Author: TechBrunch

Google has released a prototype of its Project Astra AR glasses for real-world testing. The glasses are part of Google's long-term plan to one day have hardware with augmented reality and multimodal AI capabilities. In the meantime, we plan to release a demo to attract the attention of consumers, developers, and competitors. Along with the glasses, Google also announced a new operating system, Android XR. This allows developers to build experiences for XR hardware such as glasses and headsets. The OS, along with the newly announced Samsung headset Project Moohan, will power Project Astra glasses and will be released next…

OpenAI hit back at billionaire Elon Musk on Friday, releasing a series of emails and texts in which the company claims Musk's lawsuit against the company is misleading. At the heart of Mr. Musk's legal battle with OpenAI, which has been going on for months, is the company's abandonment of its original nonprofit mission of making the fruits of AI research available to everyone. Things escalated further last month when Musk's legal team filed for an injunction to halt OpenAI's ongoing transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit entity. OpenAI says Musk's complaints are unfounded and nothing more than sour…

All year long, TechCrunch covers startups, everything from unicorns to tiny seed-stage launches. We are, in many ways, the startup experts. To create this list, organized alphabetically, we looked back through our year’s worth of coverage for startups that stood out to us. They have fascinating new technologies, business models, or founder stories, or are pushing an industry forward in exciting ways. You’ll note that OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, and other big AI model makers and newsmakers (like Perplexity), are not named on this list. While these companies are among the most disruptive of the year — and possibly of a…

A few months ago, Google's notepad app NotebookLM debuted an audio summary feature that uses an AI virtual host to generate podcasts based on the information you share with the app. Currently, NotebookLM is rolling out features that allow users to interact with an AI podcast host. The idea behind audio summaries and AI hosts is to give users new ways to digest and understand information in documents they upload to the app, such as course readings or legal summaries. With this new feature, you can talk to your AI host to ask for more information or explain a concept…

OpenAI seems to be in the holiday spirit. The series of ChatGPT rollouts, dubbed “12 Days of OpenAI,” will be live-streamed weekdays at 10 a.m. Pacific time through December 23. So far, we've seen the launch of ChatGPT Pro, OpenAI's $200/month subscription plan. A version of the “Inference” o1 model, the long-awaited public release of the text-to-video generator Sora, Canvas in Apple Intelligence, the deployment of ChatGPT, and real-time video capabilities in ChatGPT. We don't know what other announcements or product launches are planned, but we could learn more about potential efforts towards AI agents, among other surprises. Below, we'll…

Liquid AI, the AI ​​startup co-founded by robotics celebrity Daniela Russ, has raised $250 million in Series A led by AMD. The round values ​​Liquid AI at more than $2 billion, according to Bloomberg. Liquid AI aims to build general-purpose AI systems that leverage a relatively new type of AI model called liquid neural networks. Liquid neural networks are made up of “neurons” that are controlled by equations that predict the behavior of individual neurons over time. The “liquid” bit in the term “liquid neural network” refers to the flexibility of the architecture. Inspired by the “brain” of roundworms, this…

In October, Google began testing NotebookLM, a viral AI note-taking and research app for businesses. The company is now introducing NotebookLM to enterprises with work-focused security and privacy features. NotebookLM for enterprises (called NotebookLM Plus by Google) provides the same experience as the consumer version, but with additional access and data management controls. Employees can upload data and files to create things like notebooks and podcast-like audio summaries (called audio summaries), and then search and share these projects with organization members. Additional benefits include audio summaries like podcasts, notebooks, and 5x more data sources per notebook. Ability to customize the…

OpenAI blamed the longest outage in its history on a failure of its “new telemetry service.” On Wednesday, ChatGPT, OpenAI's AI-powered chatbot platform, was announced. That video generator, Sora. and its developer API experienced a massive disruption starting around 3:00 PM Pacific Time. OpenAI immediately recognized the problem and began working on a fix. However, it will take approximately three hours for the company to restore all services. In a post-mortem published late Thursday, OpenAI wrote that the outage was not caused by a security incident or recent product launch, but rather by a telemetry service it introduced on Wednesday…

When Koko Xs considered pursuing a career as a VC after graduating from college last year, he observed several trends that suggested he should do something else. He found that closing deals was difficult and taking a long time to generate returns, given that most VC funds typically take 10 years to mature. Still, he ended up becoming a VC. And now, at the young age of 21, Xs is backed by backers including Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Kevin Hertz, Josh Wolf, Lux Capital, and the Fund of Funds Nomad. , has already secured $17.5 million in committed capital for…

The path from scientist to founder is well-trodden, but that doesn't mean it's easy. Because of these pitfalls, several programs have emerged over the past decade to smooth the path for tech founders. Now, two prominent programs, Activate and The Engine Accelerator, have decided that they can offer even greater benefits to founders by teaming up. “The closer we get, the more work we can do together, the more input we can provide into each other’s programs, and ultimately increase throughput from these archetype founders to entrepreneurs.” ” said Emily Knight, CEO of The Engine. Accelerator told TechCrunch. The two…