Author: TechBrunch

A new connected fitness device is in town. Its name is Growl. Inspired by hardware companies like Peloton and Tonal, Growl creates boxing bags that attach to the walls of your home. Users can start an immersive, gamified boxing class from the comfort of their own home. The team also seems to be taking inspiration from boxing classes like Brooklyn Fitboxing. We're just looking at the opportunity to offer users a similarly intense fitness experience without having to go to a studio and sweat it out in groups. “The real purpose of this product is to transform the traditional punching…

Veeam, which helps users protect and recover their data, has seen its valuation soar in a recent secondary sale aimed at bolstering the company's cap table ahead of its eventual IPO. The Insight Partners-backed company said Tuesday it raised $2 billion in a secondary sale of stock worth $15 billion. TPG led the investment, with participation from Temasek, Neuberger Berman Capital Solutions and others. The sale is expected to close in the first quarter of 2025. The sale triples Veeam's price since it was acquired by Insight Partners for $5 billion in January 2020. According to its financial results at…

In this hyper-connected world we live in, it's easier than ever to provide feedback to the companies you patronize. But just because a company offers more ways to contact you doesn't mean they read every comment. According to Productboard's 2020 research, 90% of companies are having trouble collecting feedback from all channels, and one-third have no process at all to collect feedback. Varun Sharma realized this acutely while leading customer success efforts at LinkedIn, analytics software company Amplitude, and startup Scale AI. Despite their best efforts, product and customer experience teams struggled to use customer feedback in decision-making, Sharma said.…

Katsukokoiso.AI is a project by professional photographer Eugenio Marongiu, who is an alpha tester of OpenAI's text-to-video model Sora. Using an unpublished Sola model, Maronge created a piece titled “Surrealistic Elderly People” that aims to balance the absurd with striking realism. Previous users of Sora have noted that the system can be unwieldy and unreliable to release a final product. And of course, the whole technology is controversial, but that hasn't stopped artists like Maronge from experimenting. Marongiu said Sora helped accelerate his typical image-based production process. This process “involves creating images and later animating them.” Thanks to Sora, I…

Chinese open-source AI models have been in the news recently for their superior performance in various AI tasks such as coding and “reasoning.” However, it has also drawn criticism, including from OpenAI employees, for censoring topics sensitive to the Chinese government, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre. Clement DeLang, CEO of Hugging Face, said he has similar concerns. In a recent podcast (in French), he warned of the unintended consequences of Western companies building on top of high-performance open source Chinese AI. “If you create a chatbot and ask people questions about the Tiananmen Square incident, it's not going to…

On Tuesday, cloud business software provider ServiceTitan priced its initial public offering at $52 to $57 per share, expecting to raise between $446.2 million and $514.2 million in the midrange. I am. It also made some other interesting disclosures about what it will use the money for and who it will sell its shares to. In its latest S-1A SEC form, the company revealed that it plans to use significant cash (approximately $311 million) to buy back all of its non-convertible preferred stock at $1,000 per share. Investors paid. In addition, those shareholders will also be paid any accrued dividends…

Today, longtime Founders Fund partner Brian Singerman announced he is taking a step back at X. He will move from honorary partner to partner in order to achieve a better “work-life balance,” but will continue in his role as an “investor and strategic advisor” to the firm. Singerman has been with Founders Fund for more than 16 years. In his farewell post, he wrote that he was attracted to the company, founded by Peter Thiel in 2005, because it was considering a “literal moonshot” investment in SpaceX. Mr. Singerman has since invested in companies including fintech company Affirm and health…

Users of conversational AI platform ChatGPT discovered an interesting phenomenon over the weekend. Well, the popular chatbot is refusing to answer questions about “David Mayer.” If you ask it to do so, it will immediately freeze. Conspiracy theories abound, but there's a more mundane reason at the heart of this strange behavior. Word that the name is harmful to chatbots spread quickly over the weekend, with more people trying to trick the service into simply recognizing the name. Bad luck: Every time you try to get ChatGPT to spell that particular name, it may fail or cut off the middle…

U.S. officials said Tuesday that a Chinese-backed hacker group called Salt Typhoon continues to attack the networks of the nation's largest phone and internet providers, weeks after a long-running hacking campaign first came to light. announced that it had invaded some parts of the country. Cybersecurity agency CISA said affected telecom companies were still working to eliminate the hackers, in part because the hackers' motives were unclear. Rumors first surfaced in October that Salt Typhoon would be present on networks such as AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen (formerly CenturyLink). T-Mobile was targeted, but said it had largely repelled the attackers. The…

AI-driven demand for electricity is soaring that some big tech companies are at risk of falling short of their climate commitments. But Amazon is partnering with AI startup Orbital to test new materials that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, using AWS data centers as its initial location. One of the biggest costs of carbon capture is generating sufficient airflow for the adsorbent to capture meaningful amounts of carbon dioxide. Data centers appear to be the perfect place to deploy such technology, as cooling systems move large volumes of air to keep thousands of servers running at optimal temperatures. Orbital…