AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Dot’s AI really, really wants to get to know you

Sarah Perez — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 18:53:41 +0000

Dot is a new AI companion and chatbot that thrives on getting to know your innermost thoughts and feelings.

OpenAI buys Rockset to bolster its enterprise AI

Kyle Wiggers — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 15:55:15 +0000

The Rockset buy fits into OpenAI's broader recent strategy of investing heavily in its enterprise sales and tech orgs.

Meta is tagging real photos as ‘Made with AI,’ say photographers

Ivan Mehta — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 14:25:11 +0000

Photographers say the social media giant is applying a ‘Made with AI’ label to photos they took, causing confusion for users.

Language learning app Speak nets $20M, doubles valuation

Kyle Wiggers — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 04:48:19 +0000

Speak, the AI-powered language learning app, has raised new money from investors at double its previous valuation.

Poolside is raising $400M+ at a $2B valuation to build a supercharged coding co-pilot

Ingrid Lunden — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 18:30:58 +0000

Paris has quickly established itself as a major European center for AI startups, and now another big deal is in the works.

Labor shortages are still fueling growth at automation firms like GrayMatter

Brian Heater — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 16:18:11 +0000

GrayMatter self-reports that its systems currently produce “a 2~4x improvement in production line productivity [and a] 30% or more reduction in consumable waste.”

Anthropic claims its latest model is best-in-class

Kyle Wiggers — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0000

Claude 3.5 Sonnet can analyze both text and images as well as generate text, and it's Anthropic's best-performing model yet — at least on paper.

Pocket FM partners with ElevenLabs to convert scripts into audio content quickly

Ivan Mehta — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0000

Lightspeed Ventures-backed audio platform Pocket FM announced it has partnered with voice-cloning company ElevenLabs to quickly convert text content, such as script, into audio series using AI. Pocket FM, which raised $103 million in Series D funding in March, told TechCrunch at the time that it was already experimenting with the ability to convert text […]

Materia looks to make accountants more efficient with AI

Rebecca Szkutak — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 13:06:39 +0000

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 […]

Amazon extends generative AI-powered product listings to Europe

Paul Sawers — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 11:31:01 +0000

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 “enrich” existing product listings by automatically adding missing information. The launch comes […]

Kenya closes its probe of Worldcoin, opening the door to a relaunch of its orbs after a year-long suspension

Annie Njanja, Natasha Lomas — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 11:00:55 +0000

Worldcoin — the crypto “proof of personhood” startup co-founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman — has been given the green light to resume iris-scanning and other operations in Kenya after a year-long government probe over privacy concerns was dropped. Kenya was one of Worldcoin’s launch countries for its iris-scanning scheme — which the startup was building […]

PQShield secures $37M more for ‘quantum resistant’ cryptography

Ingrid Lunden — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 07:22:15 +0000

Malicious hacking is getting increasingly sophisticated, and that’s leading to a very clear trend in security technology. To keep people and organizations safe, security also has to continue improving. Security startup PQShield has gotten an early start on that concept with a focus on “post-quantum” cryptography: Software and hardware solutions that, in theory, are future-proofed, […]

‘Lawyer-in-the-loop’ startup Wordsmith wants to bring AI paralegals to all employees

Paul Sawers — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Wordsmith, a fledgling Scottish legal tech startup, has somehow managed to attract the backing of two well-known venture capital firms. The startup targets in-house legal teams and law firms with an AI platform that they can configure to help other workers in the company. This way, anyone in the company can solicit help with legal […]

France leads the pack for generative AI funding in Europe

Ingrid Lunden — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 23:43:17 +0000

Like it or hate it, artificial intelligence — especially generative AI — is the technology story of 2024. OpenAI, with its rollouts of viral services like ChatGPT and billions in funding, may have gobbled up the lion’s share of attention and money so far. But according to a new report out from top VC Accel […]

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s former chief scientist, launches new AI company

Tage Kene-Okafor — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 19:05:20 +0000

Ilya Sutskever, one of OpenAI’s co-founders, launches Safe Superintelligence (SSI), just a month after leaving OpenAI.

This Week in AI: Generative AI is spamming up academic journals

Kyle Wiggers, Devin Coldewey — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 17:05:00 +0000

Hiya, folks, and welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. This week in AI, generative AI is beginning to spam up academic publishing — a discouraging new development on the disinformation front. In a post on Retraction Watch, a blog that tracks recent retractions of academic studies, assistant professors of philosophy Tomasz Żuradzk and Leszek Wroński […]

In spite of hype, many companies are moving cautiously when it comes to generative AI

Ron Miller — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 16:00:00 +0000

Companies are extremely interested in generative AI as vendors push potential benefits, but turning that desire from a proof of concept into a working product is proving much more challenging.

Meta AI removes block on election-related queries in India while Google still applies limits

Ivan Mehta — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 10:23:21 +0000

Meta AI removes restrictions around answering election-related queries in India while Google is still restricting them.

How Abridge became one of the most talked about healthcare AI startups

Marina Temkin — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 04:08:20 +0000

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 large language models (LLMs) entered the common Valley vocabulary. In 2019, Shiv […]

Snap previews its real-time image model that can generate AR experiences

Aisha Malik — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 18:52:46 +0000

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 onstage that the model is small enough to run on a smartphone and […]