Author: TechBrunch
French startup Hyperline aims to build the next generation of Chargebee. Over the past two years, the startup has been building a new billing platform that can be used for recurring subscriptions, one-time purchases, usage-based billing, and more. Hyperline raised its first funding round of 4 million euros ($4.1 million at current exchange rates) from Index Ventures in 2023. Now, Index Ventures is doubling down on this investment, investing an additional $10 million in the startup. Billing may seem like a simple problem, but it becomes a pain when you start scaling. “What takes time when it comes to billing…
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears to have used YouTube's battle to remove pirated content to defend his company's use of a dataset containing copyrighted e-books. , newly released excerpts from an affidavit filed late last year. The deposition is part of a complaint filed with the court by plaintiffs' lawyers related to the AI copyright case Kadri v. Mehta. This is one of many similar cases in the U.S. court system pitting AI companies against authors and other intellectual property holders. In most cases, the AI companies that are defendants in these lawsuits claim that training on copyrighted content is…
Chinese companies continue to release AI models that rival the capabilities of systems developed by OpenAI and other US-based AI companies. This week, MiniMax, a startup backed by Alibaba and Tencent, raised about $850 million in venture capital at a valuation of more than $2.5 billion and has launched MiniMax-Text-01, MiniMax-VL-01, and debuted three new models of T2A. -01-HD. MiniMax-Text-01 is a text-only model, while MiniMax-VL-01 can understand both images and text. The T2A-01-HD, on the other hand, produces audio, especially audio. With a size of 456 billion parameters, MiniMax-Text-01 outperforms models such as Google's recently announced Gemini 2.0 Flash…
Y Combinator alumnus Stoke Space has raised $260 million in Series C, bringing its total funding to $480 million. This follows $100 million raised in October 2023 and $75 million raised in December 2021. The company was founded in 2019 by Blue Origin veteran Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman, who started his career as an intern at SpaceX. Stoke participated in the 2021 Winter YC Cohort. The space startup has an ambitious goal of building the first fully reusable rocket – both the booster and the second stage. Last month, the company released a video showing a successful test of…
On Tuesday, the United Nations Security Council held a meeting to discuss the dangers of commercial spyware. This is the first time this type of software (also known as government spyware or mercenary spyware) has been discussed by the Security Council. According to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, the purpose of the conference was to “address the impact of the proliferation and misuse of commercial spyware on the maintenance of international peace and security.” The United States and 15 other countries called for the conference. Although the meeting was largely informal and did not result in concrete proposals,…
TikTok has warned of a looming shutdown in just six days, as the Supreme Court is currently weighing the law that would ban the app. So we thought it’s time to take a look at other platforms that may be able to fill the TikTok-shaped hole in our lives. The law gives TikTok parent company ByteDance until January 19 to divest its U.S. operations or face a ban in the country. TikTok is hoping for a pause to the law, but if that doesn’t happen, the app will effectively be banned in the country. There’s no 1:1 TikTok replacement, but…
Young Gen Zers are using OpenAI's AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT for schoolwork, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center. But it's unclear whether they are fully aware of the technology's pitfalls. In a follow-up to a 2023 poll on ChatGPT usage among youth, Pew surveyed some 1,400 U.S.-based youth ages 13 to 17 for homework and other school-related tasks. I asked if they had ever used ChatGPT for an assignment. 26% answered yes, double the number two years ago. Just over half (54%) of the teens surveyed said they thought it was acceptable to use ChatGPT to research…
More U.S. users of TikTok are turning to Duolingo to learn Chinese, as the company adopts a Chinese social app called RedNote ahead of TikTok's ban. Unless blocked by the Supreme Court, the US law is set to take effect on January 19th, TikTok will be removed from US app stores and the app will no longer function on users' devices unless they install a VPN client. Masu. But instead of trying to circumvent the ban, more than 700 million TikTok users migrated to the social video platform RedNote (also known as Xiaohongshu), facilitating an amazing cultural exchange between the…
Meta announced this week that it will purchase 200 megawatts of solar energy from multinational power company Engie, adding to the company's more than 12 gigawatts of renewable power portfolio. The news comes as tech companies ramp up their AI ambitions, adding data centers at a breakneck pace, and power demand is rising to the point where half of all new AI servers could be underpowered by 2027. It was announced in the midst of a growing number of Meta has been steadily adding new capacity, announcing in December that it would build a 2-gigawatt data center in Louisiana, a…
The uproar over competing e-readers to the popular Kindle has revealed how the use of Chinese AI models in U.S. products could unwittingly spread Chinese propaganda. According to an AI screenshot shared on Reddit, a large language model (LLM) created by TikTok's parent company ByteDance was used in an e-book reader called Boox. According to posts and communications between TechCrunch and the LLM, the LLM spouted Chinese government propaganda when asked questions about China and its allies, sparking backlash from users. The LLM in question is ByteDance's Doubao, which is offered as an API under ByteDance's cloud services division Volcano…