Author: TechBrunch

We are very excited to announce the final agenda for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024's dedicated Fintech stage. This stage joins Space, SaaS, AI, and Builders as other industry-focused stages, all under one big roof. As the fintech industry evolves, new opportunities abound for founders, investors, and customers. Sectors such as mobile banking, global payroll, digital payments, embedded finance, and cryptocurrencies are only going to grow in the coming years. Open banking is still accelerating in the United States. At Disrupt's Fintech stage, hear from leaders across the industry about the challenges they've faced and where the opportunities lie. Please see below…

We're out of this world excited to announce that our dedicated space stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is complete. This stage joins FinTech, SaaS, and AI as other industry-focused stages, all under one big roof. To conclude, we are pleased to announce that this year, as part of the event, we will be holding a pitch contest called “The Space Challenge, powered by Aerospace.” The entire Space Stage agenda for Disrupt 2024 As the space industry accelerates, new opportunities for founders, investors, and customers are proliferating. Not only are the once astronomical costs of doing business in orbit falling, but…

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies. That growth has propelled OpenAI itself into becoming one of the most-hyped companies in recent memory. And its latest partnership with Apple for its upcoming generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, has given the company another significant bump in the AI race. 2024 also saw the release of GPT-4o, OpenAI’s new flagship omni…

Initialized Capital is restructuring its team to “keep up with the times” in the venture market, according to a blog post from Brett Gibson, the firm's managing partner. The San Francisco-based venture capital firm originally founded by Alexis Ohanian, Garry Tan and Harjeet Tagger yesterday laid off several people who have been with the company in various roles since 2016. announced that they had specifically nominated Jennifer Wolf. Most recently, I was appointed as Managing Partner. Cyndi Reseburg, Inialized's head of communications, declined to say how many people were laid off, adding that the company does not comment on specific…

The cybersecurity world is full of technical lingo and jargon. At TechCrunch, we have been writing about cybersecurity for years, and even we sometimes need a refresher on what exactly a specific word or expression means. That’s why we have created this glossary, which includes some of the most common — and not so common — words and expressions that we use in our articles, and explanations of how, and why, we use them.  This is a developing compendium, and we will update it regularly.  Advanced persistent threat (APT) An advanced persistent threat (APT) is often categorized as a hacker,…

OpenAI on Thursday introduced a new way to interact with ChatGPT, an interface the company calls “canvas.” The product opens a separate window next to the regular chat window with a workspace for creating and coding projects. Users can write and generate code directly within the canvas, highlighting sections of their work and letting them edit the model. Canvas will be available in beta on ChatGPT Plus and Teams on Thursday, and will be available to Enterprise and Edu tier users next week. Several consumer AI providers are rallying around editable workspaces as a practical way to use generative AI.…

Whether it's informing customers, finding new customers, or SEO, every business with a presence on the web is, to some degree, in the content business. This means managing the creation of these texts and images, updating them, and possibly optimizing them so that search engines can index and rank them. Large-scale language models (LLMs) are very good at generating text, so it's no surprise that companies expect their content manipulation tools to also generate text and images (Freelance Copy (This is unwelcome news for writers.) AirOps, which today announced a $15.5 million Series A funding round, is focused on managing…

Google will start showing ads in AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries it provides for specific Google search queries, and will also add links to related web pages for some of those summaries. . This week, the company is also rolling out search results pages curated by AI in the US. The increased prominence of AI in Google's core search products comes as users do not migrate to alternatives such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Perplexity, which use AI to answer many of the questions traditionally asked of Google. This is an effort to make this happen. Perplexity announced in May that…

Google is upgrading its visual search app Lens to answer questions about your surroundings in near real-time. English-speaking Android and iOS users with the Google app installed can now start capturing video via Lens and ask questions about objects of interest in the video. Lou Wang, Lens' director of product management, said the feature uses a “customized” Gemini model to understand the video and associated questions. Gemini is Google's family of AI models that powers numerous products across the company's portfolio. “Suppose you want to know more about some interesting fish,” Wang said at a press conference. “[Lens will] Create…

YouTube on Thursday announced a series of updates to its short video product, YouTube Shorts. These include the ability for creators to upload videos of up to three minutes. The company also says it will update the Shorts player, introduce templates, and add a new Shorts Trends page for mobile devices. A series of combined updates could help YouTube become more competitive with TikTok. TikTok already allows longer videos (10 minutes to record and 60 minutes to upload), making it easier for users to participate in trends. YouTube says the new Shorts player is designed to streamline the look of…