Author: TechBrunch

Perplexity has acquired Carbon, a small Seattle-based startup that specializes in connecting AI systems to external data sources, the companies announced Wednesday. CEO Aravind Srinivasan said Perplexity will be able to search files and work messages in Notion, Google Docs, Slack and other enterprise applications in early 2025. Carbon specializes in search extension generation (RAG). RAGs allow large language models to access information from external databases before generating answers. By bringing Carbon's technology and staff on board, Perplexity could open the door to launching an enterprise search product. These tools connect generative AI to corporate databases, allowing employees to quickly…

After slowing in 2022, the global app economy continued to recover in 2024, at least in terms of consumer spending. In 2024, global consumer spending on mobile apps and games across the App Store and Google Play reached $127 billion, an increase of 15.7% year over year. But new data from app intelligence firm Appfigures says those increases were driven by Apple's App Store as spending on Google Play declined. While spending was rising, there were other worrying signs regarding the overall health of the app ecosystem. This year, global app downloads decreased by 2.3% compared to 2023, reaching nearly…

Alphabet's Wing announced Wednesday it is expanding its partnership with DoorDash to offer drone delivery to customers in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Customers in the area will now be able to order food from 50 merchants located at Stonebriar Center in Frisco and Hulen Mall in Fort Worth. Wing says its drones can “deliver goods and meals to your doorstep in as little as 15 minutes.” The drone can travel up to a customer's residence at speeds of 100 miles per hour and a cruising altitude of about 150 feet. When customers with eligible addresses in Dallas-Fort Worth place an…

Microsoft has bought more than twice as many Nvidia Hopper chips this year as its biggest rival. The tech giant bought 485,000 Nvidia Hopper chips this year, according to a report in the Financial Times, citing data from technology consultancy Omdia. For comparison, Meta bought 224,000 of the same flagship Nvidia chips this year. Microsoft's 2024 chip purchases were more than triple the number of Nvidia chips it purchased in 2023. Microsoft is also developing its own custom AI chip called Maia, which it announced at the Ignite conference in late 2023. This year, the company got serious about AI.…

ChatGPT is coming to your phone. No, it's not a smartphone, it's a landline. Call 1-800-242-8478 (1-800-CHATGPT) and OpenAI's AI-powered assistant will respond starting Wednesday afternoon. “[Our mission at] OpenAI is about making artificial general intelligence beneficial to all humanity, and part of that is making artificial general intelligence accessible to as many people as possible,” said Kevin, OpenAI Chief Product Officer. Weil said on a livestream. “Today, we're taking the next step and bringing ChatGPT to your phone.” This experience is similar to Advanced Voice Mode, OpenAI's real-time conversation feature for ChatGPT, except for multimodality. ChatGPT can respond to…

Hello everyone, welcome to TechCrunch's regular AI newsletter. If you'd like to have this sent to your inbox every Wednesday, hit the link and sign up here. Last week, OpenAI launched Advanced Voice Mode with Vision, which feeds real-time video into ChatGPT, allowing chatbots to “see” beyond the limitations of the app layer. The premise is that by adding more context awareness to ChatGPT, bots can respond in a more natural and intuitive way. But the first time I tried it, it lied to me. “That couch looks comfy!” ChatGPT said when I held up my phone and asked the…

Microsoft-owned GitHub on Wednesday announced a free version of its popular code completion/AI pair programming tool Copilot. The tool now also ships with Microsoft's popular VS Code editor by default. Previously, most developers had to pay a monthly fee starting at $10 per month, and free access was only available to verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers. GitHub also announced that it now has 150 million developers on its platform, up from 100 million in early 2023. “My first project [at GitHub] We had free private repositories in 2018, and we launched that very early in 2019,” GitHub CEO…

Odyssey, a startup founded by self-driving pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, develops AI-powered tools that can turn text and images into 3D renderings. The tool, called Explorer, is similar in some ways to the so-called world model recently demonstrated by DeepMind, World Labs, and Israeli startup Decart. If you give it a caption like “Lush Japanese Garden,” Explorer can generate an interactive real-time scene. Output from Odyssey's Explorer tool. Image credit: Odyssey Odyssey claims its tools are “specifically tailored” to create photorealistic scenes. This is largely a result of the startup's technological approach. The AI-powered Explorer was trained on…

Over the past decade, the Sustainable Ocean Alliance has grown from a dorm room operation to a thousands-strong global network of experts, investors, and “ecopreneurs.” They all believe the best way to save our ailing oceans is to embrace innovation. Founder Daniela Fernandes has been at the helm of the ship, and SOA is ready to make new waves. Since Fernandez started SOA in 2014, SOA's approach to addressing the climate crisis has embraced the emerging startup economy. “Before us, no one in this space was even considering entrepreneurship and innovation as part of the solution,” she said in an…

OpenAI seems to be in the holiday spirit. ChatGPT's series of reveals is called “12 Days of OpenAI,” and will be streamed live weekdays at 10 a.m. Pacific time through December 23. So far, we've seen the launch of ChatGPT Pro, OpenAI's $200/month subscription plan. The complete version of that “reasoning” o1 model. Text-to-video generator Sora is now available to the public. Deploying Canvas. ChatGPT for Apple Intelligence. ChatGPT's real-time video capabilities. You can find out how to watch the event below. OpenAI will livestream the event on its YouTube channel. We'll be live blogging everything announced so you can…