Author: TechBrunch

Demand for South Asian fashion is increasing globally as more South Asians migrate and settle in new markets and purchase ethnic costumes for events such as local festivals and weddings. However, today there are not many online platforms that sell an extensive catalog of apparel and footwear from local South Indian sellers to the global market. These often have limited design options and are usually focused on a specific age group or gender. Arif Iqbal is trying to solve this problem with a Lahore-based online marketplace called Laam. Laam just raised $5.5 million in a new all-equity seed round led…

According to OpenAI's status page, OpenAI says it is experiencing a major outage with ChatGPT, Sora, and its developer APIs. The company says it has identified a path to recovery and is working on a fix as of 4:55pm PT Wednesday evening, but the service was still down as of press time. The service has now been down for more than two hours, but the cause of the outage is unknown. I saw this message when I logged on to ChatGPT on Wednesday. (Image credit: OpenAI) The ChatGPT outage occurred on the same day that OpenAI began integrating with Apple…

Anne Miura Koh, co-founder of Floodgate Partners, warns that some venture capitalists are watching with caution the Trump administration's proposed massive tax hikes on university endowments. do. “Currently, there is a proposal to raise the endowment tax from 1.4 percent to 35 percent, but most people will say that endowments are very rich people, so why bother? Well, they are venture capitalists. It's a huge limited partner in private equity, whether it's legal or not. And that can really have a huge impact on funding,” she said at the Axios Dealmakers event on Wednesday. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance proposed a…

OpenAI hasn't disclosed exactly what data it used to train Sora, its video generation AI. But from the looks of it, at least some of the data may have come from Twitch streams and game walkthroughs. Sora was released on Monday and I've been playing around with it a bit (as capacity issues allow). Sora can generate videos up to 20 seconds long in various aspect ratios and resolutions from text prompts or images. When OpenAI first unveiled Sora in February, it hinted at the fact that it trained the model on Minecraft videos. So I wondered what other video…

Late last year, Gou Rao and Vinod Jayaraman founded NeuBird, which uses generative AI to automate reliability operations tasks for IT sites. Having previously sold cloud-native storage startup Portworx to PureStorage for $370 million, the duo was familiar with the IT challenges facing today's enterprises. “It's very hard to find good site reliability engineers. There's a lot of churn,” NeuBird CEO Rao told TechCrunch. “It doesn’t help that modern IT stacks are just becoming more and more complex. Humans alone cannot keep up with these changes.” To address that increased complexity, NeuBird built Hawkeye, an AI-powered SRE that can quickly…

Late last year, Gou Rao and Vinod Jayaraman founded NeuBird, which uses generative AI to automate reliability operations tasks for IT sites. Having previously sold cloud-native storage startup Portworx to PureStorage for $370 million, the duo was familiar with the IT challenges facing today's enterprises. “It's very hard to find good site reliability engineers. There's a lot of churn,” NeuBird CEO Rao told TechCrunch. “It doesn’t help that modern IT stacks are just becoming more and more complex. Humans alone cannot keep up with these changes.” To address that increased complexity, NeuBird built Hawkeye, an AI-powered SRE that can quickly…

Microsoft announced Wednesday that it will begin rolling out a way for users to share files between their iPhones and Windows 11 or Windows 10 PCs through the company's Phone Link and Link to Windows apps. This feature is currently rolling out to Windows Insiders. Windows Insiders can now download the latest Phone Link update and enable new features to start sharing files from iPhone to PC and vice versa. Image credit: Microsoft To share a file from your iPhone to your PC, you need to go to the file, tap the share icon, and select “Link to Windows.” From…

Last week, Google DeepMind announced Genie 2, a new video model that generates plausible, consistent, and playable 3D environments based on prompt images. According to DeepMind, Genie 2 comes with a host of new and exciting features that improve lighting and reflections, and can even generate videos from real-world images. Within these generated worlds, models can also create animated characters that act as embodied agents for training purposes. Characters can interact with the world by popping balloons, opening doors, and even interacting with non-playable characters. The DeepMind team seems to be hoping that these AI-generated video games will help train…

On Wednesday, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Threads were all facing varying degrees of issues as a result of the global outage that affected Meta's apps. The cause of the outage is still unknown, but Meta acknowledged “technical issues” in a post on X. “We're aware that technical issues are impacting the ability of some users to access our apps. We're working hard to get things back to normal as soon as possible,” the company said in a statement at 1:48 p.m. ET. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.” Instagram posted a similar message to X, prominently using…

In addition to the release of many new AI functions, Apple has also updated voice memo apps on iOS 18.2. On Wednesday, iPhone manufacturers have announced that iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max users will be able to stack vocal trucks on existing instrument recording with voice memo apps without using headphones. Instead, the user will be able to record vocals using an iPhone speaker to record the instruments and at the same time using 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max microphones. This update was announced for the first time in the Apple event held in September, and the company's…