Author: TechBrunch
Parents understand the challenge of keeping young children engaged in online learning. Nurture is a new app designed for kids ages 4 to 7 with interactive content and games to keep them engaged. The company's mission is to equip kids with important life skills, including social skills, basic financial understanding, mindfulness, fitness and nutrition, through story-based adventures that actively engage kids. Nurture on Wednesday announced a $2.8 million pre-seed round led by Golden Gate Ventures that will be used to hire preschool content creators to help develop content for the platform. Nurture's first flagship title is called “Doki's Delivery” and…
California Governor Gavin Newsom said Tuesday that there are 38 bills being introduced that would enact artificial intelligence legislation, but one stands out as being particularly big: SB 1047, a California bill that aims to prevent AI systems from causing catastrophe. For the first time, the governor has revealed what he thinks about the controversial bill. In short, he sees problems with SB 1047. Newsom said he's interested in an AI bill that solves today's problems without disrupting California's burgeoning AI industry. That doesn't bode well for the future of SB 1047, which seeks to protect against disasters by holding…
California Governor Gavin Newsom on Tuesday signed some of the toughest laws in US history regulating the field of artificial intelligence, with three bills aimed at cracking down on AI deepfakes that could influence elections, and two more banning Hollywood studios from creating AI clones of actors' bodies and voices without their consent. “California is home to many of the world's leading AI companies and is committed to leveraging these transformative technologies to solve pressing challenges while studying the risks they pose,” Newsom's office said in a press release on Tuesday. One of California's new laws, AB 2655, requires major…
Investment giant BlackRock is teaming up with Microsoft and Abu Dhabi-backed investment firm MGX to launch a massive $30 billion AI-focused investment fund, the FT reported today. The fund, one of Wall Street's largest, will focus on financing the build-out of data centers and the energy infrastructure that supports AI, according to the publication, with chip giant Nvidia also reportedly providing expertise on the energy needs of AI technology, which is expected to face significant capacity constraints in the coming years. BlackRock is launching the fund in collaboration with Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), which BlackRock agreed to acquire for $12.5…
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…