Author: TechBrunch
If the 2023 crypto venture landscape was an ice cold pot of water, the first quarter of 2024 is the part where the bubbles start to form right before water boils, Tom Schmidt, a partner at Dragonfly Capital, said to TechCrunch. And he’s not wrong: $2.52 billion in total capital has been raised across the crypto and blockchain sectors in Q1 2024, according to PitchBook data. That’s about 25% higher than $2.02 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023. “It’s been an extraordinarily busy time. It has 2021 feels to it,” said David Nage, portfolio manager at Arca. “Deals in…
Demis Hassabis, CEO and one of three founders of Google's artificial intelligence (AI) subsidiary DeepMind, said: Awarded He was knighted in the UK for his “contributions to artificial intelligence.” Ian Hogarth, director of the UK government's recently launched AI Safety Institute and previously founder of music startup Songkick, has been awarded a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to AI. I did. His AI advisor to the UK government and very early stage investor Matt Clifford, co-founder of Entrepreneur First. genius Born in London in 1976, Hassabis emerged as a genius in many fields,…
Instagram is working on a “Blend” feature that will create a private feed of Reels recommendations for you and your friends. The company told TechCrunch on Friday that the feature is an internal prototype and has not been tested externally. This feature was first discovered by reverse engineering Alessandro Paluzziregularly discovers social media features in development ahead of their official release. According to a screenshot posted by Paluzzi on his In other words, when you invite a friend to “Blend,” Instagram generates a personalized feed of Reels that it thinks will be of interest to both of you. Blend seems…
As deepfakes proliferate, OpenAI is improving the technology used to clone voices, but the company insists it's doing so responsibly. Today marks the preview debut of OpenAI's Voice Engine, which extends the company's existing text-to-speech API. Voice Engine, which has been in development for about two years, allows users to upload a 15-second sample of his voice and generate a synthetic copy of that voice. However, there is no public release date yet, giving the company time to respond to how the model is used and abused. “We want to make sure everyone has peace of mind about how this…
As AI proliferates and things on the internet become easier to manipulate, the need to ensure data and brands are verifiable is more important than ever, said CTO and co-founder of Space and Time. Scott Dykstra said on TechCrunch's “Chain Reaction” podcast. “Not to get too religious about crypto here, but we saw it with the FTX collapse,” Dykstra said. “There was some brand trust in our organization, just like our personal savings were in FTX. We believed in it as a brand.” However, the now-defunct virtual currency exchange FTX internally manipulated its books and misled investors. Dykstra believes this…
A day after researchers revealed Company X's plans to test a NSFW adult community on the platform formerly known as Twitter, the company announced that community admins will have to ensure that the community's content is automatically filtered. To avoid this, we confirmed that you can set an “Adult Content” label in the settings. Otherwise, all his NSFW content will be filtered to the entire X community by default. Communities are small groups of X that have their own feeds outside of the main timeline. This change confirms previous testing of NSFW communities discovered by various researchers and reverse engineers,…
It's rare to come across a pitch deck that ticks almost all the boxes. In fact, it was so good that I fed Plantee's deck into an AI tool I built and it determined that Plante had a 97.7% chance of raising money. This tool typically determines that only about 7.5% of all pitch decks reach zero, so Plantee is clearly off the charts. What the robot didn't realize, however, was that Plantee's Kickstarter campaign was canceled before it was complete, and there are a few other confusing details. Let's take a look at what works and what could be…
Hello. Welcome to Equity, the startup business podcast. Uncover the numbers and nuances behind the headlines. This is a Friday episode that delves into the week's most important stories and themes. As this week draws to a close, we are also set to conclude the trial of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman Fried, a former crypto tycoon who is facing a 25-year prison sentence. But while the SBF news was a big deal, there was so much to cover in today's episode of Equity News Roundup. and Kirsten Kolosek, mary ann azevedoand alex wilhelm Crew members on board this week…
In Stripe's annual letter, the company describes several fast-growing areas, one of which is its “revenue and financial automation” division. These are tools that help businesses manage billing, taxes, and revenue recognition. The company says that Stripe's RFA division will reach an annual operating rate of $500 million this year. As part of its investment in RFA, the payments giant completed the “acquisition” of a four-person team from Supaglue for an undisclosed sum. Supaglue raised $6.8 million in a seed round in November 2021 led by Benchmark General Partner Chetan Puttagunta. (Puttagunta did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment.)…
You may have heard of Grok, X's answer to OpenAI's ChatGPT. It's a chatbot, and in that sense it works as expected, answering questions about current events, pop culture, and more. But unlike other chatbots, Grok has a “bit of a wit” and “a rebellious personality,” as X owner Elon Musk puts it. Simply put, Grok is happy to talk about topics that are usually off-limits to other chatbots, such as polarizing political theories and conspiracies. And in doing so, he ends up using language that is not polite. For example, when answering the question, “When is it appropriate to…