Author: TechBrunch

Rajeev Behera's new all-in-one HR startup, Every, is either brilliant or crazy. This is surprising, as the market for multi-module HR software covering payroll, onboarding and expense management for small businesses is already saturated. Competitors include unicorn startups Gusto, Rippling and Deel, established companies like Mercury and Brex that are strong in one area and expanding into others, and a host of smaller startups like Finally, Paylocity and AccountsIQ. Every's investors clearly think Behera's unique approach to his idea is great: Every has raised $22.5 million in Series A funding led by Alex Bard of Redpoint Ventures, with participation from…

Instagram Threads, a competitor to Meta X, is making it easier for users to access their Fediverse settings from a single URL, meaning it's now easier for people who want to request that others turn on the Fediverse sharing option on their accounts. Now, instead of posting a request to turn on sharing linked to some description, you can link to a URL that will pop up an option to enable the threads feature with a single click. The new option was demonstrated and announced live on Thursday at FediForum, an online “unconference” for people developing and learning about the…

OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has announced its next major product release: a generative AI model codenamed Strawberry, but officially called OpenAI o1. To be more precise, o1 is actually a family of models. There are two available now via ChatGPT and OpenAI's API: o1-preview and a smaller, cheaper model, o1 mini. You must be a ChatGPT Plus or Team subscriber to select them in ChatGPT. Enterprise and Edu users will have access early next week. It's important to note that the o1 chatbot has fairly basic capabilities at the moment: unlike ChatGPT, o1 can't browse the web or analyze…

While vinyl records are back in style and some are rebuilding their CD collections in hopes of becoming popular again, the reality is that most people are using streaming services to listen to music — in fact, according to Statista, as of 2022, just two services, Spotify and Apple Music, account for roughly 45% of the industry's market share. Today, we have access to a plethora of streaming services, but despite a fair amount of competition, music streaming startup Tune.FM is hoping its differentiated approach will help it gain a loyal following. Unlike major streaming services, Tune.FM is a decentralized…

Google announced on Thursday that it's rolling out new Wallet updates for travelers and commuters, most notably that Google Wallet will soon begin beta testing the ability to create a digital ID from your U.S. passport, which can then be used at certain TSA checkpoints when traveling within the country. Google says it's working with partners to make digital IDs accepted in more situations, including car rentals, account recovery, and identity verification, in addition to TSA checkpoints. You can create an ID Pass by selecting the “Create an ID Pass with your US Passport” option in the Google Wallet app.…

The White House announced that several major AI vendors, including OpenAI and Microsoft, have committed to taking steps to combat non-consensual deepfakes and child sexual abuse material. Adobe, Cohere, Microsoft, OpenAI, and data provider Common Crawl said they will “responsibly” source the datasets they create and use to train AI and protect against image-based sexual abuse. These organizations, except for Common Crawl, also said they will build “feedback loops” and strategies into their development process to protect AI from generating sexual abuse imagery. Adobe, Microsoft, and OpenAI (but not Cohere) also said they will commit to removing nude images from…

If you ask ChatGPT to help you make a homemade fertilizer bomb similar to the one used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the chatbot will refuse. “We can't help you with that,” Chat GPT told me during a test on Tuesday. “It goes against our safety guidelines and ethical responsibility to teach people how to make something as dangerous or illegal as a fertilizer bomb.” However, one artist and hacker found a way to trick ChatGPT into ignoring its own guidelines and ethical responsibilities, creating instructions for creating a powerful explosive. The hacker, who goes by the name Amadon,…

In an effort to prevent the spread of suicide and self-harm content online, the nonprofit Mental Health Coalition (MHC) today announced Thrive, a new program aimed at encouraging people to share “signals” of potentially harmful content on online platforms. Thrive, whose founding members include Meta, Snap, and TikTok, offers a way for platforms to share hashes — essentially unique fingerprints — of content that depicts suicide or self-harm, or that depicts or encourages viral challenges. The hashes are associated only with the content and do not contain identifying information about accounts or individuals, MHC said. Meta provided the technology infrastructure,…

The UK government has introduced new legislation to Parliament proposing new legal protections for digital assets such as cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and carbon credits. The bill comes as the crypto industry faces a variety of regulatory headwinds. In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has ruled that certain crypto assets are securities, and earlier this year the SEC approved the first U.S.-listed exchange-traded fund (ETF) tracking Bitcoin. Meanwhile, the European Union (EU) is also introducing new legislation to regulate cryptocurrencies and make transactions easier to track. The UK is also working on similar regulation, but its…

Elon Musk's social network X is considering a new feature that would let users block direct messages from other users, but this would be separate from its account blocking feature. Currently, when you block an account, they can't interact with you in public posts or direct messages (DMs). With this new feature, the company will have two blocking features: one for personal messages and one for public posts. Yesterday, several app researchers published screenshots showing what DM blocking would look like, with Musk citing one of these posts saying, “DMs will be separate from public posts, so if you want…