Author: TechBrunch
Interest in Donald Trump has now surpassed interest in Kamala Harris. People ate all the chocolate bars in Dubai. And the Yankees really won. All of these detailed insights come from a list of the year's top trending searches that Google released today. Today, there's no arguing that Google is popular culture. It is the world's largest Internet property and the most visited site in Google searches. Indeed, the rise of Generative AI chatbots and social apps could someday erode Google's dominance. But for now, it reigns supreme, and these results are a kind of barometer of what the world…
WordPress hosting company Automattic announced Monday that it will acquire WPAI, a startup building AI solutions for WordPress, for an undisclosed price. WPAI has products such as CodeWP, a tool that uses AI to create WP plugins. AgentWP, an AI assistant for WordPress site builders. WP Chat is an AI-powered chat for WordPress-related questions. WPAI said in a blog post that CodeWP and AgentWP will be deprecated in their current avatars and will eventually be integrated into Automattic's products. As part of the acquisition, Automattic said its founding team will join the company to lead efforts on WordPress' AI capabilities.…
A well-known test of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is nearing resolution. However, the test's creators argue that this is not a genuine research breakthrough, but rather indicates a flaw in the test's design. In 2019, Francois Chollet, a leading figure in the AI world, introduced the ARC-AGI benchmark, which stands for “Abstract and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence.” ARC-AGI, designed to assess whether an AI system can effectively learn new skills on data other than the data used to train it, remains the only AI test that measures progress toward general intelligence. Francois argues (although other tests have been…
Amazon has announced the creation of a new research and development lab in San Francisco, the Amazon AGI SF Lab, to focus on building “fundamental” capabilities for its AI agents. The Amazon AGI SF Lab, led by David Luan, co-founder of AI startup Adept, uses computers to build agents that can “perform actions in the digital and physical world” and “process complex workflows.” We aim to Web browser and code interpreter. “Our work builds on the work of Amazon's broader AGI team,” the post co-written by Luan and Pieter Abbeel, a robotics research leader who joined Amazon through the company's…
OpenAI Startup Fund, an early-stage AI investor in partnership with OpenAI, recently disclosed in financial filings that it has raised more than $44 million for its fifth special purpose vehicle (SPV). This is the largest to date. The fund, established in 2021, has an unusual structure. Although it uses the name OpenAI, OpenAI says it is not an investor. Initially legally controlled by OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, the company's website states that external LPs, including OpenAI's big backer Microsoft and “other OpenAI partners,” It is said that the funds were raised from. Altman transferred legal control to general…
X, the Elon Musk-owned social network formerly known as Twitter, quietly added a new image generator to its Grok assistant last Saturday. Then I deleted it. And now we are bringing it back and officially announcing it. The image generator, called Aurora, was developed by Musk's AI company xAI and trained on billions of examples from the internet. xAI said in a blog post that Aurora “excelles in photorealistic rendering,” can follow text instructions, and can “take inspiration from or edit directly from user-provided images.” . Image generated by Aurora. Image credit:xAI Aurora is currently available on X through Grok…
OpenAI released its video generation tool Sora on Monday. However, the company has chosen not to release any significant features to most users until further testing is conducted. The feature in question generates a video using an uploaded photo or footage of a real person as a reference. OpenAI says it will give “some” Sora users access to Sora users, but won't widely roll out the feature until it has had a chance to fine-tune its “approach to safety.” There is. “The ability to generate videos using uploaded photos or videos of real people as 'seeds' is a potential exploit…
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies. That growth has propelled OpenAI itself into becoming one of the most-hyped companies in recent memory. And its latest partnership with Apple for its upcoming generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, has given the company another significant bump in the AI race. 2024 also saw the release of GPT-4o, OpenAI’s new flagship omni…
Bluesky, a social networking startup and X competitor, is working on subscriptions. The company first announced plans to develop new revenue streams based on a subscription model when it detailed its $15 million Series A in October. Now, a mockup previewing the upcoming Bluesky subscription and a list of possible features have been published on Bluesky's GitHub. The company warns on GitHub that the listing here is only a mockup of the user interface, and that paid features are very likely to change before launch, but it's important to note that at least some of these are Bluesky's premium features.…
Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) said in a report released over the weekend that hacker groups are targeting the country's defense and military companies with phishing attacks. CERT identified the hacker group as UAC-0185 (also known as UNC4221), but did not say who was behind the group. But earlier this year, a cybersecurity firm linked the group to the Russian government. Contact Us Do you have more information about the cyber attack on Ukraine? Or was it another attack by Russian government hackers? You can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely from your non-work device on Signal (+1 917 257 1382),…