Author: TechBrunch
AI social media screening startup Ferretly has raised $2.5 million in seed funding to launch a new platform for vetting election officials. Founded in 2019, Ferretly uses AI to scan social media and publicly available online data to uncover potential risks and behaviors that may be missed through traditional background checks. The startup is the brainchild of Darrin Lipscomb, who previously founded software startups Pipestream and Avrio, which he sold to BMC Software and Hitachi, respectively. Lipscomb told TechCrunch that Ferretly is designed to help recruiters make sure the people they hire align with their company's values — just like…
Journalists, researchers and politicians have lamented Meta's shutdown of CrowdTangle, which they used to track the spread of misinformation on Facebook and Instagram. In place of CrowdTangle, Meta offers a content library, but its use is limited to people at “qualified academic institutions or non-profit organizations conducting scientific or public interest research.” Many researchers and academics, and most journalists, are barred from accessing the tool. Those who use meta content libraries say they offer less transparency and accessibility, fewer features, and poor user experience design. Many in the community have written open letters of protest to Meta, questioning why the…
Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, has resumed operations to users in India after being suspended for seven months by local authorities for operating “illegally” in the country. The exchange said on Thursday that it had registered as a reporting entity with the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), an Indian government agency tasked with monitoring financial transactions. Late last year, India blocked nearly 10 foreign crypto exchanges following the recommendation of the FIU. The FIU action came after a group of domestic crypto exchanges complained to the Ministry of Finance that they were losing trade to non-compliant overseas crypto exchanges. The…
Elon Musk's Grok released a new AI image generation feature on Tuesday night that, like AI chatbots, comes with few safeguards. This means you can, say, generate a fake image of Donald Trump smoking marijuana on Joe Rogan's show and upload it directly to the X platform. But it's not Elon Musk's AI company that's actually powering this madness. Rather, it's the startup Black Forest Labs that's behind the controversial feature. The collaboration between the two was revealed on Tuesday, when xAI announced it was partnering with Black Forest to use its FLUX.1 model to power Grok's image generator. Black…
Modern generative models make great demos, but will they really change the way movies and TV shows are made? Filmmaking and VFX experts say in the short term they won't, but in the long term they could literally change things beyond our imagination. At a panel at SIGGRAPH in Denver, Nikola Todorovic (Wonder Dynamics), Freddy Chavez Olmos (Boxel Studio), and Michael Black (Meshcapade, Max Planck Institute) discussed how generative AI and other systems can change (but not necessarily improve) the way media is created today. Their consensus was that while it's natural to question the short-term usefulness of these tools,…
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…