Author: TechBrunch

WorldLab, a stealth startup founded by Fei-Fei Li, a prominent Stanford AI professor, has raised two funding rounds, two months apart, according to multiple reports. The latest round was led by NEA and valued the company at more than $1 billion, according to people familiar with the investment who spoke to TechCrunch. This follows a $100 million round reported by the Financial Times in July. That's a significant increase from WorldLab's $200 million valuation in its first round of funding in April, the people said. Reuters reported in May that investors in the first round included Andreessen Horowitz and Radical…

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…

This weekend, Politico broke shocking news: someone identified only as “Robert” had provided news organizations with documents that were allegedly stolen from President Donald Trump's campaign. The New York Times and Washington Post later learned they had been contacted by the same person and received the stolen documents. The leak bears the hallmarks of a hack-and-leak operation, in which malicious hackers steal classified information and then strategically release it to harm their targets. The FBI has said it is investigating the hack. Trump himself has blamed the Iranian government for the leak. Trump's longtime aide Roger Stone has said his…

All generative AI models, from Google’s Gemini to Anthropic’s Claude to the latest stealth release of OpenAI’s GPT-4o, hallucinate. In other words, the models are unreliable narrators, sometimes to hilarious effect, sometimes to problematic effect. But not all models lie at the same rate, and the types of falsehoods they spit vary depending on the sources they've been exposed to. A recent study by researchers from Cornell University, the University of Washington, the University of Waterloo, and the nonprofit research institute AI2 attempted to benchmark models like GPT-4o against authoritative sources on a wide range of topics, from law and…

Hey everyone, welcome to TechCrunch's regular AI newsletter. This week in AI, new research shows that generative AI isn't actually all that harmful — at least not in an apocalyptic sense. In a paper presented to the Association for Computational Linguistics' annual conference, researchers from the Universities of Bath and Darmstadt argue that models like Meta's Llama family cannot learn independently or acquire new skills without explicit instruction. The researchers ran thousands of experiments to test the models' ability to complete tasks they'd never encountered before, such as answering questions about topics outside the scope of their training data. They…

Halide, the popular iOS pro photography app, released a new version today with a new feature called Process Zero, which doesn't use AI to process images. Lux Optics, the developer of the Halide app, believes this option can be a creative tool for photographers to capture different kinds of snaps. The company previously allowed users to reduce default image processing in the app. The new option skips the standard image processing and is based on a single-exposure RAW file. Halide uses 12-megapixel RAW DNG files for its Process Zero photos. The company says that using a faster processing pipeline provides…

Amid growing pressure from regulators, Apple on Wednesday announced it would open up NFC transactions to third-party developers. NFC, or Near Field Communication, is the short-range radio technology that powers Apple Pay and Wallet. Apple's exclusive access to NFC features on iPhones has been under scrutiny for years by the European Commission for restricting competition in the mobile payments space, leading Apple to finally open up its tap-and-go technology to third parties in the region. Now, Apple is expanding access to other markets as well. According to the announcement, Apple will first make its new NFC and Secure Element APIs…

OpenAI's latest GPT4-o model can behave in some pretty strange ways, for example copying the user's voice and screaming and moaning erotically during conversations. We don't know this because some independent researcher or random user discovered it: this is actually an observation by OpenAI itself, in a “red team” report that is supposed to identify risks in the model and how to address those risks. To be clear, OpenAI seems comfortable identifying these risks because it has found ways to mitigate them. So a publicly accessible version of GPT-4o wouldn't suddenly start copying people's voices, and it would refuse to…

Stork Space is an ambitious company. The five-year-old startup has attracted attention for its bold plans to develop the first fully reusable rocket, with both its booster and second stage returning to Earth vertically. Those plans got a major boost a year ago when the U.S. Space Command awarded Stork and three other startups a prized launch pad site at the Cape Canaveral Space Force base in Florida. Stork plans to redevelop the historic Launch Complex 14, home to John Glenn's landmark mission and other NASA programs, in time for its first launch in 2025. At the center of Stork's…

Telegram announced on Wednesday that it is adding new ways for creators to earn money on the platform. Most notably, the platform is launching monthly paid subscriptions that users can buy with the app's digital currency, “Stars,” to access additional content from creators. Content creators can now create invite links that allow users to join their channel by paying Stars each month. The idea behind the feature is to allow creators to charge a fee for extra or early access to their content in a similar way to Patreon. Creators can set a price for their content and convert Stars…