Author: TechBrunch
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…
Over the past few months, tech executives like Elon Musk have been touting the performance of their AI models in one particular benchmark: the chatbot arena. Chatbot Arena, run by a non-profit organization called LMSYS, has become a big focus for the industry: posts about model leaderboard updates are viewed and reshared hundreds of times on Reddit and X, and the official LMSYS X account has over 54,000 followers. The organization's website has seen millions of visitors in the last year alone. Still, the question remains as to whether Chatbot Arena can tell us how “good” these models actually are.…
Google announced on Thursday that it is expanding its generative AI-powered virtual try-on tool to include dresses, allowing users to virtually try on thousands of dresses from hundreds of brands, including Boden, Marge, Sandro, Simkhai and Staud. The company says that dresses are one of the most searched apparel categories in its tool, but as Google explained in a blog post today, dresses are more detailed and complex than other clothing items, making them difficult to use with current virality technology. To provide more context, Google Shopping last year released a tool that uses proprietary diffusion technology to create high-quality,…
Six years ago, many e-commerce and SaaS companies were able to avoid paying sales tax to states where they had customers but no brick-and-mortar stores. But as online shopping has grown, states have found themselves losing tax revenue. The era of free riding for online retailers came to an end in 2018 when the state of South Dakota sued Wayfair over sales tax collection. The Supreme Court ultimately sided with South Dakota. Currently, online stores and SaaS companies must collect sales tax from customers wherever necessary, but this is no easy task as tax laws vary widely by city, county,…