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....
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...
French startup Riot has raised a $30 million Series B round after reaching $10 million in annual revenue in 2024. Originally focused on educating employees about cybersecurity risks, the company now wants to go one step further and nudge employees so that they minimize their...
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...
DeepSeek founder Lian Wenfeng is being hailed as a hero in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, where he grew up and reportedly returned for the Lunar New Year, joined by bodyguards. Wenfeng—who, at 40, is already a billionaire due to his hedge fund, High-Flyer—is...
OpenAI is announcing a new AI “agent” designed to help people conduct in-depth, complex research using ChatGPT, the company’s AI-powered chatbot platform. Appropriately enough, it’s called deep research. OpenAI said in a blog post published Sunday that these this new capability was designed for “people...
Google’s X “moonshot factory” this week announced its latest graduate. Heritable Agriculture is a data- and machine learning-driven startup aiming to improve how crops are grown. As the firm noted in an announcement post published Tuesday, plants are incredibly efficient and impressive systems. “Plants are...
As of Sunday in the European Union, the bloc’s regulators can ban the use of AI systems they deem to pose “unacceptable risk” or harm. February 2 is the first compliance deadline for the EU’s AI Act, the comprehensive AI regulatory framework that the European...
These companies have confidentially filed to go public in recent years. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
TikTok’s potential U.S. ban has sparked a flurry of development within the open social web community. Several new applications are being built that could one day serve as a TikTok replacement for those who favor the open source, decentralized social network Bluesky and the technology...
When accounting startup Bench abruptly failed last month, the shutdown was forced when the company’s lenders called in the startup’s loan. In late 2023, the digital freight company Convoy faced financial challenges, leading venture lending firm Hercules Capital to assume control of the company to...
DeepSeek is making waves in the AI world, grabbing headlines and taking over the app stores, even beating out OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But what’s really happening behind the hype? Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Max Zeff is talking about it all with Ion Stoica, Professor of...
Thanks to the advent of cloud computing and distributed digital infrastructure, the one-person micro-enterprise is far from a novel concept. Cheap on-demand compute, remote collaboration, payment processing APIs, social media, and e-commerce marketplaces have all made it easier to “go it alone” as an entrepreneur....
India announced a new $1.15 billion Fund of Funds for startups on Saturday while unveiling sweeping regulatory reforms and an ambitious nuclear energy program, as New Delhi seeks to boost tech innovation and clean energy in the world’s fifth-largest economy. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, presenting...
OpenAI used the subreddit, r/ChangeMyView, to create a test for measuring the persuasive abilities of its AI reasoning models. The company revealed this in a system card – a document outlining how an AI system works – that was released along with its new “reasoning”...
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...
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...
Some companies are blocking DeepSeek over concerns their data will end up with the Chinese government. © 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...
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is trying to avoid being deposed in a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, according to new court filings. In response, lawyers for the plaintiff — the Authors Guild — have filed a motion to compel testimony from Amodei and his Anthropic co-founder,...
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....
A WIRED investigation shows that the popular Chinese AI model is censored on both the application and training level....
On the heels of DeepSeek R1, the latest model from OpenAI promises more advanced capabilities at a cheaper price....
The lights dimmed as five actors took their places around a table on a makeshift stage in a New York City art gallery turned theater for the night. Wine and water flowed through the intimate space as the house — packed with media — sat...
OpenAI on Friday launched a new AI "reasoning" model, o3-mini, the latest in the company's o1 family of reasoning models. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only....
Security researchers tested 50 well-known jailbreaks against DeepSeek’s popular new AI chatbot. It didn’t stop a single one....
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,...
A startup called Graze, which lets you build your own feeds for the Bluesky social network, has caught investors’ attention. In addition to offering tools to easily build, customize, publish, and manage Bluesky feeds, Graze will soon allow feed creators to monetize their efforts with...
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...