Author: TechBrunch

For startups that want to save the world, or at least make it a better place, balancing impact and profit can be difficult. “Investor and shareholder expectations are often misaligned with how difficult and intractable the problems we face as a society are,” said Co-Founder and CEO of Vibrant Planet. CEO Alison Wolf spoke on the Builders Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. In a way, we're a bit stuck. ” But it's not impossible. Wolff's company develops cloud-based software to model and respond to wildfire risk for utilities, insurance companies, and land managers such as the U.S. Forest Service. To…

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy today hinted at an improved “agent” version of the company's Alexa assistant, a version that can perform actions on your behalf. “The next generation of these assistants and generative AI applications will not only answer questions and summarize, index, and aggregate data, but also take action,” he said during Amazon's Q3 2024 earnings call. I think he's also very good at it,” he said. “And you can imagine we're pretty good at that with Alexa.” Jassy added that Amazon continues to “reimagine the brain” of Alexa with “a series of new underlying models” that it plans…

Today, Decart, the Israeli AI company that emerged from stealth with $21 million in funding from Sequoia and Oren Zeev, released what it claims is the first playable “open world” AI model. The model, called Oasis, is available for download and demo on Descart's site. This is a Minecraft-like game that is generated end-to-end on the fly. Trained on videos of Minecraft gameplay, Oasis captures keyboard and mouse movements and generates frames in real time to simulate physics, rules, and graphics. Image credit: Decart Oasis is part of an emerging category of generative AI models called “world models.” Many of…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged in a Reddit AMA that a lack of computing power is one of the major factors preventing the company from shipping products as often as it would like. “All of these models are becoming extremely complex,” he wrote in response to a question about why OpenAI's next AI model is taking so long. “We also face many limitations and difficult decisions about allocating computing to many great ideas.” Many reports suggest that OpenAI struggles to secure sufficient computing infrastructure to run and train generative models. Just this week, Reuters reported, citing sources, that OpenAI has…

Currently, two mobile operating systems account for almost 100% of the global smartphone market. Development is difficult, and for most phone manufacturers, there are better ways to utilize their resources, especially with Android right around the corner. Although this is a potential differentiator, these companies primarily choose to maintain Google's mobile OS, customized with skins and unique features. Huawei recently bucked this trend with the release of Harmony OS, which was a direct product of geopolitical restrictions on the use of US products. But despite its vast resources, the Chinese electronics giant struggled mightily as it scrambled to develop its…

Investors are rushing to put millions of dollars into a popular startup called Kalsi, either in loans or, as it turns out, cash. Carsi is an exchange that allows people to bet on the outcome of cultural events, from election results to how long Taylor Swift's latest album will stay at the top of the charts, as an official commodity trading contract. Betting on the outcome of the upcoming US election has seen such a surge in demand that Kalshi, which was unranked in the financial category for years, has rocketed to the top spot in Apple's app store, ranking…

Meta said it is partnering with sensor company GelSight and South Korean robotics company Wonik Robotics to commercialize tactile sensors for AI. The new device is not intended for consumers. Rather, they are aimed at scientists. Meta says it envisions them being used to advance research into AI that can “learn more about the world” and “better understand and model the physical world.” GelSight collaborates with Meta to bring Digit 360 to market. Meta describes it as a “tactile fingertip with human-level multimodal sensing capabilities.” The successor to Meta's Digit sensor, Digit 360 uses an on-device AI chip and about…

Google's challenger in OpenAI is finally here. The company on Thursday launched ChatGPT Search, an evolution of the SearchGPT prototype it announced this summer. Built into OpenAI's ChatGPT platform, ChatGPT Search is designed to pull information from a variety of online sources and provide “timely answers” to questions, OpenAI said. Powered by a fine-tuned version of OpenAI's GPT-4o model, ChatGPT Search provides information and photos from around the web, including sports scores, news, and stocks, along with links to related sources. Refine your ongoing search by asking follow-up questions. ChatGPT chooses to search the web based on your questions. Alternatively,…

Google Maps is adding new features powered by Gemini, Google's generative AI model. The company announced Thursday an upcoming update that will allow Google Maps users in the U.S. to use AI to find new places to visit and answer questions about different locations. The platform also has enhanced navigation features that help drivers reach their destinations by highlighting things like which lane to be in. By bringing Gemini to Maps, Google will aim to position its navigation app to compete with Apple Maps and navigation startups. In other updates, Google Maps will now allow users to get ideas for…

Starting today, developers building AI-based services and bots using Google's Gemini API and Google AI Studio will be able to base their prompt results on data from Google Search. This should allow for more accurate responses based on more recent data. As always, developers can try grounding for free in AI Studio. AI Studio is essentially Google's playground for developers to test and adjust their prompts and access the latest large-scale language models (LLMs). Gemini API users must subscribe to a paid tier and pay $35 for every 1,000 grounded queries. AI Studio recently released a built-in comparison mode that…