Author: TechBrunch

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…

The question on everyone's mind is: Are Gen Z workers actually different? TechCrunch set out to find out at this year's Disrupt 2024. We sat down with SignalFire's Heather Doshay, Comprehensive.io's Roger Lee, and CapitalG's Lauren Illovsky to discuss how to hire and retain talent. One of the topics was how young workers are very different from older workers. “It was the same with millennials, right?” Ilovsky asked on stage. “I remember baby boomers criticizing Millennials, and now Millennials were criticizing Gen Z. I love Gen Z too. How much they push the boundaries and think. I think they understand…

The question on everyone's mind is: Are Gen Z workers actually different? TechCrunch set out to find out at this year's Disrupt 2024. We sat down with SignalFire's Heather Doshay, Comprehensive.io's Roger Lee, and CapitalG's Lauren Illovsky to discuss how to hire and retain talent. One of the topics was how young workers are very different from older workers. “It was the same with millennials, right?” Ilovsky asked on stage. “I remember baby boomers criticizing Millennials, and now Millennials were criticizing Gen Z. I love Gen Z too. How much they push the boundaries and think. I think they understand…

WhatsApp makes it easy to organize the many messages that fill your inbox. The messaging app announced Thursday that it is adding the ability to filter chats into customizable categories. This helps you keep track of your conversations with family, work colleagues, college friends, etc. The “Custom List” feature is an enhancement to the chat filters that WhatsApp introduced in April. Previously, you only had access to three filters: All, Unread, and Groups. With the new update, you can now create your own lists so you can focus on your favorite chats at once. To create a list,[チャット]Tap the plus…

The European Union has thrown a spanner into chipmaker Nvidia's proposed takeover of Tel Aviv-based AI workload management startup Run:ai. The deal, announced in April, has a price tag of $700 million, according to our sources, and was completed by the EU side following a request from Italy's competition regulator under the EU Merger Regulation (EUMR). It will be considered. The proposed transaction does not meet the EUMR standard notification threshold. However, EU law requires national regulators to notify the European Commission of a transaction if they believe it poses a significant risk to domestic competition and could affect trade…

Anthropic's AI-powered chatbot, Claude, now has a desktop app. Anthropic is releasing the Claude app for Mac and Windows today in public beta. This, as Anthropic's blog post says, “brings the power of Claude directly into your preferred work environment.” To be clear, these features do not include Anthropic's recently announced computer usage features. This feature allows an upgraded version of the company's latest flagship model, the Claude 3.5 Sonnet, to perform tasks on your PC. The desktop app is available to both free Claude users and those subscribed to Anthropic's premium plan. Image credit: Humanity Anthropic also released a…

MealMe, an integration API that embeds food and retail ordering into consumer apps and websites, announced Thursday that it has secured $8 million in Series A funding. The new funding brings the total amount raised to $16 million. MealMe has undergone several changes since its launch in 2019. Initially, it was a consumer app designed to help people find the best deals on delivery from restaurants and grocery stores. It has since evolved to allow consumers to order food directly through the MealMe app. The company has now fully transitioned to a B2B model and provides an API for other…

In 2014, Ivan Krukov moved his family from Serbia to the United States as his startup Cubic.AI prepared to launch a Kickstarter campaign for a smart speaker. A week before the campaign was scheduled to launch, Amazon launched its Echo smart speaker, effectively rendering Cubic.AI dysfunctional. “It was a disaster,” Krukov told TechCrunch. “It just doesn’t make sense to compete with Amazon or Google. We ended up selling the company. [two years later]” However, this experience was not completely wasted. Moving the family from Serbia to the United States meant sending her daughters, who were used to speaking Russian at…

AI video platform D-ID today announced the release of two new avatars for content creation: Express and Premium+. Businesses are chasing the golden goose of creating AI avatars that are more human-like and can ease the burden of video creation for enterprise use cases in areas such as marketing, sales, and customer support. A variety of generative models make it easy to create professional-looking videos for business purposes with just a few text inputs and visual data. D-ID's new model is an effort to become more competitive in this context. Express avatars can be trained with approximately 1 minute of…

Businesses are concerned that in their eagerness to implement AI, they are making themselves more vulnerable to cyber threats. In a recent survey of more than 350 IT leaders, more than half of executives surveyed said the complexity of AI applications is weakening their organization's cybersecurity posture. Another study found that more than two-fifths of executives believe their security teams lack the skills needed to protect AI applications and workloads. The demand for solutions to secure AI apps has spawned a whole gamut of startups. For example, HiddenLayer and Protect AI focus on defending AI systems from adversarial attacks, while…