Author: TechBrunch

Can the US meaningfully regulate AI? It's not at all clear yet. While policymakers have made progress in recent months, they have also experienced setbacks, illustrating the difficult nature of laws that impose guardrails on technology. In March, Tennessee became the first state to protect voice actors from unauthorized AI cloning. This summer, Colorado adopted a phased, risk-based approach to AI policy. And in September, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed dozens of AI-related safety bills, some of which require companies to disclose details of their AI training. However, the United States does not yet have a federal AI policy comparable…

Meta's social network Threads now has 275 million monthly active users (MAUs), the company announced on Sunday. “Yesterday, @Threads surpassed 275 million monthly active users. We are deeply grateful to everyone who has helped us get this far. There is still much work to do and more to fix. There's a lot, but there's something exciting about this place,” said Adam Mosseri, Meta executive who leads Threads and Instagram. Launched in July 2023 with the aim of capitalizing on millions of users leaving X after Elon Musk acquired the platform, Threads quickly gained users and is now the largest It…

X rolls out an update to its controversial blocking feature, allowing others to see your public posts even if you've blocked them. People protested the change, claiming they didn't want blocked users to see their posts for security reasons. Blocked users can't follow, engage with, or send direct messages to the blocked user. An older version of X's support page states that blocked users cannot see the user's following or follower list. The company has now updated the page to remove the mention and users can now see the following and follower lists of the people who blocked them. The…

Gabor Cselle, former CEO and co-founder of X challenger Pebble, has joined OpenAI to work on a secret project. According to LinkedIn, Cselle has been employed by OpenAI since October and announced the news in a post on X yesterday. “I'll share what I'm working on in due course,” he wrote. “I've already learned a lot.” Cselle is a repeat founder who sold his first company, Y Combinator-based mobile email startup reMail, to Google. His second company, native advertising startup Namo Media, he sold to Twitter before Elon Musk acquired the social network and rebranded it as X. Nearly a…

Family offices invest large amounts of capital in startups every year. According to a recent report from PwC, 27% of all startup deals in the first half of 2023 were from deals involving family office investors. Despite their prevalence in startup transactions, family offices are less publicized and less easy to find than VCs, making them a potentially tricky investor base for founders. be. Multiple family office investors during a TechCrunch Disrupt panel said the easiest way to approach investors like them is to look for family offices that align with what the startup is trying to build. Bruce Lee,…

The hype is palpable. Self-driving car services are a hot topic of conversation as tech people from near and far gather at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Francisco, one of the few locations where Waymo will be open to the public. Pega Ebrahimi, co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures, said on stage at TechCrunch, “Given all the hype around AI, everyone is going to be excited about self-driving cars in 10 years.” spoke. Disrupt 2024. “It's not going to be perfect for a while, but people are so excited and live in an optimistic world that it can happen…

Investor Wesley Chan has shown a knack for making early investments in multi-billion dollar unicorn companies, including Plaid, Gusto, Flexport, and most recently Canva. Chan comes from an unconventional background. He grew up in an immigrant family and had middling grades in high school. However, he got a job cleaning test tubes in a California Institute of Technology lab and was able to impress lab manager Ellen Rosenberg and get him admitted to MIT. From there, his unexpected journey continued. He majored in computer science because it seemed like a good career path, but landed in Silicon Valley shortly after…

As part of TechCrunch's ongoing “Women in AI” series, which aims to give AI-focused academics and other women the time they deserve (and are overdue) in the spotlight, TechCrunch interviewed Sofia Verastegui. Mr. Velastegui is a member of the National Science Foundation (NSF) National AI Advisory Board and former Chief AI Officer of Microsoft's Business Software Division. Verastegui had no intention of pursuing a career in AI. She studied mechanical engineering as an undergraduate at Georgia Tech. But after joining Apple in 2009, she became fascinated with apps, especially those powered by AI. “We started realizing that products with AI…

“There is no AI without data, there is no AI without unstructured data, and there is no AI without unstructured data,” said Chet Kapur, chairman and CEO of data management company DataStax. There is no AI without it.” Kapur started a conversation at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 about “new data pipelines” in the context of modern AI applications, and was joined by Vanessa Larco, a partner at VC firm NEA. George Fraser, CEO of data integration platform Fivetran. The chat covered multiple topics, including the importance of data quality and the role of real-time data in generative AI, but one of…

MIT this week unveiled a new model for training robots. This technique mimics the large amount of information used to train large-scale language models (LLMs), rather than the standard set of focused data used to teach robots new tasks. It will be. The researchers note that imitation learning, where an agent learns by following an individual performing a task, can fail when small challenges are introduced. These could be things like lighting, different settings, or new obstacles. In such a scenario, the robot does not have enough data available to adapt. The team looked to models like GPT-4 as a…