Author: TechBrunch
Hello everyone and welcome to TechCrunch's regular AI newsletter. If you'd like to receive this newsletter in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. It's been just a few days since OpenAI unveiled its latest flagship generative model, o1, to the world. Marketed as an “inference” model, o1 essentially takes time to “think” about a question before answering it, breaking down the problem and finding its own answer. There's a lot that o1 doesn't do well, and OpenAI itself acknowledges this. But in some tasks, like physics and math, o1 is better than OpenAI's previous best-performing model, GPT-4o, despite not…
Last week, the FBI seized control of a botnet consisting of hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices, including cameras, video recorders, storage devices and routers, that was run by a Chinese government hacking group, FBI Director Christopher Wray and US government agencies revealed on Wednesday. The hacker group, named Flux Typhoon, “targeted critical infrastructure across the U.S. and abroad, from businesses and media organizations to universities and government agencies,” Wray said at the Aspen Cyber Summit, a cybersecurity conference, on Wednesday. “But working with our partners, we conducted a court-authorized operation and seized the botnet's infrastructure,” Wray said, explaining that…
Luminate's wearable device, which helps preserve hair during chemotherapy, is still undergoing the testing necessary for commercial release, but the startup is already looking toward its next goal: bringing cancer treatment to the home. A new $15 million funding round should help it get started on making that goal a reality. This startup is one of the most unusual yet promising we've covered in 2021. Its pitch sounds a bit like sci-fi: a helmet called “Lily” that people undergoing chemotherapy wear to prevent hair loss, a common side effect of the treatment. It sounds like magic, but it's actually quite…
At its Made on YouTube event on Wednesday, the company announced a new dedicated space for creators to interact with their fans and viewers. Called “Community,” the space is like a Discord server built into a creator's channel. With Community, YouTube hopes creators won't need to use other platforms like Discord or Reddit to interact with their viewers. A Community is a space where viewers can post and interact with other fans directly within a creator's channel. Previously, viewers could only leave comments on a creator's videos. Now, viewers can share their own content in a creator's Community and interact…
Edera, a startup looking to simplify and improve securing Kubernetes containers and AI workloads by offering a new hypervisor, today announced it has raised $5 million in seed funding led by 645 Ventures and Eniac Ventures. Kubernetes is a decade old, but Edera founders Ariadne Conill (distinguished engineer), Emily Long (CEO), and Alex Zenla (CTO) argue that securing multi-tenant workloads remains an unsolved problem. Long previously served as COO at Chainguard and Anchore, and has extensive operational and cultural experience, while Conil is a developer at security-focused Linux distribution Wolfi and a maintainer of Alpine Linux. Conil worked at Chainguard…
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The centerpiece of YouTube's Made On event on Wednesday morning was, you guessed it, artificial intelligence: The company announced that it would be integrating Google DeepMind's AI video generation model, Veo, into YouTube Shorts to let creators generate high-quality backgrounds and six-second clips. Veo was announced at Google's I/O 2024 developer conference as a state-of-the-art video generation model. The technology competes directly with OpenAI's Sora and other competing video generation models such as Pika, Runway, and Irreverent Labs. It can create a variety of cinematic-style 1080p video clips. Veo in Shorts is set to be a major upgrade to YouTube's…
During its Made On YouTube event on Wednesday, the company announced that creators can now brainstorm video ideas with the help of AI within YouTube Studio. YouTube will also soon let creators create AI-generated thumbnails and quickly reply to users with new AI-assisted comments. The company beta-tested the ability for creators to brainstorm video ideas with the help of AI in May, before officially rolling the feature out to all users. To use the feature, creators enter a prompt that helps them brainstorm ideas around a specific topic. Ebi Atawodi, director of product management for YouTube Studio, told TechCrunch that…
When mortgage rates soared in 2022, the real estate market and many real estate-focused startups took a big hit, prompting industry veteran Clelia Warburg Peters to leave her role as venture partner at Bain Capital Ventures to start her own real estate tech startup. Unlike many other specialist real estate tech funds, Peters invests in technologies that aim to transform the industry, rather than simply servicing existing players. “Anything that's a purely incremental improvement is a really hard sell to the real estate industry,” Peters told TechCrunch. “The real estate industry is a bad customer for technology. I think that's…
Runway, a startup that develops AI video tools, including generative video models, has partnered with Lionsgate, makers of the “John Wick” and “Twilight” series, to train custom video models on Lionsgate's movie catalog. The models will be accessible to the studio's “filmmakers, directors and other creative talent” to “augment their work,” Lionsgate vice chairman Michael Burns said in a statement. Runway is also looking into licensing its models as templates for individual creators to build and train their own custom models. The company is the first generative AI startup to publicly partner with a major Hollywood studio. The Wall Street…