Author: TechBrunch
While companies like OpenAI and Anthropic continue to popularize the idea of using ordinary language to ask artificially intelligent agents to answer questions, write proposals, and draw pictures, Basecamp A London startup called Research has raised $60 million to tackle new frontiers. We are building AI agents that not only answer all your questions about biology and the biodiversity of the natural world, but also generate new insights that humans alone could not achieve. “There are huge data gaps where people are training today. [biology] Glen Gowers, co-founder and CEO of Basecamp Research, said in an interview: “Some of the…
Since its founding, Meta's Threads has attempted to leverage the network effects of other social networks Facebook and Instagram by experimenting with cross-posting and highlighting Threads posts on carousels. The company is currently testing a new feature that lets you share Instagram Reels directly to threads. App researcher Alessandro Paluzzi discovered that Threads is working on a new option for the compose box that will allow you to select Reels from your account and post them to Threads. The company confirmed to TechCrunch that it is indeed testing the feature. Paluzzi said that when you tap the Instagram button in…
OpenAI said in a post on . Initiatives for global expansion. The expansion efforts follow the San Francisco-based ChatGPT maker's massive $6.4 billion funding round, announcement of restructuring plans, and a series of executive departures. The company also said managing director Oliver Jay (formerly chief revenue officer at Asana and head of APAC and LATAM at Dropbox) will oversee international operations and drive global expansion from Singapore. An OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company has begun building a team in Singapore that will serve as a hub to support customers and partners in the Asia-Pacific region. The company is…
Atlassian first showed off Rovo six months ago. Rovo is what the company calls “AI Teammate,” which combines smarter search and chat-based AI tools with agents that allow users to automate parts of their workflows in tools like Jira and Confluence. At the Team '24 Europe event in Barcelona, the company announced the general availability of Rovo. Additionally, Atlassian also announced a number of additional new AI capabilities that, like Rovo, are part of the company's Atlassian Intelligence platform. At the core of Rovo, Rovo Search not only combines data from Atlassian's core tools such as Jira and Confluence, but…
This story has been updated throughout with updated details as the story unfolds. We will continue to do so as litigation and disputes are ongoing. There is a lot of controversy going on in the world of WordPress, one of the most popular technologies for creating and hosting websites. The central issue is a dispute between WordPress founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine, which hosts websites built on WordPress. WordPress technology is open source, free, and powers a huge portion of the internet (approximately 40% of websites). Websites can host their own WordPress instance or use a…
Last year, Sound Ventures, a nine-year-old Beverly Hills, Calif.-based venture led by general partners Ashton Kutcher, Guy O'Seary and Effie Epstein, launched a new Announced $65 million AI fund. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Hugging Face. In fact, the plan was to invest in just six companies. It was a gamble that could pay off big, albeit with risks to the team's future vision. A small number and large number of companies will be the biggest winners in the AI space due to the necessary technical talent and the capital needed to cover computing costs. Sound has since raised even…
Cloud providers are chasing AI unicorns, the latest being Fei-Fei Li's World Labs. The startup just hired Google Cloud as its primary compute provider for training its AI models, a deal that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But Lee's tenure as chief AI scientist at Google Cloud was not a factor, the company said. At the Google Cloud Startup Summit on Tuesday, the companies announced that World Labs will use the majority of the funding to license GPU servers on Google Cloud Platform and eventually train “spatially intelligent” AI models. A small number of well-funded startups building…
LoanSnap, an AI-powered mortgage startup, has had its license to operate in the state revoked, according to the state's banking commissioner. This occurred after LoanSnap violated a consent order it signed with the Ministry of Banking in May. The department said Tuesday that its Consumer Credit Division began an investigation that found multiple violations of state law following a prior consent order. As a result, the Department and LoanSnap entered into a new consent order on October 2, which resulted in the revocation of LoanSnap's license. The reversal comes four months after TechCrunch's exclusive report on how LoanSnap was inundated…
Even a hot category like robotics is not immune to macroeconomic trends. The North American robot market declined in both sales and revenue in the first half of 2024, according to statistics from automation advocacy group A3. The number of orders for industrial robots in the first half of the year was 15,705 units, down 7.5% from the same period last year. Total sales for the second quarter decreased 6.8% to $982.83 million. The association puts the blame on broader economic headwinds among manufacturers. Sorting things into categories will give you different results. The auto industry, the largest employer of…
Meta's take on Twitter/X rival Instagram Threads steps further into competitor territory, perhaps with the development of community features that will allow users to better organize discussions on the platform by topic. There is a possibility. At least, the references in the app's code seem to imply that. The code mentions a new feature called Loops that Threads early adopter and veteran technologist Chris Messina discovered on Monday. The new strings he discovered were introduced in the latest app update and mention fields for joining and leaving the Loop community, community name, profile, and other elements. (Additionally, the reference “BCN”…