Author: TechBrunch
Discord, one of the world's largest group chat apps, announced on Tuesday that voice and video calls within the platform will now be end-to-end encrypted (E2EE), meaning that not even Discord can see what users are talking about during a conversation. Over the past decade, end-to-end encrypted chat has gone from being a rare exception (think Skype in the mid-2000s) to the technology used in the world's most popular chat apps, including iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, and Facebook Messenger. Discord began life as a group chat platform for gamers, with a focus on voice calling for users playing online games together,…
Mistral AI has launched a new free plan to allow developers to tweak and build test apps with its AI models, it announced in a blog post on Tuesday. The company also significantly lowered the price for developers to access its AI models through API endpoints and added image processing capabilities to its free consumer AI chatbot, Le Chat. Providing more for less is a growing trend in the world of AI model providers, and the Paris-based startup, recently valued at $6 billion, announced several updates on Tuesday to attract developers. Advanced LLMs are becoming a commodity in the developer…
Ursa Major, a startup that makes 3D printed rocket motors, announced today that it has been awarded a $12.5 million contract from the Defense Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) and the U.S. Navy to develop a new solid-fuel rocket engine. The company has raised $274 million to date, according to PitchBook, and will be matching the funding, bringing its total allocated to the effort to $25 million. The $12.5 million investment also marks the first funding publicly announced by the OSC, which has been mired in congressional red tape since its inception in 2022. The agency aims to attract more…
Do you remember what life was like before the cloud? What was life like before the AI revolution? Prukalpa Sankar, co-founder and CEO of Atlan, sat down with the team at Found to discuss the evolution of data management. She knows firsthand how things have changed: She and her co-founders started SocialCops and helped build India's national data platform and the United Nations. “We were a data team for clients, trying to solve these big world problems,” she said, citing healthcare and education as examples. But then something happened that led Sankar to launch the product that would eventually become…
DeepComposer, AWS' strange AI-powered keyboard experiment, has been discontinued. The company announced in a blog post today that it is ending its fifth year of offering DeepComposer, a physical MIDI piano and AWS service that lets users compose songs with the help of generative AI. “After careful consideration, we have decided to end support for AWS DeepComposer,” wrote Kanchan Jagannathan, program manager for AWS AI devices. “If you have data stored in the AWS DeepComposer console, you can continue to use AWS DeepComposer as usual until September 17, 2025, when support for the service ends.” Announced in 2019 at AWS'…
Snapchat's parent company Snap is expanding its suite of AI tools for creators. At this year's Snap Partner Summit in Santa Monica, Calif., Snap announced Easy Lens, a new feature that turns plain English descriptions into Snap-branded Lenses – augmented reality (AR) objects, 3D effects, characters and transformations for photos and videos. Available through Snap's developer platform, Lens Studio, Easy Lens uses a generative AI model to parse what's written and automatically builds a Lens using Lens Studio components. Among other features in Lens Studio, Snap is rolling out Body Morph, a generative tool for creating 3D characters, costumes and…
At its annual Snap Partner Summit on Tuesday, the maker of Snapchat unveiled new tools for creators aimed at bringing its app closer to rivals like TikTok and Instagram. The company also said it would make it easier for creators to connect with brands for sponsorship deals and partnerships. In an effort to catch up with its rivals, Snapchat creators can now reply to users' comments on their videos with video to further engage with their audience. Video replies to comments have been available on TikTok and Instagram for some time and are often used to keep conversations going in…
The makers of Snapchat announced a series of new AI features coming to the app at its annual Snap Partner Summit on Tuesday, most notably that the app's My AI chatbot has been updated to respond to more complex snaps and behave more similarly to Google Lens. For example, you can take a photo of a foreign menu and send it to My AI to have it translated into English, or you can take a photo of a plant and send it to the chatbot to find out its name. You can also take a photo of a parking sign…
Snapchat announced at its annual Snap Partner Summit on Tuesday that it's introducing a new AI video generation tool for creators that will allow select creators to generate AI videos from text prompts, and soon from image prompts as well. Snap said the tool is available in beta on the web to some creators starting today, and that there are currently no plans to open Snap AI Video to everyone outside of creators. The company didn't reveal any details about the AI video generation tool during the keynote, but a company spokesperson told TechCrunch in an email that the tool…
Snapchat is rolling out a stripped-down version of the app to some users as part of a test to make the disappearing photo app easier to use, the company announced at the Snap Partner Summit on Tuesday. “Simple Snapchat” declutters the app's home screen by removing the Snap Map and Stories tabs and consolidates the navigation bar into three icons: Chat on the left, Camera in the middle, and Spotlight, Snapchat's TikTok rival, on the right. Stories and Snap Map won't disappear completely from Simple Snapchat, but will be hidden away in other parts of the app. Stories will appear…