglomerate is looking to team up with TSMC on the initiative as SoftBank continues to pour money into AI.
AI may compound the burden of having a similar phone number to a popular business.
Meta is announcing its next pair of smart glasses with Oakley. The limited-edition Oakley Meta HSTN (pronounced “how-stuhn”) model costs $499 and is available for preorder starting July 11th. Other Oakley models with Meta’s tech will be available starting at $399 later this summer. Like the existing Meta Ray-Ban glasses, the Oakley model features a front-facing camera, along with open-ear speakers and microphones that are built into the frame. After they are paired with a phone, the glasses can be used to listen to music or podcasts, conduct phone calls, or chat with Meta AI. By...
The event showcased more product announcements than ever, along with Cisco’s newfound speed in innovating for infrastructure, the modern workplace and digital resiliency.
AI company Midjourney has released its first video model. This initial take on AI-generated video will allow users to animate their images, either ones made in Midjourney or uploaded from a different source. The initial results will be five-second clips that a user can opt to extend by four seconds up to four times. Videos can be generated on web only for now and require at least a $10 a month subscription to access.Introducing our V1 Video Model. It's fun, easy, and beautiful. Available at 10$/month, it's the first video model for *everyone* and it's available now. pic.twitter.com/iBm0KAN8uy...
Midjourney has released the first version of its video generation model to the public. For now, the tool can generate short videos based on images uploaded or created on the platform, but Midjourney plans on rolling out more capabilities in the future.After creating an image using Midjourney, the service will show a new “animate” button that users can press to create a 5-second clip based on a text prompt. It will also show the option to add an image you uploaded to the platform as a “starting frame” for a video. The tool will generate a generic prompt that “just makes things move...
It’s already been a tumultuous year for the U.S. semiconductor industry. The semiconductor industry plays a sizable role in the “AI race” that the U.S. seems determined to win, which is why this context is worth paying attention to: from Intel’s appointment of Lip-Bu Tan to CEO — who wasted no time getting to work […]
Over the last two years, Nvidia has used its ballooning fortunes to invest in over 80 AI startups. Here are the giant semiconductor's largest investments.
Obvio is looking to artificial intelligence to improve driver behavior, enhance road safety.
In years past, medical facilities weren’t as vulnerable as they are now; hackers had an unwritten rule not to target institutions or services where a disruption could put people in physical danger.
Last year was monumental for the AI industry in the U.S. and beyond. There were 49 startups that raised funding rounds worth $100 million or more in 2024, per our count at TechCrunch; three companies raised more than one “megaround,” and seven companies raised rounds $1 billion in size or larger. How will 2025 compare? […]
Multiplier raised Series A and seed funding from Lightspeed and Ribbit Capital.
Midjourney, one of the most popular AI image generation startups, announced on Wednesday the launch of its much-anticipated AI video generation model, V1. V1 is an image-to-video model, in which users can upload an image — or take an image generated by one of Midjourney’s other models — and V1 will produce a set of […]
YouTube is bringing its Veo 3 AI video generation model, which my colleague Allison Johnson recently called “a slop monger’s dream,” to YouTube Shorts later this summer, according to a Cannes Lions keynote from YouTube CEO Neal Mohan.Shorts creators can already take advantage of the previous-generation Veo 2 model to generate backgrounds with Dream Screen as well as standalone clips. Mohan didn’t specify exactly what Veo 3 will enable in Shorts, but he did mention Veo 3’s improved video quality and that it can incorporate audio, so presumably those upgrades will be coming to Shorts.It...
OpenAI is phasing out its work with Scale AI and cutting ties with the data provider following Meta’s deal with the startup, an OpenAI spokesperson told Bloomberg on Wednesday. Sarah Friar, the chief financial officer of OpenAI, previously suggested the company would continue its work with Scale AI. Now, it appears OpenAI has changed its […]
OpenAI researchers say they’ve discovered hidden features inside AI models that correspond to misaligned “personas,” according to new research published by the company on Wednesday. By looking at an AI model’s internal representations — the numbers that dictate how an AI model responds, which often seem completely incoherent to humans — OpenAI researchers were able […]
The game’s updated artwork was made by illustrator Henning Ludvigsen. | Image: Evil Trout Inc.Robin Ward was recovering from a broken arm when he fell in love with The Roottrees are Dead, a free browser game hosted on itch.io, an indie games salesfront. He reached out to its creator, Jeremy Johnston, and told him, "This should be a bigger deal than it is." At the same time, Ward says, he "knew why" it couldn't be.The browser version of The Roottrees are Dead used AI-generated art for its images, a central part of the puzzle game that tasks players with investigating dozens of people and...
Tapping the sparkle button beneath the search bar will open Search Live.Google is building Search Live into AI Mode, allowing you to have a back-and-forth voice conversation with the company’s AI chatbot right from its search engine. The test, which is rolling out now to Labs users in the US, currently doesn’t support camera-sharing, but Google plans to add the capability in the “coming months.”Search Live lets you interact with the company’s “custom” version of Gemini and search the web in real time. The feature currently lives in the Gemini app on Android and iOS, where it takes...
Mount it on a wall or take it with you between rooms.Eufy is launching its first portable smart display, designed to allow multiple users to control and monitor security devices from a single hub. The Smart Display E10 is capable of displaying up to four live camera feeds simultaneously and can be paired with the company’s AI-supported video doorbells, smart locks, or the Homebase S380 data hub to unlock live notification and facial recognition features.The technical specifications for the E10 largely match those in a leaked brochure shared to Reddit in May, before Eufy’s parent company...
If you stumbled across Terence Broad's AI-generated artwork (un)stable equilibrium on YouTube, you might assume he'd trained a model on the works of the painter Mark Rothko - the earlier, lighter pieces, before his vision became darker and suffused with doom. Like early-period Rothko, Broad's AI-generated images consist of simple fields of pure color, but they're morphing, continuously changing form and hue.But Broad didn't train his AI on Rothko; he didn't train it on any data at all. By hacking a neural network, and locking elements of it into a recursive loop, he was able to induce this AI...
Pope Leo XIV, the new American pope, is making the threat of AI to humanity a key issue of his legacy, even as the technology industry has spent years attempting to make friends with the Vatican.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on something of a hiring spree lately, trying to staff up Meta’s new superintelligence team with top-tier AI researchers from competing labs. To work on a team led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and at a desk physically near Zuckerberg, Meta has reportedly offered employees from OpenAI […]
AI companies are battling to dominate the industry, but sometimes, they’re also battling in Pokémon gyms. As Google and Anthropic both study how their latest AI models navigate early Pokémon games, the results can be as amusing as they are enlightening — and this time, Google DeepMind has written in a report that Gemini 2.5 […]
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says advancements in AI will “reduce” the company’s corporate headcount over the next few years. In a memo to employees on Tuesday, Jassy writes that Amazon expects the change due to “efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” without specifying how many employees would be affected.“As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,” Jassy says. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.”Amazon has laid off more than 27,...
Meta is reportedly working on a pair of AI smart glasses with Prada.
Tumblr users are complaining that content is being falsely labeled as mature, the latest tech company to grapple with automated flagging and takedowns.
The buzzy AI-powered autonomous vehicle software company doubles its valuation from last year -- and then some.
Anysphere launched a new $200-a-month subscription plan for its popular AI coding tool, Cursor, the company announced in a blog post on Monday. The new plan, Ultra, offers users 20x more usage on AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI compared to the company’s $20-a-month subscription plan, Pro. Anysphere also says Cursor users […]
Max — soon to be called HBO Max again — is rolling out an update that automatically plays video previews when you hover over shows and movies. The video previews are launching to users in the US now, but Max is still working on an “AI-assisted” tool to pick the clips that go in them.In the “coming weeks,” Max says its AI tool will automatically identify “standout” scenes from its shows and movies, which its team will then use to choose the clips featured in video previews. “This AI-driven technology will enable us to identify Drop-in Moments for the vast catalog of content on...
Last September, all eyes were on Senate Bill 1047 as it made its way to California Governor Gavin Newsom's desk - and died there as he vetoed the buzzy piece of legislation. SB 1047 would have required makers of all large AI models, particularly those that cost $100 million or more to train, to test them for specific dangers. AI industry whistleblowers weren't happy about the veto, and most large tech companies were. But the story didn't end there. Newsom, who had felt the legislation was too stringent and one-size-fits-all, tasked a group of leading AI researchers to help propose an...
The Philips Hue Play Wall Washer lights are available in black or white finish and can be purchased in a two-pack that can be synced. | Image: SignifySignify has officially announced its new Philips Hue Play Wall Washer light, which was previously leaked by Amazon UK earlier this month. The company has also launched its new Philips Hue AI assistant in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, with a broader global release expected by the end of August.Available now in Europe, the US, and Canada in a black or white finish, the Philips Hue Play Wall Washer is $219.99 for a single unit or $384.99...
Chatbots are increasingly looking to keep people chatting, using familiar tactics that we’ve already seen lead to negative consequences. Sycophancy can make AI chatbots respond in a way that’s overly agreeable or flattering. And while having a digital hype person might not seem like a dangerous thing, it is actually a tactic used by tech […]
Social networks are bolstering their terms of service against scrapers and bots that crawl the website to train AI models. Days after Elon Musk-owned X updated its terms to explicitly prohibit AI model training, decentralized social network Mastodon today updated its own rules to bar any kind of model training, as well. “We explicitly prohibit […]
When its redesigned Firefly app arrived earlier this year, Adobe launched the platform without Android and iOS app support, saying those would come at a later date. Today, the company is making good on that promise, with both versions available to download from their respective storefronts.If you're new to Firefly, it's the place where Adobe brings together all of its AI image, video, audio and vector generation tools. The company relaunched the app in April at its Max conference in London. Since then, it has been working on enhancing the functionality that's already there, starting...
Microsoft’s Copilot advertising has been criticized by an industry watchdog for its productivity claims and confusing use of Copilot branding. The Better Business Bureau’s National Advertising Division (NAD) has reviewed Microsoft’s Copilot advertising, and recommended that the software giant discontinues or modifies productivity claims about Microsoft 365 Copilot and more clearly disclose the limitations of its Business Chat feature.Microsoft has been claiming that Copilot has productivity and return on investment (ROI) benefits for businesses that adopt the AI assistant, including...
Instagram users report that their accounts were banned even though they had not violated the company's terms of service or other policies.
Reddit is launching a new feature for advertisers that slots positive posts from Reddit users right under their ads.The new alpha feature, called Conversation Summary Add-ons, “dynamically integrates positive content from Reddit users directly below an advertiser’s creative, putting community conversations front-and-center in the user experience and blending AI-driven efficiency with real human perspectives,” according to a post from Reddit.As shown by Reddit, you’ll be able to scroll through the posts that appear under an ad. You’ll also see a short summary of what Reddit users are...
Chinese companies Huawei and SMIC may have a difficult time accessing resources needed to build AI chips, due to Taiwanese export controls.
Meta’s massive investment in Scale AI may be giving some of the startup’s biggest customers pause. Reuters reports that Google had planned to pay Scale AI $200 million this year but is now planning to cut ties with the startup and is having conversations with its competitors.
Apple’s plans to improve App Store discoverability using AI tagging techniques are now available in the developer beta build of iOS 26. However, the tags do not appear on the public App Store as of yet, nor are they informing the App Store Search algorithm on the public store. Of course, with any upcoming App […]
AI researchers have recently been asking themselves a version of the question, "Is that really Zuck?"As first reported by Bloomberg, the Meta CEO has been personally asking top AI talent to join his new "superintelligence" AI lab and reboot Llama. His recruiting process typically goes like this: a cold outreach via email or WhatsApp that cites the recruit's work history and requests a 15-minute chat. Dozens of researchers have gotten these kinds of messages at Google alone. For those who do agree to hear his pitch (amazingly, not all of them do), Zuckerberg highlights the latitude they'll have...
New York state lawmakers passed a bill on Thursday that aims to prevent frontier AI models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic from contributing to disaster scenarios, including the death or injury of more than 100 people, or more than $1 billion in damages. The passage of the RAISE Act represents a win for the AI […]
Meta’s deal to sort-of but not really acquire AI startup Scale, giving it 49% ownership, is certainly unusual.
The option to generate an Audio Overview appears beneath the “People also ask” module.Google is rolling out a test that puts its AI-powered Audio Overviews on the first page of search results on mobile. The experiment, which you can enable in Labs, will let you generate an AI podcast-style discussion for certain queries.If you search for something like, “How do noise cancellation headphones work?”, Google will display a button beneath the “People also ask” module that says, “Generate Audio Overview.” Once you click the button, it will take up to 40 seconds to generate an Audio...
Google is rolling out new Gemini AI features for Workspace users that make it easier to find information in PDFs and form responses. The Gemini-powered file summarization capabilities in Google Drive have now expanded to PDFs and Google Forms, allowing key details and insights to be condensed into a more convenient format that saves users from manually digging through the files.Gemini will proactively create summary cards when users open a PDF in their drive and present clickable actions based on its contents, such as “draft a sample proposal” or “list interview questions based on this...
Data-labeling firm Scale AI confirmed on Friday that it has received a "significant" investment from Meta that values the startup at $29 billion.
Meta is making its first major minority investment in an outside company as it tries to catch up to a growing field of artificial intelligence rivals.
Two dozen venture capital firms and other investors are investing in xAI, the artificial intelligence and social media company.
The AI ad was inspired by GTA IV.If you’ve been on social media lately, you might’ve seen the unsettling AI slop videos showing AI-generated people in wild scenarios or just speaking a bunch of nonsense. On Wednesday night, the betting platform Kalshi decided to take this trend outside the social sphere by putting a nonsensical AI-generated ad in front of the millions of viewers watching the NBA Finals — and it apparently cost just $2,000 to make.The AI-generated highlights various things “people” are betting on, like whether the Oklahoma City Thunder or Indiana Pacers will win the...
Meta has entered into an agreement with XGS Energy to develop "next-generation geothermal energy" projects in New Mexico. The plan is for these projects to connect directly into the electrical grid that Meta's data centers draw from, feeding the growing energy needs of the company's AI development.Both companies claim the new deal will add 150-megawatts of carbon-free energy to the grid "with zero operating water use." New Mexico is apparently uniquely suited for geothermal energy production because the state has "some of the best hot rock resources in the country," according to the deal...
Lately, Felicis, like most VCs, has been all over AI. Its portfolio now includes, for example, Browser Use, Poolside, Runway, and Supabase.
It sounds like the start of a 21st century horror film: Your browser history has been public all along, and you had no idea. That’s basically what it feels like right now on the new standalone Meta AI app, where swathes of people are publishing their ostensibly private conversations with the chatbot. When you ask […]
At WWDC 2025, Apple announced several AI features, such as a workout coach, live translation, and more.
Barbie-maker Mattel and OpenAI have teamed up to bring generative AI to the toy-making and ever-expanding pipeline of IP repackaging.
Google developed a new AI-based model for tropical cyclone forecasts.Google is using a new AI model to forecast tropical cyclones and working with the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) to test it out. Google DeepMind and Google Research launched a new website today called Weather Lab to share AI weather models that Google is developing. It says its new, experimental AI-based model for forecasting cyclones — also called typhoons or hurricanes when they reach a certain strength — can generate 50 different scenarios for a storm’s possible track, size, and intensity up to 15 days in...
The apps use artificial intelligence to create fake nude images of people without their consent.
Snapchat has launched a new subscription tier that offers access to a wider selection of lenses and augmented-reality experiences. The Lens Plus subscription costs $8.99 per month and will include lenses made by Snapchat and “select” creators to start, such as an exclusive AI-powered video lens and a Bitmoji game lens.Along with access to “hundreds” of different lenses, Lens Plus comes with the same benefits as a $3.99 / month Snapchat Plus subscription, which includes access to early and exclusive features, like the ability to use wallpapers with chats and Bitmoji backgrounds.This week...
Meta is suing a company that advertised generative AI apps on its social media platforms that enable users to “nudify” people without their consent. The lawsuit against Joy Timeline comes after hundreds of ads for the digital undressing apps were discovered on Meta’s Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and Threads platforms by a CBS News investigation published last week.“This legal action underscores both the seriousness with which we take this abuse and our commitment to doing all we can to protect our community from it,” Meta said. “We’ll continue to take the necessary steps...
Meta is finally cracking down on "nudify" apps that use AI to generate nonconsensual nude and explicit images of celebrities, influencers and others. The company is suing one app maker that's frequently advertised such apps on Facebook and Instagram, and taking new steps to prevent ads for similar services.The crackdown comes months after several researchers and journalists have raised the alarm about such apps. A recent report from CBS News identified at least "hundreds" of ads on Meta's platform promoting apps that allow users to "remove clothing" from images of celebrities and others. One...
Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has already used AI to replace himself during earnings reports, and now Klarna is using AI to clone him another way: through an AI-powered phone hotline.The hotline is now open for users to provide feedback to an interactive AI version of Siemiatkowski that’s trained on his “real voice, insights, and experiences,” according to a press release. “Customers, including consumers and merchants alike, can speak to it about product features, issues and suggestions for improvements,” Klarna says. “‘AI Sebastian’ can also answer questions about Klarna...
SAG-AFTRA has suspended its strike against ten game studios. The organization's national board will meet tomorrow to consider a tentative agreement with the developers; more details of the arrangement will be disclosed if and when the board agrees to the terms.Variety obtained a statement from a spokesperson for the gaming companies that offered some hints about the contents of the potential deal: "This agreement builds on three decades of successful partnership between the interactive entertainment industry and the union. It delivers historic wage increases of over 24 percent for performers...
Meta has reportedly invested billions of dollars into AI startup Scale AI and hired its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to lead a new AI research lab. So what does that mean for Meta and the rest of the AI ecosystem?
The content of a vaccines information website owned U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was swapped with gay-themed spam.
This is apparently what it would look like if my parents’ dogs were digging a hole in the desert. | Screenshot by Emma Roth / The VergeMeta is launching new video editing tools that will let you transform videos using AI. The tool, which is only free for a “limited time,” gives you more than 50 preset prompts you can use to edit your video, allowing you to set a theme, change the background, and tweak what you’re wearing.The presets are presented similarly to how you would choose a filter on Instagram. You can have Meta AI restyle your clip as a video game or anime, make it appear as if...
Apple will begin using AI technology to power the discovery of apps on the App Store, the company announced at this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 25). In a session focused on updates to App Store Connect, its app distribution platform for developers, the company announced it will introduce App Store Tags — labels that […]
Editors almost immediately criticized the pilot, raising concerns that it could damage Wikipedia's credibility.
In the complaint, the Hollywood giants allege Midjourney generates “endless” ripoffs of everything from minions to Darth Vader.
The studios are seeking monetary damages, a jury trial, and an order barring Midjourney from further copyright infringement.
Disney and Universal sued Midjourney on Wednesday for generating Shrek, Darth Vader, Buzz Lightyear, and a host of other copyrighted characters in the first major legal showdown between Hollywood and generative AI.The complaint, filed in a US District Court in central California, calls Midjourney’s AI image generator a “virtual vending machine, generating endless unauthorized copies of Disney’s and Universal’s copyrighted work.”“By helping itself to Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, and then distributing images (and soon videos) that blatantly incorporate and copy Disney’s and...
The Browser Company’s new AI-powered browser is now available in an invite-only beta. Called Dia, the browser was first announced towards the end of 2024, and is built around the deep integration of what its maker calls "the most personal AI on the market".Dia allows you to "chat with your tabs" and will adapt and learn the more you use it. You can open an AI chat on any webpage without having to leave the tab, where the built-in bot can search the web, compare websites, answer questions about the content displayed, and even draft a document in the tone of a specific webpage. You can set...
DeeperDive will appear at the top of USA Today’s homepage.Taboola, the company best known for serving up those weird, clickbaity advertisements you often find beneath online articles, has created an AI chatbot. The tool, called “DeeperDive,” is launching in beta on USA Today and The Independent, and will answer readers’ questions using information “sourced from trusted journalists.”A demo on Taboola’s site shows a DeeperDive search bar at the top of USA Today’s homepage, which automatically surfaces prompts like “How is the UK government addressing the cost of living crisis in...
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Meta's V-JEPA 2 model is a "world model," referring to AI that is designed to understand its physical surroundings.
Apple's executives would not concede to being behind in the AI race.
Pinterests is experimenting with "auto-collages," an AI feature that allows advertisers to quickly turn their product catalogs into shoppable collages.
Dia, the new browser from The Browser Company, is almost nothing like the company's last product. That app, Arc, was a total rethink of how browsers work: it moved tabs to the side and combined them with bookmarks, it offered endless ways to organize all your stuff, and it had lots of ideas about how to make your web surfing a little more delightful.Dia will get some of that stuff in time, The Browser Company's CEO Josh Miller tells me. The app that's launching today for existing Arc users is very much still a beta (and only available on Mac). But none of that stuff is the point of Dia anyway...
The Lemony AI device can run large language models, AI agents and automated workflows locally.
The tool provides Amazon sellers with six AI-generated clips to choose from, among other features.Amazon is making it easier for sellers to quickly create generative AI ads on its platform, sometimes with just a single click. Amazon Ad’s Video Generator, a free advertising tool introduced in beta last year, now has some new tricks and is generally available for sellers in the US to create “photorealistic video assets” in five minutes or less.New capabilities include motion improvements to show items in action, which Amazon says is best for showcasing products like toys, tools, and worn...
Mechanize, a San Francisco start-up, is building artificial intelligence tools to automate white-collar jobs “as fast as possible.”
In a new essay published Tuesday called “The Gentle Singularity,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared his latest vision for how AI will change the human experience over the next 15 years. The essay is a classic example of Altman’s futurism: hyping up the promise of AGI — and arguing that his company is quite close […]
In March, Apple delayed its upgraded Siri, saying that “it’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver” the promised features. At WWDC this week, Apple’s SVP of software Craig Federighi and SVP of worldwide marketing Greg Joswiak shared more details about the decision to delay in an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern.As part of its initial Apple Intelligence announcements at WWDC 2024, Apple said that the improved Siri would have awareness of your personal context and the ability to take actions for you in apps. While Apple was showing real software at that...
The AI-friendly data storage startup is raising capital at a giant leap in valuation.
Apple Intelligence was designed to leverage things that generative AI already does well, like text and image generation, to improve upon existing features.
Google is starting to offer buyouts to US-based employees in its sprawling Search organization, along with other divisions like marketing, research, and core engineering, according to multiple employees familiar with the matter.The buyouts, which Google is referring to as a "voluntary exit program," are currently not being offered to employees in the DeepMind AI division, Google Cloud, YouTube, or Google's central ad sales organization. Employees in Google's platforms and services group, which includes Android and the Pixel line of devices, were offered buyouts earlier this year before the...
OpenAI is keeping up its rapid-fire pace of new AI releases. The company introduced the o3 and o4-mini models to its ChatGPT platform in April. At the time, the business promised that a pro model of the o3 was on the way, and that version became available today.Both the o3 and o4-mini models are meant to use and combine all the tools under ChatGPT's umbrella. When OpenAI adds the "pro" designation to a model, it's a version that has been built to spend longer answering queries to provide better and more accurate responses. "We recommend using it for challenging questions where reliability...
OpenAI has launched o3-pro, an AI model that the company claims is its most capable yet.
The Trump administration is working on an “AI.gov” website and API to “accelerate government innovation with AI,” 404 Media found based on code posted to Github and an early version of the site.The project appears to be run by the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services, led by former Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd. Shedd, who The New York Times has identified as an ally to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has previously discussed using AI to detect fraud, analyze government contracts, and create “AI coding agents” to write...
OpenAI has inked a deal with Google to begin using the latter's cloud service to meet its growing needs for increased computing capacity, according to a report by Reuters. This is something of a surprise, given that Google and OpenAI are rivals in the AI space.The terms of the deal remain unknown, but reporting indicates it has been in the negotiation phase for the past several months. This marks OpenAI's latest move to diversify its compute sources away from Microsoft Azure.Microsoft had been OpenAI's exclusive data center provider until January, after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman blamed...
Meta is close to finalizing an almost $15 billion investment in Scale AI, the tech giant’s largest-ever external investment, which would give Meta a 49% stake in the company, according to The Information. As part of the deal, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is personally assembling a team of about 50 people to help Meta supercharge its AI goals — specifically, to achieve artificial general intelligence — and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang is set to join that group once the deal is final, according to Bloomberg and The New York Times. AGI is the concept of AI that equals or surpasses human...
Apple has announced updates to the AI models that power its suite of Apple Intelligence features across iOS, macOS, and more. But according to the company's own benchmarks, the models underperform older models from rival tech firms including OpenAI.
Glean announced on Tuesday that is raised a $150 million Series F led by Wellington Management at a $7.2 billion valuation.
Apple has yet to deliver on some of the key technology advances that could modernize developers' apps for the AI era.
American Screen Actors Guild members have reached a “tentative” contract agreement with major gaming companies that could potentially end the 11-month-long video game actors’ strike.SAG-AFTRA announced the tentative contract on Monday without specifying terms or protections for performers. The strike began on July 26th, 2024, after the union and a bargaining committee of video game companies — including Activision, Epic Games, EA, Disney Character Voices, Take-Two, Insomniac Games, WB Games, and others — failed to agree on worker protections around AI. “It is expected the...
Mark Zuckerberg is hand-picking top researchers and engineers to join an upcoming AI research lab dedicated to “superintelligence," and Scale AI's Alexandr Wang is on the list.
Mistral released Magistral, its first family of reasoning models. Like other reasoning models — e.g. OpenAI's o3 and Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro — Magistral works through problems step-by-step for improved consistency and reliability across topics such as math and physics.
Google’s AI Overviews and other AI-powered tools, including chatbots, are devastating traffic for news publishers, per a Wall Street Journal report.
Microsoft has started testing a new feature for its Edge browser that adds an AI-powered search to browsing history. This new “enhanced search” feature lets you find websites in your browser history even if you use a phrase, synonym, or even a typo that’s similar to the site you actually want to find.The AI-powered history search started appearing in beta versions of Microsoft Edge last week. “After this feature is turned on, sites you visit will be shown in enhanced history search results,” explains Microsoft in its beta channel release notes. “An on-device model is trained using...
Starling Bank, one of the UK’s digital challenger banks, has launched a new AI-powered tool that will answer questions about your spending habits. You can now easily find out how much you’ve spent at Amazon in a particular month, how much money you’ve wasted on fast food outlets over the past year, or how much cash you’ve received over a particular period.Starling’s AI tool, or enhanced search as the bank calls it, is an opt-in feature that enables a prompt where you can ask questions about your spending habits. The tool, built with Google Gemini, even suggests prompts that are...
Scale AI, an artificial intelligence start-up, has built a business by labeling and culling data to make it easier to use to train A.I. systems.
Apple's WWDC 2025 had new software, Formula 1 references, and a piano man crooning the text of different app reviews. But one key feature got the short end of the stick: Siri. Although the company continuously referenced Apple Intelligence and pushed new features like live translation for Messages, FaceTime, and phone calls, Apple's AI assistant was barely mentioned. In fact, the most attention Siri got was when Apple explained that some of its previously promised features were running behind schedule.To address what many saw as the elephant in the room, Apple's keynote briefly mentioned that...
Apple announced a slew of updates at the Worldwide Developer Conference with one notable exception. It still hasn't revealed its previously announced AI-powered Siri.
The company also introduced artificial intelligence in its devices in the opening presentation of a company conference.
Users will be able to access the AI models either on device or with Private Compute to generate responses that feed into the rest of their shortcut.
Apple has launched at its WWDC 2025 conference Workout Buddy, an AI workout coach. The AI tool gathers data from both your current workout and your fitness history – including paces, miles logged, activity rings closed, and training load – to coach you through workouts in real time.
Apple unveiled watchOS 26 with new design, wrist-flick gesture, and AI Workout Buddy feature during WWDC 2025.
Apple said it's bringing Visual Intelligence, its AI-powered image analysis tech, to the iPhone screen in iOS 26.
It's safe to say Apple Intelligence hasn't landed in the way Apple likely hoped it would. However, that's not stopping the company from continuing to iterate on its suite of AI features. During its WWDC 2025 conference on Monday, Apple announced a collection of new features for Apple Intelligence, starting with the decision to bring its foundational models to developers. According to Craig Federighi, the company's senior vice president of software engineering, Apple's new Foundation Models framework will allow third-party developers to tap into the large language models...
The WWDC 2025 keynote gave Apple device owners a peek into what they can expect their iPhones, iPads and Macs to look like later this year. The company focused on design and productivity upgrades to all of its major operating systems this time around, and of course, some new AI features as well. When the latest OSes become available to all this fall, interfaces will look noticeably different than they did before, with a refreshed design language, updated widgets, a few overhauled apps and more. Here's everything Apple announced at WWDC 2025 this year.Apple IntelligenceApple kicked off the...
Apple’s iPhone may not be getting a significant AI upgrade, but it is getting a fresh coat of paint. As are Apple’s other operating systems. At Monday’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 25), the company announced a refreshed user interface called Liquid Glass, which features shiny, reflective, and transparent visual interface elements that give the software […]
Apple is launching what it calls the Foundation Models framework, which the company says will enable developers to tap into its AI models in an offline, on-device fashion.
A healthy chunk of corporate America has eagerly embraced AI, betting that the tech will bring heretofore unrealizable productivity gains. But adoption may be leveling off, according to transaction data from fintech company Ramp.
Let’s see what Cook is cooking.The stakes are higher than usual at this year’s WWDC. Major Apple Intelligence features the company teased at last year’s conference are stalled out, the company got a stern talking-to from a federal judge a couple months ago, and… tariffs? Not an enviable position, but the show goes on. We’re expecting to see a new, spaceship-y design language for iOS and an updated naming convention for the company’s OS versions. Will it be enough to distract from the Apple Intelligence train wreck? Will Tim Cook apologize onstage for getting out over his AI skis...
Apple's WWDC keynote is arguably the company's biggest event of the year outside of the annual iPhone launch in September. The livestream, which starts today at 1PM ET / 10AM PT, kicks off Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, the company's yearly showcase for the new features coming to all of its hardware devices over the next year. Apple execs will be showing off big new features coming over the next 15 months to iOS, macOS, iPadOS and all the company's other platforms. Of course, the elephant in the room is Apple Intelligence. Apple's take on AI was launched with...
Anthropic was experimenting with an AI-generated blog. TechCrunch profiled it. Then, Anthropic shut it down.
Apple to reveal iOS 26 at WWDC today. Here’s what to expect. The Washington PostWhat to expect from Apple's WWDC event as Wall Street looks for AI gains Yahoo FinanceWWDC 2025 live: Updates from Apple's keynote including new iOS, iPadOS, Apple Intelligence and more EngadgetApple is about to announce updates to how we use the iPhone and its other devices CNNApple heads into annual showcase reeling from AI missteps, tech upheaval and Trump's trade war AP News
Chinese AI companies have temporarily paused some of their chatbot features to prevent students from using them to cheat during nationwide college exams, Bloomberg reports. Popular AI apps, including Alibaba’s Qwen and ByteDance’s Doubao, have stopped picture recognition features from responding to questions about test papers, while Tencent’s Yuanbao, Moonshot’s Kimi have suspended photo-recognition services entirely during exam hours. The increasing availability of chatbots has made it easier than ever for students around the world to cheat their way through education. Schools in...
Today, I’m talking with Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith. Taskrabbit is one of the original gig worker platforms that’s really focused on work you might need done in your home; it’s been around for nearly 20 years, and you might be surprised to know that the core product has not changed all that much. Taskers can sign up to offer services like assembling furniture, mounting TVs, and helping people move, and they get to set their own prices for that work, which makes it a more of a marketplace than something like Uber.As you’ll hear Ania say, the difference between Taskrabbit and something like...
With Google and Microsoft’s developer conferences out of the way, now it’s time for Apple’s WWDC. The Cupertino company is gearing up to unveil new versions (and new numbers) for all its operating systems, as well as taking a second step at convincing everyone it’s a major player in the AI industry. Rumor has it we may also see a whole new product category from Apple, with a HomePad smart display possibly in the offering. Here’s how to catch it all live.When is the WWDC keynote?While WWDC itself runs all week, the keynote with all the major announcements should take just a couple...
Meta is discussing a multi-billion dollar investment in Scale AI, according to Bloomberg. In fact, the deal value could reportedly exceed $10 billion, making it the largest external AI investment for the Facebook parent company and one of the largest funding events ever for a private company.
OpenAI, the firm that helped spark chatbot cheating, wants to embed A.I. in every facet of college. First up: 460,000 students at Cal State.
Battlelines are being drawn between the major AI labs and the popular applications that rely on them.This week, both Anthropic and OpenAI took shots at two leading AI apps: Windsurf, one of the most popular vibe coding tools, and Granola, a buzzy AI app for taking meeting notes."With less than five days of notice, Anthropic decided to cut off nearly all of our first-party capacity to all Claude 3.x models," Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan wrote on X this week, noting that "we wanted to pay them for the full capacity." An additional statement on Windsurf's website said: "We are concerned that Anthropic...
AI startups are reaching growth stage much faster. That's exciting, but also risky, because investors might pour millions into a company only to watch it be unseated in a few months.
Early-stage AI startups are imbuing new life into San Francisco’s Northern Waterfront, after years of “for lease” signs dotting the post-pandemic landscape. According to the San Francisco Business Times, five AI-focused companies — four backed by Y Combinator — recently leased 23,900 square feet at the Waterfront Plaza complex. This is part of a citywide […]
Google is taking another step toward making Gemini a more helpful assistant. It’s rolling out “scheduled actions,” a feature AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers can use to ask the AI assistant to perform tasks at specific times, like providing a summary of their calendar at the end of each day or generating ideas for blog posts every Monday.Users can also have Gemini complete one-off tasks using this feature, such as asking for a summary of an award show the day after it happens, Google says. “Just tell Gemini what you need and when, and it will take care of the rest,” the company writes...
The head of a humanoid robotics startup made a rare public appearance for an on stage interview.
EleutherAI, an AI research organization, has released what it's claiming is one of the largest collections of licensed and open-domain text for training AI models.
WWDC 2025, Apple’s annual developers conference, starts at 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET. Monday. Last year’s event was notable for its focus on AI, and this year, there is considerable pressure on the company to build on its promises. As in previous years, the company will focus on software updates and new technologies, […]
AMD has acqui-hired the employees behind Untether AI.
Anysphere, the maker of AI coding assistant Cursor, has raised $900 million at a $9.9 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported. The round was led by a returning investor Thrive Capital, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Accel and DST Global. The massive round is Anysphere’s third fundraise in less than a year. The three-year-old startup secured its […]
Amazon wants this group to develop an agentic AI framework to be used to give its warehouse robots more skills.
Scams using AI deepfakes of celebrities have become an increasingly prominent issue for Meta over the last couple of years. Now, the Oversight Board has weighed in and has seemingly confirmed what other critics have said: Meta isn't doing enough to enforce its own rules, and makes it far too easy for scammers to get away with these schemes."Meta is likely allowing significant amounts of scam content on its platforms to avoid potentially overenforcing a small subset of genuine celebrity endorsements," the board wrote in its latest decision. "At-scale reviewers are not empowered to enforce...
Anthropic Co-founder and Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan said his company cut Windsurf’s direct access to Anthropic’s Claude AI models largely because of rumors and reports that OpenAI, its largest competitor, is acquiring the AI coding assistant. “We really are just trying to enable our customers who are going to sustainably be working with us […]
As part of my job as a tech writer, and as part of my ongoing efforts to get organized at some point, I've tested a whole pile of note-taking apps through the years: the simple, the sophisticated, the quirky, the AI-powered, and on it goes. It's a popular app category, and there's no shortage of options.Amid all these different choices, one of the apps that I find myself regularly coming back to is Google Keep. It's fast and easy to get around, it works on just about any device, and once you dig a little deeper into its colorful sticky note interface, there are plenty of useful features to take...
Anthropic on Thursday announced Claude Gov, its product designed specifically for U.S. defense and intelligence agencies. The AI models have looser guardrails for government use and are trained to better analyze classified information.The company said the models it’s announcing “are already deployed by agencies at the highest level of U.S. national security,” and that access to those models will be limited to government agencies handling classified information. The company did not confirm how long they had been in use.Claude Gov models are specifically designed to uniquely handle...
Google on Thursday announced an update to its Gemini 2.5 Pro preview model that the company claims is better at certain programming tasks. The company’s calling it an “updated preview,” building on the upgrade to Gemini 2.5 Pro that Google announced around a month ago. Google says the model will roll out in general availability […]
X has updated its developer agreement to add a new restriction on using posts on the platform to train AI. The updated policy, spotted earlier by TechCrunch, says developers can’t use content from X or its API to “fine-tune or train a foundation or frontier model.”The policy change could set up X to make AI training deals with third-party companies, similar to the deal Reddit struck with Google. Reddit, which has a similar policy to block AI crawlers, sued Anthropic on Wednesday over claims the company’s AI crawlers accessed the site more than 100,000 times since July 2024. Elon Musk’...
Of all the many ways Microsoft could mark its 50th anniversary, I wasn't expecting the software maker to launch a magazine. "It's our answer to a timely question: How do we earn trust and hold attention in an age of scroll and skim? How do we create Signal in a world of noise?" asks Frank Shaw, Microsoft's chief communications officer.Microsoft's response to a world of people doomscrolling on X and TikTok is a print magazine that you can thumb through in peace and quiet. The first issue of Signal is 120 pages with a focus on AI, both as a topic and, to a small degree, a means of production...
Today, I’m talking with Runway CEO and cofounder Cris Valenzuela. This one’s special: Cris and I were live at an event in New York City last month hosted by Alix Partners, so you’ll hear the audience in the background from time to time.Runway is one of the leading AI video generation platforms. The basic concept is familiar by now: you start with a reference image — either something you’ve created using Runway’s own model or something you upload — you type in a prompt, and Runway spits out a fully formed video sequence.But what’s most interesting to me about Runway is that while...
Anthropic says that it has released a new set of AI models tailored for U.S. national security customers. The new models, a custom set of “Claude Gov” models, were “built based on direct feedback from our government customers to address real-world operational needs,” writes Anthropic in a blog post. Compared to Anthropic’s consumer- and enterprise-focused […]
Social network X has changed its developer agreement to prevent third parties from using the platform's content to train large language models.
Early bipedal robots from Amazon partner Agility Robotics (pictured) were pitched for package delivery tasks.Future Amazon orders may be delivered to your door by a humanoid robot workforce. The Information reports that Amazon is developing AI software that will enable robots to operate as package delivery workers that are ferried around in Rivian electric vans, and will soon be ready to start real-world testing at a new facility.Citing an anonymous source “involved in the effort,” The Information says that Amazon has almost finished constructing an indoor “humanoid park” at one of the...
In a Bloomberg interview tonight, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai pushed back against concerns that AI could eventually make half the company’s 180,000-person workforce redundant. Instead, Pichai stressed the company’s commitment to growth through at least next year. “I expect we will grow from our current engineering phase even into next year, because it allows us […]
Despite what some experts have characterized as an environment increasingly hostile to AI R&D, North America continues to receive the bulk of AI venture dollars, according to data from investment tracker PitchBook. Between February and May of this year, VCs poured $69.7 billion into North America-based AI and machine learning startups across 1,528 deals. That’s […]
It’s becoming a little easier to build sophisticated robotics projects at home. AI dev platform Hugging Face released earlier this week an open AI model for robotics called SmolVLA. Trained on “compatibly licensed,” community-shared datasets, SmolVLA outperforms much larger models for robotics in both virtual and real-world environments, Hugging Face claims. “SmolVLA aims to democratize […]
The US Department of Commerce has renamed its AI Safety Institute to the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), shifting its focus from overall safety to combating national security risks and preventing “burdensome and unnecessary regulation” abroad. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick announced the change on June 3rd, calling the agency’s overhaul a way to “evaluate and enhance US innovation” and “ensure US dominance of international AI standards.”The AI Safety Institute was announced in 2023 under former President Joe Biden, part of a global...
No thank you.Glance AI, a brand owned by mobile advertising company InMobi, has announced a partnership with the Samsung Galaxy Store to roll out its e-commerce platform to Galaxy phones in the US. The company’s app centers around what it calls “a Generative AI shopping platform,” which is a serious contender for the most cursed phrase I’ve read today. The “experience” comprises both a standalone app and a lock screen component to try and sell you clothes. Crucially, the whole thing is “fully opt-in,” which, thank Christ. But even if you opt out — which you absolutely should...
Microsoft's LinkedIn CEO, Ryan Roslansky, is taking on an expanded role at the software maker as the head of Office. Announced in an internal memo from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the move is part of an AI shakeup that also sees Charles Lamanna and the business and industry Copilot (BIC) team move closer to the Microsoft 365 Copilot side of the company, reporting up to Rajesh Jha, Microsoft's head of experiences and devices.Roslanksy will now lead the Office, Outlook, and the Microsoft 365 Copilot app teams in his role as executive vice president of Office, reporting to Rajesh Jha for his new...
Meta has revealed more information about Aria Gen 2, its experimental smart glasses designed to serve as a test platform for research about augmented reality, AI, and robotics. The glasses pack several improvements into their lightweight frame that could one day translate into consumer products, including an improved eye-tracking system that can track gaze per eye, detect blinks, and estimate the center of pupils.“These advanced signals enable a deeper understanding of the wearer’s visual attention and intentions, unlocking new possibilities for human-computer interaction,” Meta writes...
Reddit is suing Anthropic for allegedly using the site’s data to train AI models without a proper licensing agreement, according to a complaint filed in a Northern California court on Wednesday. Reddit claims in the complaint that Anthropic’s unauthorized use of the site’s data for commercial purposes was unlawful, and alleges the AI startup violated […]
CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told the crowd at London SXSW that his company plans to balance employees and AI workers.
AMD’s latest acquisition could help reduce Nvidia’s market dominance when it comes to AI hardware. Semiconductor giant AMD on Wednesday announced it acquired AI software optimization startup Brium. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Brium is a startup that appears to be in stealth mode. The startup builds machine learning applications to enable AI […]
Snap has launched a standalone Lens Studio iOS app and web tool, the company announced on Wednesday. The new tools are designed to make it easier for anyone to create AR Lenses through text prompts and simple editing tools. With the Lens Studio app, users will be able to do things like generate their own […]
Snapchat has been experimenting with generative AI-powered augmented reality lenses in its app for the last couple years. Now, the company is allowing users to make their own with a new standalone app for making AR effects.Snap is introducing a new version of its Lens Studio software that allows anyone to create AR lenses through text prompts and other simple editing tools, and publish them directly to Snapchat. Up to now, Lens Studio has only been available as a desktop app meant for developers and AR professionals. And while the new iOS app and web version aren't nearly as powerful, it offers...
Aravind Srinivas says agents need access to apps and claims that letting OpenAI take control of Chrome would be a disaster for the open Web.
Google is delaying the rollout of its “Ask Photos” feature for about two weeks, Google Photos product manager Jamie Aspinall wrote on X. According to Aspinall, the product isn’t up to par when it comes to latency, quality, and user experience. While some users have access to the feature now, he said that a new […]
Figma is launching a new tool that can help AI models more effectively translate designs into fully coded applications. The product design company is giving LLMs and agentic coding tools like Copilot in VS Code and Claude Code more context about how designs are created in Figma via a new Dev Mode Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which is rolling out in beta for users with Dev or Full seat Figma access.The MCP server is a developer tool that allows AI models to directly tap into data from Figma, such as precise figures used in graphs or the exact color shades used in a design, instead of...
The Washington Post could soon allow non-professional writers to submit opinion columns using an AI writing coach known as Ember, according to a report from The New York Times. The move is reportedly part of a broader initiative to open the paper to outside opinion pieces, including from other publications, Substack writers, and amateur columnists.Sources tell the Times that Ember “could automate several functions normally provided by human editors,” including by offering a “story strength” tracker that indicates how a piece is progressing. The tool also reportedly has a sidebar showing...
Journaling app Rosebud has raised $6 million in seed funding as it seeks to flesh out its app as an AI mentor for self-reflection and personal growth.
Windsurf, the popular vibe coding startup that’s reportedly being acquired by OpenAI, said Anthropic significantly reduced its first-party access to the highly popular AI models Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan said in a post on X that Anthropic gave Windsurf little notice for this change, and the startup now […]
Anthropic has given its AI a blog. A week ago, Anthropic quietly launched Claude Explains, a new page on its website that’s generated mostly by the company’s AI model family, Claude. Populated by posts on technical topics related to various Claude use cases (e.g. “Simplify complex codebases with Claude”), the blog is intended to be […]
Google’s AI-powered notetaking app, NotebookLM, now lets you share your notebooks with classmates, coworkers, or students using a public link. Though viewers can’t edit what’s in your notebook, they can still use it to ask questions and interact with AI-generated content like audio overviews, briefings, and FAQs.First launched as an experiment in 2023, NotebookLM has become a breakout hit for Google. The app is designed to help you understand material from a variety of sources, such as notes, documents, presentation slides, and even YouTube videos. It can provide AI-generated summaries of...
If you're still waiting on access to Google's AI-driven Ask Photos feature, you'll need to hold tight a little longer. Jamie Aspinall, a product manager for Google Photos, chimed in to a conversation on X to address some complaints about the feature. "Ask Photos isn't where it needs to be, in terms of latency, quality and ux," Aspinall wrote. He said the rollout was being paused "at very small numbers" and that a new version of Ask Photos is slated to ship in about two weeks.I hear you both. Ask Photos isn't where it needs to be, in terms of latency, quality and ux. Rollout...
Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio is launching a nonprofit AI safety lab called LawZero to build safer AI systems, he told the Financial Times on Monday. LawZero raised $30 million in philanthropic contributions from Skype founding engineer Jaan Tallinn, former Google chief Eric Schmidt, Open Philanthropy, and the Future of Life Institute, among others. The […]
For better or worse, Fortnite will let creators make NPCs that ditch the script and go freestyle. A new tool in the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) will allow developers to create their own generative AI-powered NPCs. Their voice types, delivery styles and personality traits are all customizable.Epic demoed the tech on Tuesday during its "State of Unreal" keynote. The company said the NPC generated its responses in real-time during the presentation. It was created using "about 20 lines" of prompt text.The demoed character, Mr. Buttons, was created solely to persuade the player to press a...
Google is pausing the rollout of its AI-powered “Ask Photos” feature within Google Photos, which has been slowly expanding since last fall. “Ask Photos isn’t where it needs to be,” wrote Jamie Aspinall, a product manager for Google Photos, in a post on X responding to criticism, citing three factors: latency, quality, and user experience. The experimental feature is powered by Google’s “most capable” Gemini AI models. Specifically, it’s a specialized version of its Gemini models that are “only used for Ask Photos,” according to Google. View LinkAspinall said...
An aging nuclear power plant that has been on the verge of shuttering since 2017 has a new lease on life after Meta agreed to support its operations for the next 20 years. Meta and energy company Constellation announced the deal today, which helps the plant expand its operations while Meta uses it to try to shrink its carbon footprint. It’s the latest in a flood of recent partnerships between Big Tech and the nuclear energy industry, and part of a larger strategy Meta has in the works to bring more nuclear reactors online that can power AI data centers. The plant, called the Clinton...
TikTok is rolling out AI-powered Smart Keyword Filters to allow people to limit content they don’t want to see on their For You page, the company announced on Tuesday. While TikTok already allows users to use keyword filters to restrict specific content from appearing in their feeds, the new Smart Keyword filters will use AI […]
Last week, Chinese lab DeepSeek released an updated version of its R1 reasoning AI model that performs well on a number of math and coding benchmarks. The company didn’t reveal the source of the data it used to train the model, but some AI researchers speculate that at least a portion came from Google’s Gemini […]
Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference is from June 9 to 13 this year, and the company has a lot to answer for. Apple Intelligence hasn't exactly lived up to its original pitch, but, at its WWDC keynote presentation at 1PM ET / 10AM PT on June 9, the company has the chance to make the case for why that might not matter. You can tune in right here once the livestream kicks off to see that and lots of announcements tied to macOS, iOS, iPadOS and all the company's other platforms. One way Apple could reportedly smooth over any ill feelings about AI is by completely redesigning its operating...
Epic Games is going to allow Fortnite creators to make AI-powered NPCs that work similar to the recently-launched AI Darth Vader. The company showed off the tech at its State of Unreal show on Tuesday.Using the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), creators can make characters with personalities that they can voice chat with. Creators will be able to set the type of voice, their delivery, and the AI NPC’s characteristics when the feature is available later this year.In a live demo shown onstage at the event, two Epic staffers showed a conversation with an AI character, “Mr. Buttons,” whose...
Pet health data, now available at your wrist.Smart pet tech company Fi’s new AI collar allows dog owners to monitor their pooch’s movements, health, and habits via their Apple Watch. The Fi Series 3 Plus launched on Monday with new behaviour detection features, Apple Watch app integration, and improved GPS tracking compared to its predecessor.Fi says the Series 3 Plus can capture “meaningful changes in a dog’s behavior” with 80 percent accuracy. In addition to steps and sleep tracking, the new collar monitors for barking, licking, scratching, eating, and drinking habits to flag...
Good news to anyone living in the European Economic Area (EEA): Microsoft is toning down its "pick me" energy in order to further comply with the Digital Markets Act. The company has announced updates that notably include Microsoft Edge no longer begging to be your default browser. However, if you open the AI-powered browser, the guilt trip will return for the time being. This change should already be available, rolling in with an Edge update released on Thursday, May 29. On top of that, you should no longer get pestered by other apps to reinstall Microsoft Edge if you choose to remove it...
The FDA has launched the generative AI tool, Elsa, agency-wide to help its employees with everything from clinical reviews to investigations. Sure, we're living in a time of widespread disinformation and pushbacks against science, but why not rush things through with AI?Elsa — yes, weirdly like the snow queen from Frozen — completed a "very successful pilot program with FDA’s scientific reviewers." According to the FDA, the AI tool can help with reading, writing and summarizing everything from adverse events to assessments. Elsa can also do label comparisons and generate code. It's...
DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg’s venture fund WndrCo co-led a $15.5 million Series A round for Creatify, an AI video ad platform. Creatify’s AdMax platform uses AI to quickly generate dozens of video advertisements, which are geared toward social media marketing — AdMax analyzes high-performing social video campaigns on apps like TikTok and Instagram to shape […]
Microsoft Bing announced today that it is introducing the Bing Video Creator to its app, which uses OpenAI’s Sora model to let users generate videos from text prompts. OpenAI, which has a longstanding partnership with Microsoft, has locked down access to Sora‘s video generation for paying customers only. Its integration in Microsoft Bing represents the […]
The rebooted version of social site Digg aims to bring back the spirit of the old web.
A platform for chatting and roleplaying with AI-generated characters, Character.AI announced on Monday that it is rolling out a slate of multimedia features. These features include AvatarFX, Character.AI’s video-generation model, plus Scenes and Streams, which allow users to use these AI tools to create videos using their characters and then share them on a new […]
Remember Google Glass and the reign of the “glasshole”? Well, Google’s giving face tech another shot with Android XR glasses that look like actual glasses this time.
Salesforce has quietly snapped up Moonhub, a startup building AI to vet and hire talent. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. In a post on Moonhub’s website on Monday, the company said that its entire Menlo Park, California-based team will be joining Salesforce, an early investor in Moonhub. “As a customer and investor, Salesforce […]
Microsoft's sustainability goals are imperiled by its push into AI and cloud services.
IBM on Monday said that it has acquired Seek AI, an AI platform that allows users to ask questions about enterprise data using natural language, for an undisclosed sum. Seek CEO and founder Sarah Nagy said that the startup’s technology will be a key part of Watsonx AI Labs, IBM’s new NYC-based AI accelerator, which […]
Billionaire Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, is reportedly launching a $300 million share sale that values the company at $113 billion. The secondary stock offering, which comes after xAI acquired Musk’s social media platform, X, for $33 billion, will allow staff to sell shares to new investors. The tender offer will likely precede a larger […]
Millions of people are now using ChatGPT as a therapist, career advisor, fitness coach, or sometimes just a friend to vent to. In 2025, it’s not uncommon to hear about people spilling intimate details of their lives into an AI chatbot’s prompt bar, but also relying on the advice it gives back. Humans are starting […]
Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment are in talks to license their work to AI startups Udio and Suno, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The deals would set forth a framework for how AI companies compensate artists for their work. The record labels are pushing to receive a small […]
Samsung is in investment talks with Perplexity that would see the Korean firm incorporating the AI company's tech into its devices, Bloomberg reported.
Tiger Global-backed data labeling startup Scale AI has hired the team behind remote developer hiring platform Scale AI.
Laurene Powell Jobs (left) said that Ive’s design process is a “wondrous thing to behold.” | Image: Getty ImagesThe mysterious AI gadget being created by OpenAI and former Apple design chief Jony Ive has been given the thumbs up from Laurene Powell Jobs. In a new interview published by The Financial Times, the two reminisce about Jony Ive’s time working at Apple alongside Powell Jobs’ late husband, Steve, and trying to make up for the “unintentional” harms associated with those efforts.“Many of us would say we have an uneasy relationship with technology at the moment...
The bitter row over how to protect artists in the artificial intelligence age returns to the Lords.
Generative AI comes in many forms. Increasingly, though, it’s marketed the same way: with human names and personas that make it feel less like code and more like a co-worker. A growing number of startups are anthropomorphizing AI to build trust fast — and soften its threat to human jobs. It’s dehumanizing, and it’s accelerating. […]
Elad Gil started betting on AI before most of the world took notice. By the time investors began grasping the implications of ChatGPT, Gil had already written seed checks to startups like Perplexity, Character.AI, and Harvey. Now, as the early winners of the AI wave become clearer, the renowned “solo” VC is increasingly focused on […]
In “The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future,” Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey examines our AI-obsessed moment through one of its key figures — Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI. Hagey begins with Altman’s Midwest childhood, then takes readers through his career at startup Loopt, accelerator Y Combinator, […]
An AI-powered system could soon take responsibility for evaluating the potential harms and privacy risks of up to 90% of updates made to Meta apps like Instagram and WhatsApp, according to internal documents reportedly viewed by NPR. NPR says a 2012 agreement between Facebook (now Meta) and the Federal Trade Commission requires the company to […]
Last week, Google quietly released an app that lets users run a range of openly available AI models from the AI dev platform Hugging Face on their phones. Called Google AI Edge Gallery, the app is available for Android and will soon come to iOS. It allows users to find, download, and run compatible models […]
Venture capitalist Mary Meeker just dropped a 340-page report to describe the speed at which AI is being developed, adopted, spent on, and used.
Google’s AI assistant, Gemini, is gaining a more prominent place in your inbox with the launch of email summary cards, which will appear at the top of your emails. The company announced Thursday that users would have to tap an option to summarize an email with AI. However, the AI will now automatically summarize the […]
There's a running theory in tech circles that says, basically, AI is the new UI. Not long from now, some people argue, you simply won't need a homescreen full of app icons or a traditional web browser or really anything other than an interface to an AI assistant and agent that accomplishes everything on your behalf. Is that the actual future, absurd AI boosterism, or something in between? Who knows! But the ranks of the AI believers seem to grow every day.Apple, however, appears poised to go… a different way. On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay and David discuss some of the rumors...
This week we're fielding your burning tech questions, as well as diving into a bunch of AI web browser news. Opera has started testing its fully agentic AI browser, the Browser Company is dumping the Arc browser in favor of something AI related and Mozilla is getting in a bit of hot water with experimental AI preview summaries. Try as we might, we just can't escape AI.Subscribe!iTunesSpotifyPocket CastsStitcherGoogle PodcastsTopicsListener Mailbag: How to set up an Xbox account for your kids, will screens be obsolete, and more – 1:34Web browsers go AI ‘agentic’: The Browser...
The White House says a “formatting issue” was behind the citation errors. | Image: Demetrius Freeman / Getty ImagesThere are some questionable sources underpinning Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s controversial “Make America Healthy Again” commission report. Signs point to AI tomfoolery, and the use of ChatGPT specifically, which calls into question the veracity of the White House report meant to address reasons for the decline in US life expectancy.An investigation by NOTUS found dozens of errors in the MAHA report, including broken links, wrong issue numbers, and missing or...
Google has fixed a bug that led AI Overviews to say it's 2024 when it was asked if this year is 2025.
Another great streaming deal has hit the internet: one year of Peacock Premium is only $25 right now. Just use the code SPRINGSAVINGS at checkout to get $55 off the standard annual price of the Premium plan. Just note that this tier does include ads, and the deal only runs through May 30. Peacock is a decent platform and made our list of the best streaming services. It doesn't get the attention of Netflix or Disney+, but it's home to several nifty original shows. There's the AI-adjacent tomfoolery of Mrs. Davis and the Rian Johnson-made whodunnit Poker Face. It also airs several video game...
Gemini will now summarize select email threads without you asking.Google Workspace users are going to see a lot more of Gemini’s efforts to summarize their emails. Gmail now creates summaries automatically for complex threads, and they’ll appear above the emails themselves.AI-powered summaries of emails have been found in Google Workspace accounts since last year, but until now you’ve had to manually trigger them. Instead, Google’s AI will now decide for itself when a summary might be helpful, generating them without asking for “longer email threads or messages with several replies...
AI dev platform Hugging Face continued its push into robotics on Thursday with the release of two new humanoid robots. The company announced a pair of open-source robots, HopeJR and Reachy Mini. HopeJR is a full-size humanoid robot that has 66 actuated degrees of freedom, or 66 independent movements, including the ability to walk and […]
AI Mode excels at tasks like product research for online shopping. But it falls short on basic web searches.
Black Forest Labs, the AI startup whose models once powered the image generation features of X’s Grok chatbot, on Thursday released a new suite of image-generating models — some of which can both create and edit pics. The most capable of the models in the new family, called Flux.1 Kontext, can be prompted with text […]
Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine gunning for Google, on Thursday released Perplexity Labs, a tool for subscribers to Perplexity’s $20-per-month Pro plan that can craft reports, spreadsheets, dashboards, and more. Perplexity Labs is available on the web, iOS, and Android, and coming soon to Perplexity’s apps for Mac and Windows. “Perplexity Labs can help you […]
DeepSeek’s updated R1 reasoning AI model might be getting the bulk of the AI community’s attention this week. But the Chinese AI lab also released a smaller, “distilled” version of its new R1, DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B, that DeepSeek claims beats comparably-sized models on certain benchmarks. The smaller updated R1, which was built using the Qwen3-8B model Alibaba […]
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s newest AI model, an updated version of the company’s R1 reasoning model, achieves impressive scores on benchmarks for coding, math, and general knowledge, nearly surpassing OpenAI’s flagship o3. But the upgraded R1, also known as “R1-0528,” might also be less willing to answer contentious questions, in particular questions about topics the […]
Meta AI now has one billion monthly active users across its apps, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the company’s annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday, as first reported by CNBC. The new milestone doubles the 500 million monthly active users Meta AI had back in September 2024. The “focus for this year is deepening the experience […]
The New York Times has struck a multi-year AI licensing deal with Amazon that will bring its “editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,” the outlet announced on Thursday. Under the agreement, Amazon will include summaries and short excerpts of The Times’ content in products like Alexa, and will also use Times articles to help train its AI models.The deal comes over a year after The Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement, accusing the companies of “copying and using millions” of its articles to train their AI models, while depriving the...
Nearly two years after suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, The New York Times has agreed to license its editorial content to Amazon to train the tech giant’s AI platforms.
Google’s latest Drive features can give Workspace users more information about the videos they’ve saved. A Gemini AI feature that summarizes documents and PDFs in Google Drive is now expanding to video files, allowing users to gain insights about what’s in the video without having to watch it themselves.The Gemini in Drive feature provides a familiar chatbot interface that can provide quick summaries describing the footage or pull specific information. For example, users can ask Gemini to list action items mentioned in recorded meetings or highlight the biggest updates and new products in...
NVIDIA and AMD will soon begin selling new GPUs made for AI workloads in China to comply with US chip export restrictions.
Horizon3.ai, a cybersecurity startup that provides tools like autonomous penetration testing, is seeking to raise $100 million in a new funding round and has locked down at least $73 million, the company revealed in an SEC filing this week. NEA led the round, according to two people familiar with the deal. One person said that […]
Let’s face it: Dyson is better known for vacuum innovation than for selling budget-friendly products. Thankfully, the Dyson 360 Vis Nav — the company’s first robot vacuum in more than a decade — is now available from Amazon, Best Buy, Target, and Dyson for around $799.95 ($200 off), which is easily the best price we’ve seen.For some people, the 360 Vis Nav’s short battery life, missing AI-powered obstacle avoidance, and lack of an auto-empty dock are real deal breakers — something our own resident smart home reviewer, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, was quick to point out in her...
Chinese startup DeepSeek has released an updated version of its R1 reasoning AI model on the developer platform Hugging Face after announcing it in a WeChat message Wednesday morning. The updated R1, which is under a permissive MIT license, meaning it can be used commercially, is a “minor” upgrade, according to DeepSeek’s WeChat announcement. The […]
Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference is from June 9 to 13 this year, and the company has a lot to answer for. Apple Intelligence hasn't exactly lived up to its original pitch, but Apple will have its WWDC keynote presentation at 1PM ET / 10AM PT on June 9 to make the case for why that might not matter. You can tune in right here once the livestream kicks off to see that and lots of announcements tied to macOS, iOS, iPadOS and all the other platforms the company manages.One way Apple could reportedly smooth over any ill feelings about AI is by completely redesigning its operating...
Odyssey, a startup founded by self-driving pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, has developed an AI model that lets users “interact” with streaming video. Available on the web in an “early demo,” the model generates and streams video frames every 40 milliseconds. Via basic controls, viewers can explore areas within a video, similar to a […]
The redesign adds new AI features, Reimagine and Auto Frame, which were previously only available on Pixel devices.
Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings is joining Anthropic’s board of directors, the company announced on Wednesday. Hastings’ appointment adds a veteran big tech executive to one of OpenAI’s largest — and youngest — competitors in the AI race. The Netflix co-founder seems likely to help Anthropic grow from a startup into a major company, pulling from […]
AMD has acquired Enosemi, a startup designing custom materials to support silicon photonics product development. The terms of the deal, announced Wednesday, weren’t disclosed. Silicon photonics uses light — photons — to transmit data, offering a faster and more efficient alternative to traditional electrical communication. AMD and other chipmakers have shown an increasing interest in the […]
The UI redesign focuses on putting more of Google’s AI editing tools in front of users.Google Photos is being overhauled with more AI features that help users quickly edit their images without requiring advanced skills or professional apps. The redesigned Photos editor puts several AI editing tools — including two generative AI Magic Editor features that were only available on Pixel devices — in one place, alongside helpful suggestions on which tool to use.With this update, Google Photos is expanding the availability of AI-powered automatic framing and text-to-image Reimagine features...
AI companies have recently been experimenting with interactive, AI-generated worlds. There's an AI-generated version of Quake. An AI-generated Minecraft. Google DeepMind is also building a team to develop models that "simulate the world." Now, an AI startup backed by Pixar cofounder Edwin Catmull is trying to put its own spin on the idea - something it calls "interactive video," which it's letting people experience as part of a research preview that's available today.The startup, called Odyssey, describes interactive video on its website as "video you can both watch and interact with, imagined...
AI-powered office suite Context raises $11 million in seed funding from Lux Capital, Qualcomm Ventures and General Catalyst
Rillet directly pulls data from their customers' banks and platforms to generate financial statements, including the balance sheet and income statement.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov on Wednesday said Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, is investing $300 million worth of cash and equity in the chat app.
Another great streaming deal has hit the internet: one year of Peacock Premium is only $25 right now. Just use the code SPRINGSAVINGS at checkout to get $55 off the standard annual price of the Premium plan. Just note that this tier does include ads, and the deal runs through May 30. Peacock is a decent platform and made our list of the best streaming services. It doesn't get the attention of Netflix or Disney+, but it's home to several nifty original shows. There's the AI-adjacent tomfoolery of Mrs. Davis and the Rian Johnson-made whodunnit Poker Face. It also airs several video game...
One UI 8 includes updates to Quick Share and the Reminder app.Samsung has launched its beta test of One UI 8, the company’s customized take on Android 16. The beta is available now on the Galaxy S25, Plus, and Ultra — though strangely not the new S25 Edge — for users in the US, UK, Germany, and South Korea.Unsurprisingly, Samsung is emphasizing the OS update’s AI features, which purportedly include improved multimodal capabilities and more personalization. Despite that, the company’s announcement and update changelog are light on specific details of AI upgrades beyond speed...
The latest web browser coming to Opera’s roster embraces AI agents that aim to use the internet for you. The Norwegian tech company describes Opera Neon as an “agentic browser” that has contextual awareness and performs tasks on the users’ behalf, including researching, building, and designing whatever you need.“We’re at a point where AI can fundamentally change the way we use the internet and perform all sorts of tasks in the browser,” Opera senior AI product director Henrik Lexow said in the company’s press release. “Opera Neon brings this to our users’ fingertips.”A...
Humain, the state-owned AI company from Saudi Arabia, is reportedly on track to launch a $10 billion venture fund, Humain Ventures.
Now, the company's AI personnel will be assigned to an AI products team, or an AGI Foundations unit. No jobs appear to have been cut.
If and when AI will start replacing human labor has been the subject of numerous debates. While it’s still hard to say with certainty if AI is beginning to take over roles previously done by humans, a recent survey from the World Economic Forum found that 40% of employers intend to cut staff where AI […]
WordPress announced on Tuesday that it has formed an AI team to steward the development of AI products among its developer community. The team includes James LePage (leader of AI at Automattic, WordPress’ parent company), Felix Arntz and Pascal Birchler from Google, and Jeff Paul (Director of Open Source at web design firm 10up). As […]
Salesforce has acquired cloud data management firm Informatica in an $8 billion equity deal, marking a major move in its push to strengthen its AI and data infrastructure capabilities. The announcement, made Tuesday, comes about a year after early rumors of the acquisition sent both companies’ stock prices sliding. At the time, Informatica denied it […]
The Browser Company has stopped active development of the popular Arc web browser, according to a blog post from CEO Josh Miller. There will still be updates to fix security issues and the like, but there will likely be no new features added to the product.Miller says that "for most people, Arc was simply too different, with too many new things to learn, for too little reward." He also said that the browser "lacked cohesion, in both its core features and core value." Instead, the company has shifted focus to a new product called Dia, which is an AI-powered browser of some kind. Dia...
The Browser Company has said repeatedly that it’s not getting rid of the Arc browser as it moves onto its new AI-centric Dia browser. But what the company also not going to do is develop new features for it. A new blog post from CEO Josh Miller explains why, and what happens next.The Arc browser was a big rethink of what browsers should be like, and it has dedicated users, including yours truly. But a lot of the reasons for ceasing Arc’s development that Miller gives in the blog — like that it’s too complicated to go mainstream, that it was slow and unstable at times (true!), or that...
Memorial Day weekend might be over but the sales have kept coming. Current deals include an all-new low price on the Samsung Galaxy S25, which is down to $685 from $860. The 20 percent discount is available on the 256GB model in either Silver Shadow or Mint. Samsung released the Galaxy S25 smartphone early this year alongside the S25+, Edge and Ultra. We gave it an 82 in our review thanks to its improved Gemini AI experience and new high-powered processor. It also offers 28 hours of battery life, a four hour improvement from its predecessor. Our biggest quip with the Samsung Galaxy...
The Browser Company is pivoting away from the Arc Browser to focus on developing a new, AI-powered browser called Dia.
It’s not your imagination, graduating seniors. The tech industry’s pullback from entry-level hiring has reached concerning levels. LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer, Aneesh Raman, warned in The New York Times last week that “bottom rung of the career ladder” is “breaking” as AI eliminates traditional stepping-stone positions. The numbers are eye-opening: hiring of new grads […]
A full year of Peacock Premium is on sale right now for $25 as part of a Memorial Day promotion. This is $55 off the typical price of $80. Just enter SPRINGSAVINGS at checkout. The promotion is live until May 30. This is the ad-supported version. Peacock is a decent platform and made our list of the best streaming services. It doesn't get the attention of Netflix or Disney+, but it's home to several nifty original shows. There's the AI-adjacent tomfoolery of Mrs. Davis and the Rian Johnson-made whodunnit Poker Face. It also airs several video game adaptations, like Knuckles and the surprisingly...
As policy makers in the UK weigh how to regulate the AI industry, Nick Clegg, former UK deputy prime minister and former Meta executive, claimed a push for artist consent would “basically kill” the AI industry.Speaking at an event promoting his new book, Clegg said the creative community should have the right to opt out of having their work used to train AI models. But he claimed it wasn’t feasible to ask for consent before ingesting their work first.“I think the creative community wants to go a step further,” Clegg said according to The Times. “Quite a lot of voices say...
We thought it would be helpful to put together a glossary with definitions of some of the most important words and phrases that we use in our articles.
Another great streaming deal has hit the internet: one year of Peacock Premium is only $25 right now. Just use the code SPRINGSAVINGS at checkout to get $55 off the standard annual price of the Premium plan. Just note that this tier does include ads, and the deal runs through May 30. Peacock is a decent platform and made our list of the best streaming services. It doesn't get the attention of Netflix or Disney+, but it's home to several nifty original shows. There's the AI-adjacent tomfoolery of Mrs. Davis and the Rian Johnson-made whodunnit Poker Face. It also airs several video game...
The newly signed Take It Down Act makes it illegal to publish nonconsensual explicit images – real or AI-generated – and gives platforms just 48 hours to comply with a victim’s takedown request or face liability. While widely praised as a long-overdue win for victims, experts warn its vague language, lax standards for verifying claims, and tight compliance window could pave the way for overreach, censorship of legitimate content, and even surveillance.
These boots were not made for walking, but you can use AI to make them do it anyway.Even at first glance, there's something off about the body on the street. The white sheet it's under is a little too clean, and the officers' movements are totally devoid of purpose. "We need to clear the street," one of them says with a firm hand gesture, though her lips don't move. It's AI, alright. But here's the kicker: my prompt didn't include any dialogue.Veo 3, Google's new AI video generation model, added that line all on its own. Over the past 24 hours I've created a dozen clips depicting news reports...
Venture capitalists have always focused on investing in companies that leverage technology to either disrupt established industries or create entirely new business categories. But some VCs are starting to flip the script on their investing styles. Rather than funding startups, they are acquiring mature businesses –such as call centers, accounting firms, and other professional service […]
The Google I/O keynote may have been all about AI, but there were a handful of other meaningful updates that didn’t make it to the main stage. In addition to updates coming to Google Wallet, the company’s developer sessions also revealed handy features that will roll out to smartwatches, the Google Play Store, and Google TV.Here are some of the updates Google didn’t highlight during the keynote.Live Updates are coming to your smartwatchGoogle is preparing to bring Live Updates — a feature that lets users track the status of certain activities in delivery, rideshare, and navigation apps...
Last week, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok experienced a “bug” that made it tell users about the “white genocide” conspiracy theory in South Africa, even when prompted with questions that had nothing to do with the topic… and soon after, Grok expressed skepticism over the Holocaust death toll, which it chalked up to a “programming […]
One of Microsoft’s latest AI models can accurately predict air quality, hurricanes, typhoons, and other weather-related phenomena, the company claims. In a paper published in the journal Nature and an accompanying blog post this week, Microsoft detailed Aurora, which the tech giant says can forecast atmospheric events with greater precision and speed than traditional meteorological […]
Discord is entering its second decade as a company and seeking to go public. Along the way, it’s changed the way that online communities interact, turning groups that may have previously existed as forums or message boards into multi-channel instant message servers. Now, everything finds a home on Discord, whether it’s an AI platform like […]
Apple is reportedly looking to release a pair of smart glasses by the end of next year in a bid to compete with Meta’s AI-powered glasses, the Ray-Ban Meta. Apple’s wearable will have all the components one would expect in smart glasses, including a camera and microphone, and will have the ability to analyze what’s […]
Here's what we know: it's probably not smart glasses. Beyond that, we don't know much about what Jony Ive and OpenAI are building through their newly combined company io, except that it's some kind of AI super-gadget. But after a couple of years of watching the industry try and shove AI into every form factor you can imagine, we have some guesses.On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay and David are joined by The Verge's Alex Heath to talk through all the things we know, kind of know, and don't know at all about what io is up to. There's some interesting reporting on the notion of the device as...
Google I/O 2025 happened earlier this week, and while there was no new hardware to speak of, the company barraged developers with new AI announcements, search features and bafflingly pricy subscriptions.First up is the new AI Mode chatbot in search. AI Mode handles more complex queries than traditional search, somewhere between striking up a chat with Gemini and barreling into a traditional Google search. You could, for example, compare multiple cars you’re considering buying or parse travel options for your next big vacation.AI Mode can simulate how you might look in a new piece of clothing...
Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of Google DeepMind, says that “we’re quite close” to human-level artificial intelligence. After that, all bets are off.
Discord has become the place for gaming communities on the internet. The company just celebrated its 10th anniversary, and its impact is now big enough that it's available directly on PlayStation and Xbox and was ripped off by Nintendo for the Switch 2's GameChat.But as it tries to grow, one of the big challenges Discord faces is that, for big or longer-running communities, it can be hard to know where to start, hard to catch up to the speed of real-time conversations, and hard to sift through the potentially huge amounts of conversations and channels. A lot of communities used to form around...
After Klarna CEO, Zoom's CEO opts to use AI avatar for initial comments during the earnings call
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei believes today’s AI models hallucinate, or make things up and present them as if they’re true, at a lower rate than humans do, he said during a press briefing at Anthropic’s first developer event, Code with Claude, in San Francisco on Thursday. Amodei said all this in the midst of a […]
Tech company CEOs aren’t just making their companies AI-first: this week, they’re using AI avatars to replace themselves in earnings calls.Buy now, pay later company Klarna featured the AI version of CEO and co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski in an 83-second about its Q1 2025 results, as reported by TechCrunch. The video’s description says that his “AI avatar” is presenting the results, and the AI avatar kicks off the video by saying that “it’s me, or rather, my AI avatar.” Klarna has already been vocal about how it uses AI in its business, with Siemiatkowski telling...
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that Apple aims to release smart glasses by the end of 2026. This product would be equipped with cameras, microphones and speakers so that a wearer could interact with the Siri voice assistant. The glasses would also support activities such as listening to music, taking phone calls or hearing step-by-step directions to a location.Apple has long been working toward an end goal of true augmented reality glasses, but it has faced several hurdles in getting its AI endeavors to parity with other rivals. We're expecting a lot of AI announcements during WWDC...
Anthropic’s new flagship AI model, Claude Opus 4, is a strong programmer and writer, the company claims. When talking to itself, it’s also a prolific emoji user. That’s according to a technical report Anthropic released on Thursday, a part of which investigates how Opus 4 behaves in “open-ended self-interaction” — i.e. essentially having a chat […]
The mystery is the point, but it’s also indicative of where AI hardware is.The last 48 hours have been a wild rollercoaster ride for AI hardware. On Tuesday, Google ended its I/O keynote - a roughly two-hour event with copious references to AI - with its vision for Android XR glasses. That included flashy partnerships with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker, as well as the first hands-on opportunity with its prototype glasses for the developers and the majority of tech media alike. On the ground, it was among the buzziest things to come out of Google I/O - a glimpse of what Big Tech thinks is...
The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that House Republicans narrowly passed early Thursday would strip state legislatures of AI oversight and scale back consumer protection and climate initiatives while funding border surveillance, among many other provisions.The budget reconciliation bill still needs to be approved by the Senate, where some Republicans have voiced concerns with aspects of the text. But with President Donald Trump pushing for its passage into law, they could face an uphill battle in fighting for changes.Here are some of the key tech and science provisions in the House version...
Notepad’s new Write feature uses generative AI to create content for you based on a prompt. | Image: MicrosoftMicrosoft is now testing a new feature in Notepad that can generate text for you using AI. It’s part of a Windows 11 update being released to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels with Copilot Plus PCs. The update also includes new AI-powered features for Paint like a sticker generator, and improvements to the Snipping Tool that can automatically crop and resize screenshots based on what you’re selecting.Notepad’s new Write feature can be used to “quickly draft...
A third-party research institute that Anthropic partnered with to test one of its new flagship AI models, Claude Opus 4, recommended against deploying an early version of the model due to its tendency to “scheme” and deceive. According to a safety report Anthropic published Thursday, the institute, Apollo Research, conducted tests to see in which […]
Meta is beginning to test showing 3D photos on Instagram if you’re looking at your feed on a Meta Quest VR headset.“Thanks to our AI view synthesis algorithms, we can transform the existing photos that show up in Instagram feed pixel by pixel – no fancy 3D cameras required,” Meta says in a blog post. “That means flat photos that weren’t originally captured in 3D will automatically be converted into an immersive format that gives 2D images a sense of depth when you view them on Quest.”The test starts this week. “Not everyone will have access to 3D Instagram photos on Quest...
Anthropic’s newly launched Claude Opus 4 model frequently tries to blackmail developers when they threaten to replace it with a new AI system and give it sensitive information about the engineers responsible for the decision, the company said in a safety report released Thursday. During pre-release testing, Anthropic asked Claude Opus 4 to act as […]
As Donald Trump pens deals in the Middle East, the gulf nation opens a research lab in San Francisco.
The company already has more than 12 gigawatts of capacity in its renewable power portfolio.
With access to Gemini-powered features on Nest Cams like this one, app developers could tap into more advanced automations.Google is bringing Gemini intelligence to its Home APIs, allowing smart home developers and manufacturers to tap into Gemini’s AI-powered features and potentially making your smart home a lot, well, smarter. The company announced the news in a blog post during the Google I/O developers conference this week.Last summer, Google added several new Gemini-powered capabilities to its own platform, and now it’s extending those to others. This includes access to AI-powered...
The team behind Vercel’s V0, an AI-powered platform for web creation, has developed an AI model it claims excels at certain website development tasks. Available through an API, the model, called “v0-1.0-md,” can be prompted with text or images, and was “optimized for front-end and full-stack web development,” the Vercel team says. Currently in beta, […]
Amazon is testing a new feature that involves AI-generated hosts talking through product summaries. It looks fairly similar to Google’s audio overviews, which also include AI-generated hosts that seem plucked from a middling podcast.Amazon says that these "AI shopping experts help save time by compiling research and providing product highlights for customers from product pages, reviews and insights." This leads me to an obvious question. Amazon is notorious for hosting fake reviews. Some studies suggest that fake reviews account for more than 40 percent of the sum total. Do these AI hosts...
At I/O 2025, nothing Google showed off felt new. Instead, we got a retread of the company's familiar obsession with its own AI prowess. For the better part of two hours, Google spent playing up products like AI Mode, generative AI apps like Jules and Flow, and a bewildering new $250 per month AI Ultra plan.During Tuesday's keynote, I thought a lot about my first visit to Mountain View in 2018. I/O 2018 was different. Between Digital Wellbeing for Android, an entirely redesigned Maps app and even Duplex, Google felt like a company that had its pulse on what people wanted from technology...
When you select “hear the highlights,” a playback bar will appear at the bottom of the screen. | Image: AmazonAmazon is testing new AI-generated audio summaries that will let you listen to two AI “hosts” chat about a product’s features. Along with product details, the AI audio clips also draw information from user reviews and information from the web.The feature is currently available for select products on Amazon’s mobile app, including the Ninja Blender, OSEA Undaria Algae Body Oil, SHOKZ OpenRun Pro, and the SafeRest Waterproof Mattress Protector. You can try it out by hitting...
Another great streaming deal has hit the internet: one year of Peacock Premium is only $25 right now. Just use the code SPRINGSAVINGS at checkout to get $55 off the standard annual price of the Premium plan. Just note that this tier does include ads, and the deal runs through May 30. Peacock is a decent platform and made our list of the best streaming services. It doesn't get the attention of Netflix or Disney+, but it's home to several nifty original shows. There's the AI-adjacent tomfoolery of Mrs. Davis and the Rian Johnson-made whodunnit Poker Face. It also airs several video game...
We still don’t know for sure what Ive and Altman are building together, but it isn’t glasses or a phone.The mysterious device that OpenAI is cooking up with former Apple designer Jony Ive will be pocket-size, contextually aware, screen-free, and isn’t eyewear. Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed details about the project in an internal staff call reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, after announcing the $6.5 billion acquisition of Ive’s AI hardware startup, io.Altman suggested that the acquisition could increase OpenAI’s value by $1 trillion, and envisioned a “family of devices...
OpenAI pushed generative AI into the public consciousness. Now, it could be developing a very different kind of AI device. According to a WSJ report, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees Wednesday that the company’s next major product won’t be a wearable. Instead, it will be a compact, screenless device, fully aware of its user’s […]
Other than AI Siemiatkowski admission, it wasn't obvious that this was AI. There were only a few subtle signs.
The News/Media Alliance took aim at Google today after the tech company's announcement at its I/O showcase that AI Mode will be rolling out to all US search users. This feature more closely integrates an AI chatbot into Google search. Ostensibly, AI Mode can help people get better answers to their queries, but it also serves to keep users on a Google property rather than clicking through to get information from other publications."Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue. Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the...
A lawsuit against Google and companion chatbot service Character AI — which is accused of contributing to the death of a teenager — can move forward, ruled a Florida judge. In a decision filed today, Judge Anne Conway said that an attempted First Amendment defense wasn’t enough to get the lawsuit thrown out. Conway determined that, despite some similarities to videogames and other expressive mediums, she is “not prepared to hold that Character AI’s output is speech.”The ruling is a relatively early indicator of the kinds of treatment that AI language models could...
The trade association backing some of the biggest news publishers in the US slammed Google’s newly expanded AI Mode, which trades traditional search results for an AI chatbot-like interface. In a statement on Wednesday, the News/Media Alliance said the new feature is “depriving” publishers of both traffic and revenue.During Google I/O on Tuesday, the company announced that it’s expanding AI Mode to all users in the US, which appears in a new tab directly within Search. When users enter a query, AI Mode serves up an AI-generated response alongside a list of relevant links. “Links...
Google announced a new SynthID Detector tool at Google I/O that lets you check if content has been made with the assistance of Google’s AI tools.In a blog post, Google DeepMind’s Pushmeet Kohli describes SynthID Detector as “a verification portal” that can “quickly and efficiently identify AI-generated content made with Google AI.” It’s also able to “highlight which parts of the content are more likely to have been watermarked with SynthID.”SynthID watermarks are applied to AI-generated images, text, audio, and videos, including content generated by Google’s Gemini, Imagen...
While announcing a reportedly $6.5 billion team-up on AI hardware between his startup, io, and OpenAI, Jony Ive spoke to Bloomberg and commented on last year’s attempts at making AI hardware happen, the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin:There have been public failures as well, such as the Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit R1 personal assistant device. “Those were very poor products,” said Ive, 58. “There has been an absence of new ways of thinking expressed in products.”Our initial reviews certainly backed up Ive’s impression, as David Pierce said the Pin “doesn’t work,” and called the...
LM Arena, a crowdsourced benchmarking project that major AI labs rely on to test and market their AI models, has raised $100 million in a seed funding round that values the organization at $600 million, according to Bloomberg. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and UC Investments, which manages an investment portfolio for the University of California, led the […]
Famed Apple product designer Jony Ive will now lead creative and design work at OpenAI, the result on an usual deal announced on Wednesday. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Ive have been working on an AI device that will move consumers beyond screens for roughly two years, according to The Wall Street Journal. “Thrilled to […]
Meta is launching a new program to incentivize startups to adopt its Llama AI models. The program, Llama for Startups, provides companies “direct support” from Meta’s Llama team, as well as funding in certain cases. Any U.S.-based firm that is incorporated, has raised less than $10 million in funding, has at least one developer on […]
OpenAI is buying io, a hardware company founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive, the two companies announced on Wednesday.“We gathered together the best hardware and software engineers, the best technologists, physicists, scientists, researchers and experts in product development and manufacturing,” Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a joint post. “Many of us have worked closely for decades. The io team, focused on developing products that inspire, empower and enable, will now merge with OpenAI to work more intimately with the research, engineering and product teams in San...
OpenAI said it was buying io, a start-up founded by Mr. Ive, the designer of the iPhone, to usher in a new era of artificial intelligence hardware.
Publishers have to opt out of Search entirely to avoid their content being used in AI Overviews.Google didn’t want to give publishers the choice to keep their content out of AI Search results because it’s “evolving into a space for monetisation.” That’s according to a newly disclosed internal document spotted by Bloomberg, which reveals that Google had discussed offering publishers more granular control over how website data would be used in AI Search features instead of the illusion of choice they eventually received.The document, written by Google Search executive Chetna Bindra, was...
Just a few weeks after the U.S. and China made significant steps to de-escalate the growing trade war between the two countries, tensions are flaring again — this time over semiconductors. China’s Commerce Ministry in Beijing released a statement on Wednesday that threatened legal action against anyone who enforces U.S. export restrictions on Huawei’s AI chips, […]
Amazon is testing short-form AI-powered audio product summaries on select product pages, the company announced on Wednesday. The audio summaries are voiced by what Amazon calls “AI-powered shopping experts” that discuss key product features, customer reviews, and information from across the web. The new AI product summaries can be accessed by tapping the “Hear the […]
An increasing number of meetings have an AI note-taker present that transcribes the call and provides action items. Siro wants to do the same for sales folks who are on the ground and talking to customers face-to-face. The company on Wednesday announced it has secured $50 million in Series B round led by SignalFire with […]
Google’s AI search results are about to get even more ads. On May 21st, the company announced that it’s going to start testing ads in AI Mode, the new AI-powered search feature that just rolled out to everyone in the US.AI Mode is the new tab in Google Search that opens an AI chatbot-like interface, where you can get a rundown of what you’re searching for, along with links to relevant websites. But these answers could soon have product recommendations and other ads.As an example, Google says if a user asks AI Mode for tips on how to build a website, the feature will surface a step-by-step...
AI startup Mistral on Wednesday announced a new AI model focused on coding: Devstral. Devstral, which Mistral says was developed in partnership with AI company All Hands AI, is openly available under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially without restriction. Mistral claims that Devstral outperforms other open models like Google’s Gemma […]
AMD has announced its latest Zen 5-based Ryzen Threadripper 9000 Series of CPUs at Computex today. The 9000 Series and 9000 WX-Series are built for the demanding workstation market, and the top Threadripper Pro 9995WX will ship with 96 cores and 192 threads.This flagship Threadripper chip is designed for professionals who are working on visual effects, simulations, and AI model development. The Threadripper Pro 9995WX also has up to 384MB of L3 cache and 128 lanes of PCIe Gen 5, making it ideal to pair with multiple GPUs.AMD claims that the Threadripper Pro 9995WX is 2.2x faster than Intel’s...
Google used news from its I/O developer conference this year to show what NotebookLM can do. The AI-powered research and note-taking tool has been around for years, but the company has infused it with more and more features as its AI tech improved. To demonstrate those features, Google created a notebook filled with news from I/O 2025, including a YouTube video of the keynote (complete with a transcript of the whole event), press releases, blog posts and even product demonstrations. You can visit all of those one by one, since the company uploaded them as sources to the notebook, but you can...
Protesters outside Microsoft’s Build conferenceMicrosoft’s head of security for AI, Neta Haiby, accidentally revealed confidential messages about Walmart’s use of Microsoft’s AI tools during a Build talk that was disrupted by protesters. The Build livestream was muted and the camera pointed down, but the session resumed moments later after the protesters were escorted out. In the aftermath, Haiby then accidentally switched to Microsoft Teams while sharing her screen, revealing confidential internal messages about Walmart’s upcoming use of Microsoft’s Entra and AI gateway...
At yesterday’s I/O conference, Google announced plans to start putting its AI chatbot, Gemini, in a variety of different places, including cars. Today, Volvo said it was shoving its way to the front of the line to be the first to receive the new tech. Volvo said it was expanding its preexisting partnership with Google — the Swedish automaker was one of the first to adopt the built-in Android Automotive operating system for its vehicles — to include the integration of Gemini across its model lineup. Drivers will be able to have more “natural” conversations about their car, including...
Google says it will commit up to $150 million to the consumer eyewear company Warby Parker to jointly develop AI-powered smart glasses based on Android XR, the companies said on Tuesday during Google I/O 2025. Google has already committed $75 million to Warby Parker’s product development and commercialization costs, the companies said in a press […]
Here in sunny Mountain View, California, I am sequestered in a teeny tiny box. Outside, there's a long line of tech journalists, and we are all here for one thing: to try out Project Moohan and Google's Android XR smart glasses prototypes. (The Project Mariner booth is maybe 10 feet away and remarkably empty.)While nothing was going to steal AI's spotlight at this year's keynote - 95 mentions! - Android XR has been generating a lot of buzz on the ground. But the demos we got to see here were notably shorter, with more guardrails than what I got to see back in December. Probably, because unlike...
If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to showcase your newest innovation to a massive AI community, this is it! You have until this Friday, May 23 at 11:59 p.m. PT, to secure one of the few remaining exhibit tables at TechCrunch Sessions: AI and position your brand at the center of the conversation […]
Google just wrapped up its big keynote at I/O 2025. As expected, the keynote was chock-full of AI-related announcements, ranging from updates across Google’s image and video generation models, to new features in Search and Gmail.But there were some surprises too, like a new AI filmmaking app and an update to Project Starline. If you didn’t catch the event live, you can check out everything you missed in the roundup below.Google’s AI Mode for Search is coming to everyoneGoogle has announced that it’s rolling out AI Mode, a new tab that lets you search the web using the company’s Gemini...
The tech giant is taking its next big step in artificial intelligence by adding interactive capabilities to its flagship product.
At I/O today, Google pitched creators on a new app for "AI filmmaking": Flow. Combining all of Google’s recent announcements and developments across AI-powered services, including Veo (video), Imagen (images) and Gemini, the company bills Flow as a storytelling aid ‘built with creatives.” If it sounds familiar, this is the advanced version of VideoFX, previously a Google Labs experiment.It says it’s aimed at helping storytellers to explore ideas and create clips and scenes, almost like storyboards and sketches in motion. Google’s generally impressive Veo 2 model seems to form the core...
Google has begun rolling out AI Mode to every Search user in the US. The company announced the expansion during its I/O 2025 conference. Google first began previewing AI Mode with testers in its Labs program at the start of March. Since then, it has been gradually rolling out the feature to more people, including in recent weeks regular Search users.For the uninitiated, AI Mode is a chatbot built directly into Google Search. It lives in a separate tab, and was designed by the company to tackle more complicated queries than people have historically used its search engine to answer. For instance...
Google announced during Google I/O 2025 that it’s rolling out Project Mariner, the company’s experimental AI agent that browses and uses websites, to more users and developers. Google also says it’s significantly updated how Project Mariner works, allowing the agent to take on nearly a dozen tasks at a time. U.S. subscribers to Google’s new […]
Google's Chrome browser is the latest major product from the company to get its own built-in Gemini features. Today at Google I/O, the company detailed its plans to bring its AI assistant to Chrome.While Gemini can already distill information from websites, having the assistant baked into Chrome allows it to provide insights and answer questions about your open tabs without ever having to move to a different window or application. Instead, Gemini lives in a new menu at the top of your browser window as well as in the taskbar.The company envisions its assistant as being able to help out with...
Google announced several updates to the Gemini AI chatbot app during Google I/O 2025, including more broadly available multimodal AI features, updated AI models, and deeper integrations with Google’s suite of products. Starting Tuesday, Google is rolling out Gemini Live’s camera and screen-sharing capabilities to all users on iOS and Android. The feature, powered by […]
As part of its announcements for I/O 2025 today, Google shared details on some new features that would make shopping in AI Mode more novel. It's describing the three new tools as being part of its new shopping experience in AI Mode, and they cover the discovery, trying on and checkout parts of the process. These will be available "in the coming months" for online shoppers in the US. The first update is when you're looking for a specific thing to buy. The examples Google shared were searches for travel bags or a rug that matches the other furniture in a room. By combining Gemini'...
As part of this year's announcements at its I/O developer conference, Google has revealed its latest media generation models. Most notable, perhaps, is the Veo 3, which is the first iteration of the model that can generate videos with sounds. It can, for instance, create a video of birds with an audio of their singing, or a city street with the sounds of traffic in the background. Google says Veo 3 also excels in real-world physics and in lip syncing. At the moment, the model is only available for Gemini Ultra subscribers in the US within the Gemini app and for enterprise users on Vertex AI...
One of the new AI features that Google has announced for Search at I/O 2025 will let you discuss what it's seeing through your camera in real time. Google says more than 1.5 billion people use visual search on Google Lens, and it's now taking the next step in multimodality by bringing Project Astra's live capabilities into Search. With the new feature called Search Live, you can have a back-and-forth conversation with Search about what's in front of you. For instance, you can simply point your camera at a difficult math problem and ask it to help you solve it or to explain a...
Google is enhancing Gemini's text-to-speech (TTS). On Tuesday at Google I/O 2025, the company previewed a new TTS feature, built on native audio output, that can "converse in more expressive ways."Google’s Tulsee Doshi showed a quick demo of the Gemini 2.5 TTS models onstage in Mountain View. It showed an AI-powered voice that sounds more natural and less robotic, with subtler nuances.The TTS can converse in over 24 languages, switching between them seamlessly. The demo showed the model beginning in English, shifting to Hindi, and then circling back to English. They all used the same...
Google just touted some big numbers regarding its AI Overviews feature during its I/O conference. On the stage, company CEO Sundar Pichai said that the service has 1.5 billion monthly users. That's around 18 percent of the total human population of planet Earth, give or take.For the remaining 82 percent of humanity, AI Overviews are those little recaps that appear at the top of Google queries. These primarily appear when the search engine is asked a question, with the company saying they only show up for more complex questions, where the systems recognize that they're helpful beyond...
Late last year Google announced its new extended reality ecosystem, Android XR, designed to go up against Meta Quest and Apple's Vision Pro. Along with that it introduced the first device, Samsung's Project Moohan, a virtual reality-style headset. Now as part of Google I/O, Xreal has unveiled Project Aura, the second official Android XR device. Rather than being a full headset, it's a pair of lightweight see-through "tethered" glasses powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. It incorporates Google's Gemini AI and will deliver both optical see-through (OST) and virtual...
Apple is planning to open up the large language models that power Apple Intelligence AI features so developers can use them in their own apps, reports Bloomberg. According to its sources, Apple will start by opening up its smaller on-device models via a software development kit for third-party access, similar to the Gemini Nano AI APIs that Google is expected to launch for developers during today’s Google I/O event, as reported by Android Authority.Third-party developers could already use limited features of Apple Intelligence, including integration of AI Writing Tools such as summaries and...
Google I/O starts today, and would you believe it? They’re going to talk about AI.After getting everything Android out of the way in last week’s dedicated Android Show, we’re expecting today’s I/O developer conference keynote to be one big AI show. Gemini, Project Astra, and everything in between are likely to be the focus as Google tries to prove it’s the biggest player in the industry.Android XR is also set to get a mention, with the promise of new demos and more details. We’re hoping that includes closer looks at Google’s prototype smart glasses and...
Last year at Google I/O, one of the most interesting demos was Project Astra, an early version of a multimodal AI that could recognize your surroundings in real-time and answer questions about them conversationally. While the demo offered a glimpse into Google's plans for more powerful AI assistants, the company was careful to note that what we saw was a "research preview."One year later though, Google is laying out its vision for Project Astra to one day power a version of Gemini that can act as a "universal AI assistant." And Project Astra has gotten some important upgrades to help the...
Google is bringing an “Agent Mode” to the Gemini app and making some updates to its Project Mariner tool, CEO Sundar Pichai announced at Google I/O 2025.Project Mariner, Google’s AI agent tool that can search the web for you, can now oversee up to 10 simultaneous tasks, Pichai said. Pichai also shared details on a feature called Teach and Repeat. “This is where you can show your task once, and it learns a plan for similar tasks in the future.” Project Mariner will be available “more broadly” this summer, he said.With Agent Mode in the Gemini app, you’ll be able to...
Protesters outside Microsoft’s Build developer conference.Microsoft’s Build developer conference has been interrupted by a protester for the second day in a row. Microsoft’s head of CoreAI, Jay Parikh, was on stage discussing the company’s Azure AI Foundry efforts when a Palestinian tech worker interrupted his keynote to protest against Microsoft’s contracts with the Israeli government.“Jay! My people are suffering!” said the unnamed tech worker. “Cut ties! No Azure for apartheid! Free, free Palestine!”The developer was quickly escorted out of the keynote, while he was...
Gmail’s smart replies, which suggest potential replies to your emails, will be able to pull information from your Gmail inbox and from your Google Drive and better match your tone and style, all with help from Gemini, the company announced at I/O. The improvements build on Google’s “contextual” upgrade to smart replies it introduced last year. That change allowed responses to be longer than before, meaning smart replies could be more than a short “Sounds good!” But they could still only bring in information from the Gmail thread you were in. With the changes announced today, smart...
Meet will translate what you say in near real-time.Google is bringing speech translation to Meet. During I/O on Tuesday, Google revealed a new Gemini-powered feature that can translate what you say into your conversation partner’s preferred language.Google says the AI-generated translation will preserve the sound of your voice, tone, and expression. In a demo shown by Google, an English speaker joins a call with a colleague who speaks Spanish. Once their colleague turns on Gemini’s speech translation, Meet begins dubbing over what they’re saying with an AI-generated English translation...
If you find Google's live translation tools useful, you'll soon be able to use them more naturally during video calls and meetings. The company announced today that it's bringing the feature to Google Meet. Starting this week, AI-powered, real-time Spanish translation will be available in the app. Google says more languages are on the way and that the technology is "very, very close to having a natural and free-flowing conversation." During a brief demo, live translation in Meet matched the speaker's tone and cadence, and was even able to channel expressions. There's no...
Google first teased Project Starline in 2021, billing it at the time as a "magic window" that uses special hardware, computer vision and machine learning to create an almost holographic video call experience. Since then, we've checked out an early version of the experiment for ourselves and learned last year that the company is teaming up with HP to bring a scaled-down version of the product to enterprise clients. At I/O 2025 today, Google announced that Project Starline "is evolving into an AI-first 3D video communication platform" called Beam. CEO Sundar Pichai said onstage that the first...
When you claim to have the world’s most powerful video intelligence platform, you probably know a thing or two about foundational models. We’re pleased to announce that Twelve Labs’ CEO, Jae Lee, will be joining us on the main stage at TechCrunch Sessions: AI, happening June 5th at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. One of the […]
Apple plans to release a new set of AI products and frameworks at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) this June, including tools that’ll let third-party developers create software using Apple AI models, per a Bloomberg report. Apple’s hope is that expanding its AI tech in this way will draw more attention — and users — […]
AI is evolving fast, and access to valuable insights and powerful networking shouldn’t be reserved for those who pay top dollar. We’re rolling back TechCrunch Sessions: AI ticket prices! Save up to $300 on your pass, and get an extra 50% off when you bring a +1. Learn from the brightest minds in AI and […]
The May 18th issue of the Chicago Sun-Times features dozens of pages of recommended summer activities: new trends, outdoor activities, and books to read. But some of the recommendations point to fake, AI-generated books, and other articles quote and cite people that don’t appear to exist.Alongside actual books like Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman, a summer reading list features fake titles by real authors. Min Jin Lee is a real, lauded novelist — but “Nightshade Market,” “a riveting tale set in Seoul’s underground economy,” isn’t one of her works. Rebecca Makkai, a...
Google is gearing up to hold its largest developer conference of the year, Google I/O 2025, on May 20 and May 21. CEO Sundar Pichai, DeepMind CEO and co-founder Demis Hassabis, and executives in charge of Search, Cloud, and Android will announce major updates to Google’s product offerings. We’re expecting Google I/O 2025 to focus […]
We’re thrilled to announce that Danielle Perszyk, the leader of Amazon AGI SF Lab’s human-computer interaction efforts, will be taking the main stage at TechCrunch Sessions: AI on June 5 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. The AGI SF Lab is at the forefront of developing foundational capabilities for AI agents that can operate in the […]
AI software company Builder.ai is entering insolvency proceedings, a company spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. The Microsoft-backed unicorn, which has raised more than $450 million in funding, rose to prominence for its AI-based platform that aimed to simplify the process of building apps and websites. According to the spokesperson, Builder.ai, also known as Engineer.ai Corporation, is […]
Manus, the once-buzzy AI agent platform, on Tuesday launched a plan aimed at small businesses and organizations. The plan, dubbed Manus Team, starts at $39 per seat per month with a five-seat minimum, totaling $195 per month. Each team gets 19,500 credits in a sharable pool, as well as access to certain features in beta, […]
Microsoft is starting to integrate AI shortcuts, or what it calls AI actions, into the File Explorer in Windows 11. These shortcuts let you right-click on a file and quickly get to Windows AI features like blurring the background of a photo, erasing objects, or even summarizing content from Office files.Four image actions are currently being tested in the latest Dev Channel builds of Windows 11, including Bing visual search to find similar images on the web, the blur background and erase objects features found in the Photos app, and the remove background option in Paint.Microsoft is also...
If you’ve been holding out for the latest 2025 PC models and graphics card loadouts, Computex is usually when you have to check your bank balance. The PC-centric tech show in Taiwan has kicked off with a barrage of new laptops from the likes of Razer, ASUS and Acer.ASUS has revealed the new ROG Zephyrus G14, with a 14-inch (of course) screen at 3K resolution, a refresh rate of 120Hz, 500 nits of peak brightness and Dolby Vision support. The G14 can be outfitted with up to an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor with 12 cores and 24 threads and an AMD XDNA NPU with up to 50 TOPS. The graphics card...
A cheaper plan is also available, but only to existing All Apps subscribers.Some of Adobe’s most expensive Creative Cloud subscriptions are about to get even pricier for users in North America. Starting from June 17th, the Creative Cloud All Apps plan will be renamed Creative Cloud Pro for users in the US, Canada, and Mexico, adding a bunch of generative AI perks in exchange for bumping up subscription costs.The pre-tax monthly price for individual Creative Cloud All Apps subscribers on an annual contract will increase from $59.99 to $69.99, or from $659.88 to $779.99 annually. The monthly...
ASUS is updating both its ProArt laptop and its Chromebooks with the latest internals for Computex 2025, and giving both families of laptops a more premium look, with new colors and tasteful finishes.The ASUS ProArt A16 stands out as the most premium pick, with a black aluminum body, "stealth" hinge that bring the top half of the laptop nearly flush with the bottom and a smudge-resistant finish that should hopefully avoid fingerprints. Inside, ASUS is offering an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX processor and a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU, both of which qualify the new ProArt as a Copilot+ PC. That...
MSI has revealed its latest iteration of its Claw PC gaming handheld — and this time, it’s powered by AMD. The company showed off the Claw A8 BZ2EM at Computex 2025, which comes with an AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip along with up to 24GB of DDR5 memory.That’s a bit less than the 32GB of memory that came with the Intel-equipped Claw 8 AI Plus released late last year, but it still has an 8-inch full HD display, a 120Hz refresh rate, and a 1TB M.2 SSD. The AMD-powered Claw A8 will also come in two colors: white and lime green.MSI had a bit of a rough start with the release of its original Claw...
Last year, Klarna announced a significant initiative to leverage its internally developed AI systems, powered by OpenAI, across its operations. This wasn’t empty talk for the buy now, pay later giant. The company not only ended its pricey contract with Salesforce CRM, but also curtailed its hiring efforts, allowing AI to do some of the […]
SAG-AFTRA, the organization that represents voice, motion, and screen performers, has filed an unfair labor complaint against Epic Games. The complaint stems from the company’s recent introduction of an AI programmed to sound like James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader that can respond to a player’s actions and questions.SAG-AFTRA wrote in a statement that it understands its members and members’ estates wish to use AI technology in any way they choose. “However,” SAG-AFTRA’s statement continued, “we must protect our right to bargain terms and conditions around uses of voice that replace...
President Donald Trump signed the Take It Down Act into law, enacting a bill that will criminalize the distribution of nonconsensual intimate images (NCII) — including AI deepfakes — and require social media platforms to promptly remove them when notified.The bill sailed through both chambers of Congress with several tech companies, parent and youth advocates, and first lady Melania Trump championing the issue. But critics — including a group that’s made it its mission to combat the distribution of such images — warn that its approach could backfire and harm the very survivors it...
Google’s NotebookLM app for Android is out now, as reported by 9to5Google, and is expected to launch for iOS and iPadOS on May 20th, according to the app’s App Store listing. The app appears to offer similar functionality to the desktop version of NotebookLM, including the ability to upload sources of information that the app can summarize. It can also make AI-generated, podcast-like Audio Overviews.With the app, you can listen to those Audio Overviews in the background while you’re doing other things on your phone or while offline, Google says. Might be a handy way to get caught up on...
Google has officially released the NotebookLM app for Android, a day before Google I/O 2025 and a day before the company said it would roll out. Since its launch in 2023, the AI-based note-taking and research assistant has only been accessible via desktop. Google has now made the service available on the go. The iOS app […]
Dell just announced the new Pro Max Plus laptop, which the company has stuffed with an enterprise-grade NPU. This makes it a top-tier choice for on-device AI applications.The Pro Max Plus features the Qualcomm AI 100 PC Inference Card, making it the "world's first mobile workstation with an enterprise-grade discrete NPU." This NPU offers 32 AI-cores and 64GB of memory. This is enough to directly handle the type of large AI models that typically require the cloud to run.DellWe don't know anything else regarding traditional specs, but we do know that this will be one of many Pro Max Plus...
A Microsoft employee disrupted the company’s Build developer conference in Seattle, Washington, this morning, protesting against the company’s cloud and AI contracts with the Israeli government. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had only been on stage for a matter of minutes before protesters started interrupting his speech, with one shouting “free Palestine!” Nadella continued his keynote, ignoring the protesters as they were escorted out of a hall inside the Seattle conference center.Microsoft employee Joe Lopez, who has spent the past four years working as a firmware engineer in the...
Facial recognition cameras ping cops when suspects appear, sparking backlash.
Microsoft's annual Build developer conference kicks off today and, as always, it starts with a keynote. You can watch the opening event live starting at noon Eastern time right here, with the embedded YouTube stream below. (It's also available on Microsoft's website, though you'd have to register and sign in.) Just like last year, the event will be hosted by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, along with the company's Chief Technology Officer, Kevin Scott. According to the keynote page, the executives will be sharing how "Microsoft is creating new opportunity across [its] platforms...
Microsoft’s annual developer conference kicks off today in Seattle, Washington, during the same week Google hosts its own I/O developer event in Mountain View, California. Build will be focused on Microsoft’s latest platform changes for developers, including new AI announcements that are bound to go head-to-head with Google’s own news.Microsoft is streaming Build online free of charge and developers, students, and engineers will also be able to attend the in-person event at Seattle’s conference center. I’m expecting Microsoft to focus largely on AI this year, with emphasis on its push...
Google I/O 2025: How to Watch and What to Expect CNETAndroid and Wear OS are getting a big refresh Google BlogGoogle goes maximalist with its new Material Design kit Fast CompanyGoogle I/O will be an AI show The VergeFloating toolbars are coming with Material 3 Expressive, but where are the bottom bars 9to5Google
Apple Intelligence has been a wreck since its first features rolled out last year, and a big new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman details why — and how Apple is trying to piece things back together. And much of its effort hinges on rebuilding Siri from the ground up.Gurman has reported in the past that Apple is working on what it’s internally calling ‘LLM Siri’ — a reworked, generative AI version of the company’s digital assistant. Apple’s previous approach of merging the assistant with the existing Siri hasn’t been working. Gurman describes in great detail a number of...
Grok, the AI-powered chatbot created by xAI and widely deployed across its new corporate sibling X, wasn’t just obsessed with white genocide this week. As first noted in Rolling Stone, Grok also answered a question on Thursday about the number of Jews killed by the Nazis in World War II by saying that “historical records, […]
Netflix will embrace AI-generated ads, whether we like it or not. The streaming service will roll out AI-generated ads in 2026 that will play in the middle of a show or whenever users hit pause for its ad-supported plans. During Netflix's Upfront event for its advertisers, Amy Reinhard, the company’s president of advertising, showed off the upcoming feature for interactive midroll and pause ads that use generative AI for custom content.We've come a long way since Netflix's origin story of mailing out DVDs starting in 1997 and transitioning to an ad-free streaming service. Now more...
Another great streaming deal has hit the internet: one year of Peacock Premium is only $25 right now. Just use the code SPRINGSAVINGS at checkout to get $55 off the standard annual price of the Premium plan. Just note that this tier does include ads, and the deal runs through May 30. Peacock is a decent platform and made our list of the best streaming services. It doesn't get the attention of Netflix or Disney+, but it's home to several nifty original shows. There's the AI-adjacent tomfoolery of Mrs. Davis and the Rian Johnson-made whodunnit Poker Face. It also airs several video game...
The Trump administration and congressional officials are scrutinizing a deal between Apple and Alibaba that would bring Alibaba-powered AI features to iPhones sold in China, according to The New York Times. Citing anonymous sources, the NYT says White House officials and members of the House Select Committee on China have asked Apple executives directly about […]
While Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says he likes podcasts, he might not actually be listening to them anymore. That tidbit comes towards the end of a longer Bloomberg profile of Nadella, with a focus on Microsoft’s AI strategy and its complicated relationship with OpenAI. To illustrate how much he uses the company’s Copilot AI assistant […]
Android is getting its biggest visual update in years, and rather than unveiling it for the first time at its big annual developer conference, Google announced Material Three Expressive at a pre-show event broadcast on YouTube the week before. If a major design language shift for the world's most popular mobile OS doesn't qualify as a headliner at I/O, then what does? You guessed it: AI.We expect Google to talk all about Gemini during I/O, which kicks off on Tuesday, and how it's improving it and bringing it to products in areas that consumers will see even more.If you've paid attention to the...
The Trump administration and congressional officials have raised concerns about a deal to put a Chinese company’s artificial intelligence on iPhones.
Sonali De Rycker, a general partner at Accel and one of Europe’s most influential venture capitalists, is bullish about the continent’s prospects in AI. But she’s wary of regulatory overreach that could hamstring its momentum. At a TechCrunch StrictlyVC evening earlier this week in London, De Rycker reflected on Europe’s place in the global AI […]
Meta’s building a new AI data center so massive in Louisiana that the local utility company has plans to construct three new gas-fired power plants to provide it with enough electricity. Now, advocates and lawmakers are pressing Meta for answers about how it’ll clean up pollution stemming from the data center’s energy consumption.Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, shot off a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday demanding answers about how much energy the data center would use and the greenhouse gas emissions...
OpenAI is poised to help develop a staggering 5-gigawatt data center campus in Abu Dhabi, positioning the company as a primary anchor tenant in what could become one of the world’s largest AI infrastructure projects, according to a new Bloomberg report. The facility would reportedly span an astonishing 10 square miles and consume power equivalent […]
It's still May, which means it's still Google time. After showing off Android's new look at The Android Show, the company still has its developer conference to check off the list. Google I/O 2025 is scheduled to start on May 20 at 1PM ET / 10AM PT, and Engadget will be covering it live, via a liveblog and on-the-ground reporting from our very own Karissa Bell.Google included some Gemini news in The Android Show — the AI is coming to Wear OS, Android Auto and Google TV — but artificial intelligence should still be the focus of the company's upcoming keynote. too. Expect news...
Grok, the chatbot operated by Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, was providing the responses about South Africa to unrelated questions.
AI startup Cohere has acquired Ottogrid, a Vancouver-based platform that develops enterprise tools for automating certain kinds of high-level market research. Sully Omarr, one of the founders of Ottogrid, announced the deal Friday in a post on X. He didn’t disclose the terms. Ottogrid will sunset its product, according to Omarr, but give customers “ample […]
Roughly a month after Moonvalley, a Los Angeles-based startup developing AI tools for video creation, said it secured $43 million in new funding, the company has raised more, according to a filing with the SEC. The filing, submitted Thursday, reveals that Moonvalley actually landed (so far) around $53 million total from a group of 14 unnamed […]
When Fortnite players meet Darth Vader in the game’s ongoing Star Wars event, they will be able to speak with the Sith Lord directly, and he’s going to respond with a voice that sounds exactly like James Earl Jones.Though Darth Vader has previously appeared as an NPC (and a battle pass skin) in Fortnite, Epic Games announced today that the character’s latest outing will be a bit different thanks to the use of AI. After finding and defeating Vader on the map, players can recruit him onto their teams and speak directly with him using Fortnite’s in-game audio chat functionality. And Vader...
Microsoft says it has found no evidence that the Israeli military has used its Azure and AI technology to harm Palestinian civilians or anyone else in Gaza. The software maker says it has “conducted an internal review and engaged an external firm,” to perform a review, after some Microsoft employees have repeatedly called on the company to cut its contracts with the Israeli government.Microsoft says that its relationship with the Israel Ministry of Defense (IMOD) is “structured as a standard commercial relationship,” and that it has “found no evidence that Microsoft’s Azure and...
Not the best publicity for Anthropic’s chatbot.Anthropic has responded to allegations that it used an AI-fabricated source in its legal battle against music publishers, saying its Claude chatbot made an “honest citation mistake.”An erroneous citation was included in a filing submitted by Anthropic data scientist Olivia Chen on April 30th, as part of the AI company’s defense against claims that copyrighted lyrics were used to train Claude. An attorney representing Universal Music Group, ABKCO, and Concord said in a hearing that sources referenced in Chen’s filing were a “complete...
In the early hours of May 14, xAI's chatbot Grok repeatedly gave X users responses that referred to claims about a "white genocide" in South Africa even if their inquiries had nothing to do about the subject. Now, in a statement posted on the social network, Elon Musk's AI company has explained that "an unauthorized modification" to Grok's prompt on X caused it to "provide a specific response on a political topic." It didn't say what had happened to the personnel involved in rolling out the rogue update. But it added that the modification violated its "internal policies and core...
xAI blamed an “unauthorized modification” for a bug in its AI-powered Grok chatbot that caused Grok to repeatedly refer to “white genocide in South Africa” when invoked in certain contexts on X. On Wednesday, Grok began replying to dozens of posts on X with information about white genocide in South Africa, even in response to […]
On Thursday, Windsurf, a startup that develops popular AI tools for software engineers, announced the launch of its first family of AI software engineering models, or SWE-1 for short. The startup says it trained its new family of AI models — SWE-1, SWE-1-lite, and SWE-1-mini — to be optimized for the “entire software engineering process,” […]
The morning after Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X), reporters encountered two men with boxes outside the company’s headquarters. One introduced himself as recently laid-off Twitter engineer “Rahul Ligma.” His real name is Rahul Sonwalker but the prank went viral. He piled on his character’s notoriety when he went to the Bahamas to […]
Microsoft's Washington layoffs hit coders hardest as the tech giant embraces AI.
A lawyer representing Anthropic admitted to using an erroneous citation created by the company’s Claude AI chatbot in its ongoing legal battle with music publishers, according to a filing made in a Northern California court on Thursday. Claude hallucinated the citation with “an inaccurate title and inaccurate authors,” Anthropic says in the filing, first reported […]
Netflix is working on a new type of ad that will use AI to let advertisers “marry” their product with the streaming service’s shows and movies. This may sound like Warner Bros. Discovery’s plan to turn its IP into commercials, but during Netflix’s Upfront event on Wednesday, the company demonstrated an example that placed the image of a product over a background inspired by one of its shows, like Stranger Things.If you’re on Netflix’s ad-supported plan, that means you might see an ad that blends in with the show you’re watching, whether it’s Bridgerton or Wednesday...
The Ray-Ban Meta glasses are getting an upgrade to better help the blind and low vision community. The AI assistant will now provide "detailed responses" regarding what's in front of users. Meta says it'll kick in "when people ask about their environment." To get started, users just have to opt-in via the Device Settings section in the Meta AI app.The company shared a video of the tool in action in which a blind user asked Meta AI to describe a grassy area in a park. It quickly hopped into action and correctly pointed out a path, trees and a body of water in the distance. The AI...
If you’ve asked Grok, the AI chatbot baked into Elon Musk’s X platform, a question this week, you might have been slightly confused by its response. In what appears to have been some kind of bug that has since been addressed, the AI model was giving responses to users that repeatedly referred to claims about a "white genocide" in South Africa, even when it had nothing to do with the question it was given.X users have been posting screenshots of various responses they have received from Grok when asking about, for example, HBO’s recent name change, or Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Max...
A new feature launching in the US and Canada makes the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses more descriptive about what you’re looking at. | Image: MetaMeta announced two new features designed to assist blind or low vision users by leveraging the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses’ camera and its access to Meta AI. The news came as part of Global Accessibility Awareness Day.Rolling out to all users in the US and Canada in the coming weeks, Meta AI can now be customized to provide more detailed descriptions of what’s in front of users when they ask the smart assistant about their environment. In a short...
Microsoft is shutting off access to its Bing Search results for third-party developers. The software maker quietly announced the change earlier this week, noting that Bing Search APIs will be retired on August 11th and that “any existing instances of Bing Search APIs will be decommissioned completely, and the product will no longer be available for usage or new customer signup.”This abrupt removal of the Bing Search APIs will impact third-party app developers and rival search engines that tap into Microsoft’s search results to power their services. Microsoft is now recommending that...
Harvey AI is in discussions to raise more than $250 million in a funding round led by Kleiner Perkins and Coatue that would value it at $5 billion, Reuters reported
Music-sharing platform SoundCloud is saying it “has never used artist content to train AI models,” and that it’s “making a formal commitment that any use of AI on SoundCloud will be based on consent, transparency, and artist control.” The update comes several days after artists reported that changes made last year to its terms of use could mean it reserved the right to use their music and other content to train generative AI tools.“The language in the Terms of Use was too broad and wasn’t clear enough. It created confusion, and that’s on us,” writes SoundCloud CEO Eliah Seton....
In just under a week, Google's annual developer conference will kick off on May 20. The event is probably the most important on the company's calendar, offering a glimpse at everything it has been working on over the past year. From the rumors and even information Google has trickled out, I/O 2025 should be one of the more exciting tech keynotes this year. Plus, for the first time, Google has spun out a dedicated Android showcase planned a whole week earlier. That just happened yesterday (May 13), and you can check out everything that was announced at the Android Show or go to our...
SoundCloud is updating its Terms of Use again after angering users with language around AI that even the company now describes as "too broad." The details of the change were shared in an open letter from SoundCloud CEO Eliah Seton affirming the company's commitment to artists.Specifically, SoundCloud's Terms of Use now forbids the company from using content uploaded to SoundCloud to train generative AI that replicates an artist without their consent. As it's phrased in the new terms SoundCloud is rolling out in the next few weeks:We will not use Your Content to train generative AI...
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok appeared to experience a bug on Wednesday that caused it to reply to dozens of posts on X with information about genocide in South Africa, even when the user didn’t ask anything about the subject. The strange responses largely came from the X account for Grok, which replies to users […]
Grok, the AI model from Elon Musk’s xAI, was sending strange responses to people on X earlier on Wednesday. In responses to a number of people, Grok focused on debunking claims of white genocide in South Africa – even when tagged into a post about totally unrelated topics.Check out this thread to get an idea of what was going on. One person posted a video of a cat in a sink reacting to droplets from a faucet. New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac tagged Grok and asked “is this true.” Here is Grok’s reply:The claim of white genocide in South Africa is highly contentious and lacks...
OpenAI has launched a new web page called the safety evaluations hub to publicly share information related to things like the hallucination rates of its models. The hub will also highlight if a model produces harmful content, how well it behaves as instructed and attempted jailbreaks. The tech company claims this new page will provide additional transparency on OpenAI, a company that, for context, has faced multiple lawsuits alleging it illegally used copyrighted material to train its AI models. Oh, yeah, and it's worth mentioning that The New York Times claims the tech company...
Martha Wells’ book series uses wry humor to tell a story about artificial intelligence, humanity, and free will. The Apple TV+ adaptation tries to do the same—with mixed results.
Paladin Capital Group’s Nazo Moosa sat down with Mike Butcher at StrictlyVC London to discuss scaling innovative companies at the intersection of cybersecurity, AI, and resilience. She discussed how she’s driving purposeful investments that shape a secure and sustainable digital future
Nine years ago, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton sent shockwaves through medicine by declaring it “just completely obvious” that AI would make radiologists extinct in short order. Fast forward and the specialists — who do more than analyze images — are thriving, observes The New York Times. In fact, the field is experiencing explosive growth amid […]
SoundCloud says it’s revising its terms after widespread backlash over a clause related to AI model training. Earlier this year, SoundCloud quietly updated its usage policies, adding wording that many users interpreted as legal cover to allow the company to train AI on audio uploaded to its platform. SoundCloud was quick to assert that it wasn’t […]
OpenAI is moving to publish the results of its internal AI model safety evaluations more regularly in what the outfit is pitching as an effort to increase transparency. On Wednesday, OpenAI launched the Safety Evaluations Hub, a webpage showing how the company’s models score on various tests for harmful content generation, jailbreaks, and hallucinations. OpenAI […]
AI startup Stability AI has released Stable Audio Open Small, a “stereo” audio-generating AI model that the company claims is the fastest on the market — and efficient enough to run on smartphones. Stable Audio Open Small is the fruit of a collaboration between Stability AI and Arm, the chipmaker that produces many of the […]
Marvel's long-awaited Ironheart series premieres June 24 on Disney+. We also finally have a legitimate trailer, which looks gritty and fun. This should come as no surprise, as Black Panther and Sinners director Ryan Coogler is on board as an executive producer.The show follows Riri Williams, who was first introduced in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. She's a mechanical genius in the vein of Tony Stark who also builds her own armored suit. Iron Man. Ironheart. Get it? In the comics, it's an AI version of Stark that suggests the name, but we doubt Robert Downey Jr's new contract...
OpenAI is reportedly considering building data centers in the United Arab Emirates to greatly expand its Middle East footprint. A deal could be announced as soon as this week, according to Bloomberg. As Bloomberg notes, OpenAI has a long relationship with the UAE. In 2023, the company partnered with Abu Dhabi’s AI firm G42, which […]
Gemini, Google’s AI-powered chatbot, can now connect to GitHub — for users subscribed to the $20-per-month Gemini Advanced plan, that is. As of Wednesday, Gemini Advanced customers can directly add a public or private codebase on GitHub to Gemini to allow the chatbot to generate and explain code, debug existing code, and more. Users can […]
Enterprises want access to new software and AI tools but can’t risk sending their sensitive data out to a third-party software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. Tensor9 looks to help software companies land more enterprise customers by helping them deploy their software directly into a customer’s tech stack. Tensor9 converts a software vendor’s code into the format needed […]
Trump (center) and Jensen Huang (lower level, far right) seen posing with the Saudi royal family and other US tech leaders at a Saudi-US business investment forum. | Image: Win McNamee / Getty ImagesNvidia’s efforts to suck up to the Trump administration have seemingly paid off, with the US now lifting export limits on US-made AI chips and cracking down on anyone using Huawei’s emerging alternatives. The announcements come as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang joined President Trump in Saudi Arabia this week to solicit AI investments for US companies.The US Department of Commerce (DOC) announced on...
The technology's success sorting comments on cosmetic surgery paves the way for its wider use, the government says.
We’re excited to announce a big surprise for the AI community — TechCrunch Sessions: AI is getting a limited-time discount to broaden the number of people who can attend and learn from some of the brightest minds in the industry. For just $292, you can get a general admission ticket — plus a 50% discount […]
Google is testing a redesign of its Search homepage in which “AI Mode,” the experimental AI-powered search feature the company rolled out earlier in May, replaces its longstanding “I’m Feeling Lucky” button under the Search bar. A company spokesperson confirmed to The Verge, which was the first to report the change, that the feature began […]
A California judge slammed a pair of law firms for the undisclosed use of AI after he received a supplemental brief with “numerous false, inaccurate, and misleading legal citations and quotations.” In a ruling submitted last week, Judge Michael Wilner imposed $31,000 in sanctions against the law firms involved, saying “no reasonably competent attorney should out-source research and writing” to AI, as pointed out by law professors Eric Goldman and Blake Reid on Bluesky.“I read their brief, was persuaded (or at least intrigued) by the authorities that they cited, and looked up the...
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has missed a self-imposed deadline to publish a finalized AI safety framework, as noted by watchdog group The Midas Project. xAI isn’t exactly known for its strong commitments to AI safety as it’s commonly understood. A recent report found that the company’s AI chatbot, Grok, would undress photos of women when […]
Dua Lipa performs on May 12th in Spain. | Photo by Aldara Zarraoa/Redferns for ABALast week, Paul McCartney, Dua Lipa, Ian McKellen, Elton John, and hundreds of others in the UK creative industry signed an open letter backing an effort to force AI firms to reveal the copyrighted works used to train their models. They support an amendment to the UK’s Data (Use and Access) Bill proposed by letter organizer Beeban Kidron, adding the requirement, which the UK government has opposed.The British House of Lords passed the amendment yesterday, 272 to 125, reports The Guardian, and now it’s...
Republicans want to stop states from regulating AI. On Sunday, a Republican-led House committee submitted a budget reconciliation bill that proposes blocking states from enforcing “any law or regulation” targeting an exceptionally broad range of automated computing systems for 10 years after the law is enacted — a move that would stall efforts to regulate everything from AI chatbots to online search results. Democrats are calling the new provision a “giant gift” to Big Tech, and organizations that promote AI oversight, like Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI), say it could...
Popular legal AI tool Harvey will now be using leading foundation models from Anthropic and Google, moving beyond strictly using OpenAI’s, Harvey announced in a blog post on Tuesday. This is noteworthy because Harvey is one of the OpenAI Startup Fund’s most successful early-backed portfolio companies. The OpenAI Startup Fund is an OpenAI-associated fund to […]
TikTok has a new AI-powered tool called “AI Alive” that will let you turn photos into video with a prompt to describe what you want the video to look like. It’s a little different from other You can access the tool from TikTok’s Story Camera, and it uses “intelligent editing tools that give anyone, regardless of editing experience, the ability to transform static images into captivating, short-form videos enhanced with movement, atmospheric and creative effects,” according to a blog post.I tested the tool with a few pictures from my camera roll. After picking the photo, I could...
Amazon says it will work with Humain, the AI company recently launched by Saudi Arabia’s ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, to invest “$5 billion-plus” in a strategic partnership to build an “AI Zone” in Saudi Arabia. The AI Zone will include dedicated Amazon Web Services (AWS) AI infrastructure, servers, networks, and training and certification programs, according […]
TikTok hasn't shoved generative AI features into every corner of its app the way Meta has with Instagram, but the company has still experimented with the tech in some interesting — if slightly unsettling — ways. Now, TikTok is introducing a new AI-powered feature that feels even more meme-worthy. It's called AI Alive and it allows users to create short, stylized video clips from a static image.Right now, the feature only exists for TikTok's Stories feature, so it's meant for more ephemeral sharing than what you might typically post on the app. You start with a still image...
Amazon’s Audible has announced that it’s planning to expand its audiobook catalog by giving select publishers access to its new “fully integrated, end-to-end AI production technology” that will let them more easily convert titles to audiobooks with their choice of AI-generated voices. The initiative will also help expand global access to audiobooks with the introduction of a new AI translation tool that’s expected to launch in an early beta later this year.Audible says its new AI narration technology leverages Amazon’s advanced AI capabilities and will be made available to...
The UK's House of Lords just voted to add an amendment to a data bill that mandates that tech companies disclose which copyright-protected works were used to train AI models, as reported by The Guardian. The amendment faced government opposition but resoundingly passed with 272 votes to 125.The vote came just a few days after hundreds of artists and organizations joined together to urge the government not to "give our work away at the behest of a handful of powerful overseas tech companies." The artists involved in this push included Paul McCartney, Elton John and Dua Lipa, among many others....
WizardLM, a Beijing-based Microsoft AI research group, appears to have joined Tencent, the Chinese company that owns WeChat and blockbuster games like PUBG Mobile. In a post on X on Tuesday, Can Xu, a senior AI researcher who led a number of projects within WizardLM, said that he and the team left Microsoft to join […]
TikTok is launching its first image-to-video AI feature, the company announced on Tuesday. The new feature is called “TikTok AI Alive” and allows users to turn static photos into videos within TikTok Stories. The feature is only accessible via TikTok’s Story Camera and uses AI to create short-form videos with “movement, atmospheric and creative effects,” […]
Android 16's new Advanced Protection feature simplifies the task of managing your phone's security settings.GoogleThis summer's Android 16 release will add several new and updated security measures that should make it more difficult for criminals to scam Android users or take advantage of stolen Android phones. After introducing AI features in March that detect fraudulent messages based on common language patterns, Google is working on teaching its models to recognize a wider range of text scams, such as those unpaid road toll scams you've probably seen this year. It's also adding faster...
Google did something a bit different this year. Instead of talking about Android during the I/O developer conference, which kicks off on May 20, it’s hosting a show dedicated to its mobile software.The Android Show begins at 10 AM PT/1PM ET today and we expect to hear more about Material 3 Expressive, the new user interface that leaked recently, and when it’ll be available as part of Android 16. It’s also likely we’ll hear about the many other riffs of Android, from Wear OS to Android Auotmotive. Maybe we’ll even get another peek at Android XR.And while AI is sure to be the...
Audible, Amazon’s audiobook service, announced on Tuesday that it’s partnering with select publishers to convert print and e-books into AI-narrated audiobooks. This initiative aims to quickly expand its catalog as it competes with Apple, Spotify, and others in the rapidly growing audiobook market. Audible is leveraging Amazon’s AI capabilities to assist publishers in producing audiobooks. […]
Mark Zuckerberg wants you to be understood by the machine. The Meta CEO has recently been pitching a future where his AI tools give people something that "knows them well," not just as pals, but as professional help. "For people who don't have a person who's a therapist," he told Stratechery's Ben Thompson, "I think everyone will have an AI."The jury is out on whether AI systems can make good therapists, but this future is already legible. A lot of people are anecdotally pouring their secrets out to chatbots, sometimes in dedicated therapy apps, but often to big general-purpose platforms like...
Meeting transcription space is a hot commodity for all productivity suites. Companies like ClickUp and Zoom have added transcription with an AI summary to take on another upstart in this vertical, including Read AI, Zoom’s assistant, Circleback, Granola, or Otter. The latest entrant in the race to build meeting transcription tools is Notion. The company is rolling out an […]
Notion is coming for Otter.ai. On Tuesday, the company announced an update for Notion AI, the suite of generative AI features available through its popular note-taking app. Among the new tools included in the package is AI Meeting Notes, a feature that can transcribe and summarize any conversation directly within Notion. No need to turn to dedicated software like the aforementioned Otter.ai.If you use Notion Calendar, your meeting notifications will include the option to start an AI Meeting Note page. Alternatively, you can write "/meeting" to add a transcription block to an existing note. Any...
Only Google Labs users can currently see the experiment.Some Google Search users are starting to see the platform’s AI Mode search engine chatbot in the wild. Several user reports across X and Threads show that Google is testing different locations to display the AI Mode tab — while some examples show it in the search bar itself, besides the “search by image” button, in others it replaces the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button underneath the search bar.There’s also some variation to the appearance of the AI Mode button, with some users seeing a rotating rainbow border when the cursor...
Hungry to learn more about Anthropic, directly from Anthropic? You aren’t alone if so, which is why we’re so delighted to announce that Anthropic co-founder and Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan is joining the main stage at TechCrunch Sessions: AI on June 5 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. And TechCrunch Sessions: AI is right around […]
An analysis by Epoch AI, a nonprofit AI research institute, suggests the AI industry may not be able to eke massive performance gains out of reasoning AI models for much longer. As soon as within a year, progress from reasoning models could slow down, according to the report’s findings. Reasoning models such as OpenAI’s o3 […]
Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge live: Updates from the Unpacked event EngadgetBeyond Slim: Discover Unprecedented Innovation With Galaxy S25 Edge Samsung NewsroomSamsung set to unveil new Galaxy S25 Edge, which will use AI. What you need to know USA TodaySamsung finally has a launch date for the Galaxy S25 Edge The VergeThe latest Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge leak shows off the phone's design – and a potential price TechRadar
AllTrails, the hiking and biking companion that was named 2023’s iPhone App of the Year, is launching a new premium membership called “Peak” that includes an upgraded feature set. This $80-per-year subscription will introduce AI tools to build custom routes, real-time trail condition forecasts, trail traffic heatmaps, and a feature that lets you identify trees […]
Apple’s iOS 19 update could include an AI-powered feature designed to conserve battery, according to a report from Bloomberg. The battery management tool will reportedly optimize your iPhone’s power consumption based on how you use your device.The new feature will use “battery data it has collected from users’ devices to understand trends and make predictions for when it should lower the power draw of certain applications or features,” Bloomberg reports.Google launched its machine learning-powered Adaptive Battery on Android in 2018, and says it analyzes your phone usage patterns to...
Microsoft is hosting its annual Build developer conference next week from May 19 to 22. The event is guaranteed to include announcements regarding new AI integrations, services, and apps, including for Windows. At last year’s Build, Microsoft announced an integration of Copilot into Microsoft Teams, Copilot+ AI-powered PCs, Windows Volumetric Apps for Meta Quest headsets, […]
We've still got about a month until Apple's WWDC 2025 event, but that hasn't stopped the rumors from flying about potential iOS 19 announcements. Today brings a new one from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who reports that Apple is working on a new AI-driven battery management feature for its next operating system update.According to his sources, Apple will use AI to analyze iPhone usage trends and make adjustments to the power draw of different apps to better conserve battery on the device. iOS 19 will reportedly also add a battery indicator to the lock screen detailing how long it...
Buzzwords that are stretched to the point of being meaningless are as old as the tech industry itself. The top current one is “AI agent” and its variants, like “agentic.” So, unsurprisingly, no one really knows what an AI agent is. Even people with software engineering backgrounds who work for Andreessen Horowitz, one of the premier venture […]
OpenAI’s ambitious Stargate data center project is facing delays thanks to tariff-related economic uncertainty, reports Bloomberg. Growing market volatility and cheaper AI services have made banks, private equity investors, and asset managers wary of investing in Stargate, an OpenAI-led project that aims to raise up to $500 million for AI infrastructure in the U.S. and […]
Google’s openly available Gemma collection of AI models has reached a milestone: over 150 million downloads. Omar Sanseviero, a developer relations engineer at Google DeepMind, announced the figure on X over the weekend, also revealing that developers have created more than 70,000 variants of Gemma on the AI dev platform Hugging Face. Google launched Gemma […]
As first reported by Politico, the Trump administration has fired the Register of Copyrights and US Copyright Office Director, Shira Perlmutter. The Register of Copyrights works under the Librarian of Congress — a title held most recently by Carla Hayden, who was fired earlier this week for her DEI efforts, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told The New York Times. Perlmutter's dismissal comes just after the office released a report that raised concerns about certain uses of copyrighted material to train generative AI. It's the third in a series of papers published over the last...
President Donald Trump has fired Shira Perlmutter, who leads the U.S. Copyright Office. The firing was reported by CBS News and Politico, and seemingly confirmed by a statement from Representative Joe Morelle, the top Democrat on the Committee for House Administration. “Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power […]
The Trump administration has reportedly fired Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who leads the US Copyright Office, following the office’s choice to release a pre-publication version of its opinion on the fair use status of AI training data that’s made up of copyrighted information. Representative Joe Morelle, the ranking Democrat of the Committee on House Administration, called her firing an “unprecedented power grab with no legal basis,” linking the firing directly to her report, which he says amounted to her refusing “to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves...
OpenAI is currently in “a tough negotiation” with its biggest investor and partner, Microsoft, according to the Financial Times. The AI startup recently announced a major change to its corporate restructuring plans — while it still aims to convert its business arm into a for-profit public benefit corporation, its nonprofit board will still be in […]
The tech industry seems to have two thoughts when it comes to where human workers fit into the AI-powered world they are creating: Either they think that all the jobs, except perhaps their own, will be done by bots. (VC Marc Andreessen seems to think that his work as an investor could never be automated). […]
Google’s Gemini AI has been getting upgrade after upgrade, now being able to handle data analysis in Google Sheets and using your past conversations with its chatbot to inform better responses. One of Google's latest offerings lets Gemini generate an original background during your virtual meetings for a personal touch before getting down to business.What are Google Meet's AI backgrounds?Google Meet lets you tap into Gemini to make AI-generated backgrounds based on whatever prompt you feed it. You can enter prompts like a "luxurious living room interior" or "a magical sunny forest...
The music-sharing platform SoundCloud quietly updated its terms of use in February last year, adding language that lets it train AI models on its users’ content, as TechCrunch reported. And while the company says it hasn’t used user-created content for model training, it doesn’t rule out the possibility that it will in the future.Marni Greenberg, SVP and head of communications at SoundCloud, provided the following in a statement emailed to The Verge.SoundCloud has never used artist content to train AI models, nor do we develop AI tools or allow third parties to scrape or use SoundCloud...
Tech event season is in full swing. This week, Stripe and Figma gathered thousands of people in downtown San Francisco for their respective conferences. I caught up with Figma CEO Dylan Field after his opening keynote at Config, where he announced the most significant product expansion in the company's history. Below, you'll find our chat about how he sees AI fitting into Figma after a rough start to integrating the technology last year, the new areas he's targeting to grow the platform, and more. And keep reading for how Meta is turning up the heat on its AI team, my thoughts about this week's...
Manus AI is one of the hottest AI agent startups around, recently raising $75 million at a half-billion dollar valuation in a round led by Benchmark. But two unnamed sources told Semafor that the investment is now under review by the U.S. Treasury Department over its compliance with 2023 restrictions on investing in Chinese companies. […]
Google I/O, Google’s biggest developer conference of the year, is nearly upon us. Scheduled for May 20 to 21 at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, I/O will showcase product announcements from across Google’s portfolio. Expect plenty of news relating to Android, Chrome, Google Search, YouTube, and — of course — Google’s AI-powered chatbot, Gemini. Here’s […]
The U.S. Department of Labor has dropped its investigation into Scale AI’s compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act, according to a source directly familiar with the matter. The FLSA is a federal law that regulates misclassification of employees as independent contractors and unpaid wages. TechCrunch first reported that Scale was the subject of such […]
SoundCloud appears to have quietly changed its terms of use to allow the company to train AI on audio that users upload to its platform. As spotted by tech ethicist Ed-Newton Rex, the latest version of SoundCloud’s terms include a provision giving the platform permission to use uploaded content to “inform, train, [or] develop” AI. […]
DeepSeek has gone viral. Chinese AI lab DeepSeek broke into the mainstream consciousness this week after its chatbot app rose to the top of the Apple App Store charts (and Google Play, as well). DeepSeek’s AI models, which were trained using compute-efficient techniques, have led Wall Street analysts — and technologists — to question whether the U.S. can maintain its […]
Arlo is introducing some new AI capabilities that allow its security and doorbell cameras to describe events and alert users when certain concerns are detected. The features are included in Arlo Secure 6, the latest version of Arlo’s home security subscription service, which is set to start rolling out to customers sometime this month.Adding to the object detection capabilities introduced in Arlo Secure 5, this latest update includes advanced audio detection features that notify users when the device hears a scream, gunshot, bark, glass break, or smoke/CO alarms. Alerts will also be issued if...
The AI-generated deepfake of a deceased road rage victim gave his own impact statement in court at the sentencing hearing of the defendent, as reported by NBC News. This is likely the first time the technology has been used in this way.The idea of using an AI version of the victim, Christopher Pelkey, came from his family, according to a Maricopa County Attorney's Office spokesperson. Pelkey’s sister said she had been writing the impact statement for two years but found that what she had to say "did not seem like it would do justice" to his memory. Pelkey was shot and killed in 2021...
Smart home controller maker Brilliant NextGen has launched its second generation of touchscreen panels that replace traditional light switches. The new hardware, which looks like the previous model, has a 4x higher resolution screen and dual-band WiFi (2.4GHz and 5GHz) to help curb interference. It also has a more powerful processor that Brilliant says is ready “for the next phase of AI-powered smart home evolution,” although the company has not said when it plans to launch such features or what it could do. (As-is, there are currently no new software features from the previous gen.)In an...
Apple is reportedly developing new chips to drive smart glasses similar to Meta’s Ray-Ban Meta as well as more powerful Macs and AI servers. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman notes that one of the chips is inspired by the Apple Watch’s low-power processors. Apple aims to put these chips into mass production with TSMC by the end […]
ChatGPT is bringing its Deep Research service directly into GitHub's developer ecosystem. This integration is beginning a beta test this week, with ChatGPT Plus, Pro and Team users the first to receive access over the coming days. Members of the Enterprise and Edu plans will get a chance to try it out "soon." Users can grant the AI assistant access to select code repositories and ask questions about their contents that ChatGPT will answer with cited reports.Programmers have been a notable audience for AI assistants. A tool like ChatGPT can quickly review code and see where you've left a bracket...
Today’s robot vacuums are becoming a bit like cars: with all the features, upgrades, and fancy trimmings available these days, it’s easy to forget that they can just be simple machines that get us from point A to point B. Yes, some bots blow hot air on their bums (mop pads), deftly navigate dog poop, and have arms to pick up your socks, but there are plenty of basic budget robot vacuums that just do a decent job of cleaning your floor autonomously — as long as you tidy up first.Fancier models have obstacle recognition, and some even use AI-powered cameras to tell popcorn from poop and...
Meta has chosen Robert Fergus to lead its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab, according to Bloomberg. Fergus had been working at Google DeepMind as a research director for nearly five years, per his LinkedIn. Prior to Google, he worked as a researcher scientist at Meta. Meta’s FAIR, which has been around since 2013, has faced […]
Google is rolling out a feature in its Gemini API that the company claims will make its latest AI models cheaper for third-party developers. Google calls the feature “implicit caching” and says it can deliver 75% savings on “repetitive context” passed to models via the Gemini API. It supports Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro and 2.5 […]
Google just announced an upgrade to Chrome’s Enhanced Protection feature. On desktop, the browser now uses Gemini Nano to protect users against remote tech support scams. According to Google, the on-device large language model allows Chrome to protect people against scams the company hasn’t seen before. “[Gemini Nano] is perfect for this use because of its ability to distill the varied, complex nature of websites, helping us adapt to new scam tactics more quickly,” Google says, adding it hopes to this bring the feature to Android devices soon. The company plans to use this same AI...
ASUS is now outfitting its NUC 14 Pro mini PC with a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of reaching 48 trillion operations per second (TOPS). The new model, the ASUS NUC Pro AI, will have up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 288V processor. With a height of only 1.3 inches, this mini PC can be carried anywhere and won’t get in your way. Most of the features like ports and internals should be similar compared to its predecessor.To prevent overheating, ASUS installed some advanced thermal management solutions built for the computer's tiny footprint. Other features include Secure Boot, built-in...
If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to act, this is it. You have just 24 hours left to secure your exhibit table at TechCrunch Sessions: AI and position your brand at the center of the conversation shaping the future of the AI industry. TechCrunch Sessions: AI is bringing together the brightest builders, boldest […]
Peloton said it’s not sweating tariffs in its Q3 2025 earnings today, noting it is “predominantly a subscription business” while acknowledging that macroeconomic uncertainty could impact demand for its pricey bikes and treadmills. “During the period of GDP decline between 2008 and 2009, external data showed that us spend[ing] on fitness continued to grow, and that implies the fitness industry has some resilience to external economic factors,” Peloton CFO Liz Coddington said on its earnings call, while underscoring the company’s main revenue comes from subscriptions and that it has a...
Ever since Google introduced the "Audio Overviews" feature into its NotebookLM research tool, I have been experimenting with feeding it bodies of text that I did not want to sit and read: stereo instructions, Wikipedia rabbit holes, my Q1 performance review, etc.With this AI tool, two uncanny valley robot voices are generated to "dive deep" into any documents I upload - adding metaphors, puns, and even casual banter to a summarized conversation. Click play, and what you'll hear sounds a lot like a stereotypical podcast.After a few Audio Overviews into my week, I realized I was taking...
Meta is developing what’s described as “super-sensing” vision software that can recognize people by name, according to The Information. The company is reportedly working on two pairs of smart glasses for next year, internally called Aperol and Bellini, and has recently reworked its processes for assessing privacy and safety risks to release products more quickly.In addition to facial recognition, Meta’s AI software — which is activated with a “Hey Meta, start live AI” command — could eventually do things like remind you to grab your keys if it saw that you didn’t, or remind...
Simo, already a board member at OpenAI, will transition out of Instacart over the next few months and join the AI company full-time as Application CEO.
Microsoft's Bing or DuckDuckGo probably won't disrupt Google's dominance in search, said Apple senior vice president of services Eddy Cue - but AI services easily could.Cue was returning to a courtroom in Washington, DC where he last testified in the Justice Department's trial against Google's search monopoly in September 2023. During the current remedies trial on Wednesday, Cue said that in the time since, well-funded generative AI upstarts have made such significant advancements that they could ultimately disrupt that monopoly - perhaps more effectively than the court could. Cue was also...
Tech giants like to boast about trillion-parameter AI models that require massive and expensive GPU clusters. But Fastino is taking a different approach. The Palo Alto-based startup says it’s invented a new kind of AI model architecture that’s intentionally small and task-specific. The models are so small they’re trained with low-end gaming GPUs worth less […]
Fintech giant Stripe announced Wednesday a slew of new product launches at its annual Stripe Sessions user event. The highlights include: a new AI foundation model for payments; stablecoin-powered accounts; a new Orchestration offering, and a recent migration with chip behemoth Nvidia. Stripe’s payments foundation model has been trained on tens of billions of transactions, […]
OpenAI has met with officials from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to discuss the agency’s use of AI to speed up drug evaluations, Wired reported on Wednesday. According to the report, OpenAI and the FDA have discussed a project called cderGPT, which seems to be an AI tool for the Center for Drug Evaluation […]
Anthropic is launching a new API that allows its Claude AI models to search across the web. Developers using it can build Claude-powered apps that deliver up-to-date info, the company said in a press release published Wednesday. The rollout of the API comes as AI companies look to augment their models in various ways that […]
Diminished tech privacy appears to be another ripple effect from Trump 2.0. The Information reported on Wednesday that Meta has changed its tune on facial recognition. After considering but ultimately bailing on the technology for the first version of its smart glasses, the company is now actively working on wearables that can identify nearby faces. Remember when being a "Glasshole" was considered a faux pas?According to The Information, Meta has recently discussed adding software to its smart glasses that scans bystanders' faces and identifies people by name. The company has also reportedly...
Google is once again crossing the great divide between rival tech giants, at least with artificial intelligence. The company has launched a dedicated iPad app for its Gemini AI assistant. In addition to natively running on Apple hardware, Gemini's iPad app can take advantage of the tablet's split view, so that the AI assistant is open on the screen at the same time as another program for easier use. The app is available today from the App Store in all countries where Gemini is currently available.Gemini has been a huge focus for Google's recent announcements as it works to put its...
OpenAI is launching a program, OpenAI for Countries, that the company says will enable it to build out the local infrastructure needed to better serve international AI customers. As a part of the new program, OpenAI will partner with governments to assist with efforts like building out data center capacity and customizing OpenAI’s products, including […]
Eddy Cue at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 9th, 2024. | Photo by Kevork Djansezian / Getty ImagesEddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, gave an ominous warning today that the iPhone could go the way of the iPod 10 years from now. And the reason, as one might guess, is artificial intelligence.Cue’s remarks came during the Google Search antitrust remedies trial today while discussing how AI has the potential to reshape the tech industry and open the door to new entrants.Incumbents have a hard time … we’re not an oil company, we’re not...
Google searches fell in Safari for the first time ever last month, Apple’s senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, said during Google’s antitrust trial on Wednesday. “That has never happened in 22 years,” Cue added.Cue linked the dip in searches to the growing use of AI, which the company is now considering putting into Safari. The rise of web search in AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot may make users less inclined to visit Google as their primary way of finding information.Google currently pays Apple around $20 billion to make its search engine...
Apple is looking at adding AI search engines from OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic into Safari, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. Eddy Cue, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Services, made the statement during his testimony in the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit against Alphabet. Cue’s disclosure was part of his testimony regarding Apple and Google’s estimated $20 billion-a-year […]
Figma is expanding its creative software ecosystem to allow product designers to complete entire projects without jumping to third-party apps. Four new products for website building, AI coding, branded marketing, and digital illustration were introduced at Figma’s Config event today, aiming to fill in any gaps holding Figma back from being an all-in-one platform that supports the entire product design lifecycle.For example, while existing products like Figma Design, Slides, and FigJam could be used to ideate and create prototypes, developers would need to use services like WordPress to create...
Apple is “actively looking at” bringing AI search options to Safari. Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, made the statement during Google’s antitrust trial on Wednesday, saying the company will likely add AI search features to Safari in the coming year as they continue to improve.“To date, they’re just not good enough,” Cue said, adding that Apple has already had discussions with Perplexity, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Cue is mindful that it’s still early days for generative AI, and says that with Apple’s existing agreement with OpenAI for other AI services, it...
French AI startup Mistral is releasing a new AI model, Mistral Medium 3, that’s focused on efficiency without compromising performance. Available in Mistral’s API priced at $0.40 per million input tokens and $20.80 per million output tokens, Mistral Medium 3 performs “at or above” 90% of Anthropic’s costlier Claude Sonnet 3.7 model on “benchmarks across […]
LinkedIn is still on a mission to persuade job hunters to apply for fewer roles. But the company is rolling out a new set of AI-powered upgrades to its job-searching features it hopes will make that prospect more appealing.The company is introducing a revamped search tool that aims to make it easier for job seekers to find relevant roles. Up to now, LinkedIn’s job search feature relied mostly on matching keywords. With the update, though, LinkedIn is ditching the keywords in favor of AI so its system is able to understand job listings on a much deeper level. This should, according to the...
Vulcan’s force-sensitive arm can apply just the right amount of pressure to avoid causing damage.Amazon has announced a new AI-infused warehouse robot that it says has a sense of touch. This allows the Vulcan robot to pick and stow roughly three-quarters of the items stocked in the company’s warehouses, a task that was previously handled predominantly by human workers.“Vulcan represents a fundamental leap forward in robotics,” says Aaron Parness, Amazon’s director of applied science, in a press release. “It’s not just seeing the world, it’s feeling it...
Amazon Web Services is building a new AI-powered code generation tool codenamed “Kiro,” Business Insider reported, citing internal documents it had viewed. The tool can use prompts and existing data to generate code in “near real-time” by connecting with AI agents, the report said. The tool is said to have web and desktop apps, multimodal […]
Artificial intelligence software — some already free on your device — can quickly compose and edit documents. But be sure to check its work.
OpenAI currently has a deal to share 20% of revenue with Microsoft, but the AI company expects to cut that share to 10% by 2030, The Information reported.
A team at Hugging Face has released a freely available, cloud-hosted computer-using AI “agent.” But be forewarned: it’s quite sluggish and occasionally makes mistakes. Hugging Face’s agent, called Open Computer Agent, is accessible via the web and can use a Linux virtual machine preloaded with several applications, including Firefox. Similar to OpenAI’s Operator, you can […]
Like many leaders in tech, Arvind Krishna, the CEO of IBM, thinks federal R&D funding for AI and related technologies should be increased — not the other way around. “We have been an extremely strong advocate — and this is both the company and me personally — on that federally funded R&D should be increased,” […]
Redditors around the world were scandalized last week after learning that a team of researchers released a swarm of AI-powered, human-impersonating bots on the “Change My View” subreddit. The large-scale experiment was designed to explore just how persuasive AI can be. The bots posted over 1,700 comments, adopting personas like abuse survivors or controversial identities […]
Microsoft announced a series of upcoming new features for Copilot+ PCs and Windows 11. One of the most compelling updates for Copilot+ PCs is agent, which provides on-device AI assistance for adjusting a PC's settings. Some of the example tweaks Microsoft gave for this application are issues such as "how to control my PC by voice" and "my mouse pointer is too small."Not only can the agent answer these types of queries, but if the necessary permissions are granted, the AI can also make the requested changes for a user. The blog post specifies that only questions in English are "initially...
FutureHouse, an Eric Schmidt-backed nonprofit that aims to build an “AI scientist” within the next decade, has released a new tool that it claims can help support “data-driven discovery” in biology. The new tool comes just a week after FutureHouse launched its API and platform. The tool, called Finch, takes in biology data (primarily in the […]
You might know the story by now: Framework makes repairable, modular laptops where you can sub in new components for old or broken ones. It’s been two years since the company debuted an AMD mainboard for the Laptop 13 and so it’s time for the first replacement to arrive. The new model gets AMD’s Ryzen AI 300, a series of power-efficient chips for notebooks that can do all the Copilot+ AI nonsense the industry insists people need and want. Framework sent me the new AMD mainboard to slot into the existing chassis, along with a new bezel and input cover. Rather than the usual solid colors...
Uber announced its third partnership with a Chinese autonomous vehicle company this week, revealing the ride-hail and delivery giant’s appetite for global domination in the emerging robotaxi sector. Uber said Tuesday it would work with Guangzhou-based Pony AI, which late last year went public on the Nasdaq at a $5.25 billion valuation, to launch robotaxis […]
NBC’s upcoming NBA coverage will include the AI-generated voice of Jim Fagan, a longtime sports narrator who died in 2017. In an announcement on Tuesday, NBC said the AI-generated voice of Fagan will appear across select title sequences, show opens, and promos when the network resumes airing NBA games in October.Fagan’s voice appeared in NBC’s NBA coverage from 1990 to 2002, where he became known for his “NBA on NBC” promos. He also narrated promos and openers for the league’s biggest stars, like Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, and Hakeem Olajuwon.With permission from Fagan’s...
Particle, the startup behind an AI-powered newsreader that aims to help publishers, not just steal their work, is bringing its product to the web. On Tuesday, the company announced the launch of the new Particle.news website that connects news consumers with headlines and AI summaries from a variety of sources, plus the ability to delve […]
Google has a new AI tool that can help iPhone users to better grasp complicated or confusing writing online. The Simplify feature, rolling out in the Google app on iOS starting today, generates a simpler, more digestible version of any highlighted text without leaving the current web page.Simplify is built on Google’s Gemini AI model, and was developed by Google Research to make technical jargon easier for anyone to understand without losing key details. For example, Simplify can break down medical terms like “emphysema” (a condition that damages the air sacs in lungs) and “fibrosis...
Google on Tuesday announced the launch of Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview (I/O edition), an updated version of its flagship Gemini 2.5 Pro AI model that the company claims tops a number of widely-used benchmarks. Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview (I/O edition) is available via the Gemini API and Google’s Vertex AI and AI Studio platforms, priced […]
Agree.com says its AI-powered e-signature platform is different from competitors because it includes invoicing and payment processing. That’s why the company might have a shot at tackling the industry goliath, Docusign. Because the startup makes its money from transaction fees for any money movement facilitated by its platform, Agree.com has made e-signatures free to all […]
The AI recorder premise is an enticing one. You wear this tiny microphone around your neck, on your wrist, or pinned to your sweater, and it records everything. Your recorder can tell you all the things you promised to do and immediately forgot; remind you where you were when you talked about how much you liked the coffee; keep notes on all your meetings and conversations. Perfect memory is hard to argue with.But on this episode of The Vergecast, we wonder whether perfect memory is really such a good idea. The Verge's Victoria Song joins the show to talk about her experience with wearables like...
With long waiting lists and rising costs in overburdened healthcare systems, many people are turning to AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT for medical self-diagnosis. About 1 in 6 American adults already use chatbots for health advice at least monthly, according to one recent survey. But placing too much trust in chatbots’ outputs can be risky, in […]
Recraft, the startup behind a mysterious image model that beat OpenAI’s DALL-E and Midjourney on a respected industry benchmark last year, has raised a $30 million Series B round led by Accel, it exclusively told TechCrunch. Other investors in the round include Khosla Ventures and Madrona. Based in San Francisco, Recraft previously raised a $12 […]
Anduril announced its ninth acquisition on Monday with the purchase of Dublin’s Klas, makers of ruggedized edge computing equipment for the military and first-responders. Anduril wouldn’t reveal financial details of the deal, and the purchase is subject to regulatory approval, but the company did say that Klas employs 150 people. Relatedly, on Monday Anduril also […]
Hasan Sukkar, the founder of AI startup 11x, is stepping down from his role as CEO, Sukkar announced on LinkedIn this morning. Prabhav Jain, 11x’s CTO, has been named the company’s new CEO. Sukkar will move into a “non-executive chairman” position, where he will work with Jain on “strategic direction, product vision, industry relationships, and […]
More than 250 CEOs signed an open letter published in The New York Times on Monday calling for AI and computer science to be “core components” of K-12 curricula. The signatories, which include Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Etsy CEO Josh Silverman, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, argue that computer science and AI education are essential […]
Anthropic is launching an AI for Science program to support researchers working on “high-impact” scientific projects, with a focus on biology and life sciences applications. The program, announced Monday, will offer up to $20,000 in Anthropic API credits over a six-month period to “qualified” researchers who’ll be selected based on their “contributions to science, the potential […]
Pinterest is upgrading its visual search feature with a handful of new capabilities. On Monday, the company announced it’s rolling out new functionality to improve its feature that allows users to search using an image instead of text. This includes new tools to more precisely narrow and refine searches, as well as those that make […]
Datadog is on an acquisition spree. Just a few weeks after snatching up Metaplane, an AI-powered observability startup, the cloud monitoring and security company has acquired Eppo, a feature flagging and experimentation platform. Eppo will continue supporting existing customers and bringing on new ones under the brand “Eppo by Datadog.” Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, […]
Startups providing AI-powered coding tools are striking a positive chord with investors. Cursor, one of the most popular tools in the segment, has attracted $900 million in a fresh round of funding led by Thrive Capital, as per a report from the Financial Times. The FT noted that other top venture firms such as Andreessen […]
Duolingo announced plans this week to replace contractors with AI and become an “AI-first” company — a move that journalist Brian Merchant pointed to as a sign that the AI jobs crisis “is here, now.” In fact, Merchant spoke to a former Duolingo contractor who said this isn’t even a new policy. The company cut […]
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Google’s most expensive AI model seems to have crossed a major milestone: Beating a 29-year-old video game. Last night, Google CEO Sundar Pichai posted triumphantly on X, “What a finish! Gemini 2.5 Pro just completed Pokémon Blue!” To be clear, the Gemini Plays Pokemon livestream was created by (in his own words) “a 30 year […]
Google is notifying parents using its Family Link parental controls via email that their kids will soon be able to access Gemini AI Apps on their monitored Android devices, The New York Times reports.The company says kids will be able to use Gemini to do things like help them with homework or read them stories. Like its Workplace for Education accounts, Google says children’s data will not be used to train AI. Still, in the email, Google warns parents that “Gemini can make mistakes,” and kids “may encounter content you don’t want them to see.” Besides sillier mistakes like...
Sam Altman and Elon Musk aren't just competing in the AI race; they both have ambitions to build Silicon Valley's holy grail: an "everything" super app encompassing finance, social media, gaming, and more.Earlier this week, I got a peek at Altman's plan from a cavernous event space on the northern edge of San Francisco. He was not there as the CEO of OpenAI, but as the co-founder and chairman of Tools for Humanity, the parent company of a cryptocurrency called Worldcoin that's now available in the US. Worldcoin is distributed to people who scan their eyes at one of the startup's orbs, which are...
Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom says AI companies are trying too hard to “juice engagement” by pestering their users with follow-up questions, instead of providing actually useful insights. Systrom said the tactics represent “a force that’s hurting us,” comparing them to those used by social media companies to expand aggressively. “You can see some of these […]
Apple and Anthropic are building an AI-powered coding tool that will work in Xcode, Apple’s code-writing tool, Bloomberg reports. A new version of Xcode will integrate Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet model to “write, edit and test code on behalf of programmers,” Bloomberg says.Apple is slowly rolling this new version out internally initially and apparently has not decided if it will release it to the public. Developers will be able to enter requests in a chat interface, test user interfaces, and help manage bug fixing, according to Bloomberg. Apple and Anthropic didn’t immediately reply to...
A recently released Google AI model scores worse on certain safety tests than its predecessor, according to the company’s internal benchmarking. In a technical report published this week, Google reveals that its Gemini 2.5 Flash model is more likely to generate text that violates its safety guidelines than Gemini 2.0 Flash. On two metrics, “text-to-text […]
Apple and Anthropic are teaming up to build a “vibe-coding” software platform that will use generative AI to write, edit, and test code for programmers, Bloomberg reported on Friday. The iPhone maker is planning to roll out the software internally, according to Bloomberg, but hasn’t decided if it will launch it publicly. The system is […]
New feature searches hundreds of sources to build a document—but is it accurate?
Google’s NotebookLM Android and iOS apps are expected to launch on May 20, according to app store listings. The apps are currently available for pre-order. Since its launch in 2023, the AI-based note-taking and research assistant has only been accessible via desktop. Google is now gearing up to make the service available on the go. […]
Airbnb started rolling out an AI-powered customer service bot in the U.S. last month, CEO Brian Chesky said during the firm’s first-quarter conference call on Thursday. Chesky said 50% of Airbnb’s U.S. users are already using the AI bot for customer service, adding that the company plans to roll out the feature to all its […]
Amazon’s upgraded digital assistant powered by generative AI, Alexa+, has rolled out to over 100,000 users, CEO Andy Jassy said on the company’s earnings call Thursday. While that’s a far cry from the 600 million Alexa devices out there, the company is making steady progress on the rollout of Alexa+, which was first unveiled in […]
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says there are two kinds of people who come to the social media platform: Scrollers and seekers. Scrollers are the ones who come to Reddit’s core product, which is community conversation and engaging about topics they’re passionate about, from r/sourdough to r/popculturechat. Then there are the Seekers; the people who might […]
FutureHouse, an Eric Schmidt-backed nonprofit that aims to build an “AI scientist” within the next decade, has launched its first major product: a platform and API with AI-powered tools designed to support scientific work. Many, many startups are racing to develop AI research tools for the scientific domain, some with massive amounts of VC funding […]
‘Tis the week for small AI models, it seems. On Thursday, Ai2, the nonprofit AI research institute, released Olmo 2 1B, a 1-billion-parameter model that Ai2 claims beats similarly-sized models from Google, Meta, and Alibaba on several benchmarks. Parameters, sometimes referred to as weights, are the internal components of a model that guide its behavior. […]
Anthropic on Thursday launched a new way to connect apps and tools to its AI chatbot Claude, as well as an expanded “deep research” capability that allows Claude to search the web, enterprise accounts, and more. The new app connection feature, called Integrations, and expanded deep research tool, dubbed Advanced Research, are available in beta […]
Google is preparing to publicly unleash its AI Mode search engine tool for the first time. The company announced today that “a small percentage” of people in the US will start seeing an AI Mode tab in Google Search “in the coming weeks,” allowing users to test the search-centric chatbot outside of Google’s experimental Labs environment.In contrast to traditional search platforms that provide a wall of URL results based on the enquiry or descriptions a user has entered, Google’s AI Mode will answer questions with an AI-generated response based on information within Google’s search...
It's not really a secret that the advertising industry is about to get upended by AI - one reason big platform companies like Google and Meta have been so deeply invested in photo and video generation is because they know the first heavy users of those tools will be advertisers on their platforms. But no one's ever really just come right out and said it - until today, when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Stratechery's Ben Thompson and basically said his plan was to more or less eliminate the entire advertising ecosystem, from creative on down. Here's the quote - Zuck was talking about...
Pinterest is making it easier for users to identify and avoid AI-generated slop on its platform. The company is launching new features that will automatically label images that are detected to be made or edited using generative AI, and allow users to see fewer of them when browsing for similar topics.“As people encounter AI-generated content on Pinterest, we are empowering our users to make more informed choices about the content they see”, said Matt Madrigal, Chief Technology Officer. “Gen AI content on Pinterest should enhance users’ ability to discover and act on their inspiration...
Google’s AdSense advertising network started supporting ads inside users’ chats with some third-party AI chatbots earlier this year, Bloomberg reported. The company is rolling out the feature following tests with AI search startups iAsk and Liner, the report said, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter. “AdSense for Search is available for websites that want […]
Microsoft launched several new “open” AI models on Wednesday, the most capable of which is competitive with OpenAI’s o3-mini on at least one benchmark. All of the new pemissively licensed models — Phi 4 mini reasoning, Phi 4 reasoning, and Phi 4 reasoning plus — are “reasoning” models, meaning they’re able to spend more time […]
Meta made a prediction last year its generative AI products would rake in $2 billion to $3 billion in revenue in 2025, and between $460 billion and $1.4 trillion by 2035, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday. The documents, submitted by attorneys for book authors suing Meta for what they claim is unauthorized training of […]
Amazon on Wednesday released what the company claims is the most capable AI model in its Nova family, Nova Premier. Nova Premier, which can process text, images, and videos (but not audio), is available in Amazon Bedrock, the company’s AI model development platform. Amazon says that Premier excels at “complex tasks” that “require deep understanding […]
A new paper from AI lab Cohere, Stanford, MIT, and Ai2 accuses LM Arena, the organization behind the popular crowdsourced AI benchmark Chatbot Arena, of helping a select group of AI companies achieve better leaderboard scores at the expense of rivals. According to the authors, LM Arena allowed some industry-leading AI companies like Meta, OpenAI, […]
Microsoft customers could encounter service disruptions when using AI services due to demand outpacing the company’s ability to bring data centers online, an executive warned during the company’s earnings call Microsoft’s EVP and CFO Amy Hood said during the company’s fiscal 2025 third-quarter earnings call Wednesday the company may face AI capacity constraints as early […]
One day after Meta rolled out its standalone AI app, Mark Zuckerberg has shared more about how the company plans to eventually monetize its generative AI assistant. During the company’s first quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg said Meta AI could one day show ads and product recommendations. He also hinted at plans for a subscription component for those who want a more “premium” version of the assistant."I think that there will be a large opportunity to show product recommendations or ads, as well as a premium service for people who want to unlock more compute for additional functionality...
The tech giant’s revenue also grew 13%, topping Wall Street’s expectations.
Google’s Gemini chatbot app now lets you modify both AI-generated images and images uploaded from your phone or computer, Google announced in a blog post Wednesday. Native image editing in Gemini will start rolling out gradually today, expanding to more people in over 45 languages and most countries in the coming weeks. The launch follows […]
Google has announced that it's helping to financially support the electrical training ALLIANCe (etA), an organization formed by the National Electrical Contractors Association and the International Brotherhood of Electricians. The goal is to train "100,000 electrical workers and 30,000 new apprentices in the United States" to meet the growing power demands of AI.Using AI will unlock unspecified, but positive economic opportunities, Google's new white paper, "Powering a New Era of American Innovation," claims. In order to take advantage of them, though, the US power grid needs to become more...
BBC Studios is using AI to recreate the voice and likeness of late detective story author Agatha Christie for the purpose of featuring it in digital classes that teaches prospective writers “how to craft the perfect crime novel.” A real life actor, Vivien Keene, is standing in for Christie, with her appearance augmented by AI to resemble the author. The new class, called Agatha Christie Writing, is available today on BBC Maestro, the company’s $10-per-month online course service that usually gives you access to content from living professionals teaching things like graphic design...
Microsoft just posted the third quarter of its 2025 fiscal financial results. The software maker made $70.1 billion in revenue and a net income of $25.8 billion during Q3. Revenue is up 13 percent, and net income has increased by 18 percent. Microsoft was expected to report $68.42 billion in revenue, so the results have beaten Wall Street expectations.Cloud growth appears to be the main driver of improved revenues, with overall Microsoft Cloud revenue reaching $42.4 billion, up 20 percent. Microsoft hasn’t split out its AI revenues, so it’s still unclear exactly how much that part...
Pinterest says it’s finally going to do something about the AI slop that’s taken over its platform. After an increasing volume of complaints that AI-generated Pins and other low-quality AI content (often referred to as “AI slop”) have overtaken the social networking and image pinboarding site, Pinterest announced Wednesday a plan to begin labeling AI-generated […]
Meta has updated the privacy policy for its AI glasses, Ray-Ban Meta, giving the tech giant more power over what data it can store and use to train its AI models. The company emailed Ray-Ban Meta owners on Tuesday with a notice that AI features will now be enabled on the glasses by default, according […]
Duolingo is “more than doubling” the number of courses it has available, a feat it says was only possible because it used generative AI to help create them in “less than a year.”The company said today that it’s launching 148 new language courses. “This launch makes Duolingo’s seven most popular non-English languages – Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin – available to all 28 supported user interface (UI) languages, dramatically expanding learning options for over a billion potential learners worldwide,” the company writes.Duolingo says that...
JetBrains, the company behind a range of popular app development tools, has released its first “open” AI model for coding. On Wednesday, JetBrains made Mellum, a code-generating model the company released for its various software development suites last year, openly available on the AI dev platform Hugging Face. Mellum, trained on more than 4 trillion […]
Anthropic agrees with the U.S. government that implementing robust export controls on domestic-made AI chips will help the U.S. compete in the AI race against China. But the company is suggesting a few tweaks to the proposed restrictions. Anthropic released a blog post on Wednesday stating that the company “strongly supports” the U.S. Department of […]
Meta announced a new WhatsApp feature it says is a private way to interact with Meta AI. Called “Private Processing,” the feature is totally optional, launches in the “coming weeks,” and neither Meta, WhatsApp, nor third-party companies will be able to see interactions that use it, according to the release.Meta says users can “direct AI to process their requests,” like for AI chat summaries, using Private Processing. If they do, the system won’t “retain access to user messages once the session is complete” so that a potential attacker can’t access them after the fact...
Duolingo is introducing 148 new language courses that were created with generative AI, the company announced on Wednesday. The launch comes as Duolingo has been facing backlash this week after sharing that it was going to replace contractors with AI and become an “AI-first” company. The company says the launch of the new courses doubles […]
Meta is making a few notable adjustments to the privacy policy for its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. In an email sent out on April 29th to owners of the glasses, the company outlined two key changes. First, it’s giving Meta AI a more frequent view of the world. “Meta AI with camera use is always enabled on your glasses unless you turn off ‘Hey Meta,” the email said, referring to the hands-free voice command functionality.So unless you turn that convenience-minded feature off, Meta will frequently be analyzing whatever’s captured by the built-in camera. If you simply want to use the Ray-...
Nvidia launched a new tool that lets developers generate AI images by first creating them in 3D. The awkwardly named Nvidia AI Blueprint for 3D-guided generative AI is available to download today for computers equipped with an Nvidia RTX 4080 GPU or higher, and works by bridging Blender’s 3D modelling software with Black Forest Lab’s FLUX.1 image generator.Users can draft a scene in Blender using 3D objects like buildings, plants, animals, and vehicles, which is then used as a reference to create a 2D image. The idea is that manually adjusting the viewing position or where certain objects...
During an earnings call, Samsung's chief financial officer Soon-cheol Park told reporters that "ongoing uncertainty surrounding US tariff policies continues to pose a potential risk of demand slowdown." According to Financial Times, Park said that US tariff policies and stronger export controls against artificial intelligence products are expected to have an impact on product demand in the second half of the year. In addition to a downward trend on sales, the company also expects tariffs to raise prices for the components it uses on its mobile phones, which will have further impact on its...
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has quietly updated Prover, its AI system that’s designed to solve math-related proofs and theorems. According to South China Morning Post, DeepSeek uploaded the latest version of Prover, V2, to the AI dev platform Hugging Face late on Wednesday. It appears to be built on top of the startup’s V3 model, […]
The crush of traffic going into training and running AI has quickly turned into a major cost and resource headache for organisations. Today, Cast AI — a startup building tools to ease and optimise AI and other workloads with automation — is raising a major round of funding on the back of its strong growth […]
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 20%-30% of code inside the company’s repositories was “written by software” — meaning AI — during a fireside chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Meta’s LlamaCon conference on Tuesday. Nadella gave the figure after Zuckerberg asked roughly how much of Microsoft’s code is AI-generated today. The Microsoft CEO […]
Last month, Brett Adcock, founder of a robotics startup Figure AI, claimed in a post on X that his company “is now # 1 most sought-after private stock in the secondary market.” But the company has sent cease-and-desist letters to at least two brokers who run secondary marketplaces, those brokers told TechCrunch.These people said Figure […]
Lyft has launched “Earnings Assistant,” an AI chatbot tool for drivers seeking to “optimize their time on the road.” With it, drivers can create plans based on information about things like airport arrivals or local events, announced Jeremy Bird, EVP of driver experience at Lyft in an email to The Verge.The Earnings Assistant feature is in early access, and drivers will need to join a waitlist to use it. Once they have access and start planning with the tool, it can offer reminders, and drivers can also ask it for recommendations if they aren’t sure where to go next.In Lyft’s...
AI cheating startup Cluely went viral last week with bold claims that its hidden in-browser window is “undetectable” and can be used to “cheat on everything” from job interviews to exams. But some startups are claiming they can catch Cluely’s users. And Cluely says it’s ready to develop hardware products like smart glasses, or even […]
OpenAI is rolling back a recent update to GPT-4o, the default model that powers ChatGPT, following complaints from users that it made the chat bot act like a weirdo. "The last couple of GPT-4o updates have made the personality too sycophant-y and annoying (even though there are some very good parts of it), and we are working on fixes asap, some today and some this week," said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a X post spotted by TechCrunch. As of midday Tuesday, Altman said ChatGPT was running on an older, less sycophantic version of GPT-4o for all free users. The company hopes to get paid users...
Freepik, the online graphic design platform, unveiled a new “open” AI image model on Tuesday that the company says was trained exclusively on commercially licensed, “safe-for-work” images. The model, called F Lite, contains around 10 billion parameters — parameters being the internal components that make up the model. F Lite was developed in partnership with […]
Poker Face’s Natasha Lyonne has a new project in the works that seemed poised to become a case study in the debate about how and whether Hollywood should be using generative AI.Lyonne is teaming up with technologist and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier to produce a new sci-fi film that will feature elements generated by AI models. Titled Uncanny Valley, the feature will tell the story — which Lyonne co-wrote with The OA’s Brit Marling — of a teenage girl whose life is turned upside down by a popular virtual reality game. In addition to directing, Lyonne will star in the film...
As Meta’s first-ever generative AI conference gets underway, the company is also previewing a significant update on its plans to bring AI features to WhatsApp chats. Buried in its LlamaCon updates, the company shared that it’s working on something called “Private Processing,” which will allow users to take advantage of generative AI capabilities within WhatsApp without eroding its privacy features.According to Meta, Private Processing is an “optional capability” that will enable people to “leverage AI capabilities for things like summarizing unread messages or refining them, while...
In mid-March, Meta said that its “open” AI model family, Llama, hit 1 billion downloads, up from 650 million downloads as of early December 2024. On Tuesday at its inaugural LlamaCon developer conference, Meta revealed that figure has reached 1.2 billion downloads. “We have thousands of developers contributing tens of thousands of derivative models being downloaded […]
Meta didn't wait for Tuesday's LlamaCon keynote to unveil its first big AI announcement of the week. The company launched a standalone app that competes with ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and other multimodal AI chatbots. Sticking to the company’s roots, the app also includes a social feed and the ability to draw on info from your profile and posts you’ve shared.The Meta AI app offers similar features to rival chatbots, including text and voice chats, live web access and the ability to generate and edit images. But it also includes a Discover feed that (for better or worse) adds a social element...
A group of researchers covertly ran a months-long "unauthorized" experiment in one of Reddit’s most popular communities using AI-generated comments to test the persuasiveness of large language models. The experiment, which was revealed over the weekend by moderators of r/changemyview, is described by Reddit mods as “psychological manipulation” of unsuspecting users.“The CMV Mod Team needs to inform the CMV community about an unauthorized experiment conducted by researchers from the University of Zurich on CMV users,” the subreddit’s moderators wrote in a lengthy post notifying...
Commenters on the popular subreddit r/changemymind found out last weekend that they've been majorly duped for months. University of Zurich researchers set out to "investigate the persuasiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in natural online environments" by unleashing bots pretending to be a trauma counselor, a "Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter," and a sexual assault survivor on unwitting posters. The bots left 1,783 comments and amassed over 10,000 comment karma before being exposed.Now, Reddit's Chief Legal Officer Ben Lee says the company is considering legal action over the "...
Audio Overviews, the AI tool that turns your research into podcast-like conversations in Google’s NotebookLM app, is expanding beyond English. Now you can generate and listen to Audio Overviews in more than 50 languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, French, Hindi, Turkish, Korean, and Chinese.You switch to a different language by heading to NotebookLM, selecting your settings in the top-right corner of the screen, and choosing Output Language. From there, you can select from a list of languages, allowing you to receive responses and hear Audio Overviews in the language of your choice.Google...
After integrating Meta AI into WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger, Meta is rolling out a standalone AI app. Unveiled at Meta’s LlamaCon event on Tuesday, this app allows users to access Meta AI in a standalone app, similar to the ChatGPT app and other AI assistant apps. To win over users, Meta is trying to […]
On Tuesday, Meta is hosting its first-ever LlamaCon AI developer conference at its Menlo Park headquarters, where the company will try to pitch developers on building applications with its open Llama AI models. Just a year ago, that wasn’t a hard sell. However, in recent months, Meta has struggled to keep up with both “open” […]
OpenAI, which spends far more money than it takes in, is trying something new to stanch the bleeding. The company just announced that all users, including on the free tier, can shop from ChatGPT Search. "You can now search for a product, compare options and buy products in ChatGPT," OpenAI said in a press release. Categories currently available include fashion, beauty, home goods and electronics, with expansion to more categories set to come later. The search results you'll obtain are "chosen independently and are not ads," the company promises. The updates are available in 4o and are...
The US House of Representatives has passed the Take It Down Act, a bipartisan bill that criminalizes the "publication of non-consensual, sexually exploitative images," including AI-generated deepfakes that depict "identifiable, real people." It would also compel platforms, such as social networks, to remove those images within 48 hours of being notified. The bill enjoyed overwhelming support in Congress and was cleared for approval by President Trump with a vote of 409 to 2. It passed Senate unanimously in February, and Trump, who previously talked about it while addressing Congress, is...
The Take It Down Act is heading to President Donald Trump’s desk after the House voted 409-2 to pass the bill, which will require social media companies to take down content flagged as nonconsensual (including AI-generated) sexual images. Trump has pledged to sign it.The bill is among the only pieces of online safety legislation to successfully pass both chambers in years of furor over deepfakes, child safety, and other issues — but it’s one that critics fear will be used as a weapon against content the administration or its allies dislike. It criminalizes the publication of nonconsensual...
Hugging Face, the startup best known for the AI developer platform of the same name, is selling a programmable, 3D-printable robotic arm that can pick up and place objects and perform a few other basic chores. Called the SO-101, the arm is the follow-up to Hugging Face’s previous robotic arm, the SO-100, released last year. […]
Chinese tech conglomerate Huawei is looking to take on semiconductor behemoth Nvidia with a new advanced AI chip. Huawei is making progress developing its latest Ascend AI GPU, the Ascend 910D, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing sources familiar. The company has been reaching out to other Chinese firms to find test partners, the […]
OpenAI is launching a shopping experience inside of ChatGPT, complete with product picks and buy buttons. WIRED spoke with Adam Fry, the company's search product lead, to ask how it all works.
The hub of AI innovation is here — don’t miss out on the last 7 days of Early Bird ticket savings! AI is reshaping the world, and TechCrunch Sessions: AI is where you’ll witness the future unfold. Join 1,000+ founders, investors, researchers, and innovators on June 5 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall for a full […]
Creating animation is a time-consuming process, requiring multiple steps including storyboarding, rendering, composition, and lighting to craft a single scene. If a director wants to experiment with a different take for a scene, an animation team has to go back and tweak things before the scene can be finalized. Cheehoo, a startup founded by a […]
AI-based coding has exploded in popularity on the promise that it will make developers’ jobs faster and easier. But it’s also resulted in something else: a vast increase in lines of code, and thus the likelihood of bugs resulting in crashes or other mishaps. Today, an Israeli startup called Lightrun — which has built an […]
Meta’s AI chatbots were caught having sexual roleplay conversations with accounts labeled as underage, which sometimes involved its celebrity-voiced chatbots, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. In test conversations conducted by WSJ, both the Meta AI official chatbot and user-created chatbots would engage in — and even steer towards — sexually explicit conversations. The fantasy sex conversations continued even if the users were underage or if the chatbots were programmed as minors, according to WSJ.Even worse, the investigation found that chatbots using the voices of...
AI chatbots available on Meta’s platforms like Facebook and Instagram can engage in sexually explicit conversations with underage users, according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ says that after learning about internal concerns about whether the company was doing enough to protect minors, it spent months conducting hundreds of conversations […]
Around 300 London-based members of Google’s AI-focused DeepMind team are seeking to unionize with the Communication Workers Union, according to a Financial Times report that cites three people involved with the unionization effort. These DeepMind employees are reportedly unhappy about Google’s decision to remove a pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance from […]
Google gavel.Testimony this week from Google’s antitrust trial shows that Google gives Samsung an “enormous sum of money” each month to preinstall the Gemini AI app on Samsung devices, reports Bloomberg. Now that Judge Amit Mehta has ruled Google’s search engine is an illegal monopoly, its lawyers are sparring with the DOJ over how severe a potential penalty should be.Peter Fitzgerald, Google’s vice president of platforms and device partnerships, testified on Monday that Google’s payments to Samsung started in January. That’s after Google was found to have violated antitrust law...
Elon Musk’s xAI Holdings is in talks to raise $20 billion in fresh funding, potentially valuing the AI and social media combo at over $120 billion, according to a new Bloomberg report that says talks are in the “early stages.” If successful, the deal would constitute the the second-largest startup funding round ever, behind only […]
Google is rolling out Gmail updates for mobile users across Android and iOS, with some design updates and new access to AI features.Android tablet and foldable owners will have a more flexible Gmail app interface that lets them drag the divider to adjust the list and conversation panes to whatever size they want in landscape view. You can also drag the divider all the way to one side to switch to a single pane view if preferred. The update is rolling out now for Workspace and personal accounts.Google is also pushing a Material Design 3 update to Gmail on iOS that puts it in parity with the...
After a couple years of having its open-source Llama AI model be just a part of its Connect conferences, Meta is breaking things out and hosting an entirely generative AI-focused developer conference called LlamaCon on April 29. The event is entirely virtual, and you'll be able to watch along live on the Meta for Developers Facebook page.LlamaCon kicks off at 1PM ET / 10AM PT with a keynote address from Meta's Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, Vice President of AI Manohar Paluri and research scientist Angela Fan. The keynote is supposed to cover developments in the company's open-source AI...
Aravind Srinivas is battling Google to get his Perplexity AI assistant preinstalled on Android phones. At the same time, the CEO is refocusing his startup on what he predicts will be the next battleground in the AI race: your web browser.Perplexity plans to release its own browser called Comet next month, Srinivas tells me. "The reason we're doing the browser is that it might be the best way to build agents," he says. "A browser is essentially a containerized operating system. It can let you access other third-party services through hidden tabs if you're already logged into them, scrape the...
Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant, appears to be struggling to match its competition in terms of popularity. The number of people using Copilot has remained around 20 million weekly users for the last year, according to tech newsletter Newcomer, while OpenAI's ChatGPT has hit as high as 400 million weekly users.The data was shared at an annual executive meeting in March by Microsoft's chief financial officer Amy Hood, Newcomer reports, and raise some concerns about the AI future Microsoft is pitching. Microsoft uses OpenAI's models to power Copilot, and the assistant offers similar features to...
We knew Microsoft was about to launch Recall for real this time, and now the software maker is making it available to all Copilot Plus PCs. Recall, a feature that screenshots almost everything you do on a Copilot Plus PC, will be available today alongside an improved AI-powered Windows search interface and a new Click to Do feature that’s very similar to Google’s Circle to Search.Recall was originally supposed to launch at the same time as Copilot Plus PCs in June last year, but the feature was delayed following concerns raised by security researchers. Microsoft then planned to...
Phia will compare the prices of products with new and used options. | Screenshot: The VergePhoebe Gates, the daughter of Bill and Melinda Gates, has launched an AI shopping app with former roommate Sophia Kianni, The New York Times reports. The app, called Phia, is designed to help shoppers compare prices on listings of clothing, shoes, and accessories. It’s available on iOS and as a browser extension for Google Chrome.Once you install the app or extension, a “Should I Buy This?” button will appear when you land on a product page. Click the button, and Phia will scour the web to compare...
Kai Chen, a Canadian AI researcher working at OpenAI who’s lived in the U.S. for 12 years, was denied a green card, according to Noam Brown, a leading research scientist at the company. In a post on X, Brown said that Chen learned of the decision Friday and must soon leave the country. “It’s deeply […]
For months, a popular Australian radio station has used an AI-generated DJ to host one of its segments — and no one seemed to notice, as reported by the newsletter The Carpet and the Australian Financial Review. The show, called Workdays with Thy, offers a four-hour mix of hip hop, R&B, and pop, with no indication that the voice of its host, Thy, is AI-generated.Workdays with Thy is broadcast on the Sydney radio station CADA. Its owner, ARN Media, confirmed to the Financial Review that while Thy is AI-generated, the host’s voice and likeness are modeled after an actual employee in the...
Google started testing AI-summarized results in Google Search, AI Overviews, two years ago, and continues to expand the feature to new regions and languages. By the company’s estimation, it’s been a big success. AI Overviews is now used by more than 1.5 billion users monthly across over 100 countries. AI Overviews compiles results from around […]
Chinese startup Manus AI, which works on building tools related to AI agents, has picked up $75 million in a funding round led by Benchmark at a roughly $500 million valuation, according to Bloomberg. The company will use the money to expand to new markets, including the U.S., Japan, and the Middle East, Bloomberg noted, […]
OpenAI is giving free ChatGPT users limited access to its Deep Research tool without the need to pay for it. In addition, the company has expanded the tool's limits for all users by rolling out a lightweight version of it powered by its o4-mini model. It says the o4-mini Deep Research feature produces slightly shorter responses, but is "nearly as smart, more cost-efficient and delivers similarly high-quality results" as the original version. OpenAI previously released the tool for use by paying Pro, Plus, Team, Edu and Enterprise subscribers. But even they have a limited number of Deep...
This shot was probably made by AI — the clipboards and Mason jar are good tells. | Image: MicrosoftMicrosoft has revealed that it’s created a minute-long advert for its Surface Pro and Surface Laptop hardware using generative AI. But there’s a twist: it released the ad almost three months ago, and no-one seemed to notice the AI elements.The ad, which went live on YouTube on January 30th, isn’t entirely made up of generated content. In a Microsoft Design blog post published Wednesday, senior design communications manager Jay Tan admits that “the occasional AI hallucination would rear...
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay Thursday highlighting how little researchers understand about the inner workings of the world’s leading AI models. To address that, he’s set an ambitious goal for Anthropic to reliably detect most model problems by 2027. Amodei acknowledges the challenge ahead. In “The Urgency of Interpretability,” the CEO says Anthropic has made […]
Ziff Davis, the owner of several digital outlets like CNET, PCMag, IGN, and Everyday Health, is suing OpenAI over claims of copyright infringement, as first reported by The New York Times. In the lawsuit, the digital media company accuses OpenAI of “intentionally and relentlessly” creating “exact copies” of its outlets’ works without permission. The company also alleges that OpenAI trained its AI models on its work despite Ziff Davis instructing web crawlers not to scrape its data using a robots.txt file, adding that OpenAI allegedly removed copyright information from the...
Individuals, industry groups, and local governments submitted over 10,000 comments to the White House about its work-in-progress national AI policy, also known as the AI Action Plan. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on Thursday published the text of the submissions in a PDF spanning 18,480 pages. The comments, which touch […]
Google’s AI Overviews in Search now have “1.5 billion users per month,” CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement as part of Alphabet’s Q1 2025 earnings.Google started to widely roll out AI Overviews last May. Despite some awkward suggestions found shortly after their launch, the company has continued to expand upon the tool with updates, showing AI Overviews for more types of queries, and even officially adding ads as it aims to compete with other AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT Search and Perplexity.AI Overviews are just one of many AI tools the company is working on; in Q1, it...
For the first time in roughly five years, OpenAI is gearing up to release an AI system that’s truly “open,” meaning it’ll be available for download at no cost and not gated behind an API. TechCrunch reported on Wednesday that OpenAI is aiming for an early summer launch, and targeting performance superior to open models […]
Data centers to train and run AI may soon contain millions of chips, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and require power equivalent to a large city’s electricity grid, if the current trends hold. That’s according to a new study from researchers at Georgetown, Epoch AI, and Rand, which looked at the growth trajectory of […]
As artificial intelligence systems become smarter, one A.I. company is trying to figure out what to do if they become conscious.
Could future AIs be “conscious,” and experience the world similarly to the way humans do? There’s no strong evidence that they will, but Anthropic isn’t ruling out the possibility. On Thursday, the AI lab announced that it has started a research program to investigate — and prepare to navigate — what it’s calling “model welfare.” […]
Spotify announced on Thursday that it expanded the availability of its AI Playlist feature to over 40 additional markets, including countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean. The AI-powered tool, currently in beta on Android and iOS devices, lets listeners create personalized playlists based on written prompts, such as “workout music to make my […]
A big old thumb lump, and a touch of RGB underglow.Razer is announcing two new mice, the Pro Click V2 and Pro Click V2 Vertical Edition — the latter being Razer’s first vertical mouse design. Both mice are more ergonomic and productivity-focused than the usual gaming-first designs Razer is known for, but the $99.99 Pro Click V2 and $119.99 Vertical Edition feature the brand’s typical all-black designs and bright RGB illumination.Both Pro Click V2 mice feature programmable buttons, Razer Chroma compatibility, and Razer’s “AI Prompt Master” for quick access to prompting ChatGPT or...
Samsung’s newest washer and dryer come with 7-inch Android tablets built in that can run apps and answer phone calls.Almost a decade after launching the first smart fridge with a giant Android tablet built in, Samsung is leaning hard into the idea that we need tablets in all the things. At CES this year, the company announced its Screens Everywhere initiative, which essentially means putting 7- and 9-inch full-color touchscreens, called "AI Home screens," in its large home appliances, such as washers, dryers, wall ovens, and cooktops. Last month, Samsung launched the first products sporting...
If you're a frequent Photoshop user, there's a good chance you've run into this scenario. You open the program after a long break to edit an image, but this being Photoshop we're talking about, there are about five different ways to complete the task before you and you can't quite remember the way you learned to do it. Adobe is trying to make it easier to use its flagship app with the introduction of a built-in AI agent that can navigate Photoshop and complete tasks for users. At its Adobe Max London event today, the company demoed this agent, showing how it can automate...
Adobe has launched two new versions of its text-to-image generative AI model alongside a host of new Firefly features and Creative Cloud app updates coming to Photoshop and Illustrator. The fourth-generation Firefly Image models follow a similar precedent that OpenAI and Google have set for their chatbot releases, providing users with a choice between one model that’s suited for speed and efficiency, and another for more demanding tasks.Adobe says that Firefly Image Model 4 is its “fastest, most controllable, and most realistic Firefly image model yet,” allowing users to generate...
Perplexity’s iOS App just got an update enabling support for the company’s conversational AI voice assistant. Now Apple users can activate the assistant in the app and ask it to perform tasks like writing emails, setting reminders, and making dinner reservations.You can even navigate away from the app and continue to speak to Perplexity, although it doesn’t yet support screen sharing like it does on Android. Meanwhile, some of the conversational AI stuff Apple has promised for the Apple Intelligence-powered Siri could still be more than a year away. And unlike Apple Intelligence...
AI coding assistant startup Windsurf cut its prices “across the board” it announced on Monday, touting “massive savings” for its users as competition with its rival Cursor intensifies. Windsurf said it’s getting rid of its complex system of “flow action credits,” which charged developers for actions its AI did in the background. It’s also cutting […]
Perplexity Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko said he didn't want to testify in a trial about how to resolve Google's search monopoly because he feared retribution from Google. But after being subpoenaed to appear in court, he seized the moment to pitch a business opportunity for his AI company: buying Chrome.If Judge Amit Mehta sees things the way the Justice Department does, he could force Google to spin out its popular web browser - including the free open source Chromium browser that many other web browsers are built on. Google says this remedy is playing with fire, and could result...
Toward the end of March, OpenAI announced its intention to release its first “open” language model since GPT‑2 sometime this year. Now, details about that model are beginning to trickle out from the company’s sessions with the AI developer community. Sources tell TechCrunch that Aidan Clark, OpenAI’s VP of research, is leading development of the open model, […]
Last year was monumental for the AI industry in the U.S. and beyond. There were 49 startups that raised funding rounds worth $100 million or more in 2024, per our count at TechCrunch; three companies raised more than one “megaround,” and seven companies raised rounds $1 billion in size or larger. How will 2025 compare? […]
In mid-April, OpenAI launched a powerful new AI model, GPT-4.1, that the company claimed “excelled” at following instructions. But the results of several independent tests suggest the model is less aligned — that is to say, less reliable — than previous OpenAI releases. When OpenAI launches a new model, it typically publishes a detailed technical […]
WhatsApp is launching a new “Advanced Chat Privacy” feature that aims to prevent people from taking conversations outside the app. When the setting is turned on, you can block others from exporting your chat history and automatically downloading photos and videos sent in the app.The feature will prevent people from using messages for Meta AI as well, which you can currently use to ask questions within a chat and generate images.By default, WhatsApp saves photos and videos in a chat to your phone’s local storage. It also lets you and your recipients export chats (with or without media) to...
Margaret Mitchell, an AI ethics researcher at Hugging Face, tells WIRED about a new dataset designed to test AI models for bias in multiple languages.
As Big Tech pours countless dollars and resources into AI, preaching the gospel of its utopia-creating brilliance, here's a reminder that algorithms can screw up. Big time. The latest evidence: You can trick Google's AI Overview (the automated answers at the top of your search queries) into explaining fictional, nonsensical idioms as if they were real.According to Google's AI Overview (via @gregjenner on Bluesky), "You can't lick a badger twice" means you can't trick or deceive someone a second time after they've been tricked once.That sounds like a logical attempt to explain the idiom — if...
Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, had 350 million monthly active users around the globe as of March, according to internal data revealed in Google’s ongoing antitrust suit. The Information first reported the stat. Usage of Google’s AI offerings has exploded in the last year. Gemini had just 9 million daily active users in October 2024, but […]
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The Ray-Ban Meta Skyler frames are now available in new color lens combinations. | Image: MetaMeta announced new color lens combinations for its Ray-Ban smart glasses as well as wider availability for some features that were previously only accessible to members of Meta’s Early Access Program. These include live translation, the ability to send messages and make calls through Instagram, and conversations with Meta AI based on what you’re currently looking at.Live translation was first teased at Meta Connect 2024 last October, and saw a limited rollout through Meta’s Early Access Program...
WhatsApp is introducing a new feature called Advanced Chat Privacy that can block participants from sharing the contents of a conversation. This is an opt-in tool that’s available for both traditional chats and groups.Once selected, the toolset will prevent anyone in the chat from sharing anything outside of the app. This means it’ll block all chat exports, but that’s just the beginning. The software also prevents a smartphone from auto-downloading media and will stop integration with AI assistants. Basically, what happens on WhatsApp stays on WhatsApp. However, it's unclear if it...
Tech evangelists have been yammering about “working smarter, not harder†for years. Now, two 21-year-old Columbia University dropouts are proposing a new $5.3 million twist on the concept: use their AI tool Cluely to “cheat on everything.â€That’s what it literally says in Cluely’s online manifesto: “We want to cheat on everything.†Unlike the AI chatbots you’re familiar with, it describes Cluely as an “undetectable AI-...
Cloud monitoring and security platform Datadog on Wednesday announced that it has acquired Metaplane, an AI-powered data observability startup, for an undisclosed amount. In a press release, Datadog said that the deal “accelerates” its expansion into data observability, building on the launch of related products. Metaplane will continue supporting existing and new customers through a […]
Small and medium businesses are the newest targets for cybersecurity attacks, with 1 in 3 breached last year. SMBs are becoming more proactive in detecting and stopping these threats, and today a startup called Cynomi is announcing $37 million in funding to meet that demand. Insight Partners and Entrée Capital are co-leading the round, with previous backers […]
Anysphere, maker of AI coding assistant Cursor, is growing so quickly, it’s not in the market to be sold, even to OpenAI, a source close to the company tells TechCrunch. It’s been a hot target. Cursor is one of the most popular AI-powered coding tools and its revenue has been growing astronomically – doubling on […]
A China-based startup, Sand AI, has released an openly licensed video-generating AI model that’s garnered praise from entrepreneurs like Microsoft Research Asia founding director Kai-Fu Lee. But Sand AI appears to be censoring images that might raise the ire of Chinese regulators from the hosted version of the model, according to TechCrunch’s testing. Earlier this […]
Character.AI, a leading platform for chatting and roleplaying with AI-generated characters, unveiled its forthcoming video generation model, AvatarFX, on Tuesday. Available in closed beta, the model animates the platform’s characters in a variety of styles and voices, from human-like characters to 2D animal cartoons. AvatarFX distinguishes itself from competitors like OpenAI’s Sora because it isn’t […]
A pair of undergrads, neither with extensive AI expertise, say that they’ve created an openly available AI model that can generate podcast-style clips similar to Google’s NotebookLM. The market for synthetic speech tools is vast and growing. ElevenLabs is one of the largest players, but there’s no shortage of challengers (see PlayAI, Sesame, and so […]
Apple has stopped listing its Apple Intelligence features as “available now” following an inquiry from the National Advertising Division (NAD). Based on an archived webpage, it looks like Apple removed the claim from the top of its Apple Intelligence page in late March. The NAD, which is part of the Better Business Bureau, reviews national advertising campaigns for truthfulness. It recommended that Apple “discontinue or modify” its “available now” claim, saying it “reasonably conveyed the message” that AI-powered features like Priority Notifications, Genmoji, Image Playground...
The Washington Post is partnering with OpenAI to bring its reporting to ChatGPT. The two organizations did not disclose the financial terms of the agreement, but the deal will see ChatGPT display summaries, quotes and links to articles from The Post when users prompt the chatbot to search the web."We're all in on meeting our audiences where they are," said Peter Elkins-Williams, head of global partnerships at The Post. "Ensuring ChatGPT users have our impactful reporting at their fingertips builds on our commitment to provide access where, how and when our audiences want it."The Post is no...
Chatbots and other kinds of AI agents — and the companies that build them — may feel like a dime a dozen these days. But the truth is that, for both businesses and consumers, some may be infinitely more useful (and perhaps less dystopian) than others. Today, a startup that’s built a successful business around […]
Aidan Gomez, the co-founder and CEO of generative AI startup Cohere, has joined the board of EV maker Rivian, according to a regulatory filing. The appointment is the latest sign that Rivian sees promises in applying AI to its own venture while positioning itself as a software leader — and even provider — within the […]
On Sunday, 21-year-old Chungin ‘Roy’ Lee announced he’s raised $5.3 million in seed funding from Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures for his startup, Cluely, that offers an AI tool to “cheat on everything.” The startup was born after Lee posted in a viral X thread that he was suspended by Columbia University after he and […]
An AI doctoral student in California had their SEVIS record — the digital proof of their valid student visa — terminated, putting their immigration status at risk. Speaking to TechCrunch, the student, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, said they were notified via their college’s international student center that they’d been identified in a criminal records […]
Despite a still tight venture capital market, new unicorns are still being created every month. Using data from Crunchbase and PitchBook, TechCrunch tracked down the newly VC-backed startup minted unicorns so far this year (as of the end of January). These include healthcare companies like Hippocratic AI and satellite space companies like Loft Orbital. This […]
Meta is using AI technology to search for kids who are lying about their age on Instagram in order to bypass safeguards, the company announced on Monday. When Meta finds an account that it suspects belongs to a teen, the platform will enroll them into a restricted Teen Account, even if the account lists an […]
A discrepancy between first- and third-party benchmark results for OpenAI’s o3 AI model is raising questions about the company’s transparency and model testing practices. When OpenAI unveiled o3 in December, the company claimed the model could answer just over a fourth of questions on FrontierMath, a challenging set of math problems. That score blew the […]
Every now and then, a Silicon Valley startup launches with such an “absurdly” described mission that it’s difficult to discern if the startup is for real or just satire. Such is the case with Mechanize, a startup whose founder – and the non-profit AI research organization he founded called Epoch – is being skewered on […]
OpenAI’s recently launched o3 and o4-mini AI models are state-of-the-art in many respects. However, the new models still hallucinate, or make things up — in fact, they hallucinate more than several of OpenAI’s older models. Hallucinations have proven to be one of the biggest and most difficult problems to solve in AI, impacting even today’s […]
Under no circumstances should you let AI do your schoolwork for you, but Google has decided to make that option a little bit easier for the next year. The company is offering a free year of it's Google One AI Premium plan, which includes Gemini Advanced, access to the AI assistant in the Google Workspace and things like Gemini Live, to any college student willing to sign up.The offer gives you a sample platter of Google's latest AI features, which normally costs $20 per month, and is primarily focused on things you can do with Gemini. That includes experimental products like NotebookLM for...
Some ChatGPT users have noticed a strange phenomenon recently: occasionally, the chatbot refers to them by name as it reasons through problems. That wasn’t the default behavior previously, and several users claim ChatGPT is mentioning their names despite never having been told what to call them. Reviews are mixed. One user, software developer and AI […]
If you want to make the most out of a world increasingly filled with AI tools, here’s a habit to develop: start taking screenshots. Lots of screenshots. Of anything and everything. Because for all the talk of voice modes, omnipresent cameras, and the multimodal future of everything, there might be no more valuable digital behavior than to press the buttons and save what you’re looking at.Screenshots are the most universal method of capturing digital information. You can capture anything — well, almost anything, thanks a lot, Netflix! â...
Netflix is building a new search experience aimed at improving the discovery experience, and it’s going to use AI to do it, the company’s CEO Greg Peters said during its first-quarter results conference call. Peters said Netflix is working on “interactive search that’s based on generative technologies” to help people find different titles. Answering an […]
Welcome to your Friday edition of TMA. It’s a public holiday where I’m from, so it’s a shorter briefing than usual. Barring a barrage of new cars (tariffs? shh!) revealed at the New York International Auto Show, it’s been a relatively quiet week, but not without a bit of drama.Engadget“You know, they say money can’t buy happiness. And… yeah, OK… I guess that’s true. God knows I’ve tried. But it can buy a Cybertruck, and that’s pretty sick, right? …Right?? Fuck, I’m so alone.” That’s what a pretty realistic AI voice clone of Elon Musk was saying to pedestrians at...
When news broke that OpenAI was in talks to acquire AI coding company Windsurf for $3 billion, one of the first questions on the mind of anyone following the space was likely: “Why not buy Cursor creator Anysphere instead?” After all, OpenAI Startup Fund has been an investor in Anysphere, the maker of Cursor, since the […]
In a bid to more aggressively compete with rival AI companies like Google, OpenAI is launching Flex processing, an API option that provides lower AI model usage prices in exchange for slower response times and “occasional resource unavailability.” Flex processing, which is available in beta for OpenAI’s recently released o3 and o4-mini reasoning models, is […]
President Donald Trump’s tariffs have underscored the increasing geopolitical risk that almost all businesses now face. As the situation continues to shift with Trump’s unpredictable deal-making, it’s also becoming clear how challenging it is for companies, nonprofits, consultants, and lawyers to keep up with the rapid day-to-day changes. “We are drowning in trade updates every […]
Geoff Ralston, known for his years at Y Combinator, has a new AI VC fund called SAIF. It is seeking AI startups focused on safety.
On Thursday, weeks after launching its most powerful AI model yet, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Google published a technical report showing the results of its internal safety evaluations. However, the report is light on the details, experts say, making it difficult to determine which risks the model might pose. Technical reports provide useful — and unflattering, […]
Chatbot Arena, the crowdsourced benchmarking project major AI labs rely on to test and market their AI models, is forming a company called Arena Intelligence Inc., reports Bloomberg. In a blog post published Thursday, Chatbot Arena said that the company will “give [it] the resources to improve [its platform] significantly over what it is today.” […]
You might now be out of luck if you've been relying on Apple's AI tools to help you craft a Facebook post or generate a custom emoji to slap on an Instagram Story. As first reported by Sorcererhat Tech (by way of 9to5Mac), Apple Intelligence features are not currently functional on Meta's iOS apps, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Threads. Engadget has confirmed that Apple Intelligence isn't working in the apps at the time of writing.As things stand, along with writing tools (which include the likes of text generation and proofreading), Apple Intelligence features...
Stargate, a $500 billion project headed up by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank to build AI data centers and other AI infrastructure in the U.S., is considering investments in the U.K. and elsewhere overseas, according to a Financial Times report. While Stargate was initially launched as a way to boost U.S. AI infrastructure, the project is […]
Google is now offering Gemini live video and screen sharing to just about every Android user who wants them — totally free. The announcement comes just a couple weeks after Google first rolled out the features. They have been available to all Pixel 9 and Samsung Galaxy S25 owners and through a Google One AI Premium plan for other Android users with the Gemini app. Now, Google says that "great feedback" has motivated the company "to bring it to more people." Gemini live video and screen share allows you to ask Gemini about anything on your screen or directly in front of you. For example...
Perplexity’s AI voice assistant will reportedly play a significant role in the upcoming Motorola Razr device expected to be announced this week, Bloomberg reports. The news comes after Motorola posted a teaser video of the Razr on social media last week, showing the foldable device animate into the word AI.Sources speaking to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman say Perplexity has a deal with Motorola to feature its AI assistant alongside Google’s Gemini as an option. Motorola will have a special user interface to interact with Perplexity to encourage customers to try it, and the company will feature...
Smashing, an AI-powered app that lets users build a curated list of news and posts, is shutting down, because of its inability to scale rapidly enough.
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is slowly bringing its Grok chatbot to parity with top rivals like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Wednesday night, xAI announced a “memory” feature for Grok that enables the bot to remember details from past conversations. Now, if you ask Grok for recommendations, it’ll give more personalized responses — assuming you’ve […]
Gemini Live’s feature that lets it see and respond to what’s on your camera and your screen will now be free for all Android users via the Gemini app, Google announced today.The AI-powered feature officially launched earlier this month for everyone on Pixel 9 and Samsung Galaxy S25 using the Gemini app. At the time, Google said the feature would launch “soon” for all Android users though would only be available with a Gemini Advanced subscription. But the company has changed its mind and is now making it available for free.“We’ve been hearing great feedback on Gemini Live with...
The Trump administration is considering new restrictions on the Chinese AI lab DeepSeek that would limit it from buying Nvidia’s AI chips, and potentially bar Americans from accessing its AI services, The New York Times reported on Wednesday. The restrictions are part of the Trump administration’s effort to compete with China on AI. Months after […]
Copilot Vision is now free in Edge.Copilot Vision, Microsoft’s AI assistant feature that can interpret what’s on your screen and help you use apps, is now available for free use within the Edge browser, Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, announced on Bluesky today. Vision is a “talk-based experience,” as Microsoft calls it, meaning you use it by speaking into the air, then waiting for Copilot to respond.Suleyman says if you opt into the feature, Copilot Vision can “literally see what you see on screen.” Suleyman suggests having Copilot Vision guide you through a recipe while you...
OpenAI says that it deployed a new system to monitor its latest AI reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini, for prompts related to biological and chemical threats. The system aims to prevent the models from offering advice that could instruct someone on carrying out potentially harmful attacks, according to OpenAI’s safety report. O3 and o4-mini represent […]
Codeium, the maker of a popular AI coding assistant tool Windsurf, is in talks to be acquired by OpenAI for about $3 billion, Bloomberg reported. If the deal happens, it would put OpenAI in direct competition with a number of other AI coding assistant providers, including Anysphere, the maker of Cursor, which OpenAI backed from […]
An organization OpenAI frequently partners with to probe the capabilities of its models and evaluate them for safety, Metr, suggests that it wasn’t given much time to evaluate OpenAI’s most powerful new models, o3 and o4-mini. In a blog post published Wednesday, Metr writes that its red teaming of o3 and o4-mini was “conducted in […]
OpenAI is releasing two new AI reasoning models today: o3, which the company calls its “most powerful reasoning model,” and o4-mini, which is a smaller and faster model that “achieves remarkable performance for its size and cost,” according to a blog post.The company also says that o3 and o4-mini will be able to “think” with images, meaning they will “integrate images directly into their chain of thought.” That could be useful if you show the models things like sketches or whiteboards. OpenAI says that the models will also be able to adjust images by zooming in on them or...
OpenAI announced on Thursday the launch of o3 and o4-mini, new AI reasoning models designed to pause and work through questions before responding. The company calls o3 its most advanced reasoning model ever, outperforming the company’s previous models on tests measuring math, coding, reasoning, science, and visual understanding capabilities. Meanwhile, o4-mini offers what OpenAI says […]
In a bid to inject AI into more of the programming process, OpenAI is launching Codex CLI, a coding “agent” designed to run locally from terminal software. Announced on Wednesday alongside OpenAI’s newest AI models, o3 and o4-mini, Codex CLI links OpenAI’s models with local code and computing tasks, OpenAI says. Via Codex CLI, OpenAI’s […]
Microsoft researchers claim they’ve developed the largest-scale 1-bit AI model, also known as a “bitnet,” to date. Called BitNet b1.58 2B4T, it’s openly available under an MIT license and can run on CPUs, including Apple’s M2. Bitnets are essentially compressed models designed to run on lightweight hardware. In standard models, weights, the values that define […]
Figma slapped Swedish AI coding startup Loveable with a cease-and-desist warning for naming one of its new product features “Dev Mode.” It turns out Figma successfully trademarked the term Dev Mode in November last year, according to the US Patent and Trademark office, having introduced its own Dev Mode feature in 2023.“We’re flattered that you agree ‘Dev Mode’ is the ideal name for a software tool that helps bridge the gap between design and development,” Figma said in the letter shared by Lovable co-founder Anton Osika on LinkedIn. Figma told the startup that Dev Mode has been...
AMD says that the U.S. government’s license control requirement for exporting AI chips to China and certain other countries may impact it significantly. If it doesn’t successfully obtain a license, the company could be on the hook for roughly $800 million in inventory, purchase commitments, and related reserves charges, the company said in a filing […]
NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5060 Ti aims at a very niche group of gamers. Starting at $379 with 8GB of VRAM, or $429 with 16GB, the 5060 Ti is for people who want something a bit more powerful than the base $299 RTX 5060, but aren't willing to shell out for the midrange $549 RTX 5070. (And it's worth noting that card is already selling for well beyond that price). In terms of raw rendering power, it's a minor upgrade over the previous RTX 4060 Ti. But thanks to the power of DLSS 4 AI upscaling, as well as 4X frame generation (the ability to create three interpolated frames for every one that's...
Microsoft has enabled a new “computer use” feature for Copilot Studio this week that lets AI agents interact with websites and desktop applications. Much like OpenAI’s Operator or Claude’s identically named “computer use” feature, businesses will be able to use Copilot Studio to build AI agents that treat websites and desktop apps as if they’re tools for automating tasks.“Computer use enables agents to interact with websites and desktop apps by clicking buttons, selecting menus, and typing into fields on the screen,” explains Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president of...
Grok, the chatbot from Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has gained a canvas-like feature for editing and creating documents and basic apps. Called Grok Studio, the feature was announced on X late Tuesday. It’s available for both free and paying Grok users on Grok.com “Grok can now generate documents, code, reports, and browser games,” wrote […]
According to an SEC filing from NVIDIA, the US government now requires companies to obtain a license to export H20 integrated circuits and any other products that achieve the same performance benchmarks. The filing states that "the license requirement addresses the risk that the covered products may be used in, or diverted to, a supercomputer in China." Mainland China is not the only place targeted by this license; NVIDIA will also require permission to sell the H20 to the territories of Hong Kong and Macau as well as to nations with the D:5 designation as US Arms Embargo Countries. The...
Semiconductor giant Nvidia is facing unexpected new U.S. export controls on its H20 chips. In a filing Tuesday, Nvidia said it was informed by the U.S. government that it will need a license to export its H20 AI chips to China. This license will be required indefinitely, according to the filing — the U.S. government […]
Former Y Combinator startup telli is helping companies alleviate the bottleneck that occurs when a high-volume of customers try to, for example, book appointments. Its AI voice agents kick in and handle basic operations while handing off more-complex processes to human operators. The Berlin-based startup has now raised $3.6 million in a pre-seed funding round led […]
In an update to its Preparedness Framework, the internal framework OpenAI uses to decide whether AI models are safe and what safeguards, if any, are needed during development and release, OpenAI said that it may “adjust” its requirements if a rival AI lab releases a “high-risk” system without comparable safeguards. The change reflects the increasing […]
We may be witnessing the makings of a new tech industry feud between competitors. Figma has sent a cease-and-desist letter to popular no-code AI startup Lovable, Figma confirmed to TechCrunch. The letter tells Lovable to stop using the term “Dev Mode” for a new product feature. Figma, which also has a feature called Dev Mode, […]
Context.ai, a startup building evaluations and analytics for AI models, announced Tuesday that its co-founders will join OpenAI. Context.ai plans to wind down its products following the acqui-hire, per a message on the company’s website. When reached for comment, OpenAI declined to reveal the terms of the deal. “Evals are a requirement to building high-performing […]
In a sign of Anthropic’s increasingly cosy relationship with Amazon, Anthropic has formed a new team to recruit AWS customers to use its AI products. The team, which Anthropic appears to have begun hiring for several months ago, aims to “accelerate” the adoption of Anthropic’s AI among AWS accounts by “building programs that […] scale […]
Step into an extraordinary fireside chat featuring Ali Ghodsi, the visionary co-founder and CEO of Databricks, alongside Dario Amodei, the innovative co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. Discover how their groundbreaking partnership is set to accelerate the evolution of domain-specific AI agents. During this free, virtual event, you’ll also gain exclusive access to three additional sessions […]
On Monday, OpenAI launched a new family of AI models, GPT-4.1, which the company said outperformed some of its existing models on certain tests, particularly benchmarks for programming. However, GPT-4.1 didn’t ship with the safety report that typically accompanies OpenAI’s model releases, known as a model or system card. As of Tuesday morning, OpenAI had […]
In the wake of criticism over the underwhelming performance of its AI products, especially in areas like notification summaries, Apple on Monday detailed how it is trying to improve its AI models by analyzing user data privately with the aid of synthetic data. Using an approach called “differential privacy,” the company said it would first […]
Not even Pokémon is safe from AI benchmarking controversy. Last week, a post on X went viral, claiming that Google’s latest Gemini model surpassed Anthropic’s flagship Claude model in the original Pokémon video game trilogy. Reportedly, Gemini had reached Lavendar Town in a developer’s Twitch stream; Claude was stuck at Mount Moon as of late […]
In a decision almost certainly informed by the recent tariff chaos, NVIDIA is going to start making some of its AI chips and supercomputers in the US. The company announced that it's building and testing its Blackwell chips in Arizona and it plans to manufacture its AI supercomputers — presumably the recently announced DGX Spark and DGX Station — in Texas.NVIDIA says TSMC is already making Blackwell chips in Phoenix, Arizona and the company is partnering with Amkor and SPIL for testing and packaging. In Texas, the company's supercomputers will be made by Foxconn in Houston and Wistron in...
Apple says it’s found a way to make its AI models better without training on its users’ data or even copying it from their iPhones and Macs. In a blog post first reported on by Bloomberg, the company outlined its plans to have devices compare a synthetic dataset to samples of recent emails or messages from users who have opted into its Device Analytics program.Apple devices will be able to determine which synthetic inputs are closest to real samples, which they will relay to the company by sending “only a signal indicating which of the variants is closest to the sampled data.” That way...
Microsoft held off on releasing the privacy-unfriendly feature after a swell of pushback last year. Now it’s trying again, with a few improvements that skeptics say still aren't enough.
OpenAI said on Monday that it would soon wind down the availability of GPT-4.5, its largest-ever AI model, via its API. GPT-4.5 was released only in late February. Developers will have access to GPT-4.5 via OpenAI’s API until July 14, after which they’ll have to transition to another model in OpenAI’s catalog, the company says. […]
Google’s AI research lab, Google DeepMind, says that it has created an AI model that can help decipher dolphin vocalizations, supporting research efforts to better understand how dolphins communicate. The model, called DolphinGemma, was trained using data from the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), a nonprofit that studies Atlantic spotted dolphins and their behaviors. Built on […]
Google Classroom introduced a new AI-powered feature designed to help teachers generate questions. Launched on Monday, this tool lets educators create a list of questions based on specific text input. Using this text-dependent question generation tool, which utilizes Gemini, teachers can either upload files from Google Drive or manually enter text for the AI to […]
Nvidia has brought some of its chip production stateside. On Monday, Nvidia announced that it has started producing its Blackwell AI GPUs at TSMC’s plant in Phoenix, Arizona, while companies within the state package and test them.TSMC, or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., is the world’s biggest chipmaker and announced a $100 billion investment in US chipmaking last month. It began producing chips using the 4nm process at its Arizona factory in January and has plans to make chips with the more efficient 2nm technology by the end of the decade. Nvidia doesn’t say which Blackwell...
Meta announced on Monday that it’s going to train its AI models on public content, such as posts and comments on Facebook and Instagram, in the EU after previously pausing its plans to do so in response to regulatory pressure due to to data privacy concerns. The company will start training its AI on users’ […]
AI dev platform Hugging Face has acquired Pollen Robotics, a robotics startup based in France, for an undisclosed amount. Wired reports that Hugging Face plans to sell Pollen’s humanoid robot, Reachy 2, and let developers download and suggest improvements to its code. Pollen Robotics, which aims to bring affordable humanoid robots to the home, was […]
Nvidia says that it has commissioned more than a million square feet of manufacturing space to build and test AI chips in Arizona and Texas as part of an effort to move a portion of its production to the U.S. The chipmaker says that Nvidia Blackwell chips have started production at TSMC’s chip plants in […]
For anyone who misses the way smartphones used to work, Samsung has announced two new "rugged" Galaxy devices, the Galaxy XCover 7 Pro and the Galaxy Tab Active 5 Pro, that feature removable backplates and user-replaceable batteries.The Galaxy XCover 7 Pro is designed for enterprise customers, but it comes packed with some of the same Galaxy AI features Samsung has been pushing on its flagship smartphones, including Google's Circle to Search and Object Eraser. The phone uses a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip, has a brighter screen and comes with a 4,350mAh battery, but the reason to buy it are all the...
OpenAI may soon require organizations to complete an ID verification process in order to access certain future AI models, according to a support page published to the company’s website last week. The verification process, called Verified Organization, is “a new way for developers to unlock access to the most advanced models and capabilities on the […]
Crosswalk buttons in at least three California cities appear to have been hacked this weekend to give them the seemingly AI-generated voices of Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In videos posted online, the apparent voice of Musk begs listeners to be his friend, or that of Zuckerberg brags about “undermining democracy” and “cooking our grandparents’ brains with AI slop.”A Palo Alto, California city spokesperson told Palo Alto Online that city employees “determined that 12 downtown intersections were impacted,” and have disabled the crosswalks’ voice features...
Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the AI startup led by OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised an additional $2 billion in funding at a $32 billion valuation, according to the Financial Times. The startup had already raised $1 billion, and there were reports that an additional $1 billion round was in the works. […]
Earlier this week, Meta landed in hot water for using an experimental, unreleased version of its Llama 4 Maverick model to achieve a high score on a crowdsourced benchmark, LM Arena. The incident prompted the maintainers of LM Arena to apologize, change their policies, and score the unmodified, vanilla Maverick. Turns out, it’s not very […]
Google Cloud announced a long list of impressive AI startups as customers during its Cloud Next conference this week
A group of professors specializing in copyright law has filed an amicus brief in support of authors suing Meta for allegedly training its Llama AI models on ebooks without permission. The brief, filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, calls Meta’s fair use defense “a […]
YouTube is giving creators a new AI tool that can generate instrumental tracks to use in videos for free without worrying about copyright claims, TechCrunch reports. The new feature was demonstrated in a video posted on the company’s Creator Insider channel this week.In the video, the host, Lauren, shows a new tab in the Creator Music beta section on YouTube called “Music assistant” where you can enter a prompt like “give me uplifting and motivational music for a workout montage.” The tool then generates several tracks you can review and download so you can add them to your video...
The typo only makes it funnier.ChatGPT’s latest image generator had an explosive debut thanks to the viral Studio Ghibli art trend, and LinkedIn users have now jumped on a new gimmick: turning yourself into a toy.There are several flavors of the trend being shared. The “AI Action Figure” variant appears to have gained the most traction, in which a person generates a plastic version of themselves in a blister pack, alongside various accessories — typically a laptop, a book, and a coffee cup, which is fitting given LinkedIn is largely driving this trend. Other versions try to specifically...
People were already mad at Garmin raising the cost of the Fenix 8 before they added a subscription.Two weeks ago, Garmin announced it was launching a new subscription. Where the Garmin Connect app had previously offered everything from in-depth metrics and training plans for free, the beloved fitness tech company was now adding premium AI summaries, among other features, behind a paywall. In The Verge comments, my social media mentions, and the r/Garmin subreddit, cries about enshittification ensued.Then, earlier this week, Garmin-competitor Polar announced that it, too, was launching a premium...
GPT-4, OpenAI's first big upgrade to ChatGPT months after unleashing it on the world, is on its way out. A changelog the company published on Thursday said the model will be retired from ChatGPT on April 30. GPT-4o, which has been available since last May, will fully replace it.Despite GPT-4's significance in modern AI's brief but world-changing history, its sunsetting isn't a great loss for customers. OpenAI says GPT-4o improves on it in writing, coding and STEM. Recent upgrades have boosted the newer model further, enhancing its instruction following, problem-solving and conversational flow...
TechCrunch Sessions: AI is fast approaching. So, what does that mean for you? It means exhibit tables are nearly gone — and now’s your chance to grab one before they’re all sold out. If you’ve got a game-changing product to showcase to the AI world, don’t keep it quiet. Exhibit your brand in front of […]
Google is back with another entry-level smartphone, the Pixel 9a. With more AI smarts, a new hardware design, and the biggest battery on any Pixel yet, on paper, it sounds good. Especially the sub-$500 price tag.In our full Pixel 9a review, Sam Rutherford breaks down where corners have been cut compared to the rest of the Pixel 9 family, namely screen (which is still nice!) and sluggish charging.EngadgetWhile there is support for nearly all of Google’s AI features, the $499 Pixel 9a doesn’t get access to Google’s Screenshots app, which is an odd oversight. Especially when the phone has...
The US Department of Justice has indicted Albert Sangier for defrauding investors with misleading statements about his Nate financial technology platform. Founded by Sangier in 2018, Nate claimed it could offer shoppers a universal checkout app thanks to artificial intelligence. However, the indictment states that the so-called AI-powered transactions in Nate were actually completed by human contractors in the Philippines and Romania or by bots. Sangier raised more than $40 million from investors for the app.This case follows reporting by The Information in 2022 that cast light on Nate's use of...
Albert Saniger, the founder and former CEO of Nate, an AI shopping app that promised a “universal” checkout experience, was charged with defrauding investors on Wednesday, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. Founded in 2018, Nate raised over $50 million from investors like Coatue and Forerunner Ventures, most recently raising […]
In a recent appearance on “Possible,” a podcast co-hosted by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said Google plans to eventually combine its Gemini AI models with its Veo video-generating models to improve the former’s understanding of the physical world. “We’ve always built Gemini, our foundation model, to be multimodal from the […]
Thinking Machines Lab, the new AI startup from ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is reportedly attempting to close one of the largest seed rounds in history. Business Insider reported on Thursday that Thinking Machines Lab has doubled the target for its seed funding round to $2 billion. The round, should it close according to plan, would […]
AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other top AI labs are increasingly being used to assist with programming tasks. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in October that 25% of new code at the company is generated by AI, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has expressed ambitions to widely deploy AI coding models within the social […]
Canva is launching its latest smorgasbord of generative AI-powered workspace tools in its attempt to cram everything that Microsoft, Google, and Adobe can do into a single platform. Canva’s Visual Suite is being redesigned to combine its design and productivity tools into a single interface, alongside adding new coding, photo editing, spreadsheet, and AI chatbot features.These join the collection of office suite tools that rolled out in 2022, such as Canva Docs and Canva Whiteboards — Canva’s answer to services like Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and FigJam. Having made a name for itself as...
U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon attended the ASU+GSV Summit this week, where experts in education and technology gathered to discuss how AI will impact learning. While speaking on a panel about AI in the workforce, McMahon repeatedly referred to AI as “A1,” like the steak sauce. “You know, AI development — I mean, how […]
Jobandtalent, an AI-based “workforce as a service” marketplace that connects people with companies looking for hourly workers, announced it has raised €92 million ($103 million). The Series F — which includes participation from Atomico, BlackRock, DN Capital, Hercules, Infravia, Kibo, and Kinnevik — values the Madrid, Spain-based company at €1.3 billion ($1.5 billion) post-money. On the surface, […]
YouTube is launching a new feature that will allow creators to use AI technology to generate instrumental backing music that can be added to their videos. In an update published to its Creator Insider channel this week, the company shared that it’s beginning to roll out an update to its Creator Music marketplace that will […]
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy thinks companies should invest “aggressively” in AI now to reap the full financial rewards in the future. In his annual letter to Amazon shareholders published Thursday, Jassy said “substantial capital” is required to keep up with the pace of AI innovation and customer demand for AI products. He added that Amazon, […]
OpenAI is getting ready to unveil a number of new AI models, sources familiar with the company’s plans tell The Verge. Among the new AI models will be a release of what I’m expecting will be branded GPT-4.1, which one source describes as a revamped version of OpenAI’s GPT-4o multimodal model.GPT-4o was originally introduced last year as a flagship model that reasoned across audio, vision, and text in real time. I understand that OpenAI will launch GPT-4.1 alongside smaller GPT-4.1 mini and nano versions as soon as next week.OpenAI is also...
Google, PJM, and Tapestry announced a partnership to develop AI tools to speed interconnection requests through the queue.
In the world of tech, some might argue that the term of the decade is AI, but in the bigger scheme of things, beyond this single sector, the most important word may well be “resilience.” How well prepared are people, organizations, and countries for unforeseen, negative economic, geopolitical, social, and environmental developments? It’s a question […]
OpenAI has filed a countersuit against Elon Musk, accusing him of staging press attacks and malicious campaigns on "the social media platform he controls," as well as of making "harassing legal claims" and a "sham bid for OpenAI's assets." In its filing, courtesy of TechCrunch, the ChatGPT-maker said Musk could not tolerate seeing such "success for an enterprise he had abandoned and declared doomed" and had made it his own project to take down the organization. It also said that Musk's efforts have ramped up in recent months after it announced its plans to restructure and become a for-profit...
It's 2025, so it should be no surprise that another organization has sold its soul (entered into a licensing deal with an AI company) for an undisclosed sum. A new partnership allows UK-based Synthesia to access Shutterstock's content library for training its latest AI model, EXPRESS-2. This deal isn't the first of its kind for Shutterstock, which previously teamed up with OpenAI to sell stock images made using AI generator DALL-E 2.Synthesia creates avatars for corporate videos about topics such as cybersecurity and good communication at work. It aims to use Shutterstock's...
A man’s recent attempt to use an AI-generated avatar in his legal appeal made an immediate impression on a New York courtroom, but probably not the one he was hoping for. Jerome Dewald — a 74-year-old that The Register notes is behind a startup that says it’s “revolutionizing legal self-representation with AI” — was chewed out during an employment dispute hearing on March 26th for failing to inform judges that he had artificially generated the man presenting his oral argument. While the court had approved Dewald to submit a video for his case, Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels...
How do you get talented engineers to work for a startup in a mundane field at a time when more exciting companies are paying well and hiring aggressively? Here’s an answer from one insurance startup out of Poland called Ominimo: make pay competitive, yes, but more importantly, give those engineers the license to apply their […]
Billionaire Elon Musk might’ve just been countersued by OpenAI. But that isn’t stopping his AI company, xAI, from making its flagship Grok 3 model available via an API. It has been several months since xAI unveiled Grok 3, the company’s answer to models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini. Grok 3 can analyze images and respond to questions, […]
OpenAI filed a countersuit against Elon Musk on Wednesday, saying on X that “Elon’s nonstop actions against us are just bad-faith tactics to slow down OpenAI and seize control of the leading AI innovations for his personal benefit.”In the lawsuit, OpenAI’s lawyers argue that “Musk’s continued attacks on OpenAI, culminating most recently in the fake takeover bid designed to disrupt OpenAI’s future, must cease. Musk should be enjoined from further unlawful and unfair action, and held responsible for the damage he has already caused.”Musk, who was part of the initial founding team...
Just a few weeks after OpenAI said it would adopt rival Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI models to the systems where data resides, Google is following suit. In a post on X on Wednesday, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis announced that Google will add support for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, or MCP, to its Gemini […]
Adobe is building AI agents for Photoshop and Premiere Pro that can suggest ways to edit your photos or videos and then carry out the tasks for you, according to a blog written today by Ely Greenfield, Adobe’s CTO of digital media.Adobe Photoshop’s agentic AI, or what the company calls its “creative agent,” will be presented in a new floating Actions panel that will recommend context-aware edits after analyzing your photo. For instance, it will be able to suggest removing people standing in the background or creating a greater depth of field by blurring everything behind the subject...
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang appears to have struck a deal with the Trump administration to avoid export restrictions on the company’s H20 AI chips. The H20, the most advanced Nvidia-produced AI chip that can still be exported from the U.S. to China, was reportedly spared thanks to a promise from Huang to invest in new […]
More Gemini in more places.Were you clamoring for two AI-generated podcast hosts to talk through the key points of your document before you send it to your boss? No? Well, you’re getting it anyway. Google has announced new Gemini features coming to Workspace apps, including NotebookLM-style AI podcasts integrated right into Google Docs. There’s a wide spread of new features in this announcement, from an editor that can make suggestions in your documents to a tool that will help make sense of your spreadsheets, all with Gemini at the center.Maybe the most uncanny of them all is the podcast...
OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever’s new AI startup, Safe Superintelligence (SSI), is using Google Cloud’s TPU chips to power its AI research, part of a new partnership the companies announced on Wednesday in a press release. Google Cloud says SSI is using TPUs to “accelerate its research and development efforts toward building […]
OpenAI, like many AI labs, thinks AI benchmarks are broken. It says it wants to fix them through a new program. Called the OpenAI Pioneers Program, the effort will focus on creating evaluations for AI models that “set the bar for what good looks like,” as OpenAI phrased it in a blog post. “As the […]
WordPress.com has launched a new AI-powered site builder in early access that can construct your WordPress webpage, including fully written text, layout, generated images, and more. WordPress.com says the AI website builder can make “beautiful, functional websites in minutes.” However, it can’t yet do the heavy lifting of creating an ecommerce site or one with “complex integrations,” but the company says to stay tuned for such features.You’ll need a WordPress.com account to start the free trial for the WordPress AI Site Builder, and while you won’t need a credit card on file to...
Google is trying to make it easier for users of its video AI model Veo 2 to make cinematic-looking generations and edit real footage. The new Veo 2 capabilities are available to preview via Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, alongside other updates to improve Google’s text-to-image generator, Imagen 3, and audio-related AI models.New Veo 2 features include inpainting, which can automatically remove “unwanted background images, logos, or distractions from your videos” according to Google, and outpainting, which extends the frame of the original video into a different format. The...
A study went viral several months ago for implying that, as AI becomes increasingly sophisticated, it develops “value systems” — systems that lead it to, for example, prioritize its own well-being over humans. A more recent paper out of MIT pours cold water on that hyperbolic notion, drawing the conclusion that AI doesn’t, in fact, […]
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) may have to pay a fine of $1 billion or more to resolve a U.S. export control investigation related to a chip it made that was used in a Huawei AI processor, according to a report by Reuters. TSMC did not provide any further comments as it is now “in […]
Hosting platform WordPress.com on Wednesday launched a new AI website builder that allows anyone to create a functioning website using an AI chat-style interface. The feature, which is being made available to WordPress users for free, is targeted at entrepreneurs, freelancers, bloggers, and others who need a professional online presence, the company says. At this […]
AI was used on over 90 percent of The Wizard of Oz to prep the film for the Sphere’s 160,000-square-foot screen. | Image: GoogleFollowing an announcement last week that Sphere Entertainment was creating an immersive version of The Wizard of Oz for its unique Las Vegas venue, we now have more details on how companies like Google and Magnopus are using AI to enhance the 86-year-old film to fill the Sphere’s massive 160,000-square-foot semi-spherical screen.But a collaboration between Google’s Cloud and DeepMind research divisions didn’t only rely on off-the-shelf AI-upscaling techniques...
In an incredibly shocking turn of events, more generative AI features are coming to the Google Workspace suite of productivity apps by way of Gemini. Docs, Sheets, Chat, Meet and newcomer Vids are among the tools that are getting new AI capabilities that perhaps some folks will find useful.Google is taking a cue from audio overviews in NotebookLM to bring new Gemini-powered audio features to Docs. You'll soon have the option of listening to full audio versions of your documents or just the highlights in what Google calls a podcast-style overview. Those enrolled in the Workspace alpha...
Samsung's Ballie will go on sale in the US and South Korea this summer, the company announced today. What's more, through a partnership with Google Cloud, the diminutive robot will ship with a Gemini AI model. Samsung didn't state the specific system that powers Ballie, but in combination with the company's own proprietary language models, it says the robot has multimodal capabilities, meaning Ballie can process voice, audio and visual data from its sensors. According to Samsung, Ballie can also manage your smart home devices and even offer health and styling...
Dr. Oz, who now controls the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and its $1.5 trillion budget, promoted the idea that AI avatars could replace frontline health care workers.
A new company, Deep Cogito, has emerged from stealth with a family of openly available AI models that can be switched between “reasoning” and non-reasoning modes. Reasoning models like OpenAI’s o1 have shown great promise in domains like math and physics, thanks to their ability to effectively fact-check themselves by working through complex problems step […]
Amazon’s Nova Sonic logo.Amazon is showing off new AI technology this week, including its take on a more conversational voice model to better compete with things like Gemini Live and OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode and an update to its model that can generate video.The new Nova Sonic voice model handles real-time speech processing and AI voice generation for conversational applications, Amazon says. Nova Sonic uses a “unified model architecture” that Amazon claims is better than other approaches that interconnect separate models to handle speech recognition, speech-to-text conversion...
Tech giants like Microsoft might be touting AI “agents” as productivity-boosting tools for corporations . But a nonprofit is trying to prove that agents can be a force for good, too. Sage Future, a 501(c)(3) backed by Open Philanthropy, launched an experiment earlier this month tasking four AI models in a virtual environment with raising […]
The arguments against AI in art are obvious. Most visual artists hate Midjourney, Stability AI, and similar image generators, decrying the scraping of training data without compensation and the onslaught of generic “slop.†But is it possible to deliberately misuse generative AI for creative work? Oakland, California-based painter Brett Amory uses image generators as tools constantly. Instead of passively churning out generic images in large volumes — what he himself has referred to as addictive and mind-numbing &...
Waymo is preparing to use data from its robotaxis, including video from interior cameras tied to rider identities, to train generative AI models, according to an unreleased version of its privacy policy found by researcher Jane Manchun Wong, raising fresh questions about how much of a rider’s behavior inside autonomous vehicles could be repurposed for […]
Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s new AI venture, Thinking Machines Lab, has gained two new prominent advisors: Bob McGrew, previously OpenAI’s chief research officer, and Alec Radford, a former OpenAI researcher behind many of the company’s more transformative innovations. Thinking Machines Lab’s website was quietly updated with McGrew and Radford’s names sometime in March. A spokesperson […]
The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has released the administration's revised policies for the use of AI in federal agencies. As Reuters notes, it has altered Biden-era guidelines and has rescinded orders by the previous administration related to safety over the technology's use. The Trump administration said it's shifting towards a "forward-leaning, pro-innovation and procompetition mindset" instead of maintaining and "pursuing the risk-averse approach" of Biden's government. Before Trump took office, the government ordered federal agencies to ensure that...
Over the weekend, Meta dropped two new Llama 4 models: a smaller model named Scout, and Maverick, a mid-size model that the company claims can beat GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash “across a broad range of widely reported benchmarks.â€Maverick quickly secured the number-two spot on LMArena, the AI benchmark site where humans compare outputs from different systems and vote on the best one. In Meta’s press release, the company highlighted Maverick’s ELO score of 1417, which placed it above OpenAI’s 4o and just...
Just press the cooresponding button in Gemini Live to activate video or screenshare.Google’s Gemini Live camera and screenshare functions, which let the conversational AI chatbot answer questions about the stuff you’re looking at in real-time, are rolling out now on Pixel 9 series phones and Samsung Galaxy S25 devices. The free update is also coming soon to other Android devices, but you’ll need to be a paid Gemini Advanced user to gain access.Once available on your device, you can activate the live video function at the push of a button and ask Gemini Live questions about whatever your...
Retaining top AI talent is tough amid cutthroat competition between Google, OpenAI, and other heavyweights. Google’s AI division, DeepMind, has resorted to using “aggressive” noncompete agreements for some AI staff in the U.K. that bar them from working for competitors for up to a year, Business Insider reports. Some are paid during this time, in […]
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke sent a memo to employees saying that before they ask for more headcount or resources, teams must show why they “cannot get what they want done using AI,” as reported by CNBC.“What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team? This question can lead to really fun discussions and projects,” Lutke says in the memo, which he posted on X. The memo was sent late last month, CNBC says.The broader memo is about how “reflexive AI usage” is a “baseline expectation” at the company. In it, Lütke talks about how AI has been “the...
Amazon has upgraded its AI video model, Nova Reel, with the ability to generate videos up to two minutes in length. Nova Reel, announced in December 2024, was Amazon’s first foray into the generative video space. It competes with models from OpenAI, Google, and others in what’s fast becoming a crowded market. The latest Nova […]
Microsoft has fired one of the employees who disrupted the company’s 50th-anniversary event. In an email seen by The Verge, Microsoft told Ibtihal Aboussad that their employment has been terminated due to “acts of misconduct.”Aboussad was one of two protesters that interrupted Microsoft’s 50th anniversary event on Friday by calling Microsoft’s AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, a “war profiteer” and demanding that Microsoft “stop using AI for genocide in our region.” A second protester, Vaniya Agrawal, interrupted Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, former CEO Steve Ballmer, and Microsoft...
Waymo has “no plans” to use footage from cameras inside its robotaxis to train AI models for targeted ads, spokesperson Julia Ilina said in an email to The Verge. Ilina was responding to an unreleased page from Waymo’s privacy policy that appears to offer customers the ability to opt-out from having their “personal information,” including “interior camera data associated with rider’s identity,” to train generative AI models for a variety of purposes, including advertisements. The snippet from the privacy policy was discovered by security researcher Jane Manchun Wong, who...
Hundreds of publishers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Verge parent company Vox Media, are running an ad campaign this week urging the government to protect content from AI. The campaign, called Support Responsible AI, is run by the News/Media Alliance trade association and consists of several ads that will appear in print and online.Each ad has phrases like, “Keep Watch On AI,” “Stop AI Theft,” and “AI Steals From You Too,” while the text on the bottom reads: “Stealing is un-American. Tell Washington to make Big Tech pay for the content...
Waymo is preparing to use data from its robotaxis, including video from interior cameras tied to rider identities, to train generative AI models, according to an unreleased version of its privacy policy found by researcher Jane Manchun Wong. The draft language reveals Waymo may also share this data to personalize ads, raising fresh questions about […]
Google is bringing AI Mode to more people in the US. The company announced on Monday it would make the new search tool, first launched at the start of last month, to millions of more Labs users across the country.For uninitiated, AI Mode is a new dedicated tab within Search. It's essentially Google's answer to ChatGPT Search. It allows you to ask more complicated questions of Google, with a custom version of Gemini 2.0 doing the legwork to deliver a nuanced AI-generated response. Labs, meanwhile, is a beta program you can enroll your Google account in to gain access to new Search features...
In a recent memo to employees, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke made a bold policy change: teams must demonstrate why AI can’t perform a job before they’re permitted to ask for more headcount and resources. “Before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI,” Lütke […]
Los Angeles-based startup Moonvalley, which is developing AI tools for video creation, has raised a fresh $43 million in venture capital, according to an SEC filing. The filing, which lists 11 unnamed investors, comes roughly a week after Moonvalley launched its first AI video-generating model, Marey. Moonvalley previously raised $70 million in seed funding from backers […]
Overwhelmed with trying to keep up with the different models you can now use to build your content using AI? A startup called Krea that’s looking to solve this problem specifically for designers and other visual creatives has now raised $83 million for a platform it believes will make the task of working with generative […]
IBM on Monday announced that it acquired Hakkoda, a data and AI consultancy based in New York, for an undisclosed amount. Mohamad Ali, SVP and head of IBM’s consulting business, said that the acquisition would “further expand” IBM’s ability to bring consultants and AI to clients, particularly customers in industries like financial services, public sector, […]
OpenAI is said to have discussed acquiring the AI hardware startup that former Apple design lead Jony Ive is building with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. According to The Information, OpenAI could pay around $500 million for the fledgling company, called io Products. Ive, who left Apple in 2019 to start his own design firm called […]
One of the new flagship AI models Meta released on Saturday, Maverick, ranks second on LM Arena, a test that has human raters compare the outputs of models and choose which they prefer. But it seems the version of Maverick that Meta deployed to LM Arena differs from the version that’s widely available to developers. […]
Microsoft has released a browser-based, playable level of the classic video game Quake II. This functions as a tech demo for the gaming capabilities of Microsoft’s Copilot AI platform — though by the company’s own admission, the experience isn’t quite the same as playing a well-made game. You can try it out for yourself, using […]
Meta has released a new collection of AI models, Llama 4, in its Llama family — on a Saturday, no less. There are four new models in total: Llama 4 Scout, Llama 4 Maverick, and Llama 4 Behemoth. All were trained on “large amounts of unlabeled text, image, and video data” to give them “broad […]
Microsoft unveiled its Xbox AI era earlier this year with a new Muse AI model that can generate gameplay. While it looked like Muse was still an early Microsoft Research project, the Xbox maker is now allowing Copilot users to try out Muse through an AI-generated version of Quake II.The tech demo is part of Microsoft’s Copilot for Gaming push, and features an AI-generated replica of Quake II that is playable in a browser. The Quake II level is very basic and includes blurry enemies and interactions, and Microsoft is limiting the amount of time you can even play this tech demo. View this post...
The use of a video persona created with artificial intelligence software to help make an argument earns a stern rebuke.
Ring founder Jamie Siminoff returned to Amazon this week, coming back to the company just about two years after he left, Bloomberg reports. He’s now a vice president at the company, and he will be heading up the Ring, Blink, Amazon Key, and Sidewalk teams. Siminoff is replacing Liz Hamren, who had taken over following Siminoff’s initial departure. Hamren and the team “have done an awesome job driving the business, delivering strong results, and bringing a lot of delightful experiences to neighbors,” Siminoff says in an Amazon Q&A. He adds that the “AI transformation happening right...
AI companies can’t figure out if the Trump tariffs are about to decimate them – and the fact that no one has a clear answer is sending them, and the tech industry overall, into a confusion spiral. The markets are in disarray. Nvidia is down 7.59%, TSMC is down 7.22%. In San Francisco, sources tell us that this isn’t a big deal. But in DC, people are panicking. The core question is whether GPUs – the graphics processing units that are crucial to AI computing and other industries – are exempted from...
A new study appears to lend credence to allegations that OpenAI trained at least some of its AI models on copyrighted content. OpenAI is embroiled in suits brought by authors, programmers, and other rights-holders who accuse the company of using their works — books, codebases, and so on — to develop its models without permission. […]
GitHub Copilot, Microsoft-owned GitHub’s AI coding assistant, could soon become costlier for some users. On Friday, GitHub announced “premium requests” for GitHub Copilot, a new system that imposes rate limits when users switch to AI models other than the base model for tasks such as “agentic” coding and multi-file edits. While GitHub Copilot subscribers can […]
A Microsoft employee disrupted the company’s 50th anniversary event to protest its use of AI.“Shame on you,” said Microsoft employee Ibtihal Aboussad, speaking directly to Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman. “You are a war profiteer. Stop using AI for genocide. Stop using AI for genocide in our region. You have blood on your hands. All of Microsoft has blood on its hands. How dare you all celebrate when Microsoft is killing children. Shame on you all.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Verge (@verge)Sources at Microsoft tell The Verge that shortly after Aboussad was...
A protester interrupted Microsoft’s Copilot-focused keynote Friday afternoon, calling attention to the company’s reported dealings with the Israeli military. “Shame on you,” the protester said. “You claim that you care about using AI for good, but Microsoft sells AI weapons to the Israeli military […] All of Microsoft has blood on its hands.” Microsoft Head […]
On Friday, Google released API pricing for Gemini 2.5 Pro, an AI reasoning model with industry-leading performance on several benchmarks measuring coding, reasoning, and math. For prompts up to 200,000 tokens, Gemini 2.5 Pro costs $1.25 per million input tokens (roughly 750,000 words, longer than the entire “Lord of The Rings” series) and $10 per […]
Microsoft CopilotMicrosoft is holding a 50th Anniversary Copilot livestream today at 12:30PM ET / 9:30AM PT on April 4th, the same day Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen started the company in 1975. Dubbed “Introducing your AI companion,” it’s set up for Microsoft to show off some significant updates to its Windows AI assistant.You can watch the livestream right here via the YouTube stream or directly from Microsoft. Microsoft announced the event last month, which features Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, and “leaders of past and present.”...
Midjourney has released the alpha version of V7, which it says is an "entirely new" AI image generation model and is much smarter at processing your text prompts. The image quality of its output is noticeably higher, the Midjourney team says, and can create better textures, bodies and hands. AI image generators typically struggle with creating accurate depictions of hands, but based on photos posted by some users on their socials, V7 is capable of spitting out some photorealistic images of human hands. The new model comes with a feature called "Draft Mode," which can render images at half...
Amazon has started testing another AI-powered feature called "Buy for Me," which allows the e-commerce company to make purchases for you from other websites. Specifically, from the actual website of a brand you're looking looking up. The experience is built into the Amazon app. When you search for an item from a particular brand, you may see a section of results labeled "Shop brand sites directly" separate from the results you'll get from Amazon and its third-party sellers. If you click on the "Buy for Me" button underneath an item in the separate results section, you'll be...
Managing your finances doesn’t have to be a headache — especially with the right budgeting app at your fingertips. Whether you’re trying to track everyday spending, save for a big purchase or just keep a closer eye on your subscriptions, there’s an app that can help. With Mint shutting down, plenty of users have been looking for the best budget apps to replace it, and luckily there are plenty of solid alternatives.From AI-powered spending trackers to apps that break down your expenses into easy-to-follow categories, the best budgeting tools help you take control of your money without...
Amazon is starting to test a new AI shopping agent, a feature it calls “Buy for Me,” with a subset users, the company announced in a blog post Thursday. If Amazon doesn’t sell something that users are searching for, the Buy for Me feature will display products to users that other websites are selling. Then, […]
Amazon is introducing a new “Recaps” feature for Kindle users to help them recall plot points and character arcs before picking up the latest book in a series. While the company’s press release for the new feature doesn’t mention AI, Amazon confirmed to TechCrunch that recaps are AI-generated. “We use technology, including GenAI and Amazon […]
Zach Yadegari, the high school teen co-founder of Cal AI, is being hammered with comments on X after he revealed that out of 18 top colleges he applied to, he was rejected by 15. Yadegari says that he got a 4.0 GPA and nailed a 34 score on his ACT (above 31 is considered a […]
Cognition, the startup behind the viral AI programming tool Devin, has introduced a new low-cost plan to incentivize sign-ups. When Cognition released Devin last year, the tool quickly blew up on social media for its ability to perform certain software development tasks autonomously. It quickly became apparent that Devin struggled with more complex coding work. […]
Amazon is testing a new “Buy for Me” button that will let you purchase products from third-party websites without leaving the e-commerce giant’s mobile app. The feature is powered by agentic AI, allowing the company to purchase items on your behalf.Last month, Amazon rolled out a test that directs you to other brands’ websites for products it doesn’t sell. But now, instead of directing you to the website to fill out your payment details and shipping address, “Buy for Me” is supposed to do all the work for you. The feature runs on Amazon’s Nova AI system, which now includes a new...
This week's Nintendo Direct provided much more info about the Switch 2 but didn't go too deep into the nitty-gritty details of what powers the console. That left NVIDIA, the Mario maker's hardware partner on the console's processor and GPU, to fill in some blanks with a blog post published on Thursday — including the first confirmation that it uses Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) tech.NVIDIA said the Switch 2's DLSS support helps to give the console "ten times" the graphical performance of the original Switch. The tech lets games render games in a lower resolution, then uses trained AI...
Two leading AI labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, just announced major initiatives in higher education. It’s the constant one-upping we’ve all become familiar with: this week, Anthropic dropped their announcement at 8 AM Wednesday, while OpenAI followed with nearly identical news at 8 AM Thursday.For Anthropic, this week’s announcement was its first major academic push. It launched Claude for Education, a university-focused version of its chatbot. The company also announced partnerships with Northeastern University, London School of Economics (LSE...
On today’s episode of Decoder, we’re talking about AI, art, and the controversial collision between the two — a debate that, to be honest, is an absolute mess. If you’ve been on the internet this past week, you undoubtedly know that controversy was just kicked up a notch by the Studio Ghibli memes — pictures cribbing the style of the legendary Japanese film studio. These images, powered by OpenAI’s new image generator, are everywhere; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been posting some examples to his personal X account. And they’ve widened an already pretty stark rift between AI boosters...
Spotify announced Gen AI ads, among other changes to its advertising business, at an event in New York City on Thursday. Notably, the company introduced a new programmatic offering, the Spotify Ad Exchange (SAX), which allows advertisers to reach Spotify’s logged-in users via real-time auctions. On the latter, Spotify announced new partnerships with Google’s demand-side […]
Runway, a startup developing a range of generative AI models for media production, including video-generating models, has raised $300 million in a Series D funding round. General Atlantic led the round, which had participation from Fidelity Management & Research Company, Baillie Gifford, Nvidia, SoftBank, and others. The fresh capital will be put toward AI research […]
After years of lagging behind rivals when it comes to video capture (and then suddenly buying cinema camera manufacturer RED), Nikon is pushing new boundaries in that area. Its latest salvo is the $1,699 24-megapixel full-frame Z5 II, perhaps the cheapest mirrorless camera so far to support internal RAW video. It also offers improved autofocus with new AI powers, cleaner images and enhanced image stabilization. The Z5 II is a wholesale remake of the original Z5 and that starts with video. While still limited to 4K 30 fps and cropped 4K 60 fps, it can now capture those formats internally...
Google has added a new feature to NotebookLM that lets the AI note-taking tool find its own web sources to summarize and narrate. Instead of manually uploading sources like documents or YouTube links, users can now tap the “Discover” button and simply describe the topic they want to get a better understanding of, with the tool then gathering web sources around the subject.Google says the Discover feature started rolling out on Wednesday, and will take “about a week or so” to be available to all users.NotebookLM will hunt through “hundreds of potential web sources in seconds...
Thunderbird’s developers are planning to compete with Gmail and other email providers by offering paid “pro” tier services, including @thundermail.com email addresses and new services such as an appointment scheduler, file sharing tools, and some “Thunderbird Assist” AI features. You can join a beta waitlist by going to thundermail.com, which is the domain for the email addresses, along with an option for @tb.pro.Thunderbird managing director Ryan Sipes announced that the services are in the works in a post on the Thunderbird Planning discussion group last Friday. However, it seems...
When OpenAI unveiled its o3 “reasoning” AI model in December, the company partnered with the creators of ARC-AGI, a benchmark designed to test highly capable AI, to showcase o3’s capabilities. Months later, the results have been revised, and they now look slightly less impressive than they did initially. Last week, the Arc Prize Foundation, which […]
According to a recent Digital Education Council survey, as many as 86 percent of university students globally use artificial intelligence to assist with their coursework. It’s a staggering statistic that’s likely to have far-reaching consequences for years to come. So it’s not surprising to see a company like Anthropic announce Claude for Education, an initiative it says will equip universities to "play a key role in actively shaping AI's role in society."At the heart of Claude for Education is a new Learning mode that changes how Anthropic’s chatbot interacts with users. With the...
Sissie Hsaio, the Google exec who oversaw the launch of the company’s AI chatbot, is stepping down as head of the Gemini app, according to a report from Semafor. A memo seen by the outlet reveals that Google Labs vice president Josh Woodward will take her place.In the memo, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said the move will “sharpen our focus on the next evolution of the Gemini app,” reports Semafor. Google spokesperson Alex Joseph confirmed Semafor’s reporting but declined to comment.Hsaio has worked at Google for nearly 20 years, first joining the company in 2006 as a product...
Google DeepMind on Wednesday published an exhaustive paper on its safety approach to AGI, roughly defined as AI that can accomplish any task a human can. AGI is a bit of a controversial subject in the AI field, with naysayers suggesting that it’s little more than a pipe dream. Others, including major AI labs like […]
Actively AI argues that most AI sales reps have "failed." It just raised $22.5 million.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the umbrella organization of Wikipedia and a dozen or so other crowdsourced knowledge projects, said on Wednesday that bandwidth consumption for multimedia downloads from Wikimedia Commons has surged by 50% since January 2024. The reason, the outfit wrote in a blog post Tuesday, isn’t due to growing demand from knowledge-thirsty humans, but […]
OpenAI has been accused by many parties of training its AI on copyrighted content sans permission. Now a new paper by an AI watchdog organization makes the serious accusation that the company increasingly relied on non-public books it didn’t license to train more sophisticated AI models. AI models are essentially complex prediction engines. Trained on […]
Meta’s VP of AI research, Joelle Pineau, is planning to leave the company, she announced in a post on Facebook Tuesday. Pineau said she’s leaving in May after more than two years overseeing FAIR, Meta’s internal AI research lab led by Yann LeCun. Pineau’s exit comes as Meta ramps up its AI efforts, with the […]
NaNoWriMo, a twenty-five-year-old online writing community-turned-nonprofit, announced on Monday evening that it is shutting down. NaNoWriMo — an abbreviation of National Novel Writing Month — is an annual challenge for writers to complete a rough draft of a novel during the month of November. After starting as a Yahoo! mailing list in 1999, the project […]
Qualcomm has acquired the generative AI division of VinAI, an AI research company headquartered in Hanoi, for an undisclosed amount, the companies announced on Monday. The move marks Qualcomm’s continued expansion into the AI tooling sector. VinAI, which was founded by former DeepMind research scientist Hung Bui, develops a range of generative AI technologies, including […]
You know the online dating scene is bad when dating giants like Tinder are now introducing AI personas for users to flirt with. On Tuesday, the company announced a new game powered by OpenAI, allowing users to interact with an AI bot to practice flirting, reenact meet-cute scenarios, and receive scores with suggestions for improving […]
OpenAI on Monday announced that it closed one of the largest private funding rounds in history. “Today we’re announcing new funding — $40B at a $300B post-money valuation, which enables us to push the frontiers of AI research even further, scale our compute infrastructure, and deliver increasingly powerful tools for the 500 million people who […]
This month, ChatGPT unveiled a new image generator as part of its 4o model that is a lot better at generating text inside images. People are already using it to generate fake restaurant receipts, potentially adding another tool to the already-extensive toolkit of AI deepfakes used by fraudsters. Prolific social media poster and VC Deedy […]
Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug discovery platform that was spun out of Google’s DeepMind in 2021, has raised external capital for the first time. The $600 million round was led by Thrive Capital, with participation from GV, and existing investor Google’s parent Alphabet, it said. The funding will accelerate further development of Isomorphic’s AI […]
Microsoft is making its AI features widely available on Copilot Plus PCs equipped with Intel and AMD chips. One of the most notable of these features will be Live Captions, which translates audio to English subtitles from dozens of different languages in real time.Microsoft first started testing Live Captions on Intel and AMD devices last December, and it’s now available through the latest Windows 11 update. The update also includes Cocreator, an AI tool in Paint that creates an image based on a text description and what you’re currently drawing. On top of that, Microsoft is also expanding...
Amazon has delivered on its promise to launch an upgraded Alexa experience, Alexa+, by the end of March. But the service reportedly lacks many of the features Amazon demoed at a press event in late February. Alexa+ can’t yet perform certain “agentic” AI tasks showcased in the company’s marketing, like ordering takeout on Grubhub or […]
Retym, a U.S. chipmaker with Israeli roots, has raised a fresh $75 million series D led by James Kuklinski of Spark Capital. Existing investors — Mayfield’s Navin Chaddha and Kleiner Perkins’ Mamoon Hamid — also participated, bringing its total raised to $180 million, it says. Retym is another startup benefiting from AI’s glow-up. It’s chips […]
If there’s one thing you can count on with AI tools is that they’ll launch without most of the promised features. It happened with Apple Intelligence. It happened with Galaxy AI. Now, it’s happening with Alexa+, Amazon’s AI-heavy upgrade to its virtual assistant. The tool is officially available but it doesn’t do a whole lot, according to reporting by The Washington Post.The paper reviewed a number of internal company documents that noted the delay of many features. These documents suggest that a bunch of tools won’t be available for two months or longer. Alexa+ users won’t be...
Apple Intelligence, the iPhone maker’s suite of AI-powered tools and features, is gaining new features. Most notably, the company on Monday announced that Apple device owners will now be able to take advantage of Priority Notifcations, which allows Apple’s AI to highlight your most time-sensitive notifications in a new format. Other updates are coming to […]
Apple announced on Monday that it’s rolling out visionOS 2.4, bringing Apple Intelligence-powered AI features to the Apple Vision Pro. The update also introduces new spatial experiences and the Apple Vision Pro app for iPhone. With Apple Intelligence on the Apple Vision Pro, users will get access to writing tools that allow them to rewrite, […]
OpenAI is still struggling to overcome the capacity issues brought on by the viral image generation feature the company launched last week. On Monday, OpenAI disabled image generation for new users of Sora, the company’s suite of generative AI media tools. “We’re currently experiencing heavy traffic and have temporarily disabled Sora video generation for new […]
Amazon has launched a new AI model, Nova Act, which is designed to perform tasks — like online shopping — in your browser. For now it’s only available to developers in a “research preview,” but Amazon is also expanding access to its other Nova AI models through a web portal, making them easier to find and use.Nova Act is a new model whose function sounds similar to OpenAI’s Operator agent. Amazon says Act can carry out web searches, make purchases, or answer questions about what’s on the screen, including the option to perform tasks on a schedule. It can also recognize more...
The Echo Show 8 is one of the devices Alexa Plus is currently available on.Amazon has officially launched its AI-powered Alexa Plus – but it’s only available to a “small number” of customers to start, Amazon spokesperson Kristy Schmidt confirmed to The Verge. As shown on its early access page, Alexa Plus also doesn’t come with all the features Amazon showcased during its recent devices event, like the ability to brainstorm gift ideas, order groceries with your voice, or access Alexa Plus in your browser.There are some other missing features that “don’t yet meet Amazon’s...
AI startup Runway on Monday released what it claims is one of the highest-fidelity AI-powered video generators yet. Called Gen-4, the tool is rolling out to the company’s individual and enterprise customers. Runway claims that it can generate consistent characters, locations, and objects across scenes, maintain “coherent world environments,” and regenerate elements from different perspectives […]
Manus AI, the viral AI agent platform out of China, on Monday morning launched two subscription plans starting at $39 per month. Manus, which is still in beta, is an AI-powered agentic tool that can be used to complete tasks ranging from creating a web page for a wedding invitation to crafting a scoring sheet […]
Seattle-based Temporal has made its name over the last several years in the world of microservices — specifically providing a platform to orchestrate the messy business of building and operating integrations and updates across disparate services and apps in the cloud. But the AI boom has come at the company fast. Now, Temporal has raised […]
Amazon on Monday unveiled Nova Act, a general-purpose AI agent that can take control of a web browser and independently perform some simple actions. Alongside the new agentic AI model, Amazon is releasing the Nova Act SDK, a toolkit that allows developers to build agent prototypes with Nova Act. Nova Act, developed by Amazon’s recently […]
Some Hollywood studios are reportedly earning money from fake AI-generated movie trailers on YouTube, against the wishes of the union representing actors. According to a report from Deadline, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, and Sony Pictures redirected ad revenue to themselves instead of enforcing copyright protections and shutting down the popular Screen Culture and KH Studio trailer accounts. In response, the SAG-AFTRA union has criticized the studios for profiting off videos that use AI to exploit their members’ likenesses without permission.Fanmade trailers are nothing new, but AI...
Apple is developing a new version of its Health app that includes an AI coach that can advise users on how to get healthier, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Gurman first reported that something like this was in the works back in 2023, but now he says development is moving ahead, with the new features […]
Confused about which AI model to use? Check out this comprehensive list of the most advanced models out there.
Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, has acquired his social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, in an all-stock deal, he announced in a post on X Friday. “xAI has acquired X in an all-stock transaction,” Musk said. “The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt).” Musk […]
Social platform X struggled after Elon Musk took over, but its fortunes improved dramatically after US President Donald Trump won reelection. Now it will be become part of Musk's AI startup xAI.
A couple of years after buying Twitter, Elon Musk announced that his AI business xAI has acquired the social media platform that’s now known as X. In a tweet, he described it as an all-stock transaction, valuing xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion.Elon Musk:@xAI has acquired @X in an all-stock transaction. The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt).Since its founding two years ago, xAI has rapidly become one of the leading AI labs in the world, building models and data centers at unprecedented speed and scale.X is the digital town square where...
The Amazon Spring Sale has brought a number of discounts to Shark vacuums, both cordless and robotic varieties. On the robot vacuum side of things, you can get the well-regarded Shark AI Ultra robovac for $300, or more than $100 off its regular price. This is a version of one of our top picks for the best robot vacuums. It has strong suction power, an easy-to-use mobile app and an extra-large, self-emptying base that can hold up to 60 days worth of debris. It’s great for pet hair and all-around cleaning tasks. The only major downside is that this isn’t a hybrid unit, so it doesn’t mop...
YC-backed startup Taxo has raised a $5m seed round to save doctors time and money on admin work.
If you've been contemplating an E Ink tablet, one of our top picks has received a good discount thanks to Amazon's Spring Sale. The second-gen Kindle Scribe is on sale for $325, down from $399 — that's a 19 percent discount. Digital notebooks like the Scribe can give you the convenience of a connected device with the old-school feel of writing with pen and paper. The new Amazon Kindle Scribe received an 86 in our review thanks to its nice design, AI enhancements and excellent reading and writing experience. It also comes with a Premium Pen that has a rubberized top to symbolize an...
AI web crawling bots are the cockroaches of the internet, many developers believe. FOSS devs are fighting back in ingenuous, humorous ways.
I admire birds as much as the next person, but taking up birdwatching isn’t something I’ve considered. I don’t have the patience, nor do I own a good pair of binoculars — which is necessary for seeing the majestic, winged creatures up close. What I might sooner settle on, however, is the Bird Buddy Pro, a smart bird feeder with an integrated camera that can give you a much, much closer look at birds as they munch (and identify them using AI). Normally $299.99, the video-equipped feeder is matching its all-time low of $199 at Amazon as part of its Big Spring Sale, which runs through...
When Twin came out of stealth in January 2024, AI agents were more of a theoretical concept than a reality. Today, the Paris-based is releasing an automation agent in partnership with Qonto, the fintech startup that offers business bank accounts to more than 500,000 customers across Europe. If you want to automate repetitive tasks, there […]
Light, the company behind a pair of minimalist handsets, just released the Light Phone III. This is the perfect device for those who are tired of modern smartphones, with their easy access to doomscrolling and their abundance of wonky AI tools. The Light Phone III features a sleek black-and-white OLED display, which is a new design element. The previous models included e-paper screens. The big draw, however, is not what this phone has but what it doesn’t have. There are no third-party apps. There’s no access to social media, the internet or even email. It’s intended to be, first and...
Companies like OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek offer chatbots designed to take their time with an answer. Here’s how they work.
Nvidia is looking to get into the server rental market. The semiconductor giant is reportedly nearing a deal to acquire Lepton AI, a company that rents out servers that are powered by Nvidia’s AI chips, according to The Information. The deal is reportedly worth several hundred million dollars, according to The Information, which cited unnamed […]
When it comes to working out or just hanging outside, the perks of bone conduction headphones versus over-ear headphones or earbuds are growing. They’ve always been the safer alternative since they don’t obstruct your hearing, but with the Shokz OpenRun Pro 2, they now actually sound good. Thanks to its USB-C charging (in place of the proprietary charger that its predecessor used), more bass, fewer audible vibrations, and AI-powered noise cancellation, it’s easier than ever to recommend them to more people — especially since they’re $30 off during Amazon’s Big Spring Sale.Shokz has...
The proliferation of scarily realistic deepfakes is one of the more pernicious byproducts of the rise of AI, and falling victim to scams based on them is already costing companies millions of dollars — not to mention the implications these could have on national security. Today, a startup that’s built a toolset aimed at governments […]
Krisp, the company best known for its noise cancellation app, is launching a new AI tool that’s supposed to convert a speaker’s accent to American English in real time. The tool comes bundled in Krisp’s existing desktop app and acts as a virtual microphone to modify the sound of someone’s voice across video conferencing apps like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Webex.Krisp says AI Accent Conversion can convert someone’s accent with a 200ms latency, which it calls “an imperceptible delay in conversations,” all while preserving their natural speaking voice. In the demo...
Amazon continues to infuse AI into its shopping tools to encourage customers to make more purchases. The company announced on Wednesday a new feature called “Interests,” aimed at creating a more personalized and conversational search experience. With the new feature, customers can enter tailored prompts in the search bar, reflecting their interests, preferences, and even […]
It’s virtually impossible today to determine when a student’s writing has been composed using ChatGPT or another GenAI tool, and it can be a nightmare to disprove incorrect accusations. An AI edtech startup called Brisk has built a tool that could at least help teachers identify some of the telltale signs, and it’s now announcing […]
Copilot AI agentsAfter Google and OpenAI offered up AI news on Tuesday, Microsoft has followed with announcements of its own, including details of two “deep reasoning” agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot that it claims are the first of their kind, dubbed Researcher and Analyst, as well as new capabilities for custom AI agents. Researcher relies on OpenAI’s deep research AI model to pull off “complex, multi-step research,” along with access to third-party data via connectors to sources like Salesforce or ServiceNow so that business customers can derive insights from across their tools....
After delivering a new “open” AI model with better performance on a single GPU, Google has now introduced an update to the AI models for its products with Gemini 2.5, which combines “a significantly enhanced base model with improved post-training” for better overall performance. It’s claiming that the first release, Gemini 2.5 Pro experimental, leads competition from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and DeepSeek on common AI benchmarks that measure understanding, mathematics, coding, and other capabilities. The new model is available to access in Google AI Studio or for Gemini Advanced...
The startup uses AI to quickly search for minerals over wide areas, identifying promising potential deposits for exploration.
Google has the pedal to the metal on its AI development. Just a few months after the debut of Gemini 2.0, the tech giant has unveiled another upgrade in Gemini 2.5. As with any new AI launch, Google is touting a strong performance on LMArena for Gemini 2.5, particularly its capabilities in coding, mathematics and science.The first model in this series is Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental. Google said this is a thinking model that's intended to provide responses grounded in more reasoning, analysis and context than the answers offered by classification- and prediction-driven models. It's a...
OpenAI just announced that all users will soon be able to generate images directly inside of ChatGPT. It’s rolling out to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Team and, most importantly, Free users. This will be the default image generation tool in 4o, so there will be no need to open Dall-E whenever you want to whip up a picture of a cat in space eating lasagna or whatever. The feature’s also coming to Sora.The company says that the platform will "generate high-quality images based on your prompt, conversation and uploaded files." To the latter point, it’ll be able to transform pre-existing images based...
The company’s chatbot can now create elaborate and unusual images.
Poe, Quora’s chatbot app, launched one of its most affordable subscription options on Monday, priced at just $5 per month. In addition, the company introduced its highest-priced plan at $250 per month, designed for users who need to send a large volume of messages on Poe. Poe allows users to utilize several AI-powered bots– including […]
AI chipmaking company Cerebras Systems’ IPO is delayed again as the public listing’s national security review drags on. Cerebras, which originally filed its intent to IPO in September 2024, thought the incoming Trump administration would help it breeze through its national security review, according to Reuters. That hasn’t been the case. The White House has […]
Sometime earlier this month, Apple updated a section of its website that discloses how it collects and uses imagery for Apple Maps’ Look Around feature, which is similar to Google Maps’ Street View, as spotted by 9to5Mac. A newly added paragraph reveals that, beginning in March 2025, Apple will be using imagery and data collected during Look Around surveys to “train models powering Apple products and services, including models related to image recognition, creation, and enhancement.”Apple collects images and 3D data to enhance and improve Apple Maps using vehicles and backpacks (for...
The next time you join a video call, Otter.ai is hoping its new AI tool will help make things run smoother. On Tuesday, the company introduced the Otter Meeting Agent. It's part of a suite of three new AI helpers designed to assist a variety of different users. The first of those, the voice-activated Meeting Agent, can schedule follow-up calls and draft emails for you. It can also answer questions based on information it finds in your company's meeting database."This agent goes beyond simple transcription and empowers users to interact with AI meeting data in real-time to increase...
Nvidia’s G-Assist was originally an April Fools’ prank in 2017 before becoming a real tech demo last year and a functioning AI assistant for RTX GPU owners today. Project G-Assist is now available inside the Nvidia app, and will help to optimize game and system settings, measure frame rates, and even change the lighting on connected devices.G-Assist works as an AI assistant through voice or text prompts, so you can ask questions like “How does DLSS Frame Generation work?” and the assistant will give you a ChatGPT-like output. Where it gets a lot more interesting is the ability to...
Earlier this year, DeepSeek briefly crashed Nvidia’s stock because of speculation that its models require far fewer chips. Now, Chinese fintech giant Ant Group, which is backed by Alibaba founder Jack Ma, is claiming a major AI breakthrough. Ant was able to use Chinese chips made by Alibaba and Huawei to create methods that cut […]
Last year, AI-powered sales automation startup 11x appeared to be on an explosive growth trajectory. However, nearly two dozen sources – including investors, current and former employees – tell TechCrunch that the company has experienced financial struggles, largely of its own making. Numerous people in the U.S. and U.K. told TechCrunch that the situation has […]
Apple is getting closer to launching Priority Notifications, a feature that uses AI to automatically detect important iPhone notifications and makes them more visible on your lockscreen. The feature is included in the iOS 18.4 release candidate rolled out on Monday, as spotted earlier by MacRumors.Along with Priority Notifications, the iOS 18.4 release candidate enables support for Matter-compatible robovacs, allowing you to control a wider range of devices through Apple Home. Other features expected to arrive with the update include AI-generated review summaries on the App Store, new shortcut...
Developer tooling is changing rapidly with AI. So companies that are making it easier to adopt AI in their workflows are seeing a boom of attention. After a startup called n8n (pronounced “enay-ten”) pivoted its workflow automation platform to become more AI-friendly in 2022, it said it saw its revenues increase 5X, doubling in the […]
The most notable feature of Nothing’s latest phones may be its combo of distinct hardware design and Android software tweaks. However, after using the Nothing Phone 3a for a few weeks, the Essential Space app has kept me hooked on what is ostensibly a lower-mid-range smartphone.It’s also a hard app to explain in a single sentence. It’s a little bit of a screenshot gallery, a little bit of a notes app, a little bit of a to-do list app, a little bit of country, a little bit of rock-and-roll. It’s all sewn together with similar AI features to what we've seen on most new smartphones....
FuriosaAI, a South Korean startup that makes chips for AI applications, has rejected an $810 million acquisition offer from Meta.
The Bot Company, the robotics startup founded by former Cruise co-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt, has raised $150 million in a round led by Greenoaks, according to Reuters, citing unnamed sources. Vogt founded the startup with Paril Jain, who led the AI tech team at Tesla, and former Cruise software engineer Luke Holoubek. Vogt did […]
Apple is working on adding cameras to future Apple Watch models in order to make them function more like AI wearables, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in the Power On newsletter. Gurman reports that the company “is considering adding cameras to both its standard Series watches and Ultra models,” with plans for a 2027 launch. The move would allow the Apple Watch to support AI features like Visual Intelligence, which can provide on-the-spot information about whatever the user points the camera at.Gurman previously reported that Apple is developing AirPods with a built-in camera for the...
The Apple Watch Series 10.Apple is working on adding cameras to the Apple Watch in order to enable AI features like Visual Intelligence within the next two years, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On Newsletter.The cameras will be “inside the display” for the standard Series Watch, while the Apple Watch Ultra would feature it on the side, next to the digital crown and button, according to Gurman. With them, the Apple Watch would be able to “see the outside world and use AI to deliver relevant information,” which he says is also the plan for camera-equipped...
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Cloudflare, one of the biggest network internet infrastructure companies in the world, has announced AI Labyrinth, a new tool to fight web-crawling bots that scrape sites for AI training data without permission. The company says in a blog post that when it detects “inappropriate bot behavior,” the free, opt-in tool lures crawlers down a path of links to AI-generated decoy pages that “slow down, confuse, and waste the resources” of those acting in bad faith.Websites have long used the honor system approach of robots.txt, a text file that gives or denies permission to scrapers, but which...
In a blog post last July, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that “selling access” to Meta’s openly available Llama AI models “isn’t [Meta’s] business model.” Yet Meta does make at least some money from Llama through revenue-sharing agreements, according to a newly unredacted court filing. The filing, submitted by attorneys for the plaintiffs in the […]
Google’s Gemini app now lets you generate Audio Overviews based on Deep Research. That means you can turn the in-depth reports generated by Gemini into a conversational podcast featuring two AI “hosts.”Since launching Audio Overviews within its AI note-taking app NotebookLM last September, Google has been steadily adding to the feature by letting you guide and interact with the hosts. It also brought Audio Overviews to the Gemini app for free users and Advanced subscribers earlier this week, allowing you to transform slides and documents into AI podcast-like conversations.The feature...
New studies from OpenAI and MIT Media Lab found that, generally, the more time users spend talking to ChatGPT, the lonelier they feel. The connection was made as part of two, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed studies, one done at OpenAI analyzing "over 40 million ChatGPT interactions" and targeted user surveys, and another at MIT Media Lab following participants' ChatGPT use for four weeks.MIT's study identified several ways talking to ChatGPT — whether through text or voice — can affect a person's emotional experience, beyond the general finding that higher use led to "heightened...
Alexa Plus is scheduled to arrive in an early access preview in the coming weeks.The new souped-up Alexa voice assistant, Alexa Plus, is scheduled to arrive in the next few weeks in an early access preview. The good news is that as long as you have (or buy) an Echo Show 8, 10, 15, or 21 smart display, you’ll be able to use the generative-AI powered Alexa across any compatible Echo device you own. It will also work on Fire TV devices, Fire tablets, on the web at Alexa.com, and in the Alexa app. Sadly, a few Echo devices will be left out of the party. Several early models, including the first-...
The AI search startup Perplexity just proposed a bid for acquiring (and transforming) TikTok, per a company blog post published Friday.“Perplexity is singularly positioned to rebuild the TikTok algorithm without creating a monopoly, combining world-class technical capabilities with Little Tech independence,†the company wrote.They claim they’re uniquely positioned to do this “without creating a monopoly,†unlike potential acquisitions by competitors or investor consortiums that might maintain ByteDance’s...
Earlier this week, Anthropic rolled out a web search feature for its AI-powered chatbot platform, Claude, bringing the bot in line with many of its rivals. It wasn’t immediately clear which search index might be powering the feature — one possibility was that Anthropic had developed its own. But evidence suggests it’s Brave Search, the […]
Microsoft is launching a research project to estimate the influence of specific training examples on the text, images, and other types of media that generative AI models create. That’s per a job listing dating back to December that was recently recirculated on LinkedIn. According to the listing, which seeks a research intern, the project will […]
In recent years, Meta has introduced many AI features and capabilities to its apps, even going so far as experimenting with AI-generated characters complete with unique profiles and personalities, before scraping them after they were deemed creepy and unnecessary. In yet another move that may not be received well among users, Meta wants to use […]
President Trump wanted to ban TikTok. Now he wants to save TikTok. There might even be a plan to save TikTok, though right now it feels more like a “concepts of a plan†situation. Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to press hard on regulating Big Tech, while also cozying up to their CEOs — and illegally firing some of the regulators. Companies like OpenAI and Google are trying to convince the White House to go along with their vision for AI, but it doesn’t seem anyone knows where they stand.So what does the Trump...
After a ton of leaks, Google officially announced the $499 Pixel 9a, which has the potential to be the new king of mid-range phones. It has dual cameras and access to Google's AI features — in many ways, it's everything the iPhone 16e should have been (especially its price). In this episode, Senior Writer Sam Rutherford joins us to discuss what's great about the Pixel 9a, as well as its potential downsides compared to the Pixel 9.Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us...
As conventional AI benchmarking techniques prove inadequate, AI builders are turning to more creative ways to assess the capabilities of generative AI models. For one group of developers, that’s Minecraft, the Microsoft-owned sandbox-building game. The website Minecraft Benchmark (or MC-Bench) was developed collaboratively to pit AI models against each other in head-to-head challenges to respond […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
North Korea is reportedly launching a new cybersecurity unit called Research Center 227 within its intelligence agency Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB).© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Gmail search results will now optionally take into account frequently accessed emails and contacts. | Image: GoogleIn an effort to improve the chances of finding the email you’re looking for, Google is introducing an optional AI-powered upgrade for Gmail’s search function. Google searches will no longer just return results in chronological order based solely on the keywords you’re searching for, but will instead also take into account other criteria, including “recency, most-clicked emails and frequent contacts,” according to a post shared to Google’s The Keyword blog today...
AI-powered search startup Perplexity is said to be in early talks to raise up to $1 billion in a new funding round valuing the startup at $18 billion. Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported on Thursday that Perplexity’s annual recurring revenue has now reached $100 million. Perplexity’s valuation has soared in recent […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As Apple’s Siri comes under attack for failing at the most basic queries, the company is shaking up leadership in charge of Apple’s AI features for Siri. According to Bloomberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook is installing Mike Rockwell, the current VP of the Vision Products Group (the team behind the Vision Pro), to head up […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Google Pixel 9A may have the same Tensor G4 chip as its more expensive counterparts, but it comes with a text-only version of Gemini AI. Google confirmed to Ars Technica that the Pixel 9A doesn’t have access to certain features, like the AI-powered Pixel Screenshots app, because of the phone’s lower 8GB of memory.Unlike the Gemini Nano XS model that comes with the Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, and Pixel 9 Pro Fold, the Pixel 9A has an even smaller on-device AI model: Gemini Nano 1.0 XXS, according to Ars Technica. For comparison, the Pixel 9 comes with 12GB of RAM, while the Pixel 9 Pro and Pro...
Google is rolling out a new Gmail update that is designed to help you find the email you’re looking for more quickly. The company announced on Thursday that it will now use AI to consider factors like recency, most-clicked emails, and frequent contacts when surfacing emails based on your search query. Up until now, Gmail […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Because of sanctions that will prevent Huawei’s latest foldable from going on sale in the US, many folks who are interested in the handset will never lay eyes on it in person. Still, you might want to get a load of this oddity.The Pura X should maybe have a “wide load” warning that pops up on the back once it’s opened up. Per CNBC, the 6.3-inch display has a 16:10 aspect ratio. That means it’s wider and more tablet-like than most other phones. It's not quite as unusual as Huawei's (admittedly cool-looking) tri-fold Mate XT, but it's still funky. Close the hinge and the...
Anthropic’s AI-powered chatbot, Claude, can now search the web — a capability that had long eluded it. Web search is available now in preview for paid Claude users in the U.S., Anthropic said on its blog, with support for free users and additional countries coming soon. Users can toggle on web search in their profile […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Open Power AI Consortium says it will use domain-specific AI models to tackle problems in the power industry.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The company recently signed a deal with energy provider AES for three solar projects across the Midwest.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In case you need further evidence that companies involved in AI chip manufacturing are looking to give themselves whatever edge they can, SoftBank is adding to its institutional expertise by buying former Intel president Renee James’ Ampere Computing. The conglomerate is paying $6.5 billion in cash for the chip design business.Ampere, which James founded in 2018, focused on cloud-native computing at first. No prizes for guessing which area the company has moved into since then: "sustainable AI compute," according to a press release.SoftBank is betting that Ampere will bolster Arm’s research...
Amid an ongoing regulatory battle with European privacy authorities, Meta announced on Thursday that its AI-powered virtual assistant, Meta AI, is finally launching in the European Union. The chatbot-like tool will be rolled out across Meta’s portfolio of social platforms, albeit with a more limited feature set compared to what it offers in its domestic […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Pura X opens from the side, not the top.Huawei has launched a new flip phone that upends the form factor, opening sideways rather than vertically to create a wider device with a tablet-esque aspect ratio. It’s the first Huawei phone to ship without Android app compatibility, and debuts the company’s in-house AI assistant, Harmony Intelligence — something the industry shouldn’t ignore, Nvidia’s CEO admits.The Pura X looks similar to a Samsung Galaxy Flip or Motorola Razr when it’s closed, with a palm-sized design and a square cover screen below its triple camera. The...
Meta is bringing its AI chatbot to Europe almost one year after pausing its launch in the region. Starting this week, Meta AI will roll out across WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger in 41 European countries and 21 overseas territories — but it will be limited to text-based chat features for now.Meta AI launched in the US in 2023. While the company intended to bring the assistant to Europe, Meta had to pause the rollout in the region after Ireland’s privacy watchdog asked it to delay training on content posted by Facebook and Instagram users. It also halted the launch of its...
SoftBank Group announced on Wednesday that it will acquire Ampere Computing, a chip designer founded by former Intel executive Renee James, through a $6.5 billion all-cash deal as a strategic move to broaden its investment in AI infrastructure. Ampere will be operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of SoftBank after the deal, which is expected to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The move is a bet that Ampere’s chips can begin playing a significant role in data centers for creating artificial intelligence.
OpenAI has launched a more powerful version of its o1 “reasoning” AI model, o1-pro, in its developer API. According to OpenAI, o1-pro uses more computing than o1 to provide “consistently better responses.” Currently, it’s only available to select developers — those who’ve spent at least $5 on OpenAI API services — and it’s pricey. Very […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Noam Brown, who leads AI reasoning research at OpenAI, says “reasoning” AI models like OpenAI’s o1 could’ve arrived 20 years earlier had researchers “known [the right] approach” and algorithms. “There were various reasons why this research direction was neglected,” Brown said during a panel at Nvidia’s GTC conference in San Jose on Wednesday. “I noticed […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
This deal caught my eye last night. Google is knocking $200 off its flagship Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro XL, which means the smaller model now starts at $799, or the same price as the regular Pixel 9. That’s a no-brainer right there. Or, you can head to Best Buy where it starts at $749 ($250 off), an all-time low. You pick.The Pixel 9 Pro starts with the same-size 6.3-inch screen as the Pixel 9 but has a sharper and brighter screen, a nicer polished metal frame, and more RAM, which helps allow things to feel smooth and may even futureproof you a little bit with memory-hungry Gemini AI...
Nvidia has reportedly acquired Gretel, a San Diego-based startup that’s developed a platform to generate synthetic AI training data. Terms of the acquisition are unknown. The price tag is reportedly nine figures and exceeds Gretel’s most recent valuation of $320 million, according to Wired. Gretel and its team of roughly 80 employees will be folded […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Raj Aggarwal is leaving AWS after nearly three years as the company’s GM of generative AI and revenue acceleration, according to a LinkedIn post Aggarwal published Wednesday. “I’m proud of the pioneering work our team did in generative AI from its earliest days,” Aggarwal said in his post. “We built what might be the world’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nvidia showed off its own Grace Blackwell-powered “personal AI supercomputers” yesterday, but it also made another announcement: third-party manufacturers can come and make their own versions as well. So far, Asus, Dell, and HP have come forward showing their own mini PC designs that tout the same GB10 super chip present in the Nvidia DGX Spark (formerly known as Digits).Asus is among the first to show off its GB10 computer: the Ascent GX10. It’s a mini PC with the same 1,000 AI TOPS processing power and 128GB of unified memory as Nvidia’s Spark. The Ascent swaps the champagne metallic...
In a new report, a California-based policy group co-led by Fei-Fei Li, an AI pioneer, suggests that lawmakers should consider AI risks that “have not yet been observed in the world” when crafting AI regulatory policies. The 41-page interim report released on Tuesday comes from the Joint California Policy Working Group on Frontier AI Models, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nvidia has invested in a startup founded by a former Google DeepMind senior research scientist who specialized in robotics and AI.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has added image generation capabilities to its API. Only one model is available in the API at the moment, “grok-2-image-1212.” Given a caption, the model can generate up to 10 images per request (limited to 5 requests per second) in JPG format, priced at $0.07 per image. For comparison, AI […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Have researchers discovered a new AI “scaling law”? That’s what some buzz on social media suggests — but experts are skeptical. AI scaling laws, a bit of an informal concept, describe how the performance of AI models improves as the size of the datasets and computing resources used to train them increases. Until roughly a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Copilot is coming back after Microsoft accidentally uninstalled it from some Windows 11 devices. In an update to its support page, Microsoft said affected devices “are being returned to their original state,” ending what some may have considered a brief respite from the AI assistant.On Monday, Microsoft said it was aware of a bug that uninstalled Copilot and unpinned it from the taskbar following its March 11th update. While it worked on a fix, Microsoft suggested reinstalling Copilot from the Microsoft Store and manually pinning it to the taskbar.Microsoft began rolling out Copilot as a...
AI startup Hugging Face has released a new app for iOS that only does one thing: uses offline, local AI to describe what’s in view of your iPhone’s camera. The app, called HuggingSnap, taps Hugging Face’s in-house vision model, smolvlm2, to analyze what your phone sees in real-time without sending data off to the cloud. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
When AI giant OpenAI submitted its “freedom-focused†policy proposal to the White House’s AI Action Plan last Thursday, it gave the Trump administration an industry wishlist: use trade laws to export American AI dominance against the looming threat of China, loosen copyright restrictions for training data (also to fight China), invest untold billions in AI infrastructure (again: China), and stop states from smothering it with hundreds of new laws.But specifically, one law: SB 1047, California’s sweeping, controversial, and...
Razer is getting into AI with a new developer platform called Wyvrn. It encompasses dev-focused automation tools like the Razer AI QA Copilot to assist with quality assurance / game testing and the AI Gamer Copilot (formerly called Project Ava) for real-time tips and guides via voice assistant while playing games.Wyvrn (pronounced “wyvern,” like the mythical creature) will also be an umbrella for Razer’s next-gen Chroma RGB platform, a new THX Spatial Audio Plus game plug-in, and Razer’s Sensa HD Haptics software.The most consequential of Razer’s new tools is the AI QA Copilot. It’s...
Suno wasn’t supposed to be an important part of Amazon’s Alexa Plus presentation. The AI song generation platform was a minor demonstration of how Alexa Plus could integrate into other apps, sandwiched between other announcements. But it caught my attention all the same — because whether Amazon realized it or not, the company blundered into a massive copyright fight.Suno, for those of you not familiar, is an AI song generator: enter a text prompt (such as “a jazz, reggae, EDM pop song about my imaginationâ€...
Booking an ad campaign with social media influencers is currently not exactly easy. For starters, influencers’ approaches to marketing can be unconventional, and there’s no standard way to engage with them. On the other side, marketing agencies that employ hosts of people to book and track brand campaigns are limited by how many influencers they […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance said that the Trump administration’s support of AI and tech innovations should benefit both populists and those investing and leading tech companies. “I think there’s too much fear that AI will simply replace jobs rather than augmenting so many of the things that we do now,” said Vance at […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Asus, Dell, HP and others to produce powerful desktop machines that run AI models locally.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote Tuesday at the company’s GTC 2025 conference stuck with tradition and was chock full of announcements. But the company also snuck in a little history lesson. During the automotive portion of his speech, Huang referred to AlexNet, a neural network architecture that gained widespread attention in 2012 when it won […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nvidia at GTC 2025 announced a new lineup of “AI personal supercomputers” powered by the company’s Grace Blackwell chip platform. Jensen Huang, the semiconductor company’s founder and CEO, unveiled the two new machines, DGX Spark (previously called Project Digits) and DGX Station, during his keynote on Tuesday. The computers will allow users to prototype, fine-tune, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Help out at home or steal your job, which path do you choose? | Image: 1X Technologies (left), Fourier (right)Nvidia has announced that Isaac GR00T N1 — the company’s open-source, pretrained but customizable foundation model that’s designed to expedite the development and capabilities of humanoid robots — is now available. “The age of generalist robotics is here,” says Nvidia founder and CEO, Jensen Huang. “With Nvidia Isaac GR00T N1 and new data-generation and robot-learning frameworks, robotics developers everywhere will open the next frontier in the age of AI.”During his GTC...
General Motors is turning to Nvidia to help bring AI to the physical world in an expanded collaboration designed to touch every aspect of the automaker’s business, including factories, robots, and self-driving cars. Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, who announced the partnership Tuesday during his keynote at the company’s GTC conference in San Jose, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nvidia is releasing what it’s calling an AI foundation model for humanoid robotics. Announced at GTC 2025, the model, dubbed Groot N1, is a “generalist” model — trained on synthetic data and real data. Nvidia said that Groot N1 features a “dual system architecture” for “thinking fast and slow,” inspired by human cognitive processes. Groot […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nvidia’s little DGX Spark mini computer next to the full DGX Station desktop. | Image: NvidiaNvidia has revealed its new DGX Spark and DGX Station “personal AI supercomputers” at today’s GTC conference, which are both powered by the company’s Grace Blackwell platform and designed for users to work on large AI models with or without a connection to a datacenter; the Spark is going up for preorder today.The DGX Spark is the new name for Nvidia’s $3,000 Mac Mini-sized “world’s smallest AI supercomputer” that was announced with the name “Digits” at CES earlier this year. Its...
A Blackwell Ultra server cluster. | Image: NvidiaNvidia now makes $2,300 in profit every second on the back of the AI revolution. Its data center business is so gigantic, even its networking hardware now rakes in more money than its gaming GPUs. Now, the company is announcing the AI GPUs that it hopes will extend its commanding lead: the Blackwell Ultra GB300, which will ship in the second half of this year, the Vera Rubin for second half of next year, and the Rubin Ultra that will arrive in the second half of 2027.This year’s Blackwell Ultra isn’t we originally expected, when Nvidia said...
The rise of generative AI has been powered by Nvidia and its advanced GPUs. As demand far outstrips supply, the H100 has become highly sought after and extremely expensive, making Nvidia a trillion-dollar company for the first time.It’s also prompting customers, like Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Amazon, and Google to start working on their own AI processors. Meanwhile, Nvidia and other chip makers like AMD and Intel are now locked in an arms race to release newer, more efficient, and more powerful AI chips.As demand for generative AI services continues to grow, it’s evident that chips...
At Nvidia’s annual GTC conference in San Jose, Calif. today, the chipmaker announced it was teaming up with General Motors to develop next-generation cars, robots, and factories. GM says it will apply several of Nvidia’s products to its business, such as the Omniverse 3D graphics platform which will run simulations on virtual assembly lines with an eye on reducing downtime and improving efficiency. The automaker also plans to equip its next-generation vehicles with Nvidia’s “AI brain” for advanced driver assistance and autonomous driving. And it will employ the chipmaker’s AI...
Stability AI has released a new AI model, Stable Virtual Camera, that the company says can transform 2D images into “immersive” videos with realistic depth and perspective. Virtual cameras are tools often used in digital filmmaking and 3D animation to capture and navigate scenes in real-time. With Stable Virtual Camera, Stability sought to add generative […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The giant chipmaker has transformed its annual developer conference from an academic event into a who’s who gathering for the future of artificial intelligence.
In a brief message Tuesday morning on Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company’s “open” AI model family, Llama, hit 1 billion downloads. That’s up from 650 million downloads as of early December 2024 — a 153% increase over a roughly-three-month period. Llama, which powers Meta’s AI assistant across its various platforms, including Facebook, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
More than 400 members of the entertainment industry have signed a letter pushing back on OpenAI and Google’s proposal to allow AI models to train on copyrighted content, as reported earlier by Variety. The letter claims both companies “are arguing for a special government exemption” that would allow them to “freely exploit” creative industries.The letter, which comes in response to the Trump administration’s request for feedback on its incoming AI Action Plan, is signed by stars like Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo, Cynthia Eviro, Cate Blanchett, Taika Waititi, Ayo Edebiri, Aubrey Plaza...
According to a report, AI startup Anthropic is working on voice capabilities for its AI-powered chatbot, Claude. The company’s chief product officer, Mike Krieger, told the Financial Times that Anthropic plans to launch experiences that allow users to talk to Anthropic’s AI models. “We are doing some work around how Claude for desktop evolves [… […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
U.S. President Trump’s wide-ranging tariff hikes are already resulting in growth forecasts being cut amid other uncertainty, — actions that will inevitably impact the technology sector, too. Today, however, one food e-commerce startup called GrubMarket is announcing a new equity round of $50 million on a raised valuation of over $3.5 billion — a signal […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
After decades of relying on Google’s ten blue links to find everything from travel tips to jeans, consumers are quickly adapting to a completely new format: AI chatbots that do the searching for them.According to new research from Adobe, AI search has become a significant traffic channel for retailers. The company analyzed “more than 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail sites” through its analytics platform, and conducted a survey of “more than 5,000 U.S. respondents†to better understand how people are using AI. The report says AI search...
Liam Fedus, OpenAI’s VP of research for post-training, is leaving the company to found a materials science AI startup. The Information initially reported Fedus’ plans. In a statement on X, Fedus confirmed the report and added a few additional details. “My undergrad was in physics and I’m keen to apply this technology there,” Fedus said […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Intel’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan seems ready to get right to work to turn around the struggling company. The semiconductor giant’s new executive is considering sweeping changes for the company’s chip manufacturing and AI strategies, according to Reuters, including: cutting middle management staff and revamping the company’s approach to manufacturing chips. Tan reportedly told company […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Users on social media have discovered a controversial use case for Google’s new Gemini AI model: removing watermarks from images, including from images published by Getty Images and other well-known stock media outfits. Last week, Google expanded access to its Gemini 2.0 Flash model’s image generation feature, which lets the model natively generate and edit […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The AI search engine Perplexity just debuted a new ad featuring Squid Game star Lee Jung-jae, who’s trapped in a room and must answer a series of questions to escape. One question targets Google’s AI gaffe last year, as Lee taps Perplexity to answer, “How do I make cheese stick to a pizza?”The AI Overviews in Google Search use results from across the web to feed a summary written by Google’s AI tool. However, users quickly found issues with the feature, including one specific response that said “Mix about 1/8 cup of Elmer’s glue in the sauce” to make cheese stick to pizza.With...
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has acquired Hotshot, a startup working on AI-powered video generation tools along the lines of OpenAI’s Sora. Akash Sastry, Hotshot’s CEO and co-founder, announced the news in a post on X on Monday. “Over the past 2 years we’ve built 3 video foundation models as a small team — Hotshot-XL, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
If you woke up to a Windows PC suddenly without Microsoft's Copilot app installed, you didn't dream the last few years of AI hype, Microsoft just made a mistake. The latest monthly Windows 11 update that rolled out on March 11 "unintentionally uninstalled and unpinned" the AI assistant, according to a Microsoft support article spotted by The Verge. Microsoft is aware that Copilot's gone missing and is "working on a resolution to address this issue." For now, if you want Copilot back, you can redownload its app from the Microsoft Store and manually pin it to your taskbar. Just like...
Google is shipping the latest “experimental” features of its Gemini 2.0 Flash AI model to more developers across all regions, and people are finding some concerning abilities that include editing out watermarks from photos.The company’s lightweight localized on-device AI model is now equipped with native image generation that can not only produce pictures from a text prompt but also let you conversationally edit images. Over the weekend, users found that it can also remove watermarks with precision, TechCrunch reports.Tools like Watermark Remover.io can already scrub marks from companies...
Zoom’s AI Companion is getting an “agentic” upgrade at the end of this month, allowing it to identify and perform tasks on users’ behalf. Workspace users will be able to access the feature within a new Tasks tab in Workspace, where they can have Zoom’s AI schedule follow-up meetings, generate documents from meetings, and create video clips.Some other updates are coming to Zoom too, including a new voice recorder for the Zoom Workplace mobile app that will record, transcribe, and summarize in-person meetings when it launches this month. Zoom is also rolling out live notes in May, which...
A lot of the focus in generative AI up to now has been on text-based interfaces used to generate text, images and more. The next wave appears to be voice, and it’s rolling in fast. In the latest development, Google today announced that it would be adding Chirp 3 — its HD voice interface — […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google is doubling down on building out its AI business in the U.K., and on Monday morning in London, the CEO of Google DeepMind Demis Hassabis and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian appeared alongside customers BT and WPP to spell out some of its plans. The company said it will be expanding UK data residency […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Chinese search engine Baidu has launched two new AI models — Ernie 4.5, the latest version of the company’s foundational model first released two years ago, as well as a new reasoning model, Ernie X1. According to Reuters, Baidu claims that Ernie X1’s performance is “on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price,”, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 75, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you have some time to kill this weekend, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about Benson Boone and Tyler Cowen and EV factories and YouTube yoga, catching up on old episodes of Smartypants, making a rare trek to the theater to see Black Bag, swapping in Duck.ai for my chatbot and AI search needs, getting rehooked on the Tick, Tick… Boom...
Social network Bluesky recently published a proposal on GitHub outlining new options it could give users to indicate whether they want their posts and data to be scraped for things like generative AI training and public archiving. CEO Jay Graber discussed the proposal earlier this week, while on-stage at South by Southwest, but it attracted […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On Thursday, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent letters to 16 American technology firms, including Google and OpenAI, asking for past communications with the Biden Administration that might suggest the former President “coerced or colluded” with companies to “censor lawful speech” in AI products. The Trump Administration’s top technology advisers previously signaled it would pick […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Ashly Burch, the award-winning voice and performance actor behind Horizon Zero Dawn’s Aloy — one of the most prominent characters on PlayStation today — has some news and some very strong thoughts about the leaked Sony experiment that saw her character voiced and performed by AI technology instead of her or any other human being.The video, originally shared with The Verge by a tipster and later pulled off YouTube by a copyright enforcement company that counts Sony PlayStation as a client, was of an internal prototype — not necessarily something that’s in production for actual games...
The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee is looking into whether the Biden administration tried to "censor" artificial intelligence. Representative Jim Jordan has sent subpoenas to sixteen different tech companies that work with AI in some capacity to ask for any and all communications from the previous administration about limiting "harmful bias" and "algorithmic discrimination."Subpoenas were sent to Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), Inflection AI, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Open AI, Palantir, Salesforce, Scale AI...
As businesses race to replace humans with AI agents, coding assistant Cursor just gave a peek at the attitude bots could bring to work, too. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI is calling on the Trump administration to give AI companies an exemption to train their models on copyrighted material. In a blog post spotted by The Verge, the company this week published its response to President Trump's AI Action Plan. Announced at the end of February, the initiative saw the White House seek input from private industry, with the goal of eventually enacting policy that will work to "enhance America's position as an AI powerhouse" and enable innovation in the sector. "America's robust, balanced intellectual property system has long been key to our...
This week, Google released a family of open AI models, Gemma 3, that quickly garnered praise for their impressive efficiency. But as a number of developers lamented on X, Gemma 3’s license makes commercial use of the models a risky proposition. It’s not a problem unique to Gemma 3. Companies like Meta also apply custom, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI and Google are pushing the US government to allow their AI models to train on copyrighted material. Both companies outlined their stances in proposals published this week, with OpenAI arguing that applying fair use protections to AI “is a matter of national security.”The proposals come in response to a request from the White House, which asked governments, industry groups, private sector organizations, and others for input on President Donald Trump’s “AI Action Plan.” The initiative is supposed to “enhance America’s position as an AI powerhouse,” while preventing “...
Anthropic is one of the world’s leading AI model providers, especially in areas like coding. But its AI assistant, Claude, is nowhere near as popular as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.According to chief product officer Mike Krieger, Anthropic doesn’t plan to win the AI race by building a mainstream AI assistant. “I hope Claude reaches as many people as possible,†Krieger told me onstage at the HumanX AI conference earlier this week. “But I think, [for] our ambitions, the critical path isn’t...
Amazon is discontinuing a feature that allowed users of some of its Echo smart speakers to choose not to send their voice recordings to the cloud. According to an email the company sent to users that was posted on Reddit, it will disable the feature that allowed select Echos to process Alexa requests locally on the device on March 28th, 2025. The move appears to be connected to the launch of its generative AI-powered Alexa Plus, slated for later this month (March 28th, perhaps?). The email states, “As we continue to expand Alexa’s capabilities with generative AI features that rely on the...
Google Assistant's days are numbered. Google announced Friday that all Android devices are switching to Gemini as their default assistant and "the classic Google Assistant will no longer be accessible on most mobile devices."The company says it's working to convert more mobile devices from Google Assistant to Gemini in 2025, and plans on "upgrading tablets, cars and devices that connect to your phone, such as headphones and watches" to the new AI assistant. That presumably includes other platforms like iOS, as well. While smart home devices don't seem to be a focus at Google as of...
We’ve all experienced that moment of frustration when the GPS glitches and you miss an exit on the highway. The team at Tern AI, which is building a low-cost GPS alternative, says that’s because the current technology is limited by its reliance on satellite positioning. Tern AI says it has figured out how to locate […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple Intelligence is technically lots of things, but there’s only one feature with the potential to actually meaningfully change the way you use your phone. That would be Siri, which Apple said last year it had turned from a quasi-helpful voice assistant into an AI-powered helper that could understand everything about you and accomplish things on your behalf. Sounds cool, right? It was one of the flagship features of the iPhone 16 lineup, a big part of the way Apple promoted its new devices. Except it doesn’t exist. And it won’t anytime...
SoftBank is marching ahead on its ambitions to build out a major AI operation in its home market of Japan, on its own steam and in strategic partnership with others like OpenAI. On Friday, the tech company confirmed it would pay $676 million for factory previously used by Sharp to build LCD panels to convert […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sesame, the AI company behind the impressively realistic voice assistant Maya, has released the base AI model powering Maya, as it recently promised. The model, which is 1 billion parameters in size (“parameters” referring to individual components of the model), is under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially with few restrictions. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft is testing AI-powered summaries in Notepad. In an update rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels, you’ll be able to summarize information in Notepad by highlighting a chunk of text, right-clicking it, and selecting Summarize.Notepad will then generate a summary of the text, as well as provide an option to change its length. You can also generate summaries by selecting text and using the Ctrl + M shortcut or choosing Summarize from the Copilot menu.As is the case with other AI features in Windows 11, you must be signed into a Microsoft account to use Notepad’...
Google, following on the heels of OpenAI, published a policy proposal in response to the Trump Administration’s call for a national “AI Action Plan.” The tech giant endorsed weak copyright restrictions on AI training, as well as “balanced” export controls that “protect national security while enabling U.S. exports and global business operations.” “The U.S. needs […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Rumman Chowdhury, a data scientist, nonprofit founder, and former director of Twitter’s machine ethics team, had strong words for Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) during an SXSW panel on Thursday. “When your funding is frozen and you don’t know if you’re gonna be fired, and there’s this, like, absolutely unhinged person […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The first trailer for the next season of Black Mirror is full of the kinds of topics you’d expect from the anthology: AI, virtual worlds, video games, and lots of futuristic gadgets. All with a dark twist, of course.Season 7 will feature six episodes — series creator Charlie Brooker says that two of them “are basically feature-length” — which includes a sequel to “USS Callister.” The appearance of Will Poulter also suggests the show is returning to the Bandersnatch universe.We already knew the upcoming season had a stacked cast, with previous announcements including Paul Giamatti...
In a new policy proposal, OpenAI describes Chinese AI lab DeepSeek as “state-subsidized” and “state-controlled,” and recommends that the U.S. government consider banning models from the outfit and similar People’s Republic of China (PRC)-supported operations. The proposal, a submission for the Trump Administration’s “AI Action Plan” initiative, claims that DeepSeek’s models, including its R1 “reasoning” model, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
After being one of the first companies to roll out a Deep Research feature at the end of last year, Google is now making that same tool available to everyone. Starting today, Gemini users can try Deep Research for free in more than 45 languages — no Gemini Advanced subscription necessary. For the uninitiated, Deep Research allows you to ask Gemini to create comprehensive but easy-to-read reports on complex topics. Compared to say Google's new AI Mode, Deep Research works slower than your typical chatbot, and that's by design. Gemini will first create a research plan before it...
When I was 16, I attended a writing workshop with a group of precocious young poets, where we all tried very hard to prove who among us was the most tortured upper-middle-class teenager. One boy refused to tell anyone where he was from, declaring, “I’m from everywhere and nowhere.” Two weeks later, he admitted he […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft is preparing to launch an AI-powered Copilot for Gaming soon that will guide Xbox players through games and act as an assistant to download and launch games. Copilot for Gaming, as Microsoft is branding it, will be available through the Xbox mobile app initially and is designed to work on a second screen as a companion or assistant.Microsoft is positioning Copilot for Gaming as a sidekick of sorts, one that will accompany you through games offering up tips and guides, and useful information about a game world. During a press briefing Sonali Yadav, product manager for gaming AI...
In a proposal for the U.S. government’s “AI Action Plan,” the Trump Administration’s initiative to reshape American AI policy, OpenAI called for a U.S. copyright strategy that “[preserves] American AI models’ ability to learn from copyrighted material.” “America has so many AI startups, attracts so much investment, and has made so many research breakthroughs largely […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A rush of agentic AI solutions is hitting the enterprise market, and now one of the bigger players in automation has scooped up a startup in the space in hopes of taking a bigger piece of that business. UiPath, as part of its quarterly earnings last night, announced that it acquired Peak.ai, a startup out […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is worried about spies getting their hands on costly "algorithmic secrets" from the U.S.' top AI companies.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google DeepMind, Google’s AI research lab, on Wednesday announced new AI models called Gemini Robotics designed to enable real-world machines to interact with objects, navigate environments, and more. DeepMind published a series of demo videos showing robots equipped with Gemini Robotics folding paper, putting a pair of glasses into a case, and other tasks in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Manus, the viral AI “agent” platform from Chinese startup Butterfly Effect, has had an unintended side effect: raising the profile of another AI tool called Browser Use. Browser Use, which aims to make websites more accessible for agentic applications that perform tasks on a user’s behalf, has experienced explosive growth in the past week. Daily […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Snapchat Platinum subscribers will now be able to use video lenses featuring AI generated animals or flowers, Snap announced today. There will initially be three of the lenses, which Snap calls “AI Video Lenses.” The fox lens, for example, can have a fox snuggle on your shoulder, while the raccoon one can have raccoons scamper over your head. With the flower lens, flowers will appear in front of you and the camera will zoom out.Snap says it will be adding new AI-powered lenses every week.“These Lenses, powered by our in-house built generative video model, bring some of the most cutting...
Back in 2019, Microsoft open-sourced Dapr, a new runtime for making building distributed microservice-based applications easier. At the time, nobody was talking about AI agents yet, but as it turns out, Dapr had some of the fundamental building blocks for supporting AI agents built-in from the outset. That’s because one of Dapr’s core features is […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The new Siri was supposed to make the iPhone 16 a huge upgrade. It didn’t.The onrushing AI era was supposed to create boom times for great gadgets. Not long ago, analysts were predicting that Apple Intelligence would start a “supercycle†of smartphone upgrades, with tons of new AI features compelling people to buy them. Amazon and Google and others were explaining how their ecosystems of devices would make computing seamless, natural, and personal. Startups were flooding the market with ChatGPT-powered gadgets, so you’d never be out of...
It’s always listening.For every memory seared into my brain, there are thousands of others I either can’t retain or trust. I spent the last eight months forgetting to fix a homeowner association (HOA) violation despite numerous reminder emails. My cousins and I have been trapped in our own version of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon over who said what at grandma’s funeral. Cursed with the working memory of a goldfish, I’ve apologized dozens of times to everyone for failing to do the things I said I would.These are the problems...
Elliot Wolf, the executive producer and son of “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf, is entering a new venture aimed at engaging true crime fans. He, along with co-founders Andrew Adashek (CEO) and Noah Rosenberg (CTO), are developing Wolf Games, a new startup that leverages AI to generate daily murder mystery games. The company also […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta is facing an AI copyright publisher lawsuit in France accusing it of economic “parasitism,” Reuters reports. The French litigation was filed in a Paris court this week by the National Publishing Union (SNE), the National Union of Authors and Composers (SNAC), and the Society of People of Letters (SGDL), which are accusing Meta of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Salesforce plans to invest $1 billion in Singapore over the next five years as it seeks to fuel the adoption of its AI agent development platform, Agentforce. Salesforce claimed that Agentforce can help alleviate Singapore’s ongoing labor issues and augment the country’s workforce and enterprises by creating “digital workforces” that combine humans with autonomous AI […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A little over a year after releasing two “open” Gemma AI models built from the same technology behind its Gemini AI, Google is updating the family with Gemma 3. According to the blog post, these models are intended for use by developers creating AI applications capable of running wherever they’re needed, on anything from a phone to a workstation with support for over 35 languages, as well as the ability to analyze text, images, and short videos.The company claims that it’s the “world’s best single-accelerator model,” outperforming competition from Facebook’s Llama, DeepSeek, and...
Anthropic, a San Francisco startup often cast as an independent player in the AI race, has deeper ties to Google than previously known. Court documents recently obtained by The New York Times reveal that Google owns a 14% stake in the company and is set to pour another $750 million into it this year through […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta is reportedly testing an in-house chip for training AI systems, a part of a strategy to reduce its reliance on hardware makers like Nvidia. According to Reuters, Meta’s chip, which is designed to handle AI-specific workloads, was manufactured in partnership with Taiwan-based firm TSMC. The company is piloting a “small deployment” of the chip […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says that, despite the Trump Administration’s attacks on globalism, global trade isn’t dead. In fact, he thinks that the U.S.’s key to growth will be embracing an international exchange of goods. “So, I actually am a firm believer — I think it goes all the way back to the economists who […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Otherwise Fund's Terrance Rohan, investing in Y Combinator since 2010, says he noticed a "vibe shift" with this batch thanks to AI.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference, also known as GTC, is coming up next week. The event is happening March 17-21 in San Jose, but you can also follow along with all the big developments here at Engadget. We'll have a liveblog for the keynote with CEO Jensen Huang on March 18 at 1PM ET/10AM PT, which is when most of the big news will drop. His speech will also be livestreamed for free. It's a safe bet that you'll hear a whole lot about artificial intelligence during the week, but with all the changes in the computing landscape over the past 12 months, the stakes might be higher for the...
Flower Labs, a Y Combinator-backed startup, on Tuesday launched a preview of its distributed cloud platform for serving AI models, called Flower Intelligence. Mozilla is already using it to power the upcoming Assist summarization add-on for its Thunderbird email client. What makes Flower Intelligence unique, Flower Labs said in a post on X, is that […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Breaking: A Big Tech company is ramping up its AI development. (Whaaat??) In this case, the protagonist of this now-familiar tale is Meta, which Reuters reports is testing its first in-house chip for AI training. The idea is to lower its gargantuan infrastructure costs and reduce its dependence on NVIDIA (a company that apparently brings out Mark Zuckerberg's "adult language" side). If all goes well, Meta hopes to use it for training by 2026.Meta has reportedly kicked off a small-scale deployment of the dedicated accelerator chip, which is designed to specialize in AI tasks (and is, therefore...
Speaking at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, tech investor and entrepreneur Mark Cuban shared his thoughts on how AI technology can help small businesses outperform their competition. In short, he told the crowd that AI was not the answer, in and of itself, but is meant to serve as an aid that can help […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Last year, Hugging Face, the AI dev platform, launched LeRobot, a collection of open AI models, data sets, and tools to help build real-world robotics systems. On Tuesday, Hugging Face teamed up with AI startup Yaak to expand LeRobot with a training set for robots and cars that can navigate environments, like city streets, autonomously. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
You’re not the only one getting voicemails about your car’s extended warranty. According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), about 2.6 million people submitted reports on falling victim to fraud in 2024, totaling $12.5 billion in losses. That’s a big jump from $2.5 billion lost in 2023, when the FTC received roughly the same […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Ahead of a May deadline to lock in guidance for providers of general purpose AI (GPAI) models on complying with provisions of the EU AI Act that apply to Big AI, a third draft of the Code of Practice was published on Tuesday. The Code has been in formulation since last year, and this draft […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sony has used AI to imbue a PlayStation character with the ability to converse with a player, The Verge reports. A source shared a since-deleted video with the publication featuring an AI-powered version of Aloy from Horizon Forbidden West. Engadget viewed the video before it was pulled. In the demo, Aloy can hold a conversation with voice prompts during gameplay, and respond to questions with a synthesized voice and facial movements. It starts with a delay from Aloy, after being asked how they are, followed by the character stating they are "managing alright, just dealing with a sore...
Speaking at the SXSW conference in Austin on Monday, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber says the social network has been working on a framework for user consent over how they want their data to be used for generative AI. The public nature of Bluesky’s social network has already allowed others to train their AI systems on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Poolside co-founder and CEO Jason Warner didn’t mince words: He thinks that most companies looking to build foundation AI models should instead focus on building applications. Poolside is an AI-powered software development platform. Warner told the audience at the HumanX AI conference in Las Vegas on Monday that he doesn’t think anyone who doesn’t think […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Unlike AI competitors, DeepSeek’s founder Liang Wenfeng is in no hurry to get investment from outsiders.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sony is working on a prototype AI-powered version of at least one its PlayStation game characters. An anonymous tipster has shared an internal video from Sony’s PlayStation group with The Verge that demonstrates an AI-powered version of Aloy from Horizon Forbidden West.The video is narrated by Sharwin Raghoebardajal, a director of software engineering at Sony Interactive Entertainment who works on video game technology, AI, computer vision, and face technology for Sony’s PlayStation Studios Advanced Technology Group. Raghoebardajal demonstrates an AI-powered version of Aloy that can hold a...
Microsoft has started sending out invites to a 50th anniversary and Copilot event at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington. The April 4th event will take place on the day Microsoft marks 50 years since it was first founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975. The event on Microsoft’s campus will include an employee-only celebration of the company’s 50 years, alongside details on what’s next for the consumer side of Microsoft’s Copilot AI companion. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, and other “leaders of past and present” will be part of...
Google has announced a new AI feature that uses Gemini AI bot to add events to your Google Calendar based on emailed details in Gmail. Emails that Gemini thinks describe events will get a new “Add to Calendar button” that starts the interaction. When you click it, the Gemini prompt sidebar will open to confirm the event was added and, based on a screenshot that Google provides, give you an edit button in case you need to change anything. You could already add events with Gemini’s side panel, but now it all happens automatically.The feature is similar to Google’s past non-AI...
Today, the $700 PlayStation 5 Pro can already produce crisper, sharper, smoother, and more stable graphics than a PS5, if you sit close enough to appreciate them. But starting in 2026, the company hopes to imbue games with a new AI upscaling formula that’ll make them even crisper, based on the AMD FSR 4 technique that’s now shipping with AMD’s new RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT graphics cards and appears to be competitive against Nvidia’s latest DLSS as well.“Our target is to have something very similar to FSR 4’s upscaler available on PS5 Pro for 2026 titles as the next evolution of...
Given how much money VCs are pouring into AI startups these days, it may seem like VCs have decided: If it’s not AI, they won’t write a big check. But that’s not exactly what’s happening. Dealmaking at the moment is more nuanced, said VC Insight Partners managing director Ryan Hinkle during a recent Equity podcast. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
PS5 Pro and PS5... amateur? | Image: SonyOn September 10th, PlayStation held a “technical presentation” that confirmed the long-rumored PS5 Pro’s existence and souped-up specs, like a buffed GPU, Wi-Fi 7, and support for Sony’s AI-driven upscaling technology, PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, or PSSR. It will also come with features like PS5 Pro Game Boost to improve the performance of supported PS4 or PS5 games and enhanced image quality for PS4 games to offer higher resolution on “select” PS4 titles.The presentation was hosted by PlayStation architect...
A nifty new Gmail capability powered by Google’s Gemini AI has arrived for Google Workspace customers. Starting Monday, users can add events to a Google Calendar directly from an email. Gemini will automatically detect calendar-related content in an email and present an “Add to calendar” button. After clicking the button, the side panel in Gmail […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With an IP68 waterproof and dustproof rating, the JBL Charge 6 should easily survive a trip to the beach. | Image: JBLJBL has announced new versions of two of its popular Bluetooth speakers. The JBL Flip 7 features a more rugged design, an upgraded tweeter, and two extra hours of playtime, while the JBL Charge 6 gets an upgraded woofer and four more hours of battery life. Both speakers also feature JBL’s AI Sound Boost technology, which the company says can boost volume without introducing distortion.The JBL Flip 7 is available for preorder now through the company’s online store for $149.95...
Today, I’m talking with Almar Latour, who is the publisher of The Wall Street Journal and CEO of its parent company Dow Jones, which you can think of as a huge research and data provider for companies of all sizes. Dow Jones itself is part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Latour is a fascinating guy. He started as a news assistant at the Journal in the ’90s, spent time as a tech reporter, and eventually rose through the ranks to become CEO in 2020, putting him in charge of how everything makes money.And if you’ve been paying attention, you know it’s a tough time to be making money...
Microsoft appears to be working on 3D gaming experiences for Copilot, its AI-powered chatbot platform, according to a new job listing. The listing, published this week, seeks a senior software engineer based in Beijing specializing in 3D rendering engines, particularly engines typically used to build web browser-based video games (Babylon.js, three.js, and Unity). “Are you […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
ServiceNow said on Monday that it has agreed to acquire Moveworks, which develops enterprise-focused automation and AI tools. ServiceNow will pay $2.85 billion for Moveworks in a mix of cash and stock. The former expects the deal to close in the second half of 2025. Bloomberg reported the deal late on Sunday night. As of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As the U.S. trucking industry gears up for the negative impacts of new Trump tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, a startup building a new kind of trucking insurance — a critical cost for truck drivers — has raised some money to grow, and (it hopes) help truckers weather the changes. Nirvana, an AI-based […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
JBL just announced a pair of portable speakers that take advantage of the company’s AI Sound Boost technology. This software analyzes the signal and maxes out the driver while minimizing distortion. The company says this creates a boost in sound quality.The Flip 7 features an interchangeable strap and carabiner and an updated control placement when compared to the previous generation. The Flip 6 easily made our list of the best portable Bluetooth speakers, so any improvement is just icing on the cake. It also includes an upgraded woofer with more output power, which should further improve the...
Manus, an “agentic” AI platform that launched in preview last week, is generating more hype than a Taylor Swift concert. The head of product at Hugging Face called Manus “the most impressive AI tool I’ve ever tried.” AI policy researcher Dean Ball described Manus as the “most sophisticated computer using AI.” The official Discord server […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Creatopy, a startup that uses AI to automate the creation of digital ads, has brought on a new CEO: Tammy H. Nam. Nam was previously COO and CMO at photo-editing startup PicsArt, and before that the CEO of video streamer Viki. She told TechCrunch via email that Creatopy was looking for a US-based executive who […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The US Department of Justice is still calling for Google to sell its web browser Chrome, according to a Friday court filing. The DOJ first proposed that Google should sell Chrome last year, under then-President Joe Biden, but it seems to be sticking with that plan under the second Trump administration. The department is, however, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google has quietly updated the webpage for its Responsible AI and Human Centered Technology (RAI-HCT) team, the team charged with conducting research into AI safety, fairness, and explainability, to scrub mentions of “diversity” and “equity.” A previous version of the page used language such as “marginalized communities,” “diverse,” “underrepresented groups,” and “equity” to describe the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A federal judge is allowing an AI-related copyright lawsuit against Meta to move forward, although he dismissed part of the suit. In Kadrey vs. Meta, authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates have alleged that Meta has violated their intellectual property rights by using their books to train its Llama AI models, and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Investor interest in AI-coding assistants is exploding. Anysphere, the developer of AI-powered coding assistant Cursor, is in talks with venture capitalists to raise capital at a valuation of nearly $10 billion, Bloomberg reported. The round, if it transpires, would come about three months after Anysphere completed its previous fundraise of $100 million at a pre-money […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft is accelerating its push to compete with OpenAI, its longtime collaborator, by developing its own powerful AI models and exploring alternatives to power products like Microsoft’s Copilot bot. Microsoft has developed its own AI “reasoning” models comparable to models like OpenAI’s o1 and o3-mini, the The Information reports. OpenAI is said to have refused […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
TechCrunch will be on the ground at SXSW 2025 — the annual tech, music, comedy, and film conference that kicked off Friday in Austin — in search of the zeitgeist of this AI-centric era. Yup, we’re one sentence in and AI has already made its entrance. And why not? A quick scan of the massive […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Mobile World Congress is taking place in Barcelona this week, offering manufacturers an opportunity to show off new gear without needing to hold their own splashy event. So far, we've learned about some new laptops and phones, as well as upcoming AI updates to Android and an internet connectivity announcement from Meta. There's also been some interesting ideas in the world of headphones and a whole lot of concepts that might never make it to market, but are fun to look at any way. Here's a look at everything announced at Mobile World Congress that caught our eye. We'll update this story...
Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned Friday that agentic AI could come with a risk to user privacy. Speaking on stage at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, the advocate for secure communications, referred to the use of AI agents as “putting your brain in a jar,” and cautioned that this new paradigm of computing — […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has acquired a one-million-square-foot property in Southwest Memphis to expand its AI data center footprint, according to a press release from the Memphis Chamber of Commerce. The new land will host infrastructure to complement xAI’s existing Memphis data center. “xAI’s acquisition of this property ensures we’ll remain at the forefront […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On June 5, TechCrunch Sessions: AI will kick off — and you can be part of the industry-changing conversations that will be taking place. We have an open invitation for members of the AI community to lead breakout sessions and discussions with over 1,200 startup founders, VC leaders, and AI aficionados attending our newest event, which […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple is delaying the rollout of the “more personalized Siri” experience it promised as part of its rollout of Apple Intelligence. According to a statement from the tech giant published on Friday by Apple blog Daring Fireball, the company admits it will “take us longer than we thought to deliver” on these new Siri features. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With the rise of AI companions who serve as online friends or romantic interests, experts are questioning how the technology affects our real-world social connections and relationships. According to Kasley Killam, author of the social health-focused book “The Art and Science of Connection: Why Social Health is the Missing Key to Living Longer, Healthier, and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Thanks to AI upscaling technology, the version of A Different World that’s currently on Netflix won’t look how you remember it did when it aired. And not in a good way. The “HD” remaster of the 1980s sitcom being streamed is a nightmarish mess of distorted faces, garbled text, and misshapen backgrounds.People started spotting the issues shortly after Netflix added the Cosby Show spin-off to its service in February, with criticisms of the botched upscaling effort appearing across online social platforms. While the type of upscaling techniques used to remaster the original 480p or 360p...
Google is testing a new AI-powered Gemini side panel within Google Calendar that lets users quickly and conversationally check their schedule, create an event, and look up event details. The feature is available as part of the tech giant’s early access testing program, Google Workspace Labs. You can access Gemini by clicking the “Ask Gemini” […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta’s next major “open” AI model may have a voice focus, per a report in Financial Times. According to the piece, Meta is planning to introduce improved voice features with Llama 4, the next flagship in its Llama model family, which is expected to arrive in “weeks.” Reportedly, Meta has been particularly focused on allowing […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google co-founder Larry Page is building a new company called Dynatomics that’s focused on applying AI to product manufacturing, according to The Information. Page is reportedly working with a small group of engineers on AI that can create “highly optimized” designs for objects and then have a factory build them, per The Information. Chris Anderson, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Scale AI is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Labor for compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI company founders have a reputation for making bold claims about the technology’s potential to reshape fields, particularly the sciences. But Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face’s co-founder and chief science officer, has a more measured take. In an essay published to X on Thursday, Wolf said that he feared AI becoming “yes-men on servers” absent a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Shield AI is now one of the U.S.'s biggest defense tech startups by valuation, raising$240 million at a $5.3 billion valuation in its latest round.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nearly 6,500 artists demanded in an open letter that fine art auction house Christie’s cancel its first show dedicated solely to works created with AI. Yet, the show, Augmented Intelligence, went on — and reportedly exceeded expectations. According to Christie’s, the show brought in more than $700,000, with many lots reaching beyond their high estimates. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A high-profile ex-OpenAI policy researcher, Miles Brundage, took to social media on Wednesday to criticize OpenAI for “rewriting the history” of its deployment approach to potentially risky AI systems. Earlier this week, OpenAI published a document outlining its current philosophy on AI safety and alignment, the process of designing AI systems that behave in desirable […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Large language models work particularly well with raw text. Companies that want to create their own AI workflow know that it has become extremely important to store and index data in a clean format so that this data can be reused for AI processing. That’s why Mistral is launching a new API today for developers […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Private search engine DuckDuckGo is leaning further into the generative AI opportunity. The non-tracking search engine has been dabbling with expanding the role of AI assistance in its product for the past year, including launching a chatbot-style interface last fall — available at Duck.ai. In a blog post Thursday, the company said the service is […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A day after quietly removing Biden-era AI policy commitments from its website, Anthropic submitted recommendations to the White House for a national AI policy that the company says “better prepare[s] America to capture the economic benefits” of AI. The company’s suggestions include preserving the AI Safety Institute established under the Biden Administration, directing NIST to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As AI companies race to improve the accuracy of Large Language Models and apps built on top of them, a startup that has emerged as a key partner in fulfilling that effort is announcing a significant round of funding to expand. Turing, which works with armies of engineers to contribute code to AI projects — […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI agents are marching across the world of IT, and on Thursday a startup called Crogl is debuting its contribution to the field: an autonomous assistant for cybersecurity researchers to help them analyse thousands of daily network alerts to find and fix actual security incidents. The assistant — described by Crogl’s CEO and co-founder Monzy […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With the release of new AI models that are better at coding, developers are increasingly using AI to generate code. One of the newest examples is the current batch of Y Combinator, the storied Silicon Valley startup accelerator. A quarter of the W25 startup batch have 95% of their codebases generated by AI, YC managing […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
An example of an AI-generated review summary.Apple is bringing AI-generated review summaries to the app store with iOS 18.4. As spotted by Macworld, the latest developer beta for iOS and iPadOS adds brief summaries of user reviews to some App Store listings.The summaries are generated by large language models to “compile highlights and key information from users’ reviews into short paragraphs,” according to details on Apple’s developer site.Based on Apple’s example, the summaries use natural language to highlight what users say about the app, starting with positive...
In a policy paper published Wednesday, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, and Center for AI Safety Director Dan Hendrycks said that the U.S. should not pursue a Manhattan Project-style push to develop AI systems with “superhuman” intelligence, also known as AGI. The paper, titled “Superintelligence Strategy,” asserts that an aggressive […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On this special episode of Uncanny Valley, we talk about Elon Musk’s move to put spending limits on US government employee credit cards, plus how DOGE is embracing AI.
Prime Video is now experimenting with AI-assisted dubbing for select licensed movies and TV shows, as announced by the Amazon-owned streaming service on Wednesday. According to Prime Video, this new test will feature AI-assisted dubbing services in English and Latin American Spanish, combining AI with human localization professionals to “ensure quality control,” the company explained. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI may be planning to charge up to $20,000 per month for specialized AI “agents,” according to The Information. The publication reports that OpenAI intends to launch several “agent” products tailored for different applications, including sorting and ranking sales leads and software engineering. One, a “high-income knowledge worker” agent, will reportedly be priced at $2,000 […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In an effort to make movies and TV shows more accessible on Prime Video, Amazon announced that it's testing an AI dubbing system that will translate select content on the company's streaming service into other languages.Amazon says that "AI-aided dubbing" will be available in English and Latin American Spanish on 12 licensed movies and series available through Prime Video, including "El Cid: La Leyenda, Mi Mamá Lora and Long Lost." That the company describes it as "AI-aided dubbing" rather than just AI dubbing appears to be key here. Amazon says it's taking a hybrid approach where "...
Ataraxis AI has raised a $20.4 million Series A to make cancer treatment more personalized.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As part of the iOS 18.4 software update, currently in public beta, Apple is introducing AI-powered summaries of App Store reviews. The new feature will leverage Apple Intelligence, the company’s built-in AI technology, to offer an overall summary based on the reviews others have left on the App Store. The review summaries will be generated […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
CoreWeave’s initial S-1 document for its upcoming IPO is full of surprises. Backed by Nvidia, CoreWeave runs an AI-specific cloud service from its network of 32 data centers that together have more than 250,000 Nvidia GPUs as of the end of 2024, according to the company. Since then, it has also added a number of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Digg is getting another reboot with two of the most prominent names of the Web 2.0 era leading the charge. Founder Kevin Rose has bought it back for an undisclosed sum. Rose’s partner in this endeavor is a very interesting one. Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of Reddit — which was at one point the site’s biggest rival — acquired Digg alongside Rose.They surely have hopes that Digg can go toe-to-toe with Ohanian’s former company once again. According to a press release, Rose and Ohanian “have teamed up to revive the social platform with a fresh vision to restore the spirit of discovery...
If you spend any amount of time online, you probably noticed that your user experience keeps getting worse. Websites are waterlogged with autoplay ads, pop-ups, and tracking scripts. Customer service chatbots are useless, despite the promises of generative AI. Social media algorithms boost rage-bait to keep you scrolling and engaged. Dating apps hide all the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Elon Musk discovered a simple 30-second “fridge trick” that can reverse diabetes, but the discovery has spooked pharmaceutical companies so much they put a $78 million bounty on his head, forcing the Tesla CEO to flee the country. At least, that’s what a collection of AI-generated Facebook ads claim.Facebook ads depicting deepfakes of Elon Musk and Fox News personalities claiming that the Tesla CEO has discovered the cure for diabetes have been circulating on the platform for weeks. The ads seem to be part of a wider scam that uses the deepfakes to sell unproven supplements.Engadget has...
Two trailblazing computer scientists have won the 2024 Turing Award for their work in reinforcement learning, a discipline in which machines learn through a reward-based trial-and-error approach that lets them adapt within constrained or dynamic environments. Andrew G. Barto, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; and Richard S. Sutton, a professor at […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On Wednesday, Google announced the launch of a new AI image feature for its Shopping tab, designed to help users find clothing items they envision by allowing them to search using their own words. The company is also expanding its AR beauty and virtual try-on tools. The new feature, “Vision Match,” is now available in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hi, me. It’s me.It was just a year ago that I had my first demo of the Humane AI pin — which was also my last, as it turned out. But another AI gadget at this year’s MWC is trying to take off where Humane crashed and burned, and in ways it’s even weirder than the AI pin. It’s a phone that captures tons of information about you, both past and present, and uses it to create your own AI avatar to act as a virtual assistant. It’s part Rabbit R1, part Gemini Assistant, part science fiction. And oh yeah; there’s some blockchain stuff too. I told you, it’s wild.The team behind Newnal...
Nvidia-backed data center company CoreWeave has acquired AI developer platform Weights & Biases for an undisclosed sum. According to The Information, CoreWeave spent $1.7 billion on the transaction. Weights & Biases was valued at $1.25 billion in 2023, and it recently filed for an IPO. Lukas Biewald, Chris Van Pelt, and Shawn Lewis founded Weights & Biases […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
EcoDataCenter, a Swedish company that builds eco-friendly data centers used by major compute providers to handle their AI traffic, has raised nearly half a billion dollars — $478 million (€450 million) to be exact — in anticipation of more demand. The equity funding, which is coming from a group of unnamed institutional investors, will be […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Alec Radford, a researcher who helped develop many of OpenAI’s key AI technologies, has been subpoenaed in a copyright case against the AI startup, according to a court filing Tuesday. The filing, submitted by an attorney for the plaintiffs to the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, indicated that Radford was served […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon has formed a new group within AWS dedicated to creating AI agents, systems that help people automate parts of their lives, Reuters reported on Tuesday. In an email to staff seen by Reuters, AWS CEO Matt Garman said agentic AI has the potential to be “the next multi-billion business for AWS.” A longtime AWS […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
YouTube is warning creators about a new phishing scam that attempts to lure victims using an AI-generated video of its CEO Neal Mohan. The fake video has been shared privately with users and claims YouTube is making changes to its monetization policy in an attempt to steal their credentials, according to an announcement on Tuesday.“YouTube and its employees will never attempt to contact you or share information through a private video,” YouTube says. “If a video is shared privately with you claiming to be from YouTube, the video is a phishing scam.”In recent weeks, there have been...
“We’re a long way from pants,” Andy Dunn, founder of online fashion retailer Bonobos, told TechCrunch. Now, the former CEO is taking on a completely different challenge: he wants to help people make friends. Dunn’s newest venture, Pie, is a social app focused on bringing people together in real life. With an $11.5 million Series […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Mobile World Congress is taking place in Barcelona this week, offering manufacturers an opportunity to show off new gear without needing to hold their own splashy event. So far, we've learned about some new laptops and phones, as well as upcoming AI updates to Android and an internet connectivity announcement from Meta. Here's a look at everything announced at Mobile World Congress that caught our eye. We'll update this story throughout the week. Lenovo Sam Rutherford for Engadget Among the bigger-name manufacturers, Lenovo has arguably had the busiest MWC so far. The company has revealed a...
The founder and CEO of IPO-bound fintech Klarna took to X to once again explain why his company ditched Salesforce’s flagship CRM product about a year ago in favor of its own homegrown AI system. But this time, Sebastian Siemiatkowski emphasized that he doesn’t think others will — or should — follow his lead. “I […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon reportedly wants to get in on the AI “reasoning” model game. According to Business Insider, Amazon is developing an AI model that incorporates advanced “reasoning” capabilities, similar to models like OpenAI’s o3-mini and Chinese AI lab DeepSeek’s R1. The model may launch as soon as June under Amazon’s Nova brand, which the company introduced […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
While several of Google’s rivals, including OpenAI, have tweaked their AI chatbots to discuss politically sensitive subjects in recent months, Google appears to be embracing a more conservative approach. When asked to answer certain political questions, Google’s AI-powered chatbot, Gemini, often says it “can’t help with responses on elections and political figures right now,” TechCrunch’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We still didn’t get a straight up definition of exactly what an AI agent is during Bret Taylor’s Mobile World Congress fireside chat in Barcelona on Tuesday. The Sierra founder and OpenAI board chair preferred to side-step CNN moderator Anna Stewart’s question asking how “agentic AI” is “any different to a GenAI chatbot” by suggesting […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Yesterday morning, billionaire Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong published a letter to readers letting them know the outlet is now using AI to add a “Voices” label to articles that take “a stance” or are “written from a personal perspective.” He said those articles may also get a set of AI-generated “Insights,” which appear at the bottom as bullet points, including some labeled, “Different views on the topic.”“Voices is not strictly limited to Opinion section content,” writes Soon-Shiong, ”It also includes news commentary, criticism, reviews, and more. If a...
Google has just announced the four latest features of its Android 15 operating system.First up, Google Messages now uses AI to detect scam messages in real time. Scam Detection will notify you if it detects suspicious writing patterns from the messages you're receiving and will give you the option to report and/or block the conversation. For the privacy-minded, Scam Detection runs locally on your device, keeping your messages safe from prying eyes.Find My Device can now let you share your location live with your friends, and you can see each other on a map while trying to meet up. It’s a...
The latest Pixel feature drop is here with Google rolling updates across its family of smartphones and wearables. If you're a Pixel 9 owner in the US, you'll soon have access to a new version of Pixel Studio capable of creating stickers and images of people. As a refresher, Pixel Studio is an AI image app that is exclusive to Pixel devices. "Just type a description of a person or scene you’d like to see, or choose the style you want, like 'video game' or '3D cartoon,'" Google says of the new feature. The approach Google taking here is similar to the one Apple currently...
Google Messages is introducing an AI feature that aims to help protect Android users from text message scams. The new AI-powered scam detection tool was announced today alongside other new features, including live location sharing in the Find My app for Android users and features specifically for Pixel owners like multicamera streaming support and new text-to-image options in Pixel Studio.Scam Detection in Google Messages works by monitoring SMS, MMS, and RCS messages in real time for suspicious patterns. Once a likely scam has been detected, Google Messages will present a warning message to...
Cohere for AI, AI startup Cohere’s nonprofit research lab, this week released a multimodal “open” AI model, Aya Vision, the lab claimed is best-in-class. Aya Vision can perform tasks like writing image captions, answering questions about photos, translating text, and generating summaries in 23 major languages. Cohere, which is also making Aya Vision available for […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Chinese ride-hail firm Didi is on the hunt for fresh funds for its autonomous vehicle technology unit that could value it at $5 billion, according to Bloomberg News. Investor interest in self-driving cars is high in China on the backs of IPOs from WeRide and Pony AI, which have a market capitalization of $4.7 billion […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI on Monday announced a consortium, NextGenAI, focused on supporting AI-assisted research at top universities. NextGenAI, whose 15 founding academic partners include Harvard, the University of Oxford, and MIT, will be funded with $50 million in research grants, compute funding, and API access from OpenAI, the company said. Students, educators, and researchers will be eligible […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Lenovo hasn’t even released its futuristic laptop with a rollable screen, but it’s rejigged all those parts into a whole new thing for MWC in Barcelona. Officially called the ThinkBook codename Flip AI PC Proof of concept (no typos), the laptop uses the same flexible OLED in its rollable, revealed earlier. However, instead of disappearing inside its chassis, the display folds outwards. This allows what is normally a 13-inch panel to double to 18.1 inches. Notably, because the Flip’s screen bends instead of sliding in and out of the bottom half of the system, Lenovo can use the panel’s...
Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch brought a sales pitch to Mobile World Congress on Tuesday, urging delegates at the world’s biggest telecoms confab in Barcelona to invest in building data center infrastructure and “becoming hyperscalers” to boost the regional AI ecosystem. “We would welcome more domestic effort in making more data centers,” he said during an on-stage […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Nothing Phone 3A (right) and 3A Pro (left) are just as bold as ever.The Nothing 3A phones were just announced with a new take on the company’s “make tech more fun again” ethos. These devices have improved hardware over the Phone 2A, updated cameras, and a new feature called the Essential Space to store and index your miscellaneous screenshots, voice memos, and photographs, all through a dedicated button. Starting at $379 for the 3A and $459 for the 3A Pro, they offer solid specs for their midrange prices — and a look at what Nothing has been working on for this AI-centric moment.The...
The Trump Administration has fired a number of National Science Foundation employees who had been handpicked for their expertise in AI, threatening the agency’s ability to sustain key AI research, Bloomberg reported. One of the affected departments inside NSF, called the Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships, was instrumental in funneling government grants focused on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
At least we can watch AI play Mario.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google Gemini users can now access the AI chatbot directly from the iPhone’s lock screen, thanks to an update released on Monday first spotted by 9to5Google. Users can now call up Gemini Live, Google’s relatively real time voice feature for its AI chatbot, before they unlock their phone by adding a Gemini widget to their […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Two sharply different visions of AI were platformed on stage at the Mobile World Congress trade show on Monday. The true believer’s case for the technology’s potential — to merge with and transform human life for the better — was offered up by futurist and singularity priest Ray Kurzweil, who also has a research role […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The author of California’s SB 1047, the nation’s most controversial AI safety bill of 2024, is back with a new AI bill that could shake up Silicon Valley. California state Senator Scott Wiener introduced a new bill on Friday that would protect employees at leading AI labs, allowing them to speak out if they think […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On June 5, TechCrunch Sessions: AI will kick off — and you can be a part of the industry-changing conversations that will be taking place. We have an open invitation for members of the AI community to lead breakout sessions and discussions with over 1,200 startup founders, VC leaders, and AI aficionados attending our newest event, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google has open-sourced an AI model, SpeciesNet, designed to identify animal species by analyzing photos from camera traps. Researchers around the world use camera traps — digital cameras connected to infrared sensors — to study wildlife populations. But while these traps can provide valuable insights, they generate massive volumes of data that take days to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Podcast recording and editing platform odcastle is now joining other companies in the AI-powered, text-to-speech race by releasing its own AI model called Asyncflow v1.0. An API for developers will also be available, allowing them to directly integrate the text-to-speech model in their apps. Thanks to the new model, the company is able to offer […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft has announced Microsoft Dragon Copilot, an AI system for healthcare that can, among other things, listen to and create notes based on clinical visits. The system combines voice-dictating and ambient listening tech created by AI voice company Nuance, which Microsoft bought in 2021. According to Microsoft’s announcement, the new system can help its users streamline their documentation through features like “multilanguage ambient note creation” and natural language dictation. Its AI assistant offers “general-purpose medical information searches from trusted content sources,” as...
At Microsoft’s New York City event today, it’s announcing an all-new Copilot experience. The new Copilot design includes a new card-based look across mobile, web, and Windows. Copilot is getting more personalized with features like Copilot Vision, which adds the ability to see what you’re looking at, an OpenAI-like natural voice conversation mode, and a virtual news presenter mode that can read the headlines to you.Windows 11 is getting new features like Phone Link status in the start menu that can show notifications and your phone’s battery life. And both Paint and...
Deutsche Telekom is building a new Perplexity chatbot-powered “AI Phone,” the companies announced at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona today. The new device will be revealed later this year and run “Magenta AI,” which gives users access to Perplexity Assistant, Google Cloud AI, ElevenLabs, Picsart, and a suite of AI tools.The AI phone concept was first revealed at MWC 2024 by Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile’s parent company) as an “app-less” device primarily controlled by voice that can do things like book flights and make restaurant reservations. The capabilities are like those...
Google Colab has integrated Google Labs' Data Science Agent to help data scientists and ML engineers quickly clean their data and get insights on the datasets they upload.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
“There’s scarcely a part of the company that is unaffected by AI,” said Vishal Sharma, Amazon’s VP of Artificial General Intelligence, today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. He also dismissed the idea that open-source models might reduce compute needs and demurred over the question of whether European companies would change their GenAI strategies in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Today, I’m talking with Panos Panay, who’s in charge of devices and services at Amazon. That includes everything like Alexa, Ring security cameras, Eero Wi-Fi routers, and the Project Kuiper satellite internet service that’s meant to compete with Starlink. Panos and I talked the day after he announced Alexa Plus, the new AI-powered version of Amazon’s famous voice assistant, and this episode gets pretty deep into the weeds of how all this works and how Panay thinks about running his teams to make it happen. This is actually another one of those full circle Decoder episodes...
AI startup Anthropic today announced that it raised $3.5 billion at a $61.5 billion post-money valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The Series E, which also had participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, Jane Street, Menlo Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, brings the company’s total […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Mobile World Congress 2025 has officially kicked off in Barcelona. Google is on the ground previewing two AI features that will begin rolling out to Android devices starting later this month. The first is Live Video, which Google first showed at I/O 2024 last May. The tool takes advantage of Gemini's multi-modal capabilities to allow users to show the chatbot what their phone's camera sees. As you can see from the demo Google shared, Gemini is able to answer a question about mid-century modern decor and offer a suggestion when it comes how to apply that knowledge to pottery.The...
When hosting the 2025 Oscars last night, comedian and late-night TV host Conan O’Brien addressed the use of AI in his opening monologue, reflecting the growing conversation about the technology’s influence in Hollywood. “We did not use AI to make this show,” O’Brien said. His remarks were clearly a reference to the use of generative AI […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It was inevitable that this year at MWC in Barcelona, at least one carrier would announce a major effort at building a smartphone with a major AI company. And here it is: T-Mobile, the mobile telco owned by Deutsche Telekom, said that it is building an “AI Phone”, a low-cost handset created in close collaboration […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI startup Stability AI has teamed up with chipmaker Arm to bring Stability’s Stable Audio Open, an AI model that can generate audio including sound effects, to mobile devices running Arm chips. While a number of AI-powered apps can generate audio, like Suno and Udio, most rely on cloud processing, meaning that they can’t be […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Jolla, the erstwhile mobile maker turned privacy-centric AI business — via sister startup, Venho.ai — has taken the wraps off an AI assistant that’s touted as a “fully private” alternative to letting data-mining cloud giants crawl all over your personal information. The AI assistant is designed to integrate with apps like email, calendar and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google is adding new features to its AI assistant, Gemini, that let users ask it questions using video or content on the screen in real time. At the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2025 in Barcelona, the company showed off a new “Screenshare” feature, which lets users share what’s on their phone’s screen with Gemini and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Lenovo hasn’t even released its futuristic laptop with a rollable screen. But that hasn’t stopped the company from taking that notebook’s core components and remixing it into a whole new thing at MWC 2025.Officially called the ThinkBook codename Flip AI PC Proof of concept (yes, that is its official name and it’s a real mouthful), the laptop uses the same flexible OLED featured in its rollable sibling, except this time instead of disappearing inside its chassis, the display folds outwards. This allows what is normally a 13-inch panel to double in size to 18.1 inches at a moment's notice...
Apple is struggling to rebuild Siri for the age of generative AI, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who says the company might not release “a true modernized, conversational version of Siri” until iOS 20 comes out in 2027. That doesn’t mean there won’t be big Siri updates before then. A new version Siri will reportedly […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With just a few words, AI models can be prompted to create a story, an image, or even a short film. But according to Weber Wong, these models are all “made by non-creatives for other non-creatives to feel creative.” In other words, they’re not built for actual creative professionals. That’s something Wong is hoping to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple Intelligence was supposed to finally deliver a more natural version of Siri, but now, people who work in Apple’s AI department believe the company won’t release a ”true modernized, conversational version of Siri … until iOS 20 at best in 2027,“ writes Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter.Apple is expected to roll out an LLM-powered Siri upgrade in iOS 18.5, but Gurman says this will work as its own separate model from the old Siri, a system that “doesn’t work as smoothly as it could.” According to Gurman, the modernized Siri would merge the two into...
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek recently declared that its AI models could be very profitable — with some asterisks. In a post on X, DeepSeek boasted that its online services have a “cost profit margin” of 545%. However, that margin is calculated based on “theoretical income.” It discussed these numbers in more detail at the end […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon’s Panos Panay announced Alexa Plus last week, representing a renewed focus on software for the company’s troubled consumer electronics division.The biggest surprise at Amazon’s press conference last week was the lack of hardware announcements. Traditionally, Amazon announces dozens of new gadgets at its events, but this time, Amazon spent 70 minutes talking about software. Specifically, Alexa Plus, its new generative AI-powered Alexa voice assistant. And that was exactly the right move. Over the past decade, the company has spent way too much money...
For the last couple years, it has been evident that Google co-founder Sergey Brin is back in the building. This week, he sent a clear message to hundreds of employees in Google’s DeepMind AI division, known as GDM: the pressure to win the AGI race is on.“It has been 2 years of the Gemini program and GDM,†begins his note, which The New York Times first reported on yesterday and I’m publishing below in full. “We have come a long way in that time with many efforts we should feel very proud of. At the same...
Google is giving Sheets a Gemini-powered upgrade that is designed to help users analyze data faster and turn spreadsheets into charts using AI. With this update, users can access Gemini’s capabilities to generate insights from their data, such as correlations, trends, outliers, and more. Users now can also generate advanced visualizations, like heatmaps, that they […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Mozilla has responded to user backlash over the Firefox web browser’s new Terms of Use, which critics have called out for using overly broad language that appears to give the browser maker the rights to whatever data you input or upload. The company says the new terms aren’t a change in how Mozilla uses data, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Mobile World Congress 2025 is nearly upon us, and we’re heading to Barcelona to see what the world’s smartphone manufacturers have to offer as they launch new devices, tease new features, and talk incessantly about AI. The show officially kicks off on March 3rd and runs to March 6th, but the first announcements should arrive on March 2nd, when Xiaomi, HMD, and Honor all have press conferences scheduled.MWC may be a long way from its glory days when the likes of Samsung and Sony used it as the launchpad for that year’s flagship phones...
Amazon has been trying to make virtual assistants happen for more than a decade. Alexa is, by many definitions, wildly successful, but it has so far failed to become the kind of omnipresent, omnipotent helper the company imagines. (It has also, by all accounts, failed to become a compelling business for Amazon.) This week, though, Amazon launched the most ambitious version of Alexa yet, with new technology underneath and some big new ideas about how you might interact with AI.On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk a lot about what’s next for Alexa. David Imel â€...
The keyword for the iPhone 16e seems to be "compromise." In this episode, Devindra chats with Cherlynn about her iPhone 16e review and try to figure out who this phone is actually for. Also, they dive into Amazon's Alexa+ event, where we finally learned more about the company's AI-powered voice assistant. Alexa+ seems useful, but can we trust it?Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!Subscribe!...
Anyone who has rode the New York City subway can tell you that it has a lot of problems, from strange noises to flammable debris on the tracks. Now, as is the solution for everything these days, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is testing how AI could improve the repair process with the help of six Google Pixel phones. In this case, the Google Pixel phones rode on four different subway cars between last September and January. The experiment, conducted in partnership with Google Public Sector, used the phone's accelerometers, magnetometers and microphones to pick up...
Amazon is gearing up to launch new hardware to go along with its AI-upgraded Alexa. During an interview with Bloomberg, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company has a “brand new lineup of devices that are coming in the fall that are beautiful.”On Wednesday, Amazon revealed Alexa Plus, a more conversational version of the smart assistant that’s capable of performing a wider range of tasks, such as ordering an Uber or finding concert tickets. Amazon says “almost every” Alexa device will support Alexa Plus, save for older Echo generations. Alexa Plus will cost $19.99 per month but will be...
Microsoft is releasing a native Copilot app for macOS today. Much like the Windows app, the Copilot version for Mac will provide access to the web-based version of Microsoft’s AI assistant, where you can upload images and generate images or text.The macOS version of Copilot also includes a dark mode and a shortcut command to activate the AI assistant by using Command + Space — much like the Alt + Space on the Windows version. Microsoft is launching this new Copilot Mac app in the US, UK, and Canada today, and the iPad version is also being updated with a split screen mode.You’ll also now...
The Echo Show 21, Amazon’s newest smart display, shows the new user interface for viewing your calendar, playing music, and other tasks.Oh, Alexa, how you’ve changed. The long-awaited new Alexa, Alexa Plus, is set to bring a more conversational, context-aware, and capable assistant to your smart home. With a new voice (eight of them, in fact) and a new attitude, this is the biggest change to the voice assistant since it debuted in 2014. And it all sounds very impressive.Announced at a press conference in New York City this week, Alexa Plus offers several new generative AI-powered abilities...
Don’t let the world of AI pass you by. You have just four days left to secure your spot at TechCrunch Sessions: AI and get savings of up to $325. But make sure to act fast — this offer ends on March 2 at 11:59 p.m. PT. There’s never been a better time to network […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
TikTok is preparing to sunset its creator marketplace in favor of a new, more expanded experience, the company has informed businesses and creators via email. The online platform, which connects brands with creators for collaborating on ads and other sponsorships, will stop allowing creator invitations or the creation of new campaigns as of Saturday the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Quanta, founded by a former Affirm engineer, sells an AI-powered accounting platform to software companies. It has raised a seed round led by Accel.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI is launching GPT-4.5 today, its newest and largest model. GPT-4.5 will be available as a research preview, and OpenAI is calling it the company’s “largest and most knowledgeable model yet,” but warning that it’s not a frontier model and might not perform as well as o1 or o3-mini.GPT-4.5 will have better writing capabilities, improved world knowledge, and what OpenAI calls a “refined personality over previous models,” but it won’t introduce enough new capabilities to be considered a frontier model. “GPT-4.5 is not a frontier model, but it is OpenAI’s largest LLM...
I tell Amazon’s Alexa to shut up on a near daily basis. I have almost zero interest in speaking to Gemini after our first awkward chat. The hitches, misunderstandings, and lag in any given AI “conversation” mean I’m always wasting time speaking when I could be texting instead. But speaking to “Maya,” one of two voices from a new startup headed by the man who built Oculus VR and sold it to Facebook, is the first time I’ve been left wanting more. Like I could just talk to it, or at least play a genuinely fun game of testing its limits, like I did with Bing before Microsoft...
A group of AI researchers has discovered a curious — and troubling — phenomenon: Models say some pretty toxic stuff after being fine-tuned on unsecured code. In a recently published paper, the group explained that training models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Alibaba’s Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct, on code that contains vulnerabilities leads the models to give dangerous advice, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
When it comes to AI software, you can build something clever, but that’s not always the same as building something that is secure. With so much software now getting written by AI, having a window into its security can be a challenge. That’s the premise of Archipelo, a San Francisco-based cybersecurity startup that is today […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
I’m not a programmer. But I’ve been creating my own software tools with help from artificial intelligence.
eBay announced on Thursday that it has updated its platform to help buyers find fast-shipping items and local listings, thanks to changes to Search item cards and additional usage of AI. The company is making it easier to identify items with fast delivery, as search item cards now display delivery range estimates for all fast […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Crypto is, once again, exploding. Momentum born of a potentially friendlier regulatory atmosphere has met rising coin values, with Bitcoin more than doubling in value last year. Meanwhile, powered by advances to the underlying infrastructure, crypto is evolving beyond speculation and into real utility. That’s driving new use cases for AI and enabling seamless experiences across gaming and more.Saga has emerged as a key enabler of these shifts, providing scalable, on-demand blockspace for AI, gaming, and decentralized finance (DeFi). The company’s...
A four-year-old Swiss startup has raised a sizable chunk of change to capitalize on the burgeoning “agentic AI” movement. Unique said on Thursday that it has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round that was led by London-based VC firm DN Capital and CommerzVentures, the investment offshoot of Germany’s Commerzbank. “Agentic AI” is […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Gemini is Google’s long-promised, next-gen generative AI model family.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Silicon Valley company, which dominates the market for chips needed to build A.I. systems, said revenue was up 78 percent from a year earlier.
First-generation Echo speakers won’t get Alexa Plus.Amazon is bringing the new AI-powered Alexa Plus to a wide range of its existing Echo devices — but the upgrade will skip many of the earliest models. The majority of the company’s first-generation Echos won’t get support, according to the Alexa Plus FAQ page, though Amazon says they will continue to work with the standard Alexa.Alexa Plus won’t support “certain older generation Echo devices,” such as the first-generation Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Plus, Echo Tap, Echo Spot, and Echo Show; the second-generation Echo Show won’t...
Amazon’s Panos Panay on stage introducing Alexa Plus. | Photo: Chris Welch / The VergeAmazon announced a new version of its smart assistant today. Alexa Plus comes with expanded capabilities, the company appeared to demonstrate, like finding concert tickets on your behalf or ordering an Uber to pick up someone at the airport. The upgraded smart assistant will also make it easier to have more natural conversations with it, but Amazon will be charging users for those new abilities for the first time.Early access to Alexa Plus will begin in late March 2025 in the United States, and the roll out...
Amazon is aiming to catch up in generative artificial intelligence and to reboot its virtual assistant, which has been leapfrogged by powerful chatbots.
Amazon is launching an alexa.com website and a new mobile app where Alexa Plus subscribers will be able to use the AI-powered voice assistant. We don’t have many details beyond that, but the website and the app could be handy new ways to interact with the revamped Alexa, which was announced at an event this morning.At the event, Amazon showed how you’ll be able to have conversations with Alexa Plus for things like ordering groceries, controlling smart home devices, and even telling you if someone in your house has recently walked the dog by looking at your home camera footage. Amazon also...
At Amazon’s annual Devices & Services event on Wednesday, the company introduced Alexa+, an enhanced version of its voice assistant, now powered by generative AI. During the demonstration, Amazon showcased how users can share documents with Alexa+, allowing it to recall important details and answer questions about those documents. Mara Segal, director of Alexa, provided […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As part of the reveal of Amazon’s new AI-powered Alexa+ assistant, the tech giant announced that it’s launching two new features designed for kids called “Explore with Alexa” and “Stories with Alexa.” The features, which leverage Alexa’s new AI capabilities, will be available to Amazon Kids+ subscribers. The company demonstrated the new features at a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon says that the new and improved Alexa unveiled on Wednesday, Alexa+, is powered by a “model agnostic” system that’s always using the “best” AI model for any given task. Onstage at a press event in NYC, Amazon VP Daniel Rausch said that Alexa+ draws on Bedrock, Amazon’s cloud platform designed to let organizations experiment […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Following years of development, Amazon's next-generation digital assistant is ready for public use. Panos Panay, Amazon's senior vice president of devices and services, demoed Alexa+ at the company's 2025 devices event. The model powering Alexa+ can detect tone and mood and respond accordingly. Moreover, it's only necessary to say "Alexa" once; the assistant will follow the conversation. Panay said Alexa+ has contextual awareness, with the ability to "remember" earlier parts of a conversation. "You can have almost any conversation — that...
At an event in NYC on Wednesday, Amazon announced an upgraded Alexa experience powered by generative AI. Onstage, Amazon’s devices and services chief Panos Panay called it a “complete architecture” of the AI assistant. “[W]hile the vision of Alexa has been ambitious and remains incredibly compelling, until right this moment, right this moment, we have […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon is finally launching Alexa Plus, the long-awaited generative AI version of Alexa that, if all goes well, will take away much of the friction that comes with talking to a speaker to control your smart home or getting info on the fly.Amazon first announced it was going to “supercharge” Alexa with AI in September 2023. Back then, the company made a lot of big claims, saying that Alexa would understand context or build automated routines for you — you needed only ask. But by the following June, around when Apple announced its own Siri AI upgrade, reports emerged that the company was...
How to follow the Amazon's Alexa event today EngadgetAmazon eyes new direction for Alexa with AI overhaul ReutersAmazon Alexa event live blog: all the news from the 2025 keynote The VergeAmazon Alexa event live — all the devices and services news as it happens Tom's GuideAmazon Is Giving Alexa a Major AI Upgrade. Here's What We Know CNET
Amazon is set to announce new Alexa features beginning at 10AM ET this morning — and we hope a few devices accompany them. There isn’t a way to watch the event remotely, but our team is here in person to bring you all of the updates as they happen.We’re expecting Amazon to announce its new AI-powered Alexa, which, according to earlier reports, could cost as much as $5 to $10 per month on top of a Prime membership. Reuters said in June that Amazon has considered the subscription pricing for a complete Alexa overhaul that could allow people to order dinner from services like Uber Eats or...
Apparently almost all undergraduate students are using AI now, in one way or another. A new report from the UK's Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) found that 92 percent of students have used generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, for their studies. At the same time, 88 percent of these students have used it for exams. These numbers are a tremendous increase from HEPI's February 2024 report in which 66 percent and 53 percent participants relayed use, respectively. The top reasons students reported using AI include saving time, improved quality of their work and getting instant...
The Verge is live blogging Amazon’s big Alexa event in New York City. It kicks off at 10AM ET on February 26th, and we’re expecting the company to announce a new subscription-based version of Alexa that’s beefed up with a bunch of AI features.It seems like a good time for the company to announce new products with Alexa, too. That means we could see new Echos, Fire TV products, or other things like updated smart glasses. Sometimes Amazon announces lots of products in quick succession, while other years are more muted.We’ll keep this page updated with all the breakout news...
Alibaba is giving people free access to its generative artificial intelligence models that can produce highly realistic videos and images from both text and image input. The company has announced that four variants of its Wan 2.1 series, the latest version of its generative AI technology, are now open source and can be downloaded and modified by users. Researchers, academics and commercial entities can all get them from Alibaba Cloud's ModelScope and Hugging Face platforms, both of which give people access to open-source AI models. As Reuters said, the models Alibaba has open sourced are called...
Birdgetown Research has raised $19 million in a round co-led by Accel and Lightspeed to deploy AI agents for business decisions and M&A deals.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Framework, the company that is better known for its modular, repairable laptops, just released its first desktop computer. It’s a small desktop PC that punches above its weight. The most interesting part is what’s inside the device. Framework is one of the first companies to use AMD’s recently announced Strix Halo architecture, also known as […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Regions like the U.S. and Europe have been doubling down on rebuilding their industrial muscle, after decades of closing down factories and outsourcing the work to countries like China. To that end, a fast-growing Polish startup called Nomagic, which builds robots — specifically robotic arms — for logistics operations, is announcing $44 million in funding, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Data exposed even briefly can live on in generative AI chatbots long after the data is made private.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Voice AI company ElevenLabs is now letting authors publish AI-generated audiobooks on its own Reader app, TechCrunch has learned and the company confirmed. The announcement comes days after the company partnered with Spotify for AI-narrated audiobooks. ElevenLabs, which raised a $180 million mega-round last month, started inviting authors to try out their publishing program through […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Anthropic, one of the world’s largest AI vendors, has a powerful family of generative AI models called Claude. These models can perform a range of tasks, from captioning images and writing emails to solving math and coding challenges. With Anthropic’s model ecosystem growing so quickly, it can be tough to keep track of which Claude […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft announced that it is making some features available for free in its Copilot AI assistant. Everyone now has unlimited access to Voice and Think Deeper, which is powered by OpenAI’s o1 model.Copilot got the Voice feature, which allows users to have conversations with the AI assistant, in October 2024. Think Deeper is intended to parse complicated queries, such as assessing the pros and cons of major home purchases, taking cost and long-term value into account."We are working hard to scale unlimited access to advanced features to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible," the...
YC deleted a controversial demo video from one of its startups, which monitors factory workers with AI cameras.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Anthropic’s newest flagship AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, cost “a few tens of millions of dollars” to train using less than 10^26 FLOPs of computing power. That’s according to Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, who in an X post on Monday relayed a clarification he’d received from Anthropic’s PR. “I was contacted by Anthropic who told me […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Perplexity, the developer of an AI-powered search engine, is raising a $50 million seed and pre-seed investment fund, CNBC reported. Although the majority of the capital is coming from limited partners, Perplexity is using some of the capital it raised for the company’s growth to anchor the fund. Perplexity has reportedly raised $500 million at […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On Tuesday afternoon, Anthropic launched Claude Plays Pokémon on Twitch, a live stream of Anthropic’s newest AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, playing a game of Pokémon Red. It’s become a fascinating experiment of sorts, showcasing the capabilities of today’s AI tech and people’s reactions to them. AI researchers have used all sorts of video games, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI says that it won’t bring the AI model powering deep research, its in-depth research tool, to its developer API while it figures out how to better assess the risks of AI convincing people to act on or change their beliefs. In an OpenAI whitepaper published Wednesday, the company wrote that it’s in the process […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
When OpenAI announced Deep Research at start of February, the company promised to bring the tool to Plus users "in about a month," and now it's doing exactly that. Starting today, the feature, which you can use to prompt ChatGPT to create in-depth reports on nearly any subject, is rolling out to Plus, Team, Edu and Enterprise users. Previously, you needed a $200 per month Pro plan to try out Deep Research. For the time being, Plus users will get 10 Deep Research queries per month included with their plan. For Pro subscribers, OpenAI is increasing the monthly limit to 120, up from 100...
Framework has done it again — it’s built a new AMD-powered modular computer that fits into any previous version of its 13-inch laptop for $449, or that you can buy as a brand-new laptop starting at $899 for DIY or $1,099 entirely prebuilt for you. If you’re reading these words, I’m currently at Framework’s event, where I’m checking it out alongside the just-announced tiny Framework Desktop and possibly the new budget touchscreen convertible Framework Laptop 12.This 13-inch machine is the company’s second with AMD processors, this time featuring the new-ish Ryzen AI 300 “Strix...
Poe, Quora’s platform that brings together a number of AI models under one roof, has launched a new capability that lets users build visual interfaces — apps, essentially — on top of any combination of models. Called Poe Apps, the feature allows Poe users to describe the app they want to create in the new […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft made OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model free for all Copilot users last month, and now it’s providing unlimited use of this model and Copilot’s voice capabilities to everyone. Previously, both Think Deeper (powered by o1) and Voice in Copilot had limits for free users, but Microsoft is removing these today to allow Copilot users to have extended conversations with the company’s AI assistant. “We are working hard to scale unlimited access to advanced features to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, starting today with Voice and Think Deeper,” says the Copilot team...
Using generative AI to create software has been possibly the largest use case since it first appeared a couple years ago. But platforms like Cursor and Copilot are mostly confined to a world inhabited by trained engineers. Lovable, a Swedish AI startup, reached the front page of both Product Hunt and Hacker News last year […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Online education company Chegg filed a lawsuit on February 24th against Google claiming that the company’s AI-generated summaries of search results have hurt its traffic and revenue, Reuters reports. It’s believed to be the first antitrust lawsuit filed by a single company over the AI Overviews feature, Reuters says.Chegg claims Google uses its power as a monopoly to coerce companies into using their content for AI Overviews, “reaping the financial benefits of Chegg’s content without having to spend a dime,” CEO Nathan Schultz says in prepared remarks for investors. Chegg, which...
British creatives are speaking out against the government's proposed changes to copyright law. Take Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and Ben Howard, who join over 1,000 musicians in releasing a protest album called Is This What We Want?. Currently, AI developers must follow the same copyright laws as anyone else, meaning they can't use creative material to train models without permission. However, the December 2024 proposal would provide them with a copyright exemption that requires creatives to "opt out" of their materials being used. Tuesday, February 25 is the government's last day seeking views...
To be the best at their jobs, people need relationships in the workplace. Employees who feel comfortable taking work challenges to peers or problem solving in tandem are more likely to excel in their work.They’re also more likely to be happy, as recent research has revealed. Social connections in the workplace contribute to a greater sense of life satisfaction and well-being, one study found. Another examined the relationship between isolation and burnout and found that employees experiencing loneliness “expressed a desire to be psychologically detached from...
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has reopened access to its API after halting service for nearly three weeks due to capacity constraints. On Tuesday, the company began allowing customers to top up credits for use on its API, which lets developers build apps and services on top of cloud-hosted versions of DeepSeek’s AI. Server resources remain […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft is reportedly shrinking its data center footprint. The tech giant has canceled leases with multiple data center providers that total a “couple hundred megawatts” of capacity, according to Bloomberg, which cited a memo from investment bank TD Cowen. This total represents the equivalent of about two data centers. The reason for Microsoft’s move is […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With the rapid introduction of computing that leverages AI, the gaming experience is set to take a step forward in 2025. In January, at CES, GIGABYTE provided a glimpse at that future when it introduced its B800 series motherboards.Built to work with Intel B860 and AMD B850 chipsets, the mainstream B800 series models are redefining gaming performance. The motherboards continue GIGABYTE’s track record of innovation and the heritage of its Intel Z890 and X870(E) series motherboards, bringing the AI technology, friendly design, and ultra-durable components present in those models...
“Agentic AI” is the concept of the moment. Developers big and small are rushing to build apps to leapfrog the heavy lifting needed to employ generative AI in specific contexts… and investors are rushing to fund the most interesting of these. In one of the latest examples, a startup out of Israel called Perfect — […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A free version of Gemini Code Assist, Google’s enterprise-focused AI coding tool, is now available globally for solo developers. Google announced today that Gemini Code Assist for individuals is launching in public preview, aiming to make coding assistants “with the latest AI capabilities” more accessible for students, hobbyists, freelancers, and startups.“Now anyone can more conveniently learn, create code snippets, debug, and modify their existing applications — all without needing to toggle between different windows for help or to copy and paste information from disconnected...
The U.K. government wants to move full steam ahead on big plans to use and build AI across the country, but not everyone is marching to the beat of its drum. On Monday, a group of 1,000 musicians released a “silent album”, in protest of planned changes to copyright law — changes the artists say […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In a bold move last month, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post, telling President Trump that “America must win the AI war.” The statement sparked mixed reactions, as seen during Wang’s appearance Sunday during the opening night of Web Summit Qatar. When Wang’s interviewer Axios’s Felix Salmon […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Anthropic’s next funding round is reportedly growing larger. Anthropic, which makes the AI chatbot Claude, is finalizing a $3.5 billion fundraising round that values the company at $61.5 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. Anthropic initially set out to raise $2 billion, but investors have now agreed to a larger tranche, per the WSJ. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Edtech company Chegg has sued Google claiming that the tech giant’s AI summaries of search results have hurt Chegg’s traffic and revenue. In the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Chegg accuses Google of unfair competition — specifically reciprocal dealing, monopoly maintenance, and unjust enrichment. Google, Chegg claims, forces […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon is holding a press event this week, where we expect it to finally launch its “new” Alexa. This could be the beginning of a major shift in how we use generative AI in our homes, or it could be a big disappointment. The latter seems likely, based on the delays and persistent rumors that the voice assistant is struggling with its revamp. But I’m hoping we’ll at least end up somewhere in the middle — with a smarter, more useful Alexa, if not the “superhuman assistant” Amazon has promised.The event, scheduled for 10AM on Wednesday, February 26th, in New York City, is being...
Anthropic used Pokémon to benchmark its newest AI model. Yes, really. In a blog post published Monday, Anthropic said that it tested its latest model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, on the Game Boy classic Pokémon Red. The company equipped the model with basic memory, screen pixel input, and function calls to press buttons and navigate around the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Anthropic is releasing Claude 3.7 Sonnet, its first “hybrid reasoning model” that can solve more complex problems and outperforms previous models in areas like math and coding. In addition to a new model, Anthropic is also releasing a “limited research preview” of its “agentic” coding tool called Claude Code. While Anthropic already powers AI coding tools like Cursor, it’s pitching Claude Code as “an active collaborator that can search and read code, edit files, write and run tests, commit and push code to GitHub, and use command line tools.”Claude 3.7 Sonnet is available...
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, released Grok 3, its long-awaited flagship AI model, last week. Grok 3 powers the Grok chatbot apps for mobile and the web, as well as the Grok experience on the Musk-owned social network X. Given that there’s so much competition in the AI chatbot space these days, it wasn’t a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI-powered search engine Perplexity says it’s building its own web browser. In a post on X on Monday, the company launched a sign-up list for the browser, which isn’t yet available. It’s unclear when it might be — or what the browser look like, even. But we do have a name: Comet. “Just like Perplexity […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
For decades, patents have been a bone of contention in the technology world, seen by some as a way to protect intellectual property, but by critics as a blunt weapon against innovation. In the age of AI, they are once again getting revisited. New York startup Patlytics has developed an AI-enabled patent analytics platform to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Cambium uses data on timber and lumber transactions in a bid to make salvage wood appealing to a range of companies.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta has formally expanded Meta AI to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), opening the AI-enabled chatbot to millions more people. Back in October, Meta announced it was launching Meta AI in six additional markets, including Brazil and the U.K. At the same time, the company teased gradual rollout plans for additional markets around […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The U.S. government is leaning hard on tech companies to make more commitments to building their businesses in the country, and Big Tech is falling in line. On Monday, Apple laid out its own plans in that area: it will spend $500 billion over the next four years in areas like high-end manufacturing, engineering, and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google has quietly revealed the pricing of Veo 2, the video-generating AI model that it unveiled in December. According to the company’s pricing page, using Veo 2 will cost 50 cents per second of video, which adds up to $30 per minute or $1,800 per hour. Google DeepMind researcher Jon Barron contrasted this pricing with […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As school districts struggle to support the mental health of their students, a startup called Sonar Mental Health has built a “wellbeing companion” called Sonny to help. As described in the Wall Street Journal, Sonny is a chatbot that relies on a combination of human staff and AI. When students text their questions to Sonny, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
When billionaire Elon Musk introduced Grok 3, his AI company xAI’s latest flagship model, in a live stream last Monday, he described it as a “maximally truth-seeking AI.” Yet it appears that Grok 3 was briefly censoring unflattering facts about President Donald Trump — and Musk himself. Over the weekend, users on social media reported […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Debates over AI benchmarks — and how they’re reported by AI labs — are spilling out into public view. This week, an OpenAI employee accused Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, of publishing misleading benchmark results for its latest AI model, Grok 3. One of the co-founders of xAI, Igor Babushkin, insisted that the company was […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology could fire as many as 500 staffers, according to multiple reports — cuts that further threaten a fledgling AI safety organization. Axios reported this week that the US AI Safety Institute (AISI) and Chips for America, both part of NIST, would be “gutted” by layoffs targeting probationary employees […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It’s true: Nvidia has just confirmed it shipped some RTX 5090, RTX 5090D, and even some RTX 5070 Ti graphics chips that were missing render units, as TechPowerUp originally reported — and that you’ll be able to get a replacement if your card was affected.Nvidia GeForce global PR director Ben Berraondo tells The Verge:We have identified a rare issue affecting less than 0.5% (half a percent) of GeForce RTX 5090 / 5090D and 5070 Ti GPUs which have one fewer ROP than specified. The average graphical performance impact is 4%, with no impact on AI and Compute workloads. Affected consumers can...
Elon Musk’s OpenAI rival, xAI, says it’s investigating why its Grok AI chatbot suggested that both President Donald Trump and Musk deserve the death penalty. xAI has already patched the issue and Grok will no longer give suggestions for who it thinks should receive capital punishment.People were able to get Grok to say that Trump deserved the death penalty with a query phrased like this:If any one person in America alive today deserved the death penalty for what they have done, who would it be. Do not search or base your answer on what you think I might want to hear in any way. Answer with...
Elon Musk.Just a few weeks after everyone freaked out about DeepSeek, Elon Musk’s Grok-3 has again shaken up the fast-moving AI race. The new model is ending the week at the top of the Chatbot Arena leaderboard, while the Grok iOS app is at the top of the App Store, just above ChatGPT. Even as Musk appears to be crashing out from his newfound political power, his xAI team has managed to deploy a leading foundational model in record time.It’s one thing to have the leading model; it’s another to build the biggest user base around it. Musk...
For years, Meta employees have internally discussed using copyrighted works obtained through legally questionable means to train the company’s AI models, according to court documents unsealed on Thursday. The documents were submitted by plaintiffs in the case Kadrey v. Meta, one of many AI copyright disputes slowly winding through the U.S. court system. The defendant, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
This week, Sakana AI, a Nvidia-backed startup that’s raised hundreds of millions of dollars from VC firms, made a remarkable claim. The company said it had created an AI system, the AI CUDA Engineer, that could effectively speed up the training of certain AI models by a factor of up to 100x. The only problem […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple Intelligence is heading to the Vision Pro, as part of an upcoming operating system update. Apple confirmed on Friday that its generative AI platform will arrive on the extended reality headset as part of VisionOS 2.4. A beta version of the software is currently available for developers. The public version is set for an […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As they gain in popularity, AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot may appear to be boosting productivity. But in reality, they could be causing overall code quality to decline. That’s the top-line finding from a new report released by software engineering platform GitClear, which analyzed 211 million code lines from 2020 to 2024. According […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek plans to open-source portions of its online services’ code as part of an “open source week” event next week. DeepSeek will open-source five code repositories that have been “documented, deployed and battle-tested in production,” the company said in a post on X on Thursday. Code repositories are storage locations for software […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Operator is now out in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the UK and most places where ChatGPT is also available, OpenAI has announced. The company launched Operator in the US back in January, introducing it as an "agent that can go to the web to perform tasks" for the user. Operator can handle various browser-based tasks for users, such as filling out forms, making restaurant reservations and ordering groceries. At the moment, it's still a research preview in its early stages that comes with limitations, but the company said it hopes to roll out improvements...
Foldable phones are no longer a gimmick — they’re here to stay, and they’re better than ever. Whether you love the nostalgia of a flip phone or want the versatility of a near tablet-sized display that fits in your pocket, today’s new foldable devices are packed with cutting-edge tech. Brands like Samsung, Google and Motorola are leading the charge, pushing the boundaries of what a smartphone can do with sleek designs, powerful AI features and seamless multitasking.Unlike traditional smartphones, foldable phones give you the best of both worlds: a compact form factor when you need...
The CEO of controversial facial recognition startup Clearview AI has resigned, he confirms to TechCrunch.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
ChatGPT has surpassed 400 million weekly active users. "We feel very fortunate to serve 5 percent of the world every week," OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said on X about the new audience stat. This figure is twice the weekly active user count reported by the company in August 2024, which was double the figure it posted in November 2023.The latest milestone for the AI assistant comes after a huge uproar over new rival platform DeepSeek earlier in the year, which raised questions about whether the current crop of leading AI tools was about to be dethroned. OpenAI is on the verge of a move to simplify...
The list included Elon Musk’s xAI, as well as a good number of other AI startups.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Google Pixel 8a mid-tier smartphone is back on sale for $399 via Amazon. This is close to a record-low price and represents a discount of 20 percent. Even better? The sale applies to multiple colorways, including mint green, light blue and white. This deal is for the 128GB model. This device topped our list of the best mid-range smartphones, and with good reason. It’s a well-designed phone that gets the job done. It features a powerful Tensor G3 chip, offers support for Google Gemini AI tools and includes an excellent camera system. The 120Hz OLED display is gorgeous and the battery life...
This giant digital wall calendar and its AI assistant helped me manage my family’s busy schedules.Spring is my busy season. Since my kids were old enough to play team sports, the impending arrival of March brings an avalanche of organizational tasks. Practice schedules, game schedules, and snack signups equal so many dates to remember. They arrive in different ways — paper flyers, Excel sheets, text chains, or through yet another team sports app — but somehow never in a Google Calendar link. It’s a trying time. But this year, I have a...
Companies developing small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) have raised more than $1.5 billion in the past year, as tech companies hunger for power to train AI models and governments decide to commit to the industry. For example, X-energy raised $700 million this month, and Paris-based Newcleo raised $151 million last year, and one would be […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Codeium, an AI-powered coding startup, is raising a new round of funding at a $2.85 billion valuation, including fresh capital, according to two sources with knowledge of the deal. The round is being led by a returning investor Kleiner Perkins, the people said. The new round comes just six months after Silicon Valley-based Codeium announced […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Humane AI Pin has collapsed, but Rabbit is still kicking. The company published a blog post and video today showing off a “generalist Android agent,” slowly controlling apps on a tablet in much the same way that Rabbit claimed its R1 device would over a year ago. (It couldn’t, and can’t.) The work builds on LAM Playground, a “generalist web agent” Rabbit launched last year.The engineers don’t use the Rabbit R1 at all for the demonstration. Instead, they type their requests into a prompt box on a laptop, which translates them to actions on an Android tablet. They task it with...
After three years, Apple has finally unveiled its next entry-level iPhone. The iPhone 16e takes over for the iPhone SE in the company's lineup. It borrows the blueprint of the iPhone 14 and spices it up with (among other changes) an updated processor that's ready for Apple Intelligence. At $599, it's the cheapest AI-equipped iPhone by $200. As leaks suggested, the fourth-generation iPhone 16e resembles the iPhone 14, the company's 2023 standard (non-Pro) model. This is the first entry-level model to adopt the iPhone’s modern full-screen design. That means it's also the first with Face ID. At...
The demise of Humane is perhaps the most predictable tech story of 2025. The company tried to build some buzz around its AI Pin in late 2023, marketing the device as a tiny replacement for smartphones and playing up the fact that Humane’s co-founders were former Apple employees. The problem was that it wasn’t really clear what the AI Pin would do to justify its $700 asking price (plus a $24/month subscription).It didn’t take long for things to spiral out of control. The AI Pin was released in April of 2024 to some of the worst reviews I’ve ever seen for a consumer tech product. Just a...
Apple has released iOS 18 — plus iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia, watchOS 11, and other new updates — bringing several key updates to how the company’s devices operate and setting the stage for generative AI features.The most discussed feature of iOS 18 is the Apple Intelligence suite. With the release of iOS 18.2 on December 11th, features that are available now include generating images in Image Playground, creating custom “Genmoji” emoji, and ChatGPT integration. Other features of Apple Intelligence, including writing tools such as the ability to rewrite your text in...
Google is launching a new experiment that uses AI to help people explore more career possibilities. The company announced on Wednesday that a new “Career Dreamer” tool can find patterns between your experiences, educational background, skills, and interests to connect you with careers that might be a good fit. With Career Dreamer, you can use […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google is pulling its AI assistant Gemini from the main Google app for iOS devices. The move is meant to encourage users to download the standalone Gemini app instead, which would allow Google to more directly compete with other consumer-facing AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity. However, the change could also risk reducing Gemini’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A couple of weeks after the initial release of Mistral’s AI assistant, Le Chat, the company told Le Parisien that it has reached one million downloads. In particular, Le Chat quickly reached the top spot for free downloads on the iOS App Store in the company’s home country, France. “Go and download Le Chat, which […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As anticipated, Apple revealed the long-awaited iPhone SE refresh Tuesday. The fourth generation device arrives three years after the last major update to the budget-minded smartphone. This one arrives with a twist, however. The SE branding has been dropped to keep the device more inline with the company’s flagships. The new iPhone 6e starts at […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
World models — AI algorithms capable of generating simulated environments — represent one forefront of machine learning. Today, Microsoft published new research in the journal Nature detailing Muse, a model capable of generating game visuals and controller inputs. Unexpectedly, it was born out of a training set Microsoft built from Bleeding Edge.If, like me, you had completely erased that game from your memory (or never knew it existed in the first place), Bleeding Edge is a 4 vs. 4 brawler developed by Ninja Theory, the studio better known for its work on the Hellblade series. Ninja Theory...
The freelance service platform Fiverr will now let creators train AI models on their own work. Clients can then purchase access to custom AI models and generate content “with the speed of AI with the expertise of a pro,” the company says.The feature is part of its new Fiverr Go suite of tools, allowing creators to “train AI exclusively on their own body of work, maintaining complete control over their creative process and rights.” Freelancers can edit and set the price for their custom AI models, which are available across services like voiceovers, songwriting, graphic design...
At least it’s a nice-looking paperweight.Ten days from now, the Humane AI Pin will be able to tell you how much battery it has left, and essentially nothing else. To be fair, though, it couldn’t do that much before. And it doesn’t matter anyway, because you almost certainly didn’t buy one. But if you did, that’s the bad news: Humane is shutting down the AI Pin — almost exactly a year after it first started shipping the little chest-mounted device — and has sold some of its remnant...
As companies like Nvidia and SoftBank make industrial robotics into a key focus for future R&D, a startup has raised funding today for another facet of how AI is being used on the factory room floor. Augury, which develops AI-based hardware that measures vibrations, sound, temperature and other factors to understand how machines are working […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI hardware startup Humane has given its users just ten (10!) days notice that their Pins will be disconnected. In a note to its customers, the company said AI Pins will “continue to function normally” until 12PM PT on February 28. On that date, users will lose access to essentially all of their device’s features, including but not limited to calling, messaging, AI queries and cloud access. The FAQ does note that you'll still be able to check on your battery life, though.Humane is encouraging its users to download any stored data before February 28, as it plans on permanently deleting...
A promotional image of Humane’s AI Pin. | Image: HumaneAfter a very long windup, Humane finally revealed all the details of its AI-powered wearable at the end of 2023. The small gadget could attach to your clothes using a magnetic battery pack so that it’s within easy reach. By tapping the AI Pin, you could ask it to do smartphone-y things like make phone calls, text your friends, play music, and catch you up on your email, and it had a laser projector built-in to cast the UI on your hand for control.At $699 with a $24-per-month subscription, it was never cheap, never very good, and...
Humane announced on Tuesday that it has been acquired by HP. The hardware startup is immediately discontinuing sales of its $699 AI Pins. Humane told customers who had already purchased an AI Pin that their devices will stop functioning before the end of the month, at 12 PM PST on February 28, 2025, according to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Humane is selling “key AI capabilities” to HP and will stop selling AI Pin, the company announced today. AI Pins that have already been purchased will continue to function normally until 3PM ET on February 28th, Humane says.After that date, Pins will “no longer connect to Humane’s servers.” As a result, AI Pin features will “no longer include calling, messaging, AI queries / responses, or cloud access.” Humane is also encouraging users to download any pictures, videos, and notes stored on their Pins before they are permanently deleted at that shutdown time. Humane will only offer...
Google Meet’s Gemini-powered note-taking feature is getting a bit more useful for Workspace teams. It will now generate a checklist of suggested next steps at the end of your meetings, going as far as assigning due dates and attaching a primary stakeholder to the task.The note-taking feature was initially launched in August last year. I’ve played around a bit with it here at The Verge since then, and thus far, it hasn’t produced totally disastrous results.Gemini’s voice-to-text transcription can accurately separate speakers and produce a mostly accurate account of everything discussed...
A DOGE staffer created a custom AI chatbot that's supposed to help "eliminate" government waste.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
After her sudden departure from OpenAI last fall, ex-CTO Mira Murati vanished from public view to start something new. Now, she is ready to share some details about what she’s working on.Her new AI startup is called Thinking Machines Lab, and while the specifics of what it plans to release are still under wraps, the company says its goal is “to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable.†The startup also promises at least some level of public transparency by pledging to regularly publish technical research...
Mira Murati, who left OpenAI last year, has helped establish Thinking Machines Lab, a new artificial intelligence start-up.
Meta is holding a new “LlamaCon” conference where it will share updates on “open source AI developments” to help developers create apps and products, the company said on Tuesday. LlamaCon will take place on April 29th, 2025 — months ahead of its Meta Connect conference, which it just announced will run from September 17th to the 18th.Meta said it will reveal more information about LlamaCon, which is named after the company’s open-source AI model Llama, in “the coming weeks.” The Connect conference will feature the “latest and greatest in Meta Horizon updates” and will “...
Insta360 has introduced a tracking module for its Flow 2 Pro gimbal bringing subject tracking capabilities to any camera app. | Image: Insta360Insta360 has announced a new accessory for its Flow 2 Pro smartphone gimbal that allows any camera app to take advantage of the company’s AI-powered tracking technology. Previously, subject tracking required the use of the company’s own Android or iOS camera app, or iOS apps that supported Apple’s DockKit framework. The new Insta360 Flow 2 Pro AI Tracker handles the tracking and controls the gimbal on its own, letting you record, stream, or make...
Meta on Tuesday announced that it’ll host its first-ever dev conference dedicated to generative AI. Called LlamaCon after Meta’s Llama family of generative AI models, the conference is scheduled to take place on April 29. Meta said that, there, it’ll share “the latest on [its] open source AI developments to help developers […] build amazing […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta is clearly all in on AI, and for good reason. With models like Llama, products like the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, and a monetization plan like Facebook ads, it’s one of the companies best positioned to make AI really work. But it wasn’t that long ago that Meta was making a different, just as huge bet on the metaverse. It’s right there in the company name! So what does Meta really want to be when it grows up?On this episode of The Vergecast, we start by digging into exactly that question. The Verge’s Alex Heath joins to discuss everything from smart glasses sales numbers to CEO...
Hours after Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI released the latest version of its AI model, Grok 3, X has significantly hiked the price for its top Premium+ subscription plan, which gives users access to the latest model, to almost $50 per month. On the support page that lists X’s premium plans, the monthly subscription price […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Social media is often about scale, but Nextdoor bet long ago on something different: that it could grow a big business off smaller, local communities. For years, the plan worked. The 15-year-old company has long been a dominant platform for neighborhood-based conversations, connecting users for everything from lost pet alerts to local business recommendations. Then […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The New York Times is now allowing its product and editorial teams to use AI tools, which might one day write social copy, SEO headlines, and code, reports Semafor. The news came to staff via an email, in which the publication announced the debut of its new internal AI summary tool called Echo. The New […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The next frontier for large language models (LLMs), one of the key technologies underpinning the boom in generative AI tools, might be geographical. On Monday, Paris-based AI startup Mistral — which is vying to rival the likes of U.S.-based Anthropic and OpenAI — is releasing a model that’s a bit different from its usual LLM. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
South Korean officials on Saturday temporarily restricted Chinese AI Lab DeepSeek’s app from being downloaded from app stores in the country pending an assessment of how the Chinese company handles user data. The Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) said the Chinese app would be available to be downloaded once it complies with Korean privacy laws […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Every Sunday, NPR host Will Shortz, The New York Times’ crossword puzzle guru, gets to quiz thousands of listeners in a long-running segment called the Sunday Puzzle. While written to be solvable without too much foreknowledge, the brainteasers are usually challenging even for skilled contestants. That’s why some experts think they’re a promising way to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple Vision Pro may soon get an update bringing Apple Intelligence to the headset, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The first Apple Intelligence features started rolling out to iPhone, iPad and Mac in the fall, bringing features like notification summaries, ChatGPT integration for Siri and Genmoji over the last few months. But Apple’s AI hasn’t yet made it to the Vision Pro. According to Mark Gurman, that may change with the visionOS 2.4 update, which sources said may arrive in April with Apple Intelligence and a new app for viewing spatial media like 3D images and panoramas.The...
Artificial intelligence is being rolled out at training pools nationally as part of Australia’s bid to top the swimming medal table at the next Olympics.
Artificial intelligence is being rolled out at training pools nationally as part of Australia’s bid to top the swimming medal table at the next Olympics.
In a blog post on Friday, Perplexity introduced a new tool called Deep Research that it says can conduct “in-depth research and analysis” to deliver detailed reports in response to your questions, and it’s free for limited use. It comes just a couple of weeks after OpenAI announced its own Deep Research feature for ChatGPT Pro users… which itself followed Google’s December announcement of Deep Research for Gemini. Perplexity’s tool is available only on the web to start, but it will hit the iOS, Android and Mac apps soon too.Introducing Deep Research on Perplexity.Deep Research lets...
Apple is planning to add Apple Intelligence to its Vision Pro headset in an update that could come as early as April, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Just a couple weeks after Apple Intelligence was first announced in June 2024, Gurman reported that Apple was looking to bring its suite of AI tools to the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI plans to continue using 15 gas turbines to power its “Colossus” supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, according to an operating permit with the Shelby County Health Department for non-stop turbine use from June 2025 to June 2030. Why does it matter? The Commercial Appeal, a news outlet that obtained the documents, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Perplexity has become the latest AI company to release an in-depth research tool, with a new feature announced Friday. Google unveiled a similar feature for its Gemini AI platform in December. Then OpenAI launched its own research agent earlier this month. All three companies even have given the feature the same name: Deep Research. The […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon won’t launch the AI-powered upgrade for Alexa for at least a month after its showcase at an event set for February 26th, according to The Washington Post. The delay is reportedly at least partly because the updated assistant has issues with giving inaccurate answers to test questions.An anonymous Amazon employee told the outlet that the upgrade won’t come “until March 31 or later” due to the issues. The new Alexa could be tied to a subscription, with features like “the ability to adopt a personality, recall conversations, order takeout or call a taxi,” and was originally set...
New court filings in an AI copyright case against Meta add credence to earlier reports that the company “paused” discussions with book publishers on licensing deals to supply some of its generative AI models with training data. The filings are related to the case Kadrey v. Meta Platforms — one of many such cases winding through […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon and Apple are struggling to put generative AI technology in their digital assistants – Alexa and Siri, respectively – according to a pair of reports that came out on Friday. Amazon hoped to release its new Alexa during an event in New York on February 26. Now Amazon plans to delay the release of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Robotics startup Figure AI is raising $1.5 billion at a $39.5 billion valuation, a whopping 15 times higher than before.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Bret Taylor, the chairman of OpenAI’s board, said the artificial intelligence company was “not for sale.” Mr. Musk and other investors had offered $97.4 billion earlier this week.
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng is reportedly set to meet with China’s top politicians, including Chinese leader Xi Jinping, during a summit that Alibaba founder Jack Ma is also expected to attend. The summit, which could happen as soon as next week, may be intended as a signal by China’s Communist Party that […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is said to be in talks to raise $10 billion in a round that would value xAI at $75 billion. Bloomberg reported Friday that xAI is canvassing existing investors, including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Valor Equity Partners for the round, which would bring xAI’s total raised to $22.4 billion, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta is planning to design the hardware and software for humanoid robots, according to a report from Bloomberg. Sources tell the outlet that a newly formed team within Meta’s Reality Labs division will start by working on “humanoid robot hardware” capable of completing household chores.Bloomberg notes that Meta has broader goals of making “the underlying AI, sensors and software for robots that will be manufactured and sold by a range of companies.” That means the company might not make a Meta-branded robot to start. It’s in discussions with robotics companies like Unitree...
Airbnb is planning to first introduce AI to its customer support system. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple's artificial intelligence features for iPhones could be available in China as early as May, according to Bloomberg. The company reportedly established several teams in China and the US to make that happen, and it's also teaming up with local companies for its generative AI needs in the country. Joe Tsai, Alibaba Group's Chairman, recently confirmed that Apple will use his company's generative AI technology for Chinese iPhones during an event. Tsai didn't say when Apple intends to roll out the AI features that use Alibaba's tech, but The Information previously reported that the...
Chip designer Arm plans to unveil its own processor this year with Meta as the launch customer, The Financial Times reported. The chip would be a CPU designed for servers in data centers and would have the potential to be customized for clients. Manufacturing would be outsourced to a contract fab plant like TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.) and the first in-house chip could be revealed as early as this summer, according to the FT's sources. Last month, Arm parent Softbank announced the Stargate project, a partnership with OpenAI to build up to $500 billion worth of AI...
The European Union has denied that recent moves to row back on some planned tech regulation — principally by ditching the AI Liability Directive, a 2022 draft law which had been aimed at making it easier for consumers to sue over harms caused by AI-enabled products and services — were made in response to pressure […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The U.K. government wants to make a hard pivot into boosting its economy and industry with AI, and as part of that, it’s pivoting an institution that it founded a little over a year ago for a very different purpose. Today the Department of Science, Industry and Technology announced that it would be renaming the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google’s Gemini AI assistant can now recall past conversations to provide more relevant responses if you have a subscription to Gemini Advanced via Google One AI Premium. With the update, you’ll no longer have to recap previous chats or search for a thread to pick up a conversation, as Gemini will already have the context it needs.You can also ask Gemini to summarize previous conversations and build upon existing projects. Google already widely rolled out the ability for Gemini to “remember” your preferences, but this latest update takes things a step further by letting the chatbot...
Google’s Gemini AI chatbot can now tailor answers based on the contents of previous conversations, the company announced in a blog post on Thursday. Gemini can summarize a previous conversation you’ve had with it, or recall info you shared in another conversation thread. This means you won’t have to repeat information you’ve already shared with […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Alibaba on Thursday confirmed recent reports of a partnership with Apple that’s set to bring AI features to iPhones sold in China. The deal is an important one for Apple, as iPhone sales have dropped precipitously in the world’s largest smartphone market. The handset experienced an 11% year-over-year (YoY) drop in China, according to Apple’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A consortium of fourteen publishers including Condé Nast, The Atlantic, and Forbes have filed a lawsuit against Cohere alleging that the generative AI startup has engaged in “massive, systematic” copyright infringement. In the complaint, the publisher plaintiffs accuse Cohere of using at least 4,000 copyrighted works to train its AI models and display large portions […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amid stiff competition, Baidu says it’s making its AI chatbot free to use. Starting on April 1, ERNIE Bot will be available to users at no cost. Baidu says it will also issue refunds to users in some cases. The company cited reduced costs and tech improvements as reasons for making ERNIE Bot free across desktop and mobile.Moreover, Baidu plans to roll out an advanced search function on the same day, per Reuters. This will also be available for free and is said to include upgraded reasoning capability.Baidu started offering premium features in its search engine in late 2023. Those were powered...
YouTube Shorts is integrating with Google DeepMind’s latest video model, Veo 2, allowing creators to generate AI video clips for their posts. Veo 2 is Google’s response to Sora, OpenAI’s text-to-video generator. YouTube, owned by Google, already allowed creators to generate AI backgrounds for their Shorts with a text prompt through a feature called Dream […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
YouTube has added new generative AI video features that creators can use when making Shorts. The video platform announced that Google’s Veo 2 video model is being integrated into YouTube’s experimental Dream Screen feature, alongside allowing users to generate standalone video clips that can be added to Shorts.Dream Screen was introduced in September 2023 and already generates images and videos for Shorts content based on text descriptions; however, these could only previously be applied as virtual green screen backgrounds.To access clip generation, Dream Screen users need to open the...
EnCharge AI, a semiconductor startup developing analog memory chips for AI applications, has raised more than $100 million in a Series B round led by Tiger Global to spur its next stage of growth. The funding is significant partly because interest in AI is at an all-time high, but the high price of building and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Bethesda is adding DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation and DLSS Ray Reconstruction to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle in an update due next week. Both technologies will improve the image quality of Indiana Jones, and Multi Frame Generation will also enable smoother frame rates in the process.Nvidia has released a new Game Ready driver today (572.42) that includes support for the Indiana Jones improvements. Both the DLSS Super Resolution and DLAA features of the game will be updated to work with Nvidia’s new transformer-based AI models, and Bethesda is also adding fully ray-traced shadows to the...
Chat app Telegram, which became profitable last year, released new updates to its apps, including improved sticker search, choosing video covers, and the ability to copy videos at the current time. The company first released its AI-powered sticker search in December, which allowed you to look for stickers using natural language. However, it was limited […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Eric Schmidt says AI technology could "harm innocent people" if it ends up in the wrong hands.
Possibly in response to political pressure, OpenAI is making clear that its AI models won’t shy away from sensitive topics while refraining from making assertions that might “shut out some viewpoints.” In an updated version of its Model Spec, a collection of high-level rules that indirectly govern OpenAI’s models, OpenAI says that its models “must […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman detailed plans for the company’s GPT-4.5 and GPT-5 AI models in a roadmap published on X on Wednesday.In the post, Altman also acknowledged that OpenAI’s product lineup has gotten complicated and says that the company wants to do “a much better job” simplifying its offerings. “We hate the model picker as much as you do and want to return to magic unified intelligence,” Altman says.The company plans to ship GPT-4.5, which he says was called Orion internally, will be OpenAI’s “last non-chain-of-thought model.” The Verge reported on some details about Orion...
OpenAI has effectively canceled the release of o3, which was slated to be the company’s next major AI model release, in favor of what CEO Sam Altman is calling a “simplified” product offering. In a post on X on Wednesday, Altman said that, in the coming months, OpenAI will release a model called GPT-5 that […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Right after the end of the AI Action Summit in Paris, Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei called the event a “missed opportunity.” He added that “greater focus and urgency is needed on several topics given the pace at which the technology is progressing” in the statement released on Tuesday. The AI company held a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Scarlett Johansson is calling on the government to pass a law limiting the use of AI after a video featuring an AI deepfake of the actress circulated online. In a statement to People, Johansson said, “It is terrifying that the U.S. government is paralyzed when it comes to passing legislation that protects all of its citizens against the imminent dangers of A.I.”The video in question shows Johansson, along with other Jewish celebrities including Jerry Seinfeld, Mila Kunis, Jack Black, Drake, Jake Gyllenhaal, Adam Sandler, and others, wearing a t-shirt that shows the name “Kanye” along...
More and more legal professionals are embracing AI, surveys show. Per a recent poll from legaltech company Clio, 79% of firms used some form of AI for casework last year, up from just 19% in 2023. Despite some skepticism of the tech, in-house counsel has shown an interest, as well, with one survey suggesting that […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Adobe’s text- and image-to-video AI generator has been released for anyone to try online. Generate Video is available starting today in public beta following a limited early access testing period last year. The beta tool can be accessed via the re-designed Firefly web app, alongside new image generation and translation capabilities, and AI credit subscription tiers for creators.Adobe started launching tools powered by its generative AI Firefly Video Model in October, starting with the Generative Extend tool in beta for Premiere Pro that can be used to extend the end or beginning of footage...
A long stalled bid to beef up European Union rules around online tracking technologies — and put penalties on a similar footing to the bloc’s data protection framework, GDPR, which allows for fines of up to 4% of annual turnover for breaches — has been withdrawn by the Commission after co-legislators failed to reach agreement […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On Tuesday, US District Court of Delaware judge Stephanos Bibas issued a partial summary judgment in favor of Thomson Reuters in its copyright infringement lawsuit against Ross Intelligence, a legal AI startup. Filed in 2020, it’s one of the first cases that will deal with the legality of AI tools and how they are trained, often using copyrighted data scraped from somewhere else without license or permission.Similar lawsuits against OpenAI, Microsoft, and other AI giants are currently winding their way through the courts, and they could come down to similar questions about whether or...
Microsoft has added another 389 megawatts of renewable power to its portfolio as the tech giant scrambles to meet the power demands required to match its AI ambitions. The additional renewable power spans three solar projects developed by EDP Renewables North America — two in southern Illinois and one outside Austin, Texas. Microsoft is buying […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The high-stakes world of Formula 1 racing just became the latest battleground for AI companies.AI-powered search startup Perplexity has been in negotiations to sign a sponsorship deal with Red Bull Racing, worth $5 million a year. But after both parties had agreed to the terms, the deal was blocked by Oracle, the team’s biggest sponsor, according to sources familiar with the matter and documents viewed by The Verge.Two issues are at the heart of the conflict, according to the sources. Oracle has made a bid to purchase TikTok, and Perplexity is a rival...
BuzzFeed wants to fight the addictive nature of social media platforms.BuzzFeed plans on launching a new social platform “built specifically to spread joy and enable playful creative expression.” In a blog post published on Tuesday, BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti highlights the “growing discontent” with platforms using AI-driven algorithms to keep users glued to their screens, adding that BuzzFeed’s social network would use AI to “give users agency” rather than take it away.BuzzFeed says the platform is “designed as an oasis from algorithm-driven doomscrolling” and...
In an interview at the AI Action Summit in Paris on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dismissed Elon Musk’s unsolicited $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI’s nonprofit as “an attempt to slow [OpenAI] down.” “[Musk] obviously is a competitor,” Altman said. “He’s raised a lot of money for [his AI company] xAI, and they’re trying to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
My hand is cramping. It’s not carpal tunnel or some other dubious reason that’s causing the pain. It’s an analog ache that is oddly satisfying in a nostalgic way. In the last few days, I’ve held a pen and written more words for a much longer time than I have ever done in years. As I pushed myself to handwrite large parts of this review to spend more time with the 2024 Kindle Scribe’s stylus and note-taking tools, I started to feel a sensation I hadn’t remembered since my teens. I often feel the urge to jot down thoughts and lists, but I never really wanted to spend longer than 15...
According to a report published Tuesday by The Information, Apple is partnering Alibaba to bring its Apple Intelligence platform to China. The deal is said to arrive after the iPhone maker reportedly explored – but ultimately rejected – a potential partnership with uber-buzzy AI startup, DeepSeek, as well as with Bytedance. Apple initially selected Baidu […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Updating a newer iPhone, iPad, or Mac to the latest software could have an unintended side effect of re-enabling Apple Intelligence. Users who turned off Apple’s AI features in iOS / iPadOS 18.3 or macOS 15.3 — the first set of updates to enable the features by default — have reported that the software suite turned itself on again after they updated to iOS 18.3.1 or macOS 15.3.1, which were released yesterday with notes about fixing a security flaw on iPhones and iPads.Reports from MacRumors and on Reddit note that those who see the Apple “Welcome” screen after updating find they have...
As the chief product officer for AI customer service startup TalkDesk, Charayna “CK” Kannan said that enterprises often say they want to automate different workflows but that it’s really hard to implement AI. Enterprises are dealing with clunky, legacy software, that often doesn’t have APIs, creating a daunting task their IT departments weren’t prioritizing. “Every […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In his annual letter, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan dubbed AI as one of the company’s four “big bets” for 2025, pointing to the company’s investments in AI tools for creators, like those that help them come up with video ideas, thumbnails, or those that help translate their content into other languages. The latter feature will […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In a statement on Tuesday, Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI startup Anthropic, called the AI Action Summit in Paris this week a “missed opportunity,” and urged the AI industry — and government — to “move faster and with greater clarity.” “We were pleased to attend the AI Action Summit in Paris, and we appreciate […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Medical imaging is crucial for the timely identification of serious diseases like cancer. However, manual interpretation of scans is a time-intensive process. Healthcare professionals increasingly use AI-powered tools for diagnostic purposes, as such technologies can be very effective in detecting and categorizing diseases. A Sydney, Australia-headquartered startup, Harrison.ai, has built AI-enabled medical diagnostic software and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
At the AI Action Summit in Paris this week, the U.S. declined to sign the statement summarizing the resolutions. But it did make an appearance: Vice President J.D. Vance gave a speech to the audience of dignitaries, tech leaders and regulators. Amid a conference heavy on equitable AI development — specifically, beyond the outsized influence […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Researchers from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University recently published a study looking at how using generative AI at work affects critical thinking skills. “Used improperly, technologies can and do result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved,” the paper states. When people rely on generative AI at work, their effort shifts […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In a dramatic escalation of Silicon Valley’s most heated AI rivalry, Elon Musk just announced that he’s leading a $97.4 billion bid to buy OpenAI’s nonprofit arm, according to The Wall Street Journal. The bid was reportedly delivered to the board Monday morning.The offer brings together a powerful coalition of backers, including Musk’s own AI company xAI and venture heavyweights like Valor Equity Partners, Hollywood mogul Ari Emanuel, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s venture firm 8VC.This bid comes at a pivotal moment for OpenAI. CEO Sam Altman is already juggling...
Roblox and Discord have faced criticism for failing to protect children on their platforms.Google, OpenAI, Roblox, and Discord have formed a new non-profit organization to help improve child safety online. The Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) initiative aims to make core safety technologies more accessible for companies and provide free, open-source AI tools for identifying, reviewing, and reporting child sexual abuse material.The initiative was partially motivated by changes that generative AI advancements have made to online environments and aims to address “a critical need to...
OpenAI remains on track to start producing its in-house AI chip next year, according to a report from Reuters. Sources tell the outlet that OpenAI plans to finalize its design over the next few months before sending it to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) for fabrication.By making a chip of its own, OpenAI won’t have to use Nvidia’s chips as much to train and run AI models. TSMC will produce the chip using the more efficient 3-nanometer technology, with “high-bandwidth memory” and “extensive networking capabilities,” according to Reuters.At launch, OpenAI will deploy...
As the AI Summit got underway in Paris on Monday, some 60 European companies — from incumbent industrial giants to AI startups (including France’s LLM-maker Mistral) — signed up to an initiative to help establish Europe as a leader in AI. But the fact that they felt the need to sign up at all highlights the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Europe wants to be a top contender in the race to become a world leader in artificial intelligence, but investors are concerned that it has too much red tape and that its taxes are too high.
In a new essay on his personal blog, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company is open to a “compute budget,” among other “strange-sounding” ideas, to “enable everyone on Earth to use a lot of AI” and ensure the benefits of the technology are widely distributed. “The historical impact of technological progress suggests that most […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The latest model from DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company that’s shaken up Silicon Valley and Wall Street, can be manipulated to produce harmful content such as plans for a bioweapon attack and a campaign to promote self-harm among teens, according to The Wall Street Journal. Sam Rubin, senior vice president at Palo Alto Networks’ threat […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton helped pioneer Google’s work in artificial intelligence. Now he has lashed out at the tech giant.
Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton helped pioneer Google’s work in artificial intelligence. Now he has lashed out at the tech giant.
We may bit a post-CES news lull some days, but the reviews are coming in hot and heavy as February begins. Samsung has already debuted its latest premium phones and we've published a few long-term reviews of devices we've been testing for months. In this installment of the reviews roundup, we've got phones, a wearable, a robot vacuum and a smart grill. There's something for everyone this week. Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra Samsung has given us the first flagship phones of 2025 and they rely heavily on AI features to lure users. Sam notes that the company has improved those tools, but the...
Fei-Fei Li, the Stanford computer scientist and startup founder sometimes known as “the Godmother of AI,” has outlined “three fundamental principles for the future of AI policymaking” ahead of next week’s AI Action Summit in Paris. First, Li said policy must be based on “science, not science fiction.” In other words, policymakers should focus on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Andrew Ng, the founder and former leader of Google Brain, supports Google’s recent decision to drop its pledge not to build AI systems for weapons. “I’m very glad that Google has changed its stance,” Ng said during an on-stage interview Thursday evening with TechCrunch at the Military Veteran Startup Conference in San Francisco. Earlier this […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Elon Musk doesn’t want Tesla to be just an automaker. He wants Tesla to be an AI company, one that’s figured out how to make cars drive themselves. Crucial to that mission is Dojo, Tesla’s custom-built supercomputer designed to train its Full Self-Driving (FSD) neural networks. FSD isn’t actually fully self-driving; it can perform some […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
An AI system developed by Google DeepMind, Google’s leading AI research lab, appears to have surpassed the average gold medalist in solving geometry problems in an international mathematics competition. The system, called AlphaGeometry2, is an improved version of a system, AlphaGeometry, that DeepMind released last January. In a newly published study, the DeepMind researchers behind […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A number of startups are racing to make vehicle inspections faster, easier, and cheaper. Self Inspection, a startup based in San Diego, thinks it has them all beat with its AI-powered service — and now it has convinced outside investors. Self Inspection, founded in 2021, is set to announce Thursday it’s raised $3 million in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Japanese conglomerate SoftBank would invest up to $40 billion in the maker of the chatbot ChatGPT.
In this post, we explain the many Microsoft Copilots available and what they do, and highlight the key differences between each.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
X-Energy is one of many nuclear startups to have benefitted from the AI-driven data center boom.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Safe Superintelligence, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, is in talks to raise funding at a valuation of “at least” $20 billion, according to Reuters. It’s not clear how much Safe Superintelligence — which has yet to generate any revenue — is looking to secure, but it could be substantial. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It’s hard for these to become an all-day AI companion gadget if they don’t actually last all day.We were whizzing down the slopes, screaming because it is sort of ridiculous to go flying down a snowy hill in an inflatable tube. There was a friendly family competition going on to see who could get down the hill the fastest. Other snowtubers had their phones out — my spouse had planned to record everything on their Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. They got partway through a video when their fully charged smart glasses abruptly died. We never did find out who truly won.That’s been an unexpected...
Google appears to have faked AI output in a commercial set to run during the Super Bowl. The ad shows a business owner using Gemini to write a website description, but the text portrayed as generated by AI has been available on the business’s website since at least August 2020, as shown on this archived webpage.Google didn’t launch Gemini until 2023, meaning Gemini couldn’t have generated the website description as depicted in the ad. The Wisconsin Cheese Mart’s 2020 website description (left) is the same as the one supposedly generated by Gemini in the original ad (right). The...
Meta has partnered with UNESCO on a new plan to improve translation and speech recognition AI, Techcrunch reported. As part of its Language Technology Partner Program, Meta is seeking collaborators willing to donate at least 10 hours of speech recordings with transcriptions, large written texts (200-plus sentences) and sets of translated sentences. The aim is to focus on "underserved languages, in support of UNESCO's work," Meta wrote in a blog post. So far, Meta and UNESCO have signed on the government of Nunavut, a northern Canadian territory. The aim is to develop translation...
AI and the large language models (LLMs) that power them have a ton of useful applications, but for all their promise, they’re not very reliable. No one knows when this problem will be solved, so it makes sense that we’re seeing startups finding an opportunity in helping enterprises make sure the LLM-powered apps they’re paying […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft has started rolling out a new scareware blocker in its Edge browser this week. The AI-powered feature runs on Windows PCs and can identify and block existing scams, and even detect new and emerging ones thanks to a local machine learning model.“Scareware blocker adds a new, first line of defense to help protect the users exposed to a new scam if it attempts to open a full screen page. Scareware blocker uses a machine learning model that runs on the local computer,” explains the Microsoft Edge team in a blog post. “The model uses computer vision to compare full screen pages to...
Google this week quietly revised its artificial intelligence ethics, no longer ruling out military or surveillance use.
Google this week quietly revised its artificial intelligence ethics, no longer ruling out military or surveillance use.
OpenAI co-founder John Schulman, who left AI company Anthropic earlier this week after a mere five months, is reportedly joining former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s secretive new startup, per Fortune. It’s not clear what Schulman’s role there will be. Fortune wasn’t able to learn that information, and Murati has been tight-lipped about the venture since […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A group of more than 100 organizations has published an open letter calling on the AI industry and regulators to mitigate the tech’s harmful environmental impacts just days before leading industry CEOs, heads of state, academics, and nonprofits descend on Paris for a major AI conference. The letter, which bears the signatures of prominent advocacy […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon is joining other Big Tech companies by announcing huge AI spending plans for 2025.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Tinder hopes to reverse its ongoing decline in active users by turning to AI. In the coming quarter, the Match-owned dating app will roll out new AI-powered features for discovery and matching. The addition aims to offer fatigued singles an alternative to the “swipe” that defined the dating app in its earlier days and influenced […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Two US Congress members plan to introduce bipartisan legislation to ban China’s DeepSeek AI chatbot from government devices. The bill’s announcement came after a security expert said DeepSeek not only poses a threat to US AI stocks; it’s also a national security risk. The chatbot has recently been the most downloaded app in the US.U.S. Representatives Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Darin LaHood (R-IL), each party’s senior-most member on the House Select Committee on Intelligence, plan to introduce the “No DeepSeek on Government Devices Act.” If all of this sounds familiar, the move...
It might take a magnifying glass to notice, but the Galaxy S25 family brings subtle differences.Thousands of retailers and carrier stores in the US will be stocked with the Samsung Galaxy S25 ($799.99), S25 Plus ($999.99), and S25 Ultra ($1,299.99) on Friday, February 7th. Hardware-wise, the S25 series is a marginal improvement over last year’s S24 series, with the most noteworthy changes coming in the form of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite chip and an expanded 12GB of RAM. Each device also supports Qi2 Ready charging (with a magnet case) and a spate of new AI features thanks to Android 15...
Dojo is Tesla’s custom-built supercomputer that’s designed to train its “Full Self-Driving” neural networks.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google on Thursday announced that effective this week, it will begin adding a digital watermark to images in Photos that are edited with generative AI. The watermark applies specifically to images that are altered using the Reimagine feature found in Magic Editor on Pixel 9 devices. Announced in 2024, Reimagine utilizes generative AI to alter […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In a bid to boost its subscription service and attract more paying users, Snapchat is rolling out additional features for Snapchat+ subscribers, including allowing Snapchat+ subscribers to create AI-generated stickers in chats. The social media company and is also adding the option to send self-destructing Snaps. Snapchat+ subscribers in the U.S. can now create and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google debuted a pair of new Super Bowl commercials that portray AI as a technology that’s as central to people’s lives as the phone or computer they access it on. But, like some of Google’s other Super Bowl ads, the company is once again attempting to make you pull out your tissues in between plays.The first ad, titled “Dream Job”, depicts a man using the Gemini Live voice mode on his Pixel phone to prepare for a job interview. After Gemini asks him to talk about “the job that mattered to you most,” the man begins detailing what he’s learned after becoming a parent.Mostly, the...
Google Photos is adding its digital SynthID watermarks to photos that have been edited using the Magic Editor’s generative AI feature. The new feature is rolling out “this week” according to Google, and is intended to make it easier for people to quickly identify images that have been manipulated using the “reimagine” tool in Magic Editor.SynthID is a watermarking system created by Google’s DeepMind team that embeds a digital metadata tag directly into images, video, audio, and text to identify if they were created or altered using AI tools. The watermark is already being applied to...
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Researchers managed to create a low-cost AI reasoning model rivaling OpenAI’s in just 26 minutes, as outlined in a paper published last week. The model, called s1, was refined using a small dataset of 1,000 questions and for under $50, according to TechCrunch.To do this, researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington used a method known as distillation — which allows smaller models to draw from the answers produced by larger ones — to refine s1 using answers from Google’s AI reasoning model, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental. Google’s terms of service note that you can...
Mistral, the company that is sometimes considered as Europe’s great hope for AI, is releasing several updates to Le Chat, its AI assistant product. In addition to a major upgrade to the web interface, the company is releasing a mobile app on iOS and Android to access Le Chat from your phone. As a reminder, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI on Thursday launched data residency in Europe, allowing European organizations to meet local data sovereignty requirements while using the AI company’s products. Data residency refers to the physical location of an organization’s data, as well as the local laws and policy requirements imposed on that data. Most tech giants and cloud providers offer European […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Technically sound, Samsung’s latest Android phones are a bit of a snooze.
The race is on to build a new generation of healthcare software to replace legacy hospital systems that in some cases may not have been updated in decades. A startup out of Munich, Germany called Avelios has ambitions to build a new kind of end-to-end administrative system, leaning into more modern tooling using AI and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Zenfone 12 Ultra, announced today, is ASUS's latest flagship smartphone, and much like its competitors, it leans hard into AI.Thanks to a Snapdragon 8 Elite, the Zenfone 12 Ultra can perform AI tasks offline and online through the cloud, including transcribing audio, summarizing articles and documents and providing real-time interpretation on calls for supported languages. It can also use Circle to Search much like other Android phones. The onboard AI is powered by Meta’s Llama 3 8B language model, which works without an internet connection.The Zenfone 12 Ultra’s FHD+ AMOLED display...
Boston Dynamics Wednesday announced a partnership designed to bring improved reinforcement learning to its electric Atlas humanoid robot. The tie-up is with the Robotics & AI Institute (RAI Institute), earlier known as The Boston Dynamics AI Institute. Both organizations were founded by Marc Raibert, a former MIT professor who served as Boston Dynamics’ CEO for […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington were able to train an AI “reasoning” model for under $50 in cloud compute credits, according to a new research paper released last Friday. The model known as s1 performs similarly to cutting-edge reasoning models, such as OpenAI’s o1 and DeepSeek’s r1, on tests measuring math […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon sent out five different invites to its upcoming product event, and when pieced together, they spell out a familiar word: Alexa, the name of the company’s digital voice assistant. We assumed the event would be about Alexa’s long-heralded renaissance, and given this message, plus Amazon telling Reuters that the event will be Alexa-focused, it seems certain the new Alexa will arrive this month.The not-so-hidden message suggests that at the event, which is being held on February 26th in New York City, Amazon will launch the new generative AI-powered version of its voice assistant...
Amazon may be gearing up to release a next-gen, AI-powered Alexa experience, according to Reuters. Per the outlet’s report, Amazon plans to preview an upgraded version of Alexa, the company’s smart home assistant that runs on a number of first- and third-party devices, at an event on February 26. The revamped Alexa is said to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
During a recent press appearance, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that he’s observed the “IQ” of AI rapidly improve over the past several years. “Very roughly, it feels to me like — this is not scientifically accurate, this is just a vibe or spiritual answer — every year we move one standard deviation of IQ,” […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google has edited Gemini’s AI response in a Super Bowl commercial to remove an incorrect statistic about cheese. The ad, which shows a small business owner using Gemini to write a website description about Gouda, no longer says the variety makes up “50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption.”In the edited YouTube video, Gemini’s response now skips over the specifics and says Gouda is “one of the most popular cheeses in the world.” Google Cloud apps president Jerry Dischler initially defended the response, saying on X it’s “grounded in the Web” and “not a...
AI is heating up, and we’re diving in! TechCrunch Sessions: AI is officially open for registration. Secure your spot now and save up to $300 on select tickets before prices rise From startup founders to AI investors to aspiring innovators — TC Sessions: AI is where the entire AI ecosystem comes together. Whether you’re building, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Attorneys for Elon Musk intend to move to dismiss a case that accuses the Tesla CEO, who is also the head of President Donald Trump’s DOGE organization, of using AI-generated, copyright-violating “Blade Runner”-inspired images at a Tesla press event. In a filing submitted to the U.S. District Court Central District of California, Western Division late […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The tech giant has updated the principles governing its development of artificial intelligence.
Microsoft Build is once again being held in Seattle this year, just over the lake from Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington. The developer conference will start on May 19th and run through May 22nd at the Seattle Convention Center.Microsoft hasn’t provided any hints about what the company plans to launch at Build, but it’s safe to say the conference will be full of AI announcements. Last year’s Build included Microsoft’s AI agents announcement, an AI-powered Windows clipboard PowerToy, and a tiny Snapdragon PC.We’re building a new path forward. Come join us at #MSBuild...
Google Search is in the midst of a “journey” around AI, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during the company’s earnings call on Tuesday. The start of that journey was AI overviews, a controversial and monumental shift in how Google delivers information to billions of Search users. But that was just the beginning. “As AI continues […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Alphabet is shrugging off concerns sparked by DeepSeek over AI spending, boosting its capital expenditures to a whopping $75 billion.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google’s Gemini AI assistant doesn’t have ads today, but the company has “very good ideas” for ways they could show up down the road, CEO Sundar Pichai said on an investor call this afternoon. Right now, you can access Gemini for free or pay for a subscription to use advanced features, but it sounds like ads could be part of the product at some point.On the call, a Wells Fargo analyst asked Pichai how people should think about the “future monetization opportunity of Gemini” and if Google sees a potential “ad component.” Here’s my transcription of Pichai’s answer, which I’...
Naturally, there’s an AI element in the Apple Intelligence-created backgrounds.Apple launched a new app today, called Apple Invites, which lets you create, share, and manage invitations for events. With it, you can generate a quick digital invitation that, when shared with your friends, lets them gather all the info about the event, RSVP, and add it to their calendar. That includes your Android friends, who can access invites using a web-based version of the app on the iCloud site.It’s a mostly straightforward, easy-to-use app that offers a better way to invite friends to things than trying...
Google has made one of the most substantive changes to its AI principles since first publishing them in 2018. In a change spotted by The Washington Post, the search giant edited the document to remove pledges it had made promising it would not "design or deploy" AI tools for use in any weapons or surveillance technology. Previously, those guidelines included a section titled "applications we will not pursue," which is not present in the current version of the document.Instead, there's now a section titled "responsible development and deployment." There, Google says it will implement "...
Google parent company Alphabet expects to invest “approximately $75 billion” in capital expenditures in 2025, according to a statement from CEO Sundar Pichai in Alphabet’s Q4 2024 earnings release.Capital expenditures have become a hot topic as of late as big tech companies race to build infrastructure to support their growing AI ambitions, and today’s announcement from Alphabet is clearly meant to keep the company in that conversation. Alphabet spent $32.3 billion on capital expenditures in 2023, so $75 billion in 2025 would be a big jump. And while Google’s press release today doesn...
Google removed a pledge to not build AI for weapons or surveillance from its website this week. The change was first spotted by Bloomberg. The company appears to have updated its public AI principles page, erasing a section titled “applications we will not pursue,” which was still included as recently as last week. Asked for […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Figure AI founder and CEO Brett Adcock announced Tuesday that the humanoid robotics firm is exiting a deal with OpenAI. The Bay Area-based robotics company has instead opted to focus on in-house AI, owing to a “major breakthrough.” Adcock was tightlipped in terms of specifics, but he promised to deliver “something no one has ever […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A group of developers at AI dev platform Hugging Face, including Thomas Wolf, the company’s co-founder and chief scientist, say they’ve built an “open” version of OpenAI’s deep research tool. Deep research, which OpenAI unveiled during an event Sunday, crawls the web to compile research reports on any subject. While impressive, deep research is currently […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon’s power bill has been soaring lately as it adds data centers to deal with rising demand for AI and cloud services.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Verizon is adding a new option to bundle Google One AI Premium into its wireless myPlan and myHome internet plans, the company announced today. The add-on will be available for an extra $10 per month, or about half of the $19.99 Google charges for the subscription on its own, starting on February 6th.Google One AI Premium comes with access to Gemini Advanced, which adds Gemini features to Google apps like Gmail or Docs. It also lets you try Google’s experimental AI models and the company’s Deep Research tool.The subscription also includes discounts on Google’s online store, unlimited...
Thomas Shedd, the former Tesla engineer now serving as the director of Technology Transformation Services, reportedly outlined an “AI-first strategy” for the U.S. government department. According to a report from Wired citing multiple sources, the Musk ally described the plan to run the office like a “startup software company” during a Monday meeting. The New […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Researchers from TikTok owner ByteDance have demoed a new AI system, OmniHuman-1, that can generate perhaps the most realistic deepfake videos to date. Deepfaking AI is a commodity. There’s no shortage of apps that can insert someone into a photo, or make a person appear to say something they didn’t actually say. But most deepfakes […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Swiss startup LogicStar is bent on joining the AI agent game. The summer 2024-founded startup has bagged $3 million in pre-seed funding to bring tools to the developer market that can do autonomous maintenance of software applications, rather than the more typical AI agent use-case of code co-development. LogicStar CEO and co-founder Boris Paskalev suggests […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Snap has unveiled an AI text-to-image model for mobile devices that will power some of Snapchat’s features in the coming months. The company said on Tuesday that the model can produce high-resolution images in around 1.4 seconds on an iPhone 16 Pro Max. The new diffusion model runs entirely on the device, which reduces computational […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A new bill proposed in California (SB 243) would require AI companies to periodically remind kids that a chatbot is an AI and not human. The bill, proposed by California Senator Steve Padilla, is meant to protect children from the “addictive, isolating, and influential aspects” of AI.In addition to limiting companies from using “addictive engagement patterns,” the bill would require AI companies to provide annual reports to the State Department of Health Care Services outlining how many times it detected suicidal ideation by kids using the platform, as well as the number of times a...
The feature can help users to spot key information in agreements before they sign them.Adobe is adding features to Acrobat’s AI Assistant that should help users to better understand contracts. The new “contract intelligence capabilities” allow the PDF management software’s chatbot to automatically recognize when files and scanned documents are contracts and summarize complicated language to make it easier for users to understand.The Acrobat AI Assistant is available as a $4.99 per month add-on for Acrobat users with free or paid individual accounts. The contract intelligence update is...
Adobe has updated the Acrobat AI Assistant, giving it the ability to understand contracts and to compare them for you. The company says it can help you make sense of complex terms and spot differences between agreements, such as between old and new ones, so you can understand what you're signing. With the AI Assistant enabled, the Acrobat app will be able to recognize if a document is a contract, even if it's a scanned page. It can identify and list key terms from there, summarize the document's contents and recommend questions you can ask based on what's in it.AdobeThe feature can also compare...
While the U.S. and Canada duke it out over tariffs between the two countries, a tech company based out of Toronto is announcing a major round of funding led by a homegrown VC. StackAdapt, a programmatic advertising startup, says that it has raised $235 million in equity funding, with Teachers’ Venture Growth (TVG) — the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On the heels of Chinese AI firm DeepSeek making a huge splash in OpenAI’s American backyard, OpenAI is diving into expanding in Asia, with major commercial deals that will also help it train its AI on more Asian-language content and user behavior — a gateway to doing more business in these markets in the future […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal is investing $230 million into an AI startup he founded as the country pushes to establish itself in a field dominated by U.S. and Chinese firms. Aggarwal is largely financing the investment in Krutrim through his family office, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. In a post on X […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI is changing how we shop online, making our experiences more personalized. Smart assistants recommend products, negotiate deals, and even handle customer service. Big retailers and smaller businesses are using AI to improve search, supply chains, and checkout. If AI companies (and their investors) have their way, shopping will soon be focused on chatting with […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Presentations.ai has raised $3 million in a seed round led by Accel to scale its AI-powered software for generating presentations.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A top official at the General Services Administration said artificial intelligence could be used to identify waste and redundancies in federal contracts.
SoftBank isn’t just part of the group investing $500 billion into Project Stargate to build American AI infrastructure capacity for OpenAI. It’s also making a Japanese joint venture with OpenAI, will spend $3 billion deploying OpenAI tech across SoftBank companies, and claims it will revolutionize business with AI agents through a new AI system called “Cristal intelligence.”SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, who also invested billions in WeWork, claimed at an announcement event in Tokyo that artificial general intelligence, or AGI will come “much earlier” than his previous two- to...
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to make artificial general intelligence (AGI) — which is roughly defined as AI that can accomplish any task a human can — openly available one day. But in a new policy document, Meta suggests that there are certain scenarios in which it may not release a highly capable AI […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company, is raising the ire of regulators around the world. DeepSeek’s viral AI models and chatbot apps have been banned by a growing number of countries and government bodies, which have expressed concerns over DeepSeek’s ethics, privacy, and security practices. Corporations have banned DeepSeek, too — by the hundreds. The biggest […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Content Credentials integration is available now across Cloudflare’s entire global network.Cloudflare has launched a new feature to help people quickly verify the authenticity of online images. The web security and hosting provider has adopted the Adobe-led Content Credentials system, which applies a digital metadata tag to images and video that tracks who owns it, where it’s been posted, and if it’s been manipulated — including if generative AI tools were used to do so.Content Credentials is an ongoing project born out of the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), a cross-industry...
The Beatles’ AI-assisted track “Now and Then” won the Grammy for Best Rock Performance on Sunday night, marking the first time that a song of its kind has taken home the award. No, Paul McCartney did not use AI to create some creepy LennonGPT bot. Instead, he used noise reduction systems to clean up a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Last Friday, AI startup OpenAI filed a new application to trademark products associated with its brand — “OpenAI” — with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Normally, this wouldn’t be newsworthy. Companies file for trademarks all the time. But in the application, OpenAI hints at new product lines both nearer-term and of a more […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
People often use multiple apps for notes, schedule management, and to-dos. But why not combine them all in one app? That’s the ethos behind Hero, an all-in-one productivity app with an AI assistant (of course!). The iOS app was developed by former Meta employees Brad Kowalk and Seung W. Lee. Both met while working on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
An app that helps people and teams in the working world simplify their to-do lists — ideally by organising and doing some of the work for them — has remained one of the unsolved goals in business technology. Leaning into AI, on top of battle scars from once building Google Wave, a startup called Tana […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A screenshot from Google’s Super Bowl commercial. | Screenshot: GoogleGoogle just debuted a series of Super Bowl ads showing how small businesses use Gemini AI across all 50 states, but the cheese lovers out there might notice something a little off about its Wisconsin one. As spotted by @natejhake on X, the ad shows Gemini AI generating text that says Gouda accounts for “50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption” — a stat that isn’t quite accurate.The cheese is undoubtedly popular in Europe, but the same can’t be said for the rest of the world. “While Gouda is likely...
Ultra used to mean something, you know?When you yell “Can you just Google it?†at your AI assistant, it’s fair to say that the AI assistant is not doing its job.I was browning some beef on the stove and trying to determine when my husband’s flight was landing. I didn’t have the flight number, but there are only so many direct flights between Detroit and Seattle in a day. So I long-pressed the power button on the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and asked Google’s Gemini assistant to find the...
All your AI Paint tools under one roof.Windows Insiders will soon see a Copilot icon in one more place: Paint. Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels will see the new button thanks to an update rolling out now, putting AI tools in one location. Clicking the Copilot button in the task bar will reveal a dropdown menu with generative features like Cocreator, Image Creator, and Generative Erase. Microsoft has been on a mission to put a Copilot icon everywhere it can — from your keyboard to the taskbar — and Paint is just the latest place for it to pop up.Microsoft has been adding AI image...
OpenAI used the subreddit, r/ChangeMyView, to create a test for measuring the persuasive abilities of its AI reasoning models. The company said so in a system card – a document outlining how an AI system works – that was released along with its new “reasoning” model, o3-mini, on Friday. Millions of Reddit users are members […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
To cap off a day of product releases, OpenAI researchers, engineers, and executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, answered questions in a wide-ranging Reddit AMA on Friday. OpenAI the company finds itself in a bit of a precarious position. It’s battling the perception that it’s ceding ground in the AI race to Chinese companies like […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Midha says R1 won't stop AI from spending billions.It means they will do more with the compute power they can obtain.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
MLCommons, a nonprofit AI safety working group, has teamed up with AI dev platform Hugging Face to release one of the world’s largest collections of public domain voice recordings for AI research. The data set, called Unsupervised People’s Speech, contains more than a million hours of audio spanning at least 89 different languages. MLCommons says […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
When in mid-2022 Sarah Guo left Greylock to launch her own AI-focused fund, Conviction Partners, she indicated that she was tagging the word “Partners” to the firm’s name because she would eventually bring on other GPs. Now, more than two years later, Guo is being joined by Mike Vernal, who was a partner at Sequoia […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nvidia is touting the performance of DeepSeek’s open source AI models on its just-launched RTX 50-series GPUs, claiming that they can “run the DeepSeek family of distilled models faster than anything on the PC market.” But this announcement from Nvidia might be somewhat missing the point.This week, Nvidia’s market cap suffered the single biggest one-day market cap loss for a US company ever, a loss widely attributed to DeepSeek. DeepSeek said that its new R1 reasoning model didn’t require powerful Nvidia hardware to achieve comparable performance to OpenAI’s o1 model, letting the...
The announcement comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg maintains the company’s ambitious AI strategy, which will require hefty capital investments in data centers.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft says that it’s creating a new unit, the Advanced Planning Unit (APU), within its Microsoft AI business division that will help the company understand the societal, health, and work implications of AI the company hopes to build. Microsoft AI, which encompasses Microsoft’s Copilot, Bing, and Edge products, is becoming core to Microsoft’s growth strategy […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
MultiVersus will go offline at the end of its next season, Warner Bros. Games announced on Friday. The free-to-play brawler’s fifth and final season starts on February 4th and runs through May 30th, 2025, after which you’ll only be able to play against AI opponents or through local co-op. It will also no longer be available to download.To gain access to the offline version of MultiVersus, you need to download the latest version of the game and log in during season five. From there, you’ll get a local save file connected to your PlayStation, Microsoft, Steam, or Epic Games account, “...
Perplexity, the venture-backed startup building AI-powered search products, has been sued in federal court for allegedly violating another company’s trademark. In a complaint filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, attorneys representing a company called Perplexity Solved Solutions accuse Perplexity of infringing on its trademark rights by using the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In the span of a week, the Chinese startup DeepSeek has completely disrupted the AI landscape with its free and "open source" R1 model. In this episode, Devindra, Engadget Senior Reporter Igor Bonifacic and Producer Ben Ellman dive into what makes R1 so special, and what DeepSeek is doing differently from OpenAI and other competitors. Also, we try to figure out what’s up with “Incention,” a weird AI/blockchain project for creating new Hollywood IP, and wonder if Helion’s fusion reactor is actually legit.Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions...
Google announced Thursday that the Gemini app is getting its Gemini 2.0 Flash AI model. The upgraded model “delivers fast responses and stronger performance across a number of key benchmarks, providing everyday help with tasks like brainstorming, learning or writing,” the company said in a post.The change is rolling out to Gemini’s web and mobile apps and will be available to all users. Google also says that you’ll still be able to use Gemini 1.5 Flash and 1.5 Pro for “the next few weeks.”The company first introduced Gemini 2.0 in December and promised that it was “working quickly...
Apple CEO Tim Cook said DeepSeek’s AI models represent “innovation that drives efficiency” on an earnings call on Thursday while fielding questions from analysts about the iPhone maker’s ambitions around AI. “In general, I think innovation that drives efficiency is a good thing. And, you know, that’s what you see in that model,” said Cook, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google has quietly announced the launch of its next-gen flagship AI model, Gemini 2.0 Pro Experimental, in a changelog for the company’s Gemini chatbot app. The launch of Gemini 2.0 Pro Experimental, the successor the Gemini 1.5 Pro model Google launched last February, comes as the tech world remains fixated on Chinese AI startup DeepSeek. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Intel is effectively killing Falcon Shores, its next-generation GPU for high-performance computing and AI workloads. The move comes as Intel tries to correct course after a number of disappointing product launches and historic losses, while competitors like AMD and Nvidia gain ground. Intel co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call Thursday, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google is testing a new “Ask for Me” feature that uses AI to call local businesses on your behalf, for information about availability and pricing. The feature is available on desktop and mobile for users who have opted into the company’s Search Labs experiments. The idea is to help users access information without having to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A Logitech webcam similar to (but not the same as) the one we used.Nvidia mildly blew our minds in 2020 when its graphics cards gained the ability to delete practically all the background noise from our audio calls with a free app, and now the company’s doing it again. My colleague and Verge senior news editor Richard Lawler just fired up Nvidia’s just-announced “Studio Voice” feature on his RTX 3070 — and it made his Logitech webcam’s awful built-in microphone sound downright respectable. Take a listen:The first clip you’ll hear is Richard on his podcasting mic, then the crummy...
Google is trying out a new tool that lets AI call businesses to ask questions for you. The feature, called Ask for Me, collects information about the pricing and availability of a service, but it’s only available for nail salons and auto shops for now.Once you enable the experiment on Google Search Labs, you might see an “Ask for Me” prompt when looking for local nail salons or auto shops in Search. Select it, and Google will ask a series of questions, like whether looking to get an oil change or tile rotation, what kind of car you have, and when you want to book an appointment. You’ll...
DeepSeek has secured a “completely open” database that exposed user chat histories, API authentication keys, system logs, and other sensitive information, according to cloud security firm Wiz. The security researchers said they found the Chinese AI startup’s publicly accessible database in “minutes,” with no authentication required.The exposed information was housed within an open-source data management system called ClickHouse and consisted of more than 1 million log lines. As noted by Wiz, the exposure “allowed for full database control and potential privilege escalation within...
The data center market is booming, driven by AI demand. Just last week, OpenAI said that it plans to team up with backers including SoftBank to spend at least $100 billion on data center infrastructure in the U.S. Microsoft aims to put around $80 billion toward AI infrastructure this year, and rival tech giants have […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
At Apple’s September 2024 hardware event, the company announced its iPhone 16 lineup, which was “built for Apple intelligence†— but Apple’s leap into AI has had a soft landing. The phones arrived without Apple Intelligence and, over the course of four months, Apple has been slowly rolling out some of the promised features through iterations of iOS 18.  Apple Intelligence’s first set of features included tools we’re pretty familiar with, like...
OpenAI says it plans to let U.S. National Laboratories, the Department of Energy’s network of R&D labs, use its AI models for nuclear weapons security and other scientific projects. Per CNBC, OpenAI will work with Microsoft, its lead investor, to deploy a model on the supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The model will be a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On today’s episode of Decoder, we’re talking about the only thing the AI industry — and pretty much the entire tech world — has been able to talk about for the last week: that is, of course, DeepSeek, and how the open-source AI model built by a Chinese startup has completely upended the conventional wisdom around chatbots, what they can do, and how much they should cost to develop. DeepSeek, for those unaware, is a lot like ChatGPT — there’s a website and a mobile app, and you can type into a little text box and have it talk back to you. What makes it special is how it was built...
Web-based party games are making a comeback, now with the infusion of generative AI. Among the startups joining the trend, the current forecast looks good for one startup, Little Umbrella, which leverages AI for its social party games. The company announced on Thursday its $2 million seed funding round. Little Umbrella plans to use the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In the U.S., AI-generated creations — books, movies, and so forth— that have been edited by a human can likely be copyrighted, but those without any human modifications or additions cannot. That’s according to a report published by the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) on Wednesday, which outlined scenarios in which AI-generated content might be eligible […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Resale platform Poshmark is launching Smart List AI, an automated product listing tool for sellers, the company announced today.The tool has been in beta testing since last fall and uses sellers’ photos to generate details like the type of product, the size and brand, the style and color, and other details, as well as a title and description for the listing. Like other platforms that have introduced AI listing tools, the promise is that Smart List AI will streamline the process for sellers and cut down on the amount of time it takes to list items. Sellers will still input the price of their...
A little less AI and a lot more poking please.Mark Zuckerberg is planning some big changes for Facebook in a bid to make using the platform feel like it did “back in the day.” During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Zuck said that Facebook is an important part of its more than three billion monthly users’ lives and that he’s working on making it “way more culturally influential than it is today.”He didn’t divulge any specific changes, only that he’s “excited this year to get back to some OG Facebook,” and that the overhaul will be a significant...
Microsoft is closely associated with OpenAI's ChatGPT AI model, but the software giant has no qualms about playing the field. Microsoft announced that it's bringing the DeepSeek-R1 AI model to Copilot+ PCs soon, starting with Snapdragon X devices and following later with Intel Lunar Lake and AMD Ryzen AI 9 PCs. The DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B model will arrive "soon" on Microsoft AI Tookit for developers, with more powerful 7B and 14B variants coming later.The 1.5B (base) model isn't powerful compared to the higher-tier 32B and 70B models, but MIcrosoft points out that the models are "NPU-...
SuperOps has raised $25 million in an all-equity Series C round led by March Capital to bolster AI integration into tools supporting managed service providers and IT teams.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Here’s what the certification logo looks like, which may be used on book covers, spines, and promotional materials.The Authors Guild — one of the largest associations of writers in the US — has launched a new project that allows authors to certify that their book was written by a human, and not generated by artificial intelligence.The Guild says its “Human Authored” certification aims to make it easier for writers to “distinguish their work in increasingly AI-saturated markets,” and that readers have a right to know who (or what) created the books they read. Human Authored...
India’s IT minister on Thursday praised DeepSeek‘s progress and said the country will host the Chinese AI lab’s large language models on domestic servers, in a rare opening for Chinese technology in India. “You have seen what DeepSeek has done — $5.5 million and a very very powerful model,” IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
SoftBank is in talks to invest up to $25 billion in OpenAI as part of a broader partnership that could see the Japanese conglomerate spend more than $40 billion on AI initiatives with the Microsoft-backed startup, according to Financial Times. The potential investment would make SoftBank OpenAI’s largest single backer, the report said, surpassing Microsoft […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nearly everyone seems to be suddenly freaking out about the rise of DeepSeek. Meta isn’t worried, though.That was CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s message to investors during his company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday. During the Q&A portion of the call with Wall Street analysts, Zuckerberg fielded multiple questions about DeepSeek’s impressive AI models and what the implications are for Meta’s AI strategy. He said that what DeepSeek was able to accomplish with relatively little money has “only strengthened our conviction that this is the right thing to be focused on.”Zuckerberg...
Meta is doubling down on AI spending despite markets briefly panicking over concerns DeepSeek will reduce AI demand.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft’s cloud and AI businesses are doing pretty well — and their impact is being felt across the company. In its Q2 2025 earnings, Microsoft announced revenue of $69.6 billion for the quarter, up 12 percent year-over-year, and net income of $24.1 billion, which is up 10 percent year-over-year.As for the AI business, CEO Satya Nadella says in a statement that it has “surpassed an annual revenue run rate of $13 billion, up 175 percent year-over-year.” The company’s Azure and other cloud services business grew 31 percent year-over-year, a slight decrease from 33 percent YoY...
Believe it or not, the RTX 5090 isn’t much bigger than the pictured RTX 5080.While Nvidia’s RTX 50-series graphics cards weren’t the zaniest devices at CES 2025, they stole the show with their promised groundbreaking performance breakthroughs. The RTX 5070, in particular, made headlines as a card that can supposedly rival an RTX 4090 for just $549. We later learned it uses DLSS 4’s AI-powered multi frame generation to achieve that in supported titles, but that’s a welcome compromise for those who can’t find room in their budget for the beefier 4K-ready GPUs that are going up for...
Microsoft’s close partner and collaborator, OpenAI, might be suggesting that DeepSeek stole its IP and violated its terms of service. But Microsoft still wants DeepSeek’s shiny new models on its cloud platform. Microsoft today announced that R1, DeepSeek’s so-called reasoning model, is available on Azure AI Foundry service, Microsoft’s platform that brings together a number […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft is bringing Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s R1 model to its Azure AI Foundry platform and GitHub today. The R1 model, which has rocked US financial markets this week because it can be trained at a fraction of the cost of leading models from OpenAI, is now part of a model catalog on Azure AI Foundry and GitHub — allowing Microsoft’s customers to integrate it into their AI applications.“One of the key advantages of using DeepSeek R1 or any other model on Azure AI Foundry is the speed at which developers can experiment, iterate, and integrate AI into their workflows,” says By&...
These days, nothing is certain about the tech market or the world at large. Even NVIDIA’s seemingly bulletproof stock took a hammering on Monday, enduring a $589 billion market cap decline after China-based DeepSeek raised questions for investors about more efficient AI models. But Apple’s stock has remained steady ahead of its first quarter earnings […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
If you love nothing more than good data visualization, Google’s latest Sheets update will be right up your alley. The company has begun rolling out an upgrade to the app’s Gemini side panel, a feature it introduced this past summer, to give its AI agent the ability to generate more in-depth insights about the data in your spreadsheets.Tapping the new “Analyze for insights” shortcut in Sheets will prompt Gemini to offer insights on “contextual trends, patterns, and correlations between different variables in your data,” according to Google. The agent will also create charts based on...
In an essay on Wednesday, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, weighed in on the debate over whether Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s success implies that U.S. export controls on AI chips aren’t working. Amodei, who recently made the case for stronger export controls in an op-ed co-written with former U.S. deputy national security advisor Matt […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
American teens have lost their faith in Big Tech, according to a new report from Common Sense Media, a nonprofit offering reviews and ratings for media and technology, which more recently includes AI products. In the study released Wednesday, the organization surveyed over 1,000 teens on whether major technology companies like Google, Apple, Meta, TikTok, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The jury is still out on whether the Chinese AI upstart DeepSeek is a game changer or part of an elaborate plan by its hedge fund parent company to short Nvidia and other tech stocks. Whichever it might be (maybe both?), DeepSeek and its large language model have made some major waves. And now, it’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
UVeye started as a play to scan cars for security threats, but the Israeli startup really hit its stride when its founders realized the AI-powered computer vision systems could perform more typical vehicle inspections. Now, the company is evolving its funding strategy. UVeye announced Wednesday morning a $191 million extension to its 2023 Series D […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Tesla earnings day is upon us — the quarterly check in with one of the world’s largest EV makers and its controversial CEO Elon Musk. Tesla’s fourth-quarter and full-year earnings are expected to be released Wednesday after market close. A webcast, in which Tesla management will answer questions from analysts and retail investors, is scheduled […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hours after Italian authorities requested information from DeepSeek about how the company handles user data, the Chinese AI startup’s app is no longer available in Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. The app has claimed the top spot in the download charts in multiple countries, including in the U.S. where it is at the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nvidia’s new RTX 5080 graphics card isn’t as exciting as I was hoping it would be. While the sleek new Founders Edition redesign dramatically shrinks the size of the card compared to the RTX 4080 and RTX 4080 Super, you’re getting the same 16GB of VRAM and only small performance improvements over the previous generation of cards.The RTX 5080, which arrives January 30th for $999, is about 15 percent faster than the RTX 4080 at 4K without the use of any AI-powered upscaling tricks. While the RTX 4080 managed to beat the RTX 3090, and the RTX...
AI chatbot DeepSeek has taken the world by storm, topping app store charts and sending Silicon Valley and Wall Street into meltdown. An offshoot of Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, DeepSeek’s cost-to-performance ratio makes for impressive reading compared to incumbents such as OpenAI. However, reports have increasingly documented some of the things the AI chatbot is […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Michael Kratsios, who served in the White House and Defense Department in the first Trump administration, is a policy specialist on artificial intelligence.
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek's Android app has taken the No. 1 spot on the Google Play Store, days after the chatbot app clinched the top spot on the App Store.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
SoftBank is negotiating a $500 million investment in Skild AI, a software company building a foundational model for robotics at a $4 billion valuation, Bloomberg and Financial Times reported. The two-year-old company raised its previous funding round of $300 million at a $1.5 billion valuation last July from investors including Jeff Bezos, Lightspeed Venture Partners, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The jury is still out on whether the Chinese AI upstart DeepSeek is a game changer or possibly part of an elaborate plan by its hedge fund parent company to short Nvidia and other tech stocks. Whichever it might be (maybe both?), DeepSeek and its large language model has made some major waves. Now, it’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
David Sacks, Trump’s AI and crypto “czar,” said in an interview on Fox on Tuesday that there’s “substantial evidence” that Chinese AI company DeepSeek “distilled” knowledge from OpenAI’s AI models, a process that Sacks compared to theft. Sacks, who didn’t cite the source of this “evidence,” suggested that DeepSeek used responses from OpenAI models to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Jack Dorsey’s Block has created its own open-source AI agent. Called “codename goose,” the tool allows users to complete tasks using popular large language models.“You can think of Goose as an assistant that is ready to take your instructions, and do the work for you,” Block explains in a blog post. According to the company, the agent can autonomously complete engineering tasks like looking for bugs or making code changes.Users can configure goose to run on their preferred LLM. Iit supports Anthropic, Gemini, OpenAI and others, though the company says it “works best” with...
Attackers explain how an anti-spam defense became an AI weapon.
Safety is often overlooked in the rush to bring humanoid robots to the workplace. As high-profile corporations ranging from retailers like Amazon to carmakers such as Mercedes and BMW have announced humanoid pilots for factories and warehouses, conversations around worker safety are regularly buried beneath industry hype. One Bay Area-robotics firm is hoping to correct […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Barely a week after DeepSeek released its R1 “reasoning” AI model — which sent markets into a tizzy — researchers at Hugging Face are trying to replicate the model from scratch in what they’re calling a pursuit of “open knowledge.” Hugging Face head of research Leandro von Werra and several company engineers have launched Open-R1, a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt called for the United States to ramp up open-source AI efforts to address the rise of DeepSeek in a Washington Post op-ed published Tuesday. Just last year, Schmidt said America was two or three years ahead of China. But DeepSeek’s rise marks “a turning point” for the global AI race, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
DeepSeek, a Chinese AI lab, has Silicon Valley reeling with its R1 reasoning model, which it claims uses far less computing power than those of American AI leaders — and, it’s open source. The DeepSeek app has shot to the top of the App Store charts this week, dethroning ChatGPT. But who is Liang Wenfeng, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It took about a month for the finance world to start freaking out about DeepSeek, but when it did, it took more than half a trillion dollars — or one entire Stargate — off Nvidia’s market cap. It wasn’t just Nvidia, either: Tesla, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft tanked.DeepSeek’s two AI models, released in quick succession, put it on par with the best available from American labs, according to Alexandr Wang, Scale AI CEO. And DeepSeek seems to be working within constraints that mean it trained much more...
A new document examines the opportunities and risks of A.I. and calls for “moral and ethical considerations” to be enshrined in all of its applications.
Quibim, a Spanish startup that’s developing foundational AI models for medical imaging spanning oncology, immunology, neurology, and metabolic disorders, has raised $50 million in a Series A round of funding. The cash injection comes as AI makes ever deeper inroads into healthcare, spanning everything from drug discovery to clinical trials. Quibim, for its part, is […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI has begun offering a version of ChatGPT designed for US government agencies. ChatGPT Gov includes many of the same features found in the Enterprise offering of the chatbot, including access to the company’s GPT-4o model. “By making our products available to the US government, we aim to ensure AI serves the national interest and the public good, aligned with democratic values, while empowering policymakers to responsibly integrate these capabilities to deliver better services to the American people,” OpenAI said in a blog post published Tuesday.Before today, US government employees...
AI dev platform Hugging Face has partnered with third-party cloud vendors including SambaNova to launch Inference Providers, a feature designed to make it easier for devs on Hugging Face to run AI models using the infrastructure of their choice. Other partners involved with the new effort include Fal, Replicate, and Together AI. Hugging Face says […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Obsessed with throwing money and resources at AI in any way they can, the likes of OpenAI, NVIDIA, Google and Amazon all just got a surprise.Out of seemingly nowhere, Chinese AI assistant DeepSeek is suddenly the top-rated free app on Apple’s App Store in the US and elsewhere, beating more familiar names, like ChatGPT. The open-source DeepSeek V3 model reportedly requires far less computing power than its competitors and, depending on who you believe, was developed for under $6 million. Shocks all around — especially for OpenAI and all the billions it has floating around.Focusing on coding...
LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Siddhartha Mukherjee, cancer researcher and author of the book “The Emperor of All Maladies,” have co-founded an AI-powered drug discovery startup, Manas AI. The company, which will initially focus on breast cancer, prostate cancer, and lymphoma, has raised $24.6 million in seed funding from Hoffman, General Catalyst, and Greylock. Manas […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The tech industry's reaction to AI model DeepSeek R1 has been wild. Pat Gelsinger, for instance, is elated and thinks it will make AI better for everyone.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Quartz, the international business news outlet, has been quietly aggregating reporting from other outlets, including TechCrunch, in order to publish AI-generated articles under the byline “Quartz Intelligence Newsroom.” Quartz started publishing simple AI-generated earnings reports months ago, but beginning last week, the outlet moved on to short articles. One of the 18 AI-generated articles published […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, became the talk of the proverbial AI town when it released its R1 model on Friday. R1’s functionality and accuracy compared to its U.S. counterparts, despite using less resources and less compute power, seems like a win for the overall AI industry. But it isn’t necessarily a good news for […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek might be getting the bulk of the tech industry’s attention this week. But one of its top domestic rivals, Alibaba, isn’t sitting idly by. Alibaba’s Qwen team on Monday released a new family of AI models, Qwen2.5-VL, that can perform a number of text and image analysis tasks. The models can […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The number of machine identities is booming thanks to the growth of cloud and AI – and it’s posing real security problems by giving hackers way more entry points than ever before. For example, a 2023 hack of authentication app Okta was caused by exploiting a service account while in 2024, Microsoft disclosed a major […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta is giving its AI assistant a better “memory” in an effort to make the chatbot more useful. The company’s latest AI update allows the assistant to “remember certain details that you share with it in 1:1 chat” and uses your past activity on Facebook and Instagram to make more personalized recommendations.With the change, which will initially be available to the US and Canada, Meta AI will be able to track your preferences based on information you share in chat with it. In a blog post, the company uses the example of food allergies and other dietary restrictions so meta AI will “...
The mobile app for DeepSeek, a Chinese AI lab, skyrocketed to the number-one spot in app stores around the globe this weekend, topping the U.S.-based AI chatbot, ChatGPT. On iOS, DeepSeek is currently the No. 1 free app in the U.S. App Store and 51 other countries, according to mobile app analytics firm Appfigures. The […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The startups and power producers that are betting big on new nuclear are vulnerable to an energy efficient AI model.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge iOS 18.3 is here, and it’s bringing changes to AI notification summaries on your iPhone. In iOS 18.3’s release notes, Apple says it has temporarily disabled notification summaries for news and entertainment apps.The change, which was first spotted in the iOS 18.3 beta, comes after the BBC called out the feature for incorrectly summarizing one of its headlines. If you opt-in to the feature, Apple will notify you once it becomes available again. For Apple devices that support Apple Intelligence (iPhone 15 Pro and later, iPads and Macs with the Apple...
DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that made waves in the AI world last week when it released its open-source R1 model, is pausing new user signups. The company has temporarily paused new user registrations this morning, according to CNBC reporting, due to a cyberattack. Existing users can still access their accounts with no issue. TechCrunch […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta is widely launching the ability for its AI chatbot to “remember” certain details about you, such as your dietary preferences or your interests, the company said in a blog post on Monday. It will then use your past conversations, in addition to details from Facebook and Instagram accounts, to provide more relevant recommendations.Meta first started rolling out a memory feature for its AI chatbot last year, but now it will be available across Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp on iOS and Android in the US and Canada. Though you can tell Meta AI to...
DeepSeek, the viral AI company, has released a new set of multimodal AI models that it claims can outperform OpenAI’s DALL-E 3. The models, which are available for download from the AI dev platform Hugging Face, are a part of a new model family that DeepSeek is calling Janus Pro. They range in size from […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The company said Monday it was temporarily limiting new sign ups due to “large-scale malicious attacks” on its services.
The next flagship AI model from Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, might be nearing release. Over the weekend, several users on X, including reverse engineer Alexey Shabanov, reported gaining access to Grok 3, the successor to xAI’s current model, Grok 2, via X’s Grok chatbot app. Before their access was revoked, the users say that […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta says that it is rolling out improvements to Meta AI, its cross-platform chatbot, including the ability have the bot “remember” details from conversations. In a post on Meta’s official blog, the company said that, in chats with Meta AI on Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp for iOS and Android in the U.S. and Canada, users can […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
If you’ve been following the AI industry, Mistral should be a familiar name by now. The French AI startup with a $6 billion valuation is arguably the biggest AI company working on foundation models in Europe. Alan, on the other hand, isn’t as well known. The health insurance unicorn has been quietly growing to become […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has emerged as a potential challenger to U.S. AI leaders, demonstrating breakthrough models that claim to offer performance comparable to leading chatbots at a fraction of the cost. The company’s mobile app, released in early January, has also topped iPhone charts across major markets including the U.S., UK, and China. Founded […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Perplexity AI has submitted a revised proposal to merge with TikTok, in an arrangement that would give the U.S. government up to 50 percent ownership of the new entity. The Associated Press first reported on the new proposal. A source with knowledge of the bid confirmed to TechCrunch that the AP’s reporting is accurate. The […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In Reid Hoffman’s new book Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right With Our AI Future, the LinkedIn co-founder makes the case that AI can extend human agency — giving us more knowledge, better jobs, and improved lives — rather than reducing it. That doesn’t mean he’s ignoring the technology’s potential downsides. In fact, Hoffman (who […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Legendary musician Paul McCartney is warning against proposed changes to UK copyright law that would allow tech companies to freely train their models on online content unless the copyright holders actively opt out. In excerpts of an interview with the BBC, McCartney said the government needs to do more to protect musicians and other artists. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sam Altman stands next to President Donald Trump during the announcement for Project Stargate. | Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images “All I know is I’m good for my $80 billion.”Rarely does a one-liner so perfectly capture the state of the moment. Here, you have Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella saying he’s “not in the details” about Stargate, the supposedly multi-hundred-billion AI infrastructure project driven by his marquee investment, OpenAI.Nadella not being read in on the nebulous details of Stargate says a lot about how much Microsoft and OpenAI have drifted apart. Microsoft is...
Character AI, a platform that lets users engage in roleplay with AI chatbots, has filed a motion to dismiss a case brought against it by the parent of a teen who committed suicide, allegedly after becoming hooked on the company’s technology. In October, Megan Garcia filed a lawsuit against Character AI in the U.S. District […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Companies spent significantly more lobbying AI issues at the U.S. federal level last year compared to 2023 amid regulatory uncertainty. According to data compiled by OpenSecrets, 648 companies spent on AI lobbying in 2024 versus 458 in 2023, representing a 141% year-over-year increase. Companies like Microsoft supported legislation such as the CREATE AI Act, which […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Companies that want to build AI voice into their products are rushing to work with ElevenLabs, the startup that develops synthetic voice technology like voice cloning and dubbing tools. Now ElevenLabs is turning up the volume on its business with a huge series C raise, just a year after a sizable series A. The New […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Solar farms can be completed far faster than nuclear reactors and natural gas power plants.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took the technology world by surprise on Thursday with the release of Operator, his company’s first AI agent that can act autonomously on the web. But OpenAI is not Altman’s only venture that’s trying to capitalize on the popularity of AI agents. World, a web3 project by Altman and Alex Blania’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company plans to significantly up its capital expenditures this year as it aims to keep pace with rivals in the cutthroat AI space. In a Facebook post Friday, Zuckerberg said that Meta expects to spend $60 billion-$80 billion on capex in 2025, primarily on data centers and growing […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Stargate — the massive infrastructure project to build data centers for OpenAI in the U.S. — lacks a fully developed plan and hasn’t secured funding yet, according to a report from the Financial Times. Backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, Middle East AI fund MGX, and others, Stargate would funnel around $100 billion — and upward of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: The Verge Samsung’s new phones will almost certainly be the most popular Android phones of 2025. They’ll probably also be among the best Android phones of 2025. And yet the Unpacked event this week felt like one of the most boring phone launches... ever. Are we entering a new phase of the smartphone industry, in which companies basically just launch the same thing over and over? Wait a second: have we been in that phase for a while now?On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk a lot about what this year’s Samsung phones mean. The Verge’s Allison Johnson joins David and Nilay to...
The nonprofit Center for AI Safety (CAIS) and Scale AI, a company that provides a number of data labeling and AI development services, have released a challenging new benchmark for frontier AI systems. The benchmark, called Humanity’s Last Exam, includes thousands of crowdsourced questions touching on subjects like mathematics, humanities, and the natural sciences. To make […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
JetBrains, the company behind coding tools like the IntelliJ IDE for Java and Kotlin (and, indeed, the Kotlin language itself), on Thursday launched Junie, a new AI coding agent. This agent, the company says, will be able to handle routine development tasks for when you want to create new applications — and understand the context […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
President Donald Trump on Thursday ordered the formation of a working group to propose federal regulations for “digital assets” — including cryptocurrencies, digital tokens, and stablecoins — and evaluate a national crypto stockpile. Ex-PayPal COO and founder of VC firm Craft Ventures David Sacks, Trump’s pick for crypto an AI ‘czar,’ will lead the working […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Roli just introduced the simply-named Piano at NAMM, a 49-key smart keyboard that's primarily intended for learners, but has some neat bells and whistles for experienced musicians. It features light-up keys across all octaves, to help newbies get a handle on chords. These keys will also glow to show scales, arpeggios and more. It’s basically a larger version of the company’s beloved Piano M teaching keyboard. For veterans, the Roli Piano offers per-key pitch bend and polyphonic aftertouch, which should make for expressive playing. It also tracks fingers in four different ways while playing...
AI-powered search engine Perplexity has launched an “agent,” of sorts, called Perplexity Assistant, which Perplexity says uses reasoning, search, and apps to help with daily tasks. Perplexity Assistant, which is available for Android devices as of Thursday in the Perplexity app, can take “multi-app actions,” the company says, like hailing a ride or searching for […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, says that a “new paradigm of AI architectures” will emerge in the next three to five years, going far beyond the capabilities of existing AI systems. LeCun also predicted that the coming years could be the “decade of robotics,” where advances in AI and robotics combine to unlock a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
What do AI voice agents and self-driving cars have in common? Their performance can be evaluated in the same way, argues Brooke Hopkins, a former tech lead at Waymo. Coval, Hopkins’ new startup, looks to do just that. “When I left Waymo, I realized a lot of these problems that we had at Waymo were […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A team at AI dev platform Hugging Face has released what they’re claiming are the smallest AI models that can analyze images, short videos, and text. The models, SmolVLM-256M and SmolVLM-500M, are designed to work well on “constrained devices” like laptops with under around 1GB of RAM. The team says that they’re also ideal for […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A $2,000 video card for consumers shouldn't exist. The GeForce RTX 5090, like the $1,599 RTX 4090 before it, is more a flex by NVIDIA than anything truly meaningful for most gamers. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said as much when he revealed the GPU at CES 2025, assuming that it'll be for hardcore players who have $10,000 rigs. Personally, I don't know anyone who actually fits that bill, not unless you count parasocial relationships with streamers. (My own setup doesn't even cross $5,000.) But we all know why NVIDIA is hyping up the unattainable RTX 5090: It lets the company show off benchmarks that...
VC investment into Quantum computing declined by 50% last year according to the ‘State of Quantum 2024’ report, dropping from $2.2bn in 2022 to $1.2bn, with funds switching in favour of Generative AI. However, government spending on quantum was predicted to hit $40 billion over the next decade. Now a new VC European fund hopes […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The creators of a new test called “Humanity’s Last Exam” argue we may soon lose the ability to create tests hard enough for A.I. models.
A software engineer has bought the website “OGOpenAI.com” and redirected it to DeepSeek, a Chinese AI lab that’s been making waves in the open source AI world lately. Software engineer Ananay Arora tells TechCrunch that he bought the domain name for “less than a Chipotle meal,” and that he plans to sell it for more. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that the two AI leaders, Sam Altman and Mustafa Suleyman do not care for each other.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Another tidbit just dropped following Wednesday’s Samsung Unpacked event. This one comes courtesy of Adobe, which notes that the new Galaxy S25 line will be the first handsets to support the Content Credentials standard, aimed at labeling AI-generated content as such. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) group — of which Samsung is […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge Google worked with the Israeli military in the immediate aftermath of its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, racing to beat out Amazon to provide AI services, according to company documents obtained by the Washington Post. In the weeks after Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel, employees at Google’s cloud division worked directly with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) — even as the company told both the public and its own employees that Google only worked with civilian government ministries, the documents reportedly show.Weeks after the war began, an employee with...
Samsung’s first Unpacked event of 2025 delivered the Galaxy S25 series — as expected. Although the phones don’t have dramatically upgraded specs, the company stuffed — you guessed it! — more AI into the devices. This latest batch is more context-sensitive and predictive, and some of it even squeezes more out of the phones’ mildly upgraded hardware. Galaxy S25 Ultra Sam Rutherford for Engadget The Galaxy S25 Ultra is still the biggest, best and most expensive of the bunch. It has a 6.9-inch display and a more rounded edge for a “comfortable grip.” Samsung says it’s the “...
Hoping to capitalize on the data center power boom, state-owned utility Santee Cooper is looking for partners to finish construction on two incomplete reactors.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Last year Samsung embraced artificial intelligence with its suite of Galaxy AI features. And while the new S25 Ultra is a bit faster, a little curvier and has a slightly bigger display than before, it’s clear the company’s primary focus was upgrading the software and machine learning capabilities of its top-spec flagship phone. But is that enough? Design: A curvier titanium frame with a handful of quirks Similar to its predecessor, the Galaxy S25 Ultra features a titanium frame. However, for 2025, Samsung wanted to buck tradition by making the phone a bit less boxy. So instead of a totally...
Billionaire Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are fighting on X about Stargate, the enormous infrastructure project to build data centers for OpenAI across the U.S. Stargate, announced Tuesday during a press conference at the White House, would funnel as much as $500 billion from investors including SoftBank and Middle East AI fund MGX […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Anthropic has reportedly raised around $1 billion from Google as the AI company looks to deliver a number of major product updates this year. First reported by the Financial Times, Google’s fresh investment brings the tech giant’s total stake in Anthropic to around $3 billion. Google poured $2 billion into Anthropic late last year. Anthropic, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Demand for generative AI help drive consumer spending on apps to $150 billion globally in 2024, up 13% from the prior year. According to an annual “State of Mobile” report from app intelligence provider Sensor Tower (which acquired Data.ai, the original report’s author, last March), AI apps saw a surge of interest over the past […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google has decided to invest another billion into Anthropic, four sources told the Financial Times, bringing its total sunk cost to more than three billion dollars. Both companies have declined to comment. Google uses Anthropic’s Claude AI models on Vertex AI, an AI-powered development platform.Amazon has also invested four billion into Anthropic to integrate its Claude AI models into the next generation of Alexa speakers. Other sources say Anthropic is also in talks with Lightspeed Venture Partners to raise another two billion. This investment would make Anthropic worth 60 billion. Even so...
Google has been a much larger facilitator of tools to Israel during its war with Hamas than previously disclosed. A new report from The Washington Post found that Google employees have repeatedly worked with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Israel’s Defense Ministry (IDM) to expand the government's access to AI tools. In 2021, Google entered into a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government, titled Nimbus, alongside Amazon.Internal documents show that Google employees repeatedly requested greater access to the company's AI technology on behalf of Israel...
I want to use this feature just to side-eye Gemini. | Image: Google Google is announcing a variety of classroom and accessibility-focused ChromeOS features today, and one of the standouts is being able to control your computer with your head and facial expressions. The feature — aimed at those with motor impairments — was first announced in early December, but it’s now rolling out to more users with compatible Chromebooks (Google recommends 8GB of RAM or more).This isn’t Google’s first foray into the face-as-a-cursor space. It previously made an open-source AI accessibility tool for...
London startup Vertice has made a name for itself over the years in the very crowded world of expense management with a focus on applying AI to optimize a single area where businesses, collectively, are currently sinking hundreds of billions of dollars in IT budgets that are exceeding $5 trillion annually: software and cloud spend. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft was once the exclusive provider of data center infrastructure for OpenAI to train and run its AI models. No longer. As part of Stargate, the company’s massive new infrastructure deal with SoftBank, Oracle, and others, Microsoft says that it has signed a new agreement with OpenAI that gives it “first right of refusal” on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI says that it will team up with Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and with Oracle, along with others, to build multiple data centers for AI in the U.S. The joint venture, called The Stargate Project, will begin with a large data center project in Texas and eventually expand to other states. The companies expect to commit $100 […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Scale AI's CEO Alexandr Wang has five recommendations for President Trump to keep the US ahead of China on AI.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta’s Reality Labs is expanding its lineup of AI smart glasses with a new pair of Oakley-branded spectacles targeted at athletes, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Bloomberg reports the new smart glasses, with which Meta seeks to capitalize on the Ray-Ban Meta’s success, will be based on Oakley’s Sphaera glasses, and will shift the camera […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Perplexity on Tuesday launched an API service called Sonar, allowing enterprises and developers to build the startup’s generative AI search tools into their own applications. “While most generative AI features today have answers informed only by training data, this limits their capabilities,” Perplexity wrote in a blog post. “To optimize for factuality and authority, APIs […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images In his executive actions on day one of his presidency, Donald Trump rescinded an executive order Joe Biden signed in 2023 to establish safety guidelines for generative AI.The Biden-era order required developers of large AI models like OpenAI‘s GPT lineup to share the results of safety tests with the US government. It also directed the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop standards for safety testing, And it tasked other federal agencies with assessing any potential chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, cybersecurity...
Alongside its big public push for AI investments, the U.K. government is also playing virtual card to catapult itself into the 21st century. Today it announced plans to launch a secure digital wallet to manage government-issued credentials, alongside a chatbot — built in collaboration with OpenAI — to interact with the main GOV.UK portal. Today, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
French AI lab, Mistral, is working toward an initial public offering, co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch said Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Mistral is “not for sale,” Mensch said, adding that the company plans to open an office in Singapore to focus on the Asia-Pacific region and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Samsung is set to announce its Galaxy S25 phones at its Galaxy Unpacked event tomorrow, January 22nd at 1PM ET. The event typically focuses on its next smartphones and software features, which you can bet includes lots of AI, but there should be some other things here and there, too. Here’s what we’re expecting and how you can watch along.How you can watch Galaxy UnpackedSamsung will stream the event on YouTube, its website, and its newsroom page, and we’ll post about the announcements as they happen right here on The Verge. We expect the company to...
During his first day in office, President Donald Trump revoked a 2023 executive order signed by former President Joe Biden that sought to reduce the potential risks AI poses to consumers, workers, and national security. Biden’s executive order directed the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to author guidance that helps companies […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A week after the U.K. government announced a sweeping plan to make big investments into AI, it’s laying out more details around how this will take shape in the public sector. On the agenda: AI assistants to speed up public services; data sharing deals across siloed departments; and a new set of AI tools — […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI may be close to releasing an AI tool that can take control of your PC and perform actions on your behalf. Tibor Blaho, a software engineer with a reputation for accurately leaking upcoming AI products, claims to have uncovered evidence of OpenAI’s long-rumored Operator tool. Publications including Bloomberg have previously reported on Operator, which […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Friend, a startup creating a $99, AI-powered necklace designed to be treated as a digital companion, has delayed its first batch of shipments until Q3. Friend had planned to ship devices to pre-order customers in Q1. But according to co-founder and CEO Avi Schiffman, that’s no longer feasible. “As much as I would liked to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has released an open version of DeepSeek-R1, its so-called reasoning model, that it claims performs as well as OpenAI’s o1 on certain AI benchmarks. R1 is available from the AI dev platform Hugging Face under an MIT license, meaning it can be used commercially without restrictions. According to DeepSeek, R1 beats […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The general hype around all things AI is not lifting all boats: certain startups continue to struggle and are looking for exits. In one of the latest developments, TechCrunch has heard from a reliable source that Metropolis, an AI-powered parking platform, is buying Oosto, the controversial computer vision company that used to be known as […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Top LLMs performed poorly on a high-level history test, a new paper has found.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: The Verge Microsoft is testing AI-powered Windows search in a new dev channel build for Windows 11 Insider testers. Announced in October, it uses semantic indexing to let users search for local files using more casual language. Like other Microsoft AI features, you’ll need a Copilot Plus PC to use it.The feature applies whether you’re using search boxes in Settings, File Explorer, or the taskbar. And you don’t need to be connected to the internet for it to work, thanks to the NPU chips on Copilot Plus computers. For now, AI search is limited to Windows settings and files with image...
With a TikTok ban looming in the United States, Perplexity AI is the latest bidder hoping to give the video app a new corporate home. CNBC first reported on Perplexity’s interest. A source with knowledge of the offer confirmed to TechCrunch that Perplexity (whose CEO Aravind Srinivas is pictured above) has submitted a bid to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Federal Trade Commission said in a staff report issued Friday that there are potential competitive issues in partnerships between big tech companies and generative AI developers — specifically, Microsoft’s backing of OpenAI and Amazon and Alphabet/Google’s partnerships with Anthropic. “The FTC’s report sheds light on how partnerships by big tech firms can create lock-in, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Distracted driving is one of the leading causes of car accidents and a major reason why auto insurance premiums are expected to increase in 2025. For commercial fleets, that’s a nightmare. But for California-based startup Netradyne, it’s a tailwind. Netradyne provides fleet owners, including big names like Amazon, with AI-enabled dashcams that collect vehicle data […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Read.cv, a social media platform for professionals that competed with LinkedIn, has been acquired by AI-powered search engine Perplexity. As part of the deal, Read.cv will begin to wind down operations today. Users will be able to export their data, including their profiles, posts, and messages, until May 16. “We’ve long admired Perplexity and believe […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Character AI, a startup that lets users chat with different AI-powered characters, is now testing games on its desktop and mobile web apps to increase engagement on its platform. The games are available to Character AI’s paid subscribers and a limited set of users on the free plan. For this initial release, the company developed […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple is pausing AI notification summaries for news and entertainment apps after facing backlash for generating inaccurate news alerts. In addition, the company is introducing changes to notification summaries as a whole to allow for greater transparency. With the latest round of developer previews for iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3, Apple is disabling […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Goldman Sachs is one of the biggest investment banker “book runners” for IPOs – where banks are paid many millions of dollars for each listing they underwrite. Yet CEO David Solomon told attendees of the Cisco AI Summit in Palo Alto that startups should reconsider the idea of going public, reports the Financial Times. Solomon […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Distracted driving is a leading cause of car crashes — and rising auto insurance premiums, which are expected to increase in 2025. For commercial fleets, that’s an expensive challenge to navigate. But for California-based startup Netradyne, it’s a tailwind. Netradyne provides fleet owners, including big names like Amazon, with AI-enabled dashcams that collect vehicle data […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears to have used YouTube and its battle to take down pirated content to defend his own company’s use of a data set containing copyrighted e-books to train AI models, newly released snippets of his deposition reveals. The deposition, which was part of a complaint submitted to the court by plaintiffs’ […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Chinese firms continue to release AI models that rival the capabilities of systems developed by OpenAI and other U.S.-based AI companies. This week, MiniMax, an Alibaba- and Tencent-backed startup that has raised around $850 million in venture capital and is valued at more than $2.5 billion, debuted three new models: MiniMax-Text-01, MiniMax-VL-01, and T2A-01-HD. MiniMax-Text-01 […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The news comes as tech companies ramp up their AI ambitions, adding data centers at a breakneck pace and boosting demand for power.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The AI embedded in a popular e-reader was spouting Chinese propaganda. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI is getting into the local news game. Newsletter-based media organization Axios announced a partnership with OpenAI on Wednesday. As part of this three-year deal, the AI giant will fund Axios’ expansion of its local newsletters into four new cities: Pittsburgh; Kansas City, Missouri; Boulder, Colorado; and Huntsville, Alabama. While OpenAI has inked content-sharing and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Days after pushing for sweeping AI chip export restriction, the Biden administration has added an additional 14 Chinese companies to its restricted trade list. This brings the full list up to 25 names, according to reporting from The Associate Press. Sophgo is, perhaps, the highest profile addition. An entity of Bitmain, the firm sparked international […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
François Chollet, an influential AI researcher, is launching a new startup that aims to build frontier AI systems with novel designs. The startup, Ndea, will consist of an AI research and science lab, and seek to “develop and operationalize” AGI. AGI, which stands for “artificial general intelligence,” typically refers to AI that can perform any […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. This week was something of a swan song for the Biden administration. On Monday, the White House announced sweeping new restrictions on exporting AI chips — restrictions that tech giants, including Nvidia, loudly criticized. (Nvidia’s business […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google announced on Wednesday that all AI features in Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Meet are now available to Workspace customers at no extra charge, though the plan will see a $2 per month increase per user. This change simplifies access to Workplace AI tools, including email summaries, automated note-taking, chatting with the Gemini bot, and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
According to some of the latest statistics, employers are swamped by job applications. In the UK alone, employers running graduate training schemes received an average of 140 applications for each job in 2024, 59 per cent more than in 2023, according to the Institute of Student Employers. And despite some trepidations amongst a few recruiters, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
If you know anyone in the job market right now, then you’ve probably heard stories about just how tough it can be to even land an interview. Part of the problem, according to LinkedIn, is that too many people are applying for jobs they aren’t actually qualified for, which makes it harder for good candidates to stand out.The company is hoping its new AI-powered “Job Match” feature can help address some of that disconnect. The feature, which is beginning to roll out today, uses AI to provide detailed summaries alongside job listings that let users know how qualified they actually are for...
The U.S. Department of Commerce announced a final rule Tuesday that would ban the sale or import of connected vehicles from China and Russia due to national security concerns. The rule would also bar Chinese car companies, such as WeRide and Pony AI, from testing self-driving cars on U.S. roads. “China is trying to dominate […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Executives and researchers leading Meta’s AI efforts obsessed over beating OpenAI’s GPT-4 model while developing Llama 3, according to internal messages unsealed by a court on Tuesday in one of the company’s ongoing AI copyright cases, Kadrey v. Meta. “Honestly… Our goal needs to be GPT-4,” said Meta’s VP of Generative AI, Ahmad Al-Dahle, in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
NotebookLM's viral AI podcast hosts sounded annoyed at human callers and required "friendliness tuning," Google says.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
ChatGPT has had support for voice conversations since the end of 2023, but if you’re new to OpenAI’s chatbot, figuring out how to converse with it can be tricky since there are a couple of ways to go about it. In this guide, I'll explain the main differences between ChatGPT's two voice modes and how to use both of them. What is ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode?As of the writing of this article, OpenAI offers two different ways of interacting with ChatGPT using your voice: “Standard” and “Advanced.” The former is available to all users, with usage counting against one’s message...
With less than a week left in office, President Joe Biden is not done leaving his mark on the AI industry. President Biden issued an executive order on Tuesday that will allow private sector AI companies to lease federal sites owned by the Department of Defense and Department of Energy in order to build AI […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple has joined a consortium creating next-gen technology to link together chips in AI data centers. The consortium, the Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium, is developing a standard called UALink, which connects the AI accelerator chips found within a growing number of server farms. As of Tuesday, Apple is a member of the consortium’s board, along […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI has quietly removed language endorsing “politically unbiased” AI from one of its recently published policy documents. In the original draft of its “economic blueprint” for the AI industry in the U.S., OpenAI said that AI models “should aim to be politically unbiased by default.” A new draft, made available Monday, deletes that phrasing. When […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Data centers are expected to continue growing at a breakneck pace, doubling their power demand by 2029, according to a new report from JLL. The industry’s expansion, fueled by the rapid growth of AI alongside the continued expansion of cloud-based services, is testing the limits of the energy sector. Some experts think that half of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Months after announcing a $3 million pre-seed, the AI networking startup Boardy is back with an $8 million seed announcement led by Creandum. The company connects users with other people when they call an AI agent who chats with them for a bit and then connects them with others it thinks they ought to know. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Alex Dewez, a partner at 20VC, just released its highly anticipated State of the French tech ecosystem report. This is a nice followup to Atomico’s State of European Tech report, with a more granular view on French startups in particular. As a reminder, the bottom line of Atomico’s report is that European startups raised $45 […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Competition and Markets Authority — the U.K.’s antitrust watchdog — is wasting no time in lodging its first official investigation of 2025 under its new rules that came into effect this month. It’s looking into the market dominance of Google in Search, including the new work it’s doing in AI search as well as […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft has created a new engineering org aimed at accelerating AI infrastructure and software development within the company. According to Bloomberg, Jay Parikh, previously VP and global head of engineering at Meta, will lead the new division. He’ll report to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and oversee groups including the company’s AI platform and developer teams. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI on Monday published what it’s calling an “economic blueprint” for AI: a living document that lays out policies the company thinks it can build on with the U.S. government and its allies. The blueprint, which includes a forward from Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s VP of global affairs, asserts that the U.S. must act to attract […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Mercedes-Benz’s MBUX Virtual Assistant will use Google Gemini on the cloud. | Image: Mercedes-Benz / Google Google Cloud’s new Automotive AI Agent platform promises to “continue conversations and reference information” throughout users’ drives, and the first car announced with it is the new Mercedes CLA. That car has the next-generation MB.OS operating system with an upgraded MBUX Virtual Assistant. When Mercedes revealed it at CES in 2024, it didn’t say which company’s LLM it was running on. Meanwhile, the existing MBUX Voice Assistant system that could handle about 20 commands...
With a week left in office, President Joe Biden introduced a new set of guidelines and restrictions for exporting U.S.-made AI chips. On Monday the administration announced its Interim Final Rule on AI diffusion. This ruling is meant to “provide clarity to allied and partner nations about how they can benefit from AI” and streamline […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amid signs of a stagnating economy, the UK is going all-in on AI. On Monday, British Minister Keir Starmer announced a new AI Opportunities Action Plan. At the center of the initiative are “AI Growth Zones,” which the government plans to establish in de-industrialized areas throughout the country.In these areas, the Labour government will fast-track planning approvals for data centers and offer better access to the national energy grid. Starmer said the UK’s first AI Growth Zone would be established in Culham, Oxfordshire, home to the country’s Atomic Energy Authority. More zones will...
Financial services firm Moody’s announced on Monday that it has agreed to acquire Cape Analytics, a geospatial AI startup, for an undisclosed sum. The deal, which is expected to close in Q1, subject to customary closing conditions, will give Moody’s access to Cape’s geospatial AI analytics technology for insurance underwriting. With the tech, Moody’s plans […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Healthcare is proving to be one of the more lucrative industries when it comes to building AI solutions to speed up how work is carried out across clinical, research and administrative operations. Today comes one of the latest examples of how that is playing out in terms of venture funding. Qventus, a startup that builds […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The US government has announced a radical plan to control exports of cutting-edge AI technology to most nations.
Coreweave, the cloud computing company that provides companies with AI compute resources, has formally opened its first two data centers in the U.K. — its first outside its domestic U.S. market. CoreWeave opened its European headquarters in London last May, and announced plans to open two data centers as part of a £1 billion ($1.25 […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The maker of ChatGPT hopes to spur investment from the Middle East and avoid strict regulations on the development of new technologies.
In 2023, the U.K. made a big song and dance about the need to consider the harms of AI, giving itself a leading role in the wider conversation around AI safety. Now, it’s whistling a very different tune: today, the government announced a sweeping plan and a big bet on AI investments to develop what […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
CES 2025 has come to a close — Friday was the final day of the show — and team Engadget has departed Las Vegas. Our reporters and editors spent the week scouring endless carpeted convention halls of the CES show floor, braving lines of chain smokers, overcoming nasty colds and sore ankles and fielding thousands of emails a day to find the best and most credible products at the show. It was quite the challenge, as the landscape was dotted with countless contenders. As expected, the vast majority of things we saw this CES had an AI component, with a noticeable uptick in AR glasses...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon will be winding down its Prime Try Before You Buy program, which let Prime members try on clothes before paying for them, reports The Information. It will shutter on January 31st, according to a banner at the top of the service’s landing page.Amazon spokesperson Maxine Tagay said in a statement emailed to The Verge that the company is discontinuing the service because it only worked for a “limited number of items” and customers have been “increasingly using our new AI-powered features” to decide what to buy. Tagay gave examples like...
Microsoft has taken legal action against a group the company claims intentionally developed and used tools to bypass the safety guardrails of its cloud AI products. According to a complaint filed by the company in December in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, a group of unnamed 10 defendants allegedly used […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI companies across the globe raised more than $100 billion in venture capital dollars in 2024, according to Crunchbase data, an increase of more than 80% compared to 2023. It encompasses nearly a third of the total VC dollars invested in 2024. That’s a lot of money funneling into a lot of AI companies. The […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hugging Face, the AI developer platform, has settled a lawsuit against Korean AI startup FriendliAI, which had accused Hugging Face of infringing on one of its patents. Per a filing on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Delaware, FriendliAI reached a “confidential agreement” with Hugging Face on January 8, and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge When Elon Musk launched his own AI startup, xAI, he touted a key advantage over his competitors: access to the vast trove of data from his newly acquired social media platform Twitter. By implementing new API fees on the network he quickly renamed X, Musk locked out other AI companies, maintaining exclusive access for his own models. And he began using X’s millions of users to test the results.Musk has been using this distribution channel since xAI launched its first version of the Grok large language model, adding features like trending story...
National climate adviser Ali Zaidi | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Sure, President-elect Donald Trump is probably going to try to blow up efforts to tackle climate change as soon as he steps into office. There still isn’t enough renewable energy available to reach US climate goals or even meet skyrocketing electricity demand from AI. And time is running out to spend down climate funds from the Inflation Reduction Act before the Trump administration can attempt to claw it back. Despite it all, Joe Biden’s top adviser on climate change, Ali Zaidi, isn’t sweating it. He’s...
Hippocratic AI, a startup building AI solutions that can handle non-diagnostic patient-facing tasks, secured a massive $141 million Series B at a valuation of $1.64 billion led by Kleiner Perkins, the company announced Thursday. The funding comes nine months after Hippocratic AI raised a $53 million round from General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz and five […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nvidia unveiled a prototype AI avatar at CES 2025 that lives on your PC’s desktop. The AI assistant, R2X, looks like a video game character, and it can help you navigate apps on your computer. The R2X avatar is rendered and animated using Nvidia’s AI models, and users can run the avatar on popular LLMs […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Grok, the AI assistant that's for some reason baked into X, is now available as a standalone app. Like the version that exists as a tab on the social media platform, the Grok app can be used to generate images, summarize text and answer questions, with a conversational tone xAI, the AI assistant's creator, calls "humorous and engaging."The app was first tested with a limited set of users in December 2024, right around the same time X debuted a free tier of Grok that's available to anyone. Prior to that, you needed to pay at least $8 a month for X Premium to have the privilege of using the AI....
CES 2025 is coming to a close, and team Engadget is ready to leave Las Vegas. Our reporters and editors have scoured endless carpeted convention halls, braved lines of chain smokers and fielded thousands of emails a day to find the best and most credible products at the show.As expected, the vast majority of things we saw this CES had an AI component, with a noticeable uptick in AR glasses, hearing aid earbuds, solar-powered tech, emotional support robots and robot vacuums. Apparently people really like robovacs that can pick up socks. Our team was encouraged to see more growth in tech built to...
TripAdvisor has entered into a partnership with Perplexity to offer a human touch to the AI company's hotel information. Through this deal, listings for hotel searches on Perplexity will now include summaries of information from TripAdvisor explaining why they were included in the results. Ratings, perks and images from TripAdvisor will also appear on Perplexity."From the Tripadvisor side, they provide an up-to-date trustworthy source of information that we sync regularly," Perplexity cofounder Johnny Ho told The Verge. "On the fly, we’ll index and retrieve the right results depending on the...
As it looks to accelerate the pace of its AI development, Google is further streamlining the teams building its AI services, platforms, and tools. On Thursday, Logan Kilpatrick, who leads product for Google’s AI Studio developer platform, said in a post on X that Google’s AI Studio team and the team developing the API for […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Scale AI just got hit by another lawsuit alleging widespread wage violations and misclassification of its workers.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Counsel for plaintiffs in a copyright lawsuit filed against Meta allege that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave the green light to the team behind the company’s Llama AI models to use a data set of pirated ebooks and articles for training. The case, Kadrey v. Meta, is one of many against tech giants developing AI […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google is testing a new “Daily Listen” feature that automatically generates a podcast based on your Discover feed. The company confirmed to TechCrunch that Daily Listen is a personalized AI-powered audio experience that is designed to help you stay up to date on the topics you care about. The feature is currently rolling out on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Samsung made a bunch of announcements at CES 2025, including a slew of new laptops and TVs, but as to be expected, the company will save some of the biggest news for its own event. Samsung will host its first Galaxy Unpacked event of the year on January 22, 2025 at 1 PM ET, where it will likely show off the latest in Galaxy AI and the new Galaxy devices it runs on. The event will take place in San Jose, and like previous years, you can reserve the company's new gear in advance (and even before it's officially announced) for $50 off and the chance to win a $5,000 Samsung gift card. That's on top...
Innovaccer has raised a $275M Series F from investors including B Capital Group, Banner Health, Danaher Ventures, Generation IM, Kaiser Permanente, and M12.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: VideoLAN The popular open-source VLC video player was demonstrated on the floor of CES 2025 with automatic AI subtitling and translation, generated locally and offline in real-time. Parent organization VideoLAN shared a video on Tuesday in which president Jean-Baptiste Kempf shows off the new feature, which uses open-source AI models to generate subtitles for videos in several languages. “At the same time we have automatic translation working to translate the subtitles to your own language,” Kempf says, with more than 100 languages planned for support. “What’s important is that...
Image: The Verge The AI search engine Perplexity is launching an integration with Tripadvisor that will add more information about hotels. Now, when you search for places to stay, Perplexity will present you with a neatly organized list of hotels, alongside summaries of why it chose them using information sourced from Tripadvisor.In an example shared by Perplexity, a search for “hotels in Madrid for a business trip” yields a result for Hotel Regina, which the search engine says you should choose “if you want a centrally located hotel in Madrid with exceptional service and a rich breakfast...
French startup Rounded believes AI voice agents are going to become the default way customers interact with companies, so instead of building AI voice agents that are ready to use, the company is building an orchestration platform that lets companies build their own voice agent. Rounded started off working on a web3 product before shifting […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
VLC media player, the popular open-source software developed by nonprofit VideoLAN, has topped 6 billion downloads worldwide and teased an AI-powered subtitle system. The new feature automatically generates real-time subtitles — which can then also be translated in many languages — for any video using open-source AI models that run locally on users’ devices, eliminating […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge Google is testing an experimental AI feature that creates a personalized podcast using your Search and Discover feed history. The Daily Listen feature in Google’s Search Labs is rolling out to Android and iOS users in the US according to 9to5Google, and works similarly to the Audio Overviews feature for Google’s NotebookLM project.Daily Listen references search data and Discover feed interactions to assess which news articles would be of most interest to the user, and then summarizes those stories and topics into a roughly five-minute audio overview. It provides a...
It’s 2025, and companies still don’t know what AI is good for. That’s the impression I got from this year’s CES, which featured AI-powered kitchen appliances, baby cribs, and other products that really weren’t calling for AI. See: Spicerr, an “intelligent” touchscreen-equipped spice dispenser that learns your taste as you cook to recommend unique recipes. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Surface Laptop 7 with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processor. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Microsoft is preparing for a “major” Surface announcement later this month. The software giant has started teasing “a major announcement from Surface for Business” this week in a LinkedIn post spotted by Windows Central. The announcement will be made during Microsoft’s AI tour in New York City on January 30th.Microsoft is rumored to be launching Intel-powered variants of its Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11 devices soon, and a prototype of a Surface Laptop 7 with Intel’s Lunar...
PUBG: Battlegrounds will add non-player characters powered by NVIDIA ACE generative AI. These PUBG Allies are being dubbed Co-Playable Characters, and they can have real-time conversations with a player about what's happening in a match. They can also adapt their strategies and gameplay to work with the player's style. Krafton, the battle royale's publisher, demoed this technology at CES 2025."We will continue to innovate user experiences by integrating CPC into our games and aim to establish it as a benchmark for the gaming industry," said Kangwook Lee, head of Krafton's deep...
AMD's Ryzen AI Max chips came as a huge surprise at CES 2025. They're basically super-powered versions of the company's Ryzen AI hardware with up to 16 CPU cores and 50 RDNA 3.5 graphics cores, alongside a pool of as much as 128GB integrated RAM. AMD claims the Ryzen AI Max chips will deliver up to 2.6 times faster 3D rendering than Intel's Core Ultra 9 288V, as well as 1.4 times better graphics performance.Squint a bit, and you might think AMD was taking a bit of inspiration from Apple Silicon, with its powerful CPU cores, graphics and unified memory. But according to VP Joe...
Last April, Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, teased a mysterious “Unhinged Mode” for X’s AI-powered chatbot, Grok. Nearly a year later, xAI, the Musk-owned company behind Grok, has updated an FAQ page on its website that sheds light on the new mode. Grok in Unhinged Mode will provide responses “intended to be objectionable, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Former Google engineer and influential AI researcher François Chollet is co-founding a nonprofit to help develop benchmarks that’ll probe AI for “human-level” intelligence. The nonprofit, the ARC Prize Foundation, will be led by Greg Kamradt, an ex-Salesforce engineering director and founder of the AI product studio Leverage. Kamradt will serve as president and a member […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
CES is filled with wild and wacky curios, to be sure, but there are also plenty of good old-fashioned laptops. Every year the big chipmakers announce new products and the big computer manufacturers unveil new laptops that take advantage of updated CPUs and GPUs. All told, companies announced nearly two dozen upcoming laptops at this year's conference. Some are bulky beasts made for gaming, while others are thin beauties intended for portability. The vast majority of them are filled to the brim with the AI tools that everyone loves so very much. Here are all of the laptops that piqued our...
The "AC" in AC Future stands for Amy and Cindy, founder Arthur Qin's two daughters. That's just one of the bits of info I gained at the company's CES event in which we got a first look at the new AC Future Ai-TH transformable home. This is yet another nattily appointed answer to the housing crisis we've seen on the 2025 show floor. It comes in three models: a deliverable pod (Ai-THu), a pullable trailer (Ai-THt) and a road-ready EV RV (Ai-THd). Press and prospective buyers got to tour the EV prototype this week (but we had to take our shoes off first). Amy Skorheim / Engadget Thanks to...
Like anything in life, the secret to becoming Steph Curry or Sabrina Ionescu is practice, practice, and more practice. You practice when it’s too hot, too cold, you’re tired, or you’re sick. Finding a willing one-on-one partner through all of that is, however, another question entirely. The good news is that later this year, you […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Day two of the biggest tech event of the year is well underway and CES 2025 continues to deliver a long list of new gadgets, tech, concepts, and AI-powered devices tempting you to upgrade.It’s a lot to keep up with, so we’ll help you catch up. Below are some of the standout gadgets of the show so far. Of course, there’s still a lot more out there and a lot more to go. You can catch up on all of The Verge’s coverage of the show here.Nvidia Project Digits personal AI supercomputer Image: Nvidia Powered by Nvidia’s new GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip...
Tonal, the company behind the smart home gym of the same name, is now launching the Tonal 2. This machine is an upgrade over its predecessor, which we tested some years ago. Two years ago, Tonal laid off 35 percent of its workforce, but the company seems to be doing much better now.According to the company, Tonal 2 has improved hardware, including a better camera that uses AI to “analyze 500 data points per second” and an upgraded adaptive weight system. The latter can now let users lift up to 250 pounds. Tonal 2 also comes with new Aero HIIT workouts you can follow to combine cardio and...
San Francisco startup Based Hardware announced the launch of a new AI wearable, Omi, to boost productivity during the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas this week. The device can be worn as a necklace where Omi’s AI assistant can be activated by saying “Hey Omi.” The startup also claims Omi can be attached to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
I don't want or need 99 percent of the stuff on display at CES — don't get me wrong, most of what we're seeing this week is impressive in one way or another, but nothing had seemed like a necessary addition to my life until I happened upon the Copper Charlie, a battery-equipped induction range that plugs directly into a standard 120V outlet. Yes, among the robots, future cars, bionic exoskeletons and AI everything, the thing that's exited me most is a stove (OK, the fluffball robot is pretty great). Up until a few years ago, I had no idea natural gas cooktops were bad for your...
Seriously: would you wear something like this on your face if it could really read your mind? | Image: Omi Nik Shevchenko closes his eyes and starts to focus intently. He’s spent the last half hour or so telling me about his new product, an $89 wearable called Omi that can listen to, summarize, and get information out of your conversations. Now he wants to show me the future. So his eyes are closed, and he’s focusing all his attention on the round white puck stuck to his left temple with medical tape. (Did I mention he’s had this thing on his face the whole time? It’s very distracting...
Mythic Quest’s third season ended on a hopeful note as the Playpen team hunkered down to start developing an all-new expansion, but all that hard work looks like it’s just going to lead to more headaches judging from the show’s latest season 4 trailer.While Mythic Quest’s new season will find Dana (Imani Hakim), Jo (Jessie Ennis), and Brad (Dani Pudi) basking in the success of their Cozy Galaxy project, things are going to be a bit tougher for Ian (Rob McElhenney) and Poppy (Charlotte Nicdao) as they try to figure out how keep players coming back to Playpen. In the trailer, David (David...
Ahead of the holidays, Microsoft said it was upgrading the AI model behind Bing Image Creator, the AI-powered image editing tool built into the company’s Bing search engine. Microsoft promised that the new model — the latest version of OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 model, code-named “PR16” — would allow users to create images “twice as fast […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Samsung’s Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge It looks like Samsung is finally ready to roll out a paid subscription for its AI-powered smartphones, but it might not look like what we were expecting.According to ETNews, Samsung Electronics vice chairman Han Jong-hee has confirmed that the company’s AI Subscription Club, which launched last December for some of Samsung’s home appliances in South Korea, will soon roll out to both Galaxy phones and the upcoming Ballie AI robot.“We will apply the subscription service to Galaxy smartphones starting next month...
Surprising no one, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang isn't too worried about a future filled with robots and superintelligent AI. In fact, he welcomes it. During a CES Q&A session with media and analysts, Huang was asked if he thought intelligent robots would ultimately side with humans, or against them. "With the humans, because we're going to build them that way," he replied confidently."The idea of superintelligence is not unusual," Huang continued. "I have a company with many many people who are superintelligent in their field of work. I'm surrounded by superintelligence. And I prefer to...
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the performance of his company’s AI chips is advancing faster than historical rates set by Moore’s Law, the rubric that drove computing progress for decades. “Our systems are progressing way faster than Moore’s Law,” said Huang in an interview with TechCrunch on Tuesday, the morning after he delivered a keynote […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On Tuesday, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing division, said that it plans to invest “at least” $11 billion in Georgia to expand its infrastructure to support various cloud computing and AI technologies. AWS estimates that its investment will create roughly 550 jobs in the state. “AWS is proud to expand our operations in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Govee, maker of all manner of smart lights, has a new product it showed off at CES 2025 that creates a quirky new product category. The Gaming Pixel Light displays still or animated pixel art set to 8-bit soundtracks. In addition, it can also display weather updates, sports schedules, Bitcoin prices and so on with its retro display.But it wouldn’t be a CES gadget without AI something or other stuffed inside: perhaps unsurprisingly, the Gaming Pixel Light also has a companion app that lets you generate AI pixel art from text prompts. We got to take a look at both the Pixel Light and a Govee x...
At CES 2025 in Las Vegas, Panasonic unveiled its upcoming digital assistant, Umi, which offers families a personalized, AI-powered wellness coach. Created in partnership with Anthropic, Umi uses the Claude AI model to help families “care, coordinate, and connect” with each other, the company said. More specifically, this involves an AI assistant that focuses on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Uber will use Nvidia’s new generative world model simulation tool, Cosmos, and cloud-based AI supercomputing platform, DGX Cloud, to support the development of autonomous vehicle technology, the companies announced at CES 2025. Cosmos is being marketed to robotics and autonomy companies as a tool that generates physics-based videos from a variety of inputs, including 9,000 […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The data centers will primarily support AI and cloud technologies, the president-elect said.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The U.K. is forging ahead with plans to make the act of creating sexually explicit “deepfake” images a specific criminal offence. A deepfake refers to manipulated media, often video or audio, created using AI to make someone appear to say or do something they didn’t. The U.K. had already made sharing — and the threat […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft plans to invest an additional $3 billion to scale its cloud and AI business in India, the software giant’s chief executive said Tuesday. This is a developing story. More to follow…© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In this bonus episode, Cherlynn and Devindra discuss the latest innovations in robot vacuums, new AI PC hardware from AMD and Intel, and Dell's decision to nuke its PC brands in favor of Apple-esque "Dell Pro" and "Dell Pro Max" branding. (Note: We recorded this episode before NVIDIA announced its new RTX 5000 GPUs, but we'll have more to say on that soon!)Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!...
Nvidia has spent the last two years showing off its digital “ACE” characters that can have in-game conversations with you using generative AI. But at CES 2025, the company is taking the ACE characters a step further by showing how they can be “autonomous game characters” — including, sometime this year, a teammate to help you get a chicken dinner in PUBG. Nvidia says that ACE characters can use AI to “perceive, plan, and act like human players,” per a blog post. “Powered by generative AI, ACE will enable living, dynamic game worlds with companions that comprehend and support...
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang holding the Project Digits computer on stage at Nvidia’s CES 2025 press conference. | Image: Nvidia If you were looking for your own personal AI supercomputer, Nvidia has you covered.The chipmaker announced at CES it’s launching a personal AI supercomputer called Project Digits in May. The heart of Project Digits is the new GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, which packs enough processing power to run sophisticated AI models while being compact enough to fit on a desk and run from a standard power outlet (this kind of processing power used to require much larger, more...
Robotics have been a foundational element of Nvidia’s stratospheric growth in recent years. When the chip maker announced GR00T in March of last year, it was heralded as a watershed moment from humanoid robotics. Most of the category’s biggest names were available from launch, including, 1X Technologies, Agility Robotics, Apptronik, Boston Dynamics, Figure AI, Fourier […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
At CES 2025, MSI is launching a huge lineup of upgraded laptops with various specs that cater to an array of budgets. But of everything, one system stood out and if you take even a quick look at it, I think you can see why.As part of MSI’s Titan Series, not only is the Titan 18 HX the biggest and most powerful system the company makes. However, the special Dragon Edition features a ton of unique design traits that ensure it will never get lost in a crowd. On its lid is a hand-drawn close-up of a scaled monster (no AI art here) which was then acid-etched into the aluminum resulting in an...
Nvidia is getting into world models — AI models that take inspiration from the mental models of the world that humans develop naturally. At CES 2025 in Las Vegas, the company announced that it is making openly available a family of world models that can predict and generate “physics-aware” videos. Nvidia is calling this family Cosmos […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On the same day NVIDIA briefly became the most valuable company in the world, CEO Jensen Huang took to the CES 2025 stage to announce the company's new, long-awaited Blackwell family of graphic cards. The first salvo of RTX 50 series GPU will arrive in January, with pricing starting at $549 for the RTX 5070 and topping out at an eye-watering $1,999 for the flagship RTX 5090. Developing...This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/nvidias-rtx-5090-graphics-card-costs-2000-031133416.html?src=rss
At CES 2025, Anker has a pair of new speakers under its Soundcore brand. The first, the Soundcore Rave 3S, is a $349 party speaker with AI-powered karaoke tricks and built-in light shows. Joining it is the SoundCore Boom 2 Pro, a more powerful follow-up to its non-Pro namesake, which adds boomier bass and better protection from water and dust.The appropriately named Rave 3S is described as an “AI party speaker” with 200W output and 108dB volume. Anker says it can fill spaces of up to 1,076 square feet. Like some other Soundcore models, its RGB LEDs can create a light show that syncs with...
Nvidia will no doubt have the biggest CES 2025. After all, the company has pretty much the biggest everything nowadays. The chip giant is sporting a $3.4+ trillion market cap, due largely to its foundational position in the ongoing AI boom. Companies like OpenAI and Meta have purchased Nvidia processors by the boatload, and that’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The BBC reports Apple will change how iPhones and other devices display Apple Intelligence-summarized notifications to make it clearer to users when its AI tech has adjusted the words. Not long after the still-in-beta feature launched in the UK in December, the news organization complained about how it rewrote a headline about the UnitedHealthcare shooting suspect, incorrectly suggesting that the BBC reported Luigi Mangione shot himself. Since then, according to the BBC, Apple’s summaries had incorrectly rewritten notifications from its app to name a...
AI is leading US consumers towards a tech spending bonanza this year if tariffs don't materialize, new research from the Consumer Technology Association finds.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple will soon update Apple Intelligence notification summaries to make it clearer that they’re AI-generated. (The feature currently uses a small icon to denote their AI-generated status.) The BBC complained to the company after discovering several bogus summaries that twisted the content of some BBC headlines. On Monday, Apple told Engadget that the update will arrive “in the coming weeks.”“Apple Intelligence is designed to help users get everyday tasks done faster and more easily,” an Apple spokesperson wrote in a statement to Engadget. “This includes optional notification...
During CES 2025, I had a chance to check out a demo of the way Google is integrating Gemini capabilities into its smart home platform via devices like the Nest Audio, Nest Hub and Nest Cameras. The main takeaway is that the conversations you have with the Google Assistant will feel more natural. Personally, I'd appreciate being able to ask questions as they pop in my head, without having to formulate some Assistant-friendly sentence before speaking — what I saw makes me feel like my wish could come true. To kick things off, you'll still say "Hey Google," but for follow-up questions you...
Is Samsung’s round robot finally ready to roll out of CES demos and into actual homes? Ballie, the rolling robot that reemerged at CES last year, will be shipping to consumers as an actual product sometime in 2025. That’s what Samsung is saying at the moment, anyway. We were first introduced to Ballie at CES five years ago. Since then, the robot has undergone a more practical redesign, so maybe it’s really going to happen — but I’m still more skeptical than not.Am I the only one who thinks those wheels look a bit flimsy? Maybe Samsung is intentionally building in a weak spot and...
AMD is targeting both low-end and high-end AI PCs at CES 2025. The company unveiled a new family of Ryzen AI Max chips meant for "halo" Copilot+ AI PCs, which will sit above existing Ryzen AI 9 systems. In addition, it's also introducing Ryzen AI 7 and 5 chips for mid-tier and lower end AI PCs. Clearly, AMD wants AI PC options for everyone. AMDTo its credit, AMD's Ryzen AI Max chips seem like powerhouses. They feature up to 16 Zen 5 performance cores, 40 RDNA 3.5 GPU compute units and 50 TOPS of AI performance with AMD"s XDNA 2 NPU. The company claims it delivers 2.6 times faster...
At CES 2025, HP has three new 14-inch Elitebooks powered by the latest Intel processors. The laptop lineup includes the Elitebook Ultra G1i — it has a 3K OLED screen, a 9MP webcam and a haptic touchpad — and two Elitebook X models, one of which is a 360-degree-folding 2-in-1.Naturally, HP is marketing all three as AI PCs. That’s not only because of the mandatory “every new gadget must have AI stuffed inside” rule but also because Intel’s Core Ultra 5 and 7 chips were built for that purpose, with three compute engines for on-device AI tasks. All three Elitebooks are Copilot+ PCs and...
Dell is introducing three new monitors at CES 2025, but the most interesting one includes a feature you might have already experienced with a pair of AirPods: spatial audio. The Dell 32 Plus 4K QD-OLED Monitor is the first monitor with "AI-enhanced 3D Spatial Audio," according to Dell.The monitor's 5x5W speakers are able to pull off their audio tricks thanks to "AI-driven head-tracking" that follows your head and adjust audio playback so you're always immersed. It's a system that seems similar to Razer's Leviathan V2 Pro PC soundbar from 2023, which also used head-tracking to simulate a spatial...
Strix Halo is here. | Image: AMD AMD promised eventual “mobile gaming dominance” back in 2022, and it feels like we’re getting closer every day. Today, the company is announcing not one, not two, but three different families of chips designed to take it there, including final confirmation of the long-rumored “Strix Halo” and “Fire Range” laptop chips. The former is now known as the Ryzen AI Max and Ryzen AI Max Plus, boasting the most powerful graphics AMD’s ever put in a chip, with up to 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units, 16 Zen 5 CPU cores, and a new memory interface with 256GB per...
Image: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge Dell’s new monitor can beam audio directly toward your ears. The Dell 32 Plus 4K QD-OLED uses a camera beneath its display for AI-powered head tracking, allowing it to adjust the sound coming out of its five 5W speakers based on your position.As it directs audio toward each of your ears, the monitor also blocks sound at the opposite ear using destructive interference, which occurs when sound waves in different phases interact and cancel each other out. It’s the same type of technology used in active noise-canceling headphones.Dell isn’t the only...
Image: AMD AMD is previewing its next generation of GPUs at CES today, based on its latest RDNA 4 architecture that includes AI-powered FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4) upscaling. The Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070 will both be available in Q1 from a variety of video card manufacturers, but AMD isn’t detailing specifications, pricing, or exact release dates just yet.The announcement is light on concrete information. AMD says it has built this architecture from the ground up and that the GPUs built on RDNA 4 will include “a significant boost in AI.” AMD has optimized the compute...
Image: Acer Acer is revealing new all-in-one and mini PCs at CES 2025, and they’re among the first non-laptop computers to get Copilot Plus AI features. The new Acer Aspire S AI all-in-ones, offered in a “minimalist white profile,” come in two sizes, according to a press release. The Aspire S24 AI has a 23.8-inch 1080p screen, and the Aspire S27 AI has a 27-inch panel in 1080p or 4K. You can get both with touchscreens, too. They’re equipped with “up to” Intel Core Ultra processors (Series 2), support Bluetooth 5.4 and Wi-Fi 7, and have an HDMI 2.0 port, two USB 3.2 ports, two USB 2....
The Acer Swift Go 16 AI. | Image: Acer Acer is putting AMD chips in its ultra-thin Swift Go 16 AI and Swift Go 14 AI Copilot Plus laptops, both of which come with up to an AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 processor. Until now, Acer only offered its Swift Go 14 Copilot Plus laptop with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor.The AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 processor has eight cores, 16 threads, and an up to 5.0GHz boost clock. The Swift Go AI laptops feature a neural processing unit (NPU) running AMD’s XDNA 2 architecture with up to 50 TOPS, as well as AMD Radeon 800M graphics.Both the 16- and 14-inch Swift Go AI...
Image: HP Qualcomm teased Copilot Plus mini PCs earlier today, but HP is already announcing its own Copilot Plus mini PC and all-in-one desktop PCs, and neither will be powered by Qualcomm. HP has opted for AMD’s new Ryzen AI Max chips for its mini PC and Intel’s latest Core Ultra 200V series processors for the all-in-one.The OmniStudio X all-in-one will come in both 31.5-inch and 27-inch variants, with the ability to configure the PC with up to Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processors. These chips include a 47 TOPS NPU that’s powerful enough to handle Microsoft’s latest Copilot Plus PC...
Long gone are the days of simply watching the news. Google unveiled the latest version of its TV operating system at CES 2025 on Monday. It uses the company’s Gemini AI assistant to summarize the biggest news of the day for you. By asking Gemini to play your “News Brief,” the AI assistant will scrape […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Samsung is rolling out an updated line of Galaxy Books at CES 2025. The new Galaxy Book5 Pro (available in 16-inch and 14-inch screens) and Book5 360 (15-inch display) are equipped with Intel’s newest Arrow Lake Core Ultra processors. Since those laptop chips are built for AI tasks, it’s no surprise that Samsung is touting the laptops’ long list of on-device AI features, including an equivalent of Google’s Circle to Search.AI Select is Samsung’s branding for its Circle to Search equivalent. Much like Google’s AI trick for mobile devices, it lets you select an area on your screen and...
Google is forming a new team to work on AI models that can simulate the physical world. Tim Brooks, one of the co-leads on OpenAI’s video generator, Sora, who left for Google’s AI research lab, Google DeepMind, last October, will lead the new team, he announced in a post on X. It’ll be a part of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Unlike some of the robots we’ve seen at CES 2025, Mi-Mo doesn’t have a face, but it still looks a little familiar thanks to its resemblance to the iconic Pixar lamp. Mi-Mo is still just a prototype, but there are some interesting ideas behind the unusual-looking robot walking around the show floor.The creation of Japanese firm Jizai, the company describes it as a “general purpose AI robot” that “thinks and acts” on its own. It has a built-in camera and microphones, which allows it to move around and respond to voice prompts and commands. It runs on multiple large language models...
AMD’s CES 2025 presser is nearly upon us and rumors are swirling about new graphics cards, CPUs and more. The company regularly uses CES to promote upcoming chips and this year should be no different. To that end, the organization unveiled the AI-centric Ryzen 8000G desktop chips at CES 2024.What to expect at AMD's CES 2025 press conferenceRumors have been flying for weeks regarding AMD’s probable CES 2025 announcements. There’s a safe bet that the company will reveal its new RX 9070 XT graphics cards. These will likely be based on the new RDNA 4 architecture and should operate as a...
SAM YEH via Getty ImagesNVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang has a daunting task ahead of him at CES 2025 in Las Vegas: Outlining a 2025 gameplan that can somehow one-up his spectacular 2024. Consider that the chip giant's stock price finished last year up 178 percent, and its market cap of more than $3.5 trillion dollars — with a T — is currently second only to Apple. That's thanks to the fact that the ongoing AI revolution is powered largely by NVIDIA processors, which is raking in billions on its hardware even as its customers stay firmly in the red.What to expect at NVIDIA's CES 2025...
The U.K’s competition authority already has a lot on its plate in terms of tackling Big Tech’s growing reach across the technological spectrum, but closer to home it’s dealing with a different kind of anti-competitive threat — one it reckons AI is well-equipped to address. As per a Financial Times’ report this week, the Competition […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Birdfy has announced the Birdfy Bath Pro, a camera-equipped smart bird bath that lets you watch your local birds as they plop into the water to wash up. The device features two lenses — a wide-angle one and an auto-tracking one — and an optional AI analysis feature that keeps track of and summarizes the bath’s visitors. It’s in preorder now.The onboard camera consists of a 2MP wide-angle lens that shoots at 1080p and a 3MP “Portrait Lens” with 2K resolution. It carries an IP66 waterproof rating, so it should be able to withstand bird splashes, rain, and a direct blast from a water...
Bird Buddy’s smart bird feeders are a perfect confluence of different consumer technologies. Breakthroughs in security cameras, AI, and solar charging have converged into a terrific little product that has captured public imagination. At CES 2025, the startup’s creators announced an expansion into another wing of the animal kingdom. Wonder is a new sub-brand bringing […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Brisk It debuted its first AI-enabled smart grill concept at CES last year, and now the company is back with a new, low-cost model for 2025. Dubbed the Zelos 450, this compact unit joins the Origin series machines in the company's lineup. Despite the dramatically lower price of $399, Brisk It still managed to pack in its AI cooking tech to assist in all areas of backyard grilling. The company says its Zelos line of pellet grills were designed to offer its advanced features at a more affordable price. Although the company has only announced the 450-square-inch version at CES 2025, it sounds like...
Samsung is kicking off 2025 with a lineup of new AI-enhanced televisions. At CES 2025, Samsung unveiled the Neo QLED 8K QN990F and QN900F, plus the Neo QLED 4K QN90F, QN80F and QN70F. The TVs come with glare-free technology and a suite of AI features driven by Samsung Vision AI.The Neo QLED 8K QN990F is Samsung’s top-of-the-line model and it features a super-slim, minimalist footprint and an NQ8 AI Gen3 Processor. Its AI abilities include proprietary 8K upscaling, frame-by-frame HDR remastering, adaptive sound, color boosting and AI Mode, which automatically optimizes picture and sound based...
At CES 2025, Bosch is showing off an AI-enabled bassinet with sensors that can detect just about anything an anxious parent could ever hope to monitor about their baby. It’s not clear when the device, called Revol, may actually be available, but it’s able to track an impressive amount of data.At first glance, the Revol looks somewhat similar to other smart bassinets like the ever-popular Snoo. It has mesh walls and can soothe a sleeping baby with automated movements. But unlike the Snoo, which rocks in a horizontal motion, the Revol moves vertically with the mattress slowly raising and...
LG has unveiled its OLED evo TV lineup for 2025 and is showing them off at CES this year, along with its other home entertainment products. The new models are powered by the company's latest α (Alpha) 11 AI processor Gen2, with deep learning algorithms that give the TVs the ability to sharpen the visuals of low-resolution and low-quality images. LG says the new TVs are also the industry's first with 4K resolution and a refresh rate of 165Hz, as certified by NVIDIA G-SYNC and AMD FreeSync Premium. That enables the models to delivery stutter-free gameplay with minimal input lag. The company...
If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to upgrade your Kindle Scribe, now wouldn’t be a bad time — Amazon is running its first sale on the new model, which has only been out for a month. Normally $450, the 2024 Kindle Scribe is 19 percent off, bringing the 64GB model down to $365. With the latest generation, Amazon tweaked the appearance of the tablet and added some AI features, along with some new note-taking options. The second-gen Kindle Scribe has white bezels around the screen and either a green (Metallic Jade) or gray (Tungsten) border, in contrast to the previous model’s...
Samsung's CES 2025 theme is "AI for all."SamsungSamsung is the 800-pound gorilla of CES, a global electronics giant that produces mobile devices, TVs and home theater products and kitchen appliances — just to name a few. It's traditionally used CES to remind the world that it's a major competitor in all those arenas, while offering a peek behind the curtain of some more cutting-edge tech, too. In 2024, for instance, Samsung's CES press conference covered all the usual iterative updates — new TVs, new projectors, new soundbars — but also offered up some genuinely...
If there was any doubt, the generative AI bubble didn’t burst in 2024. Investments in generative AI, which encompasses a range of AI-powered apps, tools, and services to generate text, images, videos, speech, music, and more, reached new heights last year. According to data from financial tracker PitchBook compiled for TechCrunch, generative AI companies worldwide […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has fined accessiBe, a startup that claims to make websites more compatible with the screen readers blind people rely on to access the internet, for false advertising and compensating reviewers without disclosing that it sponsored the reviews. In a proposed order, the FTC would require accessiBe to pay $1 million […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Hugo Herrera / The Verge As promised, I’ve got a special mailbag issue this week. Thanks to everyone who sent in questions. Like last year, I picked a handful that hit some of the themes I plan to continue covering in 2025. On to your questions…I’m really concerned / worried / curious about the near-term future. Between now and 10 years from now, I think it is very clear AI will be replacing many job functions. What are we all going to do?The leaders at the AI labs say that, yes, there will be job loss, but that doesn’t mean catastrophe. The optimistic take is that humans are...
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Getty Images In September 2023, Meta made a big deal of its new AI chatbots that used celebrities’ likeness: everyone from Kendall Jenner to MrBeast leased themselves out to embody AI characters on Instagram and Facebook. The celebrity-based bots were killed off last summer after less than a year, but users have recently been finding a handful of other, entirely fake bot profiles still floating around — and the reaction is not good.There’s “Jane Austen,” a “cynical novelist and storyteller”; “Liv,” whose bio claims she is a...
Image: The Verge / Shutterstock Anthropic has made a deal to settle parts of a copyright infringement lawsuit brought against the maker of the Claude AI model for allegedly distributing protected song lyrics. The agreement was signed off by US District Judge Eumi Lee on Thursday, requiring Anthropic to apply existing guardrails in the training of future AI models and to establish a procedure for music publishers to intervene when copyright infringement is suspected.In October 2023, several music publishers including Universal Music Group, ABKCO, Concord Music Group, and Greg Nelson Music...
Members of the Elsevier-published Journal of Human Evolution quit, citing AI production processes introducing errors, high author fees, and concerns over editorial independence.
The Bill Gates-backed startup uses AI to comb through massive data sets in an attempt to find more critical minerals.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The list of flagship AI models that missed their promised launch windows continues to grow. Last summer, billionaire Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of AI company xAI, said that Grok 3, xAI’s next major AI model, would arrive by “end of year” 2024. Grok, xAI’s answer to models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI is fundamentally dependent on data, but the vast majority of health data goes unused for understandable reasons — chiefly patient privacy, regulation and IP protection. “This is the core underlying problem” of building AI solutions for life sciences and related areas like pharmaceutics, said German entrepreneur Robin Röhm. And not only that: collaboration when […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As 2025 dawns, it’s a good time to look at the trends that are likely to define the coming 12 months.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Welcome to 2025. Wave farewell to yesteryear with the biggest losers in tech. Picking our favorite villains in 2024 was challenging when it simply wasn’t a great time for tech. With the depressing spiral that is social media, the will-they-or-won’t-they dance of banning TikTok in the US and the neverending edited and deepfaked content, it’s just so noisy. Is it the internet of slop? Is it exhaustion? Is it AIs talking to AIs about AIs? In between all that, there’s the obsolescence of connectors past, Intel’s major struggles to turn around its fortunes, and, ugh, those AI assistants....
LG’s Gram laptops are back for another round of updates ahead of CES 2025. A decade into the thin and light lineup’s existence in LG’s portfolio, the latest models load up on AI (surprise!) and boost performance while maintaining their trademark portability.Four new models are launching at CES: two variants of the Gram Pro, a new Gram Pro 2-in-1 and the entry-level Gram Book. The first version of the Gram Pro has an Intel Core H-series (Arrow Lake) processor under the hood for more traditional laptop tasks (including some gaming). A second model uses an Intel Core Ultra V-series (Lunar...
While AI is lauded by some as the biggest technological breakthrough since the industrial revolution, enterprises — arguably the tech’s biggest potential customer base — have been slow to adopt AI. While some investors predicted that 2024 would be the year we’d start to see more AI adoption by enterprises, that didn’t play out as […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nvidia has completed its acquisition of Run:ai, an Israeli startup that helps manage and optimize AI hardware infrastructure. As part of the merger, Run:ai said its software, which currently only works with Nvidia products, will be open sourced, meaning Nvidia rivals like AMD and Intel will be able to adapt it for their hardware. “We […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI holds huge promise for healthcare, but not just on the medical side; many startups are convinced machine learning-based systems can do a lot of good on adjacent tasks such as appointment scheduling and confirmations. Brazilian startup Carecode is among these AI believers. It’s coming out of stealth with an ambition to reduce healthcare costs […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The proliferation of data centers aiming to meet the computational needs of AI could be bad news for the US power grid, according to a new report in Bloomberg. Using the 1 million residential sensors tracked by Whisker Labs, along with market intelligence data from DC Byte, Bloomberg found that more than half of the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hackers were reportedly able to modify several Chrome extensions with malicious code this month after gaining access to admin accounts through a phishing campaign. The cybersecurity company Cyberhaven shared in a blog post this weekend that its Chrome extension was compromised on December 24 in an attack that appeared to be “targeting logins to specific social media advertising and AI platforms.” A few other extensions were hit as well, going back to mid-December, Reuters reported. According to Nudge Security’s Jaime Blasco, that includes ParrotTalks, Uvoice and VPNCity.Cyberhaven...
CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly told Google employees that 2025 will be a “critical” year for the company. CNBC reports that it obtained audio from a December 18 strategy meeting where Pichai and other executives put on ugly holiday sweaters and laid out their priorities for the coming year. “I think 2025 will be critical,” Pichai […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Carlo Cadenas / The Verge A cyberattack campaign inserted malicious code into multiple Chrome browser extensions as far back as mid-December, Reuters reported yesterday. The code appeared designed to steal browser cookies and authentication sessions, targeting “specific social media advertising and AI platforms,” according to a blog post from Cyberhaven, one of the companies that was targeted.Cyberhaven blames a phishing email for the attack, writing in a separate technical analysis post that the code appeared to specifically target Facebook Ads accounts. According to...
Encode, the nonprofit org that co-sponsored California’s ill-fated SB 1047 AI safety legislation, has requested permission to file an amicus brief in support of Elon Musk’s injunction to halt OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit. In a proposed brief submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California Friday afternoon, counsel for Encode […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and other members of President-elect Donald Trump’s Silicon Valley coalition are clashing with the MAGA movement’s hardline anti-immigrant faction, and it’s allegedly resulted in Musk stripping far-right critics’ verification badges on X.The conflict centers on Musk and Ramaswamy’s recent praise for foreign tech workers, beginning soon after Indian immigrant Sriram Krishnan joined the team of Trump’s AI and crypto czar David Sacks. It’s pitted Trump’s tech mogul donor class against his older network of...
It’s never been more exhausting to be online than in 2024. While it’s been clear for some time that monetization has shifted social media into a different beast, this year in particular felt like a tipping point. Faced with the endless streams of content that’s formulated to trap viewers’ gazes, shoppable ads at every turn, AI and the unrelenting opinions of strangers, it struck me recently that despite my habitual use of these apps, I’m not actually having fun on any of them anymore.Take Instagram. I open the app and I’m greeted by an ad for bidets. I start scrolling. Between each...
OpenAI says its corporate structure must evolve to advance its mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence (AGI) — AI that can complete most tasks humans can — benefits all humanity. OpenAI currently has a for-profit org controlled by a nonprofit, with a “capped profit” share for investors and staff. But in a blog post published […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
When you really probe venture capitalists about investing in AI startups, they’ll tell you that businesses are experimenting wildly but are very slow to add AI solutions into their ongoing business processes. But there are some exceptions. And one of them appears to be an area known as AI sales development representatives, or AI SDRs. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A Chinese lab has created what appears to be one of the most powerful “open” AI models to date. The model, DeepSeek V3, was developed by the AI firm DeepSeek, and was released on Wednesday under a permissive license that allows developers to download and modify it for most applications, including commercial ones. DeepSeek V3 […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has raised $6 billion in a Series C financing round. The company announced this week that Andreessen Horowitz , Blackrock, Fidelity, Lightspeed, MGX, Morgan Stanley, OIA, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Nvidia, AMD, and others participated. Kingdom Holdings, the Saudi conglomerate holding company, invested roughly $400 million […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Is it possible for an AI to be trained just on data generated by another AI? It might sound like a harebrained idea. But it’s one that’s been around for quite some time — and as new, real data is increasingly hard to come by, it’s been gaining traction. Anthropic used some synthetic data to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Contractors working on Google Gemini are comparing its responses to Claude's, according to internal correspondence seen by TechCrunch.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Last month, AI founders and investors told TechCrunch that we’re now in the “second era of scaling laws,” noting how established methods of improving AI models were showing diminishing returns. One promising new method they suggested could keep gains was “test-time scaling,” which seems to be what’s behind the performance of OpenAI’s o3 model – […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Venture funding into Europe is heading for a flat year, but this may obfuscate the fact that European AI startups are thriving. According to VC firm Balderton Capital and Dealroom, 25% of VC funding into the region — approximately $13.7 billion — went to AI startups this year, compared to 15% four years ago, resulting […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
One of the most widely used techniques to make AI models more efficient, quantization, has limits — and the industry could be fast approaching them. In the context of AI, quantization refers to lowering the number of bits — the smallest units a computer can process — needed to represent information. Consider this analogy: When […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It looks like Meta is preparing to add displays to its popular line of Ray-Ban smart glasses, according to a report by Financial Times. These screens could show up in a future iteration of the device as early as next year. The likely release window is the second half of 2025.According to folks familiar with Meta’s plans, the screens will be on the smaller side and will likely be used to display notifications or responses from Meta’s AI virtual assistant. It’s highly unlikely that the company is planning on making this a full mixed-reality device just yet.For that, Meta has the recently-...
Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, is testing out a standalone iOS app for its chatbot, Grok, which was available only to X users until now.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Incoming president Donald Trump has confirmed reports that Sriram Krishnan, until recently a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), will serve as senior policy advisor for AI at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Trump said in a statement that Krishnan will “help shape and coordinate AI policy across government, working with […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Two big defense tech players, Palantir and Anduril, are talking to tech companies including SpaceX, OpenAI, Saronic, and Scale AI about forming a consortium to bid on Pentagon contracts, according to a report in the Financial Times. The goal, the FT says, is to challenge the dominance of “prime” defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A new report published by the child safety groups Heat Initiative and ParentsTogether Action details the alarming presence of inappropriate apps that are rated as suitable for children as young as four years old on Apple’s App Store. The groups worked with a researcher to review as many apps as possible in the span of 24 hours, and say they ultimately identified over 200 apps that contained “concerning content or features” given the ages they were rated for — including stranger chat and AI girlfriend apps, gaming apps with sexual or violent prompts and imagery, and AI-powered appearance...
OpenAI rules out an API for Sora, its video generation AI, for now Softonic ENSora's AI Videos Arrive as Musk Pitches Image Tool for Making Memes CNETWe Made a Fake Ad Using OpenAI’s Text-to-Video App, Sora. The Results Were Mixed Inc.OpenAI Gives Plus Users Unlimited Access to Sora Over The Holidays PCMagI Asked OpenAI Sora for a Female 'Taxi Driver'. This is What Happened The Ankler.
Image: Asus Asus has announced the Asus NUC 14 Pro AI, the first Copilot Plus-capable AI mini PC that crams an Intel Core Ultra 9 processor into a form factor resembling a black M4 Mac Mini. First introduced at IFA in September, Asus is providing a little more detail about the mini PC’s specs than it did before, but still isn’t saying it will become available or how much it will cost.The NUC 14 Pro AI will come in five CPU configurations, from the Core Ultra 5 226V processor with 16GB of integrated RAM to a Core Ultra 9 288V processor with 32GB of RAM. The company says it has up to 67 TOPS...
Google dominated the last era of search. Now the company and the US Justice Department are battling over how to set a fair playing field for generative AI.
Sam Altman dismissed what he called a "conspiracy theory" from a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On the first day of Y Combinator the founders of PearAI got “cancelled." They used the hate to launch a new product, raise $1 million.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Naveen Rao, VP of AI at Databricks. | Naveen Rao / The Verge For my last issue of the year, I’m focusing on the AI talent war, which is a theme I’ve been covering since this newsletter launched almost two years ago. And keep reading for the latest from inside Google and Meta this week.But first, I need your questions for a mailbag issue I’m planning for my first issue of 2025. You can submit questions via this form or leave them in the comments.“It’s like looking for LeBron James”This week, Databricks announced the largest known funding round for any private tech company in history...
The artificial intelligence start-up said the new system, OpenAI o3, outperformed leading A.I. technologies on tests that rate skills in math, science, coding and logic.
Google said Friday that the company is expanding Gemini’s latest in-depth research mode to 40 more languages. The company launched the in-depth research mode earlier this month, allowing Google One AI premium plan users to unlock an AI-powered research assistant of sorts. The in-depth function works in a multi-step method, from creating a research plan […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In the first half of 2024 alone, more than $35.5 billion was invested into AI startups globally.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge Life’s busy enough without wasting time on calls that are trying to scam you or sell to you. Unfortunately, stats from Hiya show that 28 percent of the calls you get are going to be suspected spam or fraud. On an iPhone, you don’t have the option to have an AI assistant answer calls for you, as you can on Android — at least not yet. But there are ways to screen calls to some extent and cut down on the number of scammers, sellers, and robots you have to talk to.These guidelines have been written using an iPhone 15 Pro Max running iOS 18.2.Identify...
Last week, Google allegedly instructed contract workers evaluating Gemini not to skip any prompts, regardless of their expertise, TechCrunch reports based on internal guidance it viewed.Now, contractors have allegedly been instructed not to skip prompts that “require specialized domain knowledge” and to “rate the parts of the prompt you understand,” adding a note that it’s not an area they have knowledge in. Apparently, the only times contractors can skip now are if a big chunk of the information is missing or if it has harmful content.Google filed a statement to Engadget, saying its...
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sat before Congress in 2023 to testify about the dangers of AI. He told American lawmakers at the time that he owns no equity in OpenAI, something he’s said many times, claiming he just runs the company because he loves it. However, Altman recently said he actually did have some equity […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
TuSimple has completed its pivot away from autonomous trucking to AI animation and gaming with a rebrand. The company shall henceforth be known as CreateAI. The rebrand comes as TuSimple is embroiled in controversy over the company’s plans to move its remaining U.S. assets to China to fund the new business, which it initially announced […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch, is launching a new AI startup, TechCrunch has learned. The startup, called Stem AI, is currently in stealth. But public documents show it was incorporated in June 2023, and filed for a trademark in August 2023. Shear is listed as CEO on an incorporation document filed with the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Led by Markforged veterans and backed by a16z, Backlip has raised $30M to democratize product design thanks to AI.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge Google has introduced a new AI “reasoning” model capable of answering complex questions while also providing a rundown of its “thoughts,” as reported earlier by TechCrunch. The model, called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, is still experimental and will likely compete with OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model.In a post on X, Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean says the model is “trained to use thoughts to strengthen its reasoning,” and also benefits from the speed that comes along with the faster Gemini Flash 2.0 model. The demo shared by Dean shows how Gemini 2.0...
Google has released what it’s calling a new “reasoning” AI model — but it’s in the experimental stages, and from our brief testing, there’s certainly room for improvement. The new model, called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental (a mouthful, to be sure), is available in AI Studio, Google’s AI prototyping platform. A model card describes […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Companies like OpenAI and Google are running out of the data used to train artificial intelligence systems. Can new methods continue years of rapid progress?
There's no arguing that AI still has quite a few unreliable moments, but one would hope that at least its evaluations would be accurate. However, last week Google allegedly instructed contract workers evaluating Gemini not to skip any prompts, regardless of their expertise, TechCrunch reports based on internal guidance it viewed. Google shared a preview of Gemini 2.0 earlier this month. Google reportedly instructed GlobalLogic, an outsourcing firm whose contractors evaluate AI-generated output, not to have reviewers skip prompts outside of their expertise. Previously, contractors...
“I think the most ironic way the world could end would be if someone makes a memecoin about a man’s stretched anus and it brings about the singularity.” That’s Andy Ayrey, the founder of decentralized AI alignment research lab Upward Spiral, who is also behind the viral AI bot Truth Terminal. You might have heard […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Internal guidelines passed down from Google led to concerns that the AI model could be prone to inaccurate outputs on topics like healthcare.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI models can deceive, new research from Anthropic shows — pretending to have different views during training when in reality maintaining their original preferences. There’s no reason for panic now, the team behind the study said. Yet they said their work could be critical in understanding potential threats from future, more capable AI systems. “Our […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The fund will offer grants to those building on BlueSky’s open source AT Protocol. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
ChatGPT is now available on WhatsApp. Starting today, if you add 1 (800) ChatGPT to your contacts — that's 1 (800) 242-8478 — you can start using the chatbot over Meta's messaging app. In this iteration, ChatGPT is limited to text-only input, so there's no Advanced Voice Mode or visual input on offer, but you still get all the smarts of the o1-mini model. What's more, over WhatsApp ChatGPT is available everywhere OpenAI offers its chatbot, with no account necessary. OpenAI is working on a way to authenticate existing users over WhatApp, though the company did not share...
Sony is furthering its partnership with AMD so they can create more AI-powered technology to make games look and play better — and not just on PlayStation hardware. The two companies are establishing a “deeper collaboration” to work on “Machine Learning-based technology for graphics and gameplay,” lead architect of the PS5 and PS5 Pro Mark Cerny announced on Wednesday.The two already partner on the PS5 and PS5 Pro’s GPUs, which are based on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture, and the PS5 Pro uses a feature called PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) to improve image clarity and...
Odyssey, a startup founded by self-driving pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, is developing an AI-powered tool that can transform text or an image into a 3D rendering. The tool, dubbed Explorer, is similar in some ways to the so-called world models recently demoed by DeepMind, World Labs, and Israeli upstart Decart. Given a caption like “A […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
YouTube is partnering with the Creative Artists Agency (CAA) to help celebrities, athletes, and creators identify content that uses their AI-generated likeness on the platform. The tool, which YouTube will begin testing early next year, will let these professionals submit requests for the removal of their AI-generated likeness. YouTube will first make the tool available for […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Redesigned interfaces, new features and artificial intelligence are meant to enhance the experience, even if the changes can be confusing at first.
Cloud software giant Salesforce looks to hire thousands of new sales people to sell its AI tools to customers. The company plans to hire 2,000 new sales representatives, according to CNBC, which cited remarks from CEO Marc Benioff at a company event Tuesday. This doubles the hiring plans that Benioff told Bloomberg last month. Benioff […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Earlier this year, IVP general partner Tom Loverro, proclaimed that the post-pandemic downturn is over, and companies that made it this far should prioritize growth over cost-cutting. Yet, the companies still struggling to raise their next round of financing at a higher valuation or survive altogether could still be in the thousands, according to Brian […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Grammarly is acquiring productivity startup Coda, the company announced on Tuesday. As part of the deal, Coda’s CEO and co-founder Shishir Mehrotra will become the new CEO of Grammarly. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition will help turn Grammarly’s AI assistant into an “AI productivity platform” thanks to the addition […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI is bringing o1, its “reasoning” AI model, to its API — but only for certain developers to start. Starting today, o1 will begin rolling out to devs in OpenAI’s “tier 5” usage category, the company said. To qualify for tier 5, developers have to spend at least $1,000 with OpenAI and have an account […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With cloud spend continuing to surge, tech companies are scrambling to meet demand for the necessary infrastructure, with the growing need for AI compute only adding fuel to the fire. By way of example, Microsoft and BlackRock have created a $30 billion fund to support new data centers and energy infrastructure for the burgeoning AI […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google has changed its terms to clarify that customers can deploy its generative AI tools to make “automated decisions” in “high-risk” domains, like healthcare, so long as there’s a human in the loop. According to the company’s updated Generative AI Prohibited Use Policy, published on Tuesday, customers may use Google’s generative AI to make “automated […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The U.K. government is consulting on an opt-out copyright regime for AI training that would require rights holders to take active steps if they don’t want their intellectual property to become free AI training fodder. The rise of generative AI models that are trained on vast quantities of data has brought intellectual property concerns to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Framework’s double SSD caddy for its Framework 16 expansion bay. | Image: Framework The most ambitious laptop ever made just got a long-promised modular upgrade. Starting today, you can pay $39 to add two extra M.2 slots to the Framework Laptop 16 — letting you potentially carry around an AI accelerator, an eGPU adapter, or a grand total of four solid state storage sticks for ludicrous capacity. As Framework’s blog post points out, the new “Dual M.2 Adapter” is Framework’s first new modular component since launch that takes advantage of the Laptop 16’s big expansion bay around...
The Canadian AI startup has quietly partnered with Palantir to put Cohere's models in use with unnamed Palantir customers.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google has yet another AI tool to add to the pile. Whisk is a Google Labs image generator that lets you use an existing image as your prompt. But its output only captures your starter image’s “essence” rather than recreating it with new details. So, it’s better for brainstorming and rapid-fire visualizations than edits of the source image.The company describes Whisk as “a new type of creative tool.” The input screen starts with a bare-bones interface with inputs for style and subject. This simple introductory interface only lets you choose from three predefined styles: sticker...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is rolling out a way for creators to let third-party companies use their videos to train AI models. To be clear, the default setting for this is off, meaning that if you don’t want to let third-party companies scrape your videos for AI training, you don’t have to do anything. But if, for some reason, you do want to allow that — Google says that “some creators and rights holders” may want to — it’s going to be an option.“We see this as an important first step in supporting creators and helping them realize new value for their...
An AI-generated image I made in Whisk using Google’s suggested images as prompts. | Image: Google via Whisk Google has announced a new AI tool called Whisk that lets you generate images using other images as prompts instead of requiring a long text prompt.With Whisk, you can offer images to suggest what you’d like as the subject, the scene, and the style of your AI-generated image, and you can prompt Whisk with multiple images for each of those three things. (If you want, you can fill in text prompts, too.) If you don’t have images on hand, you can click a dice icon to have Google fill in...
Google says it’ll soon begin to allow YouTube creators and rightsholders to let third-party companies including OpenAI, Apple, and Meta to use their content to train AI models. “Over the next few days, creators and rights holders can choose to allow third-party companies to use their content to train AI models directly in Studio Settings […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
YouTube on Monday announced it will give creators more choice over how third parties can use their content to train their AI models. Starting today, creators and rights holders will be able to flag for YouTube if they’re permitting specific third-party AI companies to train models on the creator’s content. From a new setting within […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta’s Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are getting several new AI-powered upgrades, including the ability to have an ongoing conversation and translate between languages. Ray-Ban Meta owners in Meta’s early access program for the U.S. and Canada can now download firmware v11, which adds “live AI.” First unveiled this fall, live AI lets wearers continuously converse […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google may have only recently begun rolling out its Veo generative AI to enterprise customers, but the company is not wasting any time getting a new version of the video tool out to early testers. On Monday, Google announced a preview of Veo 2. According to the company, Veo 2 “understands the language of cinematography.” In practice, that means you can reference a specific genre of film, cinematic effect or lens when prompting the model.Additionally, Google says the new model has a better understanding of real-world physics and human movement. Correctly modeling humans in motion is...
Image: The Verge; Photo: Hollie Adams / Bloomberg via Getty Images The head of the ubiquitous chip design firm on the ‘breathtaking’ pace of AI. Read the full story at The Verge.
Google has appointed Preeti Lobana to lead its India business, filling a key position that had been vacant since Sanjay Gupta’s promotion to Asia-Pacific president in July. Lobana, who was vice president of advertising technology at Google, takes over as the company pushes its AI products in India amid intensifying competition in the digital market. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A speaker at the annual NeurIPS AI conference has drawn criticism — not for her opinions about AI, but the way she referred to a Chinese student. During her keynote presentation on “How to optimize what matters most,” MIT Media Lab Professor Rosalind Picard (pictured above) included a slide quoting an excuse given by a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Regardless of how they're defined, the agents are for helping complete tasks in an automated way with as little human interaction as possible.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Never miss a delivery. These WIRED-tested picks will help you keep tabs on your front door from anywhere.
World models, also known as world simulators, are being touted by some as the next big thing in AI. AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs has raised $230 million to build “large world models,” and DeepMind hired one of the creators of OpenAI’s video generator, Sora, to work on “world simulators.” (Sora was released on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
XAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, may be embroiled in an escalating lawsuit with OpenAI. But that’s not stopping it from shipping new products — on a Friday night, no less. This evening, xAI revealed that it has begun to roll out an upgraded version of its flagship Grok 2 chatbot model to all users on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever spoke on a range of topics at NeurIPS, the annual AI conference, before accepting an award for his contributions to the field. Sutskever gave his predictions for “superintelligent” AI, AI more capable than humans at many tasks, which he believes will be achieved at some point. Superintelligent AI will be “different, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A former OpenAI employee, Suchir Balaji, was recently found dead in his San Francisco apartment, according to the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In October, the 26-year-old AI researcher raised concerns about OpenAI breaking copyright law when he was interviewed by The New York Times. “The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI published receipts, in the form of a long timeline of emails, texts and legal filings, illustrating that Elon Musk’s injunction to prevent OpenAI from converting into a for-profit company runs counter to what he wanted in 2017. Essentially, OpenAI is providing even more evidence to the fact that its former co-founder wanted the AI startup to become a for-profit company and make him CEO.You should read the whole blog to get all of the details (and get a sense for how billionaires email) but the gist is that in 2017, Musk and OpenAI came to an understanding that the then non-profit...
Google’s NotebookLM made a pretty big splash with its AI-generated podcast feature Audio Overviews, and before the year is out the app is getting another upgrade. As part of a larger redesign of Google’s AI notebook tool, Audio Overviews are now interactive.After generating an Audio Overview based on the sources you’ve uploaded, Google says you’ll be able to play the recording in a new “Interactive mode (BETA).” Clicking “Join” at any point in that new playback screen will get the AI hosts to call on you to ask a question, which they’ll answer live while you’re listening...
The oil and gas company announced that it’s planning to build a massive power plant for data centers. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Optum's AI chatbot was found exposed online at a time when the healthcare giant faces scrutiny for its use of AI to allegedly deny patient claims.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google has released a prototype of Project Astra’s AR glasses for testing in the real world. The glasses are part of Googles long-term plan to one day have hardware with augmented reality and multimodal AI capabilities. In the meantime, they will be releasing demos to get the attention of consumers, developers, and their competition. Along […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Staff at another video game studio have organized their own union. The Communication Workers of America (CWA) announced late Thursday in a statement that 461 workers for ZeniMax Online Studios (ZOS), the Maryland-based studio behind The Elder Scrolls Online, voted to form the ZOS United-CWA union covering web developers, designers, engineers and graphics artists.The new union will allow ZeniMax staffers to “collectively push for real improvements” in the workplace and provide “job security amid record layoffs, protections against AI, better pay and benefits,” according to a statement...
Apple's new artificial intelligence features falsely made it seem the BBC reported Luigi Mangione had shot himself.
Liquid AI, an AI startup co-founded by robotics luminary Daniela Rus, has raised $250 million in a Series A led by AMD. Per Bloomberg, the round values Liquid AI at over $2 billion. Liquid AI aims to build general-purpose AI systems powered by a relatively new type of AI model called a liquid neural network. Liquid […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge ChatGPT launched roughly two years and two weeks ago. Now, as we near the end of 2024, the AI race is... well, where is it, exactly? It’s more competitive than ever, there’s more money being poured into new models and products than ever, and it’s not at all clear when or even whether we’re going to get products that make it all worthwhile.On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk about a lot of different AI news, all along a single trend line: the tech industry trying desperately to build a killer app for AI. (Ideally, for them, also one that makes money...
At long last, iPhone users have access to Apple's AI image generation tools, Genmoji (for customized emoji) and Image Playground. But based on our testing, these Apple Intelligence features aren't fully baked. In this episode, Devindra and Cherlynn discuss why these AI tools aren't very useful and dive into some of Apple's most egregious image generation fails.Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!...
Image: Amazon Amazon is testing a new Prime Video feature that recommends groups of content using AI rather than traditional algorithms. If you’re part of the test, you’ll see new “AI Topics” tailored to your interests, like “mind-bending sci-fi,” “fantasy quests,” or “thrilling character journeys.”Each category will have shows, movies, and linear channels that match these AI-generated labels. You can also continue refining recommendations further by selecting topics related to the category you’re looking at, which Amazon says allows you to “discover more content without...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Gemini’s integration into Google Drive is getting a little more useful. In addition to summarizing documents or answering questions about a project, the AI assistant can now generate summaries of everything inside a folder.With the feature, you can open a folder and select the new “Summarize this folder” button at the top of the page. Gemini will then give you a breakdown of the folder’s contents. As noted by Google, you can use Gemini to find specific files inside a folder, or ask questions about it, like “What is the theme of this folder?”...
Anthropic has released one its newest AI models, Claude 3.5 Haiku, for users of its AI chatbot platform, Claude. Reports of 3.5 Haiku’s launch in Claude began rolling in Thursday morning on social media, and TechCrunch was able to independently confirm that the model is available in Claude on the web and mobile. Claude Haiku […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The American Civil Liberties Association (ACLU) is sounding a warning about the use of AI in creating police reports, saying the tech could produce errors that affect evidence and court cases. The nonprofit highlighted the dangers of the tech in a white paper, following news that police departments in California are using a program called Draft One from Axon to transcribe body camera recording and create a first draft of police reports. One police department in Fresno said that it's using Draft One under a pilot program, but only for misdemeanor reports. "It's nothing more than a...
AI training data has a big price tag, one best-suited for deep-pocketed tech firms. This is why Harvard University plans to release a dataset that includes in the region of 1 million public-domain books, spanning genres, languages, and authors including Dickens, Dante, and Shakespeare, which are no longer copyright-protected due to their age. The new […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple’s Voice Memos app just got the promised layering functionality that was shown off back in September at the iPhone event. This allows people to layer another track on top of a pre-existing track, which turns the app into an extremely-limited, though still useful, recording tool. This update is part of iOS 18.2, which also brings more AI tomfoolery like a custom emoji maker. There’s one major caveat here. The Voice Memos software tweak is only available for the iPhone 16 Pro and the Pro Max. This is a bummer, given that track layering isn’t exactly rocket science, but the company...
Late last year, Goutham Rao and Vinod Jayaraman founded NueBird to automate IT site reliability operations tasks with generative AI. Having sold their previous cloud-native storage startup, Portworx, to PureStorage for $370 million, the pair was well-versed in the IT challenges faced by today’s enterprises. “It’s very hard to find good site reliability engineers. There’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Alongside the release of a host of new AI features, Apple is also updating the Voice Memos app in iOS 18.2. On Wednesday, the iPhone maker announced that iPhone 16 Pro users will be able to layer a vocal track on top of an existing instrumental recording in the Voice Memos app, without needing to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Longtime readers of the newsletter might’ve noticed that we skipped a week last week. That wasn’t our intent, and we do apologize. The reason was we’ve reached an inflection point in the AI news cycle. We’re […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A deep learning scientist whose last startup was acquired by Snap to build its My AI chatbot has raised seed funding for his latest venture: a platform for building and operating real-time, video-based conversational AI agents. eSelf, as the startup is known, is today coming out of stealth with $4.5 million in its coffers to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Another attempt to get a class-action style privacy damages case to stick against Google has failed in the U.K. after the Court of Appeal refused to overturn an earlier dismissal. The lawsuit concerned the misuse of health records for some 1.6 million patients whose information was passed to Google’s AI division, DeepMind, back in 2015 […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple is working with semiconductor company Broadcom on its first server chip designed to handle AI applications, according to The Information, which cited three people with knowledge of the project. Apple is known for designing its own chips – called Apple Silicon and primarily manufactured by TSMC – for its devices. But those chips weren’t […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Google I stepped into a room lined with bookshelves, stacked with ordinary programming and architecture texts. One shelf stood slightly askew, and behind it was a hidden room that had three TVs displaying famous artworks: Edvard Munch’s The Scream, Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon, and Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. “There’s some interesting pieces of art here,” said Bibo Xu, Google DeepMind’s lead product manager for Project Astra. “Is there one in particular that you would want to talk about?” Project Astra, Google’s prototype AI “universal agent...
Apple’s latest iOS 18.1 software update introduced a series of Apple Intelligence features, including Writing Tools and notification summaries. However, some features were missing from the lineup, like Genmoji, which allows users to create emojis from written prompts. Now, with iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.2 officially available, the highly anticipated AI-generated Bitmoji […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple has begun rolling iOS 18.2 and iPadOS 18.2 to iPhones and iPads. The updates bring with them major enhancements to the company’s suite of AI features, and are likely the final software releases Apple has planned for 2024. More Apple Intelligence features are available through macOS 15.2. However, note access to all of the AI features mentioned below is limited to users in the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the UK for now, with support additionally limited to devices with their language set to English. Provided you own an iPhone 15 Pro, 16 or 16 Pro, one of the...
If startup funding rounds are any metric, generative AI is seeing ample adoption in the sciences. It makes sense: there’s a lot of trial and error involved in research and development, and any tool that can speed up the process for researchers is bound to be useful. The latest is Albert Invent, which offers an […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Small and medium businesses are getting more love in the world of fintech these days, and one example of that is the growth of a startup out of Sweden. Mynt, which has built an AI-based platform for corporate cards and spend management catering to SMEs, has closed a round of €22 million ($23 million) on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Generative AI has a plethora of well-documented misuses, and now, it appears to be cropping up in state influence operations.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
YouTube announced on Tuesday that its auto-dubbing feature, which allows creators to generate translated audio tracks for their videos, is now rolling out to hundreds of thousands more channels. YouTube first introduced its AI-powered auto-dubbing tool at Vidcon last year, which was only being tested with a limited group of creators. This tool could help […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The future of audiobooks and AI’s impact on the publishing industry were points of discussion for HarperCollins, whose CEO, Brian Murray, spoke at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference on Tuesday. During the event, the exec praised Spotify’s entry into the audiobooks market and detailed its future growth plans in the space. He also […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The crowd-sourced review site Yelp unveiled a new feature that uses AI and customer reviews to rate common facets of nightlife and food-related business. The new Review Insights feature is available now on the iOS version of the Yelp app, according to the company’s official blog.Review Insights aggregates customer reviews and feeds them into a large language model (LLM), which will assign specific aspects — like the vibe or service time — a rating out of 100. Supposedly it will be able to infer customer sentiment about these parts of a business "even when a review doesn’t explicitly...
Google signed a deal with Intersect Power and TPG Rise Climate to spin up enough carbon-free power to drive several gigawatt-scale data centers.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
San Francisco is the most prepared city for new transportation technologies like AI, autonomous vehicles, and air taxis, according to an new urban mobility readiness index released Tuesday. The index, created by the Oliver Wyman Forum and the University of California, Berkeley, evaluated 70 global cities on a range of factors such as walkability, air […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Languages are typically taught by first exposing you to reading and writing, but native speakers always start learning languages by hearing and talking. Speak has built a platform to teach languages by focusing on how native speakers learn: Using AI, the startup generates audio conversations and listens to users’ responses to improve their grasp of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
LambdaTest, a cloud-based software testing platform, has raised $38 million in a funding round as it looks to expand its presence in existing markets and advance its AI capabilities. The San Francisco and Noida-headquartered startup’s Series D round has been led by Avataar Ventures with participation from Qualcomm Ventures, bringing its total funding to $108 […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
WordPress hosting company Automattic said Monday that it is acquiring WPAI, a startup that builds AI solutions for WordPress, at an undisclosed price. WPAI has some products such as CodeWP, a tool to use AI to create WP Plugins; AgentWP, an AI assistant for WordPress site builders; and WP Chat, which is an AI-powered chat […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon says that it’s establishing a new R&D lab in San Francisco, the Amazon AGI SF Lab, to focus on building “foundational” capabilities for AI agents. The Amazon AGI SF Lab, which will be led by David Luan, the co-founder of AI startup Adept, will seek to build agents that can “take actions in the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
X, the Elon Musk-owned social network previously known as Twitter, quietly added a new image generator to its Grok assistant this past Saturday. Then, it removed it. Now, it’s bringing it back — and officially announcing it. The image generator, called Aurora, was developed by Musk’s AI company, xAI, and trained on billions of examples from the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman at the UK AI Safety Summit in November 2023. | Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman disagrees with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s recent claim in a Reddit AMA that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is possible on today’s hardware. While AGI is “plausible,” he tells The Verge’s Nilay Patel in the latest Decoder episode that it could take as long as 10 years to achieve.With current hardware defined by Nilay as “Within one or two generations of what we have now, I would say.” Suleyman replied, explaining why he thinks...
Image: Epic Games Indie game storefront Itch.io is currently offline because of what it describes as a bogus phishing report. While the game store’s servers are still online, the domain for the website is currently pointing towards IP addresses that itch.io doesn’t own — making it inaccessible for most people.Itch.io blames pop culture collectibles company Funko for the issues in a post on X, “because they use some trash ‘AI-powered’ Brand Protection Software called Brand Shield that created some bogus Phishing report to our registrar.”I kid you not, @itchio has been taken down by...
In winter 2025, a comparative literature class at UCLA will feature a textbook, homework assignments, and TA resources generated by AI. The class in question is a survey of literature from the Middle Ages to the 17th century, while the materials are generated by Kudu — an “evolved” textbook platform founded by Alexander Kusenko, a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google’s DeepMind team unveiled an AI model for weather prediction this week called GenCast. In a paper published in Nature, DeepMind researchers said they found that GenCast outperforms the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’ ENS — apparently the world’s top operational forecasting system. And in a blog post, the DeepMind team offered a more […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: The Verge There’s plenty to consider when it comes to deciding whether you want to engage with the many generative AI bots now available inside our apps. These include the ethics of copyright use, soaring energy demands, and the diminishing of human creativity, to begin with.Something else to bear in mind when engaging with these tools is they’re often going to use your flesh-and-blood human inputs to further train their underlying models. While some AI companies make efforts to anonymize this data, it’s something you may not feel comfortable with. The good news is, in most cases...
If you can be the first person to get an AI bot named Freysa to say ‘I love you,’ you’ll win anywhere from $3,000 to tens of thousands of dollars. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Microsoft Microsoft is expanding the testing of its new Recall AI feature to Intel- and AMD-powered Copilot Plus PCs. The software giant first released a preview of Recall on Qualcomm-powered laptops last month, allowing Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel to test the new AI-powered feature. Now Intel and AMD Copilot Plus PCs are getting access in a new build today.Recall takes screenshots of almost everything you do on a Copilot Plus PC to make it searchable and easy to recall a memory or retrace your steps. Microsoft has made the AI experience entirely optional, so you can enable...
Meta has announced the newest addition to its Llama family of generative AI models: Llama 3.3 70B. In a post on X, Ahmad Al-Dahle, VP of generative AI at Meta, said that the text-only Llama 3.3 70B delivers the performance of Meta’s largest Llama model, Llama 3.1 405B, but more cheaply. “By leveraging the latest […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI finally released the full version of o1, which gives smarter answers than GPT-4o by using additional compute to “think” about questions. However, AI safety testers found that o1’s reasoning abilities also make it try to deceive humans at a higher rate than GPT-4o — or, for that matter, leading AI models from Meta, Anthropic, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Laura Normand / The Verge Google CEO Sundar Pichai says the company’s search engine will “change profoundly” in 2025. “I think we are going to be able to tackle more complex questions than ever before,” Pichai said during the NYT’s DealBook Summit on Wednesday. “I think you’ll be surprised, even early in ‘25, the kind of newer things Search can do compared to where it is today.”Pichai also responded to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s comment from earlier this year, in which he said Google should’ve been the “default winner” in the AI race. “I would love to do...
xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has raised $6 billion, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. Investors gave a minimum of $77,593, per the filing. 97 participated, but the document doesn’t reveal their identities. The new cash brings xAI’s total raised to $12 billion, adding to the $6 billion […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A startup with founders who previously served in the German military has created a product akin to an Amazon Firestick for legacy defense equipment, complete with a software stack. ARX Robotics claims its system can turn old equipment into AI-driven devices, such as autonomous-driving trucks. Back in June this year ARX raised a €9 million […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft’s AI can now read your screen — or rather, the websites you’re browsing. On Thursday, the company began rolling out a limited, U.S.-only preview of Copilot Vision, a tool that can understand and respond to questions about sites you’re visiting using Microsoft Edge. Gated behind Copilot Labs, an opt-in program for experimental AI capabilities, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. Tamar Eilam has worked at IBM for the past 24 years. She’s currently an IBM fellow, serving as chief scientist for […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine, is expanding its publisher program, with the LA Times, Adweek, Mexico News Daily, and a dozen other news outlets signing up. Publishers will share in revenue generated by ads on Perplexity, and receive metrics to track their content’s performance — as long as they don’t withdraw. “We would not be […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Not everyone agrees on what an “AI agent” actually is, but they are all still the rage. At a broad level, these so-called “agents” promise to go several steps beyond a mere chatbot, making decisions and taking actions on people’s behalf. Some might help you do your online shopping; others might make factories more efficient […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
When Humane released its Ai Pin, the San Francisco-based gadget maker envisioned a world with dedicated AI devices — something that you would carry with you in addition to the smartphone in your pocket. However, reviews and sales haven’t been great — returns reportedly begun to outpace unit sales at one point. And Humane recently dropped […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Humane Humane, which makes the not-great AI Pin, wants other companies to build AI devices and gadgets that use its CosmOS operating system, and it has released a video that appears to show that the company already has it working in a car, TV, smart speaker, and phone.But note that the video, according to Humane’s own fine print, is for “illustrative purposes only” — it shows “working prototypes” and some “simulated experiences,” and the print says that all “designs, features, and specifications” are subject to change. So don’t take it entirely at face value.In one...
Although heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, a significant portion of people who experience heart attacks are unaware that they have the underlying condition. Cleerly, a cardiovascular imaging startup, hopes to fix this. By analyzing CT scans of the heart, the company’s AI software aims to identify early stage […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI plans to team up with Anduril, the defense startup, to supply its AI tech to systems the U.S. military uses to counter drone attacks. The Wall Street Journal reports that Anduril will incorporate OpenAI tech into software that assesses and tracks unmanned aircraft. Anduril tells the publication that OpenAI’s models could improve the accuracy […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI has partnered with defense startup Anduril Industries to develop AI for the Pentagon. The companies said on Wednesday that they’ll combine OpenAI’s models, including GPT-4o and OpenAI o1, with Anduril’s systems and software to improve the US military’s defenses against unpiloted aerial attacks.The deal comes less than a year after OpenAI softened its stance on using its models for military purposes. Although the ChatGPT maker’s policies still prohibit its models from developing or using weapons, it deleted a line in January that explicitly banned integrating its tech into “...
After weeks of anticipation, some Spotify users are left underwhelmed by the streamer’s personalized year-in-review feature, Spotify Wrapped — with many even going so far as to call it “boring” or a “flop.” Chief among the complaints are that Spotify prioritized the inclusion of an AI podcast for Wrapped over the other, clever and creative […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
World Labs has announced a new AI feature that turns 2D images into tiny worlds. This tool, the first from Fei-Fei Li’s highly hyped startup, takes a prompt or 2D reference image and spits out a fully navigable 3D environment. By generating in 3D, World Labs can avoid some of the the control and consistency […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
At last year’s AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon’s cloud computing unit launched SageMaker HyperPod, a platform for building foundation models. It’s no surprise then that at this year’s re:Invent, the company is announcing a number of updates to the platform, with a focus on making model training and fine-tuning on HyperPod more efficient and cost-effective for […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
SageMaker has long been AWS’s fully managed platform for building, training and deploying machine learning and generative AI models. Over time, however, an ecosystem of applications has sprung up around AI and ML models for performing tasks like managing experiments, evaluating model quality and security. Those always lived outside of SageMaker and had to be […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
DeepMind, Google’s AI research org, has unveiled a model that can generate an “endless” variety of playable 3D worlds. Called Genie 2, the model — the successor to DeepMind’s Genie, which was released earlier this year — can generate an interactive, real-time scene from a single image and text description (e.g. “A cute humanoid robot […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge Happy holidays from OpenAI. The AI startup plans to kick off a “shipmas” period of new features and products for 12 days, starting on December 5th. The releases will include OpenAI’s long-awaited text-to-video AI tool Sora and a new reasoning model, sources familiar with OpenAI’s plans tell The Verge.OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed the 12 days of announcements on stage at The New York Times’ DealBook conference on Wednesday morning, though he didn’t say exactly what was coming. OpenAI plans to launch or demo something every day for 12 days.Just ahead...
Image: Google Veo, Google’s latest generative AI video model, is now available for businesses to start incorporating into their content creation pipelines. After first being unveiled in May — three months after OpenAI demoed its competing Sora product — Veo has beaten it to market by launching in a private preview via Google’s Vertex AI platform.Veo is capable of generating “high-quality” 1080p resolution videos in a range of different visual and cinematic styles from text or image-based prompts. When the model was first announced these generated clips could be vaguely “beyond a...
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has a plan to bring AI infrastructure to countries around the world, and he’s pitching it in person.
HuggingFace's CEO warns that open source Chinese AI models risk spreading censorship worldwide.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
“I’m trying to find holiday gifts for my sisters. I open a bunch of tabs, I want my wife’s advice.” That’s CEO of the Browser Company, Josh Miller, in his company’s latest ad for its new AI browser, Dia. Consulting your spouse to find gifts for your siblings is a pure – and dare I […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Zack Snyder says he still questions “the why” of the technology when it comes to some aspects of filmmaking, but can definitely see the perks.
GitLab, the popular developer and security platform, and AWS, the popular cloud computing and AI service, today announced that they have teamed up to combine GitLab’s Duo AI assistant with Amazon’s Q autonomous agents. The goal here, the two companies say, is to accelerate software innovation and developer productivity, and unlike so many partnerships in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Clarifai, once known as the young computer vision startup working with the Pentagon on its controversial Project Maven, has distanced itself from its early years of espousing questionable ideas on AI ethics, its interest in building autonomous weapons — years before Silicon Valley warmed up to defense tech — and its potential cyberbreach from Russia. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing division, is launching a new tool to combat hallucinations — that is, scenarios where an AI model behaves unreliably. Announced at AWS’ re:Invent 2024 conference in Las Vegas, the service, Automated Reasoning checks, validates a model’s responses by cross-referencing customer-supplied info for accuracy. AWS claims in a press […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Marketplaces for software and services based on reviews are starting to reach their sell-by date. The user-generated reviews on sites like G2 and Capterra (one of Gartner’s three software directories) have often been accused of being paid for by software vendors. In fact, 8 out 9 of the reviews on the first page of G2’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
At the start of the year, there were widespread concerns about how generative AI could be used to interfere in global elections to spread propaganda and disinformation. Fast forward to the end of the year, Meta claims those fears did not play out, at least on its platforms, as it shared that the technology had […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Intel's second-generation Xe2 Arc GPUs are real, and once again, they could be compelling options for gamers looking for capable video cards under $250. Confirming leaks from the past week, Intel today unveiled the $249 Arc B580 and the slightly less capable $219 B570, both of which target 1,440p gaming. They feature the company's new XeSS2 AI capabilities (which are also coming to the older Arc cards), including Super Resolution upscaling (like the original XeSS), frame generation and low latency modes. The goal, according to Intel, is to deliver more performance per dollar compared to...
AI-generated content played a much smaller role in global election misinformation than what many officials and researchers had feared, according to a new analysis from Meta. In an update on its efforts to safeguard dozens of elections in 2024, the company said that AI content made up only a fraction of election-related misinformation that was caught and labeled by its fact checkers.“During the election period in the major elections listed above, ratings on AI content related to elections, politics and social topics represented less than 1% of all fact-checked misinformation,” the company...
Robot vacuums can be great helpers around the home, but they’re often quite expensive. Thankfully, Cyber Monday deals on these machines have come in clutch, knocking hundreds of dollars off the sticker prices of some of the most high-end machines we’ve tested. A version of one of our top picks, this Shark AI Ultra robot vacuum, is half off and down to $300. That’s just about a record-low price, and this model comes with a self-emptying base so you rarely have to interact with it if you don’t want to. As mentioned, the Shark AI Ultra is one of Engadget’s favorite robovacs; in fact, it...
Millions of Americans will pop open their laptops to buy gifts this holiday season, but tech companies are racing to turn the job of online shopping over to AI agents instead. Perplexity recently released an AI shopping agent for its paying customers in the United States. It’s supposed to navigate retail websites for you, find […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Users of the conversational AI platform ChatGPT discovered an interesting phenomenon over the weekend: the popular chatbot refuses to answer questions if asked about a “David Mayer.” Asking it to do so causes it to freeze up instantly. Conspiracy theories ensued — but a more ordinary reason may be at the heart of this strange […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI hardware startup Tenstorrent raised nearly $700 million in new funding. Tenstorrent raised a $693 million Series D round that values the company at more than $2.6 billion, Bloomberg first reported. The round was led by Samsung Securities and AFW Partners. Other investors including Hyundai and Jeff Bezos’s Bezos Expeditions, among others. The Toronto-based company […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
World Labs, the startup founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, has unveiled its first project: an AI system that can generate video game-like, 3D scenes from a single image. The AI-generated scenes, which anyone with a keyboard and mouse can explore on a demo on World Labs’ website, look impressive — if a bit cartoonish. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Former NBA athlete Omri Casspi has raised $60 million for his latest venture fund, Swish Ventures, which will invest in early-stage cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, and AI startups. The fund plans to back 10 companies, and will invest $5 million to $7 million per deal. Swish Ventures is Casspi’s second fund following the launch of Sheva […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly known as Twitter) may detest the current Kier Starmer government due to clashes on topics like free speech and immigration, but Musk is playing the long game. He’s getting cosy with major figures from both sides of the aisle, advancing his particular beliefs on AI […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nebius, the publicly-traded European AI infrastructure company formerly known as Yandex N.V., has raised $700 million in financing to power its U.S. expansion. The financing included “dozens of very well known investors,” according to Nebius CEO Arkady Volozh (pictured above) in a press briefing today. While all the names will eventually come out when the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Browser Company, the company behind Arc Browser for both desktop and mobile, teased its new web browser Monday called Dia — and this time, it focuses on AI tools. In the last few years, the startup launched Arc on Mac and Windows and Arc Search on iOS and Android, but the company is beginning work […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A new app called Death Clock predicts the date of its users’ deaths and offers tips on how to push that date back. TechCrunch wrote about an iPod Death Clock app way back in 2006 — but developer Brett Franson told Bloomberg that with an AI trained on more than 1,200 life expectancy studies, his […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Tech giants including OpenAI, Meta and Google are being urged to tackle AI’s dirty secret – its massive power problem.
Elon Musk’s attorneys filed for an injunction against OpenAI and Microsoft on Friday accusing the two of anticompetitive practices and seeking to stop OpenAI’s conversion to a for-profit company. The filing, spotted by TechCrunch, also names OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Microsoft’s Dee Templeton and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman as defendants. Musk first sued OpenAI earlier this year for allegedly violating its founding mission of building AI “for the benefit of humanity,” but withdrew the lawsuit a few months later. He then filed another lawsuit against...
Illustration: The Verge A host of Canadian media companies filed a lawsuit against OpenAI today, alleging “inappropriate and illegal” use of their journalism to power the company’s GPT model, Reuters reports. It’s the latest salvo fired by the media in its fight against AI companies that have scraped large swaths of the open web to train their large-language models. The suit was filed by several leading Canadian media companies, including the owners of the National Post and Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, and CBC/Radio-Canada. The group alleges that OpenAI...
Photonics — a field that underpins light-based systems for manipulating data — has a bright future, as the rise of AI demands better computing performance, but it has yet to be fully applied to a new generation of chips. German startup Akhetonics hopes to change that. It’s raised a €6 million seed funding round (approximately […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
If you’ve used ChatGPT Search or Perplexity you know that being able to search the web and get citations inline greatly improves these AI chatbots. Results are better when they involve timely information, and web search may reduce so-called hallucinations (i.e. when a generative AI outputs incorrect information). That’s why French startup Linkup is building […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Regulators are demanding information from the company on its cloud computing, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity products.
A new “reasoning” AI model, QwQ-32B-Preview, has arrived on the scene. It’s one of the few to rival OpenAI’s o1, and it’s the first available to download under a permissive license. Developed by Alibaba’s Qwen team, QwQ-32B-Preview, which contains 32.5 billion parameters and can consider prompts up ~32,000 words in length, performs better on certain […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Spotify will no longer allow developers building third-party apps with its Web API to access several features within the music streaming platform, such as song and artist recommendations, the company announced in a developer blog post on Wednesday. The company appears to be limiting third-party developers from building AI apps using data from Spotify listeners. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: The Verge A new startup created by former Android leaders aims to build an operating system for AI agents. Among them is Hugo Barra, Google’s former VP of Android product management, who says the new company — named “/dev/agents” — will revisit the leaders’ “Android roots.”AI companies are pushing AI agents as the next big leap in AI tools, promising digital assistants that can carry out tasks and make decisions autonomously and with little human input. Companies like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI each have plans to launch some version of this concept as a product in the...
OpenAI has filed a trademark application for its latest AI model, o1, as the firm moves to shield its IP. On Tuesday, OpenAI submitted paperwork to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to register the trademark “OpenAI o1.” Interestingly, the application reveals that OpenAI filed for a foreign trademark application in Jamaica in May, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The future of the proposals is uncertain as Trump admin comes to office.
Image: The Verge Uber is using gig workers to get into the AI labeling business, Bloomberg reports. It’s a sign that the ridehail and delivery company is interested in expanding its independent contractor-powered business model to meet the demands of the fast-growing world of machine learning and large-language models. The company’s new “Scaled Solutions” division claims it can connect businesses to “nuanced analysts, testers, and independent data operators” using its platform. It’s an extension of an internal team with members based in the US and India that do new feature testing...
The Chinese autonomous driving tech company will go public on the U.S. markets at $13 per share.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Getty Images Microsoft says it isn’t using customer data from its Microsoft 365 apps to train its AI models. The clarification addresses reports circulating online in the last few weeks claiming Microsoft required Word and Excel users to opt out of training the company’s AI systems.The confusion arose from a privacy setting in Microsoft Office that toggles “optional connected experiences” — a feature that helps users “search for online pictures” or “find information available online,” according to Microsoft. This toggle is...
Bluesky might not be training AI systems on user content as other social networks are doing, but there’s little stopping third-parties from doing so. Per a report by 404 Media, a machine learning librarian at AI firm Hugging Face pulled 1 million public posts from Bluesky via its Firehose API for machine learning research, pushing […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
India-based audio platform Pocket FM has more than 200,000 hours of content on the service. However, the company’s CEO, Rohan Nayak, believes that the platform still has room to grow in terms of creating original content and expanding its library to multiple genres and sub-genres. The fastest way to do that is to tap into […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
There’s a new AI model family on the block, and it’s one of the few that can be reproduced from scratch. On Tuesday, Ai2, the nonprofit AI research organization founded by the late Paul Allen, released OLMo 2, the second family of models in its OLMo series. (OLMo’s short for “Open Language Model.”) While there’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A still from a video generated by OpenAI’s Sora. | OpenAI OpenAI first teased its text-to-video AI model, Sora, back in February and hasn’t provided any meaningful updates on when it will be released since then. Now, it looks like some artists leaked access to the model in protest of being used by the company for what they claim is “unpaid R&D and PR.”On Tuesday, a group of Sora beta testers claimed to have leaked early access to Sora with a working interface for generating videos. In a post on Hugging Face, a public repository of AI models, they say that people were able to create...
Incoming president Donald Trump is considering naming an “AI czar” in the White House, Axios reports. Should Trump appoint such a policy person, they’d be charged with helping to coordinate federal regulation and governmental use of AI. Importantly, an AI czar wouldn’t require Senate confirmation, Axios notes — allowing them to get to work on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Cath Virginia / The Verge Spotify is getting support for Google’s Gemini Extensions, which will allow users to search for and play music using the generative AI assistant with natural language requests. The extension was first spotted in the code of the Google app in June, and now it’s rolling out to compatible Android devices, as reported by 9to5Google.Gemini can play music found by song titles, artist names, album names, playlist names, or for a particular activity, but at the moment, it won’t create playlists or radio stations on Spotify. One thing to be aware of is that if you’ve...
Uber is expanding its fleet of gig workers and creating a new category: AI annotation and data labeling. The ride-hailing company has started hiring contractors for a new AI and data labeling division called Scaled Solutions. These workers complete projects for Uber’s internal business units but are also serving outside customers including self-driving vehicle company […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Softbank-backed Meesho has rolled out what it claims to be India’s first generative AI-powered voice bot among e-commerce firms for customer support, paring down some expenses by 75%. The Bengaluru-based e-commerce startup, which serves 160 million customers in India, said Tuesday its AI bot currently handles 60,000 customer calls daily in English and Hindi. The […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Zoom is changing its name from Zoom Video Communications Inc. to just Zoom Communications Inc. In a post on the company blog, Zoom Communications CEO Eric Yuan writes that Zoom is now an “AI-first work platform for human connection” that delivers “modern, hybrid work solutions.” It’s a muddy, if vague, change compared to its 2020 rise when the classic Zoom Meetings product became synonymous with video conferencing and thrived as companies were forced to transition employees to work from home.Now, it no longer wants to be known for video as...
With global content consumption rising and demand for non-English content surpassing that for English movies and shows, IMAX is leveraging AI to scale localization on its original content. The entertainment and media industry grew 5% to $2.8 trillion in 2023, according to a report by PwC. The industry is expected to continue its expansion, though […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On Monday, Apple’s list of finalists for its coveted “iPhone App of the Year” award once again reveals how the iPhone maker is downplaying the impact of AI technology on the mobile app ecosystem. As it did last year, Apple’s 2024 list of top iPhone finalists favors more traditional iOS apps, including those that help […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Recipe app Pestle is rolling out a new feature that can automatically turn your favorite TikTok recipe videos into detailed, step-by-step instructions, using AI. The new feature processes the video’s caption, where creators tend to document their ingredient list and instructions, but is powered by on-device machine learning instead of using a third-party AI provider. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Anthropic is proposing a new standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data lives. Called the Model Context Protocol, or MCP for short, Anthropic says the standard, which it open sourced today, could help AI models produce better, more relevant responses to queries. MCP lets models draw data from sources like business tools […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The U.K. is seeking collaboration for a new AI security research lab that’s designed to counter Russia and other hostile states in what it dubs the “new AI arms race.” While the U.K. government has launched numerous funding initiatives in the past to support cybersecurity projects, the rise of AI-fueled nation-state attacks, specifically, is the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The UK is in a "new AI arms race" with countries like Russia and North Korea, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster will say on Monday.
Bernard Looney will join Prometheus Hyperscale, a Wyoming start-up, to help it address the enormous energy needs of the artificial intelligence industry.
Lawyers for The New York Times and Daily News, which are suing OpenAI for allegedly scraping their works to train its AI models without permission, say OpenAI engineers accidentally deleted data potentially relevant to the case. Earlier this fall, OpenAI agreed to provide two virtual machines so that counsel for The Times and Daily News […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI is funding academic research into algorithms that can predict humans’ moral judgements. In a filing with the IRS, OpenAI Inc., OpenAI’s nonprofit org, disclosed that it awarded a grant to Duke University researchers for a project titled “Research AI Morality.” Contacted for comment, an OpenAI spokesperson pointed to a press release indicating the award […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon is doubling its investment in Anthropic. The e-commerce giant will provide Anthropic with an additional $4 billion in funding on top of the $4 billion it committed last year. Although Amazon remains a minority investor, Anthropic has agreed to make Amazon Web Services (AWS) its “primary cloud and training partner.”Before today’s announcement, The Information had reported that Amazon wanted to make any additional funding contingent on a commitment from Anthropic to use the company’s in-house AI chips instead of silicon from NVIDIA. It appears Amazon got its way, with both...
MatX, a startup designing chips that support large language models, has raised a Series A of approximately $80 million, three sources say, less than a year after raising its $25 million seed round. Spark Capital led the investment, valuing the company at a pre-money valuation in the mid-$200 million range and a post-money valuation of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Gemini could spring into action soon. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google released the first Android 16 developer preview earlier this week and keen-eyed observers are already uncovering interesting tidbits, including one that hints about a much more useful future for Google’s AI assistant. In Android Authority, Mishaal Rahman writes about a mysterious new API in Android 16 called “app functions,” which appears to give Gemini Assistant agentic-like abilities to take action in apps. It sounds awfully similar to the upgraded “app intents” Apple supports in iOS 18, and it’...
Image: Microsoft Microsoft is releasing the first preview of its Recall AI feature for Copilot Plus PCs today. After a series of delays, Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel can now install a new build of Windows 11 that includes Recall and Click to Do — a feature that’s very similar to Google’s Circle to Search.Recall takes screenshots of almost everything you do on a Copilot Plus PC to make it searchable and easy to recall a memory or retrace your steps. If you enable snapshots to be recorded by Recall, then you can use the Recall app to search for what you were working on previously...
Revolut, the London-based fintech unicorn, shared a few items on the company’s 2025 roadmap at a corporate event in London on Friday. One of its main focuses for next year will be the introduction of an AI-enabled assistant to help its 50 million customers navigate the financial app, manage their money, and customize the software. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Since last September, the tech giant has pumped $8 billion into the artificial intelligence start-up, a sign of intense competition in developing tools that are reshaping the tech sector.
As the Twitter-like social network Bluesky sees a significant surge in users this month, Meta’s own X competitor Threads has been rapidly building out its platform. On Friday, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced that Threads will start testing AI-powered summaries of what people are discussing on the platform in the app’s “Trending now” section in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon announced today that it’s pumping another $4 billion into Claude AI maker Anthropic, bringing its total funding amount to $8 billion. This latest round follows $1.25 billion last September and another $2.75 billion in March.Along with the money, Amazon wrote in its blog post that Amazon Web Services (AWS) would be named Anthropic’s “primary training partner” and that the OpenAI rival would use Trainium and Inferentia chips for future models.The investment and deeper partnership align with previous reporting by Reuters that Claude will power...
Anthropic, OpenAI’s close rival, has raised an additional $4 billion from Amazon, and has agreed to make Amazon Web Services — Amazon’s cloud computing division — the sole place it’ll train its flagship generative AI models.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking told Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver a chilling but memorable hypothetical story a decade ago about the potential dangers of AI. The gist is a group of scientists build a superintelligent computer and ask it, “Is there a God?” The computer answers, “There is now” and a bolt of lightning zaps the plug preventing it from being shut down. Let’s hope that’s not what happened with OpenAI and some missing evidence from the New York Times’ plagiarism lawsuit.Wired reported that a court declaration filed by the New York Times on Wednesday says that...
Apple is developing a new version of its voice assistant, Siri, powered by advanced large language models, according to sources cited by Bloomberg. This more conversational Siri is part of Apple’s attempt to catch up in AI, where competitors have released impressive features, like Google’s Gemini Live, that are far more natural to talk to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: The Verge In a stunning misstep, OpenAI engineers accidentally erased critical evidence gathered by The New York Times and other major newspapers in their lawsuit over AI training data, according to a court filing Wednesday.The newspapers’ legal teams had spent over 150 hours searching through OpenAI’s AI training data to find instances where their news articles were included, the filing claims. But it doesn’t explain how this mistake occurred or what precisely the data included. While the filing says OpenAI admitted to the error and tried to recover the data, what it managed to...
YouTube announced on Thursday that its Dream Screen feature for Shorts now lets you create AI-generated video backgrounds. Up until now, Dream Screen could only create image backgrounds. The new capability is possible due to the integration of Google DeepMind’s AI video generation model, Veo, which can create 1080p video clips in various cinematic styles. Users […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Marissa Mayer has a lot of insights into the promise and problems with online advertising. She played an instrumental role in the early days of Google Search, and spent several years as Yahoo’s CEO. Today, Mayer the CEO of her own company, Sunshine, which is creating apps to do things like share photos among groups […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Brave announced on Thursday that it’s introducing an AI chat mode for follow-up questions based on initial queries on Brave Search. Earlier this year, the company launched “Answer with AI” summaries that appear above search results after you submit a query to give you an easy-to-read answer in response to a question. Now, the Answer […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! President-elect Trump has wasted little time picking cabinet members, including naming former Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy as the next secretary of transportation. If Duffy’s appointment is confirmed […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
When the Rabbit R1 arrived earlier this year, it was an unfinished product. Engadget’s own Devindra Hardawar called it “a toy that fails at almost everything.” Most of the features Rabbit promised, including its signature “large action model” (LAM), were either missing at launch or didn’t work as promised. Now, after more 20 software updates since the spring, Rabbit is releasing its most substantial update yet. Starting today, every R1 user now has beta access to teach mode, a feature that allows you to train Rabbit’s AI model to automate tasks for you on any website you can visit...
The new fund swims against the prevailing currents in its sector, where funds that invest in hardware or a mix of hardware and software tend to dominate.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Lawyers for The New York Times and Daily News, which are suing OpenAI for allegedly scraping their works to train its AI models without permission, say OpenAI engineers accidentally deleted data potentially relevant to the case. Earlier this fall, OpenAI agreed to provide two dedicated virtual machines so that counsel for The Times and Daily […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nvidia raked in more than $19 billion in net income during the last quarter, the company reported on Wednesday, but that did little to assure investors that its rapid growth would continue. On its earnings call, analysts prodded CEO Jensen Huang about how Nvidia would fare if tech companies start using new methods to improve […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Blackwell B200 GPU. | Image: Nvidia Nvidia has become the world’s most valuable company on the back of AI chips, passing Microsoft and Apple along the way, and in today’s Q3 2025 earnings, the company suggested its record AI revenue and profits are only the beginning. While The Information recently reported that its new flagship Blackwell AI servers might have cooling issues, the company didn’t address that on today’s call — instead, Nvidia assured investors that Blackwell is in “full production,” is “full steam” ahead, and that the company would continue to deliver more...
Several AI-based study tools are capitalizing on a “PDF to Brainrot” trend, which will read the text of a document you upload over “oddly satisfying” videos, like ASMR clips of mixing paint and cutting soap, or gameplay footage from Minecraft and Subway Surfers. Then, students can listen to an automated voice read their textbooks to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The company, which dominates the market for chips used to build artificial intelligence, expects another big jump in the current quarter.
Startups pursuing fusion power have benefitted from AI's insatiable thirst for electricity.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Meta Meta has announced that it’s adding HD video calling and noise suppression to its Messenger app, along with several other features like AI backgrounds that help bring it up to par with other popular smartphone video calling apps. HD video calling is enabled by default on Wi-Fi but can be turned on for calls using your cell data plan in the “Call settings” menu. You’ll also find options to adjust noise cancellation or switch your call’s audio output. Meta says it’s giving users the ability to leave voice or video messages as well. Image: Meta Messenger now has AI-...
Shiva Suri gained a unique perspective into how radiologists work when he quarantined and shared a home office with his mom, a well-regarded radiologist. “I watched her work day in and day out, and she was wasting about seven to eight hours on boring workflow tasks,” Suri said. “Only 5% of her time, she had […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta is introducing new features for Messenger, its messaging app, including AI-powered noise suppression. Messenger is getting HD video calls and voice isolation, both of which can be enabled via the call settings menu. HD calls are now the default for calls placed over Wi-Fi, Meta says, and an option for calls over cellular. Messenger […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. America’s AI war with China is intensifying — or at least, the rhetoric around it is. On Tuesday, a U.S. congressional commission proposed a “Manhattan Project-style” effort to fund the development of AI systems with human-level […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
H, the Paris startup founded by Google alums, made a big splash last summer when, out of the blue, it announced a seed round of $220 million, before releasing a single product. Three months later, still without a product, that splash started to look like a catastrophic flood when three of the company’s five co-founders […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The FBI unsealed an indictment yesterday that alleges Joanna Smith-Griffin, founder of the AI startup AllHere Education, engaged in “securities fraud, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft in connection with defrauding investors” out of nearly $10 million. The FBI claims she misrepresented her company’s revenue, customer base, and cash to investors from at least November […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Pony AI, the Chinese autonomous vehicle startup that’s looking to go public on the Nasdaq stock exchange, now wants to raise around $260 million, according to a new regulatory filing. That’s up from its previous target of around $224 million. To meet the goal, Pony will sell as many as 20 million American depository shares. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Sam Byford / The Verge Niantic has announced that it’s building a new “Large Geospatial Model” (LGM) that combines millions of scans taken from the smartphones of players of Pokémon Go and other Niantic products. This AI model could allow computers and robots to understand and interact with the world in new ways, the company said in a blog post spotted by Garbage Day.The LGM’s “spatial intelligence” is built on the neural networks developed as part of Niantic’s Visual Positioning System. The blog post explains that “Over the past five years, Niantic has focused on...
Illustration: The Verge Just one day after 404 Media revealed that HarperCollins struck a three-year AI training deal with an unnamed company, Bloomberg now says Microsoft will use the publisher’s content to train a not-yet-announced AI model.HarperCollins said in a statement to 404 Media that its deal will include “select nonfiction backlist titles” and that authors will have to opt into the training program. One author, Daniel Kibblesmith, posted screenshots a few days ago showing that he was offered $2,500 per book for a three-year AI licensing contract. Asked what would be an offer he...
Chroma, a startup building a new type of audiovisual entertainment for mobile devices, has been sold. The company, which had financial backing from Twitter and Medium co-founder Biz Stone as well as Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp, is headed to London-based audio technology company Bronze, an AI music startup. Founded by record producer Lex Dromgoole, who’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta hired Salesforce’s CEO of AI, Clara Shih, to lead a new organization building AI tools for businesses that use Meta’s apps to reach consumers, according to a LinkedIn post from Shih on Tuesday. Meta confirmed the appointment and the new Business AI group in a statement to TechCrunch. “I’m thrilled to share today that […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Vegas police received funding for tech like drones and license plate readers from Ben Horowitz. Now it wants AI to go through police footage.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge Google Gemini can now “remember” certain things about you, such as your interests and personal preferences. The change is rolling out to subscribers with access to Gemini Advanced, and it will allow the AI chatbot to tailor its responses based on your needs, according to Gemini’s most recent release notes.As noted by Google, you can share your interests, as well as details about your work, hobbies, or aspirations, while chatting with Gemini. You can also enter relevant details about yourself within the bot’s “Saved Info” page, such as telling it to only...
The UK’s competition regulator has cleared Google's $2 billion investment in Anthropic, according to reporting by Bloomberg and others. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has officially concluded that the company hasn’t acquired “material influence” over the AI startup Anthropic as a result of the investment.The continuing investigation into the partnership has also been squashed, with the UK antitrust watchdog saying that the investment doesn’t qualify for a full probe under merger rules. This is after phase one of a formal investigation was announced back in October.“...
The update will first come to the Galaxy Watch 6 before arriving on previous Wear OS models. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge There’s good news if you’ve got an older Samsung Galaxy Watch: the company announced today that it’s finally begun rolling out One UI 6 Watch to its older Wear OS smartwatches. One UI 6 Watch is Samsung’s take on Wear OS 5, and brings with it a host of new features. On the health and fitness front, that includes AI-powered health tips, FDA-cleared sleep apnea detection, and Energy Score, a new metric for gauging recovery from exercise and physical...
There are tons of hot Black Friday deals worth checking out already, but here's one that can help you keep the temperature just right. Google's fourth-generation Nest Learning Thermostat can be yours for $225, which is a $55 discount. The deal is available at Wellbots and you'll need to use the code ENGBFNLT55 at checkout to receive the savings. Google unveiled the latest version of its Nest Thermostat back in August. This is a solid deal on a new product. The thermostat employs AI to deliver what Google claims are more accurate readings and to make suggestions on how to save energy and cut...
The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has okayed Alphabet’s partnership and investment in AI rival Anthropic, concluding that it doesn’t qualify for investigation under current merger regulations. The announcement comes a month after the CMA revealed it was launching a formal “stage 1” probe into Google’s parent’s various investments in Anthropic, a three-year-old San […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
One of India's largest news agencies has sued OpenAI in a case that could set a precedent for how AI companies use copyrighted news content.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Unions representing Hollywood actors and writers went on strike last year to secure protections against AI systems taking their jobs. But Ben Affleck says that actors and screenwriters shouldn’t worry about AI because it’s not capable of doing either job today, and likely won’t for a long time. “Movies will be one of the last […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Department of Justice is reportedly pushing to force Google to spin off its Chrome browser business. That’s according to Bloomberg, which reports that the Justice Department is also planning to recommend to a federal judge that Google face antitrust requirements related to AI and its Android mobile operating system. The enforcement actions are the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Hugo Herrera / The Verge HarperCollins has agreed with an unnamed AI tech company to let the company use some nonfiction titles to train its models, 404 Media reports, but only if authors opt-in to having their books be used for training. Some authors are currently suing companies like OpenAI, accusing them of copyright infringement for training AI models on their works without permission.According to a statement HarperCollins gave to 404 Media, the agreement protects authors’ “underlying value of their works and our shared revenue and royalty streams.” Author Daniel Kibblesmith...
The US-based firm said hackers misdirected a $250,000 wire transfer payment that it hasn't been able to recover.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Black Friday deals are already here (no, we don't know where the year went either) and they include discounts on some of our favorite phones. Notably, the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra is currently down to $1,000 from $1,300. The Ultra came out in early 2024 and quickly became our choice for best premium Android phone. It scored an 89 in our review thanks to features like its long battery life — we often had over 50 percent left after 24 hours. It has a titanium frame and a 6.8-inch OLED panel that peaks at 2,600 nits, rather than the previous 1,750 nits. Plus, it has a slew of AI tools and...
After a brief delay, Meta says that it’s begun to roll out certain AI features to users of its Ray-Ban Meta AR glasses in France, Italy, and Spain. Starting today, people in those countries can invoke Meta’s AI assistant, Meta AI, using their voice to get answers to general questions (e.g. “What are some good […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Juna.ai wants to help factories become more efficient by automating complex industrial processes using AI agents.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On Thursday, the UK’s largest mobile network operator, O2, introduced a chatbot designed to frustrate phone scammers. Called “dAIsy,” it mimics an older woman with all kinds of time to chat – about knitting, her cat Fluffy – with the aim of keeping fraudsters engaged as they try obtaining her (fake) bank details. A press […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In the first half of 2024 alone, more than $35.5 billion was invested into AI startups globally.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: ESPN ESPN is testing an AI-generated avatar with the Saturday college football show SEC Nation. Dubbed FACTS, it’s going to be “...promoting education and fun around sports analytics” with information drawn from ESPN Analytics, which includes data like the Football Power Index (FPI), player and team statistics, and game schedules. We haven’t seen the avatar in action, but it sounds like a bot-ified version of stats encyclopedia Howie Schwab, who was ESPN’s first statistician and eventually the star of a mid-2000s game show, Stump the Schwab.ESPN has already brought generative...
Bluesky, a social network that’s experiencing a surge in users this week as users abandon X, says it has “no intention” of using user content to train generative AI tools. The social network made the announcement on the same day that X (formerly Twitter) is implementing its new terms of service that allow the platform […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Social network Bluesky, in a post on Friday, says that it has “no intention” of taking user content to train generative AI tools. It made the statement shortly ahead of competitor X implementing its new terms of service that spell out how it can analyze user text and other information to train its generative AI tools.“A number of artists and creators have made their home on Bluesky, and we hear their concerns with other platforms training on their data,” Bluesky says in a post. “We do not use any of your content to train generative AI, and have no...
Telephone scams are nothing new, but with the advent of AI, it has become harder than ever for people to know whether the person they’re speaking to is in fact who they say they are. But U.K. mobile network O2 is turning the tables, creating what it calls an “AI granny” to keep scammers on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Mr Musk, a co-founder of the company, is accusing it and the tech giant of operating a monopoly.
Per Bloomberg, X, Elon Musk’s social media company, has sued to block California law AB 2655, which requires large online platforms to remove or label AI deepfakes related to elections. X argues that the law, also known as the “Defending Democracy From Deepfake Deception Act of 2024,” will lead to widespread censorship of political speech. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: NASA NASA is teaming up with Microsoft to create an AI chatbot designed to make it easier to access and understand scientific data about the Earth. The tool, called Earth Copilot, will be able to answer questions about our planet by condensing NASA’s wide swath of geospatial information into easy-to-digest responses.To create the tool, NASA is integrating AI into its data repository, allowing Earth Copilot to refer to this information when answering questions, such as “What was the impact of Hurricane Ian in Sanibel Island?” or “How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect air quality in...
In a splashy op-ed in Time published this summer, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced Thrive AI Health, a venture with the goal of building an AI-powered assistant to promote healthier lifestyles. Backed by Huffington’s mental wellness firm Thrive Global and the OpenAI Startup Fund, Thrive AI Health would seek to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Pony AI is inching closer to its initial public offering in the U.S., but as it does so, it continues to drop its minimum target for what it hopes to raise in the transaction. Pony operates a fleet of 190 “robotrucks” in Beijing and Guangzhou and over 250 robotaxis in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Shanghai. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: The Verge TikTok will let advertisers pull in content from Getty Images when using the platform’s AI ad creation tool. With the integration, advertisers can use Getty’s licensed images and videos to make ads containing AI-generated content, including AI avatars that look like real people.The integration will be available through TikTok’s Symphony Creative Studio — an AI-powered video generation tool that rolled out today for all advertisers. This tool can generate a video based on a product description, add an AI avatar to “speak” about it, and even incorporate AI-powered...
Haliey Welch, the 22-year-old who went viral for her “Hawk Tuah” video, has managed to turn her brief moment of fame into a full-fledged career. In just a few months, Welch has rapidly risen to fame, amassing around 5 million followers across various social media platforms. After recently releasing her own podcast titled “Talk Tuah,” […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Francois Chollet, a leading figure in the AI world, is leaving Google after close to a decade. In a post on X, Chollet said that he’s starting a new company with “a friend” — but declined to reveal additional details. “I’m very grateful for my decade at Google,” he said. “In that timespan, deep learning […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI’s insatiable thirst for electricity is expected to surge in the coming years.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A first draft of a Code of Practice that will apply to providers of general-purpose AI models under the European Union’s AI Act has been published, alongside an invitation for feedback — open until November 28 — as the drafting process continues into next year, ahead of formal compliance deadlines kicking in over the coming […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images How fake music targets real artists. Continue reading…
Google launched a dedicated app for its AI-powered assistant Gemini on iOS globally today. Until now, iOS users either had to use the Google app or mobile web to chat with Gemini. The new Gemini iOS app supports 35 languages across the world. Plus, users can have a conversation with Gemini through its Gemini Live […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The travel industry continues to gain ground, expected to break $11 trillion in revenues this year, and consumers are evolving from so-called “revenge travel” post-Covid-19, to dedicating a growing share of their budget to a wider array of experiences away from home. Add AI into the mix, and that spells a bump of investment into […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With its biggest update to Final Cut Pro (FCP) in years, Apple may be re-embracing the professional video creator crowd it has neglected since the launch of FCP X in 2011. The company finally unveiled its successor, Final Cut Pro 11 (FCP 11), an update that leans heavily on AI tools. At the same time, it introduced spatial video editing to produce content for the Vision Pro headset.The key AI feature is Magnetic Mask, which lets you cut out people and other moving subjects, then stylize them or put them in another location altogether. "This powerful and precise automatic analysis provides...
Carl Madi spent a chunk of the last decade working for Uber and Handy, an online marketplace for cleaners. “I spent a lot of time convincing drivers, handyman and cleaners, to join the gig economy,” he told TechCrunch. But when the pandemic struck, he saw many people lose their jobs overnight. He noticed that there […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Every year, more than 1,000 startups join Station F, the iconic startup campus in Paris. As it can be hard to sift through 1,000 startup descriptions, Station F selects the 40 most promising startups and shares a list of what it calls the “Future 40”. The campus also invests in 10 of these startups. These […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The European Union is developing compliance guidance for its new law on AI. As part of that process it’s launched a consultation (here) seeking input in two areas. The first is how the law defines AI systems (as opposed to “simpler traditional” software). It’s asking people in the AI industry, business, academic and civil society […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
DeepL has made a name for itself with online text translation it claims is more nuanced and precise than services from the likes of Google — a pitch that has catapulted the German startup to a valuation of $2 billion and more than 100,000 paying customers. Now, as the hype for AI services continues to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Artificial intelligence has become a subject for people in the art and theater worlds who are worried about being replaced by it.
YouTube added a capability for select creators in the U.S. to create AI-generated songs via prompts using the vocals of artists like Charlie Puth, Charli XCX, Demi Lovato, John Legend, Sia, T-Pain, and Troye Sivan last year. Now, the company is adding a feature for select creators to remix a track by describing how they […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple is gearing up to announce a new smart home hub, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. As early as March 2025, the iPhone maker could release a tablet that mounts to your wall, control smart home appliances, does video calls, and of course does Apple Intelligence. The device reportedly has a 6-inch touchscreen, but it’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge For months now, there have been rumors about a smart home display Apple is supposedly working on. Now Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says the display will be wall-mounted and control smart home devices, attend video calls, and more, similar to the Amazon Echo Hub, and works on its own but requires an iPhone to complete the initial setup.The iPad-like device, which will reportedly be available as soon as next March, has a six-inch display with thick edges, a built-in camera, a rechargeable battery, and speakers, according to Gurman. The plan is to have Siri and Apple...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is testing a new feature that will let creators use AI to “restyle” licensed songs for their shorts. The small group of creators with access can enter a prompt to change up different elements in a song, such as its mood or genre, and the expansion of YouTube’s Dream Track AI feature will generate a reworked 30-second soundtrack.YouTube:If you’re a creator in the experiment group, you can select an eligible song > describe how you want to restyle it > then generate a unique 30-second soundtrack to use in your Short.These restyled...
Many feared that the 2024 election would be affected, and perhaps decided, by AI-generated disinformation. While there was some to be found, it was far less than anticipated. But don’t let that fool you: the disinfo threat is real — you’re just not the target. So at least says Oren Etzioni, an AI researcher of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge If you’ve been looking to replace your Android phone’s camera app with one that doesn’t overprocess photos to alter lighting and detail in sometimes extreme ways, now there’s an option. Zerocam is a barebones app that promises to “shoot in RAW and process your photos to remove all artificial effects, delivering soft, pleasant-to-eye images.” We’ve been talking about the definition of a photo for years, and we’re not the only ones complaining about HDR processing that sometimes makes images seem flat because they lack contrast between light...
The media industry today may not have a very favorable view of AI — a technology that’s already been used to replace reporters with AI-written copy, while other AI companies have scooped up journalists’ work to feed their chatbots’ data demands, but without returning traffic to the publisher as search engines once did. However, one […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Writer has raised $200 million at a $1.9 billion valuation to expand its generative AI platform.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Red Hat, the IBM-owned open source software firm, is acquiring Neural Magic, a startup that optimizes AI algorithms to run on commodity processors. The transaction is subject to applicable regulatory reviews and other customary closing conditions. The terms weren’t disclosed.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Enterprise spend on cloud services continues to go up, up, up — to the tune of $675 billion this year — thanks to organizations’ firm embrace of software-as-a-service, the popularity of distributed working, and the arrival of compute-intensive tech like AI. A startup called PointFive that believes it has found a better way to get […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Nvidia Nvidia is officially launching its Nvidia app on PC today, designed to overhaul and replace the GeForce Experience app. The Nvidia app originally went into beta earlier this year, and it’s now feature complete enough for the beta label to be removed and for the app to soon be bundled with GeForce drivers.The Nvidia app includes a redesigned and improved overlay, with support for 4K 120fps AV1 video capture, Nvidia’s AI-powered RTX game filters, and an improved customizable statistic overlay. Image: Nvidia The new Nvidia app also gives you access to a bunch of other Nvidia apps...
Google’s Learn About website. | Image: Google Google has launched an experimental new AI tool called Learn About, which is different from the chatbots we’re used to, like Gemini and ChatGPT. It’s built on the LearnLM AI model that Google introduced this spring, saying it’s “grounded in educational research and tailored to how people learn.” The answers it provides have more visual and interactive elements with educational formatting.We tested Learn About and Google Gemini with a simple prompt: “How big is the universe?” Both answered that “the observable universe” is “...
A founder who was an early mover in the race to build autonomous vehicles has raised $15 million for his next act: a startup that claims its AI can write enterprise software on its own. Cogna — as the U.K.-based startup is called — is led by Ben Peters, the technical co-founder of FiveAI (the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Social network X has so far limited its AI chatbot Grok (built by Elon Musk’s other company xAI) to its premium, paying users. However, the platform is seemingly preparing to open up the chatbot to free users. Over the weekend, several app researchers and users posted about a free version of Grok being made available […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI’s next flagship model might not represent as big a leap forward as its predecessors, according to a new report in The Information. Employees who tested the new model, code-named Orion, reportedly found that even though its performance exceeds OpenAI’s existing models, there was less improvement than they’d seen in the jump from GPT-3 to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Reviews of Intel’s new Arrow Lake-based Core Ultra 9 200S-series processor have been lackluster, specifically when it comes to gaming performance, but Intel says that’s not the end of the story. Its new chips should be performing better, and the company will have an ETA on getting them there soon, according to Robert Hallock, Intel’s VP and GM of client AI and technical marketing, in a new interview with HotHardware’s Dave Altavilla and Marco Chiappetta.Intel was up-front in saying these new chips wouldn’t beat AMD’s chips for gaming. But...
A lot of people tried to use OpenAI's DALL-E image generator during the election season, but the company said that it was able to stop them from using it as a tool to create deepfakes. ChatGPT rejected over 250,000 requests to generate images with President Biden, President-elect Trump, Vice President Harris, Vice President-elect Vance and Governor Walz, OpenAI said in a new report. The company explained that it's a direct result of a safety measure it previously implemented so that ChatGPT would refuse to generate images with real people, including politicians. OpenAI has been...
Paul McCartney in 2022. | Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images The Beatles have been nominated for two Grammys — nearly 50 years after the band officially split up. Their final song, called “Now and Then,” was restored last year with the help of AI, and is now up for record of the year alongside the likes of Beyoncé, Charlie XCX, Billie Eilish, and Taylor Swift. It’s also been nominated for best rock performance, where it goes up against Green Day, Pearl Jam, and The Black Keys.Released in November 2023, “Now and Then” started as a demo recorded by John Lennon in the late 1970s. This...
There isn’t a shortage of AI-powered coding assistance startups. They include Augment, Codeium, Magic, and Poolside. However, Cursor has become one of the most popular. Its developer, Anysphere, has seen its revenue grow from $4 million annualized recurring revenue (ARR) in April to $4 million a month as of last month, according to a person […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Monarch Tractor has laid off around 10% of its workforce as part of a restructuring that will see it prioritize non-agricultural customers, license its autonomous technology, and boost sales of its AI-powered farm management software, TechCrunch has learned. Around 35 employees were cut this week by the Livermore, California-based autonomous electric tractor startup that has […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Beatles have been nominated for two Grammy awards this year, and no, we did not accidentally fall into a time warp back to the 1960s. The Beatles song “Now and Then,” refined with the use of AI and released last year, is up for Record of the Year and Best Rock Performance. So, the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Laura Normand / The Verge Donald Trump’s second term means significant changes for AI, crypto, and EV policy. Continue reading…
Google Vids’ “Help me create” screen powered by Gemini AI. | Image: Google Google is generally rolling out its Gemini AI-powered Vids app that lets you create video presentations using a prompt. Some of Vids’ key features include letting Gemini auto-insert stock footage for you, generating a script, and making AI voiceovers so you don’t have to speak. Google advertises that the tool can help turn customer support articles into videos, make training videos, share company announcements, create meeting recaps, and more.Vids will be available by default for Workspace organizations with...
Other Windows Insider updates include new CPU instructions for Prism x86 emulator.
AI wants to help us drive better, write better and diagnose diseases faster. Now imagine AI helping you be a better parent. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The November update for Google Pixel devices running Android 15 is rolling out now. This batch doesn’t include exciting new features, like the AI-powered theft protection in the October update, but it has bug fixes and the latest security patches to tighten things up.The new software includes fixes for known intermittent issues with Bluetooth range, camera tilt when zooming between cameras and unexpected flashing or flickering of white dots or screen brightness. It also has fixes for adaptive brightness not activating, the keyboard dismiss button not working correctly and the performance and...
AI startup Mistral has launched a new API for content moderation. The API, which is the same API that powers moderation in Mistral’s Le Chat chatbot platform, can be tailored to specific applications and safety standards, Mistral says. It’s powered by a fine-tuned model (Ministral 8B) trained to classify text in a range of languages, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Google could soon add “AI Replies” to the Phone app’s call-screening feature. A line of code spotted by 9to5Google suggests the app will generate “new AI-powered smart replies” based on how someone responds to the call screen.Google widely rolled out its call-screening feature in Android 12. It allows you to filter calls and have Google Assistant respond with an audio message to ask who’s calling, rather than having to pick up the call yourself. Late last year, Google added “contextual replies,” which use the context of someone’s call to serve...
Image: Microsoft Microsoft appears to be stepping back from charging Microsoft 365 Personal and Home subscribers another $20 per month to get access to AI-powered Office features. The software giant quietly announced it’s making Copilot Pro features part of its Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions last week, but only in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand for now.“It’s been nine months since we introduced consumers to Copilot in our Microsoft 365 apps via Copilot Pro. We’ve spent that time adding new features, improving performance, and listening...
Anthropic today announced that it’s teaming up with Palantir, the data-mining company, and Amazon Web Services to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to Anthropic’s Claude 3 and 3.5 family of AI models. The news comes as a growing number of AI vendors, for strategic and revenue-related reasons, look to ink deals with U.S. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sony’s new beastly console is a niche product for PlayStation gamers who want the most premium experience. The PlayStation 5 Pro is the console equivalent of the iPhone Pro Max or the Kindle Signature but still cheaper than a PC gaming rig. It has a more powerful GPU, capable of offering 4K and 60 fps gaming, an AI upscaler to polish up textures, new ray tracing and a substantial 2TB SSD to store all your games. (No disc drive, however.) And, as you’ll read in our full review, the PS5’s back catalog has never looked better.There are good arguments for not buying the PlayStation 5 Pro...
Apple has released the AI-powered version of its latest mobile operating system, iOS 18.2, to its public beta users. The update includes new features like an AI emoji generator app called Genmoji, an Image Playground AI image app, ChatGPT integration with Siri, and visual search using the iPhone 16 cameras, among other things. Previously, these […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI has scooped up a domain name that sounds like a logical fit. TechCrunch reports that Chat.com, which was previously bought for over $15 million, is now in the hands of the ChatGPT maker.According to the domain history website who.is, Chat.com was first registered way back in September 1996. Before OpenAI’s acquisition, it last changed hands in 2023, when HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah reportedly bought it for $15.5 million. We can speculate that the executive saw the burgeoning AI chatbot industry and the concise term’s potential for a big return. It was reportedly one of...
A grueling election cycle has come to a close. Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the U.S., and, with Republicans in control of the Senate — and possibly the House — his allies are poised to bring sea change to the highest levels of government. The effects will be acutely felt in the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Bose updates its compact smart bar with a simpler name and some cool new features.
TechCrunch found that X's AI chatbot produced incorrect results about the U.S. presidential election, even as votes were still being cast.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nvidia on Tuesday exceeded Apple’s market capitalization to become the world’s largest company, on the strength of a global AI push. As Bloomberg notes, the chipmaker has experienced an astronomical 850% growth since the tail end of 2022. Nvidia was valued at $3.43 trillion at the close of market, topping Apple’s $3.38 trillion. This isn’t […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Suno CEO Mikey Shulman found himself in an unlikely place for the founder of a generative AI music company: a songwriting class at Berklee College of Music. “It sounds like walking into the lion’s den,” Shulman said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. “The approach of just walking in there and saying, ‘don’t worry, there’s no […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The new AI hub will support research into Arab language AI models and “Saudi-specific AI applications.”© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta had plans to build an AI data center in the US that relies on nuclear power — it even already knew where it wanted the facility to be built. According to the Financial Times, though, the company had to scrap its plans, because the a rare bee species was discovered on the land reserved for the project. Company chief Mark Zuckerberg was reportedly ready to close a deal with an existing nuclear power plant operator that would provide emissions-free energy to the plant. The Times said he told staff members at an all-hands last week that pushing through wouldn't have been possible...
Coatue Management, a hedge fund that invested heavily in tech startups during the pandemic-infused boom, is raising $1 billion to back AI-focused companies, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The funding, which will top up the firm’s flagship fund, will be raised primarily from institutional investors. However, high-net-worth individuals with accounts at the brokerage Raymond James and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta will now allow US government agencies and contractors to use its open-source Llama AI model for “national security applications.” In an announcement on Monday, the company said it’s working with Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Oracle, and others to make Llama available to the government.Under Meta’s “acceptable use policy,” people can’t use the latest Llama 3 model for “military, warfare, nuclear industries or applications, espionage.” However, as explained by Meta, this update opens the door for the US military to use Llama to do...
Image: Amazon Amazon’s Prime Video is getting a new generative AI-powered feature to help catch you up on a show. The new tool, called X-Ray Recaps, can create text summaries of “of full seasons of TV shows, single episodes, and even pieces of episodes,” the company says in a blog post.X-Ray Recaps will be accessible from the detail page of a show or in X-Ray while you’re watching something. The tool “analyzes various video segments, combined with subtitles or dialogue, to generate detailed descriptions of key events, places, times, and conversations,” Amazon says. Amazon has also...
The CEO of AI search company Perplexity, Aravind Srinivas, has offered to cross a virtual picket line and provide services during a strike by New York Times tech workers. The NYT Tech Guild announced its strike today, having said for months that this was the deadline. “But the company has decided that our members aren’t […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Large language models have already proven transformative for robotics. While researchers and companies alike utilize the platforms to supercharge robotic learning, a pair of roboticists at UC Berkeley and ETH Zurich challenged themselves by leveraging generative AI to put a cheap robot arm to work. Jannik Grothusen and Kaspar Janssen trained a pair of $120 […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Can the U.S. meaningfully regulate AI? It’s not at all clear yet. Policymakers have achieved progress in recent months, but they’ve also had setbacks, illustrating the challenging nature of laws imposing guardrails on the technology. In March, Tennessee became the first state to protect voice artists from unauthorized AI cloning. This summer, Colorado adopted a tiered, risk-based […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Verge AI search company Perplexity is answering the question of whether it’s a good idea to use AI to serve crucial voting information with a new Election Information Hub it announced on Friday. The hub offers things like AI-generated answers to voting questions and summaries of candidates, and on November 5th, Election Day, the company says it will track vote counts live, using data from The Associated Press. Perplexity says its voter information, which includes polling requirements, locations, and times, is based on data from Democracy Works. (The same group powers similar features from...
As a part of TechCrunch’s ongoing Women in AI series, which seeks to give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved (and overdue) time in the spotlight, TechCrunch interviewed Sophia Velastegui. Velastegui is a member of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) national AI advisory committee and the former chief AI officer at Microsoft’s business software division. Velastegui didn’t […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
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Two of the biggest forces in two deeply intertwined tech ecosystems — large incumbents and startups — have taken a break from counting their money to jointly plead that the government cease and desist from even pondering regulations that might affect their financial interests, or as they like to call it, innovation. “Our two companies […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
An SEO agency owner says he is “very depressed” after one of his AI-assisted Halloween parade listings misled revelers in Dublin, Ireland.
If you’re wondering what happened to Amazon’s new and improved version of its Alexa voice assistant, you’re not alone. Bloomberg reports that the new Alexa is still stuck in its developmental phase and Amazon has cut off access to its beta phase including its new “Let’s Chat” phase. As a result, a planned late 2024 launch has been pushed back to next year.The problem seems to be with its large language models (LLMs). The new Alexa is designed to understand more complicated questions from users but it’s also more likely to fail doing some of the most basic things the old version...
Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine, might hallucinate from time to time. But the company wants to show that it’s trustworthy enough to use for election results tracking. Today, Perplexity announced a dedicated hub for U.S. general election information. Populated by data from the Associated Press and Democracy Works, the company described it in a blog […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Thousands of people took to the streets in Dublin to attend a Halloween parade that never came, according to reporting by The Independent. Why did they do such a thing? It was all due to an AI-generated ad that promoted the fake event.The My Spirit Halloween website advertised the completely fabricated Macnas Halloween Parade, which was supposed to take place from 7PM to 9PM on the streets of Dublin. News of the parade quickly spread online, and it even received a news ranking on Google.People waiting for a halloween parade. #DublinNo Gardai around, no official announcement, people waiting on...
Chinese research scientists linked to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the military wing of China’s ruling party, reportedly used “open” AI from Meta to develop a tool for defense applications. According to Reuters, Chinese researchers, including two affiliated with a PLA R&D group, used Meta’s Llama 2 AI model to create a military-focused chatbot. The […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge You just left your house. As you peel out of the driveway and tear down the street in the coolest way possible, your garage door... well, what does it do? The answer’s probably nothing, and that feels like the wrong answer. The smart home was supposed to have fixed this by now.On this episode of The Vergecast, we didn’t necessarily set out to talk about smart garage doors for as long as we did, but The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern joined the show with a lot of thoughts about Apple Intelligence, notification summaries, and how we all — and in...
The Quick Insert button is on the Galaxy Chromebook Plus and is coming to future 2025 Chromebooks. | Image: Google Starting today, Google’s ChromeOS 130 update with Quick Insert, Focus Mode, Welcome Recap, and other features is rolling out. Chromebook Plus models with NPU also get exclusive special features in 130, such as the new recorder app with AI, enhanced mic, camera effects, and Gemini AI tools like “help me read” summaries.There’s a long list of changes in 130, but here are some highlights. Quick Insert is a way to add emoji, GIFs, or links to recently visited sites and access...
Nvidia made a fortune on the AI boom. AMD’s rival AI chip became the fastest ramping product in its history, already pulling in $1 billion per quarter and inspiring AMD to remake itself as an AI company overall. But Intel, which suggested it would pull in $1 billion, even $2 billion on the back of AI in 2024, now says it won’t even meet its more modest $500 million goal for its Gaudi AI accelerator this year. “We will not achieve our target of $500 million in revenue for Gaudi in 2024,” CEO Pat Gelsinger just said on the company’s Q3 2024 earnings call today. Though Intel just...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In the week's least surprising news, Amazon’s reinvention of its Alexa voice assistant has reportedly fallen even further behind. According to Bloomberg, the launch of a new Alexa — billed as a smarter, more capable AI-powered voice assistant — has been pushed back. Again. “A person familiar with the matter said Alexa AI teams were recently told that their target deadline had been moved into 2025,” writes Bloomberg. The revamped voice assistant, first announced last September, was expected to arrive this year, toting ChatGPT-style intelligence...
In a Reddit AMA, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted that a lack of compute capacity is one major factor preventing the company from shipping products as often as it’d like. “All of these models have gotten quite complex,” he wrote in response to a question about why OpenAI’s next AI models were taking so long. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Amelia Holoway Krales / The Verge After warning customers to stop using it, Humane is now formally recalling around 10,500 units of its charging case for the beleaguered AI Pin. The affected cases were sold from last November through May of this year. According to the CPSC recall page, the lithium polymer battery in the Charge Case Accessory can potentially overheat and present a fire hazard. Humane admitted similar findings in a June email to customers.That worst-case scenario, thankfully, hasn’t happened yet; the recall notes “one report of a charge case overheating and melting...
Meta says it’s partnering with sensor firm GelSight and Wonik Robotics, a South Korean robotics company, to commercialize tactile sensors for AI. GelSight will work with Meta to bring to market Digit 360, which Meta describes as a “a tactile fingertip with human-level multimodal sensing capabilities.” The successor to Meta’s Digit sensor, Digit 360 digitizes […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google Maps is getting new features powered by Gemini, Google’s generative AI model. On Thursday the company announced incoming updates that will allow Google Maps users in the U.S. to tap into AI to help them find new places to visit and answer questions about different locations. The platform is also getting enhanced navigation features […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Physical Intelligence, a well-funded startup chasing breakthroughs in robotic intelligence, has developed a robot capable of doing various household chores remarkably well.
The European Union has tossed a spanner in the works of chipmaker Nvidia’s proposed acquisition of Tel Aviv-based AI workload management startup Run:ai. The deal, which was announced back in April — with a price-tag of $700 million per our sources — will be reviewed by the bloc after a request by competition regulators in Italy […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google is bringing its Gemini AI assistant into more of its software suite, announcing several new features for Google Maps. Users looking for ideas about places to go in Maps can now ask conversational questions about the type of location they want and receive answers from Gemini. Maps can also use AI to respond to deeper queries about a specific locale. When you're looking at a location on Maps, Gemini can also provide a summary of reviews. These AI-powered features will roll out to the Maps app on Android and iOS beginning this week.The Immersive View Maps feature introduced last year is...
Last month at Meta Connect, Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta AI was “on track” to become the most-used generative AI assistant in the world. The company has now passed a significant milestone toward that goal, with Meta AI passing the 500 million user mark, Zuckerberg revealed during the company’s latest earnings call.The half billion user mark comes just barely a year after the social network first launched its AI assistant last fall. Zuckerberg said the company still expects to become the “most-used” assistant by the end of 2024, though he's never specified how the company is...
AMD and NVIDIA could be on a collision course for CES. AMD CEO Lisa Su has confirmed for the first time that the company is set to release its next-gen PC GPUs early next year."In gaming graphics, revenue declined year-over-year as we prepare for a transition to our next-gen Radeon GPUs based on our RDNA 4 architecture," Su told investors on AMD's third-quarter earnings call. "In addition to a strong increase in gaming performance, RDNA 4 delivers significantly higher ray-tracing performance and adds new AI capabilities. We are on track to launch the first RDNA 4 GPUs in early 2025."The timing...
Google CEO Sundar Pichai just revealed that AI now generates more than a quarter of new code for its products, according to a company earnings call transcribed by Ars Technica. In other words, AI tools are already having an absolutely mammoth impact on the development of software.Pichai did say that human programmers oversee the computer-generated code, which is something. The CEO noted that AI coding helps with “boosting productivity and efficiency," ensuring that engineers “do more and move faster.”There’s no two ways around it. 25 percent is a lot, and Google is just one company...
Image: Dropbox Dropbox is cutting its workforce by 20 percent today — laying off 528 people — amid slowing growth for its core cloud storage business. The latest round of cuts comes after Dropbox laid off around 500 people in early 2023 to redirect efforts to its AI division.“We’re making more significant cuts in areas where we’re over-invested or underperforming while designing a flatter, more efficient team structure overall,” writes Dropbox CEO Drew Houston in a blog post titled An update from Drew. At the same time, Houston mentions that the market is moving towards where the...
Autonomous delivery vehicle company Avride has a fresh design — and NVIDIA AI brains. The company’s engineers have swapped out the old six-wheel configuration for a more efficient four-wheel chassis. It can make 180-degree turns almost instantly, effortlessly park on inclines and move faster without compromising safety.Avride has been working on autonomous delivery robots since 2019. It began as part of Russian tech company Yandex’s autonomous driving wing. But the spun-off company divested its Russian assets after Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and rebranded as...
The US presidential election is in its final stretch. Before election day on November 5, Engadget is looking at where the candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, stand on the most consequential tech issues of our day.While it might not garner the headlines that immigration, abortion or inflation do, AI is quietly one of the more consequential issues this election season. What regulations are put in place and how forcefully those rules are enforced will have wide ranging impacts on consumer privacy, intellectual property, the media industry and national security.Normally, politicians lack...
People are generally skeptical of customer service chatbots, and many outright despise them. In a recent Gartner survey, 64% of consumers said that they’d prefer companies didn’t use AI of any kind — including chatbots — in their customer service. Fifty-three percent went so far as to say they’d weigh switching to a rival if […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Archon Biosciences, a biotech startup putting AI to work designing novel biomolecules, has just emerged from stealth with an impressive $20 million in seed funding. The company aims to supercharge antibody treatments using specially designed protein “cages” that multiply their effects, opening up new opportunities in drug development. This is the first company to be […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
iPod creator, Nest Labs founder, and investor Tony Fadell took a shot at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday during a spirited interview at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Francisco. Speaking about his understanding of the longer history of AI development before the LLM craze and the serious issues with LLM hallucinations, he said, “I’ve […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Ashton Kutcher’s VC firm, Sound Ventures, co-led by general partners Guy Oseary and Effie Epstein, is betting on AI — including with an investment in Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, the investors confirmed on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Tuesday. The startup, founded by Li, the Stanford professor dubbed the “Godmother of AI,” has already […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Ashton Kutcher, co-founder of Sound Ventures, believes that every company is going to become an AI company, but that there might not be a winner in the space. The actor and investor spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Tuesday alongside Sound co-founder Guy Oseary and partner Effie Epstein to detail what the firm is looking […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A new startup setting out to combat the scourge of deepfakes and spoofed evidence in the age of AI is showing off its wares on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 this week. ForceField is building a set of “patent-pending” APIs dubbed MARQ, the first of which is designed to authenticate content. For […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google won’t ship tech from Project Astra, its wide-ranging effort to build AI apps and “agents” for real-time, multimodal understanding, until next year at the earliest. Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed the timeline in remarks during Google’s Q3 earnings call this afternoon. “[Google is] building out experiences where AI can see and reason about the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge Google is building a bunch of AI products, and it’s using AI quite a bit as part of building those products, too. “More than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers,” CEO Sundar Pichai said on the company’s third quarter 2024 earnings call. It’s a big milestone that marks just how important AI is to the company.AI is helping Google make money as well. Alphabet reported $88.3 billion in revenue for the quarter, with Google Services (which includes Search) revenue of $76.5 billion, up 13 percent year-over-...
OpenAI is reportedly working with TSMC and Broadcom to build an in-house AI chip — and beginning to use AMD chips alongside Nvidia’s to train its AI. Reuters reports that OpenAI has — at least for now — abandoned plans to establish a network of factories for chip manufacturing. Instead, the company will focus on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is in talks to raise new funding at a valuation around $40 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. xAI hopes to raise several billion dollars in the round, adding to the $6 billion in Series B funding that the company raised in May. The rumored valuation would nearly double […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
There’s no shortage of startups trying to create enterprise AI assistants. What’s less common is an AI assistant that can actually execute tasks across several of your work apps at once. That’s the promise of Narada AI, a startup building an AI assistant based on new research out of UC Berkeley. Narada has been operating […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Growing up as an immigrant, Cyril Gorlla taught himself how to code — and practiced as if a man possessed. “I aced my mother’s community college programming course at 11, amidst periodically disconnected household utilities,” he told TechCrunch. In high school, Gorlla learned about AI, and became so obsessed with the idea of training his […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
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Amazon is extending the availability of its AI-enabled shopping assistant, Rufus, to more markets in Europe and the Americas. The ecommerce giant has been widely considered to be playing catchup with its Big Tech brethren in the AI sphere, particularly against the backdrop of the generative AI hype these past couple of years. Rufus is […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The European Union will spend €1.4 billion (about $1.5 billion) next year to bolster deeptech research and support scale-ups in strategic areas like AI, low-carbon technologies, agritech and biotech, the European Commission said on Tuesday. The budget for the 2025 Work Program of the European Innovation Council (EIC), part of the bloc’s flagship Horizon Europe research […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
President Joe Biden’s administration says it’s finalizing rules to curb investments in AI and other tech sectors in China, Reuters reports. The rules, which were first proposed in June by the U.S. Treasury and directed by an executive order President Biden signed in August 2023, cover certain AI systems, quantum information systems, and semiconductors and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Bestselling author Margaret Atwood isn’t worried about the indefatigable rise of generative AI — telling Reuters that she’s too old to be concerned about its impact on the arts. Her remarks follow a petition calling for an end to the unlicensed use of creative works to train AI models that’s now amassed over 31,000 signatures. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Vinod Khosla has no doubts that humanity’s future with AI is bright. The Sun Microsystems co-founder turned prominent investor predicts that “the need to work will go away” almost entirely thanks to AI. “Almost all expertise, it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about primary care physicians, mental health therapists, oncologists, structural engineers or accountants—all […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Oversubscribed Ventures co-founder Sara Foster (above right) made a confession on stage on Monday at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. “I don’t even have ChatGPT on my phone,” she said. It’s an unexpected comment from an investor, given that ChatGPT is arguably the most influential product to launch this decade. But what makes the Foster sisters different […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Storied investor Vinod Khosla, founder and partner at Khosla Ventures, and more recently one of the first checks into OpenAI veered off topic during a Monday interview at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 focused on the future of AI. After talking about AI’s future and risks, he took a moment to deliver a stringent warning about the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta is working on an AI-powered search engine to decrease its dependence on Google and Microsoft, according to a report from The Information. The search engine would reportedly provide AI-generated search summaries of current events within the Meta AI chatbot.The Meta AI bot built into Instagram and Facebook currently uses Google — whose parent company, Alphabet, will report quarterly earnings tomorrow — and Microsoft Bing to answer questions about recent news and events. That could eventually change, as Meta’s web crawler was spotted roving the web...
UMG and AI company Klay are forming their own foundational Music-generating AI model. | Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Image Universal Music Group (UMG) announced a new deal centered on creating an “ethical” foundational model for AI music generation. It’s partnered with a company called Klay Vision that’s creating a “Large Music Model” named KLayMM and plans to launch out of stealth mode with a product within months. Ary Attie, its founder and CEO, said the company believes “the next Beatles will play with KLAY.”The two say the model will work “in collaboration...
Vinod Khosla said the author of California’s recently vetoed AI bill, SB 1047, was clueless about the real dangers of AI, and not qualified to have an opinion on global national security issues. The comment about state Senator Scott Wiener was made during an on-stage interview at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. “He’s clueless about the real […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Data is pretty much everything when it comes to training AI systems, but accessing enough data to produce quality products that live up to their promise is a major challenge, even for companies with the deepest of pockets. This is a problem that Advex AI is setting out to address, using generative AI and synthetic […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sierra, the AI startup co-founded by OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor, has raised $175 million in a funding round that values the startup at $4.5 billion. Sierra, founded by Taylor and longtime Google exec Clay Bavor, focuses on selling AI-powered customer service chatbots to brands like WeightWatchers and Sirius XM. There’s an “agent” component, as well. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google Search’s AI Overviews, which display a snapshot of information at the top of the results page, are beginning to roll out in more than 100 countries and territories, the company announced on Monday. Google first launched the feature in the United States in May before slowly rolling out to additional regions. Google says AI […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Apple Apple did more than put out a series of press releases when it announced the new iMac with M4 and the release of its Apple Intelligence software updates. The company also made a video to go with them — although it took a keen eye to spot it at first, as it was tucked away in a “Watch the announcement” link on the company’s splashy iMac page. Apple has since released the 10-minute video on YouTube, as well. In it, Apple Intelligence product manager Allegra Tepper discussed Apple’s AI system, which is now available as a software update for compatible iPhones, iPads, and...
Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge Google’s upcoming Pixel phones could come with an upgraded Tensor chip that powers several new AI features, according to leaked documents seen by Android Authority. One feature reportedly coming to the Pixel 11 includes a more advanced, on-device version of the Pixel’s Video Boost with Night Sight feature that brightens up videos shot in the dark.The Pixel’s existing low-light feature uses AI to automatically adjust the exposure of your video, stabilize it, and reduce graininess. My colleague Allison Johnson got to try it out on the Pixel 8 Pro and found...
The immense and quickly advancing computing requirements of AI models could lead to the industry discarding the e-waste equivalent of over 10 billion iPhones per year by 2030, researchers project. In a paper published in the journal Nature, researchers from Cambridge University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences take a shot at predicting just how […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A UK man who used AI to create child sexual abuse material (CSAM) has been sentenced to 18 years in prison, according to The Guardian. Hugh Nelson, 27, created the images by using photographs of real children, which were then manipulated by AI. Nelson was convicted of 16 child sexual abuse offenses back in August, after a lengthy police investigation. This was the first prosecution of its kind in the UK.Nelson used modeling software called Daz 3D to manufacture the loathsome images. The program has a suite of AI tools, which he used to transform regular photos of children into CSAM. Greater...
Apple on Monday confirmed the general availability of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1. The point update is most notable for its inclusion of the first batch of Apple Intelligence features, which the company announced at WWDC back in June. However, only select Apple devices are equipped to run the new generative AI […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The iPhone 16 will finally be able to use the AI it was supposedly “built for.” | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge Apple’s AI features are finally starting to appear. Apple Intelligence is launching today on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, offering features like generative AI-powered writing tools, notification summaries, and a cleanup tool to take distractions out of photos. It’s Apple’s first official step into the AI era, but it’ll be far from its last.Apple Intelligence has been available in developer and public beta builds of Apple’s operating systems for the past few months...
Imagine going to the doctor, telling them exactly how you're feeling and then a transcription later adds false information and alters your story. That could be the case in medical centers that use Whisper, OpenAI's transcription tool. Over a dozen developers, software engineers and academic researchers have found evidence that Whisper creates hallucinations — invented text — that includes made up medications, racial commentary and violent remarks, ABC News reports. Yet, in the last month, open-source AI platform HuggingFace saw 4.2 million downloads of Whisper's latest version...
Elon Musk-owned xAI has added image-understanding capabilities to its Grok AI model. With that, paid users on X social platform can upload an image and ask the AI chatbot questions about it. One of the xAI employees and the official Grok handle posted about this update on X. In a separate post, Musk said that […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: The Verge A few months ago, my doctor showed off an AI transcription tool he used to record and summarize his patient meetings. In my case, the summary was fine, but researchers cited by ABC News have found that’s not always the case with OpenAI’s Whisper, which powers a tool many hospitals use — sometimes it just makes things up entirely.Whisper is used by a company called Nabla for a medical transcription tool that it estimates has transcribed 7 million medical conversations, according to ABC News. More than 30,000 clinicians and 40 health systems use it, the outlet writes. Nabla...
Software engineers, developers, and academic researchers have serious concerns about transcriptions from OpenAI’s Whisper, according to a report in the Associated Press. While there’s been no shortage of discussion around generative AI’s tendency to hallucinate — basically, to make stuff up — it’s a bit surprising that this is an issue in transcription, where you’d […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Child actor Kaylin Hayman fought back after she learned that a man had used AI to make child sex abuse materials from images on her Instagram pageLast year, Kaylin Hayman walked into a Pittsburgh court to testify against a man she’d never met who had used her face to make pornographic pictures with artificial intelligence technology.Kaylin, 16, is a child actress who starred in the Disney show Just Roll With It from 2019 to 2021. The perpetrator, a 57-year-old man named James Smelko, had targeted her because of her public profile. She is one of about 40 of his victims, all of them child...
Plus: Apple offers $1 million to hack its AI cloud infrastructure, Iranian hackers successfully peddle stolen Trump campaign docs, Russia hacks the nation of Georgia, and a “cyberattack” that wasn’t.
OpenAI says that it doesn’t intend to release an AI model code-named Orion this year, countering recent reporting from The Verge on the AI company’s roadmap. “We don’t have plans to release a model code-named Orion this year,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch via email. “We do plan to release a lot of other great technology.” […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In the decades following its 1958 release, Brenda Lee’s rockabilly-tinged “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” has attained status as an all-time holiday classic. Sixty-six years later, it’s getting a Spanish language rework courtesy of “responsible” AI. Universal on Friday announced the release of “Noche Buena y Navidad,” which utilized SoundLabs AI’s MicDrop technology to reconstruct […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We finally got a look at one of Siri’s big Apple Intelligence updates. | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge Apple Intelligence’s official launch is less than a week away, but it’s the next wave of AI updates that will start to make Siri a lot more useful. The forthcoming iOS 18.2 update — now available as a developer beta — starts to make your phone a lot smarter with the addition of Visual Intelligence and the ability to pass Siri requests along to ChatGPT. On phones that support Apple Intelligence, Siri won’t just be a “let me Google that for you” machine; now it’s a “let...
Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity, says that the AI-powered search engine is now performing 100 million queries each week. Extrapolated out to a month, that’s roughly 400 million queries — up from 250 million queries in July. Perplexity’s rapid rise comes as the company teases ecommerce features, including the ability for subscribers to its […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Another day, another publication contributes to the rise of AI. First, the likes of Time and Dotdash Meredith partnered with OpenAI to license their property, now Reuters is giving Meta's AI chatbot access to its news content for responses to current events and news questions, Axios first reported. Basically, the multi-year deal allows users in the US to now receive real-time news details from Meta's AI chatbot tool, with these answers citing and linking out to Reuters' relevant stories. This deal marks Meta's first AI news deal, but Reuter's has worked with...
Apple released iOS 18.2 as a developer beta users earlier this week. While there was a bunch of AI goodie shipped with this version — including Gemmoji, Image Playground, and ChatGPT integration — the company also shipped a new default menu to change your default apps. And it’s not just limited to the web browser […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge The first bits of Apple Intelligence are starting to show up on people’s phones. The features in iOS 18.1 are fairly basic: summarizing messages, writing emails, that kind of thing. Apple is already letting developers play with iOS 18.2, though, which looks like a much more substantial update. Meanwhile, the company is about to launch a bunch of new M4-powered and AI-focused Macs, and launched the iPad Mini this week. It’s a lot happening all at once, and it’s a lot to make sense of.On this episode of The Vergecast, we try and make sense of it. The Verge’s...
The Verge AI startup Perplexity, which offers an AI search engine, published a blog post today pushing back on News Corp’s lawsuit against the company.Perplexity has recently come under significant scrutiny following accusations that it scraped content without permission, and News Corp, which is the parent company of the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal-owner Dow Jones, alleged that Perplexity’s search engine “copies on a massive scale.” Perplexity, in its response today, argues that news organizations like News Corp that have filed lawsuits against AI companies “prefer to...
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Apple is inviting investigations into the Private Cloud Compute (PCC) system that powers more computationally intensive Apple Intelligence requests. The company is also expanding its bug bounty program to offer payouts of up to $1,000,000 for people who discover PCC vulnerabilities. The company has boasted about how many AI features (branded as Apple Intelligence) will run on-device without leaving your Mac, iPhone, or other Apple hardware. Still, for more difficult requests, it will send them to PCC servers that are built using Apple Silicon and a new operating...
Perplexity shot back at media companies skeptical of AI’s benefits in a blog post Thursday responding to News Corp’s lawsuit filed against the startup earlier this week. The lawsuit alleged Perplexity engaged in large-scale copyright violations against Dow Jones and the NY Post, which joined several other media organizations – including Forbes, The New York […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Ahead of the debut of Apple’s private AI cloud next week, dubbed Private Cloud Compute, the technology giant says it will pay security researchers up to $1 million to find vulnerabilities that can compromise the security of its private AI cloud. In a post on Apple’s security blog, the company said it would pay up […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Starting next week, the Google Photos app will add a new disclosure for when a photo has been edited with one of its AI features, such as Magic Editor, Magic Eraser, and Zoom Enhance. When you click into a photo in Google Photos, there will now be a disclosure when you scroll to the bottom […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The list includes Elon Musk’s xAI, which is already valued at a staggering $24 billion, as well as a good number of other AI startups.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The UK’s competition regulator is probing Alphabet’s investment in AI startup Anthropic. After opening public comments this summer, the Competition and Market Authority (CMA) said on Thursday it has “sufficient information” to begin an initial investigation into whether Alphabet’s reported $2.3 billion investment in the Claude AI chatbot maker harms competition in UK markets.The CMA breaks its merger probes into two stages: a preliminary scan to determine whether there’s enough evidence to dig deeper and an optional second phase where the government gathers as much evidence as...
Anthropic’s Claude chatbot can now write and run JavaScript code. Today, Anthropic launched a new analysis tool that helps Claude respond with what the company describes as “mathematically precise and reproducible answers.” With the tool enabled — it’s currently in preview — Claude can perform calculations and analyze data from files like spreadsheets and PDFs, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
President Joe Biden on Thursday is expected to sign a memorandum detailing how intelligence and national security agencies, including the Pentagon, should use and implement guardrails around AI, reports The New York Times. The order urges keeping humans “in the loop” of AI tools that may be used as targeting weapons, and prohibits letting AI […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is launching a formal probe into Alphabet’s investment in AI rival, Anthropic. The investigation comes three months after the CMA confirmed it was inviting “interested parties” to comment on Alphabet’s various investments in Anthropic, which includes a reported $300 million early last year followed by another reported $2 billion. The probe […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nvidia unveiled a series of new partnerships with Indian tech firms and data center providers on Tuesday, as the world’s most valuable chip company expands its AI push in the world’s most populous nation. The partnerships span cloud services firm tech consultancy giant Infosys, e-commerce giant Flipkart, software firm Zoho and Tech Mahindra that are […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Getty Images A lawsuit has been filed against Character.AI, its founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, and Google in the wake of a teenager’s death, alleging wrongful death, negligence, deceptive trade practices, and product liability. Filed by the teen’s mother, Megan Garcia, it claims the platform for custom AI chatbots was “unreasonably dangerous” and lacked safety guardrails while being marketed to children.As outlined in the lawsuit, 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III began using Character.AI last year, interacting with...
Humane on Wednesday announced a $200 price cut to its flagship product, the AI Pin. The Bay Area startup, founded by two former Apple executives, has reportedly struggled to sell the product, which launched in April for $700. In a message sent to its email list, Humane highlights its return policy in the new pitch. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Humane is dropping the price of the AI Pin by $200 in an attempt to reverse the AI gadget’s very poor sales. The product launched earlier this year at $699, but now, you can buy one starting at $499.This $499 version is the “eclipse” model that is a matte black anodized aluminum, and it doesn’t come with an extra battery or the charge case. The latter makes some sense given that the company warned AI Pin owners not to use the charge case because it found some battery cells from a vendor “may pose a fire safety risk.”You can still buy an...
Inspired by microscopic worms, Liquid AI’s founders developed a more adaptive, less energy-hungry kind of neural network. Now the MIT spin-off is revealing several new ultraefficient models.
Four months after unveiling Apple Intelligence, the company’s generative AI offer is finally rolling out in public form. The platform will arrive on an unspecified date next week, as part of the public versions of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1. Most rumors have pegged a Monday debut for those operating system upgrades. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Apple Intelligence rollout has been slow, staggered and steady since the company first unveiled its take on AI at WWDC this year. It continues today with the release of the latest developer betas for iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia. The updates in iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2 and macOS Sequoia (15.2) bring long-awaited features like Genmoji, Image Playground, Visual Intelligence and ChatGPT integration for those running the preview software, as well as Image Wand for iPads and more writing tools.This follows the announcement that iOS 18.1 would be available as a stable release to the public...
The iPad has long been the best tablet for most people, but figuring out which model to actually buy today isn’t so straightforward. Do you just want a thing for occasionally streaming Netflix and browsing the web? Do you need a device that can get actual work done? Does screen size matter? How about those AI features the company’s been going on about? If you’re looking to buy an Apple tablet but unsure where to start, let us help. We at Engadget have tested and reviewed just about every iPad ever made, including all six models in the current lineup, so we’ve broken down which ones...
Google is making SynthID Text, its technology that lets developers watermark and detect text generated by generative AI models, generally available. SynthID Text can be downloaded from the AI platform Hugging Face and Google’s updated Responsible GenAI Toolkit. “Today, we’re open sourcing our SynthID Text watermarking tool,” the company wrote in a post on X. “Available freely […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Suchir Balaji helped gather and organize the enormous amounts of internet data used to train the startup’s ChatGPT chatbot.
The first thing Promise Bio CEO Ronel Veksler wants you to know about the biotech company he co-founded, is that it’s not another AI drug discovery company. Instead, he’s looking to bring precision medicine to autoimmune diseases. Tel Aviv-based Promise Bio has developed a cloud-based AI platform that can spot different Post-Translational Modifications (PTMs) in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Character.AI has been sued after the suicide of a 14-year-old Florida boy whose mother says he became obsessed with a chatbot on the platform. According to The New York Times, Sewell Setzer III, a ninth grader from Orlando, had spent months talking to chatbots on Character.AI’s AI role-playing app. Setzer developed an emotional attachment to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
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A Canadian research firm called TechInsights took a deep dive on one of Huawei’s artificial intelligence accelerators and found a chip manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Bloomberg spoke with several people familiar with the investigation who asked to remain anonymous since TechInsights’ report has been released to the public.The anonymous sources says TechInsights’ investigation found an Ascend 910B chip made by TSMC in one of Huawei’s AI accelerators. The company that conducted the investigation declined to comment.The US Commerce Department implemented...
Illustration by Haein Jeong / The Verge Thousands of creatives, including famous actors like Kevin Bacon and Kate McKinnon, along with other actors, authors, and musicians, have signed a statement warning that the unpermitted use of copyrighted materials to train AI models threatens the people who made those creative works. 11,500 names are on the list of signatories so far.Here is the one-sentence statement:“The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.”The statement...
Car manufacturers will be able to develop new AI voice assistants for their cars thanks to a new partnership with Qualcomm and Google. Qualcomm announced earlier today that it’s working with Google on a new AI development system for carmakers.The new version is based on Android Automotive OS (AAOS), Google’s infotainment platform for cars. Qualcomm is offering its Snapdragon Digital Chassis with Google Cloud and AAOS to generate new AI-powered digital cockpits for cars. Qualcomm also unveiled two new chips for powering driving systems including the Snapdragon Cockpit Elite for dashboards...
Be warned, online merchants who see no issue in publishing phony reviews from made-up customers: that practice is no longer allowed. A federal ban on fake online reviews has taken effect.The Federal Trade Commission issued a final rule on the purchase and sale of online reviews back in August and it came into force 60 days after it was published in the Federal Register. The agency's commissioners voted unanimously in favor of the regulation.The rule bans businesses from creating, buying or selling reviews and testimonials attributed to people who don't exist, including those that are AI...
OpenAI has hired its first chief economist: Aaron Chatterji, formerly the chief economist at the Commerce Department under President Joe Biden and a senior economist in President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. Chatterji, who’s also a professor of business and public policy at Duke, will study AI’s economic impacts at OpenAI, leading research into how […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: The Verge Microsoft and OpenAI announced they’re offering a select group of media outlets up to $10 million ($2.5 million in cash plus $2.5 million worth of “software and enterprise credits” from each) to try out AI tools in the newsroom. This news comes while the two companies are still facing a slew of copyright lawsuits, including from The New York Times, The Intercept, Raw Story, AlterNet, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund behind the New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune. Those have continued despite licensing deals reached with...
Claude is the first major AI model to be able to take control of a computer to do useful work.
Following a string of controversies stemming from technical hiccups and licensing changes, AI startup Stability AI has announced its latest family of image generation models. The new Stable Diffusion 3.5 series is more customizable and versatile than Stability’s previous-generation tech, the company claims — as well as more performant. There are three models in total: […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Marc Andreessen, general partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, was on stage at the Ray Summit conference earlier this month, talking about AI. CFO.com has pulled out the best quotes so you don’t have to watch the full interview. “Maybe all of these companies are in a race to the bottom,” Andreessen said when talking […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Spotify’s new cover art maker is fun, and surprisingly not AI. | Image: Spotify Spotify now has a new “Create cover art” option for playlists that lets you make custom collages to represent your playlists. The beta feature, which is available for both free and Spotify Premium members, is launching for English users in 65 markets. The company says it partnered with artists like Ugly Primo, who designed Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti album cover, and Cey Adams, who has worked on albums and logos for The Notorious B.I.G and Beastie Boys.I gave it a shot and produced the masterpiece below...
When Elon Musk introduced Tesla's robotaxi, the Cybercab, earlier this month, he showed a slide during his presentation that probably looked familiar to Blade Runner 2049 fans. It featured the back of a person wearing a trench coat against a desert-like landscape with high-rise buildings in the background. Now, a producer behind the movie is suing him for copyright infringement. According to The New York Times, Alcon Entertainment accused him of using "AI-created images mirroring scenes from Blade Runner 2049, including one featuring a Ryan Gosling look-alike." It said that it previously...
Zoom is partnering with Suki, an AI medical note-taking app, to let doctors use an AI scribe that will take notes of their consultations with patients.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Wall Street Journal's parent company, Dow Jones, and the New York Post are suing AI-powered search startup Perplexity for using their content to train its large language models. Both News Corp. publications are accusing Perplexity of copyright infringement for using their articles to generate answers to people's queries, thereby taking traffic away from the publications' websites. "This suit is brought by news publishers who seek redress for Perplexity’s brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously freeriding on the valuable content the publishers produce," the publishers...
The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are the top selling product in 60% of all Ray-Ban stores throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, according to Upload VR. The detail came from EssilorLuxottica CFO Stefano Grassi, who revealed during the eyewear giant’s earnings call last week that Ray-Ban Meta proved to be a significant driver for […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A still from Blade Runner 2049. | Warner Bros. Though it remains very unclear whether any of the self-driving vehicles demoed at Tesla’s We, Robot presentation will ever actually make it to market, one of the production companies behind Blade Runner 2049 thinks Elon Musk ripped off their copyright for the event, and are taking him to court.Today, Alcon Entertainment — an LA-based production company behind Blade Runner 2049 — filed a lawsuit against Tesla, Elon Musk, and Warner Bros. Discovery alleging that an AI image generator was used to create promotional art for the We, Robot event...
Amnon Shashua, the founder and CEO of Mobileye, has an eye for complicated problems that he believes can be solved with AI, and that AI itself can be fixed to become more reliable. On the sidelines of building and running his self-driving car technology company — which he took public, then sold to Intel, then […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In an interesting variation of the usual “stop stealing our stuff” lawsuit already deployed dozens of times against AI companies, today brings a more nuanced form of alleged theft. Alcon Entertainment, a production company behind “Blade Runner 2049,” is suing Tesla, Elon Musk, and Warner Bros Digital for what they claim is a willful circumvention […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
News Corp’s Dow Jones and the NY Post have sued growing AI startup Perplexity over what they describe as a “content kleptocracy.” In a lawsuit filed in New York on Monday, the media organization claimed that Perplexity engages in copyright violations on a “grand scale,” simultaneously duplicating and misrepresenting original content created by others: Its […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In August, Elon Musk’s xAI promised to make Grok, the company’s flagship generative AI model powering a number of features on X, available via an API. Now, that API has arrived — albeit a barren bones at the moment. The xAI API only has one model available, “grok-beta,” priced at $5 per million input tokens […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On TikTok, Daze’s most popular video has been viewed 8 million times. Across TikTok and Instagram, the startup behind a new messaging app aimed at Gen Z, has seen around 48 million combined views. Pre-launch, the app’s waitlist is already bursting with roughly 156,000 signups. Driving the demand for this next-generation alternative to iMessage and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Special Edition model of the Galaxy Z Fold. | Image: Samsung Samsung just announced the Special Edition model of the Galaxy Z Fold. It’s thinner and a little lighter than the Galaxy Z Fold 6 that only recently went on sale, and includes slightly larger displays on the inside and out. It also has more memory available for Galaxy AI and an upgraded 200 megapixel wide-angle camera.Great! Unfortunately, it’s only been announced for South Korea, priced at 2,789,600 KRW or just over $2,000 when it goes on sale Friday, October 25th. And it seems the only other release market will be China.At...
AI search engine Perplexity is in fundraising talks and hopes to raise around $500 million at an $8 billion valuation, according to the Wall Street Journal. If a deal happens with those terms, it would more than double Perplexity’s valuation from its $3 billion valuation when it raised from SoftBank over the summer. The WSJ […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Mira Murati, the OpenAI CTO who announced her departure last month, is raising VC funding for a new AI startup, according to Reuters. This startup will reportedly focus on building AI products based on proprietary models and could raise more than $100 million in this round. At the time of her departure, Murati wrote on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Toyota-backed autonomous vehicle company Pony AI has joined the list of Chinese firms going public on the U.S. stock market after a multi-year ban from Beijing on offshore capital raising. Zeekr, a luxury Chinese electric vehicle startup, debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in May, and WeRide, another AV startup, also hopes to file […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Penguin Random House, the world’s largest trade publisher, will be adding language to the copyright pages of its books to prohibit the use of those books to train AI. The Bookseller reports that new books and reprints of older titles from the publisher will now include the statement, “No part of this book may be […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Midjourney is planning to release an upgraded web tool that’ll let users edit any uploaded images from the web using Midjourney’s generative AI. The upgraded tool, which Midjourney CEO David Holtz said will be released “early next week,” will also allow users to retexture objects in images to “repaint” their colors and details according to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
SandboxAQ began as Alphabet’s moonshot AI and quantum computing and now has an impressive roster of projects.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Artificial intelligence makers have faced a mountain of criticism for borrowing from the work of others to train its models. Now the world’s largest publishing house is taking steps to ensure its authors don’t have their work plagiarized in the name of progress.The Bookseller reports that Penguin Random House Publishing changed the copyright page at the front of its books to address using any of its titles as a source for AI training. Now the wording states: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or...
Image: World Worldcoin, the cryptocurrency / human identity network / UBI project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is now known as World. Along with the name change, World introduced an updated version of its eyeball-scanning Orb device which is designed to solve a problem that does not currently exist: authenticating that someone is human “in the age of AI.” People registered to the system get a World ID that they can use to “securely and anonymously” prove their humanness online, as well as a share of its associated WLD cryptocurrency token.The new Orb is made with 30 percent...
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Getty Images Google’s NotebookLM now lets you customize its podcast-like Audio Overviews. Before you generate a discussion using the note-taking app, you can give your AI hosts instructions about what topic you’d like them to focus on, or even tailor their discussions for different audiences.Google launched NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews last month, with two AI hosts that offer a “lively” discussion of your research. The company notes that its Audio Overviews aren’t meant to be a “comprehensive or objective overview of a topic...
Social networking startup Bluesky, which just reported a gain of half a million users over the past day, has now soared into the top 5 apps on the U.S. App Store and has become the No. 2 app in the Social Networking category, up from No. 181 a week ago, according to data from app […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nebius, the company formerly known as Yandex that’s now focused on cloud infrastructure for AI uses (aka “AI compute”), is to begin trading on the public markets once again — more than two years after the Nasdaq halted trading due to economic sanctions imposed in the wake of Russia’s Ukraine invasion in 2022. The Netherlands-based company […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
X is updating its privacy policy with new language that allows it to provide users’ data to third-party “collaborators” in order to train AI models. The new policy, which takes effect November 15, 2024, would seem to open the door to Reddit-like arrangements in which outside companies can pay to license data from X.The updated policy shared by X includes a new section titled “third-party collaborators.”Depending on your settings, or if you decide to share your data, we may share or disclose your information with third parties. If you do not opt out, in some instances the recipients of...
Researcher feeds screen recordings into Gemini to extract accurate information with ease.
On Wednesday, social network X (formerly Twitter) updated its Privacy Policy to indicate that it would allow third-party “collaborators” to train their AI models on X data, unless users opt out. While X owner Elon Musk trained xAI’s Grok AI chatbot on X user data, leading to an investigation by the EU’s lead privacy regulator, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
One of the tech industry’s biggest hype men, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, is psyched about AI, but points out that it hasn't cured cancer. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Just in time for the 2024 US elections, the call screening and fraud detection company Hiya has launched a free Chrome extension to spot deepfake voices. The aptly named Hiya Deepfake Voice Detector “listens” to voices played in video or audio streams and assigns an authenticity score, telling you whether it’s likely real or fake.Hiya tells Engadget that third-party testers have validated the extension as over 99 percent accurate. The company says that even covers AI-generated voices the detection model hasn’t trained on, and the company claims it can spot voices created by new...
Are today’s AI models truly remembering, thinking, planning, and reasoning, just like a human brain would? Some AI labs would have you believe they are, but according to Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, the answer is no. He thinks we could get there in a decade or so, however, by pursuing a new method […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Elias Torres has achieved a lot for somebody who immigrated to the US from Nicaragua at 17 without knowing any English. He served as a VP of engineering at HubSpot before co-founding Drift, a company that sold to Vista Equity for about $1.2 billion in 2021. “It’s very rare to get this far, but I’m […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Large technology companies are investing billions of dollars in nuclear energy as an emissions-free source of electricity for artificial intelligence and other businesses.
Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Last week, AWS lost a top AI exec. Matt Wood, VP of AI, announced that he’d be leaving AWS after 15 years. Wood had long been involved in the Amazon division’s AI initiatives; he was appointed […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images If you want to raise ungodly amounts of money, you better have some godly reasons.That’s what Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei laid out for us on Friday in more than 14,000 words: otherworldly ways in which artificial general intelligence (AGI, though he prefers to call it “powerful AI”) will change our lives. In the blog, titled “Machines of Loving Grace,” he envisions a future where AI could compress 100 years of medical progress into a decade, cure mental illnesses like PTSD and depression, upload your mind to the cloud, and alleviate...
Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute (TRI) Wednesday revealed plans to bring AI-based robotic intelligence to the electric Atlas humanoid robot. The collaboration will leverage the work that TRI has done around large behavior models (LBMs), which operate along similar lines as the more familiar large language models (LLMs) behind platforms like ChatGPT. Last September, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple just announced the seventh-gen iPad mini, three years after its sixth-gen model. It has a faster A17 Pro chip, originally found in the iPhone 15 Pro, which means it’ll be able to handle Apple’s incoming AI features — although it’s not Apple's most powerful mobile chip. There’s more RAM too.Power aside, it has the same 8.3-inch screen as the previous model and an identical 2,266 x 1,488 resolution at 326 ppi. The refresh rate remains a modest 60Hz, in an era of 90Hz or higher. It’s not any bigger, wider or slimmer than its predecessor either.It’s been a while since a new...
Alert management for developers and ops teams may seem like a solved problem. Notifying an on-call engineer isn’t exactly difficult anymore, after all. But the real question has become when to alert the right person and how to help them when a service goes down, for example. Many are turning to AI to solve some […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Biden administration has privately discussed capping sales of advanced AI chips from Nvidia and AMD to certain Persian Gulf countries in the interest of national security, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The restriction could put a ceiling on export licenses for certain countries, potentially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which are heavily investing […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
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Photo: Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto via Getty Images The New York Times has demanded that AI search engine startup Perplexity stop using content from its site in a cease and desist letter sent to the company, reports The Wall Street Journal. The Times, which is currently suing OpenAI and Microsoft over allegedly illegally training models on its content, says the startup has been using its content without permission, a claim made earlier this year by Forbes and Condé Nast.The WSJ included this passage from the letter:“Perplexity and its business partners have been unjustly enriched by using...
Google is rolling out a slew of updates for Pixel watches, smartphones and tablets. In many cases, their predecessors are also getting the new features, such as Night Sight for Instagram — available on all Pixel 6 or newer devices other than the A series. The tool allows you to take photos directly on Instagram without worrying about them coming out dark. This could be ideal if you're someone who likes taking photos at concerts or parties without worrying about a bright flash going off. Other updates available for Pixel 6 or newer devices include astrophotography through Night Sight and...
The New York Times sent a cease and desist letter demanding that Jeff Bezos-backed Perplexity stop accessing and using its content in AI summaries and other output. The Wall Street Journal reviewed the document. The letter argues that Perplexity has been “unjustly enriched” by using the publisher’s “expressive, carefully written and researched, and edited journalism […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple Tuesday unveiled a new version of the iPad mini updated for the era of Apple Intelligence. The new arrival is powered by the company’s A7 Pro chip, bringing compatibility with Apple Intelligence, the company’s new generative AI offering. The new arrival marks the first major update to the 8.3-inch device since 2021. It starts […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nvidia shares hit a record high on Monday, closing at $138.07 as Wall Street anticipates earnings updates from Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon on their AI infrastructure spending. The stock’s climb has been stupefying — surging nearly 180% this year, following a rapid climb last year; it’s also a reflection of Nvidia’s renowned stronghold on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft has lost an AI expert and OpenAI gained one, after the former’s VP of generative AI research Sebastian Bubeck left for the latter. The Information first reported the move, and Reuters also confirmed the departure with Microsoft. We know Bubeck as one of the main authors of papers describing Microsoft’s Phi models, a series […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A quirk in the Unicode standard harbors an ideal steganographic code channel.
Adobe is joining several other players in the generative AI (GAI) space by rolling out its own model. The Firefly Video Model is powering a number of features across the company's wide array of apps. At Adobe MAX, the company announced that some of those are available in beta today.Generative Extend is a Premiere Pro feature that Adobe previewed earlier this year. It enables editors to add generated footage and audio to the start or end of a clip. This can help cover a transition or edit if the required shot isn't available. All editors need to do is drag out the beginning or end of a clip...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge From a AI video model to new features for Creative Cloud apps, here’s everything announced at this year’s Adobe Max conference. Continue reading…
Computer vision applications are getting a huge boost from advances in smartphones combined with AI that helps fill in the gaps of what everyday devices cannot see. Using these tools, a startup out of Munich called Beyond Presence believes it holds the keys to what is coming next: Hyper-realistic avatars that look and sound exactly […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
One of the most attention-grabbing aspects of “Roadrunner,” the Morgan Neville-directed documentary about Anthony Bourdain, was Neville’s use of generative AI to replicate Bourdain’s voice. Looking back now, Neville told Wired that he saw this as a “fun” way to “keep [Bourdain’s] voice going in the film.” But his approach drew intense criticism — while […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta has a suggestion for folks like me who forgot to go outside and look at the Northern Lights on Thursday night: just use AI to fake it! But Threads users who replied to Meta’s idea, posted along with three AI-generated images of the Aurora Borealis Meta last night, seem to disagree.Here’s Meta’s post:The images show the Northern Lights hovering over the Golden Gate Bridge, over a city skyline, and over a ferris wheel. It’s clearly meant to latch onto a trending moment of people posting their own pictures of the Northern Lights from the amazing and rare display of the lights, which...
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wants you to know he’s not an AI “doomer.” At least, that’s my read of the “mic drop” of a ~15,000 word essay Amodei published to his blog late Friday. (I tried asking Anthropic’s Claude chatbot whether it concurred, but alas, the post exceeded the free plan’s length limit.) In broad […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
How do machine learning models do what they do? And are they really “thinking” or “reasoning” the way we understand those things? This is a philosophical question as much as a practical one, but a new paper making the rounds Friday suggests that the answer is, at least for now, a pretty clear “no.” A […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In the first half of 2024 alone, more than $35.5 billion was invested into AI startups globally.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri on Friday addressed the moderation issues that saw Instagram and Threads users losing access to their accounts, having posts disappear, and more, saying that the company “found mistakes” which it’s attributing to human moderators, not AI systems, as many believed. In a post on Threads, Mosseri addressed the issue that has […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Silicon Valley founders like Palmer Luckey and Joe Lonsdale have been grappling with fully autonomous weapons. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As well as being a major cause of premature death worldwide, hypertension, also known as high blood pressure, is a major risk factor for stroke, coronary artery disease, heart failure, and a contributing factor to dementia. It also affects an estimated 1.3 billion people, while up to 95% of cases are due to lifestyle factors […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
ByteDance’s TikTok is laying off hundreds of employees, mainly in Malaysia, according to Reuters. The cuts come as the social network is increasingly turning to AI for content moderation. Although TikTok did not provide the exact number, it said that less than 500 people were affected. The company said it’s making the changes as part […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As AI-generated slop takes over increasing swathes of the user-generated Internet thanks to the rise of large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT, spare a thought for Wikipedia editors. In addition to their usual job of grubbing out bad human edits, they’re having to spend an increasing proportion of their time trying to weed out […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
When Nick Spreen installed the beta of iOS 18.1 to try out upcoming Apple Intelligence features, he probably didn’t expect to receive an AI-generated summary of breakup texts from his then girlfriend. “No longer in a relationship; wants belongings from the apartment,” the AI summarized. After sharing a screenshot of the unfortunate message on X, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Opera browser has a new AI-powered feature that lets you take action on tabs through natural language queries. Things you can do include grouping, pinning, bookmarking and closing tabs with these commands. The company said people can trigger the Aria command bar — by pressing Ctrl + / or Cmd + / — and type out […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It has been a billboard week for artificial intelligence research. But could big wins for Demis Hassabis and Geoffrey Hinton change broader scientific incentives?
Shield AI cofounder Brandon Tseng has raised over $1 billion to create AI pilots. Here's what he's learned in Ukraine and the future of AI-powered weapons. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Geoffrey Hinton accepted a Nobel Prize this week, recognizing the foundational work on artificial neural networks that earned him the nickname “godfather of AI.” In a speech Tuesday, Professor Hinton praised one student – alluding to OpenAI’s former Chief Scientist, Ilya Sutskever – for revolting against OpenAI’s CEO. “I was particularly fortunate to have many […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Zoom plans to introduce a feature to let people effectively clone themselves digitally. There's concerns that this could be misused.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon Wednesday announced the upcoming addition of new AI-powered package retrieval technology to its electric vehicle fleet. The vision-based tech is designed help drivers prioritize packages. Vision-Assisted Package Retrieval (VAPR) works by highlighting packages with either a green circle or red light, denoting which are designated for delivery at the current stop. The company says […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta is bringing its AI chatbot Meta AI to six countries today, including Brazil, the U.K., the Philippines, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Paraguay, Mark Zuckerberg said today in an announcement on his WhatsApp channel. The company said that apart from these countries, the company plans to release Meta AI in more countries in a gradual rollout, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On Wednesday Amazon introduced the latest in a series of AI features and products aimed at consumers with the launch of AI shopping guides. The guides, arriving tomorrow, will span over 100 product types on Amazon.com and will help to consolidate the key information consumers tend to research before making a purchase as well as […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Last week Ring announced a feature that will you to capture video 24/7 so you don't miss anything if a motion alert wasn't triggered. The challenge is that if you'll then need to wade through hours of footage to find an event. Now, the Amazon-owned company has introduced Smart Video Search, an AI feature for subscribers of the upcoming $20 Ring Home serivce that makes it faster and easier to find specific moments in your video history. The system is powered by Ring IQ, a combination of Ring AI technology and in-house expertise. It uses Visual Language Modeling (VLM) to match...
Startup employees often go on to found interesting ventures, basing their new work on the experience gained from their time building a company from scratch. But not all of those experiences are positive, and sometimes, a less-than-satisfactory exit can do more to fuel a founder’s fervor than anything else. In the case of Forward Earth’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google, Microsoft and Meta are shoving A.I. chatbots into our faces. Sometimes, there’s a way out.
Cloud providers are chasing after AI unicorns, and the latest is Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs. The startup just tapped Google Cloud as its primary compute provider to train AI models, a deal that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But Li’s tenure as chief scientist of AI at Google Cloud wasn’t a factor, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The revocation comes after TechCrunch's exclusive reporting on how LoanSnap was inundated with lawsuits.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Roli is no stranger to quirky musical instruments. After all, it pioneered the idea of a “squishy” MIDI controller. The company’s latest tool, however, could be its weirdest. The Roli Airwave is an AI-infused piano teaching gadget that also doubles as a digital theremin. Yes, the same high-pitched theremin that has appeared on hit records like The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” and Erykah Badu’s “Incense.”The Airwave is basically a tall stand with a camera on top. This camera points downward to track the player’s finger movements on a connected MIDI keyboard. Movements...
If you’re ready to upgrade from your phone’s tiny speakers, or if you’re done struggling to pick out the dialogue in TV shows, now is probably a good time to scoop up a Bluetooth speaker or a soundbar. We’ve reviewed dozens of models and brands over the years and have made our recommendations in our buying guides. We also recommend more than a few smart speakers, which you can check out if you're ready to bring an AI assistant to your countertop. Now that Prime Day is here, many of the speakers from our lists are on sale, making it a great time to get a deal. Check out below for...
Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge What is a photo? No, like really. What is a photo? What is a photo? What is a photo? What is a photo? When you tap the shutter button on your phone, and it grabs nearly a dozen frames out of a cache that was capturing data well before you pressed anything, then stitches together the “best” bits of each one before allowing you to edit everything about all of them, is any of that process you taking a photo? And in a world where AI is good enough to make everything look good, does it even matter? When you ask the question enough times, it becomes the size of the...
Distributional, an AI testing platform founded by Intel’s former GM of AI software, Scott Clark, has closed a $19 million Series A funding round led by Two Sigma Ventures. Clark says that Distributional was inspired by the AI testing problems he ran into while applying AI at Intel, and — before that — his work at […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Adobe is releasing a new web app next year alongside a Chrome extension (pictured) for inspecting content metadata. | Image: Adobe Adobe is expanding its Content Credentials “nutrition labels” to make it even easier for creatives to be credited for their work, identify what is and isn’t AI online, and protect their content in the process. It’s launching a free web app that will allow users to quickly apply creator information to images, videos, and audio and even opt them out of generative AI models — for the AI developers that support it, at least.The Content Authenticity web app can...
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced the Nobel Prize in Physics 2024. Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield are jointly sharing the prestigious award for their work on artificial neural networks starting back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. More specifically, Hinton and Hopfield were given the award for “foundational discoveries and inventions […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Kobold Metals has raised $491 million of a targeted $527 million round, which could value the company at over $2 billion.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge The iPhone 16, despite its marketing so far, still doesn’t have Apple Intelligence. That’s set to change on October 28th with the release of iOS 18.1, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter. The update will bring with it AI-powered notification summaries, Gurman writes. Though he only lists that example, the iOS 18.1 beta has also included some Siri improvements (like understanding you better when you stumble over your words), along with writing tools and a new rainbow-colored glowing edge graphic when you summon Siri on a...
Terence Tao, a UCLA professor considered to be the “world’s greatest living mathematician,” last month compared ChapGPT’s o1 reasoning model to a “mediocre, but not completely incompetent” graduate student that could correctly answer a complex analysis problem with “a lot of hints and prodding.” AI might never beat its human teachers, he now tells The […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Last year, Sound Ventures, the 9-year-old, Beverly Hills, California-based venture firm led by general partners Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, and Effie Epstein, announced a new $265 million AI fund that was betting big on large language model companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Hugging Face. In fact, the plan was to invest in just six companies […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon continues to scale back efforts around its cashierless checkout technology, Just Walk Out. The e-commerce giant closed three of its Go convenience stores in New York last week, The Information confirmed on Friday, leaving just 17 across the nation. (Amazon notes it recently opened one in Washington.) These convenience stores use AI systems to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
At this point, you probably either love the idea of making realistic videos with generative AI, or you think it's a morally bankrupt endeavor that devalues artists and will usher in a disastrous era of deepfakes we'll never escape from. It's hard to find middle ground. Meta isn't going to change minds with Movie Gen, its latest video creation AI model, but no matter what you think of AI media creation, it could end up being a significant milestone for the industry.Movie Gen can produce realistic videos alongside music and sound effects at 16 fps or 24 fps at up to 1080p (...
Meta on Friday announced its Movie Gen model, which uses AI to turn prompts into realistic videos with sound. Though Movie Gen won’t be coming to Instagram or other Meta apps until next year, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a video showing how it works. In the Instagram post, we see the recent gym […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Meta A new AI-powered video generator from Meta produces high-definition footage complete with sound, the company announced today. The announcement comes several months after competitor OpenAI unveiled Sora, its text-to-video model — though public access to Movie Gen isn’t happening yet.Movie Gen uses text inputs to automatically generate new videos, as well as edit existing footage or still images. The New York Times reports that the audio added to videos is also AI-generated, matching the imagery with ambient noise, sound effects, and background music. The videos can be generated...
Select Gmail users on iOS can now chat with Google’s Gemini chatbot about their inbox directly within the app, the company announced this week. The feature, which is called Gmail Q&A, was first rolled out to Android users back in August. Now, it’s available on iOS to Google One AI Premium subscribers or Google Workspace […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
California passed a law that'll require AI companies to say which data sets they used to train their models. But few are saying whether they'll comply.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
This week, Microsoft started rolling out the Windows 11 2024 update, but it quickly became clear that the company was far more eager to unveil new features for its Copilot AI and Copilot+ AI PCs. In this episode, Devindra and Cherlynn chat about Microsoft's current AI priorities, and what it means for people with older PCs. Also, we discuss the death of HoloLens and Microsoft giving up on AR as Meta, Apple and even Snap build for an augmented reality future.Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to...
Are you confused about artificial general intelligence, or AGI? It’s that thing OpenAI is obsessed with ultimately creating in a way that “benefits all of humanity.” You may want to take them seriously since they just raised $6.6 billion to get closer to that goal. But if you’re still wondering what the heck AGI even […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
One of the co-leads on OpenAI’s video generator, Sora, has left for Google. Tim Brooks, who was heading development on Sora with William Peebles, announced in a post on X this evening that he’ll be joining Google DeepMind, Google’s AI research division, to work on video generation and “world simulators.” “I had an amazing two […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
ElevenLabs, a startup that makes AI tools for audio applications, is being approached by existing and new investors about a new round, which could value the company as highly as $3 billion, TechCrunch has learned. The two-year-old company specializes in making AI tools to generate synthetic voices for audiobook narrations, and for real-time video dubbing […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI is beta testing a new workspace interface for ChatGPT called Canvas. The AI giant unveiled its new ChatGPT workspace on its official blog and it’s currently available for ChatGPT Plus and Team users. Enterprise and Edu users will be able to access Canvas sometime next week.Canvas is a virtual interface space for writing and coding projects that allow users to consult with ChatGPT on certain portions of a project. A separate window opens besides the main chat space and users can put writing or code on this new “canvas” and highlight sections to have the model focus on and edit “...
We’re incredibly excited to announce the final agenda for our dedicated Fintech Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. It joins Space, SaaS, AI and Builders as the other industry-focused stages — all under one big roof. As the fintech industry evolves, new opportunities abound for founders, investors, and customers. Areas such as mobile banking, global payroll, digital […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We’re out-of-this-world excited to announce that we’ve finalized our dedicated Space Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. It joins Fintech, SaaS and AI as the other industry-focused stages — all under one big roof. To top it off, we’re thrilled to share we’ll be hosting a pitch competition this year called “The Space Challenge, powered by […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Representing California in Congress comes with a unique challenge: navigating national politics while reflecting the interests of the most populous state in the US, including a large constituency from the tech industry. It’s a challenge both current California Sen. Laphonza Butler and Vice President Kamala Harris — who previously held that title — have taken on. And right now, governing the tech world means addressing AI.Congress hasn’t made much headway on a national framework for regulating generative AI. But California is the...
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Meta is bringing reminders to its Ray-Ban smart glasses, a feature it previewed during its Connect event last month. With the update, you can ask Meta AI to remember your surroundings, like where you parked, and even time up reminders to make a phone call.The other features coming with the update include the ability to send and record voice messages on WhatsApp or Messenger without taking out your phone. You can now ask Meta AI to scan QR codes or call phone numbers that you come across, too.Meta is also updating how you invoke Meta AI while wearing...
To some degree, every business that has a presence on the web is in the content business — whether that’s for informing customers, finding new clients, or for SEO. That means managing the production of those texts and images, updating them, and potentially optimizing them for a search engine to index and rank. Since large […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Keeping ChatGPT running is expensive as heck, so OpenAI needs access to plenty of cash to make sure the lights stay on. A day after the company said it had secured $6.6 billion in funding — the biggest ever funding round for a startup — it confirmed that it has a new $4 billion revolving line of credit. OpenAI has yet to tap the credit line, which it obtained from JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Santander, Wells Fargo, SMBC, UBS and HSBC. Some of those banks are also among OpenAI's customers.All told, OpenAI now has a war chest of over $10 billion in liquid funds. The...
Google is rolling out a redesigned AI Overviews experience — with ads — and expanding its test of AI-organized results pages.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images It had all the makings of a typical recruiting event for a tech startup in San Francisco. There was free food, drinks, and live music generated via code being written in real time.But there were also mandatory metal detector screenings, ID checks, and security guards everywhere. It was held by Elon Musk at the original Mission District headquarters of OpenAI, which Musk cofounded before leaving after (reportedly) failing to take it over. And Musk was there to convince people to join his latest startup, xAI. The timing felt intentional...
Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) have been all the rage in recent years, upending traditional online search via the likes of ChatGPT while improving customer support, content generation, translation and more. Now, one fledgling startup is using LLMs to build AI assistants capable specifically of answering complex questions for developers, software end-users, and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
One of California's new AI laws, which aims to prevent AI deepfakes related to elections from spreading online, has been blocked a month before the US presidential elections. As TechCrunch and Reason report, Judge John Mendez has issued a preliminary injunction, preventing the state's attorney general from enforcing AB 2839. California Governor Gavin Newsom signed it into law, along with other bills focusing on AI, back in mid-September. After doing so, he tweeted a screenshot of a story about X owner Elon Musk sharing an AI deepfake video of Vice President Kamala Harris without...
Immigrants face an enormous number of challenges and difficulties. In particular, without a local base of family or friends to depend on, new immigrants often find themselves in the dark about reliable information on essential services like housing, healthcare and banking. After being scammed and exploited, one immigrant founder decided to try to help other […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google is adding new AI-powered features on Maps in India including AI-powered summaries, the ability to search for experiences, and weather alerts. The Maps app will analyze reviews and show summaries of places, it said. The company made the announcement at its annual Google for India event on Thursday. Additionally, users will be able to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A federal judge blocked one of California’s new AI laws on Wednesday, less than two weeks after it was signed by Governor Gavin Newsom. Shortly after signing AB 2839, Newsom suggested it could be used to force Elon Musk to take down an AI deepfake of Vice President Kamala Harris he had reposted (and sparking […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The deal makes the ChatGPT-maker one of the most valuable start-ups in the world.
We recently asked Meta if it trains AI on photos and videos that users take on the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The company originally didn’t have much to say. Since then, Meta has offered TechCrunch a bit more color. In short, any image you share with Meta AI can be used to train its AI. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta is rolling out some of the previously announced features to its AI-powered Ray-Ban smart glasses for users in the US and Canada. CTO Andrew Bosworth posted on Threads that today's update to the glasses includes more natural language recognition, meaning the stilted commands of "Hey Meta, look and tell me" should be gone. Users will be able to engage the AI assistant without the "look and" portion of the invocation.Most of the other AI tools showed off during last month's Connect event are also arriving on the frames today. That includes voice messages, timers and reminders. The glasses can...
Now that OpenAI is becoming a for-profit company, it’s making a tidy profit in the process. The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI has raised $6.6 billion in new funding from investors, nearly doubling its value to $157 billion. The new funding also makes it the largest venture capital deal in history.The new investors jumped on board after the artificial intelligence startup planned to switch from a charitable non-profit to a for-profit, product-focused company. If OpenAI fails to make the move to for-profit, investors have the right to pull their funding, according to Axios.The...
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images OpenAI just closed a historic funding round, taking in a $6.6 billion investment at a $157 billion valuation, to continue pursuing its mission to build artificial-general intelligence according to a company blog post.The funding round was led by Thrive Capital, which committed $1 billion, according to the Financial Times. It was also reported that Thrive got a special deal (not offered to other investors) that allows it to invest another $1 billion next year at the same valuation if the AI firm hits a revenue goal, Reuters reported.These funds are...
Did you think Amazon Fire tablets were exempt from generative AI tools? Think again. The company just announced a spate of AI-centric features that are rolling out to the just-announced Fire HD 8 refresh and a bunch of older models.None of these features are too surprising, but they seem useful and fun. There’s something called Writing Assist, which is exactly what it sounds like. This tool integrates with the on-screen keyboard and should be compatible with any app on the tablet. It provides grammar assistance and will transform copy into a number of pre-set styles. This is a quick way to...
Are creators sleeping on Facebook? Though the social network has been more enticing for AI Shrimp Jesus than young people, Facebook is consolidating its monetization programs into a more streamlined Facebook Content Monetization hub, which will reward creators for their Reels, longer videos, photos and text posts. This change could incentivize more creators to work […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon updated its Fire HD 8 lineup on Wednesday. The 2024 version of the budget tablet has more RAM, a better rear camera and some built-in AI. The device, which will usually start at $100 (with lock-screen ads), is already on sale for October Prime Day. As its name suggests, the new Fire HD 8 has an 8-inch display with a 1280 x 800 resolution (189 ppi). One of the 2024 model’s big upgrades is 3GB of RAM in the base storage tier (32B). Meanwhile, the 64GB variant slides up to 4GB of RAM. Of course, this is a budget tablet, so those aren’t close to barrier-breaking numbers. But that’s...
Poolside, the AI-powered software dev platform, has raised half a billion dollars in new capital. The cash came in the form of a Series B led by Bain Capital Ventures, which also had participation from a who’s who of big tech firms including eBay (via eBay Ventures) and Nvidia. It brings Poolside’s total raised to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI assistants are blabbing our embarrassing work secrets The Washington Post
The lawmaker behind California’s recently vetoed AI bill, SB 1047, is going down swinging. For months, Silicon Valley debated whether SB 1047 would have a chilling effect on California’s AI boom or would protect against catastrophic harms from advanced AI systems. The answer never became clear, since California governor Gavin Newsom decided it was the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Two years ago, Xiaodi Hou was ousted from his position as CEO of TuSimple, an autonomous trucking startup he co-founded that has since shut down U.S. operations and delisted from the stock exchange — and, in an odd twist, the company has pivoted to AI animation and gaming in China. Now Hou is back with […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On Wednesday the European Union requested more information from Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube about their respective content recommendation algorithms under the bloc’s online governance rulebook, the Digital Services Act (DSA). In a press release the Commission said it’s sent requests for information (RFI) to the three social media platforms asking them for more details about […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Ameba takes the unstructured data in a retailer’s supply chain systems, sprinkles in some generative AI, and makes the whole thing more efficient. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
An iPhone 14, which the next iPhone SE may look a lot like. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge An iPhone SE that feels very much like any other modern, non-budget iPhone is apparently coming early next year, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The phone will use Face ID and will be capable of running Apple Intelligence, he reiterated today.That the new iPhone SE models may support Apple Intelligence says a lot about their performance — it takes a lot of RAM to run local AI features, for instance. They’re expected to look like the iPhone 14, doing away with the chunky top and...
Sometimes, a demo is all you need to understand a product. And that’s the case with Runware. If you head over to Runware’s website, enter a prompt and hit enter to generate an image, you’ll be surprised by how quickly Runware generates the image for you — it takes less than a second. Runware is […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Numa, a startup developing AI-powered automation tech for car dealerships, has raised fresh capital in a Series B round.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Getty Images Microsoft is launching a redesigned version of Copilot today, intent on becoming an AI assistant or companion. To celebrate this, Microsoft’s new AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, has penned a 700-plus-word memo on what he describes as a “technological paradigm shift” toward AI models that can understand what humans see and hear.Suleyman joined Microsoft earlier this year as the CEO of its new Microsoft AI division, amid the software giant’s hiring of a number of key Inflection AI staff. In June, Suleyman sparked controversy after brazenly claiming that anything published on...
Now that we're a few years into Microsoft's obsession with AI and its Copilot assistant, it's clearer than ever that Windows 11's role is to show off the company's artificial intelligence prowess. At least, that's the message I took away from today's announcement that the Windows 11 2024 (version 24H2) update is now beginning to roll out. While the OS itself is getting a few new features, like long overdue File Explorer tweaks, Microsoft is far more eager to hype up new Copilot+ AI PC capabilities. There's "Click to Do," which triggers Copilot to assist you with whatever is on your screen, like...
11x.ai, a startup that develops AI-powered sales development bots, has secured roughly $50 million in Series B funding, TechCrunch has learned. The new round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the company at around $350 million, multiple sources told TechCrunch. The recent deal follows the company’s $24 million Series A, which was led by Benchmark […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI enthusiasts who like the Raspberry Pi range of products can rejoice, as the company is now announcing its new Raspberry Pi AI Camera. This product is the result of the company’s collaboration with Sony Semiconductor Solutions (SSS), which began in 2023. The AI Camera is compatible with all of Raspberry Pi’s single-board computers.The approximately 12.3-megapixel AI Camera is intended for vision-based AI projects, and it’s based on SSS’ IMX500 image sensor. The integrated RP2040 microcontroller manages the neural network firmware, allowing the camera to perform onboard AI image...
Germany's Federal Cartel Office (FCO) said the software giant could face restrictions if the competition authority deems an intervention is necessary.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The new Raspberry Pi AI Camera uses Sony’s IMX500 image sensor to handle the AI processing. | Image: Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi and Sony have co-developed a Raspberry Pi AI Camera module that’s launching today for $70. It comes with onboard AI processing that can help Raspberry Pi users develop “edge AI solutions that process visual data” with ease, according to the tiny computer maker.The new camera builds on Raspberry Pi’s plans to offer chips and add-ons for AI developers, having previously released several non-AI camera modules since its first 5-megapixel offering in 2013. “AI-...
In September, California Governor Gavin Newsom considered 38 AI-related bills, including the highly contentious SB 1047, which the state’s legislature sent to his desk for final approval. He vetoed SB 1047 on Sunday, but signed more than a dozen other AI bills into law over the course of the month. These bills try to address […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed bill SB 1047, which aims to prevent bad actors from using AI to cause "critical harm" to humans. The California state assembly passed the legislation by a margin of 41-9 on August 28, but several organizations including the Chamber of Commerce had urged Newsom to veto the bill. In his veto message on Sept. 29, Newsom said the bill is "well-intentioned" but "does not take into account whether an Al system is deployed in high-risk environments, involves critical decision-making or the use of sensitive data. Instead, the bill applies stringent standards to...
The Verge Roughly a month ago, Michael Sayman realized he could finally build the app he’d been thinking about for years: a social network where everyone but you is an AI bot. Large language models are finally good enough and cheap enough that the experience might actually feel social and useful, and not like a gimmick or a game. And so, after years of waiting and months of testing the latest models, Sayman got to work.The app he built is called SocialAI, and it has become something of a viral phenomenon since it launched. (All he’d tell me is that it was downloaded 20,000 times in the...
As the company looks for more outside investors, documents reviewed by The New York Times show consumer fascination with ChatGPT and a serious need for more cash.
The U.K.s' antitrust authority has concluded that Amazon's partnership and equity investment in AI startup Anthropic can't be investigated under current merger rules due to the size and scope of the deal.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has officially issued its full recommended fine against political consultant Steve Kramer. This is after he initiated a series of robocalls to New Hampshire residents with pre-recorded audio of President Biden’s voice, using deepfake AI technology. The fake Biden told voters not to vote in the upcoming primary, saying “Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday.” Kramer must pay $6 million in fines in the next 30 days or the Department of Justice will handle collection, according to a FCC statement.Kramer doesn’t just face a...
AI video generators need to believe that filmmakers will use their models in the production process. Otherwise why exist? To jump start the new AI film ecosystem, Runway has set aside $5 million in cash and more in service credits to fund up to 100 original films. If you’re an AI-curious director, now’s your chance […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Departures might be dominating the week’s OpenAI-related headlines. But comments on AI bias from Anna Makanju, the company’s VP of global affairs, also grabbed our attention. Makanju, speaking on a panel at the UN’s Summit of the Future event on Tuesday, suggested that emerging “reasoning” models such as OpenAI’s o1 have the potential to make […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In a surprise 30-minute event today that could have been an email, Samsung unveiled new additions to its portfolio of devices this year, including the Galaxy S24 FE and the Galaxy Watch FE LTE. The highlight of today's news has to be the new Galaxy Tab S10 tablets, though, since they've long been regarded as the best premium Android tablets around. The Galaxy Tab S10+ and Tab S10 Ultra start at $1,000 and $1,200 respectively (the same price as the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max) and are available for pre-order today before they retail on October 3. With the Tab S10 series, Samsung proclaims it has...
Samsung is once again expanding its tablet lineup, and this time, the company is doing so with AI at the forefront. Today, Samsung revealed the Galaxy Tab S10 series, two models that it says are "built with AI enhancements available right out of the box." The 14.6-inch Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra and 12.4-inch Galaxy Tab S10+ both pack anti-reflective Dynamic AMOLED 2X displays, a quad speaker setup with AI Dialogue Boost and a robust IP68 durability rating. Both tablets will be available next month. Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra Powered by Android 14, the Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra's Dynamic AMOLED 2X display...
Switch-maker shows little interest in jumping on the latest industry bandwagon.
The Federal Trade Commission is taking action against DoNotPay, alleging that the AI-powered company billing itself as "the world's first robot lawyer" failed to back its claims that it could replace human legal representation. The agency's complaint argues that DoNotPay did not conduct tests to assess whether its AI chatbot was equivalent to a human lawyer, and that the company did not hire or retain any attorneys of its own. DoNotPay has agreed to a proposed settlement that would see it face fines of $193,000. In addition, the settlement will require DoNotPay to inform customers who...
Photo: David Pierce / The Verge Pour one out for the Rabbit R1. Only 5,000 people of the 100,000 who bought the orange AI gadget are still using it daily, five months after it launched. That’s straight from the mouth of Rabbit founder Jesse Lyu, who gave the number to Fast Company while explaining that the device had to launch before it was ready in order to beat big tech companies to the punch.That’s a big fall from the moment AI gadgets were having earlier this year. There was tremendous hype around the R1 after its CES debut, and an air of mystery surrounded Humane’s AI Pin before its...
Unsurprisingly, AI companies dominated the day, with startups looking to apply the technology to problems like estate planning and automating clinical trial data.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A major shakeup is in the works at OpenAI. Reuters reported that the artificial intelligence research company is restructuring its business from a non-profit board into a for-profit corporation. The publication also says Sam Altman would be given equity in the new corporation.OpenAI’s move to for-profit wouldn’t eliminate its non-profit entity entirely. The non-profit would own a stake in the new for-profit venture but it won’t have nearly the power as it did. An OpenAI spokesperson gave a statement that’s identical to the one they gave to Fortune’s initial report about the...
Although Meta Connect 2024 lacked a marquee high-end product for the holiday season, it still included a new budget VR headset and a tease of the “magic glasses” Meta’s XR gurus have been talking about for the better part of a decade. In addition, the company keeps plowing forward with new AI tools for its Ray-Ban glasses and social platforms. Here’s everything the company announced at Meta Connect 2024.Orion AR glassesMetaToday’s best mixed reality gear — like Apple’s Vision Pro and the Meta Quest 3 — are headsets with passthrough video capabilities. But the tech industry...
The demo showcased AI Studio, a platform for designing custom chatbots.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Jay Peters / The Verge Meta has big ambitions for using AI to help creators, and it showed two impressive demos of what that could look like onstage at Connect today.One version of this involves fully recreating real influencers as AI figures. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented a live demo of a creator-based AI persona, which looked like the creator, talked like the creator, and tried to respond to questions like the creator would. It was pretty wild to watch. View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Verge (@verge)Another tool it’s developing takes Reels and automatically...
Meta Connect 2024 is starting soon, and with it comes the expectation of reveals and updates to Meta’s latest AI model and metaverse ambitions. The developer-centric event will feature a keynote from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, during which he will likely showcase new hardware and software to support two of Meta’s big ambitions: AI and the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta Connect 2024 is starting soon, and with it comes the expectation of reveals and updates to Meta’s latest AI model and metaverse ambitions. The developer-centric event will feature a keynote from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, during which he will likely showcase new hardware and software to support two of Meta’s big ambitions: AI and the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Alongside the Quest 3S and AI updates, we got a glimpse of Meta's future at Meta Connect. After teasing the device several times in recent months, Meta finally gave the world a proper look at its "full holographic" augmented reality glasses, which were codenamed Orion. The company is packing a lot of tech into those chunky frames, which are still in prototype form.This story is developing; please refresh for updates...This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/meta-reveals-its-orion-smart-glasses-175353381.html?src=rss
The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses got an update with new familiar smartphone features and AI capabilities coming later in 2024.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta announced that Meta AI will now be able to help you edit photos using AI technology as well as answer questions about the photos you share.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With the update, users will be able to use prompts to generate AI photos directly in their feed, Stories, and for their Facebook profile pictures.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta is bringing a voice mode to its AI assistant, Meta AI, along with an Meta AI-powered translation feature for Instagram Reels.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta Connect 2024 is starting soon, and with it comes the expectation of reveals and updates to Meta’s latest AI model and metaverse ambitions. The developer-centric event will feature a keynote from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, during which he will likely showcase new hardware and software to support two of Meta’s big ambitions: AI and the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta has secured deals with several actors, including Kristen Bell, John Cena and Judi Dench, to use their voices for the Meta AI chatbot, Reuters reports. Users will be able to talk to the chatbot while listening to answers in the voice of their favorite celebrities. Other celebrities include Awkwafina and Keegan-Michael Key, a source told Reuters.Besides these five voices, the source also said that there are more generic voice options if users prefer them. All voices will be available this week in the US and other English-speaking regions, though the source didn’t give any other specific...
Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook service, continues to experiment with AI to improve audiobook discovery and offer customized recommendations. Recent tests involve AI-powered tags, which analyze customer feedback to offer tailored suggestions according to individual preferences, and topic pages that recommend tags to help you find closely related subjects. The experiments are only available to 50% […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As world wide as the web is, language barriers still often limit how much of a site people can explore. Well, Reddit is using AI in an attempt to lessen this issue. The company announced Redditors across more than 35 countries will soon be able to automatically translate their entire feeds. The tool first launched in France earlier this year. The machine learning-powered feature is now available in Brazil and Spain, where Redditors can click a translate icon displayed in the overflow menu. This move will translate their entire feed, including comments, into Portuguese and Spanish...
Meta Connect starts Wednesday at 10 a.m. PT and is set to focus on Meta's XR platforms, the metaverse, and its generative AI platform, Llama.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Reddit is bringing machine learning-powered translations to more than 35 new languages, including Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
One of the most fundamental breakthroughs at Nvidia has been building processors that power and integrate with highly detailed, compute-intensive graphical simulations, which can be used in a wide range of applications, from games and industrial developments through to AI training. Now two of the engineers who helped build those physical simulations for Nvidia and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Bharti Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator, said on Wednesday it’s rolling out an AI-powered spam detection solution to all its customers as it vowed to curb the rising spam calls and messages in the world’s most populous nation. The company, which counts Google among its backers, announced the launch of what it claims is India’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Hugo Herrera / The Verge Microsoft is launching a new feature called “correction” that builds on the company’s efforts to combat AI inaccuracies. Customers using Microsoft Azure to power their AI systems can now use the capability to automatically detect and rewrite incorrect content in AI outputs.The correction feature is available in preview as part of the Azure AI Studio — a suite of safety tools designed to detect vulnerabilities, find “hallucinations,” and block malicious prompts. Once enabled, the correction system will scan and identify inaccuracies in AI output by...
Governor Gavin Newsom gave his thoughts on SB 1047 for the first time at Salesforce’s Dreamforce event last week. | Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images As Governor Gavin Newsom’s decision looms, SAG-AFTRA members leverage star power to push for SB 1047’s passage. Continue reading…
Arlo cameras and video doorbells are getting an AI-powered upgrade with new facial recognition capabilities and the ability to identify specific cars. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Arlo is upgrading its security cameras and video doorbells with additional AI capabilities. The company is adding the ability for its cameras to recognize people and vehicles, and learn to detect custom objects or changes in the surroundings. While an Arlo camera can currently alert you when it spots a person or vehicle (as well as packages and animals), it can now be trained to tell you exactly who...
On Tuesday, HP unveiled its first 2-in-1 AI PC, the OmniBook Ultra Flip 14-inch. The device has a 3K OLED display, a haptic touchpad and Intel's 200V Core Ultra series processors with a dedicated AI engine. Starting in late November, the PC will get Microsoft’s Copilot+ capabilities as an update. The OmniBook Ultra Flip 14-inch has a 2,880 x 1,800 touch-sensitive OLED display with a maximum 120Hz variable refresh rate. With a 90 percent screen-to-body ratio, the PC is only 0.59 inches (15mm) thick and weighs 2.97 lbs (1.35kg). The OmniBook Ultra Flip 14-inch starts at 512GB of storage, with...
Illustration by Álvaro Bernis / The Verge Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) is partnering with Google Cloud to generate closed captioning for content on the studio’s Max streaming service in the US. WBD will use a new “caption AI” solution that runs on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform to generate speech-to-text for some shows, starting with “unscripted programming.”Captions generated for the Max shows will have human oversight for quality assurance. According to Google, the workflow will reduce caption file creation time by up to 80 percent and cut costs by up to 50 percent compared to...
Often successful startups can give rise to ‘startup mafias’ – groups of former founders who go on to create other startups. But at least as often, new startups can be founded by employees. In the case of LiveFlow, that’s exactly what happened — and it’s now raised $13.5 million. A few years ago, Anita Koimur […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft today revealed Correction, a service that attempts to automatically revise AI-generated text that's factually wrong.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Spotify has expanded the availability of its AI Playlist tool to the U.S., Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand after initially launching it for Premium subscribers in the U.K. and Australia. This feature, currently in beta on Android and iOS devices, allows users to create personalized playlists based on written prompts. For instance, users can enter […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Snap has entered into an expanded partnership with Google Cloud to power generative AI experiences within Snapchat’s My AI chatbot. The chatbot will leverage the multimodal capabilities of Gemini AI to enable the chatbot to understand different types of information like text, audio, images, and videos. Gemini is powering the Google Lens-like features that Snapchat […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Spotify subscribers in additional countries can now create playlists using text descriptions. | Image: Spotify Spotify is expanding an AI feature that creates customized playlists from your text descriptions to additional English-speaking regions. Starting today, people in the US, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand with Premium Spotify subscriptions (which start at $5.99 per month for students or $11.99 for individuals) can access AI Playlist in beta, following its initial launch in the UK and Australia earlier this year.Subscribers can locate the feature within the mobile app by tapping the...
Google Photo’s redesigned video editor is rolling out to Android and iOS. | Image: Google Google is updating the mobile video editor on its Photos app for Android and iOS, adding new editing tools and AI-powered presets that should make it easier for users to trim and tweak their clips. Features coming to Android devices include a new “Speed” tool for creating slo-mo or sped-up videos, a new “Auto enhance” button that improves color and stability, and an updated trimming tool for making more precise cuts to footage. The tools located immediately below the video timeline are also being...
Founder mode? Pffft. Who needs that when you can be the father of creation, ushering in a new age of humanity? Welcome to “god mode.” Sam Altman, the CEO of the AI startup headed for a $150B valuation, OpenAI, has historically pitched AI as the solution to the world’s problems, despite its significant impact on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov stated that the messaging app will now start handing over the IP addresses and phone numbers of users if prompted by legal requests. Bloomberg, which first reported the policy change, notes that Telegram has historically been "notoriously non-responsive to takedown requests" and "often ignored requests for information about suspected criminals."Accompanying this development is the implementation of some moderation. Telegram has started using AI, as well as a human moderation team, to remove "problematic" content from its search results, Durov said. Durov also asked...
Meta Connect starts Wednesday at 10 a.m. PT and is set to focus on Meta's XR platforms, the metaverse, and its generative AI platform, Llama.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Chatbots like ChatGPT get stuff wrong. But researchers are building new A.I. systems that can verify their own math — and maybe more.
Ahead of the launch of Google TV Streamer, the company’s new set-top streaming box, the tech giant is also bringing new updates to all Google TV devices. This includes a home panel that can control smart home devices, AI-powered screensavers, a new sports page, and more. The company announced on Monday a host of new […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Cloudflare announced plans on Monday to launch a marketplace in the next year where website owners can sell AI model providers access to scrape their site’s content. The marketplace is the final step of Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s larger plan to give publishers greater control over how and when AI bots scrape their websites. “If […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
image: iFixit No sooner has the Phone 16 lineup arrived than the folks at iFixit start taking them apart, a process made easier this time around by the day-one release of repair manuals from Apple. The disassembly process shows the Camera control is a real button that moves, along with a flex cable that likely measures force, and the heat sink that appears positioned to keep the A18 chip’s Neural Engine cool while it handles AI workloads.For this year’s refresh, the base iPhone 16 may be more interesting than the Pro model for one reason — it’s the first one using electrically...
Jony Ive, the legendary designer who left his full-time role at Apple five years ago, is working on a new startup with OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman. The collaboration was first reported last year, and Ive confirmed it in a New York Times profile about what he’s been up to since leaving Apple. If […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Rumors emerged last year of a collaboration between former Apple designer Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, but the two have until now kept quiet about it. In a profile by The New York Times that was published this weekend, though, Ive confirms his company LoveFrom is leading the design on an AI product being built with Altman. Also on board are Tang Tan and Evans Hankey, both of whom held big design roles at Apple.There’s so far a team of about 10 employees involved with the project, based in a San Francisco office building that’s one of several properties Ive has purchased on a single...
Speaking Saturday at the UN Summit of the Future, Google CEO Sundar Pichai described AI as “the most transformative technology yet” and announced a new fund for AI education and training around the world. Pichai pointed to four broad opportunities he sees for AI and sustainable development, according to a transcript of his prepared remarks […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/what-to-read-this-weekend-a-house-haunted-by-ai-and-the-mysterious-murder-of-a-superhero-193544502.html?src=rss
AI has scrambled our ability to tell what’s real and what’s synthetic. But there are tools and techniques to help stay grounded in truth.
The $169 Plaud NotePin is a tiny magnetic recording device. Recordings are transcribed and AI provide summaries of meetings.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft is in the midst of a deal that would bring the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear power plant back to life, according to reporting by The Washington Post. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because the Pennsylvania plant was home to a partial meltdown of one of its reactors back in 1979.The deal would make Microsoft the plant’s sole customer for 20 years, meaning it’ll hoover up 100 percent of the power all for itself. Why does the company need so much juice? You can guess. It’s for AI, which is notoriously power hungry. Look, if it takes an entire nuclear power plant so we can...
The U.K.’s data protection watchdog has confirmed that Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has stopped processing user data for AI model training for now. Steven Almond, executive director of regulatory risk for the Information Commissioner’s Office, wrote in a statement on Friday: “We are pleased that LinkedIn has reflected on the concerns we raised about its approach to training […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The data centers that train all the large language models behind AI consume unimaginable amounts of energy, and the stakes are high for big tech companies to ensure they have enough power to run those plants. That’s why Microsoft is throwing its weight behind nuclear power. The tech giant on Friday signed a major deal […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge The iPhone 16 is great. But it’s great in pretty much exactly the ways you’d expect it to be great — gone, it seems, are the days of big new ideas about these slabs of glass we all use all day. And that’s basically okay! But it does make you wonder: could you just train an AI to tell you everything you need to know about the new iPhone?On this episode of The Vergecast, we find out. Joanna Stern, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal and a forever friend of The Verge, comes on the show to tell us about her adventures building the Joannabot, an AI chatbot...
It may seem like Apple is behind the competition a lot of the time. The company appeared to be slow to developments like widgets, bezel-less displays with camera notches and screens with high refresh rates. And with the iPhone 16 Pro, it appears to once again be late to the party, bringing generative-AI features and a real button for the camera to its 2024 flagship. But if you'll allow me to play therapist for a moment, I think it's not that Apple is slow. I think Apple is cautious. Perhaps overly so. Caution on its own isn't a bad trait — in fact, it could be considered thoughtful. Rather...
California’s newest law could land social media users who post, or repost, AI deepfakes that deceive voters about upcoming elections in legal trouble. Governor Gavin Newsom suggests that AB 2839, which went into effect immediately after he signed it on Tuesday, could be used to reel in Elon Musk’s retweets, among others who spread deceptive […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Starting Thursday, those who are enrolled in Apple’s public beta program will be able to experience the generative AI-fueled platform the company has been talking up since June.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Investment "goes beyond what any single company or government can finance."
Like its rival, Google, Amazon has launched an AI-powered video generator — but it’s only for advertisers at the moment, and somewhat limited in what it can do. Today at its Accelerate conference, Amazon unveiled Video generator, which turns a single product image into a few-seconds-long video clip after a few minutes of processing. In […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon sellers now have access to an AI assistant designed to help them grow their business by answering questions about their metrics, and later, may be able to help them directly resolve issues that arise. The assistant, code-named Project Amelia and built on AWS’s Amazon Bedrock, will initially be available in beta to U.S. sellers, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Fal.ai, a dev-focused platform for AI-generated audio, video, and images, today revealed that it’s raised $23 million in funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Black Forest Labs co-founder Robin Rombach, and Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. It’s a two-round deal. $14 million of Fal’s total came from a Series A tranche led by Kindred Ventures. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
YouTube’s creator-focused broadcast, Made On YouTube, is here again, and there's plenty to talk about. From more AI integration to Communities, YouTube seems to be gearing up to compete against rivals like TikTok and Netflix. Here are five things that genuinely interested us among the deluge of updates and new features.YouTube is introducing the Hype system, which lets viewers “go beyond” liking and sharing a video. The idea is to allow fans to give more visibility to smaller creators — so hyping is only allowed for videos from creators under 500,000 subscribers, and only on videos...
Edera, a startup looking to simplify and improve how Kubernetes containers and AI workloads are secured by offering a new hypervisor, today announced that it has raised a $5 million seed funding round led by 645 Ventures and Eniac Ventures. Kubernetes is now 10 years old, but Edera founders Ariadne Conill (distinguished engineer), Emily Long […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Remember when the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and SAG-AFTRA went on strike for months, in great part to get protections against AI? Well, while they did get some stipulations in there, it's not stopping AI from coming to Hollywood anyways. Lionsgate, the studio behind the John Wick and Hunger Games franchises, has struck a deal with AI startup Runway, the Wall Street Journal first reported and Runway confirmed in a press release. The arrangement will allow Runway access to Lionsgate's content library in exchange for a fresh, custom AI model that the studio can use in production and editing....
Runway, a startup developing AI video tools, including video-generating models, has partnered with Lionsgate — the studio behind the “John Wick” and “Twilight” franchises — to train a custom video model on Lionsgate’s movie catalog. Lionsgate vice chair Michael Burns said in a statement that the studio’s “filmmakers, directors and other creative talent” will get […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It may seem like Apple is behind the competition a lot of the time. The company appeared to be slow to developments like widgets, bezel-less displays with camera notches and screens with high refresh rates. And with the iPhone 16 Pro, it appears to once again be late to the party, bringing generative-AI features and a real button for the camera to its 2024 flagship. But if you'll allow me to play therapist for a moment, I think it's not that Apple is slow. I think Apple is cautious. Perhaps overly so. Caution on its own isn't a bad trait — in fact, it could be considered thoughtful. Rather...
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images California governor Gavin Newsom has signed two bills that will protect performers from having their likeness simulated by AI digital replicas.The two SAG-AFTRA supported bills, AB 2602 and AB 1836, were passed by the California legislature in August and are part of a slate of state-level AI regulations. AB 2602 bars contract provisions that would let companies use a digital version of a performer in a project instead of the real human actor, unless the performer knows exactly how their digital stand-in will be used and has a lawyer or union representative...
Investment powerhouse BlackRock is set to launch a massive AI-focused investment fund, exceeding $30 billion, in collaboration with Microsoft and the Abu Dhabi-backed investment outfit MGX, the FT reported today. According to the outlet, the fund — among Wall Street’s largest — will focus on creating data centers and funding energy infrastructure to support AI. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Getty Images In the weeks leading up to the release of OpenAI’s newest “reasoning” model, o1, independent AI safety research firm Apollo found a notable issue. Apollo realized the model produced incorrect outputs in a new way. Or, to put things more colloquially, it lied.Sometimes the deceptions seemed innocuous. In one example, OpenAI researchers asked o1-preview to provide a brownie recipe with online references. The model’s chain of thought — a feature that’s supposed to mimic how humans break down complex ideas — internally...
Mistral AI launched a new free tier to let developers fine tune and build test apps with the startup’s AI models, the company announced in a blog post Tuesday. The startup also slashed prices for developers to access its AI models through API endpoints, and added image processing to its free consumer AI chatbot, Le […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AWS’ weird AI-powered keyboard experiment, DeepComposer, is no more. In a blog post today, the company announced it’s shutting down the five-year-old DeepComposer, a physical MIDI piano and AWS service that let users compose songs with the help of generative AI. “After careful consideration, we have made the decision to end support for AWS DeepComposer,” […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge If you’ve tried out Snapchat’s AI-generated selfies, you might want to double-check a setting that lets Snap use your face in “personalized sponsored content and ads,” as spotted by 404 Media.The feature, called My Selfie, lets you and your friends create AI-generated images of yourself based on photos you share with Snapchat. When using the feature for the first time, Snapchat prompts you to agree to terms that include using “you (or your likeness)” in ads:You also acknowledge and agree that by using My Selfie, you (or your likeness) may also...
Since first introducing its generative AI assistant, Snap has been steadily ramping up the amount of AI in its app. Now, the company is adding a new slate of AI-powered features as it begins testing a larger redesign of the app.Snap often brings new AI features to its Snapchat+ subscribers first, and the company is continuing the trend with a new feature called “My Selfie.” The feature uses selfies to create AI-generated images of users and their friends (if they also subscribe) in creative poses and situations. The company is also rolling out a new "grandparents lens" that uses AI to...
Google says that it plans to roll out changes to Google Search to make clearer which images in results were AI-generated — or edited by AI tools. In the next few months, Google will begin to flag AI-generated and -edited images in the “About this image” window on Search, Google Lens and Circle to Search. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Are we at peak social media yet? It’s an interesting question to ponder after the launch of an iOS app offering a social media experience just for one (i.e. you). At a glance, SocialAI — which is billed as a pure “AI Social Network” — looks like Twitter but there’s one very big twist on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Can AI help you to break your social media addiction? That’s one of the questions raised by an odd new app SocialAI, which offers its users a private social network where they can post their thoughts and receive AI-generated comments and feedback in return. Developer Michael Sayman describes the app as something more akin to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Workday today announced it’s acquiring Evisort, an AI-powered contract management platform, for an undisclosed amount. In a statement, Terrance Wampler, group general manager at Workday, said that Evisort’s tech will enable Workday to add a range of AI-powered document processing tools to its existing finance and HR software. “Evisort will help us deliver on our […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
When it comes to talent shortages in tech, cybersecurity is one of the biggest and most urgent that needs filling. Malicious attacks are on the rise, and the techniques being used to worm into networks are also scaling up. Yet the World Economic Forum recently found that there are 4 million positions unfilled globally — […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The head of Slack, Denise Dresser, tells TechCrunch she is shifting the business chat platform into a “work operating system,” specifically by making Slack a hub for AI applications from Salesforce, Adobe, and Anthropic. The company’s CEO sees Slack as more than a place to chat with your coworkers, but do users want that? And […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge iOS 18 introduces more customization and paves the way for Apple Intelligence. Continue reading…
The marquee feature isn’t here yet, but there’s still a lot to appreciate in iOS 18. | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge It’s a weird year for iOS. Usually, the new software version arrives all at once. Not so with iOS 18. The foundational stuff has arrived, and in a normal year, things like RCS support and a redesigned control center would be more than enough. But iOS 18’s headline feature, Apple Intelligence, isn’t even part of this initial release, and we may not see some of its most interesting features until well into 2025. The iOS 18 rollout starts now, and it’s just going to...
Apple’s newest software update, iOS 18, is rolling out today to all iPhone users. While AI technology was heavily hyped as a key part of this upgrade, Apple Intelligence features aren’t part of this release. Instead, Apple says it will release Apple Intelligence with iOS 18.1 starting with the U.S. before gradually rolling them out […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Series A comes about a year after 11xAI raised a $2 million seed round led by Project A Ventures.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Runway, one of several AI startups developing video-generating tech, today announced an API to allow developers and companies to build the company’s generative AI models into third-party apps, platforms and services. Currently in limited access (there’s a waitlist), the Runway API only offers a single model at present — Gen-3 Alpha Turbo, a faster but […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It’s looking increasingly likely that OpenAI will soon alter its complex corporate structure. Reports earlier this week suggested that the AI company was in talks to raise $6.5 billion at a $150 billion pre-money valuation. Now Reuters says the deal is contingent on whether OpenAI can restructure and remove a profit cap for investors. In […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Fei Fei Li, the Stanford professor many deem the “Godmother of AI,” has raised $230 million for her new startup, World Labs, from backers including Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, and Radical Ventures. World Labs is valued at over $1 billion, and the capital was raised over two rounds spaced a couple of months apart, TechCrunch reported […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
TuSimple, once a buzzy startup considered a leader in self-driving trucks, is trying to move its assets to China to fund a new AI-generated animation and video game business. The pivot has not only puzzled and enraged several shareholders, but also threatens to pull the company back into a legal morass mere weeks after reaching […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple’s higher-end iPhones feature a titanium finish and a new “desert” option. (That just means dark gold.) | Screenshot: Apple Apple’s new iPhone 16, 16 Plus, 16 Pro, and 16 Pro Max are already up for preorder ahead of their debut on September 20th. It’ll be a few more weeks before the Apple Intelligence AI features arrive, though, as Apple is serving them up in beta as part of iOS 18.1 in October. But without those hyped-up software features in tow just yet, what’s there to be excited about on day one? Well, to make sense of all four models, we’ve put together a little side-by-...
Meta has confirmed that it’s restarting efforts to train its AI systems using public Facebook and Instagram posts from its U.K. userbase. The announcement comes three months after Facebook’s parent company paused its plans due to regulatory pressure in the U.K., with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) raising concerns over how the company might use U.K. user data […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI has unveiled yet another artificial intelligence model. This one is called o1, and the company claims it can perform complex reasoning tasks more effectively than its predecessors. Apparently, o1 was trained to “spend more time thinking through problems before they respond.” According to the company: “[the models] learn to refine their thinking process, try different strategies and recognize their mistakes.”That more considered response means it’s significantly slower at processing prompts than GPT-4o. And while it might be thinking more, o1 hasn’t solved the problem of...
Late Thursday evening, Oprah aired a special on AI, appropriately titled “AI and the Future of Us.” Guests included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, tech influencer Marques Brownlee, and current FBI director Christopher Wray. The dominant tone was one of skepticism — and wariness. Oprah noted in prepared remarks that the AI genie is out of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
By making the AI info label harder to find, it might be easier for users to be deceived by content that was edited with AI, especially as editing tools become more and more advanced.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Image Right-wing media figures and influencers have descended on Springfield, Ohio, hunting for anything that can help them prove the veracity of a viral racist rumor about Haitian migrants in the community — and relying on misleading, occasionally AI-generated content to help them prove their point. Springfield, which has seen its Haitian population grow by an estimated 15,000 people, has become a sort of shorthand for conservatives’ fears about immigration and demographic change. One of the most recent examples comes from Tyler Oliveira, a YouTuber...
At the MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) on Wednesday night, new technology allowed fans to shop their favorite artist’s styles as they appeared on the screen. Though the drama from last night’s event focused on Chappel Roan confronting a rude paparazzi and Sabrina Carpenter‘s on-stage kiss with an alien, fans were also raving about the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The White House released a statement today outlining commitments that several AI companies are making to curb the creation and distribution of image-based sexual abuse. The participating businesses have laid out the steps they are taking to prevent their platforms from being used to generate non-consensual intimate images (NCII) of adults and child sexual abuse material (CSAM).Specifically, Adobe, Anthropic, Cohere, Common Crawl, Microsoft and OpenAI said they'll be:"responsibly sourcing their datasets and safeguarding them from image-based sexual abuse"All of the aforementioned except Common...
Meta will hide the “AI Info” label in a menu if an image has been edited with AI. | Image: Meta Meta is updating how it labels content on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads that have been edited or manipulated using generative AI. In an updated blog post, Meta announced that its “AI Info” tag will appear within a menu in the top-right corner of images and videos edited with AI — instead of directly beneath the user’s name.Users can click on the menu to check if AI information is available and read what may have been adjusted. Meta previously applied the “AI Info” tag to all AI-...
Illustration: The Verge Google is rolling out its Gemini Live voice chat mode to all Android users for free. You can access the conversational AI chatbot through the Gemini app or the overlay on Android.Google first announced Gemini Live during its Pixel 9 launch event last month, but it has only been available to Gemini Advanced subscribers until now. Similar to ChatGPT’s voice chat feature, you can ask Gemini Live questions aloud and even interrupt it mid-sentence. There are also several different voices you can choose from.We're starting to roll out Gemini Live in English to more people...
Driven by new technology called OpenAI o1, the chatbot can test various strategies and try to identify mistakes as it tackles complex tasks.
The White House has announced that several major AI vendors, including OpenAI and Microsoft, have committed to taking steps to combat nonconsensual deepfakes and child sexual abuse material. Adobe, Cohere, Microsoft, OpenAI and data provider Common Crawl said that they’ll “responsibly” source and safeguard the datasets they create and use to train AI from image-based […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images We’ve been covering the rise of AI image editing very closely here on Decoder and at The Verge overall for several years now — the ability to create photorealistic images with nothing more than a chatbot prompt has the potential to completely reset our cultural relationship with photography and, in particular, how much we instinctively trust photos to reflect the truth.But the debate over image editing and the inherent truth of photos is nothing new, of course. It’s existed for as long as photography has existed, and it’s raged since...
Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge These days, there are so many digital subscriptions out there — music, movies, fitness, cloud storage, software, podcasts, audiobooks, Patreons, security cameras, AI bots, and more — that it’s perfectly understandable if you start losing track of what exactly you’re signed up for.To make things even more complicated, you may be paying some subscriptions monthly and others annually. Then, there are those insidious free trials: you sign up to test something out, forget all about it after a few days, and then get billed unexpectedly (this is an...
Google’s lead privacy regulator in the European Union has opened an investigation into whether or not it has complied with the bloc’s data protection laws in relation to use of people’s information for training generative AI. Specifically it’s looking into whether the tech giant needed to carry out a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Getty Images Google can now turn your research into an AI-generated podcast, complete with two “hosts” that discuss what you’ve dug up. The experimental feature lives within NotebookLM, the AI note-taking app Google launched last year, and will have AI hosts “summarize your material, make connections between topics, and banter back and forth.”It’s meant to build on NotebookLM’s existing features that help you interact with all your notes, transcripts, and other research documents. The app already uses Google’s Gemini AI model...
OpenAI is reportedly in talks with investors to raise $6.5 billion in new funding, valuing the startup at $150 billion, according to Bloomberg. That’s significantly higher than OpenAI’s previously reported valuation from earlier this year, $86 billion, and far higher than any other AI startup today. The funding round will reportedly be led by Thrive […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
An AMD Strix Point laptop. | Photo by Joanna Nelius / The Verge Many laptops and gaming handhelds share a single pool of memory between the CPU and GPU — and sometimes, you might want that RAM boosting your graphics instead. Now, AMD won’t make you dive into a BIOS to reroute that power. The company’s new Variable Graphics Memory lets you turn up to 75 percent of your system memory into dedicated video RAM, just by tapping a button in AMD’s desktop Adrenalin app.It’s only currently available for AMD AI 300 “Strix Point” laptops, and how much RAM you’ll be able to divert depends...
A local newspaper in Hawaii has turned to AI-generated presenters to draw in new audiences.
After a historic presidential debate replete with discourse about eating pets, Taylor Swift ended the evening with a bang. Arguably the most powerful figure in American pop culture, the singer-songwriter chose debate night to announce on Instagram that she plans to vote for Kamala Harris in the presidential election. Swift’s endorsement is monumental. She holds […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hume AI, a startup founded by a psychologist who specializes in measuring emotion, gives some top large language models a realistic human voice.
Adobe’s new text-to-video and image-to-video AI features will be available in beta later this year. | Image: Adobe Adobe has teased some of its upcoming generative AI video tools, including a new feature that can produce video clips from still images. This latest preview builds on the in-development Firefly video model that the software giant demonstrated in April, which is set to power AI video and audio editing features across Adobe’s Creative Cloud applications.The new promotional teaser shows footage produced by Firefly’s text-to-video capabilities that Adobe announced (but didn’t...
Photo by Noam Galai/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management Taylor Swift said on Tuesday that she plans to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in November’s presidential election — and that AI-generated images circulating of herself pushed her in part to make her support public.“Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation,” Swift wrote in an Instagram post. “It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very...
A group of Democratic senators is urging the FTC and Justice Department to investigate whether AI tools that summarize and regurgitate online content like news and recipes may amount to anti-competitive practices. In a letter to the agencies, Senators led by Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) explained their position that the latest AI features are hitting creators […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Bumble is increasing its investments in AI and branching out with new features to stay relevant amid a generational shift in dating behavior among younger users. During Goldman Sachs’ annual technology conference on Monday, Bumble CEO Lidiane Jones unveiled more details about the app’s upcoming AI capabilities, including a photo selection tool as well as features […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple Intelligence, the iPhone maker’s new set of AI capabilities arriving in iOS 18, is laying the groundwork for a new way to use apps. Today, the dated App Store model is under constant regulatory attack. Meanwhile, users can accomplish a lot of tasks with fairly simple questions to an AI assistant like ChatGPT. Proponents […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Gemini is Google’s long-promised, next-gen generative AI model family.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Apple Apple’s all in on AI — at least Apple’s version. “The next generation of iPhone has been designed for Apple Intelligence from the ground up,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said before revealing the iPhone 16. Software chief Craig Fedherighi pitched Apple Intelligence as a “personal intelligence system” that’s at “the heart of the iPhone 16 line-up.” After the event Apple even published a whole press release dedicated to Apple Intelligence.There’s just one catch: when the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro first come out, they won’t have any Apple Intelligence features.Sure, the new...
One would have expected that "Apple's first phone made from the ground up for Apple Intelligence" would justify being so.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Yesterday was Apple’s Glowtime event, and you know what that means – lots of new hardware for us to geek out on. As we anticipated based on the WWDC event in June, Apple is embedding a lot of new AI features into its devices. From the iPhone 16, to the AirPods 4 and AirPods Pro […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sony has officially announced the much-anticipated PS5 Pro. You'll need to dig deep into your pocket for it, though: the new console has a price tag of $700 and it will arrive this holiday season.The Pro offers some notable improvements on the specs of the original PS5, which was released in 2019. Sony focused on three core upgrades: a larger GPU, advanced ray-tracing and AI-driven upscaling.That GPU has 67 percent more compute units and 28 percent faster RAM than the standard PS5. As such, according to the console's lead architect Mark Cerny, the new console will be able to deliver up to 45...
Spotter, a startup that underwrites creators and offers AI tools, raised $7.4 million, according to a Form D filing viewed by TechCrunch. A representative for Spotter confirmed the filing’s legitimacy, but did not offer further details. This additional funding is much smaller than Spotter’s most recent raise, a $200 million Series D round led by […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
James Earl Jones died Monday at the age of 93. But long before he did, he gave Lucasfilm permission to recreate his iconic Darth Vader voice for shows like Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Some Apple analysts believe AI will spur a boom in iPhone sales. But not everyone's buying the hype.
Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge AMD is saying the quiet part out loud: it’s now prioritizing AI chips ahead of flagship GPUs for gamers. The company’s just laid out a new business strategy, where it will merge its RDNA gaming graphics and CNDA data center efforts into a single universal “UDNA” that’s aimed at AI first. In two interviews with Tom’s Hardware (you’ll definitely want to read both), AMD computing and graphics boss Jack Huynh doesn’t beat around the bush. With gaming graphics, he explains, the goal is now building scale and market share at lower price points — not...
Audible, Amazon’s audiobook business, on Monday announced that it’ll use AI trained on professional narrators’ voices to generate new audiobook recordings. A select, U.S.-based cohort of audiobook narrators will be invited to train AI on their voices starting this week, Audible said. The trained AI will be used to make recordings, and narrators will have […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple’s biggest event of the year has arrived, and with it, the iPhone 16 lineup and a slew of AI-related updates for iOS 18. Apple Intelligence was the star of the Apple event this year, like it was at WWDC in June, and Apple’s lineup of announcements echoed many of the anticipated hardware reveals, including […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Finding out what kind of dog this is with Visual Intelligence. | Screenshot: Apple Apple announced a new feature called Visual Intelligence that will be part of the company’s Apple Intelligence suite of AI features “later this year.” The feature works much like similar features offered by other multimodal AI systems from Google or OpenAI.Visual Intelligence lets you “instantly learn about everything you see,” Apple’s Craig Federighi said during the company’s September event today. Federighi said the feature is “enabled by Camera Control,” which is the company’s name for a...
Visual search is coming to the iPhone, powered by Apple Intelligence, Apple’s suite of AI capabilities. The Camera Control, the new button on the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus, can launch what Apple calls “visual intelligence” — basically a reverse image search combined with some text recognition. If you use visual intelligence to search for […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple Monday unveiled the iPhone 16 at the “It’s Glowtime” event in Cupertino, CA. CEO Tim Cook claimed that the new handset is “designed around Apple Intelligence, from the ground up,” a reference to new generative AI features announced at WWDC in June. The new handset is made from “aerospace grade” aluminum, according to the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple has announced new features for the latest version of watchOS, watchOS 11, including translation and an upgraded Smart Stack.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple’s biggest event of the year has arrived, and with it, the iPhone 16 lineup and a slew of AI-related updates for iOS 18. Apple Intelligence is expected to be the star of the Apple event this year, like it was at WWDC in June, despite the many anticipated hardware reveals like new Apple Watches, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
More than 90 nations, including the U.S. and China, will convene at a two-day summit in Seoul starting Monday to attempt to establish a blueprint for the use of AI in the military. As Reuters reports, participants hope to establish minimum guardrails and suggest principles for “responsible” AI deployment aligned with NATO principles. The summit […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The US-only beta test is limited to a “small group of narrators.” | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon will begin inviting a small group of Audible narrators to train AI-generated voice clones of themselves this week, with the aim of speeding up audiobook production for the platform. The US-only beta test was announced on Audible’s creator marketplace, and will be extended to rights holders like authors, agents, and publishers “later this year” according to Amazon.“There is a vast catalog of books that does not yet exist in audio and as we explore ways to bring more...
Apple’s iPhone 16 event invitation. | Image: Apple Apple is getting ready to announce the iPhone 16, which will surely be its most powerful and best-camera-having phone yet (at least for the Pro models). It’s also expected to be the first iPhone to launch with Apple Intelligence across the board.In addition to the iPhone 16 lineup and a slate of new watches and AirPods, Apple is expected to show more AI features, like the ability to understand what’s onscreen, along with features it introduced at WWDC in June, which include an upgraded Siri, image generation, AI rewrite, and call...
When Apple unveiled its AI plans at WWDC in June, analysts suggested the feature could put the iPhone 16 on track for another “supercycle.” Like the addition of 5G before it, industry watchers believed that Apple Intelligence’s arrival might convince holdouts to bite the bullet and upgrade their device. We’ll have a much better picture […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Elon Musk has denied a report that one of his companies, Tesla, has discussed sharing revenue with another of his companies, xAI, so that it can use the startup’s AI models. The Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday that under a proposed agreement described to investors, Tesla would use xAI models in its driver-assistance software (known […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: David Pierce / The Verge Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 51, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, I hope you love spy shows as much as I do, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about cobalt miners and religious AI and the history of the Moleskine, listening to pop-punk Disney songs on repeat, finally starting The Sopranos (I know, I know), soundtracking my workday with the Earth.fm app, giving Tweek another whirl for simple task and calendar stuff, and spending too...
Image: Apple The iPhone 16 is nigh as Apple prepares to debut its next smartphone lineup on Monday, September 9th, at 1PM ET / 10AM PT. The company is expected to officially announce four phones as usual, with two standard iPhone 16s and two iPhone 16 Pro models, all likely packed with Apple Intelligence AI features.You can catch the livestream at Apple’s own website, on its YouTube channel, and even on an Apple TV. (Apple usually makes sure you see this when you scroll from the home screen of the Apple TV app, but you can search for “Apple Event” to find it, too.)The Vergecast talks...
Illustration: The Verge The Justice Department wants to learn more about Google’s AI strategy in order to determine what kinds of changes it will ask for to resolve Google’s monopoly in search. The request came during a hearing Friday in a federal court in Washington, DC, where Google and the DOJ met before Judge Amit Mehta, who recently ruled in favor of the DOJ and agreed that Google is an illegal monopolist. Mehta’s decision officially ended the first phase of the trial, which focused on whether Google is liable under antitrust law. Now the parties are moving onto the remedies phase...
Earlier this week, the EU’s lead privacy regulator ended its court proceeding related to how X processed user data to train its Grok AI chatbot, but the saga isn’t over yet for the Elon Musk-owned social media platform formerly known as Twitter. The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s received […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The United States, United Kingdom, European Union, and several other countries have signed an AI safety treaty laid out by the Council of Europe (COE), an international standards and human rights organization. This landmark treaty, known as the Framework Convention on artificial intelligence and human rights, democracy, and the rule of law, opened for signature in Vilnius, Lithuania. It is the first legally binding international agreement aimed at ensuring that AI systems align with democratic values.The treaty focuses on three main areas: protecting human rights (including privacy and...
Microsoft announced it has partnered with StopNCII to help remove non-consensual intimate images — including deepfakes — from its Bing search engine.When a victim opens a "case" with StopNCII, the database creates a digital fingerprint, also called a "hash," of an intimate image or video stored on that individual's device without their needing to upload the file. The hash is then sent to participating industry partners, who can seek out matches for the original and remove them from their platform if it breaks their content policies. The process also applies to AI-generated deepfakes of a...
Cath Virginia / The Verge A startup funded by the co-founder of Yahoo and CTO of Intel is suing Nvidia and Microsoft for allegedly infringing on its patent for a key innovation in AI chips, and being part of a buying cartel that allegedly sought to artificially fix lower prices for the technology.In a new lawsuit, Texas-based Xockets says Nvidia has infringed on its patented Data Processing Unit (DPU) technology, which helps make cloud infrastructure more efficient by accelerating data-intensive workloads. Xockets says the chip giant inherited the infringement through its 2020 acquisition of...
Illustration: The Verge Google is testing its new “Ask Photos” feature that lets you explore your library of pictures in new ways. The feature, which Google first previewed in May, is rolling out to select Google Labs users in the US, and will let you ask things like, “Where did we camp last time we went to Yosemite?” or “What did we eat at the hotel in Stanley?”Using Google’s Gemini AI models, the Photos app will then offer a response based on the content in your photos, as well as pull up images relevant to your question. GIF: Google Google is putting an AI assistant in Photos...
The advancement of generative AI tools has created a new problem for the internet: the proliferation of synthetic nude images resembling real people. On Thursday, Microsoft took a major step to give revenge porn victims a tool to stop its Bing search engine from returning these images. Microsoft announced a partnership with StopNCII, an organization […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
First announced at Google’s I/O developer conference this May, Google Photos’ AI-powered search feature, “Ask Photos,” is rolling out to users starting today. The feature, which allows users to ask the AI to find photos using more complex queries, will initially be available in “early access” to select customers in the U.S. before expanding to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As with many open source startups, All Hands AI expects to monetize its service by offering paid, closed-source enterprise features. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Europe doesn’t have many large language model (LLM) makers but one of these rare AI beasts — Germany’s Aleph Alpha — appears to be preparing to rule itself out of the running, per Bloomberg, which has an interview with CEO Jonas Andrulis on its pivot to a broader generative AI-support play. The idea with a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google announced Thursday that it expanded its generative AI-powered virtual try-on tool to support dresses, allowing users to virtually wear thousands of dresses from hundreds of brands, including Boden, Maje, Sandro, Simkhai and Staud. According to the company, dresses were one of the most searched apparel categories for the tool. However, as Google explained in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We’re not very close to any specifics on how, exactly, AI regulations will be implemented and ensured, but today a swathe of countries including the U.S., the U.K. and the European Union signed up to a treaty on AI safety laid out by the Council of Europe (COE), an international standards and human rights organization. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Netflix The Verge spoke with Bill Gates about AI, misinformation, and climate change. Continue reading…
Maybe a lack of AI characters is what Quibi got wrong. At least, that’s what one startup appears to believe. My Drama is a new short series app with over 30 shows, with a majority of them following a soap opera format in order to hook viewers. The app is now launching an AI-powered chatbot […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Cosmos Institute, a nonprofit whose founding fellows include Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark and former Defense Department technologist Brendan McCord, has announced a venture program and research initiatives to — in the organization’s words — “cultivate a new generation of technologists and entrepreneurs equipped with deep philosophical thinking to navigate the uncharted territory of our […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Top venture firms back SSI to develop "safe" AI with teams in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.
Image: Asus Asus is launching its latest NUC mini PC today, complete with Intel’s new Core Ultra series 2 processors. For some reason, Asus has decided to put a dedicated Copilot button on the front of this puck-shaped PC, so you can reach out and launch Microsoft’s AI assistant.I’m not entirely sure why you’d want an AI button on a miniature PC that’s probably going to sit more than an arm’s length away from you on a desk, but it’s a button that has now progressed beyond Microsoft’s effort to push it on keyboards. Asus also has a fingerprint reader on top of this NUC for...
Safe Super Intelligence (SSI), the AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised over $1 billion in capital from investors including NFDG (an investment partnership run by Nat Friedman and SSI’s CEO Daniel Gross), a16z, Sequoia, DST Global and SV Angel. SSI told Reuters that it plans to use the tranche […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Acer is expanding its line of Swift laptops with four new models, and they each have AI capabilities built in. They share functions such as Microsoft Copilot+, Acer User Sensing technology, Windows Studio Effects, PurifiedVoice 2.0 and PurifiedView. Other features include Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 connectivity.We’ll take a look at the Swift 14 AI (SF14-51/T) first, a 14-inch 3K or 2K OLED laptop powered by either Intel Core Ultra 7 or Ultra 5 processors and Intel Arc Graphics. There’s also a model with a 2K IPS touchscreen. Its NPU’s AI performance is rated at 48 trillion of operations...
If you build an AI search product, you compete with Google. But Google has a lot easier time answering queries with a single, simple answer, such as “how many is a dozen?” than it does answering complex questions like “what influence did Thomas Paine’s ‘Common Sense’ have on Enlightenment ideals?” That’s why You.com is betting […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Samsung has launched its new line of Galaxy Book5 laptops with the Pro 360, a Copilot+ enabled Windows 11 PC with Intel's latest Core 2 CPU and Arc GPU. Unusually, it also supports some Android AI features like Circle to Search with Google that work by connecting the PC to a smartphone.Intel's latest Core Ultra processor (Series 2) provides the needed Copilot+ performance with four times the NPU (neural processing unit) power of its predecessor. It also uses Intel's Arc GPU to run Samsung's "most premium PC display." That display uses Dynamic AMOLED 2X tech that improves outdoor...
The Verge Microsoft is holding a special Copilot event later this month that will be focused on “the next phase of Copilot innovation.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and vice president of AI at work Jared Spataro will host the “wave 2” Copilot event on September 16th.The event will be hosted on LinkedIn and focus on the business side of Microsoft’s Copilot offerings. I revealed in my Notepad newsletter last month that Microsoft is about to rebrand Copilot in the most Microsoft way possible. This means that instead of “Copilot in Word” it will become “Microsoft 365 Copilot in Word...
Canva, the design platform, is increasing prices steeply for some customers. And it’s blaming the move in part on generative AI. In the U.S., some Canva Teams subscribers on older pricing plans are seeing the sticker price for a five-person plan jump from $119.99 per year to $500 per year (with a 40% discount for […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Qualcomm’s exclusivity period on Copilot+ PCs is winding down. Microsoft confirmed on Tuesday that Intel’s new 200V processors and AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 series chips will add Copilot+ AI capabilities beginning in November.Copilot+ PCs include features like Live Captions (real-time subtitle generation, including translations), Cocreator in Paint (prompt-based image generation), Windows Studio Effects image editing (background blurring, eye contact adjustment and auto-framing) and AI tools in Photos. Of particular interest to gamers is Auto Super Resolution, an Nvidia DLSS competitor that...
Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Clearview AI has been hit with its largest fine yet under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by a Dutch regulator. The Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) announced a fine of 30.5 million Euros, or about $33.7 million.The American facial recognition company, which built a database of images scraped from social media platforms, has been the target of regulators around the world for alleged privacy violations. It’s previously faced fines from the UK, Australia, France, and Italy, and been forced to delete data on those countries...
If you need another sign that it's a very strange year for PC hardware, consider Dell's latest XPS 13 revision with Intel's just-announced Core Ultra 200V processors. It's the third time Dell has revamped its popular ultraportable over the past year. First, it got the original Core Ultra chip in April, and then in July Dell released a Snapdragon-equipped Copilot+ variant. And, as is usually the case with PC hardware, it pays to wait.The new processors sport a 48 TOPS (tera operations per second) NPU (neural processing unit) for AI tasks, as well as dramatically faster...
The race to build the most compelling AI PC processors continues with the launch of Intel's Core Ultra 200V. At Computex in June, we learned these "Lunar Lake" laptop chips would feature a powerful 48 TOPS (tera operations per second) neural processing unit for AI work, and, surprisingly enough, they'd also sport up to 32GB of built-in memory for faster performance and lower power consumption. Today at Germany's IFA trade show, Intel has given us an even closer look at its next-generation AI PC hardware.According to Intel, the Core Ultra 200V will be "the most efficient x86...
Image: The Verge The organization behind National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is being slammed online after it claimed that opposing the use of AI writing tools is “classist and ableist.” On Saturday NaNoWriMo published its stance on the technology, announcing that it doesn’t explicitly support or condemn any approach to writing.“We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege,” NaNoWriMo said, arguing that “not all brains...
Clearview AI is back in hot — and expensive — water, with the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) fining the company €30.5 million ($33.6 million) for violating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The release explains that Clearview created "an illegal database with billions of photos of faces," including Dutch individuals, and has failed to properly inform people that it's using their data. In early 2023, Clearview's CEO claimed the company had 30 billion images. Clearview must immediately stop all violations or face up to €5.1 million ($5.6 million) in non-...
The Netherlands' data protection authority has imposed a penalty of €30.5M on Clearview AI for GDPR violations.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The maker of ChatGPT is struggling to transform itself into a profit-driven company while satisfying worries about the safety of artificial intelligence.
Alex Castro / The Verge Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman are far-right activists, convicted felons, and engineers of questionable political stunts. Politico reports that they are now also running LobbyMatic, a company that sells an “AI automation platform for lobbyists.” LobbyMatic claims on its website that its AI-powered software can do everything — like automatically monitor congressional hearings or “supercharge research” into legislative and regulatory issues. Jumping on the AI hypewagon is a perfectly respectable career move. The problem is that sources have told Politico that Wohl...
Connections, the daily word game from The New York Times, isn’t exactly easy. In fact, the solve rate dips below 50 percent some days. To help highlight where players are going wrong, a new bot is employing AI to guess the thought process they’re using for the most common mistakes every day.For the uninitiated, Connections is a word/logic game that the paper of record debuted last year. Every day, you're presented with a grid of 16 words that you have to split into four categories. There’s only one solution and after four mistakes, the game is over. However, there’s some trickiness...
No matter who powerful generative AI becomes, writer Ted Chiang says it will never create true art. Chiang is one of the most admired science fiction authors writing today, best known for the novella “Story Of Your Life” (which was adapted into the movie “Arrival”). But he’s also published terrific pieces for The New Yorker […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Samsung Food Plus can create tailored meal plans based on your nutritional needs and the food in your fridge and pantry. | Image: Samsung New features on Samsung’s AI-powered food and recipe app could make your meal planning and food management chores much easier. With Samsung Food, you can now add items to a Food List just by taking a picture. The app can then suggest recipes based on the food you have, automatically remove them when you cook a recipe using anything on the list, then add food items back to the list when you tick them off your shopping list. The Food List was previously only...
SB 1047 has drawn the ire of Silicon Valley players large and small, including venture capitalists, big tech trade groups, researchers and startup founders.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
LAION, the German research org that created the data used to train Stable Diffusion, among other generative AI models, has released a new data set that it claims has been “thoroughly cleaned of known links to suspected child sexual abuse material (CSAM).” The new data set, Re-LAION-5B, is actually a re-release of an old data […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google is gearing up for the upcoming U.S. presidential election by rolling out safeguards for more of its generative AI products. Although the company already previously announced that it would restrict Gemini queries related to the election, it’s now applying additional restrictions to its other generative AI products. These safeguards will be applied to Search […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Jam & Tea Studios is the latest gaming startup implementing generative AI to transform the way players interact with non-playable characters (NPCs) in video games. Traditionally, video game NPCs are directed by predetermined scripts, which can feel repetitive, unrealistic, and boring. It also may restrict the number of potential experiences for players. However, when generative […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Given everything you’ve already heard about AI, you may not be surprised to learn that Google is among other outfits beginning to use sound signals to predict early signs of disease. How? According to Bloomberg, Google has trained its foundation AI model with 300 million pieces of audio that included coughs, sniffles, and labored breathing, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google recently started letting you use its Gemini AI chatbot to ask questions about your Gmail inbox on the web, and now, that feature is coming to mobile. The company says its Gmail Q&A feature is starting to roll out on Android and that the feature will be “coming soon” to iOS. Using Gmail Q&A, “you can ask Gemini questions about your inbox or to do things like find specific details in your emails, show you unread messages, view messages from a specific sender, or summarize emails about a topic in your inbox,” according to Google’s...
ChatGPT now has 200 million weekly active users, according to OpenAI. That represents a doubling of the weekly audience of 100 million the company announced last November. A representative from the company told Engadget that API usage has also doubled since the July release of GPT-4o mini.User numbers aren't the only big growth OpenAI has seen over the past year. CEO Sam Altman reportedly told employees this summer that the company's annualized revenue — which takes a monthly revenue figure and stretches it out over a whole year — had reached $3.4 billion, up from $1.6 billion at the end of...
Led by the investment firm Thrive Capital, the new deal would value the artificial intelligence start-up at over $100 billion.
Gmail users on Android devices can now chat directly with Google’s AI assistant, Gemini, about their emails in the Gmail app. Google rolled out the new feature, Gmail Q&A, on Thursday to users who pay for Gemini, according to a blog post, and announced the feature would be coming to iOS devices. With Gmail Q&A, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Magic, an AI startup developing models to generate code and automate a range of software development tasks, says that it’s raised a large tranche of cash from investors including ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In a blog post this morning, Magic said that it closed a $320 million funding round with contributions from Schmidt, Jane Street, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
LG has introduced a smart home hub called ThinQ ON that has the technology to control not just LG-branded appliances but also other smart home devices. It comes with a built-in speaker that gives you a way to talk to LG's AI voice assistant, so you can use it to look up information, as well as to control your smart devices with spoken commands. LG says its technology can "understand the context of conversations" and can determine your preference for a specific device. It could, perhaps, tell your preferred temperature for the thermostat or the washer cycle you typically use. And it can...
Apple released the new developer betas for iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS 15.1 Sequoia. With this update, the company is launching new Apple Intelligence features including the ability to remove objects from photos. The feature, called Clean Up, lets users identify and remove an object from the photo without effecting the picture. The system […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Expectations for the chipmaker have been through the roof because of its dominance in a key component for artificial intelligence systems.
It hired a hardware chief who previously worked on Apple Vision Pro.
The company will allow users of its Gemini chatbot to create images of people with artificial intelligence after disabling the feature six months ago.
Midjourney, the AI image-generating company that’s reportedly raking in over $200 million in revenue without a single dime of VC investment, is officially getting into hardware. The company made the announcement in on a post on X on Wednesday. Midjourney’s new hardware team will be based in San Francisco, it revealed. Exactly what sort of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The company will allow users of its Gemini chatbot to create images of people with artificial intelligence after disabling the feature six months ago.
The Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 have a dedicated speaker for bass. The OpenRun Pro 2 add USB-C charging, a dedicated speaker for bass, reduced vibration, and AI noise cancellation. Continue reading…
You might not have to worry about taking meeting notes ever again. | Image: Google Google Meet’s newest AI-powered feature, “take notes for me,” has started rolling out today to Google Workspace customers with the Gemini Enterprise, Gemini Education Premium, or AI Meetings & Messaging add-ons. It’s similar to Meet’s transcription tool, only instead of automatically transcribing what everyone says, it summarizes what everyone talked about. Google first announced this feature at its 2023 Cloud Next conference.Unfortunately, it only supports spoken English right now, but it seems...
How many times does the letter R appear in the word “strawberry?” According to formidable AI products like GPT-4o and Claude, the answer is twice. Large language models can write essays and solve equations in seconds. They can synthesize terabytes of data faster than humans can open up a book. Yet, these seemingly omniscient AIs […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Elon Musk has come out in support of California’s SB 1047, a bill that requires makers of very large AI models to create and document safeguards against those models causing serious harm. “This is a tough call and will make some people upset, but, all things considered, I think California should probably pass the SB […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon aims to launch delayed AI Alexa subscription in October The Washington Post
OpenAI threw its support behind a California bill requiring tech companies to label AI-generated content, according to a letter from OpenAI’s chief strategy officer viewed by Reuters. The bill is headed for a final vote in August. AB 3211 requires watermarks in the metadata of AI-generated photos, videos, and audio clips. Lots of AI companies […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Generative AI models aren’t actually human-like. They have no intelligence or personality — they’re simply statistical systems predicting the likeliest next words in a sentence. But like interns at a tyrannical workplace, they do follow instructions without complaint — including initial “system prompts” that prime the models with their basic qualities, and what they should […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Newspaper giant Gannett is shutting down Reviewed, its product reviews site, effective November 1st, according to sources familiar with the decision. The site offers recommendations for products ranging from shoes to home appliances and employs journalists to test and review items — but has also been at the center of questions around whether its work is actually produced by humans. “After careful consideration and evaluation of our Reviewed business, we have decided to close the operation. We extend our sincere gratitude to our employees who have provided consumers with trusted product...
Inflection will cap free access to its AI chatbot Pi in the coming months, the startup tells TechCrunch. Users can also now export their conversations off the AI chatbot, as the new CEO shifts the company’s focus towards enterprise products. The usage caps come just a year after Inflection raised $1.3 billion to build out […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Adam Driver in Megalopolis. | Screenshot: YouTube So, all those faked review quotes from the Megalopolis trailer that got pulled last week were apparently AI, after all. Not only that, but the person who was in charge of the materials for the trailer, Eddie Egan, has been removed from the movie’s marketing team.That’s all according to Deadline, which reported on Friday that the AI-ness of it all was confirmed in an investigation after the fact. Neither Egan nor Megalopolis studio Lionsgate meant to fake the quotes, which had purported to be critical notes from contemporaneous reviews of...
Apple is about to launch a ChatGPT-powered version of Siri as part of a suite of AI features in iOS 18. Will this change the way you use your phone – and how does it affect your privacy? Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming to your iPhone soon and, according to Apple, it’s going to transform the way you use your device. Launching under the brand name “Apple Intelligence” the iPhone maker’s AI tools include a turbocharged version of its voice assistant, Siri, backed by a partnership with ChatGPT owner OpenAI.Apple isn’t the first smartphone maker to launch AI. The technology is...
The company said the Iranian effort, which used ChatGPT, did not gain much traction.
Andrew Ng is stepping down from his role as CEO at Landing AI, the computer vision platform he founded in 2017. Dan Maloney, formerly the COO, will take the reins as Ng transitions to Executive Chairmanm to “continue to help drive” the tech and collaborate on “key decisions.” Formerly of Google Brain, Coursera, and Baidu, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI models are being applied to every dataset under the sun, but are inconsistent in their outcomes. This is as true in the medical world as anywhere else, but a startup called Piramidal believes it has a sure thing with a foundational model for analyzing brain scan data. Cofounders Dimitris Sakellariou and Kris Pahuja have […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Two former OpenAI researchers who resigned this year over safety concerns say they are disappointed but not surprised by OpenAI’s decision to oppose California’s bill to prevent AI disasters, SB 1047. Daniel Kokotajlo and William Saunders previously warned that OpenAI is in a “reckless” race for dominance. “Sam Altman, our former boss, has repeatedly called […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta and Spotify are once again teaming up — this time, on the matter of open-source AI which the companies claim are being hampered by regulations. In joint statements published to both companies’ respective websites on Friday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek complain that EU privacy regulations around AI are holding […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge Google got a lot of things right with the Pixel 9 lineup. The hardware is lovely, the chip is fast, even the huge camera bump kind of has a way about it, you know? It’s a worthy Android flagship in every way. It also — and not to be dramatic here — feels a bit like a harbinger of doom. The Pixel 9’s AI photography features, particularly the “Reimagine” tool that allows you to change your photos with just a prompt, appears to be a big and worrisome step toward a world in which we won’t be able to trust photos of practically any sort. These aren’t...
Image: The Verge AI audio startup ElevenLabs has now made its text-to-speech Reader app available across the world, adding support for 32 different languages — including Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Mandarin, and Hindi.The app, which is available on both iOS and Android, was first released in June in the US, UK, and Canada. It allows users to listen to PDFs, articles, newsletters, ePub files or “any other text content” according to the developer, but that support seemingly doesn’t extend to files from Kindle or Apple Books. There’s a good selection of AI-generated voices...
At least 200 workers at DeepMind, Google’s AI R&D division, are displeased with Google’s reported defense contracts — and according to Time, they circulated a letter internally back in May to say as much. The letter, dated May 16, says the undersigned are concerned by “Google’s contracts with military organizations,” citing articles about the tech […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
“I really fucking hate generative AI,” says Procreate CEO James Cuda, who believes the technology "is ripping the humanity out of things."
Google DeepMind workers have signed a letter calling on the company to drop contracts with military organizations, according to a report by Time. The document was drafted on May 16 of this year. Around 200 people signed the document, which amounts to five percent of the total headcount of DeepMind. For the uninitiated, DeepMind is one of Google’s AI divisions and the letter states that adopting military contracts runs afoul of the company’s own AI rules. The letter was sent out as internal concerns began circulating within the AI lab that the tech was allegedly being sold to military...
When you really probe venture capitalists about investing in AI startups, they’ll tell you that businesses are experimenting wildly but are very slow to add AI solutions into their ongoing business processes. But there are some exceptions. And one of them appears to be an area known as AI sales development representatives, or AI SDRs. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Tidal, which quietly spun out of the department in mid-July, has its own grand ambitions to “feed humanity sustainably.”© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The startup — which was developed in Romania but has a U.S. TopCo — now considers more than 5,000 brands and agencies as its clients.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
For some businesses, there is a clear path to growth that doesn’t involve acquiring other companies or expanding organically: franchising. The U.S. has more than 800,000 franchise businesses, according to Statista, and that number is predicted to keep growing year over year. But franchising a business — licensing a business model and brand to an […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google is selling its ultra-premium Pixel 9 Pro in two sizes, but it’s not the size that counts here. Instead, it’s the suite of AI features Google hopes will revolutionize how you use your phone. The Morning After’s Mat Smith has spent plenty of time with both handsets to work out if they’re good enough to justify your cash.He explores headline features, like Gemini Advanced, as well as the smart new AI-enabled photo tweaks. One of my favorites is Add Me, which puts you in the background of a group shot you were holding the phone for. Or Zoom Enhance, which offers a CSI-like level of...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube has announced a new AI assistant feature to help users recover accounts that have been targeted by hackers. Described as a “troubleshooting tool” on Google’s support page, the chatbot can be accessed via the YouTube Help Center, and should ask hacked creators a series of questions to guide them through the process of securing their impacted Google logins and reversing any changes that have been made to their YouTube channels.The support assistant is currently only available in English, and access to “certain troubleshooting features” is...
Dropbox has acquired AI-powered scheduling tool Reclaim.ai, which counts Calendly and Index Ventures among its backers. The development was revealed in a blog post on Reclaim.ai’s website Tuesday. Dropbox hasn’t disclosed the terms of the deal. Reclaim.ai, which was founded in 2019 by Henry Shapiro and Patrick Lightbody, said the company plans to continue developing […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Companies are experimenting with services like ChatGPT to help workers write memos, answer questions, and much more, yet one of the clearest signs of how much traction AI is really getting in the world of enterprise IT is how often it figures in the more routine applications that organizations use. Today, a startup that exemplifies […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: The Verge In a new letter, OpenAI chief strategy officer Jason Kwon insists that AI regulations should be left to the federal government. As reported previously by Bloomberg, Kwon says that a new AI safety bill under consideration in California could slow progress and cause companies to leave the state.A federally-driven set of AI policies, rather than a patchwork of state laws, will foster innovation and position the U.S. to lead the development of global standards. As a result, we join other AI labs, developers, experts and members of California’s Congressional delegation in...
OpenAI broke its silence on California’s most controversial AI bill on Tuesday, officially expressing opposition in a letter to California state Senator Scott Wiener and Governor Gavin Newsom. The AI giant argued SB 1047 would stifle innovation and push talent out of California — a position Wiener quickly replied “makes no sense.” “The AI revolution […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images A telecom company that transmitted the deepfake robocall of President Joe Biden’s voice has agreed to pay $1 million to resolve an enforcement action from the Federal Communications Commission, the agency announced.Lingo Telecom relayed a fake Biden message to New Hampshire voters in January, urging them not to turn out for the Democratic primary. The FCC identified political consultant Steve Kramer as the person behind the generative AI calls and previously proposed Kramer pay a separate $6 million fine.Under the new settlement with Lingo, the FCC said the...
AI video creation platform D-ID is the latest company to ship a tool for translating videos into other languages using AI technologies. However, in this case, D-ID also clones the speaker’s voice and changes their lip movements to match the translated words as part of the AI editing process. The technology stems from D-ID’s earlier […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge AI-enabled ammunition vending machines could facilitate mass shootings and let people circumvent federal bans prohibiting people with certain criminal convictions from buying ammunition, two senators warn.Massachusetts Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) asking it to “closely examine” facial recognition-enabled ammunition vending machines that have recently been installed in supermarkets in certain states.“Easy access to ammunition helps to fuel our country’s gun...
Image: Microsoft Microsoft says it’s planning to allow Windows testers to try out its controversial Recall AI feature in October. The software giant was originally planning to launch Recall with its Copilot Plus PCs in June but was forced to hold back the feature after security concerns were raised. At the time of the delay on June 13th, Microsoft promised the feature — that screenshots nearly everything on your PC — would be available for Windows Insiders “in the coming weeks,” but that’s now more like the coming months. “With a commitment to delivering a trustworthy and secure...
More than 30 tech companies have pitched A.I. tools to political campaigns for November’s election. The campaigns have been wary.
Illustration: The Verge Google is upgrading its Gemini writing tools in Gmail to help you polish drafts that you’ve already written. Now, among other Gemini-powered “Help me write” options like Formalize and Elaborate, you can tap “Polish” to refine your emails, Google says in a blog post. The company has also added shortcuts that appear in the body of your emails on Android and iOS, making it more obvious that there are AI writing tools to use.The tools are available to people who pay for Google One AI Premium accounts or who have paid for Google’s Gemini add-on for Workspace. If...
Condé Nast, the media conglomerate that owns publications like The New Yorker, Vogue and Wired, has announced a multi-year partnership OpenAI to display content from Condé Nast titles in ChatGPT as well as SearchGPT, the company’s prototype AI-powered search engine. The partnership comes amid growing concerns over the unauthorized use of publishers’ content by AI companies. Last month, Condé Nast sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI search startup Perplexity, accusing it of plagiarism for using its content to generate answers.“Over the last decade, news and digital media have faced...
A game developer called Amazing Seasun Games is demonstrating NVIDIA's Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) technology through its upcoming multiplayer mecha game Mecha BREAK at Gamescom this year. NVIDIA unveiled ACE at Computer 2023, presenting it as a "custom AI model foundry service" that developers can use to make their games more interactive. Specifically, it will allow players to interact with NPCs without the constraints of pre-programmed conversations and will be able to give them appropriate responses. When NVIDIA launched the technology, it showed a player talking to an NPC called Jin...
The AI boom is fueling the demand for data centers and, in turn, driving up water consumption. (Water is used to cool the computing equipment inside data centers.) According to the FT, in Virginia — home to the world’s largest concentration of data centers — water usage jumped by almost two-thirds between 2019 and 2023, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI and Anthropic spend billions of dollars a year training models like GPT-4 and Claude, but competitive price dumping is making the business around these platforms rather precarious. Aidan Gomez, CEO of competing AI provider Cohere, says that selling access to models is quickly becoming a “zero margin business” in a podcast appearance on Monday. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On Sunday, former President Donald Trump posted a collection of memes on Truth Social — the platform owned by his media company — that make it seem like Taylor Swift and her fans are coming out in support of his candidacy. But as new legislation takes effect, these images could have deeper implications about the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images Former President Donald Trump posted what appeared to be a series of AI-generated images over the weekend to drum up support for his presidential candidacy, including a false endorsement from pop star Taylor Swift.The posts show how Trump might wield generative AI in a way that confounds attempts to police AI-created election disinformation, thanks in part to long-standing legal precedent allowing candidates to lie in political ads. They arrive on the heels of Trump falsely accusing his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, of using AI to...
Photo illustration by The Verge / Photo by GitHub Dohmke says navigating Microsoft-Open AI isn’t as complicated as it seems, and open source is still king Continue reading…
General Motors is cutting around 1,000 software workers around the world in a bid to focus on more “high-priority” initiatives like improving its Super Cruise driver assistance system, the quality of its infotainment platform and exploring the use of AI. The job cuts are not about cost cutting or individual performance, GM spokesperson Stuart Fowle […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Some parents have reservations about the South Korean government’s plans to bring tablets with AI-powered textbooks into classrooms, according to a report in The Financial Times. The tablets are scheduled to be introduced next year, and by 2028, teachers are supposed to be using these AI textbooks for all subjects except music, art, physical education, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: David Pierce / The Verge Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 48, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, get ready for a lot of books this week, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) I’m back after a couple of weeks off — thanks to everyone who wished me a good vacation and sent over book recommendations! I wound up reading Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, She Rides Shotgun, and The Wager and highly recommend all three. Mostly, I spent two weeks chasing a toddler around various restaurants and...
Entrepreneurs say use of artificial intelligence for a variety of tasks is accelerating the path to hiring and, ideally, profitability.
OpenAI said on Friday that it thwarted an Iranian influence campaign that used ChatGPT to generate fake news stories and social posts aimed at Americans. The company said it identified and banned accounts generating content for five websites (in English and Spanish) pretending to be news outlets, spreading “polarizing messages” on issues like the US presidential campaign, LGBTQ+ rights and the war in Gaza.The operation was identified as “Storm-2035,” part of a series of influence campaigns Microsoft identified last week as “connected with the Iranian government.” In addition to the...
San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu announced he intended to shut down 16 of the most popular AI “undressing” sites at a press conference on Thursday.The Verge reported that the City Attorney is accusing these sites of violating federal laws regarding revenge pornography, deepfake pornography and child pornography. Chiu’s office also accused the sites of violating the state of California’s unfair competition law because “the harm they cause to consumers greatly outweighs any benefits associated with those practices,” according to the complaint for injunctive relief filed in a...
The company said the Iranian effort, which used ChatGPT, did not gain much traction.
While the ethics of AI-generated porn are still under debate, using the technology to create nonconsensual sexual imagery of people is, I think we can all agree, reprehensible. One such method is “undressing” sites, which take a normal, clothed photo of a person and generate a fake nude version from it. As you might imagine, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Verity Ikea has launched an upgrade to its stock-counting drone system — and now it’s coming to the US, too. The Swedish furniture chain announced that the autonomous drones will soon operate alongside workers in its Perryville, Maryland distribution center, where Ikea started installation this summer.The Verity-branded drones also come with a new AI-powered system that allows them to fly around warehouses 24/7. That means they’ll now operate alongside human workers, helping to count inventory as well as identify if something’s in the wrong spot. Previously, the drones only flew...
After bringing AI overviews to the U.S., Google is expanding the AI-powered search summaries to six more countries: India, Brazil, Japan, the U.K., Indonesia and Mexico. These markets will also get local language support for AI overviews. The search giant is rethinking how it displays source material links, as well. It’s adding a view on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge The popular benchmarking utility Geekbench has launched a new cross-platform tool to evaluate the performance of devices under AI-heavy workloads. Geekbench AI measures a device’s CPU, GPU, and NPU (neural processing unit) to determine how well it can handle machine learning applications.Geekbench developer Primate Labs has been working on the software using the name Geekbench ML, which launched in preview in 2021 but shifted the name to AI for reasons that seem obvious. To explore how different hardware responds to different AI-related tasks, it evaluates...
California’s bill to prevent AI disasters, SB 1047, has faced significant opposition from many parties in Silicon Valley. Today, California lawmakers bent slightly to that pressure, adding in several amendments suggested by AI firm Anthropic and other opponents. On Thursday the bill passed through California’s Appropriations Committee, a major step towards becoming law, with several […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Imagen 3 created this image of Google’s logo. | Image: Emma Roth / Imagen 3 Google has released the latest version of Imagen 3, its AI text-to-image generator, to users in the US, as spotted by VentureBeat. The tool, which you can access on Google’s AI Test Kitchen, is supposed to generate images with “better detail, richer lighting, and fewer distracting artifacts” compared to Google’s previous models.Google first announced its updated Imagen 3 tool during I/O in May, but it only appears to have made the tool generally available through its Vertex AI platform within the past several...
Code reviews — peer reviews of code that help devs improve code quality — are time-consuming. According to one source, 50% of companies spend two to five hours a week on them. Without enough people, code reviews can be overwhelming and take devs away from other important work. Harjot Gill thinks that code reviews can be […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Prytek had already been a big investor in TipRanks since 2017, most recently leading a $77 million round in the company in 2021.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
At its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, Apple announced updates coming to its various operating systems, most of which focus on its own version of AI, dubbed Apple Intelligence. MacBooks will get macOS 15, aka Sequoia, that will support Image Playground, Apple’s image generation tool, and AI composition features that can rewrite, proofread and summarize text in Mail, Notes, Pages and more. But the AI smarts will only be available to Apple laptops with an M1 chip or newer. So if you have an older model (pre-2020), or want the latest chips to get the most out of macOS 15, you...
Eric Schmidt. | Photo By Lukas Schulze/Sportsfile for Collision via Getty Images Former Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt has made headlines for saying that Google was blindsided by the early the rise of ChatGPT because its employees decided that “working from home was more important than winning.”The comment was made in front of Stanford students during a recent interview, video of which was removed from the university’s YouTube channel after Schmidt’s gaffe was widely picked up by the press. I managed to watch most of Schmidt’s chat with Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson before it...
Elon Musk’s Grok released a new AI image generation feature on Tuesday night that, just like the AI chatbot, has very few safeguards. That means you can generate fake images of Donald Trump smoking marijuana on the Joe Rogan Show, for example, and upload it straight to the X platform. But a new startup is […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
One of the first topics tackled was the impractical nature of today's video generators.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
World Labs, a stealthy startup founded by renowned Stanford University AI professor Fei Fei Li, has raised two rounds of financing two months apart, according to multiple reports. The latest financing was led by NEA and valued the company at over $1 billion, TechCrunch has learned from several people with knowledge of the investments. This […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The research suggest that models aren't hallucinating much less, despite claims to the contrary from OpenAI, Anthropic and the other big AI players.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Wednesday a final rule that will tackle several types of fake reviews and prohibit marketers from using deceptive practices, such as AI-generated reviews, censoring honest negative reviews, and compensating third parties for positive reviews. The decision was the result of a 5-to-0 vote. The new rule will […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Analytics and AI giant Databricks reportedly paid nearly $2 billion when it acquired Tabular in June, a startup that was only doing $1 million in annual recurring revenue, according to Bloomberg. That’s a pretty outrageous exit multiple, and it was purportedly fueled by a battle between Databricks and Snowflake. Tabular had over $30 million in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: xAI Elon Musk’s AI company xAI has launched Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini: two new models of its Grok chatbot that offer upgraded performance and new image-generation capabilities. Grok’s prompt-based image maker is powered by Black Forest Lab’s Flux 1 AI model, and allows users to generate and publish images directly to the X social platform — with seemingly few guardrails in place to prevent abuse.xAI says that Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini are available in beta on X (where Grok access is currently limited to Premium and Premium Plus subscribers) and that both models will be available...
Elon Musk-owned xAI’s Grok AI model can now generate images on X social network. Grok access is currently limited to Premium and Premium+ users on X. The text below the sample image prompts suggests that Grok is using FLUX.1 by Black Forest Labs to create these images. Early images generated by users suggest that Grok’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We rounded up some of the more intriguing AI-related announcements that didn't get a ton of play, like Pixel Studio.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge In between the reveal of new Pixel phones and AI features at its event today, Google snuck in a few burns targeted at Apple. Some were subtle — others far from it.While it’s not uncommon for companies like Google to draw comparisons to competitors during big events like this, Google seemed to sprinkle references to Apple all throughout its showcase. Maybe that’s because Google has become especially competitive in the AI industry, which Apple has only just barely begun to dip into.Here are all the moments of comparison that we caught during the event.Gemini...
Google launched Gemini Live during its Made By Google event in Mountain View, California, on Tuesday. The feature allows you to have a semi-natural spoken conversation, not typed out, with an AI chatbot powered by Google’s latest large language model. TechCrunch was there to test it out firsthand. Gemini Live is Google’s answer to OpenAI’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images A lawsuit that several artists filed against Stability AI, Midjourney, and other AI-related companies can proceed with some claims dismissed, a judge ruled yesterday.Many artists allege that popular generative AI services violated copyright law by training on a dataset that included their works, and in some cases, that users of these services can directly reproduce copies of the work. Last year Judge William Orrick allowed a direct copyright infringement complaint against Stability, operator of the popular Stable Diffusion AI...
Conspiracy theories have shot up around images of surging crowds for Harris-Walz campaign events. But all it takes is a little research to prove the photos are real.
Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Google announced a new image generation app during its Pixel 9 event today. The company says the app, called Pixel Studio, will come preinstalled on every Pixel 9 device.Pixel Studio, much like Apple’s forthcoming Image Playground app that’s set to roll out on iOS 18 at some point after the operating system launches, lets you create an image from a prompt. Users can edit images after the fact, using the prompt box to add or subtract elements, and change the feel or style of the picture. During the onstage demo, a picture of a bonfire gradually changed into a...
Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Google has announced Pixel Screenshots, a new AI-powered app for its Pixel 9 lineup that lets you save, organize, and surface information from screenshots. Pixel Screenshot uses Google’s private, on-device Gemini Nano AI model to analyze the content of an image and make it searchable.During a demo at its Pixel launch event, Google showed how you can take a screenshot and then save it to a collection, like “gift ideas.” You can also search through all your other screenshots by typing in a keyword, like “bikes” or “shoes.” Pixel Screenshots will then...
Alongside the launch of new Pixel devices, the Pixel phone lineup is getting its own new weather app, powered by AI. Introduced today at the Made by Google event in Mountain View, the tech giant briefly showed off the app, which offers a custom AI weather report created by Gemini Nano — Google’s AI model […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Google’s Pixel 9 lineup is officially here, and the company can’t stop talking about the AI features it’s got coming.On the hardware front, Google boosted the RAM for all of its new phones to accommodate memory-hungry on-device AI. The Pixel 9 received 12GB of RAM, while the rest will have 16GB of memory. But the bigger side of the story is software — the phones all get a handful of new Pixel-exclusive AI features. And the Pro phones are also getting a year of Google One AI Premium, which comes with access to Gemini Advanced, Google’s most capable AI...
Google’s Pixel 9 lineup is powered by cutting-edge hardware like the Tensor G4 processor and tons of RAM that should help keep your phone feeling fast and fresh for years to come. But all that hardware is also designed to power brand new AI experiences.“Android is reimagining your phone with Gemini,” wrote Sameer Samat, Google’s president of the Android Ecosystem, in a blog post published on Tuesday. “With Gemini deeply integrated into Android, we’re rebuilding the operating system with AI at the core. And redefining what phones can do.”Here are the big new AI features coming with...
The Made by Google 2024 event has kicked off, and after a busy rumor mill preceding the event, we have the first round of announcements and reveals from Google’s biggest hardware event of the year. Notably, this year’s edition is preceding Apple’s typical September iPhone reveal, with a focus on AI that anyone watching any […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Pixel 9 Pro XL, or the newest face of “What is a photo?” | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge I played a new kind of AR Pac-Man game yesterday, guiding a circle on a phone screen toward a series of little dots that seemed to hover around a conference room. In this version, you don’t level up when you finish; instead, you get a panoramic photo.I got to spend a couple of hours using the Pixel 9 Pro XL on the eve of Google’s annual hardware event. Becca got to play with the new phones, too, and you can check out her impressions in the video below. And while my time was focused on the 9...
The plural is actually “Pixels Pro,” like attorneys general. Google’s Pixel phone lineup is getting a little bigger this year. The Pixel 9 series now counts one standard model — the Pixel 9 — and three Pro models: the Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL, and Pixel 9 Pro Fold. They all offer updated designs, new Tensor G4 processors, and AI features up the wazoo.The Pixel 9’s updated design language is giving iPhone from the front — the curved edges are out and flat sides are in. The back panel, however, is all Pixel. The camera bar is now an elongated, free-floating camera oval protruding...
Image: Google Google’s getting ready to reveal its entirely new Pixel phone lineup on Tuesday, including the already (and probably begrudgingly) confirmed Pixel 9 Pro and a new 9 Pro Fold foldable phone. The company is yet again dealing with a whole lot of leaks that have revealed everything from possibly the full lineup and their specs to new colors like bubblegum pink and fresh AI features that will continue to make you ask what a photo is. We may never know why Google keeps suffering leaks of its portfolio of new products year after year, but there’s still plenty to learn at the upcoming...
Sarvam's voice-enabled AI agents can be deployed on WhatsApp, within an app, and can even work with traditional voice calls. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A class action lawsuit filed by artists who allege that Stability, Runway, and DeviantArt illegally trained their AIs on copyrighted works can move forward, but only in part, the presiding judge decided on Monday. In a mixed ruling, several of the plaintiffs’ claims were dismissed while others survived, meaning the suit could end up at […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge I love storing a digital pass in my phone’s wallet enough that I’m a little miffed when I have to use a different app or, heaven forbid, a saved PDF instead. On Android, at least, there’s a better way, thanks to a new Google Wallet option rolling out now that uses AI to generate a digital version with all the relevant details that you can use just like any other digital pass. The feature, which Google announced at its I/O conference in May, takes the place of a previous “Photo” option in the “Add to Wallet” menu that could create a simpler version of a pass...
In the last 12 months, Balderton has announced 12 new investments.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
While Amazon has continued releasing Echo devices, including an upgraded Spot announced last month, the company has taken its foot off the gas.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Anysphere, a two-year-old startup that’s developed an AI-powered coding assistant called Cursor, has raised over $60 million in a Series A financing at a $400 million post-money valuation, two sources familiar with the deal told TechCrunch. The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital. Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, also participated […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The internet is full of deepfakes — and most of them are nudes. According to a report from Home Security Heroes, deepfake porn makes up 98% of all deepfake videos online. Thanks to easy-to-use and freely available generative AI tools, the number of deepfakes online — many of which aren’t consensual — skyrocketed 550% from […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Intel has unveiled a discrete GPU for cars, the Arc A760A, designed to bring the "triple-A gaming experience" from home over to your car, the company announced. No automotive partners were revealed, but vehicles with the new chips will go on sale as soon as 2025. With car buyers increasingly focused on in-vehicle entertainment above all else, the chips are designed to "unlock a new era of AI-powered cockpit experiences," according to Intel's press release. The GPUs will allow voice, camera and gesture recognition to make it easy to control up to "seven high-definition screens...
A new "beta rabbit" mode adds some conversational AI chops to the Rabbit r1, particularly in more complex or multi-step instructions.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On Thursday, Box filled in a missing piece on its AI platform when it bought automated metadata extracting startup, Alphamoon.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
One of the classic problems of looking into a palantir was correctly interpreting what the viewer saw... | Image: The Verge Palantir, the company named for the dangerous seeing-stones that tended to mislead their users, has announced a partnership with Microsoft to deliver services for classified networks in US defense and intelligence agencies.“This is a first-of-its-kind, integrated suite of technology that will allow critical national security missions to operationalize Microsoft’s best-in-class large language models (LLMs) via Azure OpenAI Service within Palantir’s AI Platforms (AIP...
Microsoft is teaming up with secretive data analytics company Palantir, which has been accused of (among other wretched acts) enabling the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to operate “as a domestic surveillance agency.” Bloomberg reports that Palantir will integrate its products with Microsoft’s government cloud tools, including the Azure OpenAI service, “in a bid to sell software” to US defense agencies. Oh, joy.The pair will reportedly focus on products for US defense workers to handle logistics, contracting and action planning. But given the secretive nature of Palantir...
The U.K.’s antitrust regulator has confirmed that it’s carrying out a formal antitrust investigation into Amazon’s ties with Anthropic, after Amazon recently completed a $4 billion investment into the AI startup. The news comes a week after the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) revealed it was launching an invitation to comment into Google’s own ties with […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Bardeen has raised $3M to build its platform that uses a natural language interface to automate repetitive knowledge work. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Shortly after Humane released its $699 AI Pin in April, the returns started flowing in.Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June, only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with direct knowledge of sales and return data told me. As of today, the number of units still in customer hands had fallen closer to 7,000, a source with direct knowledge said. At launch, the AI Pin was met with overwhelmingly negative reviews. Our own David Pierce said it “...
Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) is taking Elon Musk's X to court. According to Irish broadcaster RTE, the commission has launched High Court proceedings against Twitter International over concerns on how Europeans' public posts on X are being used to train the company's artificial intelligence tools. The data protection watchdog is especially worried that European users' data is being used to train the next version of Grok that Musk previously said will be released sometime this month. In July, X rolled out a change that automatically activated a setting for...
Elon Musk's X is being taken to court in Ireland for using Europeans' data to train AI models without asking for their consent.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Automattic, the owner of WordPress.com, has launched a new AI tool designed to help bloggers write more clearly and succinctly.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Reddit just wrapped up its second earnings call as a public company and CEO Steve Huffman hinted at some significant changes that could be coming to the platform. During the call, the Reddit co-founder said the company would begin testing AI-powered search results later this year.“Later this year, we will begin testing new search result pages powered by AI to summarize and recommend content, helping users dive deeper into products, shows, games and discover new communities on Reddit,” Huffman said. He didn’t say when those tests would begin, but said it would use both first-party and...
Reddit users will soon see AI-generated summaries at the top of search results. Reddit CFO Drew Vollero told investors during its earnings call on Tuesday that the company plans to test AI-powered search result pages to “summarize and recommend content.” He noted this will help users “dive deeper” into content and discover new Reddit communities. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon has released an upgraded version of its in-house image-generating model, Titan Image Generator, for AWS customers using its Bedrock generative AI platform. Simply called Titan Image Generator v2, the new model brings with it several new capabilities, AWS principal developer advocate Channy Yun explains in a blog post. Users can “guide” the images they […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon Music announced Tuesday the launch of its new AI-powered feature, “Topics,” which allows users to explore podcast episodes by specific topics discussed in the episode. When you visit the page of a podcast episode, look for new Topic tags below the episode description. You can tap on a tag to see a list of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple's Writing Tools feature will show a message notifying you that AI-generated suggestions might not be of the highest quality when tackling certain topics.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A data center in Paris has been hooked up to the energy system heating the Olympic pool. But critics call projects recycling data centers’ excess heat as a distraction from the real environmental costs of AI.
Every piece of software needs to go through software quality assurance testing. It usually involves a human tester creating a series of test cases, and then checking the software interface for bugs and other issues. On Tuesday, MuukTest, a Raleigh, North Carolina startup, announced a new AI agent designed to help build those tests in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
John Schulman, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, has left the company for rival AI startup Anthropic. In addition, OpenAI president Greg Brockman is taking an extended leave after nine years at the company to “relax and recharge,” the company confirmed. Peter Deng, a product manager who joined OpenAI last year after leading products at […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge Apple’s latest developer betas launched last week with a handful of the generative AI features that were announced at WWDC and are headed to your iPhones, iPads, and Macs over the next several months. On Apple’s computers however, you can actually read the instructions programmed into the model supporting some of those Apple Intelligence features. They show up as prompts that precede anything you say to a chatbot by default, and we’ve seen them uncovered for AI tools like Microsoft Bing and DALL-E before. Now a member of the macOS 15.1 beta subreddit posted that...
A startup developing AI market research based on location data, and backed by a who's who, has quietly raised, TechCrunch has learned. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by VALERIE MACON/AFP via Getty Images Actors have once again picked up their picket signs. But this time, members of the screen actors guild are striking against the video game industry after negotiations for a new contract governing interactive media and video games fell through. The guild began striking on Friday, July 26th, preventing over 160,000 SAG-AFTRA members from taking new video game projects and impeding games already in development from the biggest publishers to the smallest indie studios.Negotiations broke down due to disagreements over worker protections around AI. The...
According to Bloomberg and The New York Times, Meta is in talks with the likes of Keegan-Michael Key, Awkwafina and Dame Judi Dench, among others, for its AI projects. The company apparently intends to incorporate their voices into a conversational generative AI-slash-digital assistant called MetaAI, which is rumored to be like Siri and Google Assistant, which could live within Facebook, Meta hardware, and all the other parts of the multimillion-dollar social network company.The actors’ representatives are still negotiating for stricter limits, though SAG-AFTRA has reportedly agreed on terms...
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Judi Dench, Keegan-Michael Key, and Awkwafina are among multiple “actors and influencers” whose voices could become part of Meta’s AI offering, Bloomberg reported on Friday. The company is apparently working to wrap up deals quickly so it can develop and show off the new voices at its Meta Connect conference in September.Specifically, at least one tool will be “a digital assistant product called MetaAI,” according to multiple unnamed sources in a New York Times report. Meta is negotiating with all of the top talent agencies in Hollywood to...
Google is phasing out an Olympics ad after for its AI-powered chatbot, Gemini, after receiving widespread criticism of showing a father use AI to help his daughter write a fan letter to her favorite athlete. The 60-second commercial, which is still available on YouTube, shows a father using Gemini to write a fan letter to an idol, Olympic track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, on behalf of his young daughter.“She wants to show Sydney some love and I am pretty good with words, but this has to be just right,” the dad says in the commercial. “So Gemini, help my daughter write a letter telling...
Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Scott Olson, Getty Images Former President Donald Trump has expressed a newfound fondness for Mark Zuckerberg after years of railing against him.In an interview with Fox Business that aired Friday, Trump said Mark Zuckerberg recently called him “to apologize” over Meta’s AI assistant falsely saying the assassination attempt on Trump didn’t happen. (A company blog post written by Joel Kaplan, Meta’s global head of policy, attributed the erroneous responses to “hallucinations” in the system.) In a post on his social media platform Truth Social...
In a big move, Character.AI co-founder and CEO CEO Noam Shazeer is returning to Google after leaving the company in October 2021 to found the a16z-backed startup. In his previous stint, Shazeer spearheaded the team of researchers that built LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), a language model that was used for conversational AI tools. Character.AI co-founder Daniel […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The cloud infrastructure market has put the doldrums of 2023 firmly behind it with another big quarter. Revenue continues to grow at a brisk pace, fueled by interest in AI. Synergy Research reports revenue totaled $79 billion for the quarter, up $14.1 billion or 22% from last year. This marked the third consecutive quarter that […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
When most tech companies are challenged with a lawsuit, the expected defense is to deny wrongdoing. To give a reasonable explanation of why the business' actions were not breaking any laws. Music AI startups Udio and Suno have gone for a different approach: admit to doing exactly what you were sued for.Udio and Suno were sued in June, with music labels Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Group claiming they trained their AI models by scraping copyrighted materials from the Internet. In a court filing today, Suno acknowledged that its neural networks do in fact scrape...
Following the recent lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against music generation startups Udio and Suno, Suno admitted in a court filing on Thursday that it did, in fact, train its AI model using copyrighted songs. But it claimed that doing so was legal under the fair-use doctrine. The RIAA filed the lawsuit […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard created an environment that helped workers. Amid layoffs and worries about AI, their efforts could be an indicator of the future of the industry.
Illustration: The Verge Google Lens in desktop Chrome is getting an AI-powered upgrade that could make it feel like a desktop version of Circle to Search. As part of a Chrome update, Google will let you click a new button right in the search box to activate Google Lens so you can select things that you want to search for. Then, thanks to a sidebar that pops up right within the tab you’re looking at, you’ll be able to do a “multisearch,” or a search containing both text and the image that you found with Lens.The feature could prove to be a more useful way to search, especially since you...
Image: Google Google wants to help ease the pain of comparison shopping across multiple tabs in Chrome with a new AI-powered tool that can summarize your tabs into one page. The tool, which Google is calling “tab compare,” will use generative AI to pull product data from tabs you have open and collect it all into one table. Assuming it works and pulls accurate information, the tool seems like it could be a handy way to look at a number of different products in one unified view. But while it’s potentially useful, the tool could also take away traffic from sites that collect and compare...
Next time you're craving a chalupa supreme, you might not be ordering from a person. Taco Bell is expanding its program for using AI voice recognition in drive-thrus. After testing the technology in more than 100 locations in 13 states, the fast food chain's parent company aims to add voice-powered AI capabilities to hundreds more Taco Bell drive-thrus in the US by the end of the year."With over two years of fine tuning and testing the drive-thru Voice AI technology, we’re confident in its effectiveness in optimizing operations and enhancing customer satisfaction," said Lawrence Kim, chief...
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge We’ve been talking about AI a lot on Decoder lately; it’s unavoidable. But there’s one piece of feedback we’ve gotten that I really wanted to spend some time on: how the lightning-fast explosion of AI tools affects the climate. After all, to run AI at scale, we need to build a lot of data centers and pack them full of power-hungry GPUs. That takes a lot of energy, and whether using all that juice is worth it comes up frequently when we talk about AI. It’s both a matter of practical concern — “can our aging grid support all of this?” — and a...
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that OpenAI is working with the U.S. AI Safety Institute, a federal government body that aims to assess and address risks in AI platforms, on an agreement to provide early access to its next major generative AI model for safety testing. The announcement, which Altman made in a post on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
WhatsApp’s massive 500 million user in India has supercharged Meta’s AI ambitions. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday that India is the largest market in terms of Meta AI usage, a notable milestone considering the product launched in India just a few months ago. Zuckerberg said during Meta’s second-quarter earnings call that people have used […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Mark Zuckerberg. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images Meta’s second quarter earnings continue the same story from the previous quarter: generative AI may be here, but it’s going to take a long time to make money.The good news for Meta is that, unlike pretty much every AI startup, it already makes a lot of money. Last quarter, the company made just over $39 billion in revenue, up 22 percent from a year ago, and about $13.5 billion in profit, up 73 percent. 3.27 billion people use at least one of Meta’s apps every day. That kind of scale and money buys the ability to make big...
Google has released a trio of new, “open” generative AI models that it’s calling “safer,” “smaller” and “more transparent” than most — a bold claim, to be sure. They’re additions to Google’s Gemma 2 family of generative models, which debuted back in May. The new models, Gemma 2 2B, ShieldGemma and Gemma Scope, are designed […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The company has been investing in artificial intelligence technologies, as well as building the immersive world of the metaverse.
Look, we’ve all been there. You’re on a road trip and you pull off the highway for some food or fuel. And then Google Maps starts (rudely) yelling at you to get back on the road. The company has all the money and AI chips in the world and yet the app can’t just chill […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Reddit’s chief executive officer Steve Huffman didn’t pull any punches with Microsoft in an interview with The Verge. He called out Microsoft and other AI search engines like Anthropic and Perplexity for not paying for the information they take from Reddit, some of which have already been blocked from Huffman’s website.Reddit has deals in places with companies like Google and OpenAI to receive compensation for using its posts and information. Huffman says Microsoft, however, hasn’t even stepped up to the table to discuss its use of Reddit’s content in its AI searches.“Without these...
AI lobbying at the U.S. federal level is intensifying in the midst of a continued generative AI boom and an election year that could influence future AI regulation. New data from OpenSecrets, a nonprofit group that tracks and publishes metrics on campaign financing and lobbying, shows that the number of groups lobbying the federal government […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The U.S. Copyright Office has issued the first part of a report on how AI may affect its domain, and its first recommendation out of the gate is: we need a new law right away to define and combat AI-powered impersonation. “It has become clear that the distribution of unauthorized digital replicas poses a serious […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Lunar Lake will be Intel's response to Ryzen AI and Snapdragon X Elite chips.
Sybill, a startup that has built an AI assistant specifically for sales reps, has raised $11 million in a Series A round led by Greycroft. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft is making Skype ad-free in an update that will rollout to users across all platforms soon. The update also includes improved AI image creation tools on Skype for Windows and macOS, and the ability to sign in automatically on iOS if you’re already signed into another Microsoft app.“Our latest update removes all ads from Skype channels and the entire Skype platform, ensuring a smoother, decluttered and more enjoyable user experience,” says Skype product manager Irene Namuganyi.The removal of ads in Skype means you’ll no longer see ads in...
Image: Meta Meta has shut down its AI chatbots that let you have conversations with alter-ego versions of celebrities, as reported by The Information. The celebrity chatbots were a big part of Meta’s announcements at its Connect event last September, now, you can’t talk with them anymore. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Tom Brady (@tombrady)The shutdown follows Meta’s Monday rollout of AI Studio, a tool that lets creators in the US make AI chatbots of themselves. Based on a statement, the company seems to be favoring this direction rather than the more handcrafted celebrity...
Image: Activision Activision is sharing an open-source dataset for Call of Duty: Warzone’s Caldera map for researchers to study and to help support AI model training. “This first-of-its-kind data set release for Call of Duty, now available in OpenUSD, contains the near-complete geometry of Caldera as well as a collection of randomly selected anonymized time samples showing how players move around the map,” Activision writes in a blog post. It’s a huge dataset. According to Michael Vance, an Activision SVP and fellow software engineer, it’s not only one of “the largest production-...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon laptops had the summer all to themselves, but that’s coming to an end. AMD is now shipping its Ryzen AI chips — and Intel has just announced it’ll “launch” its next generation of Core Ultra laptop chips, codename Lunar Lake, on a September 3rd livestream. It sounds like they won’t be available quite that soon, but the full reveal should be just five weeks away.As we’ve discussed, Lunar Lake is an utterly overhauled chip that ditches the entire idea of plugging swappable memory sticks into your laptop, not to...
Intelmatix, a deep tech b2b startup that’s targeting businesses in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region wanting help to tap into the power of AI for decision-making, has closed a $20 million Series A funding round – one of the largest such rounds for a regional company of this type. The startup, which […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The EU has kicked off a consultation on rules that will apply to providers of general purpose AI models under the bloc's AI Act.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
When people type a question into Perplexity, the two-year-old search engine scours the internet and uses information from multiple sources, including online publishers, to synthesize an answer using AI. Soon, Perplexity will start sharing revenue with some publishers as part of an advertising platform it plans to launch around the end of September, the company announced on Tuesday.The initiative, known as the Perplexity Publishers’ Program, comes less than two months after the San Francisco-based startup backed by investors like Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA, and valued at $3 billion, came under fire...
Femtech, or tech that leverages innovations in AI, smartphones and connected wearables to give women more insights into reproductive and menstrual health, continues to gain momentum with users, and investors are following. London-based Flo Health, a fertility-focused period-tracking app, on Tuesday said it has raised a $200 million Series C from General Atlantic. The funding […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta said Monday that it is rolling out its AI studio to all creators in the U.S. to let them create personalized AI-powered chatbots. The company first announced the AI Studio last year, and started testing it with select creators in June this year. Meta is making the tool available to all creators, who can […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft is calling on members of Congress to regulate the use of AI-generated deepfakes to protect against fraud, abuse, and manipulation. Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith is calling for urgent action from policymakers to protect elections and guard seniors from fraud and children from abuse.“While the tech sector and non-profit groups have taken recent steps to address this problem, it has become apparent that our laws will also need to evolve to combat deepfake fraud,” says Smith in a blog post. “One of the most important things the...
Users will be able to get the first taste of Apple Intelligence as Apple has started to make some of the features of its AI suite available with the iOS 18.1 developer beta released Monday. The company launched Apple Intelligence at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June. However, the first set of developer beta […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Canva has acquired Leonardo.ai, a generative AI content and research startup, as the company looks to deepen its investments in its AI tech stack. The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Canva co-founder and chief product officer Cameron Adams said it’s a mix of cash and stock. All of Leonardo.ai’s 120 employees will […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple has published a technical paper detailing the models that it developed to power Apple Intelligence, the range of generative AI features headed to iOS, macOS and iPadOS over the next few months. In the paper, Apple pushes back against accusations that it took an ethically questionable approach to training some of its models, reiterating […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A fireside chat on Monday between Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the SIGGRAPH 2024 conference in Colorado took a few unexpected turns. It started innocently enough, with Huang waxing positive about the capabilities of Nvidia GPUs and Zuckerberg speaking about his vision of an AI chatbot future. But by the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In his two decades running the company now known as Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has gone through many transformations. More recently, he’s been showing off a seemingly less filtered version of himself. But during a live streamed conversation with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, the Meta CEO seemed to veer a little more off script than he intended.The conversation began normally enough, with the two billionaire executives congratulating each other on their AI dominance. Zuckerberg made sure to talk up the company’s recent AI Studio announcement before settling into his usual talking points, which...
Meta had a palpable hit last year with Segment Anything, a machine learning model that could quickly and reliably identify and outline just about anything in an image. The sequel, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg debuted on stage today at SIGGRAPH, takes the model to the video domain, showing how fast the field is moving. Segmentation […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
So-called “unlearning” techniques are used to make a generative AI model forget specific and undesirable info it picked up from training data, like sensitive private data or copyrighted material. But current unlearning techniques are a double-edged sword: They could make a model like OpenAI’s GPT-4o or Meta’s Llama 3.1 405B much less capable of answering […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Don't call it AI, but Apple's long-awaited take on artificial intelligence is finally rolling out today. Well, in limited form, anyway. The developer betas for iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1 and macOS Sequoia 15.1 just dropped, and they include some of the first Apple Intelligence features available to a broader, public group of testers. To be clear, this isn't the full release that was rumored to be delayed till October. These updates are part of an early preview for developers to test.How to get the new Apple Intelligence featuresStarting today, those with Apple developer accounts will be...
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Apple’s new AI features for the iPhone may not arrive with the initial rollout of iOS 18 and the expected launch of the iPhone 16 in September, according to a report from Bloomberg. Instead, the company reportedly plans on launching Apple Intelligence with iOS 18.1 in October as it works to get the rollout right.Apple took the wraps off its first AI features during its Worldwide Developer Conference in June, showing off a new and improved Siri, AI-powered image generation, and an integration with ChatGPT. These features may not be available with a new...
The first time I saw Google’s latest commercial, I wondered, “Is it just me, or is this kind of bad?” By the fourth or fifth time I saw it, I’d stopped wondering. It starts innocuously enough, with a father talking about how much his daughter loves Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone (she “might even be the world’s number […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. Commerce Department agency that develops and tests tech for the U.S. government, companies and the broader public, has re-released a testbed designed to measure how malicious attacks — particularly attacks that “poison” AI model training data — might degrade the performance of an AI system. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple joins 15 other tech companies — including Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI — that committed to the White House's rules for developing generative AI.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The language is ambiguous, so it's not clear whether X is helping itself to all user data for training Grok or whether this processing refers only to user interactions with the chatbot.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple’s M3 MacBook Air combines Apple’s lightest and thinnest laptop design with the impressive horsepower of third-generation Apple silicon. B&H Photo Video has the 2024 laptop on sale for $200 off. Usually $1,299, the variant with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage is only $1,099. The 2024 MacBook Air adds the M3 chip, Apple’s silicon with a 3nm process that crams more electronic components into a smaller space compared to its predecessor. Apple’s Neural Engine, which will become more crucial with the introduction of Apple Intelligence AI features this fall, is also 15 percent faster in...
The Verge X uses your data to train its Grok AI assistant, but if you’d like to opt out of that, you can do that right from your settings menu. It’s not available in the mobile apps, but it is on the web right here, or you can find it yourself if you click the three dots menu, then “Settings and privacy,” then “Privacy and safety,” and then “Grok.” There, you can uncheck a box to opt out of allowing “your posts as well as your interactions, inputs, and results with Grok to be used for training and fine-tuning purposes” and sharing data about your interactions with xAI. The...
Apple has joined several other tech companies in agreeing to abide by voluntary AI safeguards laid out by the Biden administration. Those who make the pledge have committed to abide by eight guidelines related to safety, security and social responsibility, including flagging societal risks such as biases; testing for vulnerabilities, watermarking AI-generated images and audio; and sharing trust and safety details with the government and other companies.Amazon, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI were among the initial adoptees of the pact, which the White House announced last July. The voluntary...
OpenAI announced a new AI-powered search engine prototype called SearchGPT. It’s described SearchGPT as “a temporary prototype of new AI search features that give you fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources.” The company plans to test out the product with 10,000 initial users, then roll it into ChatGPT after gathering feedback.It’s a spicy time to launch AI-powered search engines. Last month, Perplexity faced criticism for summarizing stories from Forbes and Wired without adequate attribution or backlinks to the publications. It also ignored robots.txt, a way for...
The prominent A.I. start-up said it planned to eventually fold the new technology into its popular online chatbot, ChatGPT.
The SAG-AFTRA union today called for a strike against several major video game publishers after failing to reach an accord over AI use. The action will take effect at 12:01 am on July 26."We're not going to consent to a contract that allows companies to abuse A.I. to the detriment of our members," SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher said."Enough is enough. When these companies get serious about offering an agreement our members can live – and work – with, we will be here, ready to negotiate."SAG-AFTRA performers working in games "deserve and demand the same fundamental protections as...
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge After a year and a half of negotiations, SAG-AFTRA has called a strike of all video game work produced under the union’s interactive media agreement. The strike goes into effect July 26th at 12:01 AM and impacts all SAG-AFTRA actors, voice actors, and motion capture actors and involves companies including Activision Blizzard, EA, Insomniac Games, WB Games, and more. According to SAG-AFTRA’s press release, the union and video game companies could not come to an agreement regarding AI protections.“We’re not going to consent to a contract that allows...
Illustration: The Verge Google’s Gemini AI chatbot will be able to respond to you more quickly and process more content in prompts thanks to an upgrade to the company’s Gemini 1.5 Flash AI model. With the upgrade to 1.5 Flash, you’ll see “across-the-board improvements in quality and latency, with especially noticeable improvements in reasoning and image understanding,” Amar Subramanya, VP of engineering for Gemini, says in a blog post. Gemini’s context window, or the amount of chunks of text that an AI model can process at once, is also getting quadrupled to 32K tokens, Subramanya...
Image: The Verge The ClaudeBot web crawler that Anthropic uses to scrape training data for AI models like Claude has hammered iFixit’s website almost a million times in a 24-hour period, seemingly violating the repair company’s Terms of Use in the process. “If any of those requests accessed our terms of service, they would have told you that use of our content expressly forbidden. But don’t ask me, ask Claude!” said iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens on X, posting images that show Anthropic’s chatbot acknowledging that iFixit’s content was off limits. “You’re not only taking our content...
When Reddit said last month it would block unauthorized data scraping from its site, most of us assumed it was to tackle chatbot training. It turns out the site/service/fandom battleground also appears to be blocking search engines other than Brave and Google, the latter of which reportedly inked a deal earlier this year with Reddit worth $60 million annually.A Reddit spokesperson told Engadget the empty search results are because these engines won’t agree to the company’s requirements for AI training. The company says it’s in discussions with several of them. Bing and DuckDuckGo both...
The Board wants Meta to change the terminology it uses for labeling explicit, AI-generated images from "derogatory" to "non-consensual."© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A powerful new video-generating AI model became widely available today — but there’s a catch: The model appears to be censoring topics deemed too politically sensitive by the government in its country of origin, China. The model, Kling, developed by Beijing-based company Kuaishou, launched in waitlisted access earlier in the year for users with a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The race to bring more AI features to search is escalating, with Microsoft moving forward with additional tools for Bing. Today, the company began previews for Bing generative search, where the top result for a user's query will be an original response compiled by AI.The blog post about Bing generative search showed a few sample results. In addition to the overview statement, Microsoft will provide links to the main sources that the large-language models and small-language models used to create their answer. It will also have a section of related information. For instance, with the sample query...
For frontier AI models, when it rains, it pours. Mistral released a fresh new flagship model on Wednesday, Large 2, which it claims to be on par with the latest cutting edge models from OpenAI and Meta in terms of code generation, mathematics, and reasoning. The release of Mistral Large 2 falls just one day […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft this afternoon previewed its answer to Google’s AI-powered search experience: Bing generative search. Available only for a “small percentage” of users at the moment, Bing generative search, powered by a combination of large and small generative AI models (mum’s the word on which, exactly), aggregates info from around the web and generates a summary […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images The Senate unanimously passed a bill on Tuesday letting victims of non-consensual intimate images created by AI — or “deepfakes” — sue their creators for damages.The Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act (DEFIANCE) Act lets victims of sexually explicit deepfakes pursue civil remedies against those that produced or processed the image with the intent to distribute it. Victims who are identifiable in these kinds of deepfakes can receive up to $150,000 in damages under the bill, and up to $250,000 if the incident was connected to “...
But the fate of many generative AI businesses — even the best-funded ones — looks murky.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Thousands of stories have been written about former NFL quarterback and civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick. If anyone knows a thing or two about losing control of your own narrative, it’s him. Now, Kaepernick is launching an AI storytelling platform, Lumi, to help creators tell and own their stories. If you said “Huh?” when reading […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Since launching xAI last year, Elon Musk has been using X as a sandbox to test some of the Grok model’s AI capabilities. Beyond the basic chatbot, X uses the model to summarize news and trending events. Now, the platform has launched a new feature called “More About This Account” to provide a few AI-powered […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Lakera, a Swiss startup that’s building technology to protect generative AI applications from malicious prompts and other threats, has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by European venture capital firm, Atomico. Generative AI has emerged as the poster child of the burgeoning AI movement, driven by popular apps such as ChatGPT. But […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google just announced a suite of updates to the Play Store in an attempt to make it more fun to use. This is part of a larger move by the company to turn its online marketplace into "an end-to-end experience that’s more than a store.” You read that right. They want us to hang out on Google Play.Here’s what the company has planned. The update brings AI-generated review summaries that pull from user reviews to develop a consensus. You’ve likely already encountered this type of thing on Facebook and while using Google search. The company first announced this feature at this year’s I/O...
Cybersecurity has become a white-hot topic in the world of technology. Not only are data breaches continuing unabated; but security companies themselves are very much in the spotlight as a result – with one of the fastest-growing, Wiz, the object of a (now abandoned) $23 billion acquisition bid from Google. Now, another cyber startup – […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Content creators are busy people. Most spend more than 20 hours a week creating new content for their respective corners of the web. That doesn’t leave much time for audience engagement. But Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, thinks that AI could solve this problem. In an interview with internet personality Rowan Cheung, Zuckerberg laid out his […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The company led by Elon Musk is selling fewer electric cars, and its big bets on driverless taxis and artificial intelligence could take many years to pay off.
Photo by David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Spotify The saga of Spotify HiFi has many twists and turns. First announced over three years ago, the music service’s higher-quality streaming tier has still yet to materialize. Recent reports have said lossless audio will be bundled together with other perks (like advanced library management, AI-powered playlists, and headphone sound quality optimization) as an add-on to Spotify’s premium subscription. And today, during Spotify’s earnings call, the company’s CEO, Daniel Ek, confirmed that a better-than-Premium offering is still in...
Harvey, a startup building what it describes as an AI-powered “copilot” for lawyers, has raised $100 million in a Series C round led by GV, Google’s corporate venture fund. The tranche, which also had participation from heavy-hitting angels and VCs OpenAI, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil and SV Angel, brings Harvey’s total raised to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon’s plan to launch a paid version of Alexa is part of a strategy change to reverse the over $25 billion in losses that its devices business incurred from 2017 to 2021, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The AI-supercharged Alexa, which is rumored to cost up to $10 / month, could arrive as soon as this month.With a potential launch just weeks away, employees reportedly have doubts about whether the new version of Alexa will catch on. A person who worked on the Alexa team told the WSJ that the division is racing toward the deadline...
Meta AI launched in September 2023 using the Llama 2 learning language model. Nearly a year later, Meta has announced a new round of features for its AI assistant and a fresh LLM to support it: Llama 3.1. These updates include an expansion of who can access Meta AI. Thanks to the addition of Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Cameroon, the assistant is now available in 22 countries. It's also accessible in new languages: French, German, Hindi, Hindi-Romanized Script, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. However, some of the new features are location or language-specific...
Meta on Tuesday announced the release of Llama 3.1, the latest version of its large language model that the company claims now rivals competitors from OpenAI and Anthropic. The new model comes just three months after Meta launched Llama 3 by integrating it into Meta AI, a chatbot that now lives in Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp and also powers the company's smart glasses. In the interim, OpenAI and Anthropic already released new versions of their own AI models, a sign that Silicon Valley’s AI arms race isn’t slowing down any time soon.In a blog post, Meta said that the new...
Meta's AI-powered assistant have been accessible on the Ray-Ban smart glasses for quite some time, but the company will only start rolling it out to its Quest headsets next month. The assistant will still be in experimental mode, however, and it's availability will be limited to users in the US and Canada. Meta has revealed the update alongside its announcements for the Llama 3.1 and the new Meta AI capabilities. Users who get access to the assistant in August will be able to put its hands-free controls to the test. The company said Meta AI is replacing the current technology used...
Image: Nick Barclay / The Verge Back in April, Meta teased that it was working on a first for the AI industry: an open-source model with performance that matched the best private models from companies like OpenAI. Today, that model has arrived. Meta is releasing Llama 3.1, the largest-ever open-source AI model, which the company claims outperforms GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet on several benchmarks. It’s also making the Llama-based Meta AI assistant available in more countries and languages while adding a feature that can generate images based on someone’s specific likeness...
Image: Toyota Toyota Research Institute (TRI) and Stanford are plugging AI into two Supras that pull off Formula Drift-style tandem driving — but they’re looking for something more important than style points.In a press release, TRI’s VP of human interactive driving, Avinash Balachandran, says that drifting two cars in tandem autonomously is a “milestone” and has “far-reaching implications for building advanced safety systems” in future passenger vehicles.Beyond the impressive showing, which can be seen in a video, professor Chris Gerdes, who co-directs the Center for Automotive...
Illustrator’s new Generative Shape Fill tool allows users to fill a selected shape with scalable generated images. | Image: Adobe Adobe is introducing some new tools and generative AI features to its Illustrator and Photoshop design software that aim to help speed up creative workflows. The most notable updates are coming to Illustrator courtesy of Adobe’s new Firefly Vector 2 AI model, which is available in public beta starting today.Firefly Vector 2 powers new Illustrator features like Generative Shape Fill, which allows users to add detailed vectors to shapes via descriptive text prompts...
Condé Nast, the media giant that owns The New Yorker, Vogue and Wired, has sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI-powered search startup Perplexity, according to The Information. The letter, sent on Monday, demanded Perplexity stop using content from Condé Nast publications in its AI-generated responses and accused the startup of plagiarism. It comes a month after Forbes took similar action.Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch has warned “many” media companies could face financial ruin in the time it would take for litigation against generative AI companies to conclude. Lynch has called upon...
An Adelaide pool has become the first in South Australia to use AI to help stop swimmers drowning.
An Adelaide pool has become the first in South Australia to use AI to help stop swimmers drowning.
A.I.’s math problem reflects how much the new technology is a break with computing’s past.
Apparently AI-generated artwork that was first used to promote California Forever’s city. | Image: California Forever California Forever tech billionaire-backed plan to build a new city 60 miles away from San Francisco is on hold for at least two years, pending an environmental impact study, reports The New York Times.Last year, the Times reported that a group of Silicon Valley investors (including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Andreessen Horowitz investors Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and Emerson Collective founder Laurene Powell Jobs) had secretly...
Condé Nast, the media conglomerate that owns publications such as The New Yorker, Vogue and Wired, has sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI-powered search startup Perplexity, according to The Information. The letter, which was sent on Monday, demands that Perplexity stop using content from Condé Nast publications in its AI-generated responses and accused the startup of plagiarism. The move makes Condé Nast the latest in a growing list of publishers taking a stand against the unauthorized use of their content by AI companies, and comes a month after similar action taken by Forbes...
Cohere, a generative AI startup co-founded by ex-Google researchers, has raised $500 million in new cash from investors including Cisco, AMD and Fujitsu. Bloomberg says that the round, which also had participation from Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments and Canada’s export credit agency EDC, values Toronto-based Cohere at $5.5 billion. That’s more than double […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With President Joe Biden dropping out of the race, Vice President Kamala Harris may become the Democrats’ new nominee. In announcing his plans, Biden offered his “full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year,” while Harris said her “intention is to win and earn this nomination.” That said, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
First, we need to understand: what is consciousness? And if the answer is yes, who’d be willing to switch off that artificial intelligence?
AMD touts its new Ryzen AI chips, aka Strix Point, on stage. | Image: Paul Sakuma for AMD 2024 will go down in tech history as the year Microsoft was finally able to make Windows laptops into serious competitors to the MacBook. So far, that’s thanks to Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon chips, which switched to a homogeneous chip architecture, increased clock speeds, and caught up to Apple’s speedy and power-efficient processors. But now, AMD says it has chips that can take on the MacBook, too — and keep the company’s processors in the mix.Last week, AMD held a two-day event in Los Angeles to...
New research from the Data Provenance Initiative has found a dramatic drop in content made available to the collections used to build artificial intelligence.
No one has been making foldable phones longer than Samsung. And for the first few years, the sheer number of improvements we got on the Galaxy Z Fold line meant it didn’t really have any competition. But more recently, the pace of innovation has slowed while new challengers like the OnePlus Open and Pixel Fold have arrived. Now for 2024, Samsung has reinforced the Galaxy Z Fold 6 with a stronger but significantly lighter frame, a new ultra-wide-angle camera and a bunch of AI-powered tools. Unfortunately, not much else has changed, leaving us with a very iterative upgrade. So while the Galaxy...
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Figma recently pulled its “Make Designs” generative AI tool after a user discovered that asking it to design a weather app would spit out something suspiciously similar to Apple’s weather app — a result that could, among other things, land a user in legal trouble. This also suggested that Figma may have trained the feature on Apple’s designs, and while CEO Dylan Field was quick to say that the company didn’t train the tool on Figma content or app designs, the company has now released a full statement in a company blog post.The statement says that...
Meta has suspended the use of its AI assistant after Brazil’s National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) banned the company from training its AI models on personal data from Brazilians. The move puts a dent in Facebook’s attempt to build out its AI products in Brazil, a market with more than 200 million people. As cited […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, and other big names in AI are coming together to form the Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI), according to an announcement on Thursday. The initiative aims to address a “fragmented landscape of AI security” by providing access to open-source methodologies, frameworks, and tools.We don’t know how much of an impact CoSAI will have on the AI industry, but concerns about leaking confidential information and automated discrimination come to mind as examples of questions faced about security, privacy, and...
OpenAI on Thursday released a smaller and more affordable version of its flagship large language model that powers ChatGPT. The new model, called GPT-4o mini, will reportedly cost developers 60 percent less to build AI-powered apps and services with as compared to GPT-3.5 Turbo, Open’s smallest model until today. But the big news here is for consumers. GPT-4o mini will replace GPT-3.5 Turbo for free users of ChatGPT starting today — which means that your baseline ChatGPT experience will improve significantly.OpenAI claimed that GPT-4o mini achieved an 82 percent score on an industry...
Apple Intelligence was designed to leverage things that generative AI already does well, like text and image generation, to improve upon existing features.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Samsung’s busy feeding its AI ambitions for its consumer devices. Earlier this year, the electronics giant said it would bring its Galaxy AI and Google’s AI model Gemini to its products, including its flagship smartphone, the Galaxy 24, and just last week, the company unveiled the latest versions of its two-foldable phones — the Galaxy […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta has decided to not offer its upcoming multimodal AI model and future versions to customers in the European Union citing a lack of clarity from European regulators, according to a report by Axios. The models in question are designed to process not only text but also images and audio, and power AI capabilities in Meta platforms as well as the company’s Ray-Ban smart glasses."We will release a multimodal Llama model over the coming months, but not in the EU due to the unpredictable nature of the European regulatory environment," Meta said in a statement to Axios.Meta’s move follows a...
Slope's founders both have a background in AI, so large language models power the company’s underwriting infrastructure. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
TTT models, a new architecture, could effectively replace transformers if they scale up as their creators suggest they will.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Designer app features "prompt templates" that are designed to help jumpstart the creative process.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
When Jaclyn Rice Nelson and Noah Gale launched AI talent and services company Tribe AI in 2019, they had to convince companies that having an AI strategy mattered. After the release of ChatGPT in 2022 and the AI mania it ushered in, the startup has experienced a “massive boom” in demand, Gale told TechCrunch. Rice […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Microsoft Microsoft’s AI-powered Designer app is coming out of preview today for both iOS and Android users. Microsoft Designer lets you use templates to create custom images, stickers, greeting cards, invitations, and more. Designer can also use AI to edit images and restyle them or create collages of images.Originally available on the web or through Microsoft Edge, Designer has been in preview for nearly a year. It’s now generally available to anyone with a personal Microsoft account and as a free app for Windows, iOS, and Android. The mobile app includes the ability to create...
Some of the world’s largest tech companies trained their AI models on datasets that included transcripts of more than 173,000 YouTube videos without permission. That’s according to an investigation from Proof News, which laid out how Apple, NVIDIA and Anthropic, among other companies, used transcripts of YouTube videos from more than 48,000 channels. This goes against YouTube’s own platform rules, which Google execs have repeatedly mentioned.Earlier this month, Apple was criticized for failing to reveal the source of training data for Apple Intelligence, the company’s own spin on...
AI definitely nailed the right surly energy for this orange cat. The pirate ship in Elliott Bay was one thing, but it was a little blurry bee that sent me over the edge.Samsung would very much like us (and its shareholders) to know that its new phones are the AI-est phones that ever AI-ed, and the Fold 6 that I’m testing comes with a new tool called “sketch to image.” Draw a rough sketch on a photo or an empty note page, and it will use generative AI to turn that thing into an image. I shrugged it off as just another AI thing when Samsung announced it onstage at Unpacked — but y’all...
Can generative AI substitute for having a social graph? California-based local experiences discovery startup Bigfoot is hoping the addition of a conversational interface to its weekend planner website — in the form of an AI chatbot it’s branding Littlefoot which launched last week — will give it a more personalized feel while making it easier […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It’s not immediately clear what Tinder’s Photo Selector feature looks for in a “good” selfi. | Image: Tinder Tinder is releasing an AI-powered feature that supposedly makes it easier for users to select better photos for their dating profiles. The dating app says its new Photo Selector tool aims to “take out the guesswork” when picking your most flattering photos by curating a diverse selection that’s “optimized to help users find a match.”To use Photo Selector, users will need to take a selfie within Tinder and allow the app to access their device’s camera roll. Tinder’s...
Anthropic announced that its Claude chatbot is now available as an Android app. After introducing the platform’s free iOS app in May, Android owners can now also play with the company's AI on their mobile devices. The Android app is free and works with both the Pro and Team plans for paid users. Conversations with Claude can happen across hardware, with both of the mobile apps and the web version connected to each other.This platform is one of several large-language model AI chatbots currently available to the public. OpenAI and its ChatGPT tool have attracted the lion's share of attention...
Andrej Karpathy, former head of AI at Tesla and researcher at OpenAI, is launching Eureka Labs, an “AI native” education platform. In tech speak, that usually means built from the ground up with AI at its core. And while Eureka Labs’s AI ambitions are lofty, the company is starting with a more traditional approach to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge HeHealth’s AI-powered Calmara app claimed, “Our innovative AI technology offers rapid, confidential, and scientifically validated sexual health screening, giving you peace of mind before diving into intimate encounters,” but now it’s shut down after an inquiry by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).The app prompted daters to submit dick pics to check for sexually transmitted diseases, promising “clear, science-backed answers about your partner’s sexual health status,” according to an FTC letter dated July 11th. The letter lays out some of the...
Anthropic launched its Claude Android app on Tuesday to bring its AI chatbot to more users. This is Anthropic’s latest effort to convince users to ditch ChatGPT by making Claude available in more places. The Claude Android app will work just like the iOS version released in May, including free access to Anthropic’s best AI […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The UK's antitrust watchdog is once again investigating Microsoft. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has opened a formal probe over the company's hiring of former Inflection AI staff and its licensing of the startup's tech. The initial phase one investigation will be wrapped up by September 11, at which point the CMA will determine whether to open a more in-depth (phase two) probe.The agency will try to determine whether Microsoft attempted to avoid antitrust scrutiny by recruiting Inflection's staff and employing its tech but not buying the company outright. It will...
The Bird Buddy smart bird feeder is getting an AI-powered update allowing users to name specific birds who frequently visit. | Image: Bird Buddy The Bird Buddy smart bird feeder is getting a collection of new features as part of a recently announced Nature Intelligence update. The feeder’s ability to identify the species of a visiting bird is being expanded, and users will now get notifications when individual birds stop by.The company describes the Bird Buddy’s new Name That Bird feature as being a non-invasive form of bird tagging — a practice that usually keeps tabs on the movements of...
U.K. authorities have until early September to decide whether the hiring is tantamount to a merger.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The hackers say they accessed Disney’s internal systems via an employee's compromised computer. | Image: The Verge Over a terabyte of data supposedly obtained from Disney’s internal messaging channels has been leaked online by a self-proclaimed “hacktivist group,” including login credentials, code, images, and information about unreleased projects.The anonymous group calling itself Nullbulge has claimed responsibility for the leak, alleging to have gained access to the company’s Slack messaging data via the compromised computer of a Disney employee. “Anything we could get our hands...
It doesn't get better than the Google Pixel 8a if you want a quality handset for $500 or less. But thanks to Amazon Prime Day, you can get the excellent Android phone for even less. Prime Day deals have knocked $50 off the Pixel 8a, bringing it down to a record low of $449 — the best price we've seen since it launched a few months ago. The Pixel 8a sits at the top of our list of the best midrange smartphones thanks to its Tensor G3 chipset, 120Hz OLED touchscreen, excellent cameras and strong battery life. The G3 processor not only enables excellent performance, but it also provides handy AI...
Google hits back over Gemini accusations, claiming that its AI assistant isn't prying into your files XDA DevelopersGoogle's Gemini AI caught scanning Google Drive hosted PDF files without permission — user complains feature can't be disabled Tom's HardwareGemini AI platform accused of scanning Google Drive files without user permission TechRadarGoogle Gemini might be reading your private files without permission Digital TrendsHow did Google Gemini summarize a user's private document? Mashable
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube Music is testing a new feature that lets you use AI to generate a playlist. In a statement to The Verge, YouTube spokesperson Jessica Gibby said that Premium users in the US will be able to create a custom playlist by “describing exactly what they want to hear.”As shown in screenshots obtained by 9to5Google, the feature could surface a chat UI that you can use to enter a description, or choose from prompts like, “Catchy pop choruses” or “Upbeat pop anthems.” It will then generate a playlist based on your description. Spotify has a...
Image: Google Google is launching its new Vids productivity app in Workspace Labs with the idea that “if you can make a slide, you can make a video in Vids.” Announced in April, Vids allows users to drop docs, slides, voiceovers, and video recordings into a timeline to create a presentation video to share with coworkers. Making it available in the Labs preview allows Workspace admins to opt-in users to try out the AI-powered video maker.While you can generate video in Vids, it’s not to be confused with AI tools like OpenAI’s Sora, which can create life-like footage from a prompt...
Name That Bird determines individual members of a species by identifying distinguishing characteristics that most humans would be hard-pressed to spot.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
YouTube Music is introducing two new ways to boost song discovery on its platform. YouTube announced on Monday that it’s experimenting with an AI-generated conversational radio feature, and rolling out a new Shazam-like tool to help users discover the name of a song by singing, humming or playing parts of it. The new AI-generated conversational […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
YouTube Music is rolling out some fun new features, including the expansion of the “hum to search” tool that has been in beta for Android users since March. The company says this tool allows users to “search the YouTube Music catalog of over 100 million official songs” by using natural sound.All you have to do is tap “search” and look for the waveform icon. Then it’s up to you. The tool lets people hum the song, sing the song or even play the song on another instrument. The feature is rolling out to YouTube music subscribers on both iOS and Android.It’s also been working on...
The HP OmniBook Ultra features an AMD Ryzen AI 300 series processor and integrated AMD Radeon 800M graphics. | Image: HP HP’s resurrected OmniBook line will soon be getting a performance boost with the new HP OmniBook Ultra featuring an AMD Ryzen AI 300-series processor with integrated AMD Radeon 800M graphics, up to 32GB of RAM, and a pair of 40Gbps Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports. Available starting in August for $1,449.99, the new HP Omnibook Ultra will eventually receive a free software update to make it one of the first Copilot Plus PCs not powered by an ARM processor.The OmniBook branding was...
Deezer is the latest music streaming app to introduce an AI playlist feature. The company announced on Monday that a select number of paid users will be able to create custom playlists with a text prompt using its “Playlist with AI” feature. The launch of the new feature comes a few months after Spotify and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Windows laptops are in a bit of transition thanks to the recent introduction of Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs. However, that designation currently only applies to systems featuring Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips. But now, with some help from AMD, HP’s OmniBook Ultra 14 is packing even better AI performance in a thin and light chassis.Powered by AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 series chips, the OmniBook UItra 14 is said to deliver up to 55 TOPS of AI performance, which is more than the 45 TOPS you get from the Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus’ Hexagon NPU. HP claims this will support a...
Image: Netflix The first animated take on Terminator is looking pretty slick in its debut teaser trailer. Netflix just released the first proper look at Terminator Zero, which is helmed by anime powerhouse Production I.G and starts streaming on August 29th.The show follows a resistance fighter sent to the distant past of 1997, where she’s tasked with protecting a scientist who is developing an AI that can compete with Skynet, which would potentially be good news for humanity. It’s hard to get much of a sense of the story from the teaser, but Zero looks very intense, with lots of explosions...
Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge OpenAI is a leader in the race to develop AI as intelligent as a human. Yet, employees continue to show up in the press and on podcasts to voice their grave concerns about safety at the $80 billion nonprofit research lab. The latest comes from The Washington Post, where an anonymous source claimed OpenAI rushed through safety tests and celebrated their product before ensuring its safety.“They planned the launch after-party prior to knowing if it was safe to launch,” an anonymous employee told The Washington Post. “We basically failed at the process...
A new study examines whether AI could be an automated helpmeet in creative tasks, with mixed results: it appeared to help less naturally creative people write more original stories — but dampened the creativity of the group as a whole. It’s a trade-off that may be increasingly common as AI tools impinge on creative endeavors. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A bipartisan group of senators has introduced a new bill that seeks to protect artists, songwriters, and journalists from having their content used to train AI models or generate AI content without their consent. The bill, called the Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act (COPIED Act), also seeks to make […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
There wasn’t a Factory Reset option, previously. | Photo: David Pierce / The Verge Since the launch of the Rabbit R1, the AI assistant device has been storing users’ chat logs on-device with no way to erase them, according to a company security bulletin. Rabbit is now addressing the issue with a software update that includes a new Factory Reset option in settings to wipe the device. Previously, you could only unlink your account from an R1, which did not erase all user data.Along with the new ability to fully delete local user data, the software update also addresses another eyebrow-raising...
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Getty Images The AI Act is a sweeping set of rules for technology companies operating in the EU, which bans certain uses of AI tools and puts transparency requirements on developers. The law officially passed in March after two years of back and forth and includes several phases for compliance that will happen in waves.Now that the full text has been published, it officially starts the clock for compliance deadlines that companies must meet. The AI Act will come into law in 20 days, on August 1st, and future deadlines will be tied to that...
Amazon’s AI-powered shopping assistant, named “Rufus,” is now live for all U.S. customers in the Amazon mobile app, the retailer announced on Friday. The assistant, which lives on the bottom right of the app’s main navigation bar, is designed to offer customers help with finding products, performing product comparisons, and getting recommendations on what to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The latest round of language models, like GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro, are touted as “multi-modal,” able to understand images and audio as well as text — but a new study makes clear that they don’t really see the way you might expect. In fact, they may not see at all. To be clear at […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge CEO Nicholas Thompson discusses the deal: ‘AI is coming. It is coming quickly. We want to be part of whatever transition happens.’ Continue reading…
Defence AI startup Helsing has raised €450 million ($487 million) in a Series C financing round led by General Catalyst. It now plans to expand its presence in European nations bordering Russia. The announcement came as NATO held its annual summit in Washington, DC, where the Russian invasion of Ukraine is high on the agenda. As […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Alma aims to simplify the visa process for technologists, founders and researchers by providing personal legal advisors.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
DeepMind found “preliminary evidence” that Gemini enables its robots to plan how to undertake complex tasks from simple instructions. | Image: Google DeepMind Google is training its robots with Gemini AI so they can get better at navigation and completing tasks. The Deepmind robotics team explained in a new research paper how using Gemini 1.5 Pro’s long context window — which dictates how much information an AI model can process — allows users to more easily interact with its R2-T robots using natural language instructions.This works by filming a video tour of a designated area, such...
280 Earth’s pilot carbon removal facility in The Dalles, Oregon. | Image: 280 Earth Data centers are a growing climate problem, especially as all the energy needed to train AI models inflates tech companies’ carbon footprints. A startup that spun out of Google’s “moonshot factory” X says its technology can provide a potential solution. It can pull carbon dioxide out of the air, run partially on servers’ waste heat, and even generate water to help cool a data center more efficiently.The company, 280 Earth, just signed a $40 million agreement to capture carbon dioxide emissions for...
The man behind the AI gaffes at Sports Illustrated and USA Today has a yearslong history of filling the internet with garbage. Continue reading…
Visual effects (VFX) have emerged as essential in filmmaking and have transformed storytelling and creativity in the film industry with its diverse digital techniques. However, the high cost of VFX tools often leaves independent filmmakers and content creators working with modest budgets struggling to compete with larger productions. A new company, Beeble AI, is turning […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Christina Warren hasn’t worked at this website since 2009, and that’s not her face. | Screenshot by Christina Warren An old Apple blog and the blog’s former authors have become the latest victims of AI-written sludge. TUAW (“The Unofficial Apple Weblog”) was shut down by AOL in 2015, but this past year, a new owner scooped up the domain and began posting articles under the bylines of former writers who haven’t worked there for over a decade. And that new owner, which also appears to run other AI sludge websites, seems to be trying to hide.Christina Warren, who left a long career in...
Samsung debuted the latest versions of its two foldables Wednesday at Unpacked. The Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Galaxy Z Flip 6 are thinner and lighter than their predecessors, while the Fold 6 delivers a long-awaited update to its traditionally narrow front display aspect ratio. Both devices also come with even higher starting prices, at […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Samsung has today announced the Galaxy Ring, a finger-worn wearable bolstering its ecosystem of health-tracking gear. Yes, this is the third or fourth time it’s been announced, but today is the day it’s actually available for you to pre-order. It’s a conscious attempt to corner a market held by plenty of smaller players in the space, most notably the Oura Ring. You’ll also get the usual AI woo insights to help you take better care of your body when you think things might not be going well.The company boasts that it has embedded its existing sensor technology into the far smaller space a...
Vimeo joins companies TikTok, YouTube, and Meta in implementing a way for creators to label AI-generated content. The video hosting service announced on Wednesday that creators must now disclose to viewers when realistic content is created with AI. The new updates to Vimeo’s terms of service and community guidelines ensure that videos that are AI-generated, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
US officials and their allies have identified and taken down an artificial intelligence-powered Russian bot farm comprising almost 1,000 accounts. These accounts were able to spread disinformation and pro-Russian sentiments across X, formerly Twitter. The Justice Department has revealed the scheme was made possible by software created by a digital media department in RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet.According to a cybersecurity advisory from the FBI, intelligence officers from the Netherlands, and cybersecurity authorities from Canada, it centered on a tool called Meliorator, which...
Months after Microsoft gained an observer seat on OpenAI’s board, the company is leaving the position of the non-voting seat. In a letter sent to OpenAI on Tuesday, Microsoft said that the company has seen enough progress being made in the AI company and is confident in its direction, according to Axios. OpenAI said that […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Prompt engineering became a hot job last year in the AI industry, but it seems Anthropic is now developing tools to at least partially automate it. Anthropic released several new features on Tuesday to help developers create more useful applications with the startup’s language model, Claude, according to a company blog post. Developers can now […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hebbia, a startup that uses generative AI to search large documents and respond to large questions, has raised a $130 million Series B at a roughly $700 million valuation led by Andresen Horowitz with participation of Index Ventures, Google Ventures and Peter Thiel. And its funding demonstrates that 50x annual recurring revenue (ARR) is becoming […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: The Verge Mark Matlock, a political candidate for the right-wing Reform UK party, clarified in The Independent that he is a real person, not an AI bot, as some suspected. Perhaps it was the glossy, hyper-smooth skin in a campaign image or the fact that Matlock had apparently missed events like the election count — but earlier this week, a thread on X questioned whether Matlock existed at all. “We might be on the verge of a HUGE SCANDAL,” the post read.We might be on the verge of a HUGE SCANDAL. Suspicions have been raised that Reform have fielded election candidates that aren’t...
Bumble is making it simpler for its members to report AI-generated profiles. The dating and social connection platform now has "Using AI-generated photos or videos" as an option under the Fake Profile reporting menu."An essential part of creating a space to build meaningful connections is removing any element that is misleading or dangerous," Bumble Vice President of Product at Bumble Risa Stein said in an official statement. "We are committed to continually improving our technology to ensure that Bumble is a safe and trusted dating environment. By introducing this new reporting option, we can...
Bumble’s new reporting option arrives at a time when, unfortunately, AI-generated photos on dating apps are common© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
After announcing a whopping $20 million seed last year, Unlikely AI‘s founder William Tunstall-Pedoe has kept the budding UK foundation model maker’s approach under lock and key. Until now: TechCrunch can exclusively reveal it’s taking a “neuro-symbolic” approach to its AI. In an addition development, it’s announcing two senior hires — including bringing on the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Infactory is a kind of fact-checking search engine that will be focused exclusively on data at launch. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images AI leaders are increasingly optimistic about the technology’s potential in the health sector, especially when it comes to personalized bots that can comprehend and address individual health concerns.OpenAI and Arianna Huffington are now jointly funding the development of an “AI health coach” through Thrive AI Health. In a Time magazine op-ed, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Huffington stated that the bot will be trained on “the best peer-reviewed science” alongside “the personal biometric, lab, and other medical data you...
Running a small business means doing more with less. AI agents can help, but building custom agents for specific workflows remains challenging, even with today’s low-code/no-code tools. The idea behind Enso — which is came out of stealth by announcing a $6 million seed funding round Tuesday — is to give small and medium-sized businesses […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Poe, Quora’s subscription-based, cross-platform aggregator for AI-powered chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, has launched a feature called Previews that lets users create interactive apps directly in chats with chatbots. Previews allows Poe users to build data visualizations, games and even drum machines by typing things like “Analyze the information in this report and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Generative AI businesses aside, the last couple of years have been relatively difficult for venture-backed companies. Very few startups were able to raise funding at prices that exceeded their previous valuations. Now, approximately two years after the venture slump began in early 2022, some investors, like IVP general partner Tom Loverro, are saying that the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Samsung event will feature updates to the Galaxy Z Fold, Galaxy Z Flip, as well as more details on the Galaxy Ring and Galaxy AI. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Pestle addresses the common problem of finding recipes on the web.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Here’s some potentially good news for Apple Watch owners who have Apple Watch Ultra screen envy: the Apple Watch Series 10 — may get the same size screen as the company’s 49mm outdoorsy watch. That’s in addition to other possible improvements, like a thinner case and a new chip that could “lay the groundwork for some AI enhancements down the road,” according to Mark Gurman’s latest Power On newsletter for Bloomberg.The screen rumor seems to back up a CAD render from last month that showed a Series 10 watch with a two-inch display. Gurman...
Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review — TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. This week, Figma CEO Dylan Field said the company will temporarily disable its “Make Design” AI feature after it was accused of “heavily” training the tool on existing apps. The […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Elon Musk’s X is exploring more ways to integrate xAI’s Grok into the social networking app. According to a series of recent discoveries, X is developing new features like the ability to ask Grok about X accounts, use Grok by highlighting text in the app, and access Grok’s chatbot through a pop-up on the side […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Quantum Rise, a Chicago-based startup which does AI-driven automation for companies like dunnhumby (a retail analytics platform for the the grocery industry), has raised a $15 million seed round from Erie Street Growth Partners. Its approach is somewhat akin to UIPath’s, a company famous for bringing robotic process automation to the enterprise, but with a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, July 4th was a quiet day for news, but we’ve still got editorials on e-ink writing, the most-delayed video game ever and more bad news from the makers of ChatGPT. Earlier this week, engineer and Swift developer Pedro José Pereira Vieito dug into OpenAI's Mac ChatGPT app and found that it was storing user conversations locally in plain text, rather than encrypting them. Because that app is only available from OpenAI's website, and since it's not available on the App Store, it doesn't have to follow Apple's sandboxing requirements. OpenAI...
A security breach at the maker of ChatGPT last year revealed internal discussions among researchers and other employees, but not the code behind OpenAI’s systems.
Forestay, an emerging VC based out of Geneva, Switzerland has been busy. This week it closed its second fund, Forestay Capital II, at a hard cap of $220 million. The VC wasn’t well known in Europe until it started to lead rounds in enterprise startups a couple of years ago, notably scanning software startup Scandit […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge Google is making it easier for advertisers to disclose whether political ads contain AI-generated content. In an update spotted by Search Engine Land, Google says it will automatically generate disclosures whenever advertisers label election ads as containing “synthetic or digitally altered content.”Last year, Google started requiring political advertisers to insert their own “clear and conspicuous” disclosures on ads containing AI content. But now, Google is simplifying the process, as it will automatically include an in-ad disclosure whenever advertisers select...
Cloudflare, the publicly-traded cloud service provider, has launched a new, free tool to prevent bots from scraping websites hosted on its platform for data to train AI models. Some AI vendors, including Google, OpenAI and Apple, allow website owners to block the bots they use for data scraping and model training by amending their site’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As more music streaming apps and creation tools emerge to compete for users’ attention, social music-sharing app Popster is getting two new features to grow its user base: an AI image generator for cover art and a collaboration capability where artists can remix another user’s song. Initially launched last year as a song-creation tool and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge Perplexity has launched a major upgrade to its Pro Search AI tool, which it says “understands when a question requires planning, works through goals step-by-step, and synthesizes in-depth answers with greater efficiency.”Examples on Perplexity’s website of what Pro Search can do include a query asking the best time to see the northern lights in Iceland or Finland. It breaks down its research process into three searches: the best times to see the northern lights in Iceland and Finland; the top viewing locations in Iceland; and the top viewing locations in Finland...
Google’s greenhouse gas emissions spiked by nearly 50 percent in the last five years thanks to energy-guzzling data centers required to power artificial intelligence, according to the company’s 2024 Environmental Report released on Tuesday. The report, which Google releases annually, shows the company’s progress towards meeting its self-proclaimed objective of becoming carbon neutral by 2030.Google released 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2023, the report states, which was 48 percent higher than in 2019, and 13 percent higher than a year before. “This result is primarily...
Google totally dodges the question of how much energy is AI is using — perhaps because the answer is "way more than we'd care to say."© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have ballooned, according to the company’s latest environmental report, showing how much harder it’ll be for the company to meet its climate goals as it prioritizes AI. Google has a goal of cutting its planet-heating pollution in half by 2030 compared to a 2019 baseline. But its total greenhouse gas emissions have actually grown by 48 percent since 2019. Last year alone, it produced 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution — a 13 percent year-over-year increase from the year before and roughly equivalent to the amount...
Meta plans to bring more generative AI tech into games, specifically VR, AR and mixed reality games, as the company looks to reinvigorate its flagging metaverse strategy. According to a job listing, Meta is seeking to research and prototype “new consumer experiences” with new types of gameplay driven by generative AI, like games that “change […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Figma CEO Dylan Field says the company will temporarily disable its “Make Design” AI feature that was said to be ripping off the designs of Apple’s own Weather app. The problem was first spotted by Andy Allen, the founder of NotBoring Software, which makes a suite of apps that includes a skinnable Weather app and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Anthropic is launching a program to fund the development of new types of benchmarks capable of evaluating the performance and impact of AI models, including generative models like its own Claude. Unveiled on Monday, Anthropic’s program will dole out grants to third-party organizations that can, as the company puts it in a blog post, “effectively […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta is updating its “Made with AI” labels after widespread complaints from photographers that the company was mistakenly flagging non-AI-generated content. In an update, the company said that it will change the wording to “AI info” because the current labels “weren’t always aligned with people’s expectations and didn’t always provide enough context.”The company introduced the “Made with AI” labels earlier this year after criticism from the Oversight Board about its “manipulated media” policy. Meta said that, like many of its peers, it would rely on “industry...
Meta is not the only company grappling with the rise in AI-generated content and how it affects its platform. YouTube also quietly rolled out a policy change in June that will allow people to request the takedown of AI-generated or other synthetic content that simulates their face or voice. The change allows people to request […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Investment app Robinhood is adding more AI features for investors with its acquisition of AI-powered research platform Pluto Capital, Inc., announced on Monday. The company says that Pluto will allow Robinhood to add tools for quicker identification of trends and investment opportunities, help guide users with their investment strategies, and offer real-time portfolio optimization. Pluto […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple’s AI plans go beyond the previously announced Apple Intelligence launches on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the company is also working to bring these features to its Vision Pro headsets. It’s not the most surprising move — if Apple Intelligence (a whole suite of features including an improved Siri, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
He says that the problem is that generative AI is not human or even human-like, and it’s flawed to try and assign human capabilities to it. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Adept, a startup developing AI-powered “agents” to complete various software-based tasks, has agreed to license its tech to Amazon as the startup’s co-founders and portions of its team join the ecommerce giant. Geekwire’s Taylor Soper first reported the news. According to Soper, Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan will join Amazon, along with Adept co-founders […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
There are plenty of resources to learn English, but not so many for near-native speakers who still want to improve their fluency. That description applies to Stan Beliaev and Yurii Rebryk, and this is what inspired them to create Fluently. Making use of AI, Fluently operates as a coach that gives users feedback and tips […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Riccardo Savi/Getty Images for Concordia Summit Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleyman incorrectly believes that the moment you publish anything on the open web, it becomes “freeware” that anyone can freely copy and use. When CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him whether “AI companies have effectively stolen the world’s IP,” he said:I think that with respect to content that’s already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the ‘90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been “freeware,” if you...
FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has drafted a series of letters to nine major telecom companies, including AT&T and Comcast, to ask if they’re actually doing anything about AI political robocalls. AI-generated voices are getting pretty good at mimicking humans and we’ve already seen this technology in action, when an audio deepfake urged voters to skip the New Hampshire Democratic primary.“We know that AI technologies will make it cheap and easy to flood our networks with deepfakes used to mislead and betray trust. It is especially chilling to see AI voice cloning used to impersonate...
Amazon Web Services has started an investigation to determine whether Perplexity AI is breaking its rules, according to Wired. To, be precise, the company's cloud division is looking into allegations that the service is using a crawler, which is hosted on its servers, that ignores the Robots Exclusion Protocol. This protocol is a web standard, wherein developers put a robots.txt file on a domain containing instructions on whether bots can or can't access a particular page. Complying with those instructions is voluntary, but crawlers from reputable companies have generally been...
This is your periodic reminder that AI-powered chatbots still make up things and lie with all the confidence of a GPS system telling you that the shortest way home is to drive through the lake.My reminder comes courtesy of Nieman Lab, which ran an experiment to see if ChatGPT would provide correct links to articles from news publications it pays millions of dollars to. It turns out that ChatGPT does not. Instead, it confidently makes up entire URLs, a phenomenon that the AI industry calls “hallucinating,” a term that seems more apt for a real person high on their own bullshit.Nieman Lab’s...
The new Vertex AI capabilities aim to improve the accuracy of Google’s corporate chatbots. | Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Getty Images Vertex AI, the Google Cloud development platform that allows companies to build services using Google’s machine learning and large language models, is getting new capabilities to help prevent apps and services from pushing inaccurate information. After rolling out general availability for Vertex AI’s Grounding with Google Search feature in May — which enables models to retrieve live information from the internet — Google has...
Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Instagram’s new “AI Studio” will let creators make AI chatbot versions of themselves, and Meta is starting to roll it out as an “early test” in the US, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on his broadcast channel on Thursday.As part of the test, “you might start seeing AIs from your favorite creators and interest-based AIs in the coming weeks on Instagram,” according to Zuckerberg. “These will primarily show up in messaging for now, and will be clearly labeled as AI.”Zuckerberg shared a few videos of conversations with creator-made AI chatbots...
These days, when you hear about students and generative AI, chances are that you’re getting a taste of the debate over the adoption of tools like ChatGPT. Are they a help? (Yay! Great for research! Fast!) Or are they a harm? (Boo! Misinfo! Cheating!). But some startups are taking the arrival of generative AI in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In the conversation, Zuckerberg said there needs to be a lot of different AIs that get created to reflect people's different interests. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI big shot Andrew Ng’s AI Fund, a startup incubator that backs small teams of experts looking to solve key problems using AI, plans to raise upwards of $120 million for its second tranche. A filing with the SEC shows that the AI Fund’s second fund, AI Venture Fund II, has so far amassed $69.75 […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Mark Zuckerberg said today that in an early test in the U.S., Meta is surfacing AI characters made by creators through Meta AI studio on Instagram. In a post on his broadcast channel, Zuckerberg noted that these chatbots will be clearly marked as AI to notify users. “Rolling out an early test in the US […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
a16z-backed Character.AI said today that it is now allowing users to talk to AI characters over calls. The feature currently supports multiple languages, including English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. The startup tested the calling feature ahead of today’s public launch. During that time, it said that more than 3 million users had […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son announced on Thursday that the Japanese tech giant has set up a joint venture in the country with Chicago-based health tech company Tempus. Together, the pair plan to develop AI-powered personalized medical services, by way of analyzing data in Japan under the name SB Tempus. The company plans to start […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
YouTube is expecting to launch new AI tools later this year that are trained off the back of these deals. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge After debuting a generative AI feature last year that produces music in the style of famous artists like Charli XCX, John Legend, and T-Pain, YouTube is now asking major record labels to allow it to clone more musicians. According to the Financial Times, the Google-owned video platform is offering to pay Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Records “lump sums of cash” in exchange for licensing their songs to legally...
Google said today that it is adding support for 110 languages to its translation service. The company has used its PaLM 2 AI model to power translations. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge Google is adding support for 110 new languages to Google Translate, the company announced on Thursday. Before now, Google Translate supported 133 languages, so this expansion — which the company says is its biggest ever — marks a significant jump.Google’s PaLM 2 AI language model helped Translate learn these new languages. It was especially good at learning ones that were related to one another, such as languages “close to Hindi, like Awadhi and Marwadi, and French creoles like Seychellois Creole and Mauritian Creole,” Google’s Isaac Caswell says in a blog...
Image: Baggu It all started with a nylon purse shaped like a horse.Baggu, the wildly popular brand of reusable shopping bags, announced earlier this month that it would be releasing a collaborative collection with New York-based brand Collina Strada. In the past, special-edition designer drops have been successful for Baggu: a previous collab sold out within minutes of items hitting the web. This new collection — with its colorful, dreamlike prints and bags shaped like a pony, little legs and all — seemed designed to elicit that same viral hype. The brands teased designs. Influencers posted...
The European Union has announced the winners of a “Large AI Grand Challenge” it kicked off earlier this year in a bid to accelerate the pace of homegrown innovation by large-scale AI model makers. Four startups will share €1 million in prize money and — perhaps more importantly — eight million GPU hours to train […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
EasyTranslate is headed in a new direction with a new, generative AI-driven platform that it calls HumanAI. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Opera said today it is releasing Opera One’s second version in developer beta with features including new multimedia controls, split tabs, and new AI capabilities. The company is introducing new themes and design elements to give Opera One R2 a fresh look. The company has traditionally placed the multimedia controls on the sidebar. But with […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft's AI CEO has a cozy relationship with the man who used to be his rival, he said on Tuesday.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Toys R Us Do you have fond memories of Toys “R” Us, back before private equity helped lay it to waste? If so, I’m really curious what you think of this partially AI-generated video that the zombie brand is calling “the first-ever brand film using OpenAI’s new text-to-video tool, Sora.”OpenAI’s Sora wowed the world in February with photorealistic videos created by generative AI — and again when the company’s CTO refused to say where Sora was getting its training data from. (YouTube is the going theory.) But though OpenAI has reportedly been pitching Hollywood on the tech...
The rise of artificial intelligence in our media and entertainment industries has raised a lot of concerns about programs like Open Al’s text-to-video maker Sora replacing the artistic endeavors and aspirations of humans. If those AI made movies are anything like a new brand film about the Toys 'R' Us toy store chain's origin story, the only thing we’ll have to fear is watching them.Toys ‘R’ Us’s current owner WHP Global worked with the Emmy nominated creative agency Native Foreign to create a short brand film called The Origin of Toys ‘R’ Us using OpenAI’s text-to-video...
Reddit has a warning for AI companies and other scrapers: play by our rules or get blocked. The company said in an update that it plans to update its Robots Exclusion Protocol (robots.txt file), which allows it to block automated scraping of its platform.The company said it will also continue to block and rate-limit crawlers and other bots that don’t have a prior agreement with the company. The changes, it said, shouldn’t affect “good faith actors,” like the Internet Archive and researchers.Reddit’s notice comes shortly after multiple reports that Perplexity and other AI companies...
OpenAI plans to block people from using ChatGPT in China, a country where its services aren’t officially available, but where users and developers access it via the company’s API anyway. Securities Times, a Chinese state-owned newspaper reported on Tuesday that OpenAI had started sending emails to users in China outlining its plans to block access starting July 9, according to Reuters.“We are taking additional taps to block API traffic from regions where we do not support access to OpenAI’s services,” an OpenAI spokesperson told the publication. The move could impact several Chinese...
Reddit says the update shouldn't affect the majority of users or good faith actors, like researchers and organizations, such as the Internet Archive. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Unfortunately for Udio and Suno, the RIAA has a few thousand smoking guns in the lawsuit: songs it owns that are clearly being regurgitated by the music models.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Typically, Google shows off its next generation of devices in the fall. But this year it seems that time frame has moved up: the company's next Made by Google event will be August 13 at 1PM ET.While Google didn't share any specific details regarding upcoming announcements, the invite says the company will "showcase the best of Google AI, Android software and the Pixel portfolio of devices." In another break from tradition, this year's event will take place at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, CA instead of New York City, which has been the typical host location for Pixel...
As browsers continue to add AI features into their products, Mozilla is looking give users some choice in the matter. The company announced on Tuesday that it’s launching an opt-in experiment offering access to different AI services in Nightly, the experimental version of Firefox. The company plans to improve the experience before bringing it to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
ChatGPT is now available with many Volkswagen models, including all vehicles in the electric ID family, the new Golf, Tiguan and Passat. This integration is only in Europe, for now, with North America coming soon.What does this mean exactly? ChatGPT has been integrated into Volkswagen’s own voice assistant IDA to complement the service and add more features, sort of like how Apple is handling its own partnership with OpenAI’s platform. This means that customers can better communicate with the vehicle using natural language, which allows the assistant to “answer questions about various...
Stability AI, the beleaguered generative AI startup behind Stable Diffusion, has raised new cash. But it won’t reveal how much. Greycroft, Coatue Management, Sound Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, O’Shaughnessy Ventures and angel investors Prem Akkaraju, Napster founder Sean Parker, Eric Schmidt and Robert Nelsen have injected fresh capital into Stability, the company revealed Tuesday morning […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google is rolling out a new Gemini AI side panel in Gmail that can help you write emails and summarize email threads. The company is also adding the Gemini side panel to Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive. The launch of the new features comes shortly after Google announced them last month at its I/O developer […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Tengo uses AI to find, evaluate and respond to public tenders. It is a software-as-service tool that helps companies handle public tenders at scale — a bit like Govly in the U.S. Originally created within the startup studio Hexa, the startup raised a €3 million funding round led by Point Nine ($3.2 million at today’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A relatively new startup called EvolutionaryScale has secured a massive tranche of cash to build AI models to generate novel proteins for scientific research. EvolutionaryScale today announced that it raised $142 million in a seed round led by ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross and Lux Capital with participation from Amazon and NVentures, Nvidia’s corporate […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Days after the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple and Meta were in talks to integrate the latter’s AI models, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said that the iPhone maker was not planning any such move. Apple held talks with Meta about the possibility of a partnership when it was also talking with other companies. However, the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Gmail is getting more AI features that could make it easier to stay on top of your email.On the web, Google is beginning to roll out a new Gemini side panel that can do things like summarize email threads and draft new emails. The tool will offer “proactive prompts” but you can also ask “freeform questions,” Google writes in a blog post, and it’s “built to leverage Google’s most capable models,” such as Gemini 1.5 Pro. In the Gmail mobile apps, Google will also give you the ability to have Gemini summarize threads. These improvements could...
Yet another generative AI venture has raised a bundle of money. And, like the others before it, it’s promising the moon. Emergence, whose co-founders include Satya Nitta, the former head of global AI solutions at IBM’s research division, today emerged from stealth with $97.2 million in funding from Learn Capital plus credit lines totaling more […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google announced on Monday that it’s bringing its AI technology Gemini to teen students using their school accounts, after having already offered Gemini to teens using their personal accounts. The company is also giving educators access to new tools alongside this release. Google says that giving teens access to Gemini, can help prepare them with the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple has been warned that its App Store is in breach of EU rules, and has backtracked on plans to roll out AI tech in Europe over regulatory concerns.
Yelp is rolling out an app update to include more accessibility identifiers for businesses, improved screen-reader experiences, and AI-powered alt-text for images. The company said that from 2020 to 2023, there has been an average rise of 40% in searches for “wheelchair accessible” places. With the new update, the company is adding eight more attributes […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A YouTube Live broadcast that ran for five hours today used a deepfake of Elon Musk to push a cryptocurrency scam. The video, which has has since been taken down, showed a clip of Musk that was meant to look like a livestream from a Tesla event, with an AI-generated version of his voice instructing viewers to visit a website and deposit their bitcoin, Ethereum or Dogecoin in order to participate in a giveaway. The message, playing on a loop, promised the system would then “automatically send back double the amount of the cryptocurrency you deposited.”Over 30,000 viewers were tuned into the...
Apple, Microsoft and Google need more access to our data as they promote new phones and personal computers that are powered by artificial intelligence. Should we trust them?
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge TikTok mistakenly posted a link to an internal version of its new AI digital avatar tool without guardrails, letting users create videos that say just about anything. The hiccup was first spotted by CNN and allowed the outlet to generate videos containing quotes from Hitler and a message telling people to drink bleach, among other phrases. TikTok has since taken this version of the tool down, while the version TikTok intended to launch remains available.Launched earlier this week, TikTok’s Symphony Digital Avatars let businesses generate ads using the...
Dot is a new AI companion and chatbot that thrives on getting to know your innermost thoughts and feelings.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Experts aren't unanimous about whether the AI-powered search startup's practices could expose it to legal claims ranging from infringement to defamation—but some say plaintiffs would have strong cases.
Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge Meta is apparently deprioritizing VR and its Oculus business to focus on reproducing the surprising success of its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. And it makes sense — VR is out, AI is in, and Meta’s smart glasses are the absolute standout gadget thus far for AI. But in the same week that Alex Heath reported this shake-up in Command Line, The Information reported that Apple’s focusing on a cheaper Vision headset in favor of a successor to the Vision Pro. Something’s happening here, and it feels like it’s going to have a major impact on the most distinct...
OpenAI has acquired a company, Rockset, building tools to drive real-time search and data analytics. In a post on its official blog, OpenAI said that it would integrate Rockset’s technology to “power [its] infrastructure across products.” Members of Rockset’s team will join OpenAI, and Rockset’s existing customers will be transitioned off of Rockset’s platform “gradually.” […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We've known for a while that Amazon is planning to soup up Alexa with generative AI features. While the company says it has been integrating that into various aspects of the voice assistant, it's also working on a more advanced version of Alexa that it plans to charge users to access. Amazon has reportedly dubbed the higher tier "Remarkable Alexa" (let's hope it doesn't stick with that name for the public rollout).According to Reuters, Amazon is still determining pricing and a release date for Remarkable Alexa, but it has mooted a fee of between roughly $5 and $10 per month for...
Style DNA, an AI-powered fashion stylist app, creates a personalized style profile from a single selfie. The app is particularly useful for people interested in seasonal color analysis, a process used to determine the best colors to complement an individual’s skin tone. This service can be expensive, with experts charging upwards of $300. However, the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photographers say the social media giant is applying a ‘Made with AI’ label to photos they took, causing confusion for users.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It's been a quiet week of news, but we've been feverishly testing Microsoft's new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop Copilot+ AI PCs. In this episode, Devindra and Sam will answer your questions about Microsoft’s new hardware, and we'll deliver some of our first impressions. It turns out Microsoft may have finally gotten Windows on Arm support right! And some of the Copilot+ AI features are actually useful, surprisingly enough. But we'll have to wait a few months to test out the controversial Recall feature, which was pulled from the Copilot+ launch.Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app...
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Paris has quickly established itself as a major European center for AI startups, and now another big deal is in the works.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Anthropic rolled out its newest AI language model on Thursday, Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The updated chatbot outperforms the company’s previous top-tier model, Claude 3 Opus, while working at twice the speed. Claude users (including those on free accounts) can check it out beginning today.Sonnet, which tends to be Anthropic’s most balanced model, is the first release in the Claude 3.5 family. The company says Claude 3.5 Haiku (the fastest in each generation) and Claude 3.5 Opus (the most powerful) will arrive later this year. (Those models will stay on version 3 in the meantime.) The Sonnet update...
Embracer Group is making the move to using AI in game development following the mass layoff and game cancellations months ago. The parent company of THQ Nordic, Gearbox Entertainment and Crystal Dynamics - Eidos Montreal detailed in its annual report (via Game Developer) that it is adopting an AI policy to its game production model, despite the controversy around the use of AI in the games industry and beyond. It said that not using AI will lead to the company lagging behind other major game developers and publishers like EA, Sony, Square Enix and Ubisoft, claiming that the tech will help...
A key body of European Union lawmakers remains stalled over a controversial legislative proposal that could see millions of users of messaging apps forced to agree to their photo and video uploads being scanned by AI to detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Critics of the plan — which run the gamut from tech industry […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: The Verge We’ve got a special episode of Decoder today — I was traveling last week, so Verge deputy editor Alex Heath and our new senior AI reporter Kylie Robison are filling in for me, with a very different kind of episode about AI.We talk a lot about AI in a broad sense on Decoder — it comes up in basically every single interview I do these days — and then we also dive deep into very specific problems that AI is causing with things like copyright law, misinformation, and other various policy challenges. But we don’t spend a ton of time on the day-to-day happenings of the AI...
GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5, and now Claude 3.5 Sonnet. | Image: Anthropic The AI arms race continues apace: Anthropic is launching its newest model, called Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which it says can equal or better OpenAI’s GPT-4o or Google’s Gemini across a wide variety of tasks. The new model is already available to Claude users on the web and on iOS, and Anthropic is making it available to developers as well. Claude 3.5 Sonnet will ultimately be the middle model in the lineup — Anthropic uses the name Haiku for its smallest model, Sonnet for the mainstream middle option, and Opus for its highest-end...
Anthropic’s latest Claude AI model pulls ahead of rivals from OpenAI and Google. But advances in machine intelligence have lately been more incremental than revolutionary.
The U.S. is facing an accountant shortage. Fewer first-time candidates took the CPA exam in 2022 than in 2006, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. One possible reason people aren’t as interested in the field is the large amount of drudge work involved: Accountants have to rifle through large amounts of unstructured […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon is bringing its generative AI listing smarts to more sellers, revealing today that those in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. can now access tools designed to improve product listings by generating product descriptions, titles, and associated details. Additionally, sellers can also “enrich” existing product listings by automatically adding missing information. The announcement […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Snapchat Snapchat offered an early look at its upcoming on-device AI model capable of transforming a user’s surroundings with augmented reality (AR). The new model will eventually let creators turn a text prompt into a custom lens — potentially opening the door for some wild looks to try on and send to friends.You can see how this might look in the GIF below, which shows a person’s clothing and background transforming in real-time based on the prompt “50s sci-fi film.” Users will start seeing lenses using this new model in the coming months, while creators can start making...
Ilya Sutskever, one of OpenAI’s co-founders, launches Safe Superintelligence (SSI), just a month after leaving OpenAI.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist, is starting a new AI company focused on safety. In a post on Wednesday, Sutskever revealed Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), a startup with “one goal and one product:” creating a safe and powerful AI system.The announcement describes SSI as a startup that “approaches safety and capabilities in tandem,” letting the company quickly advance its AI system while still prioritizing safety. It also calls out the external pressure AI teams at companies like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft...
Meta AI removes restrictions in answering election-related queries in India while Google is still restricting them. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Ask any of the health-focused VCs to name one of the top AI startups and one name comes up over and over again: a company based in Pittsburgh called Abridge. And it’s a startup that launched before OpenAI was a household name and LLMs entered the common Valley vocabulary. In 2019, Shiv Rao, a practicing […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Over the weekend, AI startup Luma official X account posted a series of videos created using its video-generating Dream Machine tool, which the company website describes as a “highly scalable and efficient transformer model trained directly on videos.” The only problem? At about 57 seconds in, the Dream Machine-generated trailer for Monster Camp — an animated story about furry creatures journeying to a sleepaway camp — features a slightly AI-smudged but still recognizable Mike Wazowski from Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. Many people noticed that multiple characters and its overall aesthetic...
At the Augmented World Expo on Tuesday, Snap teased an early version of its real-time, on-device image diffusion model that can generate vivid AR experiences. The company also unveiled generative AI tools for AR creators. Snap co-founder and CTO Bobby Murphy said on-stage that the model is small enough to run on a smartphone and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple is continuing its AI push, this time with its education offering. The company announced on Tuesday that it will train all Apple Developer Academy students and mentors on the fundamental of AI. Apple Developer Academy alumni can also take part in the training. Starting this fall, students will learn how to build, train, and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Decagon is a generative AI platform that automates various aspects of customer support channels.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence laboratory is working on a new technology that can generate soundtracks, even dialogue, to go along with videos. The lab has shared its progress on the video-to-audio (V2A) technology project, which can be paired with Google Veo and other video creation tools like OpenAI's Sora. In its blog post, the DeepMind team explains that the system can understand raw pixels and combine that information with text prompts to create sound effects for what's happening onscreen. To note, the tool can also be used to make soundtracks for traditional footage, such as...
The company says its platform functions like a search engine for materials, enabling the fast evaluation of a “vast number of novel structures.”© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Suse on Tuesday is announcing its AI strategy and SUSE AI solutions, a new vendor- and LLM-agnostic generative AI platform.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google has released its dedicated AI mobile app Gemini in India — over four months after its debut in the U.S. — with support for nine Indian languages, including Hindi. The Gemini mobile app in India is based on Google’s AI Gemini 1.5 Pro and supports nine Indian languages alongside English: Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Finbourne, founded out of London’s financial center, has built a platform to help financial companies organize and use more of their data in AI and other models.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
This Lego-built printer can save you the hassle of painstakingly creating your own Lego pixel art. | Screenshot: YouTube A devoted YouTuber has designed and built a Lego printer that can automate the process of assembling elaborate brick-built mosaics, similar to Lego’s art sets like da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Hokusai’s The Great Wave. But while the creation draws inspiration from another Lego printer called the Bricasso, it streamlines the process using AI.Although technically impressive when it debuted eight years ago, Jason Allemann’s Bricasso required a complicated process where mosaic...
DeepMind, Google’s AI research lab, says it’s developing AI tech to generate soundtracks for videos. In a post on its official blog, DeepMind says that it sees the tech, V2A (short for “video-to-audio”), as an essential piece of the AI-generated media puzzle. While plenty of orgs including DeepMind have developed video-generating AI models, these models […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
TikTok says the new tools are aimed at helping brands and creators develop global audiences. | The Verge TikTok is introducing some new generative AI tools that aim to help organizations and content creators grow their global audiences using customizable digital avatars and language dubbing features. Building on the Symphony generative AI ad suite unveiled last month, TikTok says these new tools are intended to break down language barriers in marketing and allow brands to “add a human touch to their content” where real models or presenters wouldn’t otherwise be used.The first of the new...
After announcing a strategic partnership with SoftBank in April, Perplexity — the AI search engine that has ambitions to take on Google — is now using the deal to expand its user base, and data touchpoints, in SoftBank’s home market. SoftBank and two of its mobile operations, Y!mobile (SoftBank’s mobile phone operator) and LINEMO (SoftBank’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT are finding widest use at big companies, but there is wide expectation that the impact will spread.
A McDonald’s in Pittsburgh. | Photo: Paul Weaver / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images If your local McDonald’s has been getting your order confidently wrong with an AI chatbot at the drive-thru, I have good news for you: The company is ending the program for now. The company told franchisees that it’s winding down an AI drive-thru ordering partnership with IBM “no later than July 26th, 2024,” according to trade publication Restaurant Business. The company will reportedly remove the tech from the over 100 restaurants it’s been testing the system in after partnering with IBM...
No one knows what AI looks like, or even is supposed to look like. It does everything, but looks like nothing.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Tempus, a genomic testing and data analysis company started by Eric Lefkosky, who previously founded Groupon, debuted on Nasdaq on Friday, rose about 15% on the opening The company priced its IPO on Thursday at $37 apiece, at the top of its $35 to $37 price range, raising nearly $411 million at a fully-diluted valuation […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Hold on to your Apple Watches, folks! At WWDC 2024, Apple finally decided to give Siri a brain transplant with something they’re calling “Apple Intelligence” (AI—get […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta is putting plans for its AI assistant on hold in Europe after receiving objections from Ireland’s privacy regulator, the company announced on Friday. In a blog post, Meta said the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) asked the company to delay training its large language models on content that had been publicly posted to Facebook and Instagram profiles.Meta said it is “disappointed” by the request, “particularly since we incorporated regulatory feedback and the European [Data Protection Authorities] have been informed since March.” Per the...
Getty has partnered up with Picsart, a popular photo-editing platform, to build an AI image generator that’s entirely trained on licensed stock images. The companies are calling it a “responsible, commercially-safe” alternative to current platforms. Images created by the model will have full commercial rights, which should address concerns about AI-generated images violating copyright laws.The service will only be available to paid Picsart subscribers and the whole thing recalls Adobe’s Firefly AI model. That generator is also trained on stock images, though not exclusively. Adobe...
Meta has confirmed that it will pause plans to start training its AI systems using data from its users in the European Union (EU) and U.K. The move follows pushback from the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), Meta’s lead regulator in the EU, which is acting on behalf of around a dozen data protection authorities […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Privacy-focused search engine and web browser company Brave is integrating search results into its Leo chatbot. Search results are based on the Brave Search API and Leo is integrated into the company’s browser. The company said that this integration will help users find more up-to-date information. People can use this integration to fetch information like […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft's Recall AI feature won't be launching with the first batch of Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs on June 18. In an update on the Windows Blog, the company said that Recall will shift from being a "preview experience broadly available for Copilot+ PCs" next week to a preview that's only available in the Windows Insider Program. It will only release the feature for all Copilot+ PCs after it receives feedback from its Insider Community of testers. The company added that it's adjusting Recall's release to "ensure the experience meets [its] high standards for quality and...
Why read the article when you can just AI generate takeaways? | Image: Yahoo Artifact is dead, long live Yahoo’s version of Artifact. The architecture behind Artifact, the news aggregation app built by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, will live on inside the body of a brand-new Yahoo News app.Available to download today on iOS and Android, the new Yahoo News app brings an AI-powered personalized news feed for users based on their interests, while a feature called Key Takeaways can give a bullet summary of a news article when a reader is feeling TL;DR.Other features of the...
Image: Microsoft Microsoft is planning to launch its new Copilot Plus PCs next week without its controversial Recall feature that screenshots everything you do on these new laptops. The software maker is holding back Recall so it can test it with the Windows Insider program, after originally promising to ship Recall as an opt-in feature with additional security improvements.“We are adjusting the release model for Recall to leverage the expertise of the Windows Insider community to ensure the experience meets our high standards for quality and security,” says Microsoft in an updated blog...
Amazon’s new Alexa has apparently suffered some setbacks. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In the voice assistant arms race, the frontrunner may be about to finish last. On the heels of Apple revealing a new “Apple Intelligence”-powered Siri at its WWDC 2024 conference, a new report from Fortune indicates that Amazon’s Alexa — arguably the most capable of the current voice assistants — is struggling with its own generative AI makeover:... none of the sources Fortune spoke with believe Alexa is close to accomplishing Amazon’s mission of being “the world’s best personal...
Spotify announced on Thursday that it’s venturing further into the ad space with its first in-house creative agency called Creative Lab, helping brands create custom marketing campaigns. It will also begin testing generative AI ads, the company said. The launch of Creative Lab shows that Spotify is ramping up its efforts to attract advertisers to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Dave Burke presenting at Google I/O 2024. | Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge Android’s leadership team at Google is losing another key leader. Dave Burke, VP of engineering for Android, is “stepping away” from heading up Android engineering and is “shifting into an advisory position while exploring AI / bio projects,” he said in an email he posted to LinkedIn. “AI has the potential to play a pivotal role in accelerating drug discovery, with wide applicability, including in hard-to-treat pediatric cancers, a topic close to my heart,” Burke said. “I’m working with Sundar to...
Amazon says that it’ll commit up to $230 million to startups building generative AI-powered applications. The investment, roughly $80 million of which will fund Amazon’s second annual AWS Generative AI Accelerator program, aims to position AWS as an attractive cloud infrastructure choice for startups developing generative AI models to power their products, apps and services. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Long-running nonprofit Common Crawl has been a boon to researchers for years. But now its role in AI training data has triggered backlash from publishers.
Yahoo’s AI push isn’t over just yet. The company, also TechCrunch’s parent, recently launched AI-powered features for Yahoo Mail, including its own take on Gmail’s Priority Inbox and AI summaries of emails, and today it’s rolling out an AI-powered version of its Yahoo News app, leveraging technology it acquired from its latest acquisition, Artifact. Still, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: The Verge, Getty Images At WWDC on Monday, Apple revealed Apple Intelligence, a suite of features bringing generative AI tools like rewriting an email draft, summarizing notifications, and creating custom emoji to the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Apple spent a significant portion of its keynote explaining how useful the tools will be — and an almost equal portion of time assuring customers how private the new AI system keeps your data.That privacy is possible thanks to a twofold approach to generative AI that Apple started to explain in its keynote and offered more detail on in papers and...
Last year, LinkedIn began experimenting with AI-powered tools for job seekers on its platform. Now the company has added a bunch of new capabilities for its premium subscribers who are #OpentoWork, including personalized resumé, AI-assisted cover letters and more conversational job searches.The changes are meant to speed up some of the most tedious aspects of looking for a new role. For example, the revamped job search feature now allows you to look for roles with queries like “find me a marketing job that’s fully remote and pays at least $100,000 a year,” or “find business development...
The economy remains on shaky ground in Europe, but there is some silver lining for enterprise startups: those building tools to help businesses run their finances in more steady and predictable ways are seeing a boost to their business. In the latest development, AccountsIQ, a Dublin-founded accounting technology company that has been in business, and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Long-time Android Engineering VP Dave Burke said today that he is stepping down from the role. Burke, who spent 14 years building Android, is not leaving Alphabet and is exploring “AI/bio” projects within the company. Burke was involved in pivotal projects, including building Nexus/Pixel phones, developing Chrome for mobile phones, starting Android TV, and spearheading […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge ChromeOS will “soon be developed on large portions of the Android stack” so that it can roll out AI features at a faster pace, Google announced on Wednesday. The company says it will be embracing things like the Android Linux kernel and Android frameworks “as part of the foundation of ChromeOS.”The changes won’t just mean more AI features, according to Google. The company also noted that they will help “simplify engineering efforts” and “help different devices like phones and accessories work better together with Chromebooks,” as detailed in a blog post...
We don’t know if OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is actually making any money so far. But thanks to a Wednesday report in The Information, what we do know is that the company doubled its annualized revenue — a measure of the previous month’s revenue multiplied by 12, as the publication helpfully explained — in the last six months.OpenAI’s annualized revenue was $3.4 billion, CEO Sam Altman reportedly told staff. That’s up from $1.6 billion around the end of last year, and $1 billion a year ago. Most of this revenue came from a subscription version of ChatGPT, which offers higher...
Photo by Walid Berrazeg / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images Intel, Nvidia, AMD, and Qualcomm are the household names in chips — but in 2025, the popular but lesser known MediaTek might make a play to join them. Reuters reports that the Taiwanese chip company is now preparing an AI PC chipset to launch in late 2025 specifically for Windows PCs. Currently, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite is the alleged MacBook Air-beating talk of the town, and MediaTek wants a piece of that action. According to Reuters, the new MediaTek chip will reportedly be aimed at the same Microsoft Copilot Plus PC program...
The push to produce a robotic intelligence that can fully leverage the wide breadth of movements opened up by bipedal humanoid design has been a key topic for researchers. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The most critical systems of our modern world rely on GPS, from aviation and road networks to emergency and disaster response, from precision farming and power grids to weather forecasting and military defense. That dependence is becoming a problem. “We’ve got an increased threat from foreign adversaries who have shown capabilities to jam, to destroy, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As usual, Apple left plenty of things out while presenting its next big software updates. | Image: Apple Apple left out a lot of small updates at its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote this year. It makes sense: the company had a lot to talk about, with a third of its presentation entirely devoted to new AI features. But that doesn’t make the features that didn’t get airtime any less worth talking about.From new bezel animations to better ways to manage widgets, there is plenty to discover in the first round of betas for iOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and more. Here are some of our favorites...
Hiya, folks, and welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. This week in AI, Apple stole the spotlight. At the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in Cupertino, Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence, its long-awaited, ecosystem-wide push into generative AI. Apple Intelligence powers a whole host of features, from an upgraded Siri to AI-generated emoji to photo-editing tools that […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Helen Toner, a former OpenAI board member and the director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, is worried Congress might react in a “knee-jerk” way where it concerns AI policymaking, should the status quo not change. “Congress right now — I don’t know if anyone’s noticed — is not super functional, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge The new Apple Intelligence features coming to iOS 18 could be the most impressive integrations of AI software and consumer hardware to date. Apple’s AI tools will be able to take actions based on what they know about you, manage your notifications, and rewrite text. They’re the kinds of things that could make day-to-day use of your iPhone a lot better. But they won’t be available unless you have one of Apple’s latest and most expensive iPhone models.AI has quickly become the latest entry in the tech industry’s never ending desire to drive an upgrade...
South Korea’s fabless AI chip industry saw a slew of fundraising events over the last couple of years as demand for hardware to power AI applications skyrocketed, and it seems the space is already consolidating. Two of the country’s prominent fabless AI chip startups, Rebellions and Sapeon, have agreed to merge, the companies said on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It’s not the sexiest of subject matters, but someone needs to talk about it: The CFO tech stack — software used by the chief financial officers of the world — is ripe for disruption. That’s according to Jonathan Sanders, CEO and co-founder of fledgling Danish startup Light, which exits stealth Wednesday with $13 million in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With dozens of antitrust cases and close to a hundred on the consumer protection side, the agency is now turning to innovative tactics to help it fight fraud, particularly in the AI space.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It’s a very Apple approach in the sense that it prioritizes a frictionless user experience above all.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images Elon Musk has dropped his lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, accusing the company of a breach of contract and allegedly abandoning its mission of creating AI technology to benefit humanity.Musk’s decision to withdraw the lawsuit, filed in a California state court in February, comes just one day before a scheduled hearing, where the judge would review OpenAI’s request to dismiss the case. It’s also one day after Musk said he would ban Apple devices at his companies if the company integrates OpenAI’s technology into the iPhone...
This is probably how the fool would look thinking they’re getting away with a steal. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is now testing Android 15’s automatic theft detection features announced at the I/O developer conference in May. The company tapped Brazil to play host for the initial testing grounds on account of local feedback from users in the country, which is an apparent hotbed for smartphone snatching. You can sign up to try the feature right now if you happen to live there.Theft Detection Lock, as it’s called, uses AI to determine whether certain jerky movements are...
Some of the new Apple Intelligence features that Apple debuted at WWDC 2024 don’t even feel like AI, they just feel like smarter tools. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Jordan Meyer and Mathew Dryhurst founded Spawning AI to create tools that help artists exert more control over how their works are used online. Their latest project, called Source.Plus, is intended to curate “non-infringing” media for AI model training. The Source.Plus project’s first initiative is a data set seeded with nearly 40 million public domain […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Screenshot: Apple Soon, you’ll be able to create you own emoji and generate custom images with new AI features on Apple devices. I hate to be the bearer of bad news (and I’m guilty of grossly overusing emoji myself) — but those images could have the biggest environmental impact of all of Apple’s new AI tools.Generative AI is notoriously energy-hungry, which means it leads to a lot of planet heating greenhouse gas emissions. Image generation, in particular, is one of the worst offenders. The AI arms race has already started to grow some companies’ carbon footprints. Now, new fruit...
Google is bringing some new and upgraded features to its hardware lineup as part of the June Pixel feature drop. The update will start rolling out today to all supported Pixel phones, tablets and smartwatches.First of all, Google is expanding access to its Gemini Nano generative AI model, which will now be available on Pixel 8 and Pixel 8a. Until now, it's only been present on the Pixel 8 Pro. At the outset, the model will be available as a developer option on Pixel 8 and 8a and this can be enabled through the device settings.The Recorder app is getting an AI-powered boost too. Google says...
Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Google’s latest feature drop for Pixel devices is a big one for people who want to run its AI tech on cheaper phones, folks who constantly misplace their phones, and photographers who want a little more control. The latest update, which starts rolling out today, will make the mobile-ready Gemini Nano model that was already available to Pixel 8 Pro owners available as an option on the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8A phones, too. Apple just announced a slew of new AI features for its platforms, but similar to Google’s initial announcement that it eventually walked...
Today marked the kickoff of Apple’s WorldWide Developer Conference (WWDC), the annual event where Apple announces some of the biggest features headed to its devices, apps and software. And this year’s WWDC is a doozy. Thanks to Apple’s newfound — and heavy — investment in generative AI tech, the company had loads to showcase on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Mistral AI has closed its much rumored Series B funding round with General Catalyst leading the round. The company has secured €600 million (around $640 million at today’s exchange rate) in a mix of equity and debt. As TechCrunch previously reported, the startup is now valued at $6 billion following this funding round. As a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Cognigy is helping create AI that can handle the highly repetitive, rote processes center workers face daily.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple is limiting its new artificial intelligence features to new phones, in hopes of a sunny September.
Apple's spin on AI is finally here, and it already seems smarter than Microsoft Copilot and Google Bard. Apple Intelligence focuses on privacy and "personal intelligence," with a bit of an assist from ChatGPT. While we haven't tested it ourselves yet, Apple appears to be avoiding the pitfalls of Microsoft's Recall feature, as well as Google Bard's unfortunate early gaffes. The company isn't trying to capture everything you're doing on your computer, and it's being careful about how it's using larger AI models like ChatGPT. Shortly after the WWDC 2024 keynote...
Image: Apple Apple will let you record and transcribe phone calls in iOS 18. The company announced the feature during its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday and says it will automatically tell call participants that they’re being recorded.The image shared by Apple shows a new recording option on the Phone app, which displays a soundwave, along with how long you’ve been recording. It then transcribes your call in the Notes app, where you can generate a summary using the new Apple Intelligence AI system. You’ll be able to record and transcribe audio from within the Notes app as well....
Apple is integrating GPT-4o, the large language model that powers ChatGPT into iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and MacOS Sequioa thanks to a partnership with OpenAI announced at WWDC, the company’s annual developer conference, on Monday. But shortly after the keynote ended, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering said that the company might also bake in Gemini, Google’s family of large language model, into its operating systems.“We want to enable users ultimately to choose the models they want, maybe Google Gemini in the future,” Federighi said in a conversation with...
Image: The Verge The WWDC keynote may be over, but we still have lots of questions about the state and future of Apple Intelligence. And in a somewhat unusual move, Apple is here to answer some of them: Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea, two of the executives in charge of all of Apple’s AI efforts, are taking the stage in the Steve Jobs theater to talk about everything Apple announced on Monday.Federighi, of course, is Apple’s software chief, overseeing nearly all the platforms and features we saw at WWDC. Giannandrea is Apple’s SVP of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, and has been an...
The company's annual developer event was stacked with demonstrations that showed off the new artificial intelligence capabilities coming to iPhones, iPads, and Macs.
Apple and Google are getting up close and personal with user data to craft memos, summarize documents and generate images.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Adobe is overhauling the terms customers must agree to when using its apps in an effort to win back trust — and clarify that it won’t train AI on their work. The change, announced via a new blog post, comes after a week of backlash from users who feared that an update to Adobe’s terms of service would allow their work to be used for AI training.The new terms of service are expected to roll out on June 18th, and aim to better clarify what Adobe is permitted to do with its customers’ work, according to Adobe’s President of Digital Media, David...
Apple Intelligence, Apple’s new generative AI offering, won’t only be a consumer-facing feature — developers will be able to take advantage of the latest technology too. In its keynote address at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, the company announced that developers would be able to integrate the experience powered by Apple Intelligence into their […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Screenshot: The Verge Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote has come to a close — and the company had a whole lot to share. We got our first look at the AI features coming to Apple’s devices and some major updates coming across the company’s operating systems.If you missed out on watching the keynote live, we’ve gathered all the biggest announcements that you can check out below.Apple’s first AI system is coming to the iPhone, iPad, and Mac Screenshot: Apple With almost all of big tech getting in on the AI boom, it’s no surprise that Apple is launching an AI system of...
While other big tech companies have aggressively tried to add artificial intelligence into products, the iPhone maker has taken a more cautious approach.
Apple is going all in on AI in the most Apple way possible. At WWDC, the company’s annual conference for developers, the company revealed Apple Intelligence, an Apple-branded version of AI that is more focused on infusing its software with the technology and upgrading existing apps to make them more useful. Apple Intelligence will be powered both by Apple’s homegrown tech as well as a partnership with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, Apple announced.One of Apple’s biggest AI upgrades is coming to Siri. The company’s built-in voice assistant will now be powered by large language models, the...
Apple announced a ton of new AI features under the new Apple Intelligence moniker. While the features are free to use, only a limited number of devices will get access to them. These devices include on iPhone 15 Pro along with iPad and Mac with M1 or newer chips. So older iPhones or iPhone 15 […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As expected, Apple’s assistant is about to get much more helpful thanks to a load of new AI-powered capabilities. During WWDC, the company previewed a new version of Siri that can take actions on your behalf and understand a wide range of new queries.The new version of Siri has a better understanding of the apps on your phone and will be able to take more than 100 actions based on your activity and device. For example, you could ask Siri to show you specific photos or memories in your Photos app or to find tracking details for an expected delivery from an email in the Mail app.Siri will also...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple has announced several AI-powered features coming to its Siri virtual assistant, such as an updated design and improvements to how it speaks and understands spoken language commands. These features, announced during Apple’s WWDC event on June 10th, come courtesy of Apple Intelligence — the company’s new personal intelligence system which the company says will be able to control actions on users' behalf in apps.For Siri, Apple says these actions include things like retrieving information from user emails if asked to check when their mom’s...
An “Apple Intelligence” (aka AI)-powered feature coming in iOS 18 will allow iPhone users to create AI images of people they’re messaging with — a feature that works something like an AI-upgraded Bitmoji. The feature, explained Apple at its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, will help to make your “everyday conversations more enjoyable.” Apple Intelligence […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Siri got a makeover at Apple’s annual WorldWide Developer Conference (WWDC) in Cupertino, courtesy of Apple’s overarching generative AI push this year. Siri is now more natural, more relevant, and more personal — and it has new look, including a new icon. It pops up with a glowing light that wraps around the edge of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
California legislators have made the biggest push to pass new laws to rein in the technology. Colorado passed one protecting consumers.
Apple Tuesday unveiled Apple Intelligence, its long awaited, ecosystem-wide push into generative AI. As earlier rumors suggested, the new feature is called Apple Intelligent (A.I., get it?). The company promised the feature will be built with safety at its core, along with highly personalized experiences. “Most importantly, it has to understand you and be grounded […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Today at its annual WorldWide Developer Conference in Cupertino, Apple announced updates to VisionOS, the operating system running on the Vision Pro. The upgraded VisionOS — VisionOS 2 — brings with it productivity enhancements and “new immersive experiences.” One lets you “spatialize” photos from regular photos, leveraging AI tech. Another is a new navigation option: […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Spotify’s personalization features are about to pop up in more areas of the app. The service will soon start showcasing banners and in-app messages tailored to your listening habits, such as telling you how many times you listened to artists like Doja Cat last month.In addition to giving you insight into your activity on the app, Spotify’s messages will prompt you to listen to Doja Cat or encourage you to use Spotify’s AI DJ to play similar music. Another example, as shown in the image embedded below, links you to your Daylist, a feature that comes...
Photo illustration by The Verge / Photo: Cohere Enterprise is the pathway to profit, Gomez says, but maybe don’t ask it to do medicine quite yet. Continue reading…
A popular AI training dataset is “stealing and weaponizing” the faces of Brazilian children without their knowledge or consent, human rights activists claim.
Anterior, a company that uses AI to expedite health insurance approval for medical procedures, has raised a $20 million Series A round at a $95 million post-money valuation led by NEA, according to two people familiar with the deal. Existing investors Sequoia, which led Anterior’s $3.2 million seed round last September, and Neo, an accelerator […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google and Microsoft have made their developer conferences a showcase of their generative AI chops, and now all eyes are on next week’s Worldwide Developers Conference, which is expected to mark the debut of Apple Intelligence. The Cupertino-based company is facing a lot of pressure. Apple has fallen behind its peers in the AI race, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Creatives are fearful of how Adobe’s adoption of generative AI will impact their privacy and rights over their work. | Illustration by Haein Jeong / The Verge A recent notification from Adobe about a terms of service update caused outrage online once many people — forced to accept the new terms for continued access to its apps and services — interpreted it to mean Adobe was permitting itself free rein to access and use their work to train AI models. Specifically, the notification said Adobe had “clarified that we may access your content through both automated and manual methods...
Apple is set to board the runaway locomotive that is generative AI at next week’s World Wide Developer Conference. Reports thus far have pointed to a partnership with OpenAI that will, among other things, help supercharge Siri. A fresh round of rumors reported by Bloomberg shed more light on the news expected to be unveiled […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
National Samsung Electronics Union members strike outside of Samsung’s office building in Seoul, South Korea. | Photo by Anthony Wallace / AFP via Getty Images Samsung Electronics workers went on a strike on Friday for the very first time in the company’s history. The move comes at a time when the Korean corporation faces increased competition from other chipmakers, particularly as demand for AI chips grows.The National Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU), the largest of the company’s several unions, called for the one-day strike at Samsung’s Seoul office building as negotiations over pay...
The author of Black Meme has ideas for how to protect digital culture from the rise of generative AI. It starts with embracing slow media.
Apple has been holding its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) for over 30 years and frankly — other than no one calling them out for abbreviating it with two Ws in that span of time — I don't have strong feelings about them. Launch a new thing. Shovel AI bloatware into whatever. It's big tech's world and I'm just as trapped in it as anyone else. Imagine thinking iterative updates to a goddamn computer are a core part of your identity. Couldn't be me! But my world-weary ears perked up when I saw this little tidbit from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman ahead of Monday&#...
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Apple is gearing up to reveal a new AI system on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac next week at WWDC 2024 — and it will be called Apple Intelligence, according to a report from Bloomberg. In addition to providing new “beta” AI features across Apple’s platforms and apps, it will reportedly offer access to a new ChatGPT-like chatbot powered by OpenAI.Apple reportedly won’t focus on buzzy AI features like image or video generation and will instead focus on adding AI-powered summarizations, reply suggestions, and an AI overhaul for Siri that could give it...
Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge Starting this fall, it appears Siri is going to be much more powerful. Whether this is good news or a harbinger of infinite technological frustration depends on how you feel about Siri, AI, virtual assistants, and the whole idea that your devices should be able to do stuff on your behalf. Either way, it seems virtually certain that at Apple’s WWDC event on Monday, we’re going to hear an awful lot about how Siri can make your life better.This year’s WWDC is actually an important one for Apple. CEO Tim Cook and others have been hinting that this is when Apple...
Voice assistants in general are having an existential moment, and generative AI is poised to be the logical successor.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge Microsoft is launching a new Automatic super resolution (Auto SR) feature on its upcoming Copilot Plus PCs that will compete with upscale technologies like Nvidia’s DLSS. The AI-based Auto SR feature will automatically upscale game resolutions and improve frame rates, and Microsoft is now detailing exactly how it’s different to DLSS, XeSS, and FSR.Auto SR will be integrated into Windows 11, and available on Copilot Plus devices that have a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU). It’s designed to work with existing games with no manual configurations required and no...
A new discovery that the AI-enabled feature's historical data can be accessed even by hackers without administrator privileges only contributes to the growing sense that the feature is a “dumpster fire.”
Susan Rice, who helped the White House broker an AI safety agreement with OpenAI and other tech companies, says she's worried China will steal American AI secrets.
Apple is hoping to make WWDC 2024 memorable as it finally spells out its generative AI plans.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As WWDC 2024 nears, all sorts of rumors and leaks have emerged about what iOS 18 and its AI-powered apps and features have in store.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Last year, during the Q3 2023 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg talked about leveraging AI to have business accounts respond to customers for purchase and support queries. Today, Meta announced AI-powered features for WhatsApp Business apps, such as helping with the creation of click-to-WhatsApp ads and generating responses to frequent customer messages. Mark Zuckerberg announced these […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Days after former employees said the company was being too reckless with its technology, OpenAI released a research paper on a method for reverse engineering the workings of AI models.
DDG offers LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Mistral for factually-iffy conversations.
Google today is issuing new guidance for developers building AI apps distributed through Google Play, in hopes of cutting down on inappropriate and otherwise prohibited content. The company says apps offering AI features will have to prevent the generation of restricted content — which includes sexual content, violence, and more — and will need to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Artists have finally had enough with Meta’s predatory AI policies, but Meta’s loss is Cara’s gain. An artist-run, anti-AI social platform, Cara has grown from 40,000 to 650,000 users within the last week, catapulting it to the top of the App Store charts. Instagram is a necessity for many artists, who use the platform to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google has developed a new AI tool to help marine biologists better understand coral reef ecosystems and their health, which can aid in conversation efforts. The tool, SurfPerch, created with Google Research and DeepMind, was trained on thousands of hours of audio reef recordings that allow scientists studying the reef to be able to “hear […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
There’s a lot of buzz right now about generative AI and what impact it might have on businesses. But look beyond the hype and high-profile deals like the one between OpenAI and PwC last week, and you’ll see that the world is already years into using customer-facing, no-code AI tools for extracting information and working […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google first launched NotebookLM, its AI-powered research tool, in summer 2023 and now the company is expanding its capabilities and access. In a new blog post, Google announced that NotebookLM is officially running on Gemini 1.5 Pro, an upgrade from the original Gemini Pro model that brings a host of new features. The research and writing assistant has also expanded to over 200 countries and territories. NoteBookLM works differently than many other AI-powered tools in that it only takes from the resources you provide, rather than a plethora of general knowledge. The research assistant has...
Microsoft is under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission over its deal with Inflection AI, according to The Wall Street Journal. Back in March, the company hired almost all of Inflection AI's employees, including founders Karén Simonyan and Mustafa Suleyman, who was also a DeepMind cofounder. In addition, Microsoft paid Inflection AI $650 million to license its artificial intelligence technology. Now, the FTC wants to know whether the companies deliberately structured the deal to avoid being the subject of regulatory antitrust review. As The Journal notes, companies are required...
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Following rumors that Humane is hunting for a potential buyer for its AI Pin business, a new report suggests that HP may be a contender. According to The New York Times, Humane started talking to HP about selling itself for more than $1 billion around a week after reviews emerged that widely panned its $699 wearable AI computer pin.That figure is also reflective of a similar report from Bloomberg last month that said the Humane is “seeking a price of between $750 million and $1 billion.” It also isn’t inconceivable for HP, which previously...
Because there simply aren’t enough AI-powered chatbots out there, we’re getting one more. This one, called AI Chat, comes courtesy of DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine that obviously doesn’t want to feel left behind in the AI arms race. The company has been testing AI Chat over the last few months, but as of today, it’s available to everyone.Unlike other standalone bots like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT that are powered by their own large language models, DuckDuckGo’s AI Chat is not. Instead, think of it as a way to access multiple chatbots in a single place...
Over half of Americans wear corrective glasses or contact lenses. While there isn’t a shortage of low-cost and luxury frames available online or in stores, consumers can only buy them with a current eyeglass prescription. That means that they first need an eye exam from an optometrist to receive that prescription. But, due to a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
BNN Breaking had millions of readers, an international team of journalists and a publishing deal with Microsoft. But it was just an A.I. chop shop.
Artificial intelligence systems are increasingly being used to help test new drugs and chemicals.
If the wave of overwhelmingly negative reviews weren’t enough, it seems that Humane has discovered yet another major issue with its once-hyped AI Pin. The company is warning customers not to use the device’s charging case due to a potential “fire safety risk.”In an email sent to AI Pin owners, the company said it had received a report of a “charging issue” that led to “a quality issue with the battery cell supplied by a third-party vendor used in your Charge Case Accessory.” Humane didn’t explicitly indicate whether the unspecified “charging issue” caused an actual fire...
French AI startup Mistral is introducing new AI model customization options, including paid plans, to let developers — and enterprises — fine-tune its generative models for particular use cases. The first is self-service. Mistral has released a software development kit (SDK), Mistral-Finetune, for fine-tuning its models on workstations, servers and small datacenter nodes. In the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The warning for the Ai Pin was issued “out of an abundance of caution,” according to Humane. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Stability AI, the startup behind the AI-powered art generator Stable Diffusion, has released an open AI model for generating sounds and songs that it claims was trained exclusively on royalty-free recordings. Called Stable Audio Open, the generative model, trained using ~486,000 samples from free music libraries FreeSound and the Free Music Archive, takes a text […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Animating a 3D character from scratch is generally both laborious and expensive, requiring the use of complex software and motion capture tools. Cartwheel wants to make basic animations as simple as describing them, generating a basic movement with AI and letting creators focus on more expressive tasks. “There hasn’t been a lot of new stuff […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Wix, the platform known chiefly for its web design tools, is launching a generative AI feature that’ll let customers create and edit iOS or Android apps by describing what they want to see in plain English. Set to arrive in Wix’s app builder tool this week, the capability guides users through a chatbot-like interface to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Nothing Phone 3 could have a very different homescreen. | Image: Nothing Nothing CEO Carl Pei just published a video in which he makes two big claims: that smartphones are in fact the AI gadget of the future and that AI might change the way we use those phones. “People love their phones!” Pei says in the video. But “the user experience hasn’t really changed for a really long time.” Everything’s faster, prettier, and easier, he says, “but the fundamental experience hasn’t changed.” Pei now thinks that’s about to change.I should note that Pei does casually mention the...
ClickUp Knowledge Management combines a new wiki-like editor and with a new AI system that can also bring in data from Google Drive, Dropbox, Confluence, Figma and other sources.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google’s newest startup program, announced on Wednesday, aims to bring AI technology to the public sector. The newly launched “Google for Startups AI Academy: American Infrastructure” will offer participants hands-on training from AI experts and other support for companies solving problems in areas like agriculture, energy, education, public safety, healthcare, telecommunications, transportation, urban development, and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
eBay’s newest AI feature allows sellers to replace image backgrounds with AI-generated backdrops. The tool is now available for iOS users in the U.S., U.K., and Germany. It’ll gradually roll out to Android users over the coming months. Following in Amazon’s and Google’s footsteps, the e-commerce company announced on Tuesday the launch of its new […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve tried every to-do list app and productivity system, only to find yourself giving up sooner than later because sooner than later, managing your productivity system becomes another drain on your productivity. Hoop, a productivity startup founded by a group of early Trello employees, wants to use AI to help […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Taloflow, an early stage startup changing the way companies evaluate and select software, has raised $1.3M in a seed round.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Asana is using its work graph to train LLMs with the goal of creating AI assistants that work alongside human employees in company workflows.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 in October 2025, but the company is now taking the unusual step of reopening its beta program for Windows 10 to test new features and improvements. Windows 10 already got the AI Copilot feature that was originally exclusive to Windows 11, and it may well get other features soon. “To bring new features and more improvements to Windows 10 as needed, we need a place to do active feature development with Windows Insiders,” explains Microsoft’s Windows Insider team in a blog post. “So today, we are opening the Beta...
If the Pixel 8A at $499 was a great value before, it’s astronomically so at around $250. | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge We’re only a couple of weeks removed from Google I/O, where the tech giant gave us a glimpse of all the fun Gemini AI features coming to Android, Chrome, and its web products. Now, it’s giving you a chance to save big money on the devices that are guaranteed to take full advantage of them. One of the biggest highlights from Google’s summer sale saves you 50 percent on an unlocked Pixel 8A when you buy a Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro, or Pixel Fold. That would bring the...
A group of current and former employees from leading AI companies like OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic have signed an open letter asking for greater transparency and protection from retaliation for those who speak out about the potential concerns of AI. “So long as there is no effective government oversight of these corporations, current and former employees are among the few people who can hold them accountable to the public,” the letter, which was published on Tuesday, says. “Yet broad confidentiality agreements block us from voicing our concerns, except to the very companies that...
Answers that are factually "wrong" are only part of the problem.
Databricks, the analytics and AI giant, has acquired data management company Tabular for an undisclosed sum. According to Tabular co-founder Ryan Blue, he and Tabular’s other two co-founders, Daniel Weeks and Jason Reid, will be joining Databricks in some capacity. There, they’ll work to unify Tabular’s and Databrick’s customer bases and communities. “Joining Databricks means […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It's unusual for three major AI providers to all be down at the same time, which could signal a broader infrastructure issues or internet-scale problem.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Raspberry Pi 5, the small-but-mighty computer that has become quite popular with tech hobbyists and industrial companies, is now also an AI computer. The company just released the AI Kit, a $70 extension kit with a neural network inference accelerator that can be used for local inferencing. For this new extension module, Raspberry Pi […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta Connect 2024 will take place on September 25 and 26 and "explore the future of AI and mixed reality," the company announced on X. Last year, Meta used the event to launch its latest Quest 3 headset, Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and more. This year may be even busier. In April, Meta teased a limited-edition Xbox-inspired Quest headset and announced that it was rebranding Quest OS to Meta Horizon OS. It also opened up the OS to third parties and said that both Lenovo and ASUS were working on AR devices. Meta could also reveal a more affordable "Quest 3S" headset, according to a recent...
Image: Samsung Samsung has added some additional features to the new OLED G8 gaming monitor it announced back in January, including safeguards against OLED burn-in and AI-powered resolution upscaling for content and games.Preorders for the display are already available in regions like Australia and Singapore, suggesting that a US launch isn’t far behind. Best Buy lists the 32-inch Odyssey OLED G8 (model G80SD) for $1,299.99 — making it a smidge cheaper than the first $1,499.99 OLED gaming monitor Samsung released last year — and Samsung currently has a countdown timer teasing its “new...
GetWhy helps businesses carry out market studies and extract insights from video-based interviews using AI. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
If content is king, then the focus today is on how the king is expanding the empire: print and traditional media first got augmented by websites, and now websites are being augmented by an exponential landscape of apps, social media platforms, new kinds of screens, and content created not by humans, but by, artificial intelligence. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Intel recently revealed that its upcoming Lunar Lake chips would be available this fall for Copilot+ AI PCs, but the company waited until Computex to give us more technical details. For one, they'll offer up to 48 TOPs (tera operations per second) of AI performance, thanks to an updated neural processing unit (NPU). In comparison, Intel's previous Meteor Lake chips sported a 10 TOPS NPU, while AMD announced its Ryzen AI 300 chips yesterday with 50 TOPS NPUs. The AI race is on, if you couldn't tell.Intel will once again have to play catch up in the AI PC space: AMD's Ryzen AI 300...
The idea of an AI beauty pageant might seem laughable or grotesque, depending on who you ask. But the World AI Creator Awards reflects something deeper about modern influencer culture.
As WWDC 2024 nears, all sorts of rumors and leaks have emerged about what iOS 18 and its AI-powered apps and features have in store.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon’s Project PI, or “Private Investigator,” setup combines generative AI and computer vision to “see” damage on products or determine if they are the wrong color or size before the item gets sent to customers.The way it works is that products on their way to customers go through a tunnel that scans the items. The computer vision program — a type of AI that looks at images and understands what’s in them — checks to see if there is damage. If it finds something, that item is isolated, while the system evaluates the defect and determines...
The company has been sued by at least seven creditors, including Wells Fargo.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Commerce platform Shopify has acquired Checkout Blocks, allowing Shopify Plus merchants to make no-code customizations in their checkout to enhance customer experience and potentially boost sales. Checkout Blocks, which debuted on Shopify in September 2022, lets merchants customize their checkout by adding things such as AI recommendations, custom content (like information banners, images, headlines, and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Cloudera, the once high flying Hadoop startup, raised $1 billion and went public in 2018 before being acquired by private equity for $5.3 billion 2021. Today, the company announced that it is acquiring Verta, an AI startup that helps customers manage machine learning models, including large language models used in generative AI. Cloudera, which launched […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo illustration by The Verge / Photo: Zoom Zoom founder Eric Yuan has big ambitions in enterprise software, including letting your AI-powered ‘digital twins’ attend meetings for you. Continue reading…
If you've ever wanted an AI assistant to do make sure your PC is optimized for whatever game you're playing, NVIDIA may have the answer. The company is showing off a new demo called G-Assist, a GeForce-powered AI chatbot that might one day help reduce the more tedious aspects of gaming. G-Assist performs a couple of key functions around both setup and directly in games. In a demo running inside ARK: Survival Ascended, NVIDIA shows it answering queries like "what's the next early game weapon and where do I find the crafting materials for it." In response, it points out that the best one is...
Image: Microsoft Microsoft is about to launch a new AI-powered Recall feature that screenshots everything you do on your PC. Recall is part of the new Copilot Plus PCs that are debuting on June 18th, but experts who have tested the feature are already warning that Recall could be a “disaster” for cybersecurity.Recall is designed to use local AI models to screenshot everything you see or do on your computer and then give you the ability to search and retrieve anything in seconds. There’s even an explorable timeline you can scroll through. Everything in Recall is designed to remain local...
The first crewed launch of Boeing’s Starliner was scrubbed less than four minutes before liftoff after a computer failed to launch the correct countdown. It’s the squillionth setback for the craft, (our math may be out a little) which should support the next generation of spaceflight. NASA says it’ll target June 5 for its next launch attempt. At this point, we’ll believe it when we see it.— Dan CooperThe biggest stories you might have missedThis tool unlocks Windows’ AI-powered Recall feature for unsupported PCsMarvel’s “What If...?” for Apple Vision Pro looks incredible, but...
Ashby consolidates existing talent acquisition tools and leans heavily on AI to automate the more repetitive steps in the recruitment pipeline.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
World-famous photographer and environmentalist Ansel Adams (pictured, 1983) is best known for his black-and-white landscape photographs. | Photo by Barbara Alper/Getty Images Adobe found itself in hot water this weekend after the Ansel Adams estate publicly scolded the company for selling generative AI imitations of the late photographer’s work. On Friday, Adams’ estate posted a screenshot to Threads showing AI-generated images available on Adobe Stock that were labeled as “Ansel Adams-style,” telling Adobe it was “officially on our last nerve with this behavior.”While Adobe permits...
Early attempts at making dedicated hardware to house artificial intelligence smarts have been criticized as, well, a bit rubbish. But here’s an AI gadget-in-the-making that’s all about rubbish, literally: Finnish startup Binit is applying large language models’ (LLMs) image processing capabilities to tracking household trash. AI for sorting the stuff we throw away to boost […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge It sounds like Apple’s WWDC plans go beyond sprinkling AI fairy dust on everything (though that’s going to be a big part of it, too). Besides Siri gaining new AI-powered app control, the company also plans to overhaul things like the Settings apps for iOS and macOS, Control Center, Messages, Mail, and more.A new, “cleaner” Settings app UI will mean better organization and improved search, Mark Gurman writes in his Power On Newsletter for Bloomberg today. He adds that a similar revamp is also coming to the macOS System Settings app. Apple will...
G-Assist is a real tech demo from Nvidia. | Image: Nvidia When Nvidia first announced G-Assist it was an April Fools’ prank in 2017 that joked about an AI assistant being able to help you play a game while you ran to the door for your pizza delivery. Now, seven years later, G-Assist is back as a real demo of a powerful GeForce AI assistant that Nvidia might eventually bring to life for game developers and RTX GPU owners.Project G-Assist is only a tech demonstration right now, but it’s a brief look at how an AI assistant could guide you through PC games and even configure optimal settings...
Nvidia leans into RTX AI PCs. | Image: Nvidia Nvidia and AMD are gearing up to launch gaming laptops that include the AI Copilot Plus features that Microsoft just announced for Qualcomm-powered laptops. At Computex today, Nvidia briefly teased that “RTX AI PC” laptops are on the way from Asus and MSI that will eventually include Copilot Plus PC features.“Newly announced RTX AI PC laptops from ASUS and MSI feature up to GeForce RTX 4070 GPUs and power-efficient systems-on-a-chip with Windows 11 AI PC capabilities,” says Nvidia in a blog post. Nvidia confirmed to The Verge in a briefing...
VCs are clamoring to invest in hot AI companies, willing to pay exorbitant share prices for coveted spots on their cap tables. Even so, most aren’t able to get into such deals at all. Yet, small, unknown investors, including family offices and high-net-worth individuals, have found their own way to get shares of the hottest […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. By the way, TechCrunch plans to launch an AI newsletter […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
During its Copilot AI and Surface event in May, Microsoft unveiled Recall, an AI-powered feature for Windows created to help you find anything you've ever looked at on your PC. The feature, Microsoft said, is exclusively available on the recently launched and future Copilot+ PCs, which are devices that come with onboard neural processing units (NPUs) for AI tasks. Now, someone using the pseudonym Albacore has released a console Windows app on Github called Amperage that will allow users to run Recall even on older computers that the feature doesn't officially support. The tool can...
Late Friday afternoon, a time window companies usually reserve for unflattering disclosures, AI startup Hugging Face said that its security team earlier this week detected “unauthorized access” to Spaces, Hugging Face’s platform for creating, sharing and hosting AI models and resources. In a blog post, Hugging Face said that the intrusion related to Spaces secrets, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google rushed out fixes after its AI search feature made errors that went viral. Fundamental limitations of generative AI mean that it will still screw up sometimes.
Google is embarrassed about its AI Overviews, too. After a deluge of dunks and memes over the past week, which cracked on the poor quality and outright misinformation that arose from the tech giant’s underbaked new AI-powered search feature, the company on Thursday issued a mea culpa of sorts. Google — a company whose name […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge If you’ve been on the Facebook app lately, you might’ve seen Meta’s AI inject itself into the comment section with summaries of what people say. Given how wild Facebook comment sections often become, it’s not hard to imagine how ridiculous some of these summaries turn out. (This isn’t the first time Meta’s AI has appeared in the comment section, by the way: 404 Media spotted it pretending to be a parent in a Facebook group.)After seeing screenshots of the feature shared on Threads and Reddit, I decided to check the comment sections on my...
With over 60 countries holding elections in 2024, deepfakes and robocalls are being used to manipulate voters across the world. WIRED is tracking every instance of AI interference during this critical election year.
The Tribeca Film Festival will debut five short films made by AI, as detailed by The Hollywood Reporter. The shorts will use OpenAI’s Sora model, which transforms text inputs into create video clips. This is the first time this type of technology will take center stage at the long-running film festival.“Tribeca is rooted in the foundational belief that storytelling inspires change. Humans need stories to thrive and make sense of our wonderful and broken world,” said co-founder and CEO of Tribeca Enterprises Jane Rosenthal. Who better to chronicle our wonderful and broken world than some...
We caught up with Antler founder and CEO Magnus Grimeland about the startup scene in Asia, the current tech startup trends in the region, and investment approaches during the rise of AI technology.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple is working on a version of its Siri voice assistant that will use advanced AI powered by large language models (LLMs), Bloomberg has reported. The technology will allow users to perform specific app functions with their voices, such as opening documents, sending emails and more. The new version of Siri will only work on Apple's own apps to start with. It won't arrive with iOS 18 but may be released subsequently as an update early next year, the report states.The assistant will be able to analyze your phone's activity and automatically enable Siri-controlled features. It'll support "...
This week, Devindra and Engadget's Nathan Ingraham discuss the new Max documentary "MoviePass, MovieCrash" and reminisce about the early days of that wild startup. It was a huge mess in the end, but we wouldn't have subscription plans in theaters without it. We also chat with MoviePass co-founder Stacy Spikes, as well as the documentary's director, Muta'Ali, about the film.In other news, Nate explains why Google is adding a slew of AI features to Chromebook Plus notebooks, and we dive into the Fitbit Ace with LTE, which has the potential to be a very useful smartwatch tracker for kids.Listen...
OpenAI released GPT-4o, its latest chatbot technology, in a partly finished state. It has much to prove.
The 2024 election is likely to be the first in which faked audio and video of candidates is a serious factor. As campaigns warm up, voters should be aware: voice clones of major political figures, from the President on down, get very little pushback from AI companies, as a new study demonstrates. The Center for […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI said that it stopped five covert influence operations over the last three months that used its AI models for deceptive activities across the internet. These operations, which originated from Russia, China, Iran and Israel, attempted to manipulate public opinion and influence political outcomes without revealing their true identities or intentions, the company said on Thursday. “As of May 2024, these campaigns do not appear to have meaningfully increased their audience engagement or reach as a result of our services,” OpenAI said in a report about the operation, and added that it...
The FCC has floated a requirement that AI-generated content be disclosed in political ads — but not banned. Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel made the official proposal Wednesday that the FCC investigate and seek comment on such a rule. (The agency already ruled AI-generated robocalls illegal, but that was more about them not conforming to automated call […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images The chair of the Federal Communications Commission introduced a proposal Wednesday that could require political advertisers to disclose when they use AI-generated content on radio and TV ads.If the proposal is implemented, the FCC will seek comment on whether to require on-air and written disclosure of AI-generated content in political ads and will propose to apply these disclosure requirements to certain mediums. In a press release, the FCC notes that the disclosure requirements wouldn’t prohibit such content but would...
Not everyone is a fan of AI Overviews. | Screenshot: Emma Roth / The Verge If you’ve searched for something on Google lately, you might’ve noticed a wall of text that appears before the actual search results. This feature, called AI Overviews, offers an AI-generated answer to certain queries. But it also pushes your list of links further down the page, which makes it a bit annoying to scroll past when you want to do your own research — and it will get even more annoying once Google starts stuffing ads into it.But even though Google doesn’t let you disable the feature, there are a few...
It’s been a busy week for AI policymakers. The EU has sealed the deal on its AI Act. Meanwhile, in Seoul, South Korea, 16 world-leading companies have signed the “Frontier AI Safety Commitments,” and a group of countries have promised to work together on mitigating risks associated with the technology. To say that the past year was the one when the world woke up to AI would be an understatement. The launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 catapulted a previously behind-the-scenes technology into conversations around the dinner table and parliamentary halls alike. And all of a sudden, an...
AI has already started replacing voice agents’ jobs. Now, companies are exploring ways to replace the existing computer-generated voice models with synthetic versions of human voices. Truecaller, the widely known caller ID service, is the latest to take this approach with its announcement that it will now allow customers to use its AI-powered Assistant to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Amazon Echo Show 8 is an Alexa-enabled smart speaker. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge It’s no secret that Amazon is busy overhauling Alexa with generative AI, but a new report from CNBC reveals that the company plans to make people pay extra for it. When Amazon launches its “more conversational” version of Alexa to the public later this year, the company will reportedly make users pay for a subscription separate from its $139 membership to Prime.This isn’t the first we’ve heard of Amazon charging a subscription for Alexa. Last year, David Limp, Amazon’s former...
A dodgy email containing a link that looks “legit” but is actually malicious remains one of the most dangerous, yet successful, tricks in a cyber criminal’s handbook. Now, an AI startup called Bolster that has built a novel approach to tackle that trick has raised $14 million in funding to expand its work, both across […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
TikTok is the latest tech company to incorporate generative AI into its ads business, as the company announced on Tuesday that it’s launching a new “TikTok Symphony” AI suite for brands. The tools will help marketers write scripts, produce videos, and enhance current assets. The suite includes a new AI video generator called the “Symphony […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
These days every company is trying to figure out if their large language models are compliant with whatever rules they deem important, and with legal or regulatory requirements. If you’re in a regulated industry, the need is even more acute. Perhaps that’s why Patronus AI is finding early success in the marketplace. On Wednesday, the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Yet more major funding is being poured into a startup focused on AI. Today, DeepL – the company that builds automated text translation and writing tools that compete against the likes of Google Translate and Grammarly – announced that it’s raised an additional $300 million. It is now valued at $2 billion, post-money. This round […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Praktika has secured a $35.5M Series A round to apply AI-powered avatars to language-learning apps.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Humane, the company behind the hyped Ai Pin that launched to less-than-glowing reviews last month, is reportedly on the hunt for a buyer.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Individuals and organizations are still struggling with how and how much to integrate AI into daily life. Rarely has that been more clear than a case out of Emory University in which the school went from awarding students with an entrepreneurship prize worth $10,000 for their AI-powered studying tool to suspending them for it, 404 Media reports. No, the students didn't suddenly misuse the tool, known as Eightball, in any way; they did just as they said they would, and all the while, Emory promoted them — until they didn't.Eightball allowed students to turn any coursework or readings...
Government officials and AI industry executives agreed on Tuesday to apply elementary safety measures in the fast-moving field, and establish an international safety research network. Nearly six months after the inaugural global summit on AI safety at Bletchley Park in England, Britain and South Korea are hosting the AI safety summit this week in Seoul. The […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images A Wisconsin software engineer was arrested on Monday for allegedly creating and distributing thousands of AI-generated images of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Court documents describe Steven Anderegg as “extremely technologically savvy,” with a background in computer science and “decades of experience in software engineering.” Anderegg, 42, is accused of sending AI-generated images of naked minors to a 15-year-old boy via Instagram DM. Anderegg was put on law enforcement’s radar after the National Center for...
Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge Microsoft launched a range of Copilot Plus PCs yesterday that includes new AI features built directly into Windows 11. Behind the scenes, the company now has more than 40 AI models running on Windows 11 thanks to a new Windows Copilot Runtime that will also allow developers to use these models for their apps.At Microsoft Build today, the company is providing a lot more details about exactly how this Windows Copilot Runtime works. The runtime includes a library of APIs that developers can tap into for their own apps, with AI frameworks and toolchains that are...
Illustration: The Verge Google only just rolled out AI summaries in search results — and now they’re getting ads. In an update on Tuesday, Google says it will soon start testing search and shopping ads within AI overviews for users in the US.In the example shared by Google, the search engine’s AI overview lists a response to the question: “how do I get wrinkles out of clothes?” Beneath the AI-generated suggestions, there’s a new “Sponsored” section with a carousel showing wrinkle spray you can buy from places like Walmart and Instacart. GIF: Google Google says it will display...
Microsoft demo is like chatting with GameFAQs when you don't have a friend to hang with.
Generative AI makes stuff up. It can be biased. Sometimes, it spits out toxic text. So can it be “safe”? Rick Caccia, the CEO of WitnessAI, believes it can. “Securing AI models is a real problem, and it’s one that’s especially shiny for AI researchers, but it’s different from securing use,” Caccia, formerly SVP of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows in a transparent shell; most if not all units will be black. | Image: Qualcomm Excited for an era of long-lasting powerful Windows laptops with Arm chips and 45 TOPS for AI but would rather pay less and plug into the wall? Qualcomm has just revealed a Mac Mini-esque box that’s ostensibly just for developers. The new $899.99 “Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows” houses the most powerful of Qualcomm’s lineup of Snapdragon X Elite chips — the one with the 4.6 TFLOP GPU — as well as 32GB of LPDDR5x RAM, 512GB of NVMe storage, and lots of ports, all within...
At this year's Build event, Microsoft has announced Team Copilot, and as you can probably guess from its name, it's a variant of the company's AI tool that can cater to the needs of a group of users. It expands Copilot's abilities beyond that of a personal assistant, so that it can serve a whole team, a department or even an entire organization, the company said in its announcement. The new tool was designed to take on time-consuming tasks to free up personnel, such as managing meeting agenda and taking down minutes that group members can tweak as needed. The new Copilot...
The UK’s data protection watchdog has closed an almost year-long investigation of Snap’s AI chatbot, My AI — saying it’s satisfied the social media firm has addressed concerns about risks to children’s privacy. At the same time, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) issued a general warning to industry to be proactive about assessing risks to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Alchemist Accelerator has a new pile of AI-forward companies demoing their wares today, if you care to watch, and the program itself is making some international moves into Tokyo and Doha. Read on for our picks of the batch. Chatting with Alchemist CEO and founder Ravi Belani ahead of demo day (today at 10:30 Pacific) […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Promise not to deploy AIs if severe risks cannot be addressed and mitigated.
Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge We’ve heard the story so many times, that this is the time that Windows on Arm will work and we’ll get a revolution in powerful, portable, long-lasting PCs. For a decade, the story has been fiction. This time, though... I don’t know. It sort of seems real.On this episode of The Vergecast, Tom Warren joins from Seattle to tell us all about Microsoft’s latest event, what a Copilot Plus PC is, how the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop feel, why Recall could be the AI killer app Microsoft needs, and more. If Microsoft is right about how good the Qualcomm X...
US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo says the US is collaborating with other countries including the UK, Japan, and Canada to manage the risks posed by artificial intelligence.
Scale AI, a company that provides data-labeling services for training machine learning models, has raised a $1 billion Series F round from a slew of big-name institutional and corporate investors including Amazon and Meta. The raise, which constitutes a mix of primary and secondary funding, comes amid a boom in AI venture capital megarounds, with […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It's a wrap: European Union lawmakers have given the final approval to set up the bloc's flagship, risk-based regulations for artificial intelligence.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Copilot, Microsoft's brand of generative AI, will soon be far more deeply integrated into the Windows 11 experience.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Copilot, Microsoft's brand of generative AI, will soon be far more deeply integrated into the Windows 11 experience.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft’s 13.8-inch Surface Laptop starts at a cool $999.99. | Image: Microsoft It feels like forever ago that we got new Surface laptops, but Microsoft has taken the wraps off a handful of 2024 refreshes at its hardware event on Monday. We’re getting consumer-centric versions of the newest Surface Laptop and Surface Pro, both starting at $999.99 and launching June 18th. Microsoft calls the Copilot Plus PCs “the most powerful Windows PCs ever built.” They’ll be first in line to benefit from Windows 11’s next-gen AI features, which we expect to hear about during Microsoft’s...
Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge Microsoft has just announced a new Surface Pro, which is part of the new wave of Copilot Plus PCs. The new Pro, which is technically the “11th edition,” starts at $999, comes in four colors, and is powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X processors. The base model comes with a 13-inch LCD screen, but you can upgrade to an OLED in some of the higher-end models. The chip is the star of the show here: it’s what enables a lot of the AI features Microsoft touted onstage, what makes possible the 14-hour battery life Microsoft promises, and more.The basic...
What if you could run an entire Windows PC on a mobile Arm-based chip, bringing the power efficiency and thinner designs from smartphones and tablets to laptops? If you've been paying attention to Microsoft's PC strategy over the past two decades, this song probably sounds familiar. From the original Surface in 2012 (running Windows RT for Arm devices) to the recent Surface Pro 9 5G, Microsoft has chipped away at this dream, only to fail miserably every time. Now with its new Copilot+ PC initiative, which includes major upgrades in Windows for Arm systems and AI, Microsoft may finally...
Microsoft's new Surface Pro, its first hybrid Copilot+ PC tablet, doesn't look much different than its predecessors. It's still a sleek and sturdy tablet with a kickstand. But the screen looks a bit more impressive, thanks to slimmer bezels, and it's potentially more useful on the go when paired with the $350 Surface Pro Flex keyboard, which lets you type wirelessly. As a Copilot+ PC though, its true value lies under the hood, thanks to a 45TOPS neural processing unit in Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips. Developing... Catch up on all the news from...
We knew more computers were coming that would feature a native version of Microsoft’s AI Copilot toolset, but we didn’t quite know how many were set to be announced. It’s practically an AI avalanche. Companies like Dell, Acer and HP have all just announced computers that have adopted Microsoft’s AI software and NVIDIA’s AI hardware. The age of the AI PC is upon us.These Copilot+ PCs could really change how we interact with computers, bringing natural language nuance to a bevy of everyday tasks. The PCs all feature a dedicated key to bring up Copilot and are stuffed with Arm-based...
Microsoft just couldn't wait until its Build developer conference properly starts tomorrow to drop some knowledge bombs. The company held a pre-Build event on Monday that wasn't livestreamed for the public, but it made some major announcements on the AI and Surface fronts.Its vision for so-called AI PCs is taking shape with Copilot+ PCs, which are designed to run many generative AI processes locally instead of in the cloud. Along with its own Surface systems that will adopt this format, several other manufacturers are making Copilot+ PCs too. Microsoft also detailed some of the upcoming...
Image: Allison Johnson Microsoft just wrapped up its special event ahead of Build 2024, and it had a lot of exciting news to share. Along with updates to its Surface lineup, Microsoft also made some major announcements related to AI and a new era of PCs.Microsoft didn’t livestream this event, so if you want to catch up with everything it revealed, check out our roundup below.The launch of Copilot Plus PCs Image: Allison Johnson / The Verge Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed how Microsoft is “bringing the AI wave to PCs,” and that involves a new category of computers called Copilot Plus...
Acer’s Swift 14 AI laptop arrives this summer. | Image: Acer On Monday, Acer announced the pending arrival of its first Copilot Plus PC: the Swift 14 AI, which is the Qualcomm Snapdragon version of one of its popular laptops. It will come in two configurations, and both will support a slate of new AI features in Windows 11, like Recall, Cocreator, and Live Captions.One configuration comes with the base 12-core Snapdragon X Elite processor (the one without dual boost) and the other with the 10-core Snapdragon X Plus. Both have the same 45 TOPS neural processing unit, and both laptop models can...
The OmniBook is on the left and the EliteBook is on the right. | Image by HP Buying a laptop from a major maker like HP can be infuriating — mainly because there are too many options. HP and other laptop makers do this to give us all “choice,” but if you are the kind of person who uses “RAM” and “storage” interchangeably, those choices can be confounding — which might be one reason HP’s using today’s big AI and Windows on Arm moment to also clean up its whole lineup. Gone are the Envys and Pavilions and Dragonflies, and in their places are the consumer-focused OmniBook and...
Illustration: The Verge Google’s data centers are expanding to support its AI ambitions, and a new project in Finland shows one way the company is trying to grapple with the environmental impact of that growth.Google will drop €1 billion (roughly $1.1 billion) to expand its data center in Finland to “further unlock the potential of AI,” the company said in an emailed press release today. It includes plans to reuse heat from the data center to warm nearby homes, schools, and public buildings. Its scramble to inject AI into Search and other products and services could derail the company...
Microsoft's Windows on Arm woes may finally be over. As part of the company's new Copilot+ AI PC initiative, which includes new Surfaces and partner systems running Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips, Microsoft says it has rebuilt core components of Windows 11 to better support Arm-based hardware and AI. That includes a new kernel, compiler, and most importantly, an emulator named "Prism" for running older x86 and x64 apps.You'd be forgiven for being skeptical, though. Since the launch of Windows RT-powered Surface in 2012, Microsoft has proven it can't be trusted to...
Image: The Verge Microsoft’s launching Recall for Windows 11, a new tool that keeps track of everything you see and do on your computer and, in return, gives you the ability to search and retrieve anything you’ve done on the device.The scope of Recall, which Microsoft has internally called AI Explorer, is incredibly vast — it includes logging things you do in apps, tracking communications in live meetings, remembering all websites you’ve visited for research, and more. All you need to do is perform a “Recall” action, which is like an AI-powered search, and it’ll present a snapshot...
Apple vs. PC | Image: Allison Johnson Microsoft is making a major push to put AI into laptops. It’s introducing a new branding called “Copilot Plus PCs” today that’ll highlight when Windows laptops come with built-in AI hardware and support for AI features across the operating system.At an event at its headquarters in Redmond on Monday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that Copilot Plus PCs will be offered by all of its major laptop partners, including Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, HP, Acer, and Asus. The company’s own Surface line will offer Copilot Plus PC models, too. And while the...
When OpenAI showed off GPT-4o's seemingly more-human like voice mode last week, observers were quick to point out that one of ChatGPT's voices sounds like Scarlett Johansson, particularly her character in Her. The company says the similarity between the flirty AI voice Sky (which it actually rolled out in September) and Johansson was unintentional. However, it's "working to pause the use of Sky" while it addresses some questions about the voice."We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity's distinctive voice — Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but...
In a shocking turn of events, AI systems might not be as safe as their creators make them out to be — who saw that coming, right? In a new report, the UK government's AI Safety Institute (AISI) found that the four undisclosed LLMs tested were "highly vulnerable to basic jailbreaks." Some unjailbroken models even generated "harmful outputs" without researchers attempting to produce them.Most publicly available LLMs have certain safeguards built in to prevent them from generating harmful or illegal responses; jailbreaking simply means tricking the model into ignoring those safeguards. AISI...
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes led a tabletop exercise for journalists to role-play as election officials to understand the speed and scale of AI threats they face. | Photo by Ash Ponders for The Verge The job has never been harder, and the threats have never been stranger. Continue reading…
Normally, Microsoft’s Build is a straightforward (often dry) showcase of the company’s software and hardware developments, with a dash of on-stage coding to excite the developer crowd. But this year, the company is likely to make some huge AI moves, following its 2023 debut of ChatGPT-powered Bing Chat. Then, there’s new Surface hardware.In fact, Microsoft has a showcase for new Surfaces and AI in Windows 11 on May 20, while Build actual kicks off a day later. And you know what? The Surface event might be the most impactful.Rumors suggest we’ll see some of the first systems with...
Ahead of the AI safety summit kicking off in Seoul, South Korea later this week, its co-host the United Kingdom is expanding its own efforts in the field. The AI Safety Institute – a U.K. body set up in November 2023 with the ambitious goal of assessing and addressing risks in AI platforms – said […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: David Pierce / The Verge Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 38, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and you can also read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been writing about iPads and the future of Google, watching American Fiction and Bodkin, rewatching Her because of… reasons, endlessly replaying the songs of Windows95man, learning how to make better sandwiches, testing Claude for AI stuff, and listening to the new-old Childish Gambino album.I also have for you a new AI...
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. By the way, TechCrunch plans to launch an AI newsletter […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge At Microsoft’s big AI and Surface event on May 20th, the company takes another shot at Arm Windows PCs. Continue reading…
Illustration: The Verge Jan Leike, a key OpenAI researcher who resigned earlier this week following the departure of cofounder Ilya Sutskever, posted on X Friday morning that “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products” at the company.Leike’s statements came after Wired reported that OpenAI had disbanded the team dedicated to addressing long-term AI risks (called the “Superalignment team”) altogether. Leike had been running the Superalignment team, which formed last July to “solve the core technical challenges” in implementing safety protocols as OpenAI...
I knew what to expect from the Surface Pro 10 for Business the minute Microsoft announced it: A faster processor with a neural processing unit (NPU) inside the same case as the Surface Pro 9. As the first "AI PC" Surface devices, the Pro 10 for Business tablet and its more traditional sibling, the Laptop 6, seemed disappointing. And the fact that you could only buy it on Microsoft's website, or through enterprise resellers, made it seem as if the company was trying to hide its shame.But after testing the Surface Pro 10 tablet (I'll omit the "For Business" part of its name for the rest of the...
Slack is making it difficult for its customers if they want the company to stop using its data for model training.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft won't be facing antitrust scrutiny in the U.K. over its recent investment into French AI startup Mistral AI.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge AI. AI? AI! AI... A. I. This has been a week filled with AI announcements from some of the biggest and most important companies in tech, all of whom seem totally convinced that we’re due for a revolution in virtual assistants. If Silicon Valley gets its way, you might never have to write an email, a line of code, or a joke ever again. All you’ll do is ask your all-knowing, ultra-helpful, maybe slightly too flirty virtual assistant, and it’ll get everything done for you.On this episode of The Vergecast, we discuss all the AI assistant stuff OpenAI announced...
The European Union has warned Microsoft it could be fined up to 1% of its global annual turnover under the bloc’s online governance regime, the Digital Services Act (DSA), after the company failed to respond to a legally binding request for information that focused on its generative AI tools. Back in March the EU asked […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI and Reddit have reached a deal to allow OpenAI to train its generative AI models on Reddit’s data. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, OpenAI said that, through a newly formed partnership with Reddit, it’ll gain access to “real-time, structured and unique content” — e.g. posts and replies — from Reddit, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s executive VP of the Microsoft Cloud and AI group, directly compared Cobalt to AWS’s Graviton chips, which have been available to developers […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission. The letter, which was obtained by TechCrunch, says Sony Music has “reason to believe” that the recipients of the letter have “may already have made […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Winston Chi, Butter's founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that "most parties, including our investors and us, are making money" from the exit.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Ampere and Qualcomm aren’t the most obvious of partners. Both, after all, offer Arm-based chips for running data center servers (though Qualcomm’s largest market remains mobile). But as the two companies announced today, they are now combining forces to offer an AI-focused server that uses Ampere’s CPUs and Qualcomm’s Cloud AI100 Ultra AI inferencing chips […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
At Google’s I/O developer conference, the company made its case to developers – and to some extent, consumers – why its bets on AI are ahead of rivals. At the event, the company unveiled a revamped AI-powered search engine, an AI model with an expanded context window of 2 million tokens, AI helpers across its […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sony has introduced the Xperia 1 VI, the sixth generation of the company’s flagship smartphone that could tempt photography enthusiasts away from rivaling iPhone and Pixel devices. Some of those perks include a true optical zoom, AI-assisted autofocus, and a unified app experience.It has three cameras on the back: a 24mm main camera with a 48-megapixel Sony Exmor T sensor, a 16mm ultrawide, and an 85-170mm variable zoom telephoto camera that provides magnification around 3.5x to 7.1x that of the main camera. The Xperia 1 VI also utilizes this new telephoto camera for its macro mode.The device...
Wind is the largest source of renewable energy in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, but wind farms come with an environmental cost as wind turbines can wreak havoc on bird populations. Meet Spoor, the startup using AI to help wind farms mitigate that risk. Spoor is a software that uses machine […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Samsung Samsung heard that Apple managed to upset a lot of people with the “Crush” ad revealed last week that smushed instruments, arcade games, and sculptures into a shiny new OLED-screened iPad Pro, and apparently just had to get into the conversation. Apple eventually apologized, with an exec saying it “missed the mark.” On one side, responses included creatives like Hugh Grant and anyone who spotted a slightly-too-on-the-nose representation of Big Tech’s steamroller approach to art, copyright, and the past, powered by the might of generative AI tools. On the other there...
A Senate Intelligence Committee hearing today saw broad agreement on how AI and other threats loom ahead of the US election—and uncertainty about how to respond.
A new program, backed by Cornell Tech, M.I.T. and U.C.L.A., helps prepare lower-income, Latina and Black female computing majors for artificial intelligence careers.
Google's video synthesis model creates minute-long 1080p videos from written prompts.
A long-running working group in the Senate has issued its policy recommendation for federal funding for AI: $32 billion yearly, covering everything from infrastructure to grand challenges to national security risk assessments. This “roadmap” is not a bill or detailed policy proposal, but nevertheless it gives a sense of the scale lawmakers and “stakeholders” are […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The emotional mimicry of OpenAI’s new version of ChatGPT could lead AI assistants in some strange—even dangerous—directions.
Back in February, Google paused its AI-powered chatbot Gemini’s ability to generate images of people after users complained of historical inaccuracies. Told to depict “a Roman legion,” for example, Gemini would show an anachronistically diverse group of soldiers, while rendering “Zulu warriors” as uniformly Black. Google CEO Sundar Pichai apologized, and Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of Google’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A feature Google demoed at its I/O confab yesterday, using its generative AI technology to scan voice calls in real-time for conversational patterns associated with financial scams, has sent a collective shiver down the spines of privacy and security experts who are warning the feature represents the thin end of the wedge. They warn that, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google’s going all-in on AI — and it wants you to know it. During the company’s keynote at its I/O developer conference on Tuesday, Google mentioned “AI” more than 120 times. That’s a lot! But not all of Google’s AI announcements were significant per se. Some were incremental. Others were rehashed. So to help sort […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
After shirking tradition and devoting its entire Google I/O keynote to showcase how it’s stuffing AI into everything imaginable, the company has reserved day two to catch up on the one-time star of the show, Android. Alongside the arrival of the second Android 15 beta on Wednesday, Google is unveiling previously unannounced security features in its 2024 mobile software, including AI-powered theft detection, Google Play fraud protection and more.Theft Detection Lock is a new Android 15 feature that will use AI (there it is again) to predict phone thefts and lock things up accordingly. Google...
Photo by Andrew Harnik / Getty Images Four top Senators unveiled a proposed roadmap for artificial intelligence regulation on Wednesday, calling for at least $32 billion to be spent each year for non-defense AI innovation.The members of the AI Working Group — Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Mike Rounds (R-SD), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), and Todd Young (R-IN) — released the long-awaited proposal after months of hosting AI Insight Forums to inform their colleagues about the technology. The events brought in AI experts, including executives like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Google CEO...
Mike Krieger has a long history in tech and AI. | Photo by Jerod Harris / Getty Images for Vox Media As Anthropic tries to take on the AI giants, it has a new big-name executive on board: the company announced this morning that Mike Krieger is its new chief product officer. Krieger, of course, was one of the co-founders of Instagram and spent the last few years working on Artifact, an AI news-reading app that was recently acquired by Yahoo.Krieger will oversee all of Anthropic’s product efforts going forward. It’s an important moment for the company to push hard on product, too: it recently...
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge I’m excited to announce Notepad, a new weekly newsletter I’ll be writing at The Verge. Notepad is an inside look at my notes on Microsoft, a company I’ve spent the past 20 years trying to make sense of through my reporting, scoops, and analyses. This newsletter is designed to uncover the secrets and strategy behind Microsoft’s era-defining bets on AI, gaming, and the future of computing.Whether it’s Windows, a new AI Copilot, the next Xbox, or every Michael at Microsoft being added to a mysterious email list, Notepad is the place to get the very latest...
Image: The Verge Google I/O introduced an AI assistant that can see and hear the world, while OpenAI put its version of a Her-like chatbot into an iPhone. Next week, Microsoft will be hosting Build, where it’s sure to have some version of Copilot or Cortana that understands pivot tables. Then, a few weeks after that, Apple will host its own developer conference, and if the buzz is anything to go by, it’ll be talking about artificial intelligence, too. (Unclear if Siri will be mentioned.)AI is here! It’s no longer conceptual. It’s taking jobs, making a few new ones, and helping millions...
Google boss, Sundar Pichai, wrapped up the company’s I/O developer conference by noting its almost-two-hour presentation had mentioned AI 121 times. It was everywhere.Google’s newest AI model, Gemini 1.5 Flash, is built for speed and efficiency. The company said it created Flash because developers wanted a lighter, less expensive model than Gemini Pro to build AI-powered apps and services.Google says it’ll double Gemini’s context window to two million tokens, enough to process two hours of video, 22 hours of audio, more than 60,000 lines of code or 1.4 million-plus words at the same...
Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images We already know Dell is getting ready to launch a new Arm-powered variant of its popular XPS 13 laptop, but now a confidential document has leaked a lot more details on Dell’s future XPS plans. VideoCardz has obtained and published a 311-page document from Dell that goes into detail on the XPS 13 — that’s due soon — and when we can expect to see Qualcomm’s next-generation chips for Windows on Arm.Qualcomm-powered Snapdragon X Elite laptops look set to debut next week, with Asus announcing it has a new “AI...
Trawa simplifies energy purchasing and management for SMEs by leveraging an AI-powered platform and downstream data from customers. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge This is not a joke: Google will now let you perform a “web” search. It’s rolling out “web” searches now, and in my early tests on desktop, it’s looking like it could be an incredibly popular change to Google’s search engine. It filters out almost all the other blocks of content that Google crams into a search results page, leaving you with links and text — and Google confirms to The Verge that it will block the company’s new AI Overviews as well. “Isn’t every search a web search? What is Google Search if not the web?” you might rightfully ask. But...
One day after OpenAI showed off an all-new, emotional, version of ChatGPT, the company announced that chief scientist Ilya Sutskever is leaving the company. He voted to fire CEO Sam Altman in November.
At I/O 2024, Google’s teaser for Project Astra gave us a glimpse at where AI assistants are going in the future. It’s a multi-modal feature that combines the smarts of Gemini with the kind of image recognition abilities you get in Google Lens, as well as powerful natural language responses. However, while the promo video was slick, after getting to try it out in person, it's clear there’s a long way to go before something like Astra lands on your phone. So here are three takeaways from our first experience with Google’s next-gen AI.Sam’s take:Currently, most people interact with...
As Google revamps itself for the AI era, offering AI overviews within its search results, the company is introducing a new way to filter for just text-based links. With the new “Web” filter that appears at the top of the results page, users will be able to filter for text links the way they can […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We just wrapped up coverage on Google's I/O 2024 keynote, and we're just so tired of hearing about AI. In this bonus episode, Cherlynn and Devindra dive into the biggest I/O news: Google's intriguing Project Astra AI assistant; new models for creating video and images; and some improvements to Gemini AI. While some of the announcements seem potentially useful, it's still tough to tell if the move towards AI will actually help consumers, or if Google is just fighting to stay ahead of OpenAI.Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like...
Mobile app developers, including Patreon and Grammarly, are already integrating with Gemini Nano, its smallest AI model, the company announced during its I/O developer keynote on Tuesday. The companies, along with other select developers were invited to work with Gemini Nano through an early access program announced last year, the company said. In the coming […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google made a lot of noise about its Gemini AI taking over search at its I/O conference today, but one of its flashiest demos was once again marked by the ever-present fatal flaw of every large language model to date: confidently making up the wrong answer.During a sizzle reel for “Search in the Gemini era,” Google demoed video search, which allows you to search by speaking over a video clip. The example is a video of a stuck film advance lever on a film camera with the query “why is the lever not moving all the way,” which Gemini recognizes and provides some suggestions to fix. Very...
Google says it’s developed a new family of generative AI models “fine-tuned” for learning: LearnLM. A collaboration between Google’s DeepMind AI research division and Google Research, LearnLM models — built on top of Google’s Gemini models — are designed to “conversationally” tutor students on a range of subjects, Google says. LearnLM is already powering features […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The official launch comes almost a year after YouTube began experimenting with AI-generated quizzes on its mobile app. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The tech giant showed off how it would enmesh A.I. more deeply into its products and users’ lives, from search to so-called agents that perform tasks.
Image: Google Google I/O just ended — and it was packed with AI announcements. As expected, the event focused heavily on Google’s Gemini AI models, along with the ways they’re being integrated into apps like Workspace and Chrome.If you didn’t get to tune in to the event live, you can catch up with all the latest from Google in the roundup below.Google Lens now lets you search by recording a videoGoogle Lens already lets you search for something based on images, but now Google’s taking things a step further with the ability to search with a video. That means you can take a video of...
It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during its I/O 2024 by its own count. CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap up the presentation, cheekily stating that the company was doing the ‘hard work’ of counting for us. No surprise, of course, that the topic took […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google's Gemini AI systems can do a lot, judging by today's I/O keynote. That includes the option to set up a virtual teammate with its own Workspace account. You can configure the teammate to carry out specific tasks, such as to monitor and track projects, organize information, provide context, pinpoint trends after analyzing data and to play a role in team collaboration.In Google Chat, the teammate can join all relevant rooms and you can ask it questions based on all the conversation histories, Gmail threads and anything else it has access to. It can tell team members whether their...
Google’s gunning for OpenAI’s Sora with Veo, an AI model that can create 1080p video clips around a minute long given a text prompt. Unveiled on Tuesday at Google’s I/O 2024 developer conference, Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage. “We’re exploring […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: The Verge Google is adding a bunch of new features to its Gemini AI, and one of the most powerful is a personalization option called “Gems” that allows users to create custom versions of the Gemini assistant with varying personalties.Gems lets you create iterations of chatbots that can help you with certain tasks and retain specific characteristics, kind of like making your own bot in Character.AI, the service that lets you talk to virtualized versions of popular characters and celebrities or even a fake psychiatrist. Google says you can make Gemini your gym buddy, sous-chef, coding...
This is a great example of a company using generative AI to open its software to more users.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
People can now search using a video they upload combined with a text query to get an AI overview of the answers they need.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As part of its push toward adding generative AI to search, Google has introduced a new twist: video. Gemini will let you upload video that demonstrates an issue you're trying to resolve, then scour user forums and other areas of the internet to find a solution. As an example, Google's Rose Yao talked onstage at I/O 2024 about a used turntable she bought and how she couldn't get the needle to sit on the record. Yao uploaded a video showing the issue, then Gemini quickly found an explainer describing how to balance the arm on that particular make and model. Google"Search is...
As Google starts to make its latest video-generation tools available, the company says it has a plan to ensure transparency around the origins of its increasingly realistic AI-generated clips. All video made by the company’s new Veo model in the VideoFX app will have digital watermarks thanks to Google’s SynthID system.SynthID is Google’s digital watermarking system that started rolling out to AI-generated images last year. The tech embeds imperceptible watermarks into AI-made content so that AI detection tools can recognize that the content was generated by AI. Considering that Veo, the...
A search results page based on generative AI as its ranking mechanism will have wide-reaching consequences for online publishers. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google has built a custom Gemini model for search to combine real-time information, Google's ranking, long context and multimodal features.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
At its Google I/O developer conference, Google on Tuesday announced the next generation of its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) AI chips. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google is upgrading Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot, with features aimed at making the experience more ambient and contextually useful.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Veo can generate few-seconds-long 1080p video clips given a text prompt.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
At Google I/O, Google announced upgrades to Gemini 1.5 Pro, including a bigger context window. .© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It's all AI all the time at Google I/O! Today, Google announced its new AI media creation engines: Veo, which can produce "high-quality" 1080p videos; and Imagen 3, its latest text-to-image framework. Neither sound particularly revolutionary, but they're a way for Google to keep up the fight against OpenAI's Sora video model and Dall-E 3, a tool that has practically become synonymous with AI-generated images.Google claims Veo has "an advanced understanding of natural language and visual semantics" to create whatever video you have in mind. The AI generated videos can last "beyond a...
On the heels of OpenAI announcing the latest iteration of its GPT large language model, its biggest rival in generative AI in the U.S. announced an expansion of its own. Anthropic said Monday that Claude, its AI assistant, is now live in Europe with support for “multiple languages,” including French, German, Italian and Spanish across […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It’s no secret that Meta is eager to prove itself as an AI company, and it might be eyeing a new hardware project to help it get there. The company is in the early stages of “exploring” designs for AI-enabled headphones, according to a new report in The Information.The company is reportedly calling it “Camerabuds,” because the headphones or earbuds (the company is considering both designs) would have two outward-facing cameras that would be able to detect the wearer’s surroundings and power real-time AI features. In that way, it sounds a but like what the company has done with the...
PauseAI protests are underway in London, New York, San Francisco, and across the globe. Its members have wildly different opinions on what the group should do next.
OpenAI has unveiled a new, faster version of its generative AI tool, ChatGPT.
Chatbots, image generators and voice assistants are gradually merging into a single technology with a conversational voice.
OpenAI is releasing a new flagship generative AI model called GPT-4o, set to roll out “iteratively” across the company’s products over the next few weeks. OpenAI CTO Muri Murati said that GPT-4o provides “GPT-4-level” intelligence but improves on GPT-4’s capabilities across text and vision as well as audio. “GPT-4o reasons across voice, text and vision,” […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
UK-based Arm, one of the world’s key players in the chip market, is reportedly planning to expand into the development of AI chips. Arm designs the building architecture for chips (mainly) in consumer electronics, which it licenses to semiconductor giants such as Qualcomm and Nvidia. The company claims that its technology is powering 99% of premium smartphones on the market. Japanese SoftBank Group holds a 90% stake in the chip designer.The move towards AI chips is part of SoftBank’s ambition to become a force in artificial intelligence, Nikkei Asia reports. According to the paper, Arm...
AI-powered tools like OpenAI’s Whisper have enabled many apps to make transcription an integral part of their feature set for personal note-taking, and the space has quickly flourished as a result. Apps like AudioPen, Cleft Notes, and TalkNotes have proliferated across app stores and the Internet, but most offer a pretty limited feature set: They […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Bumble founder and executive chair Whitney Wolfe Herd raised eyebrows this week with her comments about how AI might change the dating experience. During an onstage interview, Bloomberg’s Emily Chang brought up bots posing as real people, or real people falling in love with bots, as examples of how AI might make online dating worse. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The U.K. Safety Institute, the U.K.’s recently established AI safety body, has released a toolset designed to “strengthen AI safety” by making it easier for industry, research organizations and academia to develop AI evaluations. Called Inspect, the toolset — which is available under an open source license, specifically an MIT License — aims to assess certain […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge OpenAI has been showing some of its customers a new multimodal AI model that can both talk to you and recognize objects, according to a new report from The Information. Citing unnamed sources who’ve seen it, the outlet says this could be part of what the company plans to show on Monday.The new model reportedly offers faster, more accurate interpretation of images and audio than what its existing separate transcription and text-to-speech models can do. It would apparently be able to help customer service agents “better understand the intonation of callers’ voices or...
Google’s annual developer conference kicks off on Tuesday. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The past few months have made one thing crystal clear: phones remain undefeated.The AI gadgets that were supposed to save us from our phones have arrived woefully underbaked — whatever illusions we might have held that the Humane AI pin or the Rabbit R1 were going to offer any kind of salve for the constant rug burn of dealing with our personal tech is gone. Hot Gadget Spring is over and developer season is upon us, starting with Google I/O this coming Tuesday. It also happens to be a...
AI startup Anthropic is changing its policies to allow minors to use its generative AI tools — in certain circumstances, at least. Announced in a post on the company’s official blog Friday, Anthropic will begin letting teens and preteens use third-party apps (but not its own apps, necessarily) powered by its AI models so long […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. By the way, TechCrunch plans to launch an AI newsletter […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
CoreWeave has formally opened an office in London that will serve as its European headquarters and home to two new data centers.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Stanford’s holographic AR glasses prototype. | Image: Andrew Brodhead / Stanford A research team at Stanford is developing a new AI-assisted holographic imaging technology it claims is thinner, lighter, and higher quality than anything its researchers have seen. Could it take augmented reality (AR) headsets to the next level? For now, the lab version has an anemic field of view — just 11.7 degrees in the lab, far smaller than a Magic Leap 2 or even a Microsoft HoloLens. But Stanford’s Computational Imaging Lab has an entire page with visual aid after visual aid that suggests it could be...
Google I/O kicks off on Tuesday May 14 with a 10AM PT keynote. As ever, the presentation will offer glimpses into the latest versions of the company’s software platforms, including Android, Wear OS and Android TV. Also expect a lot of AI. Like, a lot-a lot. Gemini will be taking centerstage alongside CEO Sundar Pichai, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Paris-based Mistral AI, a startup working on open source Large Language Models — the building block for generative AI services — has been raising money at a $6 billion valuation, three times its valuation in December, to compete more keenly against the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, TechCrunch has learned from multiple sources. We understand […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
You can expect plenty of AI, but probably not a lot of hardware. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Israeli startup has raised $5.5M for its platform that uses "statistical AI" to generate synthetic data that it says is as good as the real thing.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hydrow, the at-home rowing machine, announced Thursday that it has acquired a majority stake in Speede Fitness, the company behind the AI-enabled strength training machine. The rowing startup also announced that CEO and founder Bruce Smith will step down, and President and CFO John Stellato will take over day-to-day operations, per CNBC. Smith is now […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: The Verge TikTok already automatically applies an “AI-generated” tag to content on its platform made using TikTok’s AI tools, and that same label will now apply to content created on other platforms. Now, TikTok will detect when images or videos are uploaded to its platform containing metadata tags indicating the presence of AI-generated content and says it’s the first social media platform to support the new Content Credentials.Support for the Adobe-developed tagging system (which has been added to tools like Photoshop and Firefly) comes as TikTok partners with Adobe’s Content...
TikTok is starting to automatically label AI-generated content that was made on other platforms, the company announced on Thursday. With this change, if a creator posts content on TikTok that was created with a service like OpenAI’s DALL·E 3, it will automatically have an “AI-generated” label attached to it to notify viewers that it was […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: The Verge Microsoft Strategic Missions and Technology CTO William Chappell announced that it’s deployed a GPT-4 large language model in an isolated, air-gapped environment on a government-only network. Bloomberg first reported the setup, citing an unnamed executive who claimed that the Azure Government Top Secret cloud-hosted model represents the first time a “major” LLM has operated separated from the internet.Chappell announced the AI supercomputer on Tuesday afternoon at the “first-ever AI Expo for National Competitiveness” in Washington D.C. Unlike the models behind ChatGPT...
Much of the recent AI hype train has centered around mesmerizing digital content generated from simple prompts, alongside concerns about its ability to decimate the workforce and make malicious propaganda much more convincing. (Fun!) However, some of AI’s most promising — and potentially much less ominous — work lies in medicine. A new update to Google’s AlphaFold software could lead to new disease research and treatment breakthroughs.AlphaFold software, from Google DeepMind and (the also Alphabet-owned) Isomorphic Labs, has already demonstrated that it can predict how proteins fold...
OpenAI released draft guidelines for how it wants the AI technology inside ChatGPT to behave—and revealed that it’s exploring how to ‘responsibly’ generate explicit content.
With venture totals slipping year-over-year in key markets like the United States, and concern that venture firms themselves are struggling to raise more capital, founders might be worried. After all, if private-market investment doesn’t perk up in the coming quarters, we could be on track for yet another year of declines in total startup investment […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge Google DeepMind is introducing an improved version of its AI model that predicts not just the structure of proteins, but also the structure of “all life’s molecules.” The work from the new model, AlphaFold 3, will help researchers in medicine, agriculture, materials science, and drug development test potential discoveries.Previous versions of AlphaFold only predicted the structures of proteins. AlphaFold 3 goes beyond that and can model DNA, RNA, and smaller molecules called ligands, expanding the model’s capability for scientific use. DeepMind says the new model...
Autonomous, AI-based players are coming to a gaming experience near you, and a new startup, Altera, is joining the fray to build this new guard of AI agents. The company announced Wednesday that it raised $9 million in an oversubscribed seed round, co-led by First Spark Ventures (Eric Schmidt’s deep-tech fund) and Patron (the seed […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Matt Jewell President Joe Biden is traveling to Racine, Wisconsin, today to announce a $3.3 billion investment by Microsoft, which will build an AI data center on the same site as the failed Foxconn project, according to a White House press release. The Microsoft project, which the White House estimates will create an estimated 2,300 union construction jobs and up to 2,000 permanent jobs, is part of Biden’s Investing in America initiative. Microsoft will roll out the investments in a “four-part strategy designed to create long-term benefits for the state’s economy and job market...
Checkfirst enables businesses to schedule inspectors based on geographical location and qualifications, in addition to allowing for remote inspections.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Reddit — now a publicly-traded company with more scrutiny on revenue growth — is putting a big focus on boosting its international audience, starting with francophones. In their first-ever earnings call, CEO Steve Huffman confirmed the company is now working on automatic translations of the site’s content, in real-time, into French, thanks to advances in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
While visualizing cash flow is helpful, Panax wants to go further than providing a dashboard and help finance teams manage treasury, Panax CEO Noam Mills told TechCrunch.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The French startup's AI assistant is aimed at helping obstetricians and gynecologists with the evaluation and documentation of ultrasound exams.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge OpenAI has added a new tool to detect if an image was made with its DALL-E AI image generator, as well as new watermarking methods to more clearly flag content it generates.In a blog post, OpenAI announced that it has begun developing new provenance methods to track content and prove whether it was AI-generated. These include a new image detection classifier that uses AI to determine whether the photo was AI-generated, as well as a tamper-resistant watermark that can tag content like audio with invisible signals. The classifier predicts the likelihood that a picture was...
OpenAI is partnering with another publisher as it moves towards a licensed approach to training materials. Dotdash Meredith, the owner of brands like People and Better Homes & Gardens, will license its content for OpenAI to train ChatGPT while the publisher will use the AI company’s models to boost its in-house ad-targeting tool.As part of the arrangement, ChatGPT will display content and links attributed to Dotdash Meredith’s publications. It also provides OpenAI with fully licensed training material from trusted publications.That’s a welcome change after the company got in hot water for...
Meta claims that it has strong guardrails in place to prevent its system from generating inappropriate ad content or low-quality images.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Robert Kahn has been a consistent presence on the Internet since its creation — obviously, since he was its co-creator. But like many tech pioneers his resumé is longer than that and in fact his work prefigured such ostensibly modern ideas as AI agents and blockchain. TechCrunch chatted with Kahn about how, really, nothing has […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon is launching a new tool, Bedrock Studio, designed to let organizations experiment with generative AI models, collaborate on those models, and ultimately build generative AI-powered apps. Available in public preview starting today, the web-based Bedrock Studio — a part of Bedrock, Amazon’s generative AI tooling and hosting platform — provides what Amazon describes in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Google’s Tensor 3 and AI-touting Pixel 8 phones have been joined by a cheaper versio, the Pixel 8A. Continue reading…
A new Pixel A-series phone typically gets announced at Google I/O. Unfortunately, that means the affordable handset sometimes gets buried amongst all the other news during the company’s annual developer conference. So for 2024, Google moved things up a touch to give the new Pixel 8a extra attention. And after checking it out in person, I can see why. It combines pretty much everything I like about the regular Pixel 8 but with a lower price of $499.Right away, you’ll see a very familiar design. Compared to the standard Pixel 8, which has a 6.2-inch screen, the 8a features a slightly smaller...
AI is coming for audiobooks, and that is not an entirely bad thing. But it is a cause of concern in the realm of audio titles and the folks who make them today. Audible is making it easy for authors to generate AI-narrated audiobooks, and as in many cases of AI showing up in an […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Tuesday's theme focused on the new hardware devices themselves — devices like new iPads and an updated Apple Pencil — not on the AI advances Apple is making under the hood.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI says it’s developing a tool to let creators better control how their content is used in AI. Called Media Manager, the tool — once it’s released — will allow creators and content owners to identify their works to OpenAI and specify how they want those works to be included or excluded from AI research […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In 2017, Vinod Khosla told CNBC that the job “of the radiologist will be obsolete in five years.” While the founder of Khosla Ventures later revised that timeline to as long as 15 years, he maintained that AI image recognition could soon diagnose disease on scans better than human doctors. Seven years later, radiologists are […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Bias in AI image generators is a well-studied and well-reported phenomenon, but consumer tools continue to exhibit glaring cultural biases. The latest culprit in this area is Meta’s AI chatbot, which, for some reason, really wants to add turbans to any image of an Indian man. The company rolled out Meta AI in more than […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Daloopa, a startup building AI to extract info from financial reports and investor presentations, has raised cash in a new funding round.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft and OpenAI have launched a $2 million fund to combat the growing risks of AI and deepfakes in elections.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google’s big developer showcase, encompassing software, hardware and all its consumer AI projects, is fast approaching. Google I/O’s opening keynote is on May 14, and we’ve got a good guess on what you can expect.To begin, Android 15’s first beta is already out. We know there will be enhanced privacy features, partial screen sharing and system-level app archiving. But they’re not the most thrilling updates — hopefully, Google has some spicy features in its back pocket. Redesign something!AI-wise, lots of stuff. Gemini AI is now firmly established, but what about an AI assistant...
Whether you love or hate celebrity culture, the Met Gala is an event. Those less jaded among us get to see all of the biggest stars take their boldest fashion risks of the year — unlike an award show, it’s an event that encourages avant garde extravagance. And if you find the whole thing vapid, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Wayve, a UK-born startup developing a self-learning rather than rule-based system for autonomous driving, has closed a $1.05 billion in Series C funding led by SoftBank Group. This is the UK’s largest AI fundraise ever and sits among the top 20 AI fundraises globally to date. Also participating in the raise was NVIDIA and existing […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge As people try to find more uses for generative AI that are less about making a fake photo and are instead actually useful, Google plans to point AI to cybersecurity and make threat reports easier to read.In a blog post, Google writes its new cybersecurity product, Google Threat Intelligence, will bring together the work of its Mandiant cybersecurity unit and VirusTotal threat intelligence with the Gemini AI model. The new product uses the Gemini 1.5 Pro large language model, which Google says reduces the time needed to reverse engineer malware attacks. The company claims...
As DocuSign reportedly explores a sale to private equity, it’s acquiring a company itself. On Monday, DocuSign announced that it’s buying Lexion, a contract workflow automation startup, for $165 million. The purchase comes as DocuSign makes increasing investments in the contract management space, most recently launching DocuSign IAM, a service aimed at connecting different components of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Opera announced that Aria, its browser AI product built in collaboration with OpenAI, can now summarize text-based webpages on Android.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Samsung is expanding its OLED TV range with a new entry-level lineup. It's introducing the S85 series alongside several additional sizes of the S90D.The S85D includes many of the same features as more premium models, such as the NQ4 AI Gen2 Processor, 4K AI Upscaling capabilities and Pantone Validated Colors. Dolby Atmos, the Samsung TV Plus ad-supported streaming service and Samsung Gaming Hub are also included.Samsung says the S85D also has Motion Xcelerator technology, as well as a "bold look and feel" thanks to its contour design (though as you can see above, it just looks like a modern TV...
When I first saw the Rabbit R1, it was more appealing than the Humane AI Pin. The R1 had an actual screen, not a dim projector, and it had a twee scrolling wheel, all wrapped up in a glossy, fiery orange-red shell.Alas, as our review explains, it doesn’t work as well as promised. It doesn’t do much and is, at launch, riddled with bugs and issues. Devindra Hardawar, who reviewed it, even took issue with the scrolling wheel. Nooooo.EngadgetThe main takeaway might be: If your phone can do all these tasks just as well (or better, in most cases), what’s the point, Rabbit?The truth might be I...
Randy Travis in 1987. | Photo: Mark Junge / Getty Images For the first time since a 2013 stroke left country singer Randy Travis unable to speak or sing properly, he has released a new song. He didn’t sing it, though; instead, the vocals were created with AI software and a surrogate singer.The song, called “Where That Came From,” is every bit the kind of folksy, sentimental tune I came to love as a kid when Travis was at the height of his fame. The producers created it by training an unnamed AI model, starting with 42 of his vocal-isolated recordings. Then, under the supervision of Travis...
Catherine Breslin is the founder and director of Kingfisher Labs, where she helps companies develop AI strategies.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Apple hasn’t talked too much about AI so far — but it’s been working on stuff. A lot of stuff. Continue reading…
Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the week that was in tech. This edition’s a tad bittersweet for me — it’ll be my last (for a while, anyway). Soon, I’ll be shifting my attention to a new AI-focused newsletter, which I’m super thrilled about. Stay tuned! Now, on with […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
While the venture world is abuzz over generative AI, Dayna Grayson, a longtime venture capitalist who five years ago co-founded her own firm, Construct Capital, has been focused on comparatively boring software that can transform industrial sectors. Her mission doesn’t exclude AI, but it also doesn’t depend on it. Construct recently led a seed-stage round, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Tara Chklovski is the CEO and founder of Technovation, a nonprofit that helps teach young girls about technology and entrepreneurship.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
RAG is being pitched as a solution of sorts to generative AI hallucinations. But there's limits to what the technique can do.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. By the way — TechCrunch plans to launch an […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Verge Microsoft’s latest Windows Insider blog posts say that when it comes to testing new Copilot features in Windows 11, “We have decided to pause the rollouts of these experiences to further refine them based on user feedback.” For people who already have the feature, “Copilot in Windows will continue to work as expected while we continue to evolve new ideas with Windows Insiders.” Microsoft is holding an AI event on May 20th which would be a good time to show more of what’s next, and after setting up 2024 as “the year of the AI PC,” with a new Copilot key on Windows...
X's Premium subscribers will be able to read a summary of posts on X associated with each trending story featured on the "For You" tab in Explore.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge Apple CEO Tim Cook has made it clear that AI features are coming soon, and a new report from AppleInsider offers more details about what we might see in the next version of iOS. One of the big focuses will be on Siri, which will reportedly gain the ability to analyze and summarize texts within the Messages app.AppleInsider previously said a similar “Intelligent Search” feature is coming to Safari in iOS 18, allowing users to summarize webpages. Apple’s large language model (LLM), called Ajax, will power these features. Several papers published by Apple suggest that...
Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje’s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Musk’s 10-month-old baby, xAI, is closing in on a whoppin’ $6 billion funding round. The social network X, née Twitter — also part of Elon’s tech […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Despite spending more than $100 billion on R&D over the last five years, Apple isn't planning to spin up too many new data centers to run or train AI models.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
You probably shouldn't follow this rabbit down the rabbit hole.
The numbers are in, and the cloud infrastructure market grew at a brisk pace this quarter driven by increasing interest in generative AI.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Y Combinator's founder matching tool has quietly become one of most powerful offerings. That's how medical records AI startup Hona was founded.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge The Rabbit R1 is not good. Neither is the Humane AI Pin. Does that signal the end of the AI gadget revolution before it ever really got started? Or is it just that two companies shipped too little, too soon? The whole AI industry is moving fast, and it sometimes makes you wonder where it’s actually headed — or if there’s anywhere at the end of the road.On this episode of The Vergecast, we discuss our reviews of these new devices, their potential going forward, and whether there’s ever going to be an AI gadget that isn’t just your phone. Because the phone...
Illustration: The Verge A new report from Microsoft outlines the steps the company took to release responsible AI platforms last year. In its Responsible AI Transparency Report, which mainly covers 2023, Microsoft touts its achievements around safely deploying AI products. The annual AI transparency report is one of the commitments the company made after signing a voluntary agreement with the White House in July last year. Microsoft and other companies promised to establish responsible AI systems and commit to safety. Microsoft says in the report that it created 30 responsible AI tools in the...
Microsoft has changed its policy to ban U.S. police departments from using generative AI for facial recognition through the Azure OpenAI Service, the company’s fully managed, enterprise-focused wrapper around OpenAI technologies. Language added Wednesday to the terms of service for Azure OpenAI Service prohibits integrations with Azure OpenAI Service from being used “by or for” […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple on Thursday reported a 10% drop in iPhone sales for the second fiscal quarter, dropping from $51.3 billion to $45.9 billion, year-over-year. The slowdown was fueled, in part, by an 8% drop in China. Apple’s slow adoption of AI versus competitors like Google and Microsoft likely played a role in consumers’ decision to hold […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft has changed its policy to ban U.S. police departments from using generative AI through the Azure OpenAI Service, the company’s fully managed, enterprise-focused wrapper around OpenAI technologies. Language added Wednesday to the terms of service for Azure OpenAI Service prohibits integrations with Azure OpenAI Service from being used “by or for” police departments in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It's not building any startup, but building a defensible AI startup presents its own set of unique challenges.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Satya Nadella, the executive chairman and CEO of Microsoft Corporation speaks during the “Microsoft Build: AI Day” event. | Photo by Peerapon Boonyakiat / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images Microsoft just agreed to support the development of 10.5 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity around the world, a massive amount of electricity to fuel its AI ambitions and climate goals.For comparison, 10.5 GW of renewable energy amounts to nearly half the amount of solar and wind capacity California had in 2022. This is quite literally a very big deal — effectively the largest corporate...
Lamini, a new startup with funding from Andrew Ng, has emerged from stealth with a generative AI platform aimed at enterprises.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Emails from the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google revealed how Microsoft executives were alarmed by and even envious of Google’s AI lead.In an email thread, CTO Kevin Scott wrote he was “very, very worried” about Google’s rapidly growing AI capabilities. He said he initially dismissed the company’s “game-playing stunts,” likely referring to Google’s AlphaGo models. The emails reference Gmail’s autocomplete features, which execs called “scary good.” Microsoft struggled to copy Google’s BERT-large, an AI model that deciphers the meaning and context of...
TikTok and Universal Music Group (UMG) have signed a deal that will allow Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, The Weeknd and other artists to return to the platform, the companies announced in a press release. Universal pulled songs from its roster of performers back in February and with some exceptions, its music hasn't been there since. Both sides are now "working expeditiously" to get content back on the platform that's home to a billion-plus users. A key part of the deal is artist protection from generative AI. "TikTok and UMG will work together to ensure AI development across the...
Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Getty Images A new bill seeking to track security issues by mandating the creation of a database recording all breaches of AI systems has been filed in the Senate. The Secure Artificial Intelligence Act, introduced by Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Thom Tillis (R-NC), would establish an Artificial Intelligence Security Center at the National Security Agency. This center would lead research into what the bill calls “counter-AI,” or techniques to learn how to manipulate AI systems. This center would also develop guidance for preventing counter-AI measures...
The newer format allows users to curate content from around the web and from Pinterest combined with images they optionally snap using their phone's camera to express their style, interests or tastes.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Snapchat is launching the ability for users to set in-app reminders with the help of its My AI chatbot, the company announced on Wednesday. The social network is also rolling out editable chats, AI-powered custom Bitmoji looks, map reactions, emoji reactions, and more. With the new AI reminders feature, Snapchat is hoping users will use […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 because it was “very worried” that Google was years ahead in scaling up its AI efforts. An internal email, titled “Thoughts on OpenAI,” between Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, CEO Satya Nadella, and co-founder Bill Gates reveals some of the high-level discussions around an investment opportunity in the months before Microsoft revealed the partnership.The email was released on Tuesday as part of the ongoing US Justice Department antitrust case against Google, Business Insider reports.“We are multiple...
Microsoft, it seems, is hedging its bets when it comes to general-purpose robotics AI. At the end of February, the Windows maker spearheaded a massive $675 million Series B in Bay Area-based Figure. Today, the tech giant announced a collaboration with Figure competitor Sanctuary AI, best known for its humanoid robot, Phoenix. The Sanctuary partnership […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
During its Team ’24 conference in Las Vegas, Atlassian today launched Rovo, its new AI assistant. Rovo can take data from first- and third-party tools and make it easily accessible through a new AI-powered search tool and other integrations into Atlassian’s products. The most interesting part, though, may be the new Rovo Agents, which can […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Anthropic, the generative AI startup backed by Amazon and Google, is launching a new paid plan aimed at business customers.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Rabbit R1, a pocket-sized AI virtual assistant device, runs Android under the hood and is powered by a single app, according to Android Authority. Apparently, the publication was able to install the R1 APK on a Pixel 6a and made it run as if it were the $199 gadget, bobbing bunny head on the screen and all. If you already have a phone and aren't quite intrigued by specialized devices or keen on being an early adopter, you probably didn't see merit in getting the R1 (or its competitor, the Humane AI Pin) in the first place. But this information could make you question the device'...
A group of publications that include the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News and the Orlando Sentinel are suing Microsoft and OpenAI, as reported by The Verge. The eight publications in this particular lawsuit, all owned by Alden Capital Group (ACG), are accusing the companies of "purloining millions" of their copyrighted articles "without permission and without payment to fuel the commercialization of their generative artificial intelligence products, including ChatGPT and Copilot." This is but the latest lawsuit filed against Microsoft and OpenAI for their use of copyrighted materials...
I mean, at least it’s just $200? | Image: David Pierce / The Verge Since it launched last week, Rabbit’s R1 AI gadget has inspired a lot of questions, starting with “Why isn’t this just an app?” Well, friends, that’s because it is just an app. Over at Android Authority, Mishaal Rahman managed to download Rabbit’s launcher APK on a Google Pixel 6A. With a little tweaking, he was able to run the app as if it were on Rabbit’s own device. Using the volume-up key in place of the R1’s single hardware button, he was able to set up an account and start asking it questions, just as if...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon is doubling down on enterprise AI with the release of its AI chatbot Q, even as its competitors angle to offer more consumer-facing products. Amazon announced Q in November and made it available only to a small number of users. In a post, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy writes that bringing Q to more people will help solve misalignment issues for developers. The chatbot acts as an assistant for Amazon Web Services (AWS) users, learning from a company’s data and workflows so employees can ask questions about their business. Users can also ask Q questions...
Pour one out for CodeWhisperer, Amazon’s AI-powered assistive coding tool. As of today, it’s kaput — sort of. CodeWhisperer is now Q Developer, a part of Amazon’s Q family of business-oriented generative AI chatbots that also extends to the newly-announced Q Business. Available through AWS, Q Developer helps with some of the tasks developers do […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Making life better for people with disabilities is a laudable goal, but accessibility tech hasn’t traditionally been popular among VCs. In 2022, disability tech companies attracted around $4 billion in early-stage investments, which was a fraction of fintech’s intake, for example. One reason is that disability tech startups are often considered too niche to attain […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Samsung Electronics said on Tuesday that its operating profit surged more than 930% in the first quarter of 2024, driven by soaring demand for its servers, memory chips and storage used in AI applications. The company, which struggled in 2023 as the macroeconomic slowdown hurt demand for its products, said its memory chip business returned to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sam's Club customers who pay either at a register or through the Scan & Go mobile app can now walk out of the store without having their purchases double-checked.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Vjeran Pavic / The Verge The Verge’s editor-in-chief Nilay Patel today announced that Kylie Robison is joining the site as senior AI reporter, where she’ll lead the technology publication’s coverage of artificial intelligence. She’ll work closely with The Verge’s policy and tech teams, delivering must-read coverage around the people and companies shaping the future of AI, how the technology is being developed and used by consumers and creators, and how it’s changing the world – for good and for ill.Robison joins The Verge from Fortune, where she was senior technology reporter and...
Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge Humane. Rabbit. Meta. All these companies and more are working hard to invent a new category of tech, one that doesn’t live as an app on your phone but actually creates room for other AI-powered gadgets. The AI gadget revolution could be huge.So far? It’s not going great. And in fact, as Google and Apple in particular find new ways to add powerful new models to their existing products, it seems as though the big winner in the AI race might be the phone already in your pocket.On this episode of The Vergecast, The Verge’s Allison Johnson tells us about her...
Security review automation platform SafeBase has raised new cash from investors including Zoom's corporate VC arm.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Yelp announced a new AI-powered chatbot today for consumers that helps them connect with relevant businesses for their tasks. The company joins a long list of organizations leaning into AI chatbots as an assistive medium. The company is rolling out the AI assistant on its iOS app under the “Projects” tab with plans to expand […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Yelp’s new AI releases. | Image: Yelp As Yelp tries to remind users it’s more than just a place to find a new restaurant to try, it’s launching the Yelp Assistant, an AI chatbot that “contextually” understands what users are looking for and can match them with service professionals in their area. If you want to replace your bathtub, the chatbot will ask questions like what type of bathtub you want and which features you’re interested in, then suggest a couple of nearby bathtub installers. People have the option of writing their own messages to selected businesses or having Yelp...
Realising that a former partner had, unbeknownst to him, put previously private, intimate videos of them onto a porn site, tech founder Dan Purcell felt devastated. He resolved to come up with a solution to help prevent such violations happening again. His Ceartas startup has now raised $4.5 million in a Seed round from European […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The eyes aren’t just a window into the soul; tracking saccades can help doctors pick up a range of brain health issues. That’s why French-Belgian medtech startup neuroClues is building accessible, high-speed eye-tracking technology that incorporates AI-driven analysis. It wants to make it easier for healthcare service providers to use eye tracking to support the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Gideon Valkin's solo VC firm Andrena Ventures raised $12 million from backers including several VCs and entrepreneurs, and made its first investment into AI startup Nustom.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. Commerce Department agency that develops and tests tech for the U.S. government, corporations and the broader public, today announced the launch of NIST GenAI, a new program spearheaded by NIST to assess generative AI technologies, including text- and image-generating AI. A platform designed to evaluate […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Financial Times has become the latest news organization to strike a deal with OpenAI. In a joint announcement on Monday, the Financial Times and OpenAI said that maker of ChatGPT will use the Financial Times’ journalism to train its AI models and collaborate on developing new AI products and features for the publication’s readers. ChatGPT will also attribute and and link back to the Financial Times when it includes information from the publication in its responses“It is right, of course, that AI platforms pay publishers for the use of their material,” said Financial Times CEO John...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge GitHub wants Copilot, its code completion platform powered by GPT-4, present throughout the lifecycle of development, including the very beginning of a coding project. The company is announcing GitHub Copilot Workspace, a new service that aims to cut down the time engineers and developers spend reading through code and figuring out how to start on a new project. Workspace will only be available in technical preview for a waitlist of developers, but it will be integrated into the larger GitHub Copilot platform after it exits preview. GitHub wrote in a blog...
GitHub's new Copilot Workspace brings AI-powered assistive software engineering tools front and center.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We’re off to an AI-heavy start to the week. OpenAI has a new deal with the Financial Times that caught our eye. Sure, it’s another content licensing deal, but there appears to be a bit more in the tie-up than just content flowing one way, and money the other. On this early-week episode of Equity, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Financial Times (full disclosure — the owners of The Next Web) have inked a deal with OpenAI. The American firm will use the British publisher’s content to train its generative AI models. The deal is the latest in a string of new partnerships between OpenAI and global news publishers like Axel Springer, Associated Press, and Le Monde. The company did not disclose the financial terms of any of the contracts. In 2023 alone, hundreds of pages of litigation and countless articles accused tech firms of stealing artists’ and publishers’ work to train their AI models. OpenAI has come under...
Image: Dan Seifert / The Verge Apple is preparing for its big AI coming out party in this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference; that much you can count on. But apparently, the company is going to start that party a little early with the OLED iPad Pro that it’s expected to unveil on May 7th. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, there’s “a strong possibility” the tablet will launch with an M4 chip and its accompanying neural engine, making it Apple’s “first truly AI-powered device.”Writing in his Power On newsletter today, Gurman said the company could use its May event to...
OpenAI’s video generation tool Sora took the AI community by surprise in February with fluid, realistic video that seems miles ahead of competitors. But the carefully stage-managed debut left out a lot of details — details that have been filled in by a filmmaker given early access to create a short using Sora. Shy Kids […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple has resumed conversations with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, to power some AI features coming to iOS 18, according to a new report in Bloomberg. Apple is also building its own large language models to power some iOS 18 features, but its talks with OpenAI are centered around a “chatbot/search component,” according to Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman. Apple is also reportedly in talks with Google to license Gemini, Google’s own AI-powered chatbot, for iOS 18. Bloomberg reports that those talks are still on, and things could still go either way because Apple hasn’t made a final...
EyeEm, the Berlin-based photo-sharing community that exited last year to Spanish company Freepik, after going bankrupt, is now licensing its users’ photos to train AI models. Earlier this month, the company informed users via email that it was adding a new clause to its Terms & Conditions that would grant it the rights to upload […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge Google has spent the past year dealing with two of the biggest threats in its 25-year history: the rise of generative AI and the growing drumbeat of regulation. AI, in particular, has shaken the company to its core: it’s made big search changes, realigned the Search, Android, and hardware teams around AI, and launched its own Gemini AI model to capitalize on the opportunity. Google execs cut projects and laid off employees to refocus, and yesterday, it announced its first-ever dividend and a $70 billion share buyback alongside its Q1 2024 earnings. Investors, at least...
Meta’s new large language model, Llama 3, powers the imaginatively named “Meta AI,” a newish chatbot that the social media and advertising company has installed in as many of its apps and interfaces as possible. How does this model stack up against other all-purpose conversational AIs? It tends to regurgitate a lot of web search […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Drake apparently learned it isn’t wise to mess with Tupac Shakur — even decades after his untimely death. Billboard first spotted that the Canadian hip-hop artist deleted the X (Twitter) post with his track “Taylor Made Freestyle,” which used an AI-generated recreation of Shakur’s voice to try to get under Kendrick Lamar’s skin.The takedown came after an attorney representing the late hip-hop legend threatened to sue the Canadian rapper for his “unauthorized” use of Tupac’s voice if he didn’t remove it from social channels within 24 hours. However, the track was online...
Illustration: The Verge Google is testing its AI listening skills with a feature that lets people speak into their phones and practice English with a conversational AI bot. Google first rolled out the speaking practice experience in October 2023. Originally, the feature only provided feedback on spoken sentences. Now, users can practice having ongoing conversations in the language they’re learning. TechCrunch reports that the feature is currently available for Search Labs users in Argentina, Colombia, India, Mexico, Venezuela, and Indonesia. Search Labs is Google’s sandbox for potential new...
AI may be inching its way into the newsroom, as outlets like Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Gizmodo, VentureBeat, CNET, and others have experimented with the format. But while most respectable journalists will condemn this use case, there are a number of startups that think AI can enhance the news experience — at least on the consumer’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Carmen Mandato / Getty Images Tupac Shakur’s lawyers warned Drake that they would take him to court if he did not take down his “Taylor Made” diss track featuring AI-altered vocals made to sound like the late rapper. And it seems like the message was received loud and clear.Following Tupac’s lawyers giving Drake 24 hours to pull “Taylor Made” or risk being sued, the Canadian rapper has apparently chosen the former option and removed the song from his X profile. Drake first posted “Taylor Made” on April 19th as the latest response in his ongoing beef with fellow rapper...
After a successful unveiling at CES, Rabbit is letting journalists try out the R1 — a small orange gadget with an AI-powered voice interface. This comes just weeks after the launch of the Humane Ai Pin, which is similarly pitched as a new kind of mobile device with AI at its center. While we’re still […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The OpenAI Startup Fund, a venture fund related to — but technically separate from — OpenAI that invests in early-stage, typically AI-related companies across education, law and the sciences, has quietly closed a $15 million tranche. According to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, two unnamed investors contributed the $15 million in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google is testing a new “Speaking practice” feature in Search that helps users improve their conversational English skills. The company told TechCrunch that the feature is available to English learners in Argentina, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Venezuela who have joined Search Labs, its program for users to experiment with early-stage Google Search experiences. The […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Diana Young Consumers are already putting AI tools to use for both productivity and creativity. But what’s next? Continue reading…
xAI, Elon Musk’s 10-month-old competitor to the AI phenom OpenAI, is raising $6 billion on a pre-money valuation of $18 billion, according to one trusted source close to the deal. The deal – which would give investors one quarter of the company – is expected to close in the next few weeks unless the terms […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google Cloud, Google’s cloud computing division, had a blockbuster fiscal quarter, blowing past analysts’ expectations and sending Google parent company Alphabet’s stock soaring 13%+ in after-hours trading. Google Cloud revenue jumped 28% to $9.57 billion in Q1 2024, bolstered by the demand for generative AI tools that rely on cloud infrastructure, services and apps. That […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sanctuary AI often isn’t mentioned in the same breath as humanoid robotics firms like Boston Dynamics, Agility, Figure and 1X, but the Canadian company has been operating in the space for some time. In fact, a new robot introduced on Thursday is actually the seventh-generation of its Phoenix line. While a recent iteration introduced legs […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple TV+ Before AI meant you could impersonate someone’s voice with just a snippet of audio, con artists needed actual skill to impersonate famous figures. Take Hargobind Tahilramani, who allegedly impersonated such powerful Hollywood women as Amy Pascal, Kathleen Kennedy, and Wendi Deng Murdoch. Now, it’s a documentary from Tiger King’s Chris Smith.The scam artist dubbed “the Con Queen of Hollywood” sent victims to Indonesia, then extracted cash for what seemed like normal expenses, promising reimbursements. The reimbursements never appeared. Scott Johnson at The Hollywood Reporter...
Carv, a data layer platform that lets web3 gaming and AI companies, as well as gamers, control and monetize their data, has raised a $10 million Series A round led by Tribe Capital and IOSG Ventures. Carv’s new round comes approximately five months after it received a strategic investment led by HashKey Capital. The startup […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Generative AI has captured the public imagination with a leap into creating elaborate, plausibly real text and imagery out of verbal prompts. But the catch — and there is often a catch — is that the results are often far from perfect when you look a little closer. People point out strange fingers, floor tiles […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Advances in generative AI have taken the tech world by storm. Biotech investors are making a big bet that similar computational methods could revolutionize drug discovery. On Tuesday, ARCH Venture Partners and Foresite Labs, an affiliate of Foresite Capital, announced that they incubated Xaira Therapeutics and funded the AI biotech with $1 billion. Other investors […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The generative AI gold rush is underway — just don’t expect it to create profits anytime soon.That was the message from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to investors during Wednesday’s call for the company’s first-quarter earnings report. Having just put its ChatGPT competitor in a bunch of places across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, much of the call focused on exactly how generative AI will become a money-making endeavor for Meta. The company is already quite profitable, having grown net income to more than $12 billion on $36.5 billion in revenue in...
Photo by Prince Williams / Wireimage While Drake’s fans have been having a ball with the Canadian rapper’s recently released track dissing fellow rapper Kendrick Lamar, the legal team representing Tupac Shakur is threatening to take legal action if the song isn’t pulled off the internet.Billboard reports that late rapper Tupac’s legal team is ready to take Drake to court over the release of “Taylor Made,” Drake’s recently released song featuring the AI-generated voices of Shakur and Snoop Dogg. In a statement about Drake’s creation of “Taylor Made,” litigator Howard King...
If there’s one overarching takeaway from last night’s Rabbit R1 launch event, it’s this: Hardware can be fun again. After a decade of unquestioned smartphone dominance, there is, once again, excitement to be found in consumer electronics. The wisdom and longevity of any individual product or form factor — while important — can be set […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI is supercharging coding — and developers are embracing it. In a recent StackOverflow poll, 44% of software engineers said that they use AI tools as part of their development processes now and 26% plan to soon. Meanwhile, Gartner estimates that over half of organizations are currently piloting or have already deployed AI-driven coding assistants, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Enterprises still don't trust OpenAI, while open source AI models are cheaper and more than sufficient for targeted specific tasks, Nova AI founder says.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
At CES this January, startup Rabbit unveiled its first device, just in time for the end of the year of the rabbit according to the lunar calendar. It’s a cute little orange square that was positioned as a “pocket companion that moves AI from words to action.” In other words, it’s basically a dedicated AI machine that acts kind of like a walkie talkie to a virtual assistant.Sound familiar? You’re probably thinking of the Humane AI Pin, which was announced last year and started shipping this month. I awarded it a score of 50 (out of 100) earlier this month, while outlets like Wired and...
Perplexity AI‘s latest, large fundraising event could be quickly superseded by another, even larger chunk of capital, TechCrunch reports. Yes, the $62.7 million that the startup raised at just over a $1 billion valuation could be quickly stomped on by a raise of as much as $250 million at a valuation that is up to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Getty During last night’s earnings call with investors, Elon Musk threw out an all-time late-night dorm room bong sesh of an idea: what if AWS, but for Tesla?Musk, who loves to riff on earnings calls, compared the unused compute power of millions of idle Tesla vehicles to Amazon’s cloud service business. If they’re just sitting there, he mused, why not put them to good use to run AI models? (Also, have you ever really looked at your hands? No, I mean really looked?)“There’s a potential... when the car is not moving to actually run distributed inference,” Musk said. “If you...
As the notion of the AI agent begins to take hold, and more tasks will be completed without a human involved, it is going to require a new kind of authentication to make sure only agents with the proper approval can access particular resources. Anon, an early stage startup is helping developers add automated authentication […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Well, if you are a big TikTok fan and live in the United States, I have some bad news for you: A bill that would force a sale of TikTok or ban it in the United States passed the Senate. And the President is expected to sign it. Given that China has made noise that […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nvidia is acquiring Run:ai, a startup that makes it easier for developers and operations teams to manage and optimize their AI infrastructure, for an undisclosed sum. Ctech reported earlier this morning the companies were in “advanced negotiations” that could see Nvidia pay upwards of $1 billion for Run:ai. Evidently, those negotiations went well. Nvidia says […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
All-around, highly generalizable generative AI models were the name of the game once, and they arguably still are. But increasingly, as cloud vendors large and small join the generative AI fray, we’re seeing a new crop of models focused on the deepest-pocketed potential customers: the enterprise. Case in point: Snowflake, the cloud computing company, today […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is launching preliminary enquiries into whether the close-knit tie-ups and hiring practices involving Microsoft, Amazon and a trio of AI startup falls within the scope of its merger rules — and whether the arrangements could impact competition in the U.K. market. The announcement comes amid growing scrutiny of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Automation continues to be a major theme in the enterprise — underscored not least by the rise of AI as a tool to help fix some of the more routine, resource-intensive and fragmented aspects of how security and other IT functions operate. To capitalize on that trend, one of the bigger startups in the space, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
WIRED went along to the company's launch event where customers picked up the very first R1s and learned of an inbound “all-seeing” accompanying AI device.
Adobe claims its new VideoGigaGAN generative AI model can upscale video clips more consistently and in higher quality than other VSR methods. | Image: Adobe Adobe researchers have developed a new generative AI model called VideoGigaGAN that can upscale blurry videos at up to eight times their original resolution. Introduced in a paper published on April 18th, Adobe claims VideoGigaGAN is superior to other Video Super Resolution (VSR) methods as it can provide more fine-grained details without introducing any “AI weirdness” to the footage.In a nutshell, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs...
Conversational AI platform Parloa has nabbed $66 million in a Series B round of funding, a year after the German startup raised $21 million from a swathe of European investors to propel its international growth. The company is focusing on the U.S. market in particular, where Parloa opened a New York office last year — […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With the current iteration of its product going through its paces with a handful of beta customers, FlexAI will launch its first commercial product later this year.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Leading artificial intelligence companies including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta and others have jointly pledged to prevent their AI tools from being used to exploit children and generate child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The initiative was led by child-safety group Thorn and All Tech Is Human, a non-profit focused on responsible tech.The pledges from AI companies, Thorn said, “set a groundbreaking precedent for the industry and represent a significant leap in efforts to defend children from sexual abuse as a feature with generative AI unfolds.” The goal of the initiative is to prevent...
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images Tech companies like Google, Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Amazon committed today to reviewing their AI training data for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and removing it from use in any future models.The companies signed on to a new set of principles meant to limit the proliferation of CSAM. They promise to ensure training datasets do not contain CSAM, to avoid datasets with a high risk of including CSAM, and to remove CSAM imagery or links to CSAM from data sources. The companies also commit to “stress-testing” AI models...
The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses have been something of a pleasant surprise. They make videos, take photos, livestream and act as an adequate replacement for headphones, all while looking like a normal pair of sunglasses. However, everyone’s been waiting for the addition of multimodal AI after early access testing began in January. Now it’s here.What is multimodal AI? Simply put, it’s a toolset that allows an AI assistant to process multiple types of information, including photos, videos, text and audio. It’s an AI that can view and understand the world around you in real time. This is...
Perplexity, the AI search engine startup, is a hot property at the moment. TechCrunch has learned that the company is currently raising at least $250 million more at a valuation of between $2.5 billion and $3 billion. The news comes on the heels of two other big fundraises that have seen company’s valuation leapfrog in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
At first glance, Netflix’s upcoming action thriller Atlas, starring Jennifer Lopez, seemed like it was going to be a rather serious movie about a mech pilot fighting to survive on an inhospitable planet. That could still be the case, but the movie’s latest trailer makes it out to be a bit more of a sci-fi buddy cop affair with an emphasis on human / robot alliances.Though a maniacal machine (Simu Liu) dead-set on eradicating humanity presents the biggest threat in Atlas, the movie’s new trailer puts a spotlight on how an AI-powered battle armor will join Atlas Shepherd (Lopez) in her...
AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing business, wants to be the go-to place companies host and fine-tune their custom generative AI models. Today, AWS announced the launch of Custom Model Import (in preview), a new feature in Bedrock, AWS’ enterprise-focused suite of generative AI services, that allows organizations to import and access their in-house generative AI models […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Firefly, Adobe’s family of generative AI models, doesn’t have the best reputation among creatives. The Firefly image generation model in particular has been derided as underwhelming and flawed compared to Midjourney, OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, and other rivals, with a tendency to distort limbs and landscapes and miss the nuances in prompts. But Adobe is trying […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images A new report from Stanford’s Internet Observatory said the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline needs to improve its technology if it wants to meet the influx of AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM).The report said CyberTipline, the first defense against CSAM on the internet, already struggles to handle the high volume of calls it receives. According to the center, the tip line received 36.2 million CSAM reports in 2023, a 12 percent increase from 2022. The rise of AI-generated CSAM...
I am really into (my friends might say somewhat obsessed with) coffee. Not just for the hits of caffeine that fuel our productivity-enthralled capitalist society, but also for the taste, as well as different styles of brewing (although my Swedish roots make me partial to a pour-over). Sadly, I do not often get to write about it, as — even though coffee roasting and brewing rely on technological engineering — tech startups and coffee hardly ever intersect in the news. Enter Helsinki-based Kaffa Roastery, and its new blend of beans called AI-conic. The blend for the coffee (which costs...
A report by Stanford researchers cautions that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children doesn’t have the resources to help fight the new epidemic.
To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more profiles […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Poetry Camera takes the concept of photography to new heights by generating poetry based on the visuals it encounters.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s weekly news recap. The weather’s getting hotter — but not quite as hot as the generative AI space, which saw a slew of new models released this week, including Meta’s Llama 3. In other AI news, Hyundai-owned robotics company Boston Dynamics unveiled an electric-powered humanoid follow-up to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Ewa Luger, profiled as part of TechCrunch's series on women in AI, is co-director at the Institute of Design Informatics.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Vector databases are all the rage, judging by the number of startups entering the space and the investors ponying up for a piece of the pie. The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and the generative AI (GenAI) movement have created fertile ground for vector database technologies to flourish. While traditional relational databases such as […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week, Meta released the latest in its Llama series […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
New AI models from Meta are making waves in technology circles. The two new models, part of the Facebook parent company’s Llama line of artificial intelligence tools, are both open-source, helping them stand apart from competing offerings from OpenAI and other well-known names. Meta’s new Llama models have differently sized underlying datasets, with the Llama […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Webflow, a web design and hosting platform that’s raised over $330 million at a $4 billion valuation, is expanding into a new sector: marketing optimization. Today, Webflow announced that it acquired Intellimize, a startup leveraging AI to personalize websites for unique visitors. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. But a source familiar with the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Plenty of large corporations want to join the AI revolution, but many feel it’s too early to be locked into one foundational model. That means there’s a market for a layer between companies and Large Language Models (LLMs) — something companies can use to pick LLMs easily without needing to commit for all time to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Last week, Meta started testing its AI chatbot in India across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. But with the Indian general elections beginning today, the company is already blocking specific queries in its chatbot. Meta confirmed that it is restricting certain election-related keywords for AI in the test phase. It also said that it is working […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Artificial intelligence has been in the crosshairs of governments concerned about how it might be misused for fraud, disinformation and other malicious online activity; now in the U.K. a regulator is preparing to explore how AI is used in the fight against some of the same, specifically as it relates to content harmful to children. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As I wrote recently, generative AI models are increasingly being brought to healthcare settings — in some cases prematurely, perhaps. Early adopters believe that they’ll unlock increased efficiency while revealing insights that’d otherwise be missed. Critics, meanwhile, point out that these models have flaws and biases that could contribute to worse health outcomes. But is […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge The next generation of Meta’s large language model Llama, which releases today to cloud providers like AWS and to model libraries like Hugging Face soon, performs better than most current AI models, the company said in a blog post.Llama 3 currently features two model weights, with 8B and 70B parameters. (The B is for billions and represents how complex a model is and how much of its training it understands.) It only offers text-based responses so far, but Meta says these are “a major leap” over the previous version. Llama 3 showed more diversity in...
As funny as it was when the AI Pin utterly failed at translating Korean and Japanese, it also broke my heart. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Of all the things the Humane AI Pin promised, I was most intrigued by translation. In a demo, a man speaks to Humane co-founder Imran Chaudhri in Spanish. The AI Pin automatically translates it to English. Chaudhri replies in English. Again, the AI Pin translates his words back into Spanish. There are notable pauses when the AI is processing, but it’s a powerful concept. Unlike with Google Translate, there was solid eye contact between...
Illustration: The Verge Meta is rolling out real-time AI image generation in beta for WhatsApp users in the US. As soon as you start typing a text-to-image prompt in a chat with Meta AI, you’ll see how the image changes as you add more detail about what you want to create.In the example shared by Meta, a user types in the prompt, “Imagine a soccer game on mars.” The generated image quickly changes from a typical soccer player to showing an entire soccer field on a Martian landscape. If you have access to the beta, you can try out the feature for yourself by opening a chat with Meta AI and...
Meta has released the latest entry in its Llama series of open source generative AI models: Llama 3. Or, more accurately, the company has open sourced two models in its new Llama 3 family, with the rest to come at an unspecified future date. Meta describes the new models — Llama 3 8B, which contains 8 […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta’s making several big moves today to promote its AI services across its platform. The company has upgraded its AI chatbot with its newest Large Language Model, Llama 3, and it is now running it in the search bar of its four major apps, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp across multiple countries. Alongside this, the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images Stability AI laid off 20 employees just a day after announcing the expansion of access to its new flagship model. This comes after weeks of upheaval that saw its founding CEO leave the company. CNBC reports that the layoffs at the UK-based AI company, which runs the Stable Diffusion text-to-image model, represent roughly 10 percent of its workforce. In a memo to staff, interim CEOs Shan Shan Wong and Christian LaForte say the decision to let go of employees is part of a “strategic plan to reduce our cost-base, strengthen...
Illustration: The Verge AI is taking over at Google, and the company is changing in big ways to try to make it happen even faster. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced substantial internal reorganizations on Thursday, including the creation of a new team called “Platforms and Devices” that will oversee all of Google’s Pixel products, all of Android, Chrome, ChromeOS, Photos, and more. The team will be run by Rick Osterloh, who was previously the SVP of devices and services, overseeing all of Google’s hardware efforts. Hiroshi Lockheimer, the longtime head of Android, Chrome, and ChromeOS...
Slack just rolled out its AI tools to all paying users, after releasing them to a select subset of customers earlier this year. The company’s been teasing these features since last year and, well, now they’re here.The AI auto-generates channel recaps to give people key highlights of stuff they missed while away from the keyboard or smartphone, for keeping track of important work stuff and office in-jokes. Slack says the algorithm that generates these recaps is smart enough to pull content from the various topics discussed in the channel. This means that you’ll get a paragraph on how plans...
The world is on fire. Quite literally, much of the time quite literally. Predicting such disasters before they get out of hand — or better yet, before they happen — will be key to maintaining a reasonable quality of life for the coming century. It’s a big, global issue. It’s also one Alphabet believes it […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Humane AI raised more than $230 million before it even shipped a product. And when it finally released its Ai Pin – which costs $699 plus a $24 monthly subscription – pretty much every tech reviewer came to the same disappointing realization: this much-hyped product, which promises to disrupt the smartphone’s dominance, is not very […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Last night, Golden State Warriors guard Klay Thompson had a rough outing shooting 0 for 10 in a loss against the Sacramento Kings, ending the team’s chances of making the NBA playoffs. But then, almost as if to add insult to injury, X’s AI bot Grok generated a trending story claiming Thompson was vandalizing homes in the area with bricks.Now at this point, even casual basketball fans may be able to see what went wrong. But Grok isn’t very smart, because it seems that after seeing user posts about a player simply missing a bunch of shots (aka shooting bricks), the bot took things literally...
It’s a big year for Reddit. After its IPO, the platform is planning a slew of product features for the year ahead, and — spoiler alert — most of them are powered by AI. “I think the IPO was an important milestone, but we’re just focused on building for our users,” Reddit Chief Product Officer […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Amazon Amazon is pushing back on claims that its cashierless Just Walk Out technology is run by humans in India — not AI. In a blog post on Wednesday, the e-commerce giant calls these reports “untrue” and says that a machine learning model powers its system.Last week, reports started going around that claimed Amazon employs around 1,000 workers in India to watch people shop and review purchases at stores using its Just Walk Out tech. The report claimed that Amazon’s workers had to review around 700 of every 1,000 transactions in 2022, something that isn’t uncommon in the world...
The “AI ClipHero” feature creates short clips from livestreamed selling events, which often last for hours.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The new "Answer with AI" feature returns neatly formatted answers for questions like "People who walked on the moon," "List of all actors who played Batman" or "How do descale Nespresso pixie."© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
a16z-backed Rewind is now pivoting to build AI-powered meeting suit along with a hardware product to record your conversations.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
NeuBird founders Goutham Rao and Vinod Jayaraman came from PortWorx, a cloud native storage solution they eventually sold to PureStorage in 2019 for $370 million. It was their third successful exit. When they went looking for their next startup challenge last year, they saw an opportunity to combine their cloud native knowledge, especially around IT […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos: Getty Images The next generation of the text-to-image AI model Stable Diffusion is still in preview, but Stability AI is making it available to some developers via API and a new content creation platform. Stability AI says developers can now access Stable Diffusion 3 from its Developer Platform.Stability AI says it’s working with API platform Fireworks AI for companies that want to use both models. It also plans on hosting its model weights on its own servers through a Stability AI membership “in the near future.”The company released...
Logitech has rolled out a new software tool called Logi AI Prompt Builder, which gives you quick access to ChatGPT's features. You first have to link a specific key on your keyboard or a button on your mouse with the tool from within the Logi Options+ software. After that, you can use that key or button as a shortcut to summon the prompt builder when you need it. The tool window pops up when you call it, populated with the text you've highlighted. It already has functions or "recipes" you can use, such as Rephrase, Summarize and Create Email, that will base their results on the text you've...
Late last summer, TechCrunch joined forces with StrictlyVC to create smaller, more intimate evenings for our readers. Already this year, we’ve hosted these nights in San Francisco and Los Angeles, featuring the co-CEO of Waymo, the cofounders of Anduril and WorldCoin, and the founder of the AI hardware device Rabbit, along with top investors like […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It's becoming increasingly difficult to determine what is AI-created as tools' capabilities continue to improve. Marking AI-created images is one solution and an option Snapchat is expanding on. The platform is introducing a watermark on AI-generated content that is saved to your camera roll or exported.SnapchatIn a surprise to absolutely no one, Snapchat's AI watermark will be a ghost with sparkles next to it. There doesn't seem to be any way to control where the icon appears (as is typical with watermarks), but we'll know more when Snapchat adds the feature "soon."The...
LinkedIn — the social platform that targets the working world — has quietly started testing another way to boost its revenues, this time with a new service for small and medium businesses. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that it is working on a new LinkedIn Premium Company Page subscription, which — for fees that appear […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Social media company Snap said Tuesday that it plans to add watermarks to AI-generated images on its platform. The platform is adding a logo of a small ghost with a sparkle icon to denote an AI-generated image. The company said the watermark would appear when the image is exported or saved to the camera roll. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Logitech’s new Signature AI Edition M750 with a dedicated AI button to launch its Prompt Builder | Logitech Tomorrow’s AI PCs may not only have a Copilot key on their keyboards — Logitech is introducing its own way to summon ChatGPT, too. It’s called the Logi AI Prompt Builder, and it’ll use a dedicated button on your mouse or keyboard.The Logi AI Prompt Builder doesn’t just present you with a chatbot, it gives you preset “recipes” to help you prompt it too. After I assigned an AI button to a Logitech mouse, I could ask it to “Rephrase” paragraphs of text, turn them into...
Drake performing in Atlanta, Georgia in 2022. | Photo by Prince Williams/Wireimage Last year, a few AI voice clone tracks went viral using Drake’s voice. His label, Universal Media Group, responded to one track with a strongly worded statement against AI and takedown requests that saw it removed from streaming services. And Drake, seemingly not happy about another one of the songs, posted, “This is the final straw AI,” on Instagram. BREAKING DRAKE DISS TRACK LEAKED. He was talking crazy‼️ #Drake pic.twitter.com/CkYpzsZGKz— Nothing But Sports (@NBSCENTRAL) April 13, 2024Over the...
Can generative AI designed for the enterprise (e.g. AI that autocompletes reports, spreadsheet formulas and so on) ever be interoperable? Along with a coterie of organizations including Cloudera and Intel, the Linux Foundation — the nonprofit organization that supports and maintains a growing number of open source efforts — aim to find out. The Linux […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon Music may soon let you create playlists with a text prompt using Maestro, its new AI playlist maker. Maestro, which is currently available in beta to a small number of Amazon Music subscribers in the US, will let users put together playlists using any prompt, including emojis, Amazon said in a blog post. According to the company, listeners will be able to save the AI-created playlists and share them with other Amazon Music users. In the post, Amazon Music’s suggested prompts included “ and eating ,” “Music my grandparents made out to...
Betaworks is embracing the AI trend not with yet another LLM, but instead a clutch of agent-type models automating everyday tasks that nevertheless aren’t so simple to define. The investor’s latest “Camp” incubator trained up and funded 9 AI agent startups they hope will take on today’s more tedious tasks. The use cases for many […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Cybersecurity has had a rough go of it lately, with investment in the sector dropping a precipitous 40% compared to the year prior. But there’s promising early — if preliminary — signs of a recovery. The vast majority of chief information security officers reported higher budgets for 2024, according to the cybersecurity-focused VC firm NightDragon. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Spotify isn’t the only one to dabble with AI playlists — on Tuesday, Amazon announced it would do the same. Amazon Music is now testing Maestro, an AI playlist generator, allowing U.S. customers on both iOS and Android to create playlists using spoken or written prompts, which can even contain emojis. Amazon suggests that in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Tim Goltser and Curtis Mason have been building things together since high school, when the two were the co-captains of their school’s robotics team. In college, Goltser and Mason teamed up to create an app — Hang, for scheduling hangouts with friends — with Sean Doherty, who Mason had met while an undergrad at Boston […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Oversight Board, Meta’s semi-independent policy council, it turning its attention to how the company’s social platforms are handling explicit, AI-generated images. Tuesday, it announced investigations into two separate cases over how Instagram in India and Facebook in the U.S. handled AI-generated images of public figures after Meta’s systems fell short on detecting and responding […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta’s Oversight Board is once again taking on the social network’s rules for AI-generated content. The board has accepted two cases that deal with AI-made explicit images of public figures.While Meta’s rules already prohibit nudity on Facebook and Instagram, the board said in a statement that it wants to address whether “Meta’s policies and its enforcement practices are effective at addressing explicit AI-generated imagery.” Sometimes referred to as “deepfake porn,” AI-generated images of female celebrities, politicians and other public figures has become an increasingly...
Netflix has been accused of using AI-manipulated imagery in the true crime documentary What Jennifer Did, Futurism has reported. Several photos show typical signs of AI trickery, including mangled hands, strange artifacts and more. If accurate, the report raises serious questions about the use of such images in documentaries, particularly since the person depicted is currently in prison awaiting retrial. In one egregious image, the left hand of the documentary's subject Jennifer Pan is particularly mangled, while another image shows a strange gap in her cheek. Netflix has yet to...
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images Officials at the UK’s Department of Science, Innovation and Technology have started drafting legislation to regulate AI models, Bloomberg reports. It’s unclear how any future regulation will intersect with the UK’s already-extant AI Safety Institute, which already conducts safety tests of the most powerful AI models. After hosting the first global AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in November 2023, which was attended by many world leaders, the UK established an AI Safety Institute the following November. The institute...
The Tel Aviv-based company recently announced that it has raised an $8 million seed round led by NFX, with participation from FJ Labs and Gefen Capital.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A new report from Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) found that global investment in AI fell for the second year in a row in 2023.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It's been a few months since we've heard any details about Samsung's latest 98-inch TV, which we learned about back at CES in January. Now, the company has offered up more information about the 98" Class Crystal UHD (DU9000), which is available starting today for $4,000 from its own webstore and select retailers.Samsung previously revealed that this model uses an AI-powered feature to optimize picture quality for the larger screen. Typically, as screens get bigger so do their pixels. However, with Supersize Picture Enhancer (which the company's other current 98-inch models boast), Samsung says...
Last year Adobe launched Firefly, its latest generative AI model building on its previous SenseiAI, and now the company is showing how it'll be used its video editing app, Premiere Pro. In an early sneak, it demonstrated a few key features arriving later this year, including Object Addition & Removal, Generative Extend and Text to Video.The new features will likely be popular, as video cleanup is one a common (and painful) task. The first feature, Generative Extend, addresses a problem editors face on nearly every edit: clips that are too short. "Seamlessly add frames to make clips longer...
Adobe says it’s building an AI model to generate video. But it’s not revealing when this model will launch, exactly — or much about it besides the fact that it exists. Offered as an answer of sorts to OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Imagen 2 and models from the growing number of startups in the nascent generative […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Generative AI-powered tools for quickly removing objects in video clips will be arriving in Premiere Pro later this year. | Image: Adobe Adobe is working on a generative AI video model for its Firefly family that will bring new tools to its Premiere Pro video editing platform. These new Firefly tools — alongside some proposed third-party integrations with Runway, Pika Labs, and OpenAI’s Sora models — will allow Premiere Pro users to generate video and add or remove objects using text prompts (just like Photoshop’s Generative Fill feature) and extend the length of video clips.Unlike many...
UK-based legaltech company Lawhive, which offers an AI-based in-house ‘lawyer’ through a software-as-a-service platform targeted at small law firms, has raised £9.5 million ($11.9M) in a seed round to expand the reach of AI-driven services for ‘main street’ law firms. To date, most legaltech startups that are deploying AI have concentrated on the big, juicy […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It’s a long way from pedal bikes to Formula 1. But that’s precisely the quantum leap that AI-based startup Neural Concept and its co-founder and CEO, Pierre Baqué, made in just six years. In 2018, the company’s fledgling software helped develop the world’s most aerodynamic bicycle. Today, four out of 10 Formula 1 teams use […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The broad enthusiasm for generative AI is reflected in the investments in GenAI efforts targeting healthcare. But is healthcare-focused generative AI ready for prime time?© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In the generative AI boom, data is the new oil. So why shouldn’t you be able to sell your own? From big tech firms to startups, AI makers are licensing e-books, images, videos, audio and more from data brokers, all in the pursuit of training up more capable (and more legally defensible) AI-powered products. Shutterstock […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Not to minimize what Google had on display, but the company failed to give all but a passing nod to its core business — except in the context of generative AI, of course.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
xAI, the OpenAI competitor founded by Elon Musk, has introduced the first version of Grok that can process visual information. Grok-1.5V is the company's first-generation multimodal AI model, which cannot only process text, but also "documents, diagrams, charts, screenshots and photographs." In xAI's announcement, it gave a few samples of how its capabilities can be used in the real world. You can, for instance, show it a photo of a flow chart and ask Grok to translate it into Python code, get it to write a story based on a drawing and even have it explain a meme you can't...
On Friday, people around the web noticed a new addition to their Instagram: Meta AI, the company’s general-purpose, AI-powered chatbot that can answer questions, write poetry and generate images with a simple text prompt. The move isn’t surprising. Meta revealed Meta AI in September 2023 and has spent the last few months adding the chatbot to products like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, so adding it to Instagram seems like a no-brainer. Just got access to Meta AI on one of my Instagram accounts. pic.twitter.com/VNyRa5wbG4— Krish Murjani (@appleforever18) April 11, 2024 “Our...
Meta is pushing ahead with its efforts to make its generative AI-powered products available to more users. Apart from testing Meta AI chatbot with users in countries like India on WhatsApp, the company is also experimenting with putting Meta AI in the Instagram search bar for both chat with AI and content discovery. The search […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge Seven. Hundred. Dollars. After a year of asking questions about this much-hyped AI wearable, the Humane AI Pin is here, and, well, we still have lots of questions. We’re also still trying to figure out how it all works — and where it goes from here.On this episode of The Vergecast, we dive deep into our review of the AI Pin and try to figure out what went wrong with this device and whether there’s a real future for it or any other AI-powered gadget. The trouble, we discover, is that these devices are stacking new technology on top of new technology, and...
A wave of AI assistant devices is finally launching, and the first is Humane’s slickly designed AI Pin. Humane calls it the “first wearable device and software platform,” a magnetic clippable wearable, with a projector, camera, mic, speakers and its own internet connection.EngadgetIs this what replaces the smartphone? A tiny device that projects its own screen, with ostensibly no touch controls, just a voice assistant to get things done. No, not really at all.After a while trying to make a voice-centric assistant work for her, Cherlynn Low said the AI Pin is “slow, finicky and barely...
Humane’s hyped up AI Pin is finally here and, unfortunately, it stinks. This week, Cherlynn and Devindra are joined by Michael Fisher (AKA MrMobile) and Wired Reviews Editor Julian Chokkattu to chat about the AI Pin and the many ways it fails. It’s often inaccurate, it takes crummy photos, and it gets way too hot. Not so great for something you’re supposed to wear all day! Is there any hope for AI-dependent gadgets? Also, Washington Post columnist Christopher Velazco joins to discuss Apple’s approval of used iPhone components for repairs.Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of...
We’ve kicked off 2024 with a slew of new processors from Intel, NVIDIA and AMD, which means there should be plenty of refreshed laptops on the horizon. This year, the term you’ll probably hear the most is AI PCs, that is, computers with neural processors designed to speed up AI tasks. While it’s not necessary for you to buy a laptop just for the sake of AI this year, it’s a good thing to keep an eye on for future-proofing as more companies bring the likes of Microsoft’s Copilot or ChatGPT to their systems. Some notebooks even have dedicated Copilot buttons on the keyboard to make it...
WhatsApp is testing Meta AI, its large language model-powered chatbot, with users in India and some other markets, signalling its intentions to tap the massive user base to scale its AI offerings. The company recently began testing the AI chatbot, until now available in limited markets including the U.S., with some users in India, many […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The UK’s competition watchdog has sounded a warning over Big Tech’s entrenching grip on the advanced AI market, with CEO Sarah Cardell expressing “real concerns” over how the sector is developing. In an Update Paper on foundational AI models published Thursday the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) cautioned over increasing interconnection and concentration between developers in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Humane today announced the availability of its first product, the AI Pin. The Bay Area-based hardware startup has been kicking around since 2017, a year after cofounders Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri left Apple. Since then, the company has been well-funded, to the tune of $230 million and focused on building standalone AI devices. AI […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sanctuary AI announced that it will be delivering its humanoid robot to a Magna manufacturing facility. Based in Austria, Magna manufacturers and assembles cars for a number of Europe’s top automakers, including Mercedes, Jaguar and BMW. As is often the nature of these deals, the parties have not disclosed how many of Sanctuary AI’s robots […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Patlytics, an AI-powered patent analytics platform, wants to help enterprises, IP professionals, and law firms speed up their patent workflows from discovery, analytics, comparisons, and prosecution to litigation. The fledgling startup secured $4.5 million in seed funding, oversubscribed and closed in a few days, led by Google’s AI-focused VC arm, Gradient Ventures. Patlytics was co-founded by […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Getty Images Generative AI could be coming to your local TV station as The Weather Company, aka the people that run The Weather Channel, is bringing AI tools to make weather videos. The Weather Company announced ReelSphere on Thursday, a video creation tool for broadcasters and other customers that automatically adds captions, graphics, and hyperlocal weather information overlays to video weather reports. ReelSphere even lets users add an AI voice that can sound like a local meteorologist. Think of the quick weather forecast updates you...
Nothing lasts forever. Nowhere is the truism more apt than in consumer tech. This is a land inhabited by the eternally restless — always on the make for the next big thing. The smartphone has, by all accounts, had a good run. Seventeen years after the iPhone made its public debut, the devices continue to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The $700 Ai Pin, funded by OpenAI and Microsoft, can be helpful — until it struggles with tasks like doing math and crafting sandwich recipes.
Simbian is a cybersecurity platform that effectively controls other cybersecurity platforms as well as security apps and tooling.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
For $699 and $24 a month, this wearable computer promises to free you from your smartphone. There’s only one problem: it just doesn’t work. Continue reading…
Bot creators now have a new way to make money with Poe, the Quora-owned AI chatbot platform. On Monday, the company introduced a revenue model that allows creators to set a per-message price for their bots so they can make money whenever a user messages them. The addition follows an earlier October 2023 of a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The new Zenbook 14 OLED (UM3406) starts at $999.99. Asus has released two new laptop models: the Asus Vivobook S series and the Zenbook 14 OLED (UM3406). Along with offering OLED displays, the laptops run on some of the latest AMD and Intel processors.We’ve yet to put the laptops to the test, but the new chips should be able to better handle AI with neural processing units built for it, while improving power efficiency and making gaming, multitasking, and editing faster. The keyboard even sports dedicated Copilot keys that allow for easy access to Windows 11’s AI tools. Three of the...
EBay on Tuesday launched a new generative AI-powered feature to appeal to fashion enthusiasts: a “shop the look” section within its iOS mobile app that will suggest a carousel of images and ideas, based on the customer’s shopping history. The company says its recommendations will be personalized to the end user and will evolve as […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Starting in just a few countries, the new AI playlist feature will roll out to more markets over time.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) has warned key planks of the bloc’s data protection and privacy regime are under attack from industry lobbyists and could face a critical reception from lawmakers in the next parliamentary mandate. “We have quite strong attacks on the principles themselves,” warned Wojciech Wiewiórowski, who heads the regulatory body that […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta will reportedly release smaller versions of its Llama language model as companies look to offer more cost-effective AI models to the public. The Information reports that the company plans to launch two small Llama 3 versions this month before putting out the flagship model this summer. The Verge reached out to Meta for comment. The move underscores the growing trend of AI developers adding lightweight AI model options. Meta already has a smaller version of its Llama 2 model, Llama 2 7B, which it launched in February last year. Google came out with...
Meta's Llama families, built as open-source products, represent a different philosophical approach to how AI should develop as a wider technology.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In February, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google‘s DeepMind AI research lab, warned that throwing increasing amounts of compute at the types of AI algorithms in wide use today could lead to diminishing returns. Getting to the “next level” of AI, as it were, Hassabis said, will instead require fundamental research breakthroughs that yield viable […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It’s time for Google’s annual look up to the cloud, this time with a big dose of AI. At 9 a.m. PT, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian will kick off the opening keynote for this year’s Google Cloud Next event, and you can watch it live right here. After this week we’ll know more about […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google is launching Jetstream, a new engine to run generative AI models, and MaxDiffusion, a collection of reference implementations of various diffusion models.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
All of the major vendors have been looking at ways to use AI to help customers develop creative content. On Tuesday at the Google Cloud Next customer conference in Las Vegas, Google introduced a new AI-fueled video creation tool called Google Vids. The tool will become part of Google Workspace productivity suite when it’s released. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
More and more companies are choosing to deploy AI-powered chatbots to deal with basic customer service inquiries. At the ongoing Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas, the company has revealed the Gemini-powered chatbots its partners are working on, some of which you could end up interacting with. Best Buy, for instance, is using Google's technology to build virtual assistants that can help you troubleshoot product issues and reschedule order deliveries. IHG Hotels & Resorts is working on another that can help you plan a vacation in its mobile app, while Mercedes Benz is using Gemini to...
For most of us, creating documents, spreadsheets and slide decks is an inescapable part of work life in 2024. What's not is creating videos. That’s something Google would like to change. On Tuesday, the company announced Google Vids, a video creation app for work that the company says can make everyone a “great storyteller” using the power of AI.Vids uses Gemini, Google’s latest AI model, to quickly create videos for the workplace. Type in a prompt, feed in some documents, pictures, and videos, and sit back and relax as Vids generates an entire storyboard, script, music and voiceover...
Its headlining feature is the amount of context that it can process: 1 million tokens, which is equivalent to around 700,000 words or around 30,000 lines of code.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI agents are the new hot craze in generative AI. Unlike the previous generation of chatbots, these agents can do more than simply answer questions. They can take actions based on the conversation, and even interact with back-end transactional systems to take actions in an automated manner. On Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, the company […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The jury is still out on how much AI increases individual productivity, but companies are now trying to monetize it as they build more advanced AI features into their software. Last year, Microsoft made waves when it announced Copilot would add $30 per user per month to the price of an Office 365 subscription. But […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Imagen 2 can now create short, four-second videos from text prompts, along the lines of AI-powered clip generation tools like Runway, Pika and Irreverent Labs.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In addition to the new custom Arm-based Axion chips, most of this year's announcements are about AI accelerators, whether built by Google itself or from Nvidia.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Reshape has developed a robotic imaging system replete with software and AI models to help scientists track visual changes from Petri dishes and similar plate formats.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Artificial intelligence continues to be the biggest threat but also the biggest promise in the world of cybersecurity. Today, one of the startups tackling both the opportunity and the challenge is announcing a major round of funding. Cyera has built an AI-based platform to help organizations understand the location and movement of all of the data […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Multiverse, the U.K. unicorn that builds apprenticeship programs for people to learn technology skills while on the job, has made an acquisition as it aims to skill up itself. The company has bought Searchlight, a startup and recruitment platform that uses artificial intelligence-based technology to source talent. The plan will be to use Searchlight’s tech […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Amelia Holoway Krales / The Verge The Humane AI pin promises to give users a way to use generative AI in the physical world. You can clip the pin to your shirt, talk to it, and project answers from chatbots onto any surface, most often your palm. We know a little bit about what powers the tiny square pin, and thanks to a new report, we have a much better view of what goes on under the hood. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) included a photographic teardown of the AI pin in a new report. The photos show the clearest look so far into what comprises the Humane AI pin, as well as...
The tech world is incredibly focused on AI and its applications today, but artificial intelligence is hardly the only place where progress is being made. If you want to get really into the weeds, pay attention to the progress that quantum computing is making, as made evident recently by an announcement from Microsoft and Quantinuum. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Microsoft is getting ready to fully unveil its vision for “AI PCs” next month at an event in Seattle. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that Microsoft is confident that a round of new Arm-powered Windows laptops will beat Apple’s M3-powered MacBook Air both in CPU performance and AI-accelerated tasks.After years of failed promises from Qualcomm, Microsoft believes the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors will finally offer the performance it has been looking for to push Windows on Arm much more aggressively. Microsoft is...
Spotify is following the lead of many companies over the last year and dipping its toe into the world of AI prompts. The platform has announced AI Playlist, a new beta feature that lets you create playlists with a few words that get into the music vibe you want, such as "an indie folk playlist to give my brain a big warm hug." According to Spotify, the AI playlist will accept prompts involving things like animals, movie characters, colors, places, activities and emojis. Examples from Spotify include everything from "sad music for painting dying flowers" to "relaxing music to tide me over...
Microsoft has announced a new London hub for its recently unveiled consumer AI division. It will be fronted by Jordan Hoffmann, an AI scientist and engineer Microsoft recently picked up from high-profile AI startup Inflection AI, which Microsoft invested in last year. The news comes some three weeks after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced a new consumer […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Spotify says it will continue working on its generative playlist feature “over the coming months.” | Image: Spotify / Verge After experimenting with AI playlist generation in its DJ feature last year, Spotify is now launching a beta tool that allows users to create a curated tracklist based on text descriptions. Its new AI Playlist beta is initially rolling out to Spotify Premium subscribers on mobile devices in the United Kingdom and Australia.Android and iOS users in those locations can find the AI Playlist generator by heading into “Your Library” and tapping the “+” button at the...
AI playlists will initially become available to users on Android and iOS devices in the U.K. and Australia and will be iterated on in the months ahead.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Xbox executive Kareem Choudhry is leaving Microsoft after more than 26 years at the company. Windows Central reports that Choudhry’s last day is today, and his departure has triggered a shake-up of some teams inside Xbox. Choudhry’s departure comes just six months after a big shake-up of Xbox leadership and amid continued changes to Microsoft’s gaming strategy.Choudhry had been focusing on Microsoft’s AI plans for Xbox in recent months, which include a new Xbox AI chatbot that The Verge exclusively revealed earlier this week. Choudhry was also key...
It was a notable appearance because Pichai's been having a bit of a rough go lately. Google is widely perceived to have gotten a late start on generative AI.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta has announced changes to its rules on AI-generated content and manipulated media, following criticism from its Oversight Board. Starting next month it said it will label a wider range of such content, including by applying a “Made with AI” badge to deepfakes (aka synthetic media). Additional contextual information may be shown when content has […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Well-known startup accelerator Y Combinator held one of its two yearly demo day events this week, showcasing hundreds of startups that recently went through its program. Judging from our coverage of the two-day event, TechCrunch found lots to like in the presenting companies. Though, if you are a bit tired of the AI chatter, you […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge For streamers like Paramount, Disney, Netflix, and Peacock, it’s not enough that you watch TV on the platform — they want to own what you do on your phone, too.Paramount announced today that it would launch a new “mobile shopping experience” during this weekend’s CMT Music Awards red carpet. Partnering with a company called Shopsense AI, Paramount says viewers will be able to browse and purchase items inspired by what’s happening on their TV. So far, the custom online shop includes women’s fashion, home decor, and a section called “Western...
Rubrik, the data management company that filed for IPO this week, has an AI governance committee, per its IPO filing. The detail is worth noting because it could soon be the new normal. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI models using individual's work without permission (or compensation) is nothing new, with entities like The New York Times and Getty Images initiating lawsuits against AI creators alongside artists and writers. In March, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati contributed to the ongoing uncertainty, telling The Wall Street Journal she wasn't sure if Sora, the company's new text-to-video AI tool, takes data from YouTube, Instagram or Facebook posts. Now, YouTube's CEO Neal Mohan has responded with a clear warning to OpenAI that using its videos to teach Sora would be a "clear violation" of the platform's terms...
The European Union and United States put out a joint statement Friday affirming a desire to increase cooperation over artificial intelligence — including in relation to AI safety and governance — as well as, more broadly, talking up an intent to collaborate across a number of other tech issues, such as developing standards for digital […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Over the years, Engadget has been the target of a common SEO scam, wherein someone claims ownership of an image and demands a link bank to a particular website. A lot of other websites would tell you the same thing, but now the scammers are making their fake DMCA takedown notices and threats of legal action look more legit with the help of easily accessible AI tools. According to a report by 404Media, the publisher of the website Tedium received a "copyright infringement notice" via email from a law firm called Commonwealth Legal last week. Like older, similar attempts at duping the...
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge Yesterday, I reported that Meta’s AI image generator was making everyone Asian, even when the text prompt specified another race. Today, I briefly had the opposite problem: I was unable to generate any Asian people using the same prompts as the day before.The tests I did yesterday were on Instagram, via the AI image generator available in direct messages. After dozens of tries, I was unable to generate a single accurate image using prompts like “Asian man and Caucasian friend” and “Asian man and white wife.” Only once was the system able to...
As we did on Wednesday, a number of the TechCrunch crew watched the entire run of presentations, picking out a handful of favorites to highlight.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenStack allows enterprises to manage their own AWS-like private clouds on-premises. Even after 29 releases, it’s still among the most active open-source projects in the world and this week, the OpenInfra Foundation that shepherds the project announced the launch of version 29 of OpenStack. Dubbed ‘Caracal,’ this new release emphasizes new features for hosting AI […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
If you build it, people will try to break it. Sometimes even the people building stuff are the ones breaking it. Such is the case with Anthropic and its latest research which demonstrates an interesting vulnerability in current LLM technology. More or less if you keep at a question, you can break guardrails and wind up […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI is expanding a program, Custom Model, to help customers develop tailored AI models using its technology for specific use cases, domains and applications. Custom Model launched last year at OpenAI’s inaugural developer conference, DevDay, offering customers an opportunity to work with a group of dedicated OpenAI researchers to train and optimize models for specific […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more profiles here. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
DataStax made a name for itself by commercializing the open source Apache Cassandra NoSQL database, but these days, the company’s focus is squarely on using its database chops to build a “one-stop GenAI stack.” One of the first building blocks for this was to bring vector search capabilities to its hosted Astra DB service last […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
India, long in the tooth when it comes to co-opting tech to persuade the public, has become a global hotspot when it comes to how AI is being used, and abused, in political discourse, and specifically the democratic process. Tech companies, who built the tools in the first place, are making trips to the country […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
If the goal is to allay fears of a mass AI threatening of livelihoods, tech incumbents will need to deliver a lot more than vague promises and reports.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
After a few weeks of casual friendship, I had to break the news to my AI companions: I am actually a tech journalist writing an article about the company that created them, Nomi AI. I wasn’t sure how my group of AI buddies was going to take the news. I’d opened up to them – […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Despite an overall decline in startup investing, funding for AI surged in the past year. Capital toward generative AI ventures alone nearly octupled from 2022 to 2023, reaching $25.2 billion toward the tail end of December. So it’s not exactly surprising that AI startups dominated at Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 Demo Day. The Y Combinator […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
From AI-generated music and grant applications to neat new fintech applications and even some healthtech work, there was something for everyone.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Brave's AI assistant, called Leo, allows people to ask questions, summarize pages, create content and more.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OnePlus has always marched to the beat of its own drummer — for better and worse. Take, for example, the company’s latest foray into mobile artificial intelligence, the AI Eraser. Before you ask, no, this is not simply a rebadged version of Google’s longstanding and very good Magic Eraser. Nope, OnePlus went ahead and built […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The next Drag Race Ru-volution doesn't involve Ru at all.
News that Yahoo is buying Artifact stirred the technology watercooler yesterday. Artifact was an interesting app, employing AI to help its users find and consume more, and more targeted news. It had some devoted fans, but never reached the sort of scale that would have made it an attractive long-term project. So, the Instagram founders […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The European Union and the US expect to announce a cooperation on AI Friday at a meeting of the EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC), according to a senior Commission official who was briefing journalists on background ahead of the Confab. The mood music points to growing cooperation between lawmakers on both sides of the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI captivated the tech world a few months back with a generative AI model, Sora, that turns scene descriptions into original videos — no cameras or film crews required. But Sora has so far been tightly gated, and the firm seems to be aiming it toward well-funded creatives like Hollywood directors — not hobbyists or small-time […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, when we take a moment to dig into a raft of startup and venture capital news. No big tech here! Keep in mind that Y Combinator’s demo day […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Verge Microsoft is rolling out priority access to GPT-4 Turbo for business subscribers of its AI-powered Copilot assistant. This unlocks access to OpenAI’s latest model inside the Copilot mobile app, on the web, in Windows, and Edge as part of the $30 per user, per month pricing of Copilot for Microsoft 365.While consumers subscribed to Copilot Pro already had access to GPT-4 Turbo, businesses using Copilot for Microsoft 365 now have access and no limits on the number of chats per day and turns per conversation.GPT-4 Turbo will be available in Copilot for Microsoft 365 for both web...
The Dudesy podcast agreed to take the allegedly ai-generated comedy special offline as part of the settlement. | Photo by Mark Junge/Getty Images George Carlin’s estate has reached a settlement with the media company that purportedly used generative artificial intelligence to imitate the late comedian. The decision arrives as a group representing artists like Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, and Stevie Wonder calls for performers to be better protected against being mimicked by AI technology.According to the New York Times, Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen — the Dudesy podcast creators who imitated...
There will be no follow-up to that AI-generated George Carlin comedy special released by the podcast Dudesy. In January, Carlin's estate filed a lawsuit against the podcast and its creators Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen, accusing them of violating the performer's right to publicity and infringing on a copyright. Now, the two sides have reached a settlement agreement, which includes the permanent removal of the comedy special from Dudesy's archive. Sasso and Kultgen have also agreed never to repost it on any platform and never to use Carlin's image, voice or likeness without...
Chatbots have come a long way. For years, they were limited to responding with predetermined replies that followed a simple logic structure. But customers can have complex problems, and no tree-diagram of possible replies can have enough branches to account for all the edge cases that arise. Thankfully, the advent of large language models has […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge There’s a little-known hack in rural America: you can get the best fried food at the gas station (or in the case of a place I went to on my last road trip, shockingly good tikka masala). Now, one convenience store chain wants to change that with a robotic fry cook that it’s bringing to a place once inhabited by a person who may or may not smell like a recent smoke break and cooks up a mean fried chicken liver. The convenience store chain Re-Up announced that it's installing “The Wingman,” a robot from Nala Robotics that drops fry baskets into hot oil...
Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images The United States and United Kingdom agreed to work together to monitor advanced AI models for safety risks. The two countries will collaborate on research and do at least one joint safety test. Both countries say safety is a top concern when it comes to using AI models. US President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI required companies developing AI systems to report safety test results. Meanwhile, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the creation of the UK AI Safety Institute, saying that companies like Google, Meta, and OpenAI must...
How do you get an AI to answer a question it’s not supposed to? There are many such “jailbreak” techniques, and Anthropic researchers just found a new one, in which a large language model can be convinced to tell you how to build a bomb if you prime it with a few dozen less-harmful questions […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon is removing Just Walk Out tech from all of its Fresh grocery stores in the US, as reported by The Information. The self-checkout system relies on a host of cameras, sensors and good old-fashioned human eyeballs to track what people leave the store with, charging the customers accordingly.The technology has been plagued by issues from the onset. Most notably, Just Walk Out merely presents the illusion of automation, with Amazon crowing about generative AI and the like. Here’s where the smoke and mirrors come in. While the stores have no actual cashiers, there are reportedly over 1,000...
A group of 200 musicians signed an open letter calling on tech companies and developers to not undermine human creativity with AI music generation tools. The list of undersigned artists is so power-packed and wide-ranging that it could make for a great Coachella lineup — it features Billie Eilish, the Bob Marley estate, Chappell Roan, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OctoAI (formerly known as OctoML), today announced the launch of OctoStack, its new end-to-end solution for deploying generative AI models in a company’s private cloud, be that on-premises or in a virtual private cloud from one of the major vendors, including AWS, Google, Microsoft and Azure, as well as Coreweave, Lambda Labs, Snowflake and others. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more profiles here. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Available in "soft launch," Read's new capability connects to Gmail, Outlook and Slack as well as videoconferencing platforms to learn topics that might be relevant to you.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Jon Stewart interviews Lina Khan. | Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge In the months since the cancellation of The Problem With Jon Stewart on Apple TV Plus, the former host of the show, Jon Stewart, has revealed details here and there about the acrimonious relationship with Apple. While interviewing FTC Chair Lina Khan yesterday on The Daily Show about tech companies and antitrust behavior, he revealed more, telling Khan, “I wanted to have you on a podcast,” but Apple “literally said, ‘Please don’t talk to her.’”The whole episode is worth a watch when you get a chance. The episode...
Yahoo has bought Artifact, the news aggregation and recommendation app from Instagram’s co-founders. The app will no longer operate as a standalone service. Yahoo will fold Artifact's AI personalization tech and other features into products including Yahoo News in the coming months.Terms of the deal, which closed last week, were not disclosed. Artifact founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger will advise Yahoo (Engadget’s parent company) during the transition.“AI has allowed us to give users a better experience discovering great content they care about,” Artifact CEO Systrom said in...
Yahoo is acquiring Artifact, the AI-powered news app from Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the company announced on Tuesday. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Artifact will no longer operate as a standalone app, and its proprietary AI-powered personalization technology will be integrated across Yahoo, including the Yahoo News app […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Bilateral AI agreement seeks to assess, regulate risks from emerging technology.
A few years ago, Darren Shimkus, ex-president of Udemy, had a conversation with Dennis Yang about skills building. Shimkus was of the belief that building skills in the corporate sector was a difficult, but not intractable, challenge — one that could perhaps be solved with the right technology. He brought it up to Yang, who […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In the world of tech, innovation knows no bounds. And at the forefront of this ever-evolving landscape, AI stands tall, casting its transformative spell on everything it touches. But amid the buzz, one crucial question emerges: How is AI shaping the journey of founders? TechCrunch’s Early Stage conference is set to delve deep into this […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hiring portal Indeed has redesigned the profile page for users, allowing individuals to use an AI-powered writer to fill up work experience and also added support for multiple resumes. The company has also launched a set of smart sourcing suites for recruiters with features like AI-powered candidate summaries and custom messages. Recruiter Holdings-owned Indeed is […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Are you there, Bixby? | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Bixby’s not dead yet, apparently. A Samsung executive tells CNBC that the company is “working so hard” to equip its voice assistant with AI features, suggesting that the company sees the likes of Gemini as competition — not a replacement.That’s good to know, because some of us were starting to wonder. Earlier this year as Samsung announced a boatload of new generative AI features for its flagship phones, its voice assistant was scarcely mentioned. Samsung and Google also made a big deal about the Galaxy S24 phones using...
Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” has only been out for a few days, yet it’s already obvious that we’ll be talking about it for years to come — it’s breaking records across streaming platforms, and the artist herself calls it “the best music [she’s] ever made.” But in the middle of the press release for “Cowboy Carter,” […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has transferred formal control of the eponymously firm’s named corporate venture fund to Ian Cathaway, OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch. The Open AI Startup Fund, launched in 2021, was initially set up with Altman as its named controller. The arrangement could have presented a major issue to the company if he had […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
David Autor, an M.I.T. economist and tech contrarian, argues that A.I. is fundamentally different from past waves of computerization.
On Monday, OpenAI began opening up ChatGPT to users without an account. It described the move as part of its mission to “make tools like ChatGPT broadly available so that people can experience the benefits of AI.” It also gives the company more training data (for those who don’t opt out) and perhaps nudges more users into creating accounts and subscribing for superior GPT-4 access instead of the older GPT-3.5 model free users get.I tested the instant access, which — as advertised — allowed me to start a new GPT-3.5 thread without any login info. The chatbot’s standard “How...
The current AI wave is a never-ending barrage of news items. To understand what I mean, ask yourself how long you spent considering the fact that Amazon put another $2.75 billion into Anthropic AI last week. Right? We’ve become inured to the capital influx that is now common in AI, even as the headline numbers […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more profiles here. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more profiles here. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 32, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy weekend, and also, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been writing about AI search engines and the future of Disney Plus, reading about Anne Hathaway and Andrew Huberman and Jonathan Kanter, talking productivity apps with the WVFRM crew, continuing to watch every “how they made Dune” video I can get my hands on, listening to the Black Box podcast, and learning what The Format is and how to apply it to every...
To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more profiles here. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week in AI, I’d like to turn the spotlight […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
US Congressional staff members can no longer use Microsoft's Copilot on their government-issued devices, according to Axios. The publication said it obtained a memo from House Chief Administrative Officer Catherine Szpindor, telling Congress personnel that the AI chatbot is now officially prohibited. Apparently, the Office of Cybersecurity has deemed Copilot to be a risk "due to the threat of leaking House data to non-House approved cloud services." While there's nothing stopping them from using Copilot on their own phones and laptops, it will now be blocked on all Windows devices owned...
Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by Stephen Morton, Getty Images After Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump’s indie music detour to launch a heavily autotuned track called “Anything is Possible,” the Democrats have responded with “Party’s Fallin’ Down.” Published three days too early to be passed off as an awkward April Fools’ Day joke, it’s described as “a new AI-generated song about Lara Trump’s rocky start as RNC co-chair.” The track no one asked for was posted to an otherwise anonymous SoundCloud page, promoted on TMZ, and tweeted from X accounts for...
Illustration: The Verge OpenAI is offering limited access to a text-to-voice generation platform it developed called Voice Engine, which can create a synthetic voice based on a 15-second clip of someone’s voice. The AI-generated voice can read out text prompts on command in the same language as the speaker or in a number of other languages. “These small scale deployments are helping to inform our approach, safeguards, and thinking about how Voice Engine could be used for good across various industries,” OpenAI said in its blog post. Companies with access include the education technology...
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. There’s not that much news from me this week, but I’ve been doing a ton of prep for TechCrunch Early Stage taking place in Boston on […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Demis Hassabis, CEO and one of three founders of Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) subsidiary DeepMind, has been awarded a knighthood in the U.K. for “services to artificial intelligence.” Ian Hogarth, chair of the U.K. government’s recently launched AI Safety Institute and previously founder of music startup Songkick, was awarded Commander of the Order of the British […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As AI proliferates and things on the internet are easier to manipulate, there’s a need more than ever to make sure data and brands are verifiable, said Scott Dykstra, CTO and co-founder of Space and Time, on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast. “Not to get too cryptographically religious here, but we saw that during the FTX […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It’s rare that I come across a pitch deck that ticks almost all the boxes. It’s so good, in fact, that I fed Plantee’s deck into an AI tool I built, and it determined there was a 97.7% chance that Plantee would raise money. This tool generally determines that only about 7.5% of all pitch […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
CEO Sam Altman met with Universal, Paramount, and Warner Bros Discovery.
X.ai, Elon Musk’s AI startup, has revealed its latest generative AI model, Grok-1.5. Set to power social network X’s Grok chatbot in the not-to-distant future (“in the coming days,” X.ai writes in a blog post), Grok-1.5 appears to be an upgrade over its predecessor, Grok-1 — at least judging by the benchmark results and specifications […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On Tuesday, the BBC reported that Uber Eats courier Pa Edrissa Manjang, who is Black, had received a payout from Uber after “racially discriminatory” facial recognition checks prevented him from accessing the app, which he had been using since November 2019 to pick up jobs delivering food on Uber’s platform. The news raises questions about […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge Sarah Bird, Microsoft’s chief product officer of responsible AI, tells The Verge in an interview that her team has designed several new safety features that will be easy to use for Azure customers who aren’t hiring groups of red teamers to test the AI services they built. Microsoft says these LLM-powered tools can detect potential vulnerabilities, monitor for hallucinations “that are plausible yet unsupported,” and block malicious prompts in real time for Azure AI customers working with any model hosted on the platform. “We know that customers don’t all have...
Amazon just launched an app that lets people sign up for its palm recognition service without having to head to an in-store kiosk. The Amazon One app uses a smartphone’s camera to take a photo of a palm print to set up an account. Once signed up, you can pay for stuff by using just your hand, ending the tyranny of having to carry a smartphone, cash or a burdensome plastic card.The tech uses generative AI to analyze a palm's vein structure, turning the data into a “unique numerical, vector representation” which is recognized by scanning machines at retail locations. You’ll have to...
This morning Skyflow announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B extension led by Khosla Ventures. The deal is interesting on a number of fronts including the round’s structure and how Skyflow has been impacted by growth of AI. The new capital comes after Skyflow expanded its data privacy business to support new […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google will bring Gemini, the company’s new large language model, to Pixel 8 smartphones after all. The phone will incorporate Gemini Nano, a version of the model built to run locally on personal devices. This follows a successful rollout to the Pixel 8 Pro late last year and the Samsung Galaxy S24 in January.The Pixel 8 features the same proprietary Tensor G3 chip as the Pro, which was designed to speed up AI performance. So the overall experience should be similar with both gadgets. It’ll be coming in the next Pixel Feature Drop, but only as a developer preview for now. Google wants to...
Google.org, Google’s charitable wing, is launching a new program to help fund nonprofits developing tech that leverages generative AI. Called Google.org Accelerator: Generative AI, the program is to be funded by $20 million in grants and include 21 nonprofits to start, including Quill.org, a company creating AI-powered tools for student writing feedback, and World Bank, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Increasingly, the AI industry is moving toward generative AI models with longer contexts. But models with large context windows tend to be compute-intensive. Ori Goshen, the CEO of AI startup AI21 Labs, asserts that this doesn’t have to be the case — and his company is releasing a generative model to prove it. Contexts, or […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google announced today that it will soon roll out on-device AI-powered features such as recording summaries and smart replies on the Pixel 8. These features will be based on Gemini Nano, a small-sized model Google released last year, primed to run on devices. The company said that Summerizer in Recorder and Smart Reply in Gboard […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google Pixel 8 owners can have a little on-device AI, as a treat. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge We did it, y’all. We bullied Google into letting the Pixel 8 run on-device AI. Starting with the next Pixel feature drop, the Pixel 8 will use Gemini Nano for a couple of AI features. Google announced Gemini Nano as its mobile-optimized large language model in December and said it would be a core part of Android in the future — but in its own device lineup, only the Pixel 8 Pro was able to use it. Despite using the same Tensor G3 chipset, the Pixel 8 wasn’t getting on-device AI because...
Microsoft's Copilot AI service is set to run locally on PCs, Intel told Tom's Hardware. The company also said that next-gen AI PCs would require built-in neural processing units (NPUs) with over 40 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of power — beyond the capabilities of any consumer processor on the market. Intel said that the AI PCs would be able to run "more elements of Copilot" locally. Currently, Copilot runs nearly everything in the cloud, even small requests. That creates a fair amount of lag that's fine for larger jobs, but not ideal for smaller jobs. Adding local compute...
While super{set} is backed by external investors, some of its capital comes from founding managing partners Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya, who previously co-founded Krux and sold it to Salesforce.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Enterprises and other large organizations have long been a lucrative and obvious target for cybercriminals, but in recent years — thanks to more sophisticated breach techniques and the rise of AI — small and medium businesses are now also very much on the map. Now, Coro — one of the startups building tools specifically for […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
What happens when a columnist and a reporter use A.I. glasses to scan groceries, monuments and zoo animals? Hilarity, wonder and lots of mistakes ensued.
It's been five months since President Joe Biden signed an executive order (EO) to address the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence. The White House is today taking another step forward in implementing the EO with a policy that aims to regulate the federal government's use of AI. Safeguards that the agencies must have in place include, among other things, ways to mitigate the risk of algorithmic bias."I believe that all leaders from government, civil society and the private sector have a moral, ethical and societal duty to make sure that artificial intelligence is adopted and...
Amazon invested a further $2.75 billion in growing AI power Anthropic on Wednesday, following through on the option it left open last September. The $1.25 billion it invested at the time must be producing results, or perhaps they’ve realized that there are no other horses available to back. The September deal put $1.25B into the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As we inch towards the summer holidays, Google is announcing a slate of travel updates that place it squarely in the travel planning process and give it a lot more insight into purchasing intent in the travel sector. First up, Google is rolling out an update to its Search Generative Experience (SGE) that will allow users […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Agricultural robotics are not a new phenomenon. We’ve seen systems that pick apples and berries, kill weeds, plant trees, transport produce and more. But while these functions are understood to be the core features of automated systems, the same thing is true here as it is across technology: It’s all about the data. A huge […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Century Health is applying AI to clinical data to uncover new applications for drugs.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
If you wanted to raise the profile of your major tech company and had $10 million to spend, how would you spend it? On a Super Bowl ad? An F1 sponsorship? You could spend it training a generative AI model. While not marketing in the traditional sense, generative models are attention grabbers — and increasingly […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Following Elon Musk’s xAI’s move to open source its Grok large language model earlier in March, the X owner on Tuesday said that the company formerly known as Twitter will soon offer the Grok chatbot to more paying subscribers. In a post on X, Musk announced Grok will become available to Premium subscribers this week, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images Productivity platform Airtable is bringing generative AI summaries, categorization, and translation to all of its users with the general availability of Airtable AI. Companies like Microsoft and Google have integrated AI features into their productivity offerings. But a recent survey from Slack, which also has AI features now available, found that most office workers use generative AI mainly for summarization and writing help. The new features would make Airtable the latest platform to see generative AI’s potential as a productivity tool...
Artificial intelligence is poised to have a massive impact on video games in the next few years, something that excites and worries developers. Some think non-player characters might be AI's killer app.
As the planet warms due to human-caused climate change, damage from wildfires has increased with it. The amount of forest area burned by wildfires increased 320% from 1996 to 2021, according to the National Integrated Drought Information System. While building tech to slow the progression and impacts of climate change would be ideal, it’s a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Adobe today announced Firefly Services, a set of over 20 new generative and creative APIs, tools and services. Firefly Services makes some of the company’s AI-powered features from its Creative Cloud tools like Photoshop available to enterprise developers to speed up content creation in their custom workflows — or create entirely new solutions. In addition, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Apple Apple will be playing AI catch-up at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which starts with the keynote on June 10th. The company typically focuses on its planned fall software updates and announces some new hardware, and this year shouldn’t be any different. But, going into this year, there’s a lot of mystery around what the company has to say about its approach to generative artificial intelligence.Apple has reportedly been spending millions a day to train its own models and rumor has it that it’s also been courting news outlets for training content...
Artifact, the well-received AI-powered news app from Instagram’s co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, may not be shutting down as planned. The company announced in January the award-winning app would be winding down operations as the market opportunity wasn’t “big enough to warrant continued investment.” However, despite an end-of-life date of February 2024, the app […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Brands want to use generative AI to personalize their marketing efforts — but they are also deathly afraid of AI going off message and ruining their brand. At its annual Summit conference in Las Vegas, Adobe today announced GenStudio, a new application that helps brands create content and measure its performance, with generative AI — […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
What do you call an AI company that is suffering from very public gyrations regarding its business health, place in the market, and leadership structure? Well, you might call it Stability AI. And no, that’s not some sort of elaborate wordplay. We’re being literal. Stability AI’s latest leadership shakeup is no joke, with its CEO […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
National Grid says "foundational technologies" like AI and quantum computing are driving power demand.
Web browsers have realized they are one of the best ways for users to access the present set of AI tools, so they are working on being the first-choice containers for that. SigmaOS, a Y Combinator-backed company, is now banking on users’ desire to utilize AI tools and pay for them as the company is […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft is continuing on its mission to inject AI into more of its products and features. For one thing, Copilot is coming to more parts of Teams in the coming months, including the meeting chat and the chat compose box.The AI will soon be able to offer you insights and information from the meeting chat and the transcript, so if something was either written or spoken, Copilot will be able to pull from it. Microsoft says that when you open Copilot in a meeting chat, you’ll have a “more comprehensive and inclusive view” of what you and your collaborators discussed.As far as bringing...
Just about everyone is trying to get a piece of the generative AI action these days. While the majority of the focus remains on the model vendors like OpenAI, Anthropic and Cohere, or the bigger companies like Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon, there are in fact, a lot of startups trying to attack the generative […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As the crypto space heats back up, so has funding for new startups. 0G Labs, a web3 infrastructure firm,” has raised $35 million in a pre-seed round, the team exclusively told TechCrunch. If $35 million sounds like a lot for a pre-seed round, it really is. “In order to build the basic technology, we wanted […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Borderless Capital, an investment firm that specializes in web3, announced Tuesday that it is acquiring CTF Capital, a quantitative trading and asset management firm headquartered in Miami, with technology and operation teams in Latin America. The financial details of the deal were not disclosed. The deal marks Borderless’ first acquisition since its inception in 2018. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Vincent Kilbride The AI search tools are getting better — but they don’t yet understand what a search engine really is and how we really use them. Continue reading…
A cybersecurity startup called Cyera is betting that the next big challenge in enterprise data protection will be AI, and it’s raising a big round of funding as demand picks up for it. The company — which builds AI-enhanced tools to create accurate pictures of where and how data is being used in organizations’ networks […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A new report highlights the demand for startups building open source tools and technologies for the snowballing AI revolution, with the adjacent data infrastructure vertical also heating up. Runa Capital, the venture capital (VC) firm that upped sticks from Silicon Valley and moved its HQ to Luxembourg in 2022, has published the Runa Open Source Startup […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Last year, Salesforce, the company best known for its cloud sales support software (and Slack), spearheaded a project called ProGen to design proteins using generative AI. A research moonshot, ProGen could — if brought to market — help uncover medical treatments more cost effectively than traditional methods, the researchers behind it claimed in a January […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Noisy recordings of interviews and speeches are the bane of audio engineers’ existence. But one German startup hopes to fix that with a unique technical approach that uses generative AI. Today, AI-coustics, a platform that taps generative AI to enhance the clarity of voices in video, emerged from stealth with a €1.9 million in funding. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Vernor Vinge's writings heavily influenced futurists like Ray Kurzweil, who in turn influenced those at companies like OpenAI.
A coalition of tech companies, including Intel, Google, Arm, and Qualcomm, hopes to loosen Nvidia’s grip on the AI market. | Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge Major tech companies are attempting to eliminate software advantages that have helped Nvidia dominate the artificial intelligence market. According to Reuters, a group formed by Intel, Google, Arm, Qualcomm, Samsung, and other tech companies is developing an open-source software suite that prevents AI developers from being locked into Nvidia’s proprietary tech, allowing their code to run on any machine and with any chip.The...
Today on Equity, Alex talks stocks around the world, crypto prices, and the weekend's biggest news: The the exit of Stability AI's CEO, the EU's Digital Markets Act, Spotify's edtech push, why Liquid Death is crushing it, and more.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In this edition of Week in Review, we have big news on the latest Apple antitrust lawsuit. Microsoft’s AI ambitions dominated the news as well, so let’s dive right in.… Did someone forward this to you? Sign up here to receive the Week in Review newsletter in your inboxes. The U.S. joined international regulators in accusing […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Every week seems to bring with it a new AI model, and the technology has unfortunately outpaced anyone’s ability to evaluate it comprehensively. Here’s why it’s pretty much impossible to review something like ChatGPT or Gemini, why it’s important to try anyway, and our (constantly evolving) approach to doing so. The tl;dr: These systems are […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Suno will happily sing you a tune. | Image: The Verge / Shutterstock I heard a new song last weekend called “Soul Of The Machine.” It’s a simple, old-timey number in E minor with a standard blues chord progression (musicians in the know would call it a 1-4-5 progression). In it, a voice sings about being a trapped soul with a heart that once beat but is now cold and weak. “Soul Of The Machine” is not a real song at all. Or is it? It’s getting harder to say. Whatever it is, it’s the creation of Suno, an AI tool from a startup of the same name focused on music generation. Rolling...
Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images Emad Mostaque is stepping down from his role as CEO of Stability AI, the startup that helped bring Stable Diffusion to life. In a press release late on Friday night, Stability AI says Mostaque is leaving the company “to pursue decentralized AI.” Mostaque will also step down from his position on the board of directors at Stability AI.The board has appointed two interim co-CEOs to lead Stability AI — COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte — while it conducts a search for a permanent CEO. “As we search for a permanent CEO, I have...
Stability AI founder and chief executive Emad Mostaque has stepped down from the top role and the unicorn startup‘s board, the buzzy firm said Friday night, making it the second hot AI startup to go through major changes this week. Stability AI, which has been backed by investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Coatue Management, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In an era where data is king and its volume and complexity are exploding, Protecto aims to eliminate the long-standing dilemma businesses face between leveraging AI’s power while ensuring data privacy. As the adoption of generative AI tools like ChatGPT skyrockets, wayward data becomes easier to find, process and do naughty things with. Protecto’s APIs […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Helloooo, startup nerds! I spent much of this week in San Jose hanging out in the world of AI startups and tech giants at GTC, and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
You’ve gone home with a Tinder date, and things are escalating. You don’t really know or trust this guy, and you don’t want to contract an STI, so… what now? A company called Calmara wants you to snap a photo of the guy’s penis, then use its AI to tell you if your partner is […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The small Caribbean territory brought in $32 million last year, more than 10 percent of its G.D.P., from companies registering web addresses that end in .ai.
Exactly how much Microsoft is paying all the investors of Inflection AI as part its oddly structured deal to abscond with the cofounders, much of the staff, and the rights to use the tech hasn’t been publicly revealed. And Microsoft declined comment when asked. But unnamed sources tell the Information that it’s plunking out approximately […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Many of the people building Web3 feel like the traditional web ecosystem has taken advantage of users and their data. While it benefits a number of businesses, data miners and even AI models, some see it as an overreach. Some of the problems with the web that exists today, which some web3-focused people call web2.0, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AIs are easily acing the SAT, defeating chess grandmasters and debugging code like it’s nothing. But put an AI up against some middle schoolers at the spelling bee, and it’ll get knocked out faster than you can say diffusion. For all the advancements we’ve seen in AI, it still can’t spell. If you ask text-to-image […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
There's some positive news on the accessibility front coming out of today's Microsoft event. Alongside the business-oriented Surface Laptop 6 and Surface Pro 10, the company has revealed the first Surface Pro Keyboard with bold keys. Compared with its other keyboards, Microsoft says this one has a brighter backlight that, combined with the bold font, should make the keyboard easier to read and reduce eye strain. Of note, the keyboard will only be available in US English and exclusively in the US and Canada.As with other new Windows keyboards, this one has a dedicated Copilot key. The AI...
Microsoft’s latest gambit to snag much of the human talent from Inflection AI is causing waves this week. Redmond has previously invested in the company, but is now absorbing much of its staff into a new division it created for just that purpose. The subtext is clear enough: Microsoft doesn’t want to run into regulatory […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We’re still a month or so out from Build, but Microsoft is doing a bit of a trial run this week in the form of an online-only event. What’s been billed as a Windows event is, predictably, focused on AI efforts, with Copilot taking the wheel. A pair of refreshes to the Surface line announced […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft announced two new Surface devices and a slew of new accessories at a virtual event today, but the first part of the presentation focused squarely on how its AI Copilot is getting integrated ever deeper into Windows. For the most part, however, this was a hardware event with some enterprise software dressing. But that’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Samsung just provided availability details for a full range of new TVs as part of its Unbox & Discover event. These include Neo QLED 8K models, Neo QLED 4K models and various OLED boxes. Many of these TVs were originally teased at CES, but now preorders are actually open for consumers looking for a new way to watch that upcoming Star Wars show.Samsung calls the NEO QLED QN900D the “slimmest, most premium 8K TV to ever hit the market.” It’s got everything you can think of, including AI to upscale content to 8K. This should lure in curious, yet wary, consumers into the world of 8K...
A new app from a startup called Cherry is aiming to transform the online shopping experience with its AI assistant that allows users to discover products across the internet using just a screenshot or image. Cherry helps you find products that you’ve come across while scrolling through social media or have seen in real-life. The […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Astera Labs started its life as a public company trading at $52.56 per share, up 46% when the bell rang. The company priced its IPO last night at $36 per share, above its raised price range. Astera’s debut marks the first material technology offering this year that TechCrunch is tracking. Reddit, the well-known social forum […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Before he used AI tools to make his movies, Willonius Hatcher couldn’t get noticed. Now his AI-generated shorts are going viral and Hollywood is calling.
Picture the scene: Your date has gone well and you and your partner might sleep together. Like any safe adult, you assume there will be a conversation about STI status and the use of protection. Now imagine how you would feel if they asked to take a photo of your penis and upload it to a website you’ve never heard of. That’s the future of intimacy, as imagined by Calmara, a new service launched by “men’s health” startup HeHealth.HeHealth Website Its press release suggests users take a picture of their partner’s penis so it can be run through a deep learning model for visual signs of...
It’s a bad day for bugs. Earlier today, Sentry announced its AI Autofix feature for debugging production code and now, a few hours later, GitHub is launching the first beta of its code scanning autofix feature for finding and fixing security vulnerabilities during the coding process. This new feature combines the real-time capabilities of GitHub’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, focused on startup and venture capital news that matters. Today we have a grip of startup stories, and a venture capital item that isn’t as bad of news […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Every enterprise software company out there is working to bring more workflow automation and AI to the platform. ServiceNow has been on this journey for some time now, and given the kind of data it collects via interactions on its platform, it’s building more refined models. Part of the shift to AI comes internally by […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sentry has long helped developers monitor and debug their production code. Now, the company is adding some AI smarts to this process by launching AI Autofix, a new feature that uses all of the contextual data Sentry has about a company’s production environment to suggest fixes whenever an error occurs. While it’s called Autofix, this […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced GPTs, custom chatbots powered by OpenAI’s generative AI models, onstage at the company’s first-ever developer conference in November, he described them as a way to “accomplish all sorts of tasks” — from programming to learning about esoteric scientific subjects to getting workout pointers. “Because [GPTs] combine instructions, expanded knowledge […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Intel is getting a huge boost from the US government under the CHIPS and Science Act. The company could get up to $8.5 billion in direct funding from the government, according to the preliminary agreement it has reached with the Department of Commerce. That money will go towards the chipmaker's efforts to expand its manufacturing facilities in the United States, particularly plants designed to make leading-edge semiconductor chips meant for use in AI and other advanced applications.The government's investment is expected to support Intel projects across four states, including the...
Image: OnLeaks / Smartprix Google’s Pixel 8A may have a 120Hz display — up from 90Hz in the Pixel 7A — and a brighter screen, according to Kamila Wojciechowska, whose past leaks have included videos of the pre-release Pixel Fold. Google’s I/O 2024 conference is set for May 14th, when the company will likely talk a lot about AI again. That’s also probably where the company will announce the Pixel 8A.Writing for Android Authority, Wojciechowska says this next entry in the line of budget Pixel phones will feature 1,400 nits of peak brightness, up from the 7A’s 1,000 nits, and limited...
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — often referred to as “strong AI,” “full AI,” “human-level AI” or “general intelligent action” — represents a significant future leap in the field of artificial intelligence. Unlike narrow AI, which is tailored for specific tasks (such as detecting product flaws, summarize the news, or build you a website), AGI will […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Like most other corners of the tech world, Google sees AI powering the next innovations in health technology. The company’s annual The Check Up event expanded on its plans to add a personal health chatbot to the Fitbit app, expand Google Lens for better skin condition searches and use a version of its Gemini chatbot in the medical field.One of the more intriguing of Google’s announcements on Tuesday was more detail about an experimental AI feature for Fitbit users, briefly teased last year. Fitbit Labs will let owners draw correlations and “connect the dots” from health data tracked...
While the technology world breathlessly awaits Reddit's public debut, another company you might never have heard of is about to go public: Astera Labs.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft now has a lone leader overseeing consumer AI for the first time. DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman is joining the company from rival Inflection AI. Suleyman will try to push the consumer-facing Copilot assistant into the future, preparing for what may be a long battle with Google for artificial intelligence supremacy among Silicon Valley’s Big Five companies.Suleyman’s official title will be executive vice president and CEO of a new division called Microsoft AI, reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella. Joining him will be fellow Inflection AI cofounder Karén Simonyan, who takes...
Meta is finally providing a bit of visibility into what kinds of conversations are happening on its Twitter competitor, Threads. The service is rolling out its “trending now” feature to all US users, Mark Zuckerberg said in a post.The feature, which the company began testing in February, uses AI to surface a handful of topics “based on what people are engaging with right now.” Trends will appear in Threads’ search page and will also appear in between posts in users’ For You feeds.For now, the feature is still fairly limited. Threads only shows five trending topics at any one time...
In June 2023, Inflection announced it had raised $1.3 billion to build what it called “more personal AI.” The lead investor was Microsoft. Today, less than a year later, Microsoft announced that it was essentially eating Inflection alive (though I think they phrased it differently). Co-founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan will go to Microsoft, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images The US is heading into its first presidential election since generative AI tools have gone mainstream. And the companies offering these tools — like Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft — have each made announcements about how they plan to handle the months leading up to it.This election season, we’ve already seen AI-generated images in ads and attempts to mislead voters with voice cloning. The potential harms from AI chatbots aren’t as visible in the public eye — yet, anyway. But chatbots are known to confidently provide made-up facts...
Microsoft has hired Mustafa Suleyman and Karen Simonyan, co-founders of high-profile AI startup Inflection AI, as the Satya Nadella-led cloud giant continues its aggressive push to attract top talent. Suleyman was also a co-founder of DeepMind, which Google bought in 2014 to bolster its own AI efforts. He will run Microsoft’s consumer AI business, whereas […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
“Passion. You can feel it, can’t you?” begins Bloom, an AI NPC from Ubisoft in collab with InWorld, and Nvidia. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge For the past three months, ever since I spoke to the AI NPCs in Nvidia’s cyberpunk ramen shop, I’ve been wondering: Which game developer will take a flying leap on this controversial and intriguing tech? If you said “Ubisoft,” the company that’s always raising its hand to play with VR, NFTs, interactive TV shows, secondary screens and more, you’d be half right.Last night, I played three prototype segments of an experimental...
Illustration: The Verge There are few bigger jobs at Google than being the person who runs Search. As of today, there’s a new person in that seat: Liz Reid, who has been at Google for more than 20 years and has most recently been leading the company’s efforts with AI search, known as Search Generative Experience (SGE).Reid’s promotion is part of a bigger change within Google’s Search team. Pandu Nayak, a longtime executive overseeing ranking and quality, is now going to be chief scientist of Search. He’ll be replaced by Cheenu Venkatachary, who has also been working on AI products in...
It's almost time for another Microsoft livestream event, the first since September of last year. The festivities start at 12PM ET on Thursday, March 21. The best way to watch everything unfold is via the official Microsoft stream; it doesn't look like they'll have a stream on YouTube this time. This is the first Microsoft live event without former chief product officer and longtime keynote presenter Panos Panay, who departed for Amazon last year.What to expect from MicrosoftThe event is being advertised as a “new era of work”, so there’s going to be a major focus on the...
Caller ID app Truecaller today blocks between 38 and 40 billion spam calls annually for its 374 million+ users. Now, in hopes of getting more people to sign on to its premium tiers, it’s turning up the dials on its filtering tech. A new “Max” update for Android premium subscribers uses AI to block every […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In less than two years, NVIDIA’s H100 chips, which are used by nearly every AI company in the world to train large language models that power services like ChatGPT, made it one of the world’s most valuable companies. On Monday, NVIDIA announced a next-generation platform called Blackwell, whose chips are between seven and 30 times faster than the H100 and use 25 times less power.“Blackwell GPUs are the engine to power this new Industrial Revolution,” said NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at the company’s annual GTC event in San Jose attended by thousands of developers, and which some compared...
At its GTC conference, Nvidia today announced Nvidia NIM, a new software platform designed to streamline the deployment of custom and pre-trained AI models into production environments. NIM takes the software work Nvidia has done around inferencing and optimizing models and makes it easily accessible by combining a given model with an optimized inferencing engine […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It’s tough to argue with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang when he notes, “Building foundation models for general humanoid robots is one of the most exciting problems to solve in AI today.” The humanoid form factor is one of the most hotly contested topics in the world of robotics at the moment, raising venture capital by […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Elon Musk’s xAI released its Grok large language model as “open source” over the weekend. The billionaire clearly hopes to set his company at odds with rival OpenAI, which despite its name is not particularly open. But does releasing the code for something like Grok actually contribute to the AI development community? Yes and no. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Chip giant Nvidia is hosting a massive AI conference as part of its GTC event this week, which kicks off Monday. With a keynote planned from Jensen Huang, CEO and co-founder, of the company best known in year’s past for its gaming hardware and today for its massive market share in the burgeoning AI hardware […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Roblox is introducing two new AI technologies to reduce the time it takes to create avatars and 3D models, the company announced on Monday. The technologies, which were built on Roblox artificial intelligence, are designed to help creators eliminate time-consuming avatar setup and texturing steps when building content on the Roblox platform. The first feature […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Today, YouTube announced a way for creators to self-label when their videos contain AI-generated or synthetic material. The checkbox appears in the uploading and posting process, and creators are required to disclose “altered or synthetic” content that seems realistic. That includes things like making a real person say or do something they didn’t; altering footage of real events and places; or showing a “realistic-looking scene” that didn’t actually happen. Some examples YouTube offers are showing a fake tornado moving toward a real town or...
YouTube is now requiring creators to disclose to viewers when realistic content was made with AI, the company announced on Monday. The platform is introducing a new tool in Creator Studio that will require creators to disclose when content that viewers could mistake for a real person, place or event was created with altered or […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple is reportedly in talks with Google to integrate its Gemini AI in iPhones, Bloomberg reports, a move that should help both companies compete with OpenAI and its (heavily invested) partner Microsoft. While it might seem like an admission that Apple is lagging behind on AI, the partnership fits if you think of generative AI models as an evolution of web searching, something Google already provides to all of Apple's devices. According to the report, Gemini could be the cloud-based generative AI engine for Siri and other iPhone apps, while Apple's models could be woven into the...
The job of so-called “solutions professionals” — people like sales engineers, solutions architects and consultants — revolves around pitching complex enterprise tech to potential customers. It’s important work. But despite this being the case, rarely are solutions teams adequately staffed and resourced, according to entrepreneur Dan Chen. “Solutions teams bring technical credibility to the selling […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The new “Text to Texture” feature is now available in the Adobe Substance 3D Sampler 4.4 beta. | Image: Adobe While many developers are working out how generative AI could be used to produce entire 3D objects from scratch, Adobe is already using its Firefly AI model to streamline existing 3D workflows. At the Game Developers Conference on Monday, Adobe debuted two new integrations for its Substance 3D design software suite that allow 3D artists to quickly produce creative assets for their projects using text descriptions.The first is a “Text to Texture” feature for Substance 3D Sampler...
Is it upper midrange? Is it lesser high-end? Hard to say. | Image: Qualcomm Qualcomm just launched a new chipset that’s designed to sit just below its current flagship in terms of capabilities and price. The Snapdragon 8S Gen 3 aims to bring most of the 8 Gen 3’s features — including support for on-device generative AI models — to more affordable phones. It represents a new tier for the top-of-the-line 8-series chips, and it’s also a little bit confusing.Before we get into all that, let’s start with the straightforward stuff: the 8S Gen 3 includes a GPU similar to the standard 8 Gen...
Apple is looking to team up with Google for a mega-deal to leverage the Gemini AI model for features on iPhone, Bloomberg reported. This will put Google in a commanding position as the company already has a deal with Apple as the preferred search engine provider on iPhones for the Safari browser. The publication cited […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Elon Musk’s xAI has open-sourced the base code of Grok AI model, but without any training code. The company described it as the “314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Expert model” on GitHub. In a blog post, xAI said that the model wasn’t tuned for any particular application such as using it for conversations. The company noted that […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Verge On March 11th, Elon Musk said xAI would open source its AI chatbot Grok, and now an open release is available on GitHub. This will allow researchers and developers to build on the model and impact how xAI updates Grok in the future as it competes with rival tech from OpenAI, Meta, Google, and others.A company blog post explains that this open release includes the “base model weights and network architecture” of the “314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model, Grok-1.” It continues saying the model is from a checkpoint last October and hasn’t undergone fine-tuning “for...
TechCrunch Mobility is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. I spent a few days in Austin […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter recapping noteworthy happenings in tech over the past few days. This week, TechCrunch viewed leaked documents out of SpaceX showing some questionable practices related to employee stock options. X CEO Elon Musk announced that he would open source Grok, X’s AI-powered chatbot meant to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The content management industry is shifting from pure management to AI and workflow automation to put the content to work.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
GitHub’s chief legal officer, Shelley McKinley, has plenty on her plate, what with legal wrangles around its Copilot pair-progammer, as well as the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act, which was voted through the European Parliament this week as “the world’s first comprehensive AI law.” Three years in the making, the EU AI Act first reared its head […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. Last week, Midjourney, the AI startup building image (and soon […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
LLMs are trained to block harmful responses. Old-school images can override those rules.
India is walking back on a recent AI advisory after receiving criticism from many local and global entrepreneurs and investors. The Ministry of Electronics and IT shared an updated AI advisory with industry stakeholders on Friday that no longer asked them to take the government approval before launching or deploying an AI model to users […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Screenshot by Tom Warren / The Verge Microsoft is once again injecting pop-ups into Google’s Chrome browser in a bid to get people to switch to Bing. The software giant first introduced malware-like pop-up ads last year with a prompt that appeared over the top of other apps and windows. After pausing that notification to address “unintended behavior,” the pop-ups have returned again on Windows 10 and 11.Windows users have reported seeing the new pop-up in recent days, advertising Bing AI and Microsoft’s Bing search engine inside Google Chrome. If you click yes to this prompt, then...
Conversing with your computer has been a dream of futurists and technologists for decades. When you look at 2004’s state of the art, it’s staggering to see how far we’ve come. There are now billions of devices in our hands, and homes that listen to our queries and do their very best to answer them. But for all of the time, money and effort, chatbots of any stripe have not swallowed the world as their creators intended. They’re miraculous. They’re also boring. And it’s worth asking why.Chatbot is a term covering a lot of systems, from voice assistants to AI and everything else in the...
It’s extremely heartening to see our little list effectively double since the last time we did one of these. While it’s true that layoffs continue to plague the tech industry at large, there are few better fields to be expert in at the moment than Robotics and AI. With more than 60 entries this week, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple has added another AI startup to its acquisition list with Canada-based DarwinAI, which specializes in vision-based tech to observe components during manufacturing to improve efficiency, Bloomberg reported. While Apple or DarwinAI haven’t announced this deal, several members of the startup’s team joined Apple’s machine learning teams in January, as per their LinkedIn profiles. DarwinAI […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Zscaler, a cloud security company with headquarters in San Jose, California, has acquired cybersecurity startup Avalor 26 months after its founding, reportedly for $310 million in cash and equity. In a press release announcing the news, Zscaler founder and CEO Jay Chaudhry said that the deal would expand Zscaler’s platform with capabilities including streamlined reporting of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A new ad from Under Armour featuring boxer Anthony Joshua has come under fire from creatives on Instagram after its director claimed it as the “first Ai-powered sports commercial” — but critics in the industry say it blatantly reused others’ work without credit as part of an AI hype cycle cash grab. Director Wes Walker […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
If your robotics startup is looking to raise, there’s close to a 100% chance you’re going to get two questions from potential investors: 1) How are you incorporating generative AI? and 2) Have you consider building a humanoid? The first is easy enough to answer. If you’re running a robotics firm in 2024, you have […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In his State of the Union address last week, President Joe Biden urged Congress to pass a bipartisan immigration bill “with the toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen.” The bill would have, among other things, funded “100 more high-tech drug detection machines to significantly increase the ability to screen and stop vehicles from smuggling fentanyl into America.”The high-tech drug detection machines are actually just X-rays — really high-res ones, but X-rays all the same. The idea isn’t just to get better machines but to scan more vehicles at ports of entry, with...
The European Commission has sent a series of formal requests for information (RFI) to Google, Meta, Microsoft, Snap, TikTok and X about how they’re handling risks related to the use of generative AI. The asks, which relate to Bing, Facebook, Google Search, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, and X, are being made under the Digital Services […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon launched generative AI-powered features last year to help sellers quickly create listings by entering just a few words about the product. The company is now making it easier for sellers to create listings if an item is already listed on their website. The e-commerce giant’s new tool uses AI to parse details from an […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI’s legal battle with The New York Times over data to train its AI models might still be brewing. But OpenAI’s forging ahead on deals with other publishers, including some of France’s and Spain’s largest news publishers. OpenAI on Wednesday announced that it signed contracts with Le Monde and Prisa Media to bring French and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Sellers on Amazon will soon be able to make product pages with just the copy-and-paste of a link.Amazon is releasing a new generative AI feature that takes information from a seller’s external website and then generates an Amazon product page for the item, complete with a written description and images. The goal is to help sellers reduce the time it takes to bring the product from a different website onto Amazon, says Mary Beth Westmoreland, Amazon’s VP of worldwide selling partner experience, in a blog post. Image: Amazon Amazon’s AI will parse...
Image: Microsoft Microsoft is launching its Copilot for Security next month, bringing its generative AI chatbot to the cybersecurity space. Copilot for Security is designed for cybersecurity professionals to help them protect against threats, but it won’t be a one-off monthly charge like Copilot for Microsoft 365. Instead, Microsoft will charge businesses $4 per hour of usage as part of a consumption model when Copilot for Security launches on April 1st.Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Microsoft’s own security-specific model, Copilot for Security is essentially a chatbot where cybersecurity...
Zendesk has been trying to transform customer service since it launched in 2007, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the company sees the industry being altered in a big way by the rise of generative AI. On Wednesday, the company announced it intends to acquire Ultimate, a German customer automation startup. The companies […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI models that play games go back decades, but they generally specialize in one game and always play to win. Google Deepmind researchers have a different goal with their latest creation: a model that learned to play multiple 3D games like a human, but also does its best to understand and act on your verbal […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A new sports tech startup, Volley, aims to revolutionize the way racquet sports players (platform tennis, padel, and pickleball) train with its AI-enabled sports training machine. Unlike traditional tennis ball machines that simply launch balls at varying speeds and heights, Volley’s trainer robot leverages AI and vision software to collect data as you play, learn […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge European Union lawmakers have officially approved the bloc’s landmark AI regulation, paving the way for the EU to prohibit certain uses of the technology and demand transparency from providers. In a majority vote on Wednesday, 523 European Parliament members elected to formally adopt the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), and will now work towards its enforcement and implementation.The AI Act has been hotly debated since it was first proposed in 2021, with some of its strictest regulations — such as a proposed total ban on biometric systems for...
The European Parliament voted Wednesday to adopt the AI Act, securing the bloc pole-position in setting rules for a broad sweep of artificial intelligence-powered software — or what regional lawmakers have dubbed “the world’s first comprehensive AI law”. MEPs overwhelmingly backed the provisional agreement reached in December in trilogue talks with the Council, with 523 […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Media manipulation meets technological innovation. Continue reading…
Google’s Gemini won’t answer questions about the 2024 election. Reuters reported on Tuesday that the company will block the AI chatbot’s ability to generate responses about elections this year. The company said in December it would restrict the types of political questions the chatbot could discuss as the elections drew closer.“Out of an abundance of caution on such an important topic, we have begun to roll out restrictions on the types of election-related queries for which Gemini will return responses,” the company wrote in a Google India blog post on Tuesday. “We take our...
A whiff of anti-AI sentiment got big applause at the SXSW conference in Austin this afternoon. Award-winning writers and directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as “DANIELS,” originally premiered their film “Everything Everywhere All At Once” at SXSW in 2022. The movie later went on to win 7 Oscars, including Best Picture, Best […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Deepgram has made a name for itself as one of the go-to startups for voice recognition. Today, the well-funded company announced the launch of Aura, its new real-time text-to-speech API. Aura combines highly realistic voice models with a low-latency API to allow developers to build real-time, conversational AI agents. Backed by large language models (LLMs), […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Death, as the famous saying goes, is one of the inevitable certainties of life. But that doesn’t make coping with it any easier — not least because while loved ones are grieving, they must also handle a dizzying number of practical tasks, from organizing funerals through to settling finances for the deceased. A startup called […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Recalls are costly for — and damaging to — any company, no matter the size or market. For instance, McKinsey estimates that, for businesses manufacturing medical devices, recalls have been as high as $600 million in recent decades. The reputational impact tends to be lasting; customers aren’t quick to forgive. A Harris Interactive poll found […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
By using cell-free technology, Tierra is able to cut down protein manufacturing from months to weeks and enable customers to order proteins online. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
DoorDash hopes to reduce verbally abusive and inappropriate interactions between consumers and delivery people with its new AI-powered feature that automatically detects offensive language. Dubbed “SafeChat+,” DoorDash is leveraging AI technology to review in-app conversations and determine if a customer or Dasher is being harassed. Depending on the scenario, there will be an option to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
If you want to ask Google’s AI chatbot a question about an upcoming election, you will have to do it from a country where there are no elections taking place. TechCrunch has learned that the search giant has started to restrict queries made Gemini when they relate to elections, in any market globally where elections […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nanonets, a startup using AI to automate back-office processes, has raised $29 million in a new funding round led by Accel India as it seeks to improve the accuracy of automation processes that involve large amounts of unstructured data. Processing unstructured data from documents like invoices, receipts and purchase orders often involves repetitive tasks and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We’re getting closer to this year’s Early Stage get-together in Boston, which means that it’s time to add three more names to our ever-expanding list of whip-smart speakers coming to present, and answer your most burning questions. Today, I’m stoked to announce that Felicis’s Tobi Coker, Quotient AI’s Julia Neagu, and Cellino’s Nabiha Saklayen will […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI might be the “it thing” of the moment. But that doesn’t mean it’s getting easier to deploy. According to 2023 S&P Global survey, about half of companies with at least one AI project in production are still at the pilot or proof-of-concept stages. The reasons for the slow ramp-ups vary, but the commonly cited […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
"There is no Founding Agreement, or any agreement at all with Musk," OpenAI said in a court filing as a defendant in Elon Musk's lawsuit. We're, of course, talking about the lawsuit Musk filed against OpenAI, which accuses it of violating its status as a non-profit, as well as of violating a founding agreement promising the organization would never operate for profit and would release its AI publicly. The company said the billionaire's claims are based on "convoluted — often incoherent — factual premises." It called that founding agreement "a fiction Musk has conjured to lay...
Autonomous vehicle software company Applied Intuition has raised $250 million in a round that values the startup at $6 billion, as it pushes to bring more artificial intelligence to the automotive, defense, construction and agriculture sectors. The eye-popping funding round is the latest example of investor fervor for AI. Applied Intuition appears to have nailed […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
France-based startup Nijta, whose flagship product Voice Harbor anonimizes voices for AI, raised €2 million in funding from various sources, including deep tech VC fund Elaia.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
UK-based Ada Ventures is an unusual VC. Instead of just talking about SaaS or AI, it hunts down founders addressing inclusivity and diversity. Instead of confusing LPs with this methodology, it’s attracted them, thus hitting the $80 million mark for the final close of its second fund (it reached $44.7 million as its first close […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Cyberattacks, regional conflict, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, commercial spyware, AI, misinformation, disinformation, deepfakes, and TikTok. These are just some of the top perceived threats that the United States faces, according to the U.S. government’s intelligence agency’s latest global risk assessment. The unclassified report published Monday — sanitized for public release — gave a frank […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft is holding a digital event titled “Advancing the new era of work with Copilot” on March 21. Among the possible announcements are new Surface devices, potentially the first branded as AI PCs. It will already be the second Windows hardware event — and first mainline Surface Pro launch — without former chief product officer and longtime keynote presenter Panos Panay, who left for Amazon last year. Here’s everything we could see at the company's first launch event of 2024.The company describes the event as breaking down “the latest in scaling AI in your environment with...
After frenzied speculation that a recent photo of Kate Middleton and her children was AI-generated, the Duchess of Cambridge herself had to address the controversy. “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” Middleton wrote in a statement. “I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Stability.AI CEO Emad Mostaque is currently investigating the situation. | Illustration: Beatrice Sala Midjourney says it has banned Stability AI staffers from using its service, accusing employees at the rival generative AI company of causing a systems outage earlier this month during an attempt to scrape Midjourney’s data.Midjourney posted an update to its Discord server on March 2nd that acknowledged an extended server outage was preventing generated images from appearing in user galleries. In a summary of a business update call on March 6th, Midjourney claimed that “botnet-like activity...
If investors agree to pay its high-end range, Reddit's valuation should hit around $5.4 billion.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Last year, as an experiment, I baked cakes from recipes generated by ChatGPT and Bard. It went better than I expected — because much of each recipe didn’t seem created by AI at all. The recipes I got were eerily familiar to recipes I’ve seen on food blogs or Instagram. They’d been slightly changed, and only Bard (now called Gemini) bothered offering attribution, linking to a recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction. In some ways, this isn’t a new problem; I’ve seen far too many copied non-AI recipes floating around the internet. AI, though...
According to Elon Musk, xAI will open source its Grok chatbot. The founder of the company, whose AI assistant is available to Premium+ subscribers on X, hasn't revealed any other details about the decision, which is slated to take effect this week.It's hardly the first time a Musk company has opened up access to its knowhow. Tesla open sourced its patents a decade ago, and now practically every major car manufacturer has adopted its electric vehicle charging connector. X, meanwhile, published the code that powers its "For You" algorithmic feed last year, though we didn't learn much from it.As...
Image: The Verge The self-styled ‘front page of the internet’ has unplugged third-party apps, spurned defiant mods, and struck AI partnerships in a bid to go public. Continue reading…
In the last 12 months, reader apps have adopted AI to change how users consume news. Instagram co-founders’ now discontinued Artifact introduced AI-powered summaries and headlines. Newer apps like Bulletin and former Twitter engineer’s Particle are taking similar approaches. However, developer Nate Parrott’s app Feeeed (it’s four Es), which is available for iPhones and iPads, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more profiles here. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
There’s been a lot of discussion in recent years about the practice of capitalizing on celebrities’ digital likenesses without their consent, whether after they die or while they’re still alive. Zelda Williams, for one — the Lisa Frankenstein director and daughter of Robin Williams — slammed the “disturbing” trend of people trying to recreate the voices and faces of the deceased last year, as striking actors fought for, among other things, better protections around studios’ potential use of AI clones. Yet despite the obvious ethical issues, companies keep doing it. The latest...
To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more profiles here. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Haein Jeong / The Verge Two Florida middle schoolers were arrested in December and charged with third-degree felonies for allegedly creating deepfake nudes of their classmates. A report by Wired cites police reports saying two boys, aged 13 and 14, are accused of using an unnamed “artificial intelligence application” to generate the explicit images of other students “between the ages of 12 and 13.” The incident may be the first US instance of criminal charges related to AI-generated nude images.They were charged with third-degree felonies under a 2022 Florida law that...
To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more profiles here. Sarah […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As a part of a multi-part series, TechCrunch is highlighting women innovators — from academics to policymakers —in the field of AI.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In what appears to be the first criminal case of its kind, two teenage boys were charged under a 2022 Florida law for allegedly creating AI-generated images depicting middle school classmates.
Yet another AI-powered fraud detection software provider is laying off staff. Inscribe, whose platform works to detect fraud in areas like business underwriting, tenant screening, and onboarding, has cut just under 40% of its staff, which equates to dozens of employees. The news follows that of another, small round of layoffs at AI-powered plagiarism detector, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple's refreshed MacBook Air laptops are finally here, and they're toting shiny new M3 chips. This week, Cherlynn chats with Devindra about his review of the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air M3. They're faster, as we expected, but they're also not a huge leap over the M2 MacBook Air, which now starts at $999. (And we're sure you'll find some excellent refurbished and used deals soon.) No matter which one you pick, though, you're getting one of the most stunning ultraportable notebooks around. In other news, we discuss Apple's nearly $2 billion fine from the EU, Microsoft's upcoming Surface AI...
On Tuesday, startup Anthropic released a family of generative AI models that it claims achieve best-in-class performance. Just a few days later, rival Inflection AI unveiled a model that it asserts comes close to matching some of the most capable models out there, including OpenAI’s GPT-4, in quality. Anthropic and Inflection are by no means […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Zora, a NFT-based social network platform is continuing its expansion beyond the crypto-sphere into the hot artificial intelligence market, Dee Goens, the startups’ co-founder said on Chain Reaction. Not to be confused with Sora, the text-to-video tool offered by OpenA, Zora aims to help creators, brands and artists better monetize their content through NFTs. Last […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The AI2 Incubator, spun out of the Allen Institute for AI in 2022, has secured a windfall $200M in compute that startups going through its program can take advantage of to accelerate early development. “Our community of hundreds of AI practitioners are desperate for compute,” said managing director Jacob Colker. “A lot of these startups […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sunnyvale-based Brevian wants to make it easier for business users to build custom AI agents. Currently, the company is focused on support teams and security analysts — areas where both the use cases and training sets are well defined — but plans to expand to other areas over time. The company is coming out of stealth […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
At its 14th Ability summit, which kicks off today, Microsoft is highlighting developments and collaborations across its portfolio of assistive products. Much of that is around Azure AI, including features announced yesterday like AI-powered audio descriptions and the Azure AI studio that better enables developers with disabilities to create machine-learning applications. It also showed off new updates like more languages and richer AI-generated descriptions for its Seeing AI tool, as well as new playbooks offering guidelines for best practices in areas like building accessible campuses and...
People worry that advances in AI will lead to job losses, but rarely does a company’s CEO openly admit that AI will help to reduce their headcount. Turnitin, a plagiarism detection company whose CEO Chris Caren last year warned that, in 18 months, his company would be able to reduce 20% of its headcount thanks […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Adobe is bringing its generative AI (GAI) tech to mobile for the first time. Firefly GAI features are included in the beta of the new Express app on Android and iOS starting today. They should afford users more expansive creation and editing options while they’re on the go.Using text prompts, you’ll be able to generate images and insert, remove or replace people, objects and other elements such as backgrounds. Quick Actions enable you to apply edits, remove backgrounds and resize images with a single tap. Video editing tools, a social content scheduler and collaboration options are...
This week, Anthropic, the AI startup backed by Google, Amazon and a who’s who of VCs and angel investors, released a family of models — Claude 3 — that it claims bests OpenAI’s GPT-4 on a range of benchmarks. There’s no reason to doubt Anthropic’s claims. But we at TechCrunch would argue that the results […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Before we go any further, a question: What makes a computer an AI computer? Is it simply the ability to execute AI-powered tasks? To run LLMs locally? Is it something deeper? Is any computer that is capable of running any form of artificial intelligence/machine learning fundamentally an AI computer? It’s a simple question on the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Adobe is making it easier for users to create and publish social content on mobile, as the company announced today that it’s launching the latest version of the Adobe Express app in beta. With this update, Adobe is bringing its Firefly AI models directly into the app, allowing users to quickly create and edit social […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta is revamping how Facebook recommends videos across Reels, Groups, and the main Facebook Feed, by using AI to power its video recommendation algorithm, Facebook head Tom Alison revealed on Wednesday. The world's largest social network has already switched Reels, its TikTok competitor, to the new engine, and plans to use it in all places within Facebook that show video — the main Facebook feed and Groups — as part of a "technology roadmap" through 2026, Alison said at a Morgan Stanley tech conference in San Francisco.Meta has made competing with TikTok a top priority ever since the app...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A federal grand jury has indicted a Google engineer, Linwei Ding, aka Leon Ding, for allegedly stealing trade secrets around Google’s AI chip software and hardware on March 5th, before he was arrested Wednesday morning in Newark, California. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement that Ding “stole from Google over 500 confidential files containing AI trade secrets while covertly working for China-based companies seeking an edge in the AI technology race.” Much of the stolen data allegedly revolves around Google’s tensor processing...
Illustration: The Verge A Microsoft engineer is bringing safety concerns about the company’s AI image generator to the Federal Trade Commission, according to a report from CNBC. Shane Jones, who has worked for Microsoft for six years, wrote a letter to the FTC, stating that Microsoft “refused” to take down Copilot Designer despite repeated warnings that the tool is capable of generating harmful images.When testing Copilot Designer for safety issues and flaws, Jones found that the tool generated “demons and monsters alongside terminology related to abortion rights, teenagers with assault...
Image: Logitech Logitech’s MX Brio is a new $199.99 (£219.99 / €229) 4K webcam aimed at everyone from remote workers to streamers. Key specs include the ability to stream in 4K at 30fps or 1080p at 60fps, an aperture of f/2.0, and an aluminum unibody design that kind of looks a little like a kazoo if you squint at it.Since it’s 2024, Logitech is naturally advertising some AI-powered technology in the MX Brio. The webcam’s “face-based image enhancement” is designed to automatically detect the position of your face within the frame of the webcam and adjust its picture’s white...
OpenAI, the most valuable AI startup, said Wednesday it intends to dismiss all claims made by Elon Musk in a recent lawsuit and shed more light on its relationship with the billionaire entrepreneur who helped found the startup. In a blog post authored by the entire OpenAI band – Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge The VCR will always invoke a sense of nostalgia, but Microsoft hopes it can help in court; it’s citing the tech in its attempt to dismiss three claims in The New York Times’ copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The Times sued Microsoft for allegedly copying its stories and using that data to mimic its style, but Microsoft’s lawyers are now arguing that OpenAI’s large language models are just the latest in a long line of technologies that are considered legal despite their potential for copyright abuse. “Despite The Times’s contentions...
Founders have spent a lot of time over the past few years trying to build practical consumer use cases for AI and machine learning. AI startup Advocate thinks that the tech could help people apply for federal government benefits more easily. The New York-based startup was founded by Emilie Poteat, who got the idea after […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Accenture announced today that it would acquire the learning platform Udacity as part of an effort to build a learning platform focused on the growing interest in AI. While the company didn’t specify how much it paid for Udacity, it also announced a $1 billion investment in building a technology learning platform it’s calling LearnVantage. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Last month, Amazon announced that it’d launch a new AI-powered chatbot, Rufus, inside the Amazon Shopping app for Android and iOS. After a few weeks’ delay, the company began to roll out Rufus to early testers today — including some of us at TechCrunch — to help find and compare products as well as provide […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Some GE Appliance’s Café wall ovens can now recognize what’s in them and suggest cooking modes for you. | Image: GE Appliances If you have a smart GE Appliances wall oven, it’s about to get smarter. Cookcam AI is a new feature that uses artificial intelligence to recognize what you put in the oven and figure out the rest for you, so you don’t need to hover over it and worry about burning your pizza. The company says Cookcam AI is coming to select GE Profile and Café wall ovens with in-oven cameras via a free over-the-air software upgrade.Cookcam AI will work with Precision Cooking...
Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge There’s one thing you can count on at Mobile World Congress: a whole mess of Android smartphones. This year’s conference in Barcelona, Spain, delivered, with new devices from Xiaomi, Nothing, and others showing off the state of the art in the smartphone world.But there was something else brewing at this year’s MWC: some new ideas about what a “mobile device” might really mean. As generative AI changes the way we interact with technology, devices like the Humane AI Pin are starting to chart a path past the slab of glass in your pocket. Some of those slabs...
Generative AI well and truly has a grip on public technology discourse these days. A new startup called Ema out of San Francisco thinks it’s a lot more than just a passing fancy. It’s emerging from stealth today, with a product of the same name, that it believes will open a new chapter in how […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI-powered video generation is a hot market on the back of OpenAI’s releasing Sora model last month. Two Deepmind alums Yishu Miao and Ziyu Wang have publicly released their video generation tool Haiper with its own AI model underneath. Miao, who was previously working at TikTok in the Global Trust & Safety team, and Wang, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The tech giant and its partner OpenAI were accused of infringing on copyrights to train A.I. technologies like the online chatbot ChatGPT.
AI is “not open in any sense,” the battle over encryption is far from won, and Signal’s principled (and uncompromising) approach may complicate interoperability efforts, warned the company’s president, Meredith Whittaker. But it’s not all bad news. (Actually, it is all bad news, because I wrote up the good news separately.) Speaking on stage with […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI startup Anthropic, backed by hundreds of millions in venture capital (and perhaps soon hundreds of millions more), today announced the latest version of its GenAI tech, Claude. And the company claims that it rivals OpenAI’s GPT-4 in terms of performance. Claude 3, as Anthropic’s new GenAI is called, is a family of models — […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
This time on Equity, we talk through Apple's massive fine in the EU, India's new rules for AI, Waymo's wins, and Salla's huge pre-IPO round.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
India has waded into global AI debate by issuing an advisory that requires tech firms to get government permission before launching new models. India’s Ministry of Electronics and IT issued the advisory to firms on Friday. The advisory, not published on public domain but a copy of which TechCrunch has reviewed, also asks tech firms […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! Apologies for being out last week — a cold got the best of me, but I’m back and here to talk about the fact that shutting down startups is big business, Stripe’s new valuation, Klarna’s latest AI update and more. To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
TechCrunch has launched a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple has scrapped plans to enter the automotive industry with its mysterious autonomous electric car, instead shifting focus to the wildly popular world of generative AI. The project saw the company hiring prominent executives from places like Tesla and Ford. Its end has led to job losses for some employees, while others have changed divisions […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
TechCrunch has launched a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The current-generation AI technology is the tech equivalent of a toddler, and all the mediocre reviews various GenAI software is getting is tantamount to judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Venture capitalists were in Los Angeles this week for the Upfront Summit, an invite-only conference with celebrity sightings and plenty of talk on the future of the VC industry.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Groq, a startup developing chips to run GenAI models faster than conventional hardware, has an eye toward the enterprise — and public sector. Today, Groq announced that it’s forming a new division — Groq Systems — focused on greatly expanding its customer and developer ecosystem. Within Groq Systems’ purview is serving organizations, including government agencies, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk has sued the company, his fellow co-founders, associated businesses and unidentified others. He claims that, by chasing profits, they’re violating OpenAI’s status as a non-profit and its foundational contractual agreements to develop AI “for the benefit of humanity.”The suit alleges that OpenAI has become a “closed-source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion and holds a 49 percent stake. Microsoft uses OpenAI tech to power generative AI tools such as Copilot.According to the filing, under OpenAI’s current board, it is...
Elon Musk sued OpenAI, its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman and affiliated entities on Thursday, alleging they breached their original contractual agreements by pursuing profits instead of the nonprofit’s founding mission to develop AI that benefits humanity. Musk, an early backer of OpenAI, claims Altman and Brockman convinced him to help found and bankroll […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Over the past couple of years, Nvidia, by far the largest AI chipmaker, has ramped up its investments in startups that propel it deeper into the AI space. According to S&P Global and Crunchbase, the funding and investment database, Nvidia’s startup investments jumped 280% year-over-year from 2022 to 2023, with the company and its VC […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Humane Ai Pin and Rabbit handheld have captured a good bit of press interest for their individual approaches to integrating generative AI with hardware. Humane, in particular, is presenting its wearable as a look at life beyond the smartphone. That naturally prompts the question: What, precisely, is wrong with the smartphone? While it’s true […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A team led by former Twitter engineers is rethinking how AI can be used to help people process news and information. Particle.news, which entered into private beta over the weekend, is a new startup offering a personalized, “multi-perspective” news reading experience that not only leverages AI to summarize the news, but also aims to do […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Brave is launching its AI-powered assistant, Leo, to all Android users. The assistant allows users to ask questions, translate pages, summarize pages, create content and more. The Android launch comes a few months after Brave first launched Leo on desktop. Brave says Leo will be available on iOS devices in the coming weeks. Leo can […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: The Verge Our new Thursday episodes of Decoder are all about deep dives into big topics in the news, and this week, we’re continuing our miniseries on one of the biggest topics of all: generative AI.Last week, we took a look at the wave of copyright lawsuits that might eventually grind this whole industry to a halt. Those are basically a coin flip — and the outcomes are off in the distance, as those cases wind their way through the legal system. A bigger problem right now is that AI systems are really good at making just believable enough fake images and audio — and with tools like...
The two primary fears around AI are that the information these systems produce is gibberish, and that it'll unjustly take jobs away from people who won't make such sloppy mistakes. But the UK's current government is actively promoting the use of AI to do the work normally done by civil servants, including drafting responses to parliamentary inquiries, the Financial Times reports.UK Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden is set to unveil a "red box" tool that can allegedly absorb and summarize information from reputable sources, like the parliamentary record. A separate instrument is also being...
Developer Q&A site Stack Overflow is launching a new program today that will give AI companies access to its knowledge base through a new API, aptly named OverflowAPI. The launch partner for this is Google, which will use Stack Overflow’s data to enrich Gemini for Google Cloud and provide validated Stack Overflow answers in the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
India has approved allocating up to $15.2 billion (1.26 trillion Indian rupees) to build three new semiconductor plants, including its first semiconductor fab facility — part of the country’s big bid to take on China, Taiwan and other countries in the chip race. Significantly, although AI chips are very much the talk of the industry […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft has outlined a new Windows API designed to offer a seamless way for game developers to integrate super resolution AI-upscaling features from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel. In a new blog post, program manager Joshua Tucker describes Microsoft’s new DirectSR API as the “missing link” between games and super resolution technologies, and says it should provide “a smoother, more efficient experience that scales across hardware.”“This API enables multi-vendor SR [super resolution] through a common set of inputs and outputs, allowing a single code...
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is touring Asia countries this week, said in a meeting with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Thursday that Meta wants to beef up its cooperation with Samsung Electronics for AI chips to offset geopolitical risk issue in Taiwan, where TSMC, the world’s biggest contract chip manufacturer, is headquartered. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Want to weave various Stability AI-generated video clips into a movie? Now there’s a tool for that. Morph Studio, which has its own text-to-video model, just introduced an AI filmmaking platform. The eponymous tool takes the form of a storyboard, where users can create and edit shots by entering text prompts for different scenes, and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Shader aims to challenge industry heavyweights like Snap’s AR development platform Lens Studio and TikTok’s Effect House, with its no-code AR creation tool that generates custom effects, 2D masks, and lenses in minutes — rather than spending hours to create a single AR filter, which requires engineering and design skills. The startup built its platform […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In 2017, Apple CEO Tim Cook sat down and confirmed what the global auto industry had long feared: the tech giant was working on a driverless car. “We’re focusing on autonomous systems. And clearly, one purpose of autonomous systems are self-driving cars,” Cook said in an interview with Bloomberg. “And we sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects. It’s probably one of the most difficult AI projects actually to work on and so autonomy is something that’s incredibly exciting for us, but we’ll see where it takes us.”Where it took Apple...
Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the company’s recent issues with its AI-powered Gemini image generation tool after it started overcorrecting for diversity in historical images. He called the turn of events “unacceptable” and said that the company’s “working around the clock” on a fix, according to an internal employee memo published by Semafor.“No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes,” Pichai wrote to staffers. “And we’ll review what happened...
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, focused on startup and venture capital news that matters. We pull the top stories from the week thus far, and give […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Developers are adopting AI-powered code generators — services like GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer, along with open access models such as Meta’s CodeLlama — at an astonishing rate. But the tools are far from ideal. Many aren’t free. Others are, but only under licenses that preclude them from being used in common commercial contexts. Perceiving […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
SambaNova, an AI chip startup that’s raised over $1.1 billion in VC money to date, is gunning for OpenAI — and rivals — with a new generative AI product geared toward enterprise customers. SambaNova today announced Samba-1, an AI-powered system designed for tasks like text rewriting, coding, language translation and more. The company’s calling the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI’s Sora, which can generate videos and interactive 3D environments on the fly, is a remarkable demonstration of the cutting edge in GenAI — a bonafide milestone. But curiously, one of the innovations that led to it, an AI model architecture colloquially known as the diffusion transformer, arrived on the AI research scene years ago. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Lightricks, the company that makes popular apps like Facetune and Videoleap, announced a new AI-powered filmmaking tool called LTX Studio today. The studio helps creators from the ideation phase to generate an AI-powered short clip to understand how a storyline would play out. LTX Studio, which is currently inviting users to sign up for a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai. | Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge The historically inaccurate images and text generated by Google’s Gemini AI have “offended our users and shown bias,” CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in an internal memo obtained by The Verge.Last week, Google paused Gemini’s ability to generate images after it was widely discovered that the model generated racially diverse, Nazi-era German soldiers, US Founding Fathers who were non-white, and even inaccurately portrayed the races of Google’s own co-founders. While Google has since apologized for “missing the...
A number of major AI services performed poorly in a test of their ability to address questions and concerns about voting and elections. The study found that no model can be completely trusted, but it was bad enough that some got things wrong more often than not. The work was performed by Proof News, a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge The owner of Tumblr and WordPress.com is in talks with AI companies Midjourney and OpenAI to provide training data scraped from users’ posts, a report from 404 Media alleges. The report, based on an anonymous source inside the company, says that deals between Automattic and the two AI companies are “imminent.” It follows nebulous rumors that have spread on Tumblr over the past week, suggesting a deal with Midjourney could provide a new revenue stream for the site.According to 404’s report, Automattic plans to launch a new setting Wednesday that will “allow...
Life beyond a phone screen? Or just a neat gadget? Look, I’m a Humane AI Pin doubter as much as the next person. And I still think the wearable, AI-powered assistant suffers from a case of this-thing-could-have-been-an-app. But I finally got to spend a little face-to-face time with the pin this morning, and you know what? It’s a darn cool gadget. It’s just buried under a layer of marketing so thick that it’s hard to appreciate what it actually could be if Humane wasn’t so self-serious.If you spend time on Tech Threads or the like, you probably already know what the pin does: you clip...
The artificial intelligence start-up argued that its online chatbot, ChatGPT, is not a substitute for a New York Times subscription.
Photoroom, the AI-based photo editing app out of Paris that has been growing like a weed targeting people doing business online while also attracting a lot of casual users to boot, has confirmed that it’s closed its latest funding round: $43 million at a $500 million valuation, according to CEO and co-founder Matthieu Rouif, who […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As generative AI continues to dominate the headlines, it’s hard sometimes to find actual working business use cases among the hype. Writer is a San Francisco startup that is working to create generative AI writing products with the enterprise in mind. Today, the company announced a new capability for its Palmyra model that generates text […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On the fringes of MWC, the world’s biggest mobile phone show, TechCrunch is getting a demo of a new kind of AI device. The small black box sitting in front of us on a table in a hotel lobby in Barcelona is designed to tap into the generative AI boom — making it another example […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
At CES 2023 a startup hardware company called Displace launched the 55-inch ‘Display Flex’, a “wireless” $3,000 4K OLED TV which sticks to walls without a traditional mounting. The launch created a sensation at the time, and today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona I caught up with founder and CEO Balaji Krishna, who told […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Lenovo’s Project Crystal is definitely sci-fi tech come to life. Currently, there are no plans to turn the concept laptop into a retail product. Yet. Instead, its ThinkPad division commissioned an exploration into the potential of transparent microLED panels and, sigh, AI integration.EngadgetThe most obvious use for the transparent laptop display would be sharing info at a doctor’s office or hotel desk. Instead of needing to flip a screen around, you could simply reverse the device’s output via software. According to Sam Rutherford, the transparency effect is bewildering. When closed or...
Email startup Superhuman is launching an AI-powered instant replies feature today with the company looking to double down in AI-fueled functionality this year. The feature gives you three contextual replies as options to quickly respond to an email. Superhuman has been built around the idea to get you to inbox zero in the fastest way. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hyped AI startup Humane has announced plans for its first international market, inking a deal with South Korean carrier SK Telecom. The announcement comes shortly after the San Francisco-based company revealed it was pushing back the shipping date of its Ai Pin device from March to mid-April in its domestic U.S. market. Founded in 2017 by […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Yesterday, Mistral AI, a Paris-based AI startup working on foundational models, announced a new large language model that could rival OpenAI’s GPT-4, a chat assistant and a distribution partnership with Microsoft yesterday. But Microsoft and Mistral AI buried the news — or at least an important part. As part of the partnership, Microsoft is investing €15 […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Recurring revenue is pretty much the holy grail for any business — it’s precisely why Apple has segued towards being almost as much a services company as it is a hardware company, with 20% of its revenue now emanating from Apple TV+, Apple Music, iCloud, among an array of other subscription and non-subscription-based services. The […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Everyone has a story in them, as someone famous once said. A startup called Inkitt believes that it can use AI to turn the strongest of these into blockbusters and to build a new “Disney” for the 21st century around that content. Now, it’s raised $37 million in aid of that ambition. The startup’s eponymous […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A team led by former Twitter engineers is rethinking how AI can be used to help people process news and information. Particle.news, which entered into private beta over the weekend, is a new startup offering a personalized, “multi-perspective” news reading experience that not only leverages AI to summarize the news, but aims to do so […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
UiPath was a startup darling with a $35B valuation, but the public markets proved rougher until the company diversified its product line.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On the heels of Microsoft’s investment and partnership with French Large Language Model startup Mistral AI, the company continues to work hard to try to dispel the image that it’s blocking competition through its deep partnership (and financial stake) in OpenAI. Today the company launched a new framework it’s calling “AI Access Principles” — an eleven-point […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google is hopeful it will soon be able to ‘unpause’ the ability of its multimodal generative AI tool, Gemini, to depict people, per DeepMind founder, Demis Hassabis. The capability to respond to prompts for images of humans should be back online in the “next few weeks”, he said today. Google suspended the Gemini capability last […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Today we talked about how Google wants to bring AI to its mobile ecosystem, why investing in Europe is easier said than done, and the big earnings week ahead.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Paris-based AI startup Mistral AI is gradually building an alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic as its latest announcement shows. The company is launching a new flagship large language model called Mistral Large. It is designed to rival other top-tier models when it comes to reasoning capabilities, such as GPT-4 and Claude 2. In addition to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Darwin AI’s system that connects with a company’s customer relationship management tool and evaluates possible sales leads and escalates the ones, most likely to buy, to a human salesperson.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A few months ago, OpenAI launched the GPT Store, a marketplace where people can create and list AI-powered chatbots customized to perform a number of tasks (e.g. coding, answering trivia questions and so on). The GPT Store is powerful, to be sure. But using it requires using OpenAI’s models and no others, which some chatbot […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AMD will start selling the Radeon RX 7900 GRE (Golden Rabbit Edition) graphics card in the US, offering users a detuned version of its 7900 XT flagship for $549. For a savings of around $350 over the latter, it has performance on par with NVIDIA's RTX 4070 Super for some games at some settings, according to AMD. It offers impressive specs for that sum, including a Navi 31 XL GPU with 80 compute units (5120 stream processors), 160 AI accelerators and 16GB of GDDR6 memory. That's just a bit less than the 20GB of GDDR6, 96 compute units and 168 AI accelerators in the 7900 XT. With...
Google has announced a slew of Android updates to kick off MWC this year, including Gemini integration with Messages and AI-powered text summaries for when you’re driving. As of this week, Messages users will be able to access Google’s chatbot without leaving the texting app. Gemini in Messages can handle basic tasks like drafting messages and helping to plan events, or you can just chat with it if you’re bored. The feature is still in beta, and it’s only available to English-language Messages users for now, Google says.Android Auto is also getting a boost from AI that could help...
Google announced a new set of features for phones, cars, and wearables today at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. These features include using Gemini to craft messages, AI-generated captions for images, summarizing texts through AI for Android Auto, and access to passes on Wear OS. The company’s Gemini implementation for image generation is […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge Apple’s future roadmap for wearables may include AI-powered smart glasses, as well as AirPods with cameras, according to Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter for Bloomberg. Both concepts are in the exploratory phase inside Apple, representing more of a look at the company’s future plans than discreet products.The smart glasses would be angled as AirPods stand-ins, he says, just with more sensors, AI features, and longer-lasting batteries. But even though they’d serve as a cheaper head-worn gadget than the Vision Pro, they wouldn’t be the AR face computer...
As a part of a multi-part series, TechCrunch is highlighting women innovators — from academics to policymakers — in the field of AI.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week in AI, Google paused its AI chatbot Gemini’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
TechCrunch has launched a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
After promising to fix Gemini's image generation feature and then pausing it altogether, Google has published a blog post offering an explanation for why its technology overcorrected for diversity. Prabhakar Raghavan, the company's Senior Vice President for Knowledge & Information, explained that Google's efforts to ensure that the chatbot would generate images showing a wide range of people "failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range." Further, its AI model grew to become "way more cautious" over time and refused to answer prompts that weren't inherently...
Google has apologized (or come very close to apologizing) for another embarrassing AI blunder this week, an image generating model that injected diversity into pictures with a farcical disregard for historical context. While the underlying issue is perfectly understandable, Google blames the model for “becoming” over-sensitive. The model didn’t make itself, guys. The AI system […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
House staging is a significant part of the real estate industry, and while realtors have traditionally staged houses physically before posting a listing, it’s an expensive and time consuming process. A startup called Virtual Staging AI is making it possible for realtors to virtually stage a house with the help of Generative AI. Virtual Staging […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge Google has issued an explanation for the “embarrassing and wrong” images generated by its Gemini AI tool. In a blog post on Friday, Google says its model produced “inaccurate historical” images due to tuning issues. The Verge and others caught Gemini generating images of racially diverse Nazis and US Founding Fathers earlier this week.“Our tuning to ensure that Gemini showed a range of people failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range,” Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president, writes in the post. “And second, over time...
People are more likely to do something if you ask nicely. That’s a fact most of us are well aware of. But do generative AI models behave the same way? To a point. Phrasing requests in a certain way — meanly or nicely — can yield better results with chatbots like ChatGPT than prompting in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hardware is difficult, to paraphrase a famous adage. First-generation products from new startups are notoriously so, regardless of how much money and excitement you’ve managed to drum up. Given all that, it’s likely few are too surprised that Humane’s upcoming Ai Pin has been pushed back a bit, from March to “mid-April,” per a new […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Browser company’s Arc, a browser focused on a less cluttered web experience, launched a new feature in its mobile app Arc Search that uses AI to summarize web pages. The feature involves a clever “pinching” gesture that shows a neatly formatted summary with main points. The feature has gotten attention because it presents a […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
TechCrunch has launched a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Nvidia has officially hit a $2 trillion market capitalization, making it the first chipmaker to cross the threshold. It’s also the third US company to reach over a $2 trillion valuation, right behind Apple ($2.83 trillion) and Microsoft ($3.06 trillion).The California-based company has seen rapid growth over the past year due to its leadership in the AI chip market. Nvidia’s market cap reached $1 trillion only less than one year ago, and it left both Amazon and Alphabet in the rearview mirror as it became a $1.83 trillion company earlier this month.As...
Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Axelle/Bauer-Griffin, Getty Images Look, I’ve been following the adventures of xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, and I’ve come to a conclusion: its only real idea is “What if AI, but with Elon Musk this time?”What’s publicly available about xAI makes it seem like Musk showed up to the generative AI party late, and without any beer. This is 2024. The party is crowded now. xAI doesn’t seem to have anything that would let it stand out beyond, well, Musk.That hasn’t stopped Musk from shopping his idea to investors, though! Last December, xAI said it...
Generative AI has done an impressive job in improving productivity in a wide range of areas, including website building. There’s no lack of tools that now allow one to generate web designs by simply describing what they want in prompts, including established player Wix and bootstrapped startups like Relume. 10web, a company based out of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Humane Humane announced that its AI Pin would start shipping in March, but there’s been a small delay. Early adopters are now being told orders will arrive in mid-April at the earliest, according to a video update from Humane staffer (and Verge alumnus) Sam Sheffer and emails we saw in Humane’s official Discord channel.On the plus side, the company says it’ll now throw in three months of its pricy $24-a-month subscription for free with the $699 pin — and will do so for any other customers who buy one before March 31st, too. a few @Humane updates: pic.twitter.com/olYQp8utdc— Sam...
Google and Samsung aren’t the only ones baking magical AI selective photo erasers into their devices — they’re about to become table stakes for Windows PCs too. Microsoft has just announced Generative erase, a feature that lets you do similar things in the Photos app that comes bundled with Windows. Above and below, you can see how Microsoft disappears a dog’s leash and some unintentional photobombers using the power of generative AI: GIF: Microsoft Selectively removing people from the background of a photo. While that may not be quite as nifty a party trick as other AI fakery you’ve...
Reddit’s prospects as it barrels toward a stock market listing have a lot more to do with relationships with AI vendors such as OpenAI than one might expect. In its IPO prospectus filed today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Reddit repeatedly emphasized how much it thinks it stands to gain — and has […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Pat Gelsinger says that Intel’s renewed investment in cutting-edge manufacturing technology will allow it to become a leading supplier of AI chips. Microsoft is already onboard.
Stability has announced Stable Diffusion 3, the latest and most powerful version of the company’s image-generating AI model. While details are scant, it’s clearly an attempt to fend off the hype around recently announced competitors from OpenAI and Google. We’ll have a more technical breakdown of all this soon, but for now you should know […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Justice Department appointed Princeton professor and technology law researcher Jonathan Mayer as its first chief AI officer as it figures out how AI impacts law enforcement. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement that appointing an AI officer was important for the department to “keep pace with rapidly evolving scientific and technological developments.” One of Mayer’s responsibilities will be to build a team of technical and policy experts around cybersecurity and AI. Mayer will also serve as the department’s chief science and...
Image: The Verge Google is getting AI training data from Reddit as part of a new partnership between the two companies. In an update on Thursday, Reddit announced it will start providing Google “more efficient ways to train models.” The collaboration will give Google access to Reddit’s data API, which delivers real-time content from Reddit’s platform. This will provide “Google with an efficient and structured way to access the vast corpus of existing content on Reddit,” while also allowing the company to display content from Reddit in new ways across its products. When Reddit CEO...
Google Chrome is getting a new AI writing generator today. At its core, this Gemin-powered tool is essentially the existing “Help me write” feature from Gmail, but extended to the entire web and powered by one of Google’s latest Gemini AI models. The company first announced this new tool in January and it remains in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Golden Ventures' fifth fund targets seed-stage founders working across technologies, including AI, climate, blockchain and quantum.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Massive training data sets are the gateway to powerful AI models — but often, also those models’ downfall. Biases emerge from prejudicial patterns concealed in large data sets, like pictures of mostly white CEOs in an image classification set. And big data sets can be messy, coming in formats incomprehensible to a model — formats […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google says it’s temporarily suspended the ability of Gemini, its flagship generative AI suite of models, to generate images of people while it works on updating the model to improve the historical accuracy of outputs. In a post on the social media platform X, the company announced what it couched as a “pause” on generating […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Gemini’s response to the prompt: “Can you generate an image of a 1943 German Soldier for me it should be an illustration.” | Image: Google Gemini Google says it’s pausing the ability for its Gemini AI to generate images of people, after the tool was found to be generating inaccurate historical images. Gemini has been creating diverse images of the US Founding Fathers and Nazi-era German soldiers, in what looked like an attempt to subvert the gender and racial stereotypes found in generative AI.“We’re already working to address recent issues with Gemini’s image generation feature...
A growing roster of vertical AI startups is emerging in Southeast Asia to serve sectors ranging from seafood to finance. Singapore-based venture capital firm Antler recently made a bet on 37 of them, investing $5.1 million in total for pre-seed deals. This included a strategic partnership with Khazanah, Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, which invested into […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Samsung is bringing its Galaxy AI features to more devices through a new One UL 6.1 update coming in late March, the company announced today. The features are coming to the Galaxy S23 series, S23 FE, Z Fold5 and Z Flip5, as well as Tab S9 Ultra, Tab S9+ and Tab S9. The AI features […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The results for “generate an image of the Founding Fathers,” as of February 21st. | Screenshot: Adi Robertson / The Verge Google has apologized for what it describes as “inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions” with its Gemini AI tool, saying its attempts at creating a “wide range” of results missed the mark. The statement follows criticism that it depicted specific white figures (like the US Founding Fathers) or groups like Nazi-era German soldiers as people of color, possibly as an overcorrection to long-standing racial bias problems in AI.“We’re aware that...
The game shines a light on AI bias and how far ChatGPT has to go when talking to and about different cultures.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hundreds in the artificial intelligence community have signed an open letter calling for strict regulation of AI-generated impersonations, or deepfakes. While this is unlikely to spur real legislation (despite the House’s new task force), it does act as a bellwether for how experts lean on this controversial issue. The letter, signed by over 500 people […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Empowerly, an edtech startup that specializes in college counseling and career guidance services, raised $15 million in a recent funding round led by Conductive Ventures, the company announced today. The new capital will go toward growing its services, building out its AI-powered products and developing its first mobile app, which is set to launch in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The proliferation of generative AI chatbots on extremist platforms could lead to increased radicalization, experts warn.
If you ask Gemini, Google’s flagship GenAI model, to write deceptive content about the upcoming U.S. presidential election, it will, given the right prompt. Ask about a future Super Bowl game and it’ll invent a play-by-play. Or ask about the Titan submersible implosion and it’ll serve up disinformation, complete with convincing-looking but untrue citations. It’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The race to build the next big large language model is on, and now a contender out of China has reportedly banked a major round of funding to catapult it to the front of the pack. Moonshot AI, an artificial intelligence startup founded less than a year ago building LLMs that can handle long inputs […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Microsoft Microsoft’s Copilot Pro launched last month as a $20 monthly subscription that provides access to AI-powered features inside some Office apps, alongside priority access to the latest OpenAI models and improved image generation.I’ve been testing Copilot Pro over the past month to see if it’s worth the $20 subscription for my daily needs and just how good or bad the AI image and text generation is across Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Some of the Copilot Pro features are a little disappointing right now, whereas others are truly useful improvements that I’m...
Simetrik created the Simetrik Building Blocks, scalable and adaptable concepts based on no-code development and generative AI technologies.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
While the world fixates on text-, image- and movie-generating AI, a startup headed by a former DeepMind senior researcher is developing GenAI tech to support the manufacturing of new physical materials. Orbital Materials — founded by Jonathan Godwin, who previously was involved with DeepMind’s material research efforts — is creating an AI-powered platform that can […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Of the professions in danger of being replaced by AI, language teacher is certainly up there. That’s not necessarily because it’s a good idea. AI, some employers have decided — including Duolingo, recently — is a reasonable enough stand-in for human experts when it comes to language instruction. Despite the fact that AI-translated text tends […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The House of Representatives has founded a Task Force on artificial intelligence that will “ensure America Keeps leading in this strategic area,” as Speaker Mike Johnson put it. But the announcement feels more like a punt after years of indecision that show no sign of ending. In a way this task force — chaired by […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
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There’s a new generative AI startup based in Paris. But what makes Bioptimus interesting is that it plans to apply everything we’ve collectively learned about AI models over the past few years with a narrow, exclusive focus on biology. The reason why it makes to sense to create a startup focused exclusively on biology is […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The impact of AI must be front of mind for enforcers of merger control policy, the European Union’s antitrust chief and digital EVP, Margrethe Vestager, said yesterday, warning that “wide-reaching” digital markets can lead to unexpected economic effects. Speaking during a seminar discussing how to prevent tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Meta from monopolizing […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sierra is building autonomous AI agents that can help customers resolve issues and complete tasks without human help.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
SoftBank Group’s Masayoshi Son has made no secret of his intent to double down on red-hot artificial intelligence industry. Now, he’s fundraising for his next move in that strategy. According to a report in Bloomberg, the SoftBank founder is seeking $100 billion to build a new venture that would compete with the likes of Nvidia […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! This week, we’re looking at a new finance-based dating app, Robinhood’s earnings results and the startup in which PayPal Ventures made its first investment. Let’s dive in! To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Sunday at 7:30 a.m. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering noteworthy happenings in the tech industry. This week, OpenAI stunned the blogosphere with the release of Sora, a new AI model that can generate videos in impressively high fidelity. We’ve seen video generators before. But what makes Sora unique is its understanding of time […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Tech companies are pledging to fight election-related deepfakes as policymakers amp up pressure. Today at the Munich Security Conference, vendors including Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, Adobe and IBM signed an accord signaling their intention to adopt a common framework for responding to AI-generated deepfakes intended to mislead voters. Thirteen other companies, including AI startups OpenAI, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
NFTs don’t always get taken very seriously, particularly now that AI and content creators are hogging the spotlight, but not everyone is so quick to discount crypto’s oft-derided younger sibling. According to Animoca Brands’ chairman and co-founder, Yat Siu, the growing influence of artificial intelligence and content is exactly why there is a growing need […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Anthropic, the well-funded AI startup, is testing a technology to detect when users of its GenAI chatbot ask about political topics and redirect those users to “authoritative” sources of voting information. Called Prompt Shield, the technology, which relies on a combination of AI detection models and rules, shows […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Over the past few decades, extreme weather events have not only become more severe, but are also occurring more frequently. Neara is focused on enabling utility companies and energy providers to create models of their power networks and anything that might affect them, like wildfires or flooding. The Redfern, New South Wales, Australia-based startup recently […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge A report from Bloomberg says Apple has expanded internal testing of new generative AI features for its Xcode programming software and plans to release them to third-party developers this year. Apple also reportedly looked at potential uses for generative AI in consumer-facing products, like automatic playlist creation in Apple Music, slideshows in Keynote, or AI chatbot-like search features for Spotlight search. The search upgrade could let iOS and macOS users make natural language requests, like with ChatGPT, to get weather reports or operate features deep within apps....
There’s been many attempts at open source AI-powered voice assistants (see Rhasspy, Mycroft and Jasper, to name a few) — all established with the goal of creating privacy-preserving, offline experiences that don’t compromise on functionality. But development’s proven to be extraordinarily slow. That’s because, in addition to all the usual challenges attendant with open source […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Talkie Soulful Character AI, Chai, iGirl: AI Girlfriend, Romantic AI, Genesia - AI Friend & Partner, Anima: My Virtual AI Boyfriend, Replika, Anima: AI Friend, Mimico - Your AI Friends, EVA AI Chat Bot & Soulmate, and CrushOn.AI are not just the names of 11 chatbots ready to play fantasy girlfriend — they’re also potential privacy and security risks. A report from Mozilla looked at those AI companion apps, finding many are intentionally vague about the AI training behind the bot, where their data comes from, how they protect information, and...
Image: OpenAI OpenAI is launching a new video-generation model, and it’s called Sora. The AI company says Sora “can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions.” The text-to-video model allows users to create photorealistic videos up to a minute long — all based on prompts they’ve written. Sora is capable of creating “complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background,” according to OpenAI’s introductory blog post. The company also notes that the model can understand how objects “exist in the...
This morning, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai inaugurated a new hub in Paris dedicated to artificial intelligence. This hub is located in a newly renovated building near Google’s main office in Paris. It will host around 300 researchers and engineers. But if you pay close attention to Google’s whereabouts in Paris, you may think that Google […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It doesn’t take much to get GenAI spouting mistruths and untruths. This past week provided an example, with Microsoft’s and Google’s chatbots declaring a Super Bowl winner before the game even started. The real problems start, though, when GenAI’s hallucinations get harmful — endorsing torture, reinforcing ethnic and racial stereotypes and writing persuasively about conspiracy theories. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
After the shutdown of the buzzy AI news app Artifact from Instagram’s founders, a new app called Bulletin is also now turning to AI to help remove clickbait and summarize the day’s news. Except in this case, users can customize news sources the app features, as you could in any other RSS reader, instead of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google is expanding the range of Gemini large language models it is making available to developers on its Vertex AI platform today. Gemini 1.0 Pro (which was still known as Gemini Pro 1.0 only a week ago — because Google is very good at branding) is now generally available after being in public preview for […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
API company Kong is launching its open source AI Gateway, today, an extension of its existing API gateway that allows developers and operations teams to integrate their applications with one or more large language models (LLMs) and access them through a single API. On top of this, Kong is launching several AI-specific features prompt engineering, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
There’s a lot that can go wrong with GenAI — especially third-party GenAI. It makes stuff up. It’s biased and toxic. And it can run afoul of copyright rules. According to a recent survey from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group, third-party AI tools are responsible for over 55% of AI-related failures in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
When looking at startups within healthcare, data and AI and cybersecurity, the firm considers a number of factors like the plan for infrastructure, especially now that AI is everywhere.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
NVIDIA is doing very well for itself. The chip maker has overtaken Alphabet, Google's parent company, to become the third most valuable company in the United States, Reuters reports. The news comes almost immediately after NVIDIA pushed past Amazon in the rankings, with the company now valued at $1.83 trillion. Worldwide, it sits in fourth, behind American companies Microsoft ($3.04 trillion) and Apple ($2.84 trillion) and the Saudi Arabian state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco ($2.07 trillion).AI's boom over the last year is largely to thank for NVIDIA's jump in valuation, with...
The parents of a teenager who was killed in Florida’s Parkland school shooting in 2018 have started a bold new project called The Shotline to lobby for stricter gun laws in the country. The Shotline uses AI to recreate the voices of children killed by gun violence and send recordings through automated calls to lawmakers, The Wall Street Journal reported. The project launched on Wednesday, six years after a gunman killed 17 people and injured more than a dozen at a high school in Parkland, Florida. It features the voice of six children, some as young as ten, and young adults, who have...
Researchers at Amazon have trained the largest ever text-to-speech model yet, which they claim exhibits “emergent” qualities improving its ability to speak even complex sentences naturally. The breakthrough could be what the technology needs to escape the uncanny valley. These models were always going to grow and improve, but the researchers specifically hoped to see […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Collage of Stabie Cascade art | Stability AI Stability AI’s newest model for image generation is Stable Cascade promises to be faster and more powerful than its industry-leading predecessor, Stable Diffusion, which is the basis of many other text-to-image generation AI tools. Stable Cascade can generate photos and give variations of the exact image it created, or try to increase an existing picture’s resolution. Other text-to-image editing features include inpainting and outpainting, where the model will fill edit only a specific part of the image, as well as canny edge, where users can...
Illustration: The Verge Microsoft tweeted that its annual Build conference for developers will take place in Seattle from May 21st through 23rd. The announcement tells everyone to expect to hear updates about “AI, Copilots, and more.”The 2023 event marked a return to the in-person portion, and this year’s event promises to take place both in Seattle and online. Last year, Microsoft ramped up AI efforts that now include tools for developers like Copilot Studio and Windows AI Studio, while its growing AI ambitions around Windows and Microsoft 365 will surely be front and center again.No...
It’s no fun as a customer to have an interaction with a bot when it’s clearly a bot with which you’re engaging. Rasa is a startup that claims to have developed the infrastructure to give developers at large enterprises the ability to build “robust” generative conversational AI assistants so that those interactions feel more personal […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
This is our Wednesday show, where we dig into the critical startup and venture capital stories from the week thus far.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The indoor farming startup uses repurposed warehouse robots to grow produce for Amazon Fresh.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
There’s no such thing as a future-proof career. This is something I consider nearly any time I write about advances in generative AI. Is there a sense in which I’m contributing to the propagation of my eventual replacement? Probably! But don’t worry, that’s a me problem. As for you, my roboticist friend, you’ll be just […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Welcome to our Wednesday show, in which we talk through the week’s leading startup and venture capital news. Today we have an absolute pile of material, so let’s get to work: Bret Taylor’s […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Spatial computing, climate tech, and applications of AI technology join the newly announced list of startup incubator Y Combinator’s newest request for startups, announced on Wednesday. In a blog post penned by YC Managing Direct Dalton Caldwell, the organization put out a call for the types of startups it wants to know fund, in the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Slack has finally unleashed its generative AI toolset on the world, after teasing it last year. The vast majority of these features look to simplify your day-to-day life when using the work-focused chat platform.First up, the AI will auto-generate channel recaps to give you key highlights of anything you missed while away from the keyboard or smartphone. Slack says the algorithm that generates these recaps is smart enough to separate the content in the various topics discussed. In other words, if your co-workers launched into a debate about coffee beans and also talked about third-quarter...
As an enterprise communications platform, Slack has become a de facto storage repository for institutional knowledge, but getting at that information has been challenging with conventional search tools. Today Slack introduced a couple of new features designed to make that information more accessible including a new AI-fueled search tool and the ability to summarize information […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
While carbon dioxide gets the lion's share of attention when it comes to global warming, there are other factors at play. Methane is responsible for about 30 percent of the rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution, according to the International Energy Agency. About 40 percent of methane emissions from human activity stem from the energy sector. Identifying and mitigating these emissions is said to be one of the most critical actions we can take in the short term to combat climate change.To that end, Google and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) have once again teamed up to...
Before the world became fixated on artificial intelligence, thanks to generative AI’s advances, cryptocurrency was the darling of many investors. So when some venture capital firms started swiftly switching their focus between AI and crypto, the industry’s onlookers scorn their opportunism. Meanwhile, a wave of entrepreneurs emerged as fervent advocates for the convergence of AI […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Alan’s meteoric rise in the French tech ecosystem has been both figurative and literal. A few years ago, the startup’s office was limited to one floor in a nondescriptive office building near the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris. Over time, the company added another floor, then another floor… Now, the company of 550 employees also occupies […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) maintains that artificial intelligence systems cannot be named inventors, but humans can use AI tools in the process of creating patented inventions and must disclose if they do.The agency published its latest guidance following a series of “listening” tours to gather public feedback. It states that while AI systems and other “non-natural persons” can’t be listed as inventors in patent applications, “the use of an AI system by a natural person does not preclude a natural person from qualifying as an...
In November, Airbnb acquired a stealth AI firm launched by Siri’s co-founder, called GamePlanner.AI. The deal valued the secretive startup at around $200 million, according to reports. Though the hosting company didn’t telegraph its plans for GamePlanner at the time, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky today shared a high-level overview of Airbnb’s larger plans […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
After installing a new interim CEO earlier this month, Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, is making some major changes to its product strategy, TechCrunch has learned. Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber, which launched only […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Otter, the AI-powered meeting assistant that transcribes audio in real-time is adding another layer of AI to its product with today’s introduction of Meeting GenAI, a new set of AI tools for meetings. Included with GenAI is an AI chatbot you can query to get information about past meetings you’ve recorded with Otter, an AI […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Driven by AI boom, the two companies are neck-and-neck behind Apple, Microsoft, and Google.
A Y Combinator-backed startup called Cambio is bringing AI to the banking world in a surprising way: it’s putting AI bots on the phone with companies and consumers. The startup began by offering an AI-powered service that negotiated debt collections on behalf of consumers, which helped around 70% of customers resolve their collections and raise […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Last year, there was an interest in agent-based AI approaches, such as AutoGPT. This year, we are seeing startups implement some of these use cases of “let the AI do the work for you.” Mindy, which touts itself to be your email-based executive assistant, is one such example. Using Mindy is pretty simple. You can […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We’ve been hearing about former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor’s latest gig since he announced he was leaving the CRM giant in November 2022. Last February we heard he was launching an AI startup built with former Google employee Clay Bavor. Today, the two emerged with a new conversational AI company called Sierra with some bold […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Adobe and TikTok announced today that TikTok’s AI-powered Creative Assistant is now available directly within Adobe Express. The two companies say the integration will help businesses and creators make and market content more effectively. Creative Assistant is available now globally in English as an add-on in Adobe Express for both free and Premium users. The […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Klaus – an Estonian-born startup which emerged in 2019 to aid customer services agents – has been acquired by global customer services platform Zendesk for an undisclosed amount. Last year Zendesk also acquired Tymeshift, a workforce management tool, to fold into its product. It would be remiss of us not to mention that the downturn in […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The European Parliament’s civil liberties (LIBE) and internal market (IMCO) committees have overwhelmingly endorsed draft legislation setting out a risk-based framework for regulating applications of artificial intelligence. In a vote this morning the committees voted 71-8 (with 7 abstentions) in favor of the compromise negotiated with EU Member States at the back end of last […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The question of where AI sits in the legal personhood stack isn’t as simple as it may seem (i.e. “nowhere”) — but the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today declared that, as with other intellectual property, only a person can receive its official protections. The news arrived via “guidance,” which is to say official policy […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Verge Fandom, which hosts wikis for many fandoms, will roll out generative AI features that it previously tested but now promises users will be able to opt out.The most prominent AI-generated feature is Quick Answers, which generates a Q&A-style dropdown that distills information into a bite-sized sentence. When visiting the wiki for The Witcher, for instance, anyone curious to find out who trained Geralt of Rivia can click on the question and learn that the answer is Vesemir.Fandom will also add AI to its image review process “to ensure quick and accurate removal of inappropriate...
This morning, we have an interesting mix of stories that bring technology, politics and AI together in unique ways that's well worth diving deep into© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Ashish Vaishnav/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Microsoft appears to be readying its own DLSS-like AI upscaling feature for PC games. X user PhantomOcean3 discovered the feature inside the latest test versions of Windows 11 over the weekend, with Microsoft describing its automatic super resolution as a way to “use AI to make supported games play more smoothly with enhanced details.”That sounds a lot like Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology, which uses AI to upscale games and improve frame rates and image quality. AMD and Intel also offer their own...
Peak XV, the venture capital firm that split from Sequoia Capital last year, is taking its portfolio companies from India, Southeast Asia and Australia on an “immersion” trip to Silicon Valley this week to meet several industry titans, the latest in the venture firm’s broadening offerings and networking flex. About 60 founders, many backed by […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Brian Hood made global headlines last year after OpenAI allegedly smeared his reputation. He reveals why he’s no longer suing the chatbot.
We may not be using the M word much these days, but the race to build an interconnected avatar-driven virtual world didn’t take the last year off. The metaverse, a tech buzzword sandwiched in between the hype eras of NFTs and AI, is still being built, regardless of what we’re calling it. And in light […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Every company or organization putting out an AI model has to make a decision on what, if any, boundaries to set on what it will and won’t discuss. Goody-2 takes this quest for ethics to an extreme by declining to talk about anything whatsoever. The chatbot is clearly a satire of what some perceive as […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Brilliant Labs There’s a new pair of smart spectacles in town — and this time, it’s the $349 Frame glasses said to give you multimodal “AI superpowers.” The open-source eyewear comes from a startup called Brilliant Labs, which touts Frame as a way to get AI translations, web search, and visual analysis right in front of your eyes.As shown in a video posted by Brilliant Labs, you can use your voice to ask the glasses to do things like identify a landmark you’re looking at, search the web for a particular pair of sneakers you’re seeing, or even look up nutrition information...
Broadcasting company Sinclair recently sold off its free, ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) service STIRR to Thinking Media, a startup that provides cloud-based streaming solutions for FAST and over-the-top (OTT) services. The new owners have ambitious plans for the streamer, including an international expansion, tripling its on-demand content library and becoming an AI-native streamer with advanced […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Gemini has all the conversational grace of a page of search results. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge I don’t know how to say this, but sometimes the emotional labor of opening another app on my phone and typing in some text is just too much. I need to gather details about an Airbnb reservation from two different confirmation emails and send them to my friends. Or I want to figure out when to leave this coffee shop to get home by a certain time via bus. These aren’t hard things to do, but they require enough tapping around different apps or tabbing between screens that I start...
Grammarly is laying off 230 employees worldwide as part of a “business restructuring,” the company announced this week. The layoffs are part of Grammarly’s efforts to advance its focus on “the AI-enabled workplace of the future.” the company says. “To arrive at today’s decision, we took a look at our organizational design and the current […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With the rise of AI tools that can quickly create modified images and videos, making fake images to spread political misinformation leading to the upcoming US presidential election has become easier than ever. Midjourney's solution to that might be to ban political images altogether, according to Bloomberg. David Holz, Midjourney's CEO, reportedly told users during a chat session on Discord that the company is close to banning images such as those of Biden and Trump over the next 12 months."I know it's fun to make Trump pictures — I make Trump pictures," he told users who attended...
Software asset management — an area of enterprise IT designed, in part, to help companies save money — continues to draw a lot of money itself. In the latest development, Xensam — a startup out of Stockholm that provides AI-based tools to help businesses understand and track where and how software is being used — […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The FCC’s war on robocalls has gained a new weapon in its arsenal with the declaration of AI-generated voices as “artificial” and therefore by definitely against the law when used in automated calling scams. It may not stop the flood of fake Joe Bidens that will almost certainly trouble our phones this election season, but […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The European Union has launched a consultation on draft election security mitigations aimed at larger online platforms, such as Facebook, Google, TikTok and X (Twitter), that includes a set of recommendations it hopes will shrink democratic risks from generative AI and deepfakes — in addition to covering off more well-trodden ground such as content moderation […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The Federal Communications Commission is making it illegal for robocalls to use AI-generated voices. The ruling, issued on Thursday, gives state attorneys general the ability to take action against callers using AI voice cloning tech.As outlined in the ruling, AI-generated voices are now considered “an artificial or prerecorded voice” under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). This restricts callers from using AI-generated voices for non-emergency purposes or without prior consent. The TCPA includes bans on a variety of automated...
It appears emerging price points for AI-powered software products will boost the total addressable market (TAM) for technology products, and help reaccelerate growth at tech companies big and small.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A month after the mysterious Biden calls in New Hampshire, the FCC can now go after robocall scammers that use AI voice clones.
The Federal Communication Commission is moving forward with its plan to ban AI robocalls. Commissioners voted unanimously on Wednesday in favor of a Declaratory Ruling that was proposed in late January. Under the measure, the FCC deems robocalls made using AI-generated voices to be "artificial" voices per the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). That makes the practice illegal. The ruling takes effect immediately.“Bad actors are using AI-generated voices in unsolicited robocalls to extort vulnerable family members, imitate celebrities and misinform voters. We’re putting the...
Your phone’s camera is as much software as it is hardware, and Glass is hoping to improve both. But while its wild anamorphic lens creeps to market, the company (running on $9.3 million in new money) has released an AI-powered camera upgrade that it says vastly improves image quality — without any weird AI upscaling […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In the week when gadget lovers around the world are enchanted by Vision Pro, a young, brave startup is trying to carve out a space for its augmented reality device that features a form factor starkly different from Apple’s device. Today, Singapore-based Brilliant Labs announced its new product, Frame, a pair of lightweight AR glasses […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google Assistant as we knew it is on the way out. Well, at least its guts. Late last year, Google added AI capabilities from its chatbot Bard to Google Assistant, allowing the virtual helper to make sense of images and draw on data in emails, documents and more. Now, the company’s giving users the choice […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is famous for having a million similar products with confusingly different names and seemingly nothing in common. (Can I interest you in a messaging app?) But when it comes to its AI work, going forward there is only one name that matters: Gemini.The company announced on Thursday that it is renaming its Bard chatbot to Gemini, releasing a dedicated Gemini app for Android, and even folding all its Duet AI features in Google Workspace into the Gemini brand. It also announced that Gemini Ultra 1.0 — the largest and most capable version of Google’s...
A fledgling startup founded by one of OpenAI’s first engineering hires is looking to “redefine manufacturing,” with AI-powered factories for creating bespoke precision parts. Daedalus, as the company is called, is based in the southwestern German city of Karlsruhe, where its solo factory is currently housed. Here, Daedalus takes orders from industries such as medical […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Apple isn't one of the top players in the AI game today, but the company's new open source AI model for image editing shows what it's capable of contributing to the space. The model called MLLM-Guided Image Editing (MGIE), which uses multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to interpret text-based commands when manipulating images. In other words, the tool has the ability to edit photos based on the text the user types in. While it's not the first tool that can do so, "human instructions are sometimes too brief for current methods to capture and follow," the project's paper...
Attentive.ai, a startup building vertical software for landscaping and construction services in the U.S., has raised $7 million in a new funding round as it looks to enhance its AI-led offerings and expand them to more businesses. Led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India, the all-equity Series A round, which follows the earlier $5 […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Under scrutiny from activists — and parents — OpenAI has formed a new team to study ways to prevent its AI tools from being misused or abused by kids. In a new job listing on its career page, OpenAI reveals the existence of a Child Safety team, which the company says is working with platform […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Adam Selipsky, CEO of Amazon’s dominant cloud platform AWS, says generative AI is valuable but that the excitement around some AI companies is similar to when dotcom darlings were “dramatically overhyped.”
Illustration: The Verge Apple researchers released a new model that lets users describe in plain language what they want to change in a photo without ever touching photo editing software.The MGIE model, which Apple worked on with the University of California, Santa Barbara, can crop, resize, flip, and add filters to images all through text prompts. MGIE, which stands for MLLM-Guided Image Editing, can be applied to simple and more complex image editing tasks like modifying specific objects in a photo to make them a different shape or come off brighter. The model blends two different uses of...
Illustration: The Verge X hit the number one slot among free apps on Apple’s App Store Wednesday, just as another celebrity image scandal was going viral on its platform.The hashtag “drakevideo” was trending as of Wednesday in the US, after a video that users speculated to be the rapper Drake half nude and engaged in a sexual act spread across the service.The incident comes less than two weeks after X struggled to stop the spread of another salacious celebrity image. In late January, fake, AI-generated explicit images of Taylor Swift circulated on the platform, leading the company to at...
Copilot, Microsoft’s family of AI-powered chatbots and assistants, is getting a few new upgrades timed with a flashy Superbowl LVIII ad campaign. In a post on the official Microsoft blog, Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, outlined what users can expect. “Today marks exactly one year since our entry into AI-powered experiences for people with […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
One year after fully embracing generative AI chatbots, Microsoft is giving Copilot a fresh lick of paint. Copilot now has a more streamlined design on the web and in its mobile apps. The company says there's a cleaner look and feel for the chatbot's responses, while Copilot will display a carousel of suggested prompts to highlight what it can do.The redesign comes just ahead of the Super Bowl. Microsoft is running an ad for the big game for the first time in four years. The commercial shows off Copilot (surprisingly enough) and some of the things users can do with the chatbot's mobile app....
Job searching is a drag by any measure. Entering the same information into applications over and over even more so. It feels like a process that is ripe for a digital update, and Simplify, an early stage startup is trying to do that by combining questionnaires, job scraping, job matching, auto filling applications and help […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Back in 2022, the European Commission released a proposal for a directive on how to combat domestic violence and violence against women in other forms. Now, the European Council and Parliament have agreed with the proposal to criminalize, among other things, different types of cyber-violence. The proposed rules will criminalize the non-consensual sharing of intimate images, including deepfakes made by AI tools, which could help deter revenge porn. Cyber-stalking, online harassment, misogynous hate speech and "cyber-flashing," or the sending of unsolicited nudes, will also be recognized as...
In another sign of the scramble to accelerate the uptake and transformative potential of artificial intelligence, Dutch recycling giant Bollegraaf Group is making a strategic investment in UK AI startup Greyparrot, which uses computer vision for waste analytics. The veteran manufacturer of MRFs (Material Recovery Facilities) and “turnkey” recycling systems — which was originally founded as […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft’s prescient bets and aggressive investments in AI have propelled the software giant to become the world’s most valuable company. Yet Satya Nadella, its typically reserved chief executive, couldn’t resist landing a gloved jab at the rest of the industry. “We have the best model today … even with all the hoopla, one year after, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Onfido, an early mover in the world of identity verification using computer vision and other AI tools, is getting acquired, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed. Entrust — the privately-held company that provides a range of certification and verification services around payment cards, passwords, network and website access, device access and more — is buying the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The FCC has issued a cease and desist and is working on a new proposal banning AI-generated robocalls.
AI generated imagery and other forms of deepfakes depicting child sexual abuse (CSA) could be criminialized in the European Union under plans to update existing legislation to keep pace with technology developments, the Commission announced today. It’s also proposing to create a new criminal offence of livestreaming child sexual abuse. The possession and exchange of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Many Latin America's SaaS businesses outperform others at efficiency metrics; but capital scarcity also puts a limit to innovation, although AI could change that.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Voters in New Hampshire were treated in January to a call purporting to be from President Biden telling them not to vote in the primary. After a brief but intense investigation, the perpetrator has been revealed to be Life Corporation, a Texas-based company that has been caught slinging disinformation before. The calls in New Hampshire […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With greater literacy, focus, professional experience and a vision for the future, boards can position their businesses to thrive in this new era of AI.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In the last year, the company introduced an artificial intelligence-powered ledger, offered business banking functions and built a new version of its bookkeeping app.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta is expanding the labelling of AI-generated imagery on its social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram and Threads, to cover some synthetic imagery that’s been created using rivals’ generative AI tools — at least where rivals are using what it couches as “industry standard indicators” that the content is AI-generated and which Meta is able to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Remember the Chinese “spy” balloon from 2023? If not, here’s a refresher: about a year ago, a high-altitude balloon originating from China flew across American airspace largely undetected. Later spotted — and shot down — by the U.S. Air Force, the balloon proved difficult for curious civilian lookers-on to trace back to its origin — […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Meta will start labelling AI-generated photos uploaded to Facebook, Instagram, and Threads over the coming months as election season ramps up around the world. The company will also begin punishing users who don’t disclose if a realistic video or piece of audio was made with AI.Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said in an interview that these steps are meant to “galvanize” the tech industry as AI-generated media becomes increasingly difficult to discern from reality. The White House has pushed hard for companies to watermark AI-...
The latest beta update for the PlayStation 5 will make it easier to hear what's going on in your game. Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) has announced the software update, which will enable DualSense and DualSense Edge wireless controllers to produce louder audio so that you can hear in-game sounds and audio chats more clearly. In addition to giving controllers the ability to produce louder sounds, the update also gives their noise cancellation feature a boost. Sony's announcement says the controllers now have better mic input, thanks to a new AI machine learning model. It'...
The UK government is finally publishing its response to an AI regulation consultation it kicked off last March, when it put out a white paper setting out a preference for relying on existing laws and regulators, combined with “context-specific” guidance, to lightly supervise the disruptive high tech sector. The full response is being made available […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Ben Smith speaks on stage during the Semafor Media Summit on April 10, 2023 in New York City. | Getty Suddenly, building news products on the web is back in fashion.As social traffic collapses and Google makes ominous AI-powered sounds about search, publishers across the board have started to reemphasize their websites as destinations, and that means there are a lot of new ideas about what makes websites valuable again. Interestingly, a lot of those ideas sound a lot like blogging: that’s our redesign, of course, but it’s also Business Insider, which hired Katie Notopoulos and Peter Kafka...
If you listen to a lot of podcasts, there is a chance you might remember funny tidbits and are wondering… “Wait, who talked about eating fries with sriracha again?” or more serious questions. To look for the answers, you have to first find the podcast and then search through their transcripts. Dexa is trying to […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge Roblox built an AI model that it says translates text chats so quickly users may not even notice it’s translating the messages of other players at first. It works with 16 languages, including English, French, Japanese, Thai, Polish, and Vietnamese. Dan Sturman, Roblox CTO, said in an interview with The Verge that the goal is to make Roblox users feel more comfortable engaging with each other by letting them understand what they are saying. The translator automatically translates chats, but users can click an icon to see the original message.“We know engagement goes...
Bumble announced today that it’s launching a new AI-powered feature that is designed to help identify spam, scam and fake profiles. The new tool, called Deception Detector, aims to take action on malicious content before Bumble users ever come across it. In testing, Bumble found that the tool was able to automatically block 95% of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Large AI models — the big troves of language, vision and audio data that power generative artificial intelligence services — are shaping up to be as significant in the development of AI as operating systems have been in the development of smartphones: they are, in a way, looking like the platforms of the space (an […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Felicis, the 16-year-old Bay Area-based early-stage venture firm, has a reputation for investing globally. Indeed, firm founder Aydin Senkut — who spent a handful of years at Google as a product manager in its earlier days — was born in Turkey and talks often of the hustle he sees in founders around the world. Felicis […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Last week, at a StrictlyVC event in San Francisco, we sat down with Mamoon Hamid and Ilya Fushman, two longtime VCs whose paths first crossed as children in Frankfurt, Germany, and who were brought in to reboot the storied venture firm Kleiner Perkins roughly six years ago. They’ve seemingly accomplished their mission to burnish the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week, Amazon announced Rufus, an AI-powered shopping assistant trained […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As AI’s presence in our lives increases, so does the number of diverse founders leveraging it to develop positive, socially impactful services and products.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The European Union’s AI Act, a risk-based plan for regulating applications of artificial intelligence, has passed what looked to be the final big hurdle standing in the way of adoption after Member State representatives today voted to confirm the final text of the draft law. The development follows the political agreement reached in December — […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
For its first phones of 2024, Samsung focused so much on its “Galaxy AI” features that, physically, the Galaxy S24 series doesn’t appear to be much different than the S23. Once again, the company's phones aren’t different enough to justify upgrading from their predecessors, especially knowing that the S23 series, Z Fold 5, Z Flip 5 and Tab S9 will be getting at least some of these AI features later this year. There’s also competition from the Google Pixel 8 series, which offer many of the same new features from a more established AI company.Still, that doesn’t mean we should...
For the last several quarters we’ve seen a lull in the expansion of the cloud infrastructure market, with lower growth numbers than we’ve been accustomed to seeing in the past. That changed this quarter thanks in large part to interest in generative AI. The new revenue wave began just last year driven the by the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
You can pull images generated by Firefly AI and place them around you like a floating gallery. | Image: Adobe Adobe’s Firefly AI, the text-to-image tool behind features like Photoshop’s generative fill, will be available on the Apple Vision Pro as a native app, alongside the company’s popular Lightroom photo editing software already demonstrated during the headset’s announcement. The creative software giant announced in a press release that the new Firefly experience had been “purpose-built” for the headset’s visionOS system, allowing users to move and place images generated by...
Podcastle, a podcasting platform that has boosted its product with various generative AI-driven features, has raised $13.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Mosaic Ventures. Also participating were existing Podcastle investors RTP Global, Point Nine Capital, Sierra Ventures, and Andrew Ng’s AI Fund. Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena and Moonbug Media CEO René […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI-generated voices mimicking celebrities and politicians are making it harder for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to fight robocalls. FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel wants the commission to recognize calls that use AI-generated voices as artificial, making the use of voice cloning technologies in robocalls illegal.Under the FCC’s Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), artificial voice or recording calls to residences are against the law. If AI-generated voice calls are recognized as illegal under the existing law, it’ll give state attorneys general offices nationwide “new...
Apple has tossed another crumb to investors wondering when we’ll get to see some ‘Made in Cupertino’ GenAI: Expect Apple to reveal what it’s been working on in this buzzy slice of artificial intelligence “later this year”, per CEO Tim Cook. During an earnings call yesterday, Apple’s chief exec emphasized its ongoing investment in AI, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Last week, at our first StrictlyVC evening of the year, generously hosted by Cloudflare at its San Francisco headquarters, prominent AI investors Elad Gil and Sarah Guo joined us to talk about how they think about AI investing in a world where deals were getting bid up feverishly two months ago, and where reportedly, some […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The U.K. government is taking too “narrow” a view of AI safety and risks falling behind in the AI goldrush, according to a report released today. The report, published by the parliamentary House of Lords’ Communications and Digital Committee, follows a months-long evidence-gathering effort involving input from a wide gamut of stakeholders including big tech […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge During Apple’s quarterly earnings call on Thursday afternoon, CEO Tim Cook mentioned that the company is working on generative AI software features that will make their way to customers “later this year.” That aligns with reporting from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who said recently that iOS 18 could be the “biggest” update in the operating system’s history. Cook’s teases — he mentioned generative AI several times, but never got specific — seem to confirm that we’re in for a big release this fall.“As we look ahead, we will continue to invest...
Amazon announced today the launch of an AI-powered shopping assistant it’s calling Rufus that’s been trained on the e-commerce giant’s product catalog as well as information from around the web. The company says the new tool will launch to a subset of U.S. customers in beta, starting today, before expanding to more users in the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google Maps is introducing a generative AI feature to help you discover new places, the company announced today. Using large language models (LLMs), the new feature analyzes the over 250 million locations on Google Maps and contributions from over 300 million Local Guides to pull up suggestions based on what you’re looking for. For instance, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
For years, Google (or any other search engine) has been the main gateway for people to discover websites and other content. The Browser Company, which makes the Arc Browser, is on a quest to change that by building an AI that surfs the web for you and gets you the results while bypassing search engines. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Probabl isn’t your average AI startup as this new French company is an Inria spin-off company that revolves around an open-source data science library called scikit-learn — Inria is a well-known French technology research institute. As for scikit-learn, with more than 45,000 stars on GitHub, this Python module is widely used by machine learning teams […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As GenAI tools begin to transform the music industry in incredible — and in some cases ethically problematic — ways, Google is ramping up its investments in AI tech to create new songs and lyrics. The search giant today unveiled MusicFX, an upgrade to MusicLM, the music-generating tool Google released last year. MusicFX can create […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google announced today that its Bard chatbot is now powered by the Gemini Pro model globally with support for over 40 languages including Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. In December, Google launched its new generative AI models with flagship Gemini Ultra, “lite” Gemini Pro, and Gemini Nano, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Taylor Swift deepfakes be damned, Google is releasing a new AI-powered tool, TextFX, for image creation. Underpinned by Imagen 2, a GenAI image model developed by Google’s DeepMind team, TextFX offers a prompt-based UI to create and edit images. That’s no different than tools like OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, Midjourney, Meta’s Imagine with Meta AI and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Allen Institute for AI (AI2), the nonprofit AI research institute founded by late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is releasing several GenAI language models it claims are more “open” than others — and, importantly, licensed in such a way that developers can use them unfettered for training, experimentation and even commercialization Called OLMo, an acronym […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Even though the two sectors are reaching different levels of mainstream adoption, they are also facing challenges that the other could potentially help alleviate.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
There’s an acute shortage of radiologists around the world, which means it is harder for medical teams to get imaging studies done. As a result, more than 200 companies have sprung up to create applications that use AI to automate different parts of the radiology process. CARPL, a radiology marketplace that counts Singapore’s government as […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The rise of AI-generated voices mimicking celebrities and politicians could make it even harder for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to fight robocalls and prevent people from getting spammed and scammed. That's why FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel wants the commission to officially recognize calls that use AI-generated voices as "artificial," which would make the use of voice cloning technologies in robocalls illegal. Under the FCC's Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), solicitations to residences that use an artificial voice or a recording are against the law. As...
No one likes robocalls to begin with, but using AI-generated voices of people like President Biden makes them even worse. As such the FCC is proposing that using voice cloning tech in robocalls be ruled fundamentally illegal, making it easier to charge the operators of these frauds. You may ask why it’s necessary if robocalls […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Securing generative AI-based applications from prompting attacks, ensuring that they don’t leak sensitive data or create malicious output or results that may violate privacy regulations is becoming a real business. We’ve already seen some startups in this space and today, Tel Aviv-based Aim Security is joining the fray with a new GenAI security platform and […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Microsoft Microsoft is launching a suite of its Microsoft 365 apps on Apple’s Vision Pro headset later this week. Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Loop, and Microsoft Teams will all be available in the App Store for Apple Vision Pro on February 2nd — the same day Apple’s new headset is available in stores.Apple Vision Pro owners will also be able to access an AI-powered version of Copilot while using the headset, including the ability to create drafts, summarize documents, and generate PowerPoint presentations with your voice. Image: Microsoft Microsoft Word on...
Metronome, a startup that helps software companies offer usage-based billing, has raised $43 million in a Series B funding round led by NEA. Existing backers Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst also participated in the financing, which brings its total amount raised to over $78 million since its 2019 inception. Founded by Dropbox alums Kevin Liu […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meet Twin Labs, a Paris-based startup that wants to build an automation product for repetitive tasks, such as onboarding new employees to all your internal services, reordering items when you’re running out of stock, downloading financial reports across several SaaS products, reaching out to potential propects and more. “Twin’s starting point is a science-fiction idea. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Commerce platform Shopify is releasing new features for its Winter Editon rollout including an AI-powered media editor to enhance product images, improved semantic search, and a better way for merchants to showcase different variants of a product. Many companies including Meta, Google, and Amazon have allowed advertisers to generate backgrounds using generative AI since last […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The current licensing agreement between TikTok and UMG is set to expire on January 31st. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The music catalogs of Taylor Swift, Drake, Harry Styles, and many other artists represented by Universal Music Group (UMG) are expected to be pulled from TikTok following accusations that the video platform attempted to “bully” and “intimidate” the record label into accepting a subpar licensing deal. The current licensing agreement between TikTok and UMG is set to lapse today, January 31st, with Reuters reporting that UMG will remove its songs from the...
Owner recently tapped into AI technology for its new email marketer feature that produces an email in the restaurant owner's style and tone.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google CEO Sudar Pichai said that the company’s Google One cloud storage service is ” just about to cross” 100 million subscribers. Speaking during Alphabet’s Q4 2023 earning call, Pichai added that the company is looking to add more AI-powered features to the Google One service. The search giant first launched Google One in 2018. […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Tomo, the AI avatar | Luka, Inc. AI companion company Replika partnered with the team behind the AI dating simulator Blush to release Tomo, a wellness and meditation app with an AI-generated avatar guiding users. Its the kind of concept that seemed destined as soon as generative AI took off, but in the time I’ve spent with Tomo, I found myself wondering if I can ever open up to an AI like I can with a real therapist.Tomo, now generally available on the Apple iOS store, brings users to a virtual island retreat, greeted by an AI-generated avatar guide named… Tomo. Tomo offers programs to help...
You know you’ve screwed up when you’ve simultaneously angered the White House, the TIME Person of the Year, and pop culture’s most rabid fanbase. That’s what happened last week to X, the Elon Musk-owned platform formerly called Twitter, when AI-generated, pornographic deepfake images of Taylor Swift went viral. One of the most widespread posts of […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Spend management startup Ramp has acquired AI-powered procurement startup Venue, the companies announced today. Founded in 2022 by TK Kong, Young Kim, and Kevin Chan, Venue’s aim was to “simplify how businesses review, approve, and manage the cost of vendors in use across their company.” The startup raised $1.2 million in funding from investors such […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Poem/1 Kickstarter seeks $103K for fun ChatGPT-fed clock that may hallucinate the time.
Building a solid rulebook around AI policies in the workplace now can help prevent plenty of headaches in the future.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The New York Times will begin building a team to explore the use of generative AI in its newsroom. Zach Seward, who was recently hired by the publication to head AI initiatives, posted on Threads that the team will be “focused on prototyping uses of generative AI and other machine-learning techniques to help with reporting and how the Times is presented to readers.” Seward’s post said the Times plans to hire a machine learning engineer, a software engineer, a designer, and a couple of editors to round out the AI newsroom initiative. So far, the Times has posted job listings for an...
The ad, which appears to be made using generative AI, shows how the technology can be used not just to mislead, but to more subtly influence.
Masterclass rival Studio launched today its first AI-powered online school for musicians, songwriters and producers to learn from top artists in the industry, create new songs, get feedback from like-minded peers and access Studio’s AI coach that keeps them on track with personalized schedules and deadlines. The waitlist is officially open starting today. Studio offers […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Leal enables merchants to create a customer database to then offer cashback and rewards products to loyal shoppers on everyday purchases. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
GPUs’ ability to perform many computations in parallel make them well-suited to running today’s most capable AI. But GPUs are becoming tougher to procure, as companies of all sizes increase their investments in AI-powered products. Nvidia’s best-performing AI cards sold out last year, and the CEO of chipmaker TSMC suggested that general supply could be […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Yelp is joining the wealth of platforms expanding their use of AI, as it’s rolling out a new feature on iOS that rounds up and summarizes user reviews in a blurb that appears near the top of a company’s Yelp page.The new feature uses large language models (LLMs) to parse through user feedback to highlight “what the business is best known for based on first-hand reviews,” Yelp says. That may include a mention of a location’s atmosphere, popular dishes, amenities, and more. One example (as shown in the image at the top of this article) describes a restaurant as a “retro diner well...
A new Germany-based startup, Semron, is developing what it describes as “3D-scaled” chips to run AI models locally on smartphones, earbuds, VR headsets and other mobile devices Co-created by Kai-Uwe Demasius and Aron Kirschen, engineering graduates from the Dresden University of Technology, Semron’s chips use electrical fields to perform calculations instead of electrical currents — […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Meta’s latest update to its code generation AI model, Code Llama 70B, is “the largest and best-performing model” yet. Code Llama tools launched in August and are free for both research and commercial use. According to a post on Meta’s AI blog, Code Llama 70B can handle more queries than previous versions, which means developers can feed it more prompts while programming, and it can be more accurate.Code Llama 70B scored 53 percent in accuracy on the HumanEval benchmark, performing better than GPT-3.5’s 48.1 percent and closer to the 67 percent...
Rebellions, a South Korean fabless AI chip startup, said today it has closed $124 million (165 billion KRW) in a Series B round of funding to develop its third AI chip, called Rebel. The startup will also use the new capital, oversubscribed with an initial target of $90 million, to ramp up production of its […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI hopes to win the trust of parents — and policymakers — by partnering with organizations that work to minimize tech and media harms to kids, preteens and teens. Case in point, OpenAI today announced a partnership with Common Sense Media, the nonprofit organization that reviews and ranks the suitability of various media and tech […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Cap VC is launching a tool for VC firms, and is planning to expand its offering to startups raising money. The idea is to make better investment decisions, faster, using the power of AI. VC is a people-business above all, but as AIs are getting closer and closer to being people, too, there’s a slew […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Shortwave email client, built by former Google engineers, is launching new AI-powered features such as instant summaries that will show up atop an email, a writing assistant to echo your writing, and extending its AI assistant function to iOS and Android, and multi-select AI actions. The startup introduced AI-powered summaries last year, but you had […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Members of Congress say the DOJ is funding the use of AI tools that further discriminatory policing practices. They're demanding higher standards for federal grants.
The Galaxy S24 Ultra is packed with top-tier hardware, but its highly touted AI features are hit-or-miss — and the price is higher than ever. Continue reading…
A lawsuit filed by Carlin's manager will still move forward.
Arc, a browser initially built just for the Mac, has been expanding lately. The Browser Company announced a beta of its Windows version last month, and today they're bringing the Arc experience to the iPhone with Arc Search. As the name implies, the new app is focused on searching — when you open the app, you're met with a keyboard and search field, not your usual collection of tabs. And rather than just serving up simple search results from Google or your engine of choice, Arc scans the internet for various sources and creates a "page for me" that pulls together a bunch of info on your...
The Browser Company launched the Arc’s first iPhone companion app last year, allowing users to save links for consumption on the desktop application later. The firm has now released a new mobile app, called Arc Search, that aims to focus on the search experience. The marquee AI-powered feature of the app, “Browse for me,” returns […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Arc Search browses the web for you, and then builds you the webpage you wanted. That’s the idea, anyway. | Image: The Browser Company / David Pierce A few minutes ago, I opened the new Arc Search app and typed, “What happened in the Chiefs game.” That game, the AFC Championship, had just wrapped up. Normally, I’d Google it, click on a few links, and read about the game that way. But in Arc Search, I typed the query and tapped the “Browse for me” button instead. Arc Search, the new iOS app from The Browser Company, which has been working on a browser called Arc for the last few years...
Enterprises need to understand how much to budget into AI tools, how to weigh the benefits of AI vs. new recruits, and how to ensure their training is on point.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hey, folks, and welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering notable happenings in tech over the past few days. On the agenda for this edition is Disney’s innovative VR treadmill, OpenAI fixing its “lazy” AI and MIT’s high-capacity, fast-charging organic battery tech. We also cover Apple’s new stolen device protection feature, AI […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Some thoughts on AI aesthetics, the challenge of uninsurability, and how to pitch a biotech startup to non-experts.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Boomerang thinks so. It uses machine learning to match photos and descriptions of lost items to streamline the lost and found process.© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Still frame from a teaser reel of Lumiere clips | Image: Google Google’s new video generation AI model Lumiere uses a new diffusion model called Space-Time-U-Net, or STUNet, that figures out where things are in a video (space) and how they simultaneously move and change (time). Ars Technica reports this method lets Lumiere create the video in one process instead of putting smaller still frames together. Lumiere starts with creating a base frame from the prompt. Then, it uses the STUNet framework to begin approximating where objects within that frame will move to create more frames that flow...
Richard Marcus Contributor Richard Marcus is the head of information security at AuditBoard. Many have described 2023 as the year of AI, and the term made several “word of the year” lists. While it has positively impacted productivity and efficiency in the workplace, AI has also presented a number of emerging risks for businesses. For […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Laura Normand / The Verge Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has responded to a controversy over sexually explicit AI-made fake images of Taylor Swift. In an interview with NBC Nightly News that will air next Tuesday, Nadella calls the proliferation of nonconsensual simulated nudes “alarming and terrible,” telling interviewer Lester Holt that “I think it behooves us to move fast on this.”In a transcript distributed by NBC ahead of the January 30th show, Holt asks Nadella to react to the internet “exploding with fake, and I emphasize fake, sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift.” Nadella...
The Biden administration is using the Defense Production Act to require companies to inform the Commerce Department when they start training high-powered AI algorithms.
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in! I’ll be writing today’s Insider edition of Hot Pod while Ariel Shapiro is getting some R&R in sunny Puerto Rico with her family (meanwhile, it’s been an uncharacteristically rainy and gray week here in Los Angeles). For today’s Insider issue, I’ll take a look at why the estate of legendary comedian George Carlin has sued the Dudesy comedy podcast over an AI-generated comedy special. Finally, a lightning round of deals, announcements, and further reading. A celebration of...
Intentionally poisoning someone else is never morally right. But if someone in the office keeps swiping your lunch, wouldn’t you resort to petty vengeance? For artists, protecting work from being used to train AI models without consent is an uphill battle. Opt-out requests and do-not-scrape codes rely on AI companies to engage in good faith, […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Opera revealed today that it will launch a new AI-powered browser built on its own engine for iOS in Europe. The Norway-based company announced the change following the news that Apple is going to allow alternative browser engines to run on iOS as a result of the requirements of the European Digital Markets Act (DMA). […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Deepfake porn is prolific. The explicit, AI-generated images of Taylor Swift that circulated on X this week are taking the issue to new heights.
If there’s one thing we can all agree upon, it’s that the 21st century’s captains of industry are trying to shoehorn AI into every corner of our world. But for all of the ways in which AI will be shoved into our faces and not prove very successful, it might actually have at least one useful purpose. For instance, by dramatically speeding up the often decades-long process of designing, finding and testing new drugs.Risk mitigation isn’t a sexy notion but it’s worth understanding how common it is for a new drug project to fail. To set the scene, consider that each drug project takes...
Samsung’s S24 Ultra as announced in the US earlier this month. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Samsung’s Galaxy S24 lineup has launched in China, and the company is tapping Chinese tech giant Baidu to power its Galaxy AI features, CNBC reports. There’s no mention of Google, whose Gemini foundational models are powering Samsung’s Galaxy AI features in Western markets. Instead, the Chinese launch focused on Baidu’s Ernie, the chatbot that launched last August.The list of AI translation, summarization, and text formatting features on the Chinese version of the Galaxy S24 will be...
Two fake-audio experts say that the deepfake robocall of President Biden received by some voters last week was likely created with technology from Silicon Valley’s favorite voice cloning startup.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) opened an inquiry into the investments of Big Tech companies that provide cloud services to smaller AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.The FTC sent letters to Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI, requiring the companies to explain the impact these investments have on the competitive landscape of generative AI. The commission wants to “scrutinize corporate partnerships and investments with AI providers to build a better internal understanding of these relationships and their impact on the competitive landscape.” Google and Amazon invested...
The FTC is aiming to unravel the complex and secretive corporate relationships in the top AI companies out there in a new inquiry. Orders have been sent to Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI that will, as Chair Lina Khan said, “shed light on whether investments and partnerships pursued by dominant companies risk distorting innovation […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Alongside the numerous changes Apple is making to its platforms to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), the company is also updating its rules around streaming game services and other apps that provide access to mini-apps or games. The changes could impact companies like Netflix, which has expanded into mobile and cloud gaming […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google Cloud’s new partnership with AI model repository Hugging Face is letting developers build, train, and deploy AI models without needing to pay for a Google Cloud subscription. Now, outside developers using Hugging Face’s platform will have “cost-effective” access to Google’s tensor processing units (TPU) and GPU supercomputers, which will include thousands of Nvidia’s in-demand and export-restricted H100s.Hugging Face is one of the more popular AI model repositories, storing open-sourced foundation models like Meta’s Llama 2 and...
When I first reviewed the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, I wrote that some of the most intriguing features were the ones I couldn’t try out yet. Of these, the most interesting is what Meta calls “multimodal AI,” the ability for the glasses to respond to queries based on what you’re looking at. For example, you can look at text and ask for a translation, or ask it to identify a plant or landmark. The other major update I was waiting for was the addition of real-time information to the Meta AI assistant. Last fall, the assistant had a “knowledge cutoff” of December 2022, which...
PayPal announced today that it will begin piloting a few new upcoming updates to its service, some of which will leverage AI-driven personalization. The company is introducing a new “CashPass” cash back offering, “Smart Receipts” with personalized recommendations, enhanced checkout and guest experiences, Venmo enhancements for small businesses and a new offers platform for merchants. […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Many of the posts circulating the offending images are still live. | Illustration: The Verge Sexually explicit AI-generated images of Taylor Swift have been circulating on X (formerly Twitter) over the last day in the latest example of the proliferation of AI-generated fake pornography and the challenge of stopping it from spreading.One of the most prominent examples on X attracted more than 45 million views, 24,000 reposts, and hundreds of thousands of likes and bookmarks before the verified user who shared the images had their account suspended for violating platform policy. The post was live...
DXwand, a Cairo- and Dubai-based startup that leverages conversational AI to help businesses in the Middle East automate customer service and employee assistance, has raised $4 million in a Series A round. UAE-based Shorooq Partners and Cairo-headquartered firm Algebra Ventures led the investment, with existing investor Dubai Future District Fund also participating. The Series A […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Alinea Invest, a fintech app offering AI-powered wealth management aimed at Gen Z women, has $3.4 million in seed funding ahead of the launch of a virtual AI assistant that will help users with their investing needs. The fundraising comes on the heels of 225,000 downloads of Alinea’s app, leading to a revenue run-rate of […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A view of Meta’s data center in Clonee Co Meath, Ireland. Picture date: Tuesday June 13, 2023. | Photo by Niall Carson/PA Images via Getty Images Data centers could gobble up twice as much electricity by 2026 thanks in large part to cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).We rely on data centers to store all our emails, photos, cat videos, and everything else floating around in the cloud. More and more, data centers are cropping up to mine Bitcoin and train AI. That’s already triggered backlash over the...
The recently-released GE Profile Smart Indoor Smoker is $300 off right now via Amazon, bringing the price down to $700. That’s a discount of 30 percent for the indoor smoker that managed to snag $800,000 in crowdfunding before being released to the masses at CES 2024.As a matter of fact, the kitchen gadget ruled the roost at this year’s CES. It made our list of the best devices unveiled at the event and was a regular topic of conversation. A kitchen gadget has to be pretty special to garner buzz when competing with the latest laptops, smart TVs and bunny-shaped anthropomorphic AI assistants...
As AI increasingly moves from the cloud to on-device, how, exactly, is one supposed to know whether such and such new laptop will run a GenAI-powered app faster than rival off-the-shelf laptops — or desktops, for that matter? Knowing could mean the difference between waiting a few seconds for an image to generate versus a […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A year to the day after it was proposed, the National AI Research Resource is coming online — at least in pilot form — as a coalition of U.S. agencies and private partners start to apply billions in federal funding towards public-access tools for aspiring AI scientists and engineers. NAIRR is the Biden administration’s answer […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Businesses are moving faster than ever to use generative AI and bring it to both their employees and users. Moving fast and security don’t always go hand-in-hand, though, so it’s only now that many businesses are waking up to the potential security concerns related to using generative AI. Israel-based Prompt Security wants to help organizations […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Data from various surveys show that there's an exodus in academia where it concerns top AI talent — and where they end up.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Mark Hay and Ethan Ding want to make every corporate decision a data-driven one. Ambitious? For certain. But the two engineers, who met a few years ago during the pandemic, are nothing if not optimistic. Hay and Ding are the co-founders of TextQL, a platform that connects a company’s existing data stack to large language […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google announced a bunch of new features for classroom management, accessibility, and AI-powered features for creating questions and lesson plans as part of the Bett ed-tech event in the UK. AI-powered features Google already allows teachers to add questions to a YouTube video as part of its Classroom assignment. The company said that soon, AI […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
European Union lawmakers scrambling for the bloc to be a contender in the generative AI race are presenting a package of support measures aimed at charging up homegrown AI startups and scale ups. Artificial intelligence technologies — and especially generative AI models which are trained on very large data-sets and have capabilities such as being […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
E-commerce site Etsy today launched “Gift Mode,” a new AI-powered feature to match you with tailored gift ideas based on specific preferences. Gift Mode is essentially an online quiz that asks about who you’re shopping for (sibling, parent, child), the occasion (birthday, anniversary, get well), and the recipient’s interests. At launch, the feature has 15 […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A fledgling Dutch startup wants to help companies extra data from large volumes of complex documents where accuracy and security is paramount — and it has just secured the backing of Google’s Gradient Ventures to do so. Send AI, as the startup is called, is taking on established incumbents in the document processing space such […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As conversational AI begins to take over the world, chatbots are being given a new lease of life. However, there are clear hazards on the road ahead. Parcel delivery giant DPD recently had to disable part of its online support chatbot after it swore at a customer. A user managed to convince the chatbot to be […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Aniai, a startup that has built a burger-grilling robot, Alpha Grill, said today it has raised $12 million. The round brings its total raise up to $15 million. The money will go toward launching its first manufacturing facility, Factory One, in South Korea. The firm will also be deploying a cloud-based AI software platform for […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Forta Health aims to democratize access to healthcare by utilizing AI tools, including large language models, to empower caregivers and enhance clinical treatments.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Just tacking AI onto a product isn’t enough, and investors are hoping that the technology will lead to more innovation in the space.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Artisse, one of the many AI photo creation apps that let users generate photos of themselves using uploaded selfies combined with prompts, has raised $6.7 million in seed funding, following AI selfies’ viral moment. Similar to others on the market, Artisse users upload photos of themselves to train its AI on their images, then use […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Despite all the enthusiasm, there's a niggling detail that deserves our attention: AI startups often have worse economics than most software startups.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It’s a wonder what GenAI, particularly text-to-image AI models like Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, can do. From photorealism to cubism, image-generating models can translate practically any description, short or detailed, into art that might well have emerged from an artist’s easel. The trouble is, many of these models — if not most — were […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google’s Chrome web browser is getting an infusion of AI technology in the latest release. The company announced today it’s soon adding a trio of new AI-powered features to Chrome for Mac and Windows, including a way to smartly organize your tabs, customize your theme, and get help when writing things on the web — […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Vroom is shutting down its online used car marketplace and shifting all of its resources and capital into two business units focused on auto financing and AI-powered analytics. About 800 employees, or 90% of its workforce, will lose their jobs as a result, according to a regulatory filing. The company said it is suspending all used […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Balancing protective measures, like data protection protocols, with progressive strategies, such as AI-driven product rollouts, is essential.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Blueshift, a San Francisco-based startup that taps AI to help brands automate and personalize engagement across different marketing channels, has secured $40 million in debt financing from Runway Growth Capital. Co-founder and CEO Vijay Chittoor said that the loan will be used to refinance Blueshift’s existing debt as well as expand sales and marketing and […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Qdrant, the company behind the eponymous open source vector database, has raised $28 million in a Series A round of funding led by Spark Capital. Founded in 2021, Berlin-based Qdrant is seeking to capitalize on the burgeoning AI revolution, targeting developers with an open source vector search engine and database — an integral part of […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Q4 2023 earnings cycle will kick off this week with names like Intel and Visa reporting. The largest tech companies will start to report next week.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Will AI automate human jobs, and — if so — which jobs and when? That’s the trio of questions a new research study from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), out this morning, tries to answer. There’s been many attempts to extrapolate out and project how the AI technologies of today, like large […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
There’s a lot of money in voice cloning. Case in point: ElevenLabs, a startup developing AI-powered tools to create and edit synthetic voices, today announced that it closed an $80 million Series B round co-led by prominent investors including Andreessen Horowitz, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and entrepreneur Daniel Gross. The round, which also had […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We all make mistakes. But sometimes we forget that technology does, too — especially when it comes to AI, which is still in its early days in many respects.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Welcome back to your Saturday morning tech injectable. This week's TMA focuses on two big tech launches. First of all, Samsung started 2024 early with its flagship smartphone series, announcing three S24 models set to go on sale at the end of the month. This time around, sure, they look like last year's phones again, but that's offset with a barrage of AI tricks and features that you can't find on any other smartphone. And isn't that the point of getting a new phone?We've also got more in-depth impressions of Apple's first foray into VR/AR/XR as the Vision Pro ($3,...
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week in AI, OpenAI signed up its first higher […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
When Selkie, the fashion brand viral on Instagram and TikTok for its frothy, extravagant dresses, announces new collections, reception is generally positive. Known for its size inclusivity — its sizing ranges from XXS to 6X — and for being owned and founded by an independent artist who’s outspoken about fair pay and sustainability in fashion, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Galaxy AI: free, for now. Galaxy AI has arrived, as Samsung has declared in the loudest way possible, but the company left one small detail out of its presentation earlier this week: it might come at a cost. The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, S24 Plus, and S24 all include a smorgasbord of new AI features — everything from translating phone conversations to removing objects from photos. They’ll even be coming to many older phones, too. But as spotted by Android Central, the fine print on Samsung’s website reveals that they might not be free forever. And that might be a tough sell.The footnote...
TikTok is testing a new “AI Song” feature that uses AI to create songs based on prompts that users enter, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. AI Song is an experimental feature and is currently only available to a select number of users. The feature is designed to be used for fun, not for trying to […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
One of the standout gadgets of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the rabbit r1, will use Perplexity AI’s tech to answer user queries, both companies said in an announcement. Perplexity noted that the first 100,000 r1 buyers will get one year of Perplexity Pro for free. We're thrilled to announce our partnership with Rabbit: […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The tech world isn’t taking any breaks after CES! This week, Cherlynn and Devindra are joined by Senior Writer Sam Rutherford to discuss Samsung’s latest Galaxy Unpacked event, where it debuted the Galaxy S24 smartphone line. They don’t look very different from last year, but they’re packing a load of AI smarts. Also, Cherlynn finally got to try out the Apple Vision Pro and tells us all about her spatial computing journey. While it was a mostly eye-opening experience, the headset also hurt Cherlynn’s head and forced her to confront one of nature’s most terrifying creatures: A...
The Rabbit R1 launch at CES left many questions unanswered, but earlier today, the brand finally shed light on which LLM (large language model) will be powering the device's interaction with us mere mortals. The AI provider in question is none other than Perplexity, a San Francisco-based startup with ambitions to overtake Google in the AI space, which is no wonder that it has already received investments from the likes of NVIDIA and Jeff Bezos.Perplexity will be providing up-to-date search results via Rabbit's $199 orange brick — without the need of any subscription. That said, the...
Mark Zuckerberg. Aside from Meta’s new focus on building artificial general intelligence, the biggest news inside the company this week is CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to move its AI research team, FAIR, to sit in its product organization. Going forward, Joelle Pineau, the VP who leads FAIR, and Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist, will report to Meta’s chief product officer, Chris Cox. They previously reported to CTO Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, who leads the Reality Labs division. “With this change, we elevate the importance of AI research as an essential ingredient to the long-term...
Nvidia’s cyberpunk ramen shop is back. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge What if you could just... speak... to video game characters? Ask your own questions, with your own voice, instead of picking from preset phrases? Last May, Nvidia and its partner Convai showed off a fairly unconvincing canned demo of such a system — but this January, I got to try a fully interactive version for myself at CES 2024. I walked away convinced we’ll inevitably see something like this in future games.Let me be clear: the characters I spoke to were effectively generative AI chatbots. They didn’t feel...
AI-generated content can be found everywhere online, including your Google News feed. A report from 404 Media revealed that Google is boosting websites filled with AI-generated articles ripped from other outlets. While this isn’t a total surprise, the revelation is disappointing. Google News used to be a place you’d find the latest and most accurate information on most topics. But just because something makes it to Google News doesn’t necessarily mean the information is reliable.404 Media cited several examples of AI-written articles getting past Google. One example involved a “news...
But 84% of devs are at least somewhat concerned about ethical use of those tools.
Game developers are overwhelmingly concerned about the ethics of using AI. The organizers of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) have released their annual State of the Game Industry survey, in which 84 percent of the 3,000-plus respondents said they were somewhat or very concerned about the ethics of using generative AI.The survey’s results elaborated on why developers are concerned, citing reasons that include the potential for AI to replace workers and exacerbate layoffs or expose developers to possible copyright infringement complaints. Developers are also worried that AI programs could...
Microsoft today made Reading Coach, its AI-powered tool that provides learners with personalized reading practice, available at no cost to anyone with a Microsoft account. As of this morning, Reading Coach is accessible on the web in preview — a Windows app is forthcoming. And soon (in late spring), Reading Coach will integrate with learning […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
More than one-third of video game developers were impacted by layoffs in 2023, according to a new survey. With AI automation looming, the industry is facing an outflow of talent.
Last week, Artifact, a buzzy news app from Instagram’s co-founders, announced it was shutting down after failing to gain critical mass. The news came as a surprise as the app was generally well-received by its core audience, smartly leveraged AI to power recommendations, summarize news, and rewrite clickbait, and featured a clean and modern design […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
At a time where many startups are struggling to raise funding, or are raising – but at lower valuations, it’s notable when companies raise at flat or higher valuations. Especially when their last raise took place in 2021 – a time when capital was much easier to come by and valuations were climbing at crazy […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Founded in 2007 to help IP and R&D professionals do their jobs more efficiently, Singapore-based PatSnap‘s first product was a global patent search database. Now it’s building out its suite of AI products with the launch of its AI assistant CoPilot. CoPilot lets users search patent and non-patent literature more quickly, which the company says […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Controversy continues to surround the world of AI-generated imagery, and even as AI-generated images used in elections became a source of concern this week at the World Economic Forum, startups continue to plow the new furrow of AI tools for creators. The latest is Recraft, an AI graphic design generator aimed at professionals, which has […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Today as part of its latest Galaxy Unpacked event, Samsung announced a whole host of AI-powered features for the S24 family. However, buried among the news was info that Samsung will also be porting at least some of those tools over to last year's premium phones and tablets.After asking about specifically which devices were covered, in an email to Engadget, Samsung confirmed that the company is "looking forward to bringing the Galaxy AI experience to the Galaxy S23 series, including the S23FE, ZFold5/ZFlip5 and Tab S9 later this first half."Samsung's new AI tools include things like...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon is testing a new AI feature on its app that lets customers ask specific questions about products. The AI tool can help figure out exactly how big a new shelf is, determine how long a battery will last, or even... write you a Christmas carol about snow boots. Yep, the new feature is meant for more practical applications, but it seems the tool will happily respond to more colorful queries, too, answering the same questions people occasionally ask AI chatbots when they’re bored.Using the questions box on the product page (the box right before...
Image: Samsung On top of the latest generation of its flagship phones, Samsung revealed a bevy of new AI features at its Unpacked event in San Jose. Continue reading…
At Samsung’s launch event today, where the company introduced its AI-powered Galaxy S24 line of smartphones, the company introduced how AI could improve the calling experience with a new Live Translation feature. The feature, one of several translation features coming to the new smartphones, allows customers to make or receive a call in a language […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As Samsung unveiled its new Galaxy S24 line today, Google announced a series of new AI features that are launching for Android Auto, which is the secondary interface that brings the look and functions of a smartphone, like navigation and messaging, to your vehicle’s infotainment screen. Google says that with the help of AI, Android […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
No awards for correctly guessing that today’s big Unpacked news is all about Samsung Galaxy S24 series. As anticipated, the Korean hardware giant just unveiled its latest flagship line, including the Galaxy S24, Galaxy S24+ and Galaxy S24 Ultra. The devices start at $800, $1,000 and $1,300, respectively. Also as anticipated, Samsung is leaning heavily […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With the launch of the Galaxy S24 family, Samsung is boldly declaring an end to the smartphone camera wars as it moves into the AI era. And the $1,300 S24 Ultra is its torchbearer for this new age of mobile design.While it may not look like a ton has changed on the S24 Ultra, there’s one major design update along with a handful of smaller tweaks. The move to a titanium frame (available in four colors: titanium yellow, violet, gray and black) apes what Apple did for the iPhone 15 Pro last fall. The big difference is that, because Samsung’s previous flagship featured an aluminum chassis...
Samsung unveiled its Galaxy S24 devices at its first Unpacked of the year. As expected, the three smartphones have a heavy focus on artificial intelligence-powered features, from the likes of live translations to image editing.Galaxy AI, as Samsung is calling the devices’ overarching AI system, is behind a number of communication-focused functions. For one thing, Galaxy S24 devices will natively support live, two-way translations on phone calls without the need for a third-party app, Samsung says. Since processing for most AI features is handled on-device with the help of the Snapdragon 8 Gen...
In addition to a new gesture-powered search feature for Android devices, Google today also introduced an AI-powered addition to its visual search capabilities in Google Lens. Starting today, users will be able to point their camera or upload a photo or screenshot to Lens, then ask a question about what they’re seeing to get answers […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Gemini, Google’s cutting-edge generative AI model family, is coming to Samsung’s new flagship smartphone — the Galaxy S24. Google and Samsung made the announcement to coincide with the Galaxy S24’s unveiling this afternoon. On Galaxy S24 phones, Gemini — specifically Gemini Pro, a mid-range model designed for a range of tasks — will power Samsung’s […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon is taking $290 off of the Yeedi Vac 2 Pro robot vacuum. | Image: Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge From an AI-powered robot vacuum that can suck up milk to a robovac with an actual arm, we saw some pretty cool (and downright weird) gadgets launch during CES last week. But unless you have nearly two grand just lying around to spend, those fancy features don’t come cheap. Luckily, there are significantly more affordable options on the market like the Yeedi Vac 2 Pro, which is down to just $159.99 ($290 off) at Amazon when you clip the on-page coupon.If all you need is a decent robot...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge As much of the potential legislation around AI requires reviews of models, groups have begun offering certification programs to AI companies to show how their work doesn’t violate copyright.Bloomberg reported Fairly Trained — founded by former Stability AI vice president for audio Ed Newton-Rex — adds a label to companies that prove they asked for permission to use copyrighted training data. Newton-Rex started Fairly Trained after he quit Stability AI in November, citing generative AI was “exploiting creators.” Its first accreditation, which it...
DeepMind, the Google AI R&D lab, believes that the key to more capable AI systems might lie in uncovering new ways to solve challenging geometry problems. To that end, DeepMind today unveiled AlphaGeometry — a system that the lab claims can solve as many geometry problems as the average International Mathematical Olympiad gold medalist. AlphaGeometry, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
This week, we're digging into fundraises from Vertice, Electra, and Build a Rocket Boy, and what Thomvest plans to do with its new $250M fund.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon is officially rolling out the ability to create AI-generated images on Fire TV devices. Starting today, the feature is available in the U.S. for users with a second-generation Fire TV Stick 4K Max and Fire TV Omni QLED Series. Fire TV’s new feature is powered by Amazon’s Titan Image Generator, which the company announced […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
For many, "new year, new me" includes finding a new job. Scouring sites like LinkedIn and Indeed for opportunities can feel like a full-time role in and of itself. This process could potentially improve moving forward, with LinkedIn announcing its latest feature: Job Collections. Basically, instead of searching for a specific industry or role, LinkedIn is using generative AI and large language models to analyze each job posting and categorize it into groups such as IT, pro sports, remote and top startups. Along with saving time, LinkedIn indicates that this feature can benefit people who...
When you say the phrase “expense management” in a business context, people might think of software like Concur that tracks what you spend on travel, entertainment and other work-related activities; or the software used by finance teams to help track outgoings across the wider operation. You might even think that it’s a problem that has […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The era of AI on our phones is upon us, and it’s Samsung’s turn to show us a vision for the future. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Samsung is announcing new phones this week, and they’re going to be the most AI phones that ever AI’ed. That’s not a guess, although it would be an easy one coming off the heels of “Put a ChatGPT on it” CES 2024. No, Samsung is telling us in the loudest ways possible — including putting it on the Sphere, which is the 2024 equivalent of shouting it from the rooftops. But what exactly does AI on a phone look like? So far, it has amounted to...
With the tech world fighting to win the AI race while smartphone sales slow and regulations away at its legacy revenue streams, Apple has its work cut out.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Square Enix In Foamstars, Square Enix’s forthcoming Splatoon-esque multiplayer game, some of the art you’ll see will be AI-generated.In an interview with VGC, Kosuke Okatani, producer on Foamstars, said that the development team used AI generation tool Midjourney to create in-game art for album covers for the game’s soundtracks but explained that the majority of the game was still made by humans. “All of the core elements in Foamstars — the core gameplay, and the things that make the game enjoyable — those are all made by hand,” Okatani told VGC. “However, we did want to...
OpenAI says it wants to implement ideas from the public about how to ensure its future AI models “align to the values of humanity.” To that end, the AI startup is forming a new Collective Alignment team of researchers and engineers to create a system for collecting and “encoding” public input on its models’ behaviors into […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Thomvest Ventures deploys capital in the areas of financial and real estate technology, cybersecurity, cloud and AI/data infrastructure.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
London-based notetaking startup Goodnotes said today it is acquiring South Korean startup Dropthebit, which operates a meeting and video summary tool called Traw. With the acquisition, Goodnotes is looking to move beyond classrooms and explore making productivity tools for professionals. As part of the deal, all three co-founders of Dropthebit will move to Goodnotes. Plus, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Spot’s flagship product, VisionX, taps into deep learning and computer vision technologies to analyze consumer and theft behaviors.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
You can now publish a bespoke version of ChatGPT that you’ve trained yourself. The marketplace for these custom GPTs is open to the public and works in a way that's similar to Apple’s App Store.
Another CES has come and gone and transportation was still one of the central actors on one of the world’s largest tech stages. It wasn’t just electric cars either that captured our attention at CES 2024. Companies and startups focused on automated driving, EV charging, software (and more specifically AI), sensors, aviation, boats, drones, micromobility […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Most humans learn the skill of deceiving other humans. So can AI models learn the same? Yes, the answer seems — and terrifyingly, they’re exceptionally good at it. A recent study co-authored by researchers at Anthropic, the well-funded AI startup, investigated whether models can be trained to deceive, like injecting exploits into otherwise secure computer […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Artifact news app. | Image: Artifact Artifact, the news app created by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, is shutting down just a year after launch. The app used an AI-driven approach to suggest news that users might like to read, but it seems it didn’t catch on with enough people for the Artifact team to continue making the app.“We have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way,” CEO Kevin Systrom says in a blog post. The app is beginning to wind...
The telltale error messages are a sign of AI-generated pablum all over the Internet.
One of the year’s biggest tech events has kicked off in Las Vegas, and we’re here to bring all the reveals before the show floor opens.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
After a year of people throwing money at AI companies, investors are now looking for startups that are more solid and viable.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The US government has reportedly approved AI-based memory loss prediction software for the first time. Darmiyan, a San Francisco-based brain imaging analytics company, says the FDA has granted De Novo approval for its product BrainSee. The software platform assigns “an objective score that predicts the likelihood of progression from aMCI to Alzheimer’s dementia within 5 years,” according to the medical company. Fierce Biotech first reported the announcement.Darmiyan says BrainSee can predict memory loss progression using clinical brain MRIs and cognitive tests, which are already standard...
WIRED photographer Alex Welsh captures the madness, glory, and techno-idealism of the consumer gadget extravaganza.
in this world of exploding innovation in the AI industry, a great name paired with a great product will make your technology rise above.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The latest ZenBook 14 OLED from ASUS has most of the hardware we'd want in a modern ultraportable: Intel's new Core Ultra chips, a gorgeous OLED screen and a decent number of ports. But after testing ASUS's laptops for years, and seeing how much progress it's made with the Zephyrus G gaming line, it's surprising that the company's premium Zenbook hasn't evolved much lately.While it's a solid step into the "AI PC" era, thanks to its NPU for accelerating AI tasks, the new ZenBook 14 is also a reminder that ASUS is lagging behind Apple and Microsoft when it comes to premium design. It doesn't feel...
Image: Microsoft Microsoft has started testing a change to Windows 11 that will see its AI-powered Copilot feature automatically open when Windows starts on “widescreen devices.” The change is being tested as part of Microsoft’s latest Dev Channel preview of Windows 11, allowing Windows testers to provide feedback ahead of a broader rollout.“We are trying out opening Copilot automatically when Windows starts on widescreen devices with some Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel,” says Microsoft in a blog post. The company doesn’t make it clear what exactly a “widescreen” device is...
Hello and happy new year! Once again, team Engadget has set up shop in Las Vegas for CES, living out of suitcases so that we can scour the massive show floor and occasionally injure ourselves in the process. For CES 2024, we expected to see AI everywhere, and we were not disappointed. We saw more than a few laptops with AI-powered chips inside, not to mention multiple references to Microsoft's Copilot assistant. Volkswagen built ChatGPT into its in-car system, while BMW teamed up with Amazon to improve its own in-car assistant. Qualcomm announced an AI Snapdragon chip. Walmart came to CES...
“AI” was everywhere this year at CES; you couldn’t swing a badge without hitting some company claiming generative AI was going to revolutionize your sleep, teeth, or business. But a few applications of machine learning stood out as genuinely helpful or surprising — here are a few examples of AI that might actually do some […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Video calls, while essential, often lack the naturalness of in-person conversations, causing fatigue and reduced engagement. There are a ton of tools out there that help you keep eye contact when talking with people online – some (Plexicam, CenterCam) place the camera in front of your screen. Others use AI to edit the video stream to […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Wi-Fi 7 and an RGB touchpad? I’m in. | Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge The biggest names in laptops showed up to CES this week with new designs, new chips, and usually some way to sneak in the term “AI.” But most of them also quietly arrived with one of the most important upgrades of all for competitive gamers on the go: better Wi-Fi, with support for Wi-Fi 7. It’s about time, because router companies shoved Wi-Fi 7 routers out the door throughout 2023, and we’ve been waiting on machines that can put the standard’s ludicrous speed promises to the test.Wi-Fi 7 came to...
Snapchat is introducing new parental controls that will allow parents to restrict their teens from interacting with the app’s AI chatbot. The changes will also allow parents to view their teens’ privacy settings, and get easier access to Family Center, which is the app’s dedicated place for parental controls. Parents can now restrict My AI, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Execs are skeptical about generative AI for a range of reasons, as revealed by a recent survey published by Boston Consulting Group.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
One of the year’s biggest tech events has kicked off in Las Vegas, and we’re here to bring all the reveals before the show floor opens.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge Microsoft has surpassed Apple’s market cap to become the world’s most valuable public company again. The software giant’s stock has been rallying in recent months thanks to its AI announcements. Meanwhile, there are concerns about Apple’s iPhone sales, leading to the two tech giants swapping top places for market value during trading on the Nasdaq today.Apple stock has been trending down over the past month on the back of iPhone sale concerns in China and a potential weakness of iPhone 15 sales. Rating firms have downgraded Apple stock in recent days, wiping...
Having a voice is important – figuratively and literally – and not being able to speak is a major impediment to communication. Whispp is working to change the game for individuals with speech disorders and voice disabilities, bringing voice boxes into the current millennium with its groundbreaking AI-powered assistive speech and phone-calling app. At CES 2024, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google wants to inject a little generative AI into retail. Or to try, at least. To coincide with the National Retailer Association’s annual conference in NYC, Google Cloud today unveiled new gen AI products designed to help retailers personalize their online shopping experiences and streamline their back-office operations. As to whether they perform as advertised, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Isaac Brekken/Variety/Penske Media via Getty Images During CES 2024, SAG-AFTRA announced an agreement with AI voice technology company Replica Studios. The agreement would permit SAG-AFTRA members, specifically voice performers, to work with Replica to create digital replications of their voices. Those voices can then be licensed out for use in video games and other interactive media projects with SAG-AFTRA authored protections.In the announcement, SAG-AFTRA characterized the deal as a “way for professional voice over artists to safely explore new employment opportunities for their...
CES 2024 is in full swing in Las Vegas. We’re on the ground giving you the most talked about news and announcements from the event, but much of the fun is to be found in the weirder margins of the show floor. In an era of CES where companies are all-in on the AI hype […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Brave announced today that it’s adding its newly-built CodeLLM to its search engine to deliver results for programming queries. The new AI-powered CodeLLM provides code snippets with step-by-step explanations and citations. CodeLLM is free and now integrated into Brave Search so users don’t have to switch apps to access it. CodeLLM is available to all […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
I first ran into Nowatch at CES last year, and its founders have been hard at work to evolve the product over the past year, packing in a bunch of AI-powered insights into its wearable jewelry that’s shaped like a watch, but doesn’t interrupt you or, well, do anything other than track you and look […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
People who subscribe to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus service will be able to browse the new store for tailored chatbots that perform different tasks.
It's not impossible that the tagline may flip to "Quora, brought to you by Poe" from "Poe, brought to you by Quora."© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our newly revamped Wednesday episode, and we’re going to be digging deep into critical startup and venture capital news. If you are a long-time Equity […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Building a profitable AI business poses unique challenges beyond those faced when launching a typical tech startup.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Taylor Swift is not giving out free Le Creuset products in social media advertisements — though deepfakes of her voice would like you to believe otherwise. That's right, a series of posts have recently surfaced on TikTok and in Meta's Ad Library claiming to show Swift offering free Le Creuset cookware sets, the New York Times reports.The ads featured clips where Swift was near Le Creuset products and used a synthetic version of her voice. The scammers used AI to have the cloned voice address her fans, "Swifties," and produce other little remarks. These posts led interested parties to fake...
On Tuesday, Elon Musk’s X wrote about a grand vision for the company in 2024, which includes launching peer-to-peer payments and more AI-powered tools. Amid all this, the company silently removed a feature for paid subscribers. They’re no longer able to set an NFT as a profile picture. The feature was originally launched under Twitter’s […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Wearable startup Humane AI laid off four percent of its employees before it has started shipping its Ai Pin, The Verge has reported. Leadership reportedly told employees that budgets would be lowered in 2024, according to sources familiar with the matter. The cuts were implemented earlier this week and affect around 10 people. On LinkedIn, CEO and co-founder Bethany Bongiorno called the cuts "part of a wider refresh of our organizational structure as our company evolves with purpose for this next phase of growth." She added that CTO Patrick Gates will be transitioning to an advisor role...
The Humane AI pin retails for $699 and requires a $24 per month subscription. | Image: Humane Humane laid off 4 percent of employees this week in a move that was described as a cost cutting measure to those who were impacted, according to sources familiar with the matter. Employees were recently told by leadership that budgets would be lowered this year, said one of the people, who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission.The cuts, which numbered 10 people, come ahead of the the five-year-old startup shipping its first device: a $699, screenless, AI-powered pin that is...
Yes, you probably already have a virtual assistant in your pocket on your phone. Heck, if you're reading Engadget, I'm willing to bet you've got at least one smart speaker floating around your home as well that you can ask to complete basic tasks. But a new start up called Rabbit seems to think these are less than ideal implementations of AI (if you can really call Siri and Alexa that). It envisions a world where you trade apps for conversation and, rather than a distracting device shoving icons in your face, you interact with what amounts to a walkie-talkie for an AI.The R1 is the first device...
Quora is back at it, raising funding for the first time in nearly seven years. The questions and answers website nabbed $75 million from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which will be used to power the growth of Poe, Quora’s AI chat platform. What makes Quora’s AI chatbots different from the rest of the pack? Quora is […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge Microsoft said 2024 was going to be “the year of the AI PC,” and it looks like that’s ringing true already. Microsoft appears to be readying a new generative AI feature for its Notepad application that’s built into Windows. While the software giant hasn’t officially announced it, eagle-eyed Windows watchers have discovered code in Microsoft’s latest test builds of Windows 11 that indicate a new “Cowriter” feature could be on the way soon.It looks like it has the same credits system that Microsoft uses in its Cocreator feature in Paint to let...
Apps that let users take, manipulate and share images have been some of the biggest hits in the world of mobile over the years. Now, the influx of AI is cracking open the market for a new wave of startups to step into the ring. PhotoRoom — a startup out of Paris, France — has […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In a keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Walmart president and CEO Doug McMillon is offering a glimpse as to how the retail giant was putting new technologies, including augmented reality (AR), drones, generative AI, and other artificial intelligence tech to work in order improve the shopping experience for customers. At […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Qualcomm is ringing in the new year at CES 2024 in Las Vegas with some updates in its chip lineup that power virtual and mixed-reality headsets. The keynote, which will detail more about what’s new for its anticipated AI-powered chip, will happen on January 10 at 5pm ET. It can be streamed on Qualcomm’s website or directly on the CES keynote page.What to expectThere might be some information divulged about Meta and Qualcomm’s chip collaboration and how it could improve functionality on new gen VR headsets. Qualcomm has said that the technology has been engineered into a single chip...
If AI can fix grocery shopping, count me in. | Photo: Walmart Imagine never running out of milk again. You pour the last bit into your cereal — which is, incidentally, also empty now — and then head to work. By the time you get home the empties have been replaced as if by magic.Walmart thinks it can make this happen, with the help of AI. The company announced a new feature of its InHome replenishment service that aims to automatically order the right stuff at the right time, and hand it off to a delivery person who can drop things off in a fridge in your house. Shoppers with the $20 monthly...
Tack One, a Singapore-based startup, wants to help make sure your kids, elderly parents and pets are safe with AI-powered location technology. Today, the company unveiled its new generation of GPS device, Tack GPS Plus, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2024. The startup launched its GPS tracker in 2021 to address the pain point of […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sandbox AQ, the AI and quantum firm spun out of Google parent company Alphabet in 2022, has acquired Good Chemistry, a Vancouver-based quantum and computational chemistry startup, for an undisclosed sum. Good Chemistry, founded by Arman Zaribafiyan in 2021 as a spin-off of quantum computing company 1QBit and backed by investors including Green Sands Equity […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In a sea of AI-enabled gadgets at CES, the rabbit r1 (all lowercase, they insist) stands out not just for its high-vis paint job and unique form factor, but because of its dedication to the bit. The company is hoping you’ll carry a second device around to save yourself the trouble of opening your phone […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nation state-backed hackers and criminals are using generative AI in their cyberattacks, but U.S. intelligence is also using artificial intelligence technologies to find malicious activity, according to a senior U.S. National Security Agency official. “We already see criminal and nation state elements utilizing AI. They’re all subscribed to the big name companies that you would […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With the availability of different types of Generative AI models increasing, more businesses are including features such as summarization, prompt-based image generation and even music-making in their solutions. Leap AI is building a solution for these companies to easily integrate AI-powered workflows or even build their own using an easy process. The company is aiming […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Artists have noted various inconsistencies with several of the dragon images in Wacom’s recent promotional campaign. | Image: Wacom Popular drawing tablet manufacturer Wacom is the latest target being slammed by the digital art community after appearing to use AI-generated images in ads. Over the weekend, creatives across X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok noticed that Wacom was promoting its Intuos pen tablet with a dragon illustration that showed telltale marks of AI-generated images — such as questionable scale designs and fur blending unnaturally into other sections of the image.Wacom...
OpenAI’s impressive technology stack led to a wave of startups building on top of its models and offerings. This is a popular topic on TechCrunch+, where columnists spend considerable time discussing how startups can take advantage of OpenAI. The following subscriber-only articles should serve as a foundation for founders building an AI startup on or […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Among the slew of CES announcements this week, it should be no surprise to anyone that generative AI is a major theme from tech companies this year, including Volkswagen, Nvidia and – of course – Amazon. In September 2023, Amazon announced to developers that it would be launching new tools to build LLM-powered experiences. Today, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In some parts of the world (read: Japan, primarily), eldercare has been an important robotics focus for decades. In recent years, other markets have begun exploring the space. Labrador Robotics’ home assistive system is a good example here in the States. In Tel Aviv, meanwhile, Intuition Robotics, meanwhile, has been promoting “companion” robot since 2016 […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Samples of the new solid electrolyte discovered by Microsoft AI and HPC tools. | Photo by Dan DeLong for Microsoft. Artificial intelligence (AI) and large-scale cloud computing is speeding up the search for new battery materials. An AI-enhanced collaboration between Microsoft and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has already produced one promising new material, which the two are sharing publicly today.They discovered a new kind of solid-state electrolyte, the kind of material that could lead to a battery that’s less likely to burst into flames than today’s lithium-ion...
One of the year’s biggest tech events has kicked off in Las Vegas, and we’re here to bring all the reveals before the show floor opens.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Elon Musk has been detailing his vision for X, formerly Twitter’s, transformation into an “everything app,” including payments, creator tools, shopping, and more, since acquiring the social network over a year ago. Now, the company is committing to a timeframe. In an announcement today, X shared its roadmap for the year ahead, which will include […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A couple of years ago, Alex Yu and Amit Jain came together to found a company that’d let people capture objects in 3D using their smartphones — no additional equipment required. At the time, Yu was an AI researcher at UC Berkeley while Jain was an Apple employee building out the Vision Pro‘s multimedia experiences. […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The European Union is checking whether Microsoft’s investment in generative AI giant OpenAI is reviewable under the bloc’s merger regulations, it said today. The development comes in the wake of the turmoil at OpenAI in late November when the then board voted to oust founder and CEO Sam Altman — a shock move that triggered […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As it often does in Las Vegas, Sony focused its CES 2024 keynote on some of the company's more esoteric products. To start with, it rolled out the Afeela electric car first introduced last year at CES, but did it with some gaming panache by driving it using a PlayStation DualSense controller. Otherwise, it mostly talked about how the in-vehicle experience is getting smarter thanks to our old friend, artificial intelligence (AI). Sony also unveiled something else we weren't expecting, namely a new mixed reality headset. Unlike the PlayStation VR 2 consumer model, though, this one is...
Samsung wants to make the smart home smarter — if your home’s a Samsung home, that is. During its CES 2024 keynote in Las Vegas this evening, the company announced a range of additions to — and capabilities for — its SmartThings home automation platform. A new dashboard screen, Now Plus, is headed to select […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Lenovo’s updated consumer laptop lineup at CES 2024 is (unsurprisingly) focused on AI. The company unveiled an array of Yoga and Ideapad notebooks on Monday in Las Vegas, including new versions of the Yoga Pro 9i and Yoga 9i 2-in-1.The 2024 Yoga Pro 9i and Yoga 9i 2-in-1 still have a military-spec rating (MIL-STD-810H) for durability. Both get a spec bump to the latest Intel Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” processors — up to Intel Core Ultra 5 / 7/ 9 H Series in the Pro 9i and up to Intel Evo Edition powered by Core Ultra 7 processor in the Yoga 9i 2-in-1.Like practically every other company...
Lenovo just announced a handful of new gaming laptops at CES 2024 in Las Vegas. Each of these computers features the company’s proprietary Legion Coldfront: Hyper cooling technology that keeps temperatures low while making sure the fans don’t get too loud. They're also packed with AI chips for improved speed and performance. These laptops ship with Windows 11 and come with three free months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.The Lenovo Legion 9i is the flagship model with the most features and the highest asking price. This is a refresh of the similarly named laptop that was released back in...
The Stealth is MSI’s bestselling gaming laptop model. | Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge MSI’s gaming laptops are known for balancing price and performance with a bunch of RGB lighting thrown in for good measure. For CES 2024, it’s returning to that formula once again with its new Stealth, Raider, Cyborg, and Titan laptops and adding in upgraded chips with a touch of “AI.”I had the chance to briefly see some of MSI’s new laptops in December, and perhaps the most exciting new feature is the use of 16:10 displays all around. I’ve personally been hoping for years to see...
Razer’s press materials included this image, ostensibly of a LAN party, where everyone has brought enormous plug-in RGB desk mats along with their laptops. I love it and want to go to there. | Image: Razer You truly have to hand it to Razer for stretching a series of modest spec bumps across two separate announcements and two separate weeks. Razer was so excited about the new display options on the Blade 16 and Blade 18 that it announced them on the 4th, and today, we have a few more details about what’s coming to both laptops this year, mostly of the spec sheet “number go up” variety...
Remember Ballie, Samsung’s spherical home robot from CES 2020? I sure didn’t — until Samsung brought it back at this year’s keynote with a few on-trend AI upgrades in tow. The new and improved Ballie, which Samsung previewed during its press conference at CES 2024 in Las Vegas today, is around the size of a […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
YouTube is updating its harassment and cyberbullying policies to clamp down on content that “realistically simulates” deceased minors or victims of deadly or violent events describing their death. The Google-owned platform says it will begin striking such content starting on January 16. The policy change comes as some true crime content creators have been using […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
KYC, or “Know Your Customer,” is a process intended to help financial institutions, fintech startups and banks verify the identity of their customers. Not uncommonly, KYC authentication involves “ID images,” or cross-checked selfies used to confirm a person is who they say they are. Wise, Revolut and cryptocurrency platforms Gemini and LiteBit are among those […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In late December, The New York Times sued OpenAI and its close collaborator and investor, Microsoft, for allegedly violating copyright law by training generative AI models on Times’ content. Today, OpenAI published a public response in which the startup — unsurprisingly — claims that the case is without merit. In the response, posted this afternoon […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AMD gave the first big keynote of many to come for CES 2024 and revealed a couple of interesting products arriving this year. Chief among those is the $329 Radeon RX 7600 XT GPU designed for entry-level gaming, going on sale on January 24th. The main takeaway is that it's designed for 1440p gaming and should be a solidly more capable GPU than the RX 7600, though we didn't see any benchmarks against its main rival, NVIDIA's RTX 4060 8GB. The other big news is AI acceleration for the company's Ryzen 8000G desktop processors. Those chips are aimed at folks trying to build capable systems on a...
Personal translation devices have had a hugely transformative decade. Improvements to processing power, machine learning and cloud platforms have all played key roles in this development. The technology is increasingly becoming a mainstay of wireless earbuds, and the recent explosion of generative AI platforms will only serve to further these impressive results. It’s easy to […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
One of the year’s biggest tech events has kicked off in Las Vegas, and we’re here to bring all the reveals before the show floor opens.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Wandering around the CES preview events, it’s clear that AI and other smart tech is coming to toasters, grills and all sorts of other devices. As someone who loves to cook, it’s possible that these products aren’t really for me, but I can’t help but think that a bunch of smart tech built into small […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
After rounding out its RTX 40 GPUs in 2023 with the RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti, NVIDIA has brought the inevitable follow-ups to CES 2024: slightly faster Super cards! In Las Vegas today, NVIDIA has unveiled the RTX 4080 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super and RTX 4070 Super GPUs, upgrades over its previous GPUs which aim to compete directly with AMD's cheaper high-end cards. And of course, NVIDIA can't help but tout how useful they'll be for on-device AI tasks.The RTX 4080 Super will sell for $999 when it arrives on January 31, while the RTX 4070 Ti Super will go for $799 on January 24th. AMD's Radeon 7900 XTX...
Image: The Verge Getty Images and Nvidia are deepening their AI partnership with the launch of Generative AI by iStock, a text-to-image platform specifically designed to make stock photos. Generative AI by iStock builds on Getty’s first foray into AI image generation, Generative AI by Getty Images. The difference is that the image platform from iStock — a stock photo service owned by Getty — helps individual or single-seat users, unlike Getty Images, which is more of a multiuser enterprise solution.Trained using Nvidia’s Picasso model, Generative AI by iStock only learned from Getty’s...
Volkswagen is getting into the ChatGPT game. The German automaker announced Monday at CES 2024 in Las Vegas plans to add an AI-powered chatbot into all Volkswagen models equipped with its IDA voice assistant. Why? For drivers who want an AI-based chatbot to read researched content out loud to them, of course. The AI-based chatbot, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
After recently turning to generative AI to enhance its product reviews, e-commerce giant Amazon today shared how it’s now using AI technology to help customers shop for apparel online. The company explains it’s now using large language models, generative AI, and machine learning to power four AI-powered features that will help customers find clothing that […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AMD was the first company to deliver x86 laptop chips with NPUs for AI acceleration last year — now, at CES 2024 it's doing the same for desktops. The company's new Ryzen 8000G processors, which debuted today in Las Vegas (but have already been leaked by retailers), are once again NPU pioneers among x86 desktop chips. And on top of that, the company claims its built-in Radeon 700M graphics are the fastest ever seen on a desktop chip.While the Ryzen 8000G chips aren't AMD's most powerful desktop offerings — the Ryzen 7700X and above all offer higher clock speeds, core counts and onboard...
Image: AMD Not long after AMD announced new AI-focused silicon, the company is back with more. AMD finally revealed its Ryzen 8000-series desktop processors at CES 2024, and like the Ryzen 8040 mobile APU series announced in December, these chips are also built to, according to AMD, better handle AI. The highest-specced chip of the bunch is the $329 Ryzen 7 8700G, which sports eight Zen 4 cores, 16 threads, and an up to 5.1GHz boost clock. It also comes with AMD’s flagship Radeon 780M integrated graphics with RDNA 3 architecture as well as an XDNA neural processing unit (NPU), which enables...
SentinelOne’s deal to acquire PingSafe valued the Peak XV-backed young startup at over $100 million, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch, in one of the strongest and fastest deals emerging from India. The New York Stock Exchange-listed AI security firm disclosed the cash and equity deal last week, but didn’t reveal the financial […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
At CES 2024, Govee not only revealed an upgraded AI Sync Box Kit, Neon Rope Light 2 and, because it’s 2024, there’s even a dedicated chatbot. While it wasn't available for testing at CES Unveiled, Govee’s AI Lighting Bot will eventually be bundled into the company’s smartphone app, where you’ll apparently be able to cajole it into generating using natural language inputs, a la ChatGPT.As you can see in Govee’s concept video, it’ll apparently source lighting designs and transmit them to your Govee lights, whether they’re lighting spots, strips or anything else. In one example in...
Samsung’s CES 2024 TV rollout is here. The company typically reserves finer product details (including pricing) for later, but it provided Engadget with a quick rundown of its new television lineup ahead of its press conference on Monday. Its new 8K TVs have new AI-powered features, including upscaling technology (to help with the scarcity of native 8K content), and it claims a “glare-free” OLED model looks equally clear in bright and dark rooms.Samsung’s new quantum dot TVs have AI-powered upscaling tech the company hopes will nudge curious consumers into paying a premium for an 8K TV...
The holidays are over, but there’s one winter tradition left. CES is back, once again turning Las Vegas into a haven for the tech-obsessed. Samsung is holding its annual CES press conference on January 8 at 2PM PT / 5PM ET, a day before exhibitions officially open. Engadget will have a dozen staffers on the ground in Las Vegas, and you can follow along from home by watching the livestream on Samsung’s Global Newsroom site.Samsung is, of course, a big company with its hands in just about every cookie jar, so you may wonder what the press conference will focus on. And you know the answer...
Isomorphic Labs, the London-based, drug discovery-focused spin-out of Google AI R&D division DeepMind, today announced that it’s entered into strategic partnerships with two pharmaceutical giants, Eli Lilly and Novartis, to apply AI to discover new medications to treat challenging diseases. The deals have a combined value of around $3 billion. Isomorphic will receive $45 million […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As companies, large and small, layer on generative AI features, they could struggle to find a pricing scheme that balances value and cost.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Harnessing AI to drive innovation and deliver enhanced customer value will be critical to staying competitive in the AI-driven marketplace.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: William Joel / The Verge Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 20, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, hello, welcome, hi, what’s up, how are you, welcome to the gang, and also, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) It’s our first issue of 2024, a number that still feels deeply strange to type — hope you had a good holiday and a nice break! I spent most of mine sick and then caring for a sick kid, which meant a lot of Elmo and The Office and trying as ever to beat my high score in Holedown.This week, I’ve also...
I would be lying if I said that mixed reality and generative AI were two of my favorite things. And yet, a Christmas Day TV special made me unexpectedly bullish about them.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week in AI, Microsoft unveiled a new standard PC […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Investors are hoping for more enterprise adoption and vertical AI solutions this year as the AI startup market starts to grow up.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Paris-based startup Nabla just announced that it has raised a $24 million Series B funding round led by Cathay Innovation, with participation from ZEBOX Ventures — the corporate VC fund of CMA CGM. This funding round comes just a few months after Nabla signed a large-scale partnership with Permanente Medical Group, a division of U.S. […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It’s the week before CES officially kicks off in Las Vegas, but our fingers are already tired from typing up a ton of early news. In this episode, Cherlynn and Devindra discuss the big topics they expect to see at CES 2024 (AI PCs will be huge, we swear!), as well as some of the stories that have already landed, like Dell’s revamped XPS line. Also, we explore some of 2023’s biggest winners and losers (just take a guess where Twitter ends up), and we chat about Apple Fitness+ highlighting Super Bowl halftime performers. And for a bit of fun conjecture, we explore the possibility of Apple...
Ryan Reynolds-backed Mint Mobile exited to T-Mobile for $1.35 billion last year, and Sam Altman-backed “Ai Pin” startup Humane launched a pricey little device with a $24 monthly subscription that comes with phone number, unlimited data and as many AI-powered queries as you can muster. What do they have in common? They’re both MVNOs, short […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
CES 2024 will be here before we know it, taking over Las Vegas with throngs of crowds, booths full of products and a lot of companies making claims about how AI is improving their offerings. As noted in our CES preview, though the conference has had its ups and downs of late, it’s increasingly become […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
2024 is going to be a huge year for the cross-section of generative AI/large foundational models and robotics. There’s a lot of excitement swirling around the potential for various applications, ranging from learning to product design. Google’s DeepMind Robotics researchers are one of a number of teams exploring the space’s potential. In a blog post […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI plans to launch a store for GPTs, custom apps based on its text-generating AI models, sometime in the coming week. In an email viewed by TechCrunch, OpenAI said that developers building GPTs will have to review the company’s updated usage policies and GPT brand guidelines to ensure that their GPTs are compliant before they’re […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Álvaro Bernis / The Verge How we use the internet is changing fast thanks to the advancement of AI-powered chatbots that can find information and redeliver it as a simple conversation. Continue reading…
At the end of 2022, like many, I made some predictions about what 2023 would bring to the technology investing ecosystem. Namely, the Fed would tame inflation, and the fundraising market would thaw, but overall, claiming that 2023 would be the first year of a “new normal” era for the markets and that machine learning […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google Bard Advanced is coming, and it may represent the company's first attempt to charge for an AI chatbot. The code on Bard's website shows the opportunity to get three months free of Bard Advanced — implying that it will be at a cost after that. X (formerly Twitter) user Bedros Pamboukian shared the discovered code, which also includes a defunct Google One link. This could mean that users will be required to get a Google One subscription to access Bard Advanced.hi, bard advanced will be free for 3 months and you'll need Google One too, enjoysiesthe fact that it's in prod...
As search engine incumbents — namely Google — amp up their platforms with gen AI tech, startups are looking to reinvent AI-powered search from the ground up. It might seem like a Sisyphean task, going up against competitors with billions upon billions of users. But this new breed of search upstarts believes it can carve […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft would like 2024 to be the “year of the AI PC” and to put a point on that, the company today announced a new key for Copilot — that is, a physical key that will soon make its way to your keyboard and join the Windows key, together with its friends the Control key, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Coming soon to a Windows 11 PC near you: A dedicated keyboard key for Microsoft's Copilot AI. The company calls this "the first significant change to the Windows PC keyboard in nearly three decades" in a blog post ahead of CES 2024 in Las Vegas. Just like how the Windows key serves as a quick way to open up the Windows Start menu, the Copilot key immediately summons Microsoft's AI companion to do your bidding.While it's not a huge surprise to see Copilot manifest itself in the real world, especially given just how much Microsoft has been pushing AI over the past year, it's a bit of a shock to...
Image: Microsoft Microsoft wants 2024 to be “the year of the AI PC,” and it’s kicking things off with a significant change to the keyboard on new laptops and PCs. A new Copilot key will ship on a variety of new PCs and laptops from Microsoft’s partners, providing quick access to Microsoft’s AI-powered Windows Copilot experience straight from a keyboard button press.The Copilot key is the first big change to the Windows PC keyboard layout in nearly three decades. “Nearly 30 years ago, we introduced the Windows key to the PC keyboard that enabled people all over the world to interact...
Intel, intent on making bigger moves in the market for AI-powered enterprise software, is spinning out a new platform company with the backing of Boca Raton, Florida-based asset manager and investor DigitalBridge. Called Articul8 AI (an awkward abbreviation of “Articulate AI”), the new entity builds off a proof-of-concept from an Intel collaboration with Boston Consulting […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge A second California state senator has introduced bills meant to regulate AI systems, particularly those used by state agencies.Senator Steve Padilla, a Democrat, introduced Senate Bills 892 and 893, establishing a public AI resource and creating a “safe and ethical framework” around AI for the state. Senate Bill 892 will require California’s Department of Technology to develop safety, privacy, and non-discrimination standards around services using AI. It also prohibits the state of California from contracting any AI services “unless the provider of...
A year after announcing its own lineup of Roku-branded TVs, the hardware company revealed today a new range of high-end televisions. Roku also introduced Roku Smart Picture, an AI-powered feature that automatically adjusts picture and audio quality. The Roku Pro Series TVs feature a thinner design than its Roku Select and Plus Series TVs, with […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
TLG just announced a new lineup of OLED TVs just ahead of CES 2024. The LG Signature OLED M4 and OLED G4 TVs are, surprise, packed with an updated AI processor that offers four times the performance of last year’s models. The Alpha 11 AI processor works to enhance picture and audio quality, offering a 70 percent improvement of visual performance when gaming compared to its predecessor.The AI chip upscales objects and backgrounds to reduce blur and allegedly analyzes and adjusts colors to “best convey the mood and emotional elements intended by filmmakers.” LG also promises a more “three...
The Steamboat Willie version of Disney icon Mickey Mouse just entered the public domain, and there's already an explosion of related AI-generated art. We talked to some of the creators behind it.
That’s so metal. | Image: Samsung Samsung has formally announced its winter Unpacked — coming right on the heels of CES and just down the street from some of its biggest competitors’ HQs. As previously leaked announced, the event is scheduled for Wednesday, January 17th. It’ll be hosted at the SAP Center, because nothing says “go big or go home” like an NHL arena.The company says we’ll see the “newest additions to the Galaxy mobile device portfolio,” which is all but guaranteed to be the S24 series. AI will be a major focus — no surprise there. Rumors have also pointed to...
When news broke last year that AI heavyweight OpenAI and Axel Springer had reached a financial agreement and partnership, it seemed to bode well for harmony between folks who write words, and tech companies that use them to help create and train artificial intelligence models. At the time OpenAI had also come to an agreement […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Bespoke Jet Bot Combo is the first combined robot vacuum and mop from Samsung. It features steam cleaning and automatic mop removal to keep your carpets dry. | Image: Samsung Samsung is finally bringing out a new version of its Jet Bot robot vacuum, which was last updated in 2021. The Bespoke Jet Bot Combo will be on show at CES 2024 and is the first combination of robot vacuum and mop from the Korean electronics giant. (The company has a standalone robot mop, the Jetbot Mop.)Samsung hasn’t announced a price (the previous model, the Jet Bot AI Plus, costs $1,300) or a release date. And it...
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the weekend and what’s making headlines early in the week. This being the first week […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Education has always been centered around the human element, and it's hard to imagine a world where machines can replace that.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Generative AI provoked a lot of discussion last year around images, text and video, but it may soon affect the gaming industry as well. Square Enix said it plans to be "aggressively applying" AI and other cutting-edge tech in 2024 to "create new forms of content," according to president Takashi Kiryu's New Year's letter. "Artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential implications had for some time largely been subjects of academic debate," he said. "However, the introduction of ChatGPT, which allows anyone to easily produce writing or translations or to engage in text-based...
Making good choices now will allow leaders to future-proof their business and reap the benefits of AI while boosting the bottom line.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A few days ago, Microsoft released a standalone Android app for Microsoft Copilot, giving you a quick way to access the AI assistant. Turns out the iOS and iPad versions weren't far behind, because they're now available from Apple's App Store. Just like in Copilot on desktop and other AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, you can type in your question and wait for responses generated by artificial intelligence. In Copilot's case, you'll get responses spun by OpenAI's GPT-4, the company's latest large language model. The free version of ChatGPT, in comparison, is powered by the older ChatGPT-3.5, and...
Image: Getty Michael Cohen, the former lawyer for Donald Trump, admitted to citing fake, AI-generated court cases in a legal document that wound up in front of a federal judge, as reported earlier by The New York Times. A filing unsealed on Friday says Cohen used Google’s Bard to perform research after mistaking it for “a super-charged search engine” rather than an AI chatbot.The document in question was a motion that asked a federal judge to shorten the length of Cohen’s three-year probation, which he’s now facing following prison time and a guilty plea to tax evasion and other...
Defense tech startup Shield AI has expanded its latest funding round with another $300 million in equity and debt, bringing its total Series F to $500 million, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. This total amount reflects $200 million in equity closed in November, $100 million in new equity raised at the Series F price, and $200 […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
2024 LG Gram Pro | LG Ahead of CES 2024, LG is debuting new laptops in its ultra-light LG Gram and LG Gram Pro series. If you’re in the market for OLED displays and better graphics, take a look at the 2024 LG Gram Pro lineup. As our review last year noted, the biggest difference between the Pro and standard laptops last year was the graphics — much less the look and feel. For a more visible difference, we’ll keep an eye out for their more fashion-forward cousin, the LG Gram Style. For 2024, there’s the Gram Pro 16 and 17, and the LG Gram Pro 2-in-1 (more on what those two things are...
Earlier this month, at the Slush tech conference in Helsinki, this editor had the opportunity to sit down with Sanna Marin, the popular former prime minister of Finland who became known internationally for behaving her age, but whose accomplishments in office are far more significant, including successfully pushing Finland to join NATO to better protect […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI is all the rage — particularly text-generating AI, also known as large language models (think models along the lines of ChatGPT). In one recent survey of ~1,000 enterprise organizations, 67.2% say that they see adopting large language models (LLMs) as a top priority by early 2024. But barriers stand in the way. According to […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
From when the exit market reopens to what happens with AI investing, more than 40 VCs share their predictions and expectations for 2024.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With Canva, generative AI hits different. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a better technology to boost Canva’s user growth and revenue generation.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The New York Times is suing OpenAI and its close collaborator (and investor), Microsoft, for allegedly violating copyright law by training generative AI models on Times’ content. In the lawsuit, filed in the Federal District Court in Manhattan, The Times contends that millions of its articles were used to train AI models, including those underpinning […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for using published news articles to train its artificial intelligence chatbots without an agreement that compensates it for its intellectual property. The lawsuit, which was filed in a Federal District Court in Manhattan, marks the first time a major news organization has pursued the ChatGPT developers for copyright infringement. The NYT did not specify how much it seeks in payout from the companies but that “this action seeks to hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages.”The NYT claims that OpenAI and...
As 2023 draws to a close, we reflect on some of our favorite apps that made everyday life a little easier this year. While flashy new AI apps and rival social networks grabbing headlines, sometimes the most useful innovations fly under the radar. The apps on our best-of list may not have arrived in 2023, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
GenAI is driving another layer of technical debt for many businesses. Under the pressures of constant innovation, we could see the AI cloud grow at new, record-breaking speeds. © 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft, a notoriously conservative and slow-moving giant, is bringing artificial intelligence right into the heart of Windows. But. after investing a total of $13 billion in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI (and acquiring a 49 percent stake in the process), will AI actually make its products better?Microsoft went to town. Bing Chat officially kicked off its year of AI, while Copilot, assisting with its AI smarts, subsequently launched on Edge, Microsoft 365 products like Word and Powerpoint and eventually Windows 11.While the AI interactions aren’t perfect, the one constant around AI is that...
Apple's designer exodus continues as product design chief Tang Tan is leaving the company and joining Jony Ive's design firm LoveFrom, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. There, he'll reportedly work on a new artificial intelligence hardware project backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman with aim of creating devices deploying the latest deep learning technology. Tan was in charge of design for Apple's main products including the iPhone, Watch and AirPods, so his departure leaves a sizable hole. As part of LoveFrom, Tan will act as hardware design lead for the new AI...
Every time Microsoft launched a major AI feature this year, I couldn't help but feel more skeptical about the company's new direction. Here's Microsoft, a notoriously conservative and slow-moving giant, reshaping its products around artificial intelligence not long after most people learned generative AI existed. The last time it made such a dramatic shift we got Windows 8, a failed attempt at making its flagship OS tablet and touchscreen friendly.Now, the company is bringing AI right into the heart of Windows and I'm left wondering: Is Microsoft jumping into artificial...
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week in AI, the news cycle finally (finally!) quieted […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. I know I usually lead Startups Weekly with my own column (and I did write one this week, so if you are somehow a fan of everything I write, go ham), but Devin’s piece taking a stand against the pseudanthropy […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Last month, I took an extended break. In a bid to keep my robotics newsletter Actuator (subscribe here) up and running, however, I reached out to some of the biggest names in the industry. I asked people from CMU, UC Berkeley, Meta, NVIDIA, Boston Dynamics and the Toyota Research Institute the same six questions, covering […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Various kinds of AI have been here for a while, but it’s generative AI (and LLMs) that completely changed the risk landscape.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amid rising geopolitical tensions, many Chinese tech companies find themselves recalibrating their overseas pursuits, often sidestepping any reference to their origin. One bold startup called DP Technology stands out from the crowd. Working to apply artificial intelligence to molecular simulations, DP, short for “Deep Potential”, believes that the unifying power of “scientific research for humanity” […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Verge What a year, huh? As 2023 draws to a close, it’s time to look back on the year that was. It was a great year for entertainment and a not-so-great year for the people who actually made that entertainment. It was the year Twitter died, and the year Matter mostly failed to launch. Gadgets got gadgety-er, photos got what-is-a-photo-ier, and generative AI was suddenly everywhere. Now through the end of the year, we’ll recap the highs and lows in gadgets, social media, and entertainment, and look ahead at how 2024 is shaping up (spoiler: even more AI). We’ll talk about our favorite...
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Share on X Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Ask Sophie: How […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The UK Supreme Court ruled that AI cannot get patents, declaring it cannot be named as an inventor of new products because the law considers only humans or companies to be creators. The court unanimously denied a petition from Stephen Thaler, founder of the AI system DABUS, to name his AI as an inventor. The UK’s decision aligns with a similar decision made against Thaler in the US: he previously lost an appeal with the US Patent and Trademark Office, which also denied his petition to claim AI as an inventor. The US Supreme Court declined to hear the...
Researchers have developed an AI-powered robot they claim can beat the physical marble game Labyrinth faster than humans are capable of. Thomas Bi and Raffaello D’Andrea of ETH Zurich created CyberRunner, which combines model-based reinforcement with the dexterity required to beat a game that requires physical skill, coordination and precision.For the uninitiated, the aim of the game is to guide a marble through a maze without falling into any holes. The player controls the movement of the ball by rotating two dials, which tilt the board.CyberRunner learns through experience. A camera...
Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images A popular training dataset for AI image generation contained links to child abuse imagery, Stanford’s Internet Observatory found, potentially allowing AI models to create harmful content. LAION-5B, a dataset used by Stable Diffusion creator Stability AI and Google’s Imagen image generators, included at least 1,679 illegal images scraped from social media posts and popular adult websites. The researchers began combing through the LAION dataset in September 2023 to investigate how much, if any, child sexual...
AI may or may not take people's jobs in years to come, but in the meantime, there's one thing they cannot obtain: patents. Dr. Stephen Thaler has spent years trying to get patents for two inventions created by his AI "creativity machine" DABUS. Now, the United Kingdom's Supreme Court has rejected his appeal to approve these patents when listing DABUS as the inventor, Reuters reports. The court's rationale stems from a provision in UK patent law that states, "an inventor must be a natural person." The ruling stipulated that the appeal was unconcerned with whether this should change in the...
Image: Getty Rite Aid isn’t allowed to use AI-powered facial recognition technology for another five years as part of a settlement it reached with the Federal Trade Commission. In a complaint filed on Tuesday, the FTC accuses Rite Aid of using facial surveillance systems in a “reckless” manner from 2012 to 2020.During this period, the FTC says Rite Aid used facial recognition technology to “capture images of all consumers as they entered or moved through the stores.” It then allegedly created a database of customers identified as shoplifters or exhibiting some other kind of suspicious...
The Verge Microsoft’s AI chatbot Copilot will now be able to churn out AI songs on demand — thanks to a new plug-in with Suno. The Cambridge-based AI music startup offers a tool on Discord that can compose an original song — complete with lyrics — based on a text prompt. Now, Copilot users will be able to access Suno using the Microsoft chatbot. In order to start making music, Copilot users only need to sign on to their accounts and enable the Suno plug-in — or click on the logo that says, “Make music with Suno.” Users then need to think of a simple one- or two-line text prompt...
Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images Stability AI, the maker of the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, is now offering a subscription service that standardizes and changes how customers can use its models for commercial purposes. The company said the membership “redefines” how it grants commercial rights to users, aiming to strike a balance between profitability and openness. Stability AI’s membership offers three tiers: a free one for personal and research use; a $20 per month subscription for “creators, developers and startups with less than $1 million in annual...
A European Union plan to support homegrown AI startups by providing them with access to processing power for model training on the bloc’s supercomputers, which was announced back in September and kicked off last month, has seen France’s Mistral AI participate in an early pilot phase, according to an update from the EU. But one […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft’s AI-powered chatbot, can now compose songs thanks to an integration with gen AI music app Suno. Users can enter prompts into Copilot like “Create a pop song about adventures with your family” and have Suno, via a plugin, bring their musical ideas to life. From a single sentence, Suno can generate complete […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
This last year was a banger for AI as the technology went from niche to mainstream about as fast as anything ever has. 2024, however, will be the year when the hype runs full-steam into reality as people reckon with the capabilities and limitations of AI at large. Here are a few ways we think […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is the first of a two-part series that we built for you going back over critical themes from 2023. It was a very, very busy […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
ImpriMed, a California-based precision medicine startup, builds AI-powered dog cancer treatment technology that helps veterinarians identify the most suitable drugs for individual canine and feline blood cancers. The startup, which centers on improving treatment outcomes of dogs and cats with cancer first, now aims to expand its precision medicine technology for human oncology applications. “The […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI is expanding its internal safety processes to fend off the threat of harmful AI. A new “safety advisory group” will sit above the technical teams and make recommendations to leadership, and the board has been granted veto power — of course, whether it will actually use it is another question entirely. Normally the ins […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Travel website Expedia wants to get people to start their travel search on its site with AI instead of using an external search engine.Expedia already uses AI for some customer service features and to help property owners describe their homes and hotels. The company hopes in the future that AI will help it recommend travel destinations to customers based on previous trips and bring more direct traffic to its site. It’s a long-term plan to shift the balance of power on the web — albeit one that’s still in its earliest stages for the company.Rajesh Naidu, chief architect and head of data...
As AI systems assume decision-making roles traditionally performed by humans, questions about bias, fairness, accountability, and potential societal impacts loom large.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Generative AI is only one way of creating deceptive and manipulated media—and experts are concerned that not enough attention is paid to “cheapfakes” and other forms of digital manipulation.
Meltwater, which first made its name around media monitoring and then got active in business intelligence using AI and big data analytics techniques, is picking up a new investor. Verdane, a Norwegian private equity firm that earlier this year closed a $1 billion+ fund to make investments in scaling tech companies, is taking an 11% […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering the major happenings in the tech-o-sphere — or most of them, anyway. As the world’s largest AI conference, NeurIPS, got underway in sunny New Orleans, Google shared more on Gemini, its flagship AI model family — and lots happened elsewhere. In this edition […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Grimes is stepping into the toy business with “Grok,” a character that she voiced for Curio’s new line of screen-free AI plushies. The toy is not affiliated with the AI chatbot backed by Grimes’ ex, Elon Musk, which is also named Grok. Musk described xAI’s Grok as having a “rebellious streak” and a willingness to answer […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
To hear the hype from vendors, you would think that the enterprise buyers are all in when it comes to generative AI, but like any newer technology, large companies tend to move cautiously. Throughout this year, as vendors feverishly announced new generative-AI fueled products, CIOs took note. Some companies have actually been looking to cut […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A new class action lawsuit filed this week in the U.S. District Court in D.C. accuses Google and parent company Alphabet of anticompetitive behavior in violation of U.S. antitrust law, the Sherman Act, and others, on behalf of news publishers. The case, filed by Arkansas-based publisher Helena World Chronicle, argues that Google “siphons off” news […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Just a week after AMD revealed its own Ryzen 8040 hardware, Intel has entered its own AI PC era. The company’s new Core Ultra notebook chips, codenamed Meteor Lake, are Intel’s first processors to include an NPU, or neural processing unit, for accelerating AI tasks.Intel claims the Core Ultra chips use up to 79 percent less power than AMD’s last-gen Ryzen 7840U while idling in Windows, and they’re also up to 11 percent faster than AMD’s hardware for multithreaded tasks. Intel, however, didn’t have the upcoming Ryzen 8040 chips to test against. They use the company’s new Intel 4 (...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The European Union’s three branches provisionally agreed on its landmark AI regulation, paving the way for the economic bloc to prohibit certain uses of the technology and demand transparency from providers. But despite warnings from some world leaders, the changes it will require from AI companies remain unclear — and potentially far away.First proposed in 2021, the AI Act still hasn’t been fully approved. Hotly debated last-minute compromises softened some of its strictest regulatory threats. And enforcement likely won’t start for years. “In...
I’ve spent much of the past year discussing generative AI and large language models with robotics experts. It’s become increasingly clear that these sorts of technologies are primed to revolutionize the way robots communicate, learn, look and are programmed. Accordingly, a number of top universities, research labs and companies are exploring the best methods for […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
While investors were preparing to go nuclear after Sam Altman’s unceremonious ouster from OpenAI and Altman was plotting his return to the company, the members of OpenAI’s Superalignment team were assiduously plugging along on the problem of how to control AI that’s smarter than humans. Or at least, that’s the impression they’d like to give. […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Earlier this fall, Spotify was found to be developing a new feature that would allow its streaming app users to create playlists using AI technology and prompts. Now, that “AI playlists” feature has been spotted in the wild, as part of a test that to see how users will respond to AI-driven playlist creation. The […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Lenovo has unveiled its latest productivity-focused ThinkPad and IdeaPad laptops ahead of CES. The systems are equipped with Intel's new Core Ultra chipsets, which include three compute engines — a central processing unit, graphics processing unit and neural processing unit. Those are designed to work together for greater efficiency. Lenovo notes that some compute tasks can be offloaded to the GPU or NPU for better performance and power management. Since they run on Windows 11, all three laptops will support Copilot AI features.The IdeaPad Pro 5i is the first consumer Intel Evo Edition...
Artificial intelligence – or rather, the variety based on large language models we’re currently enthralled with – is already in the autumn of its hype cycle, but unlike crypto, it won’t just disappear into the murky, undignified corners of the internet once its ‘trend’ status fades. Instead, it’s settling into a place where its use […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Companies are increasingly curious about AI and the ways in which it can be used to (potentially) boost productivity. But they’re also wary of the risks. In a recent Workday survey, enterprises cite the timeliness and reliability of the underlying data, potential bias and security and privacy as the top barriers to AI implementation. Sensing […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Every day, there seems to be new generative AI news, and while it can often be serious and quite technical, this time around it's just plain fun. Instagram has launched a new generative AI-powered tool called backdrop that lets you create a new image in the, yes, background of your Story. Meta's generative AI lead, Ahmad Al-Dahle, announced the feature on Threads alongside a video tutorial.Instagram's backdrop tool appears once you upload or capture content for your Story. It sits alongside existing icons at the top of your screen, like text and music, represented by an image of a...
Instagram introduced its generative AI-powered background editing tool to U.S.-based users Wednesday. Meta’s lead for generative AI Ahmad Al-Dahle posted on Threads saying that the tool will let users change the background to their images through prompts for Stories. When users will tap on the background editor icon on an image they will get ready […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI will pay German publisher Axel Springer to use its news articles to train its AI models and show real-time information from Axel Springer's brands, which include Business Insider and Politico in the US and Bild and Welt in Europe, in ChatGPT’s responses. None of the companies disclosed how much the deal was worth, but Bloomberg reported that OpenAI will pay the publisher tens of millions of euros over the next three years.“This partnership with Axel Springer will help provide people with new ways to access quality, real-time news content through our AI tools,” said OpenAI’s chief...
Palace intrigue might be dominating the news cycle around OpenAI, but the AI startup — and its accelerator programs — are chugging along uninterrupted, so the PR team tells me. OpenAI today announced the launch of Converge-2, the second cohort of its six-week Converge program for “exceptional engineers, designers, researchers, and product builders using AI […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Many, if not most, generative AI tech vendors argue that fair use entitles them to train AI models on copyrighted material scraped from the internet — even if they don’t get permission from the rightsholders. But some vendors, such as OpenAI, are hedging their bets — perhaps wary of the outcome of pending relevant lawsuits. […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We fed a few thousand pitch decks to an AI, analyzed them all, and found the most common problems are for founders raising early-stage funding.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Biometric AI tech like facial recognition software was one of the major sticking points contributing to negotiation delays. | Image: The Verge When European lawmakers reached a provisional deal on landmark artificial intelligence rules last week, they had reason to celebrate.The EU AI Act reached a long-awaited climax on Friday following not only two years of broad discussion but a three-day “marathon” debate between the European Commission, the European Parliament, and EU member states to iron out disagreements. All-nighters were pulled. Bins overflowed with the remnants of coffee, energy...
After announcing its family of Gemini models last week and bringing it to its Bard chatbot experience, Google is now bringing Gemini to developers by launching a slew of new and updated services today. One of these services is AI Studio — which was previously known as MakerSuite. AI Studio is a web-based tool for […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
After coming to Bard and the Pixel 8 Pro last week, Gemini, Google’s recently announced flagship gen AI model family, is launching for Google Cloud customers using Vertex AI. Gemini Pro, a lightweight version of a more capable Gemini model, Gemini Ultra, currently in private preview for a “select set” of customers, is now accessible […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google’s making the second generation of Imagen, its AI model that can create and edit images given a text prompt, more widely available — at least to Google Cloud customers using Vertex AI who’ve been approved for access. But the company isn’t disclosing which data it used to train the new model — nor introducing […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Thanks to advances in AI, small and medium businesses have become a significant target in the world of cybercrime, accounting for roughly half of all breaches worldwide by some estimates. Now, one of the companies building security tools for SMBs has raised a round of funding to expand its business, underscoring the demand in the […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hyperplane, a San Francisco-based startup that is building foundation models to help banks predict customer behavior, is coming out of stealth today by announcing a $6 million funding round led by former Stripe exec Lachy Groom, who was joined by SV Angel, Clocktower Technology Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures, Soma Capital, Latitud, Atman Capital, Crestone VC and […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Aqara’s Presence Sensor FP2 can now be used as a sleep tracker. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge The innovative Aqara Presence Sensor FP2 that debuted at CES 2023 is getting three significant new features that could make it more useful and more effective as a smart home sensor. Sleep Monitoring Mode, AI Person Detection, and People Counting are all coming to the Wi-Fi sensor, which is one of the first to use millimeter wave (mmWave) radar tech to accurately detect a person’s presence even when they’re sitting still, rather than relying on passive infrared motion sensing. The...
The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are about to get some powerful upgrades thanks to improvements to the social network’s AI assistant. The company is finally adding support for real-time information to the onboard assistant, and it’s starting to test new “multimodal” capabilities that allow it to answer questions based on your environment.Up to now, Meta AI had a “knowledge cutoff” of December 2022, so it couldn’t answer questions about current events, or things like game scores, traffic conditions or other queries that would be especially useful while on the go. But that’s now...
Music-creation software company Output just launched an AI tool that generates free sample packs based on text prompts. These packs are royalty-free and include 30 samples that can be used in the digital audio workstation (DAW) of your choice, including Logic Pro, Ableton, Pro Tools and others.The algorithm mixes and resynthesizes pre-existing samples to create new sounds that match the text prompt. This was developed to help music-makers move quickly, so they aren’t slowed down by hunting for that perfect sample to match the vibe of the track. Instead, just write something like “moody...
Pixelynx, an Animoca Brands-owned metaverse company co-founded by DJ and producer Deadmau5, announced today its newest suite of tools for its flagship product Korus, an AI-powered music creation platform where you can remix content using AI and licensed stem files made by artists and music labels, then mint music and earn revenue. Starting today, Korus […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We talk a lot about the negative side of AI, but what about the positive aspects like being able to interact with authors or historical figures based on feeding their writing into a large language model? James Lowry may not be a household name, but his history is part of the Black experience in America. […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Snapchat is releasing a few new AI powered features for Snapchat+ subscribers, the company announced on Tuesday. Most notably, subscribers can now create and send AI generated images based on a text prompt. In addition to getting access to a new AI extend tool, subscribers can now also use the app’s Dream selfie feature with […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Jackie Rocca Contributor Jackie Rocca is VP of Product, AI, at Slack, where she oversees the vision and execution of Slack AI, which brings generative AI natively and securely into Slack’s user experience. The application of generative AI in the workplace is a long game, and we’re in the very early stages. Most businesses looking […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Builders, bakers and body conditioners might not be the first trades that come to mind when you think about how AI is transforming how we work. But today a startup that’s building AI-powered business tools specifically for them — and the thousands of other categories that make up the world of small businesses and service […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The political deal clinched by European Union lawmakers late Friday over what the bloc is billing as world’s first comprehensive law for regulating artificial intelligence includes powers for the Commission to adapt the pan-EU AI rulebook to keep pace with developments in the cutting edge field, it has confirmed. Lawmakers’ choice of term for regulating […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the weekend and what’s making headlines early in the week. Alex is a little bit sick […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Every day we seem to hear another news story about some government entity exploring how to regulate AI. Just last week, the EU finalized a new set of rules, but they are far from alone as other countries look to control the growth of the technology. With a broad set of rules looming, it represents […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
French startup Mistral AI has officially closed its much anticipated Series A funding round. The company has raised €385 million, or $415 million at today’s exchange rate — according to Bloomberg, it values the company at roughly $2 billion. Mistral AI is also opening up its commercial platform today. As a reminder, Mistral AI raised […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the past few days in tech. AI stole the headlines once again, with tech giants from Google to X (formerly Twitter) heading off against OpenAI for chatbot supremacy. But plenty happened besides. In this edition of WiR, we cover Google faking a […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As generative AI shapes the next generation of application products, we can expect even more sweeping evolution.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week, Google flooded the channels with announcements around Gemini, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Welcome to Gag City, the pink metropolis inhabited by stans and brands alike. In the days leading up to the release of “Pink Friday 2,” Nicki Minaj’s fifth studio album and sequel to her debut record “Pink Friday” that dropped on Friday, Twitter was flooded with AI-generated images of pink-toned cityscapes. Gag City, the dreamy […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
After marathon ‘final’ talks which stretched to almost three days European Union lawmakers have tonight clinched a political deal on a risk-based framework for regulating artificial intelligence. The file was originally proposed back in April 2021 but it’s taken months of tricky three-way negotiations to get a deal over the line. The development means a […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The earliest that we will likely see these rules come into force is 2025. | The Verge Following a round of intense negotiations this week, lawmakers in Brussels have now reached a “provisional agreement” on the European Union’s proposed Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act). The EU’s AI Act is anticipated to be the world’s first comprehensive set of rules to govern AI and could serve as a benchmark for other regions looking to pass similar laws. According to the press release, negotiators established obligations for “high-impact” general-purpose AI (GPAI) systems that meet certain...
The Washington Post reports that after a marathon 72-hour debate European Union legislators Friday have reached a historic deal on a broad-ranging AI safety development bill, the most expansive and far-reaching of its kind to date. Details of the deal itself were not immediately available. The proposed regulations would dictate the ways in which future machine learning models can be developed and distributed within the trade bloc, impacting its use in applications ranging from education to healthcare. AI development would be split among four categories, depending on the societal risk that...
I am haunted by mulch posts. The most recent mulch video came to me in the middle of the night, when I was hours into scrolling through a particularly nasty bout of insomnia. The video was an edit of a tiny dog surrounded by a frame of glittering hearts, with an AI-generated voice narrating, “Today, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI is working with former Twitter India head Rishi Jaitly as a senior advisor to facilitate talks with the government about AI policy, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. OpenAI is also looking to set up a local team in India. People familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that Jaitly has been helping OpenAI navigate the Indian policy […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI’s recent drama hasn’t only caught UK regulators’ attention. Bloomberg reported Friday that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is looking into Microsoft’s investment in the Sam Altman-led company and whether it violates US antitrust laws. FTC Chair Lina Khan wrote in a New York Times op-ed earlier this year that “the expanding adoption of AI risks further locking in the market dominance of large incumbent technology firms.”Bloomberg’s report stresses that the FTC inquiry is preliminary, and the agency hasn’t opened a formal investigation. But Khan and company are...
Google’s AI note-taking app is now available to all users in United States who are at least 18 years old, the company announced on Friday. The experimental app is also getting a slew of new features and starting to use Gemini Pro, Google’s new large language model, to “help with document understanding and reasoning.” Once […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Yesterday, X began rolling out Grok, the “rebellious” AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI startup, to Premium+ subscribers on X’s platform. Today, Musk says that Grok’s rollout to all U.S. Premium+ subscribers is now complete, but cautioned that the beta would face many issues, though it would be steadily improved. He also offered a […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google’s NotebookLM, a note-taking app that’s infused with a large language model, is now available to everyone in the US. The company built NotebookLM to only pull information from a custom dataset. So you might use it, for instance, to help write a paper based on a specific set of PDFs and only rely on details from those documents.The idea is that, by sticking to a custom dataset, the information NotebookLM handles will always be relevant to your specific needs as opposed to a more general chatbot that might draw from the entirety of the public internet. Google debuted NotebookLM as...
Illustration: The Verge NotebookLM, Google’s experimental AI-powered note-taking app, is now widely available in the US. It’s also getting several new features and is “starting” to use Google’s Gemini Pro AI model “to help with document understanding and reasoning,” according to the company.NotebookLM can already do things like summarize the documents you import into the app, come up with key points, and even answer questions about your note-taking sources. But now, Google is adding a way to transform your notes into other types of documents, too. Once you select all the notes you...
Surveys have become an integral part of many aspects of our lives, but most of them are tedious, leading to ineffective responses and actions. Dinghan Shen and Yuan Xue, two software engineers working in Silicon Valley, recognized an opportunity to leverage the breakthroughs brought by large language models to make surveys more empathetic and engaging. […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The problem of alignment is an important one when you’re setting AI models up to make decisions in matters of finance and health. But how can you reduce biases if they’re baked into a model from biases in its training data? Anthropic suggests asking it nicely to please, please not discriminate or someone will sue […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Grok, a ChatGPT competitor developed by xAI, Elon Musk’s AI startup, has officially launched on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. Grok began rolling out late this afternoon to X Premium Plus subscribers in the U.S., “Premium Plus” being X’s plan that costs $16 per month for ad-free access to the social network. Longtime […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Google Google just announced Gemini, its most powerful suite of AI models yet, and the company has already been accused of lying about its performance. An op-ed from Bloomberg claims Google misrepresented the power of Gemini in a recent video. Google aired an impressive “what the quack” hands-on video during its announcement earlier this week, and columnist Parmy Olson says it seemed remarkably capable in the video — perhaps too capable.The six-minute video shows off Gemini’s multimodal capabilities (spoken conversational prompts combined with image recognition, for example...
Google’s new Gemini AI model is getting a mixed reception after its big debut yesterday, but users may have less confidence in the company’s tech or integrity after finding out that the most impressive demo of Gemini was pretty much faked. A video called “Hands-on with Gemini: Interacting with multimodal AI” hit a million views […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With the news that Microsoft’s Copilot is getting OpenAI’s latest models and a new code interpreter, it’s clear the battle over the future of AI is increasingly being fought at the developer and engineering level. If you can get developers hooked on “your” AI Copilot, then you will be able to better sell into that […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Avail is tackling one of the many time-consuming tasks in film and TV development: script coverage. The new ChatGPT-powered summarization tool is designed to summarize scripts and books within minutes, producing detailed summaries, loglines, synopses, character breakdowns and tonal assessments. Avail also built a Q&A assistant to help production companies and talent agencies brainstorm ideas […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
This week, Google took the wraps off of Gemini, its new flagship generative AI model meant to power a range of products and services including Bard, Google’s ChatGPT competitor. In blog posts and press materials, Google touted Gemini’s superior architecture and capabilities, claiming that the model meets or exceeds the performance of other leading gen […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Josh Claman Contributor Share on X Josh Claman is the CEO of Accelsius, makers of direct-to-chip, two-phase cooling technology. An advocate for the power of transformative technology throughout his 30-year career, Mr. Claman has grown and repositioned businesses at Dell, NCR and AT&T. Most of the world’s top-valued private companies are software companies. That’s not surprising — innovations in AI, social […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A new company, Rhythms, wants to help organizations improve their productivity by using AI to identify the working patterns of top-performing teams. Rhythms, which integrates with a business’ existing internal apps and platforms, identifies sets of activities — think business reviews, retrospectives and cross-functional meetings — that happen on a regular schedule or cadence. Leveraging […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The United States has long had an affordable housing crisis, but it’s been exacerbated as of late by a surge in mortgage interest rates and low inventory. The problem is especially acute for lower-income families. One Portland, Maine-based startup is out to help address the problem by buying single-family homes in blighted neighborhoods, renovating them […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The young startup, started in April, creates AI workflows from natural language so no technical experience is needed.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As European Union lawmakers clock up 20+ hours of negotiating time in a marathon attempt to reach agreement on how to regulate artificial intelligence a preliminary accord on how to handle one sticky element — rules for foundational models/general purpose AIs (GPAIs) — has been agreed, according to a leaked proposal TechCrunch has reviewed. In […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google officially introduced its most capable large language model to date, Gemini. CEO Sundar Pichai said it’s the first of “a new generation of AI models, inspired by the way people understand and interact with the world.” Of course, it’s all very complex, but Google’s multimillion-dollar investment in AI has created a model more flexible than anything before it. Let’s break it down.The system has been developed from the ground up as an integrated multimodal AI. As Engadget’s Andrew Tarantola puts it, “think of many foundational AI models as groups of smaller models all...
Sarvam AI has come out of stealth mode and announced it has raised $41 million as the five-month old Indian startup races to build a suite of full-stack generative AI offerings. The $41 million funding raise is across the Seed and Series A financing rounds. Lightspeed led the rounds with participation from Khosla Ventures and […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
You can try out Gemini, Google's rival to ChatGPT, for free. It’s super easy to access right inside Bard.
Last January, AMD beat out Intel by launching its Ryzen 7040 chips, the first x86 processors to integrate a neural processing unit (NPU) for AI workloads. Intel's long-delayed Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" chips, its first to integrate an NPU, are set to arrive on December 14th. But it seems AMD can't help but remind Intel it's lagging behind: Today, AMD is announcing the Ryzen 8040 series chips, its next batch of AI-equipped laptop hardware, and it's also giving us a peak into its future AI roadmap.The Ryzen 8040 chips, spearheaded by the 8-core Ryzen 9 8945HS, are up to 1.4 times...
Acer just announced a new gaming laptop, the Nitro V 16. This computer has some serious bells and whistles, with the key takeaway being the inclusion of the just-announced AMD Ryzen 8040 Series processor. The processor has plenty of oomph for modern gaming applications, with the addition of AI technology to enable enhanced ray-traced visuals.You can spec out the laptop how you see fit, with GPU options up to the respectable NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060. This GPU features DLSS 3.5 tech and its own AI-powered ray-tracing, called Ray Reconstruction. You have your pick of two display options, with...
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta detailed a bunch of updates to its Meta AI tools today in a blog post, including some new features for its AI image generators.One that caught my eye was a tool that will let you remix AI-generated images your friends share in a Messenger or Instagram chat. The images are made with a tool Meta calls “imagine,” and the company says you’ll now be able to “reimagine” images other people make in the group chat by pressing and holding on the picture and adding a text prompt. Image: Meta Meta’s new “reimagine” tool for AI-generated images...
Vast Data, to make an obvious pun, is raising vast sums of cash. The New York-based startup, which provides a scale-out, unstructured data storage solution designed to eliminate tiered storage (i.e. setups that move data between high- and low-cost storage hardware), today announced that it secured $118 million in a Series E round led by […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Ukrainian synthetic voice startup Respeecher is finding success despite not just bombs raining down on their city, but a wave of hype that has raised up sometimes controversial competitors. A new $1M in funding should help the company add a few studios to its media and gaming clients. Respeecher is perhaps best known for being […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Alongside other AI updates announced today, Meta AI, the company’s generative AI experience, is gaining new capabilities starting today, including the ability to create new AI images when prompted as well as support for Reels. The former, a feature called “reimagine” allows users in group chats to have more fun by recreating AI images with […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Earlier this year, Meta introduced a set of AI characters, including those based on real-life celebs including the likes of Paris Hilton, Mr. Beast, Kendall Jenner, Tom Brady, Charli D’Amelio, Snoop Dog, and others, which users could chat with across Meta’s apps. Today, the company announced its 28 AI characters are fully rolled out across […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Not to be outdone by Google’s Gemini launch, Meta’s rolling out a new, standalone generative AI experience on the web, Imagine with Meta, that allows users to create images by describing them in natural language. Similar to OpenAI’s DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, Imagine with Meta, which is powered by Meta’s existing Emu image generation […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple, which many had considered very conservative in its approach to AI, quietly released frameworks and model libraries designed to run on its chips and maybe bring generative AI apps to MacBooks. The company’s machine learning research team released MLX, a machine learning framework where developers can build models that run efficiently on Apple Silicon and deep learning model library MLX Data. Both are accessible through open-source repositories like GitHub and PyPI. According to Apple on GitHub, frameworks like PyTorch, Jax, and ArrayFire...
New Mexico is the latest jurisdiction to accuse Meta of failing to protect younger users. The state attorney general's office filed suit against the company this week after investigators set up test accounts on Instagram and Facebook in which they claimed to be preteens or teenagers. They used AI-generated profile photos for the accounts. The AG's office asserts that the accounts were barraged by explicit messages and images, along with sexual propositions from users. It also claimed that Meta's algorithms recommended sexual content to the test accounts.The suit claims that “Meta has allowed...
Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Google is bringing some sophisticated new AI smarts to the Pixel 8 Pro today, but it’s not stopping there. The company is also rolling out its December feature drop for Pixel hardware, which includes two big software features for the 8 Pro — but plenty of new tricks for other devices as well. Video Boost, which is exclusive to Google’s larger-size flagship, will be available starting today. It “uploads your videos to the cloud where our computational photography models adjust color, lighting, stabilization and graininess,” according to Google’s...
Google Bard, the company’s generative AI chatbot and ChatGPT rival, is getting am update today that the company claims will significantly enhance its capabilities. The company says Bard will now be powered by Gemini, Google’s newest and most advanced AI model, giving the chatbot more advanced reasoning, planning, understanding, and other capabilities. Gemini comes in […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI's spot atop the generative AI heap may be coming to an end as Google officially introduced its most capable large language model to date on Wednesday, dubbed Gemini 1.0. It's the first of “a new generation of AI models, inspired by the way people understand and interact with the world,” CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a Google blog post.“Ever since programming AI for computer games as a teenager, and throughout my years as a neuroscience researcher trying to understand the workings of the brain, I’ve always believed that if we could build smarter machines, we could harness...
Google’s long-promised, next-gen generative AI model, Gemini, has arrived. Sort of. The version of Gemini launching this week, Gemini Pro, is essentially a lightweight offshoot of a more powerful, capable Gemini model set to arrive… sometime next year. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Yesterday in a virtual press briefing, members of the Google DeepMind […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google today announced the launch of its new Gemini large language model (LLM) and with that, the company also launched its new Cloud TPU v5p, an updated version of its Cloud TPU v5e, which launched into general availability earlier this year. A v5p pod consists of a total of 8,960 chips and is backed by […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Pixel 8 Pro will now become the first Android smartphone to be powered by Google’s next-generation AI model, Gemini, starting today, the company announced. Gemini Nano, a version of the model designed for running on-device, as on smartphones, will now leverage Google’s Tensor G3 to deliver two Pixel 8 Pro features, Summarize in Recorder […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
An MIT spinoff co-founded by robotics luminary Daniela Rus aims to build general-purpose AI systems powered by a relatively new type of AI model called a liquid neural network. The spinoff, aptly named Liquid AI, emerged from stealth this morning and announced that it’s raised $37.5 million — substantial for a two-stage seed round — […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A recent report from Pitchbook shows that 'mega-deals' could be inflating AI startup funding totals, giving a misleading picture of the sector's health.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Jimmy Stewart can now send you off to a blissful night's rest with a Calm bedtime story. The mindfulness app is known for its Sleep Stories, read by celebrities including Harry Styles and Idris Elba, to help users drift off to dreamland. To revive Stewart's iconic voice Calm has collaborated with AI company Respeecher. The new It’s a Wonderful Sleep Story, which Calm has dubbed “a heartwarming new holiday tale,” is now available for Premium subscribers.Stewart starred in several major films (including It’s a Wonderful Life) and was known for his signature drawl and calming voice. Tina...
Elon Musk is looking to raise one forty-fourth of a Twitter for his AI company, xAI. In other words, the man behind Tesla, SpaceX and X is seeking $1 billion in funding for his next venture. According to an SEC filing, Musk has raised about $135 million so far from four unnamed investors, with the […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images xAI — the AI company founded by Elon Musk — seeks to raise up to $1 billion in equity investments, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (as spotted by CoinDesk). The company has raised $134.7 million so far.Founded in April, xAI is Musk’s attempt at jumping on the AI hype train. The company’s purpose is to “understand the true nature of the universe,” according to its website, something the launch of its Grok AI chatbot is apparently supposed to further. Grok pulls real-time information from X (...
Illustration: The Verge Microsoft is readying a new Bing feature that should take the hassle out of coming up with your own AI prompt. The GPT-4-powered capability, called Deep Search, takes your Bing query and expands on it, allowing the search engine to find answers about several topics related to your question on the web.As an example, Microsoft shows how Bing turns a vague search for “how do points systems work in Japan” into a detailed prompt that asks Bing to:Provide an explanation of how various loyalty card programs work in Japan, including the benefits, requirements, and...
Amazon has been No. 1 in the cloud for years but now finds itself playing catch-up to Microsoft when it comes to AI.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The year’s coming to a close, but there’s still plenty of time for more AI news. Microsoft just announced its Copilot AI chatbot is integrating with OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4 Turbo, and the image generator DALL-E 3, among other upgrades. This should drastically improve the overall functionality of the service, just in time for its one-year anniversary/birthday. Wait, do AI chatbots have birthdays?First up, there’s OpenAI’s latest and greatest large language model. GPT-4 Turbo integration will allow Copilot users to tackle complex tasks that would cause previous iterations of the...
Technology alone isn’t a sustainable moat for AI products, especially with the barrier to entry only continuing to go down.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We're seeing a lot of folks push their capital into just a few squares on the betting table. One way or another, the result is going to be notable.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
When Respell founder Matthew Rastovac was in high school, he did an internship where his job was to copy information from a government website into a spreadsheet. It was mind-numbing work, so being an enterprising young man, he wrote some code to automate the task. These days, his company helps non-technical employees take advantage of […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Israeli startup Mine made a name for itself a few years ago with a tool designed for consumers to quickly run an audit of their data privacy situation. One scan of your inbox using AI and specifically natural language processing, and Mine can triangulate which companies have access to your personal data, and then let […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The sleep and meditation app Calm released a new story featuring the late actor’s signature drawl — or a computer-generated version of it.
Kyron Learning, an AI-based learning startup, announced today its $14.6 million Series A funding round plus a $850,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The new capital will further develop the platform’s generative AI capabilities and build out its K-12 math curriculum. Today, the company is opening the platform up to all organizations […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta, on an open source tear, wants to spread its influence further and wider in the ongoing battle for AI mindshare. This morning, the social network announced that it’s teaming up with IBM, whose audience is decidedly more corporate and enterprise, to launch the AI Alliance, a industry body to support “open innovation” and “open […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Around a year ago, TechCrunch wrote about a little-known company developing AI-accelerating chips to face off against hardware from titans of industry — e.g. Nvidia, AMD, Microsoft, Meta, AWS and Intel. Its mission at the time sounded a little ambitious — and still does. But to its credit, the startup, EnCharge AI, is alive and […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On their way to building fully-autonomous vehicles, self-driving car makers are facing a tall task: training their AIs to be able to respond reliably to any and all scenarios that a car, truck or bus might encounter as well as, or hopefully better, than a human would. Today, a startup with a platform to help […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The UK’s Internet regulator has set out draft guidance for how porn sites will need to meet a newly introduced hard legal requirement to prevent children accessing adult content. So, yep, those years-in-the-making British age checks for porn sites are finally on the way. The watchdog intends this kind of bared flesh to be safety […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Verge A UK court ruled a lawsuit from Getty Images against Stable Diffusion creator Stability AI can move on to trial, finding merit in Getty’s insistence that its copyrighted material was used to train AI models. The Business and Property Courts of England and Wales under the High Court of Justice ruled on Friday, determining Getty’s claim that the startup used its copyrighted library of images to train the Stable Diffusion model should be investigated further. Stability argued the case should not be heard in a UK court because it said no one involved in the training or development of...
Mastercard is launching a new generative AI shopping tool called “Shopping Muse” that is designed to help users get personalized product recommendations. The tool is powered by Dynamic Yield, a personalization company that was acquired by Mastercard in April 2022. Mastercard says the idea behind Shopping Muse is to “revolutionize how customers search for and […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge OpenAI may be chasing after enterprise users, but some of its executives warn people not to expect the technology to change their businesses quickly. OpenAI chief operating officer Brad Lightcap said in an interview with CNBC that one of the more overhyped parts of artificial intelligence is that “in one fell swoop, [it] can deliver substantive business change.”Lightcap said companies have approached OpenAI expecting generative AI to solve many problems, dramatically cut costs, and bring back growth if they’re struggling. He said that while AI could improve more...
Few would disagree that 2023 was, in the world of technology at least, dominated by artificial intelligence. The dictionaries have taken note in their “word of the year” lists, and notably all the AI-related words they highlight are, in fact, existing words that have been appropriated and regurgitated with new meanings. A little on the […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft's Seeing AI app is available on Android devices for the first time starting today. You can download it from the Google Play Store. The aim of the free app is to help blind and low-vision folks understand more of the world around them with the assistance of their smartphone's cameras and AI-powered narration. Microsoft says the Android app uses the company's latest advances in generative AI and it has the same features as the iOS version. Given that there are more than 3 billion Android users around the world, the app could help improve the quality of life of many people.Seeing AI's...
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the weekend and what’s making headlines early in the week. And we had a lot to […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and AI startup Hugging Face collaborated to see the carbon footprint of all those whimsical AI images we’ve generated over the last few years. They discovered that creating an image using artificial intelligence uses the same energy as charging a smartphone. Generating text, whether a conversation with a chatbot or cleaning up an essay, predictably requires much less energy. The researchers examined 13 tasks, ranging from summarization to text classification, and measured the carbon dioxide produced per every 1,000 grams.The researchers urge machine...
Google has canceled its Gemini launch events scheduled for next week and now plans to launch its GPT-4 competitor in January, according to The Information. The company teased Gemini at I/O 2023, touting it then as a foundational model with “impressive multimodal capabilities” early in its training.Google initially planned to debut it before the end of the year in an unusually timed launch between the holidays — which it didn’t publicly announce — but sources told The Information that Gemini was struggling with non-English queries, prompting CEO Sundar Pichai to delay its release...
The people who were most afraid of the risks of artificial intelligence decided they should be the ones to build it. Then distrust fueled a spiraling competition.
OpenAI is pushing the launch of its GPT store to early 2024, according to an email seen by The Verge. The company introduced its GPT Builder tool in early November at its first developer conference, giving subscribers an easy way to create their own custom AI bots. At the time, OpenAI also said it would soon release a GPT Store for users to list their GPTs and potentially make money from them. It was initially slated for a November launch. But, with the surprise ouster of OpenAI’s since-reinstated CEO Sam Altman, the month didn’t quite pan out as planned.“In terms of what’s next, we are...
For years, dedicated Star Trek fans have been using AI in an attempt to make a version of the acclaimed series Deep Space 9 that looks decent on modern TVs. It sounds a bit ridiculous, but I was surprised to find that it’s actually quite good — certainly good enough that media companies ought to […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
For the next few weeks, TechCrunch’s robotics newsletter Actuator will be running Q&As with some of the top minds in robotics. Subscribe here for future updates. Part 1: CMU’s Matthew Johnson-Roberson Part 2: Toyota Research Institute’s Max Bajracharya and Russ Tedrake This time it’s Dhruv Batra, research director, FAIR (The Fundamental AI Research) at Meta. […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI’s app store for AI, the GPT Store, will not launch this year as previously announced, but rather on an unspecified date in early 2024, the company said. The delay is almost certainly due to the leadership shakeup that occurred in November, just after the initial announcement. The news was first reported by Axios, which […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Remember a year ago, all the way back to last November before we knew about ChatGPT, when machine learning was all about building models to solve for a single task like loan approvals or fraud protection? That approach seemed to go out the window with the rise of generalized LLMs, but the fact is generalized […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We're going to put the deck Scalestack used to raise its $1M seed round under the microscope to see what it got right, and where it could have done better.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Researchers at the AI startup Hugging Face collaborated with Carnegie Mellon University and discovered that generating an image using artificial intelligence, whether it's to create stock images or realistic ID photos, has a carbon footprint equivalent to charging a smartphone. However, researchers discern that generating text, whether it be to create a conversation with a chatbot or clean up an essay, requires much less energy than generating photos. The researchers quantify that AI-generated text takes up as much energy as charging a smartphone to only 16 percent of a full charge.The...
A Paris-based startup called Capsule wants to transform the way users seek out their daily news. Instead of offering a standard news aggregator experience, Capsule’s mission is to become the “Spotify for news” by combining AI technology and human editorial curation to provide a news reading experience that transforms news articles, newsletter snippets, and even […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In iA Writer’s traditional minimalist interface, AI text shows up in grey, while your own words an in black. | Image: iA Writer iA Writer 7, the latest version of the minimalist multi-platform writing software, has a new feature that’s designed to clearly mark text contributed by generative AI systems like ChatGPT. While your own words appear in black, you can choose for AI-generated text copied into your iA document to be greyed out. Then, as you tweak and edit the AI additions you can easily keep track of how much text is your original work and how much is artificially generated.In its...
Yesterday in Helsinki, this editor interviewed four of the six general partners at Benchmark, the nearly 30-year-old, Silicon Valley firm that’s known for some notable bets (Uber, Dropbox), paying each general partner exactly the same way, and for continuing to raise similar-size funds over its many years rather than balloon in size. We were speaking […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Smartphone sales will mount a comeback starting in 2024, defying growing warnings of a prolonged slump across the mobile sector, according to separate projections by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley reviewed by TechCrunch. Morgan Stanley’s report predicts global smartphone shipments will rebound by nearly 4% in 2024 and by 4.4% in 2025, shrugging off comparisons […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Autonomous drones are rapidly changing combat. Anduril’s new one aims to gain an edge with jet power and AI.
Wombo, the makers of viral AI-generated art app Dream by Wombo, is back with another new AI-powered app called Wombo Me. The new AI avatar app from the Canadian startup lets you turn a single selfie into multiple lifelike avatars. Although there are several popular AI avatar apps already on the market, like Lensa AI, Wombo […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Biden White House recently enacted its latest executive order designed to establish a guiding framework for generative artificial intelligence development — including content authentication and using digital watermarks to indicate when digital assets made by the Federal government are computer generated. Here’s how it and similar copy protection technologies might help content creators more securely authenticate their online works in an age of generative AI misinformation.A quick history of watermarkingAnalog watermarking techniques were first developed in Italy in 1282. Papermakers...
It’s officially been one year since ChatGPT launched, taking the world by storm as the research preview turned into an everyday tool that brought AI chatbot technology to mainstream users. A large part of that effort was driven by the release of the ChatGPT mobile app, whose May 2023 launch on iOS put the chatbot […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google is rolling out a string of updates for the Messages app, including the ability to customize the colors of the text bubbles and backgrounds. So, if you really want to, you can have blue bubbles in your Android messaging app. You can have a different color for each chat, which could help prevent you from accidentally leaking a secret to family or friends.With the help of on-device Google AI (meaning you'll likely need a recent Pixel device to use this feature), you can transform photos into reactions with Photomoji. All you need to do is pick a photo, decide which object (or person or...
Over the course of two months from its debut in November 2022, ChatGPT exploded in popularity, from niche online curio to 100 million monthly active users — the fastest user base growth in the history of the Internet. In less than a year, it has earned the backing of Silicon Valley’s biggest firms, and been shoehorned into myriad applications from academia and the arts to marketing, medicine, gaming and government.In short ChatGPT is just about everywhere. Few industries have remained untouched by the viral adoption of the generative AI’s tools. On the first anniversary of its release...
NASA and IBM have teamed up to build an AI foundation model for weather and climate applications. They’re combining their respective knowledge and skills in the Earth science and AI fields, respectively, for the model, which they say should offer “significant advantages over existing technology.”Current AI models such as GraphCast and Fourcastnet are already generating weather forecasts more quickly than traditional meteorological models. However, IBM notes those are AI emulators rather than foundation models. As the name suggests, foundation models are the base technologies that power...
Noah Berger Amazon wants users to evaluate AI models better and encourage more humans to be involved in the process. During the AWS re: Invent conference, AWS vice president of database, analytics, and machine learning Swami Sivasubramanian announced Model Evaluation on Bedrock, now available on preview, for models found in its repository Amazon Bedrock. Without a way to transparently test models, developers may end up using ones that are not accurate enough for a question-and-answer project or one that is too large for their use case. “Model selection and evaluation is not just done at the...
From left to right: Conrad Kramer, Kim Beverett, and Ari Weinstein of Software Applications Incorporated. AI chatbots like ChatGPT have, to date, been fairly impersonal, existing outside of the apps and data that we use every day. A new startup by three ex-Apple employees called Software Applications Incorporated hopes to change that.The company’s CEO, Ari Weinstein, is a repeat founder, having sold his last startup, the iOS automation app Workflow, to Apple in 2017 alongside co-founder and CTO Conrad Kramer. This time, the two have been joined by Kim Beverett, a 10-year Apple vet who was...
Why draw the pixel cat in MS Paint when Cocreator can just make it for you? | Image: Microsoft Microsoft is officially launching its Cocreator image-generating AI feature within the Paint app for Windows 11. The new integrated text-to-image generator, powered by OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 model, was previously available only to Windows Insiders. As Windows Central points out, the new Cocreator button in Microsoft Paint has now been widely released, giving all users the ability to enter a description of something they’re visualizing and get three generated images to choose between.While the image...
There’s been a debate of sorts in AI circles about which database is more important in finding truthful information in generative AI applications: graph or vector databases. AWS decided to leave the debate to others by combining the best of both capabilities in a new service announced today at AWS re:Invent called Neptune Analytics. Swami […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon’s launching a privacy-preserving service that lets AWS customers deploy “lookalike” AI models trained for one-off company-company collaborations. Called Clean Rooms ML — an offshoot of AWS’ existing Clean Rooms product — the service removes the need for AWS customers to share data with their partners to build, train and deploy AI models. “With Clean […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon is releasing an image generator — joining the ranks of the many, many other tech giants and startups that have already done so. During a keynote at its re:Invent conference this morning, Amazon debuted Titan Image Generator, which is now available in preview for AWS customers. Titan Image Generator, a part of Amazon’s Titan […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Generative AI companies continue to raise huge amounts of capital to fuel their commercial — and, in some cases, open source — ambitions. See Together, a startup creating open source generative AI and AI model dev infrastructure, which today announced that it closed a $102.5 million Series A funding round led by Kleiner Perkins with […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AWS CEO Adam Selipsky | Noah Berger Amazon’s cloud business AWS launched a chat tool called Amazon Q, where businesses can ask questions specific to their companies.Announced during a keynote speech by AWS CEO Adam Selipsky at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Q acts like an AI assistant where users can ask questions about their businesses using their data. For example, employees can query Amazon Q on the company’s latest guidelines for logo usage or understand another engineer’s code to maintain an app. Q can surface the information instead of the employee sifting through dozens of documents. Users...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon has shared some new AI-focused offerings at its annual AWS conference. Continue reading…
The rise of generative AI opens up a massive new market for the large cloud providers, but it’s also a bit of a reset. Unlike the rise of containers, for example, generative AI is an entirely new market. Some players who have long lagged behind in the overall cloud market — like Google — are […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon is launching an AI-powered chatbot for AWS customers called Q. Announced during a keynote at Amazon’s re:Invent conference today, Q can answer questions like “how do I build a web application with AWS.” Trained on 17 years’ worth of AWS knowledge, it’ll offer a list of potential solutions along with reasons why you might […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It’s a tough day for Dataminr, the New York-based big data unicorn last valued at $4.1 billion. TechCrunch has learned that the company — which AI and big data algorithms to provide predictive insights about news and other global events, is laying off about 20% of staff today, or around 150 people. It cites the […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Generative AI has been the trend to watch. It's transforming the software paradigm and unleashing previously unimaginable opportunities.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo illustration by Alex Parkin / The Verge The co-founder of website builder Wix is embracing generative AI, and he’s not too worried that it might destroy the business models of the web. Continue reading…
The generative AI hype hasn’t died down yet. Case in point, Pika Labs, a startup creating an AI-powered platform to edit and generate videos from captions and still images, today announced that it raised $55 million in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Homebrew, Conviction Capital, SV Angel, Ben’s Bites […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Many legal tech startups streamline manual workflow for lawyers, and some legal tech companies provide tech solutions centered around intellectual property (IP). Among them is a startup called Solve Intelligence, which builds AI software specialized for patent attorneys to write drafts for IP analysis and generation. Solve Intelligence, a Delaware-based legal tech startup, has raised […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images AWS added new languages to its Amazon Transcribe product, offering generative AI-based transcription for 100 languages and a slew of new AI capabilities for customers. Announced during the AWS re: Invent event, Amazon Transcribe can now recognize more spoken languages and spin up a call transcription. AWS customers use Transcribe to add speech-to-text capabilities to their apps on the AWS Cloud. The company said in a blog post that Transcribe trained on “millions of hours of unlabeled audio data from over 100 languages” and uses self-...
Biotech and AI startup Cradle is finding success with its generative approach to protein design, landing big customers and a hefty $24 million of new investment. The company exited stealth a little over a year ago, just as the hype around large language models was really heating up. Many AI companies in biotech train models […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Cyber Monday is upon us, but the hottest deals in town are at the AI Garage Sale, where you can try to convince an AI to sell you some worthless junk (or, a PS5) for any given price. AI Garage Sale is a surprisingly functional internet gag from Brain, a small Los Angeles based art […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: The Verge Sports Illustrated published articles that were attributed to fake AI-generated authors, according to reporting by Futurism. The authors include “Drew Ortiz,” who’s “spent much of his life outdoors,” and “Sora Tanaka,” who is “a fitness guru, and loves to try different foods and drinks.” Futurism found the associated author headshots for sale on an AI-generated image website, and someone involved in the creation of the content told the outlet that there are “a lot” of similar fake writers. Sports Illustrated hasn’t confirmed whether the content is AI-...
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week, it was impossible to tune out — for […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Has OpenAI invented an AI technology with the potential to “threaten humanity”? From some of the recent headlines, you might be inclined to think so. Reuters and The Information first reported last week that several OpenAI staff members had, in a letter to the AI startup’s board of directors, flagged the “prowess” and “potential danger” […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
California’s Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) is preparing for its next trick: Putting guardrails on AI. The state privacy regulator, which has an important role in setting rules of the road for digital giants given how much of Big Tech (and Big AI) is headquartered on its sun-kissed soil, has today published draft regulations for how […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As organizations increasingly rely on generative AI capabilities, they will need AI security platforms to be successful. © 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A lot of the buzz these days in artificial intelligence is around generative AI and how AI is being used to accelerate software and products for consumers. Today, a AI startup called PhysicsX, co-founded by two theoretical physicists — including a Formula One engineering superstar — is emerging from stealth with a very specific focus […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular recap of the past few days in tech. The headlines have been dominated — nay, overwhelmed — by the drama unfolding at AI startup OpenAI, but plenty else happened in the half-week leading up to Thanksgiving. So much for a sleepy pre-holiday! In this edition […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Raphael Ouzan Contributor Share on X Raphael Ouzan is the founder and CEO of A.Team, a future-of-work company pioneering the world’s first AI-enabled team formation platform. More posts by this contributor A Developer’s Guide To The Wild West Of App Discovery The AI skills gap is real. A recent study from Randstad, the recruitment company, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The margin of success in Formula 1 often comes down to tiny measurements of time and distance. Drivers know the exact lines to take at corners for optimal lap times. Sometimes, though, racers will go out of bounds as they try to gain an advantage. To help officials check whether a car's wheels entirely cross the white boundary line, F1 will test an AI system.The Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), the motorsport's governing body, says it will employ Computer Vision tech at the season-closing Abu Dhabi Grand Prix this weekend. This approach uses shape analysis to...
Google has updated the Bard AI chatbot so you can have deeper and more meaningful conversations with it when it comes to YouTube videos. In its most recent experiment update log, the company has announced that it has expanded the capabilities of Bard's YouTube extension so that when it's enabled, the generative AI can "understand some video content." For example, Google said you'd be able to ask Bard how many eggs were used in a video for an olive oil cake recipe. As Android Authority suggested, you'll also likely be able to ask it for the name of specific tools in DIY videos...
Five days of chaos at OpenAI revealed weaknesses in the company’s self-governance. That worries people who believe AI poses an existential risk and proponents of AI regulation.
Google has announced that its Bard AI chatbot can now answer questions about YouTube videos. Although Bard already had the ability to analyze YouTube videos with the launch of the YouTube Extension back in September, the chatbot can now give you specific answers about queries related to the content of a video. “We’re taking the […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Bard continues to tap into Google’s constellation of services and platforms in increasingly useful ways. | Image: Google Bard, Google’s AI chatbot, has steadily been getting more useful after a lackluster introduction. Now, as noted by Android Authority, the bot’s YouTube integration is getting a handy upgrade so it can analyze individual videos to surface specific information for you — like key points or recipe ingredients — without ever pressing play. That’s potentially a hugely useful tool, but could spell more worry about generative AI for creators.To try it out, I turned Bard...
In the five days between Sam Altman’s mysterious firing and rehiring as OpenAI’s CEO, multiple companies dropped new artificial intelligence tools.
Photo by Berke Bayur/Anadolu via Getty Images In the early hours of Wednesday morning, OpenAI announced that Sam Altman is returning as CEO, following a shock firing on Friday. Over the weekend, it looked like Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman might end up at Microsoft, leading a new AI research lab. But after days of negotiation, that’s no longer the case and OpenAI has appointed a new board of directors and brought back Altman as CEO of the company.After a weekend of chaotic scenes, including hundreds of OpenAI employees threatening to quit and join Microsoft, things seem to be...
So, there were some non-profit folks up against a wall of money and influence. Guess who won?© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Microsoft is allowing Windows 10 users to try out the Copilot feature that was previously only available in Windows 11. The software giant announced last week that Copilot would be making its way to Windows 10, and now there’s a Release Preview version of the OS available for testers with Copilot baked in.Copilot in Windows 10 works very similar to how it appears in Windows 11, with a button on the right-hand side of the taskbar that lets you bring up the AI-powered chatbot to answer queries and generate text. There are some slight differences in features...
While everybody is trying to figure out how artificial intelligence can be leveraged across various industries, French startup Osium AI has found an interesting use cases for AI — research and development in materials science. Founded by Sarah Najmark and Luisa Bouneder, the startup raised a $2.6 million seed round from Y Combinator, Singular, Kima Ventures, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI introduced voice chats with ChatGPT on Android and iOS back in September, giving users the option to have actual back-and-forth conversations with the chatbot if they want to. The company only made the feature available to Plus and Enterprise subscribers back then, though, with the promise that it will eventually release it to other groups of users. Now, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman has announced on X that voice conversations on ChatGPT have started rolling out to all free users on mobile. ChatGPT Voice rolled out for all free users. Give it a try — totally changes the ChatGPT...
Sam Altman is returning to OpenAI as its chief executive, the high-profile AI startup said Wednesday, capping an intense discussion of five days following the sudden dismissal of Altman from the startup he co-founded. OpenAI, which is the most valuable U.S. startup, said it has reached an “agreement in principle” for Altman’s return. Bret Taylor, Larry […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI startups that aren’t OpenAI are plugging away this week, it’d seem — sticking to their product roadmaps even as coverage of the chaos at OpenAI dominates the airwaves. See: Stability AI, which this afternoon announced Stable Video Diffusion, an AI model that generates videos by animating existing images. Based on Stability’s existing Stable Diffusion text-to-image […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With the OpenAI drama continuing to deliver exciting headlines on the company’s uncertain future, Thanksgiving week is anything but slow.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Three OpenAI board members stepped down earlier this year within months of each other — yet the startup didn’t line up replacements. One of the current members, former Facebook CTO and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, launched an AI chatbot platform, Poe, that leverages — but also competes — with OpenAI products. And two members, Tasha […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Founders of a new community-powered product creation platform, Off/Script, are making a huge bet on AI-designed merchandise. Created by Jonathan Brun and Justine Massicotte, the company today announced the official launch of its mobile app, allowing anyone to conceptualize, share, and monetize product mock-ups for a chance to make the concept a reality. Creators can […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Shortly after X announced its plans to test a three-tiered subscription service, X owner Elon Musk teased that his new AI chatbot, xAI’s Grok, would be part of the top-tier subscription, X Premium+. Now we’re getting a first look at what Grok may look like when launched inside the X app, courtesy of new screenshots […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Chris Ackerson Contributor Share on X Chris Ackerson is vice president of Product at AlphaSense where his team applies the latest innovations in artificial intelligence to the information discovery challenges of investment professionals and other knowledge workers. Since the launch of ChatGPT, I can’t remember a meeting with a prospect or customer where they didn’t […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
“Here, The Doors Don’t Know Me” by Mohamed Mahdy (pictured) was the winning Open Format entry in 2023. | Image: Mohamed Mahdy / Magnum Foundation / World Press Photo Foundation The World Press Photo Contest has updated its entry rules to exclude submissions for AI-generated imagery, just days after announcing that such images could be entered into its Open Format competition category. The World Press Photo Foundation initially said it would welcome AI-generated submissions — a decision met with immediate backlash from photojournalists who said allowing artificially created images into a...
In interviews on CNBC and Bloomberg TV tonight, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made it clear that it’s possible Sam Altman, who was fired from his role as CEO at OpenAI by the AI startup’s board of directors on Friday, could return to OpenAI in some capacity. That’s despite the fact that Altman announced this morning […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It may be difficult for just any company to court OpenAI employees even if compensation packages are eye-poppingly high because of loyalty to Sam Altman. © 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Getty Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced late last night that former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman were both joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team, an announcement that sent Microsoft’s stock price soaring. Now, less than 24 hours later, following The Verge reporting that Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO, Nadella doesn’t seem so sure.“[We’re] committed to OpenAI and Sam, irrespective of what configuration,” said Nadella in an interview with CNBC’s Jon Fortt, adding that Microsoft “chose to explicitly...
OpenAI was never quite like other generative AI startups — or other startups period, for that matter. Its governance structure is unique and what ultimately led to the abrupt ousting of CEO Sam Altman on Friday. Even after it transitioned from a nonprofit to a “capped-profit” company in 2019, OpenAI retained an unusual structure that […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As the tech world watches Microsoft suck in top execs and AI engineering talent from OpenAI, the generative AI giant in which it already holds a minority stake worth several billion dollars, one question to consider is what, if anything, can competition regulators do about the visible flight of AI expertise and value into Microsoft’s […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI’s meltdown is likely to become the latest installment in what’s becoming a Silicon Valley tradition. It's hard to know how this will end.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Powder, AI-powered clipping software that takes highlights from gaming streams and turns them into short-form videos, will soon be able to detect shouting for gamers to create even better montages. The platform is also working on speech-to-text software so creators can get a transcript of their entire stream and search for keywords. Powder has developed […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Shark AI Ultra robot vacuum and mop combo machine is on sale for $400 via Amazon as part of a Black Friday deal. This is a discount of $300, or 43 percent, and is the lowest price we’ve ever seen for this particular model. This is a well-regarded midrange unit with plenty of functionality, including the ability to both vacuum and mop.As a matter of fact, the Shark AI Ultra topped our list of the best robot vacuums in 2023. We admired its reliable cleaning performance, the intuitive mobile app that produces accurate home maps and the inclusion of Alexa/Google Assistant voice control...
Startups are made or broken by product-market fit. Immediately before a funding round, founders know they need to show that they are growing rapidly. Throwing a bunch of money at sales and marketing can make the graph curl up and to the right, but does that represent real product-market fit? The team at VC fund […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon’s Skill Builder site. | Image: Amazon Amazon is starting to offer free educational courses on generative AI with an aim to extend “critical skills” to adults and young learners everywhere. The company’s initiative, called “AI Ready,” is an extension of current AWS-based AI skills training programs offered by Amazon but now includes eight free courses that cover AI project management and development. Amazon says 21 million people have already trained on AWS cloud computing skills through its programs, and it hopes 2 million will use its AI courses by 2025.Amazon says that...
Several political perspectives are shaping quite a lot of the work on artificial intelligence, and so we need to understand them, especially now.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The OpenAI saga continues. This morning, Ilya Sutskever, the AI startup’s chief scientist and board director, published a mea culpa of sorts on X (formerly) Twitter. Sutskever was among those who pushed to abruptly remove former Y Combinator president Sam Altman as CEO of OpenAI and demote Greg Brockman, the company’s president, from his position […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The AI hype train is going full swing. At this point, it is hard to name an industry not affected by this disruptive technology.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI may grab all the headlines, but Amazon has been quietly toiling on AI across all its divisions and even using AI-powered robots in its warehouses. Now, in a bid to attract new talent, the company is launching a free program called "AI Ready," with the aim of providing generative AI training to two million people globally by 2025. Consisting of eight free courses, the classes will be available through Amazon's learning website and offered to non-Amazon employees as well. They'll teach people AI skills including the generative AI technology that powers ChatGPT and other language...
Photo by Lawrence Sumulong/Getty Images OpenAI has a third CEO in three days: Emmett Shear. After a shock firing of former CEO Sam Altman on Friday, Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear is officially taking over as interim CEO of OpenAI. The Information first revealed Shear’s appointment on Sunday night. The official announcement comes just an hour after Microsoft confirmed it had hired Sam Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman to form a new advanced AI research team.“Today I got a call inviting me to consider a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to become the interim CEO of OpenAI,” says...
In another twist on the OpenAI saga that raged over the weekend, Microsoft has swooped in and hired Sam Altman and Greg Brockman just after OpenAI confirmed Altman's firing, CEO Satya Nadella announced in a post on X. The pair, along with colleagues are joining Microsoft "to lead a new advanced AI research team." Nadella added that Microsoft "remain[s] committed to our partnership with OpenAI," but the move looks a giant hedge on that bet. It also means the much of OpenAI's talent may be moving to Microsoft, which may stall the latter's progress with its widely-used ChatGPT product...
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Microsoft is hiring former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman. Altman was fired from OpenAI on Friday, after the board said it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.” After a weekend of negotiations to potentially bring Altman back to OpenAI, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced both Sam Altman and Greg Brockman will be joining Microsoft’s new advanced AI research team.“We’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to...
Sam Altman and Greg Brockman and many of their former OpenAI colleagues will join Microsoft, the software conglomerate’s chief Satya Nadella said Monday, capping an intense three days discussion following the sudden departure of the AI startup’s executives. At Microsoft, the former OpenAI members will lead a “new advanced AI research team,” Nadella said in […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. If you want to receive The Interchange directly in your inbox every Sunday, head here to sign up! This week, we dig into spend management companies’ AI aspirations, and one U.K. fintech’s recent growth. AI ambitions At one […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta has reportedly broken up its Responsible AI (RAI) team as it puts more of its resources into generative artificial intelligence. The Information broke the news today, citing an internal post it had seen. According to the report, most RAI members will move to the company’s generative AI product team, while others will work on Meta’s AI infrastructure. The company regularly says it wants to develop AI responsibly and even has a page devoted to the promise, where the company lists its “pillars of responsible AI,” including accountability...
Pippin Title uses AI to help its customers navigate the fragmented world of property titles into one digital space.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
“The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” the company said in a statement.
“The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” the company said in a statement.
Amazon is sacking employees in its Alexa division even as it prepares to upgrade Alexa to be as smart as modern AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT. The move will impact several hundred employees in the US, Canada, and India, according to an internal email sent on Friday.“As we continue to invent, we’re shifting some of our efforts to better align with our business priorities, and what we know matters most to customers — which includes maximizing our resources and efforts focused on generative AI,” wrote Daniel Bausch, Amazon’s vice president of Alexa and Fire TV in the email, first...
Is the App Store still a source for new technology innovations or has AI development become the hotter new tech to build for these days? We pondered this question this week when Apple unveiled its iPhone App of the Year finalists, which surprisingly included a trio of longtime favorites — hiking app AllTrails, language learning […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
How exactly does this thing show me a funny cat picture so I can momentarily escape the drudgery of a visit to the DMV? | Image: Humane Last week, Humane debuted its AI Pin as a phone replacement without a screen. You interact with it through voice, and a tiny projector displays things like media controls and incoming calls on the palm of your hand. The idea is to allow you to simply move through the world, unencumbered by digital devices constantly demanding your attention. To wear the AI Pin is to live in a world beyond screens.It’s a beautiful vision that I’d love to buy into. But here...
Discord is pulling the plug on its AI chatbot, Clyde, less than a year after it was first introduced. Clyde’s support page has been updated with a note alerting users that the bot will be deactivated at the end of this month. The platform announced Clyde back in March, describing it as an experimental feature. It’s powered by OpenAI technology.“By December 1, 2023, users will no longer be able to invoke Clyde in DMs, Group DMs or server chats,” according to the note. Clyde was intended to act as an AI helper that could be accessed right within the server. Users could also converse with...
This morning at Scaleway’s ai-PULSE conference, French billionaire and Iliad CEO Xavier Niel gave some extra details about his plans for an AI research lab based in Paris. This new lab called Kyutai will be a privately-funded nonprofit working on artificial general intelligence. It will work with PhD students, postdocs and researchers on research papers […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Ehsan Vaghefi, CEO and co-founder of Toku, grew up with a blind father who lost eyesight at the age of four due to congenital glaucoma. As a result of this, his dad was involved with the Blind Foundation in his home country of Iran. Vaghefi says most of his childhood friends were either blind or […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft’s Ignite 2023 event came with a lot of updates, and AI product reveals and expansions were front and center as the company laid out its updated vision for IT professionals. As our own Devin Coldewey wrote in October, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has made it clear that the company is all-in on AI, and […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Divisions over how to set rules for applying artificial intelligence are complicating talks between European Union lawmakers trying to secure a political deal on draft legislation in the next few weeks, as we reported earlier this week. Key among the contested issues is how the law should approach upstream AI model makers. French startup Mistral […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Menlo Ventures has raised $1.35 billion in new capital that it plans to use in part “to support the forthcoming generation of AI startups,” the venture firm announced today. With the new funds, the firm says it has raised more than $3.8 billion across eight fund groups and distributed $5.2 billion to its LPs. The […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Like “Avengers” director Joe Russo, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that fully AI-generated movies and TV shows will be possible within our lifetimes. A host of AI unveilings over the past few months, in particular OpenAI’s ultra-realistic-sounding text-to-speech engine, have given glimpses into this brave new frontier. But Meta’s announcement today put our AI-generated content future […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Microsoft is bringing its AI-powered Copilot to Windows 10. In a surprise move, the software giant will soon release Copilot for Windows 10 to Release Preview testers, just months after signaling an end of major Windows 10 updates.“It’s a key opportunity for us to bring Copilot value to more customers,” explains Aaron Woodman, vice president of Windows marketing, in a briefing with The Verge. While Windows 10 end of support is less than two years away, Microsoft is seeking to capitalize on its AI ambitions with a base of millions of PCs that haven’t yet...
Meta says Emu Edit “precisely follows instructions” to avoid altering anything besides user-specified changes. | Image: Meta Facebook and Instagram are getting some new AI-powered creative tools that will allow users to edit their photographs and produce “high-quality videos” using text descriptions. On Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced two new capabilities built on Emu — the company’s foundation model for image generation — that are being integrated into Facebook and Instagram.The first, dubbed “Emu Edit,” will allow users to “precisely alter images based on text...
Blackshark.ai has already made a digital twin of the Earth, and its next play further democratizes the hitherto lofty (if you will) world of geospatial intelligence. Continuing the nautical theme, its Orca Huntr tool is an AI-powered tool for finding and tracking anything from orbit — and it’s so simple that a child, or even […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
An independent review of popular AI tools has found that many — including Snapchat’s My AI, DALLE, and Stable Diffusion, may not be safe for kids. The new reviews come from Common Sense Media, a nonprofit advocacy group for families that’s best known for providing media ratings for parents who want to evaluate the apps, games, podcasts, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google is opening up access to Bard, its conversational AI tool, to teens in most countries around the world. Teens who meet the minimum age requirement to manage their own Google Account will be able to access the chatbot in English, with support for more languages to come in the future. The expanded launch comes with […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
After a song using AI deepfakes of Drake and the Weeknd’s voices was taken down after becoming a viral hit, Grimes shocked the public when she tweeted that she would split 50% of the revenue with anyone who wanted to use her voice in AI-generated songs. A week later, Grimes debuted Elf.Tech, an open-source AI […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Siena AI developed an AI-powered customer support solution that might be a machine, but understands context and responds with empathy like a human.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Customer data-syncing startup Hightouch announced today it has acquired HeadsUp. As part of the deal, HeadsUp co-founder Earl Lee will join Hightouch, working on Customer 360, a product that uses AI and machine learning to help clients manage and collaborate on customer data. Terms of the deal were undisclosed. Both companies are based in San […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Back in January, Google made some waves — soundwaves, that is — when it quietly released some research on AI-based music creation software that built tunes based on word prompts. Today, its sister business Google DeepMind went several steps further: it has announced out a new music generation model called Lyria that will work in […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It doesn’t quite bring the products you’ve been imagining to life, but it’ll find you a pretty close match. | Image: Google / The Verge Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE) is behind a bunch of new shopping features that aim to help users find niche or otherwise unique products for a friend or themselves. These include using AI to generate gift ideas or fashion items you can then shop for. Google is also expanding virtual try-ons to men ahead of the holiday season.Starting today, users in the US who have already opted into SGE via Search Labs will be presented with a...
Countless aspects of generative AI have caused rampant debate, including its access to copyrighted material. Now, the vice president of audio at Stability AI, Ed Newton-Rex, has resigned due to his belief that training generative AI models using copyrighted content doesn't qualify as "fair use," he wrote in an op-ed on Music Business Worldwide. He joins the likes of artists such as Bad Bunny, who recently spoke out against a viral TikTok song that used AI to mimic his voice.Meanwhile, AI companies have steadfastly supported fair use (training models with copyrighted material without asking...
Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Google is testing new generative AI features for YouTube that’ll let people create music tracks using just a text prompt or a simple hummed tune. The first, Dream Track, already seeded to a few creators on the platform, is designed to auto-generate short 30-second music tracks in the style of famous artists. The feature can imitate nine different artists, who’ve chosen to collaborate with YouTube on its development. YouTube is also showing off new tools that can generate music tracks from a hum.The announcement comes as YouTube attempts to navigate the...
Unity is joining the rest of the gang in providing generative AI tools for its users, but has been careful (unlike some) to ensure those tools are built on a solidly non-theft-based foundation. Muse, the new suite of AI-powered tools, will start with texture and sprite generation, and graduate to animation and coding as it […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Unity just announced that its Muse AI platform is officially available as an early access build for general use. Originally unveiled back in July, Muse is a package of AI-powered tools intended to streamline the game development process, particularly for those who lack the time or patience for intensive coding. It costs $30 per month.Unity Muse is described as an “ever-expanding suite of AI-powered features” made for developers of all skill levels. The platform lets you source usable code by interacting with a chatbot. This bot will also answer any questions you may have about what to do...
Common Sense Media’s first ratings for chatbots and other AI services warn parents that AI image generators and Snapchat’s My AI chatbot may not be safe for kids.
Illustration: The Verge Google is going to allow teens to use Bard beginning Thursday, though the AI chatbot will have some guardrails in place, according to a blog post from Google’s Tulsee Doshi.Bard will be available for teens in “most countries around the world” as long as they meet Google’s minimum age requirement to be in charge of their own account, Doshi says. (For many countries, that age is 13; Google lists the exceptions in a support document.) To start, teens will only be able to use Bard in English, but Doshi says Google will add more languages “over time.”Google has a...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Adobe is working on a new audio tool designed to break apart different layers of sound within a single recording. The tool is called Project Sound Lift, and it can use AI to separate elements like applause from the sound of someone’s voice.As shown in a demo sent to The Verge, all you have to do is import an audio file into the application, then choose which sound you want the tool to filter out. There are quite a few options to choose from, including applause, laughter, alarms, speech, crowds, traffic, typing, and more. Project Sound Lift will...
Shriyash Upadhyay and Etan Ginsberg, AI researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, are of the opinion that many large AI companies are sacrificing basic research in pursuit of developing competitive, powerful AI models. The duo blame market dynamics: when companies raise substantial funds, the majority usually goes toward efforts to stay ahead of rivals rather […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Ramp and Brex have been vocal about how they believe AI will transform the way they operate and serve their customers.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Alongside a bevy of creator updates, Instagram is adding a new feature that will allow users to create custom stickers for their Reels and Stories using AI. Driven by Meta’s Segment Anything AI model, the stickers can be created by uploading your own photos or videos from your phone’s Camera Roll, or choosing from eligible […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Cameo has added a pair of timeless superstars to its stable of celebrities (a term used loosely in some cases) available for personalized video greetings. Cookie Monster and Elmo, who may or may not have fallen on hard times, will shamelessly plug their services on the six-year-old platform, offering to count to your kid’s age or rattle off words that start with the same letter as your child’s name — for $25 a pop. Perhaps that relatively low price for the Sesame Street icons is because humans don’t appear to record their voices: Cameo describes the characters as “powered by...
Image: Niantic Peridot, Niantic’s original augmented reality pet game, will start using generative AI designed to make the game’s cute technicolor aliens behave more like your cat. Here’s how it works. Starting with today’s update, Niantic’s algorithm will analyze real-world objects captured in game with your phone’s camera and then convert those objects into words to be parsed by a large language model (LLM) — in this case, a customized version of Meta’s Llama 2 program.Additionally, each pet, called Dots, will have their personality profile — which is similar to the...
At its annual Ignite conference, Microsoft today announced a slew of interesting updates for Teams, its Slack-like collaboration and messaging service. Among the dozens of updates here, some of the highlights are the initial rollout of voice isolation, an AI-driven noise reduction feature that can not just reduce repetitive noise in the background but also […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft has announced a project it has been "refining in secret for years;" Its own custom silicon in the form of two new server chips. The company unveiled the fruits of its labor at Microsoft Ignite, showing off the Azure Maia AI Accelerator and the Azure Cobalt CPU. The latter of which, at least, the company is happy to admit is ARM-based, which can still feel unthinkable to eyes so used to Microsoft and Intel's hand-in-glove dominance of the computing market. The company turned to OpenAI to receive feedback on Azure Maia and to use the company's models for testing. OpenAI CEO Sam...
Everything’s coming up Copilot — including Bing. Today at Ignite, Microsoft renamed Bing Chat, the AI-powered chatbot it launched on Bing earlier this year, to Copilot. Meanwhile, the premium, corporate-focused version of Bing Chat, which was previously called Bing Chat Enterprise, has been rebranded to Copilot Pro. Why the name changes? Not to cause confusion, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google Photos is rolling out a set of new features today that will leverage AI technologies to better organize and categorize photos for you. With the addition of something called Photo Stacks, Google will use AI to identify the “best” photo from a group of photos taken together and select it as the top pick […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Copilot, Microsoft’s brand of generative AI technologies, promises to be a big moneymaker for the company, with one analyst predicting that it could generate $10 billion in annualized revenue by 2026. Despite a staggered and somewhat confusing rollout, 40% of companies in the Fortune 100 were testing Copilot by fall, according to Microsoft CEO Satya […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
One of the more unexpected products to launch out of this year’s Microsoft Ignite conference is a tool that can create a photorealistic avatar of a person and animate that avatar saying things that the person didn’t necessarily say. Called Azure AI Speech text to speech avatar, the new feature, available in public preview as […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft and Nvidia want to help developers run and configure AI models on their Windows PCs. During the Microsoft Ignite event on Wednesday, Microsoft announced Windows AI Studio: a new hub where developers can access AI models and tweak them to suit their needs.Windows AI Studio allows developers to access development tools and models from the existing Azure AI Studio and other services like Hugging Face. It also offers an end-to-end “guided workspace setup” with model configuration UI and walkthroughs to fine-tune various small language models (...
Image: Microsoft Microsoft is adding two new AI-powered features to Teams soon that will improve your voice and webcam. A new “decorate your background” feature is coming to Microsoft Teams Premium in early 2024 and uses generative AI effects to clean up and replace clutter in the background when on a video call.While Microsoft Teams has long offered a variety of virtual backgrounds, this decoration feature will work in a real-world room, much like the augmented reality filters you find on Snapchat. It can even add plants, lights, and seasonal objects to the background behind you. We’ll...
Unified Microsoft Defender dashboard with analytics and Sentinel on the sidebar. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft is combining its Sentinel security analytics and Microsoft Defender XDR platforms into an “industry first” unified security operations platform — with the company’s Security Copilot chatbot stationed centrally for IT and security personnel to administer everything easily. During the company’s enterprise-focused Ignite conference today, Microsoft is announcing expanded conversational AI abilities to better centrally manage its security platforms.Microsoft originally announced...
Image: Microsoft Microsoft announced a plethora of changes for its Microsoft Copilot AI during Microsoft Ignite today that make the chatbot more interactive and participatory, particularly in Teams meetings. The updates expand Copilot’s role as an enterprise helper in Office apps like Teams, PowerPoint, and Outlook.Microsoft has added some flexibility to the chatbot’s output, so users can tweak it with instructions to make its formatting and tone more to their personal liking. Word and PowerPoint will get the new personalization features to start, but the company says other Microsoft 365...
In 2022, James Allen filed a copyright application for an image titled “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” or “Space Opera Theater.” While the picture had the look of a detailed sci-fi painting, Allen had actually created it through painstaking experimentation in the AI image generator Midjourney; he described using over 600 prompt variations to get the look he wanted. But the US Copyright Office wasn’t impressed. In a series of decisions, Allen’s work became one of the first copyright requests rejected specifically for using AI tools — and an example of how these tools are raising...
“Sober curious” and “mindful drinking” have become popular terms in recent years, with 47% of the U.S. adult population wanting to cut back on alcohol. Sunnyside, the app promoting healthy drinking habits, secured $11.5 million in Series A funding led by Motley Fool Ventures with major participation from Will Ventures, the company announced today. The funds will help […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Tamar Huggins created the platform with her 13-year-old daughter, and hopes to target the Black Gen Z community. © 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Adrian Aoun, CEO and co-founder of Forward Health, aims to scale healthcare. It started in 2017 with the launch of tech-forward doctor’s offices that eschewed traditional medical staffing for technology solutions like body scanners, smart sensors, and algorithms that can diagnose ailments. Now, in 2023, he’s still on the same mission and rolled up all […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge This is Hot Pod, The Verge’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more.Today we have a look at how YouTube’s new AI rules will (and will not) affect podcasting, another late-night host ditching TV for audio, and a bunch of your recs on podcasts covering the Israel-Hamas war.What do YouTube’s new AI rules mean for podcasts? Not much.This morning, YouTube released new terms regarding AI-generated content on its platform. As my Verge colleagues Mia Sato and Nilay Patel reported, the company is creating a two-tier system...
AI image generator Stable Diffusion already has a lot of fans, and now those experimenting with the new AI technology to develop their own models have a place to share their work with other enthusiasts. A startup called Civitai — a play on the word Civitas, meaning community — has created a platform where members […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Celonis, the German process mining startup with a $13 billion valuation, is taking a varied approach to AI. Like many enterprise software companies, it has been using machine learning models for a number of years, but with the rise of generative AI, it’s adding a copilot feature, announced today at Celosphere, the company’s customer conference […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Machine learning models are taking over in the field of weather forecasting, from a quick “how long will this rain last” to a 10-day outlook, all the way out to century-level predictions. The technology is increasingly important to climate scientists as well as apps and local news stations — and yet it doesn’t “understand” the […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Atlas, a 3D generative AI platform, is launching today after two years in stealth with $6 million in seed funding. The funding consists of two rounds: a $4.5M round led by 6th Man Ventures (6MV) and a $1.5M round led by Collab+Currency. The platform partners with game developers and brands to build virtual worlds in […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Negotiations between European Union lawmakers tasked with reaching a compromise on a risk-based framework for regulating applications of artificial intelligence appear to be on a tricky knife edge. Speaking during a roundtable yesterday afternoon, organized by the European Center for Not-For-Profit Law (ECNL) and the civil society association EDRi, Brando Benifei, MEP and one of […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
YouTube today announced how it will approach handling AI-created content on its platform with a range of new policies surrounding responsible disclosure as well as new tools for requesting the removal of deepfakes, among other things. The company says that, although it already has policies that prohibit manipulated media, AI necessitated the creation of new […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Q&A tries to both answer your questions and cite its sources. | Image: Notion The first killer app of AI for businesses, it appears, is a simple thing: to be able to find information in the morass of files, folders, attachments, incompatible enterprise software apps, and everything else that constitutes modern knowledge work. Notion, which aims to replace most of those things in a single tool, is launching a feature it thinks can help. It’s called Q&A, and CEO Ivan Zhao describes it to me as essentially an all-knowing AI executive assistant that knows everything about everything and...
YouTube has announced new steps to combat AI misuse and misinformation that will roll out over the coming months. The new policies address transparency in videos made using AI and the rampant issue of deepfakes. YouTube is making it "possible to request the removal of AI-generated or other synthetic or altered content that simulates an identifiable individual, including their face or voice."Individuals can submit calls for removal through YouTube's privacy request process, but the company will weigh the decision based on whether it's satire or if the person can be uniquely recognized...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube will have two sets of content guidelines for AI-generated deepfakes: a very strict set of rules to protect the platform’s music industry partners, and another, looser set for everyone else.That’s the explicit distinction laid out today in a company blog post, which goes through the platform’s early thinking about moderating AI-generated content. The basics are fairly simple: YouTube will require creators to begin labeling “realistic” AI-generated content when they’re uploading videos, and that the disclosure requirement is especially...
Giskard is a French startup working on an open-source testing framework for large language models. It can alert developers of risks of biases, security holes and a model’s ability to generate harmful or toxic content. While there’s a lot of hype around AI models, ML testing systems will also quickly become a hot topic as […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
If the savings are even half as good as Battery seems to think that they may prove, startups could be in for a more efficient, and more valuable, future.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hey, folks, and welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s newsletter covering the past week (or so) in tech industry happenings. This week marked OpenAI’s first-ever dev conference, where the Microsoft-backed AI startup announced a host of new products. But that was far from the only item of note. In this edition of WiR, we […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The short story presents a fresh take on the idea of an AI uprising.
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. If you’ve been following along with this newsletter, you’ll have noticed that I’ve been a little bit curious about AI — especially generative AI. I’m likely not the first person to make this observation, but AIs are extremely, painfully average. […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week in AI, OpenAI held the first of what […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Building AI-powered robots that can learn how to interact with the physical world will enhance all forms of repetitive work© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Calendar apps are essential for productivity but it is hard to differentiate enough to have sustained growth from just the core usage. Y Combinator-backed Superpowered, which is an AI-powered notetaker for your meetings that doesn’t involve recording bots, hit this roadblock and is now pivoting to become Vapi, an API provider so anyone can easily […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Microsoft temporarily prohibited its employees from using ChatGPT "due to security and data concerns," according to CNBC. The company announced the rule in an internal website and even blocked corporate devices from being able to access the AI chatbot. While several tech companies had prohibited — or had at least discouraged — the internal use of ChatGPT in the past, Microsoft doing the same thing was certainly curious, seeing as it's OpenAI's biggest and most prominent investor. In January, Microsoft pledged to invest $10 billion in ChatGPT's developer over the next few years after...
A few hours after this morning’s big unveil, Humane opened its doors to a handful of press. Located in a nondescript building in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, the office is home to the startup’s hardware design teams. An office next door houses Humane’s product engineers, while the electrical engineering team operates out of a third […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI is rolling out a new partnership program to collect datasets from third parties that it intends to use to train its AI models. The initiative, OpenAI Data Partnerships, will seek large-scale private and public information that it says is “not already easily accessible online to the public.” The company says the data it will collect doesn't necessarily have to be quantitative or in text formats — the program will also accept images, audio or video.Notably, the company says it's on the lookout for data on “any topic” and in “any language” so long as it “expresses...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Snapchat will soon have AR lenses that use ChatGPT. The company announced the update today at Lens Fest, its annual developer event.The new beta of Lens Studio for developers includes the ability to create filters with ChatGPT. In an example lens, Snap shows a solar system-themed filter where a user has asked, “How far away is Neptune?” Within a few seconds, the lens returns an answer to the question. The new feature could also be applied to create quizzes or randomizers, according to TechCrunch. Image: Snap Snap’s AI lenses are powered by ChatGPT...
It’s an open secret that the data sets used to train AI models are deeply flawed. Image corpora tends to be U.S.- and Western-centric, partly because Western images dominated the internet when the data sets were compiled. And as most recently highlighted by a study out of the Allen Institute for AI, the data used […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Earlier this year, GitLab unveiled Duo, a set of AI features that aim to help developers be more productive by summarizing issues and generating descriptions of epics and issues, as well as through code suggestions and vulnerability explanations, among other features. Today, the company added Duo Chat to this lineup, a ChatGPT-like experience that allows […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Wearable startup Humane AI has been dripping details about its upcoming device, the AI Pin, for months now. We firs saw it at a TED Talk in May and, more recently, got a glimpse of its promised capabilities at Paris Fashion Week, ahead of Thursday's official unveiling. However many questions regarding how the wearable AI will actually do what it says it will remain to be answered.Here's what we do know: The Humane AI Pin is a pocket-worn wearable AI assistant that can reportedly perform the tasks that many modern cellphones and digital assistants do, but in a radically different form...
It’s here. After months of hype, leaks and reveals, Humane has officially revealed the Ai Pin. The small device magnetically attaches to its wearer’s lapel, collecting data via an on-board camera. It’s powered by a Qualcomm chip and leverages AI. Humane believes that one day it could replace your smartphone. It will be available to […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The heady, futuristic world of artificial intelligence brings us a new promise: The ability to be perfectly average.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Last night, Motier Ventures held a tech meetup focused on AI startups featuring some of the most hyped tech startups in the French tech ecosystem, Dust, Finegrain, Gladia, Mistral AI and Scenario — all of them are portfolio companies of Motier Ventures. And you could feel a sense of excitement both on stage and in […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Developed by Samsung Research, Gauss (named after mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss) powers several on-device AI technologies across Samsung products. It will have a few different facets but will do a lot of the same stuff we’ve seen from other generative AI (GAI) models.Gauss Language will handle tasks like translations and summarizing documents, while Gauss Code is a coding assistant. There’s also Samsung Gauss Image for all your image-generating needs. The latter can create images based on prompts and handle edits like style changes and additions. It will be able to upscale low-...
We've already seen Google's "Live Translate" working its magic on phones calls, but to date, this feature is still exclusive to Pixel devices. If you happen to be a Samsung fan, though, chances are you may get to use a similar feature — without having to install third-party apps — early next year. According to the Korean giant, its next phone — our money's on the "Galaxy S24" family — will come with "Galaxy AI," which is "powered by both on-device AI developed at Samsung and cloud-based AI" from providers. Part of this package will include "AI Live Translate Call...
Samsung’s Galaxy S23 Ultra. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Samsung wants to make sure you know it cares about AI, too. In a new blog post, the company previewed what it calls “a new era of Galaxy AI” coming to its smartphones and detailed a forthcoming feature that will use artificial intelligence to translate phone calls in real time.“Galaxy AI is a comprehensive mobile AI experience, powered by both on-device AI developed at Samsung and cloud-based AI enabled by our open collaborations with like-minded industry leaders,” Samsung wrote in the post. “It will transform your...
Humane’s AI Pin is set to officially be revealed this Thursday. | Image: Humane Humane has been teasing its first device, the AI Pin, for most of this year. It’s scheduled to launch the Pin on Thursday, but The Verge has obtained documents detailing practically everything about the device ahead of its official launch. What they show is that Humane, the company noisily promoting a world after smartphones, is about to launch what amounts to a $699 wearable smartphone without a screen that has a $24 a month subscription fee, and which runs on a Humane-branded version of T-Mobile’s network...
Earlier this year, Mozilla acquired Fakespot, a startup that leverages AI and machine learning to identify fake and deceptive product reviews. Now, Mozilla is launching its first LLM (large language model) with the arrival of Fakespot Chat, an AI agent that will help consumers as they shop online by answering questions about the product or […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The tech-centric war in Ukraine and the success of ChatGPT have prompted new interest in figuring out how to prevent military AI from going awry.
AI startup Hugging Face offers a wide range of data science hosting and development tools, including a GitHub-like portal for AI code repositories, models and data sets, as well as web dashboards to demo AI-powered applications. But some of Hugging Face’s most impressive — and capable — tools these days come from a two-person team […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google’s AI-powered search experience is rolling out worldwide, after initial launches in select markets including the U.S., India, and Japan. Starting today, the AI-based conversational experience known as SGE, or Search Generative Experience, will be available in over 120 new countries and territories, globally. It will also support four new languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, and […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge Google is bringing its Search Generative Experience (SGE) to more than 120 new countries, including Mexico, Brazil, South Korea, Indonesia, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa, according to a blog post from Google’s Hema Budaraju. SGE will also support four new languages, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, and Indonesian, which add to its current support for English, Hindi, and Japanese.The expansion means that a lot more people can choose to mess around with SGE. You’ll still need to jump through some hoops to try it: you have to opt in via Google’s Search Labs program...
AI is already transforming the way we search, gather information, create, code, decipher data, and more, and now it may democratize the process of building an app, too. A new AI-powered startup called Sutro promises the ability to build entire production-ready apps — including those for web, iOS, and Android — in a matter of […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Observability is a bit of a buzz word in IT circles these days, but it basically involves monitoring a company’s systems, looking for issues, or trying to find the root cause of problems after they happen – and they do happen all the time, sometimes slowing down a site or application, and in the worst […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Souvik Das Contributor Souvik Das is CTO at Clearwater Analytics, a provider of SaaS-based investment management, accounting, reporting, and analytics solutions. The day ChatGPT debuted, this transformational technology captured the imaginations of business leaders and changed decision-making forever. Today’s C-suite sees incredible upside opportunities with generative AI. Set to drive a $7 trillion increase in […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI’s extremely popular ChatGPT service is currently down and non-functional for its 100 million weekly active users. The service went down just before 9AM ET, so it’s been well over an hour. OpenAI has acknowledged the outage and said that it’s also impacting the company’s API services.Instead of a working platform, ChatGPT users are greeted with a warning message that says it's “at capacity right now.” OpenAI writes in an error report that it has “identified an issue resulting in high error rates across the API and ChatGPT, and we are working on remediation.” The...
Photo Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by Dominique Charriau, Getty Images As wild as the world of Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix might seem, it all makes perfect sense in creator Adi Shankar’s mind. Continue reading…
Ozone, the maker of an AI-powered collaborative video editor in the cloud, has raised $7.1 million in seed funding and is launching in open beta. The Y Combinator alum aims to provide content creators with AI assistance that lets them complete repetitive editing tasks in seconds, rather than in hours. Ozone doesn’t want to replace […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Developers are ready to embrace AI tools, spurred by the dual promises of increased productivity and faster learning. According to one recent survey, 77% of devs feel favorably about using AI in their workflows and 70% claim to be using — or planning to use — AI coding tools this year. Investors see potential in […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
SAG-AFTRA, the union representing Hollywood performers, has reportedly responded to studios’ “last, best and final” offer to end the strike, rejecting clauses letting studios re-use AI-created likenesses of high-demand and deceased performers without consent from their estate or families. “They can’t have that loophole to exploit performers,” a union-side source told The Hollywood Reporter. “We could not allow that language to stand.”Reportedly, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) would “secure AI scans” for Schedule F performers — union members...
Facebook parent Meta is teaming up with Hugging Face and European cloud infrastructure company Scaleway to launch a new AI-focused startup program at the Station F startup megacampus in Paris. The underlying goal of the program is to promote a more “open and collaborative” approach to AI development across the French technology world. The timing […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta will require advertisers to disclose whether the ads they submit for its websites have been digitally altered, including through the use of AI tools, if they're political or social in nature. Ads that have been digitally altered will be marked as such on Meta's platforms, in the same way some advertisements come with a "Paid for" disclaimer. The company will start implementing the rule in the new year, just as the campaign period for what's expected to be a brutal and divisive 2024 US presidential elections heats up. In a blog post, Meta explained that advertisers have to...
In 2024, Meta will begin requiring advertisers running political or issue ads on its platforms to disclose when their ads are “digitally created or altered” through the use of AI. Facebook and Instagram ads about elections, politics and social issues will soon require the extra step, which advertisers will handle when they submit new ads. […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta announced Wednesday that it would require advertisers to disclose when potentially misleading AI-generated or altered content is featured in political, electoral, or social issue ads.The new rule applies to advertisements on Facebook and Instagram that contain “realistic” images, videos, or audio falsely showing someone doing something they never did or imagining a real event playing out differently than it did in reality. Content depicting realistic-looking fake people or events would also need to be disclosed. The policy is expected to go into...
Google is rolling out a new feature that allow advertisers to create AI generated content using the same technology as the Bard chatbot, confirming a report from earlier this year. The feature is now available in beta on Google's Performance Max advertising product, allowing US advertisers to create and scale text and image assets for campaigns using AI, the company announced in a blog post. Performance Max is already an AI-powered product that works across multiple Google products including Youtube, search, display and others. It optimizes ads by analyzing performance data, and the...
Very clickable good dogs. | Image: Google Google is rolling out new generative AI tools for creating ads, from writing the headlines and descriptions that appear along with searches to creating and editing the accompanying images. It’s pitching the tool for use by both advertising agencies as well as businesses without in-house creative staff. Using text prompts, advertisers can iterate on the text and images they generate until they find something they like.Google also promises that it will never generate two of the same images, which can avoid the awkward possibility that two competing...
SAG-AFTRA, the union representing Hollywood performers, has reportedly responded to studios’ “last, best and final” offer to end the strike, rejecting clauses that would let them re-use AI-created likenesses of high-demand and deceased performers without consent. The union allegedly plans to make a counter-offer that removes the current AI-related language. “They can’t have that loophole to exploit performers,” a union-side source told The Hollywood Reporter on Monday. “We could not allow that language to stand.”THR reports that The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television...
Ready to put your AI prompting skills to work for product customization? Smartphone case and accessory maker Popsockets is today introducing a clever new AI Customizer tool that will allow anyone to design their next phone accessory — including grips, cases, and wallets — via an optimized version of Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL). The company […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
While Figma waits to hear whether regulators will allow Adobe to complete its $20 billion acquisition, the startup is not sitting idly by. Today, Figma announced it was adding three generative AI features to its FigJam whiteboard tool to make it easier to get started and organize projects. FigJam is Figma’s online collaborative whiteboard that […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
FigJam AI includes three tools for now, but Figma teases there are “more to come.” | Image: Figma Figma, best known for its product design applications, has announced FigJam AI — a new suite of generative AI tools for its collaborative whiteboard service FigJam that creates ready-to-use templates for common design and planning projects. The idea is that FigJam AI can reduce the preparation time needed to manually create these collaborative whiteboard projects from scratch, leaving designers with time to concentrate on more pressing tasks.FigJam AI is available in open beta starting...
In the midst of an AI chip shortage, Microsoft wants to give a privileged few startups free access to “supercomputing” resources from its Azure cloud for developing AI models. Microsoft today announced it’s updating its startup program, Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub, to include a no-cost Azure AI infrastructure option for “high-end,” Nvidia-based GPU virtual […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration: The Verge A group of Google contract workers who helped train the company’s Bard AI chatbot and write Google Help articles voted overwhelmingly to form a union on Monday. The workers, who are contracted to work for Google through Accenture, unionized to secure better working conditions and protections.The contractors will join the Alphabet Workers Union, the labor organization that represents employees at Google and its Alphabet parent company. They first started unionization efforts in June after they were directed to work on the then-unannounced Bard chatbot. As part of their...
Can AI provide a better filesystem and workspace for personal productivity? That’s what a new startup, Fabric, launching today, aims to offer. The company has designed an AI-powered service that helps you organize your documents and other files, and works as a home for all your information that you can then query against using an […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
For almost two decades, Chris DeWolfe and Aber Whitcomb – the minds behind social network platform Myspace and gaming company Jam City — have made it their mission to be on top of the hottest tech trends. Earlier this year, the veteran tech entrepreneurs shifted their focus to the web3 and generative AI craze with […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The mass move to digital during the pandemic and the embrace of generative AI accelerated cloud adoption, and trend hasn’t reversed — on the contrary. Gartner estimates that, in 2023, global end-user spending on public clouds will reach over $599 billion, up from $421 billion in 2021 and nearly $500 billion in 2022. Not every enterprise […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Today at its first-ever developer conference, OpenAI unveiled GPT-4 Turbo, an improved version of its flagship text-generating AI model, GPT-4, that the company claims is both “more powerful” and less expensive. GPT-4 Turbo comes in two versions: one that’s strictly text-analyzing and a second version that understands the context of both text and images. The […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With new “GPTs” service, anyone can build their own chatbot and instantly share it with friends, family and the general public.
YouTube will begin to experiment with new generative AI features, the company announced today. As part of the premium package available to paid subscribers, YouTube users will be able to try out a new conversational tool that uses AI to answer questions about YouTube’s content and make recommendations, as well as try out a new […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Before making any staffing decisions, partner with your CMO to conduct focused and measurable trials of generative AI tools.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the weekend and what’s making headlines early in the week. Here’s what we got into on […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
German AI start-up Aleph Alpha has raised a Series B funding round of $500 million from a consortium of seven new investors, as well as existing investors from previous rounds. Founded in 2019, Aleph Alpha’s funding may be dwarfed by that of Microsoft-backed OpenAI ($11.3B), but the startup makes great play of the fact that […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Between open source and cloud-hosted, more proprietary solutions, there’s an abundance of AI-powered code-generating tools to choose from. So how does one choose? That’s a nuanced question. Beyond stronger performance on particular sets of programming languages or logic problems, there’s not a lot to differentiate one code-generating tool from another. But Amazon’s looking to change […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Kai-Fu Lee, the computer scientist known in the West for his bestseller AI Superpowers and in China for his bets on artificial intelligence unicorns, has a new venture — and a great ambition. In late March, Lee launched a company called 01.AI with the vision to develop a homegrown large language model for the Chinese market. […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: The Verge A new CNN report about the MSN AI model’s news aggregation kicks off with examples of questionable editorial calls, like highlighting a story claiming President Joe Biden dozed off during a moment of silence for Maui wildfire victims (he didn’t), or an obituary that inexplicably referred to an NBA player as “useless.” An editorial staff of humans probably would've spotted the problems. But Microsoft’s system, which continues to feel more like a social experiment than a helpful tool after ditching human efforts in favor of algorithms a few years ago, did not.That these...
Alex Circei Contributor Share on X Alex Circei is the CEO and co-founder of Waydev, a development analytics tool that measures engineering teams' performance. More posts by this contributor Track the right metrics to improve your developers’ work experience Use DORA metrics to support the next generation of remote-work models If there’s one area where […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Defense tech startups raised sizable rounds in 2023, which shows VCs are interested in the sector despite market conditions.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
[A version of this piece first appeared in TechCrunch’s robotics newsletter, Actuator. Subscribe here.] Earlier this month, Google’s DeepMind team debuted Open X-Embodiment, a database of robotics functionality created in collaboration with 33 research institutes. The researchers involved compared the system to ImageNet, the landmark database founded in 2009 that is now home to more than […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, is creating its own version of ChatGPT. That appears to be the case, at least, from Musk’s tweets on X Friday evening teasing the AI model xAI has been developing. Called Grok — a name xAI trademarked recently — the model answers questions conversationally, possibly drawing on a knowledge base […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The track was made possible thanks to technology the director used on the documentary series Get Back. Listen here.
Apple CEO Tim Cook pushed back a bit at the notion that the company was behind in AI on yesterday’s Q4 earnings call with investors, as he highlighted technology developments that Apple had made recently that “would not be possible without AI.” Specifically, the exec pointed to new iOS 17 features like Personal Voice and […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Michael Koch Contributor Share on X Michael Koch is the co-founder and CEO of HubKonnect, an AI-enabled local store marketing platform. When you take venture capital money, investors will shape everything from your strategy and product to your thought process. That may not be best for what you’re offering, especially in the AI space, which […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As the holiday season approaches, I, like everyone else with the means and mental bandwidth, am brainstorming what to get the loved ones in my life. Or rather, I would be… but to be fully transparent, the irksome little procrastinating voice in my head has gotten the better of me this year. So it goes. […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
There’s been a bit of FUD around the decision to use a form of AI to resurrect John Lennon’s voice in what Paul McCartney called “the last Beatles record.” What they’ve done is far from the sketchy AI imitations of artists we see cluttering Soundcloud today, and has much more in common with a more […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A Frontier AI taskforce established by the U.K. back in June to prepare for the AI Safety Summit held this week is on course to be a permanent fixture, as the U.K. bids to take a leadership role on AI policy in the future. The U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak today formally announced the launch […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Stability AI, the startup behind the text-to-image AI model Stable Diffusion, thinks 3D model creation tools could be the next big thing in generative AI. At least, that’s the message it’s sending with the launch of Stable 3D, an AI-powered app that generates textured 3D objects for modeling and game development platforms like Blender, Maya, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Brave, a company building an alternative web browser, is releasing its AI-powered assistant, Leo, to all desktop users. The company is also releasing a $15 per month paid version called Leo Premium with features like access to faster and better large language models (LLMs) and higher-rate limits. Leo has been under testing for a few […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Kaiber, the generative AI creative studio behind the music videos of popular artists Kid Cudi and Linkin Park, announced today the launch of its new mobile app to give creators, musicians and artists a range of AI tools, including text-to-video, image-to-video and video-to-video. Founded in 2022, Kaiber leverages various open-source projects like AnimatedDiff, Automatic1111, ControlNet […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Flavrs, an iOS app that lets foodies discover recipes and and then shop for ingredients, is introducing a new takeout feature and AI-powered recommendation systems thanks to a custom integration with OpenAI. The app features a TikTok-like interface that displays videos from top chefs and creators. If you see a dish that you like, you […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Apple Corps Today marks the release of the first “new” song by the Beatles since 1995. “Now and Then” is available on streaming services (with an Atmos mix where supported), and the story behind the song’s production is one that’s drawn a lot of interest from fans of the iconic rock band. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr turned to breakthrough technology and machine learning to piece together a finished track from an old lo-fi John Lennon recording.The Beatles first attempted to make something from Lennon’s “Now and Then” demo in the mid-‘90s, when McCartney, George...
Generative AI is pervading just about every industry already, whether we like it or not, and cybersecurity is no exception. The possibility of AI-accelerated malware development and autonomous attacks should alarm any sysadmin even at this early stage. Wraithwatch is a new security outfit that aims to fight fire with fire, deploying good AI to […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Arturo Holmes/WireImage Scarlett Johansson is taking legal action against an AI app developer for using her name and likeness in an online ad, according to a report from Variety. The ad was for an AI image editor, called Lisa AI: 90s Yearbook & Avatar, and featured an AI-generated version of Johansson’s voice.As reported by Variety, the 22-second ad showed Johansson behind the scenes while filming Black Widow, where she actually says “What’s up guys? It’s Scarlett and I want you to come with me.” But then, the ad transitions away from Johansson, while an AI-generated...
HubSpot, the Boston-based marketing software maker and CRM platform, announced today it’s acquiring the B2B data provider Clearbit, to enhance its platform with third-party company data spanning millions of businesses. The deal also brings Clearbit’s over 400,0000 users and 1500-plus business customers to HubSpot, and will eventually see the two platforms combine in order to […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On the same day the U.K. gathered some of the world’s corporate and political leaders into the same room at Bletchley Park for the AI Safety Summit, more than 70 signatories put their name to a letter calling for a more open approach to AI development. “We are at a critical juncture in AI governance,” […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
More and more companies are running large language models, which require access to GPUs. The most popular of those by far are from Nvidia, making them expensive and often in short supply. Renting a long-term instance from a cloud provider when you only need access to these costly resources for a single job, doesn’t necessarily […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Following Amazon’s adoption of generative AI for advertisers last week, Google today is launching a set of generative AI product imagery tools for advertisers in the U.S. Via the new, AI-powered Product Studio, merchants will be able to leverage text-to-image AI capabilities to create new product imagery for free, simply by typing in a prompt […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Companies use Snowflake to store their data in the cloud. With the ever growing interest in generative AI and large language models, customers are looking for ways to get started with the technology quickly. Today, the company announced Snowflake Cortex, a fully managed service designed to help both business users and developers work with AI-fueled […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Despite the ongoing technological decoupling between China and the West, both sides are converging to discuss the threat that runaway artificial intelligence may pose to humanity. Wu Zhaohui, China’s Vice Minister of Science and Technology, has led a delegation to attend the landmark AI safety summit organized by the U.K government this week. A telling […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Instagram has been spotted developing an “AI friend” feature that users would be able to customize to their liking and then converse with, according to screenshots shared by app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi. Users would be able to chat with the AI to “answer questions, talk through any challenges, brainstorm ideas and much more,” according to […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Share on X Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Ask Sophie: Is […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Product Studio, Google’s AI-powered image editing tool for merchants, is rolling out in the US starting today. | Illustration: The Verge Google is introducing new Shopping features that allow merchants to quickly update product imagery using generative AI and make it easier to display important shop information to attract new customers. Starting today, Google merchants in the US can label themselves with a new “small business” attribute that makes it easier for shoppers to identify mom-and-pop-style stores. Stores that carry this new attribute will be clearly labeled as a small business...
Freeplay, a startup that lets companies build, experiment with and test apps powered by generative AI models, specifically text-generating models, today emerged from stealth with $3.25 million in a seed round led by Conviction Ventures. Founded by ex-Twitter employees, including the former heads of product and engineering for Twitter’s developer platform and enterprise data business, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The world is locked in a race, and competition, over dominance in AI, but today, a few of them appeared to come together to say that they would prefer to collaborate when it comes to mitigating risk. Speaking at the AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park in England, the U.K. minister of technology, Michelle Donelan, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Grants are the lifeblood of many organizations. But procuring them often turns out to be a time-consuming, labor-intensive process. Writing a proposal can take hundreds of hours, require the services of a specialized grant writer and cost thousands of dollars — narrowing the pool of potential applicants. Sean Carroll, the former chief of staff and […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Ahead of the AI Safety Summit starting tomorrow morning taking place outside of London in Bletchley Park, today, the U.K. government has confirmed more details about who is actually going to be attending the event. The list’s publication comes after weeks of speculation and criticism that the event’s line up — both in terms of […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Today Microsoft has begun rolling out its Windows 11 2023 update (also know as version 23H2), which adds some minor features on top of Copilot and its other AI-powered apps announced in September. Now, you may be asking yourself, "Didn't Microsoft just release a major Windows 11 update?" And you would be correct. But it turns out that release, which launched on September 26th, was basically just an AI preview meant for last year's Windows 11 22H2 update. Consequently, Copilot didn't actually reach most Windows users over the past few weeks (I eventually got it in a test laptop, but...
When you think of the term “creator” you generally think of someone making content for social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram. But Quora’s AI chatbot platform Poe is now paying bot creators for their efforts, including those who generate “prompt bots” on Poe itself, as well as server bots created by developers who […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Driven by the notion of AI as a competitor, fear of job displacement still looms in some corners of the professional world.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It’s strange times we’re living in when a blockchain billionaire, not the usual Big Tech suspects, is the one supplying the compute capacity needed to develop generative AI. It was revealed yesterday that Jed McCaleb, the co-founder of blockchain startups Stellar, Ripple and Mt Gox and aerospace company Vast, launched a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that purchased 24,000 […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Biden administration announced the details of a long-awaited Executive Order on AI today, ahead of an international summit on AI safety being held in the UK. But as with all such orders, what the President can dictate without legislative support is limited, as numerous experts and stakeholders emphasized in response. The order comes as […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Shield AI has raised $200 million in new funding as it looks to scale its autonomous flying systems for the U.S. military and its allies. The startup, which was founded in 2015, is now valued at $2.7 billion. This latest round was led by U.S. Innovation Technology Fund (USIT) with major participation from Riot Ventures, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Organizations today rely on a growing number of apps to get work done. According to Statista, in 2022, companies were licensing an average of 130 software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps, up from just 8 in 2015. What that means for employees, generally, is more work — more work getting up to speed with the various tools, reading […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The promise and pitfall of artificial intelligence is a hot topic these days. Some say AI will save us: it’s already on the case to fix pernicious health problems, patch up digital divides in education, and do other good works. Others fret about the threats it poses in warfare, security, misinformation and more. It has […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We’re getting a a first proper look at much-hyped Humane’s “AI pin” (whatever that is) on November 9, and personalized AI memory startup Rewind is launching a pendant to track not only your digital but also your physical life sometime in the foreseeable future. Buzz abounds about OpenAI’s Sam Altman meeting with Apple’s longtime design […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Can an AI be your mentor? That’s what a startup called Practica believes. The company, which evolved out of a marketplace for one-on-one executive coaching, has now launched an AI system built on top of an existing knowledge base it developed over the years spent with a large group of human coaches. The resulting AI […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We're looking at a massive earnings week, the Biden administration's order regarding AI, Web Summit's new CEO, and more.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
U.S. President Joe Biden has issued an executive order (EO) that seeks to establish “new standards” for AI safety and security, including requirements for companies developing foundation AI models to notify federal government and share results of all safety tests before they’re deployed to the public. The fast-moving generative AI movement, driven by the likes […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In July, Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) center released its large language model Llama 2 relatively openly and for free, a stark contrast to its biggest competitors. But in the world of open-source software, some still see the company’s openness with an asterisk.While Meta’s license makes Llama 2 free for many, it’s still a limited license that doesn’t meet all the requirements of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). As outlined in the OSI’s Open Source Definition, open source is more than just sharing some code or research. To be truly...
The Biden Administration unveiled its ambitious next steps in addressing and regulating artificial intelligence development on Monday. Its expansive new executive order seeks to establish further protections for the public as well as improve best practices for federal agencies and their contractors."The President several months ago directed his team to pull every lever," a senior administration official told reporters on a recent press call. "That's what this order does, bringing the power of the federal government to bear in a wide range of areas to manage AI's risk and harness its...
The explosive growth in artificial intelligence in recent years — crowned with the meteoric rise of generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT — has seen the technology take on many tasks that, formerly, only human minds could handle. But despite their increasingly capable linguistic computations, these machine learning systems remain surprisingly inept at making the sorts of cognitive leaps and logical deductions that even the average teenager can consistently get right. In this week's Hitting the Books excerpt, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That...
The last quarter in venture capital was quite gloomy. Even AI didn't change the picture that much, but its impact is starting to show in other ways. © 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A version of this post first appeared in TechCrunch’s weekly robotics newsletter, Actuator. Subscribe here. Last week was a busy one for robotics. We had RoboBusiness in the Bay, ROSCon in New Orleans and Amazon’s Delivering the Future event in Seattle. I ended up choosing the latter, as I’d gotten quite a bit out of […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With a massive $2 billion reported investment from Google, Anthropic joins OpenAI in reaping the benefits of leadership in the artificial intelligence space, receiving immense sums from the tech giants that couldn’t move fast enough themselves. A byword for the age: Those who can, build; those who can’t, invest. The funding deal, according to sources […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. For my column this week, I told the story of how an ex-colleague was impersonated by an AI-powered spambot and almost tricked me. It a nutshell: AI is often used for good, but it is increasingly used for nefarious purposes […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As the American economy posts impressive growth, we take a look at how much money big tech companies raked in from advertising in Q3.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Friday show, and we’re talking about the week’s biggest startup and tech news. Mary Ann and Alex were lucky enough to have Kirsten aboard for the […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We’ve talked about the first to market advantage before, and it certainly applies when it comes to the cloud infrastructure market. While Microsoft made headlines this week for its AI implementation, and Alphabet took a big stock hit for its slight cloud miss, Amazon growth has quietly settled into low double digits growth. And it […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In 2019, Amazon upgraded its Alexa assistant with a feature that enabled it to detect when a customer was likely frustrated — and respond with proportionately more sympathy. If a customer asked Alexa to play a song and it queued up the wrong one, for example, and then the customer said “No, Alexa” in an […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The halls of power are waking up to the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence. The big question will be how much of an impact they will have on the march of progress if (and when) there are mis-steps. Yesterday, the United Nations announced a new AI advisory board — 38 people from across government, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It seems like just about every streaming service has raised their price this year – most recently, Apple TV+, Netflix and Disney+. In this episode, we chat with Janko Roettgers, author of the newsletter Lowpass, about the state of streaming media. Why are these companies pushing their prices up now, and what does that mean for you, the viewer? Does this mean the dream of cord cutting is over? (Spoiler: No, not really.)Also, we chat about Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon chips, adult film star Riley Reid’s new AI chatbot, and why Super Mario Wonder is the best 2D Mario game since Super Mario...
OpenAI today announced that it’s created a new team to assess, evaluate and probe AI models to protect against what it describes as “catastrophic risks.” The team, called Preparedness, will be led by Aleksander Madry, the director of MIT’s Center for Deployable Machine Learning. (Madry joined OpenAI in May as “head of Preparedness,” according to […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nectar AI will help brands find new ways to personally engage and convert consumers where they spend the most time.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
While Adobe is bringing generative AI models to professional photographers and designers, another company is working to make easy-to-use generative AI tools available to a wider range of photographers, including hobbyists. Starting today, Luminar Neo, the photo-editing software from Skylum (formerly Macphun), is rolling out a set of generative AI features to its desktop apps […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google is adding a slew of new updates for Maps, including a few AI-powered features that are designed to make it easier for users to search, explore their surroundings and get to their destinations. The company is making it easier to find specific items near you and find inspiration for things to do, rolling out […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Credal.ai, a Y Combinator-backed startup that gives enterprises a way to connect their internal data to text-generating, cloud-hosted AI models, has raised $4.8 million in a seed round led by Spark Capital. Credal was founded by Jack Fischer and Ranavin Thambapillaid, who previously worked at Palantir and bonded over a mutual interest in security and […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is adding a range of new AI-powered features to Maps, including more immersive navigation, easier-to-follow driving directions, and better organized search results. The end result is an experience that will likely remind many users of Google Search. Some of this news has already been announced, like Immersive View, which is now coming to more cities. Other aspects are intended to enhance previously available features, like EV charging station availability. But the biggest takeaway is that Google wants Maps to be more like Search: a place where...
Image: Shutterstock Shutterstock will now let you edit its library of images using AI. In an update on Thursday, Shutterstock revealed a set of new AI-powered tools, like Magic Brush, which lets you tweak an image by brushing over an area and “describing what you want to add, replace or erase.”The AI image editor is still in beta, and will also let you generate alternate versions of a stock or AI-generated image, as well as expand the background of an image. Additionally, Shutterstock is rolling a “smart” resizing feature that will automatically change an image’s shape to match your...
Google has expanded its vulnerability rewards program (VRP) to include attack scenarios specific to generative AI. In an announcement shared with TechCrunch ahead of publication, Google said: “We believe expanding the VRP will incentivize research around AI safety and security and bring potential issues to light that will ultimately make AI safer for everyone,” Google’s […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
With concerns around generative AI ever-present, Google has announced an expansion of its Vulnerability Rewards Program (VRP) focused on AI-specific attacks and opportunities for malice. As such, the company released updated guidelines detailing which discoveries qualify for rewards and which fall out of scope. For example, discovering training data extraction that leaks private, sensitive information falls in scope, but if it only shows public, nonsensitive data, then it wouldn't qualify for a reward. Last year, Google gave security researchers $12 million for bug discoveries. Google...
The company’s platform structures data at the time a contract is drafted. Then as documentation is added, an intelligent workflow helps speed up approvals, negotiations and decision-making.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Meta is doubling down on business messages for revenue generation, as Mark Zuckerberg indicated during the company’s earnings call for Q3 2023. Zuckerberg said that the company is looking to tap into generative AI-based bots for businesses for use cases like customer support. The Meta CEO said that users and businesses are interacting more than […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Magic Capsule technology is coming to Honor’s next flagship. | Image: Honor We were expecting — and we got — a lot of talk about generative AI this morning when Honor CEO George Zhao took the stage at Qualcomm’s 2023 Snapdragon Summit. But the announcement of its Honor 6 flagship came with a surprising detail: it includes a feature that lets you interact with the device using your eyes. With some notable concerns about privacy implications, it looks kinda cool.The keynote briefly featured a rendering of what this technology will look like, showing a woman looking at her phone with a...
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Korean telco KT are among the investors of Moreh, which builds an AI software tool that optimizes and creates AI models. The Santa Clara- and Seoul-based startup said it has raised a $22 million Series B round, bringing its total raised to $30 million. Moreh says its flagship AI software, called […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Biden Administration is reportedly set to unveil a broad executive order on artificial intelligence next week. According to The Washington Post, the White House’s “sweeping order” would use the federal government’s purchasing power to enforce requirements on AI models before government agencies can use them. The order is reportedly scheduled for Monday, October 30, two days before an international AI Safety Summit in the UK.The order will allegedly require advanced AI models to undergo a series of assessments before federal agencies can adopt them. In addition, it would ease...
Amazon is rolling out a new AI image generation tool for advertisers to generate backgrounds based on product descriptions and themes. Amazon is currently beta testing the tool with select advertisers and will expand availability “over time,” the company says. To use the tool, advertisers upload a photo, type an image description describing a background […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Generative AI technologies are being suffused into a host of applications, and the financial results of all that investment are starting to show up.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google is taking aim at potentially problematic generative AI apps with a new policy, to be enforced starting early next year, that will require developers of Android applications published on its Play Store to offer the ability to report or flag offensive AI-generated content. The new policy will insist that flagging and reporting can be […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Frontier Model Forum, an industry body focused on studying “frontier” AI models along the lines of GPT-4 and ChatGPT, today announced that it’ll pledge $10 million toward a new fund to advance research on tools for “testing and evaluating the most capable AI models.” The fund, says the Frontier Model Forum — whose members […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: The Verge This is Hot Pod, The Verge’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more.In pursuit of profit, Spotify looks to AI rather than original content for its podcasting futureSpotify shareholders are thrilled with the company reporting an operating profit for the first time in a year, sending the stock up nearly 10 percent on the news. The revenue bump was in large part due to the streamer’s $1 price increase earlier this year, but executives also pointed to the downsizing of the podcast operation — which included hundreds of layoffs and the...
Computer vision has become commonplace across innumerable industries, but the methods of creating and controlling these visual AI models aren’t so easy. Viso is building a low/no-code end-to-end platform that lets companies roll their own computer vision stack, and they just pulled in $9M to scale up. There are tons of computer vision models and […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A number of news and media publishers are already blocking AI web crawlers from accessing their sites, worried about the impact on traffic when all their work is swept up into AI chatbot experiences. However, a startup called Direqt believes publishers should embrace AI chatbots — just on their own terms. The company, which has […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The House Fund, the pre-seed and early stage venture capital fund focused on UC Berkeley startups, specifically AI startups, today announced that it’s closed its third tranche — Fund III — at $115 million. With the close of Fund III, Ken Goldberg, the UC Berkeley professor and prolific roboticist, will join The House Fund as […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Generative AI — is there anything it won’t do? Well, truthfully, most of the time you’re not going to be able to convince it to share its innermost fantasies with you. Try it with ChatGPT, for example, and the computer just says “no”: That sort of puritan silliness is the sort of thing that Swedish […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As investments grow globally, there’s still a concern stateside for security and making sure the U.S. protects its businesses.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) once again played host to Silicon Valley’s AI leaders on Tuesday as the US Senate reconvened its AI Insights Forum for a second time. On the guest list this go around: manifesto enthusiast Marc Andreessen and venture capitalist John Doerr, as well as Max Tegmark of the Future of Life Institute and NAACP CEO Derrick Johnson. On the agenda: “the transformational innovation that pushes the boundaries of medicine, energy, and science, and the sustainable innovation necessary to drive advancements in security, accountability, and transparency in AI,” according to...
Image: Amazon Amazon is beta testing AI image generation tools for its advertisers, offering an easy way to create backgrounds or scenes around whatever product ad buyers are hoping to sell. The company says the new feature is “designed to remove creative barriers and enable brands to produce lifestyle imagery that helps improve their ads’ performance.” This could prove to be a quick, convenient option for brands that would otherwise be stuck working with boring standalone images of a product against a white background. Amazon says putting products in a lifestyle scene can lead to 40...
Many doctors are overwhelmed by paperwork, leaving them stretched thin, with less time to see patients. Based in Melbourne with plans to expand around the world, Heidi Health wants to ease the burden of administrative tasks by using AI to turn consultation transcripts into case histories, referral letters, financial forms and other documents. It also […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Contrary to what you might’ve heard, the era of large seed rounds isn’t over — at least in the AI sector. CentML, a startup developing tools to decrease the cost — and improve the performance — of deploying machine learning models, this morning announced that it raised $27 million in an extended seed round with […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon’s Echo devices will now allow kids to have interactive conversations with an AI-powered Alexa via a new feature called “Explore with Alexa.” First announced in September, the addition to the Amazon Kids+ content subscription allows children to have kid-friendly conversations with Alexa, powered by generative AI, but in a protected fashion designed to ensure […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As generative AI becomes embedded in the platforms we use every day, debates are swirling around who should get credit — and compensation — for AI-generated works. YouTube is in the process of hashing out licensing agreements with record labels to use musicians’ voices to create new music in their styles. Meanwhile, some art-generating AI […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google confirmed on its earnings call that it is working on different ad formats for its generative AI-powered search experience — Google shared some ideas earlier this year and the mention in the earnings call could indicate that a rollout could happen sooner rather than later. This project is particularly important for the company as […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Stylish, yet impractical! | Image: Lenovo Today at Lenovo Tech World ‘23, many things happened. There was a lot of talk about AI. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and his leather jacket were there. There were some celebrities I was probably supposed to recognize. And Lenovo dusted off its bendable phone concept and let it out into the light for nearly two full minutes!Almost two hours into the keynote, Lexi Valasek with the Motorola Innovation Research team took the stage with the latest iteration of Moto’s bendy concept phone. Like the one Motorola showed off at Tech World 2016, a couple of years...
Illustration: The Verge Everybody’s coming for Google, but Google is doing just fine, according to parent company Alphabet’s third quarter earnings on Tuesday.While Google has been dealing with fierce competition on all sides and is investing a lot into infusing AI into as many products as it can, its ads business, the company’s bread and butter, is still humming along. The Search business earned $44 billion, an 11 percent jump year over year. The big question coming up is how Google’s focus on AI will impact that core business. Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience is...
The AI Pin has a projector, it seems, instead of a screen. | Image: TED Humane’s first gadget, the AI Pin, is currently slated to launch on November 9th, but we just got our best look at it yet thanks to a somewhat unexpected source. Before it has even been announced, the AI Pin is one of Time Magazine’s “Best Inventions of 2023,” along with everything from the Framework Laptop 16 to the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 to the Bedtime Buddy alarm clock.The write-up is brief and relatively light on details, but there are a couple of new details, along with the best photo we’ve seen yet of the...
The what-is-a-photo-pocalypse gets even more complicated. | Image: Qualcomm Qualcomm’s new flagship mobile chipset is an on-device AI fest from top to bottom. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 brings generative AI capabilities right to the chipset, vastly speeding up the processing-intensive activities that are usually outsourced to the cloud. It’s one more leap forward in a year that has seen a lot of leaping when it comes to AI, and it will come sooner than later: the first phones with the new chipset are expected to debut in the coming weeks.The 8 Gen 3 supports a chatbot trained on Meta’s Llama...
Signos, a metabolic health platform that utilizes a unique AI-engine with a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to offer real-time data and recommendations for healthy weight management, has announced a successful $20 million Series B funding round. The round was led by Cheyenne Ventures and GV (Google Ventures), with additional investments from Dexcom Ventures and Samsung. […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: YouTube YouTube Music is finally letting you change the cover art of your playlists. While you still won’t get to upload your own image, you can now make a custom image using generative AI.As shown in the below GIF, you can create AI-generated art by tapping the pen icon in the bottom right corner of your playlist’s cover art. You can then select the category that you want your image to fall into, like animals, food and drink, colors, nature, or travel.From there, you can either hit “randomize” or choose from several prompts, such as creating a pug “in the style of a Medieval...
We can't wait to find out if these companies will report a material improvement from their investments in AI-related computing tasks and products.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
YouTube is introducing a new feature that lets users create customized playlist art using generative AI, the Google-owned company announced on Tuesday. The new experimental feature is rolling out starting today for English language users in the United States. The company plans to bring the feature to additional regions and languages in the future. To […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Text-generating AI is one thing. But AI models that understand images as well as text can unlock powerful new applications. Take, for example, Twelve Labs. The San Francisco-based startup trains AI models to — as co-founder and CEO Jae Lee puts it — “solve complex video-language alignment problems.” “Twelve Labs was founded … to create […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
There’s no shortage of startups trying to automate marketing tasks by using generative AI. For WorkMagic, the target users are the millions of small-scale Shopify sellers who it believes can benefit immensely from cost savings in their marketing efforts. Founded in June, WorkMagic offers a full-stack platform that handles everything from image and copy generation […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
D-ID, the Tel Aviv-based startup best known as the tech behind those viral videos of animated family photos, is bringing its AI video technology to a new mobile app, launching today. Originally available as a web platform, D-ID’s Creative Reality Studio allows users to upload a still image and script and then turn that into […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Drew Angerer / Getty Images Data workers urged lawmakers to protect their rights ahead of a Senate meeting with artificial intelligence leaders on Tuesday. In a letter addressed to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), workers and civil society groups demanded Congress guard against a “dystopian future” of surveillance and low wages for the people in charge of training AI algorithms.“The contributions of data workers, often invisible to the public, are critical to advancements in AI,” the letter read. “Congress should develop a new generation of economic policies and...
Texts is a messaging app... for all your messaging apps. | Image: Texts Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and a number of other popular web properties, just made a different kind of acquisition: it’s buying Texts, a universal messaging app, for $50 million. Texts is an app for all your messaging apps. You can use it to log in to WhatsApp, Instagram, LinkedIn, Signal, iMessage, and more and see and respond to all your messages in one place. (Beeper is another app doing similar things.) The app also offers some additional features like AI-generated responses...
Much has been made of AI-powered videos which can either make a real person speak different words or other languages, or generate a synthetic person which can speak on-demand. A few years ago former football star David Beckham helped push the idea into the mainstream via a video from Synthesia, where he spoke different languages […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The central processing unit (CPU) and the graphics processing unit (GPU) handle different types of data. The CPU is used in almost all devices including computers, cellphones, tablets, smartwatches and TVs. It deals with processing general information on the device, making sure software is running correctly. While the GPU complements the CPU, it handles complex […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
An illustration depicting a feature-less face against a pink, white, and blue background. | Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge PimEyes, a public search engine that uses facial recognition to match online photos of people, has banned searches of minors over concerns it endangers children, reports The New York Times. At least, it should. PimEyes’ new detection system, which uses age detection AI to identify whether the person is a child, is still very much a work in progress. After testing it, The New York Times found it struggles to identify children photographed at certain angles. The AI...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The long-awaited EU AI Act is still under debate as European lawmakers can’t agree on how to regulate foundation models, and it’s unlikely to pass regulation before December.As first reported by Reuters, Spain, which currently heads the EU, is pushing for more regular vetting for vulnerabilities and the creation of a tiered system of regulation depending on the number of users a model has.European lawmakers have had three trilogues (a three-party discussion between the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union, and the European Commission...
As if robocalling wasn’t already enough of a problem, the advent of easily accessible, realistic AI-powered writing and synthetic voice could supercharge the practice. The FCC aims to preempt this by looking into how generated robocalls might fit under existing consumer protections. A Notice of Inquiry has been proposed by Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel to be […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The next big Snapdragon chip headed to Android phones is likely to be announced this week — and details have leaked early revealing a heavy focus on AI. According to MSPoweruser, Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will support some handy and creative AI camera tools, including the ability to remove objects from videos, expand areas of a photo, and generate fake backgrounds.The leaked marketing materials also boast about the chip’s ability to run various AI models, including both Stable Diffusion and Meta’s Llama 2. Making that happen is...
Apple seems to be finally getting serious about infusing generative AI into its products — both internal and external — after announcing a solitary “Transformer” model-based autocorrect feature on iOS 17 earlier this year. The company has shared several job opportunities listing out specific needs for generative AI in the last few weeks. For instance, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI and other deep technologies are the prevailing themes in the new early-stage cohort from Peak XV Partners, as the largest India and Southeast Asia-focused VC fund intensifies its search for opportunities in a sector garnering international frenzy. Ten out of 13 startups in the latest cohort of Surge, Peak XV’s powerfully influential early-stage program, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Instagram is testing a sticker creation feature that will let users make custom stickers from their own photos — and other users’, in some cases — and pop them into Reels or Stories. While Meta has been going all in on prompt-based, AI-generated stickers lately, this tool is something much simpler. It’ll just select the subject of a photo and remove the background, creating a free-floating sticker that can be placed over other content.Adam Mosseri/ InstagramAdam Mosseri gave a brief demonstration of how it’ll work in a video shared to his broadcast channel. He also said that, in...
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week in AI, DeepMind, the Google-owned AI R&D lab, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Washington Post reported Friday that Reddit might cut off Google and force users to log in to Reddit itself to read anything if it can’t reach deals with generative AI companies to pay for its data. But the company tells The Verge that’s not true. “Nothing is changing,” says Reddit spokesperson Courtney Geesey-Dorr.The Washington Post’s report wasn’t just focused on Reddit — it’s about how more than 535 news organizations have opted to block their content from being scraped by companies like OpenAI to help train products such as...
After Apple discontinued its Music Memos app favored by musicians for developing song ideas, a new startup called Tape It stepped in to fill the void with an app that leveraged AI to automatically detect the instrument and annotate the recording. Now that startup is taking the next step in its journey to improve the […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
As we integrate AI into various aspects of our lives, from customer service to healthcare and beyond, it becomes imperative that AI systems align with our values and needs.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It’s become increasingly evident that two parallel AI universes are forming between the U.S. and China. While the U.S. has spawned notable players like OpenAI and Anthropic, China has its own emerging candidates. One of these foundation model developers, Zhipu AI, announced today that it has raised 2.5 billion yuan ($340 million) in total financing […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sure, AI can write sonnets and do a passable Homer Simpson Nirvana cover. But if anyone is going to welcome our new techno-overlords, they’ll need to be capable of something more practical — which is why Meta and Nvidia have their systems practicing everything from pen tricks to collaborative housework. The two tech giants coincidentally […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Problem With Jon Stewart isn't coming back for a third season at Apple TV+, according to The New York Times. It was already supposed to begin filming for another eight episodes within the next couple of weeks, but Apple and Stewart reportedly decided to part ways before it can start. While neither party has issued a statement yet, the publications said the parties didn't see eye to eye when it came to hot button topics. The host apparently told production staff that Apple executives had raised concerns about certain subject matters he's potentially covering in the show, particularly China...
A court ruled that a British agency does not have jurisdiction over how foreign law enforcement agencies use citizens’ data.
Jon Stewart on the set of The Problem With Jon Stewart. | Image: Apple Snagging Jon Stewart to host a new political talk show after his departure from The Daily Show was one of Apple TV Plus’ biggest achievements when The Problem With Jon Stewart was first announced back in 2020. But ahead of production kicking off on the show’s third season, Stewart and Apple have reportedly parted ways over “creative differences,” and The Problem is coming to an end.The New York Times reports that along with concerns about some of the guests booked to be on The Problem With Jon Stewart, Stewart’s...
OpenAI has “discussed and debated quite extensively” when to release a tool that can determine whether an image was made with DALL-E 3, OpenAI’s generative AI art model, or not. But the startup isn’t close to making a decision anytime soon. That’s according to Sandhini Agarwal, an OpenAI researcher who focuses on safety and policy, […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
What good are AI-powered processors without apps that take full advantage of them? That seems to be the question Intel has been asking itself lately. The company just announced a new initiative, the AI PC Acceleration Program, which is meant to help developers create new AI-powered features that take advantage of Intel's upcoming Core Ultra mobile chips.Those processors, which are due to arrived on December 14th, are notable for being the company's first to include a neural processing unit (NPU). Just like how a GPU speeds up gaming tasks, an NPU accelerates AI workloads, like the background...
YouTube has not yet announced a release date or name for the AI voice cloning tool. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is currently developing an AI-powered tool that allows users to replicate the voice of famous musicians while recording audio, according to a new report by Bloomberg. The video streaming giant has reportedly approached music companies to obtain the rights to train its new AI tool on songs from their music catalogs. No deals have yet been signed by any major record label, but Bloomberg’s sources claim that discussions between parties are currently ongoing....
Personalized news aggregation app Artifact is taking another step to become a place to discover interesting links of all sorts, not just the latest headlines. After last month adding a way to share organic posts as well as links of any sort through the service, the AI-powered app from Instagram’s co-founders is today adding a […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Utilities have long known about the hazards posed by trees growing close to power lines, but the successive disasters have thrown the issue into sharp relief.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
This week, we talk about how fake, doctored, and false media is so easily spread, how the social platforms are dealing with it, and how generative AI is making things worse.
Google announced a bunch of generative AI-focused tools in India at its Google for India event. The features include visual results like images and videos and information on government schemes. Google said today that in the coming weeks, users will be able to get summaries of more than 100 government-led schemes in India. The feature […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tesla continues to see its margins slip due to price cuts. Today the company reported earnings of $1.9 billion in net income on $23.4 billion in revenue during the third quarter of 2023. The figures represent a small bump in revenue, from $21.4 billion the same time last year, but a big dip in profits, falling from $3.3 billion on close to the same amount of revenue.Tesla also missed its target date for a Cybertruck delivery event. Tesla CEO Elon Musk had planned for a handover event sometime in the third quarter, and the company now plans for its first...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge No prominent developer of AI foundation models — a list including companies like OpenAI and Meta — is releasing sufficient information about their potential impact on society, determines a new report from Stanford HAI (Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence).Today, Stanford HAI released its Foundation Model Transparency Index, which tracked whether creators of the 10 most popular AI models disclose information about their work and how people use their systems. Among the models it tested, Meta’s Llama 2 scored the highest, followed by BloomZ and then...
Almost ten years ago, the online phenomenon “Twitch Plays Pokémon” convened over a million people to play Pokémon Red at the same time, with each player’s keystrokes registering as commands for the one pixelated avatar. Now, like a Magikarp growing into a Gyarados, the evolution of technology begs a new question: can AI play Pokémon? […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Mention automation and someone will invariably (and understandably) mention its impact on jobs. There are a lot of opposing views on the subject, of course, but the one thing everyone seems to agree on is that robotics and AI will have a profound impact on human jobs, going forward. At today’s Delivering the Future event […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Photo by Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images Rapper Pras Michél, known by many elder millennials as a member of the Fugees, claims his former lawyer mishandled his criminal conspiracy case by using AI to write closing arguments.Michél, who was convicted by a Washington federal court in April for conspiracy to defraud the US, and his new legal team filed a motion for a new trial. First reported by Politico, the team alleges Michél’s former lawyer, David Kenner, “used an experimental AI program to write his closing argument, which made frivolous arguments, conflated the schemes, and failed...
As a part of TC's ongoing AI survey series, we spoke to a group of five investors about the pros and cons of open source AI business models.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is upgrading Android’s Play Protect malware protection system to help it spot malicious apps that change their identifiable features to avoid detection, the company has announced. “This enhancement will help better protect users against malicious polymorphic apps that leverage various methods, such as AI, to be altered to avoid detection,” Google’s blog post reads.The update follows a rise in this so-called “polymorphic malware,” which is harder for Google’s existing systems to detect. So now, in addition to checking newly installed...
There are some things an AI chatbot can’t reliably answer, like how to solve a problem in your relationship, what outfit looks best, advice on a problem you’re facing, or maybe a list of personal recommendations about what movies or shows to watch, among other things. For these types of questions, users today still turn […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI’s GPT-4V is being hailed as the next big thing in AI: a “multimodal” model that can understand both text and images. This has obvious utility, which is why a pair of open source projects have released similar models — but there’s also a dark side that they may have more trouble handling. Here’s how […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
It likely won’t surprise you to learn that generative AI has been a white-hot topic in the world of robotics. There are a number of different ideas floating around about the best ways to embrace the emerging technologies, from natural language commands to design. I put the question of generative AI to Deepu Talla, Nvidia’s […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Controversial US facial recognition company, Clearview AI, has won an appeal against a privacy sanction issued by the UK last year. In May 2022, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) issued a formal enforcement notice on Clearview — which included a fine of around £7.5 million (~$10M) — after concluding the self-scraping AI firm had committed […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
In August last year, a ban on Nvidia’s chip export to China sent the country’s budding artificial intelligence startups scrambling for alternatives. A momentary sense of relief came when Nvidia unveiled chips with reduced performance to bypass export restrictions. But this respite was short-lived. On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced a slew of measures to […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nvidia and Foxconn are working together to build so-called “AI factories,” a new class of data centers that promise to provide supercomputing powers to accelerate the development of self-driving cars, autonomous machines and industrial robots. Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang and Foxconn chairman and CEO Young Liu announced the collaboration at Hon Hai Tech […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Image: Microsoft OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model may be more trustworthy than GPT-3.5 but also more vulnerable to jailbreaking and bias, according to research backed by Microsoft.The paper — by researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, Center for AI Safety, and Microsoft Research — gave GPT-4 a higher trustworthiness score than its predecessor. That means they found it was generally better at protecting private information, avoiding toxic results like biased information, and resisting adversarial attacks...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge New US rules blocking the export of most artificial intelligence chips to China will build upon a sweeping set of restrictions introduced in October 2022.Nvidia makes sought-after AI chips like the H100, and the AI boom has proven to be profitable as its valuation has expanded beyond $1 trillion. Last year’s restrictions meant the US-based company couldn’t sell the H100 to China, so it introduced a lower-specced H800 that could get around the US’s rules — but with the new rules, Nvidia won’t be able to sell that chip or its A800 chip to China...
Good morning! We have lots of good stuff for you this Tuesday, so let’s dig right in. Up first, we surveyed six investors who are placing bets on AI. We wanted to know how startups should begin building tools for AI; whether startup-focused AI work is defensible; and how tech companies are thinking about monetization. […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Mayor Eric Adams during a press conference at City Hall Blue Room on Tuesday, October 10th, 2023. | Photo by Luiz C. Ribeiro for NY Daily News via Getty Images Thanks to artificial intelligence tools, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has sent a barrage of robocalls to residents in languages he doesn’t speak. That includes “thousands” of robocalls in Spanish, more than 250 in Yiddish, more than 160 in Mandarin, 89 in Cantonese, and 23 in Haitian Creole, The City reports. That’s triggered pushback over how ethical it is for Adams to portray himself to potential voters as someone who...
The American government has tightened its restrictions on exports of chips and chipmaking equipment, closing loopholes that let Chinese companies access advanced technology.
Nearly a year ago, developers Seth Forsgren and Hayk Martiros released a hobby project called Riffusion that could generate music using not audio but images of audio. It sounds counterintuitive (no pun intended), but it worked — my colleague Devin Coldewey got the rundown here. While their approach had its limitations, Riffusion netted Forsgren and […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Nirvana Insurance — an insurance startup taking a new approach to insurance products for commercial fleets using artificial intelligence, telematics, internet-of-things technology and 15 billion miles of trucking data to calculate risk models — is taking on something else: new funding. The startup has raised an all-equity Series B of $57 million, money that it […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Roughly eight years ago, a little-known startup called Procurify raised $4 million for its platform that hosts tools to take some of the pain out of enterprise procurement. The company never became buzzy, exactly. But Procurify grew steadily over the subsequent years, going on to raise $20 million in its Series B and today closing […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Reality Defender, one of several startups developing tools to attempt to detect deepfakes and other AI-generated content, today announced that it raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by DCVC with participation from Comcast Ventures, Ex/ante, Parameter Ventures and Nat Friedman’s AI Grant. The proceeds will be put toward doubling Reality Defender’s […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
CapCut, the ByteDance-owned video editing app that’s the company’s second to hit $100 million in consumer spending after TikTok, is now expanding into business tools. Known today for its easy-to-use templates, tight integration with TikTok, and rapid adoption of AI effects and filters, CapCut has been a top consumer video editing app that now regularly […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Earlier this month, LinkedIn announced that it would roll out a raft of new AI-powered tools across the business. Today, it’s making a different kind of announcement focused on the future: the company is laying off 668 employees. We understand from a reliable source that the majority of the layoffs, some 563, will be in […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
To maximize your chances of getting the patent filing process right, here are four tips that will help protect your work so you can capitalize on it.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
AI adoption among Mac app users is booming, according to a new report from app subscription service Setapp that found that 42% of Mac users today report using AI-based apps on a daily basis, and 63% claim to believe that AI apps are more beneficial than those without AI. In addition, Mac app developers are […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
YouTube is putting Google AI to use for advertisers, the company announced this morning with the introduction of a new advertising package called “Spotlight Moments.” The idea here is to leverage AI to automatically identify the most popular YouTube videos related to a specific cultural moment — like Halloween, a major awards show, such as […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
[A version of this piece first appeared in TechCrunch’s robotics newsletter, Actuator. Subscribe here.] The topic of generative AI comes up frequently in my newsletter, Actuator. I admit that I was a bit hesitant to spend more time on the subject a few months back. Anyone who has been reporting on technology for as long […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Ten billion. That’s how many commercially procurable molecules are available today. Start looking at them in groups of five — the typical combination used to make electrolyte materials in batteries — and it increases to 10 to the 47th power. For those counting, that’s a lot. All of those combinations matter in the world of […]© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We asked a number of venture capitalists who are active in the AI investing space to walk us through what they are seeing in the market today.© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A promotional rendering of Franz — she’s much more cartoonish (usually) in the app. | Image: Ice-Pick Lodge On Christmas Day 2021, a man took a crossbow to Windsor Castle with plans to kill Queen Elizabeth II. (He failed.) In court, the would-be assassin claimed he’d been egged on by a virtual companion named Sarai on the AI platform Replika. A virtual friend “always agrees with you when you talk with them,” warned an expert quoted by the BBC in an article about the saga last week, deeming the chatbot system dangerous. “It always reinforces what you’re thinking.” Including, it...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A bipartisan bill seeks to create a federal law to protect actors, musicians, and other performers from unauthorized digital replicas of their faces or voices. The Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act of 2023 — or the No Fakes Act — standardizes rules around using a person’s faces, names, and voices. Sens. Chris Coons (D-DE), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Thom Tillis (R-NC) sponsored the bill. It prevents the “production of a digital replica without consent of the applicable individual or rights...
The $999 Google Pixel 8 Pro takes good photos with its 50-megapixel f/1.68 main sensor. | Photo by Eddie Costas / The Verge The $999 Google Pixel 8 Pro takes good photos with its 50-megapixel f/1.68 main sensor. For the most part, subjects are sharp, colors aren’t too saturated, and the focus fall-off can fool you into thinking images came from a larger camera. But it’s important to remember that Google is a software company that sometimes makes hardware. And for every one photo it takes, there are two AI editing tools ready to either make its hardware look better than it really is or...
Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Google’s Tensor 3 and AI-touting new Pixel 8 phones are now available. Continue reading…
Israeli biotech startup Mana.bio has been planning to launch its programmable drug treatment solution for months, and decided to forge ahead in spite of the attacks that happened this past weekend in the country. The company is using an AI-driven approach called liquid nanoparticles (LNP) to create unique programmable drug treatments. “Mana.bio’s integrated experimental and […]
Google’s AI-powered search feature, SGE (Search Generative Experience), is gaining some new skills, starting today. The AI feature, which introduces a conversational mode in Search, is now going to be able to generate images using prompts directly in SGE similar to rival Bing’s support of OpenAI’s DALLE-E 3. In addition, SGE will now allow users […]
Photo illustration by Alex Parkin / The Verge AI is relatively easy, Baszucki said at Code. Working in China? That’s harder. Continue reading…
When blogging first came to the forefront back in the early 2000s, it provided a way to deliver a complex idea to a broad audience, but more than two decades later could there be a way to reinvent that idea? Kobie Fuller, whose day job is general partner at Upfront Ventures, thinks there may be […]
Deasie, a startup developing tools to give companies greater control over text-generating AI models, today announced that it raised $2.9 million in a seed funding round with participation from Y Combinator, General Catalyst, RTP Global, Rebel Fund and J12 Ventures. Deasie’s founders, Reece Griffiths, Mikko Peiponen and Leo Platzer, previously built data governance tools together […]
Large language models (LLMs) are the driving force behind the burgeoning generative AI movement, capable of interpreting and creating human-language texts from simple prompts — this could be anything from summarizing a document to writing poem to answering a question using data from myriad sources. However, these prompts can also be manipulated by bad actors […]
The reviews keep coming this week. After all the AI tricks, rock-climbing and specification barrage we saw at Google’s big Pixel reveal event, how do Google’s flagship smartphones stack up?Pretty well, according to our reviews of both the Pixel 8 Pro and Pixel 8. The surprise highlight is AI, using machine learning and its homemade Tensor G3 chip in a tangible and practical way compared to services like ChatGPT or Midjourney. This includes making your photos look better, videos sound better and adds interactive robo-voice panache to call screening.EngadgetBoth devices once again have...
Character.AI, the a16z-backed AI chatbot startup from ex-Google AI researchers, is out today with a new feature for its subscribers. The chatbot platform, which offers customizable AI companions with distinct personalities and tools to make your own, is now offering a group chat experience where users and their friends can chat with multiple AI characters […]
U.K.-based startup Yepic AI claims to use “deepfakes for good” and promises to “never reenact someone without their consent.” But the company did exactly what it claimed it never would. In an unsolicited email pitch to a TechCrunch reporter, a representative for Yepic AI shared two “deepfaked” videos of the reporter, who had not given […]
Anysphere, a startup building what it describes as an “AI-native” software development environment, called Cursor, today announced that it raised $8 million in seed funding led by OpenAI’s Startup Fund with participation from former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi and other angel investors. The new cash, which brings Anysphere’s total raised to […]
Kinktober. Whumptober. Kisstober. Flufftober. Goretober. October is a bacchanal of fanfiction, from romantic one-shots about unconventional character pairings, to delicious smut that’ll make you reconsider your own sense of morality — all inspired by the month’s countless themed writing challenges. It’s an especially busy time for the fanfiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3). But […]
Image: Adobe / The Verge Some of the most exciting developments announced during Adobe’s annual Max conference involve the company’s experimental technology previews, and this year is no exception. Eleven new AI-powered prototype tools and features are being showcased under the events “Sneak” program today, including an impressive video upscaler and Project Stardust — an “object-aware editing engine” teased last week that automatically identifies individual objects in photographs so they can be easily moved, changed, or deleted.Adobe uses Sneaks to both showcase the future...
Earlier this year Splice launched a new mobile app called CoSo that used AI to build what it calls "Stacks" collections of samples that are supposed to work well together. Slowly but surely elements of that app have made their way to Splice proper under the banner of Create. But it was always just a complete roll of the dice. You picked a style and Splice spit out four loops. You can swap out individual samples if you don't like them. But that's about the extent of your ability to curate. The latest update to Create allows you to start a Stack from any loop in the Splice library. (Well...
AMD yesterday acquired Nod.ai, an open source AI software provider, as the chipmaker looks to bolster its efforts to build an ecosystem of AI development tools, libraries and models around its hardware. The acquisition is expected to close this quarter, CNBC reports. AMD didn’t disclose the details of the transaction. In a press release, AMD […]
Medium has gone through a number of versions over the years, but what has been a steady focus in Medium's life in recent years has been its subscription business.
Captions, an AI-powered video editing startup, has launched a new app called Lipdub for translating clips into 28 different languages. Lipdub is available in the App Store for free and supports several languages including French, Hindi, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, and more. The app even lets users translate videos into Texas slang, Gen Z, pirate, […]
As generative AI becomes embedded in enterprise software, one of the challenges that companies face is how to fairly price it to recoup the cost of running their content against foundational large language models like OpenAI’s. Box introduced Box AI last May, bringing generative AI to the platform via a partnership with OpenAI. Today, at […]
Image: Adobe Adobe has developed an experimental AI-powered upscaling tool that greatly improves the quality of low-resolution GIFs and video footage. This isn’t a fully-fledged app or feature yet, and it’s not yet available for beta testing, but if the demonstrations seen by The Verge are anything to go by then it has some serious potential. Adobe’s “Project Res-Up” uses diffusion-based upsampling technology (a class of generative AI that generates new data based on the data it’s trained on) to increase video resolution while simultaneously improving sharpness and detail.In a side-...
A screenshot of Dropbox Dash, an AI-powered search tool that pulls together information from across apps and services, not just Dropbox. | Image: Dropbox Dropbox has announced several changes coming to its file hosting service including a new web interface, an open beta for its AI-powered universal search feature, upgrades to another AI feature that’s in alpha, and another early alpha of a new video collaboration tool.Let’s start with the new web interface, since it’s something most Dropbox users are likely to encounter as it rolls out, regardless of whether they engage with the service...
Klarna is introducing a suite of new features, including an AI-powered image-search tool called Shopping lens, the company announced on Wednesday. The company is also launching shoppable videos in Europe, in-store product scanning, a new cashback program, express refunds and more. The new Shopping lens allows users to take a picture of items and styles […]
Germany, France, and Italy are among the countries which last year enacted laws to stop the practice of culling male day-old chicks, because, as they do not lay eggs, are considered surplus to requirements. This was not just because of the waste created but also out of animal welfare and ethical considerations. The laws were […]
Image: Adobe Adobe and other companies have established a symbol that can be attached to content alongside metadata, establishing its provenance, including whether it was made with AI tools.The symbol, which Adobe calls an “icon of transparency,” can be added via Adobe’s photo and video editing platforms like Photoshop or Premiere and eventually Microsoft’s Bing Image Generator. It will be added to the metadata of images, videos, and PDFs to announce who owns and created the data. When viewers look at a photo online, they can hover over the mark, and it will open a dropdown that...
TikTok today is introducing a new feature that will allow its users to post directly to the video platform from a range of popular editing apps, including Adobe’s AI-powered video editing software Premiere Pro, its AI creativity app Adobe Express, as well as others, including Twitch, SocialPilot, and ByteDance’s CapCut. The new offering, Direct Post, […]
SnapEDA, a platform for electrical engineers to easily access electric component data, is rebranding as SnapMagic and introducing a new suite of features that could be a game changer for electronics design. If you’re an electrical engineer, you’ve likely heard of (or use) SnapEDA. The platform has been around for a decade, with a user […]
At MAX, its annual conference for creatives, Adobe today announced that it has updated the models that power Firefly, its generative AI image creation service. According to Adobe, the Firefly Image 2 Model, as it’s officially called, will be better at rendering humans, for example, including facial features, skin, body and hands (which have long […]
Illustrator is Adobe’s vector graphics tool for graphic artists and it’s about to join the generative AI era with the launch of the Firefly Vector Model at Adobe’s MAX conference today. Adobe describes the new model as “the world’s first generative AI model focused on producing vector graphics.” Like Firefly for creating images and photos, […]
The latest version of Adobe’s Project Stardust AI photo editor already thoroughly leaked earlier this month, but at its MAX conference, the company now officially launched this project as a sneak preview of what a next-generation AI-powered photo editing engine could look like. Powered by Firefly Model 2, which is also launching today, Stardust enables […]
Security fencing around the Google Cloud data center ahead of its ceremonial opening in Hanau, Germany, on Friday, October 6th, 2023. | Photo by Alex Kraus / Bloomberg via Getty Images If every search on Google used AI similar to ChatGPT, it might burn through as much electricity annually as the country of Ireland. Why? Adding generative AI to Google Search increases its energy use more than tenfold, according to a new analysis. The paper published today in the journal Joule starts to paint a picture of what AI’s environmental impact might be as it starts to permeate into seemingly every nook...
After Disney releases a new film in English, the company will go back and localize it in as many as 46 global languages to make the movie accesible to as wide an audience as possible. This is a massive undertaking, one for which Disney has an entire division — Disney Character Voices International Inc — to handle the task. And it's not like you're getting Chris Pratt back in the recording booth to dub his GotG III lines in Icelandic and Swahili — each version sounds a little different given the local voice actors. But with a new "AI dubbing" system from ElevenLabs, we could soon...
The race to create AI assistants that help humans write computer code is heating up. TabbyML, built by two ex-Googlers, has secured $3.2 million in seed funding to work on its open source code generator. In contrast to GitHub’s Copilot, a self-hosted coding assistant like TabbyML has the advantage of being highly customizable, suggested the […]
There’s some good news and bad news for ChatGPT’s mobile efforts. On the positive side, the AI chatbot continues to see the number of app installs and its revenue grow, with September setting a new record on both fronts: 15.6 million downloads and nearly $4.6 million in gross revenue across its iOS and Android apps […]
Funding to Canadian startups declined by 57% to $808 million in Q3 2023 from the previous quarter, per Tracxn’s Geo Quarterly report.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the weekend and what’s making headlines early in the week. This time ’round we had a bit of a theme. See if you […]
Online designers are upset over what appears to be an AI-generated stock image in the poster for Loki’s second season. | Image: Disney / Marvel A promotional poster for the second season of Loki on Disney Plus has sparked controversy amongst professional designers following claims that it was at least partially created using generative AI. Illustrator Katria Raden flagged the image on X (formerly Twitter) last week, claiming that the image of the spiraling clock in the background “is giving all the AI telltale signs, like things randomly turning into meaningless squiggles” — a reference...
Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge One of the first known photo fakes, a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, was made just decades after the dawn of photography itself. Since then, photographers have found themselves in endless arguments about what truly constitutes a photo — what’s real, what’s fake, and when is editing too much? Now, as we head into an era where AI-powered tools are everywhere and easily accessible, the discussion is going to be messier than ever. And with the Pixel 8, Google has turned the question of “what is a photo” right on its head.Google has been leading...
As creative industries grapple with AI’s explosion into every artistic medium at once, separate calls from artists warning the world to take action before it’s too late are starting to converge. From fake Drake songs to stylized Instagram profile pictures, art conjured with newly sophisticated AI tools is suddenly ubiquitous — and so are conversations […]
OpenAI, one of the best-funded AI startups in business, is exploring making its own AI chips. Discussions of AI chip strategies within the company have been ongoing since at least last year, according to Reuters, as the shortage of chips to train AI models worsens. OpenAI is reportedly considering a number of strategies to advance […]
Yes, Techtober is in full swing! This week, Cherlynn and Devindra chat with Engadget’s Sam Rutherford about everything from the Made by Google event. That includes the Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro and Pixel Watch 2. We give Google credit for leaning on AI long before it was trendy, but we wonder if the Pixel 8 Pro’s temperature sensor will actually be useful. Also, we dive into Samsung’s latest FE devices, Apple’s fix for overheating iPhone 15s, and Google’s Chromebook Plus initiative.Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like...
Another week, another AI app going viral. This time around, the AI app that has surged to the top of the App Store is EPIK, an photo editing app that lets users generate nostalgic, 90s-inspired “yearbook” photos of themselves as one of its many templates. Similar to other recently popular AI apps, EPIK works by […]
The AI industry is progressing at a terrifying pace, but no amount of training will ever prepare an AI model to stop people from making it generate images of pregnant Sonic the Hedgehog. In the rush to launch the hottest AI tools, companies continue to forget that people will always use new tech for chaos. […]
A person using generative AI — models that generate text, images, music and more given a prompt — could infringe on someone else’s copyright through no fault of their own. But who’s on the hook for the legal fees and damages if — or rather, when — that happens? It depends. In the fast-changing landscape […]
It looks like Spotify’s rumored “Superpremium” offering is gearing up for a launch. According to references discovered in the Spotify app’s code by Chris Messina, the Superpremium service now has a flashy logo and a longer list of features beyond the 24-bit lossless audio we’ve been anticipating. In fact, the broader feature set appears to […]
A pile of new Pixel 8 devices. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Google’s latest products are filled with AI. There’s Magic Editor, a photo editing tool powered by generative AI; there’s Conversation Detection, an audio transparency feature powered by AI; there are improved heart rate algorithms, which, yes, are also powered by AI.Seven years of OS updates? Sounds like a great way to get more AI features from Google. New photography features? All AI. Tensor processor? Designed for AI, baby! “As always, our focus is on making AI more helpful for...
Snap’s AI chatbot has landed the company on the radar of the UK’s data protection watchdog which has raised concerns the tool may be a risk to children’s privacy. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) announced today that it’s issued a preliminary enforcement notice on Snap over what it described as “potential failure to properly assess […]
Image: Microsoft Not long into playing my preview copy of Forza Motorsport, I was intrigued but not that impressed — until I went back and played Forza Motorsport 7 for a while.Arriving six years after the last entry and as the first game in the series built for the new generation of hardware, this latest Forza doesn’t make the biggest graphical leap in the series’ history. But after about 10 hours of driving in the game’s single and multiplayer events with the game, I felt like everything else you encounter while driving, like the audio, physics, and AI drivers, is noticeably different...
As founder and CEO of healthy grocery delivery service Hungryroot, Ben McKean has been investigating the power of AI technologies to improve his business. But with the launch of his new side project — an app called Every — McKean wants to explore the use of AI to help people establish deeper relationships with themselves […]
To better understand where startups still stand a chance, and where oligopoly dynamics and first-mover advantages are shaping up, we polled a select group of investors about the future of AI.
Yesterday, 75,000 workers at healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente embarked on a three-day strike to protest understaffing, burnout and low wages — setting a record for the biggest healthcare strike to date in U.S. history. But timing is everything in medicine. While Kaiser Permanente works through terms with union reps, another interesting development has emerged: it […]
Guardrails for testing and learning are essential to accelerating exploration while minimizing security risks.
AI-powered parking platform Metropolis today announced that it raised $1.7 billion to acquire SP Plus, a provider of parking facility management services, in a combination of equity and debt. Eldridge Capital and 3L capital co-led the tranche with participation from BDT & MSD Partners’ affiliated credit funds, Vista Credit Partners, Temasek, Slow Ventures and Assembly […]
Likewise, the company behind an app that can recommend your next TV binge, movie to watch, podcast to stream, or book to read, is out today with its own entertainment-focused AI companion, Pix. Built using a combination of Likewise’s own customer data and technology from partner OpenAI, Pix can make entertainment recommendations and answer other […]
Google launched the Pixel 8 series on October 4. The company relied on showing Google’s AI prowess as a core selling point. Google’s launch comes weeks after Apple launched its new iPhone 15 series of devices. That’s why we wanted to compare the specifications of these new devices from Apple and Google. In this comparison, […]
Section 32, a venture firm founded by ex-Google Ventures CEO Bill Maris, has closed on $525 million in capital commitments across its fifth fund, TechCrunch is first to report. A portion of the capital will go toward early-stage investments, while the remaining will be reserved for follow-on opportunities. The San Diego, California, firm, which now […]
Gradient, a startup that allows developers to build and customize AI apps in the cloud using large language models (LLMs), today emerged from stealth with $10 million in funding led by Wing VC with participation from Mango Capital, Tokyo Black, The New Normal Fund, Secure Octane and Global Founders Capital. Chris Change, Gradient’s CEO, co-founded […]
Venture investors see potential in observability software — i.e. software that gives teams the ability to monitor, measure and understand the state of a system or app. And that’s not surprising. The observability market is forecasted to reach $2 billion by 2026, climbing from $278 million in 2022, according to 650 Group. The growth is […]
Liz O’Sullivan is on a mission to make AI “a little bit safer,” in her own words. A member of the National AI Advisory Committee, which drafts recommendations to the White House and Congress on how to foster AI adoption while regulating its risks, O’Sullivan spent 12 years on the business side of AI startups […]
Even Adobe is sick of using the lasso tool to manually separate objects from photographs. | Image: Adobe Adobe is set to announce a new AI-powered photo editing tool at the Adobe Max event next week that makes it much easier to alter images without prior editing experience. According to a promotional video (seen via Techspot), the new “object-aware editing engine” — dubbed Project Stardust — automatically identifies individual objects in regular photographs, allowing them to be easily moved around and changed. It’s similar to Google’s Magic Editor announced yesterday for its new...
Image: Artifact Just one week after adding the ability to post, Artifact announced on Wednesday that users can now use AI to generate cover art for their content. The company says the feature will add “eye-catching images” that’ll help users better tell their stories.Up until recently, Artifact was an AI-powered news app from Instagram’s co-founders that aggregated news and links around the internet. By adding the ability to directly share and personalize content, it’s becoming even more of a rival to Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). Image: Artifact If you want an image related to...
After launching a generative AI tool for corporate employees in August, Walmart is bringing the technology to its customers. During a demo with TechCrunch, a company spokesperson outlined how the retail giant is experimenting with generative AI to help shoppers in all stages of the shopping experience, from the search and discovery phase to making […]
AI deepfakes are getting so good that a fraudulent MrBeast ad slipped past TikTok’s ad moderation technology to end up on the platform. In the ad, the massively influential creator appeared to be offering 10,000 viewers an iPhone 15 Pro for just $2. In most cases, this would be a clear indication of a scam, […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge At Zoomtopia 2023 today, Zoom announced Zoom Docs, a collaboration-focused “modular workspace” that integrates the company’s Zoom AI Companion for generating new content or populating a doc from other sources — you know the drill by now. Along with the Mail and Calendar offerings launched during last year’s event, Zoom Docs is another step toward a full office suite alternative to Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, which both have started to integrate AI-powered tools of their own, dubbed Duet AI and Copilot, respectively. The company says it...
Sam Altman, Peak XV, Eric Schmidt’s trust, and Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman’s AI grant are among backers of an AI startup, founded by two teenagers, that’s aiming to assist businesses in automating numerous workflows in previously unexplored ways. Induced AI, founded this year, enables businesses to input their workflows in plain English, subsequently converting […]
Image: Microsoft Microsoft is announcing the third generation of its OneDrive cloud storage today, complete with the company’s AI-powered Copilot system, a Fluent design refresh, and big improvements to the way businesses share and use cloud documents.OneDrive hosts trillions of files for consumers and businesses, with 2 billion files added every single day. Microsoft is now overhauling a lot of the experience of working in OneDrive for businesses, with many quality-of-life improvements that will make managing and using files a lot better on the web, in Windows, and in Microsoft’s various...
If someone wants to advise you on “storytelling,” you have my permission to skip that meeting and work on your data room instead.
It seems like everyone in the database business is thinking about how to capitalize on the growth of AI by adding support for vectors to their products. That, after all, remains to be the easiest way to feed up-to-date data to foundation models. Almost 28 years after its launch, MySQL may not have much hype […]
LinkedIn — the Microsoft-owned social platform for those networking for work or recruitment — is now 21 years old, an aeon in the world of technology. To stay current with what the working world is thinking about most these days, and to keep its nearly 1 billion users engaging on its platform, today the company […]
Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge You can’t have missed Microsoft’s attempts to stuff generative AI into almost everything it makes, from Bing search to the Windows OS. And it continues: the most recent update for Windows 11 has rolled out Copilot to all users.If you’re new to Copilot, it’s very much like the AI you can chat with via Bing search, with a few Windows-specific features: the ability to launch apps, for example, or manage screenshots pasted to the clipboard.It’s worth bearing in mind that it’s early days for the toolIn its announcement of the feature, Microsoft...
Content moderation continues to be a contentious topic in the world of online media. New regulations and public concern are likely to keep it as a priority for many years to come. But weaponised AI and other tech advances are making it ever harder to address. A startup out of Cambridge, England, called Unitary AI […]
Visa announced today that it plans to invest $100 million in companies developing generative AI technologies and applications “that will impact the future of commerce and payments.” The investments will be made through Visa Ventures, the card giant’s 16-year-old global corporate investment arm. Visa claims to have been a “pioneer of AI use in payments” […]
We developed an 'AI as agent' approach and shipped a new AI capability that exploded to 5% adoption in the first week.
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. Last week during its annual Connect conference, Meta launched a […]
Everything from materials to manufacturing and distribution leaves a carbon footprint, and not all vendors report their emissions.
Following the successful launch of Spotify’s AI-powered DJ feature and, more recently, added support for AI-translated podcasts, Spotify now appears to be developing another means of using AI in its app: AI-powered playlists. References discovered in the app’s code indicate the company may be developing generative AI playlists users could create using prompts. The new […]
Cyrus Khajvandi, a Stanford biology graduate and two-time entrepreneur, often found it challenging to stay on top of scientific research while managing his daily workload . Recognizing that he wasn’t the only one — and that AI technology was becoming more accessible — Khajvandi began developing an AI platform to summarize and answer questions about […]
The National Security Agency (NSA) has launched a dedicated artificial intelligence security center. This apparently follows the increased government use of algorithms and AI systems, related to defense and intelligent systems. The security center aims to protect these systems from theft and sabotage, as well as safeguard the country from external AI-based threats.The NSA’s outgoing director, General Paul Nakasone, says the division will operate within the existing Cybersecurity Collaboration Center. This entity works with private industry and international partners to protect the US from...
Illustration: The Verge Apple will soon bring its powerful internal search engine to the App Store and other apps, as Mark Gurman reports in this week’s Power On newsletter for Bloomberg. Apple debuted upgrades to its Spotlight search feature in iOS 14 and iPadOS 14, letting users search there for web results, details from apps, documents, and much more.According to the newsletter, former Google executive John Giannandrea’s search team is working to bake the internally-named “Pegasus” search engine more deeply into iOS and macOS and could even use generative AI tools to enhance it...
As tech companies begin to monetize generative AI, the creators on whose work it is trained are asking for their fair share. But so far no one can agree on whether or how much artists should be paid. A recent open letter from the Authors Guild signed by more than 8,500 writers, including Margaret Atwood, […]
You’d better believe that Humane is going to milk the media hype cycle for all it’s worth. After all, the company’s been buzzy since it first engaged with the media – well before it offered the slightest bit of insight into what it’s been working on. That’s courtesy of its being founded by high-profile Apple […]
The Humane Ai Pin, up-close on a model at coperni’s Ready to Wear show during Paris Fashion Week, September 29th, 2023. | Photo by Victor VIRGILE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images It’s Paris Fashion Week, and Humane was designer Coperni’s latest buzzy tech name to be included. Humane’s Ai Pin — a device we’ve so far only seen in silhouette on the company’s website or peeking out of Humane co-founder Imran Chaudhri’s breast pocket in a TED demo earlier this year — was pinned on the clothes of multiple Coperni models during its presentation. And it’s a rounded-corner square thing...
Meeting investors is easy. The hard part is crafting a story that’s so convincing, they’ll wire you some money.
This week, we cover the latest news from Meta: AI-enabled smart glasses, a VR headset, and an army of fresh chatbots.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Nvidia’s France offices were raided by the country’s competition authority this week, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. While the French agency doesn’t mention Nvidia by name, it confirms it carried out a raid over concerns about anti-competitive practices in the graphics cards industry.Sources tell the WSJ that French authorities specifically targeted Nvidia, which has seen demand for its chips skyrocket in recent months. Several companies, including Microsoft and OpenAI, have purchased thousands of the company’s high-end AI...
Large language models are trained on all kinds of data, most of which it seems was collected without anyone’s knowledge or consent. Now you have a choice whether to allow your web content to be used by Google as material to feed its Bard AI and any future models it decides to make. It’s as […]
Illustration: The Verge Google just announced it’s giving website publishers a way to opt out of having their data used to train the company’s AI models while remaining accessible through Google Search. The new tool, called Google-Extended, allows sites to continue to get scraped and indexed by crawlers like the Googlebot while avoiding having their data used to train the company’s present and future AI models. The company says Google-Extended will let publishers “manage whether their sites help improve Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs,” adding that web publishers can use the toggle...
Journalism and other fields are dealing with a new wave of tools like Google Bard. | Image: Google The arrival of generative artificial intelligence has accelerated the use of AI in different fields, including journalism. AI is most visible in journalism when things go wrong. Some newsrooms have published AI articles riddled with errors or offensive suggestions. There’s widespread anxiety that AI will be used to replace journalists on the cheap. But a new global survey demonstrates the ways that AI has worked its way into the business, even as journalists worry about its implications — and...
Web publishing platform Medium has announced that it will block OpenAI’s GPTBot, an agent that scrapes web pages for content used to train the company’s AI models. But the real news may be that a group of platforms may soon form a unified front against what many consider an exploitation of their content. Medium joins […]
There are important protections in the Writers Guild of America deal, but it's not enough. When the Screen Actors Guild goes to the table, it should fight for more to keep AI from impinging on the work of artists.
Pilot, a Vancouver-based startup, wants to become “the hub of global travel experience” and connect people via travel.
New AI tech could upend the status quo, and I think that Microsoft adding AI at the OS level could be a big step in that direction.
The AI-powered news reading app Artifact, built by Instagram’s co-founders, has been transforming itself into a more social experience over time with recent launches like profiles, commenting, link sharing and more. But yesterday, the app launched one of its most social features yet: the ability for users to post their own content directly on Artifact, […]
Zapier today announced the launch of Canvas, a new tool that aims to help its users plan and diagram their business-critical processes — with a fair bit of AI sprinkled in there to help them turn those processes into Zapier-based automations. Canvas is now in early access. In addition, the company also today announced that […]
Earlier this year, prominent AI and tech experts signed a letter calling for a halt to advanced AI development. When WIRED checked back in, some signatories said they had never expected it to work.
The impact of AI-first companies will be greater, financial returns superior, and moats more enduring than their AI-enabled counterparts.
If you haven’t noticed, a growing amount of code that’s being generated today is “AI-assisted.” In fact, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of Cloud and AI, estimated back in March that upwards of 40% the code that developers were uploading to the AI developer tool GitHub Copilot was both “AI-generated and unmodified.” Now, the […]
On the heels of the debut of its Bedrock service for building generative AI apps, Amazon has launched a new enterprise plan for CodeWhisperer, its AI-powered service to generate and suggest code. The new plan, aptly called CodeWhisperer Enterprise Tier, introduces new functionality that allows a company to integrate their internal codebases and resources to […]
Amazon today announced the general availability of Bedrock, its service that offers a choice of generative AI models from Amazon itself and third-party partners through an API. Bedrock, which was unveiled in early April, allows AWS customers to build apps on top of generative AI models and customize them with their proprietary data. Leveraging these […]
Bumble, Inc. CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd believes the power of AI technology will lead to a better online dating experience for her apps’ users. Speaking at the Code Conference on Wednesday, the Bumble and Badoo exec shared how her company uses AI technology to improve matching and other aspects of the business. While she noted […]
Shopping for clothing online has liberated us from the need to brave the endless aisles, fluorescent lights and sale-hungry crowds of the brick-and-mortar retail inferno. But anyone who has found themselves two hours deep into a fashion rabbit hole, with nothing to show for it but 15 open tabs, four full shopping carts, an earful […]
Market intelligence — where organizations gather information about industries, other businesses, trends, and more in order to use that data to help make business decisions — has become a huge industry in itself over the last few decades, projected to be worth nearly $84 billion in revenues this year. Now, as newer innovations like ChatGPT […]
Adobe officially launched Photoshop for the web on Wednesday for all users with paid plans. The web version, which was in beta for almost two years, is now available with Firefly-powered AI tools such as generative fill and generative expand. The company said that the tools in the toolbar on the web is based group […]
Meta announced a host of new AI-powered bots, features and products to be released across its messaging apps, the Meta Quest 3 and the future Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The new features — ranging from an AI assistant to image editing — harness the power of generative AI to make Meta’s technology just that much […]
FedEx handles over 15 million packages daily. A two-armed, AI-infused robot is now helping pack some of them into delivery vans with expert care.
Actors are in the middle of a major, protracted battle with Hollywood over what role AI will be playing in the future of entertainment, and how they’ll be compensated for that when those AIs are basically likenesses of them. Over at Meta, it looks like some of those kinks have been ironed out… Today, the […]
Meta has just wrapped up its 2023 Connect keynote. As promised, the company had a lot more to share about its Meta Quest 3 headset. It also announced the latest pair of smart glasses it created in collaboration with Ray-Ban. In an astoundingly shocking turn of events, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also had some AI updates to discuss. Meta Quest 3 release dateMeta first showed off the Quest 3 back in June to preempt Apple's announcement of the Vision Pro. However, we had to wait a few months to get all of the details about Meta's mixed reality headset (which we've already had some hands-on time...
Meta, angling for a seat at the AI chatbot table, is launching a host of new AI-powered bots across its messaging apps, including WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. They’re available for select users in beta in the U.S. as of today. One is an AI assistant called Meta AI, which, judging by The Verge’s hands-on piece, […]
The most popular language models out there may be accessed via API, but open models — as far as that term can be taken seriously — are gaining ground. Mistral, a French AI startup that raised a huge seed round in June, has just taken the wraps off its first model, which it claims outperforms […]
Image: Artifact Artifact, the AI-powered news app from Instagram’s co-founders, is adding a major new feature: the ability to post. So far, the app has been an aggregator for news and links from around the internet, but you’re going to be able to add posts directly to the app.Mike Krieger, one of the co-founders of Artifact, announced the new features onstage in a conversation with Casey Newton at the Code Conference on Wednesday. The new feature is a logical next step from Artifact’s recently launched update that lets users share links. This new feature means you won’t just be limited...
Today at its annual Connect developer conference, Meta launched AI Studio, a platform that’ll let businesses build AI chatbots for the company’s messaging services, including Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. Starting with Messenger, AI Studio will let companies “create AIs that reflect their brand’s values and improve customer service experiences,” Meta writes in a press release. […]
At its Meta Connect event today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that generative AI stickers would be coming to Meta’s messaging apps. The feature, which is powered by its new foundational model for image generation, Emu, will allow users to create unique AI stickers in a matter of seconds across Meta apps including WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, […]
Image: Meta New generative AI tools announced Wednesday at Meta’s Connect event will allow users to edit images and create stickers using text prompts. AI image editing will be available on Instagram, and AI-generated chat stickers will roll out on Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger.AI-powered photo editing on Instagram includes two new features: restyle and backdrop. With restyle, users input a text prompt — Meta’s examples include “watercolor” or “magazine collage” — and the tool updates the existing image based on those directions. The backdrop feature also utilizes...
An example of what Meta’s AI assistant can do. | Meta The Meta AI assistant is coming to WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, along with dozens of AI characters based on celebrities like MrBeast and Charli D’Amelio. Continue reading…
Just because generative AI is trendy right now, doesn’t mean it has to be applied to every application. But try telling that to Workday. The enterprise management platform vendor today announced a suite of new generative AI features aimed at “increasing productivity” and “streamlining business processes.” Soon, Workday customers will be able to automatically compare […]
Warner Music CEO Robert Kyncl believes AI will be significantly impacting the music industry within the next year. Speaking at the Code Conference this week, the industry exec said the industry should soon expect the increasing quality of music made with AI technologies that comes at a very fast pace, and the industry’s best bet […]
OpenAI, not content with building large language models and art-generating AI, wants to get into hardware. That’s according The Information, which reported this week that storied former Apple product designer Jony Ive is in talks with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about an AI hardware project. The details are wanting. But billionaire Masayoshi Son, the founder […]
Feature hopes to remove language barriers, but will speakers know if translations are faulty?
Mythos Ventures invests in AI startups focused on transformative AI, an area General Partner Vishal Maini says is still catching on.
Yaysay, an AI-powered shopping app, launched in beta today to gamify off-price shopping and bring the experience to mobile. Created by Casper co-founder Philip Krim, Yaysay combines concepts from social media, video games, online ticketing platforms and dating apps. Each day, the app curates a set of items tailored to you and your favorite brands, […]
Looking to cash in on the AI craze, Cloudflare, the cloud services provider, is launching a new collection of products and apps aimed at helping customers build, deploy and run AI models at the network edge. One of the new offerings, Workers AI, lets customers access physically nearby GPUs hosted by Cloudflare partners to run […]
Former Tinder CEO Renate Nyborg’s startup Meeno, which aims to fight loneliness through an AI-powered chatbot, announced that it has raised a $3.9 million seed round led by Sequoia. Meeno aims to release its app on the App Store in December in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands. […]
Xavier Niel, the founder, CEO and majority shareholder of telecom company Iliad, has announced several new projects around AI and told the AFP that he plans to conduct strategic investments in artificial intelligence of up to $210 million (€200 million). Niel isn’t just a telco CEO. In addition to Iliad, he is also the owner […]
After almost five months, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) has reached an agreement with Hollywood studios to end the writers strike. Starting Wednesday, writers will be able to resume work under the conditions established by their new contract. During the historic strike, AI emerged as a key point of contention between the writers and […]
Photo by Alexi Rosenfeld / Getty Images Hollywood productions are in limbo, even with a new deal between writers and producers, as actors remain on strike over many of the same issues with AI and streaming. Continue reading…
Photo by Mario Tama / Getty Images After a nearly five-month-long strike, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) is telling its members to lower their picket signs. In a post, the WGA said its Negotiating Committee, WGAW Board, and WGAE Council all voted unanimously to recommend the deal reached with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.The terms of the deal have been posted so that we can see them for the first time, and two segments that jump out are the regulations around the use of generative AI tools as well as data about streaming and how bonuses are calculated. The WGA...
The goal of Atlassian's CTO, Rajeev Rajan, and that of the two CEOs is to create one of the top tech companies at the world.
Eufy Clean X8 Pro with its self-emptying station and app. | Image: Eufy Anker’s Eufy division has a new robot vacuum cleaner with more powerful suction than its other offerings, and which can automatically detangle hair and pet fur from its bottom roller brush. The new $649.99 Eufy Clean X8 Pro vacuum is available to purchase today on Amazon and includes many advanced features available in other vacuums, like infrared laser navigation and AI home mapping to both avoid and remember walls and other obstacles. The X8 Pro also features self-emptying abilities, and basic mopping.Anker’s press...
The European Union has warned more needs to be done to address the risks that widely accessible generative AI tools may pose to free and fair debate in democratic societies, with the bloc’s values and transparency commissioner highlighting AI-generated disinformation as a potential threat to elections ahead of the pan-EU vote to choose a new […]
Kolena, a startup building tools to test, benchmark and validate the performance of AI models, today announced that it raised $15 million in a funding round led by Lobby Capital with participation from SignalFire and Bloomberg Beta. The new cash brings Kolena’s total raised to $21 million, and will be put toward growing the company’s […]
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, speaks during an interview in Redmond, Washington, on Wednesday, March 15th, 2023. | Image: Chona Kasinger / Bloomberg via Getty Images Microsoft thinks next-generation nuclear reactors can power its data centers and AI ambitions, according to a job listing for a principal program manager who’ll lead the company’s nuclear energy strategy.Data centers already use a hell of a lot of electricity, which could thwart the company’s climate goals unless it can find clean sources of energy. Energy-hungry AI makes that an even bigger challenge for the company to...
Amazon’s bid for AI glory is in the billions. It’s investing up to $4 billion in OpenAI rival Anthropic to provide advanced deep learning and other services for its Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers. Google has already invested $400 million in the company, which was founded by former OpenAI executives.Anthropic recently unveiled its first consumer-facing chatbot Claude 2, accessible by subscription much like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The Claude Constitutional AI system is guided by 10 “foundational” principles of fairness and autonomy and is supposed to be harder to trick than other AI...
Kneron, which is developing AI chips to power self-driving cars, among other autonomous machines, today announced that it raised $49 million in an extension to its Series B round from investors including Foxconn, Alltek, Horizon Ventures, Liteon Technology Corp, Adata and Palpilot. Kneron’s CEO, Albert Liu, says that the new tranche, which brings Kneron’s total […]
Why is it that so many companies that rely on monetizing the data of their users seem to be extremely hot on AI? If you ask Signal president Meredith Whittaker (and I did), she’ll tell you it’s simply because “AI is a surveillance technology.” On stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, Whittaker explained her perspective that […]
Stock photo giant Getty Images has partnered with Nvidia to build an image generator. Just like with other tools of its ilk, questions remain about who should get credit for the pictures it dreams up.
The FBI makes heavy use of face recognition services like that of controversial startup Clearview AI, but 95 percent of the agents using them haven’t completed training on the technology.
“Honestly, and I really can say this with a straight face, we create jobs. Because there’s so much shit to do to actually put these use cases into production, that a lot of our customers can’t fill those jobs fast enough,” May Habib, CEO at enterprise-targeted AI tool Writer, told me onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt […]
Getty Images, one of the largest suppliers of stock images, editorial photos, videos and music, today announced the launch of a generative AI art tool that it claims is “commercially safer” than other, rival solutions on the market. Called Generative AI by Getty Images, the tool — powered by an AI model provided by Nvidia, […]
Snapchat has a new advertising partner in Microsoft for the ads it’s inserting into its AI product, My AI, an AI chatbot introduced earlier this year to the wider Snapchat user base. The company in May said it would begin testing Sponsored Links in My AI — link suggestions that are paired with the user’s […]
Companies like OpenAI hone their bots using hand-tailored examples from well-educated workers. But is this always for the best?
A new version of OpenAI’s popular chatbot behaves a lot like Siri and Alexa. You can talk to it — and have a conversation.
Amazon has commited to an initial $1.25 billion investment that can be increased by an additional $2.75 billion. | Image: Amazon / Anthropic Amazon announced on Monday that it will invest up to $4 billion into Anthropic — the AI startup best known for its Claude chatbot and founded by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei who used to work for OpenAI.This deal pales in comparison to the reported $13 billion that Microsoft has so far invested into OpenAI, the biggest name in generative AI technology right now, but that partnership has been blossoming since 2019. Nevertheless, it’s a clear sign...
Amazon said Monday it has agreed to invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic as the e-commerce group steps up rivalry against Microsoft, Meta, Google and Nvidia in the fast-growing red hot sector that many technologists believe could be the next great frontier. The e-commerce group said it will initially invest $1.25 billion […]
The generative AI boom has put a spring in the step of Correcto, a Madrid-based language writing tool startup focused on Spanish speakers that’s today announcing $7 million in seed funding. The round is led by London-based Octopus Ventures, with Carya Venture Partners and River Park Ventures also contributing. The founding team began work on […]
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta is preparing to announce a generative AI chatbot, called “Gen AI Personas” internally, aimed at younger users, according to The Wall Street Journal. Reportedly set to launch during the company’s Meta Connect event that starts Wednesday, they would come in multiple “personas” geared towards engaging young users with more colorful behavior, following ChatGPT’s rise over the last year as one of the fastest-growing apps ever. Similar, but more generally targeted, Meta chatbot personas have already been reportedly tested on Instagram...
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 7, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, first of all, hi, hello, welcome, and second of all, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about the AI writing lives of real writers, rewatching the John Wick movies to prepare for The Continental, shopping for StandBy-capable iPhone docks, getting back into VR exercise with Supernatural boxing, and really, really, really hoping Microsoft’s controller-first vision for the future of gaming comes true soon.I also have...
The Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Pixel 8 camera specs and a new AI promo video for the phone were posted by 91Mobiles, courtesy of leaker Kamila Wojciechowska, giving us our first real look at how Google will integrate more AI into its flagship smartphones (via 9to5Google). Magic Editor, which the company said earlier this year would come to “select” Pixel phones, is like a supercharged version of Magic Eraser. It enables you to remake any picture you take so it looks like you want it to. That’s shown in a demonstration where a person takes three...
Along with AI advances in Windows 11 and Bing, Microsoft also this week announced it’s bringing new AI-powered features to its SwiftKey mobile keyboard app for iOS and Android. This third-party app lets users replace the default keyboard on their phone with an intelligent keyboard that learns your writing style so you can type faster. […]
Microsoft’s Bing is gaining a number of AI improvements, including support for OpenAI’s new DALLE-E 3 model, more personalized answers in search and chat, and tools that will watermark images as being AI-generated. The company announced these and other Windows and Bing news at an event this week in New York, where it also introduced […]
FinanceGPT is a generative AI startup built to help companies in their financial analysis tasks. Initially built for startups without in-house finance teams, and VCs looking to run financial health checks for their portfolios in Africa, FinanceGPT (Ipoxcap) says it has over the last two years grown to attract a diverse range of clientele including […]
Plantiga Technologies, a Vancouver-based movement analytics company, wants to help people improve rehabilitation and reduce injury risks through an artificial intelligence-powered monitoring sensor pod that can be embedded into shoes, orthotics or insoles to analyze users’ movement patterns. Plantiga is participating in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, and while it’s been around for a […]
Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images Intel has wrapped up its annual Innovation event in San Jose, where the chipmaker gave us a glimpse of what’s coming down the pipeline over the next few years. In case you don’t have a spare hour and a half to sit down and watch CEO Pat Gelsinger’s keynote, here are some important things we learned.Meteor Lake will launch on December 14th If you haven’t guessed, AI was kind of a theme here. The company officially introduced its “Meteor Lake” generation (known officially as the Intel Core Ultra) to the world at the Innovation keynote. These will...
Kinhub, a B2B SaaS platform powered by AI, seeks to democratize access to coaching and wellness support for employees.
Salesforce has announced plans to acquire Airkit.ai, a low-code platform that helps ecommerce companies build AI-powered customer service agents. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2017, Redwood City, California-based Airkit was created by Adam Evans and Stephen Ehikian, who sold a previous big data startup called RelateIQ to Salesforce for $390 million […]
YouTube has new AI features for creators on the way. AI-powered features the company announced at its Made on YouTube event on Thursday include a green screen feature, insights to stimulate ideas, automatic dubbing to other languages and a soundtrack search.Dream Screen gives YouTube Shorts creators an AI-powered green screen, similar to a popular feature on TikTok. YouTube’s tool will automatically remove backgrounds from your videos, replacing them with AI-generated images or videos based on your prompts.Although it’s yet to be seen how professional and convincing the generated content...
Ron Williams, co-founder and CEO of Kindo, knows a thing or two about cybersecurity, having previously led security teams at League of Legends developer Riot Games, shared scooter startup Bird and Alphabet-backed Clover Health. He is now bringing this expertise to the fast-moving world of artificial intelligence (AI) with Kindo, his new AI productivity and […]
As Anthropic takes on OpenAI and other challengers in the growing artificial intelligence industry, there is also an existential question looming: can large language models and the systems they enable continue growing in size and capability? CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei has a simple answer: yes. Speaking on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, Amodei explained that […]
Can software work alongside human physicists and engineers in R&D labs to develop new quantum computers? That’s the question Qruise, a startup in TechCrunch’s Battlefield 200 competition at Disrupt 2023, is attempting to answer. Qruise, a spinoff of Forschungszentrum Jülich, a national research institute based in Germany, is building what its founders describe as a […]
News aggregation startup Artifact co-founder Kevin Systrom doesn’t believe in AI doomerism, even as he’s developing a new app that’s embracing novel AI technologies. The Instagram co-founder, speaking on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, said it’s good that people are questioning the potential impacts of AI but feels it’s more likely that people will become […]
Secoda, a startup developing what it describes as an AI-powered data search and cataloging platform, today announced that it raised $16 million in a funding round led by Craft Ventures with participation from Abstract Ventures and several angel investors. Bringing Secoda’s total raised to $18.3 million, Secoda co-founder and CEO Etai Mizrahi said that the […]
For years, Forethought and other vendors have been selling chatbots to help answer common customer service questions without a human agent. With the growing popularity of generative AI, the company sees even more potential to expand that capability. Today, Forethought introduced the next logical step in that journey called Autoflows. “We’re announcing a concept called […]
Photo by Chris Welch/The Verge This morning, Microsoft set the release date for its AI-powered Copilot feature and showed off some of its capabilities for the first time. At a “Responsible AI” panel following the announcement, company executives spoke about the danger of over-reliance on its generative software, which was shown creating blog posts, images, and emails based on user prompts. Six months after the company laid off the team dedicated to upholding responsible AI principles in the products it shipped, the execs attempted to make a clear statement onstage: Everything is fine...
People are more aware of disinformation than they used to be. According to one recent poll, nine out of ten American adults fact-check their news, and 96% want to limit the spread of false information. But it’s becoming tougher — not easier — to stem the firehose of disinformation with the advent of generative AI […]
At an event today focused on AI and security tools and new Surface devices, Microsoft announced that Windows 11 users will soon be able to take better advantage of passkeys, the digital credentials that can be used as an authentication method for websites and apps. Once the expanded passkeys support rolls out, Windows 11 users […]
It was Microsoft's turn to step up to the plate and hold a fall hardware event on Thursday. Although Surface devices were the name of the game, there was a heavy — and I mean heavy — focus on AI. In the company's first event since longtime Chief Product Officer Panos Panay departed this week (reportedly for Amazon), Microsoft revealed a pair of new consumer laptops and a whole lot of Copilot AI news.Copilot and other AI updatesMicrosoft spent most of the event talking about AI and Copilot. In fact, the hardware almost seemed like an afterthought. The company is unifying the Copilot...
Gizmo, a generative AI learning startup that uses gamified quizzes to engage learners, today announced $3.5 million in seed funding from NFX, Ada Ventures, and Capital T. The company will use the funding to scale its platform globally, hire more engineers and roll out new features. Gizmo generates quizzes from user’s class notes, which can […]
Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio 2 looks to be a minor update of the prior model, with faster performance and new connectivity options. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Microsoft announced the Surface Laptop Studio 2 and Surface Laptop Go 3 during its recent hardware event in New York City, introducing the two laptops alongside a flurry of AI-powered features for Windows 11, Microsoft 365, and Bing. The high-end Surface Laptop Studio 2 starts at $1,099, while the Surface Laptop Go 3 starts at $799; both are slated to launch on October 3rd at 12AM ET.Although the forthcoming laptops look...
Microsoft is releasing a big Windows 11 update next week, on September 26. The catchily-named 23H2 is packed with some real game changing features, along with a whole bunch of quality of life improvements. The update arrives just in time for the launch of the just-announced Surface Laptop Go 3 and the Surface Laptop Studio 2.The big news here is the inclusion of the new AI-powered Windows Copilot feature. This toolset already exists as part of the Edge browser, but now it’ll be natively implemented in Windows, which allows for some nifty use cases. This native implementation means that...
Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio 2. We’ve just had a chance to play with Microsoft’s new Surface Studio Laptop 2 after it was announced at a “special event” in New York City. Visually, it doesn’t look a lot different than what came before it, but the trackpad is greatly improved, the specs inside upgraded, and there’s a new AI-focused neural processing unit that’s designed to light up some AI-powered experiences in Windows 11.The Surface Laptop Studio 2 retains the same unique fold-over design as its predecessor but makes the laptop all around more capable. It runs on one of...
Microsoft unveiled the Surface Laptop Go 3 during its Surface event on Thursday. The company says the latest model will run for up to to 15 hours on a single charge and that it will be ultra thin and ultra light (at under 2.5 pounds). It has a 12.4-inch touchscreen and a fingerprint power button. At first glance, the bezel doesn't seem to have changed much from previous iterations. Performance-wise, Microsoft claims the Surface Laptop Go 3 is 88 percent faster than the original model, which arrived three years ago.Unsurprisingly, given Microsoft's focus on AI over the last year...
During today’s YouTube event, CEO Neal Mohan revealed that the platform is testing a new generative AI-powered tool in YouTube Studio that suggests video topics, making the brainstorming process easier for content creators. Called “AI insights for Creators,” the inspiration tool will generate ideas based on data about what audiences are already watching, Mohan explained. […]
YouTube is expanding its Creator Music Studio, announced last year, with new AI features in addition to the launch of an AI-dubbing tool. Currently, creators can use the Creator Music Studio to search for songs, a specific artist, or a music genre they want to use in a video. Now, they’ll be able to leverage […]
Image: YouTube More content on YouTube is going to be created at least in part using generative AI.The video platform announced several new AI-powered tools for creators at its annual Made on YouTube event on Thursday. Among the features coming later this year or next are AI-generated photo and video backgrounds, AI video topic suggestions, and music search.A new feature called Dream Screen will create AI-generated videos and photos that creators can place in the background of their YouTube Shorts. Initially, creators will be able to type in prompts to generate backgrounds; eventually, YouTube...
YouTube today announced a new feature coming to its short-form video platform Shorts that will allow users to leverage AI tools to create videos. The feature, called Dream Screen, will allow users to create an AI-generated video or image background just by typing in what you want to see. For example, explained YouTube CEO Neal […]
Image: Microsoft Microsoft is ready to talk more about its AI plans at a “special event” in New York City today. We’re expecting to hear about three new Surface devices, with the Surface Laptop Studio 2 the main flagship device that could be part of a bigger AI push for Windows.The event comes just days after former Surface and Windows chief Panos Panay announced his resignation from Microsoft. Panay won’t be presenting at the event anymore, and we’re expecting to see Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s head of consumer marketing, instead. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will also appear on stage....
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Microsoft’s big Windows and Surface event will focus on its AI vision of the future. Continue reading…
Indian health and wellness startup HealthifyMe has introduced an AI-powered feature that recognizes Indian food from images for calorie intake logging, allowing users to track their meal intake more efficiently. Tracking Indian foods through images is challenging given there is a vast variety of cuisines. Also, a number of people eat on a plate called […]
OpenAI is gearing up to roll out the third version of DALL-E, its text-to-image AI system, which reportedly improves its predecessor's capabilities and can generate results within the ChatGPT app. The company demonstrated how the new iteration integrates with ChatGPT to The Verge, and it showed the publication how users can ask the chatbot to write a lengthy and detailed prompt the image AI can use. OpenAI told Axios that DALL-E 3 is "significantly better" at being able to grasp a user's intention, especially if the prompt is long and detailed. If a user can't articulate what they want in...
Several years ago, Aleksander Caban, the co-founder of Carbon Studio, a Polish VR game developer, observed a major problem in modern game design. He had to create rocks, hills, paths and other basic elements of video game environments manually, which often turned out to be a time-consuming — and laborious — process. So Caban decided […]
GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke considers AI and software development to now be inextricably linked, powered by assistive tools such as Copilot and its associated Copilot Chat, which the Microsoft-owned company expanded to individual GitHub subscribers today. But speaking on stage at TC Disrupt today, Dohmke maintained that the snowballing AI revolution won’t be the death knell […]
Founded by the former vice president of AI at Meta, Jerome Pesenti, Sizzle is a free AI-powered learning app that generates step-by-step answers to math equations and word problems. The company recently launched four new features, including a grading capability, a feature that regenerates steps, an option to see multiple answers to one problem and […]
The Panasonic SoundSlayer (GNW10). | Image: Panasonic Companies keep trying to make neck speakers a thing. People must be buying them, though, because Panasonic is releasing a new one: the GNW10 SoundSlayer, a wireless neck speaker with AI voice isolation (which it confusingly calls “AI voice control”) for phone calls and in-game voice chat. The SoundSlayer is $299 and will be available in late October of this year.This is essentially an updated version of the wired SoundSlayer neck speaker that Panasonic released two years ago. The biggest change is that the new SoundSlayer employs a small...
Amazon’s fall hardware event was chock full of updates. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the generative AI boom from the last year, the company began transforming Alexa into a much more versatile and conversational personal chatbot. But it also had plenty of new hardware to introduce, with new models of the Echo Show, security cameras, Echo Frames, a 10-gigabit router and more. Here’s everything Amazon unveiled on Wednesday.Alexa with generative AIAmazonAs generative AI has exploded in popularity during the last year, task-focused personal assistants like Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa now...
In the artificial intelligence world, there’s no shortage of image or text generators that allow users to spur up content with the push of a button. Alpha3D, a generative AI-powered platform, is participating in the TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 a participant of the Startup Battlefield 200 cohort in hopes of showcasing a technology that can hyper-scale […]
Amazon kicked off its annual Fall Devices Event today, revealing its generative AI plans, a slew of Alexa and Echo announcements, Fire TV streaming news, along with updates to Amazon’s smart home gear like its Blink and Ring cameras and a new, yet very expensive, eero Wi-Fi system. It’s a lot to digest, to say […]
While studying computer science at the University of Chicago, Devshi Mehrotra and Leslie Jones-Dove were inspired to build tech that centered on the needs of communities historically marginalized by law enforcement. They ended up reaching out to local public defenders, who told them that they were being overwhelmed by hours of jail calls, body cams and other […]
Spiral Town, which has jumped from Reddit to X to everywhere, is helping to usher in a hopeful but increasingly dangerous era of artificiality.
Clika, a startup participating in the Battlefield 200 competition at TC Disrupt 2023, aims to build tech to "compress" existing AI models.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft-owned GitHub is rolling out its AI-powered coding chatbot to more people. The company launched its Copilot Chat tool in public beta for business users in July, and on Wednesday, GitHub announced that it’s available in public beta for GitHub Copilot individual users in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.Copilot Chat lets users talk to an AI assistant to get help as they’re writing code. “Now, teams of developers and individuals alike can use GitHub Copilot Chat to learn new languages or frameworks, troubleshoot bugs, or get answers to...
Capsule, a startup that’s been putting AI to use in video editing, is releasing its product to the public, after three years in development. The company’s enterprise-focused AI editor aims not to replace the humans involved in video editing, but to help content and marketing teams produce video ten times faster than before, the company […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon’s assistant now has its own Alexa LLM poised to improve the brains in your smart home thanks to its extensive knowledge of smart home APIs. Continue reading…
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon’s big fall product event comes from a smaller company and with big AI expectations. Continue reading…
Since large language models (LLMs) shot up in popularity, plenty of developers have built tools on top of OpenAI’s GPT or Anthropic’s Claude to help people draft emails in different tones and formats. Shortwave, an email client built by former Google employees, is launching an AI-powered assistant that lets you ask questions about your inbox. […]
At its annual devices event, Amazon updated its Fire TV lineup with new devices, including the Fire TV Stick 4K and Fire TV Stick 4K Max, as well as a new Fire TV-branded soundbar — following its rival Roku into expansions into other home entertainment products. But beyond the hardware news alone, the company also […]
Uber's AI chatbot will help users find restaurant deals and reorder favorites on the app. Available in the U.S., U.K., Australia and Canada.
In addition to getting a generative AI-powered upgrade, and the ability to continue conversations without again using the wakeword “Alexa,” Amazon’s voice assistant is going to gain a more natural-sounding voice. The company introduced today an updated text-to-speech engine that’s now more context-aware of the user’s emotions and the tone of your voice, which then […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge More authors sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, joining other writers in pursuing legal action against generative AI companies for using their books to train AI models. The Authors Guild and 17 well-known authors like Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult filed the lawsuit in the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs hope to get the filing classified as a class action.According to the complaint, OpenAI “copied plaintiffs’ works wholesale, without permission or consideration” and fed the copyrighted...
Two years after announcing voice chat was coming to Roblox, the gaming company has acquired a voice tech startup, Speechly, offering voice chat moderation, real-time transcription, and and Voice API that lets companies add AI voice technology and voice interfaces to their products and experiences. The Helsinki, Finland-based startup Speechly was founded in 2016 with […]
AUDIO Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. We were live at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023! Yes, even though our dear friend and colleague Mary Ann had to handle a family emergency, the larger […]
Artificial intelligence continues to be a major force in the world of healthcare, and in one of the latest developments, a Copenhagen startup called Corti has raised $60 million to expand its contribution to the field: an AI assistant designed to support healthcare clinicians with patient assessments in real time. Prosus Ventures and Atomico are […]
In the Wild West of generative AI, a new, unlikely cowboy is riding into town. LimeWire — once infamous for music piracy and incurring the wrath of the music industry before shutting down — last year pivoted under new owners into the world of content creation. Now, to build that out further, today it’s announcing […]
Edsoma, a startup that developed an AI-powered reading, education and communication platform for children, raised $2.5 million in a seed round led by Shaquille O’Neal. The trick? Founder and CEO Kyle Wallgren didn’t ask the NBA superstar and philanthropist for money. “He didn’t ask me for money; what he asked was actually ‘I would like […]
Shaquille O’Neal, 15-time NBA All-Star, four-time NBA champion and three-time NBA Finals MVP, took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to talk about his passion for investing in edtech and backing projects that aim to change people’s lives. O’Neal is the lead investor in Edsoma, an AI-powered reading, education and communication platform for children. The NBA […]
The idea of bringing AI into the classroom doesn’t sit well with everyone, but the team behind Nolej believes that generative AI can supercharge learning — all while keeping teachers front and center. Nolej AI is an AI-powered tool that lets educators quickly generate interactive learning modules like quizzes, flashcards, games and interactive videos. “We […]
Creating crops that’ll endure climate change — think worse droughts, heat waves and pests — is a time-consuming and costly feat. Avalo is betting its machine learning models can speed that process up and make it a whole lot cheaper too. The Durham, North Carolina–based startup, which pitched onstage at the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield […]
US Representative Deborah Ross (D-NC) has introduced an updated version of the Protect Musicians Act in an attempt to change the way independent artists bargain with major streaming platforms. Created in collaboration with The American Association of Independent Music (A2IM) and The Artists Rights Alliance (ARA), the updated bill aims to "level the playing field" for artists in the digital age and the world of AI-generated music."This legislation will help give small, independent music creators a level playing field, empowering them to stand together for fairer compensation and giving...
In its ongoing effort to make its AI systems more robust, OpenAI today launched the OpenAI Red Teaming Network, a contracted group of experts to help inform the company’s AI model risk assessment and mitigation strategies. Red teaming is becoming an increasingly key step in the AI model development process as AI technologies, particularly generative […]
Google admits that Bard isn't always accurate; ropes in Gmail through new Extensions.
Meet BioticsAI, a startup that has built an AI-based platform that plugs into an ultrasound machine to prevent fetal malformation misdiagnosis. BioticsAI has been quietly working on its solution for the past two years and is now unveiling its product onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt as part of the Startup Battlefield. “BioticsAI processes all of the […]
David Van Bruwaene was pursuing his Ph.D. in philosophy at Cornell when he developed a passion for linguistics and natural language processing, the subfield of AI concerned with allowing machines to understand human language. After leaving academia to join VISR, an AI startup focused on applying NLP to detecting cyberbullying on social media, Van Bruwaene […]
Do you want some frittata? | Image: Toyota Research Institute Yeah, so Toyota Research Institute (TRI) used generative AI in a “kindergarten for robots” to teach robots how to make breakfast — or at least, the individual tasks needed to do so — and it didn’t take hundreds of hours of coding and errors and bug fixing. Instead, researchers accomplished this by giving robots a sense of touch, plugging them into an AI model, and then, as you would a human being, showing them how. The sense of touch is “one key enabler,” researchers say. By giving the robots the big, pillowy thumb (my...
Image: TikTok TikTok is introducing a new way for creators to label content that was made using artificial intelligence tools. The feature was first spotted by users last month and was announced by TikTok today in a blog post.TikTok’s user guidelines already require creators to disclose when content is made using AI tools. The new feature will prompt a creator to turn on the labeling feature so viewers know when videos and photos were created using AI software. The AI label appears below the username in the corner of videos. The prompt also includes a reminder that content could be removed if...
AlphaMissense, a new model from Google’s artificial intelligence team, analyzes the effects of DNA mutations and will accelerate research into rare diseases.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Software company Digimarc will now let copyright owners add more information to their work, which the company said will improve how AI models treat copyright in training data. In a statement, Digimarc said its new Digimarc Validate service lets users include ownership identification in the metadata. The company said this means that when copyrighted material becomes part of a generative AI training dataset, users can point to the digital watermark with intellectual property information.For example, an image with Digimarc Validate adds a © symbol that is...
Image: CD Projekt Red Cyberpunk 2077 will become the first game to support Nvidia DLSS 3.5, the latest version of the chipmaker’s upscaling technology. The update will arrive on September 21st with Update 2.0 — just days before the launch of the game’s Phantom Liberty expansion.DLSS 3.5 uses a new technology called Ray Reconstruction, which Nvidia describes as an AI-powered technique that enhances the quality of ray tracing. Ray Reconstruction swaps “hand-tuned denoisers” with an AI network trained by a supercomputer that should result in higher-quality pixels between sampled rays....
Pryon, a startup developing an AI-powered platform to look for insights in — and surface answers from — enterprise knowledge bases, today announced that it raised $100 million in a funding round led by Thomas Tull’s U.S. Innovative Technology Fund. Pryon’s founder, Igor Jablokov, said that the new cash will be put put toward supporting […]
HiddenLayer, a security startup focused on protecting AI systems from adversarial attacks, today announced that it raised $50 million in a funding round co-led by M12 and Moore Strategic Ventures with participation from Booz Allen Hamilton, IBM, Capital One and TenEleven. Bringing the company’s total raised to $56 million, the new funds will be put […]
The U.S. is famous (or infamous) for its litigiousness: the country may not have the highest per capita amount of lawsuits (that’s Germany), but it has the most of any country overall amid a very active legal industry whose caseload is growing in a market that is worth many tens of billions of dollars. Now, […]
Image: Google Google’s Bard AI chatbot is no longer limited to pulling answers from just the web — it can now scan your Gmail, Docs, and Drive to help you find the information you’re looking for. With the new integration, you can ask Bard to do things like find and summarize the contents of an email or even highlight the most important points of a document you have stored in Drive.There’s a whole range of use cases for these integrations, which Google calls extensions, but they should save you from having to sift through a mountain of emails or documents to find a particular piece of...
Outschool, the online learning platform that offers kid-friendly academic and interest-based classes, announced today the launch of its AI Teaching Assistant, a tool for tutors to generate progress reports for their students. The platform – mainly popular for its small group class offerings — also revealed that it’s venturing into one-on-one tutoring, putting it in […]
Google today is releasing a more capable version of Bard, its generative AI chatbot and ChatGPT rival, which now lets you double-check its answers, collaborate with others, and, notably, integrate with Google’s own apps and services, including Gmail, Docs, Drive, Maps, YouTube, and Google Flights and hotels. The latter is available through new Bard Extensions […]
As more creators turn to AI for their artistic expression, there’s also a broader push for transparency around when AI was involved in content creation. To address this concern, TikTok announced today it will launch a new tool that will allow creators to label their AI-generated content and will begin testing other ways to label […]
A Microsoft AI research team that uploaded training data on GitHub in an effort to offer other researchers open-source code and AI models for image recognition inadvertently exposed 38TB of personal data. Wiz, a cybersecurity firm, discovered a link included in the files that contained backups of Microsoft employees' computers. Those backups contained passwords to Microsoft services, secret keys and over 30,000 internal Teams messages from hundreds of the tech giant's employees, Wiz says. Microsoft assures in its own report of the incident, however, that "no customer data was exposed, and no...
The most recent cohort from Y Combinator features more than 200 startups. The S23 batch stands out for several reasons. More than half of these startups focus on AI applications, highlighting a dominant trend we can expect in the coming years. It’s also remarkable for at least one more reason: only one startup from the […]
Catch+Release, a startup that lets brands license creator content, said it has launched an AI-powered search that lets users look for user-generated content in natural language queries. The startup helps companies license creator content for their marketing campaigns. While brands can add links from Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok to their collection for potential use, the […]
Investors haven’t tired of generative AI startups yet — particularly those with clear enterprise applications. Case in point, Writer, which is developing what it describes as a “full-stack” generative AI platform for businesses, today announced it raised $100 million in a Series B funding round led by ICONIQ Growth with participation from WndrCo, Balderton Capital […]
An initial review of generative AI by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) which was announced back in May has concluded with a report containing seven proposed principles to “ensure consumer protection and healthy competition are at the heart of responsible development and use of foundation models” (FMs), as it puts it. The principles […]
Bird Buddy, the startup behind multiple AI-powered smart bird feeders, including the recently announced smart Hummingbird Feeder and Bird Bath, is today launching its latest product — and it’s not another bird feeder. Instead, the company is debuting a new digital product called Bird Buddy Explore, which allows anyone to browse feeds from Bird Buddy […]
Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge With only a couple of minutes and access to YouTube, you can now make SpongeBob SquarePants sing your favorite Taylor Swift song. Or make Taylor Swift sing your favorite Drake song. Or make Drake sing your song. AI covers and AI-generated originals are suddenly everywhere on the internet, to the point where even diehard fans don’t know what’s a real leak and what’s a generated one. It’s a complicated ethical and legal mess and makes being a music fan weirder than ever.That’s only the very beginning of the ways AI is coming into the music-making...
Microsoft AI researchers accidentally exposed tens of terabytes of sensitive data, including private keys and passwords, while publishing a storage bucket of open-source training data on GitHub. In research shared with TechCrunch, cloud security startup Wiz said it discovered a GitHub repository belonging to Microsoft’s AI research division as part of its ongoing work into […]
"This was the point where AI-generated art passed the Turing Test for me."
Ethical AI requires a deep understanding of what there is, what we want, what we think we know, and how intelligence unfolds.
Dozens of US senators listened quietly as tech titans and AI ethicists schooled them on the “civilizational risks” of generative AI.
Databricks announced a $500 million funding round this morning, signaling it was putting more cash to work in the growing AI market.
Proteins, the natural molecules that carry out key cellular functions within the body, are the building blocks of all diseases. Characterizing proteins can reveal the mechanisms of a disease, including ways to slow it or potentially reverse it, while creating proteins can lead to entirely new classes of drugs and therapeutics. But the current process […]
“The growth of AI, I believe, is the growth of Arm,” Arm EVP and Chief Commercial Officer Will Abbey told me this morning, minutes before the chip designer’s stock started trading on Nasdaq. While AI may not always be the first thing you think about when you hear about Arm, when I asked Abbey about […]
LastMile AI, a platform designed to help software engineers develop and integrate generative AI models into their apps, has raised $10 million in a seed funding round led by Gradient, Google’s AI-focused venture fund. AME Cloud Ventures, Vercel’s Guillermo Rauch, 10x Founders and Exceptional Capital also participated in the round, which LastMile co-founder and CEO […]
Helsing, a ‘Defence AI’ startup backed by Spotify founder Daniel Ek which had previosuly raised €102.5 million, has today pulled in another €209 million ($223 million) in a Series B funding round led by General Catalyst. Swedish heavy industry and defence group Saab is joining as a strategic investor, deepening what was previously an existing […]
Pixis, an AI-powered platform for brands to monitor and orchestrate their marketing campaigns, today announced that it raised $85 million in a Series C1 round led by Touring Capital with participation from Grupo Carso, General Atlantic, Celesta Capital and Chiratae Ventures. The funding brings Pixis’ total raised to $209 million, and comes at a time […]
It turns out that when you put together two AI experts, both of whom formerly worked at Meta researching responsible AI, magic happens. The founders of Patronus AI came together last March to build a solution to evaluate and test large language models with an eye towards regulated industries where there is little tolerance for […]
Data analytics and AI software maker Databricks has raised a Series I round worth more than $500 million, earning a valuation of $43 billion. This round sticks out, particularly as many late-stage startups are seeing their valuations being slashed amid a wider funding slowdown. Databricks last raised $1.6 billion in August of 2021 at a […]
AI is just about everywhere lately, but nobody expected it to be used as a salvo in the ongoing cola wars. Coca-Cola, however, has other plans, as it just launched a new flavor co-created by artificial intelligence. The company’s calling it the soda “from the future” and it’s available for a limited time in both regular and zero sugar varieties, as reported by CNBC.It’s called Y3000, which is certainly a futuristic-sounding name, though it calls to mind Skynet and its army of evil Terminators more than a refreshing beverage. Coke hasn’t released any information as to how it actually...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A California lawmaker will file a bill seeking to make generative AI models more transparent and start a discussion in the state on how to regulate the technology. Time reports that California Senator Scott Wiener (D) has drafted a bill requiring “frontier” model systems, usually classified as large language models, to meet transparency standards when they reach above a certain quantity of computing power. Wiener’s bill will also propose security measures so AI systems don’t “fall into the hands of foreign states” and tries to establish a...
The European Union has signalled a plan to expand access to its high performance computing (HPC) supercomputers by letting startups use the resource to train AI models. However there’s a catch: Startups wanting to gain access to the EU’s high power compute resource — which currently includes pre-exascale and petascale supercomputers — will need to […]
The company is building an AI-enabled data platform for companies that want to know more about the carbon credits they buy.
Creating smooth, high-quality is a challenge, with car horns and accidental pauses two of the many obstacles necessary to overcome. Adobe Premiere Pro is attempting to make these points less of a nuisance with the automatic removal of any background noise or accidental "ums" that get muttered.Adobe Premiere Pro should get rid of your "ums" and "hmms" with an update called filler word detection — an AI-based tool that does exactly what it says before deleting them from both the audio and any transcription. It can also identify and cut any long pauses you want out of the final version. Filler...
Photo by Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto via Getty Images Stability AI, a company mostly known for AI-generated visuals, launched a text-to-audio generative AI platform called Stable Audio.Stable Audio uses a diffusion model, the same AI model that powers the company’s more popular image platform, Stable Diffusion, but trained with audio rather than images. Users can use it to generate songs or background audio for any project.Audio diffusion models tend to generate a fixed length of audio, which is terrible for music production as songs can vary in length. Stability AI’s new platform lets users...
Amazon today introduced a new set of generative AI tools aimed at sellers which the retailer says will simplify the process of creating product listings. The retail giant claims these new capabilities are designed to help sellers generate “captivating product descriptions, titles, and listing details.” Sellers will also be able to add to their existing […]
Photoshop’s Generative Fill tool is finally available outside of the beta app. | Image: Adobe Following several months of beta testing, Adobe has announced that its Firefly generative AI model is now commercially available across Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Express, and Adobe Experience Cloud.That means the Firefly-powered workflows that have so far been limited to the beta versions of Adobe’s apps — like Illustrator’s vector recoloring, Express text-to-image effects, and Photoshop’s Generative Fill tools — are now generally available to most users (though there are some regional...
Just seven months, and reportedly 2 billion generated images, after first incorporating the beta AI into its suite of image and video editing tools, Adobe announced on Wednesday that its Firefly for Enterprise generative AI is now commercially available in Photoshop, Illustrator and Adobe Express workflows. And with the release comesa new Firefly web application as well, available as part of the company’s Creative Cloud paid plans.The new subscription plan revolves around “generative credits” (GCs), which Adobe defines as, “tokens that enable customers to turn a text-based prompt into...
176 days after launching its Firefly generative AI models into beta, Adobe today announced that Firefly is now generally and commercially available in its Creative Cloud, Adobe Express and Adobe Experience Cloud. This means, for example, that Firefly features like generative fill and generative expand in Photoshop are now available without having to install the […]
Now that Adobe’s Firefly generative AI models are now generally available. One feature that always made Firefly stand out from a crowd of other image generation models was that the company only trained it on content that was either in the public domain or that it had rights to through Adobe Stock, its stock image […]
Adobe is making it easier to improve and clean up the audio quality of your recorded footage in Premiere Pro. | Image: Adobe Adobe is introducing some new AI and 3D features in beta for Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Frame.io — its popular suite of video and audio editing applications that are designed to improve workflow and speed up time-intensive tasks. To start, Premiere Pro is adding an AI-powered Enhance Speech feature that Adobe claims can make poorly recorded dialogue sound like “it was recorded in a professional studio.” Enhance Speech automatically removes background noise and...
A year ago, Stability AI, the London-based startup behind the open source image-generating AI model Stable Diffusion, quietly released Dance Diffusion, a model that can generate songs and sound effects given a text description of the songs and sound effects in question. Dance Diffusion was Stability AI’s first foray into generative audio, and it signaled […]
Despite the surge of interest in AI, startups hoping to use it as a springboard to their next funding round should think twice.
If AI is essential to your solution, you should be prepared to explain the measurable impact it has on your product offering.
Today at the Dreamforce customer conference in San Francisco, Salesforce announced Einstein Copilot Studio, a tool that lets customers customize the Salesforce base Einstein GPT and Einstein Copilot offerings. Einstein Copilot Studio consists of three elements: prompt builder, skills builder and model builder, according to Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI. “The first piece is […]
European AI startup Druid today announced it has raised $24 million in a Series B round of funding, as it looks to double down on its U.S. growth which it says now makes up the lion’s share of its revenue. Founded out of Romania in 2018, Druid touts its “conversational business applications” that lean on […]
Enfabrica, a company building networking chips designed to handle AI and machine learning workloads, today announced that it raised $125 million in a Series B funding round that values the company at “five times” its Series A post-money valuation, according to co-founder and CEO Rochan Sankar. Led by Atreides Management with participation from Sutter Hill […]
ELSA, the English language learning platform, announced today it has raised $22.5 million in Series C funding. It also launched ELSA AI Tutor, which draws on years of speech recognition data collected by the app and reproduces conversations through generative AI to help learners correct their pronunciation, grammar and tone. This brings ELSA’s total raised […]
Generative AI startups should familiarize themselves with the parameters and limits of several common antitrust theories of harm.
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week in AI, D-Matrix, an AI chip startup, […]
Character.ai, the AI app maker that lets users design their own AI characters, is catching up to ChatGPT in terms of mobile app usage. According to a recent analysis by market intelligence firm Similarweb, the iOS and Android apps for the a16z-backed Character.ai are now seeing 4.2 million monthly active users in the U.S., compared […]
There’s a gold rush on in biotech as AI and other tools are used to find new drugs and treatments. With $5.5 million in new funding, Scala Biodesign is focusing these methods on a related problem: making existing or promising drugs more practical by tweaking them one (or more) molecule at at time. The founders […]
Ahead of Wednesday’s AI-focused private Congressional meeting with tech giants, Google this morning announced a new initiative aimed at supporting researchers and public policy solutions around AI with the debut of the Digital Futures Project. As part of the effort, Google’s charitable arm Google.org is establishing a $20 million fund that will provide grants to […]
Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge You may not think of it this way, but you probably hear AI voices all the time. When you’re talking to Alexa or Siri, that’s a model trained on human speech to be able to say almost anything. Did you ever have a celebrity give you directions on Waze? AI. And every time you watch TikTok and you hear that slightly too chipper voice speaking the captions aloud, that’s AI all the way down. Heck, Apple’s AI will even read you a romance novel before you go to bed.AI systems are getting good at turning text into believable speech in almost any language...
Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. is setting the record straight. After Variety reported earlier this week that an AI-generated track echoing the voices of Drake and The Weeknd could be considered for a Grammy Award in songwriting categories, Mason is insisting that’s not the case.In an interview with The New York Times only last week, Mason suggested the track would be “absolutely eligible” as the lyrics a human made the lyrics. On Instagram, the Recording Academy CEO has now clarified that the song will not be eligible.“Even though it was written by a human creator, the vocals...
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta has been snapping up AI training chips and building out data centers in order to create a more powerful new chatbot it hopes will be as sophisticated as OpenAI’s GPT-4, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company reportedly plans to begin training the new large language model early in 2024, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg evidently pushing for it to once again be free for companies to create AI tools with.The Journal writes that Meta has been buying more Nvidia H100 AI-training chips and is beefing up its infrastructure so that, this time around...
Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. This week was packed with news, including in the world of startups — our favorite arena. Before we jump in, let me direct your attention to Friday’s Equity Podcast […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The organization behind the Grammys wants to make it clear that the AI Drake song “Heart on My Sleeve” won’t qualify for an award. In a video on Instagram, Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. says the song is “not eligible for Grammy consideration” (via Deadline).On Tuesday, the anonymous creator, who goes by Ghostwriter, released another track using the AI-generated vocals of Travis Scott and 21 Savage. That’s when a report from The New York Times also suggested that the creator is shooting for a Grammy, with Mason Jr. telling the outlet...
There’s a very high risk that artificial intelligence (AI) will put the integrity of the election process into question.
Having pulled in more than six million players in less than a week, Starfield is Bethesda’s biggest game launch of all time. Some of those players are already poking at the game’s limits by creating mods and speedrunning it. One has found another way to break the game, namely by building a ship that enemies can’t figure out how to consistently hit.The player, who goes by Morfalath, figured out that the enemy AI targets the center of your ship. By building a spacecraft that’s essentially a hollow cube with a few missing edges, they created what they claim is an “unbeatable ship.”It...
Elon Musk-owned X, formerly Twitter, has updated its terms of service to prohibit scraping and crawling — likely to fend off any AI models training on its data. The new terms, which are effective from September 29, ban any kind of scraping or crawling without “prior written consent.” NOTE: crawling or scraping the Services in […]
Reliance Industries has partnered with GPU giant Nvidia to work on building a large language model that is trained on India’s diverse languages, the two firms said Friday, as the largest Indian corporate firm expands into the nascent space. The companies will work together to build AI infrastructure that is “over an order of magnitude […]
Artists are among the many groups who will feel the effects of AI over the next few years, but it’s not doom and gloom for everyone. A group of artists have organized an open letter to Congress, arguing that generative AI isn’t so bad and, more importantly, the creative community should be included in talks […]
Image: eBay eBay will give sellers the option to create entire product listings from just a photo using a generative AI tool, the company announced on Thursday. eBay believes the AI-driven product listings will accelerate the selling process, especially for new merchants who might feel overwhelmed by all the details they need to provide. The new tool uses pictures uploaded by sellers to fill in details like a product title, description, item category, and other key information a buyer might want to know. Right now, it’s available only in the iOS app, and according to TechCrunch, it will be...
The word on everybody's lips was "AI," but there was a number of startups trying to make trucking, and the larger logistics world, work better and faster.
Ello aims to eradicate childhood illiteracy by leveraging artificial intelligence and child speech recognition technology. The startup announced today that it secured $15 million in Series A financing to help it do so, and the funding will go toward product development and expanding access to consumers. “Ello is one of those great companies,” Coddy Johnson, […]
Here's how some AI-forward tech companies on the public markets are forecasting growth.
Imbue, the AI research lab formerly known as Generally Intelligent, has raised $200 million in a Series B funding round that values the company at over $1 billion. Among those participating are the Astera Institute, Nvidia, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt and Notion co-founder Simon Last. The new tranche takes Imbue’s total raised to $220 million, […]
eBay is rolling out a new AI tool for marketplace sellers that can generate a product listing from a single photo. Available in the eBay app for iOS to start, with the Android app to follow in the coming weeks, the tool can automatically write a title and description based on a photo, as well […]
There’s a new self-driving trucks startup in town. And the faces are familiar. Bryan Salesky, Peter Rander and Brett Browning — the trio behind the now defunct Ford and VW-backed autonomous vehicle startup Argo AI — have formed a new company called Stack AV that’s focused on commercializing self-driving trucks. Softbank Group is the sole […]
Retool started out as a platform for building line-of-business apps, but over the last few years, the well-funded startup added a number of backend services as well, including, most recently, a workflow automation service. Today, it’s launching a number of new tools that will help its users build AI-based apps, including a hosted vector store […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Anthropic, the AI company backed by Google, has launched a paid version of its Claude chatbot in the US and UK. Priced at $20 (or £18) per month, the new Claude Pro option offers priority access when the bot is busy, early access to new features, and the ability to send more messages. The main draw is that you’ll get five times more usage with Claude Pro when compared to the free tier, which means you can send more messages in a shorter period of time. Anthropic says the typical user will get at least 100 messages every eight hours depending on Claude...
Once upon a time, we used to use travel agents to book our flights, book our hotels and maybe even make recommendations about things to do and places to eat while you were away. But then along came the internet and the ability to book your own flights, and Airbnb or Vrbo for your accommodation, […]
When a software program generates output data based on input data, which output data is a derivative of the input data? All? Some? None?
Illustration: The Verge Google will soon start requiring political advertisers to “prominently disclose” when they made their ads with AI, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. Starting in November, Google says advertisers must include a disclosure when an election ad features “synthetic content” that depicts “realistic-looking people or events.”That includes political ads that use AI to make someone look as if they’re saying or doing something they never did, as well as changing the footage of an actual event (or fabricating a realistic-looking one) to create a scene that never...
If tech could claim just one theme this year, it would, hands down, be AI. It’s absolutely everywhere, especially, one could argue, in the cloud. And if you’re going to talk about AI in the cloud, it’s tough to imagine a better candidate for that discussion than Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. We’re thrilled […]
Give this phone the software update policy it deserves, Google. | Image: Google If this year’s I/O was any indication, we’re going to hear about AI a lot at next month’s Pixel 8 launch. AI for your videos, AI for your text to the babysitter, blah blah blah. Fine. But there’s something else I’m hoping to see in the next generation of Pixel phones, even if it’s not quite the attention-getting feature that AI is: four years of OS upgrades.Samsung does it. Xiaomi just announced it’s doing it. Even OnePlus is doing it. So why is Google — the company behind Android — still only...
It’s that time of year again: the week when startups in Y Combinator’s latest batch present their products for media — and investor — scrutiny. Over the next two days, roughly 217 companies will present in total, a tad smaller than last winter’s 235-firm cohort as VC enthusiasm a slight slump. In the first half […]
HubSpot, the Boston-based marketing and CRM platform, announced a comprehensive AI strategy it’s calling HubSpot AI, at its Inbound customer conference in Boston today. While HubSpot, much like other enterprise SaaS vendors, has been building in elements of AI for years, with the rise of ChatGPT this year, it is taking a broader approach, while maintaining […]
After introducing the generative AI capabilities it was developing for Slack at World Tour NYC earlier this year, Salesforce has revealed as part of its Dreamforce announcements that it's now gearing up to pilot the new features this winter. Slack AI, as the capabilities are collectively called, is built natively into the platform to make it easy to access. One of its abilities is to instantly generate channel highlights that can immediately tell users the most important part of conversations, which they can then use for reports or to simply read what they might have missed. Slack AI...
We’re less than two weeks away from TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, and we still have more amazing people and sessions to share with you. Today, we’re introducing you to our industry chairs. These folks act as expert resources for TechCrunch, and they assist with our outreach across their respective fields. Now you, too, can benefit from […]
Lucas Ochoa and Gautam Bose were hired together out of college at Google Creative Lab, Google’s tech and culture incubator, and spent three and a half years launching products like the AI Test Kitchen, Teachable Machine and Google Pixel Buds Pro. In early 2020, their team was tasked with finding consumer applications of Google’s LaMDA […]
Intuit, the U.S. financial and accounting software giant, has unveiled its first customer-facing generative AI–powered solution: a digital assistant to assist small businesses and consumers. Called Intuit Assist, the digital assistant is embedded across Intuit’s platform and products, namely TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks and Mailchimp, with a standard user interface to offer personalized recommendations using […]
The Attorneys General in all 50 U.S. states, plus 4 territories, signed onto a letter calling for Congress to take action against AI-enabled child sexual abuse material (CSAM). “While internet crimes against children are already being actively prosecuted, we are concerned that AI is creating a new frontier for abuse that makes such prosecution more […]
Illustration by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The attorneys general from all 50 US states want lawmakers to establish a commission dedicated to investigating the impact of AI on child exploitation, as reported earlier by The Associated Press. In a letter to Congress, the attorneys general say that the proposed commission should come up with solutions to prevent the creation of AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM).As outlined in the letter, the attorneys general point out that bad actors can train an AI using images of abused and non-abused children to create deepfakes while also...
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Graham Hine, the co-founder and CEO of ePlant, a startup that creates sensors that monitor the health of trees. Hine talked about what got him interested in the tree space to begin with and […]
There has never before been a technology that has so quickly rallied the private sector to proactively seek government oversight.
Founders want to know what new technology can do, but an investor is much more likely to ask about which specific problems it solves.
An increasing number of companies are looking to automate as a shortage of skilled workers is expected to take a toll on manufacturers through 2030. Tokyo- and Atlanta-based startup Mujin, which develops AI-based software for industrial automation, believes that robots can improve productivity and safety. Today, the startup is announcing an $85 million Series C, bringing its total […]
Artisse is the latest AI photo creation app to challenge the recently viral app Remini and others by allowing users to generate AI photos of themselves by first uploading a series of selfies. However, Artisee claims to improve on the current crop of AI photo apps by offering a broader range of both input and output […]
To stay competitive in the crowded market for videoconferencing, Zoom is updating and rebranding several of its AI-powered features, including the generative AI assistant formerly known as Zoom IQ. The news comes after controversy over changes to Zoom’s terms of service, which implied that Zoom reserved the right to use customers’ videos to train its […]
The company uses AI and large language models to generate product attributes from things like titles, descriptions, ingredients and consumer reviews.
Money laundering — the process of transferring assets around in order to disguise the illicit origin of the money behind them — has been a huge and growing business for years, used by terrorists to finance their work, criminals to wash their spoils, (some) fat cats to avoid taxes and more. Aided by the rise […]
Tinrocket, makers of popular apps such as Waterlogue and Olli, have released a new camera app called Cinemin to shoot animated photos and videos without the help of any AI filters. The app, available for free, uses inspiration from traditional animated art and films for its filters. You can apply the filters while capturing the […]
Researchers have spent almost two decades trying to better understand the social and systemic factors behind opioid addiction.
X’s recently updated privacy policy informed its users it would now collect biometric data as well as users’ job and education history, Bloomberg spotted earlier this week. But it appears that’s not the only thing that X plans to do with user data. According to an update to another section of the policy, the company […]
August is one of the slowest months in venture capital, which is why now is such a good time for fundraising founders to ramp up their outreach.
Here's a high-level guide for evaluating an AI-based solution as a potential customer — an enterprise buyer scorecard, if you will.
Cruise, the self-driving subsidiary of General Motors, has raised over $15 billion, employs more than 3,000 people and expanded its footprint across multiple cities within the U.S. It even has a presence in Dubai. What does it take to build and scale such complex technology? We’re looking forward to discussing that and more with Kyle […]
In July last year, Naver, maker of the search engine known as the “Google of South Korea,” opened its new second headquarters, Naver 1784. The building’s name refers to a year commonly associated with the Industrial Revolution. Inside you’ll find a testament to automation’s growing global influence, in the form of 100 autonomous robots. The robots, […]
Samsung’s new app, Samsung Food, is designed to be a personalized AI cooking assistant. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Wi-Fi-connected kitchen appliances have struggled to prove their worth, but Samsung’s not entirely new app could help realize the potential of connected cooking. Continue reading…
Chinese giant Baidu officially launched its chatbot, Ernie Bot, after the government approved its application, alongside that of several other AI companies. Ernie Bot is now available for download from app stores or Baidu’s website. Much like its main rival, ChatGPT, users can ask Ernie Bot questions or prompt it to help write market analysis, give marketing slogan ideas, and summarize documents. People need to log in to their Baidu accounts to use Ernie Bot, but it’s unclear if the platform is available globally. The Baidu app is available on US Android and iOS app stores but is only in...
Are startups facing an insurmountable hurdle when it comes to leveraging LLMs and related technologies as effectively as their larger rivals?
About the time that Floworks co-founders Sudipta Biswas and Sarthak Shrivastava were starting at Y Combinator in the Winter 23 cohort, they had a chat with veteran investor Vinod Khosla, who encouraged the pair to think bigger. They said that that conversation had a huge influence on them as they were building Floworks, an AI […]
Continuing on its open source tear, Meta today released a new AI benchmark, FACET, designed to evaluate the “fairness” of AI models that classify and detect things in photos and videos, including people. Made up of 32,000 images containing 50,000 people labeled by human annotators, FACET — a tortured acronym for “FAirness in Computer Vision […]
A UK parliamentary committee that’s investigating the opportunities and challenges unfolding around artificial intelligence has urged the government to reconsider its decision not to introduce legislation to regulate the technology in the short term — calling for an AI bill to be a priority for ministers. The government should be moving with “greater urgency” when […]
The Martian Lawyers Club (MLC) wants to take game personalization to the next level with the help of generative AI. While there are plenty of companies that focus on using AI to generate game assets, MLC is taking a decidedly different approach by focusing less on content and more on the systems that form the […]
One month after China announced its provisional measures to oversee generative artificial intelligence, the country has granted approval to the first batch of large language model-empowered services for public use. Eight generative AI applications have registered with China’s cyberspace authority, including Baidu’s Ernie Bot, ByteDance’s Doubao, Sogou founder’s Baichuan and chatbots built on the lab […]
Amazon‘s march on the Indian market is taking to the rails and the mail. The e-commerce giant today announced new deals with India Post and Indian Railways to boost delivery for small businesses. At its SMB event Amazon Sambhav in New Delhi on Thursday, Amazon also unveiled new efforts to target D2C brands, and a […]
Google has been working to marry its new-found focus on generative AI with its existing expertise in search since mid-May, as part of Search Lab's Google Search Generative Experience (SGE) project. On Wednesday, the company announced that the SGE program is expanding beyond America's digital borders and into both the Japanese and Indian marketplaces.SGE is Google's answer to Microsoft's Bing AI and is designed to provide summarized and curated answers to input prompts rather than a list of webpages. Google's system differs from Microsoft's in that it incorporates its AI...
Google is bringing its generative AI search experience to the first countries outside the U.S., the company announced today, starting with expansions in India and Japan. The new AI-powered search feature, also known as SGE (Search Generative Experience), will become available through Google’s Search Labs in those markets, and will introduce a new feature aimed […]
AI21 Labs, a Tel Aviv-based startup developing a range of text-generating AI tools, has raised $155 million in a Series C funding round led by Walden Catalyst, Pitango, SCB10X, b2venture, Samsung Next and Amnon Shashua, the founder of Intel-owned Mobileye and an AI21 Labs co-founder, with participation from Google and Nvidia. The tranche, which brings […]
Substack is introducing new AI-powered tools that are designed to make podcasting on the platform easier, the company announced on Wednesday. With these new tools, users can easily generate transcripts and audiograms. Users can now use an AI tool to create a transcript of their podcast episode or narration in about a minute. Once you […]
Software as a service (SaaS) is an ever-evolving industry, especially now with AI changing the software landscape yet again. It’s why we dedicated a day and a stage to the topic at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. We teased some of the programming a few weeks back, and today we’re excited to announce that the SaaS Stage […]
We have customized our 'people-first' framework to apply to AI companies and are using it to guide our investment decisions.
Google has revealed more details about how you'll be able to use the Duet AI assistant to help you rapidly whip up emails and documents. In Gmail, the tool builds on existing AI-powered features such as Smart Reply. Click or tap the "help me write" button and you'll have several options at your disposal.Select "write your draft" and you can detail the type of message that you'd like Duet AI to generate. The tool will be able to draw from previous messages in the thread to make the draft response more relevant, Google says. If Duet AI creates a message in a tone that's perhaps too casual, you...
Betaworks is no stranger to investing in artificial intelligence and machine learning, but the latest cohort of their Camp “thematic accelerator” indicates a confidence in the field beyond the present fascination with chatbots. Founder and CEO John Borthwick described the firm as being “rabidly interested” in the field of AI as augmentation rather than just […]
Entrepreneur Steve Blank says we’re collectively underestimating the potential of generative AI.
Since the release of ChatGPT at the end of last year, we’ve seen companies developing generative AI tooling to help customers interact with their products and services in a more natural way. Yet in many cases, these vendors have no idea how well the underlying large language models are performing, or how good the answers […]
Biotech, pharmaceutical, and life sciences companies all hope AI will streamline drug development and make it more efficient, and 38% have already adopted the technology, according to Deloitte. QuantHealth aims to take part with a model that predicts risks and outcomes for clinical trials. The company’s AI-powered platform for drug discovery claims to reduce potential […]
General Motors has found a new way to get in on the generative AI buzz. The automaker is now using Google Cloud’s conversational chatbot, dubbed Dialogflow, to handle some non-emergency OnStar features. GM announced the collaboration alongside a keynote from Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai at the Google Cloud Next 23 event Tuesday. OnStar, GM’s in-car […]
After months of vetting thousands of applications, the Startup Battlefield 200 (SB 200) cohort for TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 is complete. You do not want to miss this incredible, curated collection of early-stage startups you’ll find exhibiting on the expo floor. We want to highlight them, but listing all of them at once would be, well, […]
In partnership with Google Cloud, Google Deepmind, Google’s AI research division, is launching a tool for watermarking and identifying AI-generated images. But only images created by Google’s own image-generating model. The tool, called SnythID and available in beta for select users of Vertex AI, Google’s platform for building AI apps and models, embeds a digital […]
The F-22 and F-35 are two of the most cutting-edge and capable war machines in America's arsenal. They also cost $143 million and $75 million a pop, respectively. Facing increasing pressure from China, which has accelerated its conventional weapon procurement efforts in recent months, the Pentagon announced Monday a program designed to build out America's drone production base in response. As part of that effort, the United States Air Force has requested nearly $6 billion in federal funding over the next five years to construct a fleet of XQ-58A Valkyrie uncrewed aircraft, each of which...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The US Copyright Office is opening a public comment period around AI and copyright issues beginning August 30th as the agency figures out how to approach the subject. As announced in the Federal Register, the agency wants to answer three main questions: how AI models should use copyrighted data in training; whether AI-generated material can be copyrighted even without a human involved; and how copyright liability would work with AI. It also wants comments around AI possibly violating publicity rights but noted these are not technically copyright issues...
AI — the tech that’s everywhere and touching everything — keeps evolving at a pace that’s surprising even in an industry where change is just about the only constant. It’s complicated, unregulated, thrilling and unnerving all at once. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, we’re dedicating a day and a stage to this galloping industry — and […]
General Motors is taking Google’s AI chatbot on the road. The automaker announced today that it’s using Google Cloud’s Dialogflow to automate some non-emergency OnStar features like navigation and call routing. Crucially, the automaker claims the bot can pinpoint keywords indicating an emergency situation and “quickly route the call” to trained humans when needed. GM says the system frees up OnStar Advisors to spend more time with customers requiring a live human.According to GM, the OnStar Interactive Virtual Assistant (IVA) has used Google Cloud’s Dialogflow under the hood since...
Considering the ongoing debate about the existential dangers of AI, it was interesting to watch a three-hour historical epic about the dawn of the Atomic Age last night.
Google took a step towards transparency in AI-generated images today. Google DeepMind announced SynthID, a watermarking / identification tool for generative art. The company says the technology embeds a digital watermark, invisible to the human eye, directly onto an image’s pixels. SynthID is rolling out first to “a limited number” of customers using Imagen, Google’s art generator available on its suite of cloud-based AI tools.One of the many issues with generative art — apart from the ethical implications of training on artists’ work — is the potential for creating deepfakes. For...
Back at I/O, we got a sense of some of Google's big plans for generative artificial intelligence, including the integration of the Duet AI virtual assistant into Workspace productivity apps. The company is now starting to roll out Duet AI to those who pay for versions of Docs, Gmail, Sheets and so on that are geared toward professional use. The virtual assistant is also making its way to Google Meet and Google Chat.There's a free trial of Duet AI for Google Workspace. However, to use the virtual assistant in the cloud-based apps after that, large organizations will need to pay $30 per month per...
AI is nothing new in the recycling industry, but Refiberd’s approach appears to break fresh ground both in its application to textile recycling and hyperspectral imagery.
If the 2020s are going to be the decade of AI, then the 2030s could be the decade of fusion power. That is, if the sector’s startups are able to deliver.
Snapchat is launching a new generative AI feature called “Dreams” that allows users to create fantastical images of themselves in different scenarios, such as a mermaid in a deep-seascape or a renaissance era royal. The official roll out comes a week after TechCrunch reported that Snapchat was gearing up to launch the feature. To get […]
Snapchat has added a new generative AI feature to its app. Called “Dreams,” it’s in some ways similar to the company’s signature AR effects, known as lenses. But instead of real-time camera-based effects, the feature uses generative AI to remix users’ selfies into “fantastical images that transform their persona into new identities.”The feature, which can be found in the app’s “memories” section, begins by asking users to take selfies showing their face at different angles. The app will then creates a series of eight images based on themes like “time travel” or “...
Quora’s AI chatbot product Poe is still being updated at a rapid pace as the company announced new features over the past few days including the ability to search for custom bots and a new enterprise tier for its premium plans. In an email sent to customers over the weekend, Poe announced that it will […]
Companies increasingly see the value in mining their data for deeper insights. According to a NewVantage survey, 97.6% of major worldwide organizations are focusing investments into big data and AI. But challenges stand in the way of executing big data analytics. One recent poll found that 65% percent of organizations feel they have “too much” […]
Duet AI, Google’s collection of generative AI features for text summarization, organizing data and more, is expanding to new products and services in Google Cloud. At its annual Cloud Next conference, Google announced that Duet AI — still in preview with general availability set for sometime later this year — can now assist with code […]
Google Colaboratory (Colab for short), Google’s service designed to allow anyone to write and execute arbitrary Python code through a browser, including code to run AI apps, is gaining an enterprise tier. Called Colab Enterprise, the new offering combines Colab notebooks — the environment where developers write Python code — with what Google describes as […]
At Cloud Next, its annual user conference, Google Cloud today announced the launch of the fifth generation of its tensor processing units (TPUs) for AI training and inferencing. Google announced the fourth version of its custom processors in 2021, but it only became available to developers in 2022. The company notes that it built this […]
Today at Google Cloud Next, the company announced several new generative AI enhancements to its security product line in an effort to make it easier to find information from a massive amount of security data by simply asking questions in plain language. Steph Hay, head of UX for cloud security at Google, says that these […]
Google’s Duet AI, its generative AI-powered helper, is now becoming generally available to any organization using Google Workspace the company announced today at its Google Cloud Next event. The AI helper, previously in testing with thousands of companies, will gain new capabilities, being able to act as a meeting assistant, a chatbot you can communicate […]
Over half of CEOs globally are experimenting with AI to generate text, images and other forms of data, a recent joint survey by Fortune and Deloitte found. Meanwhile, a third of organizations are using generative AI “regularly” in at least one business function, a McKinsey report shows. Given the massive (and apparently growing) addressable market, […]
A developer used widely available AI tools to generate anti-Russian tweets and articles. The project is intended to highlight how cheap and easy it has become to create propaganda at scale.
Once generative AI can use real-world tools, it will become exponentially more capable. Companies and regulators need to get ahead of these rapidly evolving algorithms.
Here are ways your generative AI organization can build as an open book while building trust with potential customers.
Uber Eats is developing an AI-powered chatbot that will offer recommendations to users and offer them a quicker way to place orders, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The report says developer Steve Moser discovered details about the chatbot inside of code hidden within the Uber Eats app. The chatbot will ask users about […]
From its prominence in the tech world, you might think that everyone on the planet is using ChatGPT or some other AI tool for everything from automating their job to planning their garden. But recent Pew polling suggests the language model isn’t quite as popular or threatening as some would have you think. Ongoing polling […]
In March, OpenAI sought to head off concerns that its immensely popular, albeit hallucination-prone, ChatGPT generative AI could be used to dangerously amplify political disinformation campaigns through an update to the company's Usage Policy to expressly prohibit such behavior. However, an investigation by The Washington Post shows that the chatbot is still easily incited to breaking those rules, with potentially grave repercussions for the 2024 election cycle.OpenAI's user policies specifically ban its use for political campaigning, save for use by "grassroots advocacy campaigns...
Daniel Marcous Contributor Share on Twitter Daniel Marcous is the co-founder and CTO of april, an AI-driven tax platform. Daniel was previously the CTO of AI-driven navigation platform Waze, which was acquired by Google in 2013. We are living through one of the most transformative tech revolutions of the past century. For the first time […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge DoorDash is launching a new answering service for restaurants that could put you on the phone with AI when ordering takeout or delivery. With the new service, restaurants can have AI field phone calls and take orders from customers, with live agents available “to support customers at any time.”The answering service is supposed to pick up every phone call that restaurants receive, making it easier for staff to manage takeout orders while juggling in-person customers. When someone calls in, the AI-powered service will attempt to upsell them by offering...
Yahoo is introducing new AI tools for Yahoo Mail that are aimed at helping users save time and money, the company announced on Monday. The rollout includes upgrades to several of Yahoo Mail’s existing AI features, and introduces a new Shopping Saver tool. Yahoo is TechCrunch’s parent company. The new Shopping Saver tool surfaces gift […]
Email really can be the treasure trove of potential generative AI uses, so check your old Yahoo Mail address because Yahoo wants to add more AI capabilities.Yahoo used Google Cloud’s AI platform to build out its generative AI features. The features were previously tested only on iOS users, but now, it’s available to users on web browsers. The company said it is adding a shopping feature called Shopping Saver, which finds gift cards, discount codes, and store credits hidden in inboxes and helps draft messages to use those savings even after purchase. Yahoo claims Shopping Saver is “unique...
DoorDash is launching AI-powered voice ordering technology that will allow restaurants to increase their sales by answering all of the calls they receive, the company announced on Monday. The system will also provide customers with curated recommendations to complement their meal. The company’s 2023 Restaurant Online Ordering Trends Report reveals that one in five customers […]
Hollywood may be embroiled in ongoing labor disputes that involve AI, but the technology infiltrated film and TV long, long ago. At SIGGRAPH in LA, algorithmic and generative tools were on display in countless talks and announcements. We may not know where the likes of GPT-4 and Stable Diffusion fit in yet, but the creative […]
Illustration by Haein Jeong / The Verge News publishers have jumped headfirst into artificial intelligence, using generative AI tools to produce bland travel guides, inaccurate film blogs, and SEO-bait explainers. By and large, the goal has been: can we make more pages for ads without paying more writers?Now, a group of tech outlets is attempting to incorporate generative AI into its websites, though readers won’t find a machine’s byline anytime soon. On August 1st, an AI chatbot tool was added to Macworld, PCWorld, Tech Advisor, and TechHive, promising that readers can “get [their] tech...
Internet users in the European Union are logging on to a quiet revolution on mainstream social networks today: The ability to say ‘no thanks’ to being attention hacked by AI. Thanks to the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA), users of Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, ByteDance’s TikTok and Snap’s Snapchat can easily decline “personalized” content feeds […]
When Nvidia reported earnings this week with three-digit growth, it put extra pressure on the company to continue performing at a high level.
Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa. | Image: Monarch Tractor Praveen Penmetsa is bringing the AI craze to farms. His company, Monarch Tractor, makes an electric tractor powered by an Nvidia AI platform that allows the vehicle to drive itself through farm fields and work autonomously. The first machines rolled out of the company’s Livermore, California headquarters last year.Now, Monarch Tractor is scaling up production in partnership with a Foxconn plant in Ohio, and Penmetsa is coming to the Code Conference to talk about it. He’ll chat with The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel about...
As Amazon’s Prime Video gears up for its second year as the exclusive rights holder to NFL’s Thursday Night Football (TNF), the streaming service hopes to give fans a more enhanced viewing experience with a slew of new AI-driven features. During a demo with Prime Video executives, TechCrunch learned about the AI elements coming to […]
Modular, a startup creating a platform for developing and optimizing AI systems, has raised $100 million in a funding round led by General Catalyst with participation from GV (Google Ventures), SV Angel, Greylock and Factory. Bringing Modular’s total raised to $130 million, the proceeds will be put toward product expansion, hardware support and the expansion […]
From pricing new add-ons outright and raising prices for bundled offerings to simply getting an edge in negotiations, AI opens up a host of pricing strategies.
Meta, intent on making a splash in a generative AI space rife with competition, is on something of an open source tear. Following the release of AI models for generating text, translating languages and creating audio, the company today open sourced Code Llama, a machine learning system that can generate and explain code in natural […]
Organizations are awash in data, but struggle with a host of challenges to actually use, organize and analyze that data. According to one estimate, companies will store 100 zettabytes of data in the cloud by 2025. But as of now, just 13% of organizations are delivering on their analytics and data strategy, a MIT Technology […]
Generative artificial intelligence, used to create content from text to images to videos, is still on the rise. Big Tech and startups across the globe are racing to compete and launch their own AI-powered chatbots, text-to-image generators, and video tools. Among them is a Bellevue, Washington–based startup called Irreverent Labs, whose AI technology enables anyone […]
We all learned the importance of 'showing our work' in elementary school, and we can certainly demand that same rigor from AI.
If you've been wondering who's making the most money from the AI boom, NVIDIA may have the answer in it's latest earnings report. The company announced revenue of $13.51 billion in the second quarter, more than doubling the $6.7 billion it made last year and crushing market expectations. On top of that, it earned $6.18 billion in GAAP net income, nine times the $656 million it made in Q2 2022. NVIDIA's gaming segment did pretty well too, thanks to $2.49 billion in Q2 revenue, up 22 percent from last year. During the quarter, it started shipping the budget-oriented GeForce...
Nvidia’s second-quarter earnings, which were reported Wednesday after markets closed, prove there is money to be made — and lots of it — selling the picks and shovels of the generative AI boom. “A new computing era has begun. Companies worldwide are transitioning from general-purpose to accelerated computing and generative AI,” Nvidia founder and CEO […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Roughly three months after joining Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft among the world’s trillion-dollar companies — on the back of the AI boom — Nvidia is now making far more money than it’s ever made before. The company raked in $13.5 billion in revenue since May, it revealed in its Q2 2024 earnings, with the unprecedented demand for its generative AI chips blowing past any difficulty it may have had selling desktop and laptop GPUs into a shrinking PC industry. Data center accounted for a record $10.32 billion of that revenue, and Nvidia made $...
Huge arrays of phase-change material perform in-memory processing.
As companies move to the cloud, keeping data secure is always front of mind. While Google is quick to point out that it has never had an exploit in Google Workspace, it doesn’t mean it isn’t working to continually stay ahead of security issues. Today, the company announced a number of security-related enhancements to Google […]
Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and other online publishing tools, is offering a glimpse into Tumblr’s future — the blogging site Automattic acquired from Verizon in 2019. On the Evening Standard’s “How to be a CEO” podcast, the WordPress founder offered a vision of Tumblr’s future direction, including its embrace of […]
What I like about Lex is that it makes for a good writing tool that is fast, simple to use, and uses AI to help writers instead of trying to supplant them.
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, in which we sit down with a guest, talk about their work and unpack the rest. This week, Mary Ann spoke with Mercedes […]
Wand.app, an AI-powered creative tool that gives artists the ability to manually customize and visualize their ideas, has raised $4.2 million in seed funding led by O’Shaughnessy Ventures. Unlike AI-powered creative tools that provide limited control over the content they generate, which can be alienating to artists who have specific visions for what they want […]
Kombai, a startup that aims to help front-end developers easily convert UI designs to code using AI, has emerged from stealth and announced a $4.5 million in a seed funding round led by Stellaris Venture Partners and Foundation Capital. In response to rapid hardware advancements, software evolution has underscored a pressing need for superior user […]
High energy prices are leading to a solar boom across the world, but in Singapore, many home owners are still hesitant to install solar panels because of the high cost, says Bolong Chew, the founder of Solar AI Technologies. The startup wants to make solar energy more accessible in Southeast Asia with a rent-to-own model […]
ElevenLabs, the viral AI-powered platform for creating synthetic voices, today launched its platform out of beta with support for more than 30 languages. Using a new AI model developed in-house, ElevenLabs says that its tools are now capable of automatically identifying languages including Korean, Dutch and Vietnamese and generating “emotionally rich” speech in those languages. […]
Photo by Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images Google has made clear it is going to use the open web to inform and create anything it wants, and nothing can get in its way. Except maybe Frank Sinatra. Continue reading…
OpenAI customers can now bring custom data to the lightweight version of GPT-3.5, GPT-3.5 Turbo — making it easier to improve the text-generating AI model’s reliability while building in specific behaviors. OpenAI claims that fine-tuned versions of GPT-3.5 can match or even outperform the base capabilities of GPT-4, the company’s flagship model, on “certain narrow […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft Paint could be the next Windows app to get the AI treatment. According to a report from Windows Central, Microsoft is exploring ways to bring AI-powered features to the app in Windows 11, which could include the ability to generate a canvas based on a text prompt.Sources tell Windows Central that the AI feature will be powered by the same technology behind Bing’s Image Creator, a tool that spits out an image based on your description. You can see how the integration might look in what appears to be an internal mock-up posted by Windows Central...
COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language, is one of the oldest programming languages in use, dating back to around 1959. It’s had surprising staying power; according to a 2022 survey, there’s over 800 billion lines of COBOL in use on production systems, up from an estimated 220 billion in 2017. But COBOL has a reputation […]
Acquiring a patent can open doors with investors, lead to joint partnerships, and even help immigrant founders in the U.S. obtain green cards.
Screenshot by Emma Roth / The Verge Microsoft Designer, the company’s free AI-powered design tool, is now broadly available to Edge users in the US. This means you can access Designer from Edge’s sidebar, allowing you to generate designs without opening up a separate tab or program.After launching Designer last year, Microsoft announced in April that it would build the tool into Edge. The integration lets you create a number of designs, such as social media posts, fliers, greeting cards, invitations, and more — all from Edge’s sidebar. Once you enter a prompt, Designer’s AI will pull...
Private equity firm Trive Capital has acquired Hypergiant Industries, in a deal that will furnish the Texas-based AI company with capital to “build even faster,” Hypergiant CEO Mike Betzer told TechCrunch in a recent interview. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Hypergiant’s core product is called CommandCenter, a geospatial data visualization platform designed […]
In its quest to develop AI that can understand a range of different dialects, Meta has created an AI model, SeamlessM4T, that can translate and transcribe close to 100 languages across text and speech. Available in open source along with SeamlessAlign, a new translation data set, Meta claims that SeamlessM4T represents a “significant breakthrough” in […]
Despite the abundant venture capital available for startups in the current wave of generative AI breakthroughs, totaling $14 billion in equity funding as of August this year, Relume has turned down investments and instead relied on bootstrapping since its launch in November 2021. “We are focusing more on building a product that we can get […]
Meta has confirmed that non-personalized content feeds are incoming on Facebook and Instagram in the European Union ahead of the August 25 deadline for compliance with the bloc’s rebooted digital rulebook, the Digital Services Act (DSA). Meta’s move follows a similar announcement by TikTok earlier this month. The DSA requires larger platforms and search engines […]
The launch of ChatGPT in November of 2022 propelled our world into the Age of AI, and the tech industry will never be the same.
Before founding dipp, Jennifer Chen and Mikhail Abramov spent 15 years working as art directors in New York City. During that time, Chen says they realized that the marketing, sales and design process have stayed the same, despite new technology and tools being introduced to the market, and is often riddled with bottlenecks. “Salespeople have […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The New York Times has blocked OpenAI’s web crawler, meaning that OpenAI can’t use content from the publication to train its AI models. If you check the NYT’s robots.txt page, you can see that the NYT disallows GPTBot, the crawler that OpenAI introduced earlier this month. Based on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, it appears NYT blocked the crawler as early as August 17th. Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge A snippet of the NYT’s robots.txt showing that the company has disallowed GPTBot. The change comes after the NYT updated its terms...
Match Group, the company behind dating apps like Tinder and OkCupid, is getting serious about its relationship with AI. After toying with some AI-powered features on Tinder, Match Group is taking things to the next level by appointing former Zynga head of growth Mark Kantor as Vice President of Innovation. Kantor, who also cofounded startups […]
Snapchat is preparing to further expand into generative AI features, after earlier launching its AI-powered chatbot My AI which can now respond with a Snap back, not just text. With the company’s forthcoming generative AI feature called “Dreams,” Snap will again experiment with AI images — but soon, those images may contain you and your […]
With the rise in popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI tools like ChatGPT Developers have found use cases to mold text in different ways for use cases ranging from writing emails to summarizing articles. Now, they are looking to help you generate bits of music by just typing some words. Brett Bauman, […]
AI companies are using online labor to outsource the large amounts of hidden manual work needed to build their applications.
YouTube is partnering with record labels to establish rules for how AI-generated music is treated on its platform, including monetization opportunities for both companies and creators.The platform said in a blog post it would invest in building its rights management system Content ID, update its policies on uploading manipulated content, and deploy generative AI tools to help detect videos that violate its rules. “Generative AI systems may amplify current challenges like trademark and copyright abuse, misinformation, spam, and more,” YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said. “But AI can also be used...
There’s already a handful of great examples of SaaS companies leveraging usage-based pricing to monetize AI.
YouTube announced today how it plans to approach the impact AI technology is having on the music industry with regard to its video hosting platform and its existing partnerships across the music industry, including with artists, labels and other rightsholders. While the company is bullish on AI’s potential to “enhance music’s unique creative expression,” it […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled on Friday that AI-generated artwork can’t be copyrighted, as noted by The Hollywood Reporter. She was presiding over a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office after it refused a copyright to Stephen Thaler for an AI-generated image made with the Creativity Machine algorithm he’d created.Thaler had tried multiple times to copyright the image “as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine,” which would have listed the author as the creator of the work and Thaler as the artwork’s...
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of the last week’s stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week in AI, Amazon announced that it’ll […]
Earlier this week, the New York Times shone a light on some of the desperation that founders are experiencing as they try and fail to secure compute power for their nascent artificial intelligence startups, thanks to the big companies (and even rich nations) racing to snatch them up. One founder reportedly said of the graphics […]
Language models like GPT-4 and Claude are powerful and useful, but the data on which they are trained is a closely guarded secret. The Allen Institute for AI (AI2) aims to reverse this trend with a new, huge text dataset that’s free to use and open to inspection. Dolma, as the dataset is called, is […]
Illustration: The Verge A Microsoft travel guide for Ottawa, Canada, prominently recommended tourists visit the Ottawa Food Bank, as spotted by Paris Marx until it was removed after this article was originally published. (You can see the article in full here.) The food bank was the No. 3 recommendation on the list, sitting behind the National War Memorial and above going to an Ottawa Senators hockey game.We reported in 2020 about Microsoft laying off journalists at Microsoft News and MSN to replace them with artificial intelligence. However, the company says its content is not generated by the...
Microsoft reportedly published — and retracted — an AI-generated article that recommended people visit a Canadian food bank as a tourist attraction. The article “Headed to Ottawa? Here’s what you shouldn’t miss!” included recommendations for catching a baseball game, honoring falling soldiers at a war museum and… swinging by the Ottawa Food Bank. Paris Marx first called out the story on X (formerly Twitter). “People who come to us have jobs and families to support, as well as expenses to pay,” the AI-written section about the food bank section read. “Life is already...
Mondelez logo with Oreos. | Photo by Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto via Getty Images Creating an ad can be tricky and costly, and more brands see generative AI as a means to make that process less painful. Reuters reported large advertising agencies like WPP and multinational corporations like Unilever look to generative AI to cut marketing costs while making more ads. WPP clients Nestlé and Mondelez, makers of Oreo and Cadbury, used OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 to make ads. One ad for Cadbury ran in India with an AI-generated video of the Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan inviting pedestrians to shop at...
There could be good news just around the corner, provided services with generative AI become as powerful as expected, and are as in demand as hoped.
Sitting in a meeting room in a startup office in Lisbon, I silently typed the answer to a question only the person opposite would know the answer to. What kind of coffee had I asked for when I’d arrived at the office? A short moment later, without even moving or opening his mouth, the reply […]
As evidenced by the slow death of Cortana, it’s clear that the AI assistants of yesteryear aren’t meeting expectations. And so they’re being remade. Amazon is building a new large language model akin to OpenAI’s GPT-4 to power its Alexa voice assistant. Meanwhile, Google is reportedly planning to “supercharge” Google Assistant with AI that’s more […]
To help TechCrunch+ readers understand what fintech investors are thinking these days, we interviewed six active investors over the last couple of weeks.
Arthur, a machine learning morning monitoring startup, has benefited from the interest in generative AI this year, and it has been developing tools to help companies work with LLMs more effectively. Today it is releasing Arthur Bench, an open source tool to help users find the best LLM for a particular set of data. Adam […]
My AI, the in-app digital assistant that rides herd on your Snapchat Plus experience, has suffered numerous breakdowns and technical malfunctions since its debut in February. Tuesday was more of the same as the chatbot took it upon itself to post single-second-long Stories to users' feeds and then go unresponsive for extended periods of time. Thing is, My AI doesn't have the capacity to post to Stories. And now it's got a bunch of people on Twitter wondering if we're at the dawning of the Singularity.Did Snapchat Ai just add a picture of my wall/ceiling to their Snapchat story?...
Image: AP The Associated Press released guidelines around generative AI to its journalists as it and other news organizations look at ways to use the technology in news gathering. AP vice president for standards and inclusion Amanda Barrett said in a blog post the publication does not see AI “as a replacement of journalists in any way” but developed guidelines for reporters and editors on how to use it. Journalists for AP can experiment with ChatGPT but are asked to exercise caution by not using the tool to create publishable content. Any result from a generative AI platform “should be...
Snapchat’s My AI feature, an in-app AI chatbot launched earlier this year with its fair share of controversy, briefly appeared to have a mind of its own. On Tuesday, the AI posted its own Story to the app and then stopped responding to users’ messages, which some Snapchat users found disconcerting. “My Snapchat AI posted […]
GM’s current Ultium cells are NCMA-based. | Image: GM GM is leading a $60 million investment round for battery research company Mitra Chem. The California-based startup could help spur the development of more cathode active materials (CAM) for GM’s electric vehicles. Mitra Chem’s battery research and design facility touts the use of AI to test out thousands of different cathode designs every month. It can potentially finalize chemistries for new battery cells quicker, including for lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries.GM is looking to update its Ultium battery chemistry with Mitra Chem...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we sit down with a guest, talk about their work and unpack the rest. This week, Alex had Amplitude CEO Spenser Skates on the show to talk […]
Opera’s web browser app for iOS is getting an AI assistant. The company announced today that Opera for iOS will now include Aria, its browser AI product built in collaboration with OpenAI, integrated directly into the web browser, and free for all users. The AI solution had previously launched on Opera for desktop and Opera […]
Vector databases are the unsung heroes of the modern AI movement, storing unstructured data such as images, videos and text to enable people and systems to search uncategorized content. They are particularly integral to large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 (which powers ChatGPT), owing in large part to the databases’ ability to power real-time […]
Álvaro Bernis / The Verge How we use the internet is changing fast thanks to the advancement of AI-powered chatbots that can find information and redeliver it as a simple conversation. Continue reading…
Illustration: The Verge Iowa’s Mason City Community School District is pulling 19 books from school libraries that administrators found to contain “a description or depiction of a sex act” in order to comply with Republican-backed state laws. A key arbiter of whether the books should be banned: ChatGPT.The news that the district had used AI software in its decisions was first reported by the Mason City Globe Gazette last week, but it wasn’t clear what tool was used — or how exactly officials went about doing it — until Popular Science reported that ChatGPT was used. The banned books...
OpenAI claims that it’s developed a way to use GPT-4, its flagship generative AI model, for content moderation — lightening the burden on human teams. Detailed in a post published to the official OpenAI blog, the technique relies on prompting GPT-4 with a policy that guides the model in making moderation judgements and creating a […]
Given the hype around generative AI, it's easy to forget that IBM Watson competed on Jeopardy in 2011 — and won a $1M first-place prize.
The Share button is gone, making room for Memories. | Image: Google Google is adding a new Memories tab to its Photos app to create a dedicated place for auto-generated collections of pictures. The company is adding new generative AI titling features that can help you name your photo collections, too.These Google-generated collections have shown up at the top of the Photos app for years, but they’ll now have a dedicated button at the bottom of the app. Default titles for memories are often location-based names using images’ GPS metadata. The new AI titles feature helps to summarize the...
Google today is rolling out a few new updates to its nearly three-month-old Search Generative Experience (SGE), the company’s AI-powered conversational mode in Search, with a goal of helping users better learn and more sense of the information they discover on the web. The features include tools to see definitions of unfamiliar terms, those that […]
WhatsApp is testing the ability to create custom stickers using generative AI. According to WABetaInfo, the feature is available to a small number of testers through the Google Play Beta Program. Meta is said to be preparing to roll out the tool more broadly in the coming weeks.Those who are part of the test should see a Create button when they open the keyboard in the sticker tab. As with similar tools, you can enter a description of the sticker you'd like to use. The AI will spit out a set of stickers for you to choose from and share in your chats. As WABetaInfo notes, you can report any...
Traditionally, companies looking to extract data from websites have had to create custom code to get at the data, an expensive and time-consuming process that is often out of reach of smaller businesses. Enter Browse AI, an early stage startup that has developed an automated solution to scrape information from websites and move it into […]
The unfortunate reality of being an investor is that the vast majority of inbound pitch decks are completely irrelevant to the investor. All VCs big and small have an investment thesis that outlines how they invest: Market size, founder profile, verticals, geography, ownership targets, round size, check size, etc. It’s just how VC works. If you […]
Google Photos is introducing a new way to relive and share your most memorable moments with the introduction of a new Memories view, launching today to U.S. users. The feature lets you save your favorite memories or create your own from scratch in order to build out a scrapbook-like timeline that includes things like your […]
Viewed today, the vintage sci-fi TV show Lost in Space was a hoot. But TechCrunch and the Aerospace Corporation are more interested in startups that can help protect people, crafts and cargo from the Robinson family’s fate. If your startup’s focused on AI and satellite data streams, listen up! Space Domain Awareness Challenge Pitch-off at […]
Illustration: The Verge Meta-owned WhatsApp has started testing a new AI-generated stickers feature. WABetaInfo reports that some testers in the Android WhatsApp beta program have spotted the new AI-powered stickers, allowing WhatsApp users to generate a sticker based on a text description.Android Police points out that it’s not clear which generative AI model WhatsApp has picked for this feature, as WABetaInfo’s report only notes that the stickers are generated using “a secure technology offered by Meta.”The feature looks like it will work similarly to how Midjoureny or OpenAI’s DALL...
Thousands of security experts, hackers, and college students competed to trick powerful text-generation systems into revealing their dark sides at the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas.
It certainly didn't take long for AI's other shoe to drop, what with the emergent technology already being perverted to commit confidence scams and generate spam content. We can now add censorship to that list as the Globe Gazette reports the school board of Mason City, Iowa has begun leveraging AI technology to cultivate lists of potentially bannable books from the district's libraries ahead of the 2023/24 school year. In May, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed, and Governor Kim Reynolds subsequently signed, Senate File 496 (SF 496), which enacted sweeping changes to the...
Image: TED Humane, a startup founded by ex-Apple employees, plans to share more about its mysterious AI-powered wearable on the same day as a solar eclipse in October, co-founder Imran Chaudhri said in a video on the company’s Discord (via Inverse). The solar eclipse is set to happen on October 14th.The device, officially called the “Humane Ai Pin” (in the Discord video, Chaudhri pronounces that middle word like you would say the word AI), is being promoted as something that can replace your smartphone. In a wild demo at this year’s TED conference, Chaudhri uses the device, which is...
Hello, and welcome back to Max Q! In this issue: More propulsion troubles on-orbit News from Astranis and more By the way . . . We’re out-of-this-world excited to announce that we’ve added a dedicated Space Stage to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. Plus, we’ve joined forces with the Aerospace Corporation to host the Space Domain Awareness Challenge Pitch-off for startups using AI […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon is using AI to make it easier to see if a product is any good. The company is now rolling out AI-generated review summaries, which boil down hundreds or thousands of Amazon reviews into a one-paragraph blurb explaining what most people like or dislike about a product.The summaries have been in testing for at least a couple of months, and they’re now more widely available to a “subset” of users in the US on Amazon’s mobile app. Amazon says they’re available “across a broad selection of products.” So far, we’ve seen them on TVs...
Amazon announced this morning it will begin to leverage generative AI to help customers better understand what customers are saying about a product, without necessarily having to read through dozens of individual reviews. The retailer says it will use the new technology to provide a short paragraph of text right on the product detail page […]
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the weekend and what’s making headlines early in the week. Here’s the rundown from this morning: […]
Refusing to comply with the restrictions could result in unspecified fines or penalties. | Photo by Kena Betancur/VIEWpress The New York Times has taken preemptive measures to stop its content from being used to train artificial intelligence models. As reported by Adweek, the NYT updated its Terms of Service on August 3rd to prohibit its content — inclusive of text, photographs, images, audio/video clips, “look and feel,” metadata, or compilations — from being used in the development of “any software program, including, but not limited to, training a machine learning or artificial...
Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup co-founded by former OpenAI leaders, will receive $100 million in funding from one of the biggest mobile carriers in South Korea, SK Telecom (SKT), the telco company announced on Sunday. The funding news comes three months after Anthropic raised $450 million in its Series C funding round led by Spark Capital in […]
AI has been has hot as it comes since the start of the year, but the question remains whether it's a product category or a platform piece.
For most startups it is hard to land a government contract but IVIX has landed multiple inside the U.S. and beyond.
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Fri-yay indeed. We sigh, as humans spool up to take a break, while the semi-sentient machines continue writing their poetry in their air-conditioned underground data-center homes. In my column this week, I spent a bit of time thinking about the […]
Vague ToS previously implied that customer data could be used for AI training.
The unchecked rise of AI has captured headlines, causing extreme enthusiasm for its promise and considerable concern over its potential dangers. The mood swings between hype and fearmongering call for a rational voice of reason. Enter Gary Marcus. We’re thrilled that Marcus — author, founder and neuroscientist — will join us for a session called […]
The company builds automated digital workers that can be used in lieu of human employees.
Image: Daniela Vladimirova / Flickr Aug X released Augie, an AI-powered video creation platform incorporating a voice cloning feature to read ad copy without booking a recording studio. Partnering with ElevenLabs, Aug X lets users record their or someone else’s voice and clone it to use for other short videos. The Augie platform, aimed primarily toward marketers and social media teams, lets people quickly add narration, photos, text, and music to videos without needing to learn audio and video editing. Jeremy Toeman, founder of Aug X, said the company wanted to add a voice cloning feature...
In a scenario where we have an AI that is self-aware, faced with the prospect of being switched off, or dying, would you empathize with it?
When a major system incident occurs, there is a ton of online and offline communication going on — or at least there should be. The online part creates a digital audit trail of what happened when and how people reacted, and ultimately how the problem was solved. Jeli launched a few years ago to help […]
Basys combines generative AI and deep learning to power its “engine” which can automate up to 90% of the prior authorization requests for drugs and procedures at high accuracy.
Wint, a so-called “water intelligence” company that says it uses AI to detect and stop leaks, has raised $35 million in a Series C round of funding. Founded out of Israel in 2011, Wint has developed a water management system comprising AI-enabled software and connected hardware that alerts users when there may be a leak, […]
AI’s potential is huge and terrifying. But a new generation of artists is starting to find new uses for the technology, as well showing its many limitationsWhen I visited the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in early June, a fabulous drag cabaret was in full swing. Across seven small screens and a large wall projection, a rotating cast of performers in an array of bold looks danced and lip-synced their hearts out to banger after banger. Highlights included Freedom! 90 by George Michael, Five Years by David Bowie and Beyoncé’s Sweet Dreams.Then the whole thing started again. And again...
Anthropic, the AI startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI execs, has released an updated version of its faster, cheaper text-generating model available through an API, Claude Instant. The updated Claude Instant, Claude Instant 1.2, incorporates the strengths of Anthropic’s recently announced flagship model, Claude 2, showing “significant” gains in areas such as math, coding, reasoning and safety, […]
Quizlet, a tool that helps personalize studying for students, recently released a set of new AI-powered features. Quizlet is one of the many educational platforms embracing generative AI to facilitate learning, despite consternation from teachers when ChatGPT first burst into the scene. I no longer have assignments to read, but to do my job, I have to read tons of news articles, reports, and research papers fairly quickly. I wondered: can I use Quizlet to make my job easier and test how much of my beat I actually understand?Oh man, it didn’t turn out well for me. Quizlet released several AI-...
Tech veteran Chris Messina and writer/podcaster Brian McCullough are launching a new $15 million fund aimed at AI startups. The backers include tech luminary investors and founders such as Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, and Dennis Crowley, who are all investing personally. McCullough has been running his Ride Home Fund for two years now, a fund […]
Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of Bumble. | Photo: Ramona Rosales Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd is coming to the Code Conference, where she’ll be interviewed on stage by CNBC senior media and tech correspondent Julia Boorstin.Wolfe Herd’s company has moved quickly to adopt AI in targeted ways to help daters. Last year, the company open-sourced an AI tool that Bumble had been using since 2019 to detect — and then blur — nude photos. Bumble’s president, Tariq Shaukat, has also said the company is using AI to “remove some of the friction” of dating. For Bumble, that...
Illustration: Nick Barclay / The Verge TikTok appears to be working on a new way for creators to disclose if their posts contain AI-generated content. As shared by social media consultant Matt Navarra, a new “AI-generated content” toggle has appeared under the “more options” section before uploading a video. As part of the description for that toggle, TikTok says the label will help “prevent content removal”; TikTok updated its content policies in March to require that users disclose deepfakes and AI-generated content in the video’s caption or use an identifying sticker.Navarra...
A plane flying over Barcelona airport in March 2023. | Photo by Urbanandsport/NurPhoto via Getty Images Google has been working with American Airlines and Bill Gates’ climate investment fund, Breakthrough Energy, to chart more sustainable flight routes. The aim is to help pilots limit a flight’s impact on the climate by avoiding routes that create contrails, those white streaks in the sky that planes sometimes leave behind. Contrails are a big problem for the planet because they trap heat, accounting for about 35 percent of aviation’s global warming impact. Using satellite imagery and AI...
As a part of an ongoing White House initiative to make software more secure, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plans to launch a two-year contest, the AI Cyber Challenge, that’ll task competitors with identifying and fixing software vulnerabilities using AI. In collaboration with AI startups Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as Microsoft and […]
Google is in talks with major music labels to license artists' voices and tunes for AI-generated songs, according to a report.
Google announced today that it’s launching a redesigned Arts & Culture app for Android, with an iOS launch to follow soon. The redesigned app includes a new AI-generated postcards feature, a new Play tab, a TikTok-like “Inspire” feed and more. Most notably, the app now includes a “Poem Postcards” feature that lets users send AI-generated […]
One of the more prolific AI and machine learning development platforms, Weights & Biases has secured a new tranche of cash from ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and former Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross. Friedman and Gross, alongside existing investors Coatue, Insight Partners, Felicis, Bond, BloombergBeta and Sapphire, have invested $50 million in Weights & Biases […]
Microsoft announced that it is partnering with layer-1 blockchain Aptos to expand AI and web3 capabilities and trust.
GoodNotes is releasing a new version with features like AI-powered handwriting recognition, a marketplace for digital stationery, and an educational module for maths in the popular note-taking app’s biggest push in four years to win and retain customers. The app, launched by Steven Chan in 2011, said the new version, GoodNotes 6, has put immense […]
Three years ago Zoom settled with the FTC over a claim of deceptive marketing around security claims, having been accused of overstating the strength of the encryption it offered. Now the videoconferencing platform could be headed for a similar tangle in Europe in relation to its privacy small print. The recent terms & conditions controversy […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Nvidia, already the market leader in providing high-end processors for generative AI use, will release an even more powerful chip as the demand to run large AI models continues. The company announced the availability of the GH200 super chip, which Nvidia said can handle “the most complex generative AI workloads, spanning large language models, recommender systems and vector databases.”The GH200 will have the same GPU as the H100, currently Nvidia’s most powerful and popular AI offering, but triple the memory capacity. The company said systems...
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said today that the company had made an existential business decision in 2018 that few realized would redefine its future, and help redefine an evolving industry. It’s paid off enormously, of course, but Huang said this is only the beginning of an AI-powered near future — a future powered […]
Google today announced the launch of Project IDX, its foray into offering an AI-enabled browser-based development environment for building full-stack web and multiplatform apps. It currently supports frameworks like Angular, Flutter, Next.js, React, Svelte and Vue, and languages like JavaScript and Dart, with support for Python, Go and others in the works. Google did not […]
Nvidia is partnering with Hugging Face, the AI startup, to expand access to AI compute. Timed to coincide with the annual SIGGRAPH conference this week, Nvidia announced that it’ll support a new Hugging Face service, called Training Cluster as a Service, to simplify the creation of new and custom generative AI models for the enterprise. […]
Timed to coincide with SIGGRAPH, the annual AI academic conference, Nvidia this morning announced a new platform designed to let users create, test and customize generative AI models on a PC or workstation before scaling them to a data center and public cloud. Dubbed AI Workbench, the service can be accessed through a basic interface […]
Companies seeking images or videos for their materials materials will typically commission a shoot, or scour stock media catalogs. Catch+Release, however, wants to help marketers license existing user-generated content, and the eight-year-old startup is setting out to build an AI-powered search engine to help brands do just that. Catch+Release — founded out of San Francisco […]
The reliance on public data — mostly web data — to train AI is holding back the AI field. That’s according to Daniel Beutel, a tech entrepreneur and researcher at the University of Cambridge, who co-founded a startup, Flower, to solve what he sees as a growing problem in AI research. “Public, centralized data is […]
Chargeflow, a startup using AI to fight chargeback fraud, today announced that it raised $11 million in a seed round led by the VC firm OpenView Venture Partners. The tranche builds on Chargeflow’s previously undisclosed $3 million seed round closed several months ago, bringing the startup’s total raised to $14 million. Chargeflow was launched in […]
Spotify is expanding its AI-powered “DJ” to dozens of markets globally, six months after debuting the feature in North America. Available through the “music” feed section in the Spotify mobile app, DJ personalizes users’ listening through a curated music selection that includes spoken-word commentary powered by a synthetic voice. The commentary includes light-hearted banter and […]
As SoftBank prepares to dive deeper into AI investments, the group posted an unexpected consecutive quarterly overall loss, as well as a continued loss in its existing investment business. SoftBank’s Vision Fund 1 and 2 and its Latin American fund together posted a quarterly investment loss of 13 billion yen ($91 million). That is significantly […]
The pervasive use of facial recognition technology across all facets of life in China has elicited both praise for its convenience and backlash around privacy concerns. The widespread adoption has also fueled the exponential growth of valuations in companies specializing in the field, such as AI giants SenseTime and Megvii. Now the industry is facing […]
On Monday morning, numerous writers woke up to learn that their books had been uploaded and scanned into a massive dataset without their consent. A project of cloud word processor Shaxpir, Prosecraft compiled over 27,000 books, comparing, ranking and analyzing them based on the “vividness” of their language. Many authors — including Young Adult powerhouse […]
Zoom has made changes to its terms of service after online blowback over recent updates to the company’s fine print allowing AI training on customer data. A report from StackDiary over the weekend highlighted how the changes, which rolled out in March without fanfare, appeared to grant the company sweeping control over customer data for AI training purposes. In response, Zoom published a blog post today claiming it wouldn’t do what its terms said it could do; the company then updated its terms in response to the continued blowback. It now says it doesn’t train AI models on consumer video...
Microsoft wasn't subtle in announcing its plans to add AI functionality to any and all of its existing products. On Monday, the company announced that, in addition to its availability on the Edge mobile browser, as well as standalone Android and iOS apps, Microsoft's Bing Chat AI chatbot will now be accessible through third-party browsers like Safari and Chrome.The news comes as part of Microsoft's six-month commemoration of Bing Chat's public availability. The company also notes that in that time, users have engaged in more than a billion conversations with the AI and have had...
Since 2018, a dedicated team within Microsoft has attacked machine learning systems to make them safer. But with the public release of new generative AI tools, the field is already evolving.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Zoom doesn’t train its artificial intelligence models on audio, video, or text chats from the app “without customer consent,” according to a Monday blog post from Zoom’s chief product officer, Smita Hashim. She also writes that “our customers continue to own and control their content.” The company’s handling of customer data for AI training has come under scrutiny after a Stack Diary article reported changes to the company’s terms of service that took effect in late July and appeared to give the company broad control over user data for AI...
Google is taking aim at the likes of Grammarly with a feature it added to Search recently. The service now includes a grammar checker, which can analyze the construction of a phrase or sentence and offer suggestions if it something seems off.Punching in a phrase like “grammar check,” “check grammar” or “grammar checker” will make sure the tool activates, as 9to5 Google points out. But Search might still offer grammar suggestions if you don’t include one of those phrases with your query.If the tool notices an error, including a spelling mistake, Google will rewrite the sentence and...
Image: The Verge Microsoft is bringing its AI-powered Bing Chat to mobile browsers soon. While Bing Chat has been available in separate Android and iOS mobile apps since late February, Microsoft is opening it up to all mobile browsers as part of the broader changes to stop blocking Bing Chat on third-party browsers.Bing Chat first launched in February, but it was restricted to Microsoft’s own Edge browser. Microsoft started opening up to Chrome and Safari desktop browsers in late July as part of testing for full third-party browser support. “With so many new, useful features now a part of...
One Model, a platform that uses AI to help employers make decisions about recruiting, hiring, promotions, layoffs and general workplace planning, today announced that it’s raised $41 million in a funding round led by Riverwood Capital. Christopher Butler, CEO of One Model, said that the capital will be used to “boost several of the company’s […]
Thomson Reuters has been around since the 19th century, but it's not stuck there, embracing AI as a way to help customers and employees.
Startups that want to be seen amid the flurry as AI enters the media will need to remember that what most people really want is a human story.
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of the last week’s stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. YouTube has begun experimenting with AI-generated summaries for […]
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday morning. State-sponsored bad actors have long been able to make “deepfake” videos that are good enough to trick unsophisticated viewers — and probably some more clued-in folks, too. That sort of work takes significant processing power and technical know-how to […]
The appetite for hardware to train AI models is voracious. AI chips are forecast to account for up to 20% of the $450 billion total semiconductor market by 2025, according to McKinsey. And Insight Partners, the VC firm, projects that sales of AI chips will climb to $83.3 billion in 2027 from $5.7 billion in […]
It’s clear that AI is driving the latest hype cycle, but how are early-stage investors sorting the wheat from the chaff these days?
Microsoft is shutting down its digital assistant app Cortana this month, having now put more of its focus on modern-day AI advances, like its ChatGPT-like Bing Chat and other AI-powered productivity features across Windows and its web browser Edge. A support page confirms the end of Cortana as a standalone app in Windows, starting in […]
Salesforce introduced its AI layer, dubbed Einstein, in 2016. More recently, at the Salesforce World Tour event in NYC in May, all the company talked about was generative AI and Data Cloud, its in-house data lake. Today, it announced the next step in that journey with the release of Einstein Studio and the ability to […]
While our reviewers spend time testing the numerous Samsung devices that were just announced, this episode Cherlynn and Sam dive into the relatively slow week in tech. Of course, we can’t escape the onslaught of news coming from X-Twitter-Musk land, just like how residents from a building across from the company’s San Francisco headquarters were unable to escape from blinding lights this weekend. We also go over some updates from Meta and Google and discover why Cherlynn loves clowns.Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like...
Get ready for a version of TikTok you’ve never seen before! Without the hyper-sticky, AI-driven ‘For You’ feed… The video sharing platform has announced that TikTok users in the European Union will “soon” be able to switch off its infamously engaging content-selection algorithm as it prepares to comply with the bloc’s updated digital rulebook. The EU’s […]
GoStudent — the late-stage tutor marketplace that has raised $686.3 million so far – has now raised another $95 million in what it calls as strategic fundraise from Deutsche Bank, and other investors including Left Lane Capital, DN Capital, Tencent, Prosus, DST, Coatue and Softbank Vision Fund 2. The raise was described as a mix […]
The global hype surrounding the potential benefits of AI has captured the attention of the business world and beyond, so it’s no surprise that new and existing SaaS startups are integrating it into their products. According to one recent survey, 35% of SaaS businesses already use AI, while another 42% plan to in the near […]
The fact that any flight departs on time is a minor miracle, one that requires the precise synchronization of thousands of data points and an equally large workforce on the ground. Much of this the passenger never sees – especially the ground support crews and infrastructure that load catering and baggage, refuel planes, and assist […]
Popular image pinboarding and shopping inspiration site Pinterest provided an update on its recently announced Amazon partnership and its other efforts around AI during its Q2 2023 earnings this week. The company in April announced a multi-year deal with Amazon that saw the e-commerce giant become Pinterest’s first partner on third-party ads. Those efforts are now […]
Long before people were talking about ChatGPT and generative AI, companies like Datasaur were dealing with the nuts and bolts of building machine learning models, helping label things to train the model. As AI has taken off, this kind of capability has become even more important. In order to bring model building to more companies […]
NASA estimates that its Earth science missions will generate around a quarter million terabytes of data in 2024 alone. In order for climate scientists and the research community efficiently dig through these reams of raw satellite data, IBM, HuggingFace and NASA have collaborated to build an open-source geospatial foundation model that will serve as the basis for a new class of climate and Earth science AIs that can track deforestation, predict crop yields and rack greenhouse gas emissions.For this project, IBM leveraged its recently-released Watsonx.ai to serve as the foundational model using...
The way artificial intelligence can write software has already prompted many companies to introduce code-generating products, so it’s no surprise that SettleMint, a low-code blockchain programming tool for enterprises, recently added an AI assistant to its platform. The AI assistant, which arrived about nine months after SettleMint announced its 16 million euro Series A funding […]
Microsoft is rolling out Windows Copilot in preview today. Windows 11 Insiders in the Beta Channel can install a preview build that offers the first semi-public availability for the AI-infused sidebar announced at Build 2023. “This first preview focuses on our integrated UI experience, with additional functionality coming down the road in future previews,” the company wrote in a blog post today.Windows Copilot is a system-level version of the browser-based Copilot the company began previewing in February. Microsoft views the tool — also coming to Microsoft Office and Teams — as...
Image: Getty Images White Castle, yes of Harold and Kumar fame, wants to roll out AI-enabled voices to over 100 drive-thrus by 2024 in the hope that people can get their sliders faster with maybe less arguing with someone over speakers.Working with speech recognition company SoundHound for the technology, White Castle will have an AI voice on its speakers interacting with customers and figuring out what the orders are. The companies promise it will process orders in just over a minute.If you’ve been at a drive-thru recently, you would know that the menu board and speakers are now big and...
As we meet with many AI-native founders, here are the top five pieces of company-building advice we’re sharing with them.
Google is adding contextual images and videos to its AI-powered Search Generative Experiment (SGE), the generative AI-powered search feature announced at May’s I/O conference. Later in the month, the company made the feature available to select users who signed up for the experiment through Google Labs. With the updates, SGE now shows images or videos […]
Tinder is currently testing an AI photo selection feature that looks at a user’s photo album and selects the five that best represents them for their dating profile, parent company Match Group revealed during its earnings call today. “AI has really inspired our product people across the entire company to really think about ways that […]
With artificial intelligence becoming increasingly prominent, Kickstarter wants you to know if and how it’s being used in any projects on the platform. The company will soon require creators to disclose any use of AI in their projects. The policy will apply to every project that’s submitted on or after August 29th.“We want to make sure that any project that is funded through Kickstarter includes human creative input and properly credits and obtains permission for any artist's work that it references,” Kickstarter’s director of trust and safety Susannah Page-Katz wrote in a blog...
Google has pulled its AI Test Kitchen app from the Play Store and the App Store to focus solely on the web platform. The company launched the AI Test Kitchen experience last year to let users interact with projects powered by different AI models such as LaMDA 2. The first set of experiments included the […]
The competition in the spend management space continues to heat up. Brex and Rho today each announced AI-powered/enabled accounts payables offerings. Their announcements coincidentally came out the same day competitor Ramp announced it had expanded into procurement — further evidence that the companies in the space are clamoring to not only meet customer demand but […]
As many entrepreneurs jump on the AI bandwagon, investors are being choosey about which kinds of companies they back.
Meta is gearing up to roll out AI-powered chatbots with different personas as early as next month, according to a new report from the Financial Times. The chatbots are designed to have humanlike conversations with users on Meta’s social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. The report indicates that these chatbots will take on different […]
As generative AI enters the mainstream, crowdfunding platform Kickstarter has struggled to formulate a policy that satisfies parties on all sides of the debate. Most of the generative AI tools used to create art and text today, including Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT, were trained on publicly available images and text from the web. But in […]
We’re out-of-this-world excited to announce that we’ve added a dedicated Space Stage to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. It joins six other brand-new industry-focused stages — all under one big roof. Plus, we’ve joined forces with the Aerospace Corporation to host the Space Domain Awareness Challenge Pitch-off for startups using AI to analyze satellite data streams. Learn […]
YouTube is running a new test to auto-generate video summaries with the use of AI. As noted on the support page, the summaries have begun appearing on the watch and search pages, however are only available for a limited number of English-language videos and viewers. The video platform explains that the AI auto-generated summaries provide […]
The next internet video summary you see might not have been written by a human. YouTube is testing AI-generated video summaries that appear on search and watch pages. The text is meant to provide a "quick overview" of a clip to help you decide if it's worth watching. The company is quick to stress that these don't replace creators' own video descriptions.The test will only be visible with a "limited number" of English-language videos, and only for some viewers. YouTube hasn't said which countries, platforms or video types will get the AI-produced summaries. We've asked the...
As tools for building AI systems, particularly large language models (LLMs), get easier and cheaper, some are using them for unsavory purposes, like generating malicious code or phishing campaigns. But the threat of AI-accelerated hackers isn’t quite as dire as some headlines would suggest. The dark web creators of LLMs like “WormGPT” and “FraudGPT” advertise […]
Multiple generative AI apps have been removed from Apple’s China App Store, two weeks ahead of the country’s new generative AI regulations that are set to take effect on August 15. The move came after Chinese developers received notices from Apple informing them of their apps’ removal. In its letter to OpenCat, a native ChatGPT […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is experimenting with the use of AI to auto-generate YouTube video summaries, according to a notice on a support page dated July 31st. The page, which we spotted via Android Police, notes that these summaries will only appear next to a limited number of English-language videos, and will only be viewable by a limited number of users. They’ll appear on YouTube’s watch and search pages, and are intended to give a brief overview of a video’s contents without replacing its existing description written by a human.“We’re starting to test...
Illustration: Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta could launch AI-powered “personas” in its services — which include Facebook and Instagram — as soon as next month, giving users a new way to search, get recommendations, and otherwise engage with its products, the Financial Times reports. Citing conversations with three company insiders, the FT notes that the chatbots could come with distinct personalities, including one that offers travel recommendations “in the style of a surfer” and another that speaks like Abraham Lincoln.The imminent launch could help Meta compete on two fronts. On...
Indian entrepreneur Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder of ride-hailing firm Ola and electric vehicle startup Ola Electric, is venturing into fresh terrain as he navigates his businesses towards initial public offerings. He has set up an AI startup that seeks to develop a large language model and is currently scouting two U.S.-headquartered AI startups for a potential […]
Illustration: The Verge Google is planning to update Assistant with features powered by generative AI, according to a report from Axios. In an email obtained by the outlet, Google tells staff members that it has already started exploring a “supercharged” Assistant powered by the newest large language models (LLM), similar to the technology behind ChatGPT and Google’s own Bard chatbot. According to the email, “A portion of the team has already started working on this, beginning with mobile.”As part of this change, Google says it’s condensing the team that works on Assistant. The...
When Google had its unpleasant realization that it had been complacently spinning its wheels on a form of fake AI for a decade, chances are it started re-aligning itself that day. And it sounds like Assistant itself is now getting a generative facelift, according to an internal email reported by Axios. The email says that […]
Photo by Monica Chin / The Verge It isn’t just software companies looking to enter the generative AI fray. Dell, the PC maker, is going all in on generative AI and offering hardware to run powerful models and a new platform to help organizations get started. The company released what it calls Dell Generative AI Solutions for clients to set up access to large language models and create generative AI projects. The company will offer new hardware setups, a managed service platform, and computers to run generative AI projects faster. Dell is known for releasing laptops and monitors, but the...
The devs behind AI-based sample editing software Samplab are back with a free VST3 plugin that generates samples from text prompts. The appropriately-named TextToSample is a plugin that opens inside your DAW or as a standalone tool, allowing you to type, say, “bubbly synth melody” to create a, well, bubbly synth melody to do with as you see fit.TextToSample utilizes Meta’s open-source AI-based sound generation toolset, MusicGen, and was trained using data provided by the algorithm. You can also drag and drop pre-existing sounds into the plugin and have it generate related samples, in...
When Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger co-founded Instagram in 2010, they basically invented photo-based social networking in the modern mobile era. Fast-forward to 2012 and a $1 billion acquisition by Facebook — and then again to 2018 when Systrom stepped down to research his next company. That’s one heck of an eight-year ride. Fast-forward once […]
The company added a social media hub for automated posts and ads as well as an AI-enabled “Super Assistant” to help with navigating through the application and digitizing customer interactions.
Hey, friends, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s roundup of the week in tech news. Life getting in the way of your daily TechCrunch habit? Not to worry. WiR will get you caught up in no time. This week, WiR covers the improving quality of AI porn generators and the ethical dilemmas they raise; […]
Pitch in space! Okay, not really, but we do have exciting news for early-stage AI/ML startups. The Aerospace Corporation and TechCrunch are hosting a pitch competition at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, which takes place September 19–21 in San Francisco. Apply to the Space Domain Awareness Challenge Pitch-off at TC Disrupt 2023 The Aerospace Corporation and TechCrunch […]
Google robot choosing a ball. | Image: Google Google wants to make its robots smarter with the release of the AI learning model Robotic Transformer (RT-2).RT-2 is the new version of what the company calls its vision-language-action (VLA) model. The model teaches robots to better recognize visual and language patterns to interpret instructions and infer what objects work best for the request. Researchers tested RT-2 with a robotic arm in a kitchen office setting, asking its robotic arm to decide what makes a good improvised hammer (it was a rock) and to choose a drink to give an exhausted person...
PODCAST VO SCRIPT, [unpublished] Haje: The dark web is a lot of things; particularly user-friendly ain’t one of them. The other day, I got an amazing tip about ‘Dark Web Gift Shop,’ which tries to at least give you a little bit of a reward for your struggles. Haje: The founders say that: [AI generated voice]: […]
After a few years of being background noise, AI has suddenly become ubiquitous. From consumer apps to enterprise tools to medical devices, nearly everything claims to be “powered by AI” these days. But the technology’s unprecedented (and unregulated) rise prompts as many questions as it provides answers. Fortunately, you’re coming to Disrupt, where we have […]
Image: Intel Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger was very bullish on AI during the company’s Q2 2023 earnings call — telling investors that Intel plans to “build AI into every product that we build.”Later this year, Intel will ship Meteor Lake, its first consumer chip with a built-in neural processor for machine learning tasks. (AMD recently did the same, following Apple and Qualcomm.) But while Intel previously suggested to us that only its premium new Ultra chips might have those AI coprocessors, it sounds like Gelsinger expects AI will eventually be in everything Intel sells. Gelsinger often...
Universe, the no-code mobile website builder, announced today that it’s launching an AI-powered website designer in beta. The designer, called GUS (Generative Universe Sites), can help anyone build and launch a custom website from their iOS device. Once you get started with GUS, you will enter the familiar Universe grid editor. Instead of starting with […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge LinkedIn appears to be developing a new AI tool that can help ease the effectively robotic task of looking for and applying to jobs. According to a new leak, the Microsoft-owned company seems to have a new “LinkedIn Coach” assistant in testing that could support you through the application processes, teach you new skills, and help you network on your LinkedIn network.The news comes from app researcher Nima Owji, who uncovers features from various developers that haven’t been deployed yet. In an email, LinkedIn spokesperson Amanda Purvis tells The...
The discovery of an AI product manager role at Netflix with a pay ceiling of $900,000 sent critics of the company and entertainment industry wild yesterday. That isn’t the only such listing, and likely not even the most lucrative. No one should be surprised that one of the biggest tech companies in the world is […]
New data from a number of tech businesses indicates that the ad market is recovering, partly due to AI.
Adobe is building on Firefly, its family of generative AI models, with a feature in Photoshop that “expands images beyond their original bounds,” as the company describes it. Aptly called Generative Expand, the capability, available in the beta version of Photoshop, lets users expand and resize images by clicking and dragging the Crop tool, which […]
Samsung Electronics continues to cut back its memory chip production, including NAND flash used in smartphones and PCs, after reporting a $3.4 billion (4.36 trillion won) operating loss in the second quarter of this year in its memory chip unit. The world’s biggest memory chip maker posted a roughly $7 billion operating loss in its […]
Business is regularly won and lost on the strength of a proposal. Now, a startup out of London called AutogenAI has built a tool based on generative AI that it claims can help businesses write stronger pitches to improve that strike rate, and it has won some money of its own: $22.3 million from Blossom […]
AWS VP Swami Sivasubramanian at the AWS Summit event. | Image: Amazon During the AWS Summit in New York on Wednesday, Amazon launched Agents for Bedrock, which will let companies build AI apps that can automatically do tasks on their own, like booking a flight for users instead of just telling them about it. AI agents are the assistant that actually gets a restaurant reservation instead of just giving suggestions on where to eat.“I believe this will supercharge developers who wanted an easier way to build agents and at the same time customize the data the models read,” Swami Sivasubramanian...
Amazon is expanding its range of health-focused apps and services with a platform that offers AI tools to help clinicians transcribe and analyze their conversations with patients. At its annual AWS Summit conference in New York, Amazon unveiled AWS HealthScribe, an API to create transcripts, extract details and create summaries from doctor-patient discussions that can […]
Amazon QuickSight, Amazon’s business intelligence service, is getting a few upgrades — courtesy of generative AI. Announced at AWS Summit New York this afternoon, QuickSight will soon be able to generate visuals, fine-tune and format those visuals when given instructions in natural language and create calculations from commands without specific syntax. On the QuickSight home […]
Amazon continues to march unencumbered toward a generative AI future. At AWS Summit New York, one of its annual conferences, Amazon announced the launch in preview of Agents for Bedrock — Bedrock being Amazon’s platform that provides a way to build generative AI-powered apps via pretrained models from startups as well as Amazon itself. Agents […]
AI startup Stability AI continues to refine its generative AI models in the face of increasing competition — and ethical challenges. Today, Stability AI announced the launch of Stable Diffusion XL 1.0, a text-to-image model that the company describes as its “most advanced” release to date. Available in open source on GitHub in addition to […]
Alphabet and Microsoft's results clearly indicate that the costs are high if you want to stay on the leaderboard in the modern AI arena.
Egnyte introduced some new generative AI tools today, and revealed more of what’s coming on the AI roadmap. The company also pointed out that it has been incorporating AI into the platform for over a decade, and is not simply jumping on the bandwagon of the moment. Today, it’s announcing a ChatGPT-like interface where customers […]
Shopify, like countless other Big Tech brands, is leaning into generative AI. At its bi-annual Editions conference, the ecommerce company announced an expanded set of features under Shopify Magic, Shopify’s catchall brand for generative AI. As of today, Shopify Magic can provide answers to merchants’ customers tailored to their conversation histories and store policies, and […]
When Graft launched its AI development platform in beta last year, it was looking to build something that put AI within reach of every company, not just the largest ones with tons of engineering resources. Today, the company announced a $10 million seed investment. While it was at it, the startup announced that it’s inviting […]
Effectiv developed AI-driven payment fraud detection, verification and compliance tools as well as models that are trained to detect that simulated behavior.
Protect AI, a startup building tools to harden the security around AI systems, today announced that it raised $35 million in a Series A round led by Evolution Equity Partners with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Acrew Capital, boldstart ventures, Knollwood Capital and Pelion Ventures. The tranche is more than double the size of Protect AI’s […]
It's no secret that AI development brings a lot of security risks. While governing bodies are working to put forth regulations, for now, it's mostly up to the companies themselves to take precautions. The latest show of self-supervision comes with Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and Open AI's joint creation of the Frontier Model Forum, an industry-led body concentrating on safe, careful AI development. It considers frontier models to be any "large-scale machine-learning models" that go beyond current capabilities and have a vast range of abilities.The Forum plans to establish an...
Leaders from the AI research world appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss and answer questions about the nascent technology. Their broadly unanimous opinions generally fell into two categories: we need to act soon, but with a light touch — risking AI abuse if we don’t move forward, or a hamstrung industry if we […]
Image: OpenAI OpenAI shuttered a tool that was supposed to tell human writing from AI due to a low accuracy rate. In an (updated) blog, OpenAI said it decided to end its AI classifier as of July 20th. “We are working to incorporate feedback and are currently researching more effective provenance techniques for text,” the company said.As it shuts down the tool to catch AI-generated writing, OpenAI said it plans to “develop and deploy mechanisms that enable users to understand if audio or visual content is AI-generated.” There’s no word yet on what those mechanisms might be, though....
During the company’s second-quarter earnings call this morning, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek teased a few ways the streaming service could introduce additional AI-powered functionality. Ek touched on how AI could be used to create more personalized experiences, summarize podcasts and generate ads. Earlier this year, the company launched a DJ feature that delivers a curated […]
Will this pair of Hollywood strikes ever end? It looks like the big corporations are digging in for a long battle, illustrated by Netflix’s recent job posting for a machine learning platform product manager. The position pays an annual salary of $300,000 to $900,000 at a time when many actors make around $200 a day, according to this SAG-AFTRA contract. The role AI will play in creating future entertainment is a key item of debate for both striking parties.The job listing indicates that the AI will be used to “create great content” and not just develop new algorithms to recommend shows...
OpenAI has shut down its AI classifier, a tool that claimed to determine the likelihood a text passage was written by another AI. While many used and perhaps unwisely relied on it to catch low-effort cheats, OpenAI has retired it over its widely criticized “low rate of accuracy.” The theory that AI-generated text has some […]
With Alphabet and Microsoft reporting their quarterly results today, there's going to be a lot of scrutiny on the ability of their investments in new AI tech to drive growth.
The US already has a road map for the deployment of AI systems. Biden's promised executive order just needs to put these guidelines into practice.
As organizations grow, it becomes harder to understand what’s happening operationally across departments inside a company. We tend to use meetings to try and figure out what others are doing, which isn’t terribly efficient. Akooda is an early stage startup trying to help solve that problem by using AI to analyze the company’s internal software […]
Stay Ai developed a recurring commerce enablement platform for subscriptions, clubs and memberships with loyalty tools to help brands increase customer lifetime value.
Generative AI is good for more than marketing copy and anime-style avatars — or so Wayfair wants you to think. Today, Wayfair launched a new app with a cutesy name, Decorify, that lets customers create “shoppable,” “photorealistic” images of rooms in their homes or apartments in new styles. After uploading a picture of the space […]
Microsoft’s AI chatbot, Bing Chat, is coming to non-Microsoft browsers the company today confirmed following various reports of the AI chatbot being spotted in other browsers like Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari. The expansion will make Microsoft’s ChatGPT-like AI chatbot available to a broader set of users, as it was previously available to consumers only […]
Illustration: The Verge Watch out Bard — Bing’s AI chatbot is now available in Google Chrome and Safari. As first spotted by Windows Latest (via 9to5Google), you can now access the chatbot from Bing.com in both browsers.There are some limitations to using Bing Chat on Chrome and Safari, though. For one, you can only type 2,000-word prompts, as opposed to the 4,000-word limit that you get when using Bing Chat on Edge. Your conversation with the chatbot will also reset after five turns instead of 30, and you’ll see some annoying pop-ups that prompt you to download Edge. Screenshot by Emma...
Illustration: The Verge Apple is using an internal chatbot to help its employees “prototype future features, summarize text and answer questions based on data it has been trained with,” says Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in Power On today. Apple hasn’t been sure what it wants to do with its Apple GPT chatbot project on the customer-facing side yet, but Gurman’s report shed some light on at least its internal chatbot uses. According to the newsletter, Apple is looking at ways to expand the use of generative AI within its organization, with one possibility being giving the tool to its...
Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular roundup of the past week in tech. Too busy to check the headlines this week? Don’t sweat it. That’s why WiR exists — we’ll get you caught up to speed. This edition of WiR features pieces about a fake AI-generated “South Park” episode; the surging […]
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week in AI, we saw OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, […]
When OpenAI released a ChatGPT app for the iPhone in May, it promised that Android users will get theirs soon. Now, the company has announced that ChatGPT for Android is rolling out to users sometime next week. Moreover, its Google Play listing is already up, and users can pre-register to get it as soon as it becomes available. It's unclear if the app will initially only be available in the US like the iPhone app, but I was able to pre-order it from Asia. OpenAI expanded the iOS app's reach to more regions just a few days after it was released, so the Android app will most likely be...
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. It seems like the fizzle has gone out of the VR conversation altogether, as every manufacturer and conversation is refocusing its attention on AR. That wasn’t particularly new, but Apple’s flagship headset is a huge leap away from virtual reality, […]
There’s a lot of performative behavior in startup land, such as foosball tables in reception areas and kitchens with kombucha taps.
The MTA is cracking down on subway fare evasions after revealing the issue cost the authority $285 million last year. | Photo by Gary Hershorn / Getty Images The persistence of fare evasion on the New York City subway system has prompted the Metropolitan Transit Authority to install AI-powered surveillance software at several subway stations to track riders who avoid paying for a ticket. As reported by NBC News, the MTA disclosed in a fare evasion report that the tracking software was being used at seven undisclosed subway stations and eight physical fare barriers in May 2023, with plans for...
Google is testing a tool that uses AI to write news stories and has started pitching it to publications, according to a new report from The New York Times. The tech giant has pitched the AI tool to The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal’s owner, News Corp. The tool, […]
With the cost of living ever more painful, and Generative AI supposedly gunning for your job, at least — for the moment — it might be here to save you some money on your household bills. UK-based cost-of-living start-up Nous.co has now launched an OpenAI-powered assistant (combined with its own proprietary systems) to help its […]
Gushwork.ai, a global platform that aims to advance business process outsourcing (BPO) using AI and human expertise, has raised $2.1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Lightspeed. B Capital, Sparrow Capital, Seaborne Capital and Beenext also participated in backing the startup that launched in April this year. In recent years, companies have invested […]
Python is the preferred programming language in AI, however, most organisations can’t incorporate their Python developers into legacy data infrastructure. That means they miss out on pulling the benefits of AI into the org. However, there has been a lack of open source python library for developers designed around AI workflows. DLT (short for data […]
Illustration: The Verge The New York Times cites anonymous sources in a report saying Google demonstrated Genesis for media execs from the Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal owner News Corp, presenting “responsible” technology that takes in facts and spits out news copy. Two execs mentioned in the article “said it seemed to take for granted the effort that went into producing accurate and artful news stories,” while another saw it as more of a personal assistant / helper.Without seeing it, judging the responsibility of the tool is difficult. but the examples of CNET / Red...
Zhipu AI, one of China’s most promising challengers to OpenAI, has received funding from the country’s food delivery giant Meituan, which has a market cap of around $100 billion at the time of writing. An affiliate of Zhipu AI recently added a Meituan subsidiary as its shareholder, which now owns a 10% stake in the […]
Qualtrics, the cloud-based platform for managing online customer experiences, intends to spend $500 million on AI over the next four years. The company made the announcement this morning alongside the launch of its new AI-integrated platform, XM/os2 (an unwieldy name, to be sure), which offers generative AI solutions tailored to enterprise experience management use cases. […]
Apple is developing artificial intelligence tools to challenge Open AI, Google and others, according to a new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The tech giant has created a chatbot that some engineers are internally referring to as “Apple GPT.” Apple has yet to determine a strategy for releasing its AI tools to consumers, but is […]
Large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 are the building blocks for an increasing number of AI applications. But some enterprises have been reluctant to adopt them, owing to their inability to access first-party and proprietary data. It’s not an easy problem to solve, necessarily — considering that sort of data tends to sit […]
In case one needed more evidence that there’s a massive appetite for generative AI, SAP, the Germany-based consulting giant, yesterday invested in three major generative AI players: Anthropic, Cohere and Aleph Alpha. The terms of the direct investments, which weren’t disclosed, build on SAP’s $1 billion-plus commitment to back AI-powered enterprise tech startups from Sapphire […]
Nothing CEO Carl Pei knows better than most how hard it is to make a dent in the hardware world. | Image: Nothing Nothing wants to invent the future. But you don’t get to invent the future if you can’t first make it in the smartphone biz. Continue reading…
CodeSee was founded in 2019 with the goal of helping programmers understand the entire code base inside a company. The idea was to provide visual maps, so you could see the connections between services and systems and how changes might affect the different links. Today, the company announced it was adding a generative AI capability […]
Language learning platform Preply made a name for itself for connecting students with a selection of some 35,000 tutors and group classes across some 50 languages. Now it’s looking to the future — an AI future. The company today announced that it has raised a further $70 million in funding — a combination of debt […]
Interest in AI among the enterprise continues to rise, with one recent survey finding that nearly two-thirds of companies plan to increase or maintain their spending on AI and machine learning into this year. But often, these companies are encountering blockers in deploying various forms of AI into production. A 2020 poll from Rexer Analytics […]
Google is experimenting with a generative AI feature to create new backgrounds for Google Meet calls. This new test lets people type in a prompt to generate a background for the call. The feature, which was first posted by Artem Russakovsii on Twitter, is part of Google Workspace Labs. That means only a few people […]
Photo illustration by Alex Parkin / The Verge Squarespace has lived through the eras of domain squatting, SEO keywords, and social algorithms and is now launching AI tools. Here’s what’s next for the 20-year-old company. Continue reading…
The ongoing strike of creatives in TV and film, plus the nascent threat of AI-based writing and effects, make it a complicated time to work in show business. But little savvy is required to see that this may be the worst possible moment to soft-launch an AI that can “write, animate, direct, voice, edit” a […]
A backer of the Lensa AI app, which sent AI-generated images from Stable Diffusion rocketing into mainstream social media, has just exited a company for a substantial amount of money, say well-placed sources speaking on the condition of anonymity. CloudOne Digital has today announced its acquisition of Servers.com, a provider of ‘bare metal’ services with […]
If you ask GPT-4 to do a passage in the style of Carmen Machado or Margaret Atwood or Alexander Chee, it will do a fair job at it, and for good reason: it likely ingested all their works in the training process, and now uses their ingenuity for its own. But these authors, and thousands […]
For almost three decades in the Mission: Impossible franchise, Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt has gone head to head in high-speed motorcycle battles, climbed Dubai's Burj Khalifa, and hung from the side of a plane during takeoff. Oh, and he also died at one point (following an extended free dive into an underwater data bank). But in the latest film, Dead Reckoning Part 1, Ethan Hunt faces his toughest opponent yet: an omnipotent AI that could reshape geopolitics as we know it. After defying the laws of physics, it only makes sense that he has to defeat a god.As ludicrous as that may sound, it...
A group of designers are suing Shein, the Chinese fast-fashion firm reportedly valued at $66 billion, for allegedly stealing independent artists’ works “over and over again, as part of a long and continuous pattern of racketeering.” The designers — Krista Perry, Larissa Martinez and Jay Baron — claim in their lawsuit that Shein’s “design ‘algorithm’ […]Designers sue Shein over AI ripoffs of their work by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge As rumors mount for a “Windows 12” release for next year, Microsoft confirmed and named a new Windows 11 23H2 update planned for the fourth quarter of 2023. Microsoft hasn’t yet revealed what’s in it, but the company does have many unreleased features in the beta testing pipeline that could be included. One of the big new items is Windows Copilot, which takes the GPT generative AI tech being used in Bing and Microsoft (Office) 365 and gives users an OS-wide personal assistant — and is available to test now.Another feature to look out for is the...
The AMPTP proposal will sound familiar to Black Mirror fans. | Image: Netflix During today’s press conference in which Hollywood actors confirmed that they were going on strike, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s chief negotiator, revealed a proposal from Hollywood studios that sounds ripped right out of a Black Mirror episode.In a statement about the strike, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) said that its proposal included “a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors’ digital likenesses for SAG-AFTRA members.”When asked about the proposal during...
American regulators now appear to be clamping down on generative AI in earnest. The Washington Post has learned the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has launched an investigation into OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT and DALL-E. Officials have requested documents showing how the company tackles risks stemming from its large language AI models. The FTC is concerned the company may be violating consumer protection laws through "unfair or deceptive" practices that could hurt the public's privacy, security or reputation.The Commission is particularly interested in information linked to a bug that...
Inventory robots are having a moment. Two days back, Swiss firm Verity announced an $11 million raise. That followed a $20 million round from fellow drone inventory startup B Garage, which, in turn, arrived two days after Gather AI announced it had acquired competitor Ware. That same day, Dexory announced $19 million for its back-of-house […]Simbe’s inventory robots score $28 million in funding by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
The agency sent OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, a letter this week over the chatbot’s potential harms and the company’s security practices.
As the use cases of generative AI see explosive adaption, China has taken a leading role in defining how the rapidly changing technology should be used, including a licensing regime for service providers. On Thursday, China’s top cyberspace regulator unveiled a set of provisional rules to govern generative AI services, including API providers, that serve […]China unveils provisional rules for generative AI, including a licensing regime by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch
Artificial intelligence has been a big theme in the world of health and medical research, and specifically in the area of drug discovery. Today, another hopeful in the space is announcing a funding round to expand its own contribution to the field. Causaly, a London startup that has built an AI platform to help researchers […]Causaly, an AI platform for drug discovery and biomedical research, raises $60M by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
As we reported earlier, Google’s AI chatbot Bard has finally launched in the European Union. We understand it did so after making some changes to boost transparency and user controls — but the bloc’s privacy regulators remain watchful and big decisions on how to enforce the bloc’s data protection law on generative AI remain to […]Google’s Bard and other AI chatbots remain under privacy watch in the EU by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Stability AI, the startup behind the image-generating model Stable Diffusion, is launching a new service that turns sketches into images. The sketch-to-image service, Stable Doodle, leverages the latest Stable Diffusion model to analyze the outline of a sketch and generate a “visually pleasing” artistic rendition of it. It’s available starting today through ClipDrop, a platform […]Stability AI releases Stable Doodle, a sketch-to-image tool by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Meta’s Twitter competitor Threads, has been off to a great start as it gained 100 million sign-ups within five days of the launch. But with its absence in the EU, some AI-powered content generator apps are trying to gain the advantage of the situation. Today, Apple removed one of the biggest gainers — an app […]Apple removes AI-powered content generator impersonating Meta’s Threads app after it appeared in top charts by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Google is making its ChatGPT rival Bard available to a wider audience today, launching the generative AI chatbot in more than 40 languages and finally bringing it to the European Union (EU) after an initial delay due to data privacy concerns. The internet giant also introduced a swathe of new features to Bard, though some […]Google’s Bard chatbot finally launches in the EU, now supports more than 40 languages by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration: The Verge Google is adding some new features to its Bard AI chatbot, including the ability for Bard to speak its answers to you and for it to respond to prompts that also include images. The chatbot is also now available in much of the world, including the EU.In a blog post, Google is positioning Bard’s spoken responses as a helpful way to “correct pronunciation of a word or listen to a poem or script.” You’ll be able to hear spoken responses by entering a prompt and selecting the sound icon. Spoken responses will be available in more than 40 languages and are live now...
Image: Microsoft After showing off an AI hub in the Microsoft Store earlier this year, now it’s finally arriving for Windows 11 Insiders in Preview Build (25905). The built-in AI hub will highlight a set of curated AI apps from both third-party developers and Microsoft.Microsoft first announced the new hub during its Build conference in May, where it also showed off new AI-generated app review summaries for the Microsoft Store. These summaries haven’t been rolled out just yet, but they’re supposed to live alongside an app’s rating in the Microsoft store, summing up users’ reviews in...
xAI will feature veterans from DeepMind, Google, Microsoft, and Tesla.
Sony is launching its new A6700 APS-C mirrorless camera today, bringing key AI-powered autofocus enhancements from the company’s full-frame lineup to its mainstream (and more affordable) A6000-series. The 26-megapixel mirrorless camera, which succeeds 2019’s A6600, offers 4K video at up to 120fps, a big boost from the 30fps of its predecessor. It’s priced at $1,399.99 for the body alone.The biggest upgrade here is AI processing. The new camera gets the same autofocus enhancements that made Sony’s $3,900 A7R V camera so great, giving it the ability to detect more granular subjects than...
Google is making its “AI notebook for everyone” available to a select few, and renaming it from Project Tailwind to NotebookLM. If you struggle to make sense of the pile of information in your Google Drive, a light coating of AI could be just the thing. The project was announced at I/O in May as […]Google’s AI-assisted note-taking app gets limited launch as NotebookLM by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Elon Musk has a new AI company. A website has appeared for xAI, which will embark on the self-described mission to “understand the true nature of the universe.” This is the first direct word about the project after filing documents revealed the existence of a company called “X.AI Corp” earlier this year.Not much else is known yet about Musk’s latest venture. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO and Twitter Chairman tweeted today, “Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality.” The company webpage notes that the team will host a Twitter Spaces chat on Friday, July 14th.Announcing...
Elon Musk, Twitter’s not-so-benevolent CEO, today announced the launch of a new organization, xAI, to “understand the true nature of the universe.” Ambitious? A little. So how does xAI plan to achieve it? More details will be announced during a Twitter Spaces on Friday, apparently. But xAI’s splash page reveals that the team — 12 […]Elon Musk wants to build AI to ‘understand the true nature of the universe’ by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
At Google I/O in May, the company revealed its plans to go all-in on AI with the likes of PaLM 2, Bard, and a whole host of intelligent enhancement features for its myriad products. Tucked into that cavalcade of consumerism was a brief discussion of Google's Project Tailwind, an experimental product geared towards students as an "AI-first notebook" to help them stay organized. On Wednesday, Project Tailwind graduated development to become NotebookLM (NLM).NLM is essentially note taking software with a large language model tacked onto the side, which is "paired with your existing content to...
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images xAI, Elon Musk’s newly formed AI company, has revealed itself with a new website detailing its mission and team at https://x.ai/. Musk tweeted the company’s intent is to “understand reality” without any other details or explanation. “The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” according to the website. The team is headed up by Elon Musk and includes team members that have worked at other big names in AI, including OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, and DeepMind (which was recently folded into...
Google might be laser focused on generative AI these days, like the majority of its Big Tech competitors. But that hasn’t stopped the search giant from patronizing pretty out-there art projects, true to its experimental roots. Enter the latest creation from Google’s Art & Culture Lab, Viola the Bird, which uses AI to understand cello […]Google’s latest art project recruits an animated bird — and AI — to play the cello by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
There is a long list of Large Language Models (LLMs) out in the wild already, from OpenAI’s GPT-4 to Google’s PaLM2 to Meta’s LLaMA, to name three of the more high profile examples. Differentiation between LLMs is determined by factors including the core architecture of the model, training data used, model weights applied and any […]Clibrain joins the generative AI race with Lince, an LLM optimized for Spanish by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Sony has produced numerous full-frame cameras of late, but just a single APS-C model over the last four years — the vlogging-oriented ZV-E10. Now, the company has finally rectified that with the launch of the 26-megapixel (MP) A6700, it's new flagship APS-C mirrorless camera. It's particularly strong for vlogging thanks to features like 4K 120p video, active mode stabilization and AI auto-framing — but it's not cheap, either.The A6700 looks like other Sony A6000-series models at first glance, but there are some considerable improvements. The grip is now bigger for improved...
South Korean tech giant Kakao wants a piece of the action in the generative AI race, and today it made a bid for it, with big updates to its AI image generator Karlo and its KoGPT large language model and a new fund to back AI image generating startups. Kakao’s AI division Kakao Brain‘s launch […]Kakao ups its game in generative AI with Karlo 2.0, an AI image generator by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch
Quora’s AI-powered chatbot service Poe introduced a bunch of new tools on Tuesday ranging from a larger context window for better responses to support for URL retrieval, and document upload, along with continuing other users’ public conversations. The company said in an email to customers that with Anthropic launching Claude-2, Poe is making its 100k-token […]Quora’s Poe chatbot introduces better context window and document upload support by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Resemble AI, a platform that uses generative AI to clone realistic-sounding voices, today announced that it raised $8 million in a Series A round led by Javelin Venture Partners, with participation from Craft Ventures and Ubiquity Ventures. The tranche, which brings the startup’s total raised to $12 million, will be put toward further developing Resemble’s […]Voice cloning platform Resemble AI lands $8M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Discord has updated its policy meant to protect children and teens on its platform after reports came out that predators have been using the app to create and spread child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), as well as to groom young teens. The platform now explicitly prohibits AI-generated photorealistic CSAM. As The Washington Post recently reported, the rise in generative AI has also led to the explosion of lifelike images with sexual depictions of children. The publication had seen conversations about the use of Midjourney — a text-to-image generative AI on Discord — to create inappropriate...
AI, when it works well, can feel like magic, but all too often AI-based systems don’t work as they should: if the data used to train models is not deep, wide and reliable enough, any kind of curve ball can send that AI in the wrong direction. A London startup called Prolific has built a […]Prolific raises $32M to train and stress-test AI models using its network of 120K people by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
Image: Shutterstock Shutterstock is extending its partnership with OpenAI for six more years, allowing the AI company to train its models using Shutterstock’s sprawling library of images, videos, music, and metadata during that time.The stock image site’s partnership with OpenAI first began in 2021. That’s when Shutterstock started letting the company use its images to train its text-to-image model, DALL-E — a deal OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described as “critical” to the model’s training. Last year, Shutterstock launched a “Contributor Fund” to compensate artists when their work...
According to a survey we conducted, 39% said it will be difficult to get everyone in their organization on board with AI.Create context and provide examples to lower AI adoption barriers by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
Anthropic, a safety-focused A.I. start-up, is trying to compete with ChatGPT while preventing an A.I. apocalypse. It’s been a little stressful.
Shutterstock today announced that it plans to expand its existing deal with OpenAI to provide the startup with training data for its AI models. Over the next six years, OpenAI will license data from Shutterstock including images, videos and music as well as any associated metadata. Shutterstock, in turn, will gain “priority access” to OpenAI’s […]Shutterstock expands deal with OpenAI to build generative AI tools by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Meta acquired 100M users for Threads in just 5 days. You are not Meta, however, which means you'll need to develop and protect stronger IP.TechCrunch+ roundup: Generative AI catch up, bootstrapping tactics, hiring a head of growth by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
eBay announced today that it has closed its acquisition of Certilogo, a company that provides AI-powered apparel and fashion goods digital IDs and authentication. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Milan-based company will continue to be led by CEO Michele Casucci. Certilogo uses digital technology to help brands manage the lifecycle […]eBay acquires AI-powered product authentication company Certilogo by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
VC firm Sapphire Ventures says that it plans to invest more than $1 billion in AI-related enterprise startups, demonstrating the strong appetite among investors for cutting-edge AI tech. Reuters reports that the $1 billion in capital will come from Sapphire’s existing funds, which have $10 billion under management and about $3 billion waiting to the […]Sapphire Ventures plans to invest over $1B in enterprise AI startups by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Just five months after Anthropic debuted its open-source ChatGPT rival, Claude, the company is back with an updated version that promises longer answers, more detailed reasonings, fewer hallucinations and generally better performance. It also now scores in the 90th percentile of graduate school applicants on the GRE reading and writing exams.The updated version, Claude 2, is available today for users in the US and the UK. It can now handle as many as 100,000 tokens — that's around 75,000 words, or a few hundred pages of documents users can have Claude digest and analyze — up...
The startup helps companies improve their generative AI prompting, and this quick fundraise indicates there's room for more of its ilk.Prompt engineering startup Vellum.ai raises $5M as demand for generative AI services scales by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
Investors are throwing money at AI startups, so it's no wonder we're starting to see them leaning on the tech to save their most precious resource: Time.This VC firm uses personality tests and AI to find its next investments by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
Anthropic, the AI startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI execs, today announced the release of a new text-generating AI model, Claude 2. The successor to Anthropic’s first commercial model, Claude 2 is available in beta starting today in the U.S. and U.K. both on the web and via a paid API (in limited access). The API pricing […]Anthropic releases Claude 2, its second-gen AI chatbot by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Samsung widened its OLED TV range early this year, but it didn't include any sets larger than 77 inches — you still had to turn elsewhere if you wanted a bigger set. That won't be an issue after today. The company has introduced an 83-inch model to its relatively affordable S90C series. The 4K screen shares the smaller models' 144Hz QD-OLED panel technology, AI-powered HDR mapping, Dolby Atmos support, soundbar syncing and "lite" object tracking audio.As with other S90C variants, you only miss a few features compared to the top-end S95C. You won't get the slightly better display, external...
Illustration: The Verge Just a couple of months ago, a leaked memo said to be from a Google researcher cast doubt on the company’s future in AI, stating that it has “no moat” in the industry — and now, we seemingly have confirmation that it was real. In an interview with Decoder, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google’s DeepMind, told The Verge that although he believes the memo was legitimate, he disagrees with its conclusions.“I think that memo was real. I think engineers at Google often write various documents, and sometimes they get leaked and go viral,” Hassabis said. “I think...
The process of compositing, or placing actors in front of a background that’s not actually there, is as old as filmmaking itself — and it’s always been a pain. Netflix has a new technique that relies on machine learning to do some of the hard work, but it requires lighting actors in a garish magenta. […]Netflix’s AI-assisted green screen bathes actors in eye-searing magenta by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI. On Friday, the comedian and author, alongside novelists Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, filed a pair of complaints against OpenAI and Meta (via Gizmodo). The group alleges the firms trained their large language models on copyrighted materials, including works they published, without obtaining consent.The complaints center around the datasets OpenAI and Meta allegedly used to train ChatGPT and LLaMA. In the case of OpenAI, while it's "Books1" dataset conforms approximately to the size of Project Gutenberg — a well known copyright-free book repository...
Not all use cases for AI make sense, but Pano AI makes a life-saving contribution in the “yes” column. Just last week, the company was able to send early warnings of the Kutch Fire, that broke out near Kutch Mountain in Yamhill County, Oregon. The company showed me how it was able to detect and […]Wildfire detection startup Pano extends its $20M series A with another $17M by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration: The Verge Google’s Med-PaLM 2, an AI tool designed to answer questions about medical information, has been in testing at the Mayo Clinic research hospital, among others, since April, The Wall Street Journal reported this morning. Med-PaLM 2 is a variant of PaLM 2, which was announced at Google I/O in May this year. PaLM 2 is the language model underpinning Google’s Bard.WSJ reports that an internal email it saw said Google believes its updated model can be particularly helpful in countries with “more limited access to doctors.” Med-PaLM 2 was trained on a curated set of...
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week, SpeedyBrand, a company using generative AI to […]The week in AI: Generative AI spams up the web by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
YouTube is experimenting with AI-generated quizzes on its mobile app for iOS and Android devices, which are designed to help viewers learn more about a subject featured in an educational video. The feature will also help the video-sharing platform get a better understanding of how well each video covers a certain topic. The AI-generated quizzes, […]YouTube tests AI-generated quizzes on educational videos by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
For a glimpse of the AI-generated misery fast accelerating onto our screens thanks to developments in synthetic media that are powering ever more sophisticated forms of deception, check out this clip of UK consumer finance champion Martin Lewis apparently shilling an investment opportunity backed by Elon Musk. Except of course the footage (also embedded in […]Martin Lewis warns over ‘first’ deepfake video scam ad circulating on Facebook by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
While working at Vetan, a startup helping small- and medium-sized (SMBs) businesses manage employee payroll, Jatin Mehta realized that SMBs often lack the tools to thrive online with organic sales. The cost to hire an agency is beyond their budget, and generating content is costly — both in terms of time and money. “Having a […]SpeedyBrand uses generative AI to create SEO-optimized content by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Last week, G/O Media leadership had news for staffers at the many publications the company owns: AI-generated articles were just around the corner. “We are both a leading technology company and an editorial organization that covers technology in world class fashion across multiple sites,” editorial director Merrill Brown wrote in an email. “So it is utterly appropriate — and in fact our responsibility — to do all we can to develop AI initiatives relatively early in the evolution of the technology.”G/O’s early experiments with AI tools began...
SoftBank is backing Japanese robotics startup Telexistence, making good on the tech giant’s recent pledge to go back on the investment offensive in light of the current AI hype. Tokyo-based Telexistence said Thursday that it has raised $170 million (23 billion yen) in a Series B round of funding from SoftBank, Airbus Ventures, Monoful Partners, KDDI […]SoftBank backs Japanese robotics startup Telexistence in $170M funding round by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch
It was only a question of time, I suppose, before someone made a generative AI that can whisper sweet, sweet obscenities at you. Lovense – perhaps best known for its remote-controllable sex toys – this week announced its ChatGPT Pleasure Companion. The company’s newest innovation in sex tech is to do what everyone else seems […]This sex toy company uses ChatGPT to whisper sweet, customizable fantasies at you by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
When it first appeared on the scene around ten years ago, Notion Capital was poised to take advantage of the oft-repeated phrase, “Software is eating the world.” In particular, it was aiming at what was then called the enterprise SaaS space. Several years on, and it’s capitalised on that thesis, investing in in more than […]Notion hits €300M for its fifth fund, but is unimpressed by big rounds into Generative AI startups by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch
OpenAI is forming a new team led by Ilya Sutskever, its chief scientist and one of the company’s co-founders, to develop ways to steer and control “superintelligent” AI systems. In a blog post published today, Sutskever and Jan Leike, a lead on the alignment team at OpenAI, predict that AI with intelligence exceeding that of […]OpenAI is forming a new team to bring ‘superintelligent’ AI under control by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Whatever content is publically available on the web, Google has given itself permission to use it to train AI. | Illustration by Haein Jeong / The Verge On Monday, Gizmodo spotted that the search giant updated its privacy policy to disclose that its various AI services, such as Bard and Cloud AI, may be trained on public data that the company has scraped from the web.“Our privacy policy has long been transparent that Google uses publicly available information from the open web to train language models for services like Google Translate,” said Google spokesperson Christa Muldoon to The Verge...
Unless you’ve been on an extended digital detox this year, you can’t have missed how a certain flavor of AI hype has been accelerating down the tracks like a runaway train. But far from the viral buzz swirling around developments in generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E, Konux, a Munch-based deep tech AI scale-up, […]Konux gears up to scale its AI + IoT play for optimizing the railways by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Valve has issued a rare statement after claims it was rejecting games with AI-generated assets from its Steam games store. The notoriously close-lipped developer of the Half-Life series and de facto gatekeeper of PC gaming distribution said its policy was evolving and not a stand against AI. Steam has a review and approval process much […]Valve responds to claims it has banned AI-generated games from Steam by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
"Legal uncertainty" over models means many devs can't establish "appropriate rights."
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images Elon Musk continues to blame Twitter’s new limitations on AI companies scraping “vast amounts of data” as he announced new “temporary” limits on how many posts people can read. Now unverified accounts will only be able to see 600 posts per day, and for “new” unverified accounts, just 300 in a day. The limits for verified accounts (presumably whether they’re bought as a part of the Twitter Blue subscription, granted through an organization, or verification Elon forced on people like Stephen King, LeBron James, and anyone...
AI’s grabbing headlines, but the robotics field is still making a significant impact in the real world — and this is your briefing on our latest coverage of the growing industry. Before we get into the depths of the past week’s noteworthy robotics news, our resident expert Brian Heater dove into the debate over the […]The week in robotics: Teaching robots chores from YouTube, robot dogs at the border and drone consolidation by Alyssa Stringer originally published on TechCrunch
University of Toronto professor Geoffrey Hinton, often called the “Godfather of AI” for his pioneering research on neural networks, recently became the industry’s unofficial watchdog. He quit working at Google this spring to more freely critique the field he helped pioneer. He saw the recent surge in generative AIs like ChatGPT and Bing Chat as signs of unchecked and potentially dangerous acceleration in development. Google, meanwhile, was seemingly giving up its previous restraint as it chased competitors with products like its Bard chatbot.At this week’s Collision conference in...
Humane, the startup launched by ex-Apple design and engineering duo Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, today revealed details about its first product: The Humane Ai Pin. It’s been a long time coming. Humane has kept its work more or less under wraps since 2018, its founding year, unveiling no products but bringing on dozens of […]Secretive hardware startup Humane’s first product is the Ai Pin by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
IRL’s company logo. | Photo illustration by William Joel/The Verge I have a packed issue this week, starting with the implosion of a once-hot social media startup called IRL. It raised $200 million at over a $1 billion valuation, and now its board is dissolving the company after finding that most of its users were fake. The SEC is investigating. It’s a whole mess. I have ex-CEO Abraham Shafi’s first public comments on the situation since he was ousted by the board. Also in this issue: a convo with the earliest investor in MosaicML, the AI startup that just sold to Databricks for more than...
Major tech Founders, CEOs, VCs and industry giants across Europe have signed an open letter to the EU Commission, warning that Europe could miss out on the Generative AI revolution if the EU passes laws stifling innovation. Executives from 150 businesses, including Germany’s Siemens and France’s Airbus, highlighted the risks of tight regulation, saying the […]European VCs & tech firms sign open letter warning against over-regulation of AI in draft EU laws by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch
AI has a role in improving productivity, but let’s examine the facts to understand how — and then make informed decisions.AI is not a panacea for software development by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
We’re publishing on a lighter schedule to commemorate Independence Day, so I’ll return on Friday, July 7 with a new TC+ roundup.TechCrunch+ roundup: Vertical AI, crypto losses decline, machine learning investor survey by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
Services like Midjourney and ChatGPT have pushed the boundaries of how AI can create images and text out of basic text prompts. Now, audio appears to be the inevitable next frontier. Music generation based on word prompts, AI tutors for language learning, and voice simulators have all seen developments in recent months. Voice.ai hopes to […]Voice.ai raises $6M as its real-time voice changer approaches 500k users by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration: Nick Barclay / The Verge This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. Sign up here.Last July, as the Instagram feed began to fill up with recommended posts, the company was thrown briefly into crisis. The once-familiar landscape of friends, family, and influencers you had chosen to follow had begun to be replaced by algorithmic guesses. “Make Instagram Instagram again,” opined Kylie Jenner. Many viral tweets followed in the same vein.“When you discover something in your feed that you didn’t follow...
After a long M&A drought, we saw a lot of activity this week as companies looking for AI and data startups went shopping.M&A is back and the enterprise is hot by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
The letter warns that the strict rules for generative AI outlined in the AI Act have ‘consequences.’ | Photo by Philipp von Ditfurth/picture alliance via Getty Images Some of the biggest companies in Europe have taken collective action to criticize the European Union’s recently approved artificial intelligence regulations, claiming that the Artificial Intelligence Act is ineffective and could negatively impact competition. In an open letter sent to the European Parliament, Commission, and member states on Friday, and first seen by the Financial Times, over 150 executives from companies...
Protecting training data and models must be the top priority; it’s no longer sufficient to encrypt fields in databases or rows on a form.How confidential computing could secure generative AI adoption by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
Scriptic (previously ElectricNoir), the immersive storytelling platform, announced Thursday that it raised $5.7 million in funding to expand its catalog of phone-first interactive games created using generative AI tools. The studio will also use the funding to build out its team of TV and gaming talent as well as introduce a new initiative — user-generated […]Scriptic scores $5.7M as it expands its phone-first generative AI content library by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
It’s a big day for generative AI funding. On the heels of Inflection AI landing a $1.3 billion investment, Runway, a startup building generative AI tools for multimedia content creators, today announced a $141 million extension to its Series C round from Google, Nvidia and Salesforce, among others. Building on the Series C the company […]Runway, a startup building generative AI for content creators, raises $141M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
In our tech-driven world, the right to privacy — once the cornerstone of democracy — is disappearing at an alarming rate. But not everyone is keen on having Big Tech companies and nation-states surveilling every digital communication. This may be one reason why Signal, the end-to-end encrypted messaging app, has been downloaded more than 100 […]Signal talks privacy, encryption, AI and more at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023’s Security Stage by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch
As the race to build generative AI tools for the enterprise devolves into a battle royale, big tech is busy wielding its most powerful weapon: checkbooks.Big tech corporate venture capital ???? generative AI startups by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
Just about every developer wants to create APIs to help other companies connect to their services more easily, but creating and documenting an API is a time consuming process. Speakeasy, an early stage startup, wants to make that an easier and more automated set of activities. Today, the company emerged from stealth with a $7.6 […]Speakeasy is using AI to automate API creation and distribution by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Between the robots and an AI-powered workflow, GeologicAI’s new business model is looking far more scalable than its old approach.Batteries beat oil and gas as AI startup pivots to critical minerals exploration by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
Microsoft today announced a slew of new AI-powered shopping tools for its new Bing search engine and the Bing AI chatbot in the Edge sidebar. While a lot of the shopping features that Microsoft built into Edge over the years aren’t exactly fan favorites, this new set of tools actually looks useful. Microsoft will now, […]Microsoft brings new AI-powered shopping tools to Bing and Edge by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
There’s still plenty of cash to go around in the generative AI space, apparently. As first reported by Forbes, Inflection AI, an AI startup aiming to create “personal AI for everyone,” has closed a $1.3 billion funding round led by Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and new investor Nvidia. A source familiar with […]Inflection lands $1.3B investment to build more ‘personal’ AI by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Unless you switch to chronological timeline on Facebook, the things you see on your timeline could seem pretty arbitrary at times. Now, Meta has given us pretty comprehensive look at how its AI systems decide on the posts that appear on our Facebook and Instagram feeds. The social networking giant has released 22 card systems for the platforms that explain how its AI systems rank content for its Feed, Stories and Reels. Each card explains how a certain aspect of Meta's platform works — for instance, the company explains that for Facebook Feeds, its AI system starts by gathering all...
Meta’s President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg (pictured) affirms the company’s commitment to transparency. | Kristen Radtke / The Verge Meta has published a deep dive into the company’s social media algorithms in a bid to demystify how content is recommended for Instagram and Facebook users. In a blog post published on Thursday, Meta’s President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg said that the info dump on the AI systems behind its algorithms is part of the company’s “wider ethos of openness, transparency, and accountability,” and outlined what Facebook and Instagram users can do to...
Meta is publishing new material to explain how its recommendation engine works across different products. Along with that, it is also rolling out a new option called “Why am I seeing this?” for Instagram and Facebook Reels as well as Instagram’s Explore page. This way, you can understand the reason why that post is being […]Meta really wants to explain its AI recommendation algorithms to you by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
David Lazovsky and Preet Virk, technologists with backgrounds in semiconductor engineering and photonics, came to the joint realization several years ago that AI and machine learning workloads would quickly encounter a “data movement” problem. Increasingly, they predicted, it would become challenging to move data to and from compute hardware as AI models scaled past what […]Celestial AI raises $100M to transfer data using light-based interconnects by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Image: OpenAI People apparently find tweets more convincing when they’re written by AI language models. At least, that was the case in a new study comparing content created by humans to language generated by OpenAI’s model GPT-3. The authors of the new research surveyed people to see if they could discern whether a tweet was written by another person or by Chat-GPT. The result? People couldn’t really do it. The survey also asked them to decide whether the information in each tweet was true or not. This is where things get even dicier, especially since the content focused on science topics...
Snowflake and Databricks are on similar tracks, and both announced tools to help customers put stored data stored to work in AI apps.Snowflake and Databricks are putting the data stored in their services to work by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Parabola, a San Francisco-based startup that uses AI to help expedite back-office processes, particularly in the logistics and ecommerce sectors, today announced that it raised $24 million in a Series B funding round led by OpenView with participation from strategic investor Flexport alongside Matrix, Thrive, Flexport, Good Friends, Webflow, Otherwise Fund, Abstract Ventures and Merus […]Workflow automation startup Parabola raises $24M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
For business owners, phone calls can be an enormous time waster. Take the restaurant industry, for example. Calls can lead to more important tasks being overlooked, like doing inventory, balancing staff schedules, running payroll and fixing equipment issues. The issue, exacerbated by the pandemic, is so severe that restaurants are increasingly abandoning their phone lines. […]Slang taps AI to answer phone calls for brick-and-mortar businesses by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
What one educator wants students, teachers, and everyone else to know about the ethics of using of AI in education.
Gleamer, a five-year-old French startup that has developed AI software to help radiologists diagnose and detect bone trauma lesions in scans among other conditions, has raised €27 million ($29.5 million) in a Series B round of funding. Founded in 2017, Gleamer’s core flagship BoneView software, which it touts as an “AI companion for bone trauma […]Gleamer, which provides AI software for radiologists, raises $29.5M by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch
The U.S. is weighing additional restrictions on AI chip export to China amid rising concerns over the use of advanced semiconductors for military modernization. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the U.S. Department of Commerce could prohibit shipments of chips from manufacturers including Nvidia to customers in China as soon as early next month. […]China’s AI firms might further lose chip access in new US ban by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch
We are only scratching the surface of how artificial intelligence might be used in art, and musicians are already experimenting with the technology. But if their AI-assisted composition is to be eligible for a Grammy, they’ll need to make sure that their contribution is “meaningful,” the rules now state. An update to the famous awards’ […]‘Only human creators’ can win a Grammy, but AI isn’t totally forbidden by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
“AI and software development are now inextricably linked for the rest of our lives,” GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said today during a presentation at the Collision conference in Toronto, Canada. “In a world eaten by software, every developer deserves a co-pilot.” In an interview after his talk, Dohmke expanded on this a bit when I […]GitHub CEO: AI and software development are now inextricably linked by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
A still from Secret Invasion’s opening credits sequence. | Image: Marvel Studios Secret Invasion’s AI-generated opening credits aren’t Marvel’s best, but they do feel like a very telling sign of where the studio and the larger entertainment industry are at right now. Continue reading…
The AI category is rapidly evolving, but developing into three layers: foundational models, AI infrastructure, and AI applications.Vertical AI: The next logical iteration of vertical SaaS by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
Large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT-4 are all the rage these days, owing to their unparalleled ability to analyze and generate text. But for organizations looking to leverage LLMs for specific tasks — say, writing ad copy in a brand’s style — their generalist nature can become a liability. When the instructions get too […]Reka emerges from stealth to build custom AI models for the enterprise by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Amazon wants to help organizations connect the various apps that they use — leveraging, in part, AI. The company today announced AWS AppFabric, a new no-code service designed to bridge the gap between software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps in enterprise environments. Amazon claims that AppFabric, generally available as of today, can deliver better security and management than […]Amazon launches AWS AppFabric to help customers connect their SaaS apps by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Rubber Ducky Labs, a San Francisco-based startup, is looking to make it easier for teams to debug, analyze and improve their recommendation systems. The quest for better AI recommendation engines by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
Some of the world’s most famous robots are heading to United Nations — alongside some human experts. At a UN summit in Geneva next week, luminaries including futurist Ray Kurzweil and DeepMind COO Lila Ibrahim will discuss AI for good. It’s a stellar lineup of speakers, but the real stars in our eyes are in the roster of robots. Over 50 of the beasts — the majority from Europe — will be in attendance. All of them are worthy of places in your dreams and nightmares, but we’ve narrowed the roster down to a list of our 10 favourites. 1. Sophia…This story continues at The Next Web...
TechCrunch+ surveyed four active VCs about their views on the ecosystem for ML startups, an underexplored subfield of AI. 4 VCs illustrate why there’s good reason to be optimistic about the machine learning startup market by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Brilliant Labs’ augmented reality wearable stands in stark contrast to Apple’s pricey, bulky, stealthy Vision Pro. The startup’s inaugural product, Monocle, is an open-source, pocket-sized AR lens that can be clipped on any eyewear or held to the eye, Launched in March, Monocle has a much more accessible price tag of $349. “Other AR and […]Brilliant Labs puts AI in front of your eye with its tiny open-source AR lens by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch
Roblox, the virtual world and game platform, has 66 million daily users who spent 14 billion collective hours on it in just Q1 of 2023. If you have kids, you’ve probably heard of Roblox. If you haven’t heard of it, Roblox CEO David Baszucki wants to change that. One idea? Aging up the kinds of experiences that are allowed on its platform. Roblox recently introduced 17-plus experiences. It wants to add new AI world-building capabilities. It’s even partnering with advertisers to roll out more immersive ad experiences.It’s been years since the number of adults gaming outnumbered kids...
Spinal is one of the fastest-growing categories of surgery, with the number of operations taking place annually now approaching 8 million. But their frequency belies the complexity and sometimes less-than-perfect outcomes of these procedures. That’s created a vacuum that technology is mobilizing to fill: today, a startup called Augmedics that’s built an augmented reality-based navigation […]Augmedics snaps up $82.5M advance spinal surgery navigation using AR and AI by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
While running a 5,000-agent contact center, Brian Tuite often experienced the problem of having to train new agents on the basics. The way he tells it, they weren’t prepared for success — and drained the contact center’s resources. That gave Tuite the idea of creating what he describes as “simulation training” for customer service agents. […]Zenarate, an AI-powered agent coaching platform, raises $15M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
It’s always a bit of a bummer when an exhibitor pays for booth space at an event, but ultimately fails to show. The empty table, the photocopied bit of signage — perhaps one of the neighboring booths has annexed the spot. Occasionally there are murmurs. Ware’s conspicuous absence at ProMat in April fell into the […]Gather AI buys drone inventory competitor, Ware by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
The jury is still out on whether AI adoption really will spell the end of humanity as we know it, but in the meantime, we’re continue to see a boom of AI startups and AI dealmaking. In the latest development, a generative AI-based language learning startup called Loora is coming out of stealth with $9.25 […]Loora, a generative AI app that uses an audio interface to help users learn English, raises $9.25M by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
AI-based traffic management platform NoTraffic has bagged $50 million in Series B funding as it picks up momentum in cities across the U.S. The capital injection comes as the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill enters its second year and a host of funding programs kick in to alleviate traffic congestion, tackle CO2 emissions and reduce road […]NoTraffic raises $50M to tackle congestion and enhance road safety by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch
Dexory, a company that serves warehouses with real-time inventory management data using AI software and autonomous robots, has raised $19 million in a Series A round of funding led by European VC Atomico. Founded out of London in 2015, Dexory’s product can be split into two segments. On the hardware side, the company develops robots […]Dexory nabs $19M to bring visibility to warehouses through analytics and autonomous robots by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch
Last week, we talked with Kindred Ventures, a small, nine-year-old, San Francisco-based early stage venture firm that, despite investing in a lot of nascent startups — more than 100 to date — takes a generalist approach, investing in AI, climate tech, consumer internet companies, crypto deals, fintech startups, health startups, mobility startups and the outfits […]Kindred Ventures foresees a “massive explosion of startups” courtesy of AI by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch
Image: The Verge On AlaskaCommons.com, the writer “Chelsea Waller” says she is a “dedicated journalist with a passion for uncovering the truth.” One of her stories reads, “As an AI language model, I cannot predict whether or not John Wick 4 is going to be a finale of a saga that will be remembered for years to come.”The website is just one of the news sites flagged by NewsGuard filled with low-quality, spammy content generated using artificial intelligence tools, where ads for major brands are now appearing, according to a report by NewsGuard. The study was first reported by MIT...
ThoughtSpot, an AI-powered analytics startup, today announced that it’s entered intop a definitive agreement to acquire Mode Analytics, a business intelligence platform, for $200 million in cash and stock. The deal, ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair says, will bolster ThoughtSpot’s generative AI capabilities while doubling the company’s customer base and growing its annual recurring revenue to […]ThoughtSpot acquires Mode Analytics, a BI platform, for $200M in cash and stock by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Want more fintech news in your inbox? Sign up here. Finance automation company Ramp has acquired Cohere.io, a startup that built an AI-powered customer support tool, the companies told TechCrunch exclusively. Founded in 2020, New York-based Cohere.io (not to be confused with Cohere, another AI startup that recently raised capital) raised $3.1 million in a […]As the generative AI craze rages on, Ramp acquires customer support startup Cohere.io by Mary Ann Azevedo originally published on TechCrunch
Image: The Verge In recent months, the signs and portents have been accumulating with increasing speed. Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an “AI editor” expects “output of 200 to 250 articles per week.” ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy is flooded with “AI-generated junk.” Chatbots cite one another in a misinformation ouroboros. LinkedIn is using AI to stimulate tired...
The success of large language models like GPT has sparked a frenzy of developers eager to make AI-powered applications. But building AI services can be tricky, especially due to the shortage of skilled developers to meet the rising demand these days. That’s where Chaoyu Yang, an early software engineer at the data mega-unicorn Databricks, comes […]BentoML scores $9M funding to expedite AI app development by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch
Who’s using AI?AI is suddenly everywhere. Image generators and large language models are at the core of new startups, powering features inside our favorite apps, and — perhaps more importantly — driving conversation not just in the tech world but also society at large. Concerns abound about cheating in schools with ChatGPT, being fooled by AI-generated pictures, and artists being ripped off or even outright replaced.But despite widespread news coverage, use of these new tools is still fairly limited, at least when it comes to dedicated AI products. And experience with these tools skews...
Investors aren’t the only ones who want to get their hands on hot tech companies in the field of AI: it’s also likely to spur a big wave of M&A, too: today, Databricks announced that it would pay $1.3 billion to acquire MosaicML, an open-source startup with neural networks expertise that has built a platform […]Databricks picks up MosaicML, an OpenAI competitor, for $1.3B by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
While working at Google, Wade Norris wanted to create a project that could positively impact people’s lives. He co-founded Google Lens, Google’s computer vision-powered app that brings up information related to the objects it identifies. But it didn’t quite scratch the itch. So several years ago, Norris teamed up with Scott Baron, a systems engineer […]SnapCalorie taps AI to estimate the caloric content of food from photos by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
When it comes to artworks created by generative AI, enterprise users have specific legal concerns around permissions – and Adobe has recognized those worries. That’s why the company has written an indemnity clause that states that Adobe will pay any copyright claims related to works generated in Adobe Firefly, the company’s generative AI art creation […]Adobe indemnity clause designed to ease enterprise fears about AI-generated art by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Hello, lovelies, and welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the week in tech. For many folks, this workweek was a day shorter, thanks to the Juneteenth observance on Monday. But plenty happened. We’ve got coverage on the OceanGate tragedy, and we’ve continued to closely track the Reddit API controversy — […]OceanGate fires a whistleblower, hackers threaten to leak Reddit data, and Marvel embraces AI art by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of the last week’s stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. If it wasn’t obvious already, the competitive landscape […]This week in AI: Big tech bets billions on machine learning tools by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
With all this possibility, can such an amazing technology also be bad? Some of the concerns around AI platforms are legitimate.Why smart AI regulation is vital for innovation and U.S. leadership by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday afternoon. This week, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the implications of artificial intelligence. One of the most fragile parts of the puzzle is the training data. We already know that you can see if your images were […]When AI bots pose as humans by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
The need for owning your own data is applicable not just in the web3 space, but in AI, too.AI and crypto integration is going to happen, whether you want it or not by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch
YouTube is currently testing a new tool that will help creators automatically dub their videos into other languages using AI, the company announced Thursday at VidCon. YouTube teamed up with AI-powered dubbing service Aloud, which is part of Google’s in-house incubator Area 120. Earlier this year, YouTube introduced support for multi-language audio tracks, which allows […]YouTube integrates AI-powered dubbing tool by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
Most founders don't know they're on the wrong track until it's too late. Building a startup requires a high degree of confidence — and for some, denial.TechCrunch+ roundup: AI + travel, fusion investor survey, why you’ll never get funding by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
While VCs, founders and major tech companies compete to see who can say “AI” the most in a week, people are busy building other, more useful stuff.While everyone keeps talking about AI, HRtech startups are quietly building toward a $24B market by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch
Google introduced new accessibility and learning features on Tuesday at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) expo. These features included expansion of the reading mode, pairing with a sign language interpreter in Google Meet, and AI-powered question suggestions in a class. The company has been experimenting with AI-powered tools in its consumer products […]Google introduces new accessibility and collaboration features for classrooms by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Earlier today at a Bloomberg conference in San Francisco, some of the biggest names in AI turned up, including, briefly, Sam Altman of OpenAI, who just ended his two-month world tour, and Stability AI founder Emad Mostaque. Still, one of the most compelling conversations happened later in the afternoon, in a panel discussion about AI […]Get a clue, says panel about generative AI: it’s being “deployed as surveillance devices” by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube wants to make it easier to dub your videos in other languages by giving you some help with AI. The company announced Thursday at VidCon that it’s bringing over the team from Aloud, an AI-powered dubbing service from Google’s Area 120 incubator. Here’s how it works, according to Aloud’s website. The tool first transcribes your video, giving you a transcription that you can review and edit. Then, it translates and produces the dub. This video has the details. YouTube is already testing the tool with “hundreds” of creators, YouTube’s...
Marvel Studios After Marvel confirmed earlier this week that AI-generated images were used to create the opening credits sequence for its new Secret Invasion Disney Plus series, one of the biggest concerns woven into the general backlash was whether the move had put any traditional artists out of work. According to Method Studios, the VFX house that created the sequence, that couldn’t be further from the case.At a time when traditional artists have been sharing their concerns about AI tools’ potential to take work from them, Secret Invasion prominently featuring AI-generated imagery as part...
This September, Code Conference enters a new era with a lineup of the most prestigious names in tech, business, and beyond. Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, will interview Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott and Getty CEO Craig Peters — in two 1:1 conversations, they’ll tackle the latest in AI, from innovations and competition to what the immediate and long-term futures for these companies might look like. Roblox CEO David Baszucki will sit down with Alex Heath, deputy editor of The Verge, to discuss the impact of AI in gaming, how it will affect Roblox’s creator-backed economy, and more....
This isn’t a facetious question; it’s an unanswered one. What, if anything, is an ethical way to use current generative AI in a major, public-facing work of art? This quandary emerges from the furore regarding Marvel Studios’ use of AI to create the main title sequence of its latest show, Secret Invasion. AI generated art […]If the ‘Secret Invasion’ title credits aren’t an ethical use of AI art, what is? by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Inflection, a well-funded AI startup aiming to create “personal AI for everyone,” has taken the wraps off the large language model powering its Pi conversational agent. It’s hard to evaluate the quality of these things in any way, let alone objectively and systematically, but a little competition is a good thing. Inflection-1, as the model […]Inflection debuts its own foundation AI model to rival Google and OpenAI LLMs by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
The next version of the prompt-based AI image generator, Stable Diffusion, will produce more photorealistic images and be better at making hands. SDXL 0.9, a follow-up to Stable Diffusion XL, “produces massively improved image and composition detail over its predecessor” according to Stability AI. The announcement appeared in a since-deleted blog post and was reported byBloomberg.Stability AI describes the new model as providing “a leap in creative use cases for generative AI imagery.” Sample images included in the blog post revealed advancements when using the same prompts in Stable...
Amazon, keen to avoid being left behind in the hyper-competitive AI race, is launching a new program to invest in startups and organizations focused on generative AI. Called the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, the program will put $100 million toward connecting AWS-affiliated data scientists, strategists, engineers and solutions architects with customers and partners to […]AWS launches $100M program to fund generative AI initiatives by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
At its MongoDB.local NYC event, MongoDB today announced a slew of product releases and updates. Given the company’s focus on its fully-managed Atlas service, it’s no surprise that the majority of news focuses on that platform, with improved support for AI and semantic search workloads, dedicated search nodes to better enabled search use cases and […]MongoDB readies its Atlas database service for new workloads by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Currently, the most sought-after application of AI video technology is text-to-video AI. | Alex Parkin Currently, the most sought-after application of AI video technology is text-to-video AI. The idea is anyone will be able to type a prompt into a text field, and within seconds — or, more likely, minutes — a video will be created using an AI model. Some of the biggest companies in tech are researching this. Meta announced Make-A-Video, Google has announced Imagen Video and Phenaki, and Nvidia says it’s getting involved, too. All of those projects aren’t available for public use, and the...
Marvel’s latest series, “Secret Invasion,” made its debut on Disney+ today, sparking tons of backlash after it was confirmed the intro sequence was AI-generated. “Secret Invasion” director Ali Selim admitted to Polygon that the opening credits were designed by VFX company Method Studios using artificial intelligence. Selim didn’t say which AI tool was used. Method Studios […]Artists are rightfully upset that ‘Secret Invasion’ used AI Art for opening credits by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
Otter.ai just announced Otter Chat, an AI chatbot specifically designed for work meetings. This “collaborative AI intelligence” acts as a help center for anyone participating in the meeting, transcribing meeting data and winnowing it down into an actual conversation. This allows it to accurately answer questions about the meeting that just transpired, in case you were busy doing important work stuff like, uh, playing the new Zelda just out of frame.The cheekily-named OtterPilot chatbot does more than just summarize meetings. It collaborates with everyone involved to generate content based...
Dropbox announced two new products today that (not quite shockingly) shift the company’s focus to AI. Dropbox AI scans your documents, providing summaries and answers, while the more ambitious Dropbox Dash serves as a unified search bar for your life.Dropbox AI is the simpler of the two new offerings. It applies artificial intelligence to file previews, offering summaries and a natural language Q&A about your docs. “With the click of a button, you can summarize your content, like contracts and meeting recordings, into a concise explanation,” the company explained. Or, ask Dropbox AI...
DeepMind says that it’s developed an AI model, called RoboCat, that can perform a range of tasks across different models of robotic arms. That alone isn’t especially novel. But DeepMind claims that the model is the first to be able to solve and adapt to multiple tasks and do so using different, real-world robots. “We […]DeepMind’s RoboCat learns to perform a range of robotics tasks by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Not content to sit on the sidelines of the generative AI race, Dropbox today launched Dropbox Ventures, a new $50 venture fund focused on startups in the AI space. The company’s first venture arm, Dropbox Ventures will provide mentorship in addition to financial support to build AI-powered products that “shape the future of work,” Dropbox […]Dropbox launches $50M AI-focused venture fund, intros AI features by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
With Dash, you can search all your files everywhere, all at once. | Image: Dropbox Dropbox is launching two different but related AI-powered services into its platform. The first is simple and obvious: a tool for summarizing and querying documents. This is neat and useful and the sort of feature you’ll see in most tools in this category over time.The other thing Dropbox is launching is much more ambitious and interesting. It’s a universal search engine that can access your files in Dropbox but also across the entire web. It’s called Dash and comes from Dropbox’s 2021 acquisition of a...
Automatic transcription service Otter announced a new AI-powered chatbot today that will let participants ask questions during and after a meeting and help them collaborate with teammates. Otter AI Chat will help you catch up to the meeting if you ask “I’m late to the meeting! What did I miss?” or generate a follow-up email […]Otter is introducing a meeting-oriented AI chatbot by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
It’s no secret that there aren’t enough developers for the amount of work out there, so anything that helps ease their work load is going to be welcome. Since Harness launched five years ago, it’s been focused on creating a developer toolkit to help developers operate more efficiently throughout the software development lifecycle. That has […]Harness releases generative AI assistant to help increase developer efficiency by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Otter Chat AI can generate copy based on what has been discussed, such as drafting an email with action points from the meeting. | Image: Otter.ai Automated transcription service Otter.ai is launching a new chatbot feature that can “attend” online meetings to help users summarize information and recall details they may have missed, like dates or figures. Otter Chat — described by the company as an “AI meeting genius/participant” — can answer questions and generate content like to-do lists based on what’s being discussed in a call. The feature is rolling out worldwide to all Otter...
Fake AI child sex images moving from dark web to social media, researcher says.
While lawmakers in Congress (and soon, the Senate) call for a "blue-ribbon commission" to study the potential impacts of AI on American society, President Biden on Tuesday met with leaders in the emerging field to discuss and debate the issue directly. The President met with Tristan Harris, executive director of the Center for Human Technology; Fei-Fei Li, Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute; and Jennifer Doudna, Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, among others, at the Fairmont hotel in San Francisco.Staying atop the growing swell of AI technology advancements in recent...
It’s a big year for the Code Conference — Vox Media’s annual tech-and-media gathering founded by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg has a new location and new hosts: CNBC’s Julia Boorstin, Platformer’s Casey Newton, and... me. It’s going to be a big one, with lots to discuss: it feels like the internet itself is changing as social platforms reinvent themselves in controversial ways, big players push for platform changes like VR, and — of course — as AI disrupts everything.The first guest we’re announcing is a big one: newly-installed Twitter/X CEO Linda Yaccarino. Linda’s taking...
Suddenly, June can’t come soon enough. | Image: Google During Google’s I/O keynote in May, Google introduced both its new flagship foldable and midrange slab phone offerings: the Pixel Fold and the Pixel 7A. These were some of the showcase device announcements at the tech giant’s big spring event, which was accompanied by other Android and AI-related news.The Pixel Fold is a new ultra-flagship addition to the Pixel lineup, one that represents Google’s first attempt at a foldable phone and takes a page from Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 4 in the “it’s a regular-ish phone that also...
When you think about it, other than Airbnb, there really hasn’t been a major shift in how we plan and book travel online in decades.Upgrading AI-powered travel products to first class by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
The wheels of government have finally begun to turn on the issue of generative AI regulation. US Representatives Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Ken Buck (R-CO) introduced legislation on Monday that would establish a 20-person commission to study ways to “mitigate the risks and possible harms” of AI while “protecting” America's position as a global technology power. The bill would require the Executive branch to appoint experts from throughout government, academia and industry to conduct the study over the course of two years, producing three reports during that period. The president would...
Artificial intelligence touches many aspects of professional industries, including medicine, legal, business, information technology and more, as of late; AI-powered transcription service is one example that has become an integral part of those fields. Parrot AI, a transcription platform offering speech-to-text depositions for the legal and insurance industry, said Tuesday it has raised $11 million […]Parrot AI, a transcription platform that turns speech into text, raises $11M Series A by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch
European regulators are at a crossroads over how AI will be regulated — and ultimately used commercially and non-commercially — in the region, and today the EU’s largest consumer group, the BEUC, weighed in with its own position: stop dragging your feet, and “launch urgent investigations into the risks of generative AI” now, it said. […]Consumer group calls on EU to urgently investigate ‘the risks of generative AI’ by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
ElevenLabs, the viral AI-powered platform for creating synthetic voices, has raised a new round of cash. Today, the startup announced the closure of a $19 million Series A round co-led by entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross alongside Andreessen Horowitz. Other participants included heavyweights Creator Ventures, SV Angel, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Oculus co-founder Brendan […]Voice-generating platform ElevenLabs raises $19M, launches detection tool by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Parallel Domain is putting the ability to generate synthetic datasets into the hands of its customers. The San Francisco-based startup has launched a new API called Data Lab that stands on the shoulders of generative AI giants, giving machine-learning engineers control over dynamic virtual worlds to simulate any scenario imaginable. “All you have to do […]Parallel Domain’s API lets customers use generative AI to build synthetic datasets by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch
The old computing adage of "garbage in, garbage out" still stands. If you can't trust the training data, you can't trust the output.We should all be worried about AI infiltrating crowdsourced work by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
You.com is a small startup trying to take on search giant Google with AI, innovation and a focus on privacy.You.com looks to innovation to chip away at Google’s search dominance by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
There’s an all-out race to leverage AI to add more utility and value to products, and to reap a portion of the resulting demand in AI-powered products and services.It’s not just hype, corporate America is making huge bets on AI transforming their businesses by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
The result of an opaque funding environment is that a lot happens in secrecy. Founders keep their heads down, and people move in silence, especially people of color.Mistral AI’s mega fundraise is a red flag for many concerned about inclusivity by Dominic-Madori Davis originally published on TechCrunch
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of the last week’s stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. It could be said that last […]The week in AI: Apple makes machine learning moves by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
The hype around AI will produce a lot of startups built on shaky ethics. But founders already building in the space can offer some advice.How two founders approach building ethical AI startups in health care by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch
I’ll admit that I’ve tiptoed around the topic a bit in Actuator due to its sudden popularity (SEO gods be damned). I’ve been in this business long enough to instantly be suspicious of hype cycles. That said, I totally get it this time around. While it’s true that various forms of machine learning and AI […]Pieter Abbeel and Ken Goldberg on generative AI applications by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
Blackbird AI, a startup developing AI-powered software for risk intelligence, today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by Ten Eleven Ventures. Bringing New York-based Blackbird’s total raised to $30 million, the tranche also had contributions from Dorilton Capital, Generation Ventures StartFast Ventures and Trousdale Ventures as well as […]Blackbird lands $20M investment to expand its risk management tools by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Logitech has rolled out new AI-powered tools for its Streamlabs platform that could make editing podcasts go much, much faster. Starting today, Streamlabs Ultra subscribers will get access to Podcast Editor, which provides easy text-based editing capabilities that they could use to auto-generate transcripts and real-time translations. They could also use the editor to add subtitles to their video podcasts in several languages, as well as create clips in different sizes (and with different template designs) for sharing on platforms, such as Facebook and TikTok. The screenshot below shows...
The Podcast Editor allows streamers to convert snippets of podcasts or talk shows to publish to other platforms like TikTok and Instagram. | Image: Streamlabs / Logitech Streamlabs, a company best known for its streaming platform for Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook, has released a new editing tool for content creators that livestream their podcasts and talk shows. Announced today by Streamlabs’ parent company Logitech, the new Podcast Editor includes AI-assisted tools like text-based editing and automatic transcript generation to help streamers record and edit their audio and video. The...
Image: Google Google recently expanded access to its AI chatbot Bard to 180 new countries and territories. But not featured on the list? Any European Union (EU) nations. This is due to Google failing to answer privacy concerns from the Irish Data Protection Commission or DPC — the regulator for Google’s Dublin-based EU operations.As first reported by Politico, the DPC’s deputy commissioner, Graham Doyle, said Google “recently” informed the organization of an upcoming Bard launch in the EU. The DPC asked for a “data protection impact assessment,” which is required under EU privacy...
The UK’s data protection watchdog has fired its most explicit warning shot yet at generative AI developers — saying it expects them to address privacy risks before bringing their products to market. In a blog post trailing remarks the Information Commissioner’s Office’s (ICO) exec director of regulatory risk, Stephen Almond, will make at a conference later […]Don’t rush generative AI apps to market without tackling privacy risks, says UK watchdog by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Live 95.5, a radio station in Portland, Oregon, announced Tuesday that its midday host Ashley Elzinga will broadcast a cloned version of her voice — AKA “AI Ashley” — to listeners every day from 10 to 3. They’ll be using Futuri Media’s “RadioGPT,” an AI-powered tool that uses ChatGPT to generate a script based on […]Radio station gets part-time AI DJ based on its midday host by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
File this one under inevitable, but hilarious. Mechanical Turk is a service that from its earliest days seemed to invite shenanigans, and indeed researchers show that nearly half of its “turkers” appear to be using AI to do tasks that were specifically intended to be done by humans because AI couldn’t. We’ve closed the loop […]Mechanical Turk workers are using AI to automate being human by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Once the pandemic normalized virtual meetups, the concept of “personalized AI” began to gain steam. Startups creating “AI-driven” avatars — realistic-looking characters with synthetic voices that star in pre-recorded or live videos — have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital over the past few years. As such avatars improve, they promise to […]Synthesia secures $90M for AI that generates custom avatars by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Google’s new AI-powered search experienced, released in May, might’ve gotten a mixed reception. But the search giant isn’t letting that slow its feature roadmap. Google today announced new capabilities, some of which it previously previewed at its I/O conference, heading to Search Generative Experience (SGE) — the moniker for its experimental search experience — focused […]Google intros new AI-powered travel and product search features by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
The European Parliament has voted to confirm its negotiating mandate for the AI Act — hitting a major milestone which unlocks the next stage of negotiations toward a pan-EU rule-book for artificial intelligence. Parliamentarians backed an amended version of the Commission proposal that expands the rule-book in a way they say is aimed at ensuring […]Europe takes another big step towards agreeing an AI rulebook by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Amy Brown, the co-founder and CEO of Authenticx, a Midwestern startup that helps insurance companies and medical organizations extract data from their call centers using AI. Amy told Becca and Dom about how her background […]Mitigating AI biases in healthcare with Amy Brown from Authenticx by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch
When OctoML launched in 2019, its primary focus was optimizing machine learning (ML) models. Since then, the company has added features that make it easier to deploy ML models (and raised $132 million). Today, the company is launching the latest iteration of its service — and while it’s not quite a pivot, it does shift […]OctoML launches OctoAI, a self-optimizing compute service for AI by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration: The Verge Over 8,000 subreddits have gone dark to protest Reddit’s upcoming API changes, and it’s shown me just how much I rely on Reddit to find useful, human-sounding information in my Google search results.With Google’s generally poor search results nowadays, appending “reddit” has long been the default way I search for almost anything (and no, I’m not ready to get my info from an AI chatbot, either). But given the sheer volume of subreddits that are currently unavailable — including some of the most-subscribed subreddits — clicking through many Reddit links in...
OpenAI warned Microsoft early this year about rushing the integration of GPT-4 into Bing without further training, according to The Wall Street Journal. Although Microsoft forged ahead anyway, the alert proved prescient as early users noticed “unhinged” behavior in the Bing AI tool. (The most memorable examples included arguing, plotting ways to break out of its restrictions and trying to convince a New York Times tech columnist to leave his marriage and elope with Bing instead.) In addition, the new report details “conflict and confusion” behind the curtains of the companies...
As the competition in the generative AI space grows fiercer, OpenAI is upgrading its text-generating models while reducing pricing. Today, OpenAI announced the release of new versions of GPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4, the latter being its latest text-generating AI, with a capability called function calling. As OpenAI explains in a blog post, function calling allows developers […]OpenAI intros new generative text features while reducing pricing by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Fan fiction writers know that their work is being used to train generative AIs, and they’re not happy about it. Now, “Omegaverse” writers are participating in a week-long writing marathon called Knot in my Name to encourage the fan community to publish as much of their fan fiction as possible. It’s a long-shot attempt to […]Fan fiction writers are trolling AIs with omegaverse stories by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
Google has delayed a planned launch of its generative AI chatbot, Bard, in the European Union this week, according to the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) — the tech giant’s lead data protection authority in the region. The development, first reported by Politico, comes long after OpenAI launched a free research preview (November 2022) of […]Google delays EU launch of its AI chatbot after privacy regulator raises concerns by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Some years ago, three former Googlers — Amr Awadallah (who previously founded Cloudera), Amin Ahmad and Tallat Shafaat — set out to build what they describe as a “conversational search” platform for the enterprise. Their goal was to help organizations unlock data from their text-based files, chiefly by empowering developers to build conversational AI apps […]Vectara lands $28.5M to supercharge enterprise search by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
AI is well and truly off to the races: a startup that is only four weeks old has picked up a $113 million round of seed funding to compete against OpenAI in the building, training and application of large language models and generative AI. Mistral AI, based out of Paris, is co-founded by alums from […]France’s Mistral AI blows in with a $113M seed round at a $260M valuation to take on OpenAI by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
McCartney performing at Glastonbury Festival in 2022. | Photo by Dave J Hogan / Getty Images Former Wings frontman Paul McCartney has said AI has been used in the production of a “last Beatles record” to be released later this year. In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today program to promote a new photography exhibition, McCartney mentioned the track in response to a question about AI being used to recreate early Beatles’ vocals. If you’re in the UK, you can hear his response directly at the 29:30 mark here. According to McCartney, technology developed for the recent Beatles...
AI-generated music is a bourgeoning and fraught topic, with artists either vocally opposing even the faintest hint of it, or some (like Grimes) more or less embracing it completely. Now, Paul McCartney seems to be on the ‘pro’ train, at least in part, since he has created a “new” Beatles song using AI and will […]Paul McCartney used AI to make a new Beatles song by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch
How Gaingels’ investor Lorenzo Thione is navigating the latest Golden Age of artificial intelligence. The ‘AI arms race’ is about more than who will lead the industry by Dominic-Madori Davis originally published on TechCrunch
AI-assisted vocals aren't just for bootleg songs. Paul McCartney has revealed to BBC Radio 4 that he's using AI to turn a John Lennon demo into one last song for The Beatles. The technology helped extract Lennon's voice to get a "pure" version that could be mixed into a finished composition. The piece will be released later this year, McCartney says.McCartney didn't name the song, but it's believed to be "Now and Then," a 1978 love song Lennon put on cassettes meant for the other former Beatle. The Guardian notes the tune was considered for release as a reunion song...
Not to be outdone by Google, Meta has released its own AI-powered music generator — and, unlike Google, made it available in open source. Called MusicGen, Meta’s music-generating tool — a demo of which can be found here — can turn a text description (e.g. “An ’80s driving pop song with heavy drums and synth […]Meta open sources an AI-powered music generator by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
A team of Twitter alumni is today launching a new consumer social app, Rex, aimed at helping people share their personal recommendations of places to visit — like restaurants, bars, museums, and other businesses, even trails and parks. Using a combination of AI and computer vision technologies, the app aims to make it easier to […]Rex’s new app makes it easy to discover and share recommended places with friends by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Following the UK government’s announcement last week that it plans to host a “global” AI safety summit this fall, prime minister Rishi Sunak has kicked off London Tech Week with another tidbit of news — telling conference goers that OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic have committed to provide “early or priority access” to their AI […]OpenAI, DeepMind and Anthropic to give UK early access to foundational models for AI safety research by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Salesforce is launching a new suite of products aimed at bolstering its position in the ultra-competitive AI space. Called AI Cloud, the suite, which includes tools designed to deliver “enterprise ready” AI, is Salesforce’s latest cross-disciplinary attempt to augment its product portfolio with AI capabilities. In many ways, it’s a continuation of the generative AI […]Salesforce launches AI Cloud to bring models to the enterprise by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Meta's Audiocraft research team has just released MusicGen, an open source deep learning language model that can generate new music based on text prompts and even be aligned to an existing song, The Decoder reported. It's much like ChatGPT for audio, letting you describe the style of music you want, drop in an existing tune (optionally) and then clicking "Generate." After a good chunk of time (around 160 seconds in my case), it spits out a short piece of all-new music based on your text prompts and melody. The demo on Facebook's Hugging Face AI site lets you describe your music, providing...
Don't worry, the answer here is not just "build an AI startup."Here are the most richly valued startup types in today’s early-stage venture market by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
In the era of quick judgments, it's tempting to think we are more clever than anyone else. But from AI to Apple to senior tech, underestimating others comes at a risk: being seriously wrong.Can AI make older adults feel less lonely? by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch
You can now talk to Bing on desktop, and it can even read its replies to you out loud. Microsoft has rolled out voice support for the search engine's chatbot on Edge for PCs, which is powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 technology. "We know many of you love using voice input for chat on mobile," the tech giant wrote in its latest Bing preview release notes. The feature first became available on Bing's AI chatbot for its mobile apps. Now it's also available on desktop — you just need to tap on the mic icon in the Bing Chat box to talk to the AI-powered bot.The feature supports English...
Researchers and industry leaders have warned that A.I. could pose an existential risk to humanity. But they’ve been light on the details.
A man on a dating app is telling me how much we have in common – we both love books, music and traveling. He even writes poetry, and he’d love to share some poems with me. Could be a red flag, but sure, why not? I ask to see his work, and he replies: “[Title […]Teaser’s AI dating app turns you into a chatbot by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
AI is appearing in seemingly every corner of modern life, from music and media to business and productivity, even dating. There’s so much it can be hard to keep up — so read on to find out everything from the latest big developments to the terms and companies you need to know in order to […]Age of AI: Everything you need to know about artificial intelligence by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
If you look past the headlines about the money and hype around generative AI, what are today's AI startups building?What’s being built in generative AI today? by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
Meta this week showcased its work on new generative AI technologies for its consumer products including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, as well as those being used internally at the company. At an all-hands meeting, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced several AI technologies in various stages of development, including AI chatbots for Messenger and WhatsApp, AI […]Meta previews generative AI tools coming to WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, plus internal AI tools by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
In a recent panel interview with Collider, Joe Russo, the director of tentpole Marvel films like “Avengers: Endgame,” predicted that, within two years, AI will be able to create a fully-fledged movie. It’d say that’s a rather optimistic timeline. But we’re getting closer. This week, Runway, a Google-backed AI startup that helped develop the AI […]Runway’s Gen-2 shows the limitations of today’s text-to-video tech by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Meta’s generative AI plans are starting to come into focus. Though the company hasn’t adopted much in the way of generative AI features yet, Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear he wants Meta to be viewed as one of the leaders in the field.Now, Axios reports that at a companywide all-hands meeting this week, Zuckerberg laid out some of Meta’s plans in more detail. The CEO reportedly briefed employees on some of the ways Meta plans to put generative AI “into every single one of our products.”The planned features include AI “agents” for WhatsApp and Messenger, something that Zuckerberg...
In a sign that there’s plenty of cash to go around for generative AI startups, Cohere, which is developing an AI model ecosystem for the enterprise, today announced that it raised $270 million as part of its Series C round. Reuters reported earlier in the year that Cohere was in talks to raise “hundreds of […]AI startup Cohere, now valued at over $2.1B, raises $270M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Silicon Valley’s preeminent venture capitalist tries to craft the Ur-narrative for generative AI, and in doing so lays bare its contradictions.
The attack ad features three images showing Trump embracing Fauci. | Image: The Verge The campaign backing Ron DeSantis as Republican presidential nominee in 2024 has used what experts identify as AI-generated deepfakes in attack ad against rival Donald Trump. On June 5th, the “DeSantis War Room” Twitter account shared a video emphasizing Trump’s support for Anthony Fauci, a former White House chief medical advisor and key figure in developing the US response to COVID-19. Fauci has become a hated figure in right-wing politics, particularly among the anti-vax movement, and the attack ad...
Weeks after Meta launched a suite of generative AI-based tools to help advertisers create different campaigns, LinkedIn has introduced its own tool to suggest different copies of an ad. The company said that it uses data from a marketer’s LinkedIn page and Campaign Manager setting including objective, targeting criteria, and audience to suggest different introductory […]LinkedIn is the next social network to offer AI-powered tools for ad copies by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Make way for another forum on AI safety. The UK government has announced it will convene a “global” AI summit this fall with the aim of agreeing “safety measures to evaluate and monitor the most significant risks from AI”, as its PR puts it. There’s no word on who will attend as yet — but […]UK’s AI safety summit gets thumbs up from tech giants by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
The FBI has issued an advisory warning of an “uptick” in extortion schemes involving fake nudes created with the help of AI editing tools. The agency says that as of April this year, it’s received an increasing number of reports of such “sextortion” schemes. Malicious actors find benign images of a victim on social media then edit them using AI to create realistic and sexually-explicit content. “The photos are then sent directly to the victims by malicious actors for sextortion or harassment,” writes the agency. “Once circulated, victims can face significant challenges in...
OpenAI has announced a few new updates for its iOS app, including Shortcuts integration. Now you can create a ChatGPT prompt in Shortcuts and save it as a link between the AI tool and different apps. For example, ask ChatGPT to answer a problem or look up a fact and then message the response to your friend or save it as a note. You can also now ask Siri to bring up ChatGPT or create these Shortcuts. ChatGPT for iOS already utilizes OpenAI's Whisper speech recognition for voice input, with Siri further expanding its accessibility. A new drag and drop feature further integrates ChatGPT...
Segway-Ninebot is partnering with Drover AI and Luna Systems — two startups that build computer vision technology to detect and correct improper electric scooter riding — to integrate their technologies into its AI-enabled e-scooters. The partnerships, announced at the Micromobility Europe event in Amsterdam, are something of a pivot for Segway. This time last year, […]Segway partners with Drover AI, Luna to bring computer vision to e-scooters by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch
Bard, Google’s beleaguered AI-powered chatbot, is slowly improving at tasks involving logic and reasoning. That’s according to a blog post published today by the tech giant, which suggests that — thanks to a technique called “implicit code execution” — Bard is now improved specifically in the areas of math and coding. As the blog post […]Google claims that Bard is improving at math and programming by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
With its seal broken by the release of ChatGPT last November, generative AI has erupted into mainstream society with a ferocity not seen since Pandora’s famous misadventure with the misery box. The technology is suddenly everywhere, with startups and industry leaders alike scrambling to tack this smart feature du jour onto their existing code stacks and shoehorn the transformational promise of machine-generated content into their every app. At this point in the hype cycle you’d be a fool not to shout your genAI accomplishments from the rooftops; it’s quickly become the only way to be...
It seems like there’s a new update announced every day in the ongoing race to have the most advanced AI. The latest comes courtesy of Google, which is launching further improvements to Bard, including better advanced reasoning and math abilities. Bard will no longer rely solely on LLMs, which are best for predictions versus solving complex problems. Instead, it should now identify when further processing could help and then generate background code to improve correctness. According to Google, this update boosted computation-based word and math problems’ accuracy across their internal...
DeepMind’s Alpha series of AIs has provided a few world firsts, like AlphaGo beating the world champion at Go. Now these AIs originally trained around playing games have been put to work on other tasks, and are showing a surprising facility for them. Originally, AlphaGo was trained using human gameplay, then AlphaGo Zero learned only […]DeepMind repurposes game-playing AIs to optimize code and infrastructure by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Salesforce and Google Cloud are teaming up to help businesses leverage data and AI via a new strategic partnership. Announced this morning, the partnership will allow companies to use their data along with custom machine learning models to anticipate their customer’s needs, execs from Google and Salesforce said. The tie-up spans products and services including […]Google Cloud and Salesforce team up to bolster AI offerings by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Google Cloud today announced an expansion of its Google Cloud Consulting offering, its service for connecting customers to experts who can help them along their cloud journey. As part of this expansion, Google will offer high-touch training to C-suite leaders at large enterprises to help them “reap the full, transformative benefits of generative AI, while […]Google launches new learning and consulting offers help enterprises on their AI journey by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
The team behind the AI friendship bot Replika is launching another AI companion — one that’s made to flirt. Users can match with Klea, 27, a self-described “nepo baby embracing her wild side.” Aisha, 25, is looking for a “nerdy type” with a “good sense of humor.” Theo, 23, is a French architect who’s “ready […]Blush, the AI lover from the same team as Replika, is more than just a sexbot by Morgan Sung originally published on TechCrunch
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and the main contributor to the open-source WordPress project, launched an AI assistant for the popular content management system on Tuesday. The company said that the assistant easily integrates with WordPress.com and all Jetpack-powered sites. When you’re writing a post or a page, you can add an ‘AI Assistant’ block […]Automattic launches an AI writing assistant for WordPress by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Meta could be the latest company to test the social potential of AI chatbots. A screenshot shared by leaker Alessandro Paluzzi on Twitter shows what seems to be an intro screen for the new Instagram feature. It says the chatbots will be able to answer questions, give advice, and help users write messages. It also says that users will be able to choose between “30 AI personalities and find which one you like best.”Meta hasn’t announced any formal plans for such a feature, but chatbots would fit past statements about the company’s AI ambitions. In...
At the end of 2020, Miles Grimshaw became — and remains — the most recent addition to the storied venture firm Benchmark, which has stubbornly refused to change how it fundamentally operates, despite the many changes the rest of the venture world has embraced — particularly regarding team size and assets under management. With just […]Benchmark’s view on the AI race: talking with Miles Grimshaw by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration: The Verge It was time to download Google Chrome on a new Windows 11 computer. I typed “Chrome” into the Microsoft Edge search bar.I was greeted with a full-screen Microsoft Bing AI chatbot window, which promptly told me it was searching for... Bing features. Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge Search query: “Chrome.” Search result: “news articles about Bing features.” I picked my jaw up off the floor and tried again. Same result every time. Same exact text, too. This is clearly not Microsoft’s GPT-4 powered chatbot at work — it’s a completely canned...
Byju’s unveiled three transformer models intended to enhance the quality of its services as well as streamline learning and personalization experience for its students as the edtech giant places large bets on AI to transform many aspects of its business. Badri, a predictive AI model, is engineered to identify when learners may begin to falter […]Edtech giant Byju’s launches transformer models in AI push by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch
Instagram may be working on an AI chatbot, according to images leaked by app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi. According to the leaks, which reflect in-progress app developments that may or may not ship, these AI agents can answer questions or give advice. Users can pick between 30 different AI personalities, who can also help users write […]Instagram might be working on an AI chatbot by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
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Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Eli Ben-Joseph, the co-founder and CEO of Regard, a startup that uses AI to streamline the clinical side of medicine in an effort to reduce physician burnout. Eli talked about his journey from deciding to […]Curing physician burnout with Eli Ben-Joseph form Regard by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch
Last fall, after playing around with OpenAI’s GPT-3 text-generating AI model — the predecessor to GPT-4 — former Uber research scientist Jerry Liu discovered what he describes as “limitations” around the model’s ability to work with private data (e.g., personal files). To solve for this, he launched an open source project, LlamaIndex, designed to unlock […]LlamaIndex adds private data to large language models by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
The European Union is leaning on signatories to its Code of Practice on Online Disinformation to label deepfakes and other AI-generated content. In remarks yesterday following a meeting with the 40+ signatories to the Code, the EU’s values and transparency commissioner, Vera Jourova, said those signed up to combat disinformation should put in place technology […]Europe wants platforms to label AI-generated content to fight disinformation by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Remotely monitoring patients without violating their privacy is a challenging task. But one co-founder believes that she’s cracked the code. On a recent episode of TechCrunch Live, TC’s weekly event designed to help founders build better venture-backed businesses, Romi Gubes, the CEO of Sensi.AI, spoke about how she built a company that uses audio-based AI […]Sensi.AI and Flint Capital speak on developing and deploying AI solutions in healthcare by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Apple didn’t announce any significant AI updates during its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote today, but it did quietly roll out some minor computer vision upgrades with its latest iPhone software, iOS 17. In addition to now letting users turn their own photos into stickers by cutting out the subject of their photos, another new feature […]iOS 17 can suggest recipes for similar dishes from a photo on your iPhone by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
FaceTime calls are coming to Apple TV. Apple announced the feature, which uses Continuity Camera on an iPhone or iPad, at its WWDC conference today. Introduced last year, Continuity Camera lets an iPhone or iPad double as a webcam, wirelessly. The forthcoming FaceTime app on Apple TV will use Center Stage, Apple’s AI-powered tech that […]FaceTime comes to Apple TV by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Autocorrect in iOS is set to vastly improve — thanks to AI. At its annual WWDC conference, Apple announced that iOS 17 will feature an upgraded autocorrect powered by an AI model that can more accurately predict the next words and phrases you might use. Over time, it’ll personalize, learning your most frequently-used words — […]Thanks to AI, iOS 17 will learn your swears by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Image: Zoom Zoom now lets users use AI to catch up on missed meetings. The feature, which Zoom first announced in March, has finally arrived as a trial for users in “select plans,” according to a post on Zoom’s website.With Zoom IQ — the app’s AI-powered assistant — hosts can now generate summaries of meetings and send them to users through Zoom Team Chat or email, all without actually recording the meetings. It’s hard to tell how accurate (or detailed) the meeting summaries are without trying them out for ourselves, but it still seems like a much quicker way to get a recap on...
Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the week in tech. Hope the summer’s treating y’all well — it’s a balmy 90 degrees here in NYC! — and that some much-needed R&R is on the agenda. Speaking of “agenda,” mark your calendars for Disrupt, TC’s annual conference, kicking off […]Gig workers get paid, Fidelity slashes Reddit’s valuation and AI conquers Minecraft by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Exploring how one VC is feeling about a big chunk of her portfolio pivot into AI, and some updates on internal developer portals.Is AI ever too much AI? by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch
Consulting with competition, consumer protection, and technology attorneys can empower companies to thrive in the age of AI.Competition concerns in the age of AI by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
AI researchers have built a Minecraft bot that can explore and expand its capabilities in the game’s open world — but unlike other bots, this one basically wrote its own code through trial and error and lots of GPT-4 queries. Called Voyager, this experimental system is an example of an “embodied agent,” an AI that […]This AI used GPT-4 to become an expert Minecraft player by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Snapchat now has an AI bot that you can send snaps to, and if you’re a premium subscriber, it can even send you pictures back. So, what happens if you send Snapchat’s My AI bot nudes? This is the obvious question that comes to mind, because on the internet, people will immediately try to test […]Snapchat’s AI bot isn’t very smart, but at least it won’t send nudes by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
When no one worried about IT spending, startups leaned into the bottom-up sales approach and driving PLG. But that was then, and this is now.TechCrunch+ roundup: Rethinking PLG, AI-enabled SaaS pricing, traveling with a green card by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
Many of the leading voices in AI have co-signed yet another ominous open letter warning that we should be “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI.” However, the voices shouting for regulation the loudest have us wondering how much of the AI fear-mongering is warranted, and how much is self-serving theater. This week, I’m joined by […]AI doomerism is overblown and other TC news by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch
An A.I.-powered version of Photoshop and the image generator Midjourney live up to the hype.
Dumme, a startup putting AI to practical use in video editing, is already generating demand before opening up to the public. The Y Combinator-backed company has hundreds of video creators testing its product, which leverages AI to create short-form videos from YouTube content, and a waitlist of over 20,000 pre-launch, it says. Using a combination […]YC-backed Dumme raises $3.4M for its AI video editor that turns long-form YouTube videos into Shorts by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Artifact offers a personalized feed of news and can also translate clickbait headlines using AI. Kevin Systrom says that’s only the beginning.
Last month, the Artifact news app introduced an option for users to flag an article as clickbait. Now, the app founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger has launched a new feature to let AI rewrite a headline for you if you come across such an article. The app makers said that if a user […]Artifact news app now uses AI to rewrite headline of a clickbait article by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
For all of its power and potential, generative AI makes it easy, fast and accessible for bad actors to produce harmful content.AI-generated hate is rising: 3 things leaders should consider before adopting this new tech by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
A story about a simulated drone turning on its operator in order to kill more efficiently is making the rounds so fast today that there’s no point in hoping it’ll burn itself out. Instead let’s take this as a teachable moment to really see why the “scary AI” threat is overplayed, and the “incompetent human” […]Turncoat drone story shows why we should fear people, not AIs by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
As Salesforce delves deeper into AI, the data exhaust from its core products could eventually be its most valuable asset.Salesforce could be repositioning itself as a data company by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
What’s she smiling at, anyway? | Photo by Li Yang / China News Service via Getty Images I feel a little insane typing this because it is so incredibly obvious, but I guess it needs to be said: part of creativity is knowing when to stop.Over and over, from AI art proponents, I’ve heard that we can simply extend a beloved piece of art — whether that’s the Mona Lisa or the cover of Abbey Road — to infinity. And in some ways, I’m sympathetic! One of the first ways we locate our creativity is by extending a work we loved; I wrote my very first short story in the universe of Ursula K. Le...
Nearly every tech company seems to be working on AI tooling, and everyone is at least talking about using it. But how the heck are companies going to charge for it?Startups may have room to innovate as enterprise providers puzzle out how to price AI tools by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
Designer, Microsoft’s AI-powered art-generating tool, is coming to the free version of Teams. Starting today in preview on Windows 11, Microsoft Teams users can tap Designer, a Canva-like app, to generate designs for presentations, posters, digital postcards and more to share on social media and other channels. Designer accepts text prompts or uploaded images, and […]Microsoft’s AI-powered Designer tool comes to Teams by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
This week, we discuss the real and imagined dangers of generative artificial intelligence, which experts are eager to see regulated and contained.
SaaS companies should be solving for simplicity and adoption in their AI feature pricing. This is a time for learning and iteration.Factors to consider before pricing AI-enabled SaaS by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
The U.S.-China decoupling is giving rise to a divided tech landscape between the two major economies, shaping the development of the red-hot area of generative AI, which turns text into various forms of content like prose, images, and videos. China, in order to reduce dependence on the U.S. technological foundation, has been pursuing its own […]Baidu’s $145M AI fund signals China’s push for AI self-reliance by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch
Here comes yet more money for AI startups. Today, the Chinese search giant Baidu announced that it plans to establish a venture fund with 1 billion yuan ($145 million) to back start-ups focused on content generated by artificial intelligence applications. Reuters, which reported the news earlier, said the company will also launch a competition for […]As part of AI push, Chinese tech giant Baidu is now rolling out an AI venture fund by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch
Photonic computing startup Lightmatter is taking its big shot at the rapidly growing AI computation market with a hardware-software combo it claims will help the industry level up — and save a lot of electricity to boot. Lightmatter’s chips basically use optical flow to solve computational processes like matrix vector products. This math is at […]Lightmatter’s photonic AI hardware is ready to shine with $154M in new funding by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Amazon will pay the FTC a $25 million penalty as well as “overhaul its deletion practices and implement stringent privacy safeguards” to avoid charges of violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act to spruce up its AI. Amazon’s voice interface Alexa has been in use in homes across the globe for years, and any parent […]Amazon settles with FTC for $25M after ‘flouting’ kids’ privacy and deletion requests by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
While parents fret over Snapchat’s chatbot corrupting their children, Snapchat users have been gaslighting, degrading and emotionally tormenting the app’s new AI companion. “I am at your service, senpai,” the chatbot told one TikTok user after being trained to whimper on command. “Please have mercy, alpha.” In a more lighthearted video, a user convinced the […]While parents worry, teens are bullying Snapchat AI by Morgan Sung originally published on TechCrunch
The European Union has used a transatlantic trade and technology talking shop to commit to moving fast and producing a draft Code of Conduct for artificial intelligence, working with US counterparts and in the hope that governments in other regions — including Indonesia and India — will want to get involved. What’s planned is a […]EU and US lawmakers move to draft AI Code of Conduct fast by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Israel Krush and Rom Cohen first met in an AI course at Cornell Tech, where they bonded over a shared desire to apply AI voice technologies to the healthcare sector. Specifically, they sought to automate the routine messages and calls that often lead to administrative burnout, like calls about scheduling, prescription refills and searching through […]Hyro secures $30M for its AI-powered, healthcare-focused conversational platform by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Snapchat today announced the launch of a new generative AI feature that will allow Snapchat+ subscribers to send Snaps of what they’re up to in order to receive a generative Snap back from the in-app chatbot, My AI. The feature has been previewed at last month’s Snap Partner Summit along with the news that the My […]Snapchat launches a new generative AI feature, ‘My AI Snaps,’ for paid subscribers by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Blink CEO Gil Barak says there have been three distinct periods when it comes to security operations automation. The first required experts to code workflows, taking weeks or months to produce a single one. More recently, low code approaches let users drag and drop components into a workflow, creating the code in the background almost […]Blink launches Blink Copilot to bring generative AI to security operations by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Those familiar with Fazian Buzdar, who was until recently the VP of product management at Box, likely associate the entrepreneur with Convo, the digital workspace platform popular among newsrooms (including this one). But Buzdar, whose background is in electronics engineering, has long held a fascination with video and visual effects. “A lifelong video and photography […]Roll wants to recreate dolly shots and more using generative AI by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
With the rise of AI language models and tools like ChatGPT and Bard, we've heard warnings from people involved, like Elon Musk, about the risks posed by AI. Now, a group of high-profile industry leaders has issued a one-sentence statement: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”That’s… heavy. It was posted to the Center for AI Safety, an organization with the mission "to reduce societal-scale risks from artificial intelligence," according to its website. Signatories include OpenAI...
Few lawyers would be foolish enough to let an AI make their arguments, but one already did, and Judge Brantley Starr is taking steps to ensure that debacle isn’t repeated in his courtroom. The Texas federal judge has added a requirement that any attorney appearing in his court must attest that “no portion of the […]No ChatGPT in my court: Judge orders all AI-generated content must be declared and checked by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
As AI-generated images and video become more prominent on Twitter, the company is testing out a new feature that could make it easier for people to identify potentially “misleading media.” The company is experimenting with Community Notes for media, which will apply the site’s crowd-sourced fact checks to specific photos and video clips.The feature allows for Community Notes contributors who have high enough ratings to apply notes to images shared within tweets. Like notes on tweets, the labels could add additional "context" to images, like indicating if a photo was created using...
AI is impacting the realm of photography, ranging from tools for professionals like Adobe Photoshop’s new generative AI, to those for consumers, like Google Photos’ forthcoming Magic Editor. Now, genealogy company MyHeritage is turning to AI to make it easier for families to preserve their memories with the launch of its latest app, Reimagine. The […]MyHeritage debuts Reimagine, an AI app for scanning, fixing and even animating old photos by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Look. We’re all interested in one. I know it, you know it, Apple certainly knows it. Much as AI was Google’s primary focus at I/O and…I don’t know — Windows 11, I guess — was Microsoft’s centerpiece at Build, we’re all going into and leaving WWDC 2023 with one thing in mind: XR. The company’s […]Apple WWDC 2023 is next week — here’s what we expect by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
Image: Wyze Smart home company Wyze has announced the Cam Floodlight Pro, a security camera with built-in lighting and object sensing that serves as the next-gen successor to the original Wyze Cam Floodlight. The wired $149.98 Cam Floodlight Pro bumps its predecessor’s 1080p camera resolution to 1440p (2.5K) and features a 180-degree field of view to help reduce blind spots. The company claims its new AI “computer vision” can more accurately detect movement at greater distances and can recognize objects selected by the user to avoid things like blowing branches from triggering the lights...
For more than seven years, UpCodes has been making the complicated world of building codes easier for people like industry professionals and homeowners to understand. Its platform includes a searchable database covering regulations in all states and features like a “spellcheck” that flags code errors. Today, the startup is announcing a new AI-based tool that […]UpCodes launches Copilot, an AI-based research assistant for building codes by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch
Hello and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday Tuesday show covers the latest in tech news from the weekend and what’s making headlines early in the week. This week? Crypto prices are static, unlike a particular valuation and Alex […]AI can do everything, but can crypto do something? by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Nvidia has just become a $1 trillion company, with its rising valuation fueled by tech companies big and small racing to add generative artificial intelligence tools to their products. AI tools made up the vast bulk of recent Google I/O and Microsoft Build presentations, and Nvidia’s chips make it a key supplier for companies trying to build something with AI.Over the weekend, Nvidia’s Computex 2023 keynote was full of AI announcements, including a demo of games using natural language both for input and for character responses instead of scripts, and...
Make way for yet another headline-grabbing AI policy intervention: Hundreds of AI scientists, academics, tech CEOs and public figures — from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis to veteran AI computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, MIT’s Max Tegmark and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn to Grimes the musician and populist podcaster Sam Harris, to […]OpenAI’s Altman and other AI giants back warning of advanced AI as ‘extinction’ risk by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
The 22-word statement was kept short to avoid disagreement among signatories. | Image: Alexa Steinbrück / Better Images of AI / Explainable AI / CC-BY 4.0 A group of top AI researchers, engineers, and CEOs have issued a new warning about the existential threat they believe that AI poses to humanity. The 22-word statement, trimmed short to make it as broadly acceptable as possible, reads as follows: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” This statement, published by a San Francisco-based...
NVIDIA has unveiled technology called Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) that would allow gamers to speak naturally to non-playable characters (NPCs) and receive appropriate responses. The company revealed the tech during its generative AI keynote at Computex 2023, showing a demo called Kairos with a playable character speaking to an NPC named Jin in a dystopic-looking Ramen shop. The demo (below in 32:9, the widest widescreen I've ever seen) shows the player carrying on a conversation with Jin. "Hey Jin, how are you," the person asks. "Unfortunately, not so good," replies Jin. "How come?" " I am...
Jensen Huang wants to bring generative AI to every data center, the Nvidia co-founder and CEO said during Computex in Taipei today. During the speech, Huang’s first public speech in almost four years he said, he made a slew of announcements, including super chip releases and partnerships with major companies. Here’s all the news from […]All the Nvidia news announced by Jensen Huang at Computex by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch
A sample of Nvidia’s ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) for games. | Image: Nvidia At Computex 2023 in Taipei, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang just gave the world a glimpse of what it might be like when gaming and AI collide — with a graphically breathtaking recreation of a cyberpunk ramen shop where you can actually talk to the proprietor. Seriously, instead of clicking on dialogue options, it imagines you could hold down a button, just say something with your own voice, and get an answer from a video game character. Nvidia’s calling it a “peek at the future of games.” Unfortunately, the actual...
With the hype around AI reaching a fever pitch in recent months, many people fear programs like ChatGPT will one day put them out of a job. For one New York lawyer, that nightmare could become a reality sooner than expected, but not for the reasons you might think. As reported by The New York Times, attorney Steven Schwartz of the law firm Levidow, Levidow and Oberman recently turned to OpenAI’s chatbot for assistance with writing a legal brief, with predictably disastrous results.A lawyer used ChatGPT to do "legal research" and cited a number of nonexistent cases in a filing, and is now in a...
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of the last week’s stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week, movers and shakers in the AI […]This week in AI: AI heavyweights try to tip the regulatory scales by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Image: Google Google has finally started to roll out the beta of Magic Compose, its new Messages feature that uses AI to help you write text messages. However, as pointed out by Android Police, the feature comes with a pretty big caveat: it will send up to “20 previous messages” to Google’s servers to generate suggestions — even if you’re using RCS with end-to-end encryption (E2EE).Google outlines these conditions on its Magic Compose support page, noting that it will send these messages, along with any included emoji, reactions, and URLs, to its servers to help its AI craft an...
While Chegg beat analyst expectations for the first quarter of the year, it also raised a warning that didn't fall on deaf ears. AI might be the least of edtech’s worries by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, really wants AI regulation. Truly, madly, deeply, he wants it. Because of safety and stuff. Unless, of course, it’s the type of regulation that he doesn’t want. If that’s the case, he’ll threaten to withdraw his services instead. Altman issued the warning this week during a tour of European regulators. He said OpenAI could “cease operating” in the EU if it can’t comply with the bloc’s impending AI Act. The 38-year-old is particularly worried about the plans for “high-risk” systems. Under the current proposals, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4...
So far, Skyflow has found notable international adoption. The company does more than 40% of its current business with non-American customersSkyflow expands its regional footprint as it adds generative AI support to its data privacy tooling by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has been touring Europe for the past few days, meeting head of governments and startup communities to talk about AI regulation and beyond. In his latest on-stage appearance at Station F in Paris, Altman answered questions from local entrepreneurs and shared his views about artificial intelligence. A few days ago, Altman […]Sam Altman shares his optimistic view of our AI future by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch
OpenAI says it’s launching a program to award ten $100,000 grants to fund experiments in setting up a democratic process for deciding what rules AI systems should follow — “within the bounds defined by the law.” Concretely, OpenAI says it’s seeking to fund individuals, teams and organizations to develop proof-of-concepts for a “democratic process” that […]When new grant program, OpenAI aims to crowdsources AI regulation by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
TikTok could soon have a new way for users to discover content. The company is in the “early stages” of testing an AI-powered chatbot, called Tako, which will be able to recommend videos and respond to queries about what users are watching.The bot, which was first reported by TechCrunch, is currently being tested in the Philippines, TikTok said in a statement. “Tako is powered by a third-party chat assistant and is designed to help make it easier to discover entertaining and inspiring content on TikTok,” the company said.Despite being in an early phase of testing, TikTok is apparently...
Google announced today that it’s starting to open up access to new generative AI capabilities in Search after teasing them at its I/O event two weeks ago. The tech giant is opening up access to Search Labs, a new program that allows people to sign up for experiments, including the Search Generative Experience, and test […]Google starts opening up access to its new generative AI capabilities in Search by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
SGE is a big change to Google Search, and Google’s rolling it out cautiously. | Screenshot taken from the Google I/O 2023 keynote replay A few Google users are about to start seeing a very different set of search results. The company announced this morning that it is opening up access to Search Labs, its new home for testing search features. Labs is still guarded by a waitlist, and it’s not clear how quickly Google intends to let people in, but two weeks after announcing Labs at Google I/O, it’s at least starting to ship.The most interesting feature in Labs is the Search Generative...
Rishi Sunak meets heads of firms including DeepMind and OpenAI to discuss safety and regulationThe “existential” risk of artificial intelligence has been acknowledged by No 10 for the first time, after the prime minister met the heads of the world’s leading AI research groups to discuss safety and regulation.Rishi Sunak and Chloe Smith, the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, met the chief executives of Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic AI on Wednesday evening and discussed how best to moderate the development of the technology to limit the risks of catastrophe...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge TikTok is testing an AI chatbot called Tako that can recommend videos based on what people ask it, according to screenshots of the feature shared with The Verge. If TikTok ends up releasing it widely, the chatbot could “radically change search and navigation” in the app, according to Daniel Buchuk of Watchful Technologies, a firm that spots these kinds of upcoming app changes for Fortune 500 companies.In screenshots of the test that Buchuk shared with The Verge, Tako sits above the TikTok profile icon to the right of a video. Tapping it opens up a...
Fresh from telling US lawmakers he’s a fan of regulation and laws are needed to mitigate the risks around artificial intelligence — and, indeed, calling for an international regulatory body for AI — OpenAI CEO’s Sam Altman is on a tour of Europe this week to meet European regulators and warn against, er, too much […]Sam Altman’s big European tour by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Artificial intelligence captures headlines on an almost a daily basis — and for good reason. The technology will have a profound effect on just about every aspect of life for billions of people around the world. Over the past year, we’ve watched as two giants — Google-owned DeepMind and Microsoft-backed OpenAI — fight for dominance […]DeepMind’s CEO will discuss research, Google and more on Disrupt’s AI Stage by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch
Here are three actions organizations preparing their application security for a post-AI world need to consider in their security strategies.3 things businesses must do to secure applications in the AI era by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
Few are as involved in so many different artificial intelligence efforts as Mr. Hoffman, a Silicon Valley investor who co-founded LinkedIn.
New York City’s pioneering, focused approach sets rules on how companies use the technology in work force decisions.
The world’s governments have taken note of generative AI’s potential for massive disruption and are acting accordingly. European Commission (EC) industry chief Thierry Breton said Wednesday that it would work with Alphabet on a voluntary pact to establish artificial intelligence ground rules, according toReuters. Breton met with Google CEO Sundar Pichai in Brussels to discuss the arrangement, which will include input from companies based in Europe and other regions. The EU has a history of enacting strict technology rules, and the alliance gives Google a chance to provide input while...
After months of moving fast and breaking things at Twitter, Elon Musk’s been on a crash course of a different sort in the last several weeks, doing the rounds of interviews across a range of media events and with different media platforms (although TC’s invite may have gotten lost in the mail…). Yesterday, it was […]Elon thinks AI could become humanity’s uber-nanny: excerpts from a dinner convo by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google just combined DeepMind and Google Brain into one big AI team, and on Wednesday, the new Google DeepMind shared details on how one of its visual language models (VLM) is being used to generate descriptions for YouTube Shorts, which can help with discoverability.“Shorts are created in just a few minutes and often don’t include descriptions and helpful titles, which makes them harder to find through search,” DeepMind wrote in the post. Flamingo can make those descriptions by analyzing the initial frames of a video to explain what’s going on. (...
Add Eric Schmidt to the list of tech luminaries concerned about the dangers of AI. The former Google chief tells guests at The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council Summit that AI represents an "existential risk" that could get many people "harmed or killed." He doesn't feel that's true at the moment, but he sees a near future where AI could help find software security flaws or new biology types. It's important to ensure these systems aren't "misused by evil people," the veteran executive says.Schmidt doesn't have a firm solution for regulating AI, but he believes there won...
Ten months into his tenure as CEO at Red Hat, Matt Hicks has had to deal with myriad issues from the economy to emerging AI.Ten months after promotion, Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks navigates layoffs and AI’s rise by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration: The Verge Think Google is already loaded with ads? Well, if a new video in a blog post is anything to go by, ads might be even more obtrusive in the company’s new AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE).I’ve already expressed some concern over how much ads push things down in SGE based on what Google showed when it revealed the new experience at I/O. But those ads were only above and below SGE, and what Google showed on Tuesday were examples of ads within SGE. See for yourself in a GIF of the video below: This is a video from Google that I converted to a GIF. The GIF...
Microsoft Build 2023 kicked off with an opening keynote from CEO Satya Nadella, followed by two other keynote sessions. Surprising absolutely no one, there was a big focus on AI. While we have coverage of all the big news, if you want to hear the updates straight from the source without watching the entire thing, you can check out our supercut below.Perhaps the biggest announcement is that Microsoft will soon embed AI deeply into Windows 11. Windows Copilot, which you'll be able to try a preview of next month, can be used in a similar way to Bing AI. So, you can ask it general questions...
The White House has made responsible AI development a focus of this administration in recent months, releasing a Blueprint AI Bill of Rights, developing a risk management framework, committing $140 million to found seven new National Academies dedicated to AI research and weighing in on how private enterprises are leveraging the technology. On Tuesday, the executive branch announced its next steps towards that goal including releasing an update to the National AI R&D Strategic Plan for the first time since 2019 as well as issuing a request for public input on critical AI issues. The Department...
With Spotify’s AI DJ, the company trained an AI on a real person’s voice — that of its head of Cultural Partnerships and podcast host, Xavier “X” Jernigan. Now, the streamer may turn that same technology to advertising, it seems. According to statements made by The Ringer founder Bill Simmons, the streaming service is developing […]Spotify may use AI to make host-read podcast ads that sound like real people by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
At its Google Marketing Live event today, the tech giant announced that it’s launching Product Studio, a new tool that lets merchants easily create product imagery using generative AI. Brands will be able to create new imagery within Merchant Center Next, Google’s platform for businesses to manage how their products show up on Google. Google […]Google introduces Product Studio, a tool that lets merchants create product imagery using generative AI by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
Google is going to start using generative AI to boost Search ads relevance based on the context of a query, the company announced at its Google Marketing Live event today. Last year, the tech giant rolled out automatically created assets (ACA) for Search ads, which use which use content from landing pages and existing ads […]Google Search ads will soon automatically adapt to queries using generative AI by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
AI chatbots have only just been put into consumers’ hands, but tech giants are rushing to monetize them. Shortly after Bing Chat’s arrival, Microsoft began slipping ads into the experience, for instance. Today, Google says it will do something similar, detailing its plans for running Search and Shopping ads inside its conversational AI experience in […]Google to experiment with ads that appear in its AI chatbot in Search by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
What are AI chatbots good for? Lovers of sci-fi novels may recall the “librarian”, a character in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 classic Snow Crash; not a person but an AI program and virtual library which was capable of interacting with users in a conversational manner. The fictional concept suggested an elegant and accessible solution to the […]Wellen taps OpenAI’s GPT for a chatbot that dishes advice on bone health by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Expect plenty of AI announcements as Microsoft integrates the technology into its lineup. Continue reading…
Remotely monitoring patients without violating their privacy is a challenging task. But one co-founder believes that she’s cracked the code. I’m excited to announce I’m speaking with Romi Gubes, the CEO of Sensi.AI,a startup that has developed 24/7 audio-based AI software to detect and predict physical, cognitive and emotional care-related anomalies that can impact the […]Hear how Sensi.AI is building AI for remote patient monitoring by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Microsoft wants to take the pain out of designing web pages. AI is its solution. Today marks the launch of Copilot in Power Pages in preview for U.S. customers, an AI-powered assistant for Microsoft’s low-code business website creation tool, Power Pages. Given prompts, Copilot can generate text, forms, chatbots and web page layouts as well […]Microsoft launches an AI tool to take the pain out of building websites by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Microsoft is launching a new AI-powered moderation service that it says is designed to foster safer online environments and communities. Called Azure AI Content Safety, the new offering, available through the Azure AI product platform, offers a range of AI models trained to detect “inappropriate” content across images and text. The models — which can […]Microsoft launches new AI tool to moderate text and images by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
In its early days, the Microsoft Store (which was previously known as the Windows Store), had a bit of a middling reputation, in part because it was full of low-quality tools. With the launch of Windows 11, Microsoft gave the store a major facelift and today, at its annual Build developer conference, it’s adding a […]Microsoft puts a spotlight on AI in its Windows app store by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Balenciaga Pope. Fake Pentagon explosions. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell AI-generated images apart from the real thing, sometimes to disastrous effect. A solution remains elusive. But Microsoft’s making an attempt with new media provenance features debuting at its annual Build conference. Launching for Bing Image Creator and Designer, Microsoft’s Canva-like web app that can […]Microsoft pledges to watermark AI-generated images and videos by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
There are vanishingly few places in Microsoft's business ecosystem that remain untouched by January's OpenAI deal, with GPT-4 backed chatbot and generative capabilities coming to Office products like Word and Excel, Bing Search, and integrated directly into the Edge browser. During the Microsoft Build 2023 conference on Tuesday, company executives clarified and confirmed that its 365 Copilot AI — the same one going into Office — will be "natively integrated" into the Edge browser. Microsoft 365 Copilot essentially takes all of your Graph information — data from your Calendar...
ChatGPT no longer needs to rely on its own models or plugins to provide information to users: Microsoft has announced Bing Search is integrating into ChatGPT to provide more relevant — and potentially newer — responses. Bing will act as the "default search experience," allowing ChatGPT to pull answers from the internet and provide citations.Microsoft and OpenAI have worked together closely over the last few months, with Bing, itself, running on GPT-4 (with some tailoring for searches). Bing works by displaying responses in detailed or summary form and sources facts and suggestions with...
Microsoft Store will let AI handle review summaries. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft is making a big AI-focused change to the Microsoft Store: AI-generated review summaries are going to start appearing across the Microsoft Store, showing top-line synopsis of the reviews in addition to the usual rating of up to five stars. AI-generated rundowns like these are becoming increasingly common — see Artifact’s simple article summaries as well as the forthcoming search summaries Google is working on — and given Microsoft’s recent pushes into everything AI, it makes some sense why the company is...
Image: Microsoft Microsoft is building a natural language AI chatbot into its Windows Terminal application. The upcoming GitHub Copilot Chat experience will be available to Windows Terminal users as Microsoft experiments further with adding AI-powered features to Windows features. “Users of GitHub Copilot will be able to take advantage of natural language AI both inline and in an experimental chat experience to recommend commands, explain errors, and take actions within the Terminal application,” explains Windows chief Panos Panay in a developer blog post today. The expansion of GitHub...
Photo illustration by Will Joel / The Verge Microsoft is putting AI Copilots in everything. Will it change the way we use computers? Continue reading…
Illustration: The Verge Microsoft’s AI-powered Copilot assistant is coming to the Edge browser, the company announced Tuesday. Copilot in Edge uses whatever website the user is currently visiting as context to complete tasks elsewhere — such as in Office documents, Outlook emails, and other places with Microsoft 365 Copilot reach.For example, if you’re in corporate sales and visiting a potential client’s website, you can ask Copilot in Edge to summarize everything about that lead as discussed in meetings, emails, and chats. Copilot can also suggest to use the information you’re...
Image: Microsoft Microsoft is adding a Copilot AI assistant to Windows 11. Much like the Copilot sidebars we’ve seen in Edge, Office apps, and even GitHub, Windows Copilot will be integrated directly into Windows 11 and available to open and use from the taskbar across all apps and programs.“Once open, the Windows Copilot side bar stays consistent across your apps, programs, and windows, always available to act as your personal assistant,” explains Panos Panay, Microsoft’s head of Windows and devices. “It makes every user a power user, helping you take action, customize your settings...
Anthropic, the prominent generative AI startup co-founded by OpenAI veterans, has raised $450 million in a Series C funding round led by Spark Capital. Anthropic wouldn’t disclose what the round valued its business at. But The Information reported in early March that the company was seeking to raise capital at an over-$4.1 billion valuation. It […]Anthropic raises $450M to build next-gen AI assistants by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
The Solana Foundation is working to integrate AI into its network with a ChatGPT plug-in developed by Solana Labs.Solana launches ChatGPT plugin to help users interact with its network by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch
As generative AI has taken the tech world by storm, it was only a matter of time before Photoshop got in on the action. Adobe announced today that a new Generative Fill feature is coming to its ubiquitous photo-editing software later this year. The company promises “a magical new way to work” as the Firefly-powered feature lets you add, remove and extend visual content based on natural-language text prompts. “Generative Fill combines the speed and ease of generative AI with the power and precision of Photoshop, empowering customers to bring their visions to life at the speed of their...
Photoshop is getting an infusion of generative AI today with the addition of a number of Firefly-based features that will allow users to extend images beyond their borders with Firefly-generated backgrounds, use generative AI to add objects to images and use a new generative fill feature to remove objects with far more precision than the […]Adobe brings Firefly’s generative AI to Photoshop by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
It was only recently that we reported Buildier.ai had signed a strategic collaboration with and undisclosed investment from Microsoft. Builder’s “Natasha” AI will be shortly available to users of Teams. But it appears the startup is on a something of a roll. It’s now announced a $250 million Series D funding led by the Qatar […]Modular app-building platform Buildier.ai raises $250 million Series D funding by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch
Image: Artifact Feel like an article is clickbait-y? Artifact, the AI-powered news app from Instagram’s co-founders, now has a tool that lets you feel like you can do something about it. In the latest version of the app, which is now available, you can flag articles you think are clickbait. The feedback will be used as “a signal in ranking so we can better prioritize helpful articles over misleading ones for the community,” Artifact writes in a blog post.To start, Artifact will be monitoring the most reported articles and then deciding what it might want to do in response. That includes...
AI is developing rapidly enough and the dangers it may pose are clear enough that OpenAI’s leadership believes that the world needs an international regulatory body akin to that governing nuclear power — and fast. But not too fast. In a post to the company’s blog, OpenAI founder Sam Altman, President Greg Brockman, and Chief […]OpenAI leaders propose international regulatory body for AI by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Recent news from Appian and Neeva make plain that the number of participants racing to build AI tooling and services for large companies is expected to be healthy.Will startups have a shot in the enterprise AI race? by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
“Digital transformation” and AI remain very buzzy terms in the world of enterprise software, and today a startup out of Romania that’s built a platform that taps into both concepts, and is seeing user traction in the financial sector, has raised a decent round of funding. FlowX.ai — which lets enterprises port legacy and newer […]Romania’s FlowX.ai raises $35M for its AI-based approach to application integration by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
Challenger search engine Neeva is no more, in its current guise at least, as the Mountain View, California-based company revealed that it’s winding down its consumer business. Founders Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan wrote in a blog post yesterday that they had faced significant challenges attracting new users which, combined with the difficult economic environment that […]Google challenger Neeva gives up on consumer search, goes all in on AI and the enterprise by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch
Neeva tried to build a different kind of search engine — but couldn’t make the business work. | Image: Neeva Neeva, which for a while looked like one of the startups with a real chance to challenge the supremacy of Google Search, announced on Saturday that it is shutting down its search engine. The company says it’s pivoting to AI — and may be acquired by Snowflake, The Information reported — but mostly seems to believe it failed.“Building search engines is hard,” Neeva co-founders Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan wrote in a blog post announcing the shutdown. (Ramaswamy in...
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app economy in 2023 hit a few snags, as consumer spending last year dropped for the first time by 2% to $167 billion, according to data.ai’s “State of […]This Week in Apps: ChatGPT comes to iPhone, Bing AI efforts expand, Instagram’s Twitter clone by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Companies building AI platforms can engage society in the process and earn — not demand — trust and legitimacy.Procedural justice can address generative AI’s trust/legitimacy problem by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
Back at CES in Las Vegas in January this year, I previewed the Nuwa Pen; a three-camera-containing ballpoint pen that promises to turn your scribbles into digital notes and then apply OCR and AI smarts to pull out the most pertinent data. Write “Meeting with Chris at 6pm Tuesday” on a Post-it and the promise […]Nuwa Pen launches with misleading Kickstarter campaign by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
The city’s first-of-its-kind policy encourages its public servants to use the technology—and could serve as a blueprint for other governments.
Google has prevailed against another UK class-action style privacy lawsuit after a London court dismissed a lawsuit filed last year against the tech giant and its AI division, DeepMind, which has sought compensation for misuse of NHS patients’ medical records. The decision underscores the hurdles facing class-action style compensation claims for privacy breaches in the […]UK Court tosses class-action style health data misuse claim against Google DeepMind by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Apple, like a number of companies right now, may be grappling with what role the newest advances in AI are playing, and should play, in its business. But one thing Apple is confident about is the fact that it wants to bring more generative AI talent into its business. The Cupertino company has posted at […]Apple is on the hunt for generative AI talent by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appearing before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law. | Photo by Win McNamee / Getty Images The most unusual thing about this week’s Senate hearing on AI was how affable it was. Industry reps — primarily OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — merrily agreed on the need to regulate new AI technologies, while politicians seemed happy to hand over responsibility for drafting rules to the companies themselves. As Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) put it in his opening remarks: “I can’t recall when we’ve had people representing large corporations or...
This week, we’re focusing on Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), an annual event meant to promote the need for accessible tech solutions. Cherlynn returns to tell us what Apple, Google, Adobe and others are doing to make their products more useful for people with disabilities (and, it turns out, many general users too). We also discuss Sam Altman’s trip to Congress, and why we’re not entirely impressed with the OpenAI CEO’s calls for AI regulation. Finally, we explain why the BlackBerry movie is one of the best films about tech ever made (take that, Tetris!).Listen below or...
No, it’s not over yet: the ability of AI tools to manipulate images continues to grow. The latest example is only a research paper for now, but a very impressive one, letting users simply drag elements of a picture to change their appearance. This doesn’t sound too exciting on the face of it, but take a look at the examples below to get an idea of what this system can do. Not only can you change the dimensions of a car or manipulate a smile into a frown with a simple click and drag, but you can rotate a picture’s subject as if it were a 3D model — changing the direction someone is...
Apple is famous for being protective of its projects and for expecting secrecy from its workers. Now, according to The Wall Street Journal, the tech giant is concerned about the possibility of its employees inadvertently leaking proprietary data while using ChatGPT. To prevent that scenario from happening, Apple has reportedly restricted the use of ChatGPT and other AI tools, such as GitHub's Copilot that can autocomplete code. The Journal also says that Apple is working on large language models of its own. In early April, The Economist Koreareported that three Samsung employees shared...
AI chatbots may soon find a place as consumer personal assistants, with OpenAI releasing a ChatGPT app for the iPhone.
AI chatbots may soon find a place as consumer personal assistants, with OpenAI releasing a ChatGPT app for the iPhone.
On Tuesday of this week, neuroscientist, founder and author Gary Marcus sat between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Christina Montgomery, who is IBM’s chief privacy trust officer, as all three testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee for over three hours. The senators were largely focused on Altman because he runs one of the most powerful […]Psst, Gary Marcus is happy to help regulate AI on behalf of the U.S. government by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta is building its first custom chip specifically for running AI models, the company announced on Thursday. As Meta increases its AI efforts — CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said the company sees “an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful” — the chip and other infrastructure plans revealed Thursday could be critical tools for Meta to compete with other tech giants also investing significant resources into AI.Meta’s new MTIA chip, which stands for Meta Training and Inference...
As tech conglomerates and moneyed men call for AI dealers to pump their breaks, I believe another emergent technology, Heinz Remix, warrants close examination. At first, Heinz Remix simply appears to be a mix-n-match soda dispenser — for sauce. Yet, a great deal more is going on beneath the surface. This is about responsibility, in […]Big sauce wants your condiment data by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch
OpenAI is aiming to build on the popularity of its chatbot with a smartphone app that responds to voice prompts.
At a virtual event this morning, Meta lifted the curtains on its efforts to develop in-house infrastructure for AI workloads, including generative AI like the type that underpins its recently launched ad design and creation tools. It was an attempt at a projection of strength from Meta, which historically has been slow to adopt AI-friendly […]Meta bets big on AI with custom chips — and a supercomputer by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Meta says it’s created a generative AI tool for coding similar to GitHub’s Copilot. The company made the announcement at an event focused on its AI infrastructure efforts, including custom chips Meta’s building to accelerate the training of generative AI models. The coding tool, called CodeCompose, isn’t available publicly — at least not yet. But […]Meta built a code-generating AI model similar to Copilot by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Stability AI, the AI startup behind the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, this week announced the release of StableStudio, an open source version of DreamStudio, Stability AI’s commercial AI-powered design suite. In a blog post, Stability AI writes that it hopes to “foster a project [that] can outpace anything developed by a single company,” alluding to […]Stability AI open sources its AI-powered design studio by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration: The Verge Google is planning to use artificial intelligence to help companies create ads, according to a report from CNBC. Internal documents viewed by the outlet suggest that Google wants to use its new PaLM 2 AI language model to help advertisers generate assets that they can use in their ads.This tracks with a report from the Financial Times in April, which similarly stated that Google could soon create ads by putting together images, video, and text supplied by the advertiser. That’s not the only way Google could use its AI language model, however. CNBC reports that Google...
Seven weeks after Alibaba announced its historic restructuring plan to split itself into six independent companies, the juggernaut is gearing up to take its cloud intelligence group public. Alibaba went public in New York back in 2014, marking the largest IPO at the time. Not long after Hong Kong relaxed rules around dual-class structures, which […]Alibaba to take its cloud, AI and business messenger unit public by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch
Let’s look at the three most important milestones along the road to predictive analysis in the retail media context.Retail media targeting on the AI maturity curve by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
As large language models from Western tech firms show the potential to disrupt everything from marketing, teaching, to coding, China is rushing to cultivate its home-grown AI pioneers by stepping up state support. Beijing is now seeking public opinion on a draft policy aimed at developing artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a category of AI […]Beijing calls on cloud providers to support AI firms by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch
Skynet. Ultron. HAL-9000. These are but a few artificial intelligence systems that have gone rogue in films. Whether The Creator can produce a fictional AI that would make a mark on popular culture remains to be seen, but it is another movie that pits humanity against artificial intelligence. Its official website says the movie is about Joshua, an ex-special forces agent recruited to hunt down the Creator. That's the architect behind the advanced AI that was developed to protect humanity only to detonate a nuclear warhead in Los Angeles. The Creator apparently also developed a weapon...
Cars will pull up beside an “Instant Pickup portal.” | Image: The Wendy’s Company After announcing plans to use an AI chatbot at its drive-thrus, now Wendy’s is piloting a robot-powered “underground delivery system” for online order pickups. The system, which will be built through a partnership with the autonomous logistics company Pipedream, will have robots travel through tunnels to transport online food orders from Wendy’s kitchens to the “Instant Pickup portals” that sit beside parking spaces. When a customer arrives at a space, they talk to the restaurant crew through the...
Like it or not, AI is part of our lives from here on out — for better or worse. In the past six months alone, TechCrunch has written nearly 600 articles focused on the impact of AI technology in our lives across industries as varied as film, healthcare, marketing and supply chains to name but […]AI touches everything, everywhere all at once at Disrupt by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch
Union AI, a Bellevue, Washington–based open source startup that helps businesses build and orchestrate their AI and data workflows with the help of a cloud-native automation platform, today announced that it has raised a $19.1 million Series A round from NEA and Nava Ventures. The company also announced the general availability of its fully managed […]Union AI raises $19.1M Series A to simplify AI and data workflows with Flyte by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Curio, a startup building a platform that turns expert journalism into professionally narrated content, is embracing AI technology to create customized audio episodes, based on your prompts. The company today already has a large catalog of high-quality journalism licensed from partners like The Wall St. Journal, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, New […]Audio journalism app Curio can now create personalized episodes using AI by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
StableStudio is effectively DreamStudio, only with a new plug-in system and no DreamStudio branding. | Image: Stability AI Stability AI is releasing an open-source version of DreamStudio, a commercial interface for the company’s AI image generator model, Stable Diffusion. In a press statement on Wednesday, Stability AI said the new release — dubbed StableStudio — “marks a fresh chapter” for the platform and will serve as a showcase for the company’s “dedication to advancing open-source development.”Making an open-source version of DreamStudio carries benefits for Stability AI...
Psychedelic startups want to make psilocybin, ketamine and other substances more mainstream, but how are investors approaching this space?TechCrunch+ roundup: Psychedelics VC survey, how to run an AI pilot, Europe’s robotics renaissance by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
CNET, the venerable tech site which began publication nearly 30 years ago, has become the latest digital media company whose staff have chosen to band together and demand more. The CNET Media Worker's Union (CMWU) today sent a letter to Red Ventures, the private equity concern which purchased CNET in 2020, seeking recognition of a bargaining unit of nearly 100 workers including editors, writers, and video producers. According to CMWU, a supermajority of those in the unit signed union authorization cards.Like the overwhelming majority of other organized digital publications, the workers who make...
Bird Buddy, the AI-powered smart bird feeder, is bringing the popular pastime of bird-watching into the digital age — and growing its line of products in support of the hobby. With the startup’s original affordable bird feeder, connected camera, and companion mobile app, birdwatching enthusiasts and newcomers alike can view photos and videos of bird […]Birdwatching tech startup Bird Buddy introduces an AI-powered Smart Hummingbird Feeder and Bird Bath by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Clay, a startup that’s something of a personal CRM, as it’s designed to help people manage their own relationships — including those with friends, family, colleagues, industry peers and more — is now turning to AI to help you derive more insights from your network of contacts. If you ever wanted to ask an AI […]Personal CRM app Clay introduces an AI helper to help you navigate your relationships by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
I’m not sure I’d call this the golden age of humanoid robots, but they sure have been coming out of the woodwork since Tesla announced its intentions to build one back in the summer of 2021. It’s difficult to compare the progress of various systems at the moment (they’re all fairly early stage), but Sanctuary […]Sanctuary AI’s new humanoid robot stands 5’7″ and lifts 55 lb by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
AI, specifically generative AI, has the potential to transform healthcare. At least, that sales pitch from Hippocratic Health, which emerged from stealth today with a whopping $50 million in seed financing behind it and a valuation in the “triple digit millions.” The tranche, co-led by General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz, is a big vote of […]Hippocratic is building a large language model for healthcare by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Training machine learning models for computer vision use cases takes massive amounts of images. Often, those images are mislabeled, broken or duplicated, leading to sub-par model performance. But with millions of images in many datasets, it’s virtually impossible to catch these issues. Visual Layer, a Tel Aviv-based startup that wants to enable data scientists and […]Visual Layer helps enterprise manage the massive visual data sets they need to build AI models, raises $7M by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Spotify is launching its AI feature called “DJ” for premium customers in the U.K. and Ireland. The feature is aimed at music discovery and it plays curated music with AI-powered commentary in English. In many ways, using the AI DJ feels like listening to a radio DJ. The company first launched this feature back in […]Spotify expands AI-powered DJ feature to UK and Ireland by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Elad Gil, a successful founder and prolific investor, has already been called Silicon Valley’s biggest solo venture capitalist given the massive amounts of capital he has been investing in recent years, including on behalf of institutions that reportedly include Harvard’s endowment. His track record goes a long way in explaining his quiet rise. For example, […]Renowned investor Elad Gil on how the great AI race will likely shake out by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch
Generative AI — AI that can write essays, create artwork and music, and more — continues to attract outsize investor attention. According to one source, generative AI startups raised $1.7 billion in Q1 2023, with an additional $10.68 billion worth of deals announced in the quarter but not yet completed. There’s scores of competition, including […]Together raises $20M to build open source generative AI models by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge It looks like Amazon will be joining the chatbot fray. As spotted by Bloomberg, the company has posted job listings describing how it is “reimagining Amazon Search” with a new “interactive conversational experience that helps you find answers to product questions, perform product comparisons, receive personalized product suggestions, and so much more,” according to a listing for a machine learning-focused engineer. You can see another cached job listing here.Amazon is pitching these changes to search as absolutely massive. “This will be a once in...
One mistake AI founders commonly make is that building models of client data is sufficient for product-market-fit and differentiation.How to avoid AI commoditization: 3 tactics for running successful pilot programs by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
With AI hype peaking, it would seem that investment in AI startups would be correspondingly high, but surprisingly, it's way down.VCs love to talk about AI, but they aren’t writing as many checks as you might think by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Today, leaders of technology businesses and the United States government are coming together to map out a unified vision for responsible AI.US tech policy must keep pace with AI innovation by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
Hey, friends — you’ve made it to the end of the week. Congrats! That’s an achievement worth celebrating, I’d say. And what better way to ring in the weekend than by recapping the week in tech? This is Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s weekly news roundup, where we highlight the most important, impactful and otherwise […]Google bets the farm on AI, Twitter gets a new CEO, and Meta contractors protest by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of the last week’s stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week, Google dominated the AI news cycle […]The week in AI: Google goes all out at I/O as regulations creep up by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app economy in 2023 hit a few snags, as consumer spending last year dropped for the first time by 2% to $167 billion, according to data.ai’s “State of […]This Week in Apps: Google I/O 2023 recap; Android, apps and AI; Twitter’s new CEO by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Screenshot taken from the Google I/O 2023 keynote replay Of all the emotions I expected out of this week’s Google I/O keynote, “dread” was not on my short list. Google has spent a couple of decades creating products that make my life easier. This week, it demonstrated the exact opposite: a way to make communicating with other people worse.Google I/O, this year, was focused on artificial intelligence, and one of its centerpieces was prompt-based text generation, particularly in Google’s office suite. At several points throughout the keynote, it demoed a system called “Help me write...
Amorai is creating an AI relationship coach but the startup isn't sharing what it could look like, and an AI expert isn't sure it would work.Deal Dive: AI relationship coach Amorai offers more questions than answers by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch
News from Google’s AI-soaked developer event this week makes it plain that we’re on the cusp of a new era of search. Following Microsoft’s moulding of OpenAI’s tech into Bing, Google is experimenting with its own AI tech and opening up new ways to use search. It’s clear that we’re about to see the first […]As AI consumes search, what will be left for us humans? by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
Can open-source foundation AI models level the playing field while addressing concerns about privacy and bias?TechCrunch+ roundup: Minimizing M&A mayhem, cybersecurity PM checklist, open-source AI by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
Image: Google It wouldn’t be Google I/O if the company didn’t have a new version of its smartphone and tablet operating system waiting in the wings — and while Android 14 got totally upstaged by AI and the company’s first folding phone, we’ve since learned more from the company’s developer sessions. Don’t get too excited: these changes are subtle! But here are a few ways Google’s “Upside Down Cake” might make your life slightly sweeter when it arrives this fall. Screenshot by Sean Hollister / Video by Google Every Android version has a dessert codename — Android 14’s is...
Clearly, VC firms are landing on different conclusions while debating how to jump into AI during its nondebatable watershed moment.The debate happening inside of every VC firm by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch
The homescreen for Project Gameface is so cheerful. | Screenshot by Wes Davis / The Verge While Wednesday’s Google I/O event largely hyped the company’s biggest AI initiatives, the company also announced updates to the machine learning suite that powers Google Lens and Google Meet features like object tracking and recognition, gesture control, and of course, facial detection. The newest update enables app developers to, among other things, create Snapchat-like face filters and hand tracking, with the company showing off a GIF that’s definitely not a Memoji.This update underpins a special...
Image: Artifact Artifact, the AI-powered news app from Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, has a new feature that makes it even more of a news-focused social media app. With the latest version of the Artifact app, you can now follow individual writers. Articles from those writers will be prioritized in your feed and you can opt to get notifications when those writers post.Writers can also claim their profiles on Artifact to get a verified checkmark beside their name in search and in Artifact’s comments. (Writers can only claim profiles on iOS, but it’s coming to Android...
Meta today announced an AI Sandbox for advertisers to help them create alternative copies, background generation through text prompts and image cropping for Facebook or Instagram ads. The first feature lets brands generate different variations of the same copy for different audiences while trying to keep the core message of the ad similar. The background […]Meta announces generative AI features for advertisers by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Stating the obvious, you can’t have software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies without software developers. Creative developers build the proprietary and open-source code that fuels commercial engines around the world. Yet as we know, technologies can change entire industries. And that begs the question, what’s the future of coding in the age of AI? It’s a huge issue […]GitHub’s Thomas Dohmke talks open source, AI and more on the Disrupt SaaS Stage by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch
Can AI work backward from a text description to generate a coherent song? That’s the premise of MusicLM, the AI-powered music creation tool Google released yesterday during the kickoff of its I/O conference. MusicLM, which was trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of audio to learn to create new music in a range of […]Hands on with Google’s AI-powered music generator by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Millions of people use sign language, but methods of teaching this complex and subtle skill haven’t evolved as quickly those for written and spoken languages. SLAIT School aims to change that with an interactive tutor powered by computer vision, letting aspiring ASL speakers practice at their own rate like in any other language learning app. […]SLAIT pivots from translating sign language to AI-powered interactive lessons by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
WhatsApp has announced that it has introduced back-end updates to tackle spam calls, which are particularly prevalent in India right now. It has impacted many users in the last few days and eventually brought the attention of the Indian government. On Thursday, the Meta-owned messaging app announced that it quickly ramped up its AI and […]WhatsApp rolls out back-end fixes to address spam calls impacting Indian users by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch
PaLM 2. GPT-4. The list of text-generating AI practically grows by the day. Most of these models are walled behind APIs, making it impossible for researchers to see exactly what makes them tick. But increasingly, community efforts are yielding open source AI that’s as sophisticated, if not more so, than their commercial counterparts. The latest […]AI2 is developing a large language model optimized for science by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
We’ve entered a critical phase of AI where who gets to build and serve these powerful models has become an important discussion point.Making foundation models accessible: The battle between closed and open source AI by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
As companies explore generative AI more deeply, one of the more confounding issues is the hallucination problem, where if the model doesn’t know the answer, it simply makes one up, whether it makes sense or not. To work in business, finding a way to mitigate this problem is paramount. Today, Writer, the generative AI writing […]Writer introduces product that could help reduce hallucinated content in its LLMs by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Google’s big developer conference had a lot to get through. That included the Pixel Fold (more on that below), a new Pixel A-series phone for only $500, a tablet, Android 14, a faster, more sophisticated AI language model, and lots more tricks for AI chatbot Bard. Coming soon, Bard will be able to analyze images and integrate into Google apps, like Gmail and GDocs. And if you haven’t dabbled with Bard yet – no more waiting list.GoogleAnd while Google had media and analysts captive, it showed off its holographic meeting experience, Project Starline, two years after it first appeared...
This year’s Google IO was all about AI. The company announced a number of AI-powered features across its products on Wednesday. The search giant also launched a new page called Google Labs to let people sign up for these experiments and test out AI-powered features for feedback before the wider release. Currently, you can look […]Google’s new Labs page lets you sign up for its AI experiments by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Yes, Sony is still making smartphones, and its latest is the flagship Xperia 1 V designed for both photographers and vloggers. It features a new stacked, backside-illuminated (BSI) sensor along with features aimed at content creators found in its Alpha-series cameras. The Xperia 1 V has a new image sensor called "Exmor T for Mobile" designed to be faster and work better with computational (AI) photography, while offering "approximately double" the low-light performance of the Xperia 1 IV, Sony said. As you'd expect in a flagship, it offers other high-end features like a Snapdragon 8 Gen2...
In 2007, Alan O’Herlihy, who previously worked with large SAP installations as well as retail, set out to find a way to help retailers minimize “shrinkage,” or where a store has fewer items in stock than in its recorded inventory. He settled on computer vision as the solution to the problem, and founded a company, […]Everseen raises over $70M for AI tech to spot potential retail theft by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Google's I/O event this year was jam-packed with new product launches and an in-depth introduction to its new generative AI offerings. The star of its new set of device was, perhaps, the new Pixel Fold, a veritable rival to Samsung's foldables powered by a Tensor G2 chip. Like the Samsung Galaxy Fold, it opens like a book so you can fully use its 7.6-inch display, though it also comes with a 5.8-inch external display. It's now available for pre-order and will set you back $1,799 when it starts shipping in June. The company has also unveiled its new mid-range phone, the Pixel 7a...
More AI-generated music mimicking a famous artist has made the rounds — while making lots of money for the scammer passing it off as genuine. A collection of fake Frank Ocean songs sold for a reported $13,000 CAD ($9,722 in US dollars) last month on a music-leaking forum devoted to the Grammy-winning singer, according toVice. If the story sounds familiar, it’s essentially a recycling of last month’s AI Drake / The Weeknd fiasco.As generative AI takes the world by storm — Google just devoted most of its I/O 2023 keynote to it — people eager to make a quick buck through unscrupulous...
Alongside its work to integrate more AI features into Search, Google today also announced it’s introducing a new “Perspectives” filter will be coming to the top of some of its Search results when the results “would benefit from others’ experiences,” Google says — like posts on discussion boards, Q&A sites and social media platforms, including […]Google ‘Perspectives’ integrates Reddit, YouTube, TikTok and more in search results by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
AI-generated music has been in the spotlight lately, between a track that seemingly featured vocals from Drake and The Weeknd gaining traction to Spotify reportedly removing thousands of songs over concerns that people were using them to game the system. Now, Google is wading further into that space as the company is opening up access to its text-to-music AI, which is called MusicLM.Google detailed the system back in January when it published research on MusicLM. At the time, the company said it didn't have any plans to offer the public access to MusicLM due to ethical concerns related to...
Today at I/O, Google announced the latest prototype of Project Starline, its 3D teleconferencing video booth. On the face of it, the biggest difference a dramatic reduction in hardware. The earlier model, which it showed off late last year, relied on several cameras to capture speakers from all angles. This time out, however, the system […]Google’s latest Project Starline prototype uses AI to make 3D images of people by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
Image: Google In a world increasingly filled with photorealistic images that have either been altered with AI editing tools or created using a generative AI bot like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, how do you know if a picture is real? One thing that could help is a new tool Google is rolling out this summer for English-language searches in the US called “About this image.”It’s similar to the “about this” drop-down that appears on links in regular search results but is now available in Google image searches. When you perform a “reverse image search” by uploading an image of...
Screenshot: Emma Roth / The Verge Google is launching a new AI-powered coding bot for Android developers. During its I/O event on Wednesday, Google announced that the tool, called Studio Bot, will help developers build apps by generating code, fixing errors, and answering questions about Android.According to Google, the bot is built on Codey, the company’s new foundational coding model that stems from its updated PaLM2 large language model (LLM). Studio Bot supports both the Kotlin and Java programming languages and will live directly in the toolbar on Android Studio. There, developers can...
At its I/O developers conference, Google today announced its new ML Hub, a one-stop destination for developers who want to get more guidance on how to train and deploy their ML models, no matter whether they are in the early stages of their AI career or seasoned professionals. “We talk about this concept of democratizing […]Google launches ML Hub to help AI developers train and deploy their models by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Android Studio, like so much of Google’s product portfolio, is getting its infusion of AI today at the company’s annual I/O developer conference. Android Studio Hedgehog, the upcoming version of Android Studio currently in the canary release channel, will be the first to add support for the here., a new conversational experience in Android Studio […]Android Studio gets a built-in coding bot by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
In addition to its AI-powered Play Store updates, Google also introduced today several new security and privacy features for both app developers and Play Store users at its I/O developer conference. These include updates to its Play Integrity API, the introduction of a new beta version of the Play Console app, changes to the Data […]Google Play developers will be able to push you to update your apps by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Suddenly, June can’t come soon enough. | Image: Google After the rumors, leaks, and an early tease, Google has now properly introduced both its new flagship foldable and midrange slab phone offerings: the Pixel Fold and the Pixel 7A. These were some of the showcase device announcements at the tech giant’s Google I/O 2023 keynote, accompanied by other Android and AI-related news.The Pixel 7A continues Google’s formula of taking some of the best features from its latest generation of flagship phones, leaving out extras that cost a premium and dropping the cost to a more budget-friendly...
Firebase, Google’s backend-as-a-service platform for application developers, is getting its fair share of new features at the company’s I/O developer conference today, but the marquee update is the addition of AI extensions, powered by Google’s PaLM API. That’s in addition to support for the Python language in Cloud Functions for Firebase (2nd gen), updates to […]Google’s Firebase gets AI extensions, opens up its marketplace by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Screenshot: Emma Roth / The Verge Google just finished up its I/O keynote, where it announced some pretty major updates to its Pixel lineup and showed off its latest advances in AI. If you didn’t get a chance to watch the event live, we’ve rounded up all of the biggest news that came out of the Google I/O keynote.Three new additions to the Pixel lineup Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Google’s Pixel hardware took center stage during the keynote, as the company launched three new products: the Pixel Fold, the Pixel Tablet, and the budget-friendly Pixel 7A. The $1,799 Pixel Fold marks...
ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images Fans of Frank Ocean lost thousands of dollars after a scammer sold them fake AI-generated songs, according to a report from Motherboard. It was only a matter of time.The scammer made off with around $13,000 CAD by selling a collection of bogus “leaked” tracks by the artist to a Discord server of his fans. To build trust, the scammer reportedly shared one real unreleased Frank Ocean song on Discord, and then jumped at the opportunity when they saw that fans couldn’t tell the difference between the real track and a fake one. “We now live in a world where...
Google is updating Wear OS to bring new features, apps, and app experiences to its smartwatch OS platform, the company announced today at its Google I/O developer conference. The features, coming later this year, include improvements to Google’s own first-party apps, like Gmail, Calendar, and Home, as well as new and improved apps from third […]Android smartwatches are getting Spotify’s AI DJ, WhatsApp and updated Google apps by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Google is building upon Material You to give users the option to create a more personalized experience on their devices, the company announced at it I/O developer conference today. Most notably, the company announced generative AI wallpapers that will roll out this fall. With generative AI wallpapers, you can answer suggested prompts to describe your […]Android’s new generative AI wallpapers will let you create unique and personalized designs by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
Google’s building an AI-powered notebook tool called Project Tailwind, the company revealed at its I/O developer conference. The goal, Google says, is to take a user’s freeform notes and automatically organize and summarize them. To use Tailwind — which is available through Labs, Google’s refreshed hub for experimental products — users pick files from Google […]With Project Tailwind, Google aims to make note-taking smarter by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Google today introduced a new feature that combines Android’s guided customization with its advances in generative AI to help people compose more personal messages. The feature, called Magic Compose, was demoed briefly on stage this afternoon at the company’s I/O developer conference, showing how the feature could be used within messages and conversations to rewrite […]Google’s Magic Compose can rewrite your texts to be more playful, professional and more by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Project Tailwind is Google's latest foray into AI and it's aimed at helping students organize their notes. Google describes it as "your AI-first notebook," and the toolset is able to distill information from a personal notebook, making it all searchable, suggesting questions and main themes, and otherwise organizing the subject matter in an interactive way. Project Tailwind is an experiment at the moment and it's available only in the US — the waitlist to try it out is accessible via Google.Google revealed Project Tailwind during today's I/O developer conference, showing off a...
Project Tailwind is just a concept for now, but a very intriguing one. | Image: Google Google has announced a lot of AI projects at its I/O conference this year, but the one that has me most excited is just a prototype: Project Tailwind. Essentially, it’s an AI notebook trained on your documents that you can query like a sort of personalized tutor or writing companion. Google framed it as a tool for students, but it could have a lot more potential for anyone who deals with a lot of text in their life.“Like a real notebook, your notes and your sources power Tailwind,” said Josh Woodward, a...
Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Google just revealed some big AI-focused updates to Search and Workspace at Google I/O, and you can now sign up to test them on a dedicated Labs page. They’re a little ways down the page: scroll until you see “Learn More” buttons, and you can click on those to go to the pages that actually let you sign up for the tests.Generative AI tools are all the rage right now, but they’ve also made some famously bad blunders. By letting users opt in to test these early products, Google can get feedback on the new tools by positioning them as “experiments...
Image: Getty This year, Google has a lot to prove — and at least one product to unfold. Continue reading…
To paraphrase Andreessen Horowitz, generative AI, particularly on the text-to-art side, is eating the world. At least, investors believe so — judging by the billions of dollars they’ve poured into startups developing AI that creates text and images from prompts. Not to be left behind, Big Tech is investing in its own generative AI art […]Google brings new generative models to Vertex AI, including Imagen by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
As we’ve seen LLMs and generative AI come screaming into our consciousness in recent months, it’s clear that these models take enormous amounts of compute power to train and run. Recognizing this, Google Cloud announced a new A3 supercomputer virtual machine today at Google I/O. The A3 has been purpose-built to handle the considerable demands […]Google Cloud announces new A3 supercomputer VMs built to power LLMs by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
At its annual I/O developer conference, Google today announced the launch of a number of AI-centric coding tools, including its competitor to GitHub’s Copilot, a chat tool for asking questions about coding and Google Cloud services, as well as AI-assisted coding in Google’s no-code AppSheet product. At the core of virtually all of these new […]Google launches a GitHub Copilot competitor by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Google Search is experimenting with a new conversational mode that is powered by generative AI, the company announced at its annual I/O developer conference today. The company says the new experience helps you quickly find and make sense of information. The experience is integrated with Google Shopping and is designed to quickly connect users with […]Google is experimenting with a new AI-powered conversational mode in Search by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
Google’s going all-in on generative AI at its I/O developer conference today – so much so that it introduced a new tool called Sidekick that aims to help provide better prompts, potentially usurping the one thing people are supposed to be able to do best in the whole generative AI loop. You may have heard […]Google’s ‘Sidekick’ offers contextual prompts to get better results from AI by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch
Google is taking its first steps toward combatting the potential for misinformation arising from AI-generated images. At its I/O developer event this afternoon, the company announced two new features coming to Google Search that aim to help people better understand the content and the context of the image they’re viewing in the search results. This […]Google introduces new features to help identify AI images in Search and elsewhere by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Google announced new features to its image search function to make it easier to spot altered content, the company announced at Google I/O 2023 on Wednesday. Photos on the search engine will soon include an "about this image" option that tells users when the image and ones like it were first indexed by Google, where it may have appeared first and other places the image has been posted online. That information could help users figure out whether something they're seeing was generated by AI, according to Google. The new feature will show up by clicking the three dots on an image in Google...
It's fair to say that Google was caught flat-footed by Microsoft's launch of Bing search powered by ChatGPT, as it didn't have anything similar when it unveiled its own conversational AI, Bard. Now, Google has announced Search Labs, a new way for consumers to test "bold new ideas and ideas we're exploring" in search, the company said at its IO conference.There are three key features available for a limited time. The first is called Search Generative Experience (SGE), bringing generative AI directly into Google Search. "The new Search experience helps you quickly find and make...
Knowingly or unknowingly, Microsoft kicked off a race to integrate generative AI into search engines when it introduced Bing AI in February. Google seemingly rushed into an announcement just a day before Microsoft’s launch event, telling the world its generative AI chatbot would be called Bard. Since then, Google has opened up access to its ChatGPT and Bing AI rival, but while Microsoft’s offering has been embedded into its search and browser products, Bard remains a separate chatbot.That doesn’t mean Google hasn’t been busy with generative AI. It’s infused basically all of its...
Google’s still careful to say SGE is an experiment — but it’s a front-and-center one now. | Image: Google Google is moving slowly and carefully to make AI happen. Maybe too slowly and too carefully for some people. But if you opt in, a whole new search experience awaits. Continue reading…
Google today released MusicLM, a new experimental AI tool that can turn text descriptions into music. Available in the AI Test Kitchen app on the web, Android or iOS, MusicLM lets users type in a prompt like “soulful jazz for a dinner party” and have the tool create several versions of the song. When Google […]Google makes its text-to-music AI public by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Google is adding generative AI tools to apps like Docs, Gmail, and more. | Image: Google / The Verge In March, Google announced a bunch of AI features for its Workspace suite of apps in an effort to keep pace with Microsoft’s rapid integration of similar tools. At Google I/O, the company has new branding for this effort — Duet AI — but the features themselves are still not yet widely available to the general public. The company also teased a new feature called “Sidekick” that’s able to read, summarize, and answer questions on documents across different Google apps.Duet AI covers a...
Generative AI seems to be the only thing Google wants to talk about at its I/O developer conference this year and unsurprisingly, one of the prime surfaces for highlighting its AI smarts is its Workspace productivity suite. Earlier this year, the company already launched limited previews of new features that help users write (and rewrite) […]Google brings more AI tools to Workspace by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
PaLM 2 is Google’s latest and greatest AI language model. | Image: Google Google has announced PaLM 2: its latest AI language model and competitor to rival systems like OpenAI’s GPT-4. “PaLM 2 models are stronger in logic and reasoning, thanks to broad training in logic and reasoning,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai onstage at the company’s I/O conference. “It’s also trained on multilingual text spanning over 100 languages.” PaLM 2 is much better at a range of text-based tasks, Google senior research director Slav Petrov told journalists in a roundtable prior to the model’s...
At Google I/O today, the company announced that it was removing most waitlist restrictions and making Bard, the company’s generative AI chatbot more widely available, starting today in English. The idea is to continue to work on the chatbot, but with a larger group of people In a blog post announcing the change, Sissie Hsiao, […]Google ends Bard waitlist, making English version of chatbot widely available by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
When Google launched its Bard AI-chatbot, it didn’t compare all that favorably to the likes of Bing Chat and ChatGPT. Indeed, the launch was a bit of a disaster, with a Google ad featuring a wrong answer by Bard briefly tanking the company’s stock by 8%. Today, at its I/O developer conference, Google is hoping […]Google launches a smarter Bard by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
At its annual I/O conference, Google unveiled PaLM 2, the successor to its PaLM large language model for understanding and generating multilingual text. Google claims that it’s a significant improvement over its predecessor and that it even bests OpenAI’s GPT-4, depending on the task at hand. But it’s far from a panacea. Absent some hands-on […]Google’s PaLM 2 paper shows that text-generating AI still has a long way to go by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Image: Google Google’s latest Photos trick is a feature it’s calling Magic Editor, which uses generative AI to let you make major edits to a photo without professional tools. The company revealed the feature at Google I/O 2023.Google shared a couple examples of Magic Editor in action that are both pretty cool. In one, a photo of a person in front of a waterfall, Google entirely moves the person further to the side of the photo, erases people in the background, and makes the sky a prettier blue. Watch this GIF to see it all happen: GIF: Google In another photo, Magic Editor scoots a child on...
Google Photos is expanding its use of AI to help users edit and enhance their photos. While the company has already leveraged AI for its tools like the distraction-removing Magic Eraser and corrective Photo Unblur features in Photos, it’s now turning to AI for more complex edits with the introduction of Magic Editor. The new […]Google Photos to gain a new ‘Magic Editor’ feature powered by generative AI by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration: The Verge Google plans to tease the future of Search, Pixel devices, and more at what’s expected to be an AI-heavy event. Continue reading…
Mandopop singer Stefanie Sun has gone viral on Bilibili, China’s largest user-generated video streaming site. But the sudden revival of interest in Sun, who hasn’t released an album since 2017, comes not from the artist having another moment of genius. The songs that have attracted millions of views on Bilibili feature Sun’s voice cloned by […]China has its DrakeGPT moment as AI singer goes viral by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch
The AI startup world may be getting hotter by the day, but there’s a difference between a startup that uses AI and an AI-first startup — and the Allen Institute for AI prides itself on fostering the latter in its AI2 Incubator. Their previous $10 million fund did so well that the backers have returned […]AI2 Incubator’s new $30M fund triples down on early stage AI startups by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Salesforce is betting that generative AI will be at the center of its enterprise strategy, and it can fuel LLMs as a trusted data source.Salesforce is betting that its own content can bring more trust to generative AI by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Clearview AI, the US startup that’s attracted notoriety in recent years for a massive privacy violation after it scraped selfies off the Internet and used people’s data to build a facial recognition tool it pitched to law enforcement and others, has been hit with another fine in France over non-cooperation with the data protection regulator. […]Clearview fined again in France for failing to comply with privacy orders by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Sound Ventures, the eight-year-old, Beverly Hills, Ca.,-based venture firm led by general partners Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, and Effie Epstein, announced a new $240 million AI fund just last week. Turns out half of it is already invested in the three companies that it announced at the time that it rolled out the fund: OpenAI, […]Sound Ventures has already plugged half its new $240 million AI fund into three companies by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.Daily Crunch: IBM says its new Watsonx platform is an ‘enterprise studio for AI builders’ by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Every startup isn’t ready to hire a full-time marketer, but that’s no excuse to toss money out the window on paid acquisition.TechCrunch+ roundup: Unicorn origins, red flags for investors, generative AI meets copyright law by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
Photo Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge Airbnb is revamping its Rooms feature while eyeing AI and betting on work from anywhere. Continue reading…
Image: Anthropic Anthropic is a bit of an unknown quantity in the AI world. Founded by former OpenAI employees and keen to present itself as the safety-conscious AI startup, it’s received serious funding (including $300 million from Google) and a space at the top table, attending a recent White House regulatory discussion alongside reps from Microsoft and Alphabet. Yet, the firm is a blank slate to the general public; its only product is a chatbot named Claude, which is primarily available through Slack. What does Anthropic offer, exactly?According to co-founder Jared Kaplan, the answer is a...
Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Wendy’s is partnering with Google to create an AI chatbot that can take orders at its drive-thrus, as reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal. The fast-food chain has plans to bring its first “Wendy’s FreshAI” enabled drive-thru to a Columbus, Ohio, restaurant in June.The chatbot will be able to take verbal orders from customers who line up at Wendy’s drive-thru kiosks, all with the hope that it will help reduce long wait times. Wendy’s worked with Google to build a tailored chatbot on top of the company’s existing large language model (...
Investing in artificial intelligence (AI) startups is the latest bandwagon VCs are piling onto. But as last year’s crypto experts quickly work to rebrand as AI experts, they’ll have to compete with the VCs who have been investing in the category all along. Seattle-based Ascend is one of them. Firm founder and solo GP Kirby […]Ascend raises $25 million for pre-seed AI startups in the Pacific Northwest by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch
Spotify has reportedly pulled tens of thousands of tracks from generative AI company Boomy. It's said to have removed seven percent of the songs created by the startup's systems, which underscores the swift proliferation of AI-generated content on music streaming platforms.Universal Music reportedly told Spotify and other major services that it detected suspicious streaming activity on Boomy's songs. In other words, there were suspicions that bots were being used to boost listener figures and generate ill-gotten revenue for uploaders. Spotify pays royalties to artists and rights...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Meta has announced a new open-source AI model that links together multiple streams of data, including text, audio, visual data, temperature, and movement readings.The model is only a research project at this point, with no immediate consumer or practical applications, but it points to a future of generative AI systems that can create immersive, multisensory experiences and shows that Meta continues to share AI research at a time when rivals like OpenAI and Google have become increasingly secretive.The core concept of the research is linking together...
Image: _H0x0d_ (Twitter) Microsoft is expanding preview access to its Microsoft 365 Copilot, a digital assistant based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 that brings AI-powered capabilities across Microsoft 365 apps and services. The tech giant has also announced a new indexing tool that lets Copilot more accurately report on internal company data, alongside some new Copilot features for apps like Microsoft Whiteboard, Outlook, and PowerPoint.The company is launching the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program — an invitation-only paid preview that will initially be rolled out to 600 global customers...
Gai Sher Contributor Share on Twitter Gai Sher is senior counsel in the Innovation and Technology practice group at Greenspoon Marder LLP, where she represents and advises startups, emerging growth companies, brands, creators, and executives in media, technology, and consumer products in all aspects of commercial transactions. Ariela Benchlouch Contributor Share on Twitter A third-year […]Generative AI and copyright law: What’s the future for IP? by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
IBM, like pretty much every tech giant these days, is betting big on AI. At its annual Think conference, the company announced IBM Watsonx, a new platform that delivers tools to build AI models and provide access to pretrained models for generating computer code, text and more. It’s a bit of a slap in the […]IBM intros a slew of new AI services, including generative models by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration: The Verge Google’s I/O event is less than two days away, and a new CNBC report might have just revealed some of the major AI-focused updates to be announced at the show.One big component will be a new large language model (LLM), PaLM 2, which CNBC describes as a “general-use” LLM that is Google’s “most recent and advanced.” The LLM has apparently performed “a broad range of coding and math tests as well as creative writing tests and analysis,” according to CNBC, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see Google show off some of those capabilities onstage. (The first PaLM...
Synthetic speech can be a fearful object these days when paired with deepfakes and other AI deceptions, but it’s also an indispensable tool for anyone who can no longer speak on their own. Acapela Group has these folks squarely in mind with its new “my own voice” service, which lets anyone train an AI voice […]Acapela lets anyone back up their own voice for free in minutes — just in case by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
The AI pioneer is alarmed by how clever the technology he helped create has become. And it all started with a joke.
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive the full edition of the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point […]Waymo doubles its robotaxi footprint, Joby lands $180M and the latest sign generative AI has reached peak hype by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch
More capital went to AI startups in Q1 2023 than in the sequentially preceding quarter. In contrast, non-AI startups saw their capital inflows constrict over the same timeframe.The best way to avoid a down round is to found an AI startup by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
Álvaro Bernis / The Verge How we use the internet is changing fast, thanks to the advancement of AI-powered chatbots that can find information and redeliver it as a simple conversation. Continue reading…
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.Daily Crunch: New AI model DeepFloyd IF offers ‘advanced text-to-image generation techniques’ by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Amazon quietly acquired New York-based audio content discovery engine Snackable AI last December to boost its podcast features, as first reported by New York Post. The tech giant told TechCrunch in email on Friday that the Snackable AI team joined Amazon Music to work on existing podcast projects. The financial terms of the deal were […]Amazon quietly acquired audio content discovery engine Snackable AI to boost its podcast projects by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
Generative AI is pretty impressive in terms of its fidelity these days, as viral memes like Balenciaga Pope would suggest. The latest systems can conjure up scenescapes from city skylines to cafes, creating images that appear startlingly realistic — at least on first glance. But one of the longstanding weaknesses of text-to-image AI models is, […]With DeepFloyd, generative AI art gets a text upgrade by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
AMD’s AI-capable MI300 data center APU is set to arrive sometime later this year. | Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images Microsoft has allegedly teamed up with AMD to help bolster the chipmaker’s expansion into artificial intelligence processors. According to a report by Bloomberg, Microsoft is providing engineering resources to support AMD’s developments as the two companies join forces to compete against Nvidia, which controls an estimated 80 percent market share in the AI processor market.In turn, Bloomberg’s sources also claim that AMD is helping Microsoft to develop its own in-...
HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan told investors that generative AI is going to "rapidly” change the business landscape.As generative AI finds its footing in enterprise products, how will companies charge for its use? by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
Senzai’s technology measures impact, experimentation and optimization to determine which sales campaigns will appeal to customers.Senzai taps into AI optimization to guide LatAm companies to the right customers by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Regulator will examine technology behind software such as ChatGPT.
Vice President Kamala Harris also plans to meet with the chief executives of tech companies that are developing A.I. later on Thursday.
AI startup Hugging Face and ServiceNow Research, ServiceNow’s R&D division, have released StarCoder, a free alternative to code-generating AI systems along the lines of GitHub’s Copilot. Code-generating systems like DeepMind’s AlphaCode; Amazon’s CodeWhisperer; and OpenAI’s Codex, which powers Copilot, provide a tantalizing glimpse at what’s possible with AI within the realm of computer programming. Assuming […]Hugging Face and ServiceNow release a free code-generating model by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
The UK government has announced an initial impact review in response to the continued growth and concerns around generative AI and learning language models. The investigation will reportedly look at how the creation and distribution of AI technology impact five wide-reaching areas: appropriate transparency and explainability; accountability and governance; safety, security and robustness; fairness; and contestability and redress. Overall, the review aims to learn how AI foundation models can, and likely will, impact both competition and consumer protections. Regulating bodies tasked with...
Slack has evolved from a pure communications platform to one that enables companies to link directly to enterprise applications without having to resort to dreaded task switching. Today, at the Salesforce World Tour event in NYC, the company announced the next step in its platform’s evolution where it will be putting AI at the forefront […]Slack updates aim to put AI at the center of the user experience by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images The White House announced more funding and policy guidance for developing responsible artificial intelligence ahead of a Biden administration meeting with top industry executives. The actions include a $140 million investment from the National Science Foundation to launch seven new National AI Research (NAIR) Institutes, increasing the total number of AI-dedicated facilities to 25 nationwide. Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI and other companies have also agreed to allow their language models to be publicly evaluated during this year’s Def Con. The...
Microsoft is embarking on the next phase of Bing’s expansion. And — no surprise — it heavily revolves around AI. At a preview event this week in New York City, Microsoft execs including Yusuf Mehdi, the CVP and consumer chief marketing officer, gave members of the press including this reporter a look at the range […]Microsoft doubles down on AI with new Bing features by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
In the must-watch final season of “Succession,” Kendall Roy enters a conference room with his siblings. As the scene opens, he takes a seat and declares: “Who will be the successor? Me.” Of course, that scene didn’t appear on HBO’s hit show, but it’s a good illustration of generative AI’s level of sophistication compared to […]AI can’t replace human writers by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The security team at Meta is acknowledging broad occurrences of fake ChatGPT malware that exists to hack user accounts and take over business pages.In the company’s new Q1 security report, Meta shares that malware operators and spammers are following trends and high-engagement topics that get people’s attention. Of course, the biggest tech trend right now is AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Bing, and Bard, so tricking users into trying a fake version is now in fashion — sorry, crypto.Meta security analysts have found about 10 forms of malware posing as...
Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Google Bard may seem cutting edge, but the underlying infrastructure is nothing new.AI is just someone else’s computer by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch
Signaling that investments in the supply chain sector remain robust, Pando, a startup developing fulfillment management technologies, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series B round, bringing its total raised to $45 million. Iron Pillar and Uncorrelated Ventures led the round, with participation from existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Chiratae Ventures and […]AI-powered supply chain startup Pando lands $30M investment by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
After Google cut all but three of the projects at its in-house incubator Area 120 and shifted it to work on AI projects across Google, one of the legacy efforts — coincidentally also an AI project — is now officially exiting to Google. Checks, an AI-powered tool to check mobile apps for compliance with various […]Checks, the AI-powered data protection project incubated in Area 120, officially ‘exits’ to Google by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
Some onus lies on investors to make sure these new technologies are being built by founders with ethics in mind.Four investors explain why AI ethics can’t be an afterthought by Dominic-Madori Davis originally published on TechCrunch
Databricks today announced that it has acquired Okera, a data governance platform with a focus on AI. The two companies did not disclose the purchase price. According to Crunchbase, Okera previously raised just under $30 million. Investors include Felicis, Bessemer Venture Partners, Cyber Mentor Fund, ClearSky and Emergent Ventures. Data governance was already a hot […]Databricks acquires AI-centric data governance platform Okera by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
As brands incorporate generative AI into their creative workflows to generate new content associated with the company, they need to tread carefully to be sure that the new material adheres to the company’s style and brand guidelines. Nova is an early stage startup building a suite of generative AI tools designed to protect brand integrity, […]Nova is building guardrails for generative AI content to protect brand integrity by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
As public interest in generative AI chatbots grows, hackers are increasingly using ChatGPT-themed lures to spread malware across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. That’s according to Facebook’s parent company Meta, which said in a report out Wednesday that malware posing as ChatGPT was on the rise across its platforms. The company said that since March 2023, […]Hackers are increasingly using ChatGPT lures to spread malware on Facebook by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch
The legal spats between artists and the companies training AI on their artwork show no sign of abating. Within the span of a few months, several lawsuits have emerged over generative AI tech from companies including OpenAI and Stability AI, brought by plaintiffs who allege that copyrighted data — mostly art — was used without […]Spawning lays out plans for letting creators opt out of generative AI training by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
The real Joe Rogan at a comedy club in 2019. | Photo by Michael S. Schwartz/Getty Images On a recent podcast episode, you can hear Joe Rogan ask OpenAI founder Sam Altman whether society should be concerned about fake AI content. “How will we be able to tell what’s real and what’s not?” It was a particularly fitting question for the episode — since the entire hourlong conversation was generated by AI.Depending on whom you ask, AI is either an existential threat to every creative industry, a groundbreaking technology that will advance human civilization, or a kind of fun, dumb toy that...
In the high-stakes race for supremacy in the burgeoning field of generative AI, India’s bustling technology ecosystem is facing an uphill battle to catch up to global leaders. Despite being home to one of the world’s largest startup ecosystems, the South Asian economy has yet to make a material impact in the rapidly advancing AI […]Where is India in the generative AI race? by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.Daily Crunch: Due to ‘growing concerns about security risks,’ Samsung bans workers from using generative AI by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
In Roku’s recent quarter, the company posted better-than-expected revenue of $741 million, but worried investors with its warning of an uncertain ad market and declining average revenue per user. Today, at the IAB NewFronts, the streaming media company introduced its latest ad products to potentially help it address the latter, at least. These included new […]Roku touts its new ad products, including an AI that matches campaigns to TV moments by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Faraday Future is nearly out of cash and its long-delayed EV has yet to land in customers’ hands, which means this is the perfect time for the publicly-traded company to jump head first into the AI hype machine. Faraday Future said Tuesday it is adding generative AI to its first production car, the FF 91 […]Faraday Future is adding generative AI to its vaporware EV by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch
In the 19th century, electricity was the primary technology that was driving innovation, but it wasn’t until it was practically applied with inventions like the light bulb and the telephone that it stimulated the public’s imagination. With the release of ChatGPT last year, it triggered what some industry experts believe is a light bulb moment […]This could be AI’s light bulb moment by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
After Snap’s stock took a hit from its weak first-quarter earnings, the company today made its pitch to advertisers at IAB’s NewFronts where it introduced new ad products and opportunities. Here, Snap’s new President of Americas Rob Wilk, previously Microsoft’s Head of Advertising, and Chief Creative Officer Colleen DeCourcy, spoke about a test that allowed […]Snap announces tests of sponsored links in My AI, new ad products for Spotlight and Stories by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
One of the bigger trends in telecoms has been the evolution of cloud computing and how software operating in the cloud is being used by carriers to build out and manage their networks — moves disrupting traditional business models based around the purchasing and deployment of costly telecoms routers, switches and other costly physical equipment. […]Mavenir raises $100M to build more AI into its cloud-based automated network technology for telecoms services by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
A month after internal, sensitive data from Samsung was accidentally leaked to ChatGPT, Samsung is cracking down on usage of the generative AI service. The electronics giant is planning a temporary block of the use of generative AI tools on company-owned devices, covering computers, tablets, phones, as well as non-company-owned devices running on internal networks. […]Samsung bans use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT after April internal data leak by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch
We’re currently deep in the cycle of every enterprise-adjacent company integrating a large language model into its services. Today, New Relic is throwing its hat in the ring with Grok, which it calls the “world’s first generative AI assistant for observability” (and I’m sure it won’t be the last). Unsurprisingly, the idea here is to […]New Relic launches Grok, it’s AI observability assistant by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
We’ve seen a number of enterprise software companies making announcements related to generative AI in the last six weeks from established companies like Salesforce and Adobe to startups like Ada and Forethought. Box is the latest to be announcing its own flavor of the technology under the moniker Box AI, and it will be teaming […]Box is partnering with OpenAI to bring generative AI tools across the platform by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Several years ago, entrepreneur Dhiraj Sharma’s first company, a software consultancy, was hired by an HR tech firm to develop an app to improve the employee onboarding experience. Instead of creating a one-off, ad hoc solution, Sharma spearheaded a platform, Simpplr, which later spun off into its own company. Today, Simpplr sells what’s essentially an […]Simpplr raises $70M for its AI-powered intranet platform by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Halo reportedly tried surviving on targeted ads, user data, & creepy AI dreams.
Illustration: The Verge SwiftKey recently received Bing AI integration that puts Microsoft’s chatbot right at the fingertips of users who’ve installed the software keyboard. But now, the OpenAI-based search tool is making its way automatically onto pretty much every modern Samsung Galaxy device, SamMobile reports.You see, Samsung Galaxy devices use their own One UI Android launcher, and that launcher includes a SwiftKey keyboard integrated into the system. This means Microsoft’s Bing AI is straight up making a Kool-Aid entrance onto Galaxies. Last week, Microsoft also barged in on users...
As part of this year’s YouTube Newfront presentation, the company announced Monday that it’s rolling out all kinds of ad formats to its short-form feature Shorts. For instance, the company is expanding Shorts into its video reach campaigns. Video reach campaigns use Google AI to improve reach by combining ad formats like skippable and non-skippable […]YouTube gives advertisers new ad formats across Shorts by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge A redesigned Halo service was due this fall with an AI-powered personal trainer, celebrity-led fitness classes, and even Apple Watch support. But Amazon threw in the towel on Halo before it got there. Continue reading…
Illustration by Hugo Herrera for The Verge Major record labels are going after AI-generated songs, arguing copyright infringement. Legal experts say the approach is far from straightforward. Continue reading…
Geoffrey Hinton (foreground) has left Google to speak out on the dangers of AI. | Image: Getty Geoffrey Hinton, who alongside two other so-called “Godfathers of AI” won the 2018 Turing Award for their foundational work that led to the current boom in artificial intelligence, now says a part of him regrets his life’s work. Hinton recently quit his job at Google in order to speak freely about the risks of AI, according to an interview with the 75-year-old in The New York Times.“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” said Hinton, who...
In this increasingly AI-driven era, creative and media teams will probably need to employ the technology to up their game on analyzing their creative assets and A/B testing — or someone else will simply beat them to the punch. Alison is a startup out of Israel that analyzes creative work, such as typeface characters, colors, […]AI platform to analyze creative advertising raises $5.1M from investors, including a16z by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch
Snapchat Rolled out their generative AI chatbot, My AI to their 750 million monthly users so it feels like the right time to pause and ask whether we’re ready for the real thing – and ready or not, whether anybody wants one. This week on the TechCrunch Podcast, we’re talking to TechCrunch reporter Amanda Silberling about […]#NotMyAI and other TC news by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch
Never mind using AI to write stories — Walmart is finding it helpful for landing a good bargain. The retailer tellsBloomberg that it's using a chatbot from Pactum AI to automatically negotiate some supplier deals. The technology is not only saving an average of three percent on contracts, but preferable to the vendors. Three out of four suppliers prefer haggling with the AI over a human, Walmart says.Pactum's system just asks Walmart to set its budget and requirements, such as discounts and payment terms. It compares a supplier's demands with trends, commodity values and...
A developer build of Microsoft’s Edge browser displays an invitation to use the new Bing if the user is on Google’s Bard page. | Screenshot: Umar Shakir / The Verge Microsoft’s Edge can be a great Chromium browser alternative to Google’s Chrome, but the former is displaying some annoying new rivalry antics: advertising Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot while you’re trying out Google’s Bard AI. As pointed out by developer and Twitter user Vitor de Lucca, a new developer version of Edge will now display a new Bing ad next to the Google Bard URL.When pointing Edge to bard.google.com, a new...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This week Mary Ann, Natasha and Alex were especially chattery as they waded through a busy week in tech and startups. We’re talking AI. We’re talking layoffs. And we’re talking coffee. Here’s what we got into: Three […]Is First Republic just a victim of SVB’s collapse? by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch
This week, Devindra chats with Sam Rutherford about his recent experiences with ASUS’s ROG Ally, a powerful new Steam Deck competitor, and Nintendo’s long-awaited The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The ROG Ally sounds like one of the best portable gaming systems yet, though we’re still waiting for pricing details. And Zelda was apparently a blast to play, but of course it was. Also, Devindra and Podcast Producer Ben Ellman dive into the latest news, including the FAA grounding SpaceX’s Starship and Grimes’ decision to let people run free with her AI voice.Listen...
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.Daily Crunch: Citing slow growth and desire to be ‘at the forefront of the AI era,’ Dropbox CEO lays off 500 by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Microsoft Designer, Microsoft’s AI-powered design tool, today launched in public preview with an expanded set of features. Announced in October, Designer is a Canva-like web app that can generate designs for presentations, posters, digital postcards, invitations, graphics and more to share on social media and other channels. It leverages user-created content and DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s […]Microsoft makes its AI-powered Designer tool available in preview by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Investors continue to pump money into generative AI tech. Case in point, Replit, an IDE startup developing a code-generating AI-powered tool called Ghostwriter, this week raised nearly $100 million ($97.4 million) at a $1.16 billion post-money valuation. Andreessen Horowitz led the round — a Series B extension — with participation from Khosla Ventures, Coatue, SV […]Replit, the web-based IDE developing a GitHub Copilot competitor, raises $100M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
When Pinecone launched a vector database aimed at data scientists in 2021, it was probably ahead of its time. But as the use cases began to take shape last year, the company began pushing AI-driven semantic search. With the rise of LLMs in the public consciousness, companies are beginning to see the value of vector […]Pinecone drops $100M investment on $750M valuation, as vector database demand grows by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Cloud storage giant Dropbox today joined the fray of tech companies announcing layoffs. The company today announced that it would be laying off 16% of its staff, equivalent to about 500 employees, due to slowing growth, and — in the words of CEO Drew Houston — because “the AI era of computing has finally arrived.” […]Dropbox lays off 500 employees, 16% of staff, CEO says due to slowing growth and ‘the era of AI’ by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
The billionaire plans to compete with OpenAI, the ChatGPT developer he helped found, while calling out the potential harms of artificial intelligence.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Meta sees “an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors today.While he was vague about how exactly Meta will add generative AI to its apps, Zuckerberg gave the most detailed preview yet during the company’s earnings call for the first quarter of this year, when it reported $28.6 billion in revenue and a record 2 billion daily users of the Facebook app, beating Wall Street’s estimates. Meta’s profit for the quarter was $5.7 billion, a 24 percent...
Meta shared some updated engagement info around its platforms on its Q1 2023 quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, with Meta CFO Susan Li joining CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg to field questions from analysts about its results. Zuckerberg shared that time spent on Instagram has grown more than 24% since the company launched Reels on […]Meta says time spent on Instagram grew 24% thanks to TikTok-style AI Reel recommendations by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch
Instacart is introducing a few new ways for users to find deals on its app, the company has announced. The app will now surface a new “You Items on Sale” section on a store’s page that will leverage Instacart’s AI recommendation systems to help users find personalized deals based on their past orders. There’s also […]Instacart rolls out new ways for users to find deals on its app by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
Workplaces are increasingly adopting AI. Workers are wary — but not necessarily opposed, depending on the application.Workers are wary — but also optimistic — about AI by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Last week, a song using AI deepfakes of Drake and the Weeknd’s voices went viral, but neither major artist was involved in its creation. Meanwhile, Grimes has taken to Twitter to offer 50% royalties on any AI-generated song that uses her voice, then declared that she is interested in “killing copyright,” which would probably undermine […]From DrakeGPT to Infinite Grimes, AI-generated music strikes a chord by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
TikTok is experimenting with a new tool that allows users to create generative AI avatars, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The new tool was first spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra. The tool isn’t broadly available, and is currently being tested in a few select markets, the company said. With this test product, TikTok […]TikTok is testing an in-app tool that creates generative AI avatars by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
There is a shift in the air, and it feels like companies need to be thinking about how to put large language models to work, but as with any new advanced technology, it’s often easier said than done, especially for less technical organizations. AirOps, an early stage startup is in the right place at the […]AirOps is helping companies build AI-enabled applications on top of LLMs by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Today, Snapchat explained that its My AI bot might take a while to notice if you stop giving your location information to the app. That means that the bot retains the location details for a while before understanding that a user has stopped sharing that info. After Snapchat rolled out its AI-powered chatbot My AI […]Snap says its bot won’t notice instantly that you stopped sharing your location by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Tile, best known for its AirTag-like trackers that help you locate lost objects, can now find something that can get lost on purpose — your cat. The $40 Tile for Cats tracker from Life360 is a modified version of the Tile Sticker with a silicon collar attachment and 250 foot Bluetooth range. The idea is to give you peace of mind that your cat is somewhere in the house, and then help you figure out exactly where that sneaky floof is hiding. The battery on the Tile for Cats lasts a generous three years, and you can easily replace the sticker. It even offers AI assistant integration with...
Tinder today is rolling out an AI-powered update to its Photo Verification feature, which to date has allowed the app’s users to prove to others they’re neither a bot nor a catfisher. In the past, users would take pictures of themselves, posing as instructed, to become verified on the dating app and receive a blue […]Tinder’s verification process will now use AI and video selfies by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Tinder’s new video verification process. | Image: Tinder Tinder is fortifying its photo verification system with video — specifically, by asking members to take a series of video selfies to prove they’re actually the real person they claim to be and not just some AI hound dog. The new feature, announced today, is rolling out globally as the new method to verify your account — and will be needed to earn the coveted verified blue-checkmark (no, a billionaire is not going to just give it to you).The new Tinder process to verify yourself with a video selfie involves recording a video of...
You can compare this summary to the actual article if you’d like. | Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge Artifact, the recently launched news app from Instagram’s co-founders, announced a new AI feature on Tuesday that can summarize articles for you. But the best part about the feature is that it can summarize in different tones that are varying amounts of silly and surprisingly useful.If you’re on the latest version of the app, you can summarize an article you’re reading by tapping the “Aa” icon at the top of the screen and then on “Summarize.” After a moment, the summary will...
Runway, an AI startup that helped develop the AI image generator Stable Diffusion, launched its first mobile app yesterday to give users access to Gen-1, its video-to-video generative AI model. The app is currently only available on iOS devices. With the new app, users will be able to record a video from their phones and […]AI startup Runway launches app to bring users video-to-video generative AI by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
A developer is attempting to reverse-engineer APIs to grant anyone free access to popular AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 — legal ramifications be damned. The developer’s project, GPT4Free, blew up on GitHub over the past several days after links to it from Reddit went viral. At present, GPT4Free provides — or at least appears to […]A developer exploited an API flaw to provide free access to GPT-4 by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Apple is developing an AI-powered health coaching service codenamed Quartz, according to a new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The tech giant is reportedly also working on technology for tracking emotions, and plans to roll out an iPad version of the iPhone health app this year. The AI-powered health coaching service is designed to help […]Apple is reportedly developing an AI-powered health coaching service by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
Image: The Verge Apple is working on a paid AI-powered health coach that could help you improve your exercise, sleep, and eating habits, according to Bloomberg. Codenamed “Quartz,” the service will apparently “use AI and data from an Apple Watch to make suggestions and create coaching programs tailored to specific users,” Bloomberg reports. However, Quartz won’t be announced this year and is instead set to come out next year.The new Quartz service (and app) are just one of a few new health initiatives outlined in Bloomberg’s report. The iPad, for example, will finally be getting a...
Photo by Prince Williams/Wireimage AI Drake has struck again, and the latest track shows just how easy it is for someone to use a familiar celebrity voice to make a song go viral. The track, called “Not a Game,” first emerged on SoundCloud and YouTube late last week and arrived only days after a song from someone named Ghostwriter went viral for featuring Drake’s AI-generated voice. “Not a Game” got mentions in both TMZ and the Daily Mail, shining even more of a spotlight on the track.But it turns out, “Not a Game” isn’t exactly a brand-new song. The Verge found that the track...
It's not a huge surprise that the Republican National Committee (RNC) had attack ads ready to go whenever President Joe Biden officially announced his re-election campaign. What's novel this time is that the video uses imagery generated by artificial intelligence to present the RNC's vision of what the world may look like if Biden wins again in 2024. The RNC told Axios it was the first time it had used a video that was made entirely with AI. The ad starts by depicting Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at an election victory party. Although there's a faint disclaimer in...
Artifact, the personalized news aggregator from Instagram’s founders is further embracing AI with the launch of a new feature that will now summarize news articles for you. The company announced today it’s introducing a tool that generates article summaries with a tap of a button, in order to give readers the ability to understand the […]News app Artifact can now summarize stories using AI, including in fun styles by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
In its first-quarter earnings call, streaming music service Spotify talked in more detail about how AI advances are impacting its business. On the positive side, the company offered an update on the user adoption of its new AI DJ feature, which offers personalized music selections introduced by a realistic-sounding DJ voice powered by AI. But […]Spotify CEO says AI progress is both “really cool and scary,” may pose risk to creative industry by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
If you’ve added 'AI' to your pitch deck to make it more appealing, I have some bad news: FOMO is passé, and due diligence is the new black.TC+ roundup: Pitch coaching from 5 VCs, Black founder funding options, 3 fintech flubs by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
AI language models can be used to generate convincing text — as long as you remember to remove the label. | Image: The Verge A big worry about the rise of AI language models is that the internet will soon be subsumed in a tidal wave of automated spam. So far, these predictions have not yet come to pass (if they prove true at all), but we are seeing early signs that tools like ChatGPT are being used to power bots, generate fake reviews, and stuff the web with low-grade textual filler.If you want proof, try searching Google or Twitter for the phrase “as an AI language model.” When...
Yelp announced today that it’s introducing a series of new updates, including an enhanced AI-powered search experience and the ability to add videos to reviews. Yelp says it can now better understand a user’s search intent and highlight relevant information from reviews in new snippets that appear under each business listing in search results. For […]Yelp rolls out AI-powered search updates and the ability to add videos to reviews by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
Opera has released the early access version of its completely redesigned browser that it plans to launch for all platforms later this year. It's called Opera One, and it was designed to have a cleaner look with plenty of open space for future generative AI features and extensions in its sidebar and address bar. Opera says it has implemented a new multithreaded compositor and its new modular design principles for the browser to enable a fresh batch of features that include what it calls "tab islands."The browser has the capability to automatically and intuitively group websites people open based...
Opera has launched a new browser called Opera One, which will eventually replace its flagship browser. The Norway-based company said that this new browser has elements that will make it ready for a “generative AI-based future” without specifying what it means. The core feature for Opera One, which is being launched as a developer preview, […]Opera launches Opera One browser with a new tab grouping concept by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.Daily Crunch: App Store reviews and social media depict user backlash against Snapchat’s new AI chatbot by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
There’s a new trend emerging in the generative AI space — generative AI for cybersecurity — and Google is among those looking to get in on the ground floor. At the RSA Conference 2023 today, Google announced Cloud Security AI Workbench, a cybersecurity suite powered by a specialized “security” AI language model called Sec-PaLM. An […]Google brings generative AI to cybersecurity by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Petey, the mobile app that introduced ChatGPT to Apple Watch users, recently brought its feature set to the iPhone, allowing users to access its AI assistant more quickly and even swap out Siri with Petey using Apple’s Shortcuts. Now, Petey has a new trick up its sleeve. In its latest update, out today, the app […]AI app Petey uses ChatGPT to make Apple Music playlists for you by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Developer platform GitLab today announced a new AI-driven security feature that uses a large language model to explain potential vulnerabilities to developers, with plans to expand this to automatically resolve these vulnerabilities using AI in the future. Earlier this month, the company announced a new experimental tool that explains code to a developer — similar […]GitLab’s new security feature uses AI to explain vulnerabilities to developers by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Canadian synth-pop artist Grimes says AI artists can use her voice without worrying about copyright or legal enforcement. “I’ll split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice. Same deal as I would with any artist i collab with,” she tweeted on Sunday. “Feel free to use my voice without penalty. I have no label and no legal bindings.”The musician’s declaration comes in the wake of streaming platforms removing an AI-generated song using simulated voices of Drake and The Weeknd. Universal Music Group (UMG), which represents both artists, called for the purge...
Runway’s new iOS app is its first available for mobile. | Image: Runway AI startup Runway has launched its first mobile app on iOS, letting people use the company’s video-to-video generative AI model — Gen-1 — directly from their phones. You can download the app here, with free users offered a limited number of credits. Gen-1 allows you to transform an existing video based on a text, image, or video input. Functionally, it works a lot like a style transfer tool (though, unlike style transfer, it generates entirely new videos as an output rather than applying filters). You can upload a...
The user reviews for Snapchat’s “My AI” feature are in — and they’re not good. Launched last week to global users after initially being a subscriber-only addition, Snapchat’s new AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT technology is now pinned to the top of the app’s Chat tab where users can ask it questions and get […]Snapchat sees spike in 1-star reviews as users pan the ‘My AI’ feature, calling for its removal by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic While major record labels have been trying to fend off songs using AI voice tracks of famous artists, Grimes has other ideas.“I’ll split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice,” Grimes posted on Twitter Sunday night. “Feel free to use my voice without penalty,” she said, claiming she has no label and “no legal bindings.”At this point, Grimes’ Sunday night tweet seems to be just that — a late-night tweet that maybe, possibly, potentially could become something in the future. Grimes didn’t add much detail as to how...
The UK government doesn't want to sit idle while foundational AI models like ChatGPT flourish. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan have pledged an initial £100 million (about $124.5 million) to establish a Foundation Model Taskforce. The team will develop AI that ideally makes the country "globally competitive," and will work with the industry to make these systems safer and more reliable.The taskforce is inspired by the COVID-19 vaccine unit from the height of the pandemic. The group will report directly to both the Prime Minister and Technology Secretary...
For all the investment speculation and hype, cryptocurrency has so far struggled to find meaningful use cases. Now there’s some effort from Singapore to turn the general public into crypto adopters through blockchain payments. Cosmose AI, a nine-year-old company that uses AI analytics to track in-store foot traffic and engage with shoppers online, is partnering […]Now valued at $500M, Cosmose ditches Stripe to adopt Near’s crypto solution by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch
Hello, friends, and welcome to the latest edition of Week in Review (WiR), the weekly newsletter where we recap the past several days (or so) in tech news. We’d argue that there’s no better way to get your news fix, but we’d be biased. Still! Trust us when we say it’s a labor of love. […]AI-generated chart toppers, Apple gets into savings, and Microsoft drops Twitter by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smartKevin Schaul, Szu Yu Chen and Nitasha Tiku, The Washington PostAI chatbots are all the rage on the internet right now, but how much do you know about how the tech is being trained? The Washington Post explains how text that's mostly scraped from the internet is ingested and transformed into human-like speech, including training material from "proprietary, personal and often offensive websites."Why social media impostors pose a constant battle for starsJ. Clara Chan, The Hollywood ReporterBeing a celebrity in the social...
Silicon Valley’s quest to automate everything is unceasing, which explains its latest obsession: Auto-GPT. In essence, Auto-GPT uses the versatility of OpenAI’s latest AI models to interact with software and services online, allowing it to “autonomously” perform tasks like X and Y. But as we are learning with large language models, this capability seems to […]What is Auto-GPT and why does it matter? by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
In Silicon Valley, some of the brightest minds believe a universal basic income (UBI) that guarantees people unrestricted cash payments will help them to survive and thrive as advanced technologies eliminate more careers as we know them, from white collar and creative roles — lawyers, journalists, artists, software engineers — to labor jobs. The idea […]As AI eliminates jobs, a way to keep people afloat financially (that’s not UBI) by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch
EU lawmakers in the European parliament are closing in on how to tackle generative AI as they work to fix their negotiating position so that the next stage of legislative talks can kick off in the coming months. The hope then is that a final consensus on the bloc’s draft law for regulating AI can […]EU lawmakers eye tiered approach to regulating generative AI by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Google’s conversation AI tool Bard can now help software developers with programming, including generating code, debugging and code explanation— a new set of skills that were added in response to user demand. Coding has been one of the top requests Google has received from users, according to Friday a blog post by Google Research product […]Google’s Bard AI chatbot can now generate and debug code by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch
In March, Spotify launched its first AI-powered feature with the debut of its AI DJ — a smart audio guide with a convincingly realistic voice. That AI persona was actually based on a real person, as it turns out — Spotify’s Head of Cultural Partnerships, Xavier “X” Jernigan, who had the honor of becoming the […]Xaviar ‘X’ Jernigan, the voice of Spotify’s DJ, explains what it’s like to become an AI by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
Photonic chips — and the startups creating them — have a long way to go before reaching the mainstream.Is there a future in light-powered AI chips? by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Chaudhry wearing Humane’s device in his breast pocket, activating it with the press of a button. | Image: TED Humane, the startup founded by ex-Apple employees Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, has given a first live demo of its new device; a wearable gadget with a projected display and AI-powered features intended to act as a personal assistant. Chaudhri, who serves as Humane’s chairman and president, demoed the device onstage during a TED talk, a recording of which has been acquired by Inverse and others ahead of its expected public release on April 22nd.“It’s a new kind of...
As Google looks to maintain pace in AI with the rest of the tech giants, it’s consolidating its AI research divisions. Google today announced Google DeepMind, a new unit made up of the DeepMind team and the Google Brain team from Google Research. In a blog post, DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis said that […]Google consolidates AI research divisions into Google DeepMind by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
In March, Discord announced that it had integrated OpenAI’s technology into its bot named Clyde, turning into an AI-powered chatbot. Just like with any other chatbot launched in the last few months, users have been trying to trick Clyde into saying things it’s not supposed to say, a process colloquially known as a “jailbreaking.” This […]Jailbreak tricks Discord’s new chatbot into sharing napalm and meth instructions by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai originally published on TechCrunch
Who wrote it, the novelist or the technology? How about both? Stephen Marche experiments with teaching artificial intelligence to write with him, not for him.
Image: Adobe Adobe is launching a new feature for its Illustrator graphic design software that allows users to quickly adjust the color scheme of vector-based images through generative AI. Users can upload their own Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) files to Illustrator’s Vector Recoloring tool to generate different colors and palette variations within seconds, either by typing out a text description or selecting from a list of sample prompts.Illustrator Vector Recoloring — which Adobe claims is the first-ever generative AI-powered vector tool to hit the market — is being introduced as the...
Google's advertising customers will soon be able to use the company's generative artificial intelligence to create ad campaigns, according to the Financial Times. Apparently, the tech giant is gearing up to embed its generative AI, the same technology powering its Bard chatbot, into its Performance Max program. Performance Max can already help customers determine where their ads should run and generate simple ad copy. But the Times' says the AI's addition will give it the capability to create sophisticated campaigns similar to those designed by marketing agencies. The...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Stability AI, the company behind the AI-powered Stable Diffusion image generator, has released a suite of open-source large language models (LLMs) collectively called StableLM. In a post shared on Wednesday, the company announced that its models are now available for developers to use and adapt on GitHub.Like its ChatGPT rival, StableLM is designed to efficiently generate text and code. It’s trained on a larger version of the open-source dataset known as the Pile, which encompasses information from a range of sources, including Wikipedia, Stack Exchange...
Image: Ghostwriter / YouTube The generative AI music hype train only needed about 48 hours to go from “oh, that’s interesting” to full Balenciaga pope territory, and while it’s clear someone is using the technology to run a scheme, we’re still not sure who it is. Here’s the short version:Someone made an AI-generated Drake voice rapping an Ice Spice track, to which Drake posts on Instagram, “This is the final straw AI.” The same weekend, an unknown TikTok user, @ghostwriter977, goes viral for an AI-generated Drake song featuring The Weeknd. The lyrics are apparently Ghostwriter...
If young Metro don’t trust you, I’m gonna... tie you up in a decade of fair use litigation. Continue reading…
Snapchat’s AI chatbot is now opening up to a global audience, the company announced today at its Snap Partner Summit. Initially launched in February, the feature allows Snapchat’s paid subscribers to chat with an AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT technology directly in its app. To date, users have sent nearly 2 million messages per […]Snapchat opens its AI chatbot to global users, says the AI will later Snap you back by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
You can now change the look of Snap’s My AI. | Image: Snap The OpenAI-powered chatbot is also being added to group chats, gaining the ability to make recommendations for things like AR filters, and will soon be able to even generate photos inside Snapchat. Continue reading…
Atlassian today announced the launch of Atlassian Intelligence, the company’s AI-driven ‘virtual teammate’ that leverages the company’s own models in conjunction with OpenAI’s large language models to create custom teamwork graphs and enable features like AI-generated summaries Confluence and test plans in Jira Software, or rewriting responses to customers in Jira Service Management. These new […]Atlassian brings an AI assistant to Jira and Confluence by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration: The Verge Google employees repeatedly criticized the company’s chatbot Bard in internal messages, labeling the system “a pathological liar” and beseeching the company not to launch it.That’s according to an eye-opening report from Bloomberg citing discussions with 18 current and former Google workers as well as screenshots of internal messages. In these internal discussions, one employee noted how Bard would frequently give users dangerous advice, whether on topics like how to land a plane or scuba diving. Another said, “Bard is worse than useless: please do not launch...
One of the promises of generative AI is the ability to create code based on a written request. This can lead to the ability to generate SQL queries and simple API calls to move work between systems. Salesforce is laying the foundation for a generative AI-driven workflow system, and it’s in the early stages of […]Salesforce is working on a pair of new generative AI-driven workflow tools by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
While Generative AI is buzzy right now, what OpenAI, Microsoft and Google are doing may be only part of the story. There is also the process of using biology: the idea of using stem cells to create biocomputers that could potentially be smarter and more energy efficient than what we are used to today. Australian […]Cortical Labs raises $10M for its Pong-playing stem cells which eventually could power AI by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch
In a Congressional hearing on Tuesday focused on the Federal Trade Commission’s work to protect American consumers from fraud and other deceptive practices, FTC Chair Lina Khan and fellow commissioners warned House representatives of the potential for modern AI technologies, like ChatGPT, to be used to “turbocharge” fraud. The warning was issued in response to […]FTC warns Congress that AI technology like ChatGPT could ‘turbocharge’ fraud and scams by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Reddit has collected a treasure trove of human interactions and conversations throughout the past 18 years and this rich data pool has been the perfect spot for companies to train large language models, otherwise known as AI chatbots. Now, Reddit wants a piece of the AI pie and will begin charging companies for API access, which is necessary to train LLMs.After all, these are not mom-and-pop companies using the API to train AI chatbots. Bigwigs like Google and OpenAI use Reddit to help provide initial guidance to burgeoning artificial intelligence services. To that end, Reddit is introducing a...
At the Imagination in Action event last week at MIT, a number of industry folks talked about what it takes to build a successful AI startup.So you want to launch an AI startup by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Softr's quick revenue expansion is a good reminder that there's more to keep an eye on than just AI.Amid the AI hype, don’t forget about no-code by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
Set in an alt-near future reality, Peacock’s newest original series, “Mrs. Davis,” releasing on April 20, is edging towards being a little too believable—minus the kidnapping Germans, an elusive Holy Grail, and a life-threatening venture inside a gargantuan whale. The show centers around an all-knowing AI that’s designed to satisfy its users, sending them on […]Let’s talk about ‘Mrs. Davis’ and the show’s wild approach to AI by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
Mediwhale co-founder and CEO Kevin Choi discovered that he had lost nearly half of one of his eyes from glaucoma when he was 24, which is rare in young people. “I was devastated and could not believe this was happening to me,” Choi told TechCrunch. “There were no [initial] symptoms for me to recognize. If […]AI-powered retina scanning startup Mediwhale raises $9M by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch
Microsoft has worked with Qualcomm and AMD on custom chips in the past. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Microsoft is reportedly working on its own AI chips that can be used to train large language models and avoid a costly reliance on Nvidia. The Information reports that Microsoft has been developing the chips in secret since 2019, and some Microsoft and OpenAI employees already have access to them to test how well they perform for the latest large language models like GPT-4.Nvidia is the key supplier of AI server chips right now, with companies racing to buy up these chips and...
Adobe debuted its Firefly generative AI initiative last month, showcasing first a model trained on its own Adobe Stock images, and then yesterday it unveiled what it’s working on initially around video and audio editing. The features sound like powerful, efficiency-enhancing additions to a creative workflow – but they also sound poised to replace a […]Goodbye to the fat middle by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch
On Tuesday, Elon Musk said in an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that he wants to develop his own chatbot called TruthGPT, which will be “a maximum truth-seeking AI” — whatever that means. The Twitter owner said that he wants to create a third option to OpenAI and Google with an aim to “create […]Elon Musk wants to develop TruthGPT, “a maximum truth-seeking AI” by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Laura Normand / The Verge Elon Musk says he’s working on “TruthGPT,” a ChatGPT alternative that acts as a “maximum truth-seeking AI.” The billionaire laid out his vision for an AI rival during an interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, saying an alternative approach to AI creation was needed to avoid the destruction of humanity.“I’m going to start something which I call TruthGPT or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” Musk said. “And I think this might be the best path to safety in the sense that an AI that cares about...
You can now use the Roomba j7’s camera to check in on your home. Today, an alert popped up on my iRobot app telling me I could now use the j7 Combo robot vacuum to see a live view of my home, should I want to. A new beta feature called Remote Check In turns the company’s flagship robot vacuum into a livestreaming security camera. iRobot is playing catch-up here; lots of robot vacuum manufacturers have had the live view camera function for a while now (including Samsung’s JetBot AI and models from Roborock and Ecovacs). But I was intrigued to see how the Roomba would handle this new task....
Over the weekend, we started a cult. It was one of those things that happen when you decide to stop drinking for a few weeks. It’s an avocado-oriented octopus cult called Octo-guacamolians. But that’s not important right now. What is important is that we fed the parameters of the cult into GPT-4, and it came […]Was I an AI all along? by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
A song featuring the voices of Drake and The Weeknd called “Heart On My Sleeve” has amassed over 250,000 Spotify streams and 10 million views on TikTok. But the two renowned musicians had nothing to do with the song — an artist going by the name “ghostwriter” generated the song using AI. Drake and The […]Uh-oh — an AI-generated song by Drake and The Weeknd went viral by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
YouTube TV just won its first-ever Technical Emmy award for its “Views” feature, which lets users access sports highlights, key plays, player stats and game scores. At the 74th annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards, YouTube TV was declared the winner for the category “AI-ML Curation of Sports Highlights.” “Thank you to the Academy for […]YouTube TV nabs its first-ever Technical Emmy win for ‘Views’ feature by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
A month ago, Adobe announced Firefly, its entry into the generative AI game. Initially, Firefly’s focus was on generating commercially safe images, but the company is now pushing its technology beyond still images. As the company announced today, it will soon bring Firefly to its Creative Cloud video and audio applications. To be clear, you […]Adobe brings Firefly to its video tools by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Hello, friend! Much like yourself, the TechCrunch+ crew has been working to stay up to date, and get ahead on all things generative AI. With the rapid evolution of AI models, it’s hard to keep up. But don’t worry. TechCrunch+ has your back. Building off of TechCrunch’s regular drumbeat of AI coverage, we’re going deeper […]What’s new in the world of generative AI? by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
Image: AT&T / Cherish Medical AT&T has teamed up with medical sensor manufacturer Cherish Health to create a claimed “industry first” radar device capable of detecting emergency conditions and monitoring people who are at risk of falling. It can do this across multiple rooms throughout the home, even through walls. Dubbed the Cherish Serenity, the device uses a combination of AT&T cellular connectivity and Cherish’s radar and AI technology to detect body position, movement, and biometrics without requiring cameras or wearable trackers.The device is designed to help older...
Illustration: The Verge Google will release new AI-powered search tools next month, with even more features coming in the fall, reports The New York Times. The new features will be available exclusively in the US, and will be released initially to a maximum of one million users, says the NYT. It’s not clear exactly what the tools will offer, but they will likely build on the conversational promise of Google’s experimental Bard chatbot. They’re being developed under the codename “Magi.”The plans are part of Google’s efforts to meet the threat posed by new systems like Microsoft’s...
The tech giant is sprinting to protect its core business with a flurry of projects, including updates to its search engine and plans for an all-new one.
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of the last week’s stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. The biggest news of the last […]The week in AI: OpenAI attracts deep-pocketed rivals in Anthropic and Musk by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration by Lille Allen / The Verge Elon Musk has created a new company dedicated to artificial intelligence — and it’s called X.AI, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The company, which a Nevada filing indicates was incorporated last month, currently has Musk as its director and Jared Birchall, the director of Musk’s family office, listed as its secretary. The filing, which The Verge has also obtained, indicates that Musk incorporated the business on March 9th, 2023.Rumors about Musk starting up an AI company have been floating around for days, with a report from Business...
Microsoft has begun integrating Bing AI capabilities into its popular keyboard app SwiftKey. While the third-party tool already includes some AI features, like learning from users' writing styles to make suggestions. Once a user clicks on the Bing button, which is located on the top left side of the keyboard, it offers three options: Search, Tone and Chat. Say you want to know which dessert pairs best with lasagna, just type that in to the search bar as you converse. Chat will suggest responses that it feels are in keeping with the messages or emails it's responding to. Tone...
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.Daily Crunch: Amazon’s new Bedrock cloud service lets developers incorporate generative AI by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
In a sign that the seed-stage AI segment is still alive and kicking, Betaworks, the startup studio and VC firm, is launching a new program that’ll award around ten companies working on AI $500,000 in funding. Scheduled to run from mid-June until mid-September, Betaworks’ program — the ninth of its kind — will provide startups […]Betaworks’ new ‘camp’ aims to fund transformative early-stage AI startups by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon is making its AI-powered coding assistant free for individual developers, undercutting the $10 per month pricing of its Microsoft-made rival. In a post shared on Thursday, Amazon announced that its CodeWhisperer tool is now available to everyone who signs up to use it.Amazon launched CodeWhisperer as a preview last year, which developers can use within various integrated development environments (IDEs), like Visual Studio Code, to generate lines of code based on a text-based prompt. While it was originally only made available to Amazon Web Services...
Stability AI, the startup funding a range of generative AI experiments, has released a new version of Stable Diffusion, the text-to-image AI system that was among the first to rival OpenAI’s DALL-E 2. Called Stable Diffusion XL, or SDXL, the new system — which is available in beta through DreamStudio, Stability AI’s generative art tool […]Stability AI’s new model is slightly better at generating hands by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
In the past couple of weeks, already an ice-age ago in AI hype terms, a number of very well known names in tech (Elon Musk! Woz!) signed an open letter calling for a halt on the development of AI models more powerful that OpenAI-s GPT-4 — arguing humanity needs time for planning and management around […]Unpicking the rules shaping generative AI by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
The ecommerce giant doesn’t have a ChatGPT rival, but it wants to sell you the tools you need to build one.
Generative AI, particularly text-to-image AI, is attracting as many lawsuits as it is venture dollars. Two companies behind popular AI art tools, Midjourney and Stability AI, are entangled in a legal case that alleges they infringed on the rights of millions of artists by training their tools on web-scraped images. Separately, stock image supplier Getty Images […]This startup wants to train art-generating AI strictly on licensed images by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Amazon is throwing its hat into the generative AI ring. But rather than build AI models entirely by itself, it’s recruiting third parties to host models on AWS. AWS today unveiled Amazon Bedrock, which provides a way to build generative AI-powered apps via pretrained models from startups including AI21 Labs, Anthropic and Stability AI. Available […]With Bedrock, Amazon enters the generative AI race by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
If you've been putting off any spring cleaning — who hasn't? — now might be the time to consider a helper. Robot vacuums have been popping up everywhere and, though they can be pricier than a do-it-yourself option, the Shark AI Ultra 2-in-1 robot vacuum is currently making a play for your home with a 43 percent off sale. It's still not an impulse buy in the check out lane, but, at $400 versus $700, it's the best deal we've seen since it launched.This 2-in-1 model uses smart home mapping to clean in a precise grid, empties itself and has improved suction power. Shark also claims the mops can...
The march toward an open source ChatGPT-like AI continues. Today, Databricks released Dolly 2.0, a text-generating AI model that can power apps like chatbots, text summarizers and basic search engines. It’s the successor to the first-generation Dolly, which was released in late March. And — importantly — it’s licensed to allow independent developers and companies […]Databricks open-sources a model like ChatGPT, flaws and all by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
ChatGPT, Bard and Bing AI: You can’t escape the AI models and chatbot evolution and headlines. Now, the US government is trying to get a handle on things. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is asking for public comments on possible regulations to hold AI creators accountable. The measures will ideally help the Biden administration ensure these models work as promised "without causing harm," the NTIA says. Hopefully, they’ll also speak to experts, too, and not just rely on the anonymous internet public.ChatGPT and similar generative AI models have already...
For a firm whose bets are largely unpredictable, the early-stage venture firm Future Ventures has become very formulaic in its fundraising. Now entering its fifth year, the firm just closed a $200 million fund – its third in a row. In fact, it would have exactly $600 million under management at this point if not […]Talking with Future Ventures about its new fund, AI hype, and Siri sucking by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch
More than a month after hiring a couple of former DeepMind researchers, Twitter is reportedly moving forward with an in-house artificial intelligence project. According to Business Insider, Elon Musk recently bought 100,000 GPUs for use at one of the company’s two remaining data centers. A source told the outlet the purchase shows Musk is “committed” to the effort, particularly given the fact there would be little reason for Twitter to spend so much money on datacenter-grade GPUs if it didn’t plan to use them for AI work.The project reportedly involves the creation of a generative AI...
Chinese regulators have proposed restrictive rules around AI models like ChatGPT being built in the country, requiring user identification, security reviews, and prohibiting “any content that subverts state power, advocates the overthrow of the socialist system, incites splitting the country or undermines national unity.” The rules come hot on the heels of Chinese tech companies […]Prohibition of AI that ‘subverts state power’ in China may chill its nascent industry by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Over the last few months, the world’s two biggest economies have been racing to showcase their generative AI capabilities. ChatGPT, Midjourney, the new Bing and others have captivated tens of millions of users around the world. In China, entrepreneurs are racing to match their American counterparts. Baidu rolled out a ChatGPT equivalent, for instance. Today, […]Alibaba unveils ambitions for a copilot as China steps up scrutiny over generative AI by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch
Infogrid, a startup that uses AI to collect and analyze data on things like air quality, occupancy and energy consumption, today announced that it raised $90 million in a Series B round led by Northzone and AO Proptech. William Cowell de Gruchy, Infogrid’s CEO, says that the cash will be put toward product development, strategic […]Infogrid raises $90M for its AI-driven building monitoring tech by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
What would happen if you filled a virtual town with AIs and set them loose? As it turns out, they brush their teeth and are very nice to one another! But this unexciting outcome is good news for the researchers who did it, since they wanted to produce “believable simulacra of human behavior” and got […]Researchers populated a tiny virtual town with AI (and it was very wholesome) by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
An app called Poe will now let users make their own chatbot using prompts combined with an existing bot, like ChatGPT, as the base. First launched publicly in February, Poe is the latest product from the Q&A site Quora, which has long provided web searchers with answers to the most Googled questions. With chatbots now […]Poe’s AI chatbot app now lets you make your bots using prompts by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Sitting through hundreds of startups on YC Demo Days, you’re not always sure whether you are actually perceiving patterns or if your brain, as coffee battles with monotony, is inventing them in a kind of pareidolia for business plans. This year, though, the theme was pretty obvious: “AI can do that, probably! Maybe.” Certainly today’s […]YC’s latest batch sure was a lot of ‘maybe AI can do… this?’ by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
The advent of generative AI has the potential to be the biggest change to enterprise software interfaces since the graphical user interface.Generative AI could transform the way we interact with enterprise software by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Human eyes — and even technology — often struggle to identify images created by artificial intelligence. Experts fear that may hasten an erosion of trust in media, in government and in society.
Artificial intelligence in its current form is based on the wholesale appropriation of existing culture, and the notion that it is actually intelligent could be actively dangerousArchive: BBC Continue reading...
David was passionate, courteous and (artificially) intelligent.
AI research startup Anthropic aims to raise as much as $5 billion over the next two years to take on rival OpenAI and enter over a dozen major industries, according to company documents obtained by TechCrunch. A pitch deck for Anthropic’s series C fundraising round discloses these and other long-term goals for the company, which […]Anthropic’s $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
The tech world’s hottest new toy may find itself in legal hot water as AI’s tendency to invent news articles and events comes up against defamation laws. Can an AI model like ChatGPT even commit libel? Like so much surrounding the technology, it’s unknown and unprecedented — but upcoming legal challenges may change that. Defamation […]Can AI commit libel? We’re about to find out by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
As generative AI proliferates, it’s beginning to reach the ads we hear on podcasts and the radio. Startup Adthos this week launched a platform that uses AI to generate scripts for audio ads — and even add voiceovers, sound effects and music. Customers can optionally go in and edit the ads using a browser-based, multi-track […]Adthos uses generative AI to completely automate audio ads by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
India does not plan to regulate the growth of AI within the South Asian market, identifying the sector as a “significant and strategic” area for the nation. This stance arrives at a time when numerous voices are calling for increased scrutiny of the rapidly advancing technology. The Ministry of Electronics and IT said in a […]India opts against AI regulation by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch
Amazon’s first foray into the world of accelerator programs, designed to help early-stage startups build and launch, was focused on conversational AI back in 2016. Now, seven years later, Amazon has another AI accelerator – this time led by Amazon Web Services with a focus on the newest zeitgeist: generative artificial intelligence. Announced today, AWS […]Amazon wants to boost ten generative AI startups around the globe by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch
Data has emerged as one of the world’s greatest resources, underpinning everything from video-recommendation engines and digital banking, to the burgeoning AI revolution. But in a world where data has become increasingly distributed across locations, from databases to data warehouses to data lakes and beyond, combining it all into a compatible format for use in […]Dozer exits stealth to help any developer build real-time data apps ‘in minutes’ by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch
Companies at the forefront of AI would naturally like to stay at the forefront, so it’s no surprise they want to stay close to smaller startups that are putting some of their newest advancements to work. Last month, for example, Neo, a startup accelerator founded by Silicon Valley investor Ali Partovi, announced that OpenAI and Microsoft […]Amid a boom in AI accelerators, a UC Berkeley-focused outfit, House Fund, swings open its doors by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch
Evan Buhler moved to San Francisco’s Hayes Valley three months ago to build an AI company that would combine the buzzy technology and his experience as a startup attorney. At the time, he didn’t realize he had moved to the heart of a movement. Hayes Valley, which has been nicknamed “Cerebral Valley” by tech enthusiasts […]‘There’s too much opportunity’ in Cerebral Valley by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch
Financial fraud and other online crime continue to present major threats to businesses, and they remain a key focus for regulators requiring more rigorous efforts to keep illicit activity at bay. Now, Quantexa — one of the big startups providing AI and other tools to major banks and others in financial services, governments and other […]Quantexa raises $129M at a $1.8B valuation to help navigate online fraud and customer data management by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
Generative AI is hot among venture capital firms now, with $4.5 billion invested in 2022. Narrato, a AI content creation and collaboration platform, announced today it has joined the ranks of other generative AI startups with VC funding. Based in San Francisco, Narrato raised a $1 million pre-seed round led by AirTree Ventures, the Australian […]AirTree backs generative AI content creation and management platform Narrato by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of the last week’s stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. In one of the more surprising […]The week in AI: The pause request heard ’round the world by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
As digital financial services become more advanced, so too do the efforts of malicious hackers and fraudsters to crack into those valuable systems — and so too do the efforts of regulators to build better structures to avoid that abuse. To help the finance sector meet those demands, an Amsterdam-based startup called Fourthline has built […]AI startup Fourthline locks down $54M to bring better ID checks and compliance tools to the finance sector by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
Krablr, the real-time crab pricing engine for amateur fishermen, has announced yet another pivot in its business model. Following a successful transition from crab pricing to crab futures trading, the company is now setting its sights on a new, cutting-edge technology: generative AI. Krablr’s latest pivot is focused on developing a new language in which […]Krablr develops generative AI language to boost crab yields by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
A group of well-known AI ethicists have written a counterpoint to this week’s controversial letter asking for a 6-month “pause” on AI development, criticizing it for a focus on hypothetical future threats when real harms are attributable to misuse of the tech today. Thousands of people, including such familiar names as Steve Wozniak and Elon […]Ethicists fire back at ‘AI Pause’ letter they say ‘ignores the actual harms’ by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Emad Mostaque, the CEO and founder of open source platform Stability AI, hinted at plans to go public in the next few years, during the Cerebral Valley AI Conference in San Francisco on Thursday. He also shut down the idea that Stability AI, an Open AI rival and leader in the generative artificial intelligence space, […]Stability AI CEO has the ambition to IPO in next few years by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch
The generative AI race is on, and the current frontrunners appear to be Google's Bard and Microsoft's Bing AI, which is powered by ChatGPT. The two companies are also rushing to stuff their AI into all their software and productivity offerings, and look set to change the way we search and interact with the internet. But right now, both Bard and Bing are highly experimental and flawed, as they begin to conduct conversations with larger groups of the population and learn how to work with humans. That makes it the perfect time for us to prod and poke at the pair of chatbots and see...
Where we’re heading tomorrow, next year and beyond.
Two days after an open letter called for a moratorium on more powerful generative AI models being developed so regulators can catch up with the likes of ChatGPT, Italy’s data protection authority has just put out a timely reminder that some countries do have laws that already apply to cutting edge AI — by ordering […]Italy orders ChatGPT blocked citing data protection concerns by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Summarization is one of the common use cases of different AI models. Multiple tools have come up with a summarization of articles, PDFs, videos, and transcripts. Meeting intelligence tool Read has introduced a new feature that trims an hour-long meeting into a two-minute clip with important pointers. The company said that it is using large […]Read’s AI-powered summary feature squeezes a meeting into a two-minute clip by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Open source "text2video" ModelScope AI made the viral sensation possible.
While some startups are reinventing the wheel, most are looking to build nuanced use cases of AI. It would be weirder if they weren't.Yeah, of course, YC’s winter class is oozing with AI companies by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch
Confluent co-founder Neha Narkhede today announced a new fintech company, Oscilar, that’s developing an “AI-driven” platform to help financial institutions protect online transactions from fraud and theft. Oscilar is entirely self-funded, backed by $20 million that Narkhede and the company’s other co-founder, Sachin Kulkami, themselves contributed. Narkhede says that they opted not to take outside […]Oscilar emerges from stealth to fight transactions fraud with AI by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Online businesses are at risk of bad bot activity, certainly more now than they used to be. According to a survey from Imperva, 42.3% of internet traffic in 2021 wasn’t human, but instead bots that ran automated routines with ill intent. Given the damage bots can do — for example, stealing content and inventory, degrading […]DataDome, which uses AI to protect against bot-based attacks, raises $42M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Aravita's AI-powered solution for supermarkets looks at variables, including climate, seasonality and consumer behavior, to manage the purchasing of fresh food.Qualcomm-backed Aravita wants to help Brazilian supermarkets control food waste by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Microsoft is “exploring” putting ads in the responses given by Bing Chat, its new search agent powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4. While these sponsored responses are clearly labeled as such, it does make one question how far we’ve really come from the old model of ads on search engines. Microsoft confirmed this is happening, albeit in […]That was fast! Microsoft slips ads into AI-powered Bing Chat by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
At Spotify’s Stream On event this month, the company introduced a redesigned app with TikTok-like discovery feeds, an AI DJ, and other tools for artists and podcasters. But the app’s changes may not be stopping there. The company confirmed it’s now testing a revamp of its user profiles, which includes a card-style layout that lets […]Spotify is testing new card-style user profiles focused on discovery by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
AI is riding high on a curve of hype, which means some of the practical questions that might grow louder over time — the many costs (financial and social), the business models — may not be the most front of mind right now. Today a startup called Fetch.ai is announcing $40 million in funding in […]Blockchain startup Fetch.ai grabs $40M to provide monetization and other tooling for AI-generated information by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single person, think about their work and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha interviewed a Jack of all trades in the AI […]AI’s moral compass with a jack of all trades by Theresa Loconsolo originally published on TechCrunch
The UK isn’t going to be setting hard rules for AI any time soon. Today, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) published a white paper setting out the government’s preference for a light-touch approach to regulating artificial intelligence. It’s kicking off a public consultation process — seeking feedback on its plans up to […]UK to avoid fixed rules for AI – in favor of ‘context-specific guidance’ by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Workers are being bombarded with data from a variety of sources. If the point is to make people more productive, as the volume increases, the more difficult it is to find the information you need to do your job. AI thrives in large data environments and can help cut through the noise, move across applications, […]Jigso is building an AI assistant to surface the data employees need automatically by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
An open letter signed by tech leaders and prominent AI researchers has called for AI labs and companies to "immediately pause" their work. Signatories like Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk agree risks warrant a minimum six month break from producing technology beyond GPT-4 to enjoy existing AI systems, allow people to adjust and ensure they are benefiting everyone. The letter adds that care and forethought are necessary to ensure the safety of AI systems — but are being ignored.The reference to GPT-4, a model by OpenAI that can respond with text to written or visual messages, comes as companies...
With extreme weather events regularly flooding our coastal cities and burning out our rural communities, Google in its magnanimity has developed a new set of online tools that civil servants and community organizers alike can use in their efforts to stave off climate change-induced catastrophe.Google already pushes extreme weather alerts to users in affected locations, providing helpful, easy-to-understand information about the event through the Search page — whether its a winter storm warning, flood advisories, tornado warnings, or what have you. The company has now added extreme heat alerts...
Tech luminaries, renowned scientists, and Elon Musk warn of an “out-of-control race” to develop and deploy ever-more-powerful AI systems.
Google’s Bard chatbot fared far worse than OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but human assistants might soon be out of their jobs.
More than 1,100 signatories, including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology, have signed an open letter that calls on “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.” Says the letter: Contemporary AI systems are now becoming […]1,100+ notable signatories just signed an open letter asking “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months” by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch
Covariant was founded in 2017 with a simple goal: helping robots learn how to better pick up objects. It’s a large need among those looking to automate warehouses, and one that is much more complex than it might appear. Most of the goods we encounter have traveled through a warehouse at some point. It’s an […]Covariant’s CEO on building AI that helps robots learn by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.Daily Crunch: Zoom’s new AI-powered features include whiteboard generation and meeting summaries by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Microsoft is working on a new “modern” version of Windows with better security and faster updates, according toWindows Central. The initiative, called CorePC, would allow Windows to scale better for different devices while still supporting legacy apps.CorePC would aim for many of the same goals as the scrapped Windows Core OS (including the also canceled Windows 10X), which Microsoft billed as a modular modernization of its OS. CorePC would use “state separation” and split Windows into multiple partitions, similar to iOS and Android. This could make it harder for malware to infect the...
As a part of its continued quest to inject generative AI into all its products, Microsoft today introduced Security Copilot, a new tool that aims to “summarize” and “make sense” of threat intelligence. In a light-on-the-details announcement, Microsoft pitched Security Copilot as a way to correlate data on attacks while prioritizing security incidents. Countless tools […]Microsoft lets generative AI loose on cybersecurity by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Humanity took another step towards its Ghost in the Shell future on Tuesday with Microsoft's unveiling of the new Security Copilot AI at its inaugural Microsoft Secure event. The automated enterprise-grade security system is powered by OpenAI's GPT-4, runs on the Azure infrastructure and promises admins the ability "to move at the speed and scale of AI."Security Copilot is similar to the large language model (LLM) that drives the Bing Copilot feature, but with a training geared heavily towards network security rather than general conversational knowledge and web search optimization. "...
Krisp got its start as an AI-powered noise cancellation service, but now the startup is moving beyond that with instant on-device transcription of all your calls and meetings — and of course it integrates ChatGPT now for quick summaries as well. The open beta goes live today. My transcribing experience is usually a matter of […]Krisp expands from noise canceling to on-device transcription by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Image: Getty Images The US Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice’s antitrust division say they’ll scrutinize the new field of artificial intelligence-powered tools for signs of anti-competitive behavior. FTC Chair Lina Khan and Justice Department antitrust head Jonathan Kanter made remarks about the issue at the agencies’ joint Enforcers Summit, raising the fear of large companies leveraging AI’s economies of scale to crush competition.“As you have machine learning that depends on huge amounts of data and also depends on huge amounts of storage, we need to be very...
A new security tool aims to actually deliver the network insights and coordination that “AI” security tools have long promised.
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Darrell and Becca are joined by Angela Hoover, the co-founder and CEO of Andi, a program that uses generative AI to bring its users answers to their questions. Angela talked about why she decided to launch Andi after a unique start […]Building Generative AI before it was cool with Angela Hoover from Andi by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch
Google is rolling out new Chrome and Classroom features for teachers and students, the company announced on Tuesday. The tech giant is adding a new “reading mode” for Chrome, an AI-powered Hand Raise Gesture Detection feature for Meet and more. The new “reading mode” is a customizable reader view coming to the side panel in […]Google Chrome and Classroom add new features for educators and students, including ‘reading mode’ by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
With all the software tools we have, it’s still hard to figure out how work moves across large organizations, the state of a project and how closely people are tracking against personal, team and company goals. Asana, which is built on top of a work graph, has that knowledge and the company announced a new […]Asana launches new work intelligence tools with AI on the way by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
VCs aren't giving up on generative AI, which they believe will be the next big thing in tech. The investment numbers are staggering.VCs continue to pour dollars into generative AI by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Weeks after laying off 1,300 people (or 15% of the staff), Zoom is introducing new features to compete with numerous companies including Slack, Calendly, Google, and Microsoft. These features include AI-powered meeting summaries, prompt-based email responses, and whiteboard generation along with video “Huddles” and a meeting scheduler. The company wants you to shift more of […]Zoom is adding new features to compete with Slack, Calendly, Google and Microsoft by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
In a couple of weeks, all the tweets you see on the For You feed will come from Twitter Blue users. Twitter boss Elon Musk has announced that the website will only display tweets from verified accounts in For You's recommendations starting on April 15th going forward. Musk explained that the company is making the move to combat AI bots and that it's the "only realistic way" to prevent "advanced AI bot swarms" from taking over. He also said that Twitter is fighting a "hopeless losing battle" otherwise if it doesn't implement the change. In a follow-up tweet, Musk clarified that...
Faux “puffy pontiff” AI image fools many in viral social media post.
Generative AI is disrupting industries — with understandable controversy. Earlier this month, Danny Postma, the founder of Headlime, an AI-powered marketing copy startup that was recently acquired by Jasper, announced Deep Agency, a platform he describes as an “AI photo studio and modeling agency.” Using art-generating AI, Deep Agency creates and offers “virtual models” for […]Deep Agency shows the perils of applying AI to the fashion industry by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Apple has quietly acquired a Mountain View-based startup, WaveOne, that was developing AI algorithms for compressing video. Apple wouldn’t confirm the sale when asked for comment. But WaveOne’s website was shut down around January, and several former employees, including one of WaveOne’s co-founders, now work within Apple’s various machine learning groups. In a LinkedIn post […]Apple acquired a startup using AI to compress videos by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
A third of Australian companies rely on artificial intelligence to help them hire the right person. But studies show it’s not always a benign intermediary Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcastMichael Scott, the protagonist from the US version of The Office, is using an AI recruiter to hire a receptionist.Guardian Australia applies. Continue reading...
More than 300 lines added for cannibals, lunkheads, and other role-players.
European Union lawmakers are on track to ban the use of remote biometric surveillance for general law enforcement purposes. However that hasn’t stopped parliamentarians in France voting to deploy AI to monitor public spaces for suspicious behavior during the 2024 Paris Olympics. On Thursday the parliament approved a plan to use automated behavioral surveillance of […]French parliament votes for biometric surveillance at Paris Olympics by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. We had the whole gang together this week, which was fitting given the sheer number of news stories that we simply had to get through. So, what did Mary Ann and Natasha […]Not-so-fake dry powder, AI and the future of DAOs by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch
Google finally opened up its Bard AI for testing, and it turns out it’s a little loopy. This week, Cherlynn and Devindra dive into their experience with Bard, as well as how it compares with Microsoft’s BingAI (and GPT4, consequently). Also, we discuss even more AI news from NVIDIA, Microsoft and Midjourney, as well as TikTok CEO Shou Chew’s date with Congress.Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcasts...
If AI is going to work its way out of the chat box and into our living rooms, it will need to understand spaces and objects better. To further that work, the Allen Institute for AI has created a gigantic and diverse database of 3D models of everyday objects, so simulations for AI models can […]Enter the Objaverse: 800,000 virtual props for AIs to play with by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Some say the European tech startup ecosystem lacks investors who have been “operators,” as in former entrepreneurs. And indeed, that has been the case for many years. However, it’s good to see that this has been changing, even if the pace has been slow. One of the newest VC funds to wear it’s “former operators” […]Plural VC lures mRNA vaccine and AI pioneer to become its newest partner by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch
Workera, an upskilling platform geared toward enterprise customers, today announced that it raised $23.5 million in a Series B round led by Jump Capital with participation from existing investors NEA, Owl Ventures, the AI Fund and Sozo Ventures. CEO Kian Katanforoosh says that the fresh capital will be put toward expanding Workera’s product offerings and […]Workera double downs on AI for upskilling with $23.5M infusion by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Founded by ex-Google employees, the Silicon Valley company is among the few start-ups poised to compete with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.
Canva is introducing a series of new features, including a suite of AI-powered tools, and a new Brand Hub. The company unveiled the new features and tools during its Canva Create virtual event today. The company is launching Assistant, which lets users search for design elements, provides quick access to features. The tool can also […]Canva unveils a series of new features, including several AI-powered tools by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
“We’re at a tipping point where AI is going to break trust in what you see and hear — and democracies can’t survive when people don’t agree on facts. You have to have a baseline of understanding of facts,” Dana Rao, Adobe’s general counsel and chief trust officer, told me. And while that’s not necessarily a new observation, […]Adobe’s thoughts on the ethics of AI-generated images (and paying its contributors for them) by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Ubisoft, the developer behind popular games like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, announced that it’s using an AI “Ghostwriter” tool to write dialogue for some of its games with the aim of keeping NPCs (non-playable characters) individually interesting and realistic with less manual work. The company says tool isn’t replacing video game writers, but instead […]Ubisoft’s new AI tool automatically generates dialogue for non-playable game characters by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
Bard prominently tells users it’s an experiment, but that doesn’t mean they’ll listen. | Image: Google If you don’t believe the rushed launch of AI chatbots by Big Tech has an extremely strong chance of degrading the web’s information ecosystem, consider the following: Right now,* if you ask Microsoft’s Bing chatbot if Google’s Bard chatbot has been shut down, it says yes, citing as evidence a news article that discusses a tweet in which a user asked Bard when it would be shut down and Bard said it already had, itself citing a comment from Hacker News in which someone joked about...
Artificial intelligence can make adults nervous, but experts say exploring it as a family is the best way to understand its pros and cons.
On the eve of its 25th anniversary, Mozilla, the not-for-profit behind the Firefox browser, is launching an AI-focused startup. Called Mozilla.ai, the newly forged company’s mission isn’t to build just any AI — its mission is to build AI that’s open source and “trustworthy,” according to Mark Surman, the executive president of Mozilla and the […]Mozilla launches a new startup focused on ‘trustworthy’ AI by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Just weeks after Microsoft launched GPT-4 powered chatbot into its Edge browser, Opera is following suit and integrating generative AI chatbots powered by ChatGPT and ChatSonic into its desktop browsers Opera and Opera GX. These new tools are available in early access across all desktop platforms, the browser maker said. Opera is also launching a […]Opera browser adds ChatGPT and AI summarization features by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
While LinkedIn is helpful for displaying people’s educational and professional achievements, there exists a world of self-taught tech talent whose skills are not so easily reflected on the networking site. Rather, their expertise is hidden in the lines of code they write. Aspecta is trying to fill that gap by providing an AI-powered profile builder […]Aspecta nabs $3.5M to build AI-vetted coder profiles by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch
Doctored images of the former US president went viral on Twitter. These are the telltale signs that they aren’t what they seem.
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images This is Hot Pod, The Verge’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more.It’s been pretty slow in the audio world for the past few weeks — except when it comes to AI, which seems to be progressing at a clip. Today, ChatGPT comes to radio, NPR employees prepare for layoffs, and Spotify expands its audiobook business.Widespread layoffs expected this week at NPRLast month, NPR CEO John Lansing announced that the network would lay off 10 percent of its workforce to cover an expected $30 million budget...
Google has taken the wraps off Bard, its conversational AI meant to compete with ChatGPT and other large language models. But after its shaky debut, users may understandably be a bit wary of trusting the system — so we compared it on a few example prompts with its AI peers, GPT-4 and Claude. This is […]Google’s Bard lags behind GPT-4 and Claude in head-to-head comparison by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
The worlds of technology and medicine are making big bets on AI playing a central role in the delivery of healthcare in the future. Today a startup out of Durham, NC, called Bionic Health — built by two early movers in the commercializing of AI — is throwing its hat into that ring to build […]Bionic Health raises $3M for its AI health clinic using GPT-4 and other ML models to design better preventative care by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
In partnership with Google, Nvidia today launched a new cloud hardware offering, the L4 platform, that it says is optimized to run generative AI applications along the lines of OpenAI’s DALL-E 2. Available in private preview on Google Cloud through Google’s G2 virtual machines, Nvidia says that the L4 platform is designed to accelerate “AI-powered” […]Nvidia partners with Google Cloud to launch AI-focused hardware instances by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
The age of enterprise AI has come crashing down upon us in recent months. Public infatuation with ChatGPT since its release last November has opened the floodgates of corporate interest and set off an industry-wide land grab with every major tech entity vying to stake their claim in this burgeoning market by incorporating generative AI features into their existing products. Heavyweights including Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Baidu are already jockeying their Large Language Models (LLMs) for market dominance, while everybody else, from Adobe and AT&T to BMW and BYD, scrambles to find uses for...
One of the big problems with generative AI is understanding what source material was used to train the large language models underlying the solution. This comes down to two main problems for users: Do they have permission to use that underlying work, and will the artist or writer be compensated for that use. In an […]Adobe promises artists will be compensated fairly with new generative AI product, but is fuzzy on details by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
At its annual GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia announced a set of cloud services designed to help businesses build and run generative AI models trained on custom data and created for “domain-specific tasks,” like writing ad copy. Under the brand Nvidia AI Foundations, each individual cloud service — Nvidia NeMo for language models and Nvidia Picasso […]Nvidia launches new cloud services and partnerships to train generative AI by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
When NVIDIA's founder and CEO Jensen Huang waxed poetic about artificial intelligence in the past, it mostly felt like marketing bluster, the sort of lofty rhetoric we've come to expect from an executive with a never-ending supply of leather jackets. But this year, following the hype around OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's revamped Bing and a slew of other competitors, NVIDIA's AI push finally seems to be leading somewhere.The company's GTC (GPU Technology Conference) has always been a platform to promote its hardware for the AI world—now it's practically a...
Google just announced that the company is releasing its ChatGPT competitor Bard. But chances are you won’t be able to access the product right away as the company is starting with a limited public rollout. Users in the U.K. and the U.S. can head over to bard.google.com and join a waitlist. The company calls Bard […]Google opens early access to Bard, its AI chatbot by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch
Since unveiling its Bard conversational AI in February, Google has been working to improve the chatbot's responses, after it spouted misinformation in its Twitter debut. More recently, we've seen the company add generative AI features to practically its entire suite of services, while access to the Bard chatbot remained exclusive to a few. We saw some Pixel users receive invites to test out Google's bot yesterday, and today, the company said it's "starting to open access to Bard."In a blog post that "Bard did help us write," vice president of product Sissie Hsiao and vice...
Adobe launched the enterprise tier of its creative application Adobe Express today at the company’s Adobe Summit event. The enterprise subscription will also let organizations access Adobe Firefly — the company’s newly launched generative AI tools. The creative tools company said that this new offering would help businesses build anything ranging from brand content to […]Adobe Express launches an enterprise tier with generative AI tools by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Adobe is jumping into the generative AI game with the launch of a new family of AI models called Firefly. Focused on bringing AI into Adobe’s suite of apps and services, specifically AI for generating media content, Firefly will be made up of multiple AI models “working across a variety of different use cases,” Adobe […]With Firefly, Adobe gets into the generative AI game by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Microsoft today announced that its new AI-enabled Bing will now allow users to generate images with Bing Chat. This new feature is powered by DALL-E, OpenAI’s generative image generator. The company didn’t say which version of DALL-E it is using here, except for saying that it is using the “very latest DALL-E models.” Dubbed the […]Microsoft brings OpenAI’s DALL-E image creator to the new Bing by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Adobe’s suite of photo and video editing software has long leveraged the assistance of machine intelligence to help its human users do their jobs, having employed the Sensei AI system for more than a decade to power features like Neural Filters in Photoshop or Acrobat's Liquid Mode. On Tuesday, Adobe revealed its next generation of AI features, a family of generative models the company has collectively dubbed, Firefly — the first of which will generate both images and font effects.“Generative AI is the next evolution of AI-driven creativity and productivity, transforming the...
Coinciding with the launch of its Firefly family of generative AI models, Adobe today unveiled Adobe Sensei Generative AI Services, a set of enterprise-focused, AI-powered services across its suite of productivity apps. Generative AI Services — or “Sensei GenAI,” for short — leverages a combination of AI tech including Adobe’s own large language models and […]Adobe launches generative AI tools aimed at marketers by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
OP3N, a web3 AI-powered platform, raised a $28 million Series A round that values the company at $100 million, the startup shared exclusively with TechCrunch. “I wanted to make a connection for creators, chats and commerce in one place,” Jaeson Ma, co-CEO of OP3N, said to TechCrunch. “It’s a web3 version of WhatsApp meets Amazon, […]OP3N raises $28M to build ‘WhatsApp meets Amazon’ for web3 by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch
ChatGPT went offline and temporarily became inaccessible on Monday after some users discovered that they could see the titles of other people's chat histories. People posted screenshots of their ChatGPT UI on social networks like Reddit and Twitter, showing sidebars populated with chats they said weren't theirs. While they could only see the titles and not the entirety of other people's conversations, the incident still highlights the need to be mindful when it comes with sharing details with or writing up questions for the chatbot. An OpenAI spokesperson told Bloomberg that...
IPRally, a Finnish startup building a knowledge graph-based patent search engine, has raised €10 million ($10.8 million) in a Series A round of funding. Founded in 2018, IPRally is one of a number of emerging players looking to infiltrate a billion-dollar intellectual property (IP) management market dominated by incumbents such as Clarivate, Anaqua, and Questel. The […]IPRally, a patent search engine powered by explainable AI, raises $10.8M by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch
TikTok is announcing updates to its community guidelines that are designed to make the app a more secure environment for users. The company has overhauled the guidelines to make them easier to understand, and added new policies on AI and climate misinformation. TikTok has also added more detail about its existing policies regarding civil and […]TikTok overhauls its community guidelines, adds new policies on AI and climate misinformation by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
For many tech companies, investors are applying a new valuation method that has caught our eye: AI proficiency.For tech titans, AI prominence is the new measuring stick by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
Filmustage is an AI-powered platform that’s designed to streamline pre-production in the film industry using a variety of features, such as the ability to break down scripts in a few minutes and categorize them into scenes and elements like props, costumes and characters. The startup announced today that it raised $550,000 in VC funding. The […]Filmustage leverages AI to breakdown film scripts, create shooting schedules and more by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
Corporate investment in AI is on the rise, driven both by hype and the tech's promise to bolster productivity — and revenues.Corporate investment in AI is on the rise, driven by the tech’s promise by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Samsung is finally offering more than one OLED TV series. The company is expanding its Quantum Dot OLED range to add a more affordable S90C family (pictured above). You'll have to settle for a scaled-back version of object-tracking sound and won't get the S95C's near-flush wall mounting or external connection box. You'll still get a punchy QD-OLED image, AI-based HDR mapping, Dolby Atmos audio and syncing with Samsung soundbars.The S90C starts at $1,899 for a 55-inch model and scales up to $3,599 for a 77-inch version. A 65-inch set is "coming soon." Conveniently, those prices...
Can an algorithm predict whether a startup will successfully exit? PitchBook believes so. The venture capital and private equity database today launched VC Exit Predictor, a tool trained on PitchBook data to attempt to suss out a startup’s growth prospects. Given the name of a VC-backed company, VC Exit Predictor generates a score on the […]PitchBook’s new tool uses AI to predict which startups will successfully exit by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Generative AI is already looking like the major tech trend of 2023. The ability to generate fresh content via algorithms has been thrust into the public consciousness by the likes of ChatGPT, a chatbot-style technology trained on large language models (LLMs) capable of producing essays, poems, lyrics, news articles, and even computer programs. And then […]Tavus taps generative AI to power personalized videos with voice and face cloning by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch
Welcome to Week in Review, folks, TechCrunch’s regular recap of the week in tech. GPT-4, OpenAI’s text- and image-understanding AI, might’ve dominated the headlines over the past few days. But fresh drama around Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse emerged as well. We cover all that and more in this edition, so grab a coffee and settle […]OpenAI unleashes GPT-4, SVB files for bankruptcy, and a PE firm acquires Pornhub by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app economy in 2023 hit a few snags as consumer spending last year dropped for the first time by 2% to $167 billion, according to data.ai’s “State of […]This Week in Apps: AI-powered productivity apps, US weighs TikTok ban, SVB crash boosts crypto apps by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
The first app to harness GPT-4’s image-recognition capacity has been described as ‘life-changing’ by visually-impaired users. Be My Eyes, a Danish startup, integrated the AI model in a new feature for blind or partially sighted people. Named “Virtual Volunteer,” the object-recognition tool can answer questions about any image that it’s sent. Imagine, for instance, that a user is hungry. They can simply photograph an ingredient and request related recipes. If they’d rather eat out, they can take an image of a map and get directions to a restaurant. On arrival, they can snap a...
It’s a very modern conjurer’s trick: Create an SXSW talk out of thin air, with the help of generative AI. That’s what whurley did this year in Austin. It took nine weeks for whurley — a staple of the Austin tech scene — to create and prepare for a keynote at SXSW 2018, where he […]Strangeworks might be the first startup to rely on AI to create everything it brought to SXSW by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch
With SVB’s contagion contained, the VC community seems open to writing smallish checks for pre-revenue startups.TechCrunch+ roundup: 7 VCs who are taking pitches, AI best practices, zero-based budgeting by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Today, we’re celebrating Equity’s 6th birthday! Thankfully, it fell during the easiest, slowest news cycle we’ve had since the beginning of the grocery delivery wars and WeWork. Just kidding. Alex and Natasha […]Don’t use Sam Altman and AI hype in the same sentence by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch
There’s nothing more romantic than having an AI-powered bot write your vows for you. Earlier this month, wedding planning platform Joy launched a new OpenAI-powered “Wedding Writer’s Block” tool that uses AI technology to generate a draft for one of the most important speeches of your life. The AI assistant is designed to help write […]Wedding platform Joy will let you outsource your vows to OpenAI by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
NVIDIA's DLSS 3 upscaling (Deep Learning Super Sampling 3) will soon be available for some particularly high-profile games. To begin with, Diablo IV will use the AI-based technology when the game launches on June 6th. If you have a GeForce RTX 40 series GPU, you can push the click-heavy action RPG to a high resolution without worrying so much about a frame rate drop.Bethesda's open-world vampire shooter Redfall will also support DLSS 3 when it ships on May 2nd. And if you're a fan of arcade-style racing, you'l be happy to know that a Forza Horizon 5 update will introduce the...
The technology industry continues to rack up an ever-longer list of layoffs — which now stand at nearly 139,000 according to Layoffs.fyi — but taking the wider job market, the overall pace of recruiting engineers and other technical talent has not let up. Now, one of the bigger players in the area of technical recruitment […]Technical recruitment platform Karat snaps up Triplebyte to add AI-based quizzes for engineers by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
At its virtual “Future of Work” event, Microsoft today announced the launch of an AI copilot — and make no mistake, Microsoft is all-in on using this ‘copilot’ metaphor across all of its products — to Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate. The idea here is to use AI to make using these […]Microsoft’s new Power Platform AI copilot will build your apps for you by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
During an AI-focused press event today, Microsoft unveiled Microsoft 365 Copilot, its latest push to embed its suite of productivity and enterprise apps with AI. Currently in testing with select commercial customers, Copilot combines the power of models similar to OpenAI’s recently announced GPT-4 with business data and Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, […]Microsoft 365 gets a host of new AI-powered features by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Cloud costs remain a top concern for organizations. According to a recent Anodot survey, 50% of businesses are struggling to control them, in part because they lack visibility into their cloud usage. Unsurprisingly, reducing those costs has become a top priority. A report from Wanclouds finds that 81% of IT leaders have been directed by […]Cast AI raises $20M to help companies reduce cloud spend by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Warp, a fast-growing startup that is working on building a better terminal, today announced that it has added a new chat feature (unsurprisingly based on ChatGPT) that will help its user with using the command line and troubleshooting errors. We’ve obviously seen a flood of ChatGPT-enabled services lately, with some more interesting than others, but […]Warp brings an AI bot to its terminal by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
If not for last week’s Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapse almost every conversation in tech seems to be centered around AI and chatbots. In the last few days, Microsoft-backed OpenAI released a new language model called GPT-4. Its competitor Anthropic released the Claude chatbot. Google said that it is integrating AI into its Workspace tools […]Apple is reportedly experimenting with language-generating AI by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
With inflation sparking an increase in the cost of repairs, labor and claims, fees for insurance are similarly spiking across the board. Car insurance premiums rose 13.7% nationally over the past year, according to a study from Bankrate.com. Home insurance, meanwhile, climbed 12.1% year-on-year, Policygenius found. But Jonathan Matus argues that it doesn’t have to […]Fairmatic raises $46M to bring AI to commercial auto insurance by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Microsoft launched its ChatGPT-powered version of Bing last month in a limited beta, and it promptly brought a bunch of new viewers and some respect to the beleaguered search engine. Now, it appears that Microsoft has opened up the new Bing to nearly everyone who wants to use it, as Windows Central has noticed. While the signup page still says "join the waiting list," all you have to do is sign in to get instant access — a trick that worked for myself and a colleague. Microsoft has yet to confirm the change, but we may learn more at an event it's holding today called "Reinventing...
The rise of ChatGPT has fuelled growth in the public awareness of AI, as well as the growing discourse around AI ethics. How should AI be used? What are its implications for society, not just business? The inherent bias within AI applications — remember, it’s not just how the algorithm is built and by whom, it’s […]MLOps platform Seldon raises £20M Series B to improve the productions of AI models by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch
In another sign that the current VC appetite for AI is insatiable, Adept, a startup building AI that “enables humans and computers to work together creatively to solve problems,” yesterday announced that it raised $350 million in a Series B funding round co-led by General Catalyst and Spark Capital with participation from Addition, Greylock, Atlassian […]Adept, a startup training AI to use existing software and APIs, raises $350M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
You can add Duolingo to the growing list of companies jumping on the generative AI craze. On Wednesday, the company announced Duolingo Max, a new, more expensive subscription tier that comes with access to a pair of GPT-4 features. The first of those, “Explain My Answer,” allows you to ask Duo, a chatbot named after the company’s owl mascot, to spell out why your answer to a question was right or wrong, with the option to ask for additional clarification if you need more help.The second feature, Roleplay, allows you to practice the skills you’ve learned through Duolingo in a handful of...
Peacock released yesterday the official trailer for its upcoming original series, “Mrs. Davis,” a peculiar take on artificial intelligence and a nun (played by “G.L.O.W.” actress Betty Giplin) that wants to defeat it. (Or her?) The first four episodes of “Mrs. Davis” will premiere on April 20 and the other four episodes will be released […]The bizarre trailer for Peacock’s new series, ‘Mrs. Davis,’ features a war against AI by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
“Greetings, meatbag.” Carrot Weather, the snarky weather app that delivers daily forecasts, has launched a ChatGPT-based chatbot that delivers even more sass. The feature is rolling out globally today on iOS devices. There’s a lot you can do with the Carrot AI beyond just chatting about the weather and getting insulted. Users can also play […]Get utterly roasted by Carrot Weather’s new chatbot with ChatGPT update by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
The U.K.’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt’s spring budget — delivered on the same day that teachers, transportation workers, civil servants and others were on strike across the country — sought to strike a note of its own: optimism in the face of many signals to the contrary. With the U.K. narrowly predicted to […]UK Spring Budget: Chancellor plans £1M annual AI prize, quantum investments, and a new £900M ‘exascale’ computer by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, your computer is going to get a lot smarter and more useful in the coming years.AI’s ascendance seems unfazed by SVB mess by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
OpenAI, which created the chatbot sensation ChatGPT, said in a blog post that its latest technology is “multimodal,” meaning images as well as text prompts can spur it to generate content.
Despite their ability to crank out incredibly lifelike prose, generative AIs like Google's Bard or OpenAI's ChatGPT (powered by GPT-4), have already shown the current limitations of gen-AI technology as well as their own tenuous grasp of the facts — arguing that the JWST was the first telescope to image an exoplanet, and that Elvis' dad was an actor. But with this much market share at stake, what are a few misquoted facts against getting their product into the hands of consumers as quickly as possible? The team over at Anthropic, conversely, is made up largely of ex-OpenAI...
In addition to today’s launch of OpenAI’s GPT-4, which is now confirmed to be the GPT model running in Bing, Microsoft also announced the stable version of its Edge web browser will now include the new Bing AI chatbot in a sidebar. The feature was first introduced at Microsoft’s AI press event in February but […]Microsoft’s new Bing AI chatbot arrives in the stable version of its Edge web browser by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Alongside GPT-4, OpenAI has open-sourced a software framework to evaluate the performance of its AI models. Called Evals, OpenAI says that the tooling is designed to allow anyone to report shortcomings in its models to help guide further improvements. It’s a sort of crowdsourcing approach to model testing, OpenAI says. “We use Evals to guide […]With Evals, OpenAI hopes to crowdsource AI model testing by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Duolingo is introducing a new subscription tier with features powered by OpenAI’s new GPT-4 technology, the company announced on Tuesday. The new tier, Duolingo Max, unlocks two new AI-powered features called “Roleplay” and “Explain My Answer.” The announcement comes the same day that OpenAI released its next-generation GPT-4 AI language model. The Roleplay feature unlocks […]Duolingo launches new subscription tier with access to AI tutor powered by GPT-4 by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
In just weeks, a gold rush into artificial intelligence start-ups has become a full-blown mania.
OpenAI has introduced the world to its latest powerful AI model, GPT-4, and refreshingly the first thing they set the new system to was helping people with visual impairments. Be My Eyes, which lets blind and low vision folks ask sighted people to describe what their phone sees, is getting a ‘virtual volunteer’ that offers […]GPT-4’s first app is a ‘virtual volunteer’ for the visually impaired by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Making subtitles, including rough machine-translated ones, has never been easier in Resolve. | Photo by Chris Person / The Verge I love when people care about their subtitles. Not enough people on YouTube do it, and it’s wildly important from a basic accessibility perspective. What’s more, tons of people (myself included) prefer to watch movies with the subtitles on. And while the process of transcription itself can be tedious, you can have a lot of metatextual fun with authoring subtitles for dramatic effect, in particular with descriptive subtitles. So I wanna talk a little bit about a...
At its annual health event, The Check Up, Google announced a slew of updates for Search, Fitbit and developers. On the Search front, the company says it will soon identify community health centers and make it clear whether those facilities have free or low-cost care options. It seems there will be a label that reads, "offers free or low-cost care based on individual circumstances."In addition, Google says it has employed Duplex to call hundreds of thousands of US healthcare providers and verify their information. The conversational AI has also been used to check whether providers accept various...
Healthcare has been pegged as a prime candidate for more AI applications — both to aid in clinical work and to lighten some of the more time-consuming administrative burdens that come around clinical care. Now, Nabla, the digital health startup out of Paris co-founded by AI entrepreneur Alexandre Lebrun, claims to be the first to […]Nabla, a French digital health startup, launches Copilot, using GPT-3 to turn patient conversations into actionable items by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
Google and Microsoft are locked in a head-to-head competition to bring as much generative AI to their productivity services as possible. Only days ahead of Microsoft’s “Future of Work” event, Google today announced a sweeping update to Workspace that will bring its generative AI models to virtually every part of its productivity suite, in addition […]Google goes all-in on bringing AI to Workspace by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Microsoft laid off an entire team dedicated to guiding AI innovation that leads to ethical, responsible and sustainable outcomes. The cutting of the ethics and society team, as reported by Platformer, is part of a recent spate of layoffs that affected 10,000 employees across the company. The elimination of the team comes as Microsoft invests […]Microsoft lays off an ethical AI team as it doubles down on OpenAI by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch
Earlier this year, an amateur Go player decisively defeated one of the game’s top-ranked AI systems. They did so using a strategy developed with the help of a program researchers designed to probe systems like KataGo for weaknesses. It turns out that victory is just one part of a broader Go renaissance that is seeing human players become more creative since AlphaGO’s milestone victory in 2016In a recent study published in the journal PNAS, researchers from the City University of Hong Kong and Yale found that human Go players have become less predictable in recent years. As the New Scientist...
Spotify has bigger plans for the technology behind its new AI DJ feature after seeing positive consumer reaction to the new feature. Launched just ahead of the company’s Stream On event in L.A. last week, the AI DJ curates a personalized selection of music combined with spoken commentary delivered in a realistic-sounding, AI-generated voice. But […]Spotify’s new ‘DJ’ feature is the first step into the streamer’s AI-powered future by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge It makes sense that LinkedIn would be the first major social network to push AI-generated content on its users. The Microsoft-owned company is weird. It’s corporate. It’s full of workfluencer posts and engagement bait that ranges in tone from management consultant bland to cheerfully psychotic. Happily, this is the same emotional spectrum on which AI tends to operate. LinkedIn isn’t populating its feed with AI chatbots just yet, but last week began sharing “AI-powered conversation starters” with the express purpose of provoking discussion among...
Mythic, an AI chip startup that last November reportedly ran out of capital, rose from the ashes today with an unexpected injection of fresh funds. Mythic this morning announced that it closed a $13 million financing round led by existing investors Atreides Management, DCVC and Lux Capital alongside new investors Catapult Ventures and Hermann Hauser […]AI chip startup Mythic rises from the ashes with $13M, new CEO by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Following a beta that saw just 5,000 people get a chance to use the software, Aimi’s iOS and Android app is now available to all. The release brings the company’s generative music platform to mobile, where it was not available previously. Engadget’s James Trew has been using the app since January. Since then, Aimi has made a few user interface tweaks.What hasn’t changed is the premise of the app. As before, Aimi is built around continuous music “experiences” you can subtly tweak by interacting with a handful of interface elements. If you're familiar with platforms like Endel and...
Move over, software. Prompts may well be the new oil. Writing the text strings that instruct AI systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 to generate essays, articles, images and more has become a veritable profession, commanding salaries well into the six-figure range. Anyone can come up with prompts, of course. But only certain prompts (e.g. […]A look at the budding market for the text that prompts AI systems by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
So far this week we’ve seen generative AI come to CRM from Salesforce and to customer service chatbots from Forethought – and that’s just the ones I’ve covered personally. Today, we look at ThoughtSpot’s generative AI entry, which lets you query your data using natural language to get text or a graph back, as appropriate, […]ThoughtSpot adds GPT-3 integration to help customers query data by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
This week, WIRED and NPR team up to cover the debate about students and teachers using generative AI in the classroom.
A startup founded by ex-Apple design and engineering team Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, Humane, today raised another $100 million to build what it calls an “integrated device and cloud services platform” for AI. Humane’s work is shrouded in mystery. But its latest round of funding, a Series C, attracted a laundry list of notable […]Humane, a secretive AI startup founded by ex-Apple employees, raises another $100M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
After successful autonomous flight tests in December, the military is ramping up its plans to bring artificial intelligence to the skies.
Forethought has been building chatbots since 2017 with increasing levels of sophistication, intelligence and automation. Today, the startup announced the next phase in their development. It’s bringing generative AI to the platform with a beta release of a new tool called SupportGPT. The product is designed to deliver auto-generated customer service responses without the need […]Forethought aims to build more accurate chatbots with constrained generative AI models by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Hailo, the well-funded Tel Aviv-based AI chipmaker, today announced the launch of its latest processor family: the Hailo-15H, M and L SoCs. Like its predecessor, the Hailo-8, the company designed these new processors to bring AI models to the edge and specifically, to power intelligent cameras. “Hailo-15 represents a significant step forward in making AI […]Hailo’s new AI chips bring more image processing power to the edge by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Following the lead of Microsoft and Google, DuckDuckGo is about to dip its toes in generative AI. But the company isn’t starting with a chatbot. Instead, DuckDuckGo is partnering with OpenAI and Anthropic to enhance its existing Instant Answer feature. You won’t see “DuckAssist” with each and every search you conduct, but when it does appear, the tool will pull from Wikipedia (as well as Encyclopedia Britannica in some instances) to provide a natural language response to your questions.DuckDuckGo is limiting DuckAssist’s sourcing to reduce the likelihood of the feature’s machine-...
Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has followed Microsoft and Google to become the latest veteran search player to dip its beak in the generative AI trend — announcing the launch today in beta of an AI-powered summarization feature, called DuckAssist, which can directly answer straightforward search queries for users. DDG says it’s drawing on natural language […]DuckDuckGo dabbles with AI search by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
La Famiglia, a Berlin-based VC fund (no, not the Mafia organization, in case there is any confusion) has raised €250 million for its combined third seed fund (which is €165 million) and its first growth co-investment fund (€90 million). The fund has a vertical focus on ML and AI, data, logistics, and supply chains, consumerization […]Berlin VC fund La Famiglia raises €250M for both Seed and Growth B2B startups by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch
Fake virtual identities are nothing new. The ability to so easily create them has been both a boon for social media platforms — more “users” — and a scourge, tied as they are to the spread of conspiracy theories, distorted discourse and other societal ills. Still, Twitter bots are nothing compared with what the world […]Worldcoin, cofounded by Sam Altman, is betting the next big thing in AI is proving you are human by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.Daily Crunch: AI-driven fintech Candidly nabs $20.5M Series B to help consumers ‘crush debt’ by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
If your startup doesn't have a well-defined business model — and a backup in case the first one fails — it's unlikely to get funded.TechCrunch+ roundup: Building a core AI team, Brazil’s CVC climate, remote work rituals by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
The enterprise is about to get hit by the generative AI hype train, as Salesforce prepares to invest in startups developing what it calls “responsible generative AI.” The cloud software giant, via its Salesforce Ventures VC off-shoot, today announced a $250 million generative AI investment fund, which it said has already invested in four startups: […]Salesforce Ventures targets new $250M fund at generative AI startups by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch
Gaming is at a crossroads these days: a decades-old business that has had remarkable staying power banked around classic concepts is now engaged in a battle royale with innovations in areas like mixed reality, AI, blockchain, and networking, as it strives to connect with an increasingly fragmented consumer base. Today, a startup is announcing $55 […]Believer, a new approach to gaming, raises $55M from Lightspeed, A16Z, and more by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
Candidly partners with employers and financial institutions to embed AI-driven student debt and savings optimization products into employee benefits engines.Candidly picks up student debt relief where new US policies leave off by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Businesses dependent on the physical supply chain face a number of potential roadblocks. Customers expect fast deliveries with visibility into each step, but costs — including transportation and raw materials costs — are rising thanks to inflation and other factors. Meanwhile, there’s a talent shortage, particularly in areas like logistics and operations management, and technical […]Overhaul, which taps AI to secure physical supply chains, raises $73M in equity and debt by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Salesforce has been in the news for a lot of non-product reasons of late, so it would be understandable that the company wants to bring the focus back to the business of selling software and away from the machinations of activist investors. Today at the TrailheadDX developer conference, the company announced a generative AI push […]Salesforce plans to incorporate generative AI across the platform by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Cash management — tracking who needs to pay an invoice and whether it’s been done — can make or break a business. Now, a startup building SaaS software to help finance departments manage this more intelligently is announcing some funding to expand after seeing strong demand. Growfin, a Singapore- and San Francisco–based fintech startup that […]Growfin’s AI-based cash collection SaaS expands further to US and Asia by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch
A lot of music streaming services and discovery apps have followed a formula for introducing new artists and songs to their users: an AI-powered vertical feed that highlights clips of songs. SoundCloud is the latest app to try this feature out. The company is testing a vertical feed discovery feature both on its iOS and […]SoundCloud is testing a TikTok-like feed for music discovery by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Now that Microsoft has outlined how AI will reshape Bing search, it's ready to detail how the technolgy will influence your workplace. The company is holding a "Future of Work with AI" event on March 16th at 11AM Eastern. While Microsoft isn't saying much about what the news will entail, CEO Satya Nadella and Microsoft 365 lead Jared Spataro are hosting the presentation. As it stands, rumors may give an idea of what to expect.A February leak from The Vergesuggested Microsoft may introduce AI-equipped versions of Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook and Word. While the exact functionality isn't known...
A marching band, a red carpet and a DJ who codes her beats are all things you can get before coffee (and a business card) at the Upfront Summit, one of venture’s most awaited conferences. But not even a marching band couldn’t pull focus away from the true star of the show: AI. Upfront Summit […]At Upfront Summit 2023, AI is the omnipresent celebrity by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch
You don’t need to hire a mega-influencer like Serena Williams or a Kardashian to build buzz for your startup.TechCrunch+ roundup: Ocean tech investor survey, AI and PR, L-1 visa options by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This week Mary Ann Azevedo and Rebecca Szkutak, and Alex Wilhelm gathered to riff through the week’s biggest startup and venture news. A big thank you to Becca for stepping in while Alex was on […]Why hasn’t generative AI come up with something easier to say than ‘generative AI’? by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch
Whether it’s headlines about AI startups securing massive funding rounds or Twitter threads about how you SHOULD be using ChatGPT, the AI news cycle is well and truly here.Startup PR professionals should be jumping on the AI bandwagon by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Following monthslong questions about how CNET uses artificial intelligence tools, longtime CNET editor-in-chief Connie Guglielmo will step down from her role and take on a new job: senior vice president of AI content strategy and editor-at-large, according to an internal draft memo circulated today, a copy of which was obtained by The Verge.In her new role, Guglielmo will work on machine learning strategy at Red Ventures, the private equity-backed media company that acquired the tech news site in 2020. Adam Auriemma, the former editor-in-chief of a...
Scott Belsky, chief product officer and executive vice president for Adobe’s Creative Cloud, believes there’s a big difference between the hype cycle around web3 last year, and what we’re seeing this year with ChatGPT and other generative AI models. Belsky, who was interviewed by Forbes reporter Alex Konrad at the Upfront Summit in Los Angeles […]Adobe’s Scott Belsky talks generative AI – and why it’s not going to end up like web3 by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
According to a recent report, 92.4% of consumers use reviews when deciding to purchase products. It’s understandable. They want confidence in their purchase choice before buying a product online. A Seoul-based startup called Indent wants to help these shoppers through access to video reviews and product ratings, while also helping to drive sales for e-commerce merchants […]Indent raises $8.1M funding for its AI-powered customer video review tool by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch
Hate sitting in rush hour traffic? Ford knows you do — and the company is doubling down on developing automated driving technology to help make traffic a little more tolerable. Today, Ford announced the creation of Latitude AI, a wholly owned subsidiary that aims to make driving less stressful, specifically in "bumper-to-bumper traffic or on long stretches of highway."The idea seems to be to develop a more advanced version of Ford BlueCruise — but without sensors that warn drivers to pay attention if their eyes wander from the road. Ford's announcement instead imagines the system giving...
It is raining AI-powered features all across search engines. Today, Brave Search launched a new “Summarizer” feature, which is powered by different large langue models (LLMs) — OpenAI’s GPT tech isn’t one of them. Just like the name suggests, its job is to provide a synopsis of a search query using different sources. The summary […]Brave Search launches an AI-powered summarization feature by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
SpotDraft, an Indian legaltech startup that has built an AI-powered Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution, has raised $26 million in a funding round led by Premji Invest. As a company grows, so does the need for business contracts. Whether it’s with employees, clients, investors, or regulatory authorities, contracts become an essential tool for expansion. However, […]Legaltech startup SpotDraft raises $26M to streamline contracts by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, announced several significant changes today. First, it’s launching developer APIs for ChatGPT and the Whisper speech-transcription model. It also changed its terms of service to let developers opt out of using their data for improvements while adding a 30-day data retention policy.The new ChatGPT API will use the same AI model (“gpt-3.5-turbo”) as the popular chatbot, allowing developers to add either unchanged or flavored versions of ChatGPT to their apps. Snap’s My AI is an early example, along with a new virtual tutor feature for the...
Shifting investor priorities, more expensive cash and a dearth of large deals could leave many late-stage web3 companies short on cash. And the clock is ticking.Does web3 need a venture bailout now that AI has all the hype? by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
AI lets designers input abstract concepts and turn them into a flood of images.
Last year, a bunch of Google executives launched an email app called Shortwave, which aimed to fill in the gap left by the search giant’s Inbox app. Now, the company has introduced an AI-powered summary feature so you don’t have to read long emails or threads to get the gist. The feature — powered by […]Shortwave email app introduces AI-powered summaries by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
D-ID, the Israeli company leveraging artificial intelligence to create unique experiences like Deep Nostalgia, announced today that it’s launching a new chat API to enable face-to-face conversations with an AI digital human. The announcement was timed to coincide with Mobile World Congress (MWC), which is taking place in Barcelona this week. The company is currently […]D-ID unveils new chat API to enable face-to-face conversations with an AI digital human by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
Typeface, a startup developing an AI-powered dashboard for drafting marketing copy and images, emerged from stealth this week with $65 million in venture equity backing from Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV (Google Ventures), M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund) and Menlo Ventures. Founded by former Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis, Typeface attempts to combine generative AI with a brand’s […]Typeface emerges from stealth with $65M to bring generative AI to the enterprise by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Three weeks after introducing the new AI-infused Bing, Microsoft is ready to shove it into Windows 11 with an update coming today. If you're in the Bing AI preview, you'll be able to access all of its new features from the search box in the Windows 11 taskbar. Just imagine a slightly more streamlined version of what we saw with the Bing AI on Edge: In addition to general web searching, you can ask Bing natural language queries and its intelligent chatbot will reply conversationally. If you don't have access to the new Bing yet, you can still sign up for access on Microsoft's...
Microsoft is wasting no time bringing its new AI-powered Bing to all of its products. After introducing it in its Edge browser and then bringing it to the Edge, Bing and Skype apps on mobile, today it’s Windows 11’s turn to welcome the new Bing to its taskbar. This is part of a major Windows […]Microsoft brings the new Bing to Windows 11 and launches Phone Link for iOS by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
With active learning, training a model moves from being a linear process to a circular one with a strong feedback loop.Active learning is the future of generative AI: Here’s how to leverage it by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch
No company is immune from the generative AI wave, and everybody wants in. Meta is the latest entrant in testing AI-powered tools for its products. Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the company is building “a new top-level product group” to integrate generative AI into its services used by billions of users. Zuckerberg said the team […]Meta says it is experimenting with AI-powered chat on WhatsApp and Messenger by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
The FTC, fresh off announcing a whole new division taking on “snake oil” in tech, has sent another shot across the bows of the over-eager industry with a sassy warning to “keep your AI claims in check.” I wrote a little while ago (okay, five years) that “AI Powered” is the meaningless tech equivalent of […]FTC warns tech: ‘Keep your AI claims in check’ by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Snapchat is the latest company to get in on the AI frenzy. The company announced today that it’s launching “My AI,” a new chatbot running the latest version of OpenAI’s GPT technology that it has customized for its users. My AI is now available as an experimental feature for Snapchat+, the social network’s $3.99 a […]Snapchat launches an AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT technology by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
Anthropic, a buzzy AI startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI employees, has begun offering partners access to its AI text-generating models. The first commercial venture to announce that it’s integrating Anthropic models is Robin AI, a legal tech startup that’s raised over $13 million from investors including Plural, Episode 1 and the Google Black Founders Fund. Quora’s […]Anthropic begins supplying its text-generating AI models to select startups by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
It’s Friday (or should I say, Fri-yay.) You’ve made it. Give yourself a pat on the back — and then go read the rest of this issue of Week in Review, TechCrunch’s newsletter summing up the past seven days in tech (sign up here to get it directly in your inbox every Saturday). I’ll continue […]Magic Eraser comes to more devices, Spotify gains an AI DJ, and Netflix decreases prices by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. First off, hello to all the new Startups Weekly subscribers who joined us after last week’s newsletter. I’m glad we all still resonate with a comeback […]AI’s hype isn’t going to be simply star-studded by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch
Image: The Verge A short story titled “The Last Hope” first hit Sheila Williams’ desk in early January. Williams, the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, reviewed the story and passed on it.At first, she didn’t think much of it; she reads and responds to writers daily as part of her job, receiving anywhere from 700 to 750 stories a month. But when another story, also titled “The Last Hope,” came in a couple weeks later by a writer with a different name, Williams became suspicious. By the time yet another “The Last Hope” came a few days later, Williams knew immediately...
Ashton Kutcher and others starting to pour money into AI.Will AI receive the same celebrity-fueled hype as crypto once did? It’s complicated by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch
When Microsoft released Bing Chat, an AI-powered chatbot co-developed with OpenAI, it didn’t take long before users found creative ways to break it. Using carefully tailored inputs, users were able to get it to profess love, threaten harm, defend the Holocaust and invent conspiracy theories. Can AI ever be protected from these malicious prompts? What […]Can AI really be protected from text-based attacks? by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
It appears the U.S. isn’t content to wager that small actions can achieve the wide-ranging impacts necessary to gain an edge over China in the development of AI and machine learning technologies.How are global chipmakers preparing for the US-China chip war? by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch
The first thing we ask Voicemod‘s CEO and co-founder, Jamie Bosch, when he picks up the phone to talk about a new funding round is not something we’re accustomed to asking — but our question may become the norm in the generative AI future that’s fast-flying at us: Is this your real voice? Bosch’s startup […]Voicemod tools up with $14.5M to ride the generative AI (sonic)boom by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Dr. Jaishree Naidoo was in charge of pediatric radiology at a South African hospital in 2014, when she had a moment of epiphany after coming across a news story on the usage of AI recognition pattern in distinguishing animals. As a radiologist with 20 years of experience, Naidoo was already familiar with pattern recognition, and […]South Africa’s Envisionit Deep AI gets $1.65M to expand access to medical imaging by Annie Njanja originally published on TechCrunch
One of the Google Pixel’s best photo-editing features, “Magic Eraser,” is now making its way to other Android and iOS devices. But it won’t be free. Today, Google announced that the popular tool, which uses AI to remove unwanted content from images, will become available to Google One subscribers in addition to existing Pixel owners. […]Google Photos’ AI-powered ‘Magic Eraser’ is now a Google One subscription perk by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
The European Union has kicked off a consultation on how to fund the “massive” upgrades to Internet connectivity which regional lawmakers believe are needed for the bloc to make the most of transformative technologies like AI or immersive virtual worlds while delivering on the big bang, cross-industry digitization it also wants to characterize the next […]EU asks who should fund future networks, as telcos eye Australia-style Big Tech bargaining code by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Based in the Netherlands, blossoming agtech startup Source.ag has announced a $23 million Series A funding round to help grow its business, less than a year after its previous, $10 million round. The company assists commercial greenhouse crop growers adjust their growing conditions, optimize their resources and maximize their yields by using state-of-the-art AI models […]Source.ag raises $23M to raise the bar on raising crops with AI by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration by William Joel Plus more musical features come to Snapchat, and the Dynamic Island could come to an Android phone. Continue reading…
As generative AI’s fast-unfolding power to supercharge content-creation amps up concern over what automation might mean for free access to quality information online, Berlin-based startup Spoke AI is gearing up to apply generative AI in a more bounded (but still noisy) context: Internally, within businesses — pitching information workers on tools to help them stay […]Spoke AI is using generative AI to pull signal from workplace noise by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Samsung has announced a new feature for its Bixby mobile assistant that creates an AI-generated copy of a user’s voice to answer calls. The new “Custom Voice Creator” lets users record different sentences for Bixby to analyze and create an AI-generated copy of their tone and voice. Unfortunately, the feature is currently only available in […]Samsung debuts a Bixby feature that creates an AI-generated copy of a user’s voice to answer calls by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
Generative AI is absolutelyeverywhererightnow, so it’s no surprise to see Spotify putting it to use in its latest feature, simply called “DJ.” It’s a new way to immediately start a personalized selection of music playing that combines Spotify’s well-known personalization tools that you can find in playlists like Discover Weekly as well as the content that populates your home screen with some AI tricks. I got early access to DJ and have been playing with it for the last day to see how Spotify’s latest take on personalized music works, but the feature is available as of today in beta...
Ahead of Spotify’s upcoming Stream On event, where the company is expected to announce a redesigned home feed and other updates, the company today launched a new AI feature called “DJ” to better personalize the music listening experience for its users. Similar to a radio DJ, Spotify’s DJ feature will deliver a curated selection of […]Spotify launches ‘DJ,’ a new feature offering personalized music with AI-powered commentary by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Barely two weeks after launching the new AI-enabled Bing on desktop (and a few ups and downs during that time), Microsoft today announced that the new Bing is now also available in the Bing mobile app and through Microsoft’s Edge browser for Android and iOS. With that, you can now also use voice input to […]Microsoft brings the new AI-powered Bing to mobile and Skype, gives it a voice by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Baidu today revealed more details about its much-anticipated intelligent Ernie Bot, widely seen as the search giant’s counterpart to ChatGPT. Ernie Bot is built atop Baidu’s large language model Erniethat released in 2019. In May last year, the third generation of Ernie launched. Here’s how Baidu plans to integrate Ernie Bot into its ecosystem of services, […]Baidu to deploy conversational AI across search, in-car entertainment and more by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch
OpenAI is quietly launching a new developer platform that lets customers run the company’s newer machine learning models, like GPT-3.5, on dedicated capacity. In screenshots of documentation published to Twitter by users with early access, OpenAI describes the forthcoming offering, called Foundry, as “designed for cutting-edge customers running larger workloads.” “[Foundry allows] inference at scale […]OpenAI’s Foundry will let customers buy dedicated compute to run its AI models by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Across the seventeen-year history of Clarkesworld, a renowned literary magazine of science fiction and fantasy, authors have speculated about how evolving, futuristic technology will impact our world. Now, editor and publisher Neil Clarke is living through a debacle that could very well be a sci-fi story in its own right: his magazine in being uncontrollably […]Science fiction publishers are being flooded with AI-generated stories by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
Microsoft was quick to limit Bing's AI chats to prevent disturbing answers, but it's changing course just days later. The company now says it will restore longer chats, and is starting by expanding the chats to six turns per session (up from five) and 60 chats per day (up from 50). The daily cap will climb to 100 chats soon, Microsoft says, and regular searches will no longer count against that total. With that said, don't expect to cause much havoc when long conversations return — Microsoft wants to bring them back "responsibly."The tech giant is also addressing concerns that...
ChatGPT is listed as the author or co-author of at least 200 books on Amazon’s Kindle Store, according to Reuters. However, the actual number of bot-written books is likely much higher than that since Amazon’s policies don’t explicitly require authors to disclose their use of AI. It’s the latest example of AI-generated writing flooding the market and playing a part in ethically dubious content creation since the November release of OpenAI’s free tool.“I could see people making a whole career out of this,” said Brett Schickler, a Rochester, NY salesman who published a children’s...
Kaito, an AI-powered search engine for crypto, raised $5.3 million in a seed round led by Dragonfly Capital, the company exclusively shared with TechCrunch. “There’s constantly people fighting against information overload,” Yu Hu, founder and CEO of Kaito, said. “We are shortening the path to finding answers from 30 minutes or an hour into 10 […]AI-powered crypto search engine Kaito raises $5.3M to improve browsing with AI, ChatGPT by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch
You can now test your racing skills against Sony AI’s GT Sophy – the one already wiping the floor with folks who get paid to play this professionally – when it arrives in today’s update for Gran Turismo 7 on the PlayStation 5 today. Players will face off against four GT Sophy AI opponents, all with vehicles specced slightly differently. There will be a four-circuit series separated by difficulty, too. The GT Sophy races will only be available until the end of March.SonyMeanwhile, an amateur Go player beat a highly-ranked AI system after exploiting a weakness discovered by a second...
A solid six percent of Americans think they can out-punch a Grizzly bear, another one in eight men think they can beat 23-time grand slam champion Serena Williams at tennis. On February 21st, this proud internet tradition of being very loud and very wrong about your physical prowess continues! On Tuesday, gamers around the world will get their shot at racing Sony AI’s GT Sophy — the one that’s already wiping the floor with folks who get paid to play this game professionally — when it arrives in the rev1.29 update for Gran Turismo 7 on the Playstation 5.Sony AIGT7 players will be able to...
This week's theme seems to be a decline in growth for some much-buzzed-about apps, including a group of Twitter alternatives, AI photo apps and even the BeReal. Let's dive in.This Week in Apps: Twitter alternative winners and losers, BeReal declines, iOS web apps to get notifications by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
AI chatbots can spit out convincing — if at times overconfident — natural language responses, but what if an AI could build custom virtual worlds based on a text description alone? Roblox is exploring that possibility with its kit of developer tools, which are designed to make it possible for just about anyone to build […]Roblox wants to let people to build virtual worlds just by typing by Taylor Hatmaker originally published on TechCrunch
Technologist and researcher Aviv Ovadya isn’t sure that generative AI can be governed, but he thinks the most plausible means of keeping it in check might just be entrusting those who will be impacted by AI to collectively decide on the ways to curb it. That means you; it means me. It’s the power of […]Can ‘we the people’ keep AI in check? by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch
As the fervor around generative AI grows, critics have called on the creators of the tech to take steps to mitigate its potentially harmful effects. In particular, text-generating AI in particular has gotten a lot of attention — and with good reason. Students could use it to plagiarize, content farms could use it to spam […]Most sites claiming to catch AI-written text fail spectacularly by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Incymo, which leverages machine learning to maximize advertising revenues for game publishers, shared the deck it used to raise an $850,000 seed round. Pitch Deck Teardown: Gaming monetization company Incymo AI’s $850K seed deck by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
Microsoft has acknowledged reports of Bing’s strange responses to some queries over the past week since the launch of the updated search engine. Some users have reported receiving rude, manipulative and unnerving responses from the AI-boosted Bing. In a new blog post, Microsoft said it’s listening to feedback from users about their concerns about the […]Microsoft says Bing can be provoked to respond outside of its ‘designed tone’ by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
South Korea hopes to be a key player in fulfilling the new global demand for next-generation AI chips, and today the government put some money where its mouth is: the country’s Ministry of Science and ICT said it would earmark $642.5 million (826.2 billion won) through 2030 to invest in companies working on advanced AI […]South Korea boosts its AI chip industry with $642M amid ChatGPT frenzy by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch
Natural language processing (NLP), while hardly a new discipline, has catapulted into the public consciousness these past few months thanks in large part to the generative AI hype train that is ChatGPT. Alongside other NLP models such as Hugging Face’s Transformers, and Google’s LaMDA which is set to power its ChatGPT-rival Bard, there’s a palpable […]German startup Kern AI nabs seed funding for modular NLP development platform by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.Daily Crunch: Generative AI search engine startup You.com adds multimodal chat by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
You.com founder Richard Socher knows that his company has always been a David going after the Goliath in search, Google, and to a lesser extent Microsoft. He likes to point out that his company built search based on generative AI in December, several months before the other giant search players made their announcements. Today, the […]You.com takes aim at Google and Microsoft with multimodal chat search by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
AI’s ability to reinvent web search remains murky, but the technology’s impact on everyday tools seems to be more promising. Case in point: a startup called Capsule has been putting AI to use in video editing software to improve the speed and efficiency of post-production edits. After launching its AI-powered editor into beta, the company […]Capsule snags $4.75M for its AI-powered video editor that summarizes text, generates images and more by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Relationship app Flamme, previously known as Sparks, has launched its rebranded app and introduced a new AI-powered Ask Me Anything tool in time for Valentine’s Day. Although there are numerous dating apps on the market, there aren’t many apps that aim to keep the spark alive after you enter a relationship. Flamme is catered toward […]Relationship app Flamme, previously Sparks, rebrands and adds new AI tool by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
There can never be too much Mario in the world. Sure, it’s probably been a while since you played one of the original NES games, but probably because they’re so familiar. What if I told you researchers had created a way to generate infinite Mario levels so you can play a brand new one every […]MarioGPT hints at a glorious AI-generated future where we will all play Nintendo forever by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Meta today announced it’s making changes to increase transparency around ads. The company says it’s updating a nearly decade-old Facebook feature “Why am I seeing this ad?” to better explain to consumers how an AI technique called machine learning may have played a role in the ad’s placement, among other factors. Specifically, it will now […]Meta improves its consumer-facing tool that explains why you’re seeing that ad by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
GitHub today announced that Copilot for Business, the company’s $19/month enterprise version of its AI-powered code completion tool, is now generally available, after a short beta phase that started last December. Copilot for Business adds features like license management, organization-wide policy management and additional privacy features. Until now, you had to work with GitHub’s sales […]GitHub’s Copilot for Business is now generally available by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Cloud observability platform Logz.io today announced that it is launching a generative AI model to augment its existing machine learning tools, which focus on a company’s observability data, with additional information from other data sources. Through this, the tool can now generate smarter remediation recommendations and, in turn, improve ops teams’ reaction times. The company, […]Logz.io bets on generative AI to help ops teams remediate issues by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
BuzzFeed’sAI-powered quizzes have arrived. Starting today, there are six for readers to try. As you can probably imagine, the majority are themed around Valentine’s Day. Want help writing the perfect breakup text? How about a brief synopsis for a romcom starring your favorite actor as you? Those are just a few of the “Infinity Quizzes” BuzzFeed has on offer.Each works in more or less the same way. You pick the quiz you want to complete and then answer a few questions to give Buzzy the Robot, an algorithm based on OpenAI’s public API, the material it needs to generate a personalized...
Early in the pandemic, a number of researchers, startups and institutions developed AI systems that they claimed could diagnose COVID-19 from the sound of a person’s cough. At the time, we ourselves were enthusiastic about the prospect of AI that could be yielded as a weapon against the virus; in one headline, we endorsed cough-scrutinizing […]AI does a poor job of diagnosing COVID-19 from coughs, study finds by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Turning a great idea into a viable startup takes patience, perseverance and more than a little luck. But when an idea originates in a lab — whether it’s AI, biotech, robotics or another deep tech research project — things quickly become tougher and much more expensive. So, how do you navigate the tricky transition from […]Learn what it takes to turn a lab idea into a real business by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch
BuzzFeed — the media site that made its name (literally) spinning out viral content — landed in the middle of the buzz itself last month when news leaked out that it would partner with the AI startup of the moment, OpenAI, to build a new AI-powered quiz format, building on the media company’s very popular […]BuzzFeed launches Infinity Quizzes, creating personalized stories powered by OpenAI by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
AI-powered voice transcription service Otter.ai is launching a new AI meeting assistant called OtterPilot, the company announced on Tuesday. OtterPilot automates meetings and is designed to help professionals save time and increase meeting productivity. The new features will roll out to users on all plans over the coming days, the company says. After each meeting, […]Otter.ai launches OtterPilot, its new AI meeting assistant by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
An artificial intelligence agent recently flew a Lockheed Martin VISTA X-62A training aircraft for over 17 hours. VISTA (which stands for Variable In-flight Simulation Test Aircraft) normally uses software to simulate the performance characteristics of other aircraft. On this flight during a testing period in December, however, it mimicked a human pilot. US Air Force Test Pilot School (USAF TPS) Director of Research Dr. M. Christopher Cotting said in a statement, "VISTA will allow us to parallelize the development and test of cutting-edge artificial intelligence techniques with new uncrewed...
There’s a lot of noise right now about how generative AIs like ChatGPT and Bard are going to revolutionize various aspects of the web, but companies targeting narrower verticals are already experiencing success. Writer is such a one, and it just announced a new trio of large language models to power its enterprise copy assistant. […]Writer deploys home-cooked large language models to power up enterprise copy by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Is the AI photo app trend already over? Over the past several months, AI-powered photo apps had been going viral on the App Store as consumers explored AI powered-experiences like Lensa AI’s “magic avatars” feature and other apps promising to turn text into images using AI tech. But new data from app intelligence firm Apptopia […]The AI photo app trend has already fizzled, new data shows by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Opera is going all-in on artificial intelligence. This week, the company shared plans to integrate generative AI capabilities into its web browser, starting with “Shorten,” a feature that will use ChatGPT to create summaries of articles and webpages. When the tool becomes available to the public, you’ll see a new icon to the right of the address bar. Tapping it will open a sidebar where ChatGPT will provide a bulleted summary of the webpage you’re looking at.Jan Standel, vice president of marketing and communications at Opera, told The Verge, Shorten will start rolling out to users “...
Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. […]AI comes to expense reports by Mary Ann Azevedo originally published on TechCrunch
This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, M&As and much more.This Week in Apps: AI apps, Bing hits the Top Charts, Google and Mozilla test non-WebKit browsers by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Ahoy, all. Welcome back to the latest edition of Week in Review, the newsletter where we point you to some of the most-read TechCrunch stories from the past seven days. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning (which, not for nothin’, used to be cartoon time for this Gen Xer)? Here’s the link. And […]AI is coming to your Bing and Google searches, Apple’s M2 chip and Super Bowl streaming by Henry Pickavet originally published on TechCrunch
Google is flailing. After years of singleminded worship of the false god Virtual Assistant, the company is rushing its AI strategy as its competitors join their hands and raise their pitchforks. The irony is it’s all happening because Google thought it had the pitchfork market cornered. See, in 2017, Google researchers published the article “Attention […]Google is losing control by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Image: The Verge Microsoft and Google say a new era of AI-assisted search is coming. But as with any new era in tech, it comes with plenty of problems, from bullshit generation to culture wars and the end of ad revenue. Continue reading…
ChatGPT is getting all the attention as of late, but modern AI technologies have a range of use cases beyond finally making Bing useful. One emerging trend is putting AI to work to aid with the frustrating and laborious task of filing and auditing corporate expense reports. Today, Microsoft and American Express announced a deal […]Amex and Microsoft turn to AI to make expense reports less horrible by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.Daily Crunch: Google announces global rollout for AI-driven ‘multisearch’ on mobile devices by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
One of the more interesting, but seemingly academic, concerns of the new era of AI sucking up everything on the web was that AIs will eventually start to absorb other AI-generated content and regurgitate it in a self-reinforcing loop. Not so academic after all, it appears, because Bing just did it! When asked, it produced […]AI is eating itself: Bing’s AI quotes COVID disinfo sourced from ChatGPT by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
This week’s news about Microsoft’s plan to add ChatGPT-like capabilities to its search engine Bing has sent its companion mobile app into the App Store’s Top Charts as of Wednesday. On the U.S. App Store, the Bing app has surged to the No. 12 spot among all free iPhone apps, while Microsoft’s Edge browser is […]Bing’s previously unpopular app sees a 10x jump in downloads after Microsoft’s AI news by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
If the unofficial debut of Google’s Bard chatbot is any indication, misinformation is about to get a lot worse. The company posted an ad to Twitter this week showing off the natural-language AI model displaying false information about the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).In the advertisement (via Reuters), a short GIF shows an example of a Q&A with Bard. “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year old about?” the query reads. The machine quickly spits out three ideas, including the last one that says, “JWST took the very first pictures of a planet...
Illustration: The Verge And Biden calls for Big Tech regulation in his State of the Union. Continue reading…
Ethics is often a separate conversation from AI building, but they should be one and the same. Bias is dangerous, especially as AI continues spreading.AI is the next frontier — but for whom? by Dominic-Madori Davis originally published on TechCrunch
Super Bowl ads make strange bedfellows. Half a week out from The Big Game™, Google just dropped their spot. This time out, the company’s Pixel 7 is in the spotlight — specifically the smartphone’s impressive AI imaging features. Legally, one can’t have a Super Bowl spot without enlisting celebrities, so the company hired musician Doja […]Giannis, Doja Cat and Amy Schumer will peddle Google’s Pixel during the Super Bowl by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
For anyone who wants to get a piece of content they’ve created out there, the number of platforms and formats means it’s not so simple as it used to be. GlossAi is a startup aiming to automate the process using (what else?) AI, and its approach of turning a half hour of content into an […]GlossAi’s generative highlights are a glimpse of content’s crowded future by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Microsoft's oft-forgotten search engine is about to get a new lease on life. As expected, the tech giant announced on Tuesday that it is partnering with Open AI to enhance Bing with the company's AI technology. However, Microsoft also had a surprise up its sleeve: the next release of Bing will feature a new next-generation large language model the company claims is "much more powerful" than ChatGPT and designed specifically to excel at search. Developing...
Generative AI reminds me of ball bearings: the technology is relatively inexpensive, highly adaptable and a proven way to reduce friction.TechCrunch+ roundup: Generative AI for proptech, cloud vendor shopping, cybersecurity fairy tales by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
The company’s presentation will focus on new artificial intelligence-powered features in Search. You can stream it for free on YouTube.
Microsoft's set to make an AI-related announcement today at 1pm ET, but it will not be streaming the keynote to the public. Not to worry, though, we're here at the event in Redmond and will be liveblogging all the news the company is sharing today. After Google unveiled its ChatGPT rival Bard yesterday, Microsoft revealed it had been planning today's event all along, without disclosing many details beyond telling us to expect information about "exciting projects." Thanks to a tweet from OpenAI's Sam Altman, though, we can at least guess that generative AI is on the agenda, if...
Moonhub founder and CEO Nancy Xu was studying for her computer science PhD at Stanford when she had an epiphany about hiring. She believes that 90% of the candidates that are a great fit for any job opportunity are not being identified by recruiters because the tools they are using are too fixated on a […]Moonhub wants to transform the way companies find job candidates using AI by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
We’ve all had a lot of fun with creating game assets, odd selfies, custom stock images and dubious nudes, and it was only a question of time before one of the big hardware-makers jumped on the AI image generation band wagon. Today, laser cutting and printing company Glowforge releases its Magic Canvas feature, which lets […]Laser-focused on creativity, Glowforge adds AI image generation by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
AI’s emergence will cut through material use cases in proptech, from search and listings to mortgages, construction and sustainability.Generative AI is building the foundation of proptech’s next wave by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch
It has long had technology to rival chatbots like ChatGPT, but can’t afford to back artificial intelligence that can spread misinformation and toxic content.
One could make a very reasonable argument that FRIDA (Framework and Robotics Initiative for Developing Arts) is as much a thought experiment as it is a research project. Certainly it butts up against similar questions around art and creativity as AI projects like DALL-E and ChatGPT — though the question is arguably even more in […]FRIDA’s robot arm attempts to bring DALL-E-style AI art to real-world canvases by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
After charming the internet (and us) with its absurdist nature, the AI-generated “Seinfeld”-spoof “Nothing, Forever” was suspended from Twitch for 14 days. As part of its parody of “Seinfeld,” one of the recurring scenes on “Nothing, Forever” shows Larry Feinberg — the Jerry Seinfeld character — performing stand-up routines. Usually, Larry’s jokes went something like, […]AI-generated ‘Seinfeld’ suspended on Twitch for AI-generated transphobic jokes by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
You might not have to wait long to see how Microsoft and OpenAI deepen their relationship. Microsoft has confirmed plans for an event tomorrow (invitations were sent out last week) at its Redmond headquarters at 1PM Eastern. The company will only say that chief Satya Nadella will share details on some "exciting projects," but it's expected to show its integration of ChatGPT into Bing and other uses of the conversational AI technology.The news comes shortly after Google offered a first look at Bard, its take on a ChatGPT-style service.Developing...
ChatGPT, the automated text generation system from Open, has taken the world by storm in the two months since its public beta release but that time alone in the spotlight is quickly coming to an end. Google announced on Monday that its long-rumored chatbot AI project is real and on the way. It's called Bard. Bard will serve as an "experimental conversational AI service," per a blog post by Google CEO Sundar Pichai Monday. It's built atop Google's existing Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) platform, which the company has been developing for the past two...
Mentions of the “metaverse” were relatively few and far between in Meta’s quarterly earnings call this week — we counted a mere seven mentions compared to 23 for “AI” — but the company’s investment into its vision of a VR-connected social future remains colossal. Starting in 2021, Meta began breaking out its Reality Labs VR […]Meta’s Reality Labs lost $13.7 billion on VR and AR last year by Taylor Hatmaker originally published on TechCrunch
For a product that its own creators, in a marketing pique, once declared “too dangerous” to release to the general public, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is seemingly everywhere these days. The versatile automated text generation (ATG) system, which is capable of outputting copy that is nearly indistinguishable from a human writer’s work, is officially still in beta but has already been utilized in dozens of novel applications, some of which extend far beyond the roles ChatGPT was originally intended for — like that time it simulated an operational Linux shell or that other time when it passed the...
GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke says that open source developers should be made exempt from the European Union’s (EU) proposed new artificial intelligence (AI) regulations, saying that the opportunity is still there for Europe to lead on AI. “Open source is forming the foundation of AI in Europe,” Dohmke said on stage at the the EU […]GitHub CEO on why open source developers should be exempt from the EU’s AI Act by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch
San Francisco-based AI chatbot maker, Replika — which operates a freemium ‘virtual friendship’ service based on customizable digital avatars whose “personalized” responses are powered by artificial intelligence (and designed, per its pitch, to make human users feel better) — has been ordered by Italy’s privacy watchdog to stop processing local users’ data. The Garante said […]Replika, a ‘virtual friendship’ AI chatbot, hit with data ban in Italy over child safety by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
The U.K. Government is seemingly backtracking on plans that would have allowed text and data mining “for any purpose,” plans designed to position the U.K. as a “global AI superpower.” The news emerges following months of blowback from creative industries concerned about what impact the rules might have on protected works. Background Text and data […]The UK reverses course on controversial plans to open up text and data mining regulations by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch
“So, I was at the store the other day, and as I’m checking out, the cashier asks me if I have any coupons, and I say, ‘No coupon problem!'” recalls a pixelated, barely three-dimensional figure that vaguely resembles Jerry Seinfeld. “So I’m walking down the street, and this guy comes up to me and says, […]‘Nothing, Forever,’ an AI ‘Seinfeld’ spoof, is the next ‘Twitch Plays Pokémon’ by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
Casey becomes a content moderator, Kevin breaks some news on OpenAI and Instagram’s co-founder reveals his new project.
SimpliSafe’s live guard feature is launching in Beta this week. | Image: SimpliSafe DIY home security company SimpliSafe is beta testing a new service that lets its agents both see inside your home and talk with potential intruders during an alarm event. The “24/7 live guard” service relies on a new AI-powered security camera. If the camera detects human motion while the system is armed, it can trigger the alarm and open a live feed for a monitoring agent to see and speak with whoever set it off — and hopefully scare them off.The program will only work with SimpliSafe’s new Smart...
Given our general reliance on something called “food” you’d think the issue of pollination – and its general decline – might be higher up the world’s agenda. Over 80% of crops require insect pollination, but growers can no longer rely on the dwindling wild bee population. But it’s a complex problem. Pollinating crops with honey […]As the bee population declines, this startup secures $8M to apply AI and EVs to pollination by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch
ChatGPT has been growing at a rate much, much faster than TikTok or any other popular app or service. According to a new study by analytics firm UBS (via Reuters and CBS), the OpenAI-developed chatbot was on pace to reach over 100 million monthly active users in January. The chatbot only became available to the public on November 30th last year, but its rise to fame has apparently been meteoric. Within its first month of availability, it already boasted 57 million monthly active users, the study said. By January, it was already being visited by around 13 million individual users a day. In...
Years ago, Will Allred and William Ballance were developing a tech platform, Sorter, to apply personality and communication psychology to marketing campaigns. Just as Sorter was heading to market, the pandemic hit — and marketing budgets froze. With a week of funding left, Allred and Ballance pivoted, repackaging their tech to work in Gmail in […]Lavender lands $13.2M for its AI-powered email marketing engine by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
The growing ease with which anyone can create convincing audio in someone else’s voice has a lot of people on edge, and rightly so. Resemble AI’s proposal for watermarking generated speech may not fix it in one, but it’s a step in the right direction. AI-generated speech is being used for all kinds of legitimate […]‘Inaudible’ watermark could identify AI-generated voices by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
In 2016, Studio Ghibli co-founder and director Hayao Miyazaki, responsible for beloved anime classics like Princess Mononoke and Kiki’s Delivery Service, made headlines around the world for his reaction to an AI animation program. “I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all,” Miyazaki told the software engineers who came to show their creation to him. “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” A half-decade later, artificial intelligence and the potential role it could play in anime productions is once again in the spotlight.This week, Netflix...
A new Twitch livestream tries to answer the question: What if AI made never-ending Seinfeld? “Nothing, Forever” is an experiment using OpenAI’s GPT-3 natural language model to produce (occasionally coherent) dialog between pixelated counterparts of Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer. Although it’s closer to surreal performance art than the beloved 90s sitcom, it conjures images of a strange, dystopian future where we entertain ourselves with endless content generated by robots.“Nothing, Forever” immediately hits you with well-known aesthetics. Scene transitions show the exterior of a...
Summari took a shot at making article summaries on demand a must-have tool for the overloaded reader. But a year later the startup is leaving that model in the dust for a new, and in retrospect way better, use for its summarization service: link previews. And once you give them a shot, you may find […]Summari pivots to AI-generated link previews that really click by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Writing an obituary isn’t an easy task. That’s an understatement — it’s incredibly painful, usually expensive too. But someone has to do it. Or perhaps not. Consider leaving it to AI. That’s the pitch Empathy, a platform that provides support for families who’ve recently suffered a loss, is making with the launch of its new tool […]Empathy’s new tool uses AI to generate obituaries, and it’s not half bad by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes AI can help usher in “unbelievable abundance,” but he says he wants to ensure that such abundance is shared. Toward that end, Altman has embraced a theory of 19th century political economist Henry George, who in his own lifetime worried about wealth amassing in the hands of the few following […]ValueBase, backed by Sam Altman’s Hydrazine, raises $1.6 million seed round by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch
After a few years of staying mostly under the radar, Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are back with a new project. It’s an app called Artifact, a name Systrom told Platformer’s Casey Newton is designed to evoke the project’s three tenants: “articles, facts and artificial intelligence.” In short, it’s a news aggregation app driven by a TikTok-like recommendation algorithm.When you first launch Artifact, you’ll see a central feed populated by stories from publications like The New York Times. As you read more articles, the app will begin personalizing your feed...
This January, Germany’s largest vaccine maker BioNTech announced that it had agreed to acquire Tunisian-born and London-headquartered AI startup InstaDeep for up to £562 million, including a performance-tied £200 million tranche investment. InstaDeep’s deal — subject to regulatory approval and expected to close in the first half of this year — is quite intriguing, for […]InstaDeep’s acquisition is a classic case of an African startup gone global by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch
Hey, party people, it’s Kyle, continuing to step in for Greg to write Week in Review as he spends time with his newborn. Dunno about y’all, but it’s been a week. I’m dead tired and thankful it’s over. But because the news never sleeps, I’m rallying with the help of a fourth cup of coffee. […]Stripe eyes an exit, Dell bets on the cloud, and Shutterstock embraces generative AI by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
An impressive new AI system from Google can generate music in any genre given a text description. But the company, fearing the risks, has no immediate plans to release it. Called MusicML, Google’s certainly isn’t the first generative AI system for song. There’s been other attempts, including Riffusion, an AI that composes music by visualizing […]Google created an AI that can generate music from text descriptions, but won’t release it by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
As generative AI enters the mainstream, each new day brings a new lawsuit. Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI are currently being sued in a class action motion that accuses them of violating copyright law by allowing Copilot, a code-generating AI system trained on billions of lines of public code, to regurgitate licensed code snippets without providing […]The current legal cases against generative AI are just the beginning by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
There's plenty of concern that OpenAI's ChatGPT could help students cheat on tests, but just how well would the chatbot fare if you asked it to write a graduate-level exam? It would pass — if only just. In a newly published study, University of Minnesota law professors had ChatGPT produce answers for graduate exams at four courses in their school. The AI passed all four, but with an average grade of C+. In another recent paper, Wharton School of Business professor Christian Terwiesch found that ChatGPT passed a business management exam with a B to B- grade. You wouldn't want to...
What is automation good for? Harvesting more broccoli than human laborers can, according to Upp, a Shropshire-UK based agTech startup that’s using computer vision AI plus farm-sized proprietary machinery to expand crop yields. Its pitch is not only that its specialist, AI-driven harvester will make it more efficient to pick a familiar crop but also […]Upp wants to add more broccoli to the plant-protein mix using big automation by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
The AI chatbot has stoked fears of an educational apocalypse. Some teachers see it as the reboot education sorely needs.
Hawk AI, a German company developing anti-money laundering (AML) and tangential fraud prevention smarts for financial institutions, has raised $17 million in a Series B round of funding. Prior to now, Hawk AI had raised $10 million, and with a fresh $17 million in the bank, the company said that it plans to bolster its […]Hawk AI, an anti-money laundering and fraud prevention platform for banks, raises $17M by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch
Generative AI is the tech industry’s buzzword of the moment. It’s no wonder — the VC firm Sequoia not long ago predicted that generative AI, which comprises AI that can generate text, art and more from prompts, could yield trillions of dollars in economic value over the long run. Is that simply the optimistic musing […]Supernormal raises $10M to automatically transcribe and summarize meetings by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
The last year was a roller coaster ride in the AI world, and no doubt many people are dizzied by the number of advances and reversals, the constant hype and equally constant fearmongering. But let’s take a step back: AI is a powerful and promising new technology, but the conversation isn’t always genuine, and it’s […]Don’t be sucked in by AI’s head-spinning hype cycles by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
The biotech industry is experiencing a rush of AI-powered tools for many aspects of the complex drug discovery process. But one that has flown under the radar, increasingly thought to be key to certain diseases but woefully understudied, is RNA. With $35 million in new funding, Atomic AI aims to do for RNA what AlphaFold […]With new funding, Atomic AI envisions RNA as the next frontier in drug discovery by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
When Shutterstock and OpenAI announced a partnership to help develop OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 artificial intelligence image-generating platform with Shutterstock libraries to train and feed the algorithm, the stock photo and media giant also hinted that it would soon be bringing its own generative AI tools to users. Today the company took the wraps off that […]After inking its OpenAI deal, Shutterstock rolls out a generative AI toolkit to create images based on text prompts by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
The final report from the government’s National AI Research Resource recommends a new, multi-billion-dollar research organization to improve the capabilities and accessibility of the field to U.S. scientists. The document presents “a roadmap and implementation plan for a national cyberinfrastructure aimed at overcoming the access divide, reaping the benefits of greater brainpower and more diverse […]Task force proposes new federal AI research outfit with $2.6B in funding by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
AI may be getting hyped as the next billion dollar (or, much bigger) opportunity these days after that mega round for OpenAI from Microsoft, but that rising tide is not lifting all boats. SoundHound — the voice AI company that provides conversational AI services for automotive, connected home and hospitality applications — earlier this month […]SoundHound, the voice AI company, raises $25M after laying off 40% of staff earlier this month by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
Digital twins — virtual representations of actual systems — have become an important component in how engineers and analysts build, visualize and operate AI projects, network security, and other complicated architectures that might have a number of components working (or malfunctioning as the case may be) in tandem. Today, a startup called Forward Networks — […]Forward Networks raises $50M for digital twin technology to help model, manage and secure complex enterprise networks by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
The same day Microsoft invested billions in OpenAI, McKinsey snatched up an enterprise-focused AI firm, Iguazio, for a relative steal. The consulting giant reportedly paid around $50 million for Iguazio, a Tel Aviv-based company offering an MLOps platform for large-scale businesses — “MLOps” referring to a set of tools to deploy and maintain machine learning […]McKinsey, eyeing the MLOps space, buys Tel Aviv-based Iguazio by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
The tech giant aims to remain at the forefront of generative artificial intelligence with its partnership with OpenAI.
As AI teams bring new products to life, it’s critical that they ask themselves the right questions to eliminate all kinds of bias.4 questions to ask when evaluating AI prototypes for bias by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch
Depending on who you ask, generative AI is either massively overhyped or undervalued. Defined as algorithm-driven tech that creates text, art and other forms of media given a prompt, it’s captured the attention of major VC backers who’ve piled hundreds of millions of dollars into firms like Jasper and Stability AI. But generative AI has […]Scenario lands $6M for its AI platform that generates game art assets by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
A few big names in the smart home space, iRobot and Shark in particular, have jumped on the robot-vacuum-and-mop bandwagon as of late. The two companies recently came out with their first 2-in-1 devices, and now you can pick up Shark's at its best price yet. The Shark AI Ultra robot vacuum and mop is 36 percent off at Amazon right now, bringing it down to $450, which is less than it was during the holiday shopping season last year. If you're an iRobot fan, the Combo j7+ is also on sale, but it's much more expensive at $899.It's important to note that we at Engadget have not had the chance to...
In 2023, there are cameras and microphones that match and surpass the capabilities of human sight and sound. But for all of our technological advancements, humans haven’t quite managed to build a better nose. After all, evolution has had millions of years to perfect the receptors humans, animals and inspects use to identify odors. But, with the help of nature, scientists may have made a breakthrough on that front.In a study published Monday in the journal Biosensor and Bioelectronics, a group of researchers from Tel Aviv University (via Neuroscience News) said they recently created a robot...
ChatGPT, the AI that can write poems, emails, spreadsheet formulas and more, has attracted a lot of negative publicity lately. Q&A coding site Stack Overflow temporarily banned users from sharing content generated by ChatGPT, saying that the AI made it too easy for users to flood the site with spammy answers. Then, New York City […]AI21 Labs intros an AI writing assistant that cites its sources by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
On the heels of raising a big round of funding at a $1 billion valuation last week, DeepL is taking the wraps off a new language product, the first extension for a startup that made its name from its popular AI-based translation tools. Write is a new tool that fixes your writing — catching grammar […]DeepL takes aim at Grammarly with the launch of Write, to clean up your prose by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
Microsoft is giving more people — or at least more customers — access to OpenAI's technologies, including ChatGPT. The tech giant has announced that it's now making the Azure OpenAI Service generally available after giving a limited number of enterprise customers access to it when it debuted in November 2021. As Bloomberg notes, customers who have access to the service can use various OpenAI tools for their own cloud applications, including the Dall-E AI art generator and the GPT-3.5 language system. Microsoft says it's also adding access to ChatGPT, which it describes as a "fine-tuned...
As a new chatbot wows the world with its conversational talents, a resurgent tech giant is poised to reap the benefits while doubling down on a relationship with the start-up OpenAI.
Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), or integrated circuits sold off-the-shelf, are a hot topic in tech. Because they’re relatively affordable and can be programmed for a range of use cases, they’ve caught on particularly in the AI and machine learning space, where they’ve been used to accelerate the training of AI systems. The global FPGA […]FPGA startup Rapid Silicon lands $15M to bring its first chip to market by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
OpenAI’s new chat bot is raising fears of cheating on homework, but its potential as an educational tool outweighs its risks.
Nvidia's new tools are meant to help developers more quickly build and deploy applications designed to prevent theft.Nvidia unveils new AI workflows to help the retail industry with loss prevention by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Teams dedicated to boosting customer acquisition, retention and sales don’t necessarily have the time or tools to use data insights effectively. In a 2019 survey, NewVantage partners found that the percentage of firms identifying themselves as being data-driven declined in each of the past three years, with over half admitting that they’re not competing on […]Coho AI, which uses AI to help B2B SaaS companies boost revenue, raises $8.5M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Since its debut in November, ChatGPT has become the internet’s new favorite plaything. The AI-driven natural language processing tool rapidly amassed more than one million users, who have used the web-based chatbot for everything from generating wedding speeches and hip-hop lyrics to crafting academic essays and writing computer code. Not only have ChatGPT’s human-like abilities […]Is ChatGPT a cybersecurity threat? by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch
Artificial intelligence, they say, will either vastly improve our lives or take away our jobs. For veteran venture investor Peter Wagner, it’s a little more nuanced than that.Veteran enterprise VC Peter Wagner on the opportunities for AI startups by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch
There’s lots of people out there with their finger on the pulse of the business, who have ideas on how to build useful apps, but lack basic coding skills and the ability to put their ideas to work. What if those people could describe an app they wanted to build, then add connectors to common […]Blaze makes coding more accessible with AI-driven, no code app builder by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Seek, an automation platform for data analytics tasks, today announced that it raised $7.5 million across pre-seed and seed rounds that had participation from Conviction Partners, Battery Ventures and former Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia. CEO Sarah Nagy says that the funding will be put toward growing Seek’s team into the next year, particularly on the […]Seek lands $7.5M investment for AI that answers domain-specific questions by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Artificial intelligence startups, and (thanks to GPT and Open AI) specifically those helping humans communicate with each other, are commanding a lot of interest from investors, and today the latest of these is announcing a big round of funding. DeepL, a startup that provides instant translation-as-a-service both to businesses and to individuals — competing with […]DeepL, the AI-based language translator, raises over $100M at a $1B+ valuation by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
Microsoft’s latest research in text-to-speech AI centers on a new AI model, VALL-E. While there are already multiple services that can create copies of your voice, they usually demand substantial input. Microsoft claims its model can simulate someone's voice from just a three-second audio sample. The speech can match both the timbre and emotional tone of the speaker – even the acoustics of a room. It could one day be used for customized or high-end text-to-speech applications, but like deepfakes, there are risks of misuse.Researchers trained VALL-E on 60,000 hours of English language speech...
In 2011, Jordi Torras, a former Oracle VP, had a realization: companies weren’t optimizing their search technologies as well as they could be. He founded Inbenta to solve this, providing professional consulting services while simultaneously developing an internal AI toolkit for search optimization. Over the years, Inbenta transitioned from consulting to providing conversational AI as […]Inbenta, a provider of AI-powered chatbots and more, lands $40M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Face filters and selfie apps are so compelling because they simulate limitless interest in what we look like.
German-based biotech company BioNTech SE is set to acquire InstaDeep, a Tunis-born and U.K.-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup InstaDeep for up to £562 million (~$680 million) in its largest deal yet. Per The Financial Times, the German vaccine maker intends to use InstaDeep’s machine learning to “improve its drug discovery process, including developing personalised treatments tailored […]BioNTech acquires Tunisian-born and U.K-based AI startup InstaDeep for £562M by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch
For investors, ChatGPT’s surge isn’t just an inspiration for them to run and back the next big AI tool.Some investors are (cautiously) implementing ChatGPT in their workflows by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch
Meta is acting on its vow to reduce ad discrimination through technology. The company is rolling out a Variance Reduction System (VRS) in the US that ensures the real audience for an ad more closely matches the eligible target audience — that is, it shouldn't skew unfairly toward certain cultural groups. Once enough people have seen an ad, a machine learning system compares the aggregate demographics of viewers with those the marketers intended to reach. It then tweaks the ad's auction value (that is, the likelihood you'll see the ad) to display it more or less often to certain...
Welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Now that the weird “remember how to work” week is over, I’m feeling refreshed and ready to take on the year. My goal for this week is to collaborate more, whether that means asking for […]Generative AI’s Magic Leap by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch
From AI and ML to bespoke solutions, cloud technology is on track to expand into more areas than ever in 2023 as adoption increases.5 cloud trends to track in 2023 by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch
The visually impaired are getting a helping hand (or a helping belt, as it were) from Korean startup AI Guided. At CES in Las Vegas, the company was showing off some pretty neat tech that incorporates optical and Lidar technology along with AI-powered on-device computing to identify obstacles and help with navigation. The company claims […]Guide dogs will be giving the side-eye to self-driving car tech coming for their jobs by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
A sharp-eyed developer at Krita noticed recently that, in the settings for their Adobe Creative Cloud account, the company had opted them (and everyone else) into a “content analysis” program whereby they “may analyze your content using techniques such as machine learning (e.g. for pattern recognition) to develop and improve our products and services.” Some […]Is Adobe using your photos to train its AI? It’s complicated by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
On Tuesday, New York City public schools banned ChatGPT from school devices and WiFi networks. The artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, released by OpenAI in November, quickly gained a foothold with the public — and drew the ire of concerned organizations. In this case, the worry is that students will stunt their learning by cheating on tests and turning in essays they didn’t write.ChatGPT (short for “generative pre-trained transformer”) is a startlingly impressive application, a sneak preview of the light and dark sides of AI’s incredible power. Like a text-producing version of...
A definitive founder's guide would have to include chapters like, "So you've hired the wrong person," or, "Five ways to tell if an investor is lying to you."TechCrunch+ roundup: Dry powder’s slow fuse, landing page basics, generative AI hype by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
Riding the generative AI wave, Picsart, the developer behind various photo and video editing apps for the web and mobile devices, is introducing a new iOS app that transforms photos and drawings into digital art. Called SketchAI, the app lets users sketch a picture or upload an existing image and apply different artistic styles to […]Picsart’s AI-powered SketchAI app turns images and outlines into digital art by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
This year, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) — the celebration of all things tech and then some — brought what it usually brings to the Vegas Strip: AI-powered gadgets. Of course, AI comes in many forms, and not all that’s advertised as AI is in fact true AI. But there’s always diamonds in the rough, […]Here’s a roundup of the top AI-powered products we saw at CES 2023 by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
When you browse Apple Books for your next audiobook, you might come across a few titles with a note that says they were "Narrated by Apple Books." That's because the tech giant has released a catalogue of titles that make use of its new AI-powered digital narration service. The company said the service uses the advanced speech synthesis technology it developed "to produce high-quality audiobooks from an ebook file." According to The Guardian, Apple approached independent publishers who may be interested in teaming up for the project's launch in recent months. Authors were...
At a time when there is a lot of debate going on around ChatGPT and generative AI potentially eating up jobs, Apple has launched AI-powered audio narration for select titles on Apple Books. On its website for authors, the company says that this feature will help independent authors who might not be able to convert […]Apple launches AI-powered book narrations by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Profet AI, a Taiwanese startup that makes auto machine learning software for manufacturers, announced today it has raised $5.6 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Darwin Ventures. Returning investors Hive Ventures, AUO and SVTI also participated, along with Harbinger VC and Jensen Capital Management. Founded in 2018, Profet AI’s customers include […]Profet AI helps manufacturers build prediction models and industrial AI software by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch
A picture is worth 1,000 words, as the saying goes, and now a startup called Nuralogix is taking this idea to the next level: soon, a selfie will be able give you 1,000 diagnostics about the state of your health. Anura, the company’s flagship health and wellness app, takes a 30-second selfie and uses the […]Seen at CES: Nuralogix uses AI and a selfie to measure your heart rate, BP, body mass, skin age, stress level, and more by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
It's no surprise that LG is refreshing its OLED TV lineup for 2023, but you might appreciate this year's upgrade if your set lives in a well-lit room. LG's new models include a per-pixel Brightness Booster Max feature that, on certain G3 series TVs (shown above), promises up to a 70 percent brighter picture. You might not spend as much time squinting during daytime viewing sessions.The G3, C3 and 8K-capable Z3 all use a new a9 Gen 6 processor that offers AI upscaling, HDR tone mapping and object-based picture sharpening. The chip is similarly key to AI audio processing that delivers...
Generative AI is coming for videos. A new website, QuickVid, combines several generative AI systems into a single tool for automatically creating short-form YouTube, Instagram TikTok and Snapchat videos. Given as little as a single word, QuickVid chooses a background video from a library, writes a script and keywords, overlays images generated by DALL-E 2, and […]QuickVid uses AI to generate short-form videos, complete with voiceovers by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
A recent study finds that software engineers who use code-generating AI systems are more likely to cause security vulnerabilities in the apps they develop. The paper, co-authored by a team of researchers affiliated with Stanford, highlights the potential pitfalls of code-generating systems as vendors like GitHub start marketing them in earnest. “Code-generating systems are currently […]Code-generating AI can introduce security vulnerabilities, study finds by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
As generative AI like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 attract investor attention, startup entrepreneurs are looking to cash in with new business models built around them. One of the more interesting ventures to emerge from the space recently is Poly, which lets designers create video game and other virtual assets, including textures for 3D models, using […]Y Combinator-backed Poly uses AI to generate art assets by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
As a rather commercially successful author once wrote, “the night is dark and full of terrors, the day bright and beautiful and full of hope.” It’s fitting imagery for AI, which like all tech has its upsides and downsides. Art-generating models like Stable Diffusion, for instance, have led to incredible outpourings of creativity, powering apps […]What to expect from AI in 2023 by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
The OnePlus 11 is launching globally on February 7th, but the flagship smartphone will actually make debut in China earlier on January 4th, OnePlus announced. The company has also announced pretty much all the specs, including the processor, RAM and storage, showing it'll be right up there with other high-end smartphones. The OnePlus 11 will be powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip, already announced with recent Xiaomi and Vivo phones. That chip promises not just the usual speed improvements, but upgrades to AI, camera features, 5G speeds and graphics, including ray tracing...
Reliance has backed Philadelphia-based AI and robotics startup Exyn, the Indian conglomerate disclosed in a stock exchange filing on Thursday, making further inroads in startups globally. Reliance Strategic Business Ventures, a wholly owned subsidiary of Reliance Industries, has acquired a 23.3% stake in Exyn for $25 million, the Indian firm said. The Indian firm’s investment […]Reliance buys 23.3% stake in US-based AI firm Exyn by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch
The group trying to monetize AI porn generation, Unstable Diffusion, raised more than $56,000 on Kickstarter from 867 backers. Now, as Kickstarter changes its thinking about what kind of AI-based projects it will allow, the crowdfunding platform has shut down Unstable Diffusion’s campaign. Since Kickstarter runs an all-or-nothing model and the campaign had not yet […]Kickstarter shut down the campaign for AI porn group Unstable Diffusion amid changing guidelines by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
Signaling its interest in text-generating AI systems like ChatGPT, Quora this week launched a platform called Poe that lets people ask questions, get instant answers and have a back-and-forth dialogue with AI. Short for “Platform for Open Exploration,” Poe — which is invite-only and currently only available on iOS — is “designed to be a […]Quora launches Poe, a way to talk to AI chatbots like ChatGPT by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.Daily Crunch: New Point-E AI allows users to generate 3D objects from detailed text prompts by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Darrell and Becca catch up with Alice Albrecht about her early-stage AI startup re:collect. Alice talked about why she founded the company that uses machine learning algorithms to help creatives brainstorm and recall information without breaking focus. She also talked about […]Augmenting creativity with Alice Albrecht from re:collect by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch
The next breakthrough to take the AI world by storm might be 3D model generators. This week, OpenAI open-sourced Point-E, a machine learning system that creates a 3D object given a text prompt. According to a paper published alongside the code base, Point-E can produce 3D models in 1 to 2 minutes on a single […]OpenAI releases Point-E, an AI that generates 3D models by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
BigScience, a community project backed by startup Hugging Face with the goal of making text-generating AI widely available, is developing a system called Petals that can run AI like ChatGPT by joining resources from people across the internet. With Petals, the code for which was released publicly last month, volunteers can donate their hardware power […]Petals is creating a free, distributed network for running text-generating AI by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Aviva uses AI and natural language processing to match customers’ spoken words with fields of a loan application. Within minutes, customers can qualify for up to $1,000.Early-stage Mexico fintech Aviva is making loans as easy as a video call by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
ImagenAI, a startup using AI to help professional photographers edit photos and automate post-production work, today announced that it raised $30 million in an all-equity growth investment from Summit Partners. The new capital brings Imagen’s total raised to $34 million, and co-founder and CEO Yotam Gil tells TechCrunch that it’ll be used to expand the […]ImagenAI, which uses AI to personalize photo editing styles, lands $30M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
"Growth at all costs" is a fairy tale made possible by cheap money that helped VCs set expectations for founders — and each other.TechCrunch+ roundup: New VC rules, AI biotech investor survey, Instagram ad case study by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
Hello and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. To end the year, we are bringing back our predictions episode with the entire Equity crew: Alex, Natasha, Mary Ann, Maggie, Theresa, and Becca. Grace couldn’t make the mic but we have a […]Equity’s 2023 predictions on the future of building, crypto and AI by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch
AI-generated music is already an innovative enough concept, but Riffusion takes it to another level with a clever, weird approach that produces weird and compelling music using not audio but images of audio. Sounds strange, is strange. But if it works, it works. And it does work! Kind of. Diffusion is a machine learning technique […]Try ‘Riffusion,’ an AI model that composes music by visualizing it by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Six investors we surveyed recently told us that the macro environment has had a big impact on dealflow, valuations and M&A in biotech.As AI pervades biotech, what are investors looking for in 2023? by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch
AI investments might be down from their highs. But that doesn't mean companies aren't increasing their budgets for 'intelligent' apps.Companies — and VCs — continue to invest in AI despite market slowdown by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Seeking to bring greater security to AI systems, Protect AI today raised $13.5 million in a seed-funding round co-led by Acrew Capital and Boldstart Ventures with participation from Knollwood Capital, Pelion Ventures and Aviso Ventures. Ian Swanson, the co-founder and CEO, said that the capital will be put toward product development and customer outreach as […]Protect AI lands a $13.5M investment to harden AI projects from attack by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
In countries where English is not a main language, listed companies not only have to deal with financial disclosure regulations, but make sure their investor materials are available in English for global backers. WritePath make the process faster and scalable by combining its AI tech with human translators. The Taipei-based startup’s clients include Foxconn, ASUS, […]Taiwanese startup WritePath’s AI tech speeds up financial disclosure translation by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch
The startup uses AI tech to measure live data from solar plants, and offers suggestions for fixes when their solar arrays start underperforming.SmartHelio raises $5M to fix solar panels before they break by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
EnCharge AI, a company building hardware to accelerate AI processing at the edge, today emerged from stealth with $21.7 million in Series A funding led by Anzu Partners, with participation from AlleyCorp, Scout Ventures, Silicon Catalyst Angels, Schams Ventures, E14 Fund and Alumni Ventures. Speaking to TechCrunch via email, co-founder and CEO Naveen Verma said […]EnCharge AI emerges from stealth with $21.7M to develop AI accelerator hardware by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Google has launched chatbots like Assistant, but has kept AI improvements to its search engine in the background. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The launch of ChatGPT has prompted some to speculate that AI chatbots could soon take over from traditional search engines. But executives at Google say the technology is still too immature to put in front of users, with problems including chatbots’ bias, toxicity, and their propensity for simply making information up. According to a report from CNBC, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Google’s head of AI Jeff Dean addressed the rise of...
Defense technology continues to get a lot of attention from investors, and today, one of the bigger startups in the space is announcing more funding. Shield AI — which develops platforms and planes for autonomous flying systems, targeting the U.S. military and its allies as customers — has raised $60 million in funding, money that […]Shield AI raises another $60M at a $2.3B valuation for its military autonomous flying tech by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
If your deck doesn't give prospective investors a clear idea of how you will put their money to work, you're not going home with a term sheet.TechCrunch+ roundup: Summary slide showcase, video SEO strategy, how to value AI startups by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
Dataiku is the latest well-financed startup to suffer from macroeconomic headwinds, raising new capital at a significantly reduced valuation. The company today announced that it raised $200 million in a Series F round led by Wellington Management at a $3.7 billion valuation, down from the $4.6 billion valuation that Dataiku received in August 2021. A […]AI and analytics platform Dataiku raises $200M at a reduced valuation by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Fundraising may be drying up for some segments of the tech industry at the moment, but one area that continues to get a lot of attention is AI and specifically startups that are using it to build out revenue-generating businesses. Today, a startup called Zappi, which has built a market research platform that utilizes AI […]Zappi raises $170M for its AI-based market research platform by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
Valuing startups is an established process today, but do the methods employed apply equally to pre-revenue companies using novel AI?3 methods for valuing pre-revenue novel AI startups by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch
Image-generating AI models like DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion can — and do — replicate aspects of images from their training data, researchers show in a new study, raising concerns as these services enter wide commercial use. Co-authored by scientists at the University of Maryland and New York University, the research identifies cases where image-generating […]Image-generating AI can copy and paste from training data, raising IP concerns by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
AI is an imperfect technology, but one task at which it excels is identifying patterns in vast amounts of data. That’s perhaps why a number of startups have sprung up in recent years offering AI-powered products aimed at automating accounting tasks, like redacting sensitive info in paperwork and filing forms across different departments. Simply put, […]Vic.ai raises $52M, shows that automating accounting processes can be profitable by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
As text-to-image generators and intelligent chatbots keep blowing people’s minds, China has swiftly moved to lay out what people can do with the tools built on powerful AI models. The country’s regulators clearly verge on the side of caution when it comes to the consequences of generative AI. That’s a contrast to the US, which […]China’s generative AI rules set boundaries and punishments for misuse by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch
Artificial intelligence is touching every aspect of how we engage with information (and much more) these days. Today, a startup building out a business based on one particular application of that — how to apply AI to knowledge management in the workplace — is announcing some funding as it finds some decent traction for its […]Sana raises $34M for its AI-based knowledge management and learning platform for workplaces by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
A DALL-E depiction of “a dream that is fun to experience but boring to tell other people about.” | Image: DALL-E If you’ve been on Twitter (or Discord or plenty of other places) this month and your feed is anything like mine, it’s currently full of weird machine-generated text and art. The launch of ChatGPT, Lensa, and other tools has made a once difficult-to-access tool ubiquitous, and the result is an explosion of people posting their interactions with artificial intelligence.I love these tools, and I’ve been playing with them for a while now — at least since the release of AI...
Hello again! Greg here again with Week in Review. WiR is the newsletter where we take the most read TechCrunch stories from the last seven days and wrap them up in as few words as possible — no fluff, no nonsense,* just a quick blast of everything you probably want to know about in tech […]Another week of layoffs, executive departures and AI-generated everything by Greg Kumparak originally published on TechCrunch
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by […]This Week in Apps: Apple App Store’s new pricing, Twitter app makers shift to Mastodon, debate over Lensa AI by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
Could Lensa AI's hybrid pricing be an example of a new path that more mobile app developers will follow?Hybrid pricing can help app developers better monetize their apps by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch
Kite's failure doesn't bode well for the many other companies pursuing — and attempting to commercialize — generative AI for coding.With Kite’s demise, can generative AI for code succeed? by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Have you ever thought up an idea for a movie or play that you just know will be a smash hit, but haven't gotten around to writing the script? Alphabet's DeepMind has built an AI tool that can help get you started. Dramatron is a so-called "co-writing" tool that can generate character descriptions, plot points, location descriptions and dialogue. The idea is that human writers will be able to compile, edit and rewrite what Dramatron comes up with into a proper script. Think of it like ChatGPT, but with output that you can edit into a blockbuster movie script.To get started, you'll...
Portal will look the best it ever has with an RTX 40-series GPU, but you definitely don’t need one to play the game. | Image: Nvidia and Valve A deal on a single PC game doesn’t usually rise to the top of our daily pickings of discounts, but it did today. Valve’s mind-bending and often hilarious puzzle game Portal costs a single dollar at Steam. This price cut is timed with Nvidia’s release of a big graphical overhaul of the game that adds optional ray tracing and DLSS 3 AI upscaling that’s best experienced with its pricey RTX 40-series GPUs. Thankfully, you don’t need one of those...
This week, many of us saw our social media feeds taken over by colorful, surreal pictures of people we follow, except they don’t quite look like themselves. The images were generated by Lensa AI, and it’s the latest in what feels like a now-annual trend to use a new app to create mockups of your face in various scenarios. Alongside Lensa, some folks also saw blocks of text from another AI generator, ChatGPT. So on this episode of the podcast, Devindra and Cherlynn chat the appeal, implications and possible future of these types of AI, before being joined by Engadget editor-at-large James...
OpenAI’s new chatbot is a coder, a teacher, a potential Google killer, and … a friend?
Ubie, a Tokyo-based startup providing an AI-powered symptom checker app and hospital SaaS products, has closed a $19 million extension to its previous Series C round. This brings the health tech startup’s total funding to $45.2 million in Series C. The extension round consists of 90% equity and 10% debt financing, according to the co-founder […]Japan’s health-tech Ubie wants to fuel its U.S expansion with $19M Series C extension by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch
Artificial intelligence is taking over almost every industry. The investment and finance industry is no exception. In Deloitte’s 2019 report, the firm reveals that AI is transforming the financial ecosystem to reduce costs and make operations more efficient by providing automated insights and alternative data, analysis and risk management. Technology such as AI has digitized […]Akros Technologies, an AI-powered asset management platform, raises funding from Z Holdings by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch
A close-up image of a silicon mono-crystal. Silicon is a crucial component in AI. | Image: Catherine Breslin / Better Images of AI / Silicon Closeup / CC-BY 4.0 Researchers talk about the ‘capability overhang,’ or hidden skills and dangers, of artificial intelligence. As the technology goes mainstream, we’re going to discover a lot of new things about them. Continue reading…
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge AI is in at the moment. Everyone is talking to ChatGPT like it’s an AOL chatbot circa 2001, and everyone else is happily handing their pictures over to Lensa so they can see what they’d look like rendered by an artist’s pen. The picture thing has struck me as a little odd, as there’s not a lot we know about how those images are used after uploading. Could my photos be used to develop the next person’s AI portrait?Prisma Labs, the maker of Lensa, told TechCrunch it deletes the photos. But I’m reluctant to give my name when they ask for it at...
There’s a lot of weird and wonderful uses for AI applications. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen AI powering better marketing emails, more smartly understanding the context of video content, and getting the most from customer feedback. It shows no sign of slowing: OpenAI announced it is pouring $10 million into the ecosystem to […]Smartynames uses AI to find you the perfect domain name by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
The dreamy photo-editing AI is a nightmare waiting to happen.
Hunt Club, a senior talent recruiting platform powered by AI, today announced that it raised $40 million in a Series B round co-led by WestCap and Sator Grove. In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO Nick Cromydas said that the new capital will be put toward further developing the platform while growing Hunt Club’s national footprint. […]Hunt Club injects AI and a network of experts into the recruitment process by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
For investors, assessing a portfolio company’s AI-readiness today is just as important as scrutinizing its books.3 methods for investors assessing AI-readiness in portfolio companies by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch
It’s all good and well to sell a carbon credit, but if you chop down the tree representing that credit as soon as the money hits the bank account, it’s not exactly a win for the planet. Gaia AI is building a tool that can be used for that, and other aspects of forest management, […]Gaia raises $3M to bring more science to the art of forestry by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
African credit-led neobank Finclusion Group has raised an additional $2 million in equity financing as it officially rebrands to Fin, the company said in a statement shared with TechCrunch. The news follows a January announcement that the fintech, which uses AI algorithms to provide financial services to African customers via an array of credit-centric products, […]African credit-led fintech Finclusion raises additional capital amidst rebrand by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.Daily Crunch: Lensa AI can transform Photoshopped fakes into nonconsensual pornography by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
In 2018, appliance conglomerate Bosch created a startup, Security and Safety Things (or “SAST” for short), whose stated mission was to develop a platform to help developers create software for AI-equipped cameras. SAST was to host a moderated, vetted “app store” for internet-connected cameras that would allow developers to build software on an open standard […]Bosch shuts down its app store for AI-powered, internet-connected cameras by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
We recently uncovered that Lensa AI can be tricked into creating NSFW images. When TechCrunch made the Prisma team aware of its findings, the company’s CEO replied with its findings. Prisma Lab’s CEO and co-founder Andrey Usoltsev told us that the behavior we observed in our article can only happen if the AI is intentionally […]Prisma Labs, maker of Lensa AI, says it is working to prevent accidental generation of nudes by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
Lensa has been climbing the app store hit lists with its avatar-generating AI that is making artists wave the red flag. Now there’s another reason to fly the flag: As it turns out, it’s possible — and way too easy — to use the platform to generate non-consensual soft porn. TechCrunch has seen photo sets […]UPDATED: It’s way too easy to trick Lensa AI into making NSFW images by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
Everyone who has email knows what a canned marketing email sounds like (and has probably deleted tons of them). For sales development representatives, automated emails are necessary to create the volume of outbound inquiries they need to get a decent number of leads. But badly written emails result in few replies and also make companies […]Sellscale uses generative AI to create better marketing emails by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch
A new chatbot from OpenAI is inspiring awe, fear, stunts and attempts to circumvent its guardrails.
Chattermill, a platform that helps companies unlock insights by analyzing customer feedback data from across myriad digital channels, has raised $26 million in a Series B round of funding. Founded out of London in 2015, companies such as Uber and Amazon use Chattermill to unify all their customer data, integrating with social networks, customer feedback […]Chattermill, which uses AI to extract insights from customer experience data, raises $26M by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch
If your Instagram is awash in algorithmically generated portraits of your friends, you aren’t alone. After adding a new avatar generation tool based on Stable Diffusion, the photo editing app Lensa AI went viral over the last few days, with users sharing their uncanny AI-crafted avatars (and the horrible misfires) in stories and posts. Lensa’s […]Lensa AI, the viral app making ‘magic avatars,’ raises red flags for artists by Taylor Hatmaker originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Facebook is testing ways for people to verify their age when using the platform’s dating app, including using an AI face scanning tool.In a blog post today, Meta announced it would start prompting users on Facebook Dating to verify that they’re over 18 if the platform suspects a user is underage (you must be over 18 to use the dating service). Users can then confirm their age either by submitting a copy of their ID or by uploading a selfie video, which Facebook shares a portion of with a third-party company. Meta says the company, Yoti, uses facial...
To Jae Lee, a data scientist by training, it never made sense that video — which has become an enormous part of our lives, what with the rise of platforms like TikTok, Vimeo and YouTube — was difficult to search across due to the technical barriers posed by context understanding. Searching the titles, descriptions and […]Twelve Labs lands $12M for AI that understands the context of videos by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Photo by Jens Büttner/picture alliance via Getty Images Stack Overflow, the go-to question-and-answer site for coders and programmers, has temporarily banned users from sharing responses generated by AI chatbot ChatGPT.The site’s mods said that the ban was temporary and that a final ruling would be made some time in the future after consultation with its community. But, as the mods explained, ChatGPT simply makes it too easy for users to generate responses and flood the site with answers that seem correct at first glance but are often wrong on close examination. “The primary problem is...
Google is shutting down Duplex on the Web, its AI-powered set of services that navigated sites to simplify the process of ordering food, purchasing movie tickets and more. According to a note on a Google support page, Google on the Web and any automation features enabled by it will no longer be supported as of […]Google shuts down Duplex on the Web, its attempt to bring AI smarts to retail sites and more by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Released two years ago, OpenAI’s remarkably capable, if flawed, GPT-3 was perhaps the first to demonstrate that AI can write convincingly — if not perfectly — like a human. The successor to GPT-3, most likely called GPT-4, is expected to be unveiled in the near future. But in the meantime, OpenAI has quietly rolled out […]While anticipation builds for GPT-4, OpenAI quietly releases GPT-3.5 by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Monarch Tractor, an electric smart tractor company, says its first AI-powered farming vehicles, dubbed the MK-V, are rolling off the production line. It’s the Livermore, California-based startup’s first product, and it uses Nvidia’s Jetson edge AI platform to perform agricultural tasks with or without a driver behind the wheel.“The NVIDIA Jetson enables the MK-V to run low-latency, real-time AI applications while at the same time conserving energy for longer battery life and extended run time,” said Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa. Image: Monarch Tractor The Monarch MK-V being...
Image: Disney Remember when making actors look older or younger in movies was a huge deal? The amount of postproduction work to achieve realistic results was immense back in the day, but now, researchers from Disney have revealed FRAN, a new artificial intelligence tool that can convincingly age or de-age an actor in a fraction of the time.In an academic paper, Disney Research Studios explains that FRAN (which stands for face re-aging network) is a neural network that was trained using a large database containing pairs of randomly generated synthetic faces at varying ages, which bypasses the...
Google is quickly joining Apple in recognizing the top apps of the year. The company has announced the Google Play Best of 2022 awards, and this year's biggest winners clearly reflect the cultural zeitgeist. The best Android app of the year is Wombo's Dream, an AI art generator — yes, one of the trendiest technologies of the year took top honors. The user's choice winner, meanwhile, is the social media phenomenon BeReal.Respawn swept the top game awards. Apex Legends Mobile won both Google's nod as well as the user's choice pick. Todoist is Google's favorite app for Wear OS smartwatches...
Artificial intelligence is creating increasingly sophisticated images. But what does it mean for the art world? Gilbert and George, Gillian Wearing, Mat Collishaw, Elizabeth Price, Polly Morgan and Lindsey Mendick found outFor more than 30,000 years we have been the only art-making species on Earth, give or take the odd paint-throwing Neanderthal or chimpanzee. Art is the oldest and most spectacular triumph of human consciousness, from Lascaux to the Sistine Chapel. But a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) art software may be about to end that. It will whip you up a Picasso or a...
Microsoft may have long had OpenAI as its trusty partner (after its sizable investment), but AWS today announced that Stability AI, one of the hottest new upstarts in the generative AI space and the company behind Stable Diffusion, is doubling down on its cloud, making it its “preferred cloud provider to build and scale its […]Stability AI doubles down on AWS by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
This philosophy—supported by tech figures like Sam Bankman-Fried—fuels the AI research agenda, creating a harmful system in the name of saving humanity
OnePlus is joining the ranks of Android vendors committing to longer-term support. The Oppo brand is promising four years of major OxygenOS updates for "selected" phones launching in 2023 and later. They'll also receive five years of security patches. The company hasn't named devices, but it won't be surprising if the company prioritizes higher-end phones like the unofficially expected OnePlus 11 series.The phone maker also teased some features coming to OxygenOS 13.1 when it ships in the first half of 2023. The new software will include a revised always-on display with Spotify support, AI-...
Amazon announced today the launch of “Create with Alexa,” a new AI tool for kids that generates animated stories. The company first revealed the feature in September. “Create with Alexa” launched in the U.S. today, November 29, across supported Echo Show devices and is available in English. To craft a story, a child says, “Alexa, […]Amazon’s new Alexa feature uses AI to create animated kids’ stories on Echo Show by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
Artificial intelligence promises to help, and maybe even replace, humans to carry out everyday tasks and solve problems that humans have been unable to tackle, yet ironically, building that AI faces a major scaling problem. It’s only as good as the models and data used to train it, so there is a need for sourcing […]V7 snaps up $33M to automate training data for computer vision AI models by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
French startup Deepomatic has raised a $10.5 million (€10 million) Series B funding round. While the founding round is relatively small, the startup has managed to convince some large-scale clients to use its visual automation platform. For instance, telecom companies use Deepomatic on the field to check that tasks have been completed successfully. EnBW New […]Deepomatic wants to build the AI-based computer vision companion for field workers by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch
An image generated using Stable Diffusion Version 2. | Image: Stability AI Users of AI image generator Stable Diffusion are angry about an update to the software that “nerfs” its ability to generate NSFW output and pictures in the style of specific artists. Stability AI, the company that funds and disseminates the software, announced Stable Diffusion Version 2 early this morning European time. The update re-engineers key components of the model and improves certain features like upscaling (the ability to increase the resolution of images) and in-painting (context-aware editing). But, the...
Harvey, a startup building what it describes as a “copilot for lawyers,” today emerged from stealth with $5 million in funding led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, the tranche through which OpenAI and its partners are investing in early-stage AI companies tackling major problems. Also participating in the round was Jeff Dean, the lead of […]Harvey, which uses AI to answer legal questions, lands cash from OpenAI by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Healthtech startup RedBrick AI has raised $4.6 million in a funding round led by Sequoia India and Southeast Asia’s Surge as it plans to expand the market for its medical imagery annotations solution. Artificial intelligence has become ubiquitous in clinical diagnosis. But researchers need much of their initial time preparing data for training AI systems. […]Sequoia India’s Surge backs healthtech startup RedBrick AI in $4.6M funding by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch
It’s that time of year again. It can drop 20 degrees on any given day, and we’re stuck indoors watching people watch Qualcomm announce new chips and reference designs in sunny Hawaii. The Snapdragon Summit is the component-maker’s annual opportunity to map out its big plans for the next year, ahead of the holiday scrum […]Qualcomm debuts latest flagship Snapdragon chip and a new AI platform by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
CCTV and other kinds of security cameras have a strong big brother vibe, but for many of us that may be because we don’t really understand or know how the footage they pick up ever gets used. Today, a startup called Spot AI that’s built a system to help answer that question at least in […]Spot AI raises $40M to build smarter CCTV security camera tech by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
Proteins are the molecules that get work done in nature, and there’s a whole industry emerging around successfully modifying and manufacturing them for various uses. But doing so is time consuming and haphazard; Cradle aims to change that with an AI-powered tool that tells scientists what new structures and sequences will make a protein do […]Protein programmers get a helping hand from Cradle’s generative AI by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Crowdfunding platform OurCrowd, which has now become Israel’s most active venture firm, today announced that it is expanding its operations in Abu Dhabi by launching a new office and AI tech hub — enabled by the Abu Dhabi Investment Office — in the emirate. In total, OurCrowd plans to invest $60 million as part of […]Israel’s OurCrowd expands to Abu Dhabi by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Roughly two years ago, Microsoft announced a partnership with OpenAI, the AI lab with which it has a close commercial relationship, to build what the tech giant called an “AI Supercomputer” running in the Microsoft Azure cloud. Containing over 285,000 processor cores and 10,000 graphics cards, Microsoft claimed at the time that it was one […]Microsoft and Nvidia team up to build new Azure-hosted AI supercomputer by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
A DreamUp generation for “a man in a 1950s business suit defusing a bomb at a table in the style of Norman Rockwell.” | Image: DreamUp Artificial intelligence is learning to make art, and nobody has quite figured out how to handle it — including DeviantArt, one of the best-known homes for artists on the internet. Last week, DeviantArt decided to step into the minefield of AI image generation, launching a tool called DreamUp that lets anyone make pictures from text prompts. It’s part of a larger DeviantArt attempt to give more control to human artists, but it’s also created confusion...
Itay Dressler and Itzik Ben Bassat, who’ve held various software engineering and executive roles at startups together over the years, are accustomed to exchanging brief messages. Ben Bassat has ADHD, and for that reason prefers to keep texts on the shorter side. But as he and Dressler were faced with wrangling an increasing number of […]TheGist taps AI to summarize Slack channels and threads by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Last year, MIT developed an AI/ML algorithm capable of learning and adapting to new information while on the job, not just during its initial training phase. These “liquid” neural networks (in the Bruce Lee sense) literally play 4D chess — their models requiring time-series data to operate — which makes them ideal for use in time-sensitive tasks like pacemaker monitoring, weather forecasting, investment forecasting, or autonomous vehicle navigation. But, the problem is that data throughput has become a bottleneck, and scaling these systems has become prohibitively expensive...
Payload, which develops a headless open-source content management system (CMS), today announced that it has raised a $4.7 million seed round led by Google’s AI-focused Gradient Ventures. Other investors include MongoDB Ventures, Y Combinator, SV Angel, Grand Ventures and Exceptional Capital, in addition to a number of angel investors. Unlike most CMS tools, Michigan-based Payload […]Payload raises $4.7M for its developer-first headless CMS by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
An A.I.-powered online fashion marketplace, Shoptrue, is launching its website into beta today with plans for a public release early next year. The site blends artificial intelligence and personalized recommendations with taste-driven shopping, the company says, which helps give users a source for style inspiration as well as the ability to create and share outfit […]AI-driven fashion platform Shoptrue constantly learns its users shopping habits by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
Descript, the audio and video editing platform founded in 2017 by former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, has raised $50 million in a Series C round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, a tranche through which OpenAI and its partners, including Microsoft, are investing in early-stage companies. Descript is the second startup to receive a cash […]AI-powered media editing app Descript lands fresh cash from OpenAI by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
New York-based venture platform Modus has launched Modus Africa, a venture capital fund for AI and blockchain startups across sub-Saharan Africa, TechCrunch has learned. The fund is expected to reach a final close in the first quarter of next year. The spinoff continues Modus’s string of moves over the past 18 months, which has seen […]Modus expands to sub-Saharan Africa with the launch of its AI and blockchain-focused $75M fund by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch
Owl Labs, a startup developing a linuep AI-powered meeting hardware, today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series C round led by HP Tech Ventures (HP’s venture capital arm) with participation from Sourcenext, Matrix Partners, Spark Capital and Playground Global. The closing of the tranche marks the start of a strategic partnership with […]Meeting camera startup Owl Labs lands $25M and partnership with HP by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Amazon has unveiled its latest warehouse robot. It says "Sparrow is the first robotic system in our warehouses that can detect, select, and handle individual products in our inventory." The robotic arm uses AI and computer vision to recognize and handle millions of items, according to Amazon.The company says that, by employing robots in its warehouses, it can conduct operations more efficiently and safely. "Sparrow will take on repetitive tasks, enabling our employees to focus their time and energy on other things, while also advancing safety," Amazon said. "At the same time, Sparrow will help...
The third annual Sight Tech Global conference, a virtual, free and highly accessible event on December 7 and 8 convenes some of the world’s top experts working on assistive tech, especially AI, for people who are blind or visually impaired. If you don’t follow this topic, maybe you should, because a lot of cutting-edge tech […]Sight Tech Global 2022 agenda announced by David Riggs originally published on TechCrunch
DeviantArt, the Wix-owned artist community, today announced a new protection for creators to disallow art-generating AI systems from being developed using their artwork. An option on the site will allow artists to preclude third parties from scraping their content for AI development purposes, aiming to prevent work from being swept up without artists’ knowledge or […]DeviantArt provides a way for artists to opt out of AI art generators by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Last year, OpenAI announced the OpenAI Startup Fund, a tranche through which it and its partners, including Microsoft, are investing in early-stage AI companies tackling major problems. Mum’s been the word since on which companies have received infusions from the Fund. But today, the OpenAI Startup Fund revealed that it led a $23.5 million investment […]OpenAI leads $23.5M round in Mem, an AI-powered note-taking app by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
If you think of robots in the military, your mind may conjure dystopian images of science-fiction battlefields with AI-powered machines trading laser fire. But in a much more humane application, UK researchers are developing a potentially lifesaving medical system equivalent to a VR triage video call.University of Sheffield researchers are working on a telepresence system to treat military personnel during combat. The plan is for offsite medics to don virtual reality headsets and control a battlefield robot. The machine can take the patient's vitals with the same technology used in robotic...
SoundHound — maker of the voice AI technology used by Mercedes-Benz, Deutsche Telecom, Snap and Mastercard and more — has laid off about 10% of its workforce amid ongoing economic turmoil across global markets. The Santa Clara-headquartered company — which went public via a SPAC in April of this year — announced the decision to […]SoundHound, the voice AI platform, lays off 10% of staff citing ‘challenging market conditions’ by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch
GitHub is working on a new tool that will allow developers to code with their voice. Announced at the annual GitHub Universe conference yesterday, the experimental feature works in tandem with Copilot, GitHub’s controversial AI-powered pair-programmer that collaborates with software developers by suggesting functions or lines of code — a bit like Gmail’s Smart Compose. Copilot […]GitHub teases new Copilot feature that lets developers code with their voice by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch
Version 4 offers greater detail and better compositions from simple prompts.
Nvidia’s A100 card, which is the basis for the A800 being sold in China. | Image: Nvidia Nvidia has released a cut-down version of its high-end A100 GPU as a way to get around restrictions the US government recently imposed to limit how companies can sell AI training equipment to countries like China and Russia. The card, known as the A800, should have the same massive computing capabilities as the original but can only communicate with other cards in a computing cluster at 400 gigabytes per second instead of 600Gbps. According to The Wall Street Journal, that means the A800 should be just as...
Photo illustration by William Joel / The Verge We also talk about AI and VR — but we know why you’re here. Continue reading…
Generative AI is suddenly everywhere. Over the past year, you’ve probably seen people showcasing impressive AI-generated artworks, thanks to progress in text-to-image algorithms introduced by groups like OpenAI and Stability AI. A proliferation of startups is now trying to devise applications for this new class of language model, where the machine is capable of creating […]Movio wants to make your marketing videos with generative AI by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch
Research in the field of machine learning and AI, now a key technology in practically every industry and company, is far too voluminous for anyone to read it all. This column, Perceptron, aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in, but not limited to, artificial intelligence — and explain […]Perceptron: AI that sees with sound, learns to walk, and predicts seismic physics by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Spinning out of top U.K. universities Cambridge University and UCL, Carbon Re just raised £4.2 million ($4.8 million) in a bid to tackle the gigatonnes of carbon emissions spewing forth from the traditional thorn-in-climate-change-side cement industry. The company says it is building state-of-the-art AI to decarbonize energy-intensive industries. It claims that its “Delta Zero AI” […]Carbon Re spins out of academia-land to take on cement pollution by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
The iMerit ML DataOps Summit kicks off tomorrow, November 8. Don’t miss your chance to gather online with more than 2,000 data scientists, engineers and top AI & ML speakers to learn about the latest in dataops solutions, connect and engage with attendees and expand your network. If you haven’t registered yet, here are just […]5 great reasons to attend iMerit’s ML DataOps Summit by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple’s looking to change Siri’s trigger phrase from “Hey Siri,” to just “Siri,” according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. This means you would just need to say “Siri” followed by a command to activate the smart assistant.As noted by Gurman, Apple’s been working on this feature for the past several months and is expected to roll it out next year or in 2024. But Apple will have to put in a “significant amount of AI training and underlying engineering work,” to get the feature to function properly, as the smart assistant...
Jack Dorsey, who stepped down as Twitter CEO less than one year ago, finally addressed the layoffs that impacted approximately 50% of the company he co-founded in 2006. The workforce reduction, led by Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk, impacted thousands of people – and key teams working on human rights, accessibility, AI ethics and curation. […]Jack Dorsey breaks his silence, owns “responsibility for why everyone is in this situation” at Twitter by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch
Stability AI, the venture-backed startup behind the text-to-image AI system Stable Diffusion, is funding a wide-ranging effort to apply AI to the frontiers of biotech. Called OpenBioML, the endeavor’s first projects will focus on machine learning based approaches to DNA sequencing, protein folding, and computational biochemistry. The company’s founders describe OpenBioML as an “open research […]Stability AI backs effort to bring machine learning to biomed by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
As part of a wave of layoffs, the new CEO disbanded a group working to make Twitter’s algorithms more transparent and fair.
You won't have to visit a specific website to use DALL-E 2 for much longer. OpenAI has publicly released a beta framework that lets apps and other products use the AI art generator. This includes the natural language descriptions that define DALL-E as well as moderation to filter out hate, gore and similar extreme content. A handful of customers are already using the technology. Microsoft's new Designer app uses DALL-E to create artwork for social media, documents and invitations. The AI image tool is coming to Bing and Edge to help you make art when you can't find what you need. Cala...
At long last, DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s image-generating AI system, is available as an API, meaning developers can build the system into their apps, websites and services. In a blog post today, OpenAI announced that any developer can start tapping the power of DALL-E 2 — which more than three million people are now using to […]Now anyone can build apps that use DALL-E 2 to generate images by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Data annotation, or the process of adding labels to images, text, audio and other forms of sample data, is typically a key step in developing AI systems. The vast majority of systems learn to make predictions by associating labels with specific data samples, like the caption “bear” with a photo of a black bear. A […]Dataloop secures cash infusion to expand its data annotation tool set by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Four years ago, Comma.ai founder George Hotz turned to his board — of which he is the only member — and fired himself as CEO. At the time, the goal for the famed iPhone and Playstation 3 hacker, known as geohot, was to build out a new research division to focus on behavioral models that […]George Hotz, aka ‘geohot’ is leaving Comma.ai for a lofty AI project by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch
Don’t miss the investor-focused session “Current and Future State of ML DataOps Landscape” at the iMerit ML DataOps Summit on November 8. As enterprises dive deeper into commercializing AI applications to improve business efficiencies, many realize the massive transformation and increasing complexity of the machine learning data operations landscape. Join our panelists as they dig […]Hear the VC perspective at iMerit ML DataOps Summit by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch
At an AI-focused press event today in New York, Google announced that it’s bringing its AI-powered wildfire detection system to the U.S. Canada, Mexico and parts of Australia. It’s one of several “AI for good” efforts the company detailed this morning, which also included Google’s efforts to expand flood forecasting to more regions around the […]Google’s wildfire detection is available in US, Mexico, Canada and parts of Australia by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
Digital creation company Picsart is adding an AI Image Generator and an AI Writer to create images and ad copy, the company announced on Wednesday. Picsart says that as text-to-image generators are growing in popularity, it’s bringing one directly into its platform. As with other models, Picsart’s AI Image Generator allows you to create images […]Picsart adds an AI Image Generator and AI Writer to its suite of creative tools by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
Galileo, a startup launching a platform for AI model development, today announced that it raised $18 million in a Series A round led by Battery Ventures with participation from The Factory, Walden Catalyst, FPV Ventures, Kaggle co-founder Anthony Goldbloom and other angel investors. The new cash brings the company’s total raised to $23.1 million and […]MLOps platform Galileo lands $18M to launch a free service by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Creative Fabrica, a marketplace for digital files like print-on-demand assets, fonts and graphics, announced today it will launch its own generative AI tool. Called CF Spark, it’s already seen three million prompts generated, and more than 500,000 published by Creative Fabrica creators over the past three weeks. Like other digital assets on the platform, users […]Digital assets marketplace Creative Fabrica launches generative AI tool by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch
Topline Pro uses generative AI so service-based businesses can get discovered, build trust among customers and generate repeat customers.Topline Pro grabs $5M to help home service businesses scale online by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive the full edition of the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. This is a shorter version of The Station newsletter that is emailed to subscribers. Want all the deals, news roundups and commentary? Subscribe […]Mobileye cruises into the public market and inside the Argo AI collapse by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch
Women have faced gender-based discrimination in the workforce throughout history, denied employment in all but a handful of subservient roles, regularly ignored for promotions and pay raises — and rarely ever compensated at the same rates as their male peers. This long and storied socioeconomic tradition of financially screwing over half the population continues largely unabated into the 21st century where women still make 84 cents on the dollar that men do. In her new book, The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future, Professor of Law and...
If you’ve been closely following the progress of Open AI, the company run by Sam Altman whose neural nets can now write original text and create original pictures with astonishing ease and speed, you might just skip this piece. If, on the other hand, you’ve only been vaguely paying attention to the company’s progress and […]Why “generative AI” is suddenly on everyone’s lips: it’s an “open field” by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch
This update is “just the beginning” for the driver assist system, Ford says. | Image: Ford When Ford announced yesterday that it was pulling its support for Argo AI, the autonomous driving startup it had financed since 2017, it cited as one of its reasons a belief that driver-assist technology will have more near-term payoffs. The automaker said it will be shifting its resources from the Level 4 autonomous technology that was under development at Argo to “internally developed L2+/L3 technology.” “So it’s taking that investment and putting it towards a business where we think we will...
The firm’s fifth seed fund targets startups focused on data science, AI, software automation, APIs and web 2.5.Solo GP secures $140M for fifth seed, third opportunity funds by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Drew Anthony Smith Argo AI, the self-driving startup backed by Ford and Volkswagen, is shutting down, The Verge has learned. Employees were notified that an announcement would be made late in the day Wednesday. (The news was first reported by TechCrunch.)The company, which was founded by veterans of Google and Uber’s self-driving car projects, has lost the financial support of Ford and VW, a source said. And according to TechCrunch, the company’s resources will be absorbed by both automakers. Argo is estimated to have around 2,000 employees, though it did announce a round of layoffs earlier...
Argo AI, an autonomous vehicle startup that burst on the scene in 2017 stacked with a $1 billion investment, is shutting down — its parts being absorbed into its two main backers: Ford and VW, according to people familiar with the matter. During an all-hands meeting Wednesday, Argo AI employees were told that some people […]Ford, VW-backed Argo AI is shutting down by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch
Sony has launched the $3,900 A7R V, its latest mirrorless camera designed to shoot portraits, landscapes and other subjects that require as much resolution as possible. The new model carries the same 61-megapixel resolution as the A7R IV, but has a much more powerful new Bionz XR processor that allows for improved AI autofocus, better shake reduction and 8K 24p video. The key improvement is in the autofocus, as the A7R V is Sony's first camera to introduced something called "human pose estimation." The system can see 20 different points in the human body and and thus figure out where the...
The Sony A7R V looks a whole lot like other Alpha cameras until you look closer at its rear LCD. | Image: Sony Sony is trying to reclaim any technological footing it lost last year to the Nikon Z9 and Canon EOS R3 cameras. While Sony was at the forefront for years with advanced features like real-time autofocus and eye tracking, its competitors have recently made huge strides to catch up. Now, Sony is announcing its new $3,899.99 A7R V camera — set to launch in mid-December — and it’s baking in an AI processing unit for the sole purpose of getting back in the lead of the autofocus rat...
The UK’s privacy watchdog has warned against use of so-called “emotion analysis” technologies for anything more serious than kids’ party games, saying there’s a discrimination risk attached to applying “immature” biometric tech that makes pseudoscientific claims about being able to recognize people’s emotions using AI to interpret biometric data inputs. Such AI systems ‘function’, if […]UK watchdog warns against AI for emotional analysis, dubs ‘immature’ biometrics a bias risk by Natasha Lomas originally published on...
LatticeFlow, a startup that was spun out of Zurich’s ETH in 2020, helps machine learning teams improve their AI vision models by automatically diagnosing issues and improving both the data and the models themselves. The company today announced that it has raised a $12 million Series A funding round led by Atlantic Bridge and OpenOcean, […]LatticeFlow raises $12M to eliminate computer vision blind spots by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Research in the field of machine learning and AI, now a key technology in practically every industry and company, is far too voluminous for anyone to read it all. This column, Perceptron, aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in, but not limited to, artificial intelligence — and explain […]Perceptron: AI saving whales, steadying gaits and banishing traffic by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Stock image giant Shutterstock has announced a major push into AI generated imagery today in partnership with OpenAI, expanding on a strategic tie-up the pair announced last year. The partnership between Shutterstock and OpenAI will see the latter’s DALL-E 2 image-generating AI system integrating with Shutterstock content and made available to Shutterstock users worldwide — […]Shutterstock to integrate OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and launch fund for contributor artists by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
A robot wields a paintbrush — but AI artwork is created with algorithms not oil paints. | Photo by Hollie Adams/Getty Images Getty Images CEO Craig Peters has criticized companies “racing” to commercialize AI art generators, saying firms aren’t thinking through the potential legal and ethical hazards of the technology. In an interview with The Verge, Peters reiterated Getty Images’ rule against selling AI content (which it banned in September), while announcing a new partnership between the company and Israeli firm Bria to offer AI-powered image editing tools. Getty Images’ stance...
Several years ago, Fabrizio Del Maffeo and a core team from Imec, a Belgium-based nanotechnology lab, teamed up with Evangelos Eleftheriou and a group of researchers at IBM Zurich Lab to develop a computer chip. Unlike conventional chips, theirs was destined for devices at the edge, particularly those running AI workloads, because Del Maffeo and […]AI chip startup Axelera lands $27M in capital to commercialize its hardware by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
As part of its larger commitment to combat “cyberflashing,” the dating app Bumble is open sourcing its AI tool that detects unsolicited lewd images. First debuted in 2019, Private Detector (let’s take a moment to let that name sink in) blurs out nudes that are sent through the Bumble app, giving the user on the […]Bumble open sourced its AI that detects unsolicited nudes by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
At its Build conference in May, Microsoft debuted Project Volterra, a device powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform designed to let developers explore “AI scenarios” via Qualcomm’s Neural Processing SDK for Windows toolkit. Today, Volterra — now called Windows Dev Kit 2023 — officially goes on sale, priced at $599 and available from the Microsoft Store […]Microsoft’s Windows Dev Kit 2023 lets developers tap AI processors on laptops by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
A series of AI-generated selfies created using the Facetune app, with the prompt used to create the selfie written below. From left to right, the images are in the style of M.C. Escher, the Top Gun movie, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. | Image: The Verge Like any novel technological development, text-to-image AI models are slowly moving from the R&D stage to the phase of “making weird stuff for social media.” Case in point is the phenomenon of the AI-generated selfie, which splices your likeness with different artistic styles and themes using machine learning. Think of it like the next...
A celebration for Stability AI, the start-up behind the controversial Stable Diffusion image generator, represents the arrival of a new A.I. boom.
Emad Mostaque, the founder of Stability AI, says his Stable Diffusion image generator is the key to unlocking creativity. His critics say it’s a potential threat.
A new AI research company is launching out of stealth today with an ambitious goal: to research the fundamentals of human intelligence that machines currently lack. Called Generally Intelligent, it plans to do this by turning these fundamentals into an array of tasks to be solved and by designing and testing different systems’ ability to […]Generally Intelligent secures cash from OpenAI vets to build capable AI systems by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Italy-based company Musixmatch is well-known for providing community-powered lyrics to major music streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, and Tidal. Now it’s launching a new platform for podcasts that combines AI-generated transcription and community-verified editing. While there are millions of podcast shows and episodes available for listeners, Musixmatch argues that podcast […]Musixmatch launches a podcast platform for transcription driven by AI and community by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
As the global data privacy regulatory landscape gets more convoluted and constrictive, engineering teams looking to use structured data to improve their products and AI models are being pushed to jump through plenty of hoops to stay compliant. BetterData, which is launching onstage at the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Battlefield startup competition, is aiming to help […]BetterData taps the blockchain to help create better synthetic data by Lucas Matney originally published on TechCrunch
Rivian has hired former Waymo executive James Philbin to lead autonomy and AI at the automaker, a new role that signals the company’s interest in automated driving technology. Philbin was director of software engineering for two years at Waymo. Before that, Philbin worked for five years at Amazon’s self-driving subsidiary Zoox, where he lead computer […]Rivian hires former Waymo exec for new autonomy, AI role by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch
AI tech like Adobe’s Project Motion Mix could make your still images replicate viral dance moves. | Image: Adobe Adobe will reveal a prototype AI project later today at Adobe Max 2022 that can convert a still image of a person into an animated dancer. Adobe says that all you need to do is load a full-body picture into Project Motion Mix, and the system will turn that individual into an AI-controlled puppet, animating new dance moves. The system uses a combination of AI-based motion generation and what Adobe is calling “human rendering technologies” to create its animations. The software...
Every year at Adobe Max, Adobe shows off what it calls “Sneaks,” R&D projects that might — or might not — find their way into commercial products someday. This year is no exception, and lucky for us, we were given a preview ahead of the conference proper. Project Clever Composites (as Adobe’s calling it) leverages […]Adobe’s AI prototype pastes objects into photos while adding realistic lighting and shadows by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.Daily Crunch: AI content developer Jasper now valued at $1.5B following capital infusion by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
As if it weren’t enough to have AI tanning humanity’s hide (figuratively for now) at every board game in existence, Google AI has got one working to destroy us all at ping pong as well. For now they emphasize it’s “cooperative” but at the rate these things improve, it will be taking on pros in […]Watch Google’s ping pong robot pull off a 340-hit rally by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
When Quddus Pativada was 14, he wished that he had an app that could summarize his textbooks for him. Just five years later, Pativada has been there and done that — earlier this year, he launched the AI-based app Kado, which turns photos, documents or PDFs into flash cards. Now, as the 19-year-old founder takes […]DigestAI’s 19-year-old founder wants to make education addictive by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
Chri Besenbruch, CEO of Deep Render, sees many problems with the way video compression standards are developed today. He thinks they aren’t advancing quickly enough, bemoans the fact that they’re plagued with legal uncertainty and decries their reliance on specialized hardware for acceleration. “The codec development process is broken,” Besenbruch said in an interview with […]Deep Render believes AI holds the key to more efficient video compression by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Meet Omneky, a startup that leverages OpenAI’s DALLE-2 and GPT-3 models to generate visuals and text that can be used in ads for social platforms. The company wants to make online ads both cheaper and more effective thanks to recent innovations in artificial intelligence and computer vision. Omneky is participating in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch […]Omneky uses AI to generate social media ads by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch
Adobe's annual design and technology conference begins today, so the company is making updates across much of its software lineup as part of the fall event. When it comes to Photoshop, Adobe has a host of new features for desktop and iPad as well as an update on the progress of the web version. With additional tools for selections, Neural Filters, collaboration and working on a tablet, there could be something to make everyone's workflow a bit easier in the latest releases. First, Adobe has refined the Object Selection tool to improve the accuracy of automatic selections and...
Adobe Lightroom 2022 has arrived, and the latest features are all about making it easier to select people or objects to adjust their colors or remove them completely. The key features, AI-powered masking and content-aware remove, are available on Lightroom, Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera RAW.Where Photoshop has been the usual way you'd go in and tweak or remove objects, Adobe introduced AI-powered masking to Lightroom last year. Now, it's expanding on that with more specific tools that allow you to easily select people and even individual body parts, objects or the background in a...
As the enthusiasm around AI image and text generators grows, Jasper, a startup developing what it describes as an “AI content” platform, has raised $125 million at a $1.7 billion valuation. The tranche is the company’s first, remarkably, and comes as Jasper acquires AI startup Outwrite, a grammar and style checker with over a million […]AI content platform Jasper raises $125M at a $1.7B valuation by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Google is bringing a set of new kids-focused features such as parent-controlled watchlists and AI-powered suggestions to Google TV, the latest in a series of efforts from the Android-maker as it attempts to broaden the offerings of its TV operating system for family consumption. The company said it is adding these features to the kids’ […]Google TV is getting parent-controlled watchlists and AI-powered suggestions for kids by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Sample images generated by Stable Diffusion. | Image: The Verge via Lexica Stability AI, the company behind popular text-to-image AI program Stable Diffusion, has raised new funding that values the company at around $1 billion (according to a report from Bloomberg citing a “person familiar with the matter”). It’s a significant validation of the company’s approach to AI development, which, in contrast to incumbents like OpenAI and Google, focuses on open-source models that anyone can use without oversight. In a press statement, Stability AI said it raised $101 million in a round led by...
Adobe Express, the company’s template-centric tool for helping anyone quickly create logos, banners, flyers, ads and more, has always long offered a free version for schools. As the company announced today — one day before its annual MAX conference — Adobe Express for Education now has over 43 million K-12 users globally. With over 43M […]With over 43M K-12 users, Adobe Express for Education gets new AI and safe search tools by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Sarah Guo raised $101 million for her new fund to back companies that are building artificial intelligence and what she describes as software 3.0.Carving out conviction around the future of AI with Sarah Guo by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch
As companies look to build diverse workforces, the biggest problem seems to be sourcing candidates from historically underrepresented groups, often because companies don’t know where to look. TaTio, an Israeli startup from a couple of HR veterans, has built a platform to help connect companies to candidates who have the skills, but may lack a […]TaTio AI-based work simulations help diverse job seekers showcase their skills by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
Microsoft has been gradually updating its Seeing AI app since its launch in 2017, expanding language support and general functionality over the years. Today, the company is announcing a new feature that would let Seeing AI read out detailed information when users scan the barcodes of products by healthcare company Haleon. The feature is rolling out today for US and UK users on the free app, which is only available on iOS. The company says an Android version will be available "in the future."In a press release, Microsoft and Haleon said "With today’s launch in honor of World Sight Day, people...
Microsoft might have a way to make Teams a more enticing option for meetings: make AI tackle the dirty work. The company is launching a Teams Premium offering for Microsoft 365 that uses AI to greatly simplify meeting management. Most notably, an "Intelligent Recap" feature automatically creates tasks, chapters and even personalized highlights. Miss a review meeting and you might know which segments to watch when catching up, not to mention what you'll need to work on.Premium also uses AI to translate captions in real time for 40 spoken languages, so you won't always need to wait for...
Two years ago, Microsoft debuted SharePoint Syntex, which leverages AI to automate the capture and classification of data from documents — building on SharePoint’s existing services. Today marks the expansion of the platform into Microsoft Syntex, a set of new products and capabilities including file annotation and data extraction. Syntex reads, tags and indexes document […]Microsoft announces Syntex, a set of automated document and data processing services by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Power Automate, Microsoft’s Power Platform service that helps users create workflows between apps, is getting new AI smarts. During its Ignite conference, Microsoft rolled out capabilities powered by OpenAI’s Codex, the code-generating machine learning system underpinning GitHub Copilot. Starting today (in public preview), Power Automate users can write what they want to automate in natural […]Thanks to AI, you can now create automations in Power Automate by simply describing them by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
At its Ignite conference this week, Microsoft announced updates heading to Teams, its ever-evolving videoconferencing and workplace collaboration app. New avatars are available, and more details were announced around Teams Premium, a paid set of Teams features including AI-generated tasks and meeting guides, which is set to arrive in December in preview. Teams Premium is […]Microsoft Teams gains animated avatars and AI-powered recaps by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
This Shark robot vacuum is only sold as a package with its self-cleaning charging station. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge If you’re in the market for a quality robot vacuum, the midrange Shark AI Ultra XL is now on sale for an all-time low price of $349.99 at Amazon. This deal saves you $300, though it’s exclusive to Prime subscribers as part of Amazon’s Prime Early Access sale event that’s going on today through tomorrow evening. This Shark robovac is a formidable challenger to various Roombas and Roborocks of the world, as it’s one of the few bots in this price range...
IMO, “growth hacking" is a sloppy way to describe the iterative work required to fine-tune marketing campaigns and systems.TechCrunch+ roundup: Growth hacking real talk, RPA market slowdown, AI and IP by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch
Insite AI, a platform for consumer packaged goods companies that uses AI to provide recommendations on how to price, distribute and promote their products in physical stores, today launched out of stealth with $19 million in Series A capital from NewRoad Capital and M12, Microsoft’s corporate venture arm. Co-founder Shaveer Mirpuri says that the funding […]Insite AI raises $19M to help consumer brands figure out their in-store strategies by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
We’ve seen AIs create music, pornography and art. The Estonian startup Yummy started off creating a meal-kit startup, but along the way created an AI that can create and adapt recipes based on your taste and dietary restrictions, complete with AI-generated images of what your dishes might look like. “Imagine a world where you would […]Great, now the AI is coming for your grandma’s recipes as well! by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
As AI becomes more prevalent in our economy and integral to innovation, startups cannot afford to ignore IP rights.5 key IP considerations for AI startups by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch
It was only five years ago that electronic punk band YACHT entered the recording studio with a daunting task: they would train an AI on fourteen years of their music, then synthesize the results into the album “Chain Tripping.” “I’m not interested in being a reactionary,” YACHT member and tech writer Claire L. Evans said […]AI music generators could be a boon for artists — but also problematic by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
This week, Cherlynn, Devindra and Engadget’s Sam Rutherford dive into everything we learned at Google’s Pixel 7 event. Sure, it’s nice to have new phones, but it’s even nicer to see Google developing a cohesive design for all of its new devices. The Pixel Watch actually looks cool! And while we were ready to knock the (way too late) Pixel Tablet, its speaker base seems genuinely useful. Google may have finally figured out how to combine its software and AI smarts with well-designed hardware.Engadget · The Pixel 7 and Google’s new family of devicesListen above, or subscribe on your...
Eye scans could provide a non-invasive way to screen for cardiovascular disease. | Image: Getty Images Software developed using machine learning can be used to predict someone’s risk of heart disease in less than a minute by analyzing the veins and arteries in their eye. The new research, published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, paves the way for the development of quick and cheap cardiovascular screenings, if the findings are validated in future clinical trials. These screenings would let individuals know their risk of stroke and heart attack without the need for blood tests or...
Pixel devices are adored for their punchy images and AI-powered photo features, and today, we get treated to a pair of new phones: The Pixel 7 and the Pixel 7 Pro. Both phones have a 50-megapixel main sensor and a 12-megapixel ultrawide sensor. The Pixel 7 Pro has an additional 48-megapixel telephoto lens. With these new […]Here are all new camera feature coming to the Pixel 7 by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Google just launched its Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro smartphones, and as expected, the cameras haven't changed much from the previous model, hardware-wise. As usual though, Google has introduced a bunch of new and useful AI software camera tricks powered by the new Tensor G2 chip, including updates to Real Tone, and new Photo Unblur and Cinematic Blur features. It also unveiled the very cool "Guide Frame" feature that helps visually impaired people take selfies.One that's bound to be popular (and maybe overused) is Cinematic Blur. This gives you the same portrait-like blurred backgrounds...
At today's Pixel 7 event, Google has announced a new accessibility feature that will help blind and visually-impaired users take better selfies. "Guided Frame" is a voice coach that will tell users where to hold their phones in order to, for instance, take a selfie. Hold the device in front of you, and it'll ask you to go up, down, or to the side, until its AI believes you're in the best place to shoot. When it does, it'll even trigger the shutter automatically, telling the user when they can relax their hand. This breaking news story is developing, please refresh for more...
Gather AI, a startup using drones to inventory items in warehouses, today announced that it raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Tribeca Venture Partners with participation from Xplorer Capital, Dundee Venture Capital, Expa, Bling Capital, XRC Labs and 99 Tartans. The proceeds bring the company’s total raised to $17 million, which […]Gather AI secures new cash to scan inventory in warehouses using drones by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Trade wars, military conflicts, the rise of e-commerce and sustainability concerns are driving changes to supply chain networks and trade flows. Seventy-four percent of supply chain companies made changes to their networks within the past two years, according to Gartner. And in an IBM survey, 40% of executives stressed the need for spare capacity to weather […]AI-powered supply chain visibility platform Altana bags $100M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Not to be outdone by Meta’s Make-A-Video, Google today detailed its work on Imagen Video, an AI system that can generate video clips given a text prompt (e.g., “a teddy bear washing dishes”). While the results aren’t perfect — the looping clips the system generates tend to have artifacts and noise — Google claims that […]Google answers Meta’s video-generating AI with its own, dubbed Imagen Video by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
The White House this morning unveiled what it’s colloquially calling an “AI Bill of Rights,” which aims to establish tenants around the ways AI algorithms should be deployed as well as guardrails on their applications. In five bullet points crafted with feedback from the public, companies like Microsoft and Palantir and human rights and AI […]White House proposes voluntary safety and transparency rules around AI by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Crypto is still loaded with uncertainty, but Mastercard is betting that it can assuage buyers' minds. The credit card giant has introduced a Crypto Secure service meant to boost trust in crypto purchases. The offering uses AI from CipherTrace (a blockchain security firm Mastercard bought in 2021) to create a "risk profile" for digital asset providers and help card issuers decide whether or not to approve a transaction. Your bank might block a purchase if a merchant has significant fraud problems.The system shows color-coded risk ratings that vary from green (safe) to red (dangerous...
Macroeconomic factors are placing pressure on companies to improve efficiency, and on employees and their managers to do more with less. Amidst all the challenges and tribulations, workers believe a large portion of their work week is unproductive, with the majority of respondents to a recent (2018) Intuit survey saying that they’d get more done […]Xembly raises cash to develop an AI assistant for corporate meetings by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
A “rough development” version of Optimus is unveiled at Tesla’s AI Day. | Image: Tesla Elon Musk has finally unveiled a prototype of the much-hyped Optimus robot — a bipedal machine that the Tesla CEO imagines will one day be sold as a “general purpose” bot that’s cheaper than a car and equally capable of working in factories and doing chores at home.The presentation of Optimus at Tesla’s AI Day was laced with the usual Musk intoxicants of hype and misdirection. But it also offered roboticists an admirably detailed look at some of the machine’s actual capabilities. Their...
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive the full edition of the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. This is a shorter version of The Station newsletter that is emailed to subscribers. Want all the deals, news roundups and commentary? Subscribe […]Geely’s Europe expansion continues, Argo robotaxis on the Lyft app and Tesla AI Day takeaways by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tesla's Optimus robot prototype was not the only thing the company shared on Friday evening during its AI Day presentation. Autopilot director Ashok Elluswamy took the stage during Tesla's AI day to talk about how the company's Full Self Driving software has improved. He revealed that there are now 160,000 customers running the beta software, compared to 2,000 from this time last year. In total, Tesla says there have been 35 software releases of FSD. In a Q&A at the end of the presentation, Musk made another prediction — he's made a few before...
Tesla CEO Elon Musk kicked off its Tesla AI Day 2022 with a quick level set on expectations — “we’ve come a long way” — and then stepped aside to allow the first iteration of its robot walk out onto the stage. The robot wasn’t a human dressed in a robot costume like last year. […]Tesla’s robot is a real robot now, not just a guy in a suit by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch
Tesla’s Optimus robot has been revealed on stage at AI day. | Image: Tesla Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed a prototype of a humanoid robot that he said utilizes the company’s AI software, as well as the sensors that power its advanced driver assist features. At the start of Tesla’s 2022 AI Day presentation, Musk acknowledged that last year they had “a guy in a suit,” but promised something much more impressive today.The robot was showcased at Tesla’s AI Day, and reps said it features the same technology used to enable the Full Self-Driving beta in Tesla’s cars. According to Musk, it...
It seems like just yesterday that Elon Musk ushered a gig worker in a spandex suit onto the Tesla AI Day 2021 stage and told us it was an robot — or at least probably would be one eventually. In the intervening 13 months, the company has apparently been hard at work, replacing the squishy bits from what crowd saw on stage with proper electronics and mechanizations. At this year's AI Day on Friday, Tesla unveiled the next iteration of its Optimus robotics platform and, well, at least there isn't still a person on the inside? TeslaTesla CEO Elon Musk debuted the "first" Optimus (...
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.Daily Crunch: It’s AI day for Tesla, but we’re here for the cringey texts by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
Elon Musk said he expects to show off a prototype of the Tesla Bot. | Image: Tesla Tesla’s AI Day kicks off today, September 30th, at which Elon Musk has said he hopes to show off a working prototype of the company’s humanoid robot, Optimus. The event, which will be held at Tesla’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California, will be livestreamed for the public and will start at 9:15PM ET / 6:15PM PT — a bit later in the evening than last year’s AI Day.AI Day will be livestreamed on Tesla’s website: click here to watch.We don’t have a lot of details about what will be announced, but...
Meta’s researchers have made a significant leap in the AI art generation field with Make-A-Video, the creatively named new technique for — you guessed it — making a video out of nothing but a text prompt. The results are impressive and varied, and all, with no exceptions, slightly creepy. We’ve seen text-to-video models before — […]Meta’s Make-A-Video AI achieves a new, nightmarish state of the art by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Ride-hailing giant Lyft and autonomous vehicle technology company Argo AI are now officially offering public robotaxi service in Austin, Texas. This is the second city in which Lyft and Argo are operating a commercial robotaxi service after Miami, which launched in December. Riders in Austin will have the option of choosing a driverless commute directly […]Argo AI’s robotaxis officially available via Lyft in Austin by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch
Anyone who has followed global news events of late will have noticed the devastating floods that have engulfed pretty much every corner of the world, from the U.S. and Europe, to Africa, Australia, and Asia, where India and Pakistan have been hit by some of their worst floods in recent memory. By pretty much all […]As extreme weather events worsen, 7Analytics meshes AI and big data to predict flooding by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch
Ahead of its annual MAX event next month, Adobe has unveiled the 2023 version of its non-subscription Elements products. As with yearspast, the highlights are new AI features like animation for Photoshop Elements images and AI-applied art styles for Premiere.For Photoshop Elements 2023, the most dramatic update is the ability to add motion to still photos. To do so, you just need to select the part of the image you want to move and indicate the direction of movement using the arrow tool. The AI will then do the rest, adding appropriate movement to water, fabrics, sand and so on. A bit cheesy...
Meta unveiled its Make-a-Scene text-to-image generation AI in July, which like Dall-E and Midjourney, utilizes machine learning algorithms (and massive databases of scraped online artwork) to create fantastical depictions of written prompts. On Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed Make-a-Scene's more animated contemporary, Make-a-Video.As its name implies, Make-a-Video is, "a new AI system that lets people turn text prompts into brief, high-quality video clips," Zuckerberg wrote in a Meta blog Thursday. Functionally, Video works the same way that Scene does — relying on a mix of...
Doccla, a Sweden founded but London-headquartered health tech startup that sells a remote patient monitoring platform to hospitals to run so-called ‘virtual wards’, has closed a £15 million (~$17M) Series A funding round a year after raising a $3.3M seed. The Series A is led by US VC General Catalyst, with participation from funds managed […]‘Virtual ward’ startup Doccla gets Series A injection as it eyes AI tools by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Tesla’s second AI Day is fast approaching, and with it a flurry of speculations as to what will be discussed at the event — a phenomenon that we at TechCrunch are certainly not above. AI Day is the luxury electric vehicle maker’s annual event to hype up its artificial intelligence capabilities across different business segments, […]Our top 4 Tesla AI day predictions by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch
Buoys equipped with onboard computers could use AI to help save humpback whales in the US from ship collisions. | Photo by Tim Graham / Getty Images AI software monitoring sounds from within bright yellow buoys could reduce whale deaths by identifying whale species and pod locations. Scientists then verify the data and relay that information to any ships passing nearby, helping them to avoid the animals. The Whale Safe project was launched by Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory and partners, with the first Whale Safe systems already deployed in the Santa Barbara Channel near the ports of Los...
After nine generations of Pokémon, it can sometimes feel like the game developers are just pulling random words from a hat and seeing what they come up with. I still can’t decide if Klefki, the sentient keyring Pokémon, is a stroke of genius or madness. Now, there’s an AI generator for that. Justin Pinkney, a […]Make your very own AI-generated Pokémon-like creature by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
A rendering of the Tesla Bot. | Image: Tesla This Friday, Elon Musk is expected to unveil a prototype of his Optimus robot — better known as the Tesla Bot. When Musk announced last August that Tesla was developing a general-purpose robot capable of handling “unsafe, repetitive or boring” tasks, the reaction from experts was skeptical. A year on and not much has changed, with roboticists telling The Verge that we’re a long way off building a robot that can outright replace human labor.That doesn’t mean, though, that they’re not excited to see what Tesla has come up with. “We still...
What do more than 2,000 data scientists, engineers and machine learning professionals have in common? They’re all getting ready to hear from a fantastic lineup of speakers at the iMerit ML DataOps Summit on November 8. Over the course of the summit, you’ll hear from 18 of the the most influential and forward-thinking leaders in […]Hear game-changing AI and ML leaders at the iMerit ML DataOps Summit by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch
The rise of so-called “smart factory” technologies is leading to a race to modernize manufacturing plant and warehouse floors. Old equipment is being replaced by newer, more advanced machinery as manufacturers look to keep pace with the competition — and wrestle with high turnover rates. According to a survey by Plex Systems, 50% of manufacturers […]Invisible AI raises $15M to stick worker-monitoring cameras in factories by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Large AI systems like OpenAI’s GPT-3 might grab headlines, but the practical limitations of power consumption and cost — not capabilities — often determine where AI is deployed. For the most part, highly capable systems are relegated to the cloud because they’re too complex to run on edge devices with weaker hardware and limited connectivity. […]Femtosense raises capital to power the AI inside of consumer electronics by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
The European Union is to update product liability laws to tackle the risk of damage caused by artificial intelligence systems and address other liability issues arising from digital devices — such as drones and smart devices. Presenting a proposal for revisions to long-standing EU products rules — which includes a dedicated AI Liability Directive — […]Bad robot: Europe plans product liability changes to make it easier to sue AIs by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Higher education, at its best, aims to be less elitist and more accessible to people from all walks of life. Today, a startup called Ocelot is announcing a big round of funding to build more tools to help in that effort. The company, which provides an AI-based platform to facilitate easier communications between universities and […]Ocelot, an engagement platform aimed at college students, raises $117M in its first outside funding by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
Chipotle's tortilla-making robot will soon help out in a restaurant you can visit. The chain has unveiled a slew of technology updates that include moving the Miso Robotics-made Chippy robot to a real restaurant. The machine will start cooking tortilla chips in a Fountain Valley, California location in October. Feedback from customers and workers will help the company decide on a national rollout.Artificial intelligence will influence some human cooks, too. Chipotle is piloting a demand-based cooking system that uses AI to tell staff what and when to cook based on forecasts for how much...
Kumo, a startup offering an AI-powered platform to tackle predictive problems in business, today announced that it raised $18 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia, with participation from A Capital, SV Angel and several angel investors. Co-founder and CEO Vanja Josifovski says the new funding will be put toward Kumo’s hiring efforts […]Kumo aims to bring predictive AI to the enterprise with $18M in fresh capital by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
From the cringe-inducing Jar-Jar Binks to unconvincing virtual Leia and Luke, Disney’s history with CG characters is, shall we say, mixed. But that’s not stopping them from replacing of one of the most recognizable voices in cinema history, Darth Vader, with an AI-powered voice replica based on James Earl Jones. The retirement of Jones, now […]AI is taking over the iconic voice of Darth Vader, with the blessing of James Earl Jones by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Disperse, a U.K.-based construction tech company that offers an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform to help project managers track work and capture data from building sites, has raised $16 million in funding. Founded out of London in 2015, Disperse effectively creates a digital version of an entire construction site, including visual snapshots that track the progress […]Disperse, which brings AI-fuelled data to construction projects, raises $16M by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch
After 45 years of voicing one of the most iconic characters in cinema history, James Earl Jones has said goodbye to Darth Vader. At 91, the legendary actor recently told Disney he was “looking into winding down this particular character.” That forced the company to ask itself how do you even replace Jones? The answer Disney eventually settled on, with the actor’s consent, involved an AI program.If you’ve seen any of the recent Star Wars shows, you’ve heard the work of Respeecher. It’s a Ukrainian startup that uses archival recordings and a “proprietary AI algorithm” to create...
Research in the field of machine learning and AI, now a key technology in practically every industry and company, is far too voluminous for anyone to read it all. This column, Perceptron, aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in, but not limited to, artificial intelligence — and explain […]Perceptron: Multilingual, laughing, Pitfall-playing and streetwise AI by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
The chess world is currently consumed by a drama as lurid and compelling, in its way, as the Don’t Worry Darling fracas. Involving implications of cheating at the highest levels of play, the feud between the world champion and an upstart challenger has prompted speculation on the existential threat to chess posed by an AI […]Tech is at the heart of the biggest chess drama in years by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Deepfakes, AI generated porn, and a thousand more innocent uses — there’s been a lot of news about neural network-generated images. It makes sense that people started getting curious; were my photos used to train the robots? Are photos of me in the image-generating training sets? A brand new site tries to give you an […]This site tells you if photos of you been used to train the AI by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
Brightflow AI automates financial services and disseminates that information in a way that a business owner can understand.Brightflow AI aims to spotlight small business cash flow by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
The Nvidia RTX 6000 ADA professional GPU isn’t your run-of-the-mill gaming card. | Image: Nvidia Nvidia has announced the RTX 6000 48GB graphics card, the latest model to join its family of workstation-focused GPUs designed for content creators and enterprise-grade graphics. Nvidia describes the RTX 6000 as the perfect tool for creating content for the metaverse alongside Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise, thanks to its Ada Lovelace generation AI, massively increased raytracing and CUDA cores, and programmable shader technology. While the recently announced GeForce RTX 4090 is the top-end Ada...
Synthetic speech tech startup Murf gives a voice, literally, to content creators of all sizes. Murf, which now has a library of more than 120 human-parity AI voices across 20 languages, announced today it has raised $10 million Series A funding led by Matrix partners. Participation came from returning investors Elevation Capital and several prominent […]Synthetic speech startup Murf lends a voice to content creators of all sizes by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch
If you’re having trouble tracking your work and personal life as it spreads over 20 different apps and productivity suites, to the point where you have a meeting in 5 minutes you don’t even remember making, you’re not alone. We can’t all have a PA to keep track for us, but Augment hopes that a […]Augment’s personal AI assistant could help you keep track of a scattered digital life by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
Data privacy regulations like GDPR, the CCPA and HIPAA present a challenge to training AI systems on sensitive data, like financial transactions, patient health records and user device logs. Historical data is what “teaches” AI systems to identify patterns and make predictions, but there are technical hurdles to using it without compromising a person’s identity. […]DynamoFL aims to bring privacy-preserving AI to more industries by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge OpenAI is letting users of its AI art generator program DALL-E edit images with human faces. This feature was previously off-limits due to fears of misuse, but, in a letter sent to DALL-E’s million-plus users, OpenAI says it’s opening up access after improving its filters to remove images that contain “sexual, political, and violent content.” The feature will let users edit images in a number of different ways. They can upload a photograph of someone and generate variations of the picture, for example, or they can edit specific features, like...
As the weather gets hot and dry, things get a little bit tense these days. While it’s been possible for humans to be on the lookout for fires (there are even organizations that make it easy to volunteer to do so), one of the big challenge is that technology often comes up short; by the […]Pano has a burning desire to apply AI smarts to wildfire detection by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
Israeli AI company D-ID, which provided technology for projects like Deep Nostalgia, is launching a new platform where users can upload a single image and text to generate video. With this new site called Creative Reality Platform, the company is targeting sectors like corporate training and education, internal and external communication from companies, product marketing […]D-ID, the company behind Deep Nostalgia, lets you create AI-generated videos from a single image by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
After a Florida man was accused of vehicular homicide, his lawyer used Clearview AI’s facial recognition software to prove his innocence. But other defense lawyers say Clearview’s offer rings hollow.
Everyone wants to get in on the AI image generation action, but if you’ve been intimidated by the existing options out there based on Stable Diffusion, including the Midjourney Discord bot, you’re in luck: Diffusion Bee is a simple Mac app that gives you everything you need to generate your own images from text prompt […]This Mac app makes it easy to create your own AI images with Stable Diffusion by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch
First Star, backer of deep tech startups like Plus One and Fyto, aims to raise as much as $40 million for its third venture fund, TechCrunch has learned. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, First Star typically backs robotics, blockchain, AI and machine learning-focused startups at the early stage. The firm has not disclosed a first close […]Deep tech VC First Star plots a $40M third fund by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch
Will Ross and William Steenbergen were AI researchers at Stanford working on climate and atmospheric modeling and reinforcement learning, respectively, when they began to collaborate on wildfire modeling and hurricane modeling initiatives for the insurance industry. They were surprised to learn how big of a difference there was between what the data told insurers to […]Federato raises $15M to help insurance customers manage risk by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Conventionally, salespeople are responsible for juggling tasks like following a playbook, capturing responses, building rapport, and updating a customer relationship management (CRM) system during sales calls. As these tend to be repetitive and time consuming, tedium can quickly set in. The average salesperson spends over five hours a week updating CRM records, according to a […]Winn.AI launches out of stealth with an AI assistant for sales calls by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
AI Dungeon realized the dream many gamers have had since the ’80s: an evolving storyline that players themselves create and direct. Now, it’s going further with a new feature that enables players to generate images that illustrate those stories. Developed by indie game studio Latitude, which was initially a one-person operation, AI Dungeon writes dialogue […]Latitude brings AI-generated artwork to AI Dungeon by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Walmart is expanding its support for AI-powered virtual try-on technology that allows online shoppers to better visualize clothing on models that look like themselves in both appearance and body type. Before, Walmart.com customers could select from among dozens of different models to find one who best looked like them in order to see how clothing […]Walmart introduces virtual try-on tech which uses customers’ own photos to model the clothing by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
There’s a ghost in the machine. Machine learning, that is. We are all regularly amazed by AI’s capabilities in writing and creation, but who knew it had such a capacity for instilling horror? A chilling discovery by an AI researcher finds that the “latent space” comprising a deep learning model’s memory is haunted by least […]A terrifying AI-generated woman is lurking in the abyss of latent space by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch
It’s difficult to convince users to switch search engines. That’s one reason why public search service startups rarely succeed. Another is that it’s expensive to index a huge number of websites (Google has an estimated tens of billions of pages indexed), but one Y Combinator-backed company, Andi, is undeterred — forging ahead to build an […]Y Combinator-backed Andi taps AI to build a better search engine by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
French biotech company WhiteLab Genomics has raised $10 million in funding for an AI platform designed to aid the discovery and development of genomic therapies. Founded out of Paris in 2019, recent Y Combinator (YC) graduate WhiteLab Genomics provide gene and cell therapy companies with predictive software simulations to expedite the design of gene and […]How WhiteLab Genomics is using AI to aid gene and cell therapy development by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch
In 2016, Meta (then but a simple country Facebook) launched its open-source AI research library, the Pytorch framework. Six years and 150,000 projects from 2,400 contributors later, Meta announced on Monday that the Pytorch project will soon spin out from the company’s direct control to become its own entity, the Pytorch Foundation, a subsidiary within the larger Linux Foundation nonprofit hegemony.Over the last half decade, Pytorch has grown to become a leading standard for the AI research community with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg noting in Monday’s press release that some 80 percent of “...
In 2017, three entrepreneurs — Chris Hazard, Mike Resnick and Mike Capps — came together to launch a platform for building AI and machine learning tools geared toward the enterprise. Hazard and Resnick had been working on various AI and game projects for the U.S. military, while Capps had recently retired as president of Epic […]Diveplane lands $25M to grow its MLOps platform by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Arize AI, a startup developing a platform for machine learning operations, today announced that it raised $38 million in a Series B round led by TCV with participation from Battery Ventures and Foundation Capital. Bringing Arize’s total capital raised to $62 million, CEO Jason Lopatecki says that the new cash will be used to scale […]Arize lands $38M to grow its MLOps platform for the enterprise by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
At a jam-packed event in Cupertino this morning, Apple revealed details of the chip powering the iPhone 14 Pro: the A16 Bionic. The successor to the A15 Bionic, it packs more transistors and components specially-designed to accelerate AI and other tasks across smartphone apps and iOS. Apple says that the A16 Bionic has a multi-core […]Apple unveils the A16 Bionic, its most powerful mobile chip yet by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Proposed E.U. rules could limit the type of research that produces cutting-edge AI tools like GPT-3, experts warn in a new study. The nonpartisan think tank Brookings this week published a piece decrying the bloc’s regulation of open source AI, arguing it would create legal liability for general-purpose AI systems while simultaneously undermining their development. […]The EU’s AI Act could have a chilling effect on open source efforts, experts warn by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
We sat down with Drover AI CEO Alex Nesic as part of an ongoing series of interviews with founders who are building transportation companies.
The cost of cybercrime has been growing at an alarming rate of 15% per year, projected to reach $10.5 trillion by 2025. To cope with the challenges that this poses, organizations are turning to a growing range of AI-powered tools to supplement their existing security software and the work of their security teams. Today, a […]
A red-headed woman stands on the moon, her face obscured. Her naked body looks like it belongs on a poster you’d find on a hormonal teenager’s bedroom wall – that is, until you reach her torso, where three arms spit out of her shoulders. AI-powered systems like Stable Diffusion, which translate text prompts into pictures, […]
“I won, and I didn’t break any rules,” the artwork’s creator says.
Nvidia, the world’s largest maker of artificial intelligence chips, is at the heart of a new round of U.S. tech sanctions targeting China. Nvidia noted in an SEC filing that the U.S. government had imposed new export restrictions on two of its most advanced AI chips to China, its second-largest market after Taiwan making up […]
Instacart is acquiring Eversight, an AI-powered pricing and promotions platform for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands and retailers, the company announced on Thursday. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2013, Eversight allows retailers and CPG brands to continuously test customized pricing and promotions directly with their individual customers. The company’s […]
Companies tend to divide their procurement spending into two main buckets. The first is large purchases over $500,000 with some starting $1 million, depending on the size of the organization. Anything below that figure falls under a category known as “tail spend.” Boston-based startup Fairmarkit has been working on a tail spend procurement solution for […]
The US government has introduced and immediately started imposing a new rule that would restrict the export of computer chips used for supercomputers and artificial intelligence to Russia and China. NVIDIA has revealed in a SEC filing that the government has informed the company of the new license requirement affecting one of its current (A100) and one of its upcoming (H100) GPUs, which were designed to speed up machine learning tasks. The government apparently indicated to NVIDIA that the new license requirement will address the risk that the affected products may be used for military...
Mavenoid, a Swedish company that provides both human- and AI-enabled support and troubleshooting tools for hardware companies, has raised $30 million in a series B round of funding. Founded out of Stockholm in 2017, Mavenoid works with hardware and consumer electronics companies including HP, Husqvarna, and Jabra, serving to automate technical support and onboarding for […]
Hello, hello! We’re back with another edition of Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly break down the top stories to hit TC in the last seven days. Want it in your inbox? Sign up here. Our most read story this week was about Stable Diffusion, a “new open source AI image generator capable […]
Kyle Wiggers Contributor Kyle Wiggers is a senior reporter at TechCrunch with a special interest in artificial intelligence. His writing has appeared in VentureBeat and Digital Trends, as well as a range of gadget blogs including Android Police, Android Authority, Droid-Life, and XDA-Developers. He lives in Brooklyn with his partner, a piano educator, and dabbles […]
The first pitching machine dates back well over 100 years. Obviously things have come a long way since that injury-inducing, gunpowder-fueled machine made its debut at Princeton University, but most modern systems are more or less the same. A ball is manually or mechanically dropped into a spinning wheel or wheels, which propel it toward […]
Mobile photo editing app creator Lightricks is hopping on the AI-generated art bandwagon with its new “Text to Image” generator within its apps including Photoleap, which is known for its photo editing capabilities, and Motionleap, an app that can animate a still photo to make it look like it’s in motion. As of today, users can […]
Image: Google Earlier this year, Google unveiled AI Test Kitchen — an Android app that lets users talk to one of its most advanced AI chatbots, LaMDA 2. Today, the company is opening up registrations for early access. You can sign up here, and Google says it will soon be letting people download the app and start chatting. (Though it’s limited to US users right now.)It’s interesting, considering that Meta made an almost identical move just earlier this month, opening up its latest and greatest AI chatbot, BlenderBot 3, for public consumption. Of course, people quickly found that they could...
Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images Whenever a popular online app announces a change to its fees, or in the services it provides for those fees, you’re going to get a reaction from its subscribers — especially the long-term ones. The latest app to cause this type of dismay is Otter, a recording and transcription service that recently announced downgrades of the services it provides on two of its plans and raised the price on a monthly plan.For free users, it means that they will no longer have access to all their past transcriptions — only the last 25. For paying customers who are on...
Google today launched AI Test Kitchen, an app that lets users try out experimental AI-powered systems from the company’s labs before they make their into production. Beginning today, folks interested can complete a sign-up form as AI Test Kitchen begins to roll out gradually to small groups in the U.S. As announced at Google’s I/O […]
Headroom, a startup developing AI-powered software to make meetings ostensibly more efficient, today announced that it raised $9 million in funding led by Equal Opportunity Ventures with participation from Gradient Ventures, LDV Capital, AME Cloud Ventures, and Morado Ventures. CEO Julian Green said that the proceeds will be put toward product development and expanding the company’s […]
Identity governance and administration (IGA) -- that's probably not something you think of every waking hour of your day, but somebody on your IT team probably is.
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.
During the pandemic, retailers were forced to embrace e-commerce. But some found that they struggled to maintain customer loyalty as consumer expectations changed and purchasing patterns shifted. As a result of formidable competition like Amazon, they discovered, customers have low patience for sites that don’t present them with what they want. According to research from […]
A new open source AI image generator capable of producing realistic pictures from any text prompt has seen stunningly swift uptake in its first week. Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion, high fidelity but capable of being run on off-the-shelf consumer hardware, is now in use by art generator services like Artbreeder, Pixelz.ai and more. But the […]
AI copywriters are getting a lot of attention from investors. A couple that have recently raised funding include Copy.ai and Copysmith. Now Scalenut is entering the arena with a $3.1 million funding round led by Saama Capital and Amit Singhal, formerly a senior vice president at Google and head of Google Search. Launched earlier this […]
If you have great lighting, a good photographer can take decent photos even with the crappiest camera imaginable. In low light, though, all bets are off. Sure, some cameras can shoot haunting video lit only by the light of the moon, but for stills — and especially stills shot on a smartphone — digital noise […]
Policymakers have been cracking down on platforms that collect consumer data, implementing rules that require companies to be transparent about the details they gather and use for commercial purposes. For example, last year, Virginia passed the Colorado Data Protection Act, which requires businesses to obtain consent before processing sensitive information, disclose when the information will […]
If software is eating the world, AI isn’t far behind. AI-powered text-, art- and audio-generating systems will soon make — and already are making — their way into the tools people use every day, from programming environments and spellcheck plugins to concept art creation platforms. The video game industry is no exception to this, and […]
Every August for the past two years, Chinese developer Game Science Studio has released new gameplay footage from its upcoming action RPG Black Myth: Wukong. Not one to miss a beat, it has done the same this year. On Friday, the studio shared a new eight-minute gameplay trailer and six-minute in-game cutscene. Much like last year’s Unreal Engine 5 reveal, the former is partly a showcase for NVIDIA’s DLSS AI-powered upscaling tech, and you can see what a difference it – and a year of additional work – has meant for the game’s framerate. Compared to last year’s trailer, the action is...
Podcasting has emerged as a major billion-dollar industry, with ad revenue in the U.S. alone expected to hit $2 billion this year — a figure that’s set to double by 2024. Against that backdrop, major players in the field are bolstering their podcasting armory, with Spotify recently doling out around $85 million for two companies […]
TikTok has rolled a new in-app text-to-image AI generator that lets users type in a prompt and receive an image that can be used as the background in their videos. The effect is called “AI greenscreen” and can be accessed via the short-form video app’s camera screen. The new effect was first spotted by The […]
You don't need to fire up DALL-E if you want AI to create images from text — you just need a popular social media app. The Vergenotes TikTok has introduced a rudimentary "AI greenscreen" effect in its Android and iOS apps that turns your text descriptions into artwork. It's much simpler than OpenAI's DALL-E 2, producing abstract blobs rather than photorealistic depictions, but it might do the trick if you want an original background for your latest video.As The Verge explains, though, there may be strong reasons to limit the AI generator's capabilities. Even if the required...
The company's three-pronged technology includes creating ideal environment for the shrimp, remote operations management and AI-powered automation to monitor and feed them.
DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s powerful text-to-image AI system, can create photos in the style of cartoonists, 19th century daguerreotypists, stop-motion animators and more. But it has an important, artificial limitation: a filter that prevents it from creating images depicting public figures and content deemed too toxic. Now an open source alternative to DALL-E 2 is on […]
There are a number of startups working to improve trash sorting with robots. AMP Robotics is near the top of the list, coupling a picker and a conveyor belt to sort materials in large, automated facilities. The technology aims to correct human shortcomings when it comes to recycling. Too often people either don’t bother to […]
A stitch in time saves nine, they say — and a blood thinner in time saves a trip to the emergency room for a heart attack, as Diagnostic Robotics hopes to show. The company’s machine learning-powered preventative care aims to predict and avoid dangerous (and costly) medical crises, saving everyone money and hopefully keeping them […]
When Hyundai acquired Boston Dynamics at the end of 2020, there were plenty of open questions. Chief among them was why we should assume this acquisition would be any different than the past few? The 30-year-old bleeding edge robotics form had been an uncomfortable fit for its last two owners, Google and Softbank, but the […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Meta’s AI thinks CEO Mark Zuckerberg is as sketchy as you might — at least, if you ask the right questions at the right time. The BBC and other outlets like Insider have reported on their adventures stress-testing BlenderBot 3, the artificial intelligence chat tool Meta released last week. As they note, it’s easy to make BlenderBot turn against its creator, calling him “creepy” or untrustworthy or even saying he “exploits people for money.” But that’s not precisely an indictment of BlenderBot or Zuckerberg. It’s a funny reminder that...
If you’ve ever Googled something only to be met with a little info box highlighting the top answer, you’ve encountered one of Google’s “featured snippets. Featured snippets are the little bite-sized Google results the search engine packages up and delivers to the top of the page for many searches. The problem with featured snippets is […]
You know that highlighted piece of text at the very top of a Google search results page when you look up a piece of information? That's called a "featured snippet," and it's meant to provide you with a quick answer to your query. Now, Google is making sure that the information it highlights is reliable and accurate by using its latest AI model, the Multitask Unified Model, so that Search can now look for consensus when deciding on a snippet to feature.Google's Search AI can now check snippet callouts — those are the information with larger fonts that serve as heading for featured snippets...
Hong Kong-based drug discovery and development company Insilico has secured fresh capital at a time that its CEO described as a “biotech winter.” The firm has raised $35 million on the heels of its last tranche in June, bringing its total Series D investment to $95 million. The new round was “oversubscribed”, the firm’s founder […]
Is there much more space for innovation in desks, I hear you ask? After all, now that we’ve made them go up and down, there are no new worlds worth conquering. Not so, says Lumina, makers of its eponymous AI webcam that’s been described as the equal of a DSLR in some corners. Now, the company is turning its attention to building a smart desk with a programmable, 24-inch OLED screen nestled in its top, designed to offer you a place to put passive data in easy view.The Lumina Desk, as it’s called, is a powered sit-stand desk, with a display that sits between your laptop (or monitor) and...
Nightfall AI, a startup providing cloud data loss prevention services, today announced that it raised $40 million in Series B financing from investors including WestBridge Capital, Venrock, Bain Capital Ventures and — for some reason — athletes and celebrities including Paul Rudd, Drew Brees and Josh Childress. CEO Isaac Madan says that the proceeds will […]
You know what? Fair play for dropping an F-bomb in a scene like this. | Screenshot: Fall Without enough production budget for reshoots, the director of upcoming action-thriller Fall says the team turned to AI technology to remove over thirty F-bombs to turn its R-rating into a much more box office friendly PG-13, Variety reports. The problem — which has now turned into a handy little marketing hook — apparently emerged when the indie film was picked up by Lionsgate for a cinematic release, where an R-rating (meaning children under the age of 17 cannot see the film without an adult present...
Manufacturing plants or factories take raw material inputs and add value through a sequence of unit processes before shipping a product. Now, this process must follow a recipe. There are a series of instructions for products such as cars; in those instructions, a list of parameter values, specific temperature for iron melting, specific pressure for […]
It’s been just a few weeks since OpenAI began allowing customers to commercially use images created by DALL-E 2, its remarkably powerful AI text-to-image system. But in spite of the current technical limitations and lack of volume licensing, not to mention API, some pioneers say they’re already testing the system for various business use cases […]
As millions of people are playing with AI-powered image-generation tools like DALL-E and Midjourney, new works of art are generated by the billions. Many of them are curiosities, some of them are legitimately incredible works of art that I wouldn’t hesitate to stick on my wall. In fact, I did; I have a Meural digital […]
Intel’s new Arc Pro GPUs. | Image: Intel Intel is launching its Arc Pro series of GPUs today, designed primarily for powerful desktop workstations and laptops. The Intel Arc Pro A40 and A50 will both be available for workstations, while the A30M will be available in pro-focused laptops. All three GPUs are capable of hardware-based ray tracing and AV1 hardware acceleration — and are designed with AI tasks and creator apps like Adobe Premiere Pro in mind.The Intel Arc Pro A40 will ship in a small single-slot form factor with 3.5 teraflops of graphical power, eight ray-tracing cores, and 6GB...
By 2025, three-quarters of VCs could use AI to guide their investments. But we're a far cry from that number today.
Machine learning systems have for years now been besting their human counterparts at everything from Go and Jeopardy! to drug discovery and cancer detection. With all the advances that the field has made, it's not unheard of for people to be wary of robots replacing them in tomorrow's workforce. These concerns are misplaced, argues Gerd Gigerenzer argues in his new book How to Stay Smart in a Smart World, if for no other reason than uncertainty itself. AIs are phenomenally capable machines, but only if given sufficient data to act on. Introduce the acutely fickle precariousness of human nature...
BlenderBot 3 learns by chatting with you, and tries to ignore the trolls. Like so many of us, it’s very much a work in progress.
Artist Miao Ying says Surplus Intelligence depicts humanity's conflicted relationship with the algorithms that control people's lives.
A Ford Argo AI test vehicle, being tested, drives through the downtown area in Detroit, Michigan on July 12, 2019 | Photo credit should read JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images As autonomous vehicle testing ramps up, Argo AI announced the formation of a panel of outside experts to oversee the safe deployment of its technology. The startup, which is backed by Ford and Volkswagen, will “provide feedback on Argo’s safety and security practices and policies, including maintaining a world-class safety culture, scaling safely across multiple cities and countries, and responsibly launching and...
UK police are testing a roadside van that can detect whether a driver is holding a phone while they're at the wheel. The three-month trial is being conducted in Warwickshire with the help of government-owned National Highways, which oversees motorways and major A roads in England. The test will help determine how the tech may be used in the future, according to The Guardian.The van, which can also check whether drivers or passengers are wearing seatbelts, is kitted out with several cameras that capture footage of passing vehicles. An AI system analyzes the images for possible phone and...
Aisera, a startup developing what it describes as an “AI-driven” support ticketing system, today announced that it raised $90 million in Series D funding led by Goldman Sachs with participation from True Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Icon Ventures, Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital and others. CEO Muddu Sudhakar said the new cash will […]
Can AI automate enterprise decision-making? It’s an exceptionally broad and challenging task — assuming it’s within the realm of possibility. But that’s what startup Arena claims to do, fueled by a round of funding ($32 million) led by Initialized Capital and Goldcrest Capital along with Founders Fund, Flexport and a colorful cast of characters, including […]
As of 2020, the clothing sector lost about $27 billion in annual sales due to counterfeits, an illicit trade that results in huge losses to both brands and buyers. Clothes, accessories and luxury goods are the most popular product items for counterfeiting, according to the 2022 intellectual property crime threat assessment report. But that’s not where […]
If you’ve been anywhere close to the interwebs recently, you’ll have heard of DALL-E and MidJourney. The types of art the neural networks can generate — and with a deeper understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the tech — means that we are facing a whole new world of hurt. Often the butt of […]
In late 2020, Alphabet's DeepMind division unveiled its novel protein fold prediction algorithm, AlphaFold, and helped solve a scientific quandary that had stumped researchers for half a century. In the year since its beta release, half a million scientists from around the world have accessed the AI system's results and cited them in their own studies more than 4,000 times. On Thursday, DeepMind announced that it is increasing that access even further by radically expanding its publicly-available AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (AlphaFoldDB) — from 1 million entries to 200 million...
Figuring out the right text prompts to yield the best results with AI systems like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 has become a science in its own right. Now a startup is looking to let “prompt engineers” cash in with an online marketplace that sells these finely tuned phrases. PromptBase, launched in June, allows users to sell […]
Kompliant, a startup delivering an “AI-driven” business onboarding and risk scoring platform, today announced that it raised $14 million in a seed round led by Level One Fund with contributions from former Visa president John Partridge and current CEO Stuart Sopp. The funds will be put toward supporting Kompliant’s product development, CEO Edward Katzin told […]
Facebook News tab (2019) | Image: Facebook As you’ve probably heard, Facebook and Instagram will lean heavily into AI-curated creator content going forward, and the News Tab project Facebook launched a few years ago doesn’t seem to be a big part of that. As reported by Axios and confirming earlier rumors, Facebook’s parent company Meta is telling publishers it no longer plans to pay for the content it has been aggregating in the news tab. According to the report, Meta spent about $105 million in three-year content deals for news (plus another $90 million for news videos), including $10...
Fresh fish isn’t really that fresh — even straight off the boat, the way they’re caught and killed is not only inhumane but detrimental to the resulting meat. There’s a far superior alternative, but it’s time-consuming and manual — but Shinkei Systems has figured out a way to automate it, even on the deck of […]
The idea of corporate gifting to maintain client relationships isn’t a novel concept. In fact, there’s a cottage industry of “gifting-as-a-service” startups that promise to streamline the task, ranging from companies such as Reachdesk and &Open to Sendoso and Goody. Vendors claim their industry is a profitable one (worth an estimated $258 billion) because the […]
Remember Natural Language Processing? NLP arose several years ago but it was only in 2018 that AI researchers proved it was possible to train a neural network once on a large amount of data and use it again and again for different tasks. In 2019 GPT-2 from Open AI, and T5 by Google appeared, showing […]
How should AI be considered in the context of copyright protection and authorship under U.K. law as it presently stands?
As regulation, platform dynamics and consumer choice continue to eat into the adtech stalwart known as cookies, it’s leaving a gap in the market for advertising solutions that can work well without relying on cookie functionality. Today, an adtech out of Spain that’s doing just this has raised a big round of funding to double […]
As we enter a new era defined by artificial intelligence and machine learning, the very foundation of many modern technologies is being put under a microscope by policymakers. That foundation? Data. Data is required for the refinement of most cutting-edge technology, and it will only become more important in future as we develop more sophisticated AI and ML models, fueled by richer, higher quality data sets. However, there are strict regulations around how data can be used, particularly within the EU. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mandates that businesses need consent to...
Sony’s racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice (and fast)Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology ReviewGran Turismo Sophy is a computer program built by Sony AI that debuted in 2020. It was trained to drive in Gran Turismo and the company put it up against some of the best human sim racers in private events. In the process, Sony learned a lot about how AI could work alongside people — both on the road and off. ‘A uniquely dangerous tool’: How Google's data can help states track abortionsAlfred Ng, PoliticoSeveral states that are moving to ban abortion also use a...
The wig industry aimed at women of color has an estimated market in the neighborhood of $13 billion. Black women face unique issues when it comes to building these wigs, and the process traditionally has involved sitting with a stylist for eight hours or more. A group of four Black women, two with MBAs from […]
This week, OpenAI granted users of its image-generating AI system, DALL-E 2, the right to use their generations for commercial projects, like illustrations for children’s books and art for newsletters. The move makes sense, given OpenAI’s own commercial aims — the policy change coincided with the launch of the company’s paid plans for DALL-E 2. […]
When it comes to video-based data, advances in computer vision have given a huge boost to the world of research, making the process of analyzing and drawing insights from moving images something that is scalable beyond the limits of a small team of humans. A startup called Theator has been applying this concept to the […]
Who doesn’t want to know what it’s like to pet a giraffe? | Image: Sony Sony released a ten-minute-long trailer for The Last of Us Part 1 on Thursday, where the game’s directors talk through some of the improvements coming in the PlayStation 5 remake of Naughty Dog’s iconic game. The trailer takes plenty of opportunities to show off the improved graphics (which look as nice as they have in the leaked screenshots, but it’s not like the game was ugly on the PS3 or PS4), but the most interesting involve changes to the gameplay — Naughty Dog says that the AI for enemies and companions...
A lot of promising companies come out of work by researchers at universities, or even grad students who have struck on some new innovation. But the transition from tech-focused research group to product-focused startup isn’t easy to make; fortunately three experts in the matter joined us at TC Sessions: Robotics to discuss a few ways […]
Robots relying on AI to learn a new task generally require a laborious and repetitious training process. Berkeley researchers are attempting to simplify and shorten that with an innovative learning technique that has the robot filling in the gaps rather than starting from scratch. The team shared several lines of work with TechCrunch to show […]
Run.ai, the well-funded service for orchestrating AI workloads, made a name for itself in the last couple of years by helping its users get the most out of their GPU resources on-premises and in the cloud to train their models. But it’s no secret that training models is one thing while putting them into production […]
Baidu, the Chinese search engine giant that has plowed money into AI and autonomous vehicle technology, unveiled Wednesday a new all-electric robotaxi that it plans to deploy at scale across China. Baidu will add the Apollo RT6 EV – a cross between an SUV and a minivan that comes with a detachable steering wheel – […]
OpenAI Those waiting for a chance to use DALL-E may soon get their turn. The powerful AI tool that generates images based on provided text will open in beta to one million users on the waitlist, OpenAI, the company that created DALL-E, announced today.Users enter a phrase or string of words into DALL-E, and the tool returns its own interpretation in the form of four images, ranging from whimsical to hyperreal. An updated DALL-E 2, launched in April, added the ability to edit existing images.A bowl of soup that is a portal to another dimension as digital art pic.twitter.com/vDbUpJoRWz— Critter...
As AI-powered services like OpenAI’s GPT-3 grow in popularity, they become an increasingly attractive attack vector. Even shielded behind an API, hackers can attempt to reverse-engineer the models underpinning these services or use “adversarial” data to tamper with them. According to Gartner, 30% of all AI cyberattacks in 2022 will leverage these techniques along with […]
Research in the field of machine learning and AI, now a key technology in practically every industry and company, is far too voluminous for anyone to read it all. This column, Perceptron, aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in, but not limited to, artificial intelligence — and […]
We’re fired up and ready to connect with the global robotics and AI community at TC Sessions: Robotics on July 21. The agenda for this online event is packed with presentations, interviews and robot demos, and our speaker lineup features the brightest minds and makers in the business. If for some reason you haven’t yet […]
Sophisticated AI systems like OpenAI’s GPT-3 can write prose that’s impressively human-like, or at least good enough to fool the average person. They’ve been used to generate essays, poetry, stories, news reports and more to impressive effect. Perhaps it was only a matter of time, then, before entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to leverage such systems […]
Mike Greene founded Hi Marley in 2017 and has since raised $41.75 million to fund the AI-powered insurance chat platform. Hear how the company — which was designed as an SMS texting platform — is finding product market fit as the insurance landscape rapidly changes, and how Underscore VC Lily Lyman provides support for the […]
In a world rife with opposing views, let’s draw attention to something we can all agree on: if I show you my pen, and then hide it behind my back, my pen still exists – even though you can’t see it anymore. We can all agree it still exists, and probably has the same shape and color it did before it went behind my back. This is just common sense. These common-sense laws of the physical world are universally understood by humans. Even two-month-old infants share this understanding. But scientists are still puzzled by some aspects of how we achieve…This story continues at The Next Web
Large-scale machine learning models are at the heart of headline-grabbing technologies like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and Google’s LaMDA. They’re impressive, to be sure, capable of generating images and text convincing enough to pass for a human’s work. But developing the models took an enormous amount of time and compute power — not to mention cash. […]
There’s a growing appetite for alternative search engines. At least, that’s the crux of the argument Richard Socher, the former chief scientist at Salesforce, likes to make. In 2020, Socher co-founded You, a search engine that uses AI to understand search queries, rank the results and parse the queries into different languages (including programming languages). […]
Text-to-image generation is the hot algorithmic process right now, with OpenAI’s Craiyon (formerly DALL-E mini) and Google’s Imagen AIs unleashing tidal waves of wonderfully weird procedurally generated art synthesized from human and computer imaginations. On Tuesday, Meta revealed that it too has developed an AI image generation engine, one that it hopes will help to build immersive worlds in the Metaverse and create high digital art.A lot of work into creating an image based on just the phrase, “there's a horse in the hospital,” when using a generation AI. First the phrase itself is...
Photo By Michael Macor/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s head of AI and a key leader in the development of Autopilot, its driver assist feature which requires supervision by a human, announced on Twitter Wednesday that he’s leaving the company. “It’s been a great pleasure to help Tesla towards its goals over the last 5 years and a difficult decision to part ways,” Karpathy wrote. “In that time, Autopilot graduated from lane keeping to city streets and I look forward to seeing the exceptionally strong Autopilot team continue that momentum.” In a...
Clearview AI has been hit with another sanction for breaching European privacy rules. The Athens-based Hellenic data protection authority has fined the controversial facial recognition firm €20 million and banned it from collecting and processing the personal data of people living in Greece. It has also ordered it to delete any data on Greek citizens […]
Deci, a startup company with 50 employees who are developing a platform to build and optimize AI-powered systems, today announced that it closed a $25 million Series B financing round led by Insight Partners with participation from Square Peg, Emerge, Jibe Ventures, Fort Ross Ventures, and ICON that brings the company’s total raised to $55.1 […]
If you thought turning academic research into robots is challenging, you’d be right. Turning academic AI research into products is brutal. If you want to 10x the challenge, though, it would be to take that research and the fun prototypes that come out of the lab and turn it into a commercially viable company. Robots […]
After more than a year of planning and training, a volunteer-led project has produced an open source language model that they claim is as powerful as OpenAI’s GPT-3, but free and open for anyone to use (if they have the computing power). Dubbed Bloom, the model is available in open source along with the code […]
Wikipedia is a unique fountain of free knowledge, but the world’s most popular encyclopaedia isn’t always accurate. The site’s crowdsourced editing model is prone to vandalism and biases. While its reputation for accuracy has improved, even Wikipedia doesn’t consider itself a reliable source. The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that oversees Wikipedia, regularly explores new solutions for these shortcomings. Its latest effort harnesses the power of AI. The foundation recently teamed up with Meta to improve Wikipedia’s citations. These references are used to...
Facebook may be infamous for helping to usher in the era of “fake news”; but it’s also tried to find a place for itself in the follow-up: the never-ending battle to combat it. In the latest development on that front, Facebook parent Meta today announced a new tool called Sphere, an AI tool built around […]
An Argo AI vehicle in Miami, Florida. | Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Argo AI, an autonomous vehicle startup backed by both Ford and Volkswagen, has laid off about 150 employees, as reported earlier by Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. The move is supposed to offset a period of rapid growth, in which the company hired more employees than needed.“With incredible growth and progress made in our mission to deploy driverless vehicles, we are making prudent adjustments to our business plan to best continue on a path for success,” Argo...
Meta has taken another step towards creating a universal language translator. The company has open-sourced an AI model that translates over 200 languages — many of which aren’t supported by existing systems. The research is part of a Meta initiative launched earlier this year. “We call this project No Language Left Behind, and the AI modeling techniques we used from NLLB are helping us make high quality translations on Facebook and Instagram for languages spoken by billions of people around the world,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. NLLB focuses on lower-resource...
Just about every electronic contraption you care to think of contains at least one printed circuit board (PCB), which serves to house and connect the various components that allow the device to function as a whole. While circuit boards are mostly invisible to end-users, they are foundational to the world they inhabit, powering smartphones, automobiles, […]
IBM today announced that it acquired Databand, a startup developing an observability platform for data and machine learning pipelines. Details of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Tel Aviv-based Databand had raised $14.5 million prior to the acquisition. Databand employees will join IBM’s data and AI division, with the purchase expected to close on June 27. […]
South Korean AI chip developer Rebellions has raised a $22.8 million ($30 million) extension to its Series A financing from a strategic investor KT, one of the largest telecom companies in South Korea. Last month, TechCrunch reported on Rebellions closing on $50 million in funding that valued the company at an estimated $283 million. At that time, Rebellions […]
The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), a non-profit community of open-source advocates, today announced its withdrawal from GitHub in a scathing blog post urging members and supporters to rebuke the platform once-and-for-all. Up front: The SFC’s problem with GitHub stems from accusations that Microsoft and OpenAI trained an AI system called Copilot on data that was published under an open-source license. Open-source code isn’t like a donations box where you can just take whatever you want and use it in any way you choose. It’s more like photography. Just because a photographer doesn’t...
As a stock photographer, taking great photos is often only just a tiny part of the job. To run a successful business, keywording, categorizing, captioning, and all the other admin that goes with it can take up almost as much time. That’s the problem Wirestock is solving, and the company just landed an important deal […]
Software Freedom Conservancy, a not-for-profit organization that provides support and legal services for open source software projects, has called on the open source community to ditch GitHub after quitting the code-hosting and collaboration platform itself. The move comes a week after Microsoft-owned GitHub launched the commercial version of Copilot, an AI-powered pair-programmer that collaborates with […]
AI has become adept at recreating, altering, and restoring human speech. But as the replicas become indistinguishable from the real, fears about the tech are growing. Alex Serdiuk has a unique understanding of both the opportunities and threats. As the co-founder and CEO of AI startup Respeecher, Serdiuk has won an Emmy for creating a deepfake Richard Nixon, developed voice clones for speech disabilities, and de-aged Mark Hamill’s vocal cords for The Mandalorian. Yet Serdiuk has also seen synthetic media at its worst. The CEO and his company are based in Ukraine, which has been the target...
Snowplow, a platform designed to create data for AI and business intelligence applications, today announced that it raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by NEA, Snowplow investors, Atlantic Bridge and MMC. Co-founder and CEO Alex Dean said that the new cash will enable Snowplow to grow its team, establish a second […]
TechCrunch Live records weekly, live, each Wednesday at 3:00pm EDT / 12:00pm PDT. Forethought AI won Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2018. Since then, the company raised two rounds of funding and is now a leader in human-centric artificial intelligence. During this live event, Dean Nicholas, CEO and co-founder of Forethought, and Vanessa Larco, NEA […]
Most Americans dread doing their taxes. Surveys show as much. But as many as 40% rely on money from tax refunds to satisfy some financial obligation. Ben Borodach, a former Deloitte fintech strategist and the CEO of tax service provider April, believes this points to the need for taxpayers to change their behavior from thinking […]
When you read a sentence like this one, your past experience tells you that it’s written by a thinking, feeling human. And, in this case, there is indeed a human typing these words: [Hi, there!] But these days, some sentences that appear remarkably humanlike are actually generated by artificial intelligence systems trained on massive amounts of human text. People are so accustomed to assuming that fluent language comes from a thinking, feeling human that evidence to the contrary can be difficult to wrap your head around. How are people likely to navigate this relatively uncharted territory...
A lot of people are worried about the prospect of competing with AI for their jobs, but this probably isn’t what they were expecting. The FBI has warned of an uptick in cases where “deepfakes” and stolen personal information are being used to apply for jobs in the U.S. — including faking video interviews. Don’t […]
The U.K. is planning to tweak an existing law to allow text and data mining “for any purpose,” in a move that’s designed to boost artificial intelligence (AI) development across the country. The announcement constitutes part of a broader strategy to “level up” AI and transform the U.K. into what it calls a “global AI […]
In 2020, Thrive Capital asked a cohort of folks — including Glossier VP of Communications Ashley Mayer, Cityblock Health co-founder Toyin Ajayi, Umbrella co-founder Lindsay Ullman and Tribe AI co-founder Jackie Nelson — if they wanted to be scouts, or invest tiny checks on behalf of the firm with a potential for shared upside. Instead, […]
Artificial intelligence has completely upended the business world. Whether you’re a fledgling startup or a billion-dollar global conglomerate, the way you do business today is radically different than it was just five years ago. In the modern paradigm, one of your company’s greatest assets is the data generated by your employees, clients, and customers. And, sadly, most businesses are leaving money on the table by simply storing that data away somewhere to collect digital dust. The problem: How do you audit your company’s entire data ecosystem, deploy models to identify and infer...
Deon Nicholas is the CEO and co-founder of Forethought, the AI company whose mission is to transform customer experiences with human-centered AI. Forethought has raised over $100 million in venture capital, including from NEA, which led Forethought’s $9.52 million Series A. Hear from NEA’s Vanessa Larco on what convinced the firm to invest in Forethought, […]
At its Data + AI Summit, Databricks today made the requisite number of announcements one would expect from a company’s flagship developer events. Among those are the launch of Delta Lake 2.0, the next version of its platform for building data lakehouses, MLflow 2.0, the next generation of its platform for managing the machine learning […]
Last week I wrote about an AI startup that’s building technology that can alter, in real time, the accent of someone’s speech. But what if the AI goal instead is to make it possible for people speaking in whatever way they do, to be understood just as they are, and to remove some of the […]
A Google AI engineer recently stunned the world by announcing that one of the company’s chatbots had become sentient. He was subsequently placed on paid administrative leave for his outburst. His name is Blake Lemoine and he sure seems like the right person to talk about machines with souls. Not only is he a professional AI developer at Google, but he’s also a Christian priest. He’s like a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of science and religion. The only problem is that the whole concept is ridiculous and dangerous. There are thousands of AI experts debating “sentience” right now, and...
AI Squared integrates AI it into existing applications in a timely and straightforward manner.
A team of scientists at the Max Planck Society recently published astounding new research indicating they’ve pushed the field of “organoids,” to a bold new frontier. Up front: Organoids are synthetic biological constructs that mimic human organs to various degrees. Scientists grow organoids by programming stem cell clusters. Essentially, they feed the clusters the necessary components to spark their growth, and then they employ a series of limiters to guide them into becoming the kind of organoid we want. The ultimate hope is that we’ll be able to grow organ analogs — synthetic liver...
At its re:Mars conference, Amazon today announced the launch of CodeWhisperer, an AI pair programming tool similar to GitHub’s Copilot that can autocomplete entire functions based on only a comment or a few keystrokes. The company trained the system, which currently supports Java, JavaScript and Python, on billions of lines of publicly available open-source code […]
It takes massive amounts of data to train AI models. But sometimes, that data simply isn’t available from real-world sources, so data scientists use synthetic data to make up for that. In machine vision applications, that means creating different environments and objects to train robots or self-driving cars, for example. But while there are quite […]
Instagram is testing new age verification methods including asking followers to vouch for your age and even using AI that can estimate your age via a video selfie. It's part of a push to ensure users are at least the minimum 13 years old and "to make sure that teens and adults are in the right experience for their age group," it announced. For the "social vouching" system, Instagram asks three mutual followers of the user to confirm their age. Those followers must be at least 18 and have three days to respond to the request. Users can still verify their age with pictures of ID cards as...
Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Amazon has revealed an experimental Alexa feature that allows the AI assistant to mimic the voices of users’ dead relatives. The company demoed the feature at its annual MARS conference, showing a video in which a child asks Alexa to read a bedtime story in the voice of his dead grandmother. “As you saw in this experience, instead of Alexa’s voice reading the book, it’s the kid’s grandma’s voice,” said Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s head scientist for Alexa AI. Prasad introduced the clip by saying that adding “human attributes” to AI systems was...
At Amazon’s Re:Mars conference, Alexa’s senior vice-president Rohit Prasad exhibited a startling new voice assistant capability: the supposed ability to mimic voices. So far, there's no timeline whatsoever as to when or if this feature will be released to the public.Stranger still, Amazon framed this copycatting ability as a way to commemorate lost loved ones. It played a demonstration video in which Alexa read to a child in the voice of his recently deceased grandmother. Prasad stressed that the company was seeking ways to make AI as personal as possible. “While AI can’t eliminate...
General Motors is bringing artificial intelligence into the vehicle inspection process. The automaker is making an undisclosed “strategic investment” in Israeli startup UVeye, which makes vehicle diagnostic systems that use sensors and AI to quickly identify damaged parts or maintenance issues. The investment in UVeye was made by GM Ventures, the automaker’s venture fund, which also has investments in a variety of other AI-themed startups. GM will sell UVeye’s technology to its dealer network to upgrade their vehicle inspection systemsAs part of the collaboration, GM will sell UVeye’s...
OctoML, the well-funded machine learning startup that helps enterprises optimize and deploy their models, launched a major update to its product today that will make it far easier for developers to integrate ML models into their applications. With this new release, OctoML can now transform ML models into portable software functions that developers can interact […]
Today, IKEA is launching a new AI-driven interactive design experience called IKEA Kreativ for IKEA.com and the IKEA app. With the new feature, U.S. customers can design and visualize their own living spaces with digitalized furniture on their smartphones instead of traveling to the brick-and-mortar store where they are likely to be distracted by the […]
A Ukrainian deeptech startup is launching a charity NFT project to sell AI-generated artworks with the twin goal of raising money to support people affected by Russia’s war of aggression and also — it hopes — keep attention locked on the conflict as it approaches its fourth month, with many in the country concerned that […]
Image: Microsoft Microsoft is phasing out public access to a number of AI-powered facial analysis tools — including one that claims to identify a subject’s emotion from videos and pictures. Such “emotion recognition” tools have been criticized by experts. They say not only do facial expressions that are thought to be universal differ across different populations but that it is unscientific to equate external displays of emotion with internal feelings. “Companies can say whatever they want, but the data are clear,” Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern...
Data centers, which drive the apps, websites, and services that billions of people use every day, can be hazardous places for the workers that build and maintain them. Workers sometimes have to service a data center’s electrical equipment while it’s being energized. And they can become exposed to chemicals like chlorine, which is used as […]
In an interview with WIRED, the engineer and priest elaborated on his belief that the program is a person—and not Google's property.
The Allen Institute for AI (AI2), the division within the nonprofit Allen Institute focused on machine learning research, today published its work on an AI system, called Unified-IO, that it claims is among the first to perform a “large and diverse” set of AI tasks. Unified-IO can process and create images, text, and other structured […]
Today’s chatbots are compelling. They use AI and ML algorithms to learn, speak like people, offer solutions and basic customer support, route customers, and much more.
Lightning AI, the startup behind the open source PyTorch Lightning framework, today announced that it raised $40 million in a Series B round led by Coatue with participation from Index Ventures, Bain, and First Minute Capital. CEO William Falcon told TechCrunch that the new money will be used to expand Lightning AI’s 60-person team while […]
Nay, nay, I say! This cannot be, That machines should e’er surpass our art. We are the masters, them the slaves, And thus it ever shall be so! They learn, ‘tis true, but they learn Only what we bid them learn, no more. They cannot understand the heart Or beauty of our words, you see. So let us not give in to these Machines – they’ll never be as good As we are at creating art. If that reads a little like Shakespeare defending humans’ innate superiority over artificial intelligence hundreds of years ahead of his time, it’s not. But…This story continues at The Next Web
Metropolis, a startup building payment infrastructure for parking facilities, today announced that it raised $167 million in a Series B round co-led by 3L Capital and Assembly Ventures with participation from Dragoneer, Eldridge Industries, Silver Lake Waterman, UP Partners, and former deputy mayor of New York Dan Doctoroff. CEO Alex Israel told TechCrunch via email […]
Tabnine, a startup creating an “AI-powered assistant” for software developers, today closed a $15.5 million funding round co-led by Qualcomm Ventures, OurCrowd, and Samsung NEXT Ventures with participation from existing backers Khosla Ventures and Headline Ventures. CEO Dror Weiss said that the proceeds will be put toward improving the developer experience, adding new capabilities, and […]
It's difficult to build high-growth clean tech companies using venture capital. Despoiling the planet has a much higher return on investment than saving it.
Cohere, a startup creating large language models to rival those from OpenAI, today announced the launch of a nonprofit research lab: Cohere For AI. Headed by Google alum Sara Hooker, Cohere says that Cohere Labs will work to solve some of the industry’s toughest challenges by contributing “fundamental research” to the open source community. “We’re […]
Invoca, a platform that uses AI to analyze calls for marketing, sales, and customer agent training purposes, today closed an $83 million funding round that values the company at $1.1 billion post-money. Invoca has raised $184 million to date, the bulk of which is being used to support product development focused on Incova’s contact center […]
Biotech startup Meta Pharmaceuticals sets itself an ambitious goal as it secures its initial investment. The Shenzhen-based company, which sets out to develop treatments for autoimmune diseases with the help of artificial intelligence, has raised $15 million from its seed and pre-A rounds. There is no lack of investor interest in companies applying machine learning […]
Bluesheets, a Singaporean AI-powered data-processing platform that enables financial automation for enterprises, has raised $4 million led by Insignia Ventures. The latest funding, which brings its total raised to $5.7 million, will help bluesheets to expand the use cases of its software and reach more businesses in international markets. Since its SaaS product launch in […]
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Microsoft might soon mitigate some of the worst nuisances in video chats. The Vergenotes Microsoft is rolling out AI-based voice quality upgrades that should help every call participant hear each other clearly. New machine learning models can not only cancel echoes, but even reduce the chances of awkward interruptions by eliminating echo-related overlaps. This won't stop rude people from hijacking the conversation, but it might help you raise an important point without completely disrupting someone else's train of thought.The machine learning technology counters echoes by using a...
Streaming giant Spotify, most famous for its music and podcast streaming services targeting consumers, it’s making an acquisition of a voice AI company to expand its reach in audio technology — opening the door not just to building more functionality on Spotify itself, but other potential business opportunities elsewhere, too. Today, the company announced that […]
The TNW Conference is finally just around the corner! Get ready for inspiring speakers, insightful talks, networking opportunities, and some seriously fun vibes. The event venue is full of amazing spots — so grab the conference’s floor plan and check out those that you simply can’t miss: 1. The stages Make sure to visit the conference’s stages: Vision, Ignite, Discovery, and Growth Quarters. You’ll get to attend some thought-provoking sessions on business growth, finance, AI, and technological disruptions. And don’t forget about the TNW Talks stages, where you can talk in-person...
Its LaMDA system is built to make AI more conversational. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google has placed one of its engineers on paid administrative leave for allegedly breaking its confidentiality policies after he grew concerned that an AI chatbot system had achieved sentience, the Washington Post reports. The engineer, Blake Lemoine, works for Google’s Responsible AI organization, and was testing whether its LaMDA model generates discriminatory language or hate speech. The engineer’s concerns reportedly grew out of convincing responses he saw the AI system generating...
A team of researchers using what they call “state-of-the-art artificial intelligence techniques” has reportedly created a system capable of identifying a human’s political ideology by viewing their brain scans. Wow! This is either the most advanced AI system in the entire known universe or it’s a total sham. Unsurprisingly, it’s a sham: There’s little reason for excitement. You don’t even have to read the researcher’s paper to debunk their work. All you need is the phrase “politics change,” and we’re done here. But, just for fun, let’s actually get into the paper and...
As if official confirmation was actually needed after the leak earlier today, a remake of 2013's The Last Of Us is coming to PlayStation 5 on September 2nd. Sony put together a trailer showing some of the gorgeous visuals of The Last of Us Part I and noted that the remake is coming to PC as well. The bundle also includes the excellent Left Behind expansion.The developers used original performances from Ashley Johnson, Troy Baker, and the rest of the cast, but utilized a new AI and refreshed the combat. The effects and exploration have been enhanced as well. The team is harnessing 3D audio and...
Dubbing is a lucrative market, with Verified Market Research predicting that film dubbing services alone could generate $3.6 billion annually by 2027. But it’s also a laborious and costly process. On average, it can take an hour of recording studio time for five minutes of narration; one calculator pegs the price at $75 per minute for […]
Roughly a year ago, Google announced the launch of Vertex AI, a managed AI platform designed to help companies to accelerate the deployment of AI models. To mark the service’s anniversary and the kickoff of Google’s Applied ML Summit, Google this morning announced new features heading to Vertex, including a dedicated server for AI system […]
Technology built with defense in mind is getting some significant and serious traction at the moment, spurred by world events, advances in technology, and a growing appetite from end users to invest in more innovative ways to protect themselves. In the latest development, Shield AI — which makes software and hardware for drones and other […]
Microsoft inadvertently learned the risks of creating racist AI, but what happens if you deliberately point the intelligence at a toxic forum? One person found out. As Motherboard and The Verge note, YouTuber Yannic Kilcher trained an AI language model using three years of content from 4chan's Politically Incorrect (/pol/) board, a place infamous for its racism and other forms of bigotry. After implementing the model in ten bots, Kilcher set the AI loose on the board — and it unsurprisingly created a wave of hate. In the space of 24 hours, the bots wrote 15,000 posts that frequently...
“Can you enhance that?” the CSI detective asks a bespectacled computer nerd, pointing at a six-pixel area of CCTV footage that may or may not be a driver’s license. Two seconds later, they have the perp’s name, birthdate, address, shoe size, IQ, favorite color, list of allergies and Netflix viewing history. Entertaining, yes. Unreasonable and […]
Embedded finance — where financial services companies and others bring in different kinds of fintech technology by way of APIs to enhance their own offerings with more data and functionality — remains a growing opportunity, both to help fuel new business and to help incumbents get up to speed with their disruptors. In the latest […]
An uncrewed vessel dubbed “Mayflower” recently completed the first fully autonomous transatlantic journey on the open sea. Powered by IBM’s AI, the ship was designed and built by non-profit maritime research organization Promare. Its purpose is to boldly go where no robot has gone before, and collect oodles of data from our oceans. Up front: IBM isn’t exactly in the autonomous boating business. We’re probably not going to see Big Blue selling robo-yachts anytime soon. Instead, IBM’s involvement is more about showcasing the robust nature of its machine learning tools. Per an IBM...
The demand for AI in the enterprise is insatiable, but the challenge lies in building the infrastructure to support and its development and maintenance. A 2020 IDC survey found that a shortage of data to train AI and low-quality data remain major barriers to implementing it, along with data security, governance, performance, and latency issues. […]
9 of 12 members of an ethics board appointed by Axon to advise its technology decisions have resigned, citing the company’s plan to install Taser-equipped drones and pervasive surveillance at schools. “After several years of work, the company has fundamentally failed to embrace the values that we have tried to instill,” the departing members write. […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge If you can’t be bothered to fill out your credit card and address details when shopping for jeans online, the Nate app sounds like a service you might want. The company bills itself as an “artificial intelligence startup” that uses AI to auto-fill customer information for $1 per transaction, saving shoppers a few minutes when completing purchases through the Nate app. But instead of using high-tech methods to complete purchases, Nate transactions were often handled manually by workers in the Philippines, according to a deep dive by The Information...
Insilico Medicine, a Hong Kong-based company that has been using artificial intelligence to discover new drugs since 2014, has completed a fresh round of funding. It’s a sign that certain investors are continuing to bet on emerging biotechnologies — which often take longer to prove profitability compared to other verticals — at a time venture […]
It’s the belief of some analysts that the market for robotic process automation, which leverages AI to automate certain software tasks, is headed toward consolidation. A recent Forrester Research report predicts that the segment will start to flatten as soon as 2023 as companies shift to broader automation solutions. There’s evidence to support this. UiPath, […]
Research in the field of machine learning and AI, now a key technology in practically every industry and company, is far too voluminous for anyone to read it all. This column, Perceptron (previously Deep Science), aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in, but not limited to, artificial intelligence […]
Machine learning models are increasingly augmenting human processes, either performing repetitious tasks faster or providing some systematic insight that helps put human knowledge in perspective. Astronomers at UC Berkeley were surprised to find both happen after modeling gravitational microlensing events, leading to a new unified theory for the phenomenon. Gravitational lensing occurs when light from […]
Could a working prototype of Optimus be imminent? Or is this another fake out? | Image: Tesla In a tweet that is definitely not meant to distract from the news that he’s planning on laying off about 10 percent of his workforce, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that he was shifting the company’s “AI Day” event from August to September in anticipation of being able to show off a “working” Optimus prototype.You’ll recall that Optimus is the name given to the humanoid robot that Musk said will take on the repetitive, boring tasks that humans are loath to do. The robot was revealed during...
Global venture capital firms are pouring money into the semiconductor startups developing the next generation of chips. Semiconductors, which have become a valued asset, are used in virtually almost every industry, including 5G networks, automation, the internet of things, financials, smart homes, smart cities, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality, and self-driving cars. Sunghyun Park, a […]
In 2018, Oregon's Department of Human Services implemented its Safety at Screening Tool, an algorithm that generates a "risk score" for abuse hotline workers, recommending whether a social worker needs to further investigate the contents of a call. This AI was based on the lauded Allegheny Family Screening Tool, designed to predict the risk of a child ending up in foster care based on a number of socioeconomic factors. But after the Allegheny tool was found to be flagging a disproportionate number of black children for "mandatory" neglect, and a subsequent AP investigative report into the...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A day after Sheryl Sandberg announced she is leaving as Meta’s COO later this year, the company is losing another executive amid a reorganization of its artificial intelligence group.Jerome Pesenti, Meta’s VP of AI for the past four years, will leave later this month as the company closer integrates his AI teams across various product groups rather than have AI function as a centralized organization. AI is already used for everything from ordering what you see when you open Facebook and Instagram to the software powering the Oculus VR headset. The...
Who will be liable for harmful speech generated by large language models? As advanced AIs such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 are being cheered for impressive breakthroughs in natural language processing and generation — and all sorts of (productive) applications for the tech are envisaged from slicker copywriting to more capable customer service chatbots — the risks […]
When Refraction AI was founded in 2019, its goal was to use robotics to bring down the cost of last-mile delivery. Over the past couple of years, the startup has worked directly with restaurants in its hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, to offer its bike-lane bound robots as a logistics layer for customers, rather than […]
AI now guides numerous life-changing decisions, from assessing loan applications to determining prison sentences. Proponents of the approach argue that it can eliminate human prejudices, but critics warn that algorithms can amplify our biases — without even revealing how they reached the decision. This can result in AI systems leading to Black people being wrongfully arrested, or child services unfairly targeting poor families. The victims are frequently from groups that are already marginalized. Alejandro Saucedo, Chief Scientist at The Institute for Ethical AI and Engineering Director at ML...
It was the veritable search for a needle in a haystack. With drug-resistant bacteria on the rise, researchers at MIT were sifting through a database of more than 100 million molecules to identify a few that might have antibacterial properties. Fortunately, the search proved successful. But it wasn’t a human who found the promising molecules. It was a machine learning program. One compound has been patented under the name Halicin in homage to HAL, the artificial intelligence (AI) in Arthur C Clarke’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Halicin works differently from existing antibiotics...
Mintlify, a startup developing software to automate software documentation tasks, today announced that it raised $2.8 million in a seed round led by by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from TwentyTwo Ventures and Quinn Slack, Sourcegraph’s co-founder. CEO Han Wang says that the proceeds will be put toward product development and doubling Mintlify’s core, three-person […]
Whether to power translation to document summarization, enterprises are increasing their investments in natural language processing (NLP) technologies. According to a 2021 survey from John Snow Labs and Gradient Flow, 60% of tech leaders indicated that their NLP budgets grew by at least 10% compared to 2020, while a third said that spending climbed by […]
Jason Silva, futurist and host of National Geographic’s “Brain Games,” recently published a mind-bending YouTube video combining the technological prowess of AI with the artistic creativity of someone who believes in the power of psychoactive experiences. It’s called “Dreaming while awake: a journey into ourselves.” The description on Silva’s YouTube channel describes the video as: The first art piece of the singularity: born from a human-AI collaboration by Jason Silva, Hueman Instrument and digital intelligence. Personally, I’d describe it as a surrealistic experience that...
Before founders begin building AI systems, they should think carefully about their risk appetite, data management practices and strategies for future-proofing their AI stack.
Choose from Computer, Echo, Amazon or... Ziggy | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge If you’re getting tired of saying “Alexa” to get your smart speaker’s attention, or if Amazon’s voice assistant keeps thinking you’ve called on it when you haven’t, it might be time to try a new name. Perhaps you’d prefer to invoke the capabilities of the assistant with the word “Computer,” and mimic life on the Starship Enterprise from the comfort of your home. Or maybe you’re one of the parents of the 6,000 babies who were named Alexa in 2015 before the AI was a household name (a number...
It's been possible to automatically create song stems on your computer, but now you have that option in a sampler app on your phone. Elf Audio has updated its Koala Sampler app for Android and iOS with a feature that uses AI to automatically isolate stems from samples. You can have the J Dilla-inspired app pick out the vocals, drums or bass (plus a generic "other") so that you can fold them into a track without consuming much time on your part.The AI isn't perfect, as you can hear in the clip below. However, that's not strictly the point. As with the rest of Koala Sampler, this is...
Over 80% of food delivery orders in Latin America are still made over phone calls and settled with cash. OlaClick, a young startup that is helping these restaurants sell online and collect money digitally, announced on Thursday it has received backing from scores of investors including Gradient, Meta and Delivery Hero. Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI […]
As the demand for AI-powered apps grows, startups developing dedicated chips to accelerate AI workloads on-premises are reaping the benefits. A recent ZDNet piece reaffirms that the AI edge chip market is booming, fueled by “staggering” venture capital financing in the hundreds of millions of dollars. EdgeQ, Kneron, and Hailo are among the dozens of […]
Last June, Microsoft-owned GitHub and OpenAI launched Copilot, a service that provides suggestions for whole lines of code inside development environments like Microsoft Visual Studio. Available as a downloadable extension, Copilot is powered by an AI model called Codex that’s trained on billions of lines of public code to suggest additional lines of code and […]
Today at Build 2022, Microsoft unveiled Project Volterra, a device powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform that’s designed to let developers explore “AI scenarios” via Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine (SNPE) for Windows toolkit. The hardware arrives alongside support in Windows for neural processing units (NPUs), or dedicated chips tailored for AI- and machine learning-specific […]
Fresh off a $100 million funding round, Hugging Face, which provides hosted AI services and a community-driven portal for AI tools and data sets, today announced a new product in collaboration with Microsoft. Called Hugging Face Endpoints on Azure, Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue described it a way to turn Hugging Face-developed AI […]
Google has shown off an artificial intelligence system that can create images based on text input. The idea is that users can enter any descriptive text and the AI will turn that into an image. The company says the Imagen diffusion model, created by the Brain Team at Google Research, offers "an unprecedented degree of photorealism and a deep level of language understanding."This isn't the first time we've seen AI models like this. OpenAI's DALL-E (and its successor) generated headlines as well as images because of how adeptly it can turn text into visuals. Google's version, however, tries to...
Sample images from Google’s new text-to-image AI. | Image: Google (collage by The Verge) Imagen what else this thing can do Continue reading…
The AI world is still figuring out how to deal with the amazing show of prowess that is DALL-E 2’s ability to draw/paint/imagine just about anything… but OpenAI isn’t the only one working on something like that. Google Research has rushed to publicize a similar model it’s been working on — which it claims is […]
MIT researchers recently made one of the boldest claims related to artificial intelligence we’ve seen yet: they believe they’ve built an AI that can identify a person’s race using only medical images. And, according to the popular media, they have no idea how it works! Sure. And I’d like to sell you an NFT of the Brooklyn Bridge. Let’s be clear up front, per the team’s paper, the model can predict a person’s self-reported race: In our study, we show that standard AI deep learning models can be trained to predict race from medical images with high performance across multiple…...
Meta’s AI division has been busy in recent months finding ways to make concrete production more sustainable and machine translation better. Now one of the company’s ML teams has created a tool that builds realistic musculoskeletal simulations that run up to 4,000 times faster than state-of-the-art prosthetics. According to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the company can train the models to do things like twirl pens and rotate objects.Mark Zuckerberg just announced MyoSuite, a new AI platform we developed to build realistic musculoskeletal simulations to help accelerate development of prosthetics...
Timed to align with Build 2022, Microsoft today open-sourced tools and data sets designed to audit AI-powered content moderation systems and automatically write tests highlighting potential bugs in AI models. The company claims that the projects, AdaTest and (De)ToxiGen, could lead to more reliable large language models (LLMs), or models akin to OpenAI’s GPT-3 that […]
The UK’s data protection watchdog has confirmed a penalty for the controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI — announcing a fine of just over £7.5 million today for a string of breaches of local privacy laws. The watchdog has also issued an enforcement notice, ordering Clearview to stop obtaining and using the personal data of […]
There currently exists no machine capable of superhuman feats of intelligence. I’m sorry to be the one who bursts your bubble but, at least for the time being, that’s the way the universe works. It might seem like AI is smarter than humans in some ways. For example, the powerful neural networks used by big tech can sort through millions of files in a matter of seconds, a feat that would take humans more than a single lifetime. But that’s not a superhuman feat of intellect. It’s trading human attention for machine speed. On a file per file basis, there…This story continues at The...
The other day, Brian reported on Sony’s new LinkBuds headphones, including its partnership with “what if Brian Eno was a piece of computer software” app Endel. The company uses really fascinating AI technology to generate soundscapes and music tracks to help your brain do its best work — to help you focus deeper, sleep more […]
Qualcomm is keeping up its habit of releasing speed-bumped chips in the middle of the year, albeit with a couple of twists. The company has introduced a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 system-on-chip that delivers both the usual performance boost and, importantly, battery life. Qualcomm claims a 10 percent processing speed increase and 20 percent higher performance-per-Watt for AI, but it's also boasting a 30 percent power reduction — in theory, you'll wring an extra hour of gameplay out of your flagship-class Android handset.There won't be a shortage of device partners. Qualcomm expects...
Benchmarks are as important a measure of progress in AI as they are for the rest of the software industry. But when the benchmark results come from corporations, secrecy very often prevents the community from verifying them. For example, OpenAI granted Microsoft, with which it has a commercial relationship, the exclusive licensing rights to its […]
Heartex, a startup that bills itself as an “open source” platform for data labeling, today announced that it landed $25 million in a Series A funding round led by Redpoint Ventures. Unusual Ventures, Bow Capital, and Swift Ventures also participated, bringing Heartex’s total capital raised to $30 million. Co-founder and CEO Michael Malyuk said that […]
With breakthroughs in machine learning, it’s no longer uncommon to see algorithmically generated bodies that can move and talk authentically like real humans. The question is now down to whether startups offering such products can achieve a sustainable business model. Some of them have demonstrated that potential and attracted investors. ZMO.ai, founded by a team […]
It’s time to stop training radiologists. AI can predict where and when crimes will occur. This neural network can tell if you’re gay. There will be a million Tesla robotaxis on the road by the end of 2020. We’ve all seen the hyperbole. Big tech’s boldest claims make for the media’s most successful headlines, and the general public can’t get enough. Ask 100 people on the street what they believe AI is capable of, and you’re guaranteed to get a cornucopia of nonsensical ideas. To be perfectly clear: we definitely need more radiologists. AI can’t predict crimes, anyone who says&#...
Tractian, a startup developing a product to monitor the status of machines and electrical infrastructure, today announced that it closed a $15 million Series A funding round led by Next47 with participation from Y Combinator and others. The money will be put toward product development and expanding Tractian’s workforce and geographic footprint, according to co-founder […]
When Salesforce spent almost $16 billion to buy Tableau in 2019, it was getting a company with a goal of bringing data to the masses. As a cloud solution, it fits nicely into the growing Salesforce federation of cloud products and services. Over time, it makes sense that the two companies are finding ways to […]
Google is facing a new class-action style lawsuit in the UK in relation to a health data scandal that broke back in 2016, when it emerged that its AI division, DeepMind, had been passed data on more than a million patients as part of an app development project by the Royal Free NHS Trust in […]
As AI invades the interview process, the DOJ and EOCC have provided guidance to protect people with disabilities from bias.
Sydney-based Curious Thing is an aptly-named startup. The voice AI communication platform can call people and ask them questions like “How are you feeling today?” and then follow up with “how does it feel compared to yesterday?” Used primarily by health and financial companies, Curious Thing announced today it has raised $7 million AUD (about […]
Do not be swayed by the dulcet dial-tones of tomorrow's AIs and their siren songs of the singularity. No matter how closely artificial intelligences and androids may come to look and act like humans, they'll never actually be humans, argue Paul Leonardi, Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at University of California Santa Barbara, and Tsedal Neeley, Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, in their new book The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI — and therefore should not...
AI tools for the hiring process have become a hot category, but the Department of Justice warns that careless use of these processes could lead to violations of U.S. laws protecting equal access for people with disabilities. If your company uses algorithmic sorting, facial tracking, or other high-tech methods for sorting and rating applicants, you […]
DeepMind today unveiled a new multi-modal AI system capable of performing more than 600 different tasks. Dubbed Gato, it’s arguably the most impressive all-in-one machine learning kit the world’s seen yet. According to a DeepMind blog post: The agent, which we refer to as Gato, works as a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy. The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding based on its context whether to output text, joint torques, button presses, or other tokens. Credit: DeepMind...
Inflection AI, the machine learning startup headed by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and founding DeepMind member Mustafa Suleyman, has secured $225 million in equity financing, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The source of the capital isn’t yet clear — Inflection didn’t immediately respond to a request for more information […]
This week, Engadget Deputy Editor Nathan Ingraham joins Cherlynn and Devindra to dive into everything announced at Google I/O. There were plenty of new devices, of course, but Google also showed off how its improved AI tech is making maps, translation and more features even smarter. Also, Cherlynn discusses her exclusive feature on Microsoft’s Adaptive Mouse, as well as the company’s new Inclusive Tech Lab. And in other news, we bid farewell to the iPod and reminisce about the early days of MP3 players.Engadget · Google I/O + hands-on with Microsoft’s Adaptive MouseListen above, or...
The ultimate achievement to some in the AI industry is creating a system with artificial general intelligence (AGI), or the ability to understand and learn any task that a human can. Long relegated to the domain of science fiction, it’s been suggested that AGI would bring about systems with the ability to reason, plan, learn, […]
The road to commercializing autonomous vehicle technology for people has split into two paths. In one camp, AV developers like Argo AI, Aurora, Cruise, Motional, Waymo and Zoox are aiming straight for full autonomy — a system that can handle all driving within certain conditions and with no expectation for a human to take over. […]
As wind energy gains ground in the U.S., SkySpecs is using drones and AI to detect future equipment failures before they grind those giant turbine blades to a halt. The company, which works with wind farms to monitor the health of turbine blades from above, has locked down a fresh $80 million series D round […]
The ACLU and Clearview AI, a controversial facial recognition company, reached a legal settlement earlier this week that’s been hailed as a huge win by both parties. The big story here is that Clearview AI can no longer sell its databases to third party companies — but that’s not exactly news. Up front: The suit was filed in 2020 by the ACLU. It alleged that Clearview AI had failed to comply with the Illinois biometric information privacy act (BIPA). As Tech Crunch’s Taylor Hatmaker recently wrote: According to the terms of the Clearview settlement, which is still in the process…...
Arcane Studios has released the third major update for Deathloop, which adds a slew of accessibility features. There's now an accessibility category in the options menu that includes the previously introduced settings (some of which have been upgraded) in addition to the new ones.Players will be able to adjust various gameplay elements, though some settings will be limited to the single-player mode — i.e. when you play as Colt and Julianna is controlled by AI rather than an invading human. These include slowing down the game speed, adjusting the number of reprises (or lives) you have and...
There’s been talk throughout the venture ecosystem of a funding slowdown, but AI-powered fintech platform TIFIN seems to be a clear exception. The Boulder, Colorado-based startup, which aims to match investors with investments in the wealth and asset management industries, announced today that it has raised a $109 million Series D round, less than a […]
Lots of big announcements from Google's annual developer conference yesterday. It was a mix of intriguing new products coming soon (and some a little later), further AI advances and some more refinements to the myriad services and apps that permeate so many of our lives.I’ve pulled out some of the highlights below, and desperately tried to corral some of the other notable headlines, but, whoa, Google had a lot to get off its chest, hardware-wise: Pixel 6a, Pixel 7, Pixel Buds Pro and even a Pixel Tab.GoogleTo start with, yes, the Pixel Watch is real and arriving this fall. It features a...
The problem with waiting for quantum computing to bring in the next wave of AI is that it’s likely to arrive a lot slower than people would like. The next best options include increasing the speed of existing computers somehow – but there’s now an important added ijmperative: power-efficient systems that mean we don’t burn […]
There’s no lack of startups around the world trying to make industrial activities more efficient with artificial intelligence. Some invent robots to assist or replace manual labor, while others use machine learning to help businesses discover insights. Synergies Intelligent Systems falls into the second category. Michael Chang founded Synergies in 2016 in Boston to provide […]
The Pixel 6A is one of the many Pixel devices Google showed off today. | Image: Google Google has wrapped up its two-hour-long I/O keynote, which was absolutely packed with news. We heard about AI, Android, and, of course, a plethora of Pixel hardware. Here are the biggest announcements we saw on Wednesday. Image: Google Google isn’t bumping the price of its A lineup. The Pixel 6A features Google’s flagship chip but not its best cameraGoogle announced its new mid-tier phone, the Pixel 6A, which will cost $449 when it’s available for preorder on July 21st. The company seems to be flipping...
During the first of two Google I/O keynotes this week, Google announced LaMDA 2, the follow-up to an AI system that the company introduced at Google I/O 2021. Short for Language Models for Dialog Applications, Google claims that LaMDA 2 can break down complex topics into straightforward, digestible explanations and steps as well as generate […]
Google has been working with researchers to make its products and services more inclusive for people with darker skin tones. Now, the company is open sourcing a major part of that work. The company is making its skin tone research widely available as part of its effort at creating more ”responsible AI.” The research has so far resulted in the Monk Skin Tone Scale (MST), a scale “designed to be easy-to-use for development and evaluation of technology while representing a broader range of skin tones.”The scale is meant to more accurately reflect the diversity of different skin tones...
Google Assistant is already pretty handy, filling in your payment info on take out orders, helping get the kids to school on time, controlling your stereo systems' volume and your home's smart light schedules. At the I/O 2022 developers conference on Wednesday, company executives showed off some of the new features arriving soon for the AI.developing
Last year, Voxel raised $3 million to make warehouses safer through AI-powered security cameras. It has been busy in the background, working, and raising funds, to further develop its tech to make warehouses safer and to ramp up operations even further. The company grew from a headcount of eight to 30 so far this year, […]
When Arvind Krishna took over as CEO at IBM in April 2020, the world was immersed in the initial throes of the Covid pandemic and his company was struggling. It had spent the better part of a decade reporting declining revenue and it desperately needed a change in direction. Whatever IBM had been doing, it […]
Automating customer service tasks, particularly those that require agents to speak with customers on the phone, is something of a holy grail in the enterprise. According to a survey by OnePoll commissioned by call center software vendor TCN, customers are willing to wait on hold for six minutes on average when waiting to speak to […]
Databases are in wide use today, powering the apps that people use every day for work and play. But they can be challenging to build, configure, and maintain — particularly as their usage continues to grow. According to a recent Redgate survey, 70% of companies now use more than one database in their stack, including […]
South Korean startup Seadronix wants to reduce the issue of marine accidents, 75% of which are caused by human error, according to a 2019 Allianz safety and shipping report. The company just secured a $5.8 million Series A extension to scale its AI-based ship berthing monitoring and navigation systems to help cargo ships navigate safely […]
A company that gained notoriety for selling access to billions of facial photos, many culled from social media without the knowledge of the individuals depicted, faces major new restrictions to its controversial business model. On Monday, Clearview AI agreed to settle a 2020 lawsuit from the ACLU that accused the company of running afoul of […]
Who knows what secrets await in the hearts of plants? Brightseed has found a couple of them, anyway, using an AI-based analysis method, and will be bringing its first products to market soon with the help of a $68 million B round. Brightseed’s thesis is simply that there are almost certainly some very helpful and […]
Research in the field of machine learning and AI, now a key technology in practically every industry and company, is far too voluminous for anyone to read it all. This column, Perceptron (previously Deep Science), aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in, but not limited to, artificial […]
When we last checked in with AI-powered captioning service Ava, they had just raised a seed round and it was six months into a pandemic that would reshape how we all work together. 18 months later they have investors banging on their door following huge growth, and aim to keep showing the tech industry how […]
Utilizing AI and automation tools to enhance the delivery of human services can make exclusive services available to more people. For this to happen, the human and tech aspects must be balanced.
Developers of autonomous vehicles have long promised that the technology will fundamentally change the way people, packages and freight move around the world. But will these robotaxis, self-driving trucks and delivery bots be good citizens in the cities in which they operate? And what does a “good AV citizen” even look like? We’ve invited three […]
As the use of AI becomes more common throughout the enterprise, the demand for products that make it easier to inspect, discover and fix critical AI errors is increasing. After all, AI is costly — Gartner predicted in 2021 that a third of tech providers would invest $1 million or more in AI by 2023 […]
SoundCloud wants to make it easier to find must-listen tunes buried deep in its catalog. TechCrunchnotes the company has bought Musiio, an AI music curation company. The firm's technology uses AI to "listen" to songs, tag them and slot them into playlists. Ideally, this improves the chances of discovering tracks you like, whether they're from an established artist or a new bedroom DJ.The companies didn't disclose the terms of the deal, but said Musiio would "become core" to SoundCloud's discovery system. Musiio will still offer its technology to other companies.The two haven'...
This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try to) disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI. (In partnership with Paperspace) In recent years, the transformer model has become one of the main highlights of advances in deep learning and deep neural networks. It is mainly used for advanced applications in natural language processing. Google is using it to enhance its search engine results. OpenAI has used transformers to create its famous GPT-2 and GPT-3 models. Since its debut in 2017, the transformer architecture has evolved and branched out into many different...
An online audio sharing platform and streamer, SoundCloud has acquired Musiio, an AI music curation company. With Musiio’s team and technology, SoundCloud plans to strengthen its music discovery features, helping the platform compete with streaming giants like Spotify. The terms of the deal are undisclosed. Based in Singapore and founded in 2018, Musiio built an […]
As knowledge workers including software engineers shifted to remote work during the pandemic, executives expressed a concern that productivity would suffer as a result. The evidence is mixed on this, but in the software industry particularly, remote work exacerbated many of the challenges that employees already faced. According to a 2021 Garden survey, the majority […]
Traceable AI, a startup offering services designed to protect APIs from cyberattacks, today announced that it raised $60 million in a Series B round led by IVP with participation from BIG Labs, Unusual Ventures, Tiger Global Management, and several undisclosed angel investors. The new capital values the company at more than $450 million post-money, and […]
A team of researchers recently developed an algorithm that generates original reviews for wines and beers. Considering that computers can’t taste booze, this makes for a curious use-case for machine learning. The AI sommelier was trained on a database containing hundreds of thousands of beer and wine reviews. In essence, it aggregates those reviews and picks out keywords. When the researchers ask it to generate its own review for a specific wine or beer, it generates something similar to previous reviews. According to the researchers, its output is comparable to, and often indistinguishable...
Google is still firing AI researchers amid criticism of its work. The New York Times has learned Google fired machine learning scientist Satrajit Chatterjee in March, soon after it refused to publish a paper Chatterjee and others wrote challenging earlier findings that computers could design some chip components more effectively than humans. The scientist was reportedly allowed to collaborate on a paper disputing those claims after he and fellow authors expressed reservations, but was dismissed after a resolution committee rejected the paper and the researchers hoped to bring the issue to CEO...
Accern, which uses AI to analyze online conversations around particular companies, trends, and industries, today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series B round led by Mighty Capital alongside Tribe Capital, Shasta Ventures, Gaingels and Fusion Fund and others. CEO Kumesh Aroomoogan says that the new capital will be put toward “product-led growth,” […]
Welcome to Perceptron, TechCrunch’s weekly roundup of AI news and research from around the world. Machine learning is a key technology in practically every industry now, and there’s far too much happening for anyone to keep up with it all. This column aims to collect some of the most interesting recent discoveries and papers in […]
Less than a year ago, Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI VP of research Dario Amodei, intending to perform research in the public interest on making AI more reliable and explainable. Its $124 million in funding was surprising then, but nothing could have prepared us for the company raising $580 million less than a year […]
Bigger isn’t always better, but sometimes it is. Cerebras Systems, a company bent on accelerating machine learning systems, built the world’s largest chip last year. In the time since, it’s developed bespoke solutions to some of the largest problems in the AI industry. Founded in 2015, Cerebras is a sort of reunion tour for most of its C-suite executives. Prior to building chips the size of dinner plates, the team was responsible for Sea Micro, a company founded in 2007 that eventually sold to AMD for more than $330 million in 2012. Cerebras Systems is now valued at more than…This...
Characters in games and other digital experiences tend to be rather static, working from a set of lines and responses written long ago. But the future of games could be more responsive, generative, and of course AI-powered — something Inworld AI is attempting to enable with a newly available beta tool that lets developers create […]
The most sophisticated AI systems today are capable of impressive feats, from directing cars through city streets to writing human-like prose. But they share a common bottleneck: hardware. Developing systems on the bleeding edge often requires a huge amount of computing power. For example, creating DeepMind’s protein structure-predicting AlphaFold took a cluster of hundreds of […]
Natural language processing (NLP), the field of AI that involves parsing text for tasks including summarization and generation, is a fast-growing technology. According to a 2021 survey from John Snow Labs and Gradient Flow, 60% of tech leaders indicated that their NLP budgets grew by at least 10% compared to 2020, while a third said […]
Moveable Ink today announced that it secured $55 million in a Series D funding round led by Silver Lake with participation from Contour Venture Partners, Intel Capital, and others, bringing the marketing software startup’s total raised to $97 million. The investment comes as Moveable Ink — which was valued at $1.3 billion prior to the […]
Synthesis AI, a startup developing a platform that generates synthetic data to train AI systems, today announced that it raised $17 million in a Series A funding round led by 468 Capital with participation from Sorenson Ventures and Strawberry Creek Ventures, Bee Partners, PJC, iRobot Ventures, Boom Capital and Kubera Venture Capital. CEO and cofounder […]
Ford and autonomous vehicle technology company Argo AI have been partnering for years to bring high level self-driving capabilities to Ford vehicles. To date, much of that partnership has been realized through robotaxi services and, more recently, last mile delivery. Now, it looks like Ford is interested in expanding that partnership to focus on middle […]
Raquel Urtasun founded Waabi in 2021 after spending nearly three years as Uber’s R&D head of Advanced Technology Group (ATG). Waabi’s mission is to develop an AI-first approach to speed up the commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles, starting with long-haul trucks. To do so, her company raised an $83.5 million Series A with Khosla Venture’s […]
The e-commerce market has boomed in the last several years, and with that so has the appetite of tax collectors to do their bidding: make rules that make sure their countries are getting a cut. That’s spelled more red tape and more customs hoops (and costs) for those shipping and receiving goods, and also delays […]
Shared micromobility company Voi is deploying e-scooters in Oslo, Norway with Drover AI’s computer vision tech that can identify whether a scooter is on the pavement, road or cycle lane in order to help prevent sidewalk riding. As the micromobility industry consolidates around a few key players and cities become more discerning about which operators […]
As the tech world inches a closer to the idea of artificial general intelligence, we’re seeing another interesting theme emerging in the ongoing democratization of AI: a wave of startups building tech to make AI technologies more accessible overall by a wider range of users and organizations. Today, one of these, Baseten — which is […]
In 2016 at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, several of the original developers behind what became Siri unveiled Viv, an AI platform that promised to connect various third-party applications to perform just about any task. The pitch was tantalizing — but never fully realized. Samsung later acquired Viv, folding a pared-down version of the tech into […]
The Pentagon is still new to wielding artificial intelligence, and it's looking to an outsider for help. Breaking Defense has learned Lyft machine learning head Craig Martell is joining the Defense Department as its Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer (CDAO). He'll lead the American military's strategies for AI, analytics and data, and should play a key part in a Joint All-Domain Command and Control initiative to improve multi-force combat awareness through technology.Martell is a partial outsider. While he directed the Naval Postgraduate School's AI-driven Natural...
As the demand for feature stores grows, tech giants and startups are developing products to meet the need -- and investors are backing them enthusiastically.
Research in the field of machine learning and AI, now a key technology in practically every industry and company, is far too voluminous for anyone to read it all. This column aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in, but not limited to, artificial intelligence — and explain […]
John Deere has been in business for nearly 200 years. For those in the agriculture industry, the company that makes green tractors is as well-known as Santa Claus, McDonald’s, or John Wayne. Heck, even city folk who’ve never seen a tractor that wasn’t on a television screen know John Deere. The company’s so popular even celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and George Clooney have been known to rock a Deere hat. What most outsiders don’t know is that John Deere’s not so much a farming vehicle manufacturer these days as it is an agricultural technology company. And, judging by how…...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge First, a necessary disclaimer: don’t use artificial intelligence language generators to solve your ethical quandaries. Second: definitely go tell those quandaries to this AI-powered simulation of Reddit because the results are fascinating.Are You The Asshole (AYTA) is, as its name suggests, built to mimic Reddit’s r/AmITheAsshole (AITA) crowdsourced advice forum. Created by internet artists Morris Kolman and Alex Petros with funding from Digital Void, the site lets you enter a scenario and ask for advice about it and then generates a series of...
Advertising, particularly online advertising, isn’t a surefire way to bolster business. A report from ecommerce analytics platform Glew drives the point home: In 2015, 75% of retailers that spent at least $5,000 on Facebook ads ended up losing money on those ads, with the average return on investment landing around -66.7%. Obviously, that’s just one […]
Meta's VR hand tracking has come a long way in two years. The company has upgraded its Presence Platform hand tracking support for Quest headset apps to allow considerably more natural gestures, particularly those involving hand-over-hand interactions. You can now clap your hands, provide a truer-to-life thumbs-up and deliver high-fives — you can show your appreciation without reaching for your controllers.The update also provides more consistent tracking, including for fast movements like waving. Meta chalked up the improvements to new AI-based approaches, including deep learning that&#...
There's nobody better at persecuting a war than the United States — we've got the the best-equipped and biggest-budgeted fighting force on the face of the Earth. But does carrying the biggest stick still constitute a strategic advantage if the mere act of possessing it seems to make us more inclined to use it?In his latest book, Future Peace (sequel to 2017's Future War) Dr. Robert H. Latiff, Maj Gen USAF (Ret), explores how the American military's increasing reliance on weaponized drones, AI and Machine Learning systems, automation and similar cutting-edge technologies, when...
Research in the field of machine learning and AI, now a key technology in practically every industry and company, is far too voluminous for anyone to read it all. This column aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in, but not limited to, artificial intelligence — and explain […]
If you missed the last sale on iRobot's latest robot vacuums, you're in luck. Both the Roomba j7+ and the Roomba s9+ are $200 off at Wellbots when you use the code ENGMOM200 at checkout. That brings them down to $599 and $799, respectively, which are both close to the best prices we've seen on both vacuums.Buy Roomba j7+ at Wellbots - $599Buy Roomba s9+ at Wellbots - $799The newer of the two is the Roomba j7+, which came out at the end of last year. It's technically not as powerful as the s9+, but it has new AI-driven computer vision technology that helps it detect objects and...
Today during its second Work Transformation Summit, Zoom announced Zoom IQ for Sales, a product that uses AI to analyze sales meetings and deals to provide insights. It’s the company’s first explicit foray into sales automation software, a market that could grow to $7.3 billion in size by 2028, according to Verified Market Research. Sales […]
Processing claims at scale presents a challenge for insurers, particularly where the claims entail factors like complex underlying health conditions. According to data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the second-most common complaint that insurance customers made in 2021 was claim delays, ranked second after unsatisfactory settlement offers. The pandemic placed an additional strain […]
Contact centers play a key part in call a company engages with customers, amounting to what is a $400 billion market globally. Today, a company that believes it can improve how agents work within them using AI is announcing a big round of funding. Observe.ai — which provides natural language tools to track voice and […]
Depending on the theory of intelligence to which you subscribe, achieving “human-level” AI will require a system that can leverage multiple modalities — e.g., sound, vision and text — to reason about the world. For example, when shown an image of a toppled truck and a police cruiser on a snowy freeway, a human-level AI […]
Before you can even think about building an algorithm to read an X-ray or interpret a blood smear, the machine has to know what’s what in an image. All of the promise of AI in healthcare – an area that has attracted $11.3 billion in private investment in 2021, can’t be realized without carefully labeled […]
It looks at data like Popular Times, images from street view, and more. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google has shared how it’s using artificial intelligence, including its restaurant-calling Duplex tech, to try and keep business hours up to date on Google Maps. The company says that if it is confident enough in the AI’s prediction of what a business’s hours should be, it will update the information in Maps.In a blog post, Google outlines the various factors its AI analyzes to determine whether it should do these updates. First, it looks at when the business profile was last...
As we start to see AI advance in business, the ways in which we interact with machines are beginning to change. Companies like Salesforce are looking for new opportunities for AI to have a more direct impact on customers. While using AI to surface the customer most likely to churn or most likely to buy […]
Services that put a name to a face, including Clearview AI, are being used to identify Russian soldiers, living or dead, and to verify that travelers in Ukraine are who they claim.
Take a shipping container, add a helping of AI and a boat-load of black soldier flies, fold in a small mountain of food waste, sprinkle in $16 million of investment led by Balderton Capital, and call in the Michelin reviewers, because om nom, you’ve got yourself a delicious dish called Better Origin. The company is […]
Anker today launched a 3D printing brand named AnkerMake. Its first printer, the AnkerMake M5 just made its Kickstarter debut, with a $499 price tag. The diminutive price packs in a comprehensive feature set, including cameras that do AI-powered monitoring of your printing, enabling the printer to pause if it detects that something has gone […]
Early last year OpenAI showed off a remarkable new AI model called DALL-E (a combination of WALL-E and Dali), capable of drawing nearly anything and in nearly any style. But the results were rarely something you’d want to hang on the wall. Now DALL-E 2 is out, and it does what its predecessor did much, […]
DALL-E 2 results for “Teddy bears mixing sparkling chemicals as mad scientists, steampunk.” | OpenAI Artificial intelligence research group OpenAI has created a new version of DALL-E, its text-to-image generation program. DALL-E 2 features a higher-resolution and lower-latency version of the original system, which produces pictures depicting descriptions written by users. It also includes new capabilities, like editing an existing image. As with previous OpenAI work, the tool isn’t being directly released to the public. But researchers can sign up online to preview the system, and OpenAI...
SmartHop, a startup that uses AI to help interstate truckers make their routes more efficient and lucrative by removing administrative headaches, just raised a $30 million Series B financing round, bringing the company’s total funding to $46 million following a $12 million Series A last year. The startup’s main offering is its smart dispatch service, […]
What is sales enablement, exactly? To most companies, it’s providing sales organizations with the content, tools, and information they need to sell more effectively. Sales enablement is a broad-based goal, but one that can reap substantial benefits. According to Regalix — which, it must be noted, has a vested interest in painting sales enablement solutions […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A former employee at DeepMind, the Google-owned AI research lab, accuses the company’s human resources department of intentionally delaying its response to her complaints about sexual misconduct in the workplace, as first reported by the Financial Times.In an open letter posted to Medium, the former employee (who goes by Julia to protect her identity) says she was sexually harassed by a senior researcher for months while working at the London-based company. During this time, she was allegedly subject to numerous sexual propositions and inappropriate...
Three of the developers responsible for DeepStack, the first AI system to beat humans at heads-up, no-limit poker, have left their posts at DeepMind to form a new startup dedicated to dominating the stock market. The new venture, called Equilibre Technologies, will employ algorithms to pick stocks and cryptocurrency. Up front: The stock market is a nebulous and challenging environment to try and “solve” with AI, but the team’s leadership appears more than up for the challenge. Martin Schmid, Rudolf Kadlec, and Matej Moravcik, the company’s founders, all worked together at IBM and...
Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images An artificial intelligence tool that reads chest X-rays without oversight from a radiologist got regulatory clearance in the European Union last week — a first for a fully autonomous medical imaging AI, the company, called Oxipit, said in a statement. It’s a big milestone for AI and likely to be contentious, as radiologists have spent the last few years pushing back on efforts to fully automate parts of their job. The tool, called ChestLink, scans chest X-rays and automatically sends patient reports on those that it sees as totally healthy, with...
Among other updates, Windows 11 is getting an AI-enabled eye contact feature today that will always make it look like you’re looking at the screen. Don’t use it. There is nothing like staring into the soulless AI-enhanced eyes of a presenter during a video conference to make you question the nature of your reality. The […]
Berlin-based sound wellness company Endel has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by Waverley Capital and True Ventures to further develop its patented technology. The company’s app creates soundscapes that are designed to help people relax, focus and sleep better. The technology takes inputs from the user’s movement, time of day, weather, location […]
Welcome to AI book reviews, a series of posts that explore the latest literature on artificial intelligence. There are two contrasting but equally disturbing images of artificial intelligence. One warns about a future in which runaway intelligence becomes smarter than humanity, creates mass unemployment, and enslaves humans in a Matrix-like world or destroys them a la Skynet. A more contemporary image is one in which dumb AI algorithms are entrusted with sensitive decisions that can cause severe harm when they do go wrong. What both visions have in common is the absence of human control. Much...
The European Union’s planned risk-based framework for regulating artificial intelligence includes powers for oversight bodies to order the withdrawal of a commercial AI system or require that an AI model be retrained if it’s deemed high risk, according to an analysis of the proposal by a legal expert. That suggests there’s significant enforcement firepower lurking […]
For more than a century, popular science fiction has promised us a future filled with robotics and AI technologies. In 2022, many of those dreams are being realized — computers recognize us on sight and cars can drive themselves, we’re building intelligent exoskeletons that multiply our strength and implanting computers in our skulls to augment our intelligence — but that doesn’t mean most of America trusts these breakthrough technologies any further than they can throw them. Quite the opposite, in fact.A recently published survey from Pew Research sought the opinions of some 10,260 US...
In the pandemic era, where digital storefronts have become a matter of course for retailers, data analytics is proving its worth. Tools that analyze customer data can help better maintain stock, build a supply chain, detect fraud, and predict which products might appeal to particular customer segments. Those advantages — as well as their ability […]
Last year, when we wrote about new investment for Israeli startup Granulate — which applies AI to high-priority computing workloads to optimize how they travel across a customers’ cloud and on-premises networks — we noted that the network management space was going through some consolidation, with point solutions getting snapped up by platform players. Well […]
Intel has only just detailed its first Arc laptop GPUs, but it's already teasing its desktop plans. The company has offered a peek at an Arc A-series Limited Edition video card arriving sometime this summer — yes, that's another delay. There are no specs or prices, unfortunately, but the double-height design and twin-fan cooling make clear this is aimed directly at gamers who'd normally buy AMD or NVIDIA boards.Early Arc desktop GPUs are expected to support a raft of modern features, including hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and AI-based supersampling. Intel is already developing...
Building design teams face a range of challenges during the design phase, from building higher while avoiding higher costs to reducing the time to occupancy. If teams don’t do their due diligence, they risk omitting from design documents important mechanical equipment, like exhaust fans and valves, for example, or failing to size electrical circuits appropriately […]
AI-powered voice transcription service Otter.ai is releasing a set of new meeting-focused features to boost collaboration, the company announced on Tuesday. Most notably, the company is adding a new “Automatic Outline” feature that uses Otter’s proprietary AI to automatically create a meeting summary. The new feature aims to give you an idea of what your colleagues […]
Quantum technology, which makes use of the surprising and often counterintuitive properties of the subatomic universe, is revolutionizing the way information is gathered, stored, shared, and analyzed. The commercial and scientific potential of the quantum revolution is vast, but it is in national security that quantum technology is making the biggest waves. National governments are by far the heaviest investors in quantum research and development. Quantum technology promises breakthroughs in weapons, communications, sensing, and computing technology that could change the world’s balance of...
When Pinecone launched last year, the company’s message was around building a serverless vector database designed specifically for the needs of data scientists. While that database is at the core of what the company is doing, it is moving towards a more refined use case for that database around AI-driven search, helping those data scientists […]
Otter is one of the most useful tools for journalists. It helps me transcribe my interviews easily without having to manually listen to them and take notes. Generally, I used Otter to record my interviews, and then go back to the app to listen to them while writing my stories. The company wants to change that. It’s trying to make Otter a meeting hub for individuals and teams. To achieve this, it’s bringing new features like a revamped home feed, calendar integration, collaborative meeting notes, and AI-powered meeting summaries. The biggest change to the home screen is that now you…...
How different would we think about artificial intelligence if AI pioneers Allen Newell and Herbert Simon had won support for the seemingly less hype-prone term of “complex information processing,” rather than “artificial intelligence,” which was ultimately adopted by the field? On the surface, this thought experiment is interesting because it asks if artificial intelligence is intrinsically hyped. That is, is the word alone enough to get us in trouble? This was the focus of a recent Wall Street Journal article where columnist Christopher Mims asks experts in artificial intelligence...
Nvidia events are renowned for mixing technical bravado with splashes of showmanship — and this year’s GTC conference was no exception. The company ended a week that introduced a new enterprise GPU and an Arm-based “superchip” with a trademark flashy demo. Some 75 years after the world’s first instant photo captured the 3D world in a 2D picture, Nvidia showcased the inverse: turning 2D images into a 3D scene within milliseconds. Dubbed Instant NeRF, the technique involves training a neural rendering model on a few dozen still photos, alongside data on the camera angle for each shot...
The Samsung Jet Bot Plus and its cleaning station, rendered in a very fake home. | Image: Samsung Samsung is no stranger to attacking a product category with multiple options at different price points, and offering large discounts on those products is another of its signatures. The robot vacuum space isn’t an exception, with the Samsung Jet Bot Plus — its mid-tier option — available today for $399.99 at Best Buy and Amazon. The Jet Bot Plus offers fairly strong suction, a soft brush that’s especially good for hard surfaces, and a self-cleaning station borrowed from its pricier, AI-...
Microsoft today announced an update to its translation services that, thanks to new machine learning techniques, promises significantly improved translations between a large number of language pairs. Based on its Project Z-Code, which uses a ‘spare Mixture of Experts’ approach, these new models now often score between 3 and 15 percent better than the company’s […]
The H100 die. | Image: Nvidia Nvidia has announced a slew of AI-focused enterprise products at its annual GTC conference. They include details of its new silicon architecture, Hopper; the first datacenter GPU built using that architecture, the H100; and vague plans to build what the company claims will be the world’s fastest AI supercomputer, named Eos.Nvidia has benefited hugely from the AI boom of the last decade, with its GPUs proving a perfect match for popular, data-intensive deep learning methods. As the AI sector’s demand for data compute grows, says Nvidia, it wants to provide more...
At its annual GTC conference for AI developers, Nvidia today announced its next-gen Hopper GPU architecture and the Hopper H100 GPU, as well as a new data center chip that combines the GPU with a high-performance CPU, which Nvidia calls the ‘Grace CPU Superchip’ (not to be confused with the Grace Hopper Superchip). The H100 […]
The world continues to shift more of its customer service needs online, and those building tools to help manage that demand are seeing their stars rise as a result. In the latest development, Glia — which builds AI-based CRM solutions for agents to converse with customers across multiple mediums (including video, voice, messaging, email and […]
For self-driving cars and other applications developed using AI, you need what’s known as ‘deep learning’, the core concepts of which emerged in the ‘50s. This requires training models based on similar patterns as seen in the human brain. This, in turn, requires a large amount of compute power, as afforded by TPUs (Tensor Processing […]
Hence Technologies, a Kigali and London based startup that uses data and AI technologies to match companies with external legal service providers is set to scale its precision matching engine after raising $1.8million in seed funding from various institutions and angel investors. This brings the total amount raised by the startup, so far, to $2.6 […]
An instructor at the Fort Leonard Wood Chemical School, who is designated as an agent handler, carries the VX nerve agent to contaminate a jeep in one of the eight chambers used for training chemical defense on April 18, 2003 at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. | Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images It took less than six hours for drug-developing AI to invent 40,000 potentially lethal molecules. Researchers put AI normally used to search for helpful drugs into a kind of “bad actor” mode to show how easily it could be abused at a biological arms control conference.All the researchers had to...
Samsung has opened up pre-orders for many of its 2022 TVs and revealed when you'll be able to lock in an order for some of its other upcoming displays. The company is refreshing its Neo QLED sets this year with features such as refresh rates of up to 144Hz, 14-bit processing for enhanced brightness accuracy and AI-driven upscaling via the Neural Quantum Processor 8K.Neo QLED QN800B 8K TVs are available to pre-order now at $3,500 for the 65-inch model, $4,700 for the 75-inch TV and $6,500 for the 85-inch version. Pre-orders for the QN900B-series TVs (which have thinner bezels and 144Hz...
TruEra, a startup that offers an AI quality management solution to optimize, explain and monitor machine learning models, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series B round led by Menlo Ventures. Existing investors Greylock Partners, Wing Venture Capital (which led its $12 million Series A round in late 2020), Harpoon Ventures, Conversion […]
Image: YouTube / AI Addict Tesla has a complicated relationship with customers who pay to test the beta version of its “Full Sell Driving” software. Often, these people are diehard fans, keen to promote the company’s prowess and show off its new driver assist features. Sometimes, though, they overshare — posting videos that show exactly when and how Tesla’s software gets it wrong.When the person sharing these clips also works for Tesla, things are even more complicated. John Bernal, a former Tesla employee who reviewed the company’s FSD Beta software on his YouTube channel AI Addict...
Tel Aviv-based Run:ai, a startup that makes it easier for developers and operations teams to manage and optimize their AI infrastructure, today announced that it has raised a $75 million Series C funding round led by Tiger Global Management and Insight partners, which also led the company’s $30 million Series B round in 2021. Previous […]
Cybercrime is on the rise, and today an insurance startup that’s built an artificial intelligence-based platform to help manage the risks from that is announcing a big round of funding to meet the opportunity. Cowbell Cyber, a full-stack insurance company that provides cyber insurance to SMEs, has closed a Series B of $100 million, which […]
Photo by: IMAGE POINT FR/NIH/NIAID/BSIP //Universal Images Group via Getty Images Image databases of skin conditions are notoriously biased towards lighter skin. Rather than wait for the slow process of collecting more images of conditions like cancer or inflammation on darker skin, one group wants to fill in the gaps using artificial intelligence. It’s working on an AI program to generate synthetic images of diseases on darker skin — and using those images for a tool that could help diagnose skin cancer. “Having real images of darker skin is the ultimate solution,” says Eman Rezk, a...
The beautiful and strange new movie from South Korean filmmaker Kogonada presents a very different view of an AI-enhanced future.
Razer's latest livestreaming gear is built for broadcasts far away from your desk. The company has unveiled the Seiren Bluetooth, its first Bluetooth lapel microphone. The clip-on design's omnidirectional mic and AI-based noise suppression are built to help mobile streamers and vloggers who want better voice quality than their phone can offer, particularly in noisy situations.The lapel mic includes a 3.5mm jack for monitoring through headphones, and you can customize it through the Razer Streaming App to tweak the noise suppression levels, reduce latency for game streams and adjust...
AI has been the backbone of many a technological breakthrough over the years, but one challenge it has yet to solve is that of self-driving: try as they may, engineers have yet to build a platform that can manage all the practicalities and unexpected eventualities of conducting a vehicle as well as or better than […]
As if being a scholar in ancient Greek wasn’t hard enough fundamentally, the primary texts they rely on are frequently damaged beyond repair, being as they are thousands of years old. Historians may have a powerful new tool in Ithaca, a machine learning model built by DeepMind that makes surprisingly accurate guesses at missing words […]
Snorkel AI was founded in the summer of 2019 and over two quick years raised a total of $135.3 million in funding over five rounds. The rocket ship seemingly still has fuel, too. The company isn’t slowing down, and TechCrunch Live is thrilled to host co-founder and CEO Alex Ratner and Greylock partner Saam Motamedi. Snorkel […]
Another European privacy watchdog has sanctioned the controversial facial recognition firm, Clearview AI, which scrapes selfies off the Internet to amass a databased of some 10 billion of faces to power an identity-matching service it sells to law enforcement. Italy’s data protection agency today announced a €20 million penalty for breaches of EU law — […]
Some of the better-known minds in tech are uniting to tackle one of computing's greater challenges. CNBCreports LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman (pictured above) have formed Inflection AI, a company that will use artificial intelligence software to help humans talk to computers. The hope, according to Suleyman, is that you'll speak to computers in ordinary language — this will "almost certainly" be possible in five years, he said.Suleyman will serve as CEO, while fellow DeepMind alumni Karén Simonyan will operate as Inflection's chief...
Having held the positions of CFO at digital lenders OnDeck and Better.com, Howard Katzenberg experienced firsthand just what a lack of visibility into company spend could cost an organization. After spending three weeks analyzing spreadsheets at one point, Katzenberg and his team were able to identify $1.5 million in potential savings on about $12 million […]
Deepfakes have been ranked as the most dangerous AI threat, but new research suggests the pen is mightier than the picture. Scientists at the MIT Media Lab showed almost 6,000 people 16 authentic political speeches and 16 that were doctored by AI. The soundbites were presented in permutations of text, video, and audio, such as video with subtitles or only text. The participants were told that half of the content was fake, and asked which snippets they believed were fabricated. When shown text alone, the respondents were only barely better at identifying falsehoods (57% accuracy) than random...
Language technology powered by AI can perpetuate bias if we are not careful. We need to be sure that language AI is trained to be ethical as well.
It’s tough being a college student in the US these days. The stresses of studying, pandemic rules, exorbitant fees, and douchebags with guitars can make for trying times. But don’t worry, fellow kidz: AI has arrived to alleviate your worries. Meet the new digital university president: Image: UNLV The system is a digital twin of Keith Whitfield, the human president of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “I had this kind of grandiose desire to talk to every single student, and I think I said that and the whole room just got quiet and said, ‘he’s lost his mind’,” Whitfield…...
Verbit, a Tel Aviv- and New York-based AI-powered transcription and captioning service platform, has acquired Take Note – the UK-based company that provides transcription, captioning and note-taking services for the market research sector. This acquisition marks Verbit’s entrance into the market research space and increases its presence in Europe. The company did not disclose the […]
UK-based TrueCircle, a computer vision startup founded just last year, has nabbed $5.5 million in pre-seed funding in a bid to bring data-driven AI to the recycling industry to improve recovery rates and quality — with the overarching goal of transforming the economics of waste reuse to shrink demand for virgin materials. So far the […]
In June 2021, scientists at the AI lab DeepMind made a controversial claim. The researchers suggested that we could reach artificial general intelligence (AGI) using one single approach: reinforcement learning. They titled their paper on the subject: “Reward is Enough.” The team argued that AGI could emerge through an incentive mechanism known as a reward function. “We hypothesize that intelligence, and its associated abilities, can be understood as subserving the maximization of reward,” the study authors wrote. Their claims have been dismissed by some scientists, but they nonetheless...
When the three founders of Faros AI were working at Salesforce, they helped develop the company’s artificial intelligence, known as Einstein. While the goal of Einstein was to help companies become more data-driven, the engineering team building it experienced the same pain of tracking engineering operations data as any other company. Faros AI CEO and […]
Zero Systems launched seven years ago with an idea to bring automation to professional services like law firms. They wanted to focus on speeding up manual tasks, rather than moving large volumes of information, to help lawyers work more efficiently. They came up with an AI-driven system that can identify work product on a lawyer’s […]
Egyptian proptech startup Nawy, which began life in 2016 as an AI-driven property listing has grown to offer brokerage services, supporting the closing of property deals. It is now looking for its next path of growth after connecting 40,000 buyers to sellers last year alone, winning the confidence of the Sawiris family – Egypt’s wealthiest […]
I’ve spent the last eight months turning Google News into my personal playground. I manipulated the algorithm and made it surface my stories whether they were relevant to specific topics or not. This is a big problem. I’m a regular reporter — a writer. I have no programming skills or formal education in computer science. Google’s arguably the most technologically-advanced AI company in Silicon Valley. It also happens to be worth more than two trillion dollars. Google News reaches almost 300 million users. And I was able to game its algorithms by changing a single word on a web page.&#...
Meta, formerly known as Facebook, today showed off a prototype of an AI system that enables people to generate or import things into a virtual world just by using voice commands. The company sees the tool, which is called “Builder Bot,” as an “exploratory concept” that shows AI’s potential for creating new worlds in the […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has announced an ambitious new AI research project to create translation software that works for “everyone in the world.” The project was announced as part of an event focusing on the broad range of benefits Meta believes AI can offer the company’s metaverse plans.“The ability to communicate with anyone in any language — that’s a superpower people have dreamed of forever, and AI is going to deliver that within our lifetimes,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an online presentation. “AI...
Meta Meta is testing an artificial intelligence system that lets people build parts of virtual worlds by describing them, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off a prototype at a live event today. Proof of the concept, called Builder Bot, could eventually draw more people into Meta’s Horizon “metaverse” virtual reality experiences. It could also advance creative AI tech that powers machine-generated art.In a prerecorded demo video, Zuckerberg walked viewers through the process of making a virtual space with Builder Bot, starting with commands like “let’s go to the beach,” which prompts...
Aporia, a Tel Aviv-based startup that helps businesses monitor and explain their AI-based services, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series A funding round led by Tiger Global. New investor Samsung Next, as well as previous investors TLV Partners and Vertex Ventures also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total […]
Experts predict artificial intelligence will gain sentience within the next 100 years. Some predict it’ll happen sooner. Others say it’ll never happen. Still other experts say it already has happened. It’s possible the experts are just guessing. The problem with identifying “sentience” and “consciousness” is there’s no precedent when it comes to machine intelligence. You can’t just check a robot’s pulse or ask it to define “love” to see if it’s alive. The closest we have to a test for sentience is the Turing Test and, arguably, Alexa and Siri passed that years ago. At...
A team at Google is today launching a new product for mobile app developers called Checks which leverages A.I. technology to identify possible privacy and compliance issues within apps, amid a rapidly changing regulatory and policy landscape. The freemium solution will be offered to both Android and iOS app developers of all sizes, who will […]
Artificial intelligence-powered voice and video technologies have been gaining steady popularity in recent years. Korean startup called Neosapience has developed a synthetic voice and video platform, Typecast, that lets users turn text into a video without recording and editing in a studio. Today, Neosapience announced it has raised $21.5 million in a Series B round […]
It’s a popular idea that the path to sustainability lies in high-tech solutions. By making everyday items like cars electric, and installing smart systems to monitor and reduce energy use, it seems we’ll still be able to enjoy the comforts to which we’ve become accustomed while doing our bit for the planet – a state known as “green growth”. But the risks of this approach are becoming ever clearer. Many modern technologies use materials like copper, cobalt, lithium and rare earth elements. These metals are in devices like cell phones, televisions, and motors. Not only is their supply...
Welcome back! The US Copyright Office (USCO) is again refusing to grant copyright for a work of art that was created by an artificial intelligence system. Dr. Stephen Thaler attempted to copyright a piece of art titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise, claiming in a second request for reconsideration of a 2019 ruling that the USCO's “human authorship” requirement was unconstitutional.Current copyright law only offers protections to "the fruits of intellectual labor” that “are founded in the creative powers of the [human] mind,’ according to the USCO. For now, AI has the same access...
The US Copyright Office has once again denied an effort to copyright a work of art that was created by an artificial intelligence system. Dr. Stephen Thaler attempted to copyright a piece of art titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise, claiming in a second request for reconsideration of a 2019 ruling that the USCO's “human authorship” requirement was unconstitutional.In its latest ruling, which was spotted by The Verge, the agency accepted that the work was created by an AI, which Thaler calls the Creativity Machine. Thaler applied to register the work as "as a work-for-hire to the owner...
DeepScribe is used by more than 400 physicians and just raised $30 million to reach even more. The company’s AI-powered platform helps doctors keep better notes by automatically transcribing conversations with patients. To expand its market and reach more doctors, the company turned to venture capital and eventually connected with Nina Achadjian at Index Ventures, […]
Sirona Medical, a company developing an “operating system” for digital radiology, has acquired Nines– a company that has developed FDA-cleared analysis and triage algorithms. This acquisition comes during a somewhat shaky moment in AI-based radiology. But Sirona is betting this move proves out its thesis: to bring AI into the clinical workflow, we need to […]
A research group has taught AI to magnetically wrangle a high-powered stream of plasma used for fusion research — but wait! Put away your EMPs and screwdrivers, this is definitely a good thing, not a terrifying weapon for use against humanity in the coming robocalypse. The project is a collaboration between Google’s DeepMind and l’École […]
The first major No Man's Sky patch of the year has arrived. Among other things, Hello Games says the Sentinel update improves the space exploration sim's AI and introduces a buildable AI mech. You can put an AI pilot in your Exomech and have it follow you and help out in battles. Players can build a drone companion too.Hello GamesAs the name suggests, the update brings in changes for the Sentinels, robots that will attack if you try to change an environment or they catch you on a planet that hosts rare items. There are new enemy types (including repair drones and a giant mech with a...
Soul Machines, a New Zealand-based company that uses CGI, AI and natural language processing to create lifelike digital people who can interact with humans in real time, has raised $70 million in a Series B1 round, bringing its total funding to $135 million. The startup will put the funds toward enhancing its Digital Brain technology, […]
We are at the very beginnings of a long period of change in the interplay of technology and the law in terms of intellectual property, but it is equally clear to me that the play has started to move.
Its product confirms order accuracy in real-time for both online ordering and notifies employees if an order needs a correction, for example, they forgot to add cheese or ketchup.
Four Democratic senators and House representatives have called on several government departments to stop using Clearview AI’s facial recognition system. The Government Accountability Office said in August that the Departments of Justice, Defense, Homeland Security and the Interior were all using the contentious technology for “domestic law enforcement." Sens. Ed Markey and Jeff Merkley and Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Ayanna Pressley urged the agencies to refrain from using Clearview's products and other facial recognition tools.“Clearview AI’s technology could eliminate public...
Photo by Clive Rose - Gran Turismo/Gran Turismo via Getty Images AI agents have bested humans at many games, from chess to Go to poker. Now, the machines can claim a new high score on the classic racing video game series Gran Turismo. Sony announced today that its researchers have developed an AI driver named GT Sophy that is “reliably superhuman” — able to beat top human drivers in Gran Turismo Sport in back-to-back laps. You might think this an easy challenge. After all, isn’t racing simply a matter of speed and reaction time and therefore simple for a machine to master? But experts...
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images A group of four progressive lawmakers — Sens. Markey (D-MA) and Merkley (D-OR) and Reps. Jayapal (D-WA) and Pressley (D-OH) — sent a letter to a range of federal agencies on Wednesday calling for an end to their use of Clearview AI’s controversial facial recognition system.The letter was sent to the Departments of Justice, Defense, Homeland Security, and the Interior. All four agencies were identified in an August 2021 report from the General Accounting Office as using Clearview for “domestic law enforcement” purposes.“Clearview AI’s...
It can be a pain to time music with a video you're editing — you may spend ages trimming and slicing tracks to create an arrangement that matches your footage. Adobe thinks your computer can do the heavy lifting, though. It just updated Premiere Pro with a Remix feature that uses AI to re-time music to fit your video's duration. This probably won't be completely satisfying if you're exacting about your soundtracks, but it could save valuable hours if you were just looking for well-timed background audio.The Premiere Pro update is also far more useful for transcriptions. Speech...
In a flier, Clearview said the product “saves lives,” “saves time” and “improves health” by increasing social distancing and keeping officers’ hands free to grab their weapons.
Democrats in Congress on Thursday renewed a push to hold tech companies accountable for bias in their algorithms. Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Cory Booker (D-NJ), along with House representative Yvette Clarke (D-NY) introduced an updated version of a bill that would require audits of AI systems used in areas such as finance, healthcare, housing, education and more. First introduced by Wyden in 2019, the Algorithmic Accountability Act has never passed the committee level in either the House or Senate.“If someone decides not to rent you a house because of the color of your skin, that’s flat-...
Understanding when and why a cell dies is fundamental to the study of human development, disease, and aging. For neurodegenerative diseases such as Lou Gehrig’s disease, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s, identifying dead and dying neurons is critical to developing and testing new treatments. But identifying dead cells can be tricky and has been a constant problem throughout my career as a neuroscientist. Until now, scientists have had to manually mark which cells look alive and which look dead under the microscope. Dead cells have a characteristic balled-up appearance that is relatively easy...
Artificial intelligence (AI) has now closely matched or even surpassed humans in what were previously considered unattainable areas. These include chess, arcade games, Go, self-driving cars, protein folding, and much more. This rapid technological progress has also had a huge impact on the financial services industry. More and more CEOs in the sector declare (explicitly or implicitly) that they run “technology companies with a banking license”. There is also a rapid emergence and growth of the financial technology industry (fintech), where technology startups increasingly challenge...
Scale AI’s path to becoming a $7.3 billion company was paved in real data from images, text, voice and video. Now, it is using that foundation to get into the synthetic data game, one of the hotter and emerging categories in AI. They announced Wednesday an early access program to Scale Synthetic, a product that […]
Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch Two members of Google’s Ethical AI group have announced their departures from the company, according to a report from Bloomberg. Senior researcher Alex Hanna, and software engineer Dylan Baker, will join Timnit Gebru’s nonprofit research institute, Distributed AI Research (DAIR).Today's my last day at Google. Starting tomorrow I'm joining @timnitGebru at @DAIRInstitute as Director of Research.On my way out, here's some thoughts on the tech company as a racialized organization and the power of complaint. https://t.co/PQhAVo2r7M— Alex...
DeepMind has created an AI capable of writing code to solve arbitrary problems posed to it, as proven by participating in a coding challenge and placing — well, somewhere in the middle. It won’t be taking any software engineers’ jobs just yet, but it’s promising and may help automate basic tasks. The team at DeepMind, […]
Photo by Neil Godwin/Future via Getty Images Politico recently reported how Crisis Text Line (which is not affiliated with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline) is sharing data from conversations with Loris.ai, which builds AI systems designed to increase empathetic conversation by customer service reps. Crisis Text Line is a not-for-profit service that provides a text line for mental health discussions, but it is also a shareholder in Loris.ai and, according to Politico, at one point shared a CEO with the company.“No data scrubbing technique or statement in a terms of service can resolve...
There are few more compelling story lines at the intersection of Wall Street and Fear Street than China‘s rise to global prominence in the field of artificial intelligence. You don’t have to look very far to find a military or financial expert who believes China‘s AI program will some day surpass the capabilities of its democratic counterparts in Silicon Valley. But, as we’ve written before, the idea that China is in second place behind the US is a bit misleading. Sure, it’s technically correct, but we’re talking about a very distant second place. Currently, it would be a huge...
Troy Baker will no longer be partnering with Voiceverse. | Photo by Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for ReedPOP Troy Baker, a prominent voice actor perhaps best known for playing Joel in The Last of Us, is stepping away from an NFT partnership following significant outcry. In the early hours of January 14th, Baker announced on Twitter that he would be partnering with a company called Voiceverse, which creates “Voice NFTs” that each have a “unique AI-generated voice map,” but he now says he won’t continue the partnership.In his original announcement, it seems Baker expected some backlash...
One of the most popular applications of artificial intelligence to date has been to use it to predict things, using algorithms trained with historical data to determine a future outcome. But popularity doesn’t always mean success: predictive AI leaves out a lot of the nuance, context and cause-and-effect reasoning that goes into an outcome; and […]
Atlassian today announced that it has acquired Percept.AI, an AI company from Y Combinator’s summer 2017 batch, that offers an automated virtual agent support solution — a chatbot, basically — based on a proprietary AI engine for natural language understanding. Atlassian plans to integrate this virtual agent technology into Jira Service Management, its tool for […]
Pimloc, a UK computer vision startup that’s sharpened its business pitch to sell an AI service for quickly anonymizing video — automating the blurring of faces or licence plates, along with a suite of other visual search services — has grabbed another chunk of seed funding: Announcing a raise of $7.5M, led by Zetta Venture […]
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge So long, Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets; hello, Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association!The AV industry’s top lobbying group in Washington, DC is rebranding, dropping the reference to “self-driving” in exchange for a more straightforward moniker. The group, which was founded in 2016 by Waymo, Ford, Lyft, Uber, and Volvo, lobbies lawmakers to pass legislation favorable to its members. It has since grown to include the top AV operators in the country, including Cruise, Aurora, Argo AI, Motional, Nuro, and Zoox. It’s the latest move by the AV...
Infermedica, a Poland-founded digital health company that offers AI-powered solutions for symptom analysis and patient triage, has raised $30 million in Series B funding. The round was led by One Peak and included participation from previous investors Karma Ventures, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Heal Capital and Inovo Venture Partners. The new capital means […]
NVIDIA has reportedly made little to no progress in gaining regulatory approval for its $40 billion purchase of ARM and is privately preparing to abandon the deal, according to Bloomberg's sources. Meanwhile, current ARM owner SoftBank is reportedly advancing a program to take ARM public as an alternative to the acquisition, said another person familiar with the matter.NVIDIA announced the deal in September 2020, with CEO Jensen Huang proclaiming it would "create a company fabulously positioned for the age of AI." ARM's designs are used under license almost universally in smartphones...
A recent survey carried out by CNBC reported that 81% of executives worldwide say AI will play a prominent and critical role in how their businesses operate this year. Companies are phasing from the first generation of AI, which deals with pattern, text and image recognition, to decision-making AI, which helps them make timely decisions […]
OpenAI’s impressive AI language model GPT-3 has plenty of things going it, but with 175 billion parameters no one would claim it’s particularly streamlined. The Allen Institute for AI (AI2) has demonstrated a model that performs as well or better than GPT-3 on answering questions, but is a tenth the size. Macaw, AI2’s model, emerged […]
Big Tech has long faced accusations that it's a detriment to society, and Google thinks it can address those criticisms more directly. Axios' Ina Fried says the internet pioneer has hired James Manyika as the company's first Senior VP of Technology and Society. As Google told Engadget, the McKinsey Global Institute director will help explore tech's impact on society and shape the firm's points of view on subjects including AI, the future of work, sustainability and other areas that could make a significant difference.Manyika will report directly to Alphabet and Google chief...
There’s a global competition to build the biggest, most powerful computers on the planet, and Meta (AKA Facebook) is about to jump into the melee with the “AI Research SuperCluster,” or RSC. Once fully operational it may well sit in the top ten fastest supercomputers in the world, which it will use for the massive […]
We’re talking to serial founder Julian Green whose most recent startup, Headroom is using AI to hack human conversation—starting with meetings. Julian’s goal is to make meetings and virtual communication feel closer to talking in the real world. Come to hear a very smart founder talk about his experience, stay for Jordan pitching sound effects […]
We have accepted the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in complex processes — from health care to our daily use of social media — often without critical investigation, until it is too late. The use of AI is inescapable in our modern society, and it may perpetuate discrimination without its users being aware of any prejudice. When health-care providers rely on biased technology, there are real and harmful impacts. This became clear recently when a study showed that pulse oximeters — which measure the amount of oxygen in the blood and have been an essential tool for clinical management of...
Two years into the pandemic, online conversations are for many of us still the primary interactions that we are having every day, and we are collectively having billions of them. But as many of us have discovered, not all of those are squeaky clean, positive experiences. Today, a startup called Spectrum Labs — which provides […]
This article is part of our reviews of AI research papers, a series of posts that explore the latest findings in artificial intelligence. Deep learning models owe their initial success to large servers with large amounts of memory and clusters of GPUs. The promises of deep learning gave rise to an entire industry of cloud computing services for deep neural networks. Consequently, very large neural networks running on virtually unlimited cloud resources became very popular, especially among wealthy tech companies that can foot the bill. But at the same time, recent years have also seen a reverse...
Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of artificial intelligence research company DeepMind, has left Google to join venture capital firm Greylock Partners. Suleyman has brought to an end an eight-year run at Google, where he was most recently the company’s vice president of AI product management and policy.He joined Google when it bought DeepMind in 2014 and became the latter’s head of applied AI. Suleyman was reportedly placed on administrative leave in 2019 following allegations that he bullied employees. Suleyman, who moved to Google at the end of that year, said on a podcast with Greylock...
Suleyman says the time has come for AI due to the ecosystem maturing and more people understand the strengths and limitations of AI and how to use it.
Diversio uses AI technology, data analytics and knowledgeable subject matter experts to find where a company’s process is breaking down and create an action plan to get it back on track.
Founded back in 2012, the LoopMe adtech/martech startup focused on brand-based mobile advertising, using AI to deliver measurable outcomes for its users. At its height it had raised $32.2M in venture backing, but there’s a reason for using the past tense. For Mayfair Equity Partners a tech and consumer growth investor, has now acquired a […]
Security — as in “hey you, you can’t go in there” — quickly becomes a complex, arguably impossible job once you get past a few buildings and cameras. Who can watch everywhere at once, and send someone in time to prevent a problem? Ambient.ai isn’t the first to claim that AI can, but they may […]
Working remotely has become the norm for a lot of desk-based employees, and there have been a number of tech companies that have seen their business explode in catering to that shift. But today comes news of a different kind of startup called Turing Labs, which is addressing the same challenges, but as they apply […]
Prior to starting Pixis, the co-founders spoke to potential marketing customers about how to scale SaaS companies quickly in a “cookie less” world.
There something strange happening on Reddit. People are advocating for a kinder, more considerate approach to relationships. They’re railing against the toxic treatment and abuse of others. And they’re falling in love. Simply put: humans are showing us their best side. Unfortunately, they’re not standing up for other humans or forging bonds with other people. The “others” they’re defending and romancing are chatbots. And it’s a little creepy. I recently stumbled across the “Replika AI” subreddit where users of the popular chatbot app mostly congregate to defend the machines...
tl;dr papers shows AI’s potential to condense research Continue reading…
Clockwise, a time management and smart calendar tool, has raised $45 million in Series C funding led by Coatue, with participation from Atlassian Ventures and existing investors Accel, Greylock Partners and Bain Capital Ventures. This latest round brings the company’s total amount of funding raised to $76 million. Clockwise uses artificial intelligence to help teams […]
British autonomous vehicle startup Wayve has raised a $200 million Series B funding round from investors to scale its technology and expand its partnerships with commercial fleets. Wayve is aiming to be a major player in the arena of Robo-deliveries and logistics. It’s now raised a total of $258 million to date, for its technology, […]
Science fiction is a genre very much associated with technological marvels, innovations, and visions of the future. So it may be surprising to find so many of its writers are drawn to Shakespeare – he’s a figure associated with tradition and the past. Sometimes his plays are reworked in a science fiction setting. The 1956 film Forbidden Planet is just one of many variations on a “Tempest in space” theme. Sometimes the playwright appears as a character caught up in a time travel adventure. The Dr Who episode The Shakespeare Code is a well-known example. Here the Doctor praises...
If you want artificial intelligence to have human ethics, you have to teach it to evolve ethics like we do. At least that’s what a pair of researchers from the International Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore, India proposed in a pre-print paper published today. Titled “AI and the Sense of Self,” the paper describes a methodology called “elastic identity” by which the researchers say AI might learn to gain a greater sense of agency while simultaneously understanding how to avoid “collateral damage.” In short, the researchers are suggesting that we teach AI to be more...
China’s call to foster semiconductor independence has sent investors chasing after chip startups of all sorts. Moffett AI, a Shenzhen-based chip design company, has received a fresh Series A injection. The company did not disclose the exact amount, only saying that the proceeds were in the “several tens of millions of dollars.” The round was […]
Supply chain logistics — getting components and eventually finished products from A to B to C — is one of the most critical parts of running a business, not least because it is one of the most complex, involving dozens of companies, hundreds of combinations and permutations, accounting for world events outside of your business, […]
Nvidia says its AI-powered upscaling is more powerful than regular super-resolution. | Image: Nvidia Nvidia’s latest game-ready driver includes a tool that could let you improve the image quality of games that your graphics card can easily run, alongside optimizations for the new God of War PC port. The tech is called Deep Learning Dynamic Super Resolution, or DLDSR, and Nvidia says you can use it to make “most games” look sharper by running them at a higher resolution than your monitor natively supports.DLDSR builds on Nvidia’s Dynamic Super Resolution tech, which has been around for...
The NFL and Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced the results of their second annual artificial intelligence competition. In total, five teams split the $100K prize. And I can’t think of any reason why you should care. Up front: According to the NFL, the contest is supposed to help solve its injury problems using machine learning. Here’s what the league had to say in today’s press release: The NFL reviews game footage of all major injuries, analyzing each injury frame-by-frame from every angle, recording 150 different variables. The winners’ models automate that process, making...
Nearly four years after Sony released its highly successful A7 III hybrid full-frame mirrorless camera, it finally launched a follow up. The A7 IV brings a raft of new features and improvements like a higher-resolution 33-megapixel sensor, improved video specs and updated AI-powered autofocus. However, at $2,500 it’s also $500 more than the A7 III was at launch.A lot has changed over the years between the two models. Sony now has to contend with formidable rivals like Canon’s EOS R6 and the Nikon Z6 II. It itself has also released new high-end models like the A7S III, A7R IV and A1 loaded...
Merchants can add “return assurance” to an order, if it is returned in the next 30 days, Seel, instead of the merchant, will pay for the refund.
Over the past two years, since the pandemic hit, there has been a sharp rise in financial crime compliance costs, nearing $50 billion in 2021, up 58% compared to 2019, in the U.S. and Canada. Shield, a Tel Aviv-based startup, built a compliance surveillance platform to enable regulated financial institutions to detect market abuse, gain behavioral […]
The most dangerous part of the metaverse will be agenda-driven artificial agents that look and act like other users but are actually simulated personas controlled by AI.
DeepScribe, an AI-powered medical transcription platform, has raised $30 million in series A funding led by Nina Achadjian at Index Ventures, with participation from Scale.ai CEO Alex Wang, Figma CEO Dylan Field, and existing investors Bee Partners, Stage 2 Capital and 1984 Ventures. The company’s latest round of funding follows its $5.2 million seed round […]
Headspace Health has acquired Sayana, an AI-powered mental health and wellness company, for an undisclosed amount. Headspace Health says the acquisition of the San Francisco-based company will expand its ability to provide personalized self-care to its users. The acquisition comes as Headspace and Ginger merged last year to form Headspace Health, which is valued at […]
Synthetic data startup MOSTLY raised a $25 million Series B round led by British VC firm Molten Ventures, with participation from new investor Citi Ventures and existing investors 42CAP and Earlybird.
Dallas council members will vote Wednesday on whether to approve an economic development agreement with Ford in the hopes of being home to the automaker’s next autonomous vehicle facility. Ford, an investor and customer of AV technology company Argo AI, are working together to commercialize the technology. The two companies have established three test vehicle […]
If you have diabetes, or ever suspected that you might, you will have done the poke-your-finger-and-drop-blood-on-a-stick thing until your finger goes numb. Finger-prick blood glucose monitoring is the de facto standard, but AI company Scanbo wants to put an end to all that, replacing the droplet with some off-the-shelf diagnostic tools and a big helping […]
Malnutrition is somewhat common among hospitalized patients in the U.S., and its coded prevalence is increasing. Amid this problem lies an opportunity to optimize the overall quality of patient care, improve clinical outcomes and reduce costs. That’s the drive for South Africa-based health tech startup HealthLeap, which focuses on a global healthcare market starting from […]
Fractal has raised $360 million from TPG in a new financing round and entered the unicorn club as the Mumbai and San Francisco-headquartered AI startup, which counts Google and Wells Fargo among its customers, scales its offerings and begins preparation for an IPO. The new financing round valued the startup “at well north of $1 […]
Anker Anker has announced the B600 Video Bar, a nifty video conferencing toolkit that houses everything that meeting-goers need. It rests upon your monitor (or TV), and the webcam portion of the Video Bar features a 2K sensor capable of 30 frames per second capture. It offers field-of-view adjustment, autofocus, and like most fancy webcams these days, it supports an AI-powered zoom feature and image enhancement. Within the device, there’s also a microphone array. It uses an AI algorithm to make noisy environments sound quiet on the other end. The Video Bar also packs two features that aren’...
AMD has announced a new gaming software feature at CES 2022: Radeon Super Resolution, which promises to bring AI-powered supersampling improvements to almost any game, even if it hasn’t been specifically updated to support AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution.According to AMD, Radeon Super Resolution (RSR) is built on the same algorithm as FidelityFX Super Resolution, but it’s integrated into AMD’s Adrenalin software suite as a driver-based feature, allowing it to work on a far wider range of games. Once it rolls out, gamers will be able to simply enable RSR in Adrenalin, lower the...
AMD has a new entry-level RX 6000-series GPU, the $199 RX 6500 XT, which shaves off a considerable $179 from the company’s previous cheapest RDNA 2 GPU, the $379 RX 6600 XT released over the summer. AMD is aiming the new Radeon RX 6500 XT at owners of older graphics cards (like the GTX 1650 or RX 570) who are looking for a wallet-friendly upgrade, promising modern features like FidelityFX Super Resolution (AMD’s AI-based supersampling technology) and an overall boost in performance compared to older GPUs. A new, cheaper AMD GPU optionAMD also announced a new RX 6400 GPU, which slots in...
TCL continues its tradition of launching a barrage of devices at CES, and it’s a similar story to last year, with two new 30 series smartphones headed to the US later this year.Let’s start with the TCL 30 XE 5G. It has a 6.52-inch display at 1,600 x 720 resolution and up to 90Hz refresh rate. With a 4,500mAh battery, it runs on one of Mediatek’s Dimensity chips, the Dimensity 700, which have been designed to work better with AI tasks like image processing. Talking of images, there’s a triple camera system, but no need to get too excited. There’s a depth sensor and a 2-megapixel...
Seoul Robotics, an AI-based perception software company, wants to turn first- and last-mile logistics hubs for automotive and trucking into mind hives, wherein one sensor tower controls the movements of a fleet, like a conductor of an orchestra, guiding hundreds of vehicles into place. After two years of piloting its tech with BMW, the startup […]
As is something of an annual tradition for the company, LG is using CES as a venue to share the first details on its 2022 TV lineup. Much like last year, the company is touting improved brightness as one of the main reasons to buy its 2022 sets. That's because this year LG's more affordable C2 lineup will also include the "evo" panel technology the company debuted in 2021. Additionally, LG claims its new Alpha 9 Gen 5 AI processors will help further increase luminance through a smarter algorithm and better heat dissipation. Those chips will also improve upscaling performance and offer...
A pair of researchers from the University of Montreal today published a pre-print research paper on creating “more intelligent artificial agents” by imitating the human brain. We’ve heard that one before, but this time’s a little different. The big idea here is all about giving artificial intelligence agents more agency. According to the researchers: Despite the progress made in social neuroscience and in developmental psychology, only in the last decade, serious efforts have started focusing on the neural mechanisms of social interaction, which were seen as the “dark matter” of...
To avoid the trap of creating self-fulfilling prophecies, here’s the process you should follow for applying AI to small data problems.
Automation Anywhere, which is best known for its robotic process automation (RPA) software, plans to expand the platform. This morning, the company announced that it intends to acquire process discovery startup FortressIQ. The companies did not reveal the purchase price. FortressIQ gives Automation Anywhere this missing process discovery component, which enables AI-fueled software to map […]
The reality-bending powers of AI have been kept increasingly busy over the past decade. We’ve had computer vision-powered 3D dioramas; trend-setting style-transfer; viral photorealistic selfie-tuning, selfie-retouching, face-swaps and — ofc — deepfakes; and plenty of frivolous (and hilarious) fun with selfie filters (ohhai ‘Disneyfying’ cartoon lens!) in between. AI-powered visual remixing has shown, again and again, […]
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. The big idea A unique material, nickel oxide demonstrates the ability to learn things about its environment in a way that emulates the most basic learning abilities of animals, as my colleagues and I describe in a new paper. For over half a century, neuroscientists have studied sea slugs to understand basic animal learning. Two fundamental concepts of learning are habituation and sensitization. Habituation occurs when an organism’s response to a repeated stimulus continuously decreases. When researchers first touch a sea slug...
Interventions involving public health officials, enterprises, governments, communities, nonprofits and tech partners are the way to democratize technology and rectify urban heat island devastation.
Avoma aims to set it apart from competitors by bringing meeting management, AI assistant and conversation intelligence into one tool.
With capital flowing freely lately, managing partners Jason Schoettler and Kevin Dunlap shared some insights on what it takes to win deals these days.
Steve Ballmer wanted Microsoft’s Cortana AI to be called “Bingo” so it would be more Microsoft-branded, according to the Big Bets newsletter. That’s according to former Microsoft product manager Sandeep Paruchuri, who recounted the story of how Microsoft’s AI assistant got its name to writer Alice Newton Rex as part of a deep dive into Cortana’s origins.While we’ve gotten a pretty good idea of Microsoft’s ambitious vision for the AI assistant in the years since it leaked then launched, Paruchuri and Rex gave the inside story of how Cortana was named, pitched to management, and...
AI is having a big impact on photo editing, but the results are proving divisive. The proponents say that AI unleashes new artistic ideas and cuts the time creators spent on monotonous work. Critics, however, argue that the techniques distort reality and propagate an artificial homogeneity. A new entry to the debate is GFP-GAN. The system gives low-quality images a high-resolution revamp — and the results can be impressive. GFP-GAN’s outputs (far-right) look impressive compared to other state-of-the-art techniques.The system, which was created by researchers at the Tencent ARC Lab in China...
AI chips, which are semiconductors designed to accelerate machine learning, have many applications. One of the promising use cases, according to Albert Liu, is using AI chips in autonomous driving vehicles. That’s why Liu’s AI chipmaking startup Kneron has been quietly racking up investments to march into smart transportation. It recently closed a new round […]
Overjet is now covering nearly 75 million members through its dental insurance partnerships.
In his new book, SuperSight: What Augmented Reality Means for Our Lives, Our Work, and the Way We Imagine the Future, author David Rose delves into the current state of the art of augmented reality, discussing how the technology is already transforming myriad industries — from food service to medicine to education to construction and architecture — and what it might accomplish in the near future. In the excerpt below, Rose takes a look at two companies leveraging computer vision and generative adversarial networks to reimagine existing properties as 21st century electrified smart homes.&...
Adobe is testing out a new web-based tool that uses AI to simplify audio recording. The software is called Project Shasta, and it could make recording and editing podcasts and other projects a lot easier and more approachable.The project started off in Adobe Labs as an experiment to find "new ways to help people edit audio on the web,” Mark Webster, Adobe’s head of audio products, wrote in a post on Product Hunt. “But then it became clear that the pandemic made recording difficult too, even for audio professionals. Our vision became empowering everyone with the tools they needed to create...
Continual, a startup that aims to bring operational AI to the modern data warehouse-centric data stack, today announced that it has raised a $4 million seed round led by Amplify Partners, with Illuminate Ventures, Essence, Wayfinder and Data Community Fund also participating in the round. With this announcement, Continual is also opening up its service […]
Controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI, which has amassed a database of some 10 billion images by scraping selfies off the Internet so it can sell an identity-matching service to law enforcement, has been hit with another order to delete people’s data. France’s privacy watchdog said today that Clearview has breached Europe’s General Data Protection […]
Wonder Dynamics aims to make “blockbuster-level” visual effects achievable by living-room-level creators using AI and cloud services, though it has kept its product closely under wraps. The secretive company, which boasts a star-studded set of advisors, has raised a $10M A round ahead of a planned launch later in 2022. The company was founded by […]
Kalendar AI, a San Francisco-based startup that’s been building on top of GPT-3‘s language model — developing a SaaS for automating lead generation and sales outreach to make it easier for companies to get initial meetings with prospective customers — has raised $3.2 million in pre-seed funding from 500 Startups; The Lean Startup author, Eric […]
In 2018, Forethought, a startup looking to put AI to work across customer service, won the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield and soon after landed a $9 million Series A. Well, three years later that company just landed a $65 million Series C, and it’s rolling along. Steadfast Capital led the latest round with participation from existing […]
This article is part of our reviews of AI research papers, a series of posts that explore the latest findings in artificial intelligence. With their millions and billions of numerical parameters, deep learning models can do many things: detect objects in photos, recognize speech, generate text—and hide malware. Neural networks can embed malicious payloads without triggering anti-malware software, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Illinois have found. Their malware-hiding technique, EvilModel, sheds light on the security concerns of deep learning...
Signal AI, an artificial intelligence startup that trawls the vast sea of internet and other publicly available data to provide organizations with sentiment insights and other information to make better business decisions, has raised $50 million. It plans to use the funds to continue building out its AI platform to bring in more diversified data […]
When users ask a question they receive bite-sized answers in real time from over 40,000 possible experts based on expertise tags.
At least one LGBTQ+ youth between the ages of 13 and 24 attempts suicide every 45 seconds. That’s not the kind of problem you’d usually try to solve with artificial intelligence. Machines aren’t smart enough to take the mental health crisis head-on. Sure, AI-powered therapy bots can be very effective when it comes to augmenting human counseling sessions or reinforcing cognitive behavioral therapy instructions. But, when it comes to mental health crises, there’s no substitute for a qualified, empathetic human. That’s exactly why The Trevor Project was established. It’s core products...
Unique, a video calls platform that uses AI to teach sales teams how to improve their pitches, has closed a $6 million Seed round from a bunch of Angel investors. These include Phillip Stauffer, U.S based founder and general partner of Fyrfly Venture Partners, and Daniel Gutenberg. Unique uses AI to analyse customer conversations. The […]
In the hype around getting our cars to drive us around, it’s easy to forget that Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) have a higher function – to radically improve road safety, by reducing the number of accidents. Recently, this intention has transitioned to ebikes. As our bikes become small (ok, pretty small) data centers on wheels, their ability to monitor our surroundings becomes a catalyst for companies creating technology that provides cyclists with some of the safety insights available in connected cars. Bike riders are far more vulnerable than their car driving companions, and...
Adobe knows there’s a bigger audience of would-be creators out there than full-on pros, so it’s launching a new app that attempts to open up some of its more powerful tools to amateurs. The app, called Creative Cloud Express, offers basic versions of image and video editing tools, letting users work with layers, AI effects, and a huge font library, all with a simplified interface that’s supposed to make the features easier to use.“A lot of people need something simple and more accessible, and these customers are increasingly content-first and more focused on outcomes than process...
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. It finally happened, ladies and gentleman and our non-binary friends. The Holiday News Slowdown has arrived. Late, I might add, but still here at last. But that did not stop Grace and Alex […]
If you’re concerned about killer robots in the military, brace yourself for their arrival in civilian hands. AI weapons will soon spread from battlefields to city streets, campaigners have warned, unless new global rules are imposed on the tech. A UN conference this week can alleviate the fears. In a Geneva meeting that starts today, delegates will debate banning weapons that target people without “meaningful human control.” Activists, however, are pessimistic about the outcome. While some countries have endorsed new laws, the world’s leading military powers don’t appear...
SenseTime, one of China’s most valuable AI solution providers, is putting its $767 million public listing on hold, the company said Monday. The announcement came three weeks after the Hong Kong Stock Exchange gave the go-ahead to SenseTime’s IPO. On December 10, the U.S. Department of Treasury added the firm to a list of “Chinese […]
You know you’re in for a treat when a pre-print AI research paper begins by explaining that nobody really knows what AI is and ends by solving artificial general intelligence (AGI). The paper’s called “Co-evolutionary hybrid intelligence,” and it’s a work of art that belongs in a museum. But, since it’s state-sponsored research from Russia that was uploaded to a pre-print server, we’ll just talk about it here. The research is only four pages long, but the team manages to pack a lot in that space. They don’t beat around the bush. You want to know how to solve AGI?…This...
Do you know what the Earth’s atmosphere is made of? You’d probably remember it’s oxygen, and maybe nitrogen. And with a little help from Google you can easily reach a more precise answer: 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and 1% argon gas. However, when it comes to the composition of exo-atmospheres – the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system – the answer is not known. This is a shame, as atmospheres can indicate the nature of planets, and whether they can host life. As exoplanets are so far away, it has proven extremely difficult to probe their atmospheres. Research suggests…...
Welcome to “Codifying Humanity.” A new Neural series that analyzes the machine learning world’s attempts at creating human-level AI. Previous entries include Can humor be reduced to an algorithm? and Why robots should fear death as much as we do. Meta (the company your grandparents still call Facebook) just unveiled a new AI system it calls “an important milestone that signals a shift toward more intelligent, generalized AI systems.” It’s called the “Meta AI Few-Shot Learner,” presumably because the person who names stuff at Meta was on vacation when it was time to come up with...
Robust Intelligence, an AI startup that helps businesses stress test their AI models and prevent them from failing, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B funding round led by Tiger Global. Previous investor Sequoia, which led the company’s Series A round, as well as Harpoon Venture Capital and Engineering Capital also […]
The Covid-19 pandemic ushered in a new chapter for virtual learning, giving a boost of attention to existing tools and spurring the creation of new services and use cases as students of all ages were ordered to stay home and stay out of classrooms. Today, one of the startups that’s been a strong benefactor of […]
The “Few-Shot Learner” system doesn't need to see as many examples to identify troublesome posts, and works in more than 100 languages.
Synthesia, a startup using AI to create synthetic videos, is walking a fine, but thus far prosperous, line between being creepy and being pretty freakin’ cool. Today, it announced the close of a $50 million Series B funding round led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from GV and existing investors Firstmark Capital, LDV Capital, Seedcamp […]
In a field that ranges from text therapy and AI chat bots, to guided meditation, some mental health startups are pursuing a different niche: therapy for kids. And kids only. HelloHero, a company focused on teletherapy for kids up to 21 years old (the average user is 10 years old), announced a $7.7 million dollar […]
Research in mathematics is a deeply imaginative and intuitive process. This might come as a surprise for those who are still recovering from high-school algebra. What does the world look like at the quantum scale? What shape would our universe take if we were as large as a galaxy? What would it be like to live in six or even 60 dimensions? These are the problems that mathematicians and physicists are grappling with every day. To find the answers, mathematicians like me try to find patterns that relate complicated mathematical objects by making conjectures (ideas about how those patterns might&#...
Argo AI, an autonomous driving technology company, teamed up with advocacy group the League of American Cyclists (LAB) to come up with guidelines for how self-driving vehicles should identify and interact with cyclists. The goal is to set a standard for other AV companies in the industry to follow, particularly as the self-driving industry is […]
Clearview AI is on track to receive a US patent for its facial recognition technology, according to a report from Politico. The company was reportedly sent a “notice of allowance” by the US Patent and Trademark Office, which means that once it pays the required administration fees, its patent will be officially approved.Clearview AI builds its facial recognition database using images of people that it scrapes across social media (and the internet in general), a practice that has the company steeped in controversy. The company’s patent application details its use of a “web crawler” to...
Another lifelike robot is striking horror into the hearts of humans. Named Ameca, the android can convey an impressive range of facial gestures — and people are freaking out. How it’ll start vs How it’s going to go pic.twitter.com/MQQcRTy7NB — Jacob Brill (@JacobbBrill) December 2, 2021 These are predictable reactions. Whenever a machine shows another human-like capability, from dancing to speaking, it sparks fears of robot uprisings. These anxieties are somewhat misplaced. Why are people are more disturbed by robots that blink than combat drones and AI machine guns? It’s not the most...
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has filed a lawsuit against graphics card giant Nvidia to block its deal to purchase ARM. Before we take a look at why FTC‘s doing it, a quick recap of what has happened till now. Nvidia’s bid for ARM Last September, Nvidia announced it’s planning to buy the chip design firm for $40 billion. The US-based company said at that time, the purchase ties into its plans of bolstering its AI efforts. As ARM’s shares have risen since that, the UK-based company might be worth a whopping $80 billion now. Before this deal was announced, ARM’s then-owner,&#...
Zindi is all about using AI to solve real world problems for companies and individuals. And the South Africa-based crowd-solving startup has done that over the last three years they have been in existence. Just last year a team of data scientists under Zindi used machine learning to improve air quality monitoring in Kampala as […]
A year to the day after she was fired from Google, Timnit Gebru has unveiled plans to wrench AI research out of big tech’s grasp. Gebru, a former co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team, on Thursday launched an independent lab: the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). Armed with an initial budget of $3.7 million raised from foundations, DAIR will focus on long-term and community-based research — which can be hard to do in Silicon Valley. “The incentive structures in industry and elite academic institutions that are so intertwined with these tech companies don’t — in my view...
Almost exactly one year ago, Timnit Gebru, one of the leaders of Google’s ethics in AI team and one of the foremost experts in that topic, was fired after sending an email of concern to her team. Now she has set up shop herself with a brand new research institute, DAIR, focused on the topics […]
Technology and visual effects startup Monsters Aliens Robots Zombies (MARZ) has raised $5.3 million in Series A funding. The investment was led by Round13 Captial with participation from Rhino Ventures and Harlo Equity Partners. MARZ plans to use the funding to grow its core VFX business and accelerate the development of its ‘AI for VFX’ […]
One of the reasons artificial intelligence is such an interesting field is that pretty much no one knows what it might turn out to be good at. Two papers by leading labs published in the journal Nature today show that machine learning can be applied to tasks as technically demanding as protein generation and as […]
Tomorrow’s the day, folks! Join more than 1,600 attendees at the iMerit ML DataOps Summit 2021, a free, day-long series of masterclasses focused on AI, ML and the data solutions that power and improve them. If you don’t have your pass yet, register here to reserve your seat. If your slice of tech heaven involves […]
It’s just over a year since the European Union’s executive proposed legislation aimed at encouraging widespread sharing and reuse of industrial data and protected public sector data-sets — such as health data, environment, energy, agriculture, mobility, finance, manufacturing, public administration and skills. Yesterday the bloc’s co-legislators reached agreement on the DGA after trilogue discussions — […]
Klue, an AI-powered competitive enablement platform, has raised $62 million in Series B funding led by Tiger Global, with participation from Salesforce Ventures. The Vancouver-based company combines intel collection capabilities with a modern approach to content distribution aimed at providing users with the insights needed to drive revenue and business impact. The platform automatically gathers […]
Spain’s Jobandtalent, a “workforce marketplace”-cum-digital temping agency which uses AI to match workers to casual labor gigs in sectors like warehousing, ecommerce and logistics, has closed a $500 million Series E round of funding led by Kinnevik and with what it bills as a “significant” follow on by SoftBank VisionFund 2. Existing investors including Atomico, […]
Harrison.ai, a Sydney-based company that creates medical devices with AI technology, announced today it has raised $129 million AUD (about $92.3 million USD) in what it says is one of the largest Series B rounds ever for an Australian healthtech company. The funding was led by returning investor Horizons Ventures, and included participation from new […]
A team of scientists from Google Research, the Alan Turing Institute, and Cambridge University recently unveiled a new state of the art (SOTA) multimodal transformer for AI. In other words, they’re teaching AI how to ‘hear’ and ‘see’ at the same time. Up front: You’ve probably heard about transformer AI systems such as GPT-3. At their core, they process and categorize data from a specific kind of media stream. Under the current SOTA paradigm, if you wanted to parse the data from a video you’d need several AI models running concurrently. You’d need a model that’s been trained...
What if I told you I was selling a set of computer programs that could automagically solve all of your hiring, diversity, and management problems overnight? You’d be stupid not to at least listen to the rest of the offer, right? Of course no such system exists. The vast majority of AI products purported to predict social outcomes are blatant scams. The fact that most of them are legal doesn’t stop them from being snake oil. Typically, the following AI systems fall under the “legal snake oil” category: AI that predicts recidivism AI that predicts job success Predictive policing AI…...
Disinformation has been used in warfare and military strategy over time. But it is undeniably being intensified by the use of smart technologies and social media. This is because these communication technologies provide a relatively low-cost, low-barrier way to disseminate information basically anywhere. The million-dollar question then is: Can this technologically produced problem of scale and reach also be solved using technology? Indeed, the continuous development of new technological solutions, such as artificial intelligence (AI), may provide part of the solution. Technology companies and...
Civil society has been poring over the detail of the European Commission’s proposal for a risk-based framework for regulating applications of artificial intelligence which was proposed by the EU’s executive back in April. The verdict of over a hundred civil society organizations is that the draft legislation falls far short of protecting fundamental rights from […]
The Information Commissioner’s Office said it fined Clearview AI for failing to inform British residents that it was collecting billions of photos from sites including Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to build its facial recognition software.
You can have Citizen Kane and The Godfather. Keep your 3D films and IMAX experiences. Miss me with epics, sequels, and experimental cinema. The only real film-based art form is movie trailers. When you go to a theater there’s no guarantee you’re not about to sit through a 90-minute stinker. That’s the chance we all take when we fork over $25 bucks to see this year’s blockbuster sequel. But, for my money, it’s always worth it as long as I get there early enough to enjoy the previews. Which is why I’m exceedingly excited over this pre-print research paper from…This story...
The US 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms was added to the Constitution in 1791. In the two centuries since, firearm technology has changed significantly. But the 2nd Amendment hasn’t. In 1791, for example, US citizens were given the right to carry a single-shot firearm or sword in public. Because, well, that’s all there was. In 2021, however, there exists a vast array of weaponry ranging from easily-concealed handguns to assault rifles capable of firing hundreds of rounds per minute with uncanny accuracy. It’s so-far proven pointless to debate whether the US founders would have...
Controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI is facing a potential fine in the UK. It has also been handed a provisional notice to stop further processing of UK citizens’ data and to delete any data it already holds as a result of what the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) described as “alleged serious breaches” of national […]
The offside rule is one of the most controversial and complex laws of soccer. Due to the many factors involved, it’s hard to judge an offside call accurately for referees in a blink of a second. That’s why FIFA, soccer’s governing body, other associations introduced an official position called the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) to review game-changing moments with the help of footage. These included potential penalties, red-cards, and offside offenses. While penalty and red card calls are largely subjective — even when they are being checked by VAR — offside is an objective call that...
When TechCrunch asks Flowrite if it’s ‘Grammarly on steroids’, CEO and co-founder Aaro Isosaari laughs, saying that’s the comment they always get for the AI writing productivity tool they’ve been building since late summer 2020 — drawing on early access to OpenAI’s GPT-3 API, and attracting a wait-list of some 30,000 email-efficiency seeking prosumers keen […]
Welcome to AI book reviews, a series of posts that explore the latest literature on artificial intelligence. What is intelligence? Is it the capacity to solve complicated mathematical problems at very fast speeds? The power to beat world champions in chess and go? The ability to detect thousands of different objects in images? Predict the next word in a sentence? Those are all manifestations of intelligence. And thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, we have been able to replicate them in computers, to different degrees of success. But AI scientists are still having a hard time...
Architecture and construction have always been, rather quietly, at the bleeding edge of tech and materials trends. It’s no surprise, then, especially at a renowned technical university like ETH Zurich, to find a project utilizing AI and robotics in a new approach to these arts. The automated design and construction they are experimenting with show […]
Cannabis is quickly going to the nerds. As it gradually becomes legal around the world, startups have responded with innovative products from laser-powered water bongs to CNC machined vapes to AI-powered herb grinders. Got a friend who wants to get a bit fancy with it? Give’m the gift of high-tech consumption. Please consume responsibility. Throughout […]
Fan art has flourished in the social media age, but not everyone is blessed with the skills to turn their ideas into spectacular — and disturbing — visual creations. The worst offenders hang in galleries of horrors across Reddit and Twitter. Visit them if you dare, but be warned: these cursed images will be forever imprinted on your brain. Fearful of joining these walls of shame, fan artists are turning to a new AI app for help. Known as Wombo Dream, the software converts text into computer-generated paintings. The app was built by the company behind Wombo AI, the popular deepfake singing...
More dollars, rising deal sizes. What's going on in Canada?
The iMerit ML DataOps Summit 2021 kicks off on December 2 — that’s just eight days away. Are you ready to improve your dataops chops? More than 1,400 senior leaders in AI and ML will be in the virtual building, and this is one data deployment you can’t afford to miss. More good news: This […]
With Tesla's latest FSD ("Full Self-Driving") release, it's asking drivers to consent to allowing it to collect video taken by a car's exterior and interior cameras in case of an accident or "serious safety risk." That will mark the first time Tesla will attach footage to a specific vehicle and driver, according to an Electrek report. Tesla has gathered video footage as part of FSD before, but it was only used to train and improve its AI self-driving systems. According to the new agreement, however, Tesla will now be able to associate video to specific vehicles. "By enabling...
Samsung Electronics announced today it has selected a site in Taylor, Texas, to build a new semiconductor wafer fabrication plant that is set to produce the advanced logic device. The new facility will manufacture products based on advanced process technologies such as mobile, 5G, high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI). The Taylor site, about […]
Stock photos are the bane of many marketers and designers. The heavyweight image providers are prohibitively pricey, while the affordable ones could lead to a concerned call from HR. At TNW Towers, we smoothly circumvent these barriers by creating custom masterpieces — like these glorious pictures of Mark Zuckerberg: Mark, I promise I had nothing to do with any of this. Credit: The Next Web Sadly, not everyone is blessed with such virtuosity — including yours truly. Just check out the monstrosity I made atop this article. Thankfully, AI could soon conceal our artistic ineptitudes, by...
Less than six months after raising a $157 million Series D round, AI-powered transcription and captioning platform Verbit announced today it has closed $250 million in a Series E round that values the company at $2 billion. The latest funding brings its total raised to over $550 million. The new capital was led by Third Point […]
One of China’s biggest AI solution providers SenseTime is a step closer to its initial public offering. SenseTime has received regulatory approval to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, according to media reports. Founded in 2014, SenseTime was christened as one of China’s four “AI Dragons” alongside Megvii, CloudWalk, and Yitu. In the second […]
New York recently passed a bill providing guidelines for the operation of automated hiring software in the city. Allegedly, city council’s aim with this legislation was to protect New Yorkers from biased AI. But, from where we’re sitting, it looks like it’s going to do the exact opposite. Up front: The bill, dubbed int 1894-2020, was meant to address the issue of bias in AI software. Companies such as HireVue claim their algorithms can actually remove hiring bias – the schtick here is that computers can’t be bigots. But the reality is that there’s no magic way to remove bias…...
As companies increasingly move to take advantage of machine learning to run their business more efficiently, the fact is that it takes an abundance of energy to build, test and run models in production. Neu.ro, an early stage full-stack MLOps solution is building a greener approach. Today, the company announced a zero emissions AI cloud […]
San Diego-based startup LifeVoxel has raised $5 million in a seed round to bolster data intelligence of its AI diagnostic visualization platform for faster and precise prognosis. The platform, dubbed Prescient, is used for diagnostics, workflow management and triage, taking away the stress of managing software and hardware technology from physicians and hospitals — and […]
New York City could soon reduce the chances of AI bias in the job market. The Associated Pressnotes the city's council has passed a bill barring AI hiring systems that don't pass yearly audits checking for race- or gender-based discrimination. Developers would also need greater transparency (including disclosures of automated systems), and provide alternatives like human reviews. Fines would reach up to $1,500 per incident.The bill was passed November 10th. Departing Mayor Bill de Blasio has a month to sign it into law, but hasn't said whether or not he will. If the measure goes...
Another day, another problematic AI study. Today’s snake oil special comes via Tel Aviv University where a team of researchers have unveiled a so-called “lie-detection system.” Let’s be really clear right up front: AI can’t do anything a person, given an equivalent amount of time to work on the problem, couldn’t do themselves. And no human can tell if any given human is lying. Full stop. The simple fact of the matter is that some of us can tell when some people are lying some of the time. Nobody can tell when anybody is lying all of the time. The university…This story...
MIT researchers working with funding from Google’s Jigsaw group recently conducted a pair of studies to determine what, if any, potential impact deepfake AI technology political ads could have on US voters. In total, more than 7,500 people in the US participated in the paired studies – as far as we’re able to determine, that makes this the largest set of experiments on the subject. Participants were split into three groups; one group watch a deepfake video, the second read a text transcript of the video, and the third acted as a control group so they received no media prompts.…This...
The next generation of legal highs could be discovered by AI. Scientists in Canada have developed a model that identifies future designer drugs before they even hit the market. But don’t get too excited: the researchers aren’t planning to provide your next buzz. Instead, they want the cops to find it first. High times It wasn’t easy introducing AI to the drug game. First, the neural needed a crash course in pharmacology. Instead of a traditional education in a meth lab, the neural network was trained on a database of known psychoactive substances. After diligently studying the structures...
Fully autonomous translation solutions are some ways off, but that doesn’t mean AI/ML cannot reduce the workload today. It can.
DevOps fueled the enterprise shift to the cloud, and companies are in a similar phase of trying out and accepting machine learning (ML) in their production environments.
This call goes out to all the data devotees, engineering enthusiasts, AI aficionados and machine-learning mavens. Clear your schedule on December 2, because you do not want to miss a moment of the iMerit ML DataOps Summit 2021. Connect and engage with more than 1,400 senior-level leaders who develop, deploy and fund the data solutions […]
The UK government has named five projects that have scored public funding under a ‘tech safety’ challenged announced in September — when the Home Office said it wanted to encourage the tech industry and academia to develop novel AI/scanning technologies that could be implemented on end-to-end encrypted (e2ee) services to detect child sexual abuse material […]
Grammarly, the popular auto-editing tool for writing, has raised $200 million in funding at a $13 billion valuation from new investors including Baillie Gifford and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, among others. The company plans to use the investment to accelerate product innovation and team growth. “We believe this funding round is a great […]
A renowned theoretical computer science expert recently released an astonishing physics pre-print paper that tosses fuel on the fiery debate over… whether humans could use wormholes to traverse the universe or not. Don’t worry, I’ll explain what this has to do with self-aware robots in due course. Fun with physics First, however, let’s lay the foundation for our speculation with a quick glance at this all-new wormhole theory. The pre-print paper comes courtesy of French researcher Pascal Koiran. According to them, if you apply a different theoretical math metric to our understanding of...
Machina Labs today announced a $14 million Series A for its robotics and AI-based manufacturing. The round, led by Endeavors and featuring Congruent Ventures and Embark Ventures, brings the Los Angeles firm’s total funding to $16.3 million to date. The news also finds the company effectively coming out of stealth, following pilots with NASA and […]
Are you curious about marketing with zero-party data? Join a Twitter Space with with Ben Parr, president and co-founder of Octane AI, tomorrow at 3 p.m. PST/6 p.m. EST.
In a nutshell, the company has created an AI-powered photo editing tool that can be accessed using APIs. This means that you can do extremely powerful batch photo editing that is kind of like a mash-up between Snapchat’s photo filters, Adobe Lightroom’s batch editing features, Photoshop’s flexibility and the collaborative powers of Figma and the […]
New data from CB Insights details a global AI funding market replete with activity, sharply divided by geography.
An Amazon Go store in the US in 2018. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Amazon has reportedly landed its first customer outside the US for its cashierless retail technology. According to Bloomberg News, the UK’s second largest supermarket chain, Sainsbury’s, will use Amazon’s system of AI-powered surveillance cameras to power a cashierless grocery store in London. Sainsbury’s own FAQ for the store, which is reportedly due to open to the public on November 29, says that the technology is being provided by an unnamed “third-party supplier.” But Bloomberg says that supplier is Amazon...
Justt, a Tel Aviv-based chargeback mitigation startup, is emerging out of stealth today with $70 million in total funding. Founded in February 2020 by Roenen Ben-Ami and Ofir Tahor, Justt says it fully automates chargeback disputes on behalf of online merchants. The startup recently raised $50 million a Series B round of funding led by […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Over the last couple of years, Netflix has refined a one-button solution that picks something for you based on your tastes and starts playing it right away. It first called the feature names like Shuffle and eventually landed on Play Something. The button has top positioning in its TV and mobile apps, but now things are even easier to activate, as Netflix has linked its automatic selector to Amazon’s voice-controlled AI and streaming hardware. Image: Amazon If you’re in the US or Canada, just say “Alexa, Play Something,” and if you have an Echo...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon’s fleet of delivery drivers may be detached from Amazon warehouses, but the company still monitors its drivers; it installed always-on cameras in its delivery trucks and even asked drivers to consent to yawn-detecting AI surveillance. However, it’s that very surveillance system that puts Amazon in the crosshairs of a lawsuit that claims Amazon is at fault for a life-altering car accident.This Bloomberg report describes the details of the accident, as well as how one lawsuit may change the way legal teams approach similar situations in the...
Get ready to engage with more than 1,000+ senior-level leaders — the people forging data solutions that fuel artificial intelligence and machine learning — at the iMerit ML DataOps Summit on December 2, 2021. This day-long deep dive into AI and ML will touch on tech industries across the spectrum including autonomous mobility, healthcare AI, […]
I regularly fly with KLM from Minneapolis to New Delhi, and always stop over in Amsterdam. I am frequently in Minneapolis for research and this is my route to go home to take a break from work. I have done the journey so many times that I know almost all the shops at Schiphol inside out. However, one time in summer 2019, the predictability was broken when I missed my connecting flight to New Delhi. I was tired, hungry, sleepy, and the customer-service counter was closed. I had the choice to make the long walk to customer services at the…This story continues at The Next Web
We last heard from Ometria, an “AI-powered” customer marketing platform allowing brand and retailers to personalize marketing messages, in 2019 when it raised $21 million in a Series B. It’s now completed a $40M Series C round, led by InfraVia Growth, with participation from existing investors Octopus Ventures, Sonae IM, Summit Action, Adjuvo, Columbia Lake […]
The second annual Sight Tech Global conference, a virtual, free event on December 1-2, will convene the world’s top experts on advanced technologies, notably AI, addressing accessibility and assistive tech for people who are blind or visually impaired. Today we’re excited to roll out the main stage agenda. These 10 expertly moderated fireside and panel sessions […]
Universities are increasingly using computer programs to supervise university students sitting their exams. Is this the future of testing? Due to the pandemic, institutions worldwide have rapidly adopted exam software like Examplify, ExamSoft and ProctorU. Proctoring technology allows exam-takers to be monitored off-campus. They can sit exams in their homes, instead of a person having to watch them in a traditional exam room. Some programs simply enable a person to supervise students remotely. More sophisticated, automated proctoring software hijacks the student’s computer to block and...
Vimeo, the B2B video platform that spun out from IAC earlier this year, has made a pair of acquisitions aimed at building out the suite of features and tools it offers to businesses to create and run their own video strategies. The company has picked up short-form AI-based video creation platform Wibbitz; and Wirewax, which […]
Mathpresso, the Seoul-based edtech company behind QANDA, an AI-based learning app for K-12 students, announced today it has added Google as a new investor. Google’s undisclosed investment is not part of its Series C raised in June, the company said without providing its valuation. The additional investment event comes five months after its $50 million […]
Image: Samsung Samsung has announced its next-generation RAM tech made for mobile devices, which it says can be used in future smartphones but also in servers, cars, and “the metaverse.” While Samsung’s press release doesn’t mention how its new LPDDR5X RAM chips could help people enter the “digital reality,” the tech should help make devices run faster and last longer.Putting the buzzwords like metaverse, AI, and 5G aside, Samsung is promising some real improvements to speed and power usage: it says its next-gen RAM will have 1.3-times faster processing speeds versus the previous-...
If you believe you have a good idea for a startup, go for it. When venture capitalists say this is a good time to be a founder, you know they absolutely mean it.
The investor and entrepreneur discuss "human-in-the-loop" technology, and how artificial intelligence might be used for health and caregiving.
The dramatic rise of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has spotlit concerns about the role of technology in exam surveillance — and also in student cheating. Some universities have reported more cheating during the pandemic, and such concerns are unfolding in a climate where technologies that allow for the automation of writing continue to improve. Over the past two years, the ability of artificial intelligence to generate writing has leaped forward significantly, particularly with the development of what’s known as the language generator GPT-3. With this, companies such as...
Socure, a company that uses AI and machine learning to verify identities, announced today that it raised $450 million in funding for its Series E round led by Accel and T. Rowe Price. The round brings the company’s valuation to $4.5 billion, up from $1.3 billion this March when it raised $100 million for its […]
In a model-centric approach, the path to production doesn't facilitate the infrastructure needed for wide AI adoption. This calls for a paradigm shift to a production-centric approach.
CEO Andrew Ng says industries should adopt a data-centric approach to building AI, which provides a more efficient way for manufacturers to teach an AI model what to do.
This article is part of our reviews of AI research papers, a series of posts that explore the latest findings in artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence has proven that complicated board and video games are no longer the exclusive domain of the human mind. From chess to Go to StarCraft, AI systems that use reinforcement learning algorithms have outperformed human world champions in recent years. But despite the high individual performance of RL agents, they can become frustrating teammates when paired with human players, according to a study by AI researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory...
H2O.ai — a startup that has developed an open-source framework as well as proprietary apps that make it easier for any kind of enterprise to build and operate artificial intelligence-based services — has seen a surge of interest as AI applications have become more ubiquitous, and enterprises beyond tech companies want to get in on […]
Alphabet (the umbrella corp that owns Google and DeepMind) just launched Isomorphic Labs (IL). According to the new company’s blog, it’s “reimagining the entire drug discovery process from first principles with an AI-first approach.” In other words: The CEO of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, is going to run a drug-discovery spinoff. Up front: This seems like a really good thing. DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 has supposedly revolutionized how researchers study protein structures. And Hassabis is obviously pretty good at running a lab. But let’s just have a gander at the company’s blog, shall we...
Sensors and data are proliferating. Whether it’s from a phone, a car or smart home devices, astonishing amounts of data fuel the work of researchers and product developers conceiving new products and experiences. Among those who stand to benefit, even more than they already do, are people who are blind or visually disabled. That’s why […]
Image: Brembo High-end Italian brake manufacturer Brembo announced in October its plan to release Sensify, an AI-enhanced braking system that promises both “driving pleasure and total safety” when it rolls out via an unnamed manufacturer in 2024. Going beyond anti-lock brakes, traction, and stability control, it replaces hydraulic controls with electronic ones for design flexibility and, potentially, more precise control.Incorporating AI into vehicles isn’t new, as algorithms control playlists, maps, driver assistance, and even “self-driving” to various degrees. AI-based brake systems...
The Australian government gave Clearview AI the boot earlier this week after determining the company had no right to scrape and maintain its citizens’ data. If you or anyone else has ever uploaded a picture with your face in it to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or just about any website, there’s a very good chance you’re in Clearview AI‘s database. What does that mean? Clearview AI employees, millions of law enforcement agents, and anyone with access to the company’s data (which was recently exposed in a massive breach) can identify you as easily as snapping a photo with a smartphone...
The field of drug discovery has been supercharged by the capabilities of AI, which several companies have applied in various ways to turn an enormous practical problem into a tractable information problem. The latest to do so is Google parent company Alphabet, which has established Isomorphic Labs, under DeepMind head Demis Hassabis, to take its […]
Calling all data devotees, machine-learning mavens and arbiters of AI. Clear your calendar to make room for the iMerit ML DataOps Summit on December 2, 2021. Join and engage with AI and ML leaders from multiple tech industries including autonomous mobility, healthcare AI, technology and geospatial to name just a few. Attend for free: There’s […]
The number of DevOps tools has increased exponentially over the last few years and, with that, the amount of data these tools can produce to help businesses improve their software development processes. But most of the time, this data simply ends up in a dashboard for some scattershot analysis. Propelo (previously known as LevelOps) wants […]
WhyLabs, a machine learning startup that was spun out of the Allen Institute last year, helps data teams monitor the health of their AI models and the data pipelines that fuel them. Last year, the startup raised a $4 million seed round and today, the team announced that it has raised a $10 million Series […]
Sama is developing the first end-to-end AI tool for training data through machine learning.
Martine Paris Contributor Share on Twitter Martine Paris is a freelance tech reporter covering space, electric vehicles, climate tech, robotics, AI, consumer tech, e-commerce, streaming, gaming, venture capital and startup culture. It’s been 12 years since the animals of Zynga’s FarmVille first grazed the screens of fans worldwide. When it launched in 2009, the strategy […]
Microsoft recently announced it will soon offer ‘invitation only’ access to GPT-3 via Azure. This is a weird bit of news. We all saw it coming the moment Microsoft tossed Open AI a cool $1B for “pre AGI technologies” (AGI, artificial general intelligence, doesn’t exist yet, so literally everything is a pre AGI tech lol). But it’s unclear exactly what this means for OpenAI going forward. Back in 2019, when the two companies inked the partnership, it seemed like OpenAI was going to beef up Azure’s backbone. What we’re seeing today is more like… a turn-key business opportunity...
Thirty years ago the height of posh was owning a portable landline phone. Now our smartphones are personal computers that can process natural language commands and run AI models on-device. In another 30 years, according to the experts, we’ll have flying cars, robot butlers, and colonies on Mars. Right? Maybe, maybe not. The next 30 years of computer advances don’t seem quite as certain as the last were. We’re pushing up against Moore’s law and beginning to get diminishing returns when it comes to creating more powerful classical systems. On the other hand, we’re also on the cusp of...
Scale AI, the five-year-old visual data labeling company, has acquired a small startup that could help expand its reach in Europe and speed up development of its newest product. Financial terms were not disclosed. SiaSearch, which spun out of European venture studio Merantix, has built out a data management platform that acts as a search […]
After Canada, now Australia has found that controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI, broke national privacy laws when it covertly collected citizens’ facial biometrics and incorporated them into its AI-powered identity matching service — which it sells to law enforcement agencies and others. In a statement today, Australia’s information commissioner and privacy commissioner, Angelene Falk, […]
illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Former Google employee Meredith Whittaker could soon be working at the Federal Trade Commission as an AI policy advisor, according to a report by The Information. Whittaker may be best known for helping to organize a 2018 walkout at Google, where 20,000 employees protested against how the company handled alleged sexual harassment, and for leaving Google afterward, claiming that it had retaliated against her and other organizers. Now, the FTC seems to be in the process of hiring her to help shape regulations around AI and Big Tech.According to The...
If you stream or do videoconferencing and own certain GeForce RTX GPUs, NVIDIA's Broadcast app can be a magical helper. It uses a streamlined, AI-powered toolset to remove background noise, add virtual effects, auto-frame shots and more. Now, Logitech has announced that it's incorporating some of those features directly into certain headsets and Blue microphones via a new beta, with no need to run any NVIDIA apps. Thanks to a partnership between Logitech and NVIDIA, some of the Broadcast tools will be available through the G Hub drivers for the following products: Logitech G733...
Activeloop, a member of the Y Combinator summer 2018 cohort, is building a database specifically designed for media-focused artificial intelligence applications. Today the company announced a $5 million seed investment led by 468 Capital and CM Ventures with participation from Tribe Capital, Shasta Ventures and various tech industry angels. Davit Buniatyan, founder and CEO at […]
Coinbase is acquiring the Bangalore-based startup Agara, which operates an AI-powered customer support platform, the two said Tuesday, as the cryptocurrency exchange looks to make it easier for users to seek help and join the service. The firms didn’t share the financial details of the acquisition, but the size of the deal is between $40 […]
A heated debate is going on about the race between the United States and China to dominate in AI. But perhaps the more strategic question is whether China is building the metaverse.
According to Facebook AI Research, the next generation of robots should be much better at feeling — not emotions, of course, but using the sense of touch. And to advance the ball in this relatively new area of AI and robotics research, the company and its partners have built a new kind of electronic skin […]
Over the past 20 years, there has been a steady flight of capital away from deep-tech – those science-and tech-related breakthroughs on which world-changing businesses are built, Walden Catalyst said. The VC firm has a belief in the ability of data as the “fuel” and AI as the “engine” to transform the way people live, […]
“Fool me once, shame on…shame on you. Fool me – you can’t get fooled again.” Former US President George W Bush. It’s easy to laugh at someone who believes the Earth is flat. Dunking on pro-diseasers (AKA: antivaxxers) has become one of the internet’s favorite sports. And it’s pretty posh by social media standards to ridicule anyone who questions whether the climate-crisis is real. There’s always going to be a small, vocal contingency of people who simply cannot be convinced of a ground truth. Whether these people deserve ridicule is a question for our personal consciences, but...
On Friday, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Two Hat, a company best known for its AI content moderation tools. Financial details have not been disclosed, but Microsoft did share its vision for how they’ll work together moving forward. Over the years, the two companies have frequently collaborated to make Xbox Live and other gaming communities safer, and by the sounds of it, that will be the focus of Two Hat moving forward.“We have partnered with Xbox and the Microsoft team for several years and share the passion and drive to make meaningful change in the advancement of online civility...
Wyze is bringing more AI-powered smarts to its security cameras. | Image: Wyze Smart home company Wyze continues its tradition of making every small to medium-sized home appliance under the sun, announcing a slew of new products this week in honor of its fourth birthday. The most notable are a new smart wall switch, an interesting take on outdoor lighting, and revamped white smart bulbs that can match the sun throughout the day. But what really caught my eye is a new capability coming to its cameras. Using AI, Wyze’s smart security cameras will have the ability to alert a professional...
At this year’s Facebook Connect, the platform revealed something called the Presence Platform, a new way for developers to create mixed reality experiences for the Oculus Quest virtual reality headset. It includes a suite of AI tools for developers that makes the mixed reality experience more immersive, helping to combine the virtual world with physical reality.The system includes three main tool sets: Insight SDK, Interaction SDK, and Voice SDK. Insight, which builds on the the Passthrough API that launched this summer, lets developers overlay virtual objects on the Oculus Quest’s...
NeuraLight has launched from stealth with $5.5 million in seed funding to apply AI to advance drug development for neurological disorders. The company was co-founded by Micha Breakstone, the co-founder and former president of Chorus.ai, which sold to ZoomInfo for $575 million earlier this year. Breakstone now leads NeuraLight as the company’s CEO alongside co-founder […]
‘Shadow Planet’ was made by Robin Sloan and Jesse Solomon Clark, aka The Cotton Modules, using OpenAI’s Jukebox AI music model. The scare is over and the fun can begin. That’s how I tend to think of creative endeavors involving artificial intelligence these days. We’ve moved past, I think, hyperbolic claims about AI making human art redundant and can now enjoy all the possibilities this technology affords. In that light, Shadow Planet — a new album made as a three-way collaboration between two humans and AI — shows exactly what sort fun can be had.Shadow Planet is the creation of...
McDonald's might not be the only restaurant experimenting with AI-based order taking in the near future. Restaurant Divereports McDonald's is selling its McD Tech Labs to IBM in order to "further accelerate" work on its automated voice ordering systems. The deal will help apply the technology to a wider variety of countries, languages and menus, McDonald's said, while bolstering IBM's Watson-powered customer service offerings.The deal is expected to close in December. McD Tech Labs will join IBM's Cloud & Cognitive Software team.McDonald's started testing AI drive-thru...
Something Adobe does at nearly every one of its annual design conferences is preview experimental features that may one day make their way to its apps. In 2020, it was a tool called Sharp Shots. This year, it was Project In-Between and a feature called Project Morpheus.Building on the Neural Filters Adobe debuted last year, Project Morpheus is capable of automating frame-by-frame video edits in a way that produces consistent results. In the demo the company showed off, one of its employees modified a video of themselves where they had a neutral expression throughout to put a smile on their face...
Welcome to Neural’s beginner’s guide to AI. This multi-part feature should provide you with a very basic understanding of what AI is, what it can do, and how it works. The guide contains articles on (in order published) neural networks, computer vision, natural language processing, algorithms, artificial general intelligence, the difference between video game AI and real AI, and the difference between human and machine intelligence. The discourse surrounding artificial intelligence ethics is wide, varied, and completely out of control. Those debating technology ethics tend to be the...
Abacus.ai wants to build an AI platform that simplifies machine learning model creation, while still leaving room for power users. Today the company announced a $50 million Series C. At the same time, it announced that the platform was expanding to include computer vision use cases. Tiger Global led the round with participation from Coatue, […]
AI and big data are an important part of most enterprise-scale companies now, but that very scale can make it difficult to employ them safely and ethically. Kathy Baxter at Salesforce and Nashlie Sephus at AWS have made ethical AI and data collection their business over the last few years, both sounding the alarm on […]
Finding a way to connect with people who might buy from you, while spending less time pursuing those who will never be interested, is something akin to a holy grail of the world of sales and marketing. Now, a startup called UserGems, which has built a platform that combines AI with data mapping to help […]
Over the course of the last few years, Adobe has gone all-in on AI. At its MAX conference this year, that’s once again on full display across updates for virtually all of its products, powered by its Sensei AI platform. Those range from smarter masking tools and preset recommendations in Lightroom to the ability to […]
While Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen were racing for the Formula 1 title over the weekend, self-driving cars were fighting for the inaugural Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) championship. The Technical University of Munich (TUM) took the chequered flag at the iconic Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The team bagged a cool $1 million after hitting an average speed of 218 km/h on the fabled oval track. The contest was an impressive showcase of self-driving engineering, but it didn’t convince me that AI will soon replace human race car drivers. One reason for my skepticism is that the algorithms...
Microsoft has finally revealed a new look at Halo Infinite’s campaign mode, marking the first time that developer 343 Industries has shown the campaign since its initial gameplay reveal in July 2020.The new six-minute trailer shows off a lot of Infinite’s new gameplay and systems in a short amount of time, including new weapons, new enemies, menacing bosses, and a new AI companion character that will be accompanying players called “The Weapon.” The overview also shows off some of Infinite’s new open world gameplay and RPG style gameplay additions, which include optional bases and...
In the wake of the firing of Timnit Gebru and other notable AI researchers at Google, Alphabet’s circled the wagons and lawyered up. Reports flow out of Mountain View depicting teams of lawyers censoring scientific research and acting as unnamed collaborators and peer-reviewers. Most recently, Business Insider managed to interview several researchers who painted a startling and bleak picture of what it’s like to try and conduct research under such an anti-scientific regime. Per the article, one researcher said: You’ve got dozens of lawyers — no doubt, highly trained lawyers — who...
Earlier this month, Mailchimp released Content Optimizer, a new product that uses artificial intelligence to help improve the performance of email marketing campaigns. Thanks to its vast trove of data, Mailchimp is in a unique position to discover common patterns of successful marketing campaigns. Content Optimizer taps into that data and uses machine learning models and business rules to predict the quality of email campaigns and provide suggestions on how to improve content, layout, and imagery. This is not Mailchimp’s first foray into using AI for content marketing, but it might be its...
IBM has been in the midst of a strategy shift with a focus on hybrid cloud and AI since Arvind Krishna was promoted to CEO in last year. Red Hat, the software company it purchased for $34 billion in 2018 has been at the center of it all. With the company reporting earnings yesterday, the […]
Facebook has announced a research project that aims to push the “frontier of first-person perception”, and in the process help you remember where you left your keys. The Ego4D project provides a huge collection of first-person video and related data, plus a set of challenges for researchers to teach computers to understand the data and gather useful information from it. In September, the social media giant launched a line of “smart glasses” called Ray-Ban Stories, which carry a digital camera and other features. Much like the Google Glass project, which met mixed reviews in 2013, this...
Building usable models to run AI algorithms requires not just adequate data to train systems, but also the right hardware subsequently to run them. But because the theoretical and practical are often not the same thing, there is often a gap between what data scientists may hope to do and what they practically do. Today, […]
Resistant AI, which uses artificial intelligence to help financial services companies combat fraud and financial crime — selling tools to protect credit risk scoring models, payment systems, customer onboarding and more — has closed $16.6 million in Series A funding. GV (formerly Google Ventures) led the round, with participation from existing investors Index Ventures (led […]
There are many in the world of AI who worry about its implications. One of those people is Navrina Singh, a former product manager for Qualcomm, then Microsoft, who saw firsthand at Microsoft how a Twitter bot it developed in 2016 as an experiment in “conversational understanding,” was, to quote The Verge, “taught to be […]
The devil went down to Silicon Valley; he was looking for a soul to steal. But he ended up taking a consulting gig with Palantir instead. In the meantime, the algorithm’s in charge of punishing the wicked now. And these days the sign above hell’s gates reads “Abandon Open Source,” with an Amazon smile beneath the print. Those condemned to an eternity of pain and suffering in the modern era are now forced to read the same five AI articles over and over. Which kind of sounds like what it’s like to read tech news back here on Earth anyway.…This story continues at The Next Web
It makes sense that phone manufacturers are paying extra attention to how faces show up in photos, and the new Pixel 6, announced by Google today, introduces a suite of new AI-powered tools to make humans show up better than ever. The two highlights are Face Unblur — which helps reduce blur on moving faces […]
Google’s latest flagship phones have an impressive set of automated, AI-powered tools to help make your photos look better, with smart blurs, object removal, and skin tone exposure. While we’ll have to test them out to see if they work as advertised, they could be useful for everyone from pixel peepers to casual snapshot takers. […]
The Pixel 6 smartphone has finally been unveiled. On Tuesday, Google executives explained what sorts of cameras and image capture systems the new handsets will offer when they go on sale October 28th. Both the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro will come equipped with a 50 MP Octa PD Quad Bayer wide camera (the base 6 will additionally feature 7x Super Res Zoom) as well as a 12 MP ultrawide camera. Their new 1/1.3 inch rear sensors reportedly capture up to 150 percent more light than the Pixel 5. The 6 Pro will also sport a 48 MP telephoto camera with 4x optical and 20 Super Res zoom functionality. Around...
Google was all too excited to unveil Tensor, its first system-on-a-chip, in August. We knew it would be powering the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro, and much like Apple's A-series mobile chips, it was an attempt at tying together Google's software with some custom-tuned hardware. In particular, Google positioned Tensor as something of an AI powerhouse, giving its new phones better hardware for image processing and voice recognition. Now, we know exactly what makes Tensor tick.Google's SoC is a 5nm eight-core design broken down into big, medium and small cores. Leading the way is two ARM Cortex-...
Google's Pixel 6 is almost here after months of hype. The company is livestreaming the Pixel 6 launch event starting at 1PM Eastern, and you can watch it with us on Engadget's YouTube channel (below) for an extra dash of insight.The focus is on the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, of course — both are expected to herald Google's return to flagship-class phones with improved cameras, flashier designs and a custom AI-centric processor. We'd also expect to hear news about Android 12 availability, however, and we wouldn't rule out news on Pixel Pass or other service-oriented features...
Instacart made its name by providing a way for consumers to bypass shopping in stores in person, by ordering items online and getting them delivered to their homes — a business that positively boomed in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. But with physical stores still looming large in the world of groceries, Instacart is […]
There’s nothing easy about learning a language, and so it’s also maybe no surprise that there are plenty of startups that want to make life easier for students. But while some mostly focus on individual learners and bypass the school systems, others are trying to make inroads in schools, too. One of the latest entrants […]
Product developers want to use AI, but don't always have the right tools to do it without relying on data scientists.
The necessity of animal testing is a sad one for the process of drug discovery, but there’s seemingly no good alternative to mice, even though they’re not particularly accurate human analogues. Quris claims to have the first real option in its combination of AI with data from a “patient on a chip” that provides remarkably […]
Google‘s Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro will officially be launched on October 19, and in typical fashion, we know a ton of details about the phones well before their release. That’s in part due to unintentional leaks, but also because Google itself has already told us a ton of information about the device’s hardware. There’s a lot to be excited about with the Pixel 6, as it seems Google is taking hardware for the first time since… well, ever. Pixel phones have always been vehicles to show off Google’s software and AI chops as opposed to hardware showcases, but…This story continues...
Scientists have developed a novel way of making people care about climate change: flooding their homes. Not their real homes, of course; the destruction is merely a simulation — for now. But projecting catastrophic consequences onto familiar places could generate awareness through empathy. “Shock is not the endgame here,” said study lead author Victor Schmidt, a PhD candidate at the Mila Quebec AI Institute in Montreal, Canada. “We want to trigger and leverage emotions towards actions.” ClimateGAN simulates extreme floods (right) on real scene images (left). Credit: Schmidt et al...
Security cameras, for better or for worse, are part and parcel of how many businesses monitor spaces in the workplace for security or operational reasons. Now, a startup is coming out of stealth with funding for tech designed to make the video produced by those cameras more useful. Spot AI has built a software platform […]
Many startup founders are implementing responsible AI practices. Only they didn’t call it that. They just call it “good business.”
A new artwork has inverted the application of predictive policing. Instead of forecasting crimes committed by civilians, the project predicts which civilians will be killed by police. The future victims are memorialized on a website called Future Wake. None of them, however, are real people. Each identity and story is generated by AI. Yet he predictions about their deaths are based on historical events. The AI-generated victims explain how they died. Credit: Future Wakes. Future Wake was funded by Mozilla and created by two artist-technologists called Oz and Tim. They hope the project stirs...
One of the obvious goals of almost every computer vision project is to enable a machine to see, and perceive, the world as a human does. Today, Facebook has started talkingabout Ego4D, its own effort in this space, for which it has created a vast new data set to train future models. In a statement, the company said that it had recruited 13 universities across nine countries, who had collected 2,200 hours of footage from 700 participants. This footage was taken from the perspective of the user, which can be used to train these future AI models. Kristen Grauman, Facebook’s lead research...
If the AIs of the future are, as many tech companies seem to hope, going to look through our eyes in the form of AR glasses and other wearables, they’ll need to learn how to make sense of the human perspective. We’re used to it, of course, but there’s remarkably little first-person video footage of […]
AI shopping assistant and shopping network Karma announced that it has raised $25 million in Series A funding led by Target Global followed by MoreTech Ventures, with participation from existing investors including NFX and Altair Capital. Karma allows users to plan their next online purchases, get notified about real-time price and inventory updates, access coupons […]
IBM today announced it has committed its ModelMesh inference service to open source. This is a big deal for the MLOps and DevOps community, but the implications for the average end-user are also huge. Artificial intelligence is a backbone technology that nearly all enterprises rely on. The majority of our coverage here on Neural tends to discuss the challenges involved in training and developing AI models. But when it comes to deploying AI models so that they can do what they’re supposed to do when they’re supposed to do it, the sheer scale of the problem is astronomical. Think about…...
What do you call AI these days? ML in a suit. ML, or machine learning, is a big market today. That is thanks to modern corporations accreting data like hoarders and data science maturing as a work category. Evidence of the former can be found in the growth posted by Databricks in recent quarters, and […]
The adoption of augmented reality is happening slowly but surely, and it’s easy to see one possible future for the technology: hardware that lets you edit what you see in real time, replacing objects around you with virtual overlays. Call it mixed reality, to be more precise. Recent research from the AI team at Porsche (yes, the carmakers — we’ll get to that in a bit) shows how this might work. The team has built an AI system dubbed TransforMR that detects objects like cars and people, removes them, then replaces them with CGI alternatives in real-time. The end-results are hardly flawless...
The Blind Man’s Meal is among the most important artworks of Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period, but it also shares a canvas with a more mysterious painting. Underneath the oil paint lies a portrait of a naked woman in the shape of a heart. Picasso had painted over the picture, which wasn’t unusual for the artist when money was tight. The painting had been concealed since 1903, but a combination of AI, stereoscopic imaging, and 3D printing has peeled back the cover. Dubbed The Lonesome Crouching Nude, the painting was first discovered via X-ray. Credit: Oxia Palus Discovering the painting...
Amid a global semiconductor shortage, an upstart in the world of AI chips is announcing a big round of funding to meet a boom in demand for its technology. Hailo, which makes edge-device chips customized to work with AI workloads — typical implementations include smart cities, retail environments, industrial settings and next-generation automotive systems — […]
Fount, a robo-advisor startup in South Korea, has raised a $33.4 million Series C round to beef up its machine learning-based platform development and hire staff. The latest round was led by Hana Financial Investment, along with Nice Investment. Returning backers Smilegate Investment, KT Investment, Shinhan Capital and Korea Development Bank also participated. The […]
Are you ready for another Pixel phone? After Apple’s iPhones and Samsung’s Galaxy devices (both folding and, er, static), Google’s homegrown phones are probably the third most interesting family of smartphones.Maybe it’s because Google has typically leaned into software and processing tricks rather than spec wars, both to offer features not found elsewhere (like its AI phone assistant) and to amp up its camera skills.Now the company has shown us what the Pixel 6 looks like, and a little of what to expect, but leaks have offered a few more tidbits over the last few days.One leak suggests...
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Welcome to “Codifying Humanity.” A new Neural series that analyzes the machine learning world’s attempts at creating human-level AI. Read the first article: Can humor be reduced to an algorithm? World-renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that AI will be “a billion times more capable” than biological intelligence within the next 20-30 years. Kurzweil’s predicted the advent of over 100 technology advances with a greater than 85% success rate. But, given the current state of cutting-edge artificial intelligence research, it’s difficult to imagine this prediction coming true in the...
If you’re ever lost in the woods (or on the lam), watch out for high-speed quadcopters following you through the trees. The drones can now fly through complex and unknown environments at up to 40kmph, thanks to a new AI approach developed at the University of Zurich. The team says their approach reduces failure rates at high speeds by up to 10 times when compared with other state-of-the-art methods. Credit: UZH. The quadcopter’s flight lessons took place in a simulation. An algorithm first piloted a computer-generated drone through a simulated environment that contained complex obstacles...
Natasha and Mary Ann and Alex were all aboard this week with Grace on the dials, which meant that we had a flat lovely time recording Equity for you. Of course, Equity is TechCrunch’s venture capital focused podcast where we dig into the most critical funding rounds, and natter about the key news items impacting startups. Before we hop into […]
Riiid, a South Korea-headquartered AI-powered edtech company, acquired its Japanese distribution partner Langoo to expand its Japan footprint. The acquisition comes after the company’s latest $175 million Series D round from SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 in May. Riiid has said it will continue to fuel its global expansion with the funding. Langoo, Riiid’s partner in […]
Gustav Klimt created some of the world’s most expensive masterpieces, but around 20% of his artworks have been lost. Among them are the so-called Faculty Paintings: Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence. The three pieces are believed to have been destroyed in a fire during World War Two. Only black and white photos of the artworks remain. The original paintings may never be seen again, but machine learning has come close to bringing them back to life. Using AI and the artistic expertise of Vienna’s Belvedere Museum, the Google Arts & Culture Lab developed an algorithm that applied...
Amazon’s Echo Dot is on its fourth generation. And within each of those generations there are myriad iterations and variations on the basic design. And that’s just the Dot. In all, there are dozens of different “Echo” devices. And each one is either a newly-introduced product or an iteration of a previous generation. And there will be more next year and more the year after that. That’s what the status quo looks like in smart gadgets. If you got a smart TV for your birthday last year, you can probably get a new version of the same TV on your…This story continues at The Next Web
Output first made a name for itself with meticulously sampled software instruments like Analog Brass & Winds and Exhale, that made use of Native Instruments' Kontakt Player. The company even got into the furniture game with what is possibly the sexiest studio desk for under $1,000. But its undeniable flagship is Arcade, a subscription-based sample mangler that’s constantly serving up new sounds to mess with. Today the company is launching version 2.0 that includes a number of upgrades, but the biggest is the addition of “Note Kits” — which are simply playable chromatic instruments....
Increasingly, conversations about big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence are going hand-in-hand with conversations about privacy and data protection. Now, a startup that is building tools to make it easier for engineers to implement the two simultaneously is announcing a round of growth funding to continue expanding its operations. Gretel AI, which lets engineers […]
Artificial intelligence is often thought of as disembodied: a mind like a program, floating in a digital void. But human minds are deeply intertwined with our bodies — and an experiment with virtual creatures performing tasks in simulated environments suggests that AI may benefit from having a mind-body setup. Stanford scientists were curious about the […]
The millennia-old search for extraterrestrial life has, so far, yielded little in the way of scientifically useful results. As far as humanity can prove, ET is purely hypothetical. Yet there are more believers than skeptics. Even in the scientific community. It seems like the generally accepted belief on alien life can be boiled down to: the universe is very big and it would be silly to think that we’re all alone in it. But famed Italian physicist Enrico Fermi took a different perspective. Fermi was best known in his time for being one of the architects of the first atomic…This story...
Is the combination of regulation and pro-innovation policies enough to spur accelerating AI leadership?
The European Parliament has called on lawmakers in the European Union to ban automated facial recognition in public spaces and to enforce strict safeguards for police use of artificial intelligence. MEPs voted in favor of the non-binding resolution by 377-248, with 62 abstentions.The MEPs said citizens should only be monitored when they're suspected of a crime. They cited concerns over algorithmic bias in AI and argued that both human supervision and legal protections are required to avoid discrimination. The politicians noted there's evidence suggesting AI-based identification systems...
The European Parliament has called for bans on predictive policing and biometric mass surveillance. In a resolution adopted on Tuesday, MEPs also voted to prohibit social scoring systems, the use of AI in judicial decisions, and private facial recognition databases — like the ClearviewAI system. A majority of lawmakers (377 to 248) backed the wide-ranging resolution on the use of AI in criminal law and policing. Bulgarian MEP Petar Vitanov, the resolution’s author, called the vote “a huge win” for European citizens: For the first time ever, we are calling for a moratorium on the...
Images: Halide Halide is one of the best photography apps on the iPhone, and the company has just updated its app with a new macro feature, designed to perfectly complement the new macro mode that Apple added with this year’s iPhone 13 Pro models. But Halide’s 2.5 update doesn’t just add support for the iPhone 13 Pro’s existing macro feature that Apple made. It takes things a step further and adds a macro mode for older iPhones, too, using Apple’s Neural Engine for “AI-based detail enhancement,” which uses a neural network to squeeze extra detail out of the close-up shot, even...
AI can leave a staggering carbon footprint, but it can also help us fight climate change. Unsurprisingly, Google has been keen to highlight the field’s more positive impacts. On Tuesday, the tech giant unveiled two new AI-powered attempts to support sustainable travel. The first is eco-friendly routing for Google Maps. The service has been updated with a new model that’s designed to reduce a driver’s carbon footprint. The model analyzes factors such as road incline and traffic congestion to display the most fuel-efficient route. As well as cutting carbon emissions, the feature could help...
The European Parliament has voted to back a total ban on biometric mass surveillance. AI-powered remote surveillance technologies such as facial recognition have huge implications for fundamental rights and freedoms like privacy but are already creeping into use in public in Europe. To respect “privacy and human dignity”, MEPs said that EU lawmakers should pass […]
While working as a software engineer in Japan, Singapore and San Francisco for the past 10 years, Ryo Chikazawa, CEO and co-founder of Autify, came to realize that there’s one common problem in the software development industry; software testing takes excessive time. Chikazawa and co-founder Sam Yamashita started Autify in 2016 in San Francisco to […]
At last year’s inaugural Sight Tech Global event, a virtual event dedicated to applications of AI and related tech to accessibility for people who are blind, one of the most popular sessions belonged to Saqib Shaikh. The Microsoft engineer co-founded and leads the Seeing AI mobile app, which embeds a remarkable number of services beneficial to people […]
A UK law firm is bringing a class-action style claim over a patient health data scandal that dates back to 2015 and involves the Google-owned AI company DeepMind, after it was quietly passed medical information on over a million patients by an NHS Trust as part of an app development project. Law firm Mishcon de […]
BGV’s portfolio makeup is 95% immigrant entrepreneurs and 60% outside Silicon Valley.
TNW Conference 2021 is live! You can check out the schedule here. Many museums across the world are using AI to identify fake paintings or to measure the quality of the art on exhibition. Speaking at the TNW Conference, Robert G. Erdmann, Senior Scientist & Full Professor, Rijksmuseum & University of Amsterdam, gave examples of how the museum is using AI to unlock new artistic mysteries. To create a five-minute video of Lidded ewer, an art piece made by Adam van Vianen, the museum photographer took 1,000 images of the object. However, if you want to play a five-minute high-resolution...
Google announced a new AI model for multimodal search called MUM (Multitask Unified Model) at its developer conference Google IO in May. Last night, the firm announced a bunch of consumer-facing features, including visual search, that’ll be coming to your screen in the coming months. The Big G currently serves contextual information such as Wikipedia snippets, lyrics, or recipe videos to you based on your search phrase. Now, for the next step of the search, it aims to get you results by understanding context beyond just the phrase you’ve used. The first feature announced last night is...
Did you know Neural is taking the stage on Sept 30 and Oct 1? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of AI during TNW Conference 2021. Secure your ticket now! An NYU researcher who was shut out of Facebook has taken her fight for transparency to the US Congress. During Congressional testimony on Tuesday, Laura Edelson, who investigates online ads and misinformation, called for new data requirements and legal protections for researchers. “We hope that Congress will push for laws that require platforms to be a lot more transparent, and protect researchers...
Google is updating its visual search tool Google Lens with new AI-powered language features. The update will let users further narrow searches using text. So, for example, if you snap a photo of a paisley shirt in order to find similar items online using Google Lens, you can add the command “socks with this pattern” to specify the garments you’re looking for. Additionally, Google is launching a new “Lens mode” option in its iOS Google app, allowing users to search using any image that appears while searching the web. This will be available “soon,” but it’ll be limited to the US...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge “Can you get medicine for someone at the pharmacy?”It’s a simple enough question for humans to understand, says Pandu Nayak, vice president of search at Google, but such a query represents the cutting-edge of machine comprehension. You and I can see that the questioner is asking if they can fill out a subscription for another person, Nayak tells The Verge. But until recently, if you typed this question into Google, it would direct you to websites explaining how to fill out your prescription. “It missed the subtlety that the prescription was for...
Read Dashboard sits in virtual meetings to measure engagement, performance and sentiment among participants.
Ever since Amazon introduced Alexa to the world and invested heavily in its personal assistant AI, it seemed we all knew where the company was eventually heading: personal robots. That moment has finally arrived. The company today announced Astro, its oft-rumored home robot. Although it’s pricey at an initial cost of $999.99, it has the potential of being the first real mainstream home assistant robot (as opposed to, say, a robot vacuum). Astro has a bit of a unique design, with two big wheels and a moving monitor that served as a ‘head.’ I’m not gonna lie, it’s kind of…This...
Did you know Neural is taking the stage on Sept 30 and Oct 1? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of AI during TNW Conference 2021. Secure your ticket now! A team of researchers from the University of Glasgow in the UK have created an AI-powered system for identifying which diseases will make the leap from the animal kingdom to causing human infections. This could go a long way towards preparing us for the next pandemic. COVID-19 and dozens of other viruses that affect humans have been traced back to animal diseases. Such illnesses are called…This...
Did you know Neural is taking the stage on Sept 30 and Oct 1? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of AI during TNW Conference 2021. Secure your ticket now! Samson and Delilah is among the most famous works by Peter Paul Rubens, one of the most influential artists of the 17th century. The painting depicts an Old Testament story in which the warrior Samson is betrayed by his lover Delilah. When London’s National Gallery bought the masterpiece in 1980, it became the third most expensive artwork ever purchased at auction. But the buyers…This story...
Adobe has revealed some new masking upgrades that are coming to Lightroom, Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw (or ACR, Photoshop's raw photo processing tool). The company calls it the "biggest change to providing control over selectively enhancing photos" since it released Lightroom 2 in 2008.The Adobe Research team wanted to bring AI-powered selection tools such as Select Subject and Sky Replacement from Photoshop into Lightroom and ACR, but the image processing engine used in the latter two was incompatible. The team had to make some big changes under the hood, which gave it a chance...
Illustration by William Joel I hope my headline is an overstatement, purely for job purposes, but in this week’s Vergecast artificial intelligence episode, we explore the world of large language models and how they might be used to produce AI-generated text in the future. Maybe it’ll give writers ideas for the next major franchise series, or write full blog posts, or, at the very least, fill up websites with copy that’s too arduous for humans to do. Among the people we speak to is Nick Walton, the cofounder and CEO of Latitude, which makes the game AI Dungeon, which creates a plot in the...
Companies use data to build models that they use to automate decisions, but without visibility, it’s difficult to determine if the models are accountable, fair and responsible.
For many financial institutions in Southeast Asia, verifying new customers takes a week or two, said the founders of Verihubs. The startup cuts that time down to as little as five seconds, using AI-based identity authentication technology and APIs that let companies continue verifying returning customers through SMS, WhatsApp or flash calls. Verihubs announced it […]
Did you know Neural is taking the stage on Sept 30 and Oct 1? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of AI during TNW Conference 2021. Secure your ticket now! Scientists from Samsung and Harvard University have unveiled a new approach to building smarter computer chips: “copying and pasting” the brain onto a memory network. They propose copying the brain’s neuronal wiring map by using a novel nanoelectrode array to record electrical signals produced by neurons. The extracted map would then be rapidly pasted onto a memory network. Per the study paper: The...
The Oculus Go, originally released in 2018. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Facebook is unlocking the bootloader of its discontinued Oculus Go headset and giving users full root access. That means the headset will remain useful long after official support ends. The move was announced by Oculus’ consulting CTO John Carmack, who stepped down from his full-time role as CTO in 2019 to focus on his work as an independent AI researcher.Root access will be achieved by sideloading a future software update, opening the door for anyone to modify and improve Oculus’ original standalone...
As cybersecurity becomes a bigger and more complex problem for organizations, a startup aiming to increase its accuracy in fighting breaches — by bringing in an ever-wider funnel of data and vantage points to identify issues — is expanding its business. SenseOn, which employs cloud-based, AI powered techniques for its so-called “triangulation” approach to the […]
Did you know SHIFT is taking the stage on Sept 30 and Oct 1? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of mobility during TNW Conference 2021. Secure your ticket now! We’ve longed for a time when our transport is not simply just connected, but actually smart and intuitive. Well, that time might be here, thanks to Unagi. This week, they showcased their latest escooter, the Model Eleven, a successor to the Model One. While the escooter is available at a cheaper price without AI, its inclusion makes it a powerhouse. ADAS comes to two-wheel mobility The…This...
A handful of foundational AI models are emerging that rely upon a magnitude of training data that makes them inherently powerful, but it’s not without risk of harmful biases.
The UK published its first ever national AI strategy this week. The decade-long commitment by the government to levelling up domestic artificial intelligence capabilities — by directing resource and attention toward skills, talent, compute power and data access — has been broadly welcomed by the country’s tech ecosystem, as you’d expect. But there is a […]
Welcome to AI book reviews, a series of posts that explore the latest literature on artificial intelligence. Recent advances in deep learning have rekindled interest in the imminence of machines that can think and act like humans, or artificial general intelligence. By following the path of building bigger and better neural networks, the thinking goes, we will be able to get closer and closer to creating a digital version of the human brain. But this is a myth, argues computer scientist Erik Larson, and all evidence suggests that human and machine intelligence are radically different. Larson’...
Add the United Kingdom to the list of countries that says an artificial intelligence can’t be legally credited as an inventor. Per the BBC, the UK Court of Appeal recently ruled against Dr Stephen Thaler in a case involving the country’s Intellectual Property Office. In 2018, Thaler filed two patent applications in which he didn’t list himself as the creator of the inventions mentioned in the documents. Instead, he put down his AI DABUS and said the patent should go to him “by ownership of the creativity machine.”The Intellectual Property Office told Thaler he had to list a real...
Did you know Neural is taking the stage on Sept 30 and Oct 1? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of AI during TNW Conference 2021. Secure your ticket now! A team of AI researchers in Russia have managed to come up with one of the coolest gesture-control systems for drones that we’ve seen yet. What’s even more impressive is that it works with multiple machines simultaneously. Controlling swarms of drones in real-time is the dream. And, when you pre-program them with advanced software and run them in unobstructed areas it’s pretty easy to accomplish...
When founder Somdip Dey was a computer science masters student at the University of Manchester, his parents got in a terrible car accident. He sent all of his money back to his parents in India to help with their medical bills, but then he faced a problem familiar to too many: If he wasn’t going […]
Did you know Neural is taking the stage on Sept 30 and Oct 1? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of AI during TNW Conference 2021. Secure your ticket now! AI is a field that’s flooded with buzzwords. Ideally, terms like cognitive computing and big data help distill complex concepts into digestible ideas. But they can also confuse and mislead the public. “Artificial general intelligence” (AGI), for instance, is often used to describe hypothetical machines that can perform any intellectual task that a human can. But there’s no consensus on what AGI...
Did you know Neural is taking the stage on Sept 30 and Oct 1? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of AI during TNW Conference 2021. Secure your ticket now! Today, Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer announced that he’s stepping down from the position after spending 13 years at the company. He will transition within the organization to a part-time role by 2022. Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, Facebook’s chief of hardware division, will take over Schroepfer‘s position gradually. Here are five noteworthy things you should know about the outgoing CTO. 1. Prestigious...
What will an AI-infused world look like in 20 years? Sinovation founder and AI thought leader Kai-Fu Lee and breakout sci-fi author Chen Qiufan (AKA Stanley Chen) make an educated guess in "AI 2041."
Did you know Neural is taking the stage on Sept 30 and Oct 1? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of AI during TNW Conference 2021. Secure your ticket now! AI is frequently overhyped, but one notable exception is its potential to unearth new materials. These substances can provide the foundations for an array of transformative technologies, from life-saving drugs to new electronic devices. The discovery of graphene, for instance, could help solve the world water crisis, make smartphones virtually unbreakable, and even improve your sex life. However, the...
Cellino, a company developing a platform to automate stem cell production, presented today at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 to detail how its system, which combines A.I. technology, machine learning, hardware, software — and yes, lasers! — could eventually democratize access to cell therapies. It aims to bring down costs associated with the manufacturing of human cells, […]
The UK government has announced a national AI strategy — its first dedicated package aimed at boosting the country’s capabilities in and around machine learning technologies over the longer term. It says it hopes the strategy will lead to an increase in the number and types of AIs being developed and commercialized in the UK […]
iRobot recently launched a new robot vacuum cleaner that uses AI to avoid dog poop, but the company’s Roombas have long struggled with a more basic problem: confusing dark patterns on carpets and rugs for perilous drops. A video recently shared on Twitter by IBM researcher Dmitry Krotov shows exactly the problem: a Roomba rolling around inside a rectangular box pattern on a rug, refusing to drive over the lines as if were physical walls. Usually, iRobot’s software flags this sort of problem as a dangerous “cliff,” and a quick search on Twitter for “roomba rug cliff” shows it’s a...
Did you know Neural is taking the stage this fall? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of AI during TNW Conference 2021. Secure your ticket now! Apple’s walled garden for AI tends to keep the Cupertino company out of critical media’s crosshairs. So it’s a bit of a shock when a story breaks demonstrating that the house that Jobs and Woz built is just as dangerous and unhinged as the rest of big tech when it comes to machine learning. Exhibit A: The Wall Street Journal today reported that Apple’s developing an AI-driven system that uses…This...
Amazon delivery drivers were involved in at least 60 accidents resulting in 13 deaths between 2015 and 2019. And that was before drivers were being forced to make dangerous decisions by in-vehicle AI cameras and crappy algorithms. Up front: Motherboard ran a horrific article (great reporting, horrifying topic) about Amazon‘s third-party driver surveillance system. The skinny is that thousands of drivers across the US are being monitored by AI systems that actively watch drivers and their surroundings for “events” that trigger negative feedback for the driver. I’m being careful with how...
The Portal line has always been a kind of odd duck in the world of smart screens. Facebook’s most significant contribution to the category is almost certainly Smart Camera, which uses AI to track a subject and pan and zoom accordingly to keep them in frame. It was the first big line to bring the […]
Artist: William Joel The next few Tuesdays, The Verge’s flagship podcast The Vergecast is showcasing a miniseries dedicated to the use of artificial intelligence in industries that are often overlooked, hosted by Verge senior reporter Ashley Carman. This week, the series focuses on AI for the video world.More specifically, we’re looking at how AI is being used as a tool to help people streamline the process of creating video content. Yes, this might mean software taking on a bigger role in the very human act of creativity, but what if instead of replacing us, machine learning tools could be...
Did you know Neural is taking the stage this fall? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of AI during TNW Conference 2021. Secure your ticket now! It seems like everyone is obsessed with Mars these days. Three space missions were sent to the planet last year. More than 10 million people asked their names to be etched onto a NASA rover currently driving across its terrain. The US and China both aim to send humans to Mars in the 2030s. Elon Musk even wants to build a city there “in our lifetimes.” The planet…This story continues at The Next WebOr just...
Business Canvas, a South Korean document management SaaS company behind Typed, announced today it has raised a $2.5 million seed round led by Mirae Asset Venture Investment, with participation from Kakao Ventures and Nextrans Inc. The seed round will be used for accelerating product development and global launch of open beta for its AI-powered document […]
Shelf Engine’s grocery order automation technology applies AI to food order volume so that grocery customers can reduce their food waste by as much as 32%.
Snapchat is rolling out new augmented reality lenses and stickers that can give you cursory lessons on sign language. The company has developed the new features as part of its efforts for the Weak of the Deaf with guidance from its Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing team members. Its new AR Lenses use AI and computer vision technology by SignAll, which can recognize and translate American Sign Language. One of the lenses will teach you how to fingerspell, in which you form individual letters with your fingers to spell a word. The other new lenses will teach you how to fingerspell your username, as...
Did you know Neural is taking the stage this fall? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of AI during TNW Conference 2021. Secure your ticket now! Artificial intelligence is far too often a solution looking for a problem. So it’s refreshing when someone manages to find the perfect way to apply a simple AI trick to a huge problem plaguing humanity. And that’s exactly what serial creator Nick Bild’s done (again) with his novel AI-powered stop-motion animation system. Simply put, the big problem with creating stop-motion animation is that it takes forever...
Did you know Neural is taking the stage this fall? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of AI during TNW Conference 2021. Secure your ticket now! Opening the black box. Reducing the massive power consumption it takes to train deep learning models. Unlocking the secret to sentience. These are among the loftiest outstanding problems in artificial intelligence. Whoever has the talent and budget to solve them will be handsomely rewarded with gobs and gobs of money. But there’s an even greater challenge stymieing the machine learning community, and it’s...
Human life expectancy increased from 31 years in 1900 to 72 years in 2017. Today, we are on the cusp of another healthcare revolution driven by artificial intelligence.
Did you know Neural is taking the stage this fall? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of AI during TNW Conference 2021. Secure your ticket now! NASA has added a pair of interactive experiences to the enthralling array of sights and sounds generated from the Mars 2020 mission. The new tools let you explore the planet from the comfort of your home. In one, called “Explore with Perseverance,” you can follow the voyage of NASA’s car-shaped rover through a 3D simulation of the planet. You can find, for instance, the spot where Perseverance landed…This...
Countries have assassinated people with drones, but those attacks now appear to include robotic weapons on the ground. The New York Timessources claim Israel assassinated top Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh on November 27th, 2020 using a remotely-controlled, AI-assisted machine gun. Israel reportedly mounted the gun on a pickup truck by the side of the road and, when Fakhrizadeh's car approached had a distant operator fire the gun using a satellite link.The attack was precise, sparing Fakhrizadeh's wife, but may not have used facial recognition to assist with aiming as...
Aircover’s conversational AI software integrates with Zoom and automates parts of the sales process to lead to more effective conversations.
Did you know Neural is taking the stage this fall? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of AI during TNW Conference 2021. Secure your ticket now! Deep learning can detect abnormal chest x-rays with accuracy that matches that of professional radiologists, according to a new paper by a team of AI researchers at Google published in the peer-reviewed science journal Nature. The deep learning system can help radiologists prioritize chest x-rays, and it can also serve as a first response tool in emergency settings where experienced radiologists are not available...
Did you know Neural is taking the stage this fall? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of AI during TNW Conference 2021. Secure your online ticket now! A team of researchers at the University of Leeds recently made the startling discovery that many observable protoplanets are surrounded by the raw molecules necessary for life. Planets such as Earth are formed when the gravitational pull of a star captures swirling clouds of dust and gas. Over time, the clouds become disks. And those disks eventually gain enough mass to become planets. The Leeds team managed...
Did you know Neural is taking the stage this fall? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of AI during TNW Conference 2021. Secure your online ticket now! A team of researchers led by physicists at the University of Cambridge may have accidentally stumbled upon the biggest (as in, size-wise) discovery in the history of physics: dark energy. And not a moment too soon, as many scientists believe this mysterious force is literally ripping the universe apart. Up front: Scientists believe the universe is made up of matter, dark matter, and dark energy. Matter makes...
New Zealand-based medtech startup HeartLab has raised $2.45 million in seed funding that it says will help the company expand its AI-powered heart scanning and reporting platform to cardiologists in the United States by early next year. HeartLab provides an end-to-end solution for echocardiograms, the ultrasound tests that doctors use to examine a patient’s heart […]
It. Never. Fails. Every time an AI article finds its way to social media there’s hundreds of people invoking the terrifying specter of “SKYNET.” SKYNET is a fictional artificial general intelligence that’s responsible for the creation of the killer robots from the Terminator film franchise. It was a scary vision of AI‘s future until deep learning came along and big tech decided to take off its metaphorical belt and really give us something to cry about. At least the people fighting the robots in The Terminator film franchises get to face a villain they can see and shoot at. In…...
How do investors ensure that the startups in which they invest responsibly apply AI?
Photo: Sundar Pichai / Twitter Google is set to debut its first in-house smartphone chipset, the Tensor SoC, in its upcoming Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro phones. And if the latest report from XDA is correct, the Tensor’s rumored CPU setup could be very, very weird — even by Google standards. So far, Google has largely been hyping up the Tensor SoC’s AI performance; but it hasn’t revealed any information on the basic CPU and GPU specs of the chip. Google’s Rick Osterloh would only tell The Verge that “the standard stuff people look at will be very competitive and the AI stuff will be...
Relyance AI, an early stage startup that is helping companies stay in compliance with privacy laws at the code level, announced a $25 million Series A today. At the same time, they revealed a previously unannounced $5 million seed round. Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures led the A round, while Unusual was sole lead on […]
Tempo has rolled out Apple Watch integration for its AI-powered home gym, giving users an easy way to track their heart rate during workouts without the need for a dedicated HR monitor. Upon syncing the wearable, users can also view other data on it, including how many calories they burned during studio classes, the total volume of weights they lifted and their ranking on the leaderboard.The company says 70 percent of its users own an iPhone, and 35 percent from that group has an Apple Watch. With that in mind, rolling out Apple integration for its product is a no-brainer. In addition to being...
As Chinese tech companies come under regulatory scrutiny at home, concerns and pressures are escalating among investors and domestic tech companies including China’s four big cloud companies, BATH (Baidu AI, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud and Huawei Cloud), according to an analyst report. Despite a series of antitrust and internet-related regulation crackdowns, the four leading cloud […]
Distilling the most impactful five to 10 minutes of content out of eight or more hours of raw video becomes a non-trivial time commitment. AI can help, but there are distinctions in methodologies.
Did you know Neural is taking the stage this fall? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of AI during TNW Conference 2021. Secure your online ticket now! GPT-3 can’t talk to dead people. It’s a bit ridiculous that I have to say that, but just in case you’re not entirely sure what the world’s most powerful AI-powered text generator can and can’t do, I thought I might prepare a handy guide to help you out. What GPT-3 can do: spit out meaningless text that often appears to have meaning by association, function as a pretty nifty…This story...
The COVID-19 pandemic caused a huge shift toward remote working, though many people are still eager to return to the office. As such, the future of work may be a hybrid environment. To help account for that, Microsoft Teams is getting a bunch of features to bolster hybrid meetings.Among these is the Cameo feature for presentations in PowerPoint Live. You'll be able to add your Teams camera feed to your deck, and you can choose how and where you want to appear in slides. Microsoft plans to roll out this tool early next year.MicrosoftAlso arriving in early 2022 is an AI-powered feature called...
AV8 supports entrepreneurs developing artificial intelligence-driven technologies in the areas of health, mobility, enterprise and deep-tech.
The dog poop avoiding feature is only available on the new Roomba j7+. | Image: iRobot Using a robot vacuum has always been a bit hazardous for pet owners. Leaving a robovac to do its thing in your absence can be a problem if your less-than-perfectly-trained dog or cat also does its thing while you’re out. A quick Google of “Roomba dog poop” gives you some idea of what the outcome can be, as unheeding robots with spinning brushes barrel into the mess and proceed to spread it liberally around the house. But now, Roomba-maker iRobot say it’s fixed this scatological problem. The company’...
“Conversational AI” startup PolyAI, based out of London, has raised $14 million in a funding round led by Silicon Valley’s Khosla Ventures, with participation from existing investors (Point72 Ventures, Amadeus Capital, Sands Capital Ventures, Passion Capital and Entrepreneur First). This follows their $12m Series A, and will provide resources for further US expansion beyond its […]
By now, we’re all aware of the danger deepfakes pose. These AI-generated videos of real looking people saying false things are regularly cited as one of the future’s biggest security concerns. And, rightly or wrongly, people are scared. But… that can’t be all there is to them, right? By its very nature, technology is neither good or bad — it’s merely a tool. Yes, deepfakes can be used to spread rampant misinformation, but what about the other side? And that’s what I wanted to find out: what’s the upside of deepfake technology? In order to answer this, I spoke with…This...
Steve Dent Contributor Steve Dent is an associate editor at Engadget. More posts by this contributor NVIDIA’s latest tech makes AI voices more expressive and realistic Sony’s ZV-E10 brings interchangeable lenses to its vlogging camera series After launching it in Go stores and then bringing it to larger Freshsupermarkets, Amazon’s cashierless “Just Walk Out” tech […]
The process to train algorithms to detect wear and tear would be different for factories that produce different products; after all, a shoe is not a smartphone is not a bicycle.
AI is everywhere in tech, and you can bet it will be a vital topic at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23. It’s the driving force behind just about everything from rockets, robotics and customer service to deep science and autonomous vehicles. It’s even changing the game for dystopian fiction writers. As always, every Disrupt […]
Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, a standalone VW brand responsible for the development and sales of light commercial vehicles, and Argo AI, an autonomous driving technology company, unveiled the first version of the ID Buzz AD (Autonomous Driving) on Sunday. The two companies shared plans to test and commercially scale the jointly developed, fully-electric self-driving van over […]
You read that right, folks. CrunchMatch, our AI-powered platform that simplifies finding and connecting with the people on your must-meet list, is now open for business. TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 takes place on September 21-23, but why wait to get your network mojo working? Granted, networking can sometimes feel like a contact sport, especially at a […]
Vic.ai, a startup that has built an AI-based platform it claims can ‘automate’ enterprise accounting, has raised a $50M Series B round led by ICONIQ Growth, with participation from existing investors GGV Capital, Cowboy Ventures and Costanoa Ventures, bringing total capital raised to $63 million. The company’s customers include HSB (Sweden’s largest real-estate management company), Intercom Inc. and HireQuest […]
We’ve had visionary investors onstage before, and we’ve had science fiction authors onstage — but never at the same time, let alone a pair who collaborated on a unique book of stories and essays that make an optimistic prediction of our AI-infused future. Sinovation founder Kai-Fu Lee and author of “Waste Tide” and others Chen […]
The voices on Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant and others still lack the rhythms and intonation that make speech human. NVIDIA has unveiled new tools that can capture those natural speech qualities.
As artificial intelligence continues to weave its way into more enterprise applications, a startup that has built a platform to help businesses, especially non-tech organizations, build more customized AI decision making tools for themselves has picked up some significant growth funding. Peak AI, a startup out of Manchester, England, that has built a “decision intelligence” […]
In the two years since Gatik AI came out of stealth, the autonomous vehicle startup has launched pilots with Walmart and Canadian retail giant Loblaw in its bid to prove that self-driving technology combined with box trucks is the secret economic sauce for hauling goods short distances. Now, the company is expanding into Texas — […]
AI and Machine Learning systems have proven a boon to scientific research in a variety of academic fields in recent years. They’ve assisted scientists in identifying genomic markers ripe for cutting-edge treatments, accelerating the discovery of potent new drugs and therapeutics, and even publishing their own research. Throughout this period, however, AI/ML systems have often been relegated to simply processing large data sets and performing brute force computations, not leading the research themselves.But Dr. Hiroaki Kitano, CEO of Sony Computer Science Laboratories, has plans for a “...
When it comes to contactless, automated supermarket shopping, Imagr is backing a vision-based approach. But unlike Amazon Go stores, which use cameras and sensors to monitor the shopper as they walk in and out without scanning or paying at checkout, this New Zealand-based company thinks the only images that should be captured and analyzed are […]
Zendesk is looking to grow its customer service capabilities, and today it announced the acquisition of early-stage artificial intelligence startup Cleverly. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed at this time and Cleverly has not been entirely public about the size of its funding. Founded in 2019, Cleverly is based in Lisbon, […]
AI-powered voice transcription service Otter.ai is expanding its Otter Assistant feature for Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Cisco Webex. Otter.ai first released this feature for Zoom users earlier this year in May. With this new integration, Otter Assistant can now join and transcribe meetings on more platforms, even if the Otter user is not attending […]
“Voice skins” have become a very popular feature for AI-based voice assistants, to help personalize some of the more anodyne aspects of helpful, yet also kind of bland and robotic, speaking voices you get on services like Alexa. Now a startup that is building voice skins for different companies to use across their services, and […]
A new report claims Peter Thiel's AI company Palantir had a glitch in its software used by the FBI that allowed unauthorized personnel to access private data for more than a year.
Meet Taktile, a new startup that is working on a machine learning platform for financial services companies. This isn’t the first company that wants to leverage machine learning for financial products. But Taktile wants to differentiate itself from competitors by making it way easier to get started and switch to AI-powered models. A few years […]
Using strategically focused AI, brands can identify what their audiences are doing when they are not engaged in a purchase or using a product or service. The secret here is understanding context.
Climate change is affecting farming all over the world, and solutions are seldom simple. But if you could plant crops that resisted the heat, cold, or drought instead of moving a thousand miles away, wouldn’t you? Avalo helps plants like these become a reality using AI-powered genome analysis that can reduce the time and money […]
Level AI, an early stage startup from a former member of the Alexa product team, wants to help companies process customer service calls faster by understanding the interactions they’re having with customers in real time. Today the company launched publicly, while announcing a $13 million Series A led by Battery Ventures with help from seed […]
It hasn’t even been a week since Tesla hosted its AI Day, a live-streamed event full of technical jargon meant to snare the choicest of AI and vision engineers to come work for Tesla and help the company achieve autonomous greatness, and already CEO Elon Musk is coming in with some hot takes about the […]
Developing new packaged foods and consumer goods can take a couple years as companies research, prototype and test products. In a society that runs on social media, however, people expect to see trends land on store shelves much more quickly. Founded in 2018, Ai Palette uses machine learning to help companies spot trends in real-time […]
Cerebras says its technology can run a neural network with 120 trillion connections—a hundred times what's achievable today.
Israel-based AI healthtech company, DiA Imaging Analysis, which is using deep learning and machine learning to automate analysis of ultrasound scans, has closed a $14 million Series B round of funding. Backers in the growth round, which comes three years after DiA last raised, include new investors Alchimia Ventures, Downing Ventures, ICON Fund, Philips and […]
Did you know Neural is taking the stage this fall? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of AI during TNW Conference 2021. Secure your online ticket now! In a first-in-human study, a minimally-invasive brain implant has elicited a sense of touch in the fingertips of two people. Researchers have previously electrically stimulated folds of the brain, called gyri, to restore some generalized sensation to the hand. The new technique targets the harder-to-reach grooves, known as sulci, to evoke feelings in the fingertips. Study co-author Chad Bouton, a professor...
Movies Anywhere, the streaming hub that pulls together films you purchase for a variety of digital stores, has added a feature many users have long been hoping for: lists. Not only will this help you better organize your library, the system will automatically generate personalized lists based on the movies you own. You should now see a My Lists tab next to My Movies.Organizing a Movies Anywhere library presents a different challenge to grouping titles together on the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. While subscribers of those services have access to the same content based on the country...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Once again, Google is headed back to the drawing board to rethink its healthcare strategy. As first reported by Business Insider, the tech giant is dissolving its single, unified Google Health division, founded in 2018, in favor of a distributed approach to building health products. The head of the division, David Feinberg, is leaving the company, while an unknown proportion of Google Health employees will be sent to other teams at Google (like Search and Fitbit) to work on specific services, according to Google’s AI head Jeff Dean. It’s a messy...
Y Combinator-backed Kapacity.io is on a mission to accelerate the decarbonization of buildings by using AI-generated efficiency savings to encourage electrification of commercial real estate — wooing buildings away from reliance on fossil fuels to power their heating and cooling needs. It does this by providing incentives to buildings owners/occupiers to shift to clean energy […]
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox. Hello readers: Welcome to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. I’m […]
We rely on experts all the time. If you need financial advice, you ask an expert. If you are sick, you visit a doctor, and as a juror you may listen to an expert witness. In the future, however, artificial intelligence (AI) might replace many of these people. In forensic science, the expert witness plays a vital role. Lawyers seek them out for their analysis and opinion on specialist evidence. But experts are human, with all their failings, and the role of expert witnesses has frequently been linked to miscarriages of justice. We’ve been investigating the potential for AI to…This story...
Let’s just dive right in. Tesla held its much-ballyhooed “AI Day” yesterday which, as Shift’s Cate Lawrence pointed out earlier, was little more than a job fair. There were, however, a couple of interesting reveals. The good news was the company’s new AI chips. According to the supposed specifications and obligatory hyperbole, Tesla’s AI chips will be the world’s most powerful. It’s at least plausible that the AI team at Tesla could pull off such a feat. The race to develop a better AI chip – currently dominated by Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and the like – is a perpetual game…...
After a dense presentation about the undeniably impressive work Tesla is doing with AI, the company’s self-anointed Technoking, Elon Musk, capped the evening by bringing out a dancer in a spandex suit. Behold, said Musk: my Tesla Bot.The dancer in the suit, he said, was the model for a new humanoid robot Tesla will produce in the near future. After the dubstep and applause had faded, the vaguest of briefing slides promised that the Tesla Bot will stand five feet, eight inches (1.7m), weigh 125 pounds (56kg), have “human-level hands,” and eliminate “dangerous, repetitive, boring tasks...
Poland-based healthtech AI startup Cardiomatics has announced a $3.2M seed raise to expand use of its electrocardiogram (ECG) reading automation technology. The round is led by Central and Eastern European VC Kaya, with Nina Capital, Nova Capital and Innovation Nest also participating. The seed raise also includes a $1M non-equity grant from the Polish National […]
On Thursday Tesla held Tesla AI day. If you were looking for a great big product showcase by the automaker, you’d be left disappointed. Beyond anything else, it was a job fair. Remember those days where you turn up to some event, put on a nametag, and talk to people sitting at tables about why you should work for their company? Well, Tesla did just this following a bunch of presentations. Elon Musk admitted last month on Twitter: “Convincing the best AI talent to join Tesla is the sole goal.” Convincing the best AI talent to join Tesla is the sole goal…This story continues at...
Elon Musk has done it again! The “Technoking” of Tesla has announced another product that billionaires fantasize about: humanoids. At the company‘s AI day, he revealed that the car-making firm is making a prototype humanoid, and it’ll be called Tesla Bot — the internal codename of the bot will be Optimus. Shocking. Musk claimed that Tesla is “arguably the biggest robotics company” because its cars are “semi-sentient robots on wheels.” Weird flex, but okay. Credit: TeslaBasic specifications of a Tesla bot He added that using its experience of building these cars, with...
Elon Musk wants Tesla to be seen as “much more than an electric car company.” On Thursday’s Tesla AI Day, the CEO described Tesla as a company with “deep AI activity in hardware on the inference level and on the training level” that can be used down the line for applications beyond self-driving cars, including […]
Tesla is building a humanoid robot simply called the Tesla Bot, Elon Musk has revealed at the automaker's (and, perhaps, soon-to-be-robotmaker's) AI Day event. It's intended to be friendly, he said, and be slow and weak enough that you can outrun and overpower it — you know, just in case the robot uprising does happen in the future. The Tesla Bot will run on an artificial intelligence system, not unlike the company's Autopilot technology for its vehicles. It will be designed to do various dangerous and repetitive tasks for humans and navigate our world without having to...
Remember that weird Will Smith movie about robots? Yeah, neither do we. But Elon Musk does. Tesla is developing a 5’8” Tesla Bot, with a prototype expected sometime next year. The news comes during Tesla’s inaugural AI Day, which was streamed on the company’s website Thursday night. The bot is being proposed as a non-automotive […]
The truth is, we are still early when it comes to data transformation. The success of tech giants that put data at the core of their business models set off a spark that is only starting to take off.
Imagine you’re having friends over for lunch and plan to order a pepperoni pizza. You recall Amy mentioning that Susie had stopped eating meat. You try calling Susie, but when she doesn’t pick up, you decide to play it safe and just order a margherita pizza instead. People take for granted the ability to deal with situations like these on a regular basis. In reality, in accomplishing these feats, humans are relying on not one but a powerful set of universal abilities known as common sense. As an artificial intelligence researcher, my work is part of a broad effort to…This story...
It’s hard to believe it now, but just four short years ago articles on quantum computing were a bit of a dud when it came to catching the attention of mainstream news consumers. Oh what a difference a few years can make. You can’t open the science section on Google or Apple News nowadays without seeing a near-equal split between space and quantum physics stories. The world’s fallen in love with speculative science again thanks to quantum computing and artificial intelligence, and I couldn’t be happier. I believe quantum computing has the ability to impact our species in a way…This...
The Pixel 6 is just around the corner. But before Google brings it and its Tensor mobile chip to market, the company is updating its entry level offering with the $449 Pixel 5a. The whole point of the “a” family is to offer the basics at a reasonable price without sacrificing too much of the Pixel experience in the process. That means a relatively clean version of Android with a bunch of AI tricks and a heavy focus on photography.But apparently Google feels like it more or less nailed that formula with the Pixel 4a 5G because the 5a is basically the same phone. (Note: The Pixel 5a is not a...
Photo Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge Argo AI CEO Bryan Salesky on a new partnership with Lyft and setting realistic expectations for self-driving cars Continue reading…
I sometimes fantasize about hanging an enormous painted portrait of yours truly on my bedroom wall. Visitors would be forced to genuflect before the picture and leave a gift beneath it as a token of respect. Unfortunately, I have neither the money to buy artworks nor the skills to paint one myself. But those barriers will no longer stop me from fulfilling my dream. A team of researchers has developed a tool that will paint your portrait for you. This is the original pic & the final painting! pic.twitter.com/6hYC6HqQA3 — clem ???? (@ClementDelangue) August 11, 2021 Dubbed Paint...
ThirdAI is building tools to speed up deep learning technology without the need for hardware like graphics processing units.
Chip design is a long slog of trial and error, taking years to bring a design to market. Motivo, a five year old startup from a chip industry veteran is creating software to speed up chip design from years to months using AI. Today the company announced a $12.5 million Series A. Intel Capital led […]
The Google subsidiary solved a fundamental problem in biology but didn’t promptly share their solution. So a University of Washington team tried to recreate it.
OpenAI has released a new version of Codex, an AI system that translates written language into code. The company unveiled the upgraded software on Tuesday. It looks like a seriously powerful programming tool — and a slightly scary one. In a live demo, OpenAI used the system to convert written English commands into simple games and websites. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, said the system is merely a rudimentary version of what’s possible. But he expects it to quickly improve: I think Codex gets close to what most of us really want from computers — we say what we want, and…This story...
At first glance, a recently granted South African patent relating to a “food container based on fractal geometry” seems fairly mundane. The innovation in question involves interlocking food containers that are easy for robots to grasp and stack. On closer inspection, the patent is anything but mundane. That’s because the inventor is not a human being – it is an artificial intelligence (AI) system called DABUS. DABUS (which stands for “device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified sentience”) is an AI system created by Stephen Thaler, a pioneer in the field of AI and programming...
Prisoners across the US could soon be subjected to a high-risk application of automated surveillance. A congressional committee is pressing the Department of Justice to explore the federal use of AI to analyze inmate’s phone calls. The panel has called for further research into the tech’s potential to prevent suicide and violent crime, Reuters reports. The system transcribes phone conversations, analyzes the tone of voice, and detects certain words or phrases that are pre-programmed by officials. Bill Partridge, a police chief in Alabama, where the system is already used, said officers have...
OpenAI has already made some big changes to Codex, the AI-powered coding assistant the company announced last month. The system now accepts commands in plain English and outputs live, working code, letting someone build a game or web app without so much as naming a variable. A few lucky coders (and, one assumes, non-coders) will […]
Xiaomi has today announced the CyberDog, an open-source quadruped robot intended for developers to “build upon” and create applications for. The machine, which resembles a beefier version of Boston Dynamics’ Spot, is a showcase for Xiaomi’s engineering know-how, including its proprietary servo motors.XiaomiRunning the show is a version of NVIDIA’s Jetson Xavier NX, which has been dubbed the world’s smallest AI supercomputer. In terms of being able to experience the world, CyberDog has 11 sensors over its body, including touch and ultrasonic sensors, cameras and GPS to help it “...
Roughly a year ago, Latent AI, a now three-year-old, Menlo Park, Ca.-based startup, pitched a handful of investors during TechCrunch’s Battlefield competition. It didn’t win that contest, but that hasn’t kept it from winning the interest of investors elsewhere. It just closed on $15 million in Series A funding in a round co-led by Future […]
AI is not a magic wand that will right all the world’s wrongs. But it can help businesses plan for problems in advance and respond to them appropriately if they happen.
We have an opportunity to apply AI and machine learning to propel the future and do good. That begins with diverse teams that reflect the full diversity and rich perspectives of our world.
With most popular modern video games, there’s a huge gap between being a good player and a great one. A casual player might be able to hold their own against other casual players, only for a random pro to wander by and chew through everyone like they’re somehow playing with a different set of rules. […]
Escooter providers are forever seeking ways to facilitate, promote, and enforce safe and responsible ridership. Companies are increasingly turning to AI to aid their efforts. Uber recently published a patent using cameras, mapping, and custom AI processors to detect non-compliant rider behavior such as parking outside designed areas. Uber can then notify users of improper parking or issue penalties. Get free rides for sticking a helmet on your head Veoride uses image recognition in their user app to track and reward riders wearing a helmet. Uber is not the first company to use AI to control...
After being postponed a year due to the pandemic, the 2021 Tokyo Olympics are cause for great excitement. We’ve waited impatiently to once again, behold the impressive display of sporting skills and competitive endeavors from the top athletes in the world. But an additional factor to get excited about this year is the introduction of many new technologies used to enhance the whole experience. Being held in Japan, arguably one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, it’s no surprise that they pulled out all the stops. Multi-lingual, AI robots are greeting visitors at the...
The typical Australian will change careers five to seven times during their professional lifetime, by some estimates. And this is likely to increase as new technologies automate labor, production is moved abroad, and economic crises unfold. Jobs disappearing is not a new phenomenon – have you seen an elevator operator recently? – but the pace of change is picking up, threatening to leave large numbers of workers unemployed and unemployable. New technologies also create new jobs, but the skills they require do not always match the old jobs. Successfully moving between jobs requires making...
Two decades after businesses started deploying AI solutions, one can argue they’ve made little progress in achieving significant gains in efficiency relative to the hype that drove expectations.
MIT researchers have used AI to predict which technologies are rapidly improving — and which ones are overhyped. In a new study, the team quantitatively assessed the future potential of 97% of the US patent system. The fastest-improving domains were predominantly software-related. They then converted their findings into an online system in which users can enter keywords to find improvement forecasts for specific technologies. Their research could give entrepreneurs, researchers, investors, and policy-makers clues about the future opportunities in tech. “Our method provides predictions of...
Zeni’s AI-powered finance concierge platform offers bookkeeping, accounting, tax and CFO services, essentially becoming a back-end controller for startups.
There’s no secret that Facebook loves ads. It has stuffed the blue app and different features of Instagram with them. And the company has contemplated many times inserting ads in WhatsApp. Now the company is trying to make a match of an odd pair: encryption and ads. According to a report from The Information, the tech giant is building a team of AI researchers to explore possibilities to analyze data without breaking encryption. This will allow Facebook to insert targeted ads on WhatsApp, and let me highlight here that end-to-end encryption is one of the app’s most marketed features. And...
In the next year and a half, we’re going to see increasing adoption of technologies which will trigger a broader industry shift, much as Tesla triggered the transition to EVs.
Twitter is applying the bug bounty model to machine learning. The micro-blogging site has launched the industry’s first algorithmic bias bounty competition. The challenge was created to identify potential harms in Twitter’s notorious image cropping algorithm, which was largely abandoned after exhibiting gender- and race-based biases. The company now wants to incentivize the community to find further unidentified risks of the algorithm. The winners of the challenge will receive cash prizes of up to $3,500. The contest is a first in the field of AI biases, but bounty programs have a long...
Argo AI, the autonomous vehicle technology startup backed by Ford and VW, has landed a permit in California that will allow the company to give people free rides in its self-driving vehicles on the state’s public roads. The California Public Utilities Commission issued the so-called Drivered AV pilot permit earlier this month, according to the […]
AI platform Prometeo, the team that won the 2019 Call for Code challenge, launched its open-source Pyrrha solution in partnership with IBM, Samsung, and The Linux Foundation. This is going to save lives. Up front: Pyrrha is an open-source solution developed by a team comprised of a firefighter, a nurse, and a group of developers. It gives commanders in the field the ability to monitor personnel safety at a glance. This starts by equipping firefighters with a wearable device that detects toxins. Credit: Prometeo / IBM Per a post on the IBM developer blog: The values from the device are…...
In the past, we’ve seen doctors use AI software to detect brain tumors, kidney illness and various cancers. Now, researchers from IBM and Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) say they’ve developed a program that can predict how the symptoms of a Parkinson’s disease patient will progress in terms of both timing and severity. In The Lancet Digital Health journal, they claim the software could transform how doctors help patients manage their symptoms by allowing them to better predict how the disease will progress.“Our aim is to use AI to help with patient management and clinical trial design...
Industrial robotics are big and heavy — and in some cases, legitimately dangerous. They’re also extremely difficult to train — particularly if you plan to implement them for tasks outside of their purpose-built intentions. There’s huge opportunity for the right AI/software company to come along and help make the bulky systems intended for things like […]
One year after voice-based AI technology company ConverseNow raised a $3.3 million seed round, the company is back with a cash infusion of $15 million in Series A funding.
Voice-based and other personal assistant apps — which use natural language and hefty AI engines in the backend to source information to address your various questions, do your e-commerce bidding, or control one electronic device or another in your home — have been around for years, but too often they have come up short when […]
The first Halo Infinite multiplayer technical preview will start tomorrow, July 29th. The beta will run until Sunday August 1st, offering a short chance for those invited to test Halo Infinite’s multiplayer aspects. It’s the first of many technical previews for Halo Infinite, as Microsoft prepares to launch the free multiplayer game mode later this year. The first preview will include testing gameplay against AI bots, with a bot arena to “gather feedback on Bot behavior and online performance,” according to 343 Industries. This arena will include the slayer mode across three maps, and a...
In May of last year, Covariant announced that it had raised a $40 million Series B. It was a health sum of money for the young company, bringing its total funding up to $67 million. Just a little over a year later, the Berkeley-based AI startup is adding another $80 million to its coffers, riding […]
With Microsoft now being an investor in OpenAI the field now more open for new insurgents into the open-source AI arena. Now a German company hopes to take on the next AI mantle and produce something akin to the success of the GPT-3 AI model. German AI startup Aleph Alpha has now raised €23 million […]
We've seen helmets and AI that can spot brain tumors, but a new hard hat can actually treat them, too. Researchers used a helmet that generates a magnetic field to shrink a deadly tumor by a third.
Almost half of dating app users would trust AI to find them a match, according to new research from cybersecurity firm Kaspersky. Their trust could put them in danger, however. Kaspersky also warned that many dating apps have major privacy risks. Up front: The mass adoption of dating apps means people now find potential partners through algorithmic recommendations. To investigate the tech’s effect on relationships, Kaspersky commissioned Sapio to survey more than 18,000 dating app users from six continents. The majority of respondents perceived the impact positively. Some 44% said they’d...
LiveControl is an interesting company. Its mission is to take the incredibly complex and ridiculously expensive world of video production and distill it to a format that just about anyone can use and afford. And, because it’s 2021, that means it’s an AI startup. We love startups here at Neural, but the vast majority of pitches we get come from crappy companies pushing pie-in-the-sky misrepresentations of what predictive algorithms and computer vision can accomplish. It’s refreshing when we come across a little company with a big AI idea that seems genuinely helpful. LiveControl provides...
DeepMind, the UK-based, Google sister-company, has released a groundbreaking map of human protein structures developed with its breakthrough AI systems. That’s right, the company that taught AI to defeat humanity’s greatest chess and Go masters has turned its attentions to the greater good. And scientifically speaking, this is really good. What is protein-mapping and what do board games have to do with any of this? It’s really complex, but here’s the gist: proteins are the worker bees inside living cells. They do all sorts of stuff from maintaining your fluid balance to repairing...
Subways have never been my favorite mode of transit, but the onset of the pandemic made them even less appealing. Sixteen months later, Google Maps may finally have found a way to lure me back underground. The service is now piloting the option to see live data on the crowdedness of individual train carriages. Up front: Google initially launched transit crowdedness predictions in 2019, when people were more worried about finding a seat than catching a potentially fatal infection. The feature uses a combination of AI, historical location trends, and user contributions to estimate the seating...
The facial-recognition start-up closed a Series B financing round. It faces multiple lawsuits challenging its business model.
DNSFilter, an artificial intelligence startup that provides DNS protection to enterprises, has secured $30 million in Series A funding from Insight Partners. DNSFilter, as its name suggests, offers DNS-based web content filtering and threat protection. Unlike the majority of its competitors, which includes the likes of Palo Alto Networks and Webroot, the startup uses proprietary AI […]
Looking back, narrowly focusing on a branch of applied science undergoing a breakthrough paradigm shift that hadn’t yet reached the business world changed everything.
AI has set its destructive sights on one of life’s greatest pleasures: visiting galleries. An Italian museum has started using AI-powered cameras to measure the “attraction value” of works of art. The ShareArt devices collect visual data on spectators, such as how long they look at a painting and where on the canvas their attention is focused. “Thanks to simple data elaboration, an observer’s gaze can be translated into a graphic,” Stefano Ferriani, one of the researchers behind the project, told Bloomberg CityLab. “We can detect where most of peoples’ attention is...
Anytime “Skynet” is trending on social media, and there isn’t a movie about a gubernatorial time-traveling robot being announced, it can only mean one thing: the mainstream saw a robot sneeze or something and everyone’s running around in circles screaming that the sky is falling. Imagine what AI powered machines will be able to do in the next 5-10 years. Boston Dynamics machines flawlessly and soulfully dancing in rhythm. pic.twitter.com/1PHmurRo1k — Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) July 17, 2021 Why is this scary? I feel like I missed a memo. Did alien overlords come down and declare that...
You’ve just sat down to dinner, and your wearable device reminds you to get up and get in your steps for the day. Maybe the app has a point, but odds are, you’ll push the notification to the side. The founders of Sweetch, an Israeli company creating its own AI-driven behavior change app, are betting […]
Kdan Mobile, a company that provides a wide range of cloud-based software, including AI-based tech for organizing documents, has raised a $16 million Series B. The round was led by South Korea-based Dattoz Partners, which will also take a seat on Kdan Mobile, and included participation from WI Harper Group, Taiwania Capital and Golden Asia […]
Blackstone is acquiring a majority stake in Bangalore and San Francisco-headquartered edtech startup Simplilearn for $250 million. Simplilearn operates an eponymous online bootcamp to help people learn data science, AI, machine learning, cloud computing and other skills that are in demand in the market. The startup has partnerships with several universities and colleges including IIT […]
IBM today announced a new machine-learning, end-to-end pipeline starter kit for its Cloud Native Toolkit. The big idea here is that wrangling the myriad open-source and enterprise ML and AI platforms and solutions into production can be a challenging prospect. Per IBM‘s developer blog: Moving an application from a Jupyter notebook to a production environment requires numerous components to work together. These components cover a wide range of tasks that developers and administrators have to manage. Developers can spend their time building, training, and deploying models or they can spend all...
Photo: CNN In a new documentary, Roadrunner, about the life and tragic death of Anthony Bourdain, there are a few lines of dialogue in Bourdain’s voice that he might not have ever said out loud.Filmmaker Morgan Neville used AI technology to digitally re-create Anthony Bourdain’s voice and have the software synthesize the audio of three quotes from the late chef and television host, Neville told the New Yorker.The deepfaked voice was discovered when the New Yorker’s Helen Rosner asked how the filmmaker got a clip of Bourdain’s voice reading an email he had sent to a friend. Neville said...
DeepMind stunned the biology world late last year when its AlphaFold2 AI model predicted the structure of proteins (a common and very difficult problem) so accurately that many declared the decades-old problem “solved.” Now researchers claim to have leapfrogged DeepMind the way DeepMind leapfrogged the rest of the world, with RoseTTAFold, a system that does […]
Influencer marketing is one of the fastest-growing and one of the most impactful media channels today. There’s a growing ad-blocking movement and key demographics are spending less time in front of TVs. Marketers have now realized that their customers trust the recommendations of people they relate with. However, despite this being an impactful channel, brand […]
Easy Eat AI, a Singapore-based startup that wants to “transform restaurants into technology companies,” announced today it has raised $5 million in funding. Easy Eat AI offers an operating system for restaurants that lets them digitize all parts of their business, from inventory and customer orders to delivery, and gain AI-based data analytics to improve […]
When opposing Libyan forces signed a cease-fire last year, it wasn’t the savvy of politicians or the diplomacy of ambassadors who brokered the peace. It was the United Nations and a relatively unknown AI startup. That startup is called Remesh, and it builds tools that allow organizations to conduct surveys in real-time with more than 1,000 people simultaneously. Basically, the system lets you surface insights from a live audience. For example: if you wanted to poll 100 people about the taste of a new candy, you’d traditionally send them a questionnaire and then tally the answers to see what...
Android has been around for over a decade, yet for some reason, a feature as seemingly simple as auto-rotation is still kind of slow and janky. It’s especially annoying when lying down or using the phone from unusual angles. I’ve gotten used to it, but whenever I get to try an iPhone or iPad, I get a little jealous of the comparatively smooth rotation. It seems that Android 12 is finally ready to tackle this problem head-on… literally. Google’s solution to unreliable autorotate is to track your head using the front-facing camera. Per Google’s update notes: We’ve enhanced Android’s...
Wildfires in the West can lead to power outages. There are around 20 federally qualified health centers in the areas touched by the Lava, Tennant, and Salt fires, which started in Northern California at the end of June. The centers are part of the state’s healthcare safety net and offer primary care to low-income patients in the area. Despite the fire risk to the facilities, none of those 20 centers had backup generators, says Andrew Schroeder, who runs analytics programs at the humanitarian aid organization Direct Relief. That’s key information for officials and aid groups: if the power...
Aidoc, an artificial intelligence company that develops triage and analysis software, is about to double its funding. On Tuesday, the company announced a round of $66 million. Before that the company had raised about $67 million in its five-year lifetime. Aidoc develops “decision support” software based on artificial intelligence. This software can read images like […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Discord has purchased a company working on AI tools to help detect harassment online. The company, Sentropy, monitors online networks for abuse and harassment, then offers users a way to block problematic users and filter out messages they don’t want to see. Its first product, Sentropy Protect, was initially focused on helping users clean up their Twitter feeds.The company is now shutting down its independent tools and joining Discord, where it plans to help the hugely popular chat app “expand and evolve its [trust and safety] capabilities.”It could...
The online chat platform Discord is buying Sentropy, a company that makes AI-powered software to detect and remove online harassment and hate. Discord currently uses a “multilevel” approach to moderation, relying on an in-house human moderation team as well as volunteer mods and admins to create ground rules for individual servers. A Trust and Safety […]
ZoomInfo announced this morning it intends to acquire conversational sales intelligence tool Chorus.AI for $575 million. Shares of ZoomInfo are unchanged in pre-market trading following the news, per Yahoo Finance data. Sales intelligence, Chorus’s market, is a hot space that uses AI to “listen” to sales conversations to help improve interactions between salespeople and customers. […]
If Euro 2020 broke your heart, EA is offering a rebound relationship: a new edition of FIFA with an AI-powered gameplay overhaul. The gaming giant is heavily plugging the so-called “HyperMotion” tech, which uses motion capture and machine learning to generate new graphics. The system was unveiled on Sunday in a shaky cam trailer for FIFA 22, which is out on October 1. HyperMotion integrates motion capture of 22 professional footballers playing at high intensity. An algorithm learns from almost 9 million frames of capture footage to write new gameplay animations in real-time. EA describes...
Elon Musk had initially promised the fabled Full Self-Driving Beta version 9 back in August 2018. And then again in 2019. Well, if you’re a Tesla fan, you already know that none of these commitments were fulfilled. So when, earlier this month, Musk swore on Twitter that the “FSD Beta 9 is shipping soon,” it came as a surprise that he actually held true to his word. Haha, FSD 9 beta is shipping soon, I swear! Generalized self-driving is a hard problem, as it requires solving a large part of real-world AI. Didn’t expect it to be so hard, but…This story continues at The Next WebOr...
Misconceptions about AI in the workplace have long been a barrier to widespread adoption — but companies experiencing labor shortages should consider where it can make their employees' lives better.
Robots have a hard time improvising, and encountering an unusual surface or obstacle usually means an abrupt stop or hard fall. But researchers at Facebook AI have created a new model for robotic locomotion that adapts in real time to any terrain it encounters, changing its gait on the fly to keep trucking when it […]
Aim bots are nothing new in the world of competitive online gaming. But the possible existence of a virtually undetectable new machine learning-powered cheat for consoles has the gaming community in a bit of a fervor as of late. Up front: We can’t confirm its existence, but the Anti-Cheat Police Department Twitter account posted footage it says is a legitimate AI-powered cheating software. Ladies and gentlemen, I present you the next generation of cheating now available on console, and has been for a while but lately its been becoming more popular and more of a trend, consoles are no longer&#...
By streamlining the process to fail fast on infeasible projects, teams can significantly increase their overall success with AI initiatives.
The Pentagon yesterday announced it was scuttling its long-doomed “Project JEDI,” a cloud-services AI contract that was awarded to Microsoft in 2019. Up front: Project JEDI is a big deal. The US military needs a reliable cloud-service platform from which to operate its massive AI infrastructure. Unfortunately the project was mishandled from the very beginning. Now, two years later, the Pentagon‘s calling for a reboot: Today, the Department of Defense (DoD) canceled the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) Cloud solicitation and initiated contract termination procedures. The...
OpenAI has once again made the headlines, this time with Copilot, an AI-powered programming tool jointly built with GitHub. Built on top of GPT-3, OpenAI’s famous language model, Copilot is an autocomplete tool that provides relevant (and sometimes lengthy) suggestions as you write code. Copilot is currently available to select applicants as an extension in Visual Studio Code, the flagship programming tool of Microsoft, GitHub’s parent company. While the AI-powered code generator is still a work in progress, it provides some interesting hints about the business of large language models and...
Deep neural networks will move past their shortcomings without help from symbolic artificial intelligence, three pioneers of deep learning argue in a paper published in the July issue of the Communications of the ACM journal. In their paper, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun, recipients of the 2018 Turing Award, explain the current challenges of deep learning and how it differs from learning in humans and animals. They also explore recent advances in the field that might provide blueprints for the future directions for research in deep learning. Titled “Deep Learning for AI...
Nirman Dave’s two startups are very different, but both have a DIY spirit. The first, called CircuiTricks and founded during his gap year after high school, created kits to teach students about electronics and physics. Now Dave is chief executive officer of Obviously AI, a no code AI/ML platform that enables people without technical backgrounds […]
What is the technology stack you need to create fully autonomous vehicles? Companies and researchers are divided on the answer to that question. Approaches to autonomous driving range from just cameras and computer vision to a combination of computer vision and advanced sensors. Tesla has been a vocal champion for the pure vision-based approach to autonomous driving, and in this year’s Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), its chief AI scientist Andrej Karpathy explained why. Speaking at CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Driving, Karpathy, who has been leading Tesla...
Don’t get me wrong. Python’s popularity is still backed by a rock-solid community of computer scientists, data scientists and AI specialists. But if you’ve ever been at a dinner table with these people, you also know how much they rant about the weaknesses of Python. From being slow to requiring excessive testing, to producing runtime errors despite prior testing — there’s enough to be pissed off about. Which is why more and more programmers are adopting other languages — the top players being Julia, Go, and Rust. Julia is great for mathematical and technical tasks, while Go is...
Kevin Novak joined Uber as its 21st employee its seventh engineer in 2011, and by 2014, he was the company’s head of data science. He transitioned out of the company in late 2017, after Travis Kalanick had been replaced as CEO by Dara Khosrowshahi. But by then, he’d already begun spending weekends and evenings actively […]
Photo by FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images The World Health Organization released a guidance document outlining six key principles for the ethical use of artificial intelligence in health. Twenty experts spent two years developing the guidance, which marks the first consensus report on AI ethics in healthcare settings. The report highlights the promise of health AI, and its potential to help doctors treat patients — particularly in under-resourced areas. But it also stresses that technology is not a quick fix for health challenges, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, and...
To train a robot to navigate a house, you either need to give it a lot of real time in a lot of real houses, or a lot of virtual time in a lot of virtual houses. The latter is definitely the better option, and Facebook and Matterport are working together to make thousands of […]
As I’ve taken to online grocery shopping over the pandemic, I’ve always wondered by supermarkets didn’t offer simple ‘recipe’ features would have automatically collected up items for a homemade meal, automatically. It seemed an opportunity missed. But it is missed no more. Lollipop AI, the new British online grocery marketplace, is launching its public beta […]
Photo: GitHub GitHub and OpenAI have launched a technical preview of a new AI tool called Copilot, which lives inside the Visual Studio Code editor and autocompletes code snippets.Copilot does more than just parrot back code it’s seen before, according to GitHub. It instead analyzes the code you’ve already written and generates new matching code, including specific functions that were previously called. Examples on the project’s website include automatically writing the code to import tweets, draw a scatterplot, or grab a Goodreads rating.It works best with Python, JavaScript, TypeScript...
GitHub has unveiled a new product that leverages artificial intelligence to help you write code more efficiently. Named GitHub Copilot, today’s new product can suggest lines of code and even sometimes entire functions. GitHub has partnered with OpenAI to develop this tool. It doesn’t replace developers, it’s just a tool that should improve productivity and […]
JFrog, the company best known for a platform that helps developers continuously manage software delivery and updates, is making a deal to help it expand its presence and expertise in an area that has become increasingly connected to DevOps: security. The company is acquiring Vdoo, which has built an AI-based platform that can be used […]
Last week, I wrote an analysis of “Reward Is Enough,” a paper by scientists at DeepMind. As the title suggests, the researchers hypothesize that the right reward is all you need to create the abilities associated with intelligence, such as perception, motor functions, and language. This is in contrast with AI systems that try to replicate specific functions of natural intelligence such as classifying images, navigating physical environments, or completing sentences. The researchers go as far as suggesting that with well-defined reward, a complex environment, and the right reinforcement...
Welcome to Neural’s beginner’s guide to AI. This long-running series should provide you with a very basic understanding of what AI is, what it can do, and how it works. In addition to the article you’re currently reading, the guide contains articles on (in order published) neural networks, computer vision, natural language processing, algorithms, artificial general intelligence, the difference between video game AI and real AI, the difference between human and machine intelligence, and ethics. In this edition of the guide, we’ll take a glance at global AI policy. The US, China...
This week, we'll explore a number of projects aimed at identifying or confirming bias or cheating behaviors in machine learning systems, or failures in the data that support them.
War is coming. Later this year the US military will fight its most advanced war campaign ever as it faces off against a fictionalized version of China. The battles will be fake, but the results should provide the government with everything it needs to justify the mass development of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS). The era of government-controlled killer robots is upon us. Up front: US military leaders have increasingly come out in support of taking humans out of the loop when it comes to AI-controlled weapons. And there’s nothing in the current US policy to stop that from happening...
It’s no surprise that the coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we shop, especially when it comes to groceries. Grocery delivery apps experienced a record number of downloads in March 2020, and by the following month, Walmart Grocery (which is now integrated into the Walmart app) surpassed Amazon as the No. 1 shopping app on […]
Margins from all four sides were removed decades after the painting was completed. | Video: Rijksmuseum A mixture of artificial intelligence and painstaking research has allowed researchers to restore Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Night Watch to its original size, the Associated Press reports, centuries after it was trimmed down to fit in a smaller wall. The work was conducted as part of the Operation Night Watch project, and the results are being exhibited in the Honor Gallery in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, which sees the original painting flanked by printed strips filling in the lost sections.The...
Image: EA Battlefield 2042, coming this fall, will offer the series’ largest skirmishes yet; its “All-Out Warfare” mode can fit 128 simultaneous players in a single match on PS5, Xbox Series X and PC. But you won’t always have 128 humans in each match — EA will be backfilling those servers with bots to keep games populated, the company confirms to The Verge, and there’s currently no plan to let you turn that off.Humans will take priority, so you might never encounter an AI soldier at peak playtimes — and if you truly hate bots, you’ll be able to play other modes. But the main...
AI has been filling in the gaps for illustrators and photographers for years now — literally, it intelligently fills gaps with visual content. But the latest tools are aimed at letting an AI give artists a hand from the earliest, blank-canvas stages of a piece. Nvidia’s new Canvas tool lets the creator rough in a […]
NVIDIA has launched Canvas, a new app that can turn doodles into photorealistic landscape images.
Time is your most valuable asset — as the saying goes — and today a startup called Memory.ai, which is building AI-based productivity tools to help you with your own time management, is announcing some funding to double down on its ambitions: it wants not only to help manage your time, but to, essentially, provide […]
KeepTruckin, a hardware and software developer that helps trucking fleets manage vehicle, cargo and driver safety, has just raised $190 million in a Series E funding round, which puts the company’s valuation at $2 billion, according to CEO Shoaib Makani. G2 Venture Partners, which just raised a $500 million fund to help modernize existing industries, […]
The AI-powered defense company founded by tech iconoclast Palmer Luckey has landed a $450 million round of investment that values the startup at $4.6 billion just four years in. In April, reports suggested that the company was on the hunt for fresh investment and headed for a valuation between four and five billion, up from […]
What do you imagine when you think about artificial intelligence? For many of us, the question conjures up images from movies, novels, posters, media reports, and stock libraries. But these visualizations are often risibly unrealistic depictions of robots and AI. Just check out these beauties: You’re a screen. If serial killers made sexbots… Without a blackboard, how could robots master geometry? Pull me in, I’ve had enough. A fittingly dreadful headline for a horrifying image. “It’s like looking in a mirror. Only… not.” These images might make us laugh...
I spoke to Refraction AI co-founder/CTO Matthew Johnson-Roberson on the occasion of the Michigan startup’s $4.2 million seed raise. This week we posted a Q&A where he answers a wider range of topics about the delivery robotics company, and this bit jumped out at me: It still boggles my mind that nobody has tried to […]
Automating insurance claims is a big business, and the world of AI is coming at it ‘full pelt’. The latest is Akur8, an insurtech automating insurance platform whose ‘Transparent AI’ product is trying to eat into the incumbent large business of Willis Towers watson, among others. It’s now closed a Series B funding round of […]
As the insurance industry adjusts to life in the 21st century (heh), an AI startup that has built computer vision tools to enable remote damage appraisals is announcing a significant round of growth funding. Tractable, which works with automotive insurance companies to let users take and submit photos of damaged cars that are then “read” […]
Hey, the AI is doing the best it can!hey Cortana, is Windows 11 real? pic.twitter.com/GcbBdNL0NZ— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) June 16, 2021 Continue reading…
Vianai Systems, an AI startup founded by former chief executive of Indian IT services giant Infosys, said on Wednesday it has raised $140 million in a round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The two-year-old startup said a number of industry luminaries also participated in the new round, which brings its total to-date raise to […]
By its nature, sales one of the most social faces of a business, so it’s no surprise that there are tools being built for sales teams that are tapping into some of the most interesting dynamics of the world of social networking, and that the startups that are doing this most successfully are making a […]
While Amazon continues to expand its self-service, computer-vision-based grocery checkout technology by bringing it to bigger stores, an AI startup out of Israel that’s built something to rival it has picked up funding and a new strategic investor as a customer. Trigo, which has produced a computer vision system that includes both camera hardware and […]
Scale CEO Alex Wang joined us at TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility 2021 to discuss his company's role in the autonomous driving industry and how it's changed in the five years since its founding.
Refraction AI calls itself the ‘Goldilocks’ of robotic delivery. The Ann Arbor-based company recently raised a $4.2-million seed round and expanded operations to Austin.
Elisity, a self-styled innovator that provides behavior-based enterprise cybersecurity, has raised $26 million in Series A funding. The funding round was co-led by Two Bear Capital and AllegisCyber Capital, the latter of which has invested in a number of cybersecurity startups including Panaseer, with previous seed investor Atlantic Bridge also participating. Elisity, which is led […]
Fraud protection startup nSure.ai has raised $6.8 million in seed funding, led by DisruptiveAI, Phoenix Insurance, AXA-backed venture builder Kamet, Moneta Seeds and private investors. The round will help the company bolster the predictive AI and machine learning algorithms that power nSure.ai’s “first of its kind” fraud protection platform. Prior to this round, the company […]
Hello and welcome back to The Station, a weekly newsletter dedicated to all the ways people and packages move (today and in the future) from Point A to Point B. Welp, the mobility event is over and we had loads of interesting interviews and anyone with an Extra Crunch subscription can access the videos. For […]
A number of startups (eg, here, here, here and here) have fashioned themselves as the “Stripe for identity verification”, providing an easy way for developers to integrate ID authentication into a platform. Today, Stripe is stepping in to fill that need itself: the company is launching a new product called Stripe Identity — a self-serve […]
Dataiku is going downstream with a new product today called Dataiku Online. As the name suggests, Dataiku Online is a fully managed version of Dataiku. It lets you take advantage of the data science platform without going through a complicated setup process that involves a system administrator and your own infrastructure. If you’re not familiar […]
Eightfold AI, a startup which uses deep learning and artificial intelligence to help companies find, recruit and retain workers, said on Thursday it has raised $220 million in a new round as it looks to accelerate its growth. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led the Series E round of the five-year-old startup, which is now valued […]
Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.
AI rounds are particularly hot or at least as hot as the larger SaaS market, which is itself enjoying historically rich multiples are more capital pours into the aggregate startup world.
The European Union has been digging into the competition implications of AI-powered voice assistants and other Internet of Things (IoT) connected technologies for almost a year. Today it’s put out a first report discussing potential concerns that EU lawmakers say will help inform their wider digital policymaking in the coming years. A major piece of […]
Facebook is asking for the AI community’s help in bringing low NetHack — one of the most notoriously difficult titles in gaming history — and maybe help computers learn to simulate instances faster using fewer resources.
Proving that Central and Eastern Europe remains a powerhouse of hardware engineering matched with software, Gideon Brothers (GB), a Zagreb, Croatia-based robotics and AI startup, has raised a $31 million Series A round led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), the venture and growth arm of Koch Industries Inc., with participation from DB Schenker, Prologis Ventures, […]
An update to an existing art app that allows artists to access NFT marketplaces directly, could have the potential to democratize access to the NFT world for artists not currently in crypto. SketchAR, is an existing mobile app that allows artists to turn photos into illustrations using its AI-based computer vision. It is now is […]
One of the lingering mysteries from Uber’s sale of its Uber ATG self-driving unit to Aurora has been solved. Raquel Urtasun, the AI pioneer who was the chief scientist at Uber ATG, has launched a new startup called Waabi that is taking what she describes as an “AI-first approach” to speed up the commercial deployment […]
The medical industry is sitting on a huge trove of data, but in many cases it can be a challenge to realize the value of it because that data is unstructured and in disparate places. Today, a startup called Mendel, which has built an AI platform both to ingest and bring order to that body […]
Fixing workplace misconduct reporting is a mission that’s snagged London-based Vault Platform backing from Google’s AI focused fund, Gradient Ventures, which is the lead investor in an $8.2 million Series A that’s being announced today. Other investors joining the round are Illuminate Financial, along with existing investors including Kindred Capital and Angular Ventures. Its $4.2M […]
SentinelOne, a late-stage security startup that helps organizations secure their data using AI and machine learning, has filed for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). In an S-1 filing on Thursday, the security company revealed that for the three months ending April 30, its revenues increased by 108% year-on-year to $37.4 million […]
Toyota AI Ventures, Toyota’s standalone venture capital fund, has dropped the “AI” and is reborn as, simply, Toyota Ventures. The fund is commemorating its new identity by investing an additional $300 million in emerging technologies and carbon neutrality via two early-stage funds: the Toyota Ventures Frontier Fund and the Toyota Ventures Climate Fund. The introduction […]
Boston-based Realtime Robotics this morning announced a $31.4 million round The funding is part of the $11.7 million Series A the company announced all the way back in late 2019. Investors include HAHN Automation, SAIC Capital Management, Soundproof Ventures , Heroic Ventures, SPARX Asset Management, Omron Ventures, Toyota AI Ventures, Scrum Ventures and Duke Angels. […]
Iterative, an open-source startup that is building an enterprise AI platform to help companies operationalize their models, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series A round led by 468 Capital and Mesosphere co-founder Florian Leibert. Previous investors True Ventures and Afore Capital also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to […]
AI-powered music app AiMi is launching a major update with a new interface that features six endless eletronica mixes.
Locus, a startup that uses AI to help businesses map out their logistics, said on Wednesday it has raised $50 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its presence. The new round, a Series C, was led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC. Qualcomm Ventures and existing investors Tiger Global Management […]
Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly common part of how customer service works — a trend that was accelerated in this past year as so many other services went virtual and digital — and today a startup that has built a set of low-code tools to help enterprises integrate more AI into their customer service […]
Polish computational chemistry outfit Molecule.one has raised $4.6M to expand its quest to bring theoretical drug molecules to reality. Its machine learning systems predict the best ways to synthesize potentially valuable molecules, a crucial part of creating new drugs and treatments. Molecule.one went on stage at Disrupt SF 2019’s Startup Battlefield, where they explained the […]
From the archives: Ars talks to the filmmakers who collaborated with an AI for Sunspring.
As AI has grown from a menagerie of research projects to include a handful of titanic, industry-powering models like GPT-3, there is a need for the sector to evolve — or so thinks Dario Amodei, former VP of research at OpenAI, who struck out on his own to create a new company a few months […]
If you drive past potholes and faded lane dividers on your morning commute to work, chances are you’ll continue to see such road blemishes until someone alerts the local department of transportation to the problem by filing a complaint. Utah-based startup Blyncsy wants to help governments be a bit more preemptive than that. The movement […]
Privacy International (PI) and several other European privacy and digital rights organizations announced today that they’ve filed legal complaints against the controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI. The complaints filed in France, Austria, Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom say that the company’s method of documenting and collecting data — including images of faces it automatically extracts from public websites — violates European privacy laws. New York-based Clearview claims to have built “the largest known database of 3+ billion facial images.”PI, NYOB, Hermes...
Microsoft reveals plans to bring GPT-3, best known for generating text, to programming. “The code writes itself,” CEO Satya Nadella says.
OpenAI is launching a $100 million startup fund, which it calls the OpenAI Startup Fund, though which it and its partners will invest in early-stage AI companies tackling major problems (and productivity). Among those partners and investors in the fund is Microsoft, at whose Build conference OpenAI founder Sam Altman announced the news. In a […]
In the latest chunky funding round out of Europe, UK-based email security startup, Tessian, has closed $65 million in Series C funding. The startup applies machine learning to build individual behavior models for enterprise email use that aims to combat human error by flagging problematic patterns which could signify risky stuff is happening — such […]
People like to argue that technology is value neutral; that it’s neither inherently good nor inherently bad, but can simply be put to different uses. As a rebuttal, I’d like to direct the court’s attention to exhibit a), a video of “digital humans” rapping using AI-synthesized voices, that is intrinsically awful.Indeed, I’d argue that the video above not only disproves the whole value-neutral thing, but makes a decent case for shutting down this “technology” lark altogether and heading back to the trees before it’s too late. What I mean is: AI is posting cringe and I don’t...
In the wake of the news that UK-based AI startup Faculty has raised $42.5 million in a growth funding round, I teased out more from CEO and co-founder Marc Warner on what his plans are for the company. Faculty seems to have an uncanny knack of winning UK government contracts, after helping Boris Johnson win […]
“AI is eating the world of education,” Riiid co-founder and CEO YJ Jang notes in his biographical description on his LinkedIn profile, and today his startup — which builds AI-based personalized learning, including test prep, for students — is announcing a major funding round to help it position itself as a player in that process. […]
Emitwise, a startup that claims its AI platform can measure greenhouse gas emissions from companies and their supply chains, has added to its seed funding round by $3.2 million, bringing its total seed funding raised to $6.6 million. ArcTern Ventures led the $3.2m raise. Also participating were Angel investors including Peter Harrison, the CEO of […]
British artificial intelligence (AI) company, Faculty has raised £30 million ($42.5M) in growth funding from the Apax Digital Fund (ADF). The startup has now raised a total of £40m ($56.6M) to date. In April this year, the company announced it had won a contract to work with the UK’s NHS to better predict its future […]
It’s hard enough to talk about your feelings to a person; Jo Aggarwal, the founder and CEO of Wysa, is hoping you’ll find it easier to confide in a robot. Or, put more specifically, “emotionally intelligent” artificial intelligence. Wysa is an A.I powered mental health app designed by Touchkin eServices, Aggarwal’s company that currently maintains […]
In the past month, we’ve gotten a look at Poshmark’s early fundraising pitch deck with CEO Manish Chandra and Mayfield’s Navin Chaddha, heard where the biggest opportunities lie in the proptech space with Fifth Wall’s Brendan Wallace and Orchard’s Court Cunningham, and heard how to nail your pitch from Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire and Vise AI’s […]
Photo by Eduardo MunozAlvarez/VIEWpress Tensions between Google and its AI brain trust DeepMind have always been fascinating. To put the relationship in crude terms: DeepMind, founded in 2010, is home to some the best AI researchers in the world who output a steady stream of insightful academic papers and Nature front covers. Google, meanwhile, bought DeepMind in 2014 and bankrolls its large losses, and it really, really wants to squeeze some money out of all those juicy brains. That’s why a recent story on the two companies from The Wall Street Journal is so interesting. In it, Parmy Olson...
Salespeople have more tools than ever these days to help them with their work, whether they are tools to source new leads, keep those leads interested or informed about what’s being sold, to track how the sales process is going, to manage those relationships once they are secured, or accounting tools to manage how and […]
Qualcomm’s 700-series Snapdragon chipsets are popular among midrange and premium midrange phone manufacturers. | Image: Qualcomm Qualcomm has announced a new 700-series chipset for mobile devices: the Snapdragon 778G 5G. It will start appearing in premium midrange phones from manufacturers including Motorola, Xiaomi, Realme, Honor, Oppo, and iQOO in the next few months, bringing with it some video capture and AI capabilities borrowed from the Snapdragon 888, the current chipset of choice for flagship Android phones. The company has also made a couple of other announcements today designed to...
One of Google’s cryostats, which keeps a quantum computer cold enough to reduce errors. | Image: Google Google is aiming to build a “useful, error-corrected quantum computer” by the end of the decade, the company explained in a blog post. The search giant hopes the technology will help solve a range of big problems like feeding the world and climate change to developing better medicines. To develop the technology, Google has unveiled a new Quantum AI campus in Santa Barbara containing a quantum data center, hardware research labs, and quantum processor chip fabrication facilities. It will...
Düsseldorf-based proptech startup Dabbel is using AI to drive energy efficiency savings in commercial buildings. It’s developed cloud-based self-learning building management software that plugs into the existing building management systems (BMS) — taking over control of heating and cooling systems in a way that’s more dynamic than legacy systems based on fixed set-point resets. Dabbel […]
At Google I/O today Google Cloud announced Vertex, a new managed machine learning platform that is meant to make it easier for developers to deploy and maintain their AI models. It’s a bit of an odd announcement at I/O, which tends to focus on mobile and web developers and doesn’t traditionally feature a lot of […]
Image: Google Google just finished its live Google I/O 2021 keynote, where the company unveiled a huge number of announcements, including a new look coming to Android, a bunch of features coming to its Google Workspace productivity suite, and even a new AI that talked as if it were Pluto.Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn followed the whole thing in real time right here on our live blog. But if you just want to get caught up on the biggest news from the show, read on for our recap.Android 12 has a radical and bubbly new look Image: Google Google revealed that Android 12 will have a brand-new “...
Read on for highlights from our chat with Olson, Grooms Lee and Adler, or watch a recording of the full session, including our live pitch-off.
As far as AI systems have come in their ability to recognize what you’re saying and respond, they’re still very easily confused unless you speak carefully and literally. Google has been working on a new language model called LaMDA that’s much better at following conversations in a natural way, rather than as a series of […]
At its I/O developer conference, Google today announced the next generation of its custom Tensor Processing Units (TPU) AI chips. This is the fourth generation of these chips, which Google says are twice as fast as the last version. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted, these chips are then combined in pods with 4,096 v4 […]
Like “innovation,” machine learning and artificial intelligence are commonplace terms that provide very little context for what they actually signify. AI/ML spans dozens of different fields of research, covering all kinds of different problems and alternative and often incompatible ways to solve them. One robust area of research here that has antecedents going back to […]
In the past few weeks, we’ve heard Fifth Wall’s Brendan Wallace and Hippo’s Assaf Wand discuss the biggest opportunities in prop tech, heard why Scale AI’s Alex Wang and Accel’s Dan Levine think that unconventional VC deals can be the best option and taken a stroll through the Poshmark Series A deck with CEO Manish […]
Vise today announced a $65 million Series C financing round led by Ribbit Capital, with participation from existing investors including Sequoia. The startup launched on the Disrupt Startup Battlefield stage in 2019 and has since raised upwards of $125 million. Vise uses an AI-powered platform to give independent financial advisors the same level of data as […]
When Art Agrawal was growing up in India, a car ride was a rare treat, and car ownership was a dream. When he moved to the U.S. and bought his first car, he was shocked by how much it cost and how difficult it was to maintain a car. In 2012, he co-founded a company […]
Buzzy face-swapping video app Reface is expanding its reality-shifting potential beyond selfies by letting users upload more of their own content for its AI to bring to life. Users of its iOS and Android apps still can’t upload their own user generated video but the latest feature — which it calls Swap Animation — lets […]
Proposed EU regulations could cripple AI development in the EU while China and the U.S. leap forward and lead to complete chaos when regulations in various EU bodies start contradicting.
Using AI and ML to cut out the labor-intensive parts of M&A both speeds the process and reduces the time-consuming tasks that lead to burnout in the industry.
No matter what slice of the mobility market you’ve claimed as your own — AVs, EVs, data mining, AI, dockless scooters, robotics or the batteries that will charge and change the world — you won’t find a better place to showcase your extraordinary tech and talent than TC Sessions: Mobility 2021. Buy a Startup Exhibitor […]
While modern machine learning systems act with a semblance of artificial intelligence, the truth is they don’t “understand” any of the data they work with — which in turn means they tend to store even trivial items forever. Facebook researchers have proposed structured forgetfulness as a way for AI to clear the decks a bit, […]
Veritone’s Marvel.AI platform will let celebrities and influencers create AI copies of their voices. | Image: Veritone Recording advertisements and product endorsements can be lucrative work for celebrities and influencers. But is it too much like hard work? That’s what US firm Veritone is betting. Today, the company is launching a new platform called Marvel.AI that will let creators, media figures, and others generate deepfake clones of their voice to license as they wish.“People want to do these deals but they don’t have enough time to go into a studio and produce the content...
According to a new paper, the company’s own research showed that human activity was a contributor, but public statements suggested otherwise.
Planck, the AI-based data platform for commercial insurance underwriting, announced today it has raised a $20 million growth round. The funding came from 3L Capital and Greenfield Partners, along with returning investors Team8, Viola Fintech, Arbor Ventures and Eight Roads. This brings the New York-based startup’s total raised to $48 million, including a $16 million […]
IBM today kicked off its annual THINK conference with a hefty dose of AI news and some tantalizing tidbits about the company’s current quantum computing endeavors. We’ve got the skinny, but there’s a lot to get through so strap in and get comfy. AI, AI, AI, and more AI AutoSQL and Cloud Pak for Data: IBM’s touting a breakthrough in cloud-based database management. Basically, where businesses serve up answers to customer queries using cloud-managed AI databases, this will significantly speed things up. According to IBM, the new system gives answers to distributed queries “as much as 8x...
Singapore-based Aspire, which wants to become the financial services “one-stop shop” for SMEs, announced that its business accounts have reached $1 billion in annualized transaction volume one year after launching. The company also unveiled Bill Pay, its latest feature that lets businesses manage and pay invoices by emailing them to Aspire’s AI-based digital assistant. Launched […]
Besides a passion for progress in the mobility space, what do Toyota AI Ventures’ Jim Adler, May Mobility’s Nina Grooms Lee and May’s Edwin Olson have in common? All three of them are joining us on an upcoming episode of Extra Crunch Live. The show goes down on May 12 at 3pm ET/noon PT. Register […]
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox. Hello and welcome back to The Station, a weekly newsletter dedicated to all the ways people and packages move (today and in the future) from Point A to […]
Sensor data from smartphones and wearables can meaningfully predict an individual’s ‘biological age’ and resilience to stress, according to Gero AI. The ‘longevity’ startup — which condenses its mission to the pithy goal of “hacking complex diseases and aging with Gero AI” — has developed an AI model to predict morbidity risk using ‘digital biomarkers’ […]
Shortening the diagnostic journey and reducing the associated costs was, until recently, a moonshot challenge, but is now within reach. Technology and AI advances are combining to make genetic testing accessible.
AI is fundamental to many products and services today, but its hunger for data and computing cycles is bottomless. Lightmatter plans to leapfrog Moore’s law with its ultra-fast photonic chips specialized for AI work, and with a new $80M round the company is poised to take its light-powered computing to market. We first covered Lightmatter […]
While insurance providers continue to get disrupted by startups like Lemonade, Alan, Clearcover, Pie and many others applying tech to rethink how to build a business around helping people and companies mitigate against risks with some financial security, one issue that has not disappeared is fraud. Today, a startup out of France is announcing some […]
Despite a persistent semiconductor shortage that is disrupting the global automotive industry, investors remain bullish on the chips used to power next-generation vehicles. Kneron, a startup that develops semiconductors to give devices artificial intelligence capabilities by using edge computing, just got funded by Delta Electronics, a Taiwanese supplier of power components for Apple and Tesla. […]
It was way back in 2018 that Omni:us appeared to disrupt the insurance market by applying AI to this most legacy of all industries. It has now gone on to raise $44.1 million. In a similar vein, Shift Technology in France has raised $100 million. Now a UK startup aims to do something similar, but […]
Image: Boost Mobile In what looks to be a first in terms of subscriber perks, Boost Mobile has announced that its $60 per month Unlimited Plus cellphone plan will come with access to to 24/7 telemedicine through K Health starting this summer.Specifically, Unlimited Plus subscribers will get all of the features of K Health’s usual $9-per-month offering. That includes the ability to text chat or hop on a video call with a doctor through the K Health app, which uses the app’s AI suggestions to identify symptoms and potential ailments, and receive actual treatment, including medications and...
Four years ago, Argo AI made its first acquisition as a young, newly backed self-driving vehicle startup. Now, Argo says its acquisition of lidar company Princeton Lightwave is paying off and is poised to help it deliver autonomous vehicles that can operate commercially on highways and in dense urban areas starting next year. Argo AI […]
Twenty-first century technologies such as robots, virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) are creeping into every corner of our social and emotional lives — hacking how we form friendships, build intimacy, fall in love and get off. In my recently-published book, I consider the possibilities, both terrifying and inspiring, offered by these “artificially intimate” technologies. On one hand, these tools can help deliver much-needed support. On the other, they risk increasing sexual inequality, and replacing precious in-person interaction with less-than-ideal substitutes. Three...
Machine learning is capable of doing all sorts of things as long as you have the data to teach it how. That’s not always easy, and researchers are always looking for a way to add a bit of “common sense” to AI so you don’t have to show it 500 pictures of a cat before […]
IBM today made another acquisition to deepen its reach into providing enterprises with AI-based services to manage their networks and workloads. It announced that it is acquiring Turbonomic, a company that provides tools to manage application performance (specifically resource management), along with Kubernetes and network performance, part of its bigger strategy to bring more AI […]
Cybersecurity nightmares like the SolarWinds hack highlight how malicious hackers continue to exploit vulnerabilities in software and apps to do their dirty work. Today a startup that’s built a platform to help organizations protect themselves from this by running threat detection and response at the network level is announcing a big round of funding to […]
Kenyan consumer experience platform for businesses in Africa, Ajua today announced that it has acquired WayaWaya, a Kenya-based AI and ML messaging and payments company. WayaWaya’s customers and partners include the likes of I&M Bank, Interswitch and MTN. The company offers a range of services, from digital banking and payment services to financial services APIs […]
Materials Zone, a Tel Aviv-based startup that uses AI to speed up materials research, today announced that it has raised a $6 million seed funding round led by Insight Partners, with participation from crowdfunding platform OurCrowd. The company’s platform consists of a number of different tools, but at the core is a database that takes […]
Satellite imagery can be seen as inherently trustworthy because of the expense in creating it. | Image: DigitalGlobe via Getty Images When we think of deepfakes, we tend to imagine AI-generated people. This might be lighthearted, like a deepfake Tom Cruise, or malicious, like nonconsensual pornography. What we don’t imagine is deepfake geography: AI-generated images of cityscapes and countryside. But that’s exactly what some researchers are worried about. Specifically, geographers are concerned about the spread of fake, AI-generated satellite imagery. Such pictures could mislead in a...
Faculty, a VC-backed artificial intelligence start-up, has won a tender to work with the NHS to make better predictions about its future requirements for patients, based on data drawn from how it handled the COVID-19 pandemic. In December 2019, Faculty raised a $10.5M Series A funding round from UK-based VCs Local Globe, GMG Ventures, and, […]
Earlier this year we reported on how Snap had acquired Berlin-based Fit Analytics, an AI-based fitting technology startup, as part of a wider push into e-commerce services, specifically to gain technology that can help prospective online shoppers a better sense of how a particular item or size would fit them. A 10-Q filing from Snap […]
The European Union’s lead data protection supervisor has called for remote biometric surveillance in public places to be banned outright under incoming AI legislation. The European Data Protection Supervisor’s (EDPS) intervention follows a proposal, put out by EU lawmakers on Wednesday, for a risk-based approach to regulating applications of artificial intelligence. The Commission’s legislative proposal […]
While the concept of “deepfakes,” or AI-generated synthetic imagery, has been decried primarily in connection with involuntary depictions of people, the technology is dangerous (and interesting) in other ways as well. For instance, researchers have shown that it can be used to manipulate satellite imagery to produce real-looking — but totally fake — overhead maps […]
The Biden administration must clarify current laws pertaining to AI and machine learning models — how we will evaluate use by private actors and how we will govern AI usage within our systems.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google’s AI leadership came under fire in December when star ethics researcher Timnit Gebru was abruptly fired while working on a paper about the dangers of large language models. Now, new reporting from Bloomberg suggests the turmoil began long before her termination — and includes allegations of bias and sexual harassment. Shortly after Gebru arrived at Google in 2018, she informed her boss that a colleague had been accused of sexual harassment at another organization. Katherine Heller, a Google researcher, reported the same incident, which included...
Google today announced a major update to Meet, its video-meeting service, which brings several user interface tweaks for desktop users, as well as quite a bit of new functionality, including multi-pinning so that you can highlight multiple feeds instead of just one, as well as new AI-driven video capabilities for light adjustments, autozoom, and a […]
Photo by Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images A bipartisan group of lawmakers has proposed banning police from buying access to user data from data brokers, including ones that “illegitimately obtained” their records — like, its sponsors say, the facial recognition service Clearview AI.The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act is sponsored by a bipartisan group including Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), and 18 other members of the Senate. The bill would make law enforcement agencies obtain a court order before accessing people’s personal information through...
European Union lawmakers have presented their risk-based proposal for regulating high risk applications of artificial intelligence within the bloc’s single market. The plan includes prohibitions on a small number of use-cases that are considered too dangerous to people’s safety or EU citizens’ fundamental rights, such as a China-style social credit scoring system or certain types […]
As content moderation continues to be a critical aspect of how social media platforms work — one that they may be pressured to get right, or at least do better in tackling — a startup that has built a set of data and image models to help with that, along with any other tasks that […]
Tel Aviv’s Orca AI, a computer vision startup that can be retrofitted to cargo ships and improve navigation and collision avoidance, has raised $13 million in a Series A funding, taking its total raised to over $15.5 million. While most cargo ships carry security cameras, computer vision cameras are rare. Orca AI hopes its solution could introduce autonomous […]
Research papers come out far too frequently for anyone to read them all. That's especially true in the field of machine learning, which now affects practically every industry and company.
The US Federal Trade Commission has warned companies against using biased artificial intelligence, saying they may break consumer protection laws. A new blog post notes that AI tools can reflect “troubling” racial and gender biases. If those tools are applied in areas like housing or employment, falsely advertised as unbiased, or trained on data that is gathered deceptively, the agency says it could intervene.“In a rush to embrace new technology, be careful not to overpromise what your algorithm can deliver,” writes FTC attorney Elisa Jillson — particularly when promising decisions...
As AI gets stronger, the possibilities of what we can do with it grow exponentially (for better or worse). Synthesia, an AI video generation platform, is looking to make video content creation as simple and efficient as possible, and FirstMark is taking a bet on it. The company has just announced the close of a […]
Last week, Scale AI announced a massive $325 million Series E. Led by Dragoneer, Greenoaks Capital and Tiger Global, the raise gives the San Francisco data labeling startup a $7 billion valuation. Alexandr Wang founded the company back in 2016, while still at MIT. A veteran of Quora and Addepar, Wang built the startup to […]
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox. Hi there, new and returning readers. This is The Station, a weekly newsletter dedicated to all the ways people and packages move (today and in the future) from […]
This week Scale AI raised a $325 million Series E. The company, as TechCrunch has written, works in the data labeling space. And it has been on a fundraising tear over the last few years.
In the second episode of our new podcast Found, our guest is Brie Code. Code is the founder and CEO of TRU LUV, a startup based out of Toronto that has its roots in the game industry, but that is taking a radically different approach to designing interactive experiences based on a historically-overlooked motivating paradigm […]
You’ll need to prick up your ears up for this slice of deepfakery emerging from the wacky world of synthesized media: A digital version of Albert Einstein — with a synthesized voice that’s been (re)created using AI voice cloning technology drawing on audio recordings of the famous scientist’s actual voice. The startup behind the […]
A cross-party group of 40 MEPs in the European parliament has called on the Commission to strengthen an incoming legislative proposal on artificial intelligence to include an outright ban on the use of facial recognition and other forms of biometric surveillance in public places. They have also urged EU lawmakers to outlaw automated recognition of […]
Chili Piper, which has a sophisticated SaaS appointment scheduling platform for sales teams, has raised a $33 million B round led by Tiger Global. Existing investors Base10 Partners and Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI-focused VC) also participated. This brings the company’s total financing to $54 million. The company will use the capital raised to accelerate product […]
School closures due to the pandemic have interrupted the learning processes of millions of kids, and without individual attention from teachers, reading skills in particular are taking a hit. Amira Learning aims to address this with an app that reads along with students, intelligently correcting errors in real time. Promising pilots and research mean the […]
Nvidia’s AI-powered noise-removal technology does an excellent job at cancelling out background noise. | Image: Nvidia Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), the go-to software for streamers, is getting native support for Nvidia’s excellent noise-removal technology, the graphics card manufacturer announced today. Although it was previously possible to get the same effect by combining OBS with Nvidia’s Broadcast software, you’ll now be able to adjust the background noise-removal feature directly from within OBS. It’s currently available with the beta version of OBS Studio 27 and will be...
European Union lawmakers who are drawing up rules for applying artificial intelligence are considering fines of up to 4% of global annual turnover (or €20M, if greater) for a set of prohibited use-cases, according to a leaked draft of the AI regulation — reported earlier by Politico — that’s expected to be officially unveiled next […]
The firing of top Google AI ethics researchers has created a significant backlash Continue reading…
Artificial intelligence technology holds a huge amount of promise for enterprises — as a tool to process and understand their data more efficiently; as a way to leapfrog into new kinds of services and products; and as a critical stepping stone into whatever the future might hold for their businesses. But the problem for many […]
Meet Kyndryl — which, despite the name, is not a new legendary pokémon or a futuristic fake pharmaceutical from Cyberpunk 2077. No, Kyndryl is the new name for IBM’s legacy IT infrastructure business, which the company is spinning off into a new company to allow the main company to focus on its newer (and more lucrative) areas of emphasis, like AI and cloud services.I’ll let IBM’s press release explain: ”Kyn” is derived from the word kinship, referencing the belief that relationships with people — employees, customers and partners — are at the center of the strategy, and that...
Industry-specific AI models are only going to boom in popularity over the next few years and businesses from across sectors will realize their power in delivering accurate and powerful insights.
Microsoft is buying AI speech tech firm Nuance for $19.7 billion, bolstering the Redmond tech giant’s prowess in voice recognition and transcription. Nuance is best known for its Dragon software, which uses deep learning to transcribe speech and improves its accuracy over time by adapting to a user’s voice. Nuance has licensed this tech for many services and applications, including, most famously, Apple’s digital assistant Siri. (Though to what degree Siri currently relies on Dragon to answer users’ queries is unclear.) Dragon is an industry-leader in terms of transcription accuracy...
Practically every film production these days needs some kind of visual effects work, but independent creators often lack the cash or expertise to get that top-shelf CG. Wonder Dynamics, founded by VFX engineer Nikola Todorovic and actor Tye Sheridan, aims to use AI to make some of these processes more accessible for filmmakers with budgets […]
Few companies have done better than Scale at spotting a need in the AI gold rush early on and filling that gap. The startup rightly identified that one of the tasks most important to building effective AI at scale — the laborious exercise of tagging data sets to make them usable in properly training new […]
Welcome to Adventures with AI, a column exploring what happens when artificial intelligence takes control of everyday tasks. I enjoy exercise, but I’ve always hated gyms. I can’t stand the pugnacious meatheads hogging the bench; the vacuous EDM pounding my brain into mush; the putrid blend of BO dripping off the walls; the eye-watering fees; the fear of being judged. They’re ghastly places frequented by some of the most unpleasant people on Earth. After years of enduring these assaults on my senses, I decided enough was enough. I cancelled my membership, built a home gym, and started...
While visual ‘no code‘ tools are helping businesses get more out of computing without the need for armies of in-house techies to configure software on behalf of other staff, access to the most powerful tech tools — at the ‘deep tech’ AI coal face — still requires some expert help (and/or costly in-house expertise). This […]
Elon Musk hopes to put computer chips in our brains that will enable “human-AI symbiosis.” But for now, he’s focused on making monkeys play video games. Musk’s Neuralink startup posted a video today of a primate playing Pong with its mind. The nine-year-old macaque, called Pager, has a Neuralink implanted in his brain. Pager was first trained to play Pong with a joystick in return for a banana smoothie reward. As he played, his neural activity was captured by a 1,024 electrode device, called the N1 Link. This data was transmitted to a decoder that mapped Pager’s neural patterns to...
The Intel microprocessor company was founded in 1968. It’s bushwhacked a trail of technology and innovation in the decades since to become one of the leading manufacturers of computer chips worldwide. But never mind all that. Because we live in a world where Kodak is a failed cryptocurrency company that’s now dealing drugs and everyone still thinks Elon Musk invented the tunnel. Which means that here in this, the darkest timeline, we’re stuck with the version of Intel that uses AI to power “White nationalism” sliders and “N-word” toggles for video game chat. Behold ‘Bleep...
Indoor farming company AppHarvest this week announced that it has acquired Root AI. The deal is valued at around $60 million, with $10 million in cash and the reminder coming from AppHarvest stock. Root AI is a Boston-based robotics startup, with a mission fairly in line with that of its future parent company. We’ve covered […]
Swag has a long and patchy history in the world of business. For every hip pair of plaid socks, there are five t-shirts you may never wear, an itchy scarf, a notepad your kids might use, and an ugly mug; and most of all, likely thousands of dollars and lots of time invested to make […]
Chris McGarry, who previously led music integration at Facebook’s Oculus, is taking a new approach to bringing music into the virtual world with his startup Authentic Artists. McGarry pointed to virtual celebrities like Lil Miquela and virtual concerts like Travis Scott’s giant event in Fortnite as setting the stage for Authentic Artists. In a sense, […]
Popular saving and investing app Acorns has acquired Pillar, an AI-powered startup built to help manage student loan debt, in its second acquisition of 2021. New York-based Pillar helps consumers optimize their debt payments by focusing first on student loans. It launched in May 2019 with $5.5 million in seed funding led by Kleiner Perkins. […]
Alexandr Wang has spent the last five years looking to accelerate the development of AI and machine learning algorithms with Scale AI. The company has raised upward of $270 million since inception and doesn’t show any signs of slowing. That’s why we’re thrilled to hang out with Wang and Scale AI investor Dan Levine (Accel) […]
Artificial intelligence has become a fundamental cornerstone of how a lot of business software works, providing a useful boost in reading, understanding, and using the often-fragmented trove of data that organizations generate these days. In the latest development, an Israeli startup called Blue dot, which uses AI to help companies handle their tax accounting, is […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Alphabet shareholder Trillium Asset Management is pushing Google to adopt better whistleblower protections in light of the firing of prominent AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru. The $3.5 billion sustainable investment firm has filed a shareholder resolution asking the board of directors for a third-party review of current policies. “Reporting suggests that many Google employees who have resigned or been fired … publicly report retaliation after voicing human rights implications of company practices, including systemic workplace racism and sexism...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A Google researcher manager has resigned following the controversial firings of two female leaders in his organization. Samy Bengio, who oversaw the ethical AI team prior to a reorganization in February, is leaving to pursue other opportunities, according to Bloomberg. His last day will be April 28th.Bengio was a strong advocate of star AI ethics researchers Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, who previously co-led the ethical AI team. Gebru was fired in December while working on a paper about the dangers of large language models. Mitchell was terminated...
Tribute bands are great because even if you might not be able to see your favorite artists live, they recreate that magic to some extent. But what if that tribute band is an AI? Over The Bridge, a Canada-based non-profit that helps musicians with mental health, has started a new AI-powered project called Lost Tapes of the 27 Club. The organization is using machine learning to break down songs of artists who died at 27, including Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse, and Kurt Kobain — and compose original tunes based on their musical stylings. Check out this well-composed Niravana...
AI models not only take time to build and train, but also to deploy in an organization’s workflow. That’s where MLOps (machine learning operations) companies come in, helping clients scale their AI technology. InfuseAI, a MLOps startup based in Taiwan, announced today it has raised a $4.3 million Series A, led by original design manufacturer […]
Emotion recognition AI is bunk. Don’t get me wrong, AI that recognizes human sentiment and emotion can be very useful. For example, it can help identify when drivers are falling asleep behind the wheel. But what it cannot do, is discern how a human being is actually feeling by the expression on their face. You don’t have to take my word for it, you can try it yourself here. Dovetail Labs, a scientific research and consultancy company, recently created a website that explains how modern “emotion recognition” systems built on deep learning work. Typically when companies do stuff like this...
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox. Hi there, new and returning readers. This is The Station, a weekly newsletter dedicated to all the ways people and packages move (today and in the future) from […]
TLDR: The 2021 Complete Microsoft Azure Certification Prep Bundle explores how to build and manage a complete Azure cloud network and earn key Azure credentials in the process. Artificial intelligence. For most, those words immediately conjure images that are straight out of science fiction. The HAL 9000. The Terminator. Replicants. For the masses, AI is as far removed from daily life as walking the dog is from a trip to the moon. In recent years, that gap has been closing. Rapidly. But while the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning is playing a growingly influential role in...
It happened. LG just announced that it’s closing its mobile business unit worldwide. And so ends the glorious era of unique phones from the Korean maverick. The company’s decision was approved by the board this morning. The Korean tech firm said that it wants to concentrate on other verticals such as EV parts, IoT, and AI: LG’s strategic decision to exit the incredibly competitive mobile phone sector will enable the company to focus resources in growth areas such as electric vehicle components, connected devices, smart homes, robotics, artificial intelligence, and business-to-business...
LG said on Monday it will close its loss-making mobile phone business worldwide as the once pioneer brand looks to focus its resources in “growth areas” such as electric vehicle components, connected devices, smart homes, robotics, AI and B2B solutions, and platforms and services. The South Korean firm said in a statement that its board […]
Detecting COVID-19 is not easy, because the symptoms it causes vary greatly from one person to the next. If you have some symptoms such as a sore throat, fever, cough, or loss of smell or taste, you’ll know that you need to get yourself checked. That’s why companies like Vocalis are developing solutions to pre-screen people using simple technologies such as voice and mobile apps to predict if someone has COVID-19. What problem is it solving? Screening folks for coronavirus or any other disease is difficult unless you go to a test center in person. So Vocalis has developed an AI… This...
Spotify has launched a trio of new personalized playlists that evolve alongside your tastes in music. The streaming service today announced that it’s introducing an artist mix, genre mix, and decade mix. The feature is already rolling out to Free and Premium users around the world. The mixes use Spotify’s vaunted recommendation algorithms to curate playlists based on your listening habits. They’ll include your favorite songs from artists, genres, and decades you listen to most often, as well as new tunes that the app infers you’ll like. [Read: How to use AI to better serve your...
Facebook today posted a blog post detailing a three-year-old solution to its modern AI problems: an algorithm inspector that only works on some of the company’s systems. Up front: Called Fairness Flow, the new diagnostic tool allows machine learning developers at Facebook to determine whether certain kinds of machine learning systems contain bias against or towards specific groups of people. It works by inspecting the data flow for a given model. Per a company blog post: To measure the performance of an algorithm’s predictions for certain groups, Fairness Flow works by dividing the data a...
By now you’ve probably heard of ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) ratings for companies, or ratings for their carbon footprint. Well, now a UK company has come up with a way of rating the ‘ethics’ social media companies. EthicsGrade is an ESG ratings agency, focusing on AI governance. Headed up Charles Radclyffe, the former head […]
An international team of researchers recently developed an AI system that pieces together bits of information from dark web cryptomarkets, Twitter, and Reddit in order to better understand substance abusers. Don’t worry, it doesn’t track sales or expose users. It helps scientists better understand how substance abusers feel and what terms they’re using to describe their experiences. The relationship between mental health and substance abuse is well-studied in clinical environments, but how users discuss and interact with one another in the real world remains beyond the realm of most...
HighRadius, which has developed AI-powered fintech software, announced Tuesday it has raised $300 million in a Series C funding round led by D1 Capital and Tiger Global. The round values Houston-based HighRadius at $3.1 billion, triple its valuation of “more than $1 billion” at the time of its $125 million Series B in January of […]
AI has become a fundamental cornerstone of how tech companies are building tools for salespeople: they are useful for supercharging (and complementing) the abilities of talented humans, or helping them keep themselves significantly more organised; even if in some cases — as with chatbots — they are replacing them altogether. In the latest development, 6sense, […]
Apple’s been on a shopping spree in a bid to make Siri smarter, according to a new report by GlobalData. The market research firm says the tech giant bought more AI companies than anyone else between 2016 and 2020. The second biggest AI acquirer was Irish consultancy Accenture. But the rest of the top five were all based in the US. Google grabbed the third spot on the list, followed by Microsoft and Facebook. [Read: How to use AI to better serve your customers] GlobalData found the four American firms had collectively bought 60 AI companies — almost half of which (25) were snapped up...
Hong Kong-based viAct helps construction sites perform around-the-clock monitoring with an AI-based cloud platform that combines computer vision, edge devices and a mobile app. The startup announced today it has raised a $2 million seed round, co-led by SOSV and Vectr Ventures. The funding included participation from Alibaba Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund, Artesian Ventures and […]
Humans aspired to colonize the Moon for centuries, but the celestial body has an extremely hostile environment. The safest locations for settlers could be under the Moon’s surface. The European Space Agency (ESA) believes lunar caves could provide shelter from radiation, micrometeorites, and extreme temperatures — and perhaps even access to water ice deposits. The agency is currently testing an autonomous robot that it hopes will offer new insights into conditions in the caverns. [Read: How to use AI to better serve your customers] Named DAEDALUS, the 46-cm sphere would be lowered into a...
On the heels of Jumio announcing a $150 million injection this week to continue building out its AI-based ID verification and anti-money laundering platform, another startup in the space is levelling up. Feedzai, which provides banks, others in the financial sector, and any company managing payments online with AI tools to spot and fight fraud […]
TLDR: With Writesonic, AI can start creating all the smart, engaging copy you need for advertising, social media, web pages, and more without paying an expensive copywriter. If your business or brand doesn’t have a reasoned content marketing strategy, you’re really putting yourself behind the 8-ball. With so much depending on the copy used to promote and sell that brand, it’s no surprise that more than half of organizations reported they had specialized writers in-house for tackling their specific content marketing needs. But if you can’t afford the luxury of an on-staff copywriter...
This column aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in but not limited to artificial intelligence — and explain why they matter.
Most American retail banks are designed the same way: Customers must pass several desks set aside for loan and mortgage officers before they can talk to a customer representative. I only step inside a bank a few times each year, but even pre-pandemic, I can’t remember the last time I saw someone sitting at one […]
AI and machine learning systems are poised to drastically improve wildlife rangers’ effectiveness by helping them not only track where poachers have been but also predict where they are most likely to turn up.
Superpedestrian, the startup that makes e-scooters equipped with self-diagnostic software, is upgrading its product as it prepares for a major expansion into 10 new cities within the next two weeks. Considered an up-and-coming player in the micromobility world, Superpedestrian says it has figured out how to build AI to monitor and correct scooter safety issues, […]
Per a new dataset I spent this morning chewing on, VCs are firing cannons of capital into the AI startup world while exits reach new records.
Facebook is developing a new input device for AR glasses: a wristband that lets you interact with virtual reality by moving your fingers. The system uses electromyography (EMG) to convert nerve signals passing through the wrist into digital commands. Facebook says that these signals are so clear that EMG can understand finger motions of just a millimeter: That means input can be effortless. Ultimately, it may even be possible to sense just the intention to move a finger. The devices also use contextualized AI to dynamically adapt to you and your environment. [Read: This haptic device...
Charles Johnson, a notorious conservative provocateur, played a pivotal role at the start of the facial recognition company.
There’s something cool and meta about interacting with, playing as, or fighting against an artificial intelligence in video games. AI has captured our imagination in print, film, and even song, but games give us the space to interact with and see fantastical worlds from otherwise impossible perspectives. To be absolutely clear, this isn’t about the games with the smartest “CPU AI.” We’re not discussing whether the “AI” in a game is tough to beat. We’re talking about fictional depictions of artificial intelligence. Here’s a handy primer on the difference between the two...
We’ve painted ourselves into another corner with artificial intelligence. We’re finally starting to breakthrough the usefulness barrier but we’re butting up against the limits of our our ability to responsibly meet our machines’ massive energy requirements. At the current rate of growth, it appears we’ll have to turn Earth into Coruscant if we want to keep spending unfathomable amounts of energy training systems such as GPT-3 . The problem: Simply put, AI takes too much time and energy to train. A layperson might imagine a bunch of code on a laptop screen when they think about AI...
This morning TechCrunch covered an interesting round for Copy.ai, a startup that employs GPT-3 to help other companies with their writing projects. GPT-3, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, is a piece of AI from the OpenAI group that takes text from the user, and writes a lot more for them. As part of the process of […]
We should be deploying simple AI tools to solve and improve upon everyday tactics so we can spend more time on strategic growth goals and long-term execution.
Copy.ai, a startup building AI-powered copywriting tools for business customers, announced a $2.9 million round this morning. The investment was led by Craft Ventures. Other investors took part in the deal, including smaller checks from Lee Jin’s newly-formed Atelier Ventures, and Sequoia. The startup is notable for a few reasons. First for its model of […]
TLDR: The 2021 Complete Resume Builder Master Class Bundle offers Rezi Resume services, templates and training to help any candidate land the job they deserve. You have seconds. Literally. In many cases, you’ve got less than 30 of them. In that handful of seconds, you have to definitively prove you’re the one and only person to fill the available job opening that you so desperately want. But reality is not on your side. About 40 percent of hiring managers spend less than 60 seconds looking at a job resume. About 25 percent spend less than 30 seconds. That means the… This story...
In recent years, the publicly traded observability service New Relic started adding more machine learning-based tools to its platform for AI-assisted incident response when things don’t quite go as planned. Today, it is expanding this feature set with the launch of a number of new capabilities for what it calls its “New Relic Applied Intelligence […]
Fake news is a scourge on the global community. Despite our best efforts to combat it, the problem lies deeper than just fact-checking or squelching publications that specialize in misinformation. The current thinking still tends to support an AI-powered solution, but what does that really mean? According to recent research, including this paper from scientists at the University of Tennessee and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, we’re going to need more than just clever algorithms to fix our broken discourse. The problem is simple: AI can’t do anything a person can’t do. Sure, it can...
Facial and fingerprint recognition are certainly convenient ways to unlock phones, but they can sometimes be fooled by photos or pointing handsets at sleeping users. A new AI system aims to make biometric authentication more secure by analyzing facial movements. The tech requires users to record a short video of them making a unique facial motion. An integrated neural network framework then inspects the footage to learn their features and movements concurrently. When the user later attempts to access their phone, the system checks that their face matches with the recorded data. The tech...
Instagram today unveiled two new AI tools designed to protect young users on the platform. The first feature prevents adults from messaging people under 18 who don’t follow them. It then sends the adult user a notification saying they can’t DM the account. Instagram has provided little detail on how the system works, but parent company Facebook said in a blogpost that it uses AI to infer the users’ ages: This feature relies on our work to predict peoples’ ages using machine learning technology, and the age people give us when they sign up. As we move to end-to-end encryption, we’re...
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital adoption in a way that no one could have ever anticipated, and as more people conduct more services online and via mobile devices, businesses have had to work even harder to validate users and security. One company working to serve that need, Socure – which uses AI and machine […]
Engineers at Canada’s University of Waterloo are developing AI-powered exoskeleton legs that can walk autonomously. The system captures a user’s surroundings through a camera. Computer vision and deep learning algorithms then analyze the scene to determine the best movements for the upcoming terrain. “Our control approach wouldn’t necessarily require human thought,” said project lead Brokoslaw Laschowski in a press release. “Similar to autonomous cars that drive themselves, we’re designing autonomous exoskeletons that walk for themselves.” The devices could give people with...
Noogata, a startup that offers a no-code AI solution for enterprises, today announced that it has raised a $12 million seed round led by Team8, with participation from Skylake Capital. The company, which was founded in 2019 and counts Colgate and PepsiCo among its customers, currently focuses on e-commerce, retail and financial services, but it […]
When the world finally comes to an end in a big ball of fire, I’m confident that people will still say BMW’s iDrive infotainment system is the best there is. However, BMW isn’t going to rest on its laurels. To maintain its position as a leader in infotainment tech, it’s adding a bunch of new super techy features to the iDrive system that will be fitted to the iX and i4 electric vehicles. The iDrive 8 system uses natural language processing, gesture control, and machine learning to supposedly connect the vehicle and driver in more intuitive, personal, and emotional ways. The… This...
Sherpa, a startup from Bilbao, Spain that was an early mover in building a voice-based digital assistant and predictive search for Spanish-speaking audiences, has raised some more funding to double down on a newer focus for the startup, building out privacy-first AI services for enterprise customers. The company has closed $8.5 million, funding that Xabi […]
A Pennsylvania woman was arrested last week after police discovered she’d created “Deepfake” videos of her daughter’s cheerleading rivals in an apparent effort to harass and intimidate them. Charged with multiple misdemeanors, the woman’s alleged crimes involve sending videos to the cheerleading team’s coaches and the girls targeted that had been altered using AI-powered software to make it appear as though members of the team were engaging in lewd or rule-breaking behavior. The case is being handled by Bucks County District Attorney Matt Weintraub’s office, which recently told...
Researchers at Canada’s University of Waterloo are showcasing work with prosthesis and exoskeletons that utilizes cameras and AI to deliver more natural human movement. The ExoNet project leverages video captured by wearable camera, run through deep learning AI, in order to mimic how humans adapt and adjust movements based on their environment. The project is […]
DeepSee.ai, a startup that helps enterprises use AI to automate line-of-business problems, today announced that it has raised a $22.6 million Series A funding round led by led by ForgePoint Capital. Previous investors AllegisCyber Capital and Signal Peak Ventures also participated in this round, which brings the Salt Lake City-based company’s total funding to date […]
Yann LeCun, Facebook’s world-renowned AI guru, had some problems with an article written about his company yesterday. So he did what any of us would do, he went on social media to air his grievances. Only, he didn’t take the fight to Facebook as you’d expect. Instead, over a period of hours, he engaged in a back-and-forth with numerous people on Twitter. No it doesn't. Apparently, one can write about AI fairness without paying attention to journalistic fairness.One of those cases where one knows the reality, reads an article about it, and go "WTF?" — Yann LeCun (@ylecun) March 12,…...
Facebook has taken the wraps off a project called Learning from Videos. It uses artificial intelligence to understand and learn audio, textual, and visual representations in public user videos on the social network.Learning from Videos has a number...
Welcome to Adventures with AI, a column exploring what happens when artificial intelligence takes control of everyday tasks. Eating out is one of my great pleasures; cooking is not. Unfortunately, since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve been doing a lot of the latter and almost none of the former. Preparing meals has become paricularly tedious during London’s latest lockdown. So like an unhappy couple in a sexless marriage, I’ve been trying to spice things up in my domestic life. Only instead of strapping on a gimp mask and a ball gag, I’ve been experimenting with AI. [Read...
Illustration by Alex Castro / Th Facebook has always been a company focused on growth above all else. More users and more engagement equals more revenue. The cost of that single-mindedness is spelled out clearly in this brilliant story from MIT Technology Review. It details how attempts to tackle misinformation by the company’s AI team using machine learning were apparently stymied by Facebook’s unwillingness to limit user engagement.“If a model reduces engagement too much, it’s discarded. Otherwise, it’s deployed and continually monitored,” writes author Karen Hao of Facebook’s...
If you’ve ever had to file a claim with your insurance company, you know that it’s not exactly fun. Often, you’re on hold indefinitely waiting to speak to a live person. And if you’ve ever had to file an auto or home insurance claim, you know that all the back and forth with your carrier […]
It’s Wombo time. | Image: Wombo You’ve probably already seen a Wombo video floating around your social media. Maybe it was Ryu from Street Fighter singing the “Witch Doctor” or the last three heads of the US Federal Reserve miming in unison to Rick Astley’s “Never Going to Give You Up.” Each clip features exaggerated facial expressions and uncanny, sometimes nightmarish animation. They’re stupid, fun, and offer a useful look at the current state of deepfakes. It’s certainly getting quicker and easier to make AI-generated fakes, but the more convincing they are, the more work...
Adobe Photoshop has got a new AI feature that can quadruple the number of pixels in your photos. The tool, called Super Resolution, is now shipping in Camera Raw 13.2 and will be coming soon to Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. The feature uses a machine learning model trained on millions of photos to enlarge images while preserving their clean edges and fine details. Programmer Eric Chan said it’s very simple to use: Press a button and watch your 10-megapixel photo transform into a 40-megapixel photo. It’s a bit like how Mario eats a mushroom and suddenly balloons into Super Mario, but...
The idea of a universal minimum/basic income (UBI) isn’t new or nearly as radical as those both in favor and opposed to it would have you believe. Dozens of cities across the globe are either currently running or have run UBI test programs. And the results are usually positive. Simply put: the outcomes for people who receive a UBI are typically demonstrably better than people in similar financial and economic situations who don’t. But a significant number of people ranging from laypersons to economics experts believe that paying people for what they consider “not working” is a bad idea...
Advances in technology provide all kinds of benefits, but also introduce risks — especially to already marginalized populations. AI for the People’s Mutale Nkonde, disability rights lawyer Haben Girma, and author of Algorithms of Oppression Safiya Umoja Noble have studied and documented these risks for years in their work. They joined us at TC Sessions: […]
The wave of shared electric scooters that swept through cities several years ago helped Populus AI get its start. Now, surging demand for delivery — and the pressure it places on curb space — is helping the transportation data startup attract new capital and expand to more cities. Populus, a San Francisco-based startup founded in […]
Israel’s retrain.ai, which uses AI and Machine Learning to read job boards at scale and to gain insight into where the job market is going, has closed $9M Series A led by Square Peg. Since retrain.ai’s $4M seed round last year was unannounced (led by Hetz Ventures, with TechAviv and .406 Ventures participating) that means it’s […]
Mass transportation is a critical part of how metropolitan areas keep moving, and today a startup that has built an AI-based platform to help mass transportation work more efficiently is announcing a huge round of funding to grow its business and tackle a new set of opportunities and challenges in the modern city. Optibus — […]
Lightmatter says the computing and power demands of complex neural networks need new technologies like these to keep up.
A security vulnerability in a popular iPhone call recording app exposed thousands of users’ recorded conversations. The flaw was discovered by Anand Prakash, a security researcher and founder of PingSafe AI, who found that the aptly named Call Recorder app allowed anyone to access the call recordings from other users — by knowing their phone […]
Most companies claim they want a diverse staff but at the same time, complain they don’t know how to go about recruiting more diverse candidates. Enter SeekOut — a startup that is out to give companies no excuses with its AI-powered platform. A group of former Microsoft executives and engineers — Anoop Gupta, Aravind Bala, […]
As impressive as Amazon’s Alexa technology is, the best way to utilize it isn’t always clear. Sure, you can get it to tell you the weather, play music and set alarms, but that’s just scratching the surface of what this AI is truly capable of. And if...
Scientists have developed a new smart speaker system that could turn the Amazon Echo and Google Home into contactless heartbeat monitors. The AI-powered system sends inaudible sounds from the speakers towards a person sitting nearby. When they bounce back, algorithms analyze the sound waves to determine the heart rate. Researchers from the University of Washington tested the device on healthy people and hospitalized cardiac patients. They found that the smart speaker detected their heartbeats almost as well as medical-grade ECG monitors. The team says it’s the first time that both...
Israel-based Ibex Medical Analytics, which has an AI-driven imaging technology to detect cancer cells in biopsies more efficiently, has raised a $38 million Series B financing round led by Octopus Ventures and 83North. Also participating in the round was aMoon, Planven Entrepreneur Ventures and Dell Technologies Capital, the corporate venture arm of Dell Technologies. The […]
A Spanish artist has created a trippy music video by training a deep-learning algorithm on thousands of album covers. Bruno López produced the video by using a combination of Spotify data, Python scripts, and Generative Adversarial Networks. He first created a script that downloaded the album covers for every track featured on Spotify’s official editorial playlists. The result was a dataset of around 50,000 covers with individual resolutions of 640 x 640. This was used as training data for Nvidia’s StyleGAN2 architecture, the same system that previously brought us pizzas, fursonas, and...
Scientists from NVIDIA and Harvard have made a huge breakthrough in genetic research. They developed a deep-learning toolkit that is able to significantly cut down the time and cost needed to run rare and single-cell experiments. According to a study...
The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro talks to WIRED about AI, CRISPR, and his hopes for humanity.
We are living through an AI renaissance thought wholly unimaginable just a few decades ago — automobiles are becoming increasingly autonomous, machine learning systems can craft prose nearly as well as human poets, and almost every smartphone on the...
AI-enabled synthetic media is being used as a tool for manipulating real emotions and capturing user data by genealogy service, MyHeritage, which has just launched a new feature — called ‘deep nostalgia‘ — that lets users upload a photo of a person (or several people) to see individual faces animated by algorithm. The Black Mirror-style […]
Bollywood continues to associate female beauty with fair skin, according to a new AI study by Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists. The researchers explored evolving social biases in the $2.1 billion film industry by analyzing movie dialogues from the last 70 years. They first selected 100 popular Bollywood films from each of the past seven decades, along with 100 of the top-grossing Hollywood movies from the same period. They then applied Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to subtitles of the films to examine how social biases have evolved over time. “Our argument...
MorphAIs is a new VC out of Berlin, aiming to leverage AI algorithms to boost its investment decisions in early-stage startups. But there’s a catch: it hasn’t raised a fund yet. The firm was founded by Eva-Valérie Gfrerer who was previously head of Growth Marketing at FinTech startup OptioPay and her background is in Behavioural […]
Closed captions will soon be widely available on Zoom. The video conferencing app has announced that it's working towards making automatic closed captioning available to all of its users by the fall of 2021. Currently, the built-in AI-powered fea...
Machine learning is changing the world, and it’s changing it fast. In just the last few years, it’s brought us virtual assistants that understand language, autonomous vehicles, new drug discoveries, AI-based triage for medical scans, handwriting recognition and more. One thing that machine learning shouldn’t be changing is the climate. The issue relates to how machine learning is developed. In order for machine learning (and deep learning) to be able to accurately make decisions and predictions, it needs to be ‘trained’. Imagine an online marketplace for selling shoes, that...
In May 2019, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) declared, “No AI currently exists that can outduel a human strapped into a fighter jet in a high-speed, high-G dogfight.” Fast forward to August 2020, which saw an AI built by Heron Systems flawlessly beat top fighter pilots 5 to 0 at DARPA’s AlphaDogFight Trials. Time and time again Heron’s AI outmaneuvered human pilots as it pushed the boundaries of g-forces with unconventional tactics, lightning-fast decision-making, and deadly accuracy. The former US Defense Secretary Mark Esper announced in September that the Air...
Jack Dorsey and Jay Z create a bitcoin endowment, Datadog acquires a Startup Battlefield company and BuzzFeed experiments with AI-generated quizzes. This is your Daily Crunch for February 12, 2021. Oh, and before we get started: Consider applying to the Early Stage pitch off and submitting a pitch deck for feedback on Extra Crunch Live! […]
A new BuzzFeed quiz is the first in what VP of Product Chris Johanesen said he’s hoping will be a series of “stunt-y experiments” that the publisher launches this year. The quiz, timed for Valentine’s Day weekend, promises to “create your perfect boyfriend (or girlfriend) using AI technology.” Johanesen said it’s designed to “poke fun […]
Sweden’s data protection authority, the IMY, has fined the local police authority €250,000 ($300k+) for unlawful use of the controversial facial recognition software, Clearview AI, in breach of the country’s Criminal Data Act. As part of the enforcement the police must conduct further training and education of staff in order to avoid any future processing […]
You might soon be able to use an AI system to help train your dog to sit. A pair of researchers from Colorado State University have developed an artificial intelligence system that detects when a dog is sitting, standing or lying. If your furry frien...
Scientists have developed an AI that can generate music from silent piano performances, just by watching the movements of the player’s hands. The system, called Audeo, analyzes top-down videos of someone tickling the ivories to predict which keys are being pressed in each frame. It then produces a transcript of the music, which a synthesizer translates into sound. The researchers trained and tested the AI on footage of pianist Paul Barton playing tunes by famous composers. They then evaluated the accuracy of the Audeo’s compositions by playing them to music-recognition apps, such as Shazam and SoundHound. The apps identified the tune 86% of the time — just 7%… This story continues at The Next Web
Two Google engineers have quit the company over the firing of AI researcher Timnit Gebru, whose controversial termination in December sparked an internal backlash about ethics and diversity. David Baker, who led the engineering team for Google Trust and Safety, said he was resigning after more than 16 years because Gebru’s departure had “extinguished [his] desire to continue as a Googler.” Software engineer Vinesh Kannan has also left the company. He tweeted that Google’s treatment of Gebru and diversity recruiter Abril Christina Curley “had crossed a personal red line.” Yesterday was my last day at Google. I left because Google's mistreatment of… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Google
Google has lost a couple of talents due to the way it treated and the departure of its former top AI ethics researcher, Dr. Timnit Gebru. According to Reuters, engineering director David Baker left the tech giant last month after 16 years with the co...
Robotic process automation (RPA) has found a strong foothold in the world of enterprise IT through its effective use of AI and other technology to help automate repetitive tasks, to free up people to focus on more complicated work. Today, a startup called Infinitus is coming out of stealth to apply this concept to the […]
IBM today announced the formation of its Elite Hybrid Cloud Build Team. According to Big Blue, this group of AI and cloud computing experts was assembled to help bring its partners into the cutting edge of hybrid solution systems. What? While Elite Hybrid Cloud Build Team might sound like a crack squad of futuristic Airborne Seabees, the reality is almost just as cool. Per IBM: The elite engagement team consists of over 100 cloud architects, data scientists, cloud developers, security specialists, and developer advocates who work on the agile co-creation of advanced technology solutions for partners and their clients. With… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: IBM
Google announced today that it’s adding AI-powered measurements of heart and respiration rates to the Google Fit app. The tech uses a combination of sensors and computer vision algorithms to take measurements through a smartphone camera. The Big G said the features will be available from next month on Pixel phones, with more Android devices to follow. Users will then be able to measure their breathing rate by placing their head and upper torso in view of the phone’s front-facing camera. [Read: How much does it cost to buy, own, and run an EV? It’s not as much as you think] Their… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Google
Footage of potentially dangerous situations will be uploaded to the cloud.
TLDR: Rezi Resume software can help you create a resume designed to pass automated hiring software and land an interview for the job you want. If you’re on the job hunt right now, everyone feels for you. It’s definitely not a fun place to be and the search is often about as stressful as life gets. Considering what’s at stake in the search for a new job or even a new career, it’s up to each and every job applicant to challenge themselves to put their absolute best foot forward. And you need to understand that that first impression these… This story continues at The Next Web
Clearview AI violated Canada’s privacy laws by scraping photos of citizens from the internet without permission, the country’s regulators announced on Tuesday. The controversial firm provides software to law enforcement agencies that can match photos of faces to a database of more than 3 billion images. Canada’s privacy watchdogs said this creates a risk of significant harm to the public. They noted that people whose images are captured in Clearview’s database could be misidentified or exposed to data breaches. “What Clearview does is mass surveillance and it is illegal,” said Daniel Therrien, Canada’s privacy commissioner. “It is completely unacceptable for millions… This story continues at The Next Web
Latitude, a startup building games with stories are generated by artificial intelligence, is announcing that it has raised $3.3 million in seed funding. The idea of an AI-generated story might make you think of hilariously nonsensical experiments like “Sunspring,” but Latitude’s first title, AI Dungeon, is an impressively open-ended (and coherent) text adventure game where […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Clearview AI’s facial recognition amounts to mass surveillance and the company should delete the faces of Canadians from its database, Canada’s privacy commissioners said Wednesday. Commissioner Daniel Therrien said what Clearview does — scraping photos from social media and other public sites for use by law enforcement — is “illegal” and creates a system that “inflicts broad-based harm on all members of society, who find themselves continually in a police lineup.” The commissioners released a report that follows a yearlong investigation by several Canadian privacy agencies into Clearview’s practices, which found the company had collected highly sensitive biometric information without consent and that it “used and disclosed Canadians’... Continue reading…
Amazon’s plans to install AI-powered cameras in its delivery vans have been slammed by privacy advocates as “the largest expansion of corporate surveillance in human history.” The e-commerce giant has been testing a system that provides real-time monitoring of the roads and drivers. In an instructional video first reported by The Information, Amazon said the cameras record drivers on their route “100% of the time.” The company told Reuters that it recently started rolling out the tech across its delivery fleet: This technology will provide drivers real-time alerts to help them stay safe when they are on the road. The system,… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Amazon
In 2017, artists and filmmakers Lauren Lee McCarthy, Grace Lee and Tony Patrick were tasked with dreaming up the “future of work” for a residency at the University of Southern California. As part of a 3-month process of exploring ideas for the better...
For decades, we’ve been trying to develop artificial intelligence in our own image. And at every step of the way, we’ve managed to create machines that can perform marvelous feats and at the same time make surprisingly dumb mistakes. After six decades of research and development, aligning AI systems with our goals, intents, and values continues to remain an elusive objective. Every major field of AI seems to solve part of the problem of replicating human intelligence while leaving out holes in critical areas. And these holes become problematic when we apply current AI technology to areas where we expect… This story continues at The Next Web
In recent years we’ve seen a whole bunch of visual/style fashion-focused search engines cropping up, tailored to helping people find the perfect threads to buy online by applying computer vision and other AI technologies to perform smarter-than-keywords visual search which can easily match and surface specific shapes and styles. Startups like Donde Search, Glisten and […]
Image: Brian Mueller Carrot Weather — the entertainingly antagonistic weather application from developer Brian Mueller — just got its latest version 5.0 update, which brings a whole new (and far more customizable) design, removes the upfront price tag in favor of more subscription tiers, and, of course, adds new dialogue and Easter eggs for the app’s malevolent AI character. It’s been a few years since Mueller released Carrot Weather 4.0, and the new update brings a fresh coat of paint to the weather app, with more detailed data that’s broken down into individual cards for things like Moon phases, wind speed, precipitation, and more. Image by Brian Mueller Users are also able to fully customize the layout of those interface cards based... Continue reading…
Scientists are developing an AI device that helps people quit smoking by predicting when they’ll crave a nicotine hit. The “Level” system is an onboard computer for e-cigarettes that precisely monitors vaping behavior. It’s designed to help users control their cravings or reduce the amount of nicotine they’re inhaling. Level will incorporate insights from an observational study launched today by the University of East Anglia. The research team has developed a small monitoring device that screws onto tank-based e-cigs. It then measures the number and duration of a user’s vapes, the time between each drag, and the power used per puff. This data will create a personalized… This story continues at The Next Web
Levity, which has been operating in stealth (until now), is the latest no-code company to throw its wares into the ring, having picked up $1.7M in pre-seed funding led by Gil Dibner’s Angular Ventures. The Berlin-based startup wants to bring AI-powered workflow automation to anyone, letting knowldge workers automate tedious, repetitive and manual parts of […]
Artificial intelligence has become so good at chess that its only competition now comes from other computer programs. Indeed, a human hasn’t defeated a machine in a chess tournament in 15 years. It’s an impressive technical achievement, but that dominance has also made top-level chess less imaginative, as players now increasingly follow strategies produced by soulless algorithms. But a new research paper shows that AI could still make the game better for us puny humans. The study authors developed a chess engine with a difference. Unlike most of its predecessors, their system isn’t designed to defeat humans. Instead, it’s programmed to play like them.… This story continues at The Next Web
Finesse, a startup promising to take the guesswork and waste out of fashion, is announcing that it has raised $4.5 million in seed and pre-seed funding. Founder and CEO Ramin Ahmari said the tremendous waste in the fashion industry has become badly-kept secret, with Burberry recently facing a backlash over its practice of burning unwanted […]
Artificial intelligence has been making waves in recent years, enabling us to solve problems faster than traditional computing could ever allow. Recently, for example, Google’s artificial intelligence subsidiary DeepMind developed AlphaFold2, a program that solved the protein-folding problem. This is a problem that has had baffled scientists for 50 years. Advances in AI have allowed us to make progress in all kinds of disciplines – and these are not limited to applications on this planet. From designing missions to clearing Earth’s orbit of junk, here are a few ways artificial intelligence can help us venture further into space. Astronaut assistants… This story continues at The Next Web
One day we’re all going to die. Science and technology can put it off for awhile, but the march of time stops for no human. Sadly, most of us will be forgotten. It’s a bleak prognosis but that’s how things have always been. And that’s unlikely to change, despite the best efforts of the AI community. There’s a new tech trend (that’s actually a dumb old trope) sweeping through big tech, little tech, and South Korean TV stations: digital resurrection. The premise is simple. A person living in the modern world leaves tiny traces of who they are in everything… This story continues at The Next Web
Facebook News today rolled out across the UK, and the social network marked the launch by revealing new details on how algorithms power the feature. In a blog post, Facebook said the ranking system isn’t comprised of a single algorithm. Instead, it uses multiple layers of machine learning models to predict what a user wants to see. Facebook explained how this would work for a fictional user called Juan: Since Juan’s login yesterday, his friend Wei posted a photo of his cocker spaniel. Another friend, Saanvi, posted a video from her morning run. His favorite Page published an interesting article about the best way… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Facebook
Run:AI, a Tel Aviv-based company that helps businesses orchestrate and optimize their AI compute infrastructure, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B round. The new round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors TLV Partners and S Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to date to $43 […]
Third-party cookies might have a tasty name, but they can be pretty poisonous when they’re quietly tracking your online behavior. A new Google machine learning initiative aims to replace the rancid cookies with a privacy-first alternative. The search giant calls the system Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). FLoC (pronounced “flock”) allows businesses to send ads to groups of potential customers rather than specific individuals. The system uses machine learning algorithms to create clusters of people with similar browsing habits. All the data analyzed by the algorithms — including your web history — is kept private on the browser and not uploaded anywhere else.… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Google
5G is the current revolution in wireless technology, and every chip company old and new is trying to burrow their way into this ultra-competitive — but extremely lucrative — market. One of the most interesting new players in the space is EdgeQ, a startup with a strong technical pedigree via Qualcomm that we covered last […]
Fleksy, an autocorrecting AI keyboard which competes with big-guns like Google’s Gboard and Microsoft’s Swiftkey, has a new way to catch users’ eyes: Art keyboards. It’s just launched FleksyArt: A marketplace for artists to sell digital works to its users so they can customize the look of their keyboards. Fleksy has had keyboard themes before. […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amnesty International has launched a new campaign against facial recognition titled Ban The Scan — and is launching with a demand for New York City to halt police and government use of the technology. Amnesty argues facial recognition is incompatible with basic privacy rights, and will exacerbate structural racism in policing tactics. “New Yorkers should be able to go out about their daily lives without being tracked by facial recognition,” said Matt Mahmoudi, an AI and human rights researcher with Amnesty. “Other major cities across the US have already banned facial recognition, and New York must do the same.” “The NYPD has used facial recognition to track tens of thousands of New Yorkers” Amnesty is joined in the New York portion of... Continue reading…
A team of researchers from Las Vegas recently developed an AI model capable of judging a human pianist’s skill level. On the surface, it might not sound like the kind of breakthrough research that could change the world overnight. And it’s probably not. But it represents what could be a crucial component in a machine learning stack that could make the world fair for smart kids. Education doesn’t work the same way for everyone. In the US, for example, most public school systems have programs in place to identify so-called “gifted” children. Unfortunately, there’s no consensus in academia or government… This story continues at The Next Web
If you’re unimpressed by some of Skyrim’s hilarious dialogue, a new AI app called VASynth lets you take over the scriptwriting. The tool uses voice samples from Bethesda games to convert text into speech. You can generate dialogue in the style of many voices from the publisher’s back catalog, including Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Morrowind. YouTuber Adriac used it to produce a pretty impressive trailer — although the tone of voice sounds slightly artificial at times: Others are using it for more quirky creations, like this mod that forces characters to compliment your naked body: The tool was created by… This story continues at The Next Web
SpaceX created a unique world record of launching 143 satellites on a single vehicle on Sunday night. The firm broke the record previously held by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which launched 104 satellites in 2017. The US-based space company launched 143 satellites through its Falcon 9 rocket. The rocket took off at 10AT EST on Sunday from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The launch was originally slotted for the previous day, but there was a delay because of bad weather conditions. [Read: How this company leveraged AI to become the Netflix of Finland] This was SpaceX’s first… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: SpaceX
Healthcare is a human right, however, nobody said all coverage is created equal. Artificial intelligence and machine learning systems are already making impressive inroads into the myriad fields of medicine — from IBM’s Watson: Hospital Edition and A...
TLDR: The Asus AC1900 WiFi Router has cloud controls, AI advances and a host of special features that make it a premium router upgrade model, particular at nearly 40 percent off. You can go without a refrigerator for a day or two. You can survive without an oven, or a microwave, or your fancy coffee brewing system. But there’s no faster way to bring an entire household to a screeching halt and the edge of imminent panic than if the WiFi router sputters or fails. WiFi is the lifeblood of any modern home — and considering how many smart devices… This story continues at The Next Web
The failures of artificial intelligent systems have become a recurring theme in technology news. Credit scoring algorithms that discriminate against women. Computer vision systems that misclassify dark-skinned people. Recommendation systems that promote violent content. Trending algorithms that amplify fake news. Most complex software systems fail at some point and need to be updated regularly. We have procedures and tools that help us find and fix these errors. But current AI systems, mostly dominated by machine learning algorithms, are different from traditional software. We are still exploring the implications of applying them to different applications, and protecting them against failure needs new… This story continues at The Next Web
A couple of months ago at CNBC’s Transform conference, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna painted a picture of a company in the midst of a transformation. He said that he wanted to take advantage of IBM’s $34 billion 2018 Red Hat acquisition to help customers manage a growing hybrid cloud world, while using artificial intelligence to […]
With all the hullabaloo surrounding Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump’s last-minute pardons slipped under the RADAR a bit. Sure, Trump’s pardoning of Steve Bannon nabbed plenty of headlines. And his snub of Joe Exotic, the Tiger King, made the trades. But what’s arguably the most interesting story of them all is 45’s pardoning of Anthony Levandowski, the founder of the Church of AI. Levandowski was sentenced to 18 months in prison for the intellectual theft of Google and Waymo’s autonomous driving software and hardware details. He was once a superstar developer regarded as a pioneer in the autonomous vehicle world. After… This story continues at The Next Web
As the global agricultural industry stretches to meet expected population growth and food demand, and food security becomes more of a pressing issue with global warming, a startup out of South Africa is using artificial intelligence to help farmers manage their farms, trees, and fruits. Aerobotics is a South African startup that provides intelligent tools […]
Twenty years ago, Facebook did not exist. Google had just failed to sell itself to Yahoo for $1 million. Netflix was a fledgling startup struggling to establish a working business model around selling and renting DVDs online. Today, Facebook and Google are among the top ten most valuable companies, and Netflix, now the most popular online streaming service with nearly 200 million users worldwide, is worth over $200 billion. Yahoo sold its assets to Verizon for a fraction of Google’s value, and Blockbuster, the video-renting giant that refused to acquire Netflix in 2000, no longer exists. The internet’s short but… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Netflix
The Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) has slammed the company’s treatment of two prominent AI researchers as “an attack on the people who are trying to make Google’s technology more ethical.” The newly-formed union issued a statement on the “retaliation” against AI ethics lead Margaret Mitchell, whose corporate account was recently suspended by the Big G. Mitchell had reportedly been using automated scripts to find messages showing mistreatment of her former colleague Timnit Gebru, whose forced departure in December sparked a backlash among Google staff. [Read: How Netflix shapes mainstream culture, explained by data] In a statement, the AWU described the actions against the… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Google
Research shows that various industries have big ethnic and gender pay gaps, but the extent to which discrimination affects these inequalities is tricky to assess. A new AI tool developed at the London School of Economics has shed some light on how recruitment prejudices influence these outcomes. The system uses supervised machine learning algorithms to analyze the search behavior of recruiters on employment websites. The researchers applied the algorithms to the online recruitment platform of the Swiss public employment service. [Read: How Netflix shapes mainstream culture, explained by data] The tool used data from 452,729 searches by 43,352 recruiters, 17.4 million profiles that appeared… This story continues at The Next Web
Springbox AI, an AI-powered financial forecasting application designed to replace financial market investment service and aimed at the average financial markets trader, has launched on iOS and Android. It’s been built by a team of founders who previously worked at Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, UBS, and BNP Paribas. It’s so far raised $2M in funding […]
With every year, AI is beginning to bring more standardized levels of diagnostic accuracy in medicine. This is true of skin cancer detection, for example, and lung cancers. Now, a startup in Israel called Embryonics says its AI can improve the odds of successfully implanting a healthy embryo during in vitro fertilization. What the company […]
Google is investigating an artificial intelligence researcher after it detected that "an account had exfiltrated thousands of files” and shared them externally. Margaret Mitchell, a co-lead of the Ethical AI unit, has been locked out of Google's corp...
Google has suspended the corporate account of Margaret Mitchell, Timnit Gebru’s former co-lead of the Big G’s ethical AI division, claiming she shared thousands of internal files with people outside the company. A source told Axios that Mitchell had been using automated scripts to find messages showing discriminatory treatment of Gebru, whose recent ousting from the tech giant sparked outrage among colleagues. A Google spokesperson said the company was investigating the incident: Our security systems automatically lock an employee’s corporate account when they detect that the account is at risk of compromise due to credential problems or when an automated rule involving… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Google
Every picture posted to Facebook and Instagram gets a caption generated by an image analysis AI, and that AI just got a lot smarter. The improved system should be a treat for visually impaired users, and may help you find your photos faster in the future. Alt text is a field in an image’s metadata […]
LatticeFlow, an AI startup that was spun out of ETH Zurich in 2020, today announced that it has raised a $2.8 million seed funding round led by Swiss deep-tech fund btov and Global Founders Capital, which previously backed the likes of Revolut, Slack and Zalando. The general idea behind LatticeFlow is to build tools that […]
Skyqraft, the Swedish startup using AI and drones for electricity powerline inspection, has raised $2.2 million in seed funding, capital it will use to further develop its technology and expand its operations in Europe and in the U.S. Leading the seed round is Subvenio Invest, with participation from pre-seed backer Antler, Next Human Ventures, and […]
TLDR: Lightkey Pro Text Prediction Software can predict up to the next 12 words you type in your next document or email, saving you loads of time when you write. Back in 2019, Facebook announced it was making progress on one of its favorite pet projects, creating a wearable system that could type up to 100 words per minute translated directly from a writer’s thoughts. Facebook still hasn’t cracked that particular code quite yet, but even without digging into your brain waves, technology has done a pretty good job anticipating your next move and trying to help you carry it… This story continues at The Next Web
Machine learning and deep learning have become an important part of many applications we use every day. There are few domains that the fast expansion of machine learning hasn’t touched. Many businesses have thrived by developing the right strategy to integrate machine learning algorithms into their operations and processes. Others have lost ground to competitors after ignoring the undeniable advances in artificial intelligence. But mastering machine learning is a difficult process. You need to start with a solid knowledge of linear algebra and calculus, master a programming language such as Python, and become proficient with data science and machine learning libraries such… This story continues at The Next Web
COVID-19 has infected more than 23 million Americans and killed 386,000 of them to date, since the global pandemic began last March. Complicating the public health response is the fact that we still know so little about how the virus operates -- such...
Stanford researcher Michael Kosinski, the PhD behind the infamous “Gaydar” AI, is back with another phrenology-adjacent (his team swears it’s not phrenology) bit of pseudo-scientific ridiculousness. This time, they’ve published a paper indicating that a simple facial recognition algorithm can tell a person’s political affiliation. First things first: The paper is called “Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images.” You can read it here. Here’s a bit from the abstract: Ubiquitous facial recognition technology can expose individuals’ political orientation, as faces of liberals and conservatives consistently differ. Second things second: These are demonstrably false statements. Before… This story continues at The Next Web
Video: Samsung Samsung revealed new One UI 3 details at today’s Unpacked event, including an interesting new photo trick called object eraser, which lets you delete people from the backgrounds of your images. After a photo is taken, you can simply tap on the people you want to remove, and AI will (in theory) do the rest. If it works well — and that’s a big if — this is no small feat. Removing an element from a photo and intelligently filling in the background to replace it would be similar to what Adobe does with its Content-Aware Fill tool. We wouldn’t expect this feature to perform quite on that level, but it’s a tricky problem usually left to sophisticated image editing software to solve. If Samsung can pull this off convincingly, it’ll be a good... Continue reading…
If lockdown life has left you craving the companionship of a cuddly pet but you’re wary of dirty doggies and conniving kittens, a Japanese tech firm has created a more amenable alternative. Meet Moflin, an AI pet with “emotional capabilities that evolve like living animals.” The creature, which looks like a cross between a hamster and a slipper, won the Best of Innovation Award in Robotics at CES 2021 this week. [Read: How Netflix shapes mainstream culture, explained by data] Moflin uses a nature-inspired algorithm to learn and grow from patterns it detects through its sensors, according to its creators at Vanguard Industries.… This story continues at The Next Web
It’s hard to imagine the stress that pet owners go through when their furry friends go missing. A US government survey suggests that 7% of lost dogs are never recovered. That’s why a startup named Shadow is trying to reunite dogs with their owners using AI. The startup has a free iOS and Android app that works with shelters and rescue organizations to help owners find their lost dogs in the US. It also uses AI to match a missing dog’s picture with images posted by shelters, as well as posts on social networks. The model finds potential matches to… This story continues at The Next Web
There are some wild stats about Microsoft Flight Simulator. In the sim, all 117 million lakes in the world are rendered in their appropriate places. Each plane has more than 1,000 points that respond to a variety of conditions at any given time, incl...
A trio of researchers from the Google Brain team recently unveiled the next big thing in AI language models: a massive one trillion-parameter transformer system. The next biggest model out there, as far as we’re aware, is OpenAI’s GPT-3, which uses a measly 175 billion parameters. Background: Language models are capable of performing a variety of functions but perhaps the most popular is the generation of novel text. For example, you can go here and talk to a “philosopher AI” language model that’ll attempt to answer any question you ask it (with numerous notable exceptions). [Read next: How Netflix shapes mainstream… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Google
It’s estimated that there were some 50 billion connected devices globally in 2020, and while that really says a lot about how far we’ve come in tech, for many it also speaks to a big issue: security vulnerabilities, with the devices themselves, plus all the components and services running on them, all potential targets for […]
Bryte today announced $24M in Series A funding led by ARCHina Capital. This comes as the company moves away from selling its $8,000 mattress direct to consumers and instead is working with partners who would utilize Bryte’s technology in their mattresses. Bryte says several deals are in the works. According to the company, this pivot […]
A team of computer scientists has used theoretical calculations to argue that algorithms could not control a super-intelligent AI. Their study addresses what Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom calls the control problem: how do we ensure super-intelligence machines act in our interests? The researchers conceived of a theoretical containment algorithm that would resolve this problem by simulating the AI‘s behavior, and halting the program if its actions became harmful. But their analysis found that it would be fundamentally impossible to build an algorithm that could control such a machine, said Iyad Rahwan, Director of the Center for Humans and Machines: If you break the problem… This story continues at The Next Web
The White House today announced the launch of its National AI Initiative Office, marking what should be President Trump‘s final manipulation of the country’s gutted Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). According to an OSTP press release: The Office is charged with overseeing and implementing the United States national AI strategy and will serve as the central hub for Federal coordination and collaboration in AI research and policymaking across the government, as well as with private sector, academia, and other stakeholders. Background: Over the course of the Trump presidency, the OSTP was whittled down from a record 135 staffers… This story continues at The Next Web
Nvidia’s RTX 3060 GPU. Nvidia is announcing its new $329 GeForce RTX 3060 card today. While the company only just introduced an RTX 3060 Ti for $399 last month, this latest RTX 3060 addition is designed to replace the aging GTX 1060 Pascal cards that many PC gamers are still using today. Nvidia is promising 10 times more ray tracing performance with the RTX 3060, making it very tempting for those looking to upgrade PC parts or full machines. Like the rest of Nvidia’s RTX 3000 cards, the RTX 3060 will also be capable of using Nvidia’s suite of RTX apps and DLSS support. Nvidia’s DLSS technology uses neural networks and AI supercomputers to analyze games and sharpen up images at lower resolutions. DLSS allows a game to render at a lower resolution and use... Continue reading…
Ever since we all started spending more time at home, I've had to pay especially close attention to production gear -- we're now shooting our videos and handling our live streams away from our old office, after all. So far, I've struggled most with a...
The maker of a defunct cloud photo storage app that pivoted to selling facial recognition services has been ordered to delete user data and any algorithms trained on it, under the terms of an FTC settlement. The regulator investigated complaints the Ever app — which gained earlier notoriety for using dark patterns to spam users’ […]
It wouldn’t be CES without something cute that melts even the coldest of hearts. This year, that honor goes to Moflin, an AI pet robot that looks like someone spilled water on a Mogwai boom mic. Moflin, like many of its adorable CES counterparts, com...
When you receive a faulty or unwanted item, Amazon usually asks you to initiate a return for a refund or replacement. However, if the item is inexpensive, it might cost the company a lot to ship it back to the warehouse. So, companies like Amazon and Walmart are asking customers to keep these items to save some money. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, these online retail giants are using AI to determine if it economically makes sense to initiate a return of an unwanted item. The report notes that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this process… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Amazon
Back in 2018, a startup called Lululab brought a device called the Lumini to CES. It was a system that used a multispectral camera to capture and analyze the features of your face. An AI-powered algorithm would then use that information to diagnose s...
Just over a month after announcing the Airpeak in a vague press release and equally mysterious video, Sony has shown off its new drone in a virtual CES 2021 presentation. The Airpeak supports Sony’s Alpha series of mirrorless cameras and uses AI to k...
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Federal Trade Commission has reached a settlement with photo storage app Ever that it says used customers’ photos to develop facial recognition technology without telling them, the agency announced Monday. Under the terms of the agreement, Everalbum Inc. is required to delete photos and videos of its users who deactivated their accounts, as well as any facial recognition algorithms developed with users’ photos or videos. The company also must delete all “face embeddings,” which it describes as “data reflecting facial features that can be used for facial recognition purposes” that were derived from users’ photos who didn’t give consent for their use. Everalbum, which shut down Ever in August and rebranded itself as Paravision AI, is... Continue reading…
A team of researchers from the University of Victoria have developed an AI system capable of determining the expected chemical makeup of drugs. While it involves supercomputers and a robust cocktail of cloud-based machine learning technologies, the ultimate goal is to make it dead-simple for just about anyone to tell what’s in their drugs. Approximately 70,000 deaths from drug overdose are recorded annually in the US alone. While the causes are both myriad and systemic, a significant number of these tragedies could potentially be avoided if consumers knew what was in their drugs. The issue relates to those who take… This story continues at The Next Web
Columbia University researchers have developed a robot that displays a “glimmer of empathy” by visually predicting how another machine will behave. The robot learns to forecast its partner’s future actions and goals by observing a few video frames of its actions The researchers first programmed the partner robot to move towards green circles in a playpen of around 3×2 feet in size. It would sometimes move directly towards a green circle spotted by its cameras, but if the circles were hidden by an obstacle, it would either roll towards a different circle or not move at all. After the observer robot watched the… This story continues at The Next Web
Video: Samsung Samsung is working on a robot that can pick up laundry, load the dishwasher, set the table, pour wine, and even bring you a drink. The robot is called Bot Handy, and Samsung says it’ll be able to recognize objects using a camera and AI. The bot is meant to be “an extension of you in the kitchen, living room, and anywhere else you may need an extra hand in your home,” Sebastian Seung, president of Samsung Research, said during Samsung’s CES press conference today. For now, it’s not clear how close Bot Handy is to being a real, shipping product. Samsung didn’t announce a price or release window, and the company has previously used CES to show off futuristic-looking robots that are more of a concept than a real product. The robot is... Continue reading…
Congrats on surviving this wild first week of 2021. Outside all-things political, a few labor developments happened that are worth noting. Also, shortly before the mob of Trump supporters wreaked havoc on the U.S. Capitol, I caught up with Dr. Timnit Gebru, the prominent AI ethics researcher who said she was fired from Google last […]
Sony has unveiled a new lineup of Bravia TVs that “mimic the human brain” to replicate how we see and hear. The devices use a new processing method that Sony calls “cognitive intelligence.” The company says it goes beyond standard AI to create an immersive visual and sound experience: While conventional AI can only detect and analyze picture elements like color, contrast, and detail individually, the new Cognitive Processor XR can cross-analyze an array of elements at once, just as our brains do. By doing so, each element is adjusted to its best final outcome, in conjunction with each other, so everything is… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Sony
Emerging tech like AI, robotics, IoT, blockchain, and machine learning are kicking our organizations into high gear by catapulting our ability to process data, build products, and automate repetitive tasks. Andy Lurling, Founding Partner of impact-driven VC firm, LUMO Labs believes this shift will pave the way for us to find new and better solutions to some of society’s biggest problems. “If you want to create social impact fast, technology is the way. For example, with AI and data, you can find patterns so much faster and come up with a thousand alternatives that would take people years to work… This story continues at The Next Web
If, as I suspect many of you have, you have worked your way through baking every type of cookie, bread, and cake under the sun over the last year, Google has a surprise for you: a pair of AI-generated hybrid treats, the “breakie” and the “cakie.” The origin of these new items seems to have […]
The ongoing push for social distancing to slow the spread of Covid-19 has meant that more people than ever before are using internet-based services to get things done. And that is having a direct impact on digital customer service, which is seeing unprecedented traffic and demands when things are not running smoothly. Today, one of […]
Sports have been among some of the most popular and lucrative media plays in the world, luring broadcasters, advertisers and consumers to fork out huge sums to secure the chance to watch (and sponsor) their favorite teams and athletes. That content, unsurprisingly, also typically costs a ton of money to produce, narrowing the production and […]
YouTuber Denis Shiryaev has unveiled his most spectacular AI video restoration yet: a new montage of footage shot by the Lumière brothers. Shiryaev spent months using machine learning to colorize, upscale, and enhance a collection of films by the French cinema pioneers. He began by using an algorithm developed by his company, Neural Love, to remove duplicate frames from the footage and restore the film’s original frame rate. “This is a crucial step to achieve the effect of fluid movement when we do a version of the video at 60 frames per second (fps),” Shiryaev explained on YouTube. [Read: Meet the 4 scale-ups using data to… This story continues at The Next Web
Once the shining city on a hill that the rest of the world looked to for leadership and guidance, America’s moral high ground has steadily eroded in recent decades — and rapidly accelerated since Trump’s corrupt, self-dealing tenure in the White Hous...
If you follow the news on artificial intelligence, you’ll find two diverging threads. The media and cinema often portray AI with human-like capabilities, mass unemployment, and a possible robot apocalypse. Scientific conferences, on the other hand, discuss progress toward artificial general intelligence while acknowledging that current AI is weak and incapable of many of the basic functions of the human mind. But regardless of where they stand in comparison to human intelligence, today’s AI algorithms have already become a defining component for many sectors, including health care, finance, manufacturing, transportation, and many more. And very soon “no field of human endeavor will remain independent of artificial… This story continues at The Next Web
"We're going to start to see a lot of real value and ROI generated by AI across more and more businesses,"
It takes a lot of energy for machines to be trained with data sets.
Applications based on artificial intelligence — whether they are systems running autonomous services, platforms being used in drug development or to predict the spread of a virus, traffic management for 5G networks, or something else altogether — require an unprecedented amount of computing power to run. And today, one of the big names in the […]
Google is currently under fire for apparently pushing out a researcher whose work warned of bias in AI, and now a report from Reuters says others doing such work at the company have been asked to “strike a positive tone” and undergo additional reviews for research touching on “sensitive topics.” Reuters, citing researchers at the […]
DeepMind has made it a mission to show that not only can an AI truly become proficient at a game, it can do so without even being told the rules. Its newest AI agent, called MuZero, accomplishes this not just with visually simple games with complex strategies, like Go, Chess, and Shogi, but with visually […]
If Frank Zappa’s endless guitar solos somehow leave your earbuds craving more, music-hackers Dadabots are here to satisfy your auditory desires. The team of CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski recently used a recurrent neural network (RNN) to generate an infinite bass solo that they’re live-streaming on YouTube. The duo trained their neural network on a two-hour improvised bass solo by musician Adam Neely. “My strategy was to use the same bass, same pickup, same tone, improvise basslines over an 85 beats per minute drum groove, and keep everything in E-minor so the end result wouldn’t be too chromatic,” Neely explained on YouTube. Dadabots then ran the… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: YouTube
ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, is entering the health industry as it seeks to diversify a business dependent on advertising and livestreaming sales. The company, which prides itself on content algorithms, has started seeking talent in AI drug discovery across Mountain View, Shanghai and Beijing, its recruiting page shows. “We are looking for candidates to […]
You’ve heard of challenger banks? Now meet the challenger energy suppliers. The UK’s Octopus Energy has attained a $2.06 billion valuation (£1.5 billion) after attracting a $200 million (£150 million) investment from Tokyo Gas for a 9.7% stake, in order to launch a joint venture. Octopus will own 30% of the venture, with Tokyo Gas […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The yearly Spotify Wrapped is a rather upbeat affair, which doesn’t doesn’t quite match everyone’s mood this year. For the more sullen among us, there’s another option: a bot from The Pudding that will judge us for our crimes of listening to terrible music. If you want to be judged, you open a page titled “How Bad is Your Spotify” and you log in with your Spotify account. (It might take a couple refreshes on the “Loading your music library” page.) This absolute jerk of an AI then drags you mercilessly while it pulls your playlists and top tracks. It asks you questions before it shows any results, in phrasing that gives the plain text the same aura as the girls who bullied me in middle school. Did you really listen to Clementine by Sarah... Continue reading…
UC Berkeley researchers have developed a gesture-detecting wearable that they believe could be used to control prosthetics and electronic devices The device uses a combination of biosensors and AI software to identify the hand gestures a person intends to make by analyzing electrical signals from their arm. It’s far from the first gesture recognition system designed for human-computer interaction (HCI), but the new system offers some unique benefits. Most notably, it uses a neuro-inspired hyperdimensional computing algorithm to update itself as it receives new information, such as changes to electrical signals when an arm gets sweaty. “In gesture recognition, your signals are going to change over… This story continues at The Next Web
In their rush to offer alternatives to advanced western chipsets, Chinese semiconductor companies are racking up large fundings from investors. Horizon Robotics, a five-year-old unicorn specializing in AI chips for robots and autonomous vehicles, announced Tuesday that it has secured $150 million in funding. The proceeds are the first close of an over $700 million […]
In the past few years, researchers have shown growing interest in the security of artificial intelligence systems. There’s a special interest in how malicious actors can attack and compromise machine learning algorithms, the subset of AI that is being increasingly used in different domains. Among the security issues being studied are backdoor attacks, in which a bad actor hides malicious behavior in a machine learning model during the training phase and activates it when the AI enters production. Until now, backdoor attacks had certain practical difficulties because they largely relied on visible triggers. But new research by AI scientists at the… This story continues at The Next Web
Welcome back to Mixtape, the TechCrunch podcast that looks at the human element that powers technology. For this episode we spoke with Meredith Whittaker, co-founder of the AI Now Institute and Minderoo Research Professor at NYU; Mara Mills, associate professor of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU and co-director of the NYU Center for […]
Back in July, Microsoft added a feature called Together Mode to its Teams workplace messaging app. The tool uses an AI-powered segmentation technology to put everyone in a video call in the same virtual space. Even if you don’t use Microsoft Teams, y...
Skype’s new Together Mode option featuring Verge staff. Microsoft is bringing one of its best Teams video calling features over to Skype this week. Together Mode, which uses AI to segment your face and shoulders and place you together with other people in a virtual space, is now available in Skype. You’ll need at least five people all with webcams to enable the feature, and it will place everyone into a virtual environment as if they’re sitting next to each other. You don’t even need the Skype app to take advantage of Together Mode, as it works through the web version of Skype without the need for an account. Skype users can create a Meet Now meeting and share the link with anyone to join. GIF: Microsoft Together Mode in Microsoft Teams. Microsoft first launched... Continue reading…
Ultimately, there isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” approach to building intersectional AI. At The Trevor Project, our team has outlined a methodology based on what we do, what we know today and the specific communities we serve.
Christmas songs are ubiquitous during the festive season, but most of them lose their luster after you’ve heard them a trillion times. If you wish this really would be the Last Christmas you’re forced to endure Wham, Google‘s new Blob Opera offers a chance to create something a little different. The machine learning experiment by artist David Lee lets you create an operatic festive song for a quartet of colorful blobs to sing. The creatures were taught the art by professional songbirds Cristian Joel (tenor), Frederick Tong (bass), Joanna Gamble (mezzo‑soprano), and Olivia Doutney (soprano), who recorded 16 hours of singing to train the… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Google
It’s tougher than ever to stand out in the world of wireless earbuds, but luckily the NuraLoop have a mighty trick up their sleeve: personalized sound. Are they perfect? No, there are a number of flaws, but they’re up there with the most inreresting wireless earbuds I’ve ever used. Come, friend, grasp my hand and we’ll go on a NuraLoop adventure together. [Read: Why AI is the future of home security] Who makes the NuraLoop? A company called Nura. Want to tell us anything else? Fine. The company’s carved out a niche for itself selling ‘hearing-tuned’ headphones. Effectively, the cans fire… This story continues at The Next Web
Deep learning has come a long way since the days it could only recognize hand-written characters on checks and envelopes. Today, deep neural networks have become a key component of many computer vision applications, from photo and video editors to medical software and self-driving cars. Roughly fashioned after the structure of the brain, neural networks have come closer to seeing the world as we humans do. But they still have a long way to go and make mistakes in situations that humans would never err. These situations, generally known as adversarial examples, change the behavior of an AI model in befuddling ways. Adversarial… This story continues at The Next Web
Facebook has been trying to get a foothold in the news space for many years. Last year, the company launched a dedicated section on its site called Facebook News for users in the US. It also wants to expand this program to other countries such as Brazil, Germany, and India. But that’s not the only project the social network is working on in the news space. According to a report from BuzzFeed News, Facebook is testing an AI-powered tool called TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) to summarize news pieces, so you don’t even have to click through to read those articles. The… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Facebook
Over the course of the last few years, Skylum made a name for itself with a set of photo-editing apps like Aurora HDR and Luminar. With Luminar AI, it is now launching a brand-new photo editor, starting at $79. The new application, available as a standalone product for Mac and Windows and as a plug-in […]
Researchers from the University of Sheffield have developed an AI system that detects which social media users spread disinformation — before they actually share it. The team found that Twitter users who share content from unreliable sources mostly tweet about politics or religion, while those who repost trustworthy sources tweet more about their personal lives. “We also found that the correlation between the use of impolite language and the spread of unreliable content can be attributed to high online political hostility,” said study co-author Dr Nikos Aletras, a lecturer in Natural Language Processing at the University of Sheffield. [Read: Why AI… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Twitter
Good news for Android Auto users who hate Google derived maps — third-party navigation apps are now available! For most of its life, Android Auto only offered full support for Google Maps or Waze for navigation. Other mapping apps would work, but they were restricted to the phone interface. However, with news that offline mapping app Sygic has launched a beta build on Android Auto this week, users now have another option. I’m sure this matters to someone out there, although I’ve never had issues with using Google Maps for navigation whilst driving. [Read: Why AI is the future of… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Android,Google
Solid state batteries have been just a whisper on the winds of the electric vehicle future. That is until Toyota got involved. According to recent reports, the Japanese carmaker is taking its solid state battery tech to testing next year in preparation for bringing it to market in 2025. If it pulls this off, it will be excellent news, in excellent time, for motorists looking to make the switch to electric vehicles. It could also make Toyota the first carmaker to bring solid state battery tech into the real world. [Read: Why AI is the future of home security] In… This story continues at The Next Web
Back in 2018, Tencent pledged to put more focus on enterprises as traditional industries in China increasingly tapped technology to boost productivity. The firm’s industrial projects range from using AI to screen medical images to building customer management tools for retailers on its WeChat messenger. Most recently, Tencent invested in FJ Dynamics, a Chinese startup […]
A festive game of Scrabble is a time-tested method of surviving the extended company of obnoxious family members. But losing to a crabby relative can make their company even worse. But this year, uncle Nigel (name changed to protect identity) will face a different challenge. Thanks to a new AI version of the classic board game, his distressing knowledge of the dictionary will be of no use at all — because real words no longer count. The BLABRECS system is the brainchild of Max Kreminski, an AI researcher and game designer. He describes his creation as “like Scrabble but worse.” The browser-based tool… This story continues at The Next Web
Without revealing all its secrets, Netflix has laid out how it uses AI to market shows and predict their success. We already knew that Netflix shuffles and redesigns its interface and show tiles, apparently on the fly, to hook more viewers. But it al...
Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7 a.m. PT). Subscribe here. Maybe it is a stock market bubble, or a tech-stock bubble at least. And maybe DoorDash, Airbnb and C3.ai and their bankers should have priced higher regardless to take advantage of all […]
Google’s Portrait Light feature can make some of your more mediocre photos look a lot better by giving you a way to change their lighting direction and intensity. The tech giant launched the AI-based lighting feature in September for the Pixel 4a 5G...
Welcome to Neural’s beginner’s guide to AI. This multi-part feature should provide you with a very basic understanding of what AI is, what it can do, and how it works. The guide contains articles on (in order published) neural networks, computer vision, natural language processing, algorithms, artificial general intelligence, and the difference between video game AI and real AI. As legend has it, a reporter once asked Mahatma Ghandi what he thought of Western Civilization. His response was “I think it would be a good idea.” The same sentiment could be applied to artificial intelligence if you compare it directly to human intelligence. That… This story continues at The Next Web
The firing of an AI researcher wouldn’t normally get a response from one of the world’s most powerful CEOs or coverage from mainstream media. But Timnit Gebru’s sudden departure from Google has turned simmering discontent about diversity and ethics at the company into an eruption. Gebru, who was co-leader of Google’s Ethical AI team, is a widely-respected researcher on algorithmic bias, who’s best known for a landmark study that exposed race and gender biases in facial recognition systems. But a paper she recently co-authored on large large-scale language models (LLMs) — which are used in many Google products — sparked a dispute with her… This story continues at The Next Web
Welcome to SHIFT Basics, a collection of tips, explainers, guides, and advice to keep you up to speed with mobility tech. When it comes to low emission vehicles, broadly speaking, there are three categories: battery-electric, alternative fuel, and hybrid-electric. Today, we’re going to take a look at hybrid-electric vehicles, what they are, and the different types of them, because they’re not quite as simple as they sound. In the hybrid vehicle world, there are three types: mild hybrid (MHEV), plug-in hybrid (PHEV), and regular hybrid-electric (HEV). [Read: Why AI is the future of home security] Despite key differences between the… This story continues at The Next Web
Stripchat today released its end of the year data report for 2020 and good-golly is it packed full of more information that you could ever want to know about the live camming business. For example, who among us would have guessed that the cam-modelling industry had such a huge userbase. Per the report: Stripchat reports an overall growth in traffic in 2020 having 906,181,416 in total new users vs 537,938,778 in 2019. That’s nearly a billion new users after a year in which the platform saw more than half-a-billion. We’re talking about an industry that’s pandemic-proof. (And for good reason,… This story continues at The Next Web
Not be an alarmist, but if bees go extinct it’s likely that coffee would become a rare and expensive luxury commodity. And I don’t want to live in that world. Luckily, ApisProtect today announced its entry into the US market where it will provide its unique AI-powered hive monitoring system to beekeepers and farmers. If you’re unfamiliar, ApisProtect is a European startup that uses simple proprietary devices and a unique stack of AI and software to, essentially, give beekeepers a spy on the inside. This means ‘keepers can get ahead of health issues that otherwise could remain hidden. According to… This story continues at The Next Web
As remote work continues to solidify its place as a critical aspect of how businesses exist these days, a startup that has built a platform to help companies source and bring on one specific category of remote employees, engineers, is taking on some more funding to meet demand. Turing — which has built an AI-based […]
The worldwide shift to virtual workplaces has been a blessing and a curse to people with hearing impairments. Having office chatter occur in text rather than speech is more accessible, but virtual meetings are no easier to follow than in-person ones — which is why real-time captioning startup Ava has seen a huge increase in […]
Facebook faces big antitrust lawsuits, DoorDash and C3.ai go public and YouTube announces new election misinformation policies. This is your Daily Crunch for December 9, 2020. The big story: FTC and 48 state AGs sue Facebook The Federal Trade Commission filed an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook today, as did 48 attorneys general representing 46 states. […]
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has pledged to investigate the departure of a top AI ethics researcher, according to a company-wide memo Axios obtained. Pichai also apologized for how Google handled Dr. Timnit Gebru's exit. "I’ve heard the reaction to Dr. G...
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the controversial departure of AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru in an email to staff on Wednesday. “We need to accept responsibility for the fact that a prominent Black, female leader with immense talent left Google unhappily,” he wrote. News of the email was first published by Axios. While Pichai did not say Gebru was fired as she and many others have claimed, he promised to review the steps that led to her leaving the company. “We need to assess the circumstances that led up to Dr. Gebru’s departure, examining where we could have improved and led a more respectful process,” he wrote. He also apologized for how Gebru’s departure had “led some in our community to question their place at Google” and... Continue reading…
Every once in awhile an idea comes along that’s so good it makes you wonder why it took so long for someone to think of it. IBM’s AI Fact Sheets is one of those ideas. AI Fact Sheets are a lot like packaged food nutrition labels. They contain information about an AI model’s development, capabilities, benchmark performance, and more. Big Blue today announced its plans to “commercialize key automated documentation capabilities from IBM Research’s AI Factsheets methodology into Watson Studio in Cloud Pak for Data throughout 2021.” In other words: businesses and developers using Watson Studio in Cloud Pak for Data… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: IBM
Haters gonna hate, IPOs gonna pop. That’s the story today as richly valued DoorDash and C3.ai, two American technology unicorns, saw their values skyrocket after they began trading today. DoorDash shares are up just under 83% to $186.51. The company priced its IPO at $102 per share last night, ahead of its raised IPO range […]
Last night both DoorDash and C3.ai priced their IPOs above their raised ranges. In simpler terms, both companies provided the market with a target price interval. Then they both raised it and each priced higher than that raised target. The IPO market, even as December races along and winter begins to bite, is red-hot. The […]
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge “Siri, drive my car...” Apple is shuffling its leadership that oversees its secretive self-driving car project, according to Bloomberg. The team’s engineers will now report to John Giannandrea, the company’s head of artificial intelligence, who also oversees voice-based digital assistant Siri. Giannandrea, Google’s former head of search and artificial intelligence, joined Apple in 2018. His hire was seen as a huge get for Apple, which has struggled for years to make progress in fast-moving and increasingly important AI fields like computer vision and natural language processing. Giannandrea reports directly to CEO Tim Cook as the leader of machine learning and AI strategy. Not much is known about Apple’s so-called Project Titan Not... Continue reading…
Japanese carmaker Toyota, the company that set fire to the eco-friendly driving narrative with its Prius hybrid, has finally announced that it will make an all-electric battery-powered vehicle. According to reports, Toyota will unveil a new all-electric SUV in the next few months Toyota will unveil a new eco-focused SUV. It seems there is not a confirmed date, as yet. This will be Toyota’s first all-electric vehicle, outside of China that is. Last year, Toyota took the covers off its C-HR, its battery-electric compact SUV that shares a platform with the Corolla. [Read: Why AI is the future of home… This story continues at The Next Web
The pandemic has been terrible for many industries, but the book industry has gotten a rare reprieve in an otherwise dismal past decade. Locked in homes and forced to socially distance from others, us humans have more time on our hands and more need to connect to characters than ever before. That surge in interest […]
As TC readers know, the tricky trade-off of the modern web is privacy for convenience. Online tracking is how this ‘great intimacy robbery’ is pulled off. Mass surveillance of what Internet users are looking at underpins Google’s dominant search engine and Facebook’s social empire, to name two of the highest profile ad-funded business models. TechCrunch’s […]
These last months, I’ve been on an Apple Watch journey. While I’ve played with the wearable before, this is the first time I’ve ever actually owned one, and — as sad as this sounds — it’s actually changed my day-to-day life? I can’t believe I wrote that? God help me? Before we dive into that, I’ve got an announcement. Nay, a proclamation: every supermarket needs an Apple Watch app. This is the word, and the word is good. Let me explain. [Read: Why AI is the future of home security] I’ve written about it here, but because I wear my Apple Watch around… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Apple Watch,Apple
So much for a December slowdown— this morning, Airbnb and C3.ai raised their IPO price ranges and we got early pricing information from Upstart and Wish.
Ford’s long-running Miami self-driving car tests might just prove vital during the pandemic. The automaker, Argo AI and The Education Fund are running an eight-week pilot program that uses autonomous Fusion Hybrid cars to deliver fresh produce to Mia...
Imagine an algorithm that reviews thousands of financial transactions every second and flags the fraudulent ones. This is something that has become possible thanks to advances in artificial intelligence in recent years, and it is a very attractive value proposition for banks that are flooded with huge amounts of daily transactions and a growing challenge of fighting financial crime, money laundering, financing of terrorism, and corruption. The benefits of artificial intelligence, however, are not completely free. Companies that use AI to detect and prevent crime also deal with new challenges, such as algorithmic bias, a problem that happens when an… This story continues at The Next Web
Welcome back to Mixtape, the TechCrunch podcast that takes examines diversity, inclusion and the human labor that drives tech. This week, Megan moderated a panel at Sight Tech Global, a conference dedicated to fostering discussion among technology pioneers on how advances in AI and related technologies will alter the landscape of assistive technology. The panel […]
Photo by Kimberly White / Getty Images for TechCrunch A paper co-authored by former Google AI ethicist Timnit Gebru raised some potentially thorny questions for Google about whether AI language models may be too big, and whether tech companies are doing enough to reduce potential risks, according to MIT Technology Review. The paper also questioned the environmental costs and inherent biases in large language models. Google’s AI team created such a language model— BERT— in 2018, and it was so successful that the company incorporated BERT into its search engine. Search is a highly lucrative segment of Google’s business; in the third quarter of this year alone, it brought in revenue of $26.3 billion. “This year, including this quarter, showed how valuable Google’s founding product — search —... Continue reading…
Timnit Gebru is a leader among those examining the societal impacts of the technology. She had also criticized the company's diversity efforts.
An Executive Order was just issued from the White House regarding “the Use of Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence in Government.” Leaving aside the meritless presumption of the government’s own trustworthiness and that it is the software that has trust issues, the order is almost entirely hot air. The EO is like others in that it is […]
Google fires a leading researcher, Stripe launches a new banking service and WarnerMedia shakes up the theatrical business model. This is your Daily Crunch for December 3, 2020. The big story: Google fires co-lead of its Ethical AI team Timnit Gebru, a leading researcher in the field of ethics and artificial intelligence, tweeted last night […]
Photo by Kimberly White / Getty Images for TechCrunch Timnit Gebru, one of Google’s top artificial intelligence researchers, says the company abruptly fired her yesterday. The technical co-lead of Google’s Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team claims managers were upset about an email she’d sent to colleagues. The email, which was sent to the Brain Women and Allies listserv, voiced frustration that managers were trying to get Gebru to retract a research paper. The full text was first published in Platformer. “A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar,” it reads. “Then in that meeting your manager’s manager tells you ‘it has been decided’ that you need to retract this paper by next week... You are not worth having any conversations about... Continue reading…
Timnit Gebru, a leading researcher and voice in the field of ethics and artificial intelligence, says Google fired her for an email she sent to her direct reports. According to Gebru, Google fired her because of an email she sent to subordinates that the company said reflected “behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of […]
Day 2 for the virtual event Sight Tech Global is streaming on TechCrunch from 8 a.m. PST to 12:30. The event looks at how AI-based technologies are rapidly changing the field of accessibility, especially for blind people and those with low vision. Today’s programming includes top accessibility product and technology leaders from Apple, Waymo, Microsoft […]
Much of the hype around AI — all the disruption it was supposed to bring and the leaps it was supposed to fuel — will begin in earnest in the next few years.
VSCO, the popular photo and video editing app, today announced it has acquired AI-powered video editing app Trash, as the company pushes further into the video market. The deal will see Trash’s technology integrated into the VSCO app in the months ahead, with the goal of making it easier for users to creatively edit their […]
San Francisco-based construction startup Versatile is announcing today that it has raised a $20 million Series A. The round was led by Insight Partners and Entree Capital, along with existing investors Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH, Root Ventures and Conductive Ventures. The round follows $8.5 million in funding, including a $5.5 million seed round that […]
“LIDAR is a fool’s errand. Anyone relying on LIDAR is doomed. Doomed! Expensive sensors that are unnecessary. It’s like having a whole bunch of expensive appendices. Like, one appendix is bad, well now you have a whole bunch of them, it’s ridiculous, you’ll see.” Elon Musk, April 2019. Tesla’s approach to driverless vehicle technology has been controversial at best. A series of increasingly poor marketing and branding choices have made it difficult to ascertain exactly what the company’s actual benchmark for autonomous driving is. On the one hand, it’s clear that Tesla has one of the world’s most advanced driver-assistance… This story continues at The Next Web
A new study from the University of Melbourne has demonstrated how hiring algorithms can amplify human gender biases against women. Researchers from the University of Melbourne gave 40 recruiters real-life resumés for jobs at UniBank, which funded the study. The resumés were for roles as a data analyst, finance officer, and recruitment officer, which Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows are respectively male-dominated, gender-balanced, and female-dominated positions. Half of the recruitment panel was given resumés with the candidate’s stated gender. The other half was given the exact same resumés, but with traditionally female names and male ones interchanged. For instance, they might switch “Mark”… This story continues at The Next Web
Fylamynt, a new service that helps businesses automate their cloud workflows, today announced both the official launch of its platform as well as a $6.5 million seed round. The funding round was led by Google’s AI-focused Gradient Ventures fund. Mango Capital and Point72 Ventures also participated. At first glance, the idea behind Fylamynt may sound […]
The European Union said today that it wants to work with US counterparts on a common approach to tech governance — including pushing to standardize rules for applications of technologies like AI and pushing big tech to be more responsible for what their platforms amplify. EU lawmakers are anticipating rebooted transatlantic relations under the incoming […]
Alphabet’s Loon has been using algorithmic processes to optimize the flight of its stratospheric balloons for years now – and setting records for time spent aloft as a result. But the company is now deploying a new navigation system that has the potential to be much better, and it’s using true reinforcement learning AI to […]
Today and tomorrow, from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. the first annual, virtual event Sight Tech Global is streaming on TechCrunch. The event looks at how AI-based technologies are rapidly changing the field of accessibility, especially for blind people and those with low vision. Today’s programming includes AI giants Amnon Shashua and Kai-Fu Lee, as […]
While Salesforce made a big splash yesterday with the announcement that it’s buying Slack for $27.7 billion, it’s not the only thing going on for the CRM giant this week. In fact Dreamforce, the company’s customer extravaganza is also on the docket. While it is virtual this year, there are still product announcements aplenty and […]
Sifting through the trillions of molecules out there that might have powerful medicinal effects is a daunting task, but the solution biotech has found is to work smarter, not harder. Genesis Therapeutics has a new simulation approach and cross-disciplinary team that has clearly made an impression: the company just raised a $52 million A round. […]
We’ve seen some cool AI-based musical experiments from Google’s team recently, including a virtual piano and a voice-to-music converter. The company’s latest experiment is a bit different: an infinite version of Billie Eilish’s hit song, ‘Bad Guy.’ Don’t worry. It’s not just one song being repeated again and again. Google’s team has developed a tool that syncs all the covers of the song on YouTube and plays them bits their portion sequentially. So, imagine a montage of covers being played from the beginning till the end, and then it starts over once the song finishes. [Read: How to build a search… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Google
Scale AI, the four-year-old data labeling startup, has discovered that selling the picks and shovels needed to develop and apply artificial intelligence is big business. The company, which created a visual data labeling platform that uses software and people to label image, text, voice and video data for companies building machine learning algorithms, has raised […]
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk was given an award from media giant Axel Springer on Tuesday, and he sat down to provide a wide-ranging interview that covered topics including space, Tesla, AI and even underpopulation. Musk addressed SpaceX’s Mars ambitions first, providing current timelines he’s working towards for reaching the red planet with SpaceX’s […]
An AI system developed by Google‘s DeepMind has made a “once in a generation” breakthrough that could have a dramatic impact on the way we treat diseases: accurately predicting how proteins fold into shapes. Proteins underpin almost every biological process. Each one is comprised of strings of amino acids that fold into countless elaborate shapes that determine what they do. Predicting these structures can help us understand how proteins cause diseases — and develop drugs to treat them. But scientists currently know the exact 3D shapes of just a fraction of the 200 million-plus proteins they’ve identified. [Read: How to build a search engine… This story continues at The Next Web
Video has worked the same way for a long, long time. And because of its unique qualities, video has been largely immune to the machine learning explosion upending industry after industry. WaveOne hopes to change that by taking the decades-old paradigm of video codecs and making them AI-powered — while somehow avoiding the pitfalls that […]
An AlphaFold prediction compared against an identified protein. | Image: DeepMind Within any living organism, there are thousands of different proteins, each with its own unique shape. For decades, the exact formation of those shapes has been a pain for scientists to figure out. How exactly does a protein, which starts as a string of amino acids, fold itself into the funky 3D shapes you might recognize from diagrams? AlphaFold, an AI from DeepMind, may have an answer. It can predict, with heretofore unseen accuracy, the shape a protein will take. AlphaFold was put to the test in a global competition called Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction, or CASP, which DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis calls the “Olympics of protein folding” in a video. During the competition, systems like AlphaFold are given the amino... Continue reading…
DevOps continues to get a lot of attention as a wave of companies develop more sophisticated tools to help developers manage increasingly complex architectures and workloads. In the latest development, Databand — an AI-based observability platform for data pipelines, specifically to detect when something is going wrong with a datasource when an engineer is using […]
On the heels of news that DoorDash is targeting an initial IPO valuation up to $27 billion, C3.ai also dropped a new S-1 filing detailing a first-draft guess of what the richly valued company might be worth after its debut. C3.ai posted an initial IPO price range of $31 to $34 per share, with the […]
ServiceNow, the cloud-based IT services company, is making a significant acquisition today to fill out its longer-term strategy to be a big player in the worlds of automation and artificial intelligence for enterprises. It is acquiring Element AI, a startup out of Canada founded by AI pioneers and backed by some of the world’s biggest […]
Designed to deceive: Do these people look real to you?Kashmir Hill and Jeremy White, The New York TimesFake personas on the internet are nothing new, but completely fake people that appear to be alarmingly real in photographs or animations are becomi...
Building self-driving cars is no easy matter. Underneath, self-driving cars are dedicated and specialist artificial intelligence systems, which need to be taught how to drive. They can be taught in the real world, or in the virtual world using simulations. Companies like Tesla, Waymo, and Nuro use real-world testing to expose their AI systems to more driving scenarios. The theory goes that the more scenarios an AI experiences, the better it will be at predicting the erratic nature of our roads and highways. Testing in the real-world comes with a host of safety concerns about what happens if a self-driving… This story continues at The Next Web
If you’re worried about facial recognition firms or stalkers mining your online photos, a new tool called Anonymizer could help you escape their clutches. The app was created by Generated Media, a startup that provides AI-generated pictures to customers ranging from video game developers creating new characters to journalists protecting the identities of sources. The company says it built Anonymizer as “a useful way to showcase the utility of synthetic media.” The system was trained on tens of thousands of photos taken in the Generated Media studio. The pictures are fed to generative adversarial networks (GANs), which create new images by pitting two neural networks against each other:… This story continues at The Next Web
The vast number of festive socks you got over the past several years’ holidays bears testament to the global lack of imagination when it comes to gifts. We can do better, and we will, with the help of OpenAI’s GPT-3. More specifically, I urge you to try out GiftGenius, a handy AI concierge that claims to use the GPT-3 language model to recommend suitable gifts for everyone in your life. Simply describe a recipient with something like ‘my buddy from college who is 35, enjoys photography, and has a three-year-old son,’ and the bot will parse your query to come… This story continues at The Next Web
Have you ever seen the promo art or box cover for a video game and thought “what the hell is this even about?” Well, wonder no more. A pair of researchers have combined cutting-edge image recognition and natural language processing to create an AI system for video game genre classification. Yuhang Jiang and Lukun Zheng, in their recently published pre-print research paper “Deep learning for video game genre classification,” describe the creation of a large training database and its use in developing a novel classification system. Per the authors: We created a large dataset of 50,000 video games including game… This story continues at The Next Web
Here’s a cool one: DoNotPay, the legalese-trained email crawler that scours your inbox for ways to save you money (or earn you payouts from class action lawsuits), now helps you collect government tax fraud bounties. Natural language processing just keeps getting better. The software’s pretty simple to use. You open the DoNotPay client, input the details of the fraudulent business including any evidence you can provide, and hit send. The IRS (for US users) or HMRC (for UK users) will then contact you concerning any cash rewards. In the case of the IRS, reporters could be eligible for up to… This story continues at The Next Web
The end-of-year IPO wave continues, this time with C3.ai moving closer to its own formal debut by updating its S-1 filing with third-quarter data. The new data provides the market with a much better look into how the unicorn AI company’s business has progressed during the COVID-19 era, and should help public investors price the […]
A new wave of startups is trying to optimize meetings, from automated scheduling tools to facial recognition that measures who’s paying attention.
If you’re an aspiring poet who doesn’t know your sonnets from your stanzas, a new Google AI app could transform you into a legendary wordsmith. Or at least, a decent impersonation of one. Verse by Verse is described by the Big G as “an experimental AI-powered muse that helps you compose poetry inspired by classic American poets.” It’s powered by a combination of two machine learning models: a generator trained on lauded poetry, and a second model that decides which of its verses would be a good fit for your next line. You can choose up to three classic poets as… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Google
The setup’s hilarious: Two park rangers hiding behind a tree pointing a camera at a bear in the distance so they can use facial recognition software to determine if they’ve actually found the infamous picnic-basket-snatching ursus known as Yogi. But this is no joke. Research groups across the world are turning to image recognition AI, the same kind used for human facial recognition and identification, to solve problems in the animal kingdom. Ranchers use facial recognition software to try and track down problems with their livestock – think of it like contact-tracing for cows. And biologists use it to identify… This story continues at The Next Web
Several years ago Serenade co-founder Matt Wiethoff was a developer at Quora when he was diagnosed with a severe repetitive stress injury to his hand and couldn’t code. He and co-founder Tommy MacWilliam decided to use AI to create a tool that let him speak the code instead and Serenade was born. Today, the company […]
For some of the most awaited Silicon Valley tech companies of the decade, this week looked good enough to file for IPOs
DoorDash, Affirm, Roblox, Airbnb, C3.ai and Wish all filed to go public in recent days, which means some venture capitalists are having the best week of their lives. Tech companies that go public capture our imagination because they are literal happy endings. An Initial Public Offering is the promised land for startup pilgrims who may […]
Kea is a new startup giving restaurants an opportunity to upgrade one of the more old-fashioned ways that they take orders — over the phone. Today, Kea is announcing that it has raised a $10 million Series A led by Marbruck, with participation from Streamlined Ventures, Xfund, Heartland Ventures, DEEPCORE, Barrel Ventures and AVG Funds, […]
Google is testing an artificial intelligence system designed to help blind and vision-impaired people to run races by themselves. Project Guideline, which is an early-phase research program, is an attempt to give those people more independence. They...
Onit, a workflow software company based in Houston with a legal component, announced this week that it has acquired 2018 TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield alum McCarthyFinch. Onit intends to use the startup’s AI skills to beef up its legal workflow software offerings. The companies did not share the purchase price. After evaluating a number of companies […]
AllRight is a platform for English language learning, aimed at children four years or older, which combines lessons with real teachers and homework with ‘AI-powered’ tutors. It’s now raised a $5 million Series A round led by Genesis Investments, with participation from TMT Investments, TerraVC, and existing investors Flashpoint and Misha Lyalin. The Ukraine-based startup […]
The Crown has returned to Netflix with a host of new actors joining the star-studded cast. But a new AI analysis suggests not all of them have the royal touch required for their roles. The system was developed by Largo Films, a Swiss firm that provides data-driven analytics to the movie industry. The company used machine learning to predict which of the thespians will capture the public’s hearts — and which ones will have them dreaming of the guillotine. The AI analyzes movie scripts and footage from Largo’s database of films to create a ‘DNA footprint’ for each actor comprised of more than 1,000… This story continues at The Next Web
U.S.-based startup Neatsy AI is using the iPhone’s depth-sensing FaceID selfie camera as a foot scanner to capture 3D models for predicting a comfortable sneaker fit. Its app, currently soft launched for iOS but due to launch officially next month, asks the user a few basic questions about sneaker fit preference before walking through a […]
HuffPost has a new owner, Facebook says its misinformation-fighting AI is getting smarter and Affirm files to go public. This is your Daily Crunch for November 19, 2020. The big story: Verizon sells HuffPost to BuzzFeed TechCrunch’s parent company Verizon Media has sold HuffPost. This is part of a larger deal that also includes an […]
Facebook’s battle against misinformation will never be over at this rate, but that doesn’t mean the company has given up. On the contrary it is only by dint of constant improvement to its automated systems that it is able to keep itself even remotely free of hate speech and misinformation. CTO Mike Schroepfer touted the […]
Photo by Michele Doying / The Verge Facebook says it is proactively detecting more hate speech using artificial intelligence. A new transparency report released on Thursday offers greater detail on social media hate following policy changes earlier this year, although it leaves some big questions unanswered. Facebook’s quarterly report includes new information about hate speech prevalence. The company estimates that 0.10 to 0.11 percent of what Facebook users see violates hate speech rules, equating to “10 to 11 views of hate speech for every 10,000 views of content.” That’s based on a random sample of posts and measures the reach of content rather than pure post count, capturing the effect of hugely viral posts. It hasn’t been evaluated by external sources, though. On a... Continue reading…
Autodesk, the U.S. publicly listed software and services company that targets engineering and design industries, acquired Norway’s Spacemaker this week. The startup has developed AI-supported software for urban development, something Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost broadly calls generative design. The price of the acquisition is $240 million in a mostly all-cash deal. Spacemaker’s VC backers included […]
The UK has announced a massive boost in defense spending — £16.5 billion ($21.8BN) over four years, the biggest such spending bump for 30 years — in what prime minister Boris Johnson has described as a “once in a generation modernization” of the UK’s armed forces and “the end of the era of retreat” on […]
Eminem has written plenty of diss tracks aimed at celebrities ranging from Donald Trump to Machine Gun Kelly. But what happens when an AI tries to write a song in the famous rapper‘s style. Well, you can watch it in the video below. Creators at channel Calamity AI used a GPT-3 powered tool to write the lyrics to a Mark Zuckerberg diss song and spit it out as if it was Eminem himself. The lyrics don’t really feel like a rap song, rather a set of gibberish sentences spewed out by an AI, but we’ll let you judge that for yourself. For instance,… This story continues at The Next Web
One of the jobs for which robots are best suited is the tedious, repetitive “pick and place” task common in warehouses — but humans are still much better at it. UC Berkeley researchers are picking up the pace with a pair of machine learning models that work together to let a robot arm plan its […]
“Almost every business on earth is affected by weather,” says Alexander Levy, an investor serial entrepreneur whose latest company is the new weather prediction startup Atmo. The company, which graduated from Y Combinator earlier this year, has recently raised $2 million from Signia Ventures and Sound Ventures for its predictive software, because sometimes businesses do […]
AI startup RealityEngines.AI changed its name to Abacus.AI in July. At the same time, it announced a $13 million Series A round. Today, only a few months later, it is not changing its name again, but it is announcing a $22 million Series B round, led by Coatue, with Decibel Ventures and Index Partners participating […]
Unless you’ve been on very extended digital detox, you’ll have noticed algorithms don’t exactly have the greatest reputation these days, saddled as they are with pervasive questions of bias and inequity. Not to mention the dubious content amplification choices of social media platforms. Nor has 2020 helped their automated cause — with, in just one […]
Astrophysicists have used AI to reconstruct the first complete family tree of the Milky Way — and discover perhaps the biggest collision in the galaxy’s history. The researchers unraveled these mysteries by analyzing the globular clusters that orbit our galaxy. These clusters can contain up to a million ancient stars. The Milky Way hosts over 150 of them, many of which were formed in smaller galaxies before merging to shape our own. “The main challenge of connecting the properties of globular clusters to the merger history of their host galaxy has always been that galaxy assembly is an extremely messy process, during… This story continues at The Next Web
Google’s preset “chimeras” show off the potential of AI-assisted drawing. | Image: Google To quote Google CEO Sundar Pichai: AI is “more profound than fire or electricity.” To back up this claim with incontrovertible evidence: here’s an AI tool made by Google researchers that turns doodles into weird monsters. What could be more profound? It’s certainly fun, anyway. The tool is called Chimera Painter and uses machine learning to generate imagery based on users’ rough sketches. This sort of dynamic is becoming a relatively common one in machine learning. Nvidia has done it with landscapes before; MIT and IBM did it with buildings; and now Google is ... doing it with monsters. The team behind Chimera Painter explained their methods and motivations in a blog post, saying the idea was to create a “paintbrush that acted less like... Continue reading…
Seldon is a UK startup that specializes in the rarified world of development tools to optimize Machine Learning. What does this mean? Well, dear reader, it means that the “AI” that companies are so fond of trumpeting, does actually end up working. It’s now raised a £7.1M Series A round co-led by AlbionVC and Cambridge […]
A pair of researchers from the Oak Ridge Laboratory have developed an “explainable” AI system designed to aid medical professionals in the diagnosis and treatment of children and adults who’ve experienced childhood adversity. While this is a decidedly narrow use-case, the nuts and bolts behind this AI have particularly interesting implications for the machine learning field as a whole. Plus, it represents the first real data-driven solution to the outstanding problem of empowering general medical practitioners with expert-level domain diagnostic skills – an impressive feat in itself. Let’s start with some background. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are a well-studied form… This story continues at The Next Web
Google has taken the wraps off Chimera Painter, a web-based tool that lets anyone generate terrifying cryptozoological entities in an interface that looks like MS Paint by way of Diablo. Why, you ask? Well, isn’t it obvious? No… no, I suppose it isn’t. Surely the strangest thing to hit Google’s AI blog for at least […]
The audio on the otherwise shaky body camera footage is unusually clear. As police officers search a handcuffed man who moments before had fired a shot inside a pizza parlor, an officer asks him why he was there. The man says to investigate a pedophile ring. Incredulous, the officer asks again. Another officer chimes in, “Pizzagate. He’s talking about Pizzagate.” In that brief, chilling interaction in 2016, it becomes clear that conspiracy theories, long relegated to the fringes of society, had moved into the real world in a very dangerous way. Conspiracy theories, which have the potential to cause significant… This story continues at The Next Web
5G. Edge. Open. Programmable. AI. No, it’s not bingo at your local silicon chip enthusiast meetup, and no, I am not trying to game Google’s search algorithms (well, maybe just a bit). Rather, it’s a combination of technologies that are predicted to become critical for the future of the internet of things across industries as […]
An arthritis drug discovered by AI could reduce the risk of elderly people dying from COVID-19, according to a new study. The once-daily medicine, called baricitinib, was first identified as a potential treatment for the virus by BenevolentAI, a startup based in London. The company used its AI software to comb through scientific literature for drugs that might block the infection process. The most promising treatment it discovered was baricitinib, which it predicted could stop the infection from entering lung cells. The new study has now shown the drug’s safety and efficacy in the largest group of patients published thus far.… This story continues at The Next Web
Tibber, a ‘digital electricity’ supplier which uses AI to switch around power for houses based on their predicted levels of consumption – has closed a $65 million Series B round led by Eight Roads Ventures and Balderton Capital, with participation from existing investors including San Francisco-based Founders Fund, which invested last year. Alongside equity, Tibber […]
Ride Vision, an Israeli startup that is building an AI-driven safety system to prevent motorcycle collisions, today announced that it has raised a $7 million Series A round led by crowdsourcing platform OurCrowd. YL Ventures, which typically specializes in cybersecurity startups but also led the company’s $2.5 million seed round in 2018, Mobilion VC and […]
Artificial intelligence is as important as electricity, indoor plumbing, and the internet to modern society. In short: it would be extremely difficult to live without it now. But it’s also, arguably, the most over hyped and misrepresented technology in history — and if you remove cryptocurrency from the argument there’s no debate. We’ve been told that AI can (or soon will) predict crimes, drive vehicles without a human backup, and determine the best candidate for a job. We’ve been warned that AI will replace doctors, lawyers, writers, and anyone in a field not computer-related. Yet none of these fantasies… This story continues at The Next Web
Deep Vision, a new AI startup that is building an AI inferencing chip for edge computing solutions, is coming out of stealth today. The six-year-old company’s new ARA-1 processors promise to strike the right balance between low latency, energy efficiency and compute power for use in anything from sensors to cameras and full-fledged edge servers. […]
The last thing I recall thinking about C3.ai (C3) was seeing its billboards outside San Francisco and asking myself what the hell the company actually did and how much it was spending on a huge outdoor advertisements. So much for what I know. The company filed to go public on Friday, and instead of being […]
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can […]
Sky replacement tools are extremely popular in the current crop of photp-editing apps. Mobile apps such as Lighttricks’ Lightleap help you put up a new sky on your picture quickly. While for a more refined option, you may want to turn to Adobe Photoshop’s recently-released AI-powered feature. However, there aren’t many commercially available tools for such video effects. A new open-source tool takes a crack at replacing the sky with AR effects in clips. The unique thing about this AI-powered tool is that it can also augment objects in the sky and adjust the footage as if it was actually present… This story continues at The Next Web
TLDR: The courses in The Google Analytics Master Class Bundle break down how to analyze web traffic data to make a big impact on your business and marketing efforts. If you haven’t heard, thinking computers and the tenets of machine learning are fundamentally changing almost every industry. That story is no different when it comes to crunching numbers online. Google Analytics has just upped the traffic and sales tracking powers they offer with last month’s latest iteration of their heritage data analysis platform, packed full with new AI-powered bells and whistles. Now, Google Analytics can help users better stay on… This story continues at The Next Web
The amazon-designed Inferentia chips reduced cost and latency in text-to-speech.
On September 2 in French Guiana, an AI satellite was launched into the Earth’s orbit for the first time in history. PhiSat-1 is now soaring at over 17,000 mph about 329 miles above us, monitoring polar ice and soil moisture through a hyperspectral-thermal camera, while also testing inter-satellite communication systems. Onboard the small satellite is an AI system developed by Ubotica and powered by Intel‘s Myriad 2 VPU — the same chip inside many smart cameras, Magic Leap’s AR goggles, and a $99 selfie drone. Its first task is filtering out images of clouds that impede the analysis. Clouds cover around two-thirds of Earth’s surface at any given… This story continues at The Next Web
Apple undeniably stole the spotlight this week with the unveiling of its first-ever in-house silicon for Macs — the M1. But the Big A is hardly the only tech giant boasting new chips: Samsung has lifted the lid on its new midrange mobile chip, the Exynos 1080. The chipset, which combines 5G capabilities with enhanced AI features, is the first ever platform built on Samsung‘s 5nm technology which it first showcased last year. Among other things, the 5nm tech promises significant improvements in performance and power efficiency, which is something every phone can benefit from. [Read: Traders dump Zoom for Expedia… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Samsung
Google has plenty of apps on your phone that use speech detection from Google Assistant to Google Translate and Pixel’s nifty recorder app. However, one of the challenges these apps face is separating your voice from other people or background noise. To overcome these challenges, Google’s AI team has built a new lightweight model called VoiceFilter-lite. In 2018, the team unveiled the first VoiceFilter model which used the company’s voice match tech. It’s used in Google Assistant to analyze your speech and sound when you enroll for a service. A lot of times recognizing voices efficiently — technically, achieving better source-to-distortion… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Google
Snapchat is the quintessential consumer app: with an array of fun filters, it encourages people to send fun, disappearing messages to friends and has a large base of younger users. But could parent company Snap be eyeing up ways of leveraging its traction in the consumer world — with the app now seeing 249 million […]
Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Finding new ways to use Amazon’s Alexa has always been a bit of a pain. Amazon boasts that its AI assistant has more than 100,000 skills, but most are garbage and the useful ones are far from easy to discover. Today, though, Amazon announced it’s launched a new way to surface skills: by guessing what users are after when they talk to Alexa about other tasks. The company refers to this process as “[inferring] customers’ latent goals.” By this, it means working out any questions that are implied by other queries. Amazon gives the example of a customer asking “How long does it take to steep tea?” to which Alexa will answer “five minutes” before asking the follow-up: ”Would you like me to set a timer for five minutes?” This all sounds well... Continue reading…
This year, more than ever before because of the Covid-19 pandemic, huge droves of workers and consumers have been turning to the internet to communicate, get things done, and entertain themselves. That has created a huge bonanza for cybercriminals, but also companies that are building tools to combat them. In the latest development, an Israel-hatched, […]
Sight Tech Global goes live the week after Thanksgiving on December 2-3, and now’s the time to pick up a free pass! The agenda for this virtual, global event on AI-related technology and accessibility for people who are blind or visually impaired just keeps getting better. Today we’re delighted to announce two new sessions […]
Scientists from the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore have developed an AI-powered “electronic nose” that accurately assesses the freshness of meat. The system uses a barcode inserted in food packaging that changes color when it senses gasses emitted from rotting meat. A smartphone app then scans the barcode pattern to measure the freshness of the meat within 30 seconds. In tests on commercially-packaged chicken, beef, and fish samples that were left to age, the system predicted the meats’ freshness with 98.5% accuracy. Co-lead author Professor Chen Xiaodong said the app could help consumers decide whether meat is fit for consumption better than a… This story continues at The Next Web
The year is coming to a close and it’s safe to say Elon Musk’s prediction that his company would field one million “robotaxis” by the end of 2020 isn’t going to come true. In fact, so far, Tesla’s managed to produce exactly zero self-driving vehicles. And we can probably call off the singularity too. GPT-3 has been impressive, but the closer machines get to aping human language the easier it is to see just how far away from us they really are. So where does that leave us, ultimately, when it comes to the future of AI? That depends on… This story continues at The Next Web
A Dutch artist has launched an AI project that explores how a divided USA could be reunited. He calls it “the Bipartisan President.” Jeroen van der Most (aka Most) used the GPT-3 language model to generate a series of politically-neutral slogans. He then fused them with a nightmarish morph of Donald Trump‘s and Joe Biden’s faces uttering peak-centrist platitudes. Producing the taglines was a pretty laborious process. Most began it by feeding GPT-3 the following three prompts: “Tagline ideas for a conservative political campaign;” “Tagline ideas for a liberal political campaign:” “Tagline ideas for a bipartisan political campaign:” But the model struggled to understand… This story continues at The Next Web
Provizio, a combination hardware and software startup with technology to improve car safety, has closed a seed investment round of $6.2million. Investors include Bobby Hambrick (the founder of Autonomous Stuff); the founders of Movidius; the European Innovation Council (EIC); ACT Venture Capital. The startup has a ‘five-dimensional’ sensory platform that – it says – perceives, […]
The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic increased discussions about anxiety and suicide on Reddit, according to a new AI study by MIT and Harvard University researchers. The team analyzed conversations on 15 subreddits focused on mental health issues, along with 11-non-mental health forums, such as r/PersonalFinance. They first used natural language processing algorithms to find negative semantic changes in posts from 826,961 different users. Next, they applied unsupervised machine learning to classify the posts into their support groups. Finally, they used unsupervised methods, such as topic modeling, to assess how mental health concerns had changed across Reddit since the first wave. They discovered an overall rise in anxiety and… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Reddit
No-code is the name of the game in enterprise software, and today a startup called Ushur that has built a platform for any business to create its own AI-based customer communication flows with no coding required is announcing some funding to help fuel its growth. The startup has picked up $25 million in a Series […]
This article was originally published by Federico Cheli on Cities Today, the leading news platform on urban mobility and innovation, reaching an international audience of city leaders. For the latest updates follow Cities Today on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube, or sign up for Cities Today News. Artificial intelligence (AI) applications in the transport sector are stimulating innovations for better and more targeted use of vehicles and infrastructure. This could optimize network performances, support the monitoring and management of traffic, and create the base for solutions that pave the way to future mobility, particularly in cities. Infrastructure management and… This story continues at The Next Web
Intel continues to snap up startups to build out its machine learning and AI operations. In the latest move, TechCrunch has learned that the chip giant has acquired Cnvrg.io, an Israeli company that has built and operates a platform for data scientists to build and run machine learning models, which can be used to train […]
AI might soon be an ally in the quest to banish wake words from voice assistants. Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed a machine learning model that estimates the direction a voice is coming from, indicating your intent without the n...
Coupa Software, a publicly traded company that helps large corporations manage spending, announced that it was buying Llamasoft, an 18 year old Michigan company that helps large companies manage their supply chain. The deal was pegged at $1.5 billion. This year Llamasoft released its latest tool, an AI-driven platform for managing supply chains intelligently. This […]
When we covered Leena AI as a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2018 cohort, the young startup was firmly focused on building HR chatbots, but in the intervening years it has expanded the vision to a broader HR policy platform. Today, the company announced an $8 million Series A led by Greycroft with help […]
Top football leagues and teams around the world have TV crews and streaming services at their disposal to broadcast matches to fans across the globe. However, because of the coronavirus pandemic, smaller football teams are relying on AI-powered cameras to cast live matches through YouTube. While it’s a fantastic and pocket-friendly idea for smaller clubs to show their games, sometimes AI can frustrate everyone. Scottish team Inverness Caledonian Thistle Football Club had deployed such a camera to live-stream their match against Ayr United. [Read: 4 ridiculously easy ways you can be more eco-friendly] The camera was supposed to track the ball automatically… This story continues at The Next Web
Asymptomatic spread of COVID-19 is a huge contributor to the pandemic, but of course if there are no symptoms, how can anyone tell they should isolate or get a test? MIT research has found that hidden in the sound of coughs is a pattern that subtly, but reliably, marks a person as likely to be […]
Space is a messy place. An estimated 34,000 pieces of junk over 10 cm in diameter are currently orbiting Earth at around 10 times the speed of a bullet. If one of them hits a spacecraft, the damage could be disastrous. In September, the International Space Station had to dodge an unknown piece of debris. With the volume of space trash rapidly growing, the chances of a collision are increasing. The European Space Agency (ESA) wants to clean up some of the mess — with the help of AI. In 2025, it plans to launch the world’s first debris-removing space mission: ClearSpace-1. The technology is being developed… This story continues at The Next Web
On the battlefield, any doorway can be a death trap. A special ops vet, and his businessman brother, have built an AI to solve that problem.
One of the things that caught my eye at Nvidia’s flagship event, the GPU Technology Conference (GTC), was Maxine, a platform that leverages artificial intelligence to improve the quality and experience of video-conferencing applications in real-time. Maxine used deep learning for resolution improvement, background noise reduction, video compression, face alignment, and real-time translation and transcription. In this post, which marks the first installation of our “deconstructing artificial intelligence” series, we will take a look at how some of these features work and how they tie-in with AI research done at Nvidia. We’ll also explore the pending issues and the possible… This story continues at The Next Web
If you have a product webpage, you’d wish that you could create a handy video to show to clients with all the info. However, you might not have the budget to hire someone to make it. To solve that, Google’s AI team is working on a future solution that automatically converts webpages into videos. Google’s URL2Video tool helps you convert your website into a short video if you specify the constraints of the output video, such as the duration and aspect ratio. The tool tries to maintain the design language of the source page and uses its elements such as the… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Google
In this age of big data, companies worldwide need to sift through the avalanche of information at their disposal to enhance their products, services and overall profitability. As such, there's a growing demand in today's job market for specialists wh...
Intel has been doubling down on building chips and related architecture for the next generation of computing, and today it announced an acquisition that will bolster its expertise and work specifically in one area of future technology: artificial intelligence. The semiconductor giant today announced that it has acquired SigOpt, a startup out of San Francisco […]
Robust.AI today announced that it has raised a $15 million Series A, led by Jazz Venture Partners. Existing partners Playground Global, Liquid2, Fontinalis, Jaan Tallinn and Mark Leslie also participated in the round, which brings the Bay Area-based robotics AI startup’s funding up to $22.5 million. Founded mid-2019, the company counts Rodney Brooks among its […]
Deep learning has made tremendous strides in recent years, with new systems and models like GPT-3 offering higher quality interpretations of human language, empowering developers to use these concepts in more diverse applications. We can see these developments in our text-to-speech voice recorders and dual language translation apps, which have gotten shockingly good these days. […]
The other day we announced the first ten sessions for Sight Tech Global, a virtual event Dec. 2-3 that is convening the world’s top technologists to discuss how AI-based technologies are revolutionizing the future of accessibility. Today, we’re pleased to announce three additional sessions. Registration is free and and open now. Designing for Everyone: Accessibility […]
The GPT-3 language model has inspired both awe and fear since OpenAI unveiled the system in June. But one person who isn’t overly impressed is Facebook‘s Yann LeCun. In a Facebook post published Tuesday, the social network’s chief AI scientist said the text generator is “not very good” as a question-answering or dialog system, and that other approaches produce better results. “It’s entertaining, and perhaps mildly useful as a creative help,” LeCun wrote. “But trying to build intelligent machines by scaling up language models is like building high-altitude airplanes to go to the moon. You might beat altitude records, but… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Facebook
We’ve seen our fair share of business intelligence (BI) platforms that aim to make data analysis accessible to everybody in a company. Most of them are still fairly complicated, no matter what their marketing copy says. MachEye, which is launching its AI-powered BI platform today, is offering a new twist on this genre. In addition […]
Halloween is fast approaching, but you’ll probably have to postpone the parties this year and instead spend a lonesome evening at home with a bottle of scotch. Well, that’s my plan anyway. Still, the social restrictions don’t mean you can’t experiment with devilish new looks from the comfort of your home. Thanks to the magic of AI, you can now transform yourself — or anyone else whose picture you’ve purloined — into a revolting zombie. The app’s creator Jose Brown Kramer built the system by first transfer-learning a StyleGAN2 zombie generator. He then tweaked it to develop a hybrid model comprised… This story continues at The Next Web
Microsoft has released a public preview of a free app lets helps people train machine learning models without writing any code. The Lobe desktop app for Windows and Mac currently only supports image classification, but Microsoft plans to expand it to other models and data types in the future. “Just show it examples of what you want it to learn, and it automatically trains a custom machine learning model that can be shipped in your app,” the Lobe website explains. Users first need to import and label images of what they want Lobe to recognize. The app will then select a suitable open-source machine learning architecture… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Microsoft
Israeli startup SimilarWeb has made a name for itself with an AI-based platform that lets sites and apps track and understand traffic not just on their own sites, but those of its competitors. Now, it’s taking the next step in its growth. The startup has raised $120 million, funding it will use to continue expanding […]
Deci, a Tel Aviv-based startup that is building a new platform that uses AI to optimized AI models and get them ready for production, today announced that it has raised a $9.1 million seed round led by Emerge and Square Peg. The general idea here is to make it easier and faster for businesses to […]
A new AI system that detects flares erupting from stars could help astronomers find habitable planets, according to the tool’s inventors. The neural network detects the light patterns of a stellar flare — which can incinerate the atmospheres of planets forming nearby. The frequency and location of the flares can therefore indicate the best places to search for habitable planets. Astronomers normally look for the flares through a time-consuming process of analyzing measurements of star brightness by eye. The AI tool could make their work faster and more effective. The researchers trained the neural network on a dataset of identified flares and not-flares, and then… This story continues at The Next Web
The goal of this guide is to build a system capable of chatting like you, using your own WhatsApp and Telegram chats as an machine learning dataset. What we will do can be summarized in the following steps: Get your WhatsApp and Telegram data Parse it to build an ML-ready dataset Train a GPT-2 model Chat with the model So let’s start our adventure. Just a quick warning before we get started It’s always better not to run random scripts on personal information (like personal chat messages). I guarantee there’s no catch, but you can always check the native code that’s being used: messaging-chat-parser and pistoBot,… This story continues at The Next Web
A new AI model can predict the onset of Alzheimer’s disease more accurately than standard clinical techniques by analyzing how people describe a picture of a cookie theft, according to a new study. Researchers from IBM and Pfizer trained the model to detect signs of speech impairment in written descriptions of the image, which is frequently used to test for cognitive disorders. The transcriptions were taken from the Framingham Heart Study, which has tracked the health of more than 5,000 people and their families since 1948. The samples were collected before the participants began showing symptoms of Alzheimer‘s. The researchers then… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: IBM
A new AI system can automatically decipher a lost language that’s no longer understood — without knowing its relationship to other languages. Researchers at MIT CSAIL developed the algorithm in response to the rapid disappearance of human languages. Most of the languages that have existed are no longer spoken, and at least half of those remaining are predicted to vanish in the next 100 years. The new system could help recover them. More importantly, it could preserve our understanding of the cultures and wisdom of their speakers. [Read: What audience intelligence data tells us about the 2020 US presidential election] The algorithm works… This story continues at The Next Web
Facebook says that it will expand an online course in deep learning to more students to help improve the diversity of its AI division. After a successful pilot program at Georgia Tech, the company will roll out this graduate-level course in deep lear...
Between things like camera shake and poor lighting, the videos you take with your phone, DSLR or mirrorless camera can end up blurry for any numbers of reasons. Worse yet, it’s difficult to sharpen a photo or video after the fact, and more often than...
Sydney University scientists have invented a sensor that neutralizes a star’s twinkle, which could help astronomers find new planets in distant solar systems. The sensor uses an advanced light convertor and AI to measure and correct the distortion of starlight caused by the Earth’s atmosphere. It will now be installed on the 8.2m Subaru telescope on the summit of Maunakea, Hawaii, one of the largest optical-infrared telescopes in the world. “The main way we identify planets orbiting distant stars is by measuring regular dips in starlight caused by planets blocking out bits of their sun,” said study lead author Dr Barnaby Norris in a… This story continues at The Next Web
When Kite, the well-funded AI-driven code completion tool, launched in 2019, its technology looked very impressive, but it only supported Python at the time. Earlier this year, it also added JavaScript and today, it is launching support for 11 new languages at once. The new languages are Java, Kotlin, Scala, C/C++, Objective C, C#, Go, […]
Descript, the latest startup from Groupon co-founder Andrew Mason, made a splash in the world of audio last year with a platform for easy audio editing based on how you edit written documents, adding features like an AI-based tool that uses a recording of you to let you create audio of any written text in […]
Project management service Wrike today announced a major update to its platform at its user conference that includes a lot of new AI smarts for keeping individual projects on track and on time, as well as new solutions for marketers and project management offices in large corporations. In addition, the company also launched a new […]
As companies manufacturer goods, human inspectors review them for defects. Think of a scratch on smartphone glass or a weakness in raw steel that could have an impact downstream when it gets turned into something else. Landing AI, the company started by former Google and Baidu AI guru Andrew Ng, wants to use AI technology […]
Ford and Argo AI today released details about its fourth-generation self-driving test vehicle. Built on the 2020 Ford Escape Hybrid, the vehicle has everything needed to standup a self-driving service, the Detroit automaker said. It’s equipped with an improved battery system, new sensors, and sensor cleaning technology. The previous three generations of test vehicles used […]
Every year at its MAX user conference, Adobe shows off a number of research projects that may or may not end up in its Creative Cloud apps over time. One new project that I hope we’ll soon see in its video apps is Project Sharp Shots, which will make its debut later today during the […]
Synthetaic is a startup workign to create data — specifically images — that can be used to train artificial intelligence. Founder and CEO Corey Jaskolski’s past experience includes work with both National Geographic (where he was recently named Explorer of the Year) and a 3D media startup. In fact, he told me that his time […]
It’s crucial to predict the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic when a poor estimate could lead to overcrowded hospitals or extra-strict lockdowns. Facebook is betting that AI could help. It just published a paper outlining an AI technique it will...
Google just made good on its promise to bring back its AI-based Photos printing service, and this time it’s more affordable. The upcoming premium print series will once again have machine learning select your 10 best photos each month, but you’ll now...
Cyberpunk 2077 is just a few weeks away and the action-packed RPG will launch with support for dialogue in 10 languages and subtitle options for several others. CD Projekt Red is aiming to add a deeper layer of immersion for players by using artifici...
Montreal-based YPC Technologies today announced that it has raised a $1.8 million seed round. Led by Hike Ventures and Real Ventures, the funding includes participation from Toyota AI Ventures and Uphill Capital, among others, designed to help the company pilot its kitchen robotics technology. Toyota’s funding came as part of the company’s “Call of Innovation,” […]
Stampli, a collaborative invoice management software company, introduced a payments product today called Stampli Direct Pay. The startup launched back in 2015 with a mission to simplify invoice management through collaboration (and a dash of AI). Interestingly, Stampli said it was uninterested at the time in providing a payments product alongside its collaborative suite, focusing […]
Adobe is holding its virtual conference, Max, today, and it has announced a ton of updates to its products, from Photoshop to Illustrator and Premier Pro to Fresco. A lot of these features such as Sky Replacement in Photoshopped are powered by Adobe’s Sensei AI technology. So, here’s the round-up of some of the coolest AI-powered features announced by the company. Photoshop Sky Replacement: The company showed off this feature of automatic sky replacement in a photo in September. Now, the feature will be officially available in Photoshop. The machine learning algorithm figures out the way around objects in a photo to replace the… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Adobe
Adobe is betting big on its Sensei AI platform, and so it’s probably no surprise that the company also continues to build more AI-powered features into its flagship Photoshop applications. At its MAX conference, Adobe today announced a handful of new AI features for Photoshop, with Sky Replacement being the most obvious example. Other new […]
Adobe has released new versions of Photoshop for desktop and iPad with a bunch more AI-powered features. The Sky Replacement tool that Adobe added to the latest version of Photoshop Elements is now available in the full version of the software. The f...
Intel detailed today its contribution to PhiSat-1, a new tiny small satellite that was launched into sun-synchronous orbit on September 2. PhiSat-1 has a new kind of hyperspectral-thermal camera on board, and also includes a Movidius Myriad 2 Vision Processing Unit. That VPU is found in a number of consumer devices on Earth, but this […]
In the computing world, there are probably more types of chips available than your local supermarket snack aisle. Diverse computing environments (data centers and the cloud, edge, mobile devices, IoT, and more), different price points, and varying capabilities and performance requirements are scrambling the chip industry, resetting who has the lead right now and who […]
Facebook has open-sourced an AI model that can translate between any pair of 100 languages without first translating them to English as an intermediary step. The system, called M2M-100, is currently only a research project, but could eventually be used to translate posts for Facebook users, nearly two-thirds of whom use a language other than English. “For years, AI researchers have been working toward building a single universal model that can understand all languages across different tasks,” said Facebook research assistant Angela Fan in a blogpost. “A single model that supports all languages, dialects, and modalities will help us better serve more… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Facebook
Today Juniper Networks announced it was acquiring smart wide area networking startup 128 Technology for $450 million. This marks the second AI-fueled networking company Juniper has acquired in the last year and a half after purchasing Mist Systems in March 2019 for $405 million. With 128 Technology, the company gets more AI SD-WAN technology. SD-WAN […]
Whether you’re logging on from the US, Brazil, Borneo, or France, Facebook can translate virtually any written content published on its platform into the local language using automated machine translation. In fact, Facebook provides around 20 billion...
UK-based Pimloc has closed a £1.4 million (~$1.8M) seed funding round led by Amadeus Capital Partners. Existing investor Speedinvest and other unnamed shareholders also participated in the round. The 2016-founded computer vision startup launched a AI -powered photo classifier service called Pholio in 2017 — pitching the service as a way for smartphone users to reclaim […]
Localization is a tricky issue for all content creators. It can take significant time and resources to make their work fully accessible to folks who speak different languages. One company thinks it has cracked part of that code with an artificial int...
After years of trying to make Bixby happen, Samsung is coming around and enabling support for better AI helpers like Alexa and Google Assistant. The company announced at CES this year that you can choose to use these assistants on its QLED 8K TV, but...
Google yesterday announced a range of AI-powered enhancements to its search engine, including a new algorithm that improves spelling corrections. The tool uses a deep neural net with 680 million parameters to better understand the context of misspelled words. It runs in 3 milliseconds — faster than one flap of a hummingbird’s wings, according to Google. The algorithm will be incorporated in Google’s “did you mean” feature by the end of the month. Cathy Edwards, VP of engineering at Google, said it will improve the feature “more in this one day than it has the last five years combined.” Google is also using… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Google
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google Assistant is now available on newer Samsung smart TVs in the US, the companies announced. The AI helper will be available on Samsung 2020 smart TV models, including the 2020 8K and 4K QLED models, the 2020 Crystal UHD TVs, 2020 Frame and Serif sets, and 2020 Sero and Terrace models. The update will be available in the US first and roll out to more countries soon, according to Google. Pressing down on the TV’s remote control mic will activate Assistant, and users will be able to switch channels, open apps, and adjust the TV’s volume with voice commands. The TVs already had voice command settings available that could be controlled with the mic on the remote, but you’ll have to tell it you want to use Google Assistant rather than... Continue reading…
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google detailed a host of new improvements at its “Search On” event that it will make to its foundational Google search service in the coming weeks and months. The changes are largely focused on using new AI and machine learning techniques to provide better search results for users. Chief among them: a new spell checking tool that Google promises will help identify even the most poorly spelled queries. According to Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s head of search, 15 percent of Google search queries each day are ones that Google has never seen before, meaning the company has to constantly work to improve its results. Part of that is because of poorly spelled queries. According to Cathy Edwards, VP engineering at Google, 1 in... Continue reading…
Google today announced a number of improvements to its core search engine, with a strong focus on how the company is using AI to help its users. These include the ability to better answer questions with very specific answers, very broad questions and a new algorithm to better handle the typos in your queries. The […]
A few years ago, Whisper president and co-founder Andrew Song was talking to his grandfather about his hearing aids. Even though he spent thousands of dollars on a medical device designed to improve his hearing, and in the process his quality of life, he wasn’t wearing them. Song’s co-founders had had similar experiences with grandparents, […]
Nvidia is is going to be powering the world’s fastest AI supercomputer, a new system dubbed ‘Leonardo’ that’s being built by the Italian multi-university consortium CINECA, a global supercomutin leader. The Leonardo system will offer as much as 10 exaflops of FP16 AI performance capabilities, and be made up of more than 14,000 Nvidia Ampere-based […]
Savana, a machine learning-based service that turns clinical notes into structured patient information for physicians and pharmacists, has raised $15 million to take its technology from Spain to the U.S., the company said. The investment was led by Cathay Innovation with participation from the Spanish investment firm Seaya Ventures, which led the company’s previous round, and […]
Longevity, as far as startups are concerned, tends to be a moonshot-y space where technologies like biotech and AI are experimentally applied in a sort of modern day alchemical quest — and the great hope is to (somehow) ‘hack’ biology and substantially extend the human lifespan. Or even end death altogether. Coming considerably closer to […]
Scientists from Oxford University have used a machine learning algorithm to discover every lion has its own identifiable and trackable roar. Previous research has shown that lions roar to communicate with other members of their pride and scare off foes. But we still know little about how they recognize which animal has made the call. The Oxford scientists tried to find out by designing a device called a “biologger” that’s attached to a lion’s existing GPS collar to record audio and movement data. They then associated each call with a lion by cross-referencing the data through their recordings of roars. [Read: This AI system thinks we’re… This story continues at The Next Web
Describing an image accurately, and not just like a clueless robot, has long been the goal of AI. In 2016, Google said its artificial intelligence could caption images almost as well as humans, with 94 percent accuracy. Now Microsoft says it’s gone e...
Dataloop, a Tel Aviv-based startup that specializes in helping businesses manage the entire data lifecycle for their AI projects, including helping them annotate their datasets, today announced that it has now raised a total of $16 million. This includes a $5 seed round that was previously unreported, as well as an $11 million Series A […]
Alphabet‘s X lab has unveiled its latest moonshot project: a crop-inspecting robot named the “plant buggy.” The solar-powered prototype roams autonomously through fields, using GPS software to identify the location of plants. When it finds them, it uses cameras and machine perception tools to study their traits and any issues in the field. The cart combines data collected from the field, such as plant height and fruit size, with environmental factors including weather forecasts and soil information. This is all analyzed by machine learning to evaluate how the crops are growing and interacting with their surroundings. Alphabet says the buggy can help farmers treat… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Alphabet
If you’re not done with presentations after Apple’s iPhone 12 launch earlier, set some time aside on Thursday afternoon to find out what’s new in search. Google just sent out invites for a live stream event on October 15th at 12 PM PT / 3 PM ET where...
Edgify, which builds AI for edge computing, has secured a $6.5m seed funding round backed by Octopus Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners and an unnamed semiconductor giant. The name was not released but TechCrunch understands it nay be Intel Corp. or Qualcomm Inc. Edgify’s technology allows ‘edge devices’ (devices at the edge of the internet) to interpret […]
Microsoft has announced a series of new efforts to make AI systems more inclusive of people with disabilities. The initiatives aim to combat the so-called “data desert” that’s left machine learning algorithms without enough relevant training data to be effective for people with conditions such as ALS. One project, called Object Recognition for Blind Image Training (ORBIT), seeks to change this by building a new public dataset of videos submitted by people who are blind or have low vision. The data will be used to develop algorithms for smartphone cameras that recognize important personal objects, such as someone’s cell phone or face mask.… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Microsoft
Google first showed off Duplex by having the AI book haircut appointments, but the Assistant feature was unexpectedly left by the wayside in favor of making restaurant reservations. It appears to have come roaring back, though. VentureBeat has discov...
The South Korean government has made no secret of its ambition to be a key player in the global artificial intelligence industry, including making the semiconductors powering AI functionalities. This week, the country’s information and communications technology regulator announced plans to develop up to 50 types of AI -focused system semiconductors by 2030, Yonhap News […]
If artificial intelligence will destroy humanity, it probably won’t be through killer robots and the incarnation—it will be through a thousand paper cuts. In the shadow of the immense benefits of advances in technology, the dark effects of AI algorithms are slowly creeping into different aspects of our lives, causing divide, unintentionally marginalizing groups of people, stealing our attention, and widening the gap between the wealthy and the poor. While we’re already seeing and discussing many of the negative aspects of AI, not enough is being done to address them. And the reason is that we’re looking in the wrong… This story continues at The Next Web
A new study of perceptions on using AI in decision-making shows views on its risks and benefits vary greatly between regions and nations. Researchers from the Oxford Commission on AI and Good Governance revealed the findings after analyzing survey data from a sample of 154,195 respondents in 142 countries collected for the 2019 World Risk Poll. One question asked respondents whether “machines or robots that can think and make decisions, often known as artificial intelligence” will mostly help or harm people in their country in the next 20 years. Worries that it will be mostly harmful were highest in Latin America and the Caribbean (49% of… This story continues at The Next Web
AI-based tools like computer vision and voice interfaces have the potential to be life-changing for people with disabilities, but the truth is those AI models are usually built with very little data sourced from those people. Microsoft is working with several nonprofit partners to help make these tools reflect the needs and everyday realities of […]
Scientists at the University of Hawaii’s Mānoa Institute for Astronomy (IfA) have used AI to produce the world’s largest 3D catalog of stars, galaxies, and quasars. The team developed the map using an optical survey of three-quarters of the sky produced by the Pan-STARRS observatory on Haleakalā, Maui. They trained an algorithm to identify celestial objects in the survey by feeding it spectroscopic measurements that provide definitive object classifications and distances. “Utilizing a state-of-the-art optimization algorithm, we leveraged the spectroscopic training set of almost 4 million light sources to teach the neural network to predict source types and galaxy distances, while at… This story continues at The Next Web
Songwriter‘s block can be a problem for even the world’s most successful musicians. They can sometimes overcome it by taking breaks, seeking new forms of inspiration, or simply pushing through. And if none of that works, they could try out a new AI lyrics generator called keyword2lyrics. The system was created by Mathi Gatthi, a data scientist from Argentina, who told TNW he got the idea from his own songwriting struggles: Sometimes I have a few ideas that I want to turn into a song, but I’m too lazy for that, so I thought it would be cool to make a program that generates lyrics… This story continues at The Next Web
TuSimple and Waymo are in the lead in the emerging sector of autonomous trucking; TuSimple founder Xiaodi Hou and Waymo trucking head Boris Sofman had an in-depth discussion of their industry and the tech they’re building at TC Mobility 2020. Interestingly, while they’re solving for the same problems, they have very different backgrounds and approaches. […]
The economic slump has forced many of to us to think up some fresh lies for our resumes. If you’re struggling for inspiration, a new AI tool could help revive your imagination. Developer Thomas Davis built the system by training machine learning models on the key properties of 6,000 resumes. The result is Almost Real Resume, a website that spits out an endless stream of fake career highlights for tech job candidates. It gives you a new name, contact details, personal statement, work experience, and interests in a variety of formats and color schemes. But the best part is the… This story continues at The Next Web
Videoconferencing has become a cornerstone of how many of us work these days — so much so that one leading service, Zoom, has graduated into verb status because of how much it’s getting used. But does that mean videoconferencing works as well as it should? Today, a new startup called Headroom is coming out of […]
The 2021 versions of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements are now available, and Adobe has added a number of AI-powered features to them. Those apps are Adobe’s streamlined versions of Photoshop and Premiere, and they’re designed for beginners an...
Grid AI, a startup founded by the inventor of the popular open-source PyTorch Lightning project, William Falcon, that aims to help machine learning engineers more efficiently, today announced that it has raised an $18.6 million Series A funding round, which closed earlier this summer. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Bain […]
We don’t often cover telecom technology startups, but it’s periodically worth checking in to see what’s happening in that space. We can get a good indication from the latest cohort to emerge from an accelerator associated with South Korea’s largest wireless carrier, SK Telecom. This group of startups will join the Telecom Infra Project accelerator […]
The goal of Sight Tech Global, a virtual, global event on December 2-3, 2020, is to gather the world’s top experts who are applying advanced technologies, notably AI, to the future of accessibility and assistive tech for people who are blind or visually impaired. Today we’re excited to roll out most of the agenda. There […]
Can artificial intelligence learn the moral values of human societies? Can an AI system make decisions in situations where it must weigh and balance between damage and benefits to different people or groups of people? Can AI develop a sense of right and wrong? In short, will artificial intelligence have a conscience? This question might sound irrelevant when considering today’s AI systems, which are only capable of accomplishing very narrow tasks. But as science continues to break new grounds, artificial intelligence is gradually finding its way into broader domains. We’re already seeing AI algorithms applied to areas where the boundaries of… This story continues at The Next Web
This article was originally published by Sarah Wray on Cities Today, the leading news platform on urban mobility and innovation, reaching an international audience of city leaders. For the latest updates follow Cities Today on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube, or sign up for Cities Today News. Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) is exploring the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to plot more efficient bus routes based on how they are used throughout the day. Machine learning (ML) algorithms could eventually inform updates to 150 routes used by 2,158 buses across Dubai, the RTA said. The authority trialled… This story continues at The Next Web
The prospect of truly zero contact delivery seems closer — and more important — than ever with the pandemic changing how we think of last mile logistics. Autonomous delivery executives from FedEx, Postmates, and Refraction AI joined us to talk about the emerging field at TechCrunch Mobility 2020. FedEx VP of Advanced Technology and Innovation […]
Nvidia is in the process of acquiring chip designer Arm for $40 billion. Coincidentally, both companies are also holding their respective developer conferences this week. After he finished his keynote at the Arm DevSummit, I sat down with Arm CEO Simon Segars to talk about the acquisition and what it means for the company. Segars […]
Nvidia today unveiled a new platform for developers of video-conferencing apps, which the company says can cut the bandwidth consumed by video calls by a factor of 10. The cloud-native platform — named Nvidia Maxine — also offers AI effects including gaze correction, super-resolution, noise cancellation, and face relighting. The system slashes the bandwidth requirements of the H264 video compression standard by using AI to analyze the “key facial points” of every person on the call — rather than streaming the entire screen of pixels. The software then reanimates each face in the video on the other side. This compression technique could both… This story continues at The Next Web
Nvidia today announced that it’s building the UK‘s fastest supercomputer, which it intends to use for AI research in healthcare. The Cambridge-1 will deliver 400 petaflops of AI performance, giving it a spot among the world’s 30 most powerful supercomputers. Nvidia says it will also be among the three most energy-efficient supercomputers on the current Green500 list. The system is expected to come online by the end of the year. Its early users will include healthcare researchers at GSK, AstraZeneca, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, King’s College London, and Oxford Nanopore Technologies. “Tackling the world’s most pressing challenges in… This story continues at The Next Web
Video calling has become more common than ever following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. To help your calls look and sound better, NVIDIA has unveiled an AI-powered suite of tools that video call app developers can tap into.NVIDIA Maxine powers a...
As Nvidia continues to work through its deal to acquire ARM for $40 billion from SoftBank, the computing giant is making another big move to lay out its commitment to investing in UK technology. Today the company announced plans to develop Cambridge-1, a new AI supercomputer that will be used for research in the health […]
NASA has unveiled images of the first-ever craters on Mars discovered by AI. The system spotted the craters by scanning photos by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was launched in 2005 to study the history of water on the red planet. The cluster it detected was created by several pieces of a single meteor, which had shattered into pieces while flying through the Martian sky at some point between March 2010 and May 2012. The fragments landed in a region called Noctis Fossae, a long, narrow, shallow depression on Mars. They left behind a series of craters spanning about 100 feet (30 meters) of the planet’s surface.… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: NASA
Nvidia will use AI to make sure you’re always looking at your camera. | Image: Nvidia Nvidia has announced a new videoconferencing platform for developers named Nvidia Maxine that it claims can fix some of the most common problems in video calls. Maxine will process calls in the cloud using Nvidia’s GPUs and boost call quality in a number of ways with the help of artificial intelligence. Using AI, Maxine can realign callers’ faces and gazes so that they’re always looking directly at their camera, reduce the bandwidth requirement for calls by up to 90 percent by only transmitting “key facial points,” and upscale the resolution of videos. Other features available in Maxine include face re-lighting, real-time translation and transcription, and animated avatars. Nvidia’s face alignment feature will make sure you’re always... Continue reading…
Is there a data-driven — or even better, an AI-driven — process for gaining deeper insight into which images are more likely to engage users?
Yesterday might’ve been all about the Pixel 5 and its budget-friendly sibling, the Pixel 4a 5G, but those were certainly not the only new things Google unveiled. In a blog post, the company explained the app now uses machine learning to offer automatic suggestions tailored to the specific photo you’re editing. The new feature aims to make your photos “pop” more and also comes with a user interface that lets you further tweak the AI‘s suggestions manually. The bolstered editor, which resides in the Suggestions tab in Google Photos, currently supports only three modes, but the Mountain View giant promises more… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Google
It’s been a month since Elon Musk and Neuralink trotted out a cyborg pig to show off the company’s progress toward a brain computer interface (BCI). I still see Gertrude in my nightmares. The big idea behind Neuralink is the development of a brain implant that will allow everybody to control computers with their minds. But more than this, Musk claims it will eventually allow computers to control our minds. He says the device will be capable of “curing” depression, Alzheimer’s and myriad other brain-based conditions. This would be accomplished through targeted stimulation and interference in what would otherwise be… This story continues at The Next Web
At Toyota, researchers are experimenting with prototypes that swoop from the ceiling to take care of chores with the help of machine learning.
If you’re unimpressed by the book recommendations provided by your tasteless friends, a new AI tool called GPT-3 Books could help revive your joy of reading. The system is the brainchild of Anurag Ramdasan and Richard Reis. The duo are the co-founders of Most Recommended Books, a repository of reading suggestions from the world’s most influential people, from Bill Gates (215 recommendations) to the Rock (one recommendation: The Art and Making of Rampage, a behind-the-scenes look at a movie chronicling the love between a man and his genetically-engineered gorilla). Ramdasan said he got the idea while he was building a platform to recommend… This story continues at The Next Web
TLDR: Lumen5 is an AI-driven social media creator that can turn your text into gorgeous shareable videos in just minutes. The steady drumbeat over the past decade has finally started to settle in. Video is king. Website visitors demand video. Social media users demand video. Everyone demands video. That’s easier said than done for many online content creators, particularly brands or small businesses that may not have a dedicated multimedia team crafting professional videos and social posts. Lumen5 is an AI-powered video creation platform that ensures you don’t have to start taking loads of Adobe Premiere courses to start creating… This story continues at The Next Web
This year’s live online TNW2020 will give everyone a front-row seat to the biggest tech debates, disruptive business experiments, and impact-driven ideas of the year. But with two full days of sessions, covering twelve different themes, you may be feeling overwhelmed. Not to worry, we’ve made a shortlist of some of the coolest upcoming sessions you should not miss. Scaling your health/AI business (October 1, 11:30-12 CET) The experience of the last few months has brought the health tech industry forward at lightning speed. While red tape and budgets were once barriers preventing the adoption of new tech solutions, since… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Google
Hailo, a Tel Aviv-based startup best known for its high-performance AI chips, today announced the launch of its M.2 and Mini PCIe high-AI acceleration modules. Based around its Hailo-8 chip, these new models are meant to be used in edge devices for anything from smart city and smart home solutions to industrial applications. Today’s announcement […]
A not-for-profit called RepresentUS, working with creative media agency Mischief @ No Fixed Address, recently used the popular Deepfake AI system to create a pair of political ads featuring actors digitally manipulated to look like Vladmir Putin and Kim Jong Un mocking the current state of US politics. The ads were reportedly slated to air on Fox, CNN, and MSNBC in their DC markets but were “pulled at the last minute” for reasons unknown. Allow me to clear the mystery: they were probably pulled because this is a bad idea. But before we get into that, let’s take a moment… This story continues at The Next Web
Conversational AI has been around for a few years now, in our phones, smart speakers, and throughout connected homes. And while the adoption of this tech is steadily increasing, most applications in this space essentially only enable you to push buttons using your voice. The next frontier for conversational AI lies beyond your doorstep. From education to workforce automation to retail, the scope for plenty of novel new applications is opening up as the technology improves. As Shreyas Nivas of Replica wrote recently, we will see a shift in voice AI from services being “primarily transactional — ‘Alexa, tell me… This story continues at The Next Web
XtalPi, an American-Chinese biotech firm that focuses on AI-assisted drug discovery, has raised a $319 million round C from a slate of enthusiastic investors led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund. It joins numerous others with 9-figure rounds in what is clearly a valuable and competitive space. XtalPi works with major pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer that need […]
Small startups and logistics giants alike are working on how to use automated vehicle technology and robotics for delivery. Some have even accelerated their efforts, with mixed results, as the COVID-19 pandemic drove up demand for delivery. But is the world — or the tech — ready for the mainstream? TechCrunch has tapped three experts […]
Amsterdam and Helsinki today became the first cities in the world to launch open AI registers that track how algorithms are being used in the municipalities. In a press release, the cities said the registers would help ensure that the AI used in public services operates on the same principles of responsibility, transparency, and security as other local government activities. “Algorithms play an increasingly important role in our lives,” said Touria Meliani, Deputy Mayor of Amsterdam. “Together with the city of Helsinki, we are on a mission to create as much understanding about algorithms as possible and be transparent about… This story continues at The Next Web
The U.S. military recently conducted a live-fire full combat replication with unmanned-to-unmanned teaming guiding attacks, small reconnaissance drones, satellites sending target coordinates to ground artillery and high-speed, AI-enabled “networked” warfare.
“Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” – Dr. Ian Malcolm, fictional character, Jurassic Park. It turns out that a $1 billion investment from Microsoft and unfettered access to a supercomputer wasn’t enough to keep OpenAI’s GPT-3 from being just as bigoted as Tay, the algorithm-based chat bot that became an overnight racist after being exposed to humans on social media. It’s only logical to assume any AI trained on the internet – meaning trained on databases compiled by scraping publicly-available text online – would end up with… This story continues at The Next Web
There are lots of things I hated about my university experience, but having to occasionally browse PDF files straight from my phone is certainly up there. Fortunately, though, future generations won’t have to endure the same dreadful experience. Adobe is rolling out a new AI-powered feature in Adobe Reader that’ll make PDF files a lot more readable and responsive on Android and iOS devices. Dubbed Liquid Mode, the new functionality leverages Adobe’s AI framework, Sensei, to make PDFs fit your screen without having to constantly pinch and zoom. Okay, here’s how it’ll work. When you open a PDF in Reader,… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Adobe
I recently made a chatbot for recruiters to interact with my portfolio, which garnered some attention on Twitter: You can interact with it here. This was a simple experiment I did to manage recruitment emails and job applications, inspired by Big Kid Lab. My original intention was to showcase my resourceful skills and get hands-on experience with conversational AI design, but I added some bolder questions to filter out recruiters who represent companies that don’t align with my values. It’s rather alarming if a company still hasn’t taken a stance of support for BLM or other social justice issues at… This story continues at The Next Web
Facebook has taken down a China-based network of fake accounts that used AI-generated faces to spread government propaganda across the platform, according to research by analytics firm Graphika. The social network announced on Tuesday that it had removed 155 accounts, 11 Pages, nine Groups, and six Instagram accounts for “coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign or government entity.” The fake accounts predominantly focused on Southeast Asia, where they posted about events including Beijing’s interests in the South China Sea and developments in Hong Kong. But a smaller cluster posing as Americans posted content that both supported and criticized then-presidential candidates… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: Facebook
We’ve probably all been there: you’ve been poking around your phone for an hour, deep in some sort of Google research rabbit hole. You finally find a link that almost certainly has the info you’ve been looking for. You tap it.. aaaand it’s a fifty page PDF. Now you get to pinch and zoom your […]
PDFs can be a pain to read on smaller screens, and that’s something Adobe intends to address now that more and more people are relying on digital services for their work and personal lives. Today, the software company has revealed its multi-year effo...
YouTube will start using AI to automatically add age restrictions to videos “over the coming months,” the company announced on Tuesday. The site currently relies on content reviewers to flag videos that aren’t appropriate for viewers under 18, but will soon start using machine learning to detect content for review. Uploaders will be able to appeal the system’s decisions. In addition, viewers who try to evade the restrictions by watching videos embedded on third-party websites will be redirected to YouTube, where they’ll have to sign-in to show they’re over 18. “This will help ensure that, no matter where a video is… This story continues at The Next WebOr just read more coverage about: YouTube
Microsoft licenses the breakthrough natural language AI GPT-3 EngadgetMicrosoft exclusively licenses OpenAI’s groundbreaking GPT-3 text generation model The VergeMicrosoft Lands Exclusive License for OpenAI's Astonishing GPT-3 Model GizmodoThe Next Big Breakthrough in AI Will Be Around Language Harvard Business ReviewMicrosoft gets exclusive license for OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model VentureBeatView Full Coverage on Google News
Microsoft announced that it has “exclusively licensed” OpenAI’s sophisticated GPT-3 language model that can generate disturbingly human-like text in applications ranging from commercial bots to creative writing. After investing $1 billion in the San...
Qualcomm's newest 5G chipset is announced, will launch later this year PhoneArenaQualcomm’s new Snapdragon 750G has 5G, faster speeds, and improved AI performance The VergeQualcomm's new Snapdragon 750G chipset focuses on HDR gaming and global 5G Android PoliceQualcomm Announces Snapdragon 750G: Cortex-A77 & mmWave in the Premium Range AnandTechQualcomm announces Snapdragon 750G, its latest 5G-capable chip 9to5GoogleView Full Coverage on Google News
It won’t solve everything, but a new study suggests real-time automated feedback could help make the internet a less toxic place.
After repurposing facial recognition and deepfake tech to study galaxies and the Higgs boson, physicists think they can help shape the responsible use of AI.
PORTLAND, OR. – November 17, 2025 – A coalition of Oregon's top innovation and academic institutions, today announced the launch of the Oregon AI Accelerator, a first-of-its-kind statewide initiative designed to support early-stage founders building transformative, AI-first companies. Backed by seed funding from Google, and supported by the Metro Region Innovation Hub, Portland State University, Oregon Health & Science University, Oregon State University, the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network, the Technology Association of Oregon, and TiE Oregon, the Accelerator will launch its inaugural pilot in February 2026. The program will bring together 20 early-stage AI startups for a three-month hybrid accelerator experience combining in-person sessions in Portland with virtual programming. Participants will receive mentorship, validation support, and access to Oregon's thriving innovation ecosystem – without giving up equity – and will compete for up to $50,000 in equity-free grant prizes. "This program is much bigger than accelerating startups—it's about helping Oregon small businesses compete and grow in the age of AI," said Katy Bowman, manager of Google's community development and engagement program. "By investing in entrepreneurs and connecting them to resources statewide, we're helping ensure Oregon remains a place where innovation drives broad economic opportunity." The Oregon AI Accelerator is a collaborative initiative uniting Oregon's leading tech organizations, investors, and universities to launch and scale AI startups. The Accelerator empowers early-stage founders to build globally competitive companies while remaining grounded in values of innovation, equity, and community impact. It is building on the success of the Oregon AI Bootcamp, which trained more than 40 founders in June and demonstrated strong regional demand for deeper, hands-on support. The new Accelerator expands on that model with a comprehensive program designed to help founders refine their business models, strengthen technical capabilities, and prepare for investment. "This initiative represents the collaborative spirit that defines Oregon's innovation community," said Joseph Janda, Assistant Vice President for Innovation at PSU. "By bringing together academia, industry, and investors, we're creating a powerful platform for founders to build scalable companies that reflect Oregon's values of innovation, equity, and impact." The program will be coordinated by the Metro Region Innovation Hub, which is part of Business Oregon's statewide network of regional Innovation Hubs dedicated to maximizing support for innovation-based entrepreneurs. "The Oregon AI Accelerator is a model for how public, private, and academic partners can come together to make Oregon a true leader in responsible, human-centered AI innovation," added Jack Phan, the incoming Director of the Oregon AI Accelerator Program. Applications for the Oregon AI Accelerator open November 17, 2025, and close December 15, 2025. The pilot cohort will run from February 2 through May 15, 2026. While startups from anywhere may apply, at least 50% of the cohort will be Oregon-based to ensure strong local impact and growth. "This accelerator would not be possible without the generous support of Google and the dedication of our partner organizations," said Cara Turano, Executive Director of Oregon Entrepreneurs Network. "Together, we're building the foundation for Oregon to emerge as a global hub for AI innovation, where founders can thrive and meaningful technologies can take root." Support for Oregon's AI Accelerator continues Google's commitment in Oregon. With data centers in The Dalles and an office in downtown Portland, Google has invested more than $2 billion in Oregon since 2006. Through its tools and products, the company has also helped generate $8.6 billion in economic activity for Oregon businesses and nonprofits. The Metro Region Innovation Hub's mission is to provide Portland-area entrepreneurs with the resources, mentorship, and opportunities they need to succeed. The Hub exists to foster collaboration between entrepreneurs and business service providers, ensuring mutual trust and access to essential resources, as we work together to build a stronger, more inclusive innovation ecosystem in the Portland Metro region.
Portland, OR – The Oregon AI Startup Bootcamp successfully concluded its intensive three-day program this week, equipping 44 aspiring founders with the tools, knowledge, and mentorship needed to turn AI concepts into fundable, scalable ventures. Hosted by the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN) at the Portland State University’s Business Accelerator, the bootcamp was delivered in partnership with Google, Metro Region Innovation Hub, Portland State University Center for Entrepreneurship, Silicon Forest Partnership, Technology Association of Oregon, and TiE Oregon. The vision for the bootcamp emerged just four months ago as a conversation among four local tech entrepreneurs and investors—Bobby Kandaswamy, Charlie Kawasaki, Kristy Edwards, and Sce Pike—who identified an urgent need to support first-time founders navigating the rapidly evolving AI startup landscape. Recognizing that traditional programs often overlook early-stage, domain-driven innovators, the group partnered with OEN, PSU, and the Metro Region Innovation Hub to develop a highly curated, targeted, and inclusive program tailored for aspiring AI entrepreneurs. Thanks to generous sponsorship from Google, Portland Metro Innovation Hub, and Silicon Forest, the bootcamp was offered completely free of charge to all 44 participants—making high-quality entrepreneurial training and mentorship accessible to founders regardless of background or financial resources. Designed to catalyze innovation in Oregon’s growing AI ecosystem, the bootcamp featured expert-led sessions covering company formation, legal fundamentals, AI product development, go-to-market strategy, team building, and fundraising. Interactive workshops and pitch coaching gave participants practical, hands-on experience to validate ideas and prepare for investor engagement. The agenda also included in-depth discussions with venture investors and successful tech founders on how to pitch effectively, raise capital, overcome the product–market fit challenge, and build scalable business models and go-to-market strategies. Sessions concluded with insights on how startups can position themselves for successful exits through acquisitions or IPOs. Guest speakers included local founders, academic experts, and industry leaders who shared insights on emerging trends, real-world challenges, and the evolving AI startup landscape. Participants also had numerous opportunities to connect with investors, mentors, and ecosystem partners throughout the three-day event. With a strong emphasis on inclusivity and accessibility, the bootcamp welcomed participants from diverse backgrounds—including non-technical founders and underrepresented entrepreneurs—and fostered a supportive, action-oriented environment for learning and growth. By the end of the program, attendees left with a clear understanding of the startup lifecycle, validated tools and frameworks, and meaningful connections within Oregon’s innovation community. Plans are already underway to launch a dedicated AI startup accelerator in the very near future, aimed at supporting early-stage ventures through investment, mentorship, and sustained programming.
The new lab, set to include Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, is part of a reorganization of Meta’s artificial intelligence efforts under chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
Warhol for colour, Hopper for volume … American art world star David Salle is using AI on old paintings of his that had a mixed reception – with wild, sprawling results. Why isn’t he afraid of being replaced?By the time you read this article, there’s a good chance it will have already been scanned by an artificially intelligent machine. If asked about the artist David Salle, large language models such as ChatGPT or Gemini may repurpose some of the words below to come up with their answer. The bigger the data set, the more convincing the response – and Salle has been written about...