Author: TechBrunch
Advances in generative AI tools have created a new problem on the internet: the proliferation of synthetic nude images that resemble real people, and Microsoft took a big step Thursday by giving victims of revenge porn a tool to stop their Bing search engine from returning such images. Microsoft announced a partnership with StopNCII, an organization that empowers victims of revenge porn to create digital fingerprints of these explicit images (whether real or fake) on their devices. StopNCII partners then use those digital fingerprints, or what are technically called “hashes,” to remove the images from their platforms. Microsoft's Bing joins…
Vay, the startup that introduced remote car-sharing in Berlin and Las Vegas, is looking to expand into commercial and business-to-business services, boosted by recent deals with French carmaker Peugeot and Belgium-based Poppy. Vay isn't a traditional ride-hailing or car-sharing startup, nor does it operate a robotaxi service, but customers in Las Vegas or Berlin can simply open the Vay app to hail a car, which will arrive without a human at the wheel. The Berlin-based startup, which was founded in 2019 and has raised about $110 million to date, has developed remote-driving technology that allows an employee sitting in an…
For more than 20 years, Jay Chandarana has relied on commercial banks to meet the day-to-day working capital needs of his family business, Dhaval Agri, a sesame seed exporter. The arrangement has worked in principle: the company has grown to account for 13 percent of the country's total exports, making it the largest sesame seed exporter in the market. But it remains a mid-sized business, with revenues of just $83 million last year, despite sending seeds to customers in 40 countries. And when Chandarana was thinking about how to expand his business, he was faced with a lack of access…
Google Photos' AI-powered search feature “Ask Photos,” first announced at the Google I/O developer conference in May, will be available to users starting Thursday. The feature, which lets users ask the AI to search photos using more complex queries, will be available to a select number of customers in the U.S. as “early access” before being expanded to a wider user base. Powered by Google's Gemini AI model, Ask Photos lets users search for photos using natural language queries that leverage an AI understanding of a photo's content and other metadata. While Google Photos users could already search for specific…
Copper is essential for the energy transition away from fossil fuels. The metal is an excellent conductor of electricity and is used in everything from electric cars to wind turbines. But the International Energy Agency predicts that copper supply will fall 20% short of demand in a decade. One stealthy startup thinks it can help close the gap by helping miners extract more copper from their mines. To do so, Colorado-based Endris is turning to microbes. Currently, most copper recovery is done through hydrometallurgy, typically by pouring acid onto piles of rock to strip some of the copper away. Endris…
The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the first months of 2024. Smaller-sized startups have also seen a fair amount of cuts, and in some cases, have shut down operations altogether. By tracking these layoffs, we’re able to understand the impact on innovation across companies large and small. We’re also able to see the potential impact of businesses…
Programming is inherently a creative endeavor, but in this age of left-shifting, much of a developer's day is filled with what Robert Brennan, co-founder and CEO of All Hands AI, calls “labor-oriented tasks,” like writing unit tests, managing dependencies, keeping documentation up to date, etc. Meanwhile, AI may not be creative, but it's pretty good at these very mundane tasks. All Hands AI, which announced a $5 million seed round of funding led by Menlo Ventures on Thursday, aims to build model-agnostic, open-source AI agents that will handle much of that work, freeing up developers to spend more time doing…
Software documentation – resources that explain how the software works and how to use it – has evolved dramatically over the past few decades. Once primarily in PDF or static plain text format, documentation today is much more interactive and user-friendly than ever before. But building them still takes time, something developers and entrepreneurs Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee say they've personally struggled with. “In the 2010s, companies like Stripe, Hashicorp, and Twilio raised the bar for developer content,” Wang said. “They proved that a truly great developer experience in content wasn't just a commodity, it was a competitive advantage.…
Europe doesn't have many large language model (LLM) makers, but one of the few AI companies out there, Germany's Aleph Alpha, appears to be preparing to exit the race. Bloomberg interviewed CEO Jonas Andrulis about the company's pivot to a broader generative AI support business. The idea behind the product, PhariaAI, announced last week, is to help other companies and the public sector use AI tools, whether or not they've developed the underlying technology themselves. “The world has changed,” Andrewlis told Bloomberg. “Just getting a European law master's degree is not enough of a business model. You can't justify the…
Every automaker wants to build and sell what are called software-defined vehicles, and Rivian may have done just that, but getting there wasn't easy. Just ask Wassym Bensaid, Rivian's head of software. Rivian modified 600 parts of its flagship R1S SUV and R1T pickup truck models to lower production costs and improve the EVs' performance. The company left the exterior largely untouched, instead revamping the underside, including the electrical architecture, a redesigned software user interface that offers detailed, illustrated graphics using Unreal Engine, and deeper integration with Apple and Google. Bensaid, who joined the EV maker in 2019, led the…