Author: TechBrunch
After nine long years, Google is finally refreshing its namesake device, Nest: The company announced the launch of the Nest Learning Thermostat 4 on Tuesday ahead of its Made by Google 2024 event next week, 13 years after the original was released and nearly a decade after the launch of the Learning Thermostat 3. Google hopes the release will herald a new era for its smart home business, which has seen its performance slow significantly over the past few years and led many to believe the sector had largely stalled, with the Nest line's stagnation coinciding with a period of…
Among alternative plant-based proteins, plant-based cheese still faces challenges in terms of functionality and taste. That's where Plonts comes in. Company founders Nathaniel Chu and Josh Moser say that microbes are key to determining the taste, aroma, flavor, stretch and meltability of their plant-based cheeses — in fact, it's the microbes that give cheese its distinctive smell. CEO Chu began his career as a biologist studying complex systems from coral disease to waste, making him a literal expert on bad smells. While pursuing a PhD in bioengineering at MIT, he was inspired by an article about how much carbon it…
You've probably experienced it: Your previously hot shower suddenly turns cold, leaving you feeling depressed. Maybe someone in the family took an extra shower or did a few extra loads of laundry. It's a classic example of supply not keeping up with demand. Michael Rigney thinks it might be possible to predict when your home will need more hot water and eliminate cold showers, without having to rely on expensive alternatives like on-demand water heaters. Rigney's quest began a few years ago when he started researching water heaters, and what he saw was “really eye-opening,” Rigney told TechCrunch in a…
The growing demand for generative AI apps is driving larger and larger databases to store the relevant data (e.g., model training data). These databases tend to be resource intensive from a hardware perspective and can have high latency depending on the algorithms used to orchestrate them. Companies are often forced to make trade-offs between database cost, performance, and accuracy. But it doesn't have to be that way, says Ohad Levi, CEO and co-founder of Hyperspace, which builds custom cloud instances to speed up two specific database tasks: lexical search and vector search. Lexical search is a type of keyword-based search…
Becoming data-driven is not easy for an organization, even though many want to be. Even organizations with data analytics teams often struggle to leverage data effectively. According to a recent Gartner survey, less than half of data and analytics leaders say their teams are effectively delivering value to their organizations. German computer scientist Michael Berthold noticed this problem while he was a professor at the University of Konstanz and was consulting with many companies looking to adopt data analytics techniques. Berthold told TechCrunch that these companies often wanted a platform to help them process and analyze their data. So he…
Figure has unveiled its latest humanoid robot, the Figure 02. As the name suggests, the system is the successor to the Figure 01 robot that was unveiled in 2023. The first teaser video is similar to what we've seen with other humanoids, mimicking videos of home appliances rather than a live demonstration of the robot in action. Another video released Tuesday shows the robot walking slowly on bent legs across the floor in what appears to be a demo area in the middle of Figuure's offices, while two other robots can be seen carrying a package in the background –…
Many industries that rely on traditional energy sources are looking to electrify or at least streamline their operations, but for countless use cases the technology doesn't exist yet. H3X is changing that with an electric motor that is compact and efficient enough to catch the attention of the aerospace and marine industries, and investors too. We reported on the H3X's stealth launch back in 2021. Since then, CEO Jason Silvestre spoke exclusively to TechCrunch, saying that the H3X was “primarily demonstrating that this technology works, and we've got orders from a number of aerospace companies to prove that.” They've also…
John Shulman, one of OpenAI's co-founders, has left the company to join rival AI startup Anthropic. The news comes after The Information reported that OpenAI president Greg Brockman is taking an extended leave of absence, along with product manager Peter Deng, who joined OpenAI last year after leading products at Meta, Uber and Airtable. We asked OpenAI about Schulman's departure and the status of Brockman and Deng. A spokesperson said of Schulman: “We appreciate John's contributions as a founding team member of OpenAI and his dedicated efforts in advancing alignment research. His passion and hard work have established a strong…
Grok (not to be confused with the homophone-named AI startup Groq, which raised more than $600 million this morning) is spreading misinformation about Vice President Kamala Harris on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. This comes according to an open letter written by five secretaries of state to Tesla, SpaceX and X CEO Elon Musk, alleging that X's AI-powered chatbot falsely suggested Ms Harris was ineligible to appear on some ballots in the 2024 US presidential election. The letter, led by Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon and signed by Secretaries of State Al Schmidt of Pennsylvania, Steve…
Google is set to appeal on Monday a U.S. District Court ruling that found the company acted illegally to maintain its monopoly on online search. The ruling by Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is a major defeat for Google and, if upheld, could change the way the company does business and even the structure of the internet as we know it. Mehta said Google was abusing its monopoly power in the search business by paying companies like Apple to have its search engine appear as the default on devices and web…