Author: TechBrunch
When seed-focused Pear VC raised a $432 million fund last year, co-founder Peyman Nozad said it meant the firm had achieved “unique product-market fit.” Its fourth fund was nearly three times the size of its previous $160 million fund. The 11-year-old firm wants to help emerging venture funds follow in Pear's footsteps, and on Wednesday it announced the Pear Emerging Manager in Residence program, which will bring three promising pre-seed and seed venture funds to Pear's offices for collaboration, including sharing deal flow and due diligence. Pear will also invest in these managers' funds, facilitate LP introductions, and write $250,000…
Y Combinator, the famed Silicon Valley startup accelerator, on Wednesday kicked off a two-day “Demo Day” event to showcase what companies from its latest YC batch, S24, are building. As expected, the focus of the day was AI companies, with startups such as Elayne, which is trying to apply the technology to issues like estate planning and probate, Baseline AI, which is working on automating clinical trial data, and Passage, which helps companies clear goods through customs. Sectors that have dominated YC cohorts in the past, such as fintech, healthcare and Web3, were noticeably quiet or completely absent from Wednesday's…
Following the sudden departure of OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, CEO Sam Altman is reportedly poised to receive his first shares of the company as the company transitions away from the longtime non-profit. Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that OpenAI plans to restructure into a for-profit public benefit corporation, similar to rivals such as Anthropic and Elon Musk's xAI. The nonprofit OpenAI board, which currently oversees OpenAI's commercial operations, will give up control of the new for-profit OpenAI organization but will retain a minority stake. The move is aimed at making the company more attractive to outside investors…
AI has already given us some strange demos, and it's only going to get weirder, folks. As the tech world slams headfirst into the uncanny valley, the lines are blurring and everything is getting weirder and weirder. Take Wednesday's Meta Connect keynote, for example: Meta AI and Llama demos were running constantly throughout the event, but one in particular stood out for its strangeness. Mark Zuckerberg invited creator Don Allen Stevenson III onto the stage, where the Meta CEO picked up the phone and carried on a conversation with the AI-generated Stevenson while the real Stevenson stood between him and…
During its developer keynote at the Meta Connect conference on Wednesday, the company pitched its Quest mixed reality platform as the next big app store to developers, saying that with tech giants like Apple and Google facing tougher regulations over their app store monopolies, Meta is working to make it easier for mobile developers to move over to Meta's Horizon OS. “Today we're happy to announce that if you can develop for Android, you can also develop for Meta Horizon OS in your favorite language and favorite IDE. And to make it available to everyone, we've completed the transition to…
OpenAI CTO Mira Murati announced on Wednesday that she is leaving the company to pursue her own research after more than six years at the AI startup. “After much consideration, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” she said in the post. “While there is never an ideal time to step away from a place I care about, I feel the time is now. My six and a half years with the OpenAI team have been a special privilege.” An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment further and referred TechCrunch to Murati's tweet. CEO Sam Altman responded to Murati's…
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan wants to bring back the famed accelerator's Demo Day presentations as an in-person event by the end of the year. During opening remarks at YC's summer cohort demo day on Wednesday, Tan said this week's demo day presentations will “fortunately” be the last to be held entirely online. Tan added that the accelerator's first fall cohort demo day, which will be held on Dec. 4, will include an in-person element. Demo Day is a sort of graduation event for startups that have completed the program, where they can pitch their products to investors and others…
Meta Connect 2024 is a developer-focused event featuring a keynote from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who showed off new hardware and software to support Meta's two big ambitions: AI and the Metaverse. This included everything from new Quest headsets, updates to Meta's Llama AI model, and even a prototype for a new full line of AR glasses. Meta Connect 2024 went live at 10am PST. You can stream it on the Meta Connect site, the Meta Developer Facebook page, or, for a fully immersive experience, stream it in Horizon Worlds from a Meta Quest headset. We’ve rounded up all of the…
At the Meta Connect 2024 conference, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company is developing a “neural interface” that can be used to control its prototype Orion AR glasses. The interface, which appears to be inspired by devices developed by CTRL-Labs, a brain-machine interface company that Meta acquired in 2019, takes the form of a wrist-worn wearable device that allows wearers to use gestures to control apps on paired Orion Glasses while wearing the wristband-like peripheral. “[Orion is] “This is the first device to feature our wrist-based neural interface,” Zuckerberg said.[This is a] Just sending a signal from the brain…
Meta AI is one of the most used AI assistants in the world, with “almost” 500 million monthly active users, Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday at Meta Connect 2024. Zuckerberg said Meta AI is on track to become the most used assistant in the world. “We're at almost 500 million monthly activities, and we're not yet launched in some of the biggest countries,” Zuckerberg said at the event, noting that the service has not yet launched in the EU. Meta has previously said it has more than 400 million monthly users globally. The company's CFO Susan Lee said during the company's…