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....
When a young man from California broadcast his death on X, profit-hungry traders piled into a cryptocurrency created in his image....
If you’re reading this, you already know: It’s time to amplify your brand. Get in front of thousands of TechCrunch event attendees, readers, and decision-makers who can take your business further this year by exhibiting at a TechCrunch event. The perks of exhibiting: What’s in...
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...
Pruna AI, a European startup that has been working on compression algorithms for AI models, is making its optimization framework open source on Thursday. Pruna AI has been creating a framework that applies several efficiency methods, such as caching, pruning, quantization and distillation, to a...
A Swedish startup aiming to build a hyperscale cloud company in Europe has raised €50.6 million ($55 million) in Series A funding. Evroc, as it’s called, says it’s laying the foundations for a “secure, sovereign and sustainable hyperscale cloud to reimagine the digital future of...
OpenAI is facing another privacy complaint in Europe over its viral AI chatbot’s tendency to hallucinate false information — and this one might prove tricky for regulators to ignore. Privacy rights advocacy group Noyb is supporting an individual in Norway who was horrified to find...
Debt collection in emerging markets often feels outdated and can be costly — damaging borrower trust. As consumer lending surges and regulators push for fairer practices, legacy collection outfits are struggling to maintain pace. ClearGrid aims to help modernize debt collection — and recovery —...
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...
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...
Some users on X are turning to Grok for fact-checking, raising concerns among fact-checkers. © 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 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 was said to be nine figures, exceeding Gretel’s most recent valuation of $320 million, according to Wired. Gretel...
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 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...
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...
NVIDIA’s GTC conference kicked off with a series of announcements highlighting its role in advancing autonomous driving technology. The chipmaker provides automakers and autonomous vehicle companies with a handful of Nvidia-branded tools to help power self-driving cars and create digital twins of factories. On Tuesday,...
“The enthusiasm into AI actually carries over into everything, which effectively impacts all startups,” said AngelList CEO Avlok Kohli when asked if investors remain as excited about emerging startups outside of AI. According to Kohli, AI startups make up nearly 40% of the startups on...
Dataminr, a data analytics company that counts NATO and OpenAI among its customers, has raised $85 million in a combination of convertible financing and credit, Dataminr announced on Wednesday. It’s chump change for Dataminr, which closed a $475 million round at a $4.1 billion valuation...
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...
Robots are part of an exciting new frontier in tech, but here’s the challenge: robots rely on arrays of sensors, external signals like GPS and Wi-Fi, and customized software to navigate their environments. Further, robotics often involves expensive, ready-made hardware solutions that include built-in software...
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...
After hitting record lows at the start of the pandemic, mortgage rates began to climb in 2022 and haven’t come down significantly since. With 30-year mortgage rates hovering at over 6.5% today (they were as low as 2.49% in 2020!), buying a home is simply...
During a recent dinner with business leaders in San Francisco, a comment I made cast a chill over the room. I hadn’t asked my dining companions anything I considered to be extremely faux pas: simply whether they thought today’s AI could someday achieve human-like intelligence...
Former NSA deputy director George Barnes has made his first investment as a venture capitalist for his new job at the VC incubation studio Red Cell Partners. It’s a $3 million seed deal in an open source cybersecurity startup called Hunted Labs, he told TechCrunch exclusively....
Mobile networks continue to be a major target for cybersecurity breaches, and Chinese hacking group Salt Typhoon’s persistent attacks on multiple carriers are only the latest known examples. The mobile carrier startup Cape is taking a novel approach to addressing the problem: It has built...
TechCrunch Sessions: AI is nearly upon us, and you have the power to decide who you want to see lead a dynamic breakout session. We have whittled speaker applications down to six incredible finalists to take the stage on June 5 in Zellerbach Hall at...
There’s a controversy brewing over “AI-generated” studies submitted to this year’s ICLR, a long-running academic conference focused on AI. At least three AI labs — Sakana, Intology, and Autoscience — claim to have used AI to generate studies that were accepted to ICLR workshops. At...
Prezent has raised $20 million in an all-equity funding to build specialized presentation models and expand its footprint into new markets. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....