Author: TechBrunch
Image inspiration and shopping site Pinterest is the latest tech company to roll out generative AI products to advertisers, following similar moves by Google and Amazon. At Pinterest Presents, an advertiser event held on Tuesday, the company announced new features for its Pinterest Performance+ suite, which includes both automation and AI. The latter will allow advertisers to turn white, blank or flat backgrounds into lifestyle images. Pinterest says the new feature, which is rolling out on Tuesday, will help advertisers who want to enhance their product Pins (ads) on Pinterest to get more clicks. Using generative AI to transform product…
Sometimes a demo is all you need to understand a product. The same goes for runwear. When you visit the Runware website, type the prompt and press Enter to generate the image, you will be amazed at how quickly Runware generates the image. It takes less than a second. Runware is a newcomer to the startup world of AI inference, or generative AI. The company builds its own servers and optimizes the software layers on those servers to eliminate bottlenecks and improve the inference speed of image generation models. The startup has already secured $3 million in funding from Andreessen…
Fusion startups have struggled to raise funding of late, but young startup Acceleron Fusion has joined the pack, raising $15 million of its targeted $23.7 million round, according to an SEC filing. That's what it means. The fusion sector has recently received a lot of interest from investors, who are no doubt encouraged by the groundbreaking experiment at the National Ignition Facility two years ago, in which a controlled fusion reaction is about to begin. It has been proven that more power can be generated than is needed. The first companies to build power plants capable of producing electricity that…
Get ready for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, our signature event for startups at all stages, taking place October 28th-30th at Moscone West in San Francisco. This year, we expect massive participation, with more than 10,000 leaders from startups, venture capital, and the broader technology community. As part of the program, we're excited to announce the full Disrupt Stage agenda, with some of the biggest names in technology that have dominated the news cycle this year and will continue to dominate. Hear from the CEOs of General Motors, Databricks, and Wiz. Investors include Vinod Khosla, Ashton Kutcher, Tony Fadel, Erin Foster and…
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. This is a potentially lucrative bet, albeit a risk to the team's vision for the future, as the biggest winners in the AI space will be You will be selected. Must be small and large. Sound has since raised even more money for the same fund. And judging by some of the deals…
In some cases, pivoting can be the wisest decision for company leaders. Watch Netflix's transformation from DVD to streaming or Corning's transformation from light bulbs to touchscreens. The list of highly successful startup pivots goes on. And more. And more. A less obvious (but by no means unsuccessful) pivot is Numa's. The co-founders scrapped the startup's original conversational AI product and sold customer service automation tools instead. But it's more than just a tool. These tools are aimed at car dealers. Numa CEO Tasso Roumeliotis says it sounds like a very specific niche, but it's profitable. The company closed a…
In the early morning hours of January 20, 2023, a doctor's user account logged onto the Hawaii Electronic Death Registration System from out of state and certified the death of a man named Jesse Kipf. The death certificate listed the cause of death as “acute respiratory distress syndrome” caused by the new coronavirus infection a week ago. As a result, Kipfu was randomly registered as a deceased person in several government databases. On the same day, a hacker nicknamed “FreeRadical” posted the same death certificate on a hacking forum in an attempt to monetize access to the system. “The access…
People participating in the open social web have a problem. It is not yet possible to reach users from multiple sites such as Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads with a single post. Third-party tools are available, but most are designed for small businesses and creators, and are commensurately expensive. To solve this problem, a new cross-posting app called Croissant, released today, offers an affordable way to cross-post between social services for just $2.99 per month. The app was designed and developed by Ben McCarthy, a Dublin-based designer and developer best known for the popular camera app Obscura, along with Canadian iOS…
A week after announcing a series of updates to its enterprise suite of Copilot AI-powered products, Microsoft is rolling out updates to all users, including tools that help them understand what they see on their screens and answer questions. We're releasing new Copilot features on Windows. The updated Copilot apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and Web are rolling out today, and all Copilot now has a “warmer” and “distinct” style, as Microsoft describes it. Microsoft is also bringing a chatbot to WhatsApp, allowing users to chat with Copilot via DMs. This is similar to the experience you get with other…
Microsoft has launched Bing Generative Search, its answer to Google's AI-powered search experience. Following a pilot in July, Bing Generative Search began rolling out to all U.S. users this morning, although it is still in development. The easiest way to invoke this is to search for “Bing Generative Search” in Bing. Microsoft also said it would introduce an option to more easily launch Bing Generative Search for “informational queries.” Bing Generative Search is based on a variety of AI models that aggregate information on the web and generate summaries in response to search queries. For example, when a user searches…