Author: TechBrunch

Google is introducing a new feature to help you find the cheapest flight tickets for your next trip. The company announced Wednesday that it is adding a new “Cheapest” tab to Google Flights. Until now, Google has displayed what it considers the “best” options at the top of results, based on both price and convenience. However, some people may be willing to sacrifice convenience to save money. Click on the Lowest Price tab to see the lowest price available. For example, you may see a link to a third-party booking site that offers lower prices than the airline itself. Alternatively,…

Want a social side to your fast food? Spain's Glovo, a food delivery and quick commerce service where the majority of orders are ready-to-eat meals, adds a set of social features to further drive in-app activity We are conducting an experiment. You can also spice up the user experience by allowing restaurant partners to upload food preparation videos and push a rich media feed to your users. Glovo says new social features will allow users to find and connect with friends who use the same app. This is accomplished by matching the user's phone contacts with existing Glovo users and…

When Hurricane Helen hit Asheville, North Carolina, in September, the city's police department turned to public safety drone startup Paladin for help. The startup's 30-member team worked nights and weekends to help the Asheville Police Department locate people and deliver supplies. Asheville is a Paladin customer, and its team was able to help because the company's software can control the drone remotely from the company's Houston headquarters, Paladin founder and CEO Divy Shrivastava told TechCrunch. . Despite the closure of Asheville's roads and the lack of cell phone or internet service on the ground, Paladin's technology was able to make…

Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute (TRI) on Wednesday unveiled plans to bring AI-based robotic intelligence to their electric humanoid robot Atlas. This collaboration leverages work done by TRI on large-scale behavior models (LBMs) ​​that operate along similar lines to the more general large-scale language models (LLMs) behind platforms such as ChatGPT . Last September, TechCrunch visited TRI's Bay Area campus to get a closer look at the institute's work on robotic learning. In research revealed at last year's Disrupt conference, the institute's director, Gil Pratt, described how an overnight training taught a robot to perform household tasks like flipping…

French AI startup Mistral has released the first generative AI model designed to run on edge devices such as laptops and mobile phones. This new family of models, which Mistral calls “Les Ministraux,” can be used or adapted for a variety of applications, from basic text generation to working with more capable models to complete tasks. You can. Two Les Ministraux models are available: Ministral 3B and Ministral 8B. Both have a 128,000-token context window and can capture approximately the length of a 50-page book. “Our most innovative customers and partners are increasingly demanding local, privacy-first inference for critical applications…

At Tesla's robotaxi unveiling event last week, several Optimus humanoid robots mingled with guests, pouring drinks and cracking jokes. It's impressive technology, but the vocals and some gestures appear to be controlled remotely by humans, something Tesla hasn't disclosed. On today's episode of Equity, Rebecca Beran talks with TechCrunch's Hardware Editor Brian Heater about Tesla's Optimus Bot, the market opportunity for humanoid robots, and other companies leading the way in this industry. . Brian pointed out that what Tesla is sharing is essentially an advertisement for what the automaker's technology can do in the future, not what it can do…

Photonic computing startup Lightmatter has raised $400 million to blow away one of the bottlenecks of modern data centers. The company's optical interconnect layer enables hundreds of GPUs to work synchronously, streamlining the costly and complex task of training and running AI models. The growth of AI and its massive computing requirements are intensifying the data center industry, but it's not as simple as plugging in another 1,000 GPUs. As high-performance computing experts have known for years, it doesn't matter how fast each node of a supercomputer is if it's idle half the time waiting to receive data. there is…

The United States is facing a shortage of electricians, with job openings in the field expected to grow 11% annually over the next decade, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the shortage won't go away anytime soon, as U.S. electrician candidates typically must log 8,000 hours of work before becoming licensed. In normal times, labor shortages can cause inconvenience while the labor market changes accordingly. But the United States is in the midst of a seismic shift in how people and businesses use electricity. Adding solar panels, replacing furnaces with heat pumps, adding electric vehicle chargers, etc.…

Fable has earned a reputation as the go-to startup for helping companies develop digital products that are more accessible to people with disabilities. After raising $25 million in new funding, the Toronto-based startup is now working to expand the community it supports and make its AI training data more inclusive. Fable was launched in 2020 as an easier way to reach out to accessibility experts and people with disabilities. This ensures that anyone building a product has the best advice to make it as accessible as possible. Since our A round two years later, we've built a more robust product…

Airbnb hosting is a complex business, from setting up listings and managing properties to understanding price trends, communicating with customers, and tracking revenue. The challenge is that the more properties a host manages, the harder it becomes to juggle everything. To solve this problem, as part of its winter release, Airbnb is introducing a co-host network feature that allows hosts to find top-rated local co-hosts to help manage their properties. The travel company has built a network of “rental hosts” like LinkedIn and Fiverr made up of highly rated local hosts. Airbnb currently accepts hosts with a rating of 4.8…