Nvidia took San Jose by storm this year, with a record-breaking 25,000 attendees flocking to the San Jose Convention Center and surrounding downtown buildings. Many workshops, talks, and panels were so packed that people had to lean against walls or sit on the floor —...
Apple has been sued in federal court over what plaintiffs allege is false advertising of several Apple Intelligence features. Filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, the suit seeks class-action status and damages on behalf of those who purchased Apple Intelligence-capable iPhones and...
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-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...
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...
Germany’s Munich Re has signed a definitive agreement to acquire digital insurance company Next Insurance for $2.6 billion, the firms announced on Thursday. Founded in 2016, Palo Alto-based Next Insurance is focused on providing insurance to small-to-medium-sized businesses. It was last valued at $2.5 billion...
It’s well-established that AI models developed by Chinese AI labs like DeepSeek censor certain politically sensitive topics. A 2023 measure passed by China’s ruling party forbids models from generating content that “damages the unity of the country and social harmony.” According to one study, DeepSeek’s...
On this episode of Uncanny Valley, we tell you everything you need to know about Maye Musk....
CoreWeave said on Wednesday that it hopes to sell its initial public shares between $47 and $55 per share, putting the money it may raise between about $2.2 billion and $2.6 billion. Word on the street is that CoreWeave wanted to raise at least $3...
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...
OpenAI is bringing new transcription and voice-generating AI models to its API that the company claims improve upon its previous releases. For OpenAI, the models fit into its broader “agentic” vision: building automated systems that can independently accomplish tasks on behalf of users. The definition...
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....
Tesla says it will fix the sticky issue—which could cause panels to detach from trucks while driving—with a new adhesive “not prone to environmental embrittlement.”...
Open-source data movement company Airbyte is launching additional connectors to help enterprises better utilize their data in the age of AI without compromising data sovereignty. The San Francisco-based startup announced on Thursday that it’s releasing a host of new capabilities designed to enable customers to...
TechCrunch Sessions: AI kicks off on June 5 at Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley — and you have the power to decide who you want to see lead an impactful breakout session. We have narrowed down the impressive number of speaker applications to six incredible...
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...