Author: TechBrunch

WhatsApp has new features like creating new stickers from your selfies, sharing sticker packs, and adding new camera effects. Stickers and camera effects are great engagement strategies to keep users interacting with your contacts. Last year, the chat app added the ability to create custom stickers from photos. Now the company is adding an option to convert selfies directly into stickers. With the new update, when you tap the “Create Sticker” button in the sticker menu, camera options will appear. Then, take a selfie and the app will convert the image into a sticker and save it to your sticker…

OpenAI quietly removed language supporting “politically unbiased” AI from one of its recently published policy documents. In its draft “economic blueprint” for the U.S. AI industry, OpenAI said AI models “should aim to be politically unbiased by default.” A new draft released Monday removes that language. When asked for comment, an OpenAI spokesperson said the edits are part of an effort to “streamline” the document and that other OpenAI documents, including OpenAI's model specifications, “[s] Point of objectivity. ” Model Spec, released by OpenAI in May, aims to clarify the behavior of the company's various AI systems. But the proposed…

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang may have said that “very useful quantum computers” are probably still 20 years away, but his company is also making investments and investments in that very area. The partnership avoids risks beyond classic chips. Now, one of the companies Nvidia is partnering with in quantum development has announced funding. Quantum computing startup SEEQC has raised $30 million in funding, co-led by Booz Allen Ventures and Japanese-European VC firm NordicNinja, with participation from new backer SIP Capital and some existing investors. was procured. SEEQC CEO John Levy said the Series A extension is “a combination of financial,…

U.S. authorities have acknowledged disrupting the efforts of a Chinese state-backed hacker group that broke into millions of computers around the world and stole data as part of a years-long espionage campaign. The Justice Department and FBI announced Tuesday that they have successfully removed malware launched by a Chinese-backed hacker group known in court as Twill Typhoon or Mustang Panda from thousands of infected systems across the United States. did. -Operation will be approved in August 2024. French authorities led the operation with support from Paris-based cybersecurity firm Secoi. French prosecutors said in a press release last year that malware…

It's not an easy time to raise money for an electric vehicle startup, especially given that many companies have failed or are close to failure. But Los Angeles-based Harbinger has done just that by taking a highly focused approach to electrifying commercial trucking. The fee is a $100 million Series B, co-led by early Tesla investor Capricorn Investment Group and Leitmotif, a U.S. start-up fund co-founded by Volkswagen's former head of M&A. The round also included participation from Tiger Global and mobility venture firm Maniv, both existing investors. “We know what the EV industry has become. We know it's just…

Pixelfed, a decentralized alternative to Instagram, has released its official mobile app. The service currently runs on the same ActivityPub protocol that powers open source X alternative Mastodon, YouTube competitor PeerTube, and other decentralized social apps, and now Meta's Threads and Flipboard (plus its new app Surf) These include a more open social web known as the Fediverse. Pixelfed was originally developed by Daniel Supernault in 2018. He also recently created Loops, a federated rival to TikTok. Similar to Instagram, Pixelfed allows users to share and explore photos and videos, as well as send direct messages to others. However, quite…

Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) plans to introduce a bill that would extend TikTok's ban by 270 days. TikTok has warned of an impending shutdown in just five days, but the new bill, officially called the TikTok Deadline Extension Act, would force TikTok to leave its Chinese parent company ByteDance if approved by Congress. will give you more time. TikTok is currently expected to be “deactivated” on January 19th unless the Supreme Court intervenes to delay the ban. The Supreme Court is considering the ban and is expected to decide later this week whether the law behind the ban violates the…

Shortly after OpenAI released its first “inference” AI model, o1, people started noticing strange phenomena. Models sometimes started “thinking” in Chinese, Farsi, or other languages ​​even when asked questions in English. When given a problem to sort out, such as “How many R's are there in the word 'strawberry'?”, o1 begins a “thinking” process and performs a series of reasoning steps to arrive at the answer. If the question is written in English, o1's final response will be in English. However, the model performs several steps in another language before making a conclusion. “[O1] Halfway through, I randomly started thinking…

The App Store is full of different services designed to help you reduce screen time, count your steps, and more. A new iOS app called Steppin combines these two ideas to help users do both at the same time to bridge the gap between physical and mental health. Steppin blocks social media apps unless you take a certain number of steps each day. Achieving your daily step goal will free up your time on the most used social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. The app was co-founded by Paul English, who previously launched travel search engine Kayak, which was…

For years, twin sisters Nilo and Jen Rahmani have exchanged stories and compassion about the challenges they face in their respective engineering jobs. Niro told TechCrunch that a frequent topic of conversation was dissatisfaction with the reliability platform he uses for work. When they realized a few years ago that the reliability landscape was starting to change, they thought they had the best experience to build a reliability solution suited to the direction the industry was heading. “Before, reliability came first no matter what,” Nilo told TechCrunch. “now [companies] Cloud costs are getting more attention. Entire industries are being hit…