Author: TechBrunch

In an interview Wednesday at the New York Times' Dealbook Summit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that X and Tesla CEO Elon Musk are “hurting competitors.” He said it was “deeply un-American” to use political influence for the sake of the United States. and “advantage” [his] own business. ” “I don't think people would tolerate that,” he said, according to Bloomberg. Musk, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, heads DOGE, an advisory committee that will recommend deep cuts to federal agencies. Musk, who owns OpenAI competitor xAI, will reportedly provide input to President Trump if he decides to appoint an AI policy…

Two U.S. senators want the Pentagon to take sufficient steps to protect service members' communications as the U.S. government counters China's continued hacking efforts targeting major U.S. cell phone and internet companies. They are accusing the government of not taking proper precautions. The senators argue that the Pentagon remains overly reliant on traditional landline calls and unencrypted cell phone calls and text messages, leaving them vulnerable to snooping by foreign spies. . Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Republican Sen. Eric Schmidt of Missouri are among those most recently accused of infiltrating and spying on major U.S. telecommunications providers,…

What do Tim Cook, Jay-Z, and Fred Asum (co-founder of Coinbase) have in common? That could be their interest in Frère, a bespoke ready-to-wear brand that's making a name for itself throughout the tech world. The brand, which launched in March, will open its first store in New York's SoHo district. Frères is known for its suits, but it also sells items like a $3,490 wool knit tracksuit and a $5,990 cashmere overcoat. It's a luxury. A quiet luxury, as kids might call it on TikTok. It's that subtle high-tech look that the CEO wears in neutrals that cost about…

“If you build it, they won't come,” Bison Ventures co-founder Tom Biegala said on the Equity podcast on Wednesday. The phrase is an internal mantra at Bison, an early-stage venture firm betting on “frontier technology” companies building in materials science, robotics, biotechnology, climate change and sustainability. This is intended to discourage founders from solving problems they believe exist. According to Biegala, Bison's mantra is, “When these entrepreneurs aren't talking to their customers and testing their hypotheses around their pain points, value propositions, and product specifications, we're keenly aware that that's a big red flag for us.'' I'll let you.'' So…

SageMaker has long been AWS's fully managed platform for building, training, and deploying machine learning and generative AI models. However, over time, an ecosystem of applications centered around AI and ML models has emerged to perform tasks such as managing experiments and assessing model quality and security. These have always existed outside of SageMaker and had to be managed separately, but now AWS is announcing at the annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas that they will be the first to be fully managed and secured by the SageMaker team. We are announcing a carefully selected set of AI apps. Early…

Earlier this year, Meta took the easy way out by building a nuclear data center next to an existing reactor. But after regulators put a damper on that plan (the site is reportedly home to rare honeybees), the company came back with a new idea. The idea was to find a developer to build one or more nuclear power plants somewhere. Meta yesterday announced a request for proposals from nuclear power developers who would help the company add 1 to 4 gigawatts of power generation capacity in the U.S. According to Axios, Meta announced early in the cycle that Meta…

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…

Instagram Threads, Meta's competitor to Elon Musk's X, is testing ways to make replies to other people's posts less obtrusive on the platform. The company is adding a new privacy feature that lets you customize your profile and remove the tab that displays your replies. This leaves only two tabs showing posts and reposts. This addition gives you the option to make your profile and thread usage more private without having to switch to a completely private profile. This limits the visibility of your post to your followers and the people you choose to reply to. Threads' main “For You”…

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 hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies. That growth has propelled OpenAI itself into becoming one of the most-hyped companies in recent memory. And its latest partnership with Apple for its upcoming generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, has given the company another significant bump in the AI race. 2024 also saw the release of GPT-4o, OpenAI’s new flagship omni…

Meta announced Wednesday that it is updating its broadcast channel feature on Instagram to make it easier for creators to collaborate with their followers. Previously, viewers couldn't respond to creators' posts on broadcast channels and were limited to emoji reactions. Now, the company is giving creators the option to let users reply to their own posts and respond to other users' responses. Additionally, creators can now share prompts to start conversations within their channels. When Meta launched a broadcast channel on Instagram last year, the company pitched it as a way for creators to share public, one-to-many messages with their…