Author: TechBrunch

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday launched an investigation into Character.AI and 14 other technology platforms over children's privacy and safety concerns. The investigation will assess whether Character.AI and other platforms popular with young people, such as Reddit, Instagram, and Discord, comply with Texas child privacy and safety laws. Research by Paxton, who often takes a tough stance on technology companies, found that these platforms are subject to two Texas laws: the Parental Empowerment to Protect Children Online Act (SCOPE Act) and the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act. (DPSA) compliance will be investigated. These laws require platforms to…

Microsoft announced the latest addition to the Phi family of generative AI models. Microsoft claims that this model, called Phi-4, is improved in several ways over previous versions, particularly in math problem solving. This is partly a result of improved training data quality. Phi-4 is available with very limited access as of Thursday night. Available only on Microsoft's recently launched Azure AI Foundry development platform and for research purposes under the Microsoft Research License Agreement. Notably, the Phi-4 is the first Phi series model to be launched after Sebastien Bubeck's retirement. Bubeck, who previously served as Microsoft's AI VP and…

If you throw a rock, there's a good chance you'll hit a deepfake. The commoditization of generative AI has led to an explosion of fake content online. According to identity verification platform Sumsub, deepfakes have quadrupled worldwide from 2023 to 2024. According to Sumsub, deepfakes accounted for 7% of all fraud in 2024. , ranging from identity theft and account takeover to sophisticated social engineering campaigns. Meta is releasing a tool that applies imperceptible watermarks to AI-generated video clips in hopes of making a meaningful contribution to the fight against deepfakes. The tool, announced Thursday, is called Meta Video Seal,…

Google’s trying to make waves with Gemini, its flagship suite of generative AI models, apps, and services. But what’s Gemini? How can you use it? And how does it stack up to other generative AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Meta’s Llama, and Microsoft’s Copilot? To make it easier to keep up with the latest Gemini developments, we’ve put together this handy guide, which we’ll keep updated as new Gemini models, features, and news about Google’s plans for Gemini are released. What is Gemini? Gemini is Google’s long-promised, next-gen generative AI model family. Developed by Google’s AI research labs DeepMind and Google…

Running a startup can be expensive and require various subscriptions. Cap table management software that helps founders organize their finances can cost thousands of dollars per year. San Francisco-based Carta is the market leader in this industry. But some startup founders say Carta makes it extremely difficult to cancel subscriptions. The issue started when Sudarshan Sridharan, founder of Pipeline, posted about his struggle to cancel, writing, “I am speechless at the attitude of the anti-founder @cartainc. You won't be able to talk to a human support agent.” Carta requested a “cancellation request” meeting with a customer success manager to terminate…

Nearly half of U.S. teens are online most of the time, and the platform they use most is YouTube, a new Pew Research Center study finds. The center reports that 46% of teens say they go online “almost all the time,” and 90% of teens surveyed use Google-owned video platforms. 73% of respondents said they use the platform every day. TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat round out the list of top platforms for teens. 60% of teens report using TikTok and Instagram, and 55% say the same about Snapchat. It's no secret that teenagers aren't using Facebook as much as they…

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 supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 has been a big year for OpenAI, from its partnership with Apple for its generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, the release of GPT-4o with voice and vision capabilities, and the highly-anticipated launch of its text-to-video model Sora. OpenAI is closing the year with “12 Days of OpenAI,” a series of 12 streams highlighting new…

The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has more than 130,000 job cuts across 457 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the first months of 2024. Smaller-sized startups have also seen a fair amount of cuts, and in some cases, have shut down operations altogether. By tracking these layoffs, we’re able to understand the impact on innovation across companies large and small. We’re also able to see the potential impact of businesses…

Yahoo laid off about 25% of its cybersecurity team, known as Paranoids, last year, according to a TechCrunch investigation. Overall, the company has laid off or reduced 40 to 50 of its 200 total cybersecurity team employees since the beginning of 2024, according to multiple current and former Yahoo employees who spoke to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity. He was fired due to this. (Yahoo is TechCrunch's parent company.) Paranoid isn't the only team affected by layoffs. Valeri Ryborsky, who was named Yahoo's chief technology officer in September, sent an email to employees this week announcing changes across a wide…

ServiceTitan, which provides financial and customer management software for trading, went public on Thursday in a big way, much to the delight of retail investors. The stock quickly soared from its initial IPO sales price of $71 million to $105 per share on modest volume. Currently, the price remains above $100. ServiceTitan's success doesn't necessarily portend a return to the painfully tight IPO window for tech companies waiting to go public. This is because the company's motivation for going public was not strictly market-related. ServiceTitan has revealed that it will need to immediately repay some venture investors due to the…