Author: TechBrunch

Vikram Bhaskaran was leading creator partnerships at Pinterest when his father started showing early symptoms of ALS, a rare end-stage neurodegenerative disease. “It turned my world upside down,” Bhaskaran said. He worked during the day and spent his nights Googling about diseases and treatments and joining Facebook groups. However, Bhaskaran found it incredibly difficult to find clear and helpful information about his father's condition. “I was sitting surrounded by some of the brightest minds in engineering and design in Silicon Valley,” he said. “But health-wise, it felt like the dark ages.” So in the midst of the pandemic, Bhaskaran teamed…

Meeting recording is becoming a common service as the number of startups offering speech-to-text services increases. There are many tools that provide AI assistants that can join meetings, capture system audio, and transcribe and summarize meetings. Y Combinator-backed Circleback aims to differentiate itself by offering detailed notes and action items. Additionally, this tool allows you to automatically gain insights based on your transcripts. The company was founded in 2023 by former Stripe engineer Ali Haghani and former Tableau engineer Kevin Jacyna. The two began building a conferencing tool that would serve as a searchable knowledge base. Initially, the tool only…

There are other great reasons to join a defense startup besides patriotism. That means the pay is very good. Thanks to the Federal Funds Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA), we now know how much Anduril, a defense technology startup valued at $14 billion, pays its top employees. The law requires companies to report maximum compensation after receiving at least 80% of their annual gross revenue from federal awards and earning at least $25 million in annual gross revenue from these awards. (Mr. Anduril reportedly told investors that revenue reached $500 million last year.) The data in this report also includes…

There are other great reasons to join a defense startup besides patriotism. That means the pay is very good. Thanks to the Federal Funds Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA), we now know how much Anduril, a defense technology startup valued at $14 billion, pays its top employees. The law requires companies to report maximum compensation after receiving at least 80% of their annual gross revenue from federal awards and earning at least $25 million in annual gross revenue from these awards. (Mr. Anduril reportedly told investors that revenue reached $500 million last year.) The data in this report also includes…

A group appears to have leaked access to Sora, OpenAI's video generator, in protest of duplicity on the part of OpenAI and what it calls “artwashing.” The group published the project on Tuesday on Hugging Face, an AI development platform that appears to be connected to OpenAI's Sora API, which is not yet publicly available. This group created a frontend that allows users to generate videos with Sora, presumably using an authentication token from an early access program. Why I think this is real – It uses the OpenAI Sora API endpoint to generate and download a video with hardcoded…

Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine, is looking to get into some kind of hardware. Aravind Srinivas, founder and CEO of Perplexity, posted on X yesterday that the company is looking to create a “simple and under $50” device to “reliably answer” questions “voice-to-voice.” I posted. He promised that Perplexity would “definitely” sell such a device if the post received more than 5,000 likes. It happened. “Okay. LFG!” Srinivas replied. Are you okay. LFG! https://t.co/hMw3eugb0l — Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) November 26, 2024 Hardware is becoming something of an obsession among high-profile AI startups. Partly because of its fame, but also because…

A ransomware attack on Blue Yonder, one of the world's largest supply chain software providers, continues to disrupt operations at many major stores and retailers in the United States and United Kingdom. Arizona-based Blue Yonder, which was acquired by Panasonic in 2021, said in a statement on its website on Friday that it had experienced a disruption in its managed services hosting environment that was “determined to be the result of a ransomware incident. ” he said. The supply chain giant said it was “working diligently” to recover from the incident, but as of Sunday the company had “no timeline…

Just last year, Inflection AI received the highest profile for a startup, releasing a best-in-class AI model that it claims has the potential to outperform technologies from OpenAI, Meta, and Google. This is a stark contrast from today, as Inflection's new CEO told TechCrunch that his startup is no longer trying to compete in that space. Of course, a lot has changed at Inflection between then and now. Microsoft hired then-CEO Mustafa Suleiman to run its own AI business, hired most of its staff and paid the startup $650 million to license the technology. . A few months ago, Inflection…

Cleo Capital, an early-stage venture fund that counts AI company Groq, fintech company Ellevest, and fashion brand Hill House among its investments, has announced the launch of a new cybersecurity accelerator. The program seeks pre-seed and seed companies from around the world. The accelerator is a remote 12-week program with a standard investment of $250,000 for 7% equity. The venture fund said up to 10 companies will be selected for the program. Sarah Kunst, founder and managing partner of Creo Capital, is concerned about the amount of fraud she sees in the cryptocurrencies and fintechs she invests in, as well…

Brazil's antitrust regulator Cade has ruled that Apple must lift restrictions on in-app purchases within 20 days, Reuters reported. Otherwise, iPhone makers face fines of $43,000 per day if they don't comply. This decision is the result of a complaint filed in 2022 by e-commerce operator Mercado Libre. If you've been following recent changes to the App Store around the world, the list of complaints isn't all that surprising. Brazilian regulators have decided that Apple must allow app developers to link to external websites for subscriptions and digital purchases. Alternatively, the company could hand over payment processing to developers themselves.…