Category: AI

Auto Added by WPeMatico

AI, controversy, firing, Global IT News, Global Security News, In Brief, interview, openai, sam altman

Sam Altman has choice words for the OpenAI board members who fired him

January 5, 2025

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has strong words for the former board members who abruptly fired him late last November. “[A]ll those people that I feel, like, really f—ed me and f—ed the company were gone, and now I had to clean up their mess,” he told Bloomberg in a wide-ranging interview. Just over a year…

Samsung’s CES 2025 press conference: How to watch

January 5, 2025

Samsung’s CES presser is always an odd duck. The Korean electronics giant generally keeps its powder dry when it comes to consumer electronics. After all, it’s expected to announce its latest flagship handset — the Galaxy S25 — toward the end of January. CES 2025 is going to continue the company’s tradition of TVs and…

What will this year bring in VC? We asked a few investors

January 4, 2025

A new year brings with it hope for a better tomorrow — kind of, at least. In the world of venture capital, nothing is quite predictable. The number of firms in the U.S. has taken a sharp dip as risk-averse institutional investors splash money on only the biggest names in Silicon Valley, as reported by…

Inside the wild fall and last-minute revival of Bench, the VC-backed accounting startup that imploded over the holidays

January 3, 2025

Friday, December 27, was supposed to be the start of a relaxing holiday weekend. But it was chaos for thousands of small business owners who use Bench, an accounting and tax startup based in Canada that raised $113 million from investors like Bain Capital Ventures and Shopify. That morning, they found themselves unable to log…

Imperva’s Wildest 2025 AppSec Predictions

January 3, 2025

Humans are spectacularly bad at predicting the future. Which is why, when someone appears to be able to do it on a regular basis, they are hailed as visionaries, luminaries and celebrated with cool names like Nostradamus and The Amazing Kreskin. Nostradamus made his fame on predictions about the distant future, but that technique has…

Generative AI funding reached new heights in 2024

January 3, 2025

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…

Microsoft to spend $80 billion in FY’25 on data centers for AI

January 3, 2025

Microsoft has earmarked $80 billion in fiscal 2025 to build data centers designed to handle artificial intelligence workloads, according to a company blog post. Specifically, the tech giant plans to build out AI-enabled data centers “to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications around the world.” Of that $80 billion allocation, more than…

FTC orders AI accessibility startup accessiBe to pay $1M for misleading advertising

January 3, 2025

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…

Nvidia’s CES 2025 keynote: How to watch

January 2, 2025

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…

How to watch CES 2025’s press conferences

January 2, 2025

CES 2025 kicks off January 7. The annual Las Vegas event sets the tone for the year’s consumer electronics and automotive industries. As always, TechCrunch will be there, sniffing stories from the most exciting startups and tech giants. If you really want a piece of the action without paying for the hotel and flight, many…

xAI’s next-gen AI model didn’t arrive on time, adding to a trend

January 2, 2025

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,…

These 55 robotics companies are hiring

January 2, 2025

These 55 robotics companies are hiring

January 2, 2025

Fireside chat with Graham Cluley about risks of AI adoption in 2025

January 2, 2025

Join me, and the experts from Rubrik, on Weds January 15 2025, where we’ll be having a fireside chat with Dark Reading all about the known and unknown risks of adopting AI.

Apheris rethinks the AI data bottleneck in life science with federated computing

January 2, 2025

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…

The AI Fix #31: Replay: AI doesn’t exist

January 1, 2025

Mark and I took a break for the new year, but we’ll be back for a new episode of “The AI Fix” podcast at the usual time next week. In the meantime, here is another chance to hear one of our favourite episodes again. The very first episode from April 2024… Graham attempts to convince…

Silicon Valley stifled the AI doom movement in 2024

January 1, 2025

For several years now, technologists have rung alarm bells about the potential for advanced AI systems to cause catastrophic damage to the human race. But in 2024, those warning calls were drowned out by a practical and prosperous vision of generative AI promoted by the tech industry – a vision that also benefited their wallets.…

OpenAI failed to deliver the opt-out tool it promised by 2025

January 1, 2025

Back in May, OpenAI said it was developing a tool to let creators specify how they want their works to be included in — or excluded from — its AI training data. But 7 months later, this feature has yet to see the light of day. Called Media Manager, the tool would “identify copyrighted text,…

Judge allows California’s ban on addictive feeds for minors to go into effect

December 31, 2024

Late Tuesday evening, a federal judge blocked tech lobbying group NetChoice’s challenge to California’s recently enacted law, SB 976, which prohibits companies from serving “addictive feeds” to minors. The effect of this decision is that beginning Wednesday, companies will be prohibited from serving an addictive feed to a California-based user they know to be a…

Will Smith eating spaghetti and other weird AI benchmarks that took off in 2024

December 31, 2024

When a company releases a new AI video generator, it’s not long before someone uses it to make a video of actor Will Smith eating spaghetti. It’s become something of a meme as well as a benchmark: Seeing whether a new video generator can realistically render Smith slurping down a bowl of noodles. Smith himself…

A look back on my favorite episodes of TechCrunch’s Found podcast

December 31, 2024

TechCrunch’s Found podcast, which has brought listeners the stories behind the startups since April 2022, released its final episode today. I’ve been one of the hosts of Found since November 2022 and in that time have spoken to more than 75 founders about the startups they are building. These founders hail from many different backgrounds…

ByteDance appears to be skirting US restrictions to buy Nvidia chips: report

December 30, 2024

TikTok parent company ByteDance has big plans to buy Nvidia chips in 2025 — despite U.S. restrictions. ByteDance plans to spend $7 billion on the chips in 2025, according to reporting from The Information, citing inside sources. If ByteDance follows through, it will become one of the world’s top owners of Nvidia chips, despite U.S. efforts…

From AI agents to enterprise budgets, 20 VCs share their predictions on enterprise tech in 2025

December 30, 2024

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…

Nonprofit group joins Elon Musk’s effort to block OpenAI’s for-profit transition

December 30, 2024

Encode, the nonprofit organization 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 company. In a proposed brief submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California Friday afternoon, counsel for…

Nvidia completes acquisition of AI infrastructure startup Run:ai

December 30, 2024

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…

Backed by a16z and QED, Brazilian startup Carecode puts AI agents to work on healthcare

December 30, 2024

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…

AI data centers could be ‘distorting’ the US power grid

December 29, 2024

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…

Permira’s Brian Ruder talks AI, Squarespace acquisition, and the value of co-leadership

December 29, 2024

It has been a busy year in the private equity realm, with countless big-money acquisitions unfolding. The take-private space specifically has seen some sizable transactions, with private equity firms spearheading more than a dozen billion-dollar deals for public tech companies. London-headquartered Permira was a key protagonist, joining Blackstone to acquire European online classifieds group Adevinta…

Google CEO says AI model Gemini will the company’s ‘biggest focus’ in 2025

December 28, 2024

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…

How to watch CES 2025’s press conferences

December 28, 2024

CES kicks off January 7. The annual Las Vegas event sets the tone of the year’s consumer electronics and automotive industries. As always, TechCrunch will be there, sniffing stories from the most exciting startups and tech giants. If you really want a piece of the action without paying for the hotel and flight, many of…

Nonprofit group joins Elon Musk’s effort to block OpenAI’s for-profit transition

December 27, 2024

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…

Why DeepSeek’s new AI model thinks it’s ChatGPT

December 27, 2024

Earlier this week, DeepSeek, a well-funded Chinese AI lab, released an “open” AI model that beats many rivals on popular benchmarks. The model, DeepSeek V3, is large but efficient, handling text-based tasks like coding and writing essays with ease. It also seems to think it’s ChatGPT. Posts on X — and TechCrunch’s own tests —…

OpenAI lays out its for-profit transition plans

December 27, 2024

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 employees. But in a blog post published…

AI sales rep startups are booming. So why are VCs wary?

December 26, 2024

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.…

ChatGPT Search can be tricked into misleading users, new research reveals

December 26, 2024

ChatGPT and Sora are down for the second time this month

December 26, 2024

ChatGPT, Sora, and OpenAI’s developer-facing API went down Thursday for an hour and counting. OpenAI says it started experiencing a major outage at 11 AM PT, and the services still appear to be down at the time of publishing this article, around 12:40 PM PT. Frequent users of ChatGPT may recall that the service went…

DeepSeek’s new AI model appears to be one of the best ‘open’ challengers yet

December 26, 2024

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…

Microsoft and OpenAI have a financial definition of AGI: report

December 26, 2024

Microsoft and OpenAI have a very specific, internal definition of artificial general intelligence (AGI) based on the startup’s profits, according to a new report from The Information. And by this definition, OpenAI is many years away from reaching it. The two companies reportedly signed an agreement last year stating OpenAI has only achieved AGI when…

Elon Musk’s xAI lands $6B in new cash to fuel AI ambitions

December 25, 2024

Updated December 25, 12:21 p.m. Pacific: Added details of xAI’s valuation and Kingdom Holdings’ contribution. 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’s CES 2025 press conference: How to watch

December 25, 2024

AMD has its work cut out for it at CES 2025. Competitor Nvidia has been sucking the oxygen out of every room it graces, as the chipmaker remains at the forefront of the AI boom. So, how will AMD compete with Nvidia’s reported RTX 5000 announcement? The company should show of its own next-gen GPU.…

OpenAI ‘considered’ building a humanoid robot: report

December 24, 2024

OpenAI has recently explored building its own humanoid robot, according to The Information. The report cites “two people with direct knowledge” of those conversations. The ChatGPT maker has been involved in the space for some time now, by way of financial backing. It has thus far invested in Figure and 1X, along with the “general…

The promise and perils of synthetic data

December 24, 2024

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…

Samsung’s CES 2025 press conference: How to watch

December 24, 2024

Google is using Anthropic’s Claude to improve its Gemini AI

December 24, 2024

The AI Fix #30: ChatGPT reveals the devastating truth about Santa (Merry Christmas!)

December 24, 2024

In episode 30 of The AI Fix, AIs are caught lying to avoid being turned off, Apple’s AI flubs a headline, ChatGPT is available to people who haven’t left the 1970s, our hosts regret to inform you that an AI artist now has a personality, and ant-like robots join forces to lob each other over…

OpenAI’s o3 suggests AI models are scaling in new ways — but so are the costs

December 23, 2024

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 –…

Elon Musk’s xAI lands $6B in new cash to fuel AI ambitions

December 23, 2024

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). xAI later announced (confirming some earlier reporting) that Andreessen Horowitz , Blackrock, Fidelity, Kingdom Holdings,…

Nvidia’s CES 2025 keynote: How to watch

December 23, 2024

AI startups attracted 25% of Europe’s VC funding

December 23, 2024

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…

Coralogix acquires AI observability platform Aporia

December 23, 2024

Coralogix, the well-funded observability platform, on Monday announced that it has acquired Aporia, a startup that focuses on giving businesses tools to observe and secure their AI workloads, as well as set guardrails for them to avoid hallucinations or unintended disclosures. As part of this acquisition, Coralogix will launch a dedicated AI research center, Coralogix…

A popular technique to make AI more efficient has drawbacks

December 23, 2024

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…

xAI is testing a standalone iOS app for its Grok chatbot

December 23, 2024

Sriram Krishnan named Trump’s senior policy advisor for AI

December 22, 2024

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…

Palantir and Anduril reportedly building a tech consortium to bid on defense contracts

December 22, 2024

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,…

OpenAI trained o1 and o3 to ‘think’ about its safety policy

December 22, 2024

OpenAI announced a new family of AI reasoning models on Friday, o3, which the startup claims to be more advanced than o1 or anything else it’s released. These improvements appear to have come from scaling test-time compute, something we wrote about last month, but OpenAI also says it used a new safety paradigm to train…

Tetsuwan Scientific is making robotic AI scientists that can run experiments on their own

December 22, 2024

LLM models are already capable of diagnosing scientific outputs, but, until now, had “no physical agency to actually perform” experiments. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

OpenAI’s GPT-5 reportedly falling short of expectations

December 21, 2024

OpenAI’s efforts to develop its next major model, GPT-5, are running behind schedule, with results that don’t yet justify the enormous costs, according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal. This echoes an earlier report in The Information suggesting that OpenAI is looking to new strategies as GPT-5 might not represent as big…

Nvidia clears regulatory hurdle to acquire Run:ai

December 20, 2024

Chip company Nvidia gets the green light from the European Union to complete its acquisition of Run:ai. The EU came to a unanimous decision today that Nvidia could go ahead with its acquisition of Israeli GPU orchestration platform Run:ai, according to reporting from Bloomberg. The European Commission determined that if the merger went through other…

Google is expanding Gemini’s in-depth research mode to 40 languages

December 20, 2024

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…

Here’s the full list of 49 US AI startups that have raised $100M or more in 2024

December 20, 2024

OpenAI announces new o3 model

December 20, 2024

OpenAI announced a new o3 model on Friday. In a tweet ahead of its final livestream for its “12 Days of OpenAI” event, the company confirmed previous reports that it is skipping o2 due to copyright concerns, and is releasing early evals for the o3 model. It appears to be a successor to its o1…

OpenAI 2024 event: How to watch new ChatGPT product reveals and demos

December 20, 2024

OpenAI is in the holiday spirit, it seems. The ChatGPT series of reveals, called “12 Days of OpenAI,” will be streamed live at 10 a.m. PT each weekday through December 20. So far, we’ve seen the launch of ChatGPT Pro, OpenAI’s $200 per month subscription plan; the full version of its “reasoning” o1 model; the…

Arizona’s getting an online charter school taught entirely by AI

December 20, 2024

The newest online-only school greenlighted by the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools comes with a twist: the academic curriculum will be taught entirely by AI. Charter schools — independently operated but publicly-funded — typically get greater autonomy compared to traditional public schools when it comes to how subjects are taught. But Unbound Academy’s application,…

‘Genius Girl’ goes from inspiring a Korean TV show character to raising a $100 million AI fund

December 20, 2024

British university spinoff Mindgard protects companies from AI threats

December 20, 2024

AI creates a dilemma for companies: Don’t implement it yet, and you might miss out on productivity gains and other potential benefits; but do it wrong, and you might expose your business and clients to unmitigated risks. This is where a new wave of “security for AI” startups come in, with the premise that these…

Sam Altman once owned some equity in OpenAI through Sequoia

December 19, 2024

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…

Navigating the New Era of AI Traffic: How to Identify and Block AI Scrapers

December 19, 2024

In the not-so-distant past, webmasters faced challenges from bots like Google’s search spiders, which diligently scanned websites to index content and provide the best search results for users. Fast forward to today, and we are witnessing a new breed of bot: Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude. These AI models are not just…

Perplexity has reportedly closed a $500M funding round

December 19, 2024

AI-powered search engine Perplexity has reportedly closed a $500 million funding round, valuing the startup at $9 billion. Bloomberg, citing sources familiar, reports that the round was led by Institutional Venture Partners, and that it closed earlier in December. In an email to TechCrunch, a Perplexity spokesperson declined to comment. The mammoth tranche comes as…

Boon raises $20.5M to build agentic AI tools for fleets

December 19, 2024

Logistics is the name of the game during the holiday season: Companies that can seal the deal and get people and things to the places they need to be, on time, rake it in this time of year. But behind that demand lies a huge amount of inefficiency and fragmentation. Are logistics businesses ready for…

TuSimple pivot from self-driving to AI animation is complete with CreateAI rebrand

December 19, 2024

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…

Ex-Twitch CEO Emmett Shear is founding an AI startup backed by a16z

December 19, 2024

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…

In just 4 months AI coding assistant Cursor raised another $100M at a $2.5B valuation led by Thrive, sources say

December 19, 2024

Anysphere, the developer of AI-powered coding assistant Cursor, raised $100 million Series B at a post-money valuation of $2.6 billion, according to sources with knowledge of the deal. The round is being led by returning investor Thrive Capital, the person said. This new funding comes just four months after Anysphere raised its $60 million Series…

Backed by a16z and NEA, Backflip raises $30M Series A to turn text into AI-generated designs

December 19, 2024

Instagram teases AI tools for editing appearances, backgrounds in videos using prompts

December 19, 2024

Instagram head Adam Mosseri is teasing upcoming generative AI features for the social app that will allow creators to “change nearly any aspect” of their videos using text prompts. The editing tools will be powered by Meta’s Movie Gen AI model, and are expected to launch on the social network sometime next year, Mosseri said…

Google releases its own ‘reasoning’ AI model

December 19, 2024

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…

Smashing Security podcast #398: Fake CAPTCHAs, Harmageddon, and Krispy Kreme

December 19, 2024

This week, we delve into the dark world of fake CAPTCHAs designed to hijack your computer. Plus, the AI safety clock is ticking down – is doomsday closer than we think? And to top it off, we uncover the sticky situation of Krispy Kreme facing a ransomware attack. All this and more is discussed in…

Decart adds another $32M at a $500M+ valuation

December 19, 2024

A young startup that emerged from stealth less than two months ago with big-name backers and bigger ambitions to make a splash in the world of AI is returning to the spotlight. Decart is building what its CEO and co-founder Dean Leitersdorf describes as “a fully vertically integrated AI research lab,” alongside enterprise and consumer…

The promise and warning of Truth Terminal, the AI bot that secured $50,000 in Bitcoin from Marc Andreessen

December 19, 2024

“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…

BlueQubit raises $10M to take Quantum software into real-world applications

December 19, 2024

Integrating quantum computing into real-world computer applications is an ongoing problem, as the platforms are architected fundamentally differently. BlueQubit, a San Francisco-based quantum software startup founded by Stanford alumni, thinks it might have the answer. Its Quantum Software as a Service (QSaaS) platform attempts to tackle the above problem by providing end-users with access to…

Arctic Wolf Acquires Cylance Endpoint Security Platform to Further AI Ambitions

December 19, 2024

Arctic Wolf this week revealed it has acquired the Cyclance endpoint security platform from Blackberry for $160 million. The post Arctic Wolf Acquires Cylance Endpoint Security Platform to Further AI Ambitions appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Exclusive: Google’s Gemini is forcing contractors to rate AI responses outside their expertise

December 18, 2024

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.

New Anthropic study shows AI really doesn’t want to be forced to change its views

December 18, 2024

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…

Perplexity acquires Carbon to connect AI search to your work files

December 18, 2024

Perplexity acquired a small Seattle-based startup called Carbon which specializes in connecting AI systems to external data sources, the companies announced on Wednesday. CEO Aravind Srinivasan says this will allow Perplexity to search through your files and work messages in Notion, Google Docs, Slack, and other enterprise applications sometime in early 2025. Carbon specializes in…

Microsoft bought nearly 500,000 Nvidia Hopper chips this year

December 18, 2024

Microsoft bought more than twice as many Nvidia Hopper chips this year than any of its biggest rivals. The tech giant bought 485,000 Nvidia Hopper chips across 2024 according to reporting from the Financial Times, which cited data from tech consultancy Omdia. To compare, Meta bought 224,000 of the same, flagship Nvidia chip this year.…

OpenAI brings ChatGPT to your landline

December 18, 2024

ChatGPT is coming to phones. No, not smartphones — landlines. Call 1-800-242-8478 (1-800-CHATGPT), and OpenAI’s AI-powered assistant will respond as of Wednesday afternoon. “[Our mission at] OpenAI is to make artificial general intelligence beneficial to all of humanity, and part of that is making it as accessible as possible to as many people as we…

Who wants ‘Her’-like AI that gets stuff wrong?

December 18, 2024

Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, smash the link and sign up here. Last week, OpenAI launched Advanced Voice Mode with Vision, which feeds real-time video to ChatGPT, allowing the chatbot to “see” beyond the confines of its app layer. The premise is that…

GitHub launches a free version of its Copilot

December 18, 2024

Microsoft-owned GitHub today announced a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool, which will also now ship by default with Microsoft’s popular VS Code editor. Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting free…

AI startup Oddysee’s new tool can generate photorealistic 3D worlds

December 18, 2024

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…

Hauler Hero wants to bring waste management software into the 21st century

December 18, 2024

After nearly four years of working in sales at tradesperson software company ServiceTitan, Mark Hoadley (pictured above) was looking for a change and to potentially start something of his own in a similar industry. Hoadley’s brother-in-law, and now co-founder, Ben Sikma, was working on M&A in the waste management space at the time. Sikma discovered…

OpenAI may pay its nonprofit arm ‘billions of dollars’ in conversion to for-profit

December 18, 2024

OpenAI’s transition away from a for-profit corporation that’s governed by a nonprofit board is well underway — and the nonprofit could be compensated royally for it. That’s according to The New York Times, which reports that OpenAI is in discussions to pay the nonprofit billions of dollars for it to cede control. There’s pressure to…

EU privacy body weighs in on some tricky GenAI lawfulness questions

December 18, 2024

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) published an opinion on Wednesday that explores how AI developers might use personal data to develop and deploy AI models, such as large language models (LLMs), without falling foul of the bloc’s privacy laws. The Board plays a key steering role in the application of these laws, issuing guidance…

YouTube to test a way for creators and celebrities to find AI-generated content using their likeness

December 18, 2024

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…

The Biggest Risks of AI Apps, Agents and Copilots – and How to Combat Them

December 18, 2024

Remember, there is no free lunch with AI. The upsides are tremendous, but security cannot be an afterthought. The post The Biggest Risks of AI Apps, Agents and Copilots – and How to Combat Them appeared first on Security Boulevard.

AI is burying company web sites in search results, but Otterly.AI thinks it can help

December 18, 2024

Many sites saw their organic traffic decline in 2024, in big part due to the rise of AI-generated search results. Many queries no longer lead to click-throughs, and even when users click, it is hard for companies to get more context on searches made within apps like ChatGPT or Perplexity. The answer to this problem…

‘It’s dumb to IPO this year’: Databricks CEO explains why he’s waiting to go public

December 18, 2024

Databricks just closed one of the largest funding rounds ever, raising a staggering $10 billion in fresh capital. Naturally, technology investors were quick to ask what this means for the company’s highly anticipated IPO. During an event in San Francisco on Tuesday night, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi explained why he’s waiting until at least 2025…

The DOJ wants a Perplexity executive to testify in its Google antitrust case

December 17, 2024

Salesforce plans to hire 2,000 people to sell its AI products

December 17, 2024

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…

The AI Fix #29: AI on OnlyFans, and the bot that wants to be a billionaire

December 17, 2024

In episode 29 of The AI Fix, an AI company makes the bold step of urging us to “stop hiring humans”, Graham is wrong about GB AI, parents prepare their kids for the imminent Moxie-mageddon, Google releases Gemini 2.0, and a robot is found dead at work and nobody knows why. Graham inspects the AI…

OpenAI says it has no plans for a Sora API — yet

December 17, 2024

OpenAI says it has no plans to release an API for Sora, its AI model that can generate reasonably realistic videos when provided with a text description or reference image. During an AMA with members of OpenAI’s dev team, Romain Huet, head of developer experience at OpenAI, said that a Sora API isn’t in the…

AI boom masks fundraising struggles for non-AI startups

December 17, 2024

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…

AI, controversy, firing, Global IT News, Global Security News, In Brief, interview, openai, sam altman

AI, CES, ces 2025, Global IT News, Global Security News, Hardware, Samsung

AI, capital, Fundraising, Global IT News, Global Security News, Venture

accounting, AI, bain capital ventures, bench, Exclusive, Fintech, Global IT News, Global Security News, Shopify, Startups

AI, API security, Application Security, AppSec, GenAI, Global Security News, predictions, Security Bloggers Network, software supply chain attacks

AI, Exclusive, Funding, Fundraising, generative ai, Global IT News, Global Security News, pitchbook, Startups, trends, VC, Venture

AI, Global IT News, Global Security News, Microsoft

accessibe, accessibility, AI, Apps, blind, complaint, disabled, FTC, Global IT News, Global Security News, Government & Policy, order, startup, Startups, web accessibility

AI, CES, ces 2025, Global IT News, Global Security News, Hardware, nvidia, robotics

AI, amd, CES, ces 2025, Global IT News, Global Security News, Hardware, nvidia, Samsung, Sony, Transportation

AI, Elon Musk, generative ai, Global IT News, Global Security News, Grok, grok 3, musk, scaling. laws, xAI

AI, automation technology, evergreens, Global IT News, Global Security News, job seeker, robotics

AI, automation technology, evergreens, Global IT News, Global Security News, job seeker, robotics

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Event, Global Security News, Security threats

AI, Apheris, Fundraising, Global IT News, Global Security News, life sciences industry, OTB Ventures, Startups

AI, Amazon, Global Security News, Podcast, Smashing Security

AI, AI doom, ai safety, Global IT News, Global Security News, Government & Policy, SB 1047, TC

AI, AI training, content creators, copyright, Exclusive, generative ai, Global IT News, Global Security News, ip, Media & Entertainment, media manager, openai, opt-out

addictive feeds, AI, Apps, ban, california, Global IT News, Global Security News, Judge, law, NetChoice, Social

2024, AI, benchmarking, benchmarks, Connect 4, generative ai, Global IT News, Global Security News, Minecraft, pictionary, spaghetti, Will Smith

AI, entrepreneurs, Found, Founder Stories, founders, Global IT News, Global Security News, Startups, VC, venture capital

AI, AI chips, Artificial Intelligence, bytedance, Doubao, Global IT News, Global Security News, Hardware, nvidia, semiconductors, TikTok

AI, Artificial Intelligence, data, Enterprise, enterprise startups, enterprise tech, Global IT News, Global Security News, Startups, Venture, venture capital

AI, Elon Musk, encode, for-profit, Global IT News, Global Security News, Government & Policy, injunction, nonprofit, openai

acquisition, AI, ai infrastructure, Global IT News, Global Security News, Hardware, In Brief, Merger, nvidia, Run:AI, Startups

a16z, AI, Carecode, Fundraising, Global IT News, Global Security News, QED, Startups, TC

AI, electrical grid, Global IT News, Global Security News, whisker labs

AI, Enterprise, Europe, Global Security News, Permira, Private Equity, Squarespace

AI, Global IT News, Global Security News, Google, Sundar Pichai

AI, amd, CES, Global IT News, Global Security News, Hardware, nvidia, Samsung, Sony, Transportation

AI, Elon Musk, encode, for-profit, Global IT News, Global Security News, Government & Policy, injunction, nonprofit, openai

AI, ChatGPT, deepseek, DeepSeek v3, generative ai, Global IT News, Global Security News, gpt-4, hallucinations, openai

AI, for-profit, Global IT News, Global Security News, nonprofit, openai

AI, Global IT News, Global Security News, HubSpot, Index Ventures, Jasper, Salesforce, signalfire, Startups, Venture, Zoominfo

AI, ChatGPT, Global IT News, Global Security News, openai, Search, search engine optimization

AI, ChatGPT, Global IT News, Global Security News, major outage, openai, Outage, service disruption, TC

AI, Global IT News, Global Security News

AGI, AI, ChatGPT, Global IT News, Global Security News, In Brief, Microsoft, openai, TC

AI, Elon Musk, Enterprise, Funding, Fundraising, generative ai, Global IT News, Global Security News, startup, Startups, xAI

AI, amd, CES, Global IT News, Global Security News, Hardware

AI, Global IT News, Global Security News, humanoid, In Brief, openai, robotics

AI, generative ai, Global IT News, Global Security News, Research, synthetic, synthetic data, Training

AI, CES, Global IT News, Global Security News, Hardware, Samsung

AI, Anthropic, Claude, Exclusive, Global IT News, Global Security News, Google

AI, Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, Father Christmas, Global Security News, Google, Law & order, openai, Podcast, Santa Claus, The AI Fix

AI, ai models, AI reasoning models, ChatGPT, Global IT News, Global Security News, o3, openai, Startups, TC

AI, Elon Musk, Enterprise, Funding, Fundraising, generative ai, Global IT News, Global Security News, startup, Startups, xAI

AI, CES, Global IT News, Global Security News, Hardware, nvidia, robotics

AI, Balderton Capital, Dealroom, Europe, Exclusive, Global Security News, Startups

AI, Aporia, Coralogix, Enterprise, Global IT News, Global Security News, Startups, TC