Author: TechBrunch

DeepRoute.ai, a Shenzhen-based self-driving technology startup, has raised $100 million from an unidentified Chinese automaker. Reuters reports that the company aims to install its self-driving system in as many vehicles as possible in China before Tesla's widespread adoption next year. China lifted some restrictions on Tesla cars in April, clearing the way for the automaker to launch an advanced driver assistance system called Full Self-Driving (FSD) in China. Tesla announced in September that it plans to roll out FSD in China and Europe in the first quarter of 2025. Alibaba-backed Deeproot is now racing to put its ADAS in about…

Large-scale language models have already proven to be transformative for robotics. Researchers and companies alike are using platforms to power robot learning, but two roboticists from the University of California, Berkeley and ETH Zurich are leveraging generative AI to make inexpensive robotic arms functional. I tried to make it happen. https://twitter.com/JannikGrothusen/status/1852790503823057073 Jannik Grothusen and Kasper Janssen trained a $120 robotic arm to clean up spills. Using GPT-4o, the robot was programmed in four days to design a visual language model for human-robot interaction (HRI). The motion was trained using approximately 100 demos. If you want a robot to help you…

The city of Columbus, the capital of Ohio, confirmed that hackers stole the personal data of 500,000 residents in a ransomware attack in July. The City of Columbus said in a filing with the Maine Attorney General that a “foreign cyberattacker” compromised the city's network and stole residents' names, dates of birth, addresses, identification documents, social security numbers, and bank accounts. admitted to having accessed information such as details of Ohio's most populous city, home to about 900,000 people, has not confirmed the exact number of casualties, but said about 500,000 people were affected. The regulatory filing comes after the…

One lesson that Silicon Valley's wild venture funding environment of the past few years has clearly taught us is that higher valuations aren't necessarily better. “Over the last three years, I think we've all experienced the negative effects of high valuations,” Hustle Fund co-founder Elizabeth Yin said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt last week. he said. When a venture capital bull market arrives and startups can easily raise large sums of money before launching an actual, provable business, they are exposing themselves to tough times. That's because “the hurdles for the next round will be even higher,” she says. As a…

Last week, OpenAI released ChatGPT Search, its long-awaited search product to take on Google. The industry has been preparing for this moment for months, pushing Google to introduce AI-generated answers into its core product earlier this year, creating some embarrassing hallucinations in the process. This incident led many to believe that OpenAI's search engine would indeed become a “Google killer.” But after using ChatGPT Search as my default search engine for about a day (you can also use OpenAI's extensions), I quickly switched back to Google. OpenAI's search product has been impressive in some ways, offering a glimpse of what…

Can the US meaningfully regulate AI? It's not at all clear yet. While policymakers have made progress in recent months, they have also experienced setbacks, illustrating the difficult nature of laws that impose guardrails on technology. In March, Tennessee became the first state to protect voice actors from unauthorized AI cloning. This summer, Colorado adopted a phased, risk-based approach to AI policy. And in September, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed dozens of AI-related safety bills, some of which require companies to disclose details of their AI training. However, the United States does not yet have a federal AI policy comparable…

Meta's social network Threads now has 275 million monthly active users (MAUs), the company announced on Sunday. “Yesterday, @Threads surpassed 275 million monthly active users. We are deeply grateful to everyone who has helped us get this far. There is still much work to do and more to fix. There's a lot, but there's something exciting about this place,” said Adam Mosseri, Meta executive who leads Threads and Instagram. Launched in July 2023 with the aim of capitalizing on millions of users leaving X after Elon Musk acquired the platform, Threads quickly gained users and is now the largest It…

X rolls out an update to its controversial blocking feature, allowing others to see your public posts even if you've blocked them. People protested the change, claiming they didn't want blocked users to see their posts for security reasons. Blocked users can't follow, engage with, or send direct messages to the blocked user. An older version of X's support page states that blocked users cannot see the user's following or follower list. The company has now updated the page to remove the mention and users can now see the following and follower lists of the people who blocked them. The…

Gabor Cselle, former CEO and co-founder of X challenger Pebble, has joined OpenAI to work on a secret project. According to LinkedIn, Cselle has been employed by OpenAI since October and announced the news in a post on X yesterday. “I'll share what I'm working on in due course,” he wrote. “I've already learned a lot.” Cselle is a repeat founder who sold his first company, Y Combinator-based mobile email startup reMail, to Google. His second company, native advertising startup Namo Media, he sold to Twitter before Elon Musk acquired the social network and rebranded it as X. Nearly a…

Family offices invest large amounts of capital in startups every year. According to a recent report from PwC, 27% of all startup deals in the first half of 2023 were from deals involving family office investors. Despite their prevalence in startup transactions, family offices are less publicized and less easy to find than VCs, making them a potentially tricky investor base for founders. be. Multiple family office investors during a TechCrunch Disrupt panel said the easiest way to approach investors like them is to look for family offices that align with what the startup is trying to build. Bruce Lee,…