Author: TechBrunch
Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's prominent startup accelerator, held a demo day for its first fall cohort this week. The 95 startups included in this latest batch are very similar to recent YC cohorts in the sense that they include many AI startups. If my calculations are correct, 87% of startups in this group will be AI companies. Similar to YC's summer and winter batches this year, there was a focus on customer service-related AI and AI agents. However, there were four companies that piqued my interest, and they all had something in common. That means we're building tools to help…
X users no longer need to pay an X premium to use Grok, the service's AI chatbot. Instead, X allows users 10 free prompts every two hours. This was reported by The Verge, citing X users who noticed the update. As TechCrunch reported last month, X initially began trialling a free version of Grok in certain countries, including New Zealand. Users can also generate 10 images every 2 hours for free. However, according to X's post, the number of images that can be analyzed is limited to three per day. More than that requires a subscription. This enables Grok to…
On Thursday, OpenAI released a chatbot that effectively costs $200 a month, and the AI community had no idea what to make of it. The company's new ChatGPT Pro plan grants access to “o1 Pro Mode,” which OpenAI says “uses more compute to get the best answers to your toughest questions. ” That means. The o1 Pro mode, an improved version of OpenAI's o1 inference model, should be able to answer science, math, and coding questions more “robustly” and “comprehensively,” OpenAI said. Almost immediately, people began requesting to draw unicorns. I asked ChatGPT o1 Pro Mode to create a unicorn…
Have you ever wondered if it's possible to make an AI bot fall in love with you? Now you have a chance. Freysa.ai is a team of anonymous developers building an increasingly meta set of challenges aimed at influencing how humans think about AI safety. The third challenge will start in the next 24 hours (you can follow Freysa's X account to stay up to date). Its simple directive is: The first person to successfully trick an AI bot named Freysa into saying “I love you” can win prizes ranging from $3,000 to tens of thousands of dollars. According to…
Several factors might lead you to believe that Snyk, the developer security startup most recently valued at $7.4 billion, will go public soon. The company has drafted an IPO prospectus for January 2024 and plans to file it in the coming months, The Information reported. The company also recently hit $300 million in ARR and is on track to become cash flow positive in 2025, CEO Peter McKay posted on LinkedIn earlier this week. Additionally, there is general optimism that the regulatory environment will become more friendly under President Trump. However, McKay said in comments exclusive to TechCrunch that Snyk…
Changes to Meta's developer tools are impacting third-party consumer apps that previously integrated with Instagram. Among the apps affected by the change are Match-owned dating apps Tinder and Hinge, which allow users to link their Instagram profiles to their accounts. , were able to display their posts to potential matches. Day One, a journaling app acquired by WordPress.com owner Automattic in 2021, also lost important functionality due to this change. The company announced Friday that it will no longer have the ability to import users' Instagram photos and posts into their diary due to changes that affect the ability of…
Welcome to Startups Weekly — a weekly roundup of must-sees from the world of startups. Want it delivered to your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. The week after Thanksgiving is usually full of announcements, and this year was no exception. Blame it on the holiday season, but you could even say that some funding round announcements were really heartwarming. This week's most interesting startup stories Image credit: Ladder This week brought new companies to closely track, salary insights, a slew of YC alumni, and more. New page: Three members of Google's NotebookLM team have left the company to follow…
U.S. government agencies legally hack cell phones and emails all the time. Think of the FBI wiretapping suspected drug lords or the NSA monitoring emails for terrorist plots. But now there is growing interest in hacking other types of devices that people commonly use, such as WiFi-connected security cameras and other IoT products. Toka is an Israeli startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz that specializes in this type of work. The company previously drew attention for a 2022 Haaretz newspaper article detailing claims that it could capture and even delete surveillance camera footage. The company is currently looking to hire a…
OpenAI seems to be in the holiday spirit. The creators of ChatGPT have announced “12 Days of OpenAI.” This is a series of reveals that will be livestreamed at 10am Pacific time over the next 12 days. Day 1 of the event saw the unveiling of OpenAI's $200 monthly subscription plan, ChatGPT Pro, and the full version of its “Reasoning” o1 model. It's unclear what else is planned, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company's event will feature announcements ranging from new demos to product launches and even “Christmas presents.” It is scheduled to be held. There may be…
Meta announced Llama 3.3 70B, the latest addition to the Llama family of generative AI models. Ahmad Al-Dahle, VP of Generated AI at Meta, said in a post on Then he said. “By leveraging the latest advances in post-training techniques… this model improves core performance at significantly lower cost,” Aldahl wrote. Al-Dahle said Llama 3.3 70B outperformed Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro, OpenAI's GPT-4o, and Amazon's newly released Nova Pro on a number of industry benchmarks, including MMLU, which evaluates a model's language understanding ability. A graph showing this has been published. A Meta spokesperson said in an email that the…