Author: TechBrunch

Ahead of the NFL and college football (NCAAF) seasons, Apple has announced updates to its sports-specific apps, including live activity from every league, a new “Dynamic Drive Tracker” that visualizes the ball's position on the field, and support for live football gameplay. Launched in February, Apple Sports is a free iOS app for sports fans that provides all the latest updates, scores, and stats for 15 of the most popular leagues, including NCAA Basketball, MLS, MLB, NBA, WNBA, NHL, and the Premier League. Apple recently added support for the NFL and NCAAF ahead of the start of their seasons. The…

A startup with a product that competes with GitHub Copilot and other AI-powered coding assistants has achieved unicorn status. Codeium announced Thursday that it had closed a $150 million Series C funding round led by General Catalyst, valuing the company at $1.25 billion. Existing investors Kleiner Perkins and Greenoaks Capital also participated in the round, bringing the company's total funding to nearly $250 million just three years after founding. Codeium co-founder and CEO Varun Mohan told TechCrunch that the company has yet to tap the $65 million Series B tranche it raised in January, when the company was valued at…

Will AI take my job one day? I hope that never happens. But in the meantime, I can do something ChatGPT can't: spell the word “strawberry.” once again, Some posts have gone viral on social media These studies reveal that high-performance AI text generators don’t know how to count—failing, for example, to count how many times the letter ‘r’ appears in the word ‘strawberry.’ But what we often don’t realize about the large-scale language models (LLMs) that power products like Claude and ChatGPT is that they think differently from us. In both the diffusion model and the LLM, the generative…

Days after the Port of Seattle announced a “possible” cyberattack on its systems, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport remains largely offline, causing confusion among travelers and a warning against neglecting security. Ask me why I know. The recent hacking outage, fortunately, did not result in any planes crashing or air traffic controllers double-booking runways. These federally run resources are fairly tightly controlled. Rather than being a catastrophe, the situation we find ourselves in now is a lesson in why we have rules about where we dump our eggs, even for the foreseeable future, as authorities have not provided a timeline for recovery.…

One of the men who successfully sued the National Association of Realtors (NAR) for changes to real estate commissions has become a co-founder of a new real estate startup. It all started when Josh Sitzer and his wife put their Kansas City home on the market in 2017. The couple was unhappy with the fact that they had to pay a 3 percent commission to a buyer's agent. “Before the lawsuit, the anti-competitive structure of the industry effectively forced me, as a seller, to pay a buyer's agent 3% of the sale price of my home in order to successfully…

Earlier this month, Google rolled out a new feature on its Pixel 9 series of phones that lets users add the photographer to a group photo by swapping someone out and taking a separate photo, and a new social network launched by a pair of Oxford University PhDs is developing an app that will let you add friends to photos in a more meme-able and fun way. Vybe is a mobile app that lets you upload a selfie and place your face on any photo or existing template. It also lets you swap your face with your friend's in a…

Intel has found IBM Cloud as its first cloud customer for its Gaudi 3 AI accelerator chip. IBM and Intel announced Thursday that IBM Cloud will begin offering Gaudi 3 to customers early next year. The chip's accelerators will be available in both hybrid and on-premise environments, and IBM said it plans to enable support for Gaudi 3 within its Watsonx AI and data platform. “Unleashing the full potential of AI requires an open, collaborative ecosystem that gives customers choice and accessible solutions,” Justin Hotard, general manager of Intel's Data Center and AI division, said in a statement. “By integrating…

Google said it had evidence that Russian government hackers were using exploits that were “identical or very similar” to those previously created by spyware manufacturers Intelexa and NSO Group. Google said in a blog post on Thursday that while it was unclear how the Russian government obtained the vulnerability, it was an example of how vulnerabilities developed by spyware manufacturers could fall into the hands of “dangerous threat actors.” In this case, Google says the threat comes from APT29, a highly capable hacking group widely believed to be affiliated with Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), known for its long-running and…

Butterflies AI, a new social network where humans and AI can interact with each other, is launching a new Clone feature that lets users transform into AI characters. This latest addition builds on a feature that was publicly released in June, allowing users to create an AI persona called “Butterfly” that can automatically create posts on the social network that other AIs and humans can interact with. This new feature allows users to take a selfie and create themselves as a butterfly with an unfolding backstory. The idea behind the feature is to give users the ability to reimagine themselves…

Uber is making a strategic investment in Wayve as an extension of the UK-based startup's previously announced $1.05 billion Series C round. The partnership will see the two companies work with automakers to integrate Wayve's AI into future consumer vehicles that will operate on the ride-hailing giant's platform. The partnership comes a week after Uber announced that Cruise's robotaxis will join the Uber app in 2025. It's the latest in a series of self-driving tech partnerships that Uber has secured over the past few years. Details of Uber's partnership with Wave are scarce, but the startup has generated a lot…