Author: TechBrunch
Although the end of zero interest rates has prompted businesses to look for savings wherever possible, there are still areas where there are significant budget drains. Observability (gathering and understanding data and systems) is typically the second-highest cloud spend for organizations, after cloud provisioning itself. People are even talking about an observability cost crisis, highlighted by anecdotes like Coinbase spending $65 million on Datadog claims. And why is observability so expensive and important? Complex cloud architectures and microservices are here to stay, and security issues and outages are common, making it difficult for operations teams to keep their systems up…
Bowery Farming, the agricultural technology unicorn, is shutting down, according to Pitchbook, which cited internal documents and multiple company employees. The New York-based agtech company was known for building vertical farms that could produce crops such as lettuce, herbs, and berries. The company has raised more than $700 million in funding from VCs including First Round Capital, General Catalyst, and GV, according to PitchBook data. The company's latest funding round values the company at more than $2 billion in 2021. Pitchbook previously reported that Bowery Farming had made multiple layoffs in 2023. Vertical farming has proven to be a tough…
Apple products will integrate with OpenAI's ChatGPT in December when iOS 18.2 is released, powering Siri and several other features with smarter AI. On Wednesday, iOS 18.2 beta testers got a taste of how OpenAI could benefit from its partnership with Apple. According to an iOS 18.2 beta update spotted by 9to5Mac, Apple is including an option to upgrade to ChatGPT Plus within the Settings app. This will allow Apple users to sign up directly for OpenAI's premium subscription plan for $20 per month. This could lead many users to sign up for ChatGPT Plus, which is the core of…
Aravind Srinivas, CEO of AI search company Perplexity, has stepped across the picket line and offered his services to help cushion the impact of the tech workers' strike at the New York Times. The NYT Tech Guild announced the strike on Monday, after setting a Nov. 4 deadline months ago. The employees represented will provide software support and data analysis to The Times on the business side of the dealership. They are asking for, among other things, a 2.5% annual wage increase and firming up the current two-day work week expectation. “However, the company has determined that our members are…
Rather than searching the internet for summaries of TV shows, where the risk of unintentionally revealing important plot points is high, Prime Video's latest feature is designed to help viewers avoid encountering spoilers. It is intended to. Amazon on Monday announced the launch of X-Ray Recaps, an AI-powered generation feature that creates concise summaries of entire seasons, single episodes, and even parts of episodes. In particular, the company claims that guardrails are in place to prevent the AI from generating spoilers, so you can fully enjoy your favorite series without worrying about encountering unnecessary information. This new feature expands on…
Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are making big bets on nuclear power to power their data centers as AI and cloud computing drive electricity usage soaring. But as Amazon and Meta revealed last week, these bets are far from certain. A series of recent rulings by regulators have dashed hopes for a quick solution to electricity demand. For now, Microsoft's plans to revive the Three Mile Island reactor are moving forward. Perhaps unexpectedly, the outage has nothing to do with nuclear power itself, but points to the challenges of building large data centers without first securing a new source of power.…
Anthropic's latest AI model is here. But it's more expensive than the previous generation, and unlike Anthropic's other models, it still can't analyze images. The Claude 3.5 Haiku, announced by Anthropic last month, matches or outperforms Anthropic's flagship Claude 3 Opus in certain benchmarks. Claude 3.5 Haiku, available through Anthropic's API and numerous third-party platforms including AWS Bedrock, can help with coding suggestions, data extraction and labeling, and content moderation, Anthropic said. Anthropic previously hinted that the Claude 3.5 Haiku will be priced the same as its predecessor, the Claude 3 Haiku. Now that tone is changing. “During final testing,…
At TechCrunch Disrupt, our team sat in the front row, furiously typing away on their laptops, and was joined by impressive speakers like NFL quarterback-turned-founder Colin Kaepernick, Perplexity AI founder Aravind Srinivas, and Ashton Kutcher. We publish real-time news from top speakers. We are a well-oiled machine. Some writers have been covering disruption since before it was meta, before Silicon Valley gave us the free marketing of a lifetime (thank you, HBO). Still, this year, even TechCrunch's longest-serving editor was a little distracted by the dazzling jewelry adorning the stage. So if you've been paying more attention to the actual…
Anduril, the defense technology company co-founded by Palmer Lackey, plans to build its first major manufacturing facility in Arizona, Ohio or Texas, a 5 million square foot facility known as Arsenal-1. Officials said they are considering it. On that matter. The company, which develops autonomous drones, planes and submarines, announced a $1.5 billion investment in September at a post-money valuation of $14 billion. In connection with this round, Anduril announced plans to use the new capital for manufacturing and invest “hundreds of millions of dollars” in the development of its Arsenal-1 facility. He also said the money would be used…
Meta today made its Llama series of AI models available to U.S. government agencies and national security contractors to counter perceptions that its “open” AI is aiding foreign adversaries. Then he announced. “We are pleased to confirm that we are making Llama available to U.S. government agencies, including those working on defense and national security applications, as well as private sector partners supporting that work,” said Mehta. said in a blog post. “We partner with companies like Accenture, Amazon Web Services, Anduril, Booz Allen, Databricks, Deloitte, IBM, Leidos, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Oracle, Palantir, Scale AI, and Snowflake to bring Llama…