Author: TechBrunch

TeamViewer, which makes a remote access tool widely used by businesses, has confirmed an ongoing cyber attack on its corporate network. In a statement on Friday, the company blamed the intrusion on government-sponsored hackers working for Russian intelligence, known as APT29, or Midnight Blizzard. The Germany-based company said its investigation so far has revealed that the initial intrusion occurred on June 26 and was “linked to standard employee account credentials within our corporate IT environment.” TeamViewer said the cyberattack was “confined” to its corporate network and that its internal network and customer systems were isolated. The company added that it…

If you love gadgets and gizmos, this year’s product conferences are having them aplenty.  We’ve poked through the many product announcements made by the biggest tech companies and product trade shows of the year, so far, and compiled them into this list. It features the items we think are the most important, or the most interesting. So far this list covers Apple WWDC, Apple Let Loose, Google I/O, Microsoft Build, Mobile World Congress and CES. Please check back as we will update this  Apple WWDC Image Credits: Apple Apple Intelligence  The biggest buzz at this show was the new feature…

Heavier, a startup that uses generative AI to search through large volumes of documents and return answers, has raised about $100 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz, according to three people familiar with the matter. The round valued the company at $700 million to $800 million, though TechCrunch couldn't confirm whether it was pre- or post-money (though a possible scenario is that it was pre- or post-$700 million). One person said Emergence Capital also participated in the round. Hebbia disclosed in an SEC filing in May that it had raised $93 million to date of a…

Until now, the humanoid robotics industry has been all about promises and trials. While important for the eventual adoption of new technology, these programs often only involve a handful of robots and don't amount to anything more meaningful. But on Thursday, Agility announced that it had signed a formal contract with logistics giant GXO after successful trials. Digit's first job will be hauling packages at a Spanx factory in Georgia, which is no euphemism. Neither side will say exactly how many of the bipedal robots will be taking boxes from the cobots and putting them on the conveyor belt, meaning…

If you've heard about students and generative AI lately, you may have heard a few discussions about the adoption of tools like ChatGPT. Are they helping? (Yay! Great for research! Fast!) Or hurting? (Boo! Misinformation! Cheating!) But some startups are embracing the introduction of generative AI into school environments in a positive, and understandable, way. And they're building products to address what they believe to be a market opportunity. Now, one of them has raised funding to realise that ambition. MagicSchool AI, which is developing generative AI tools for educational environments, closed a $15 million Series A round led by…

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke about the future of AI in an interview published on Thursday, saying he strongly believes there isn't “just one AI.” Touting the value of open source in putting AI tools in the hands of many, Zuckerberg took a bit of a dig at the efforts of an unnamed competitor that he believes is far from open, adding that it seems like they think they're “creating god.” “I don't think AI technology should be monopolized or one company should use it to build its core product,” Zuckerberg said in a new YouTube interview with Kayne Sutter…

AI mogul Andrew Ng's AI Fund, a startup incubator that supports small teams of experts trying to solve important problems using AI, is planning to raise more than $120 million in its second round of funding. AI Fund's second fund, AI Venture Fund II, has raised $69.75 million so far from 13 partners, with about $50 million remaining to invest, according to an SEC filing. An AI Fund spokesman declined to comment. Ng, founder of the Google Brain deep learning project, co-founder of Coursera and recently appointed to Amazon's board of directors, was one of the best-known figures in the…

On Wednesday, Evolve Bank and Trust, a financial institution popular with fintech startups, announced it had fallen victim to a cyberattack and data breach that may have also affected its partner companies. The incident involved “some data and personal information of Evolve's retail banking customers and customers of its financial technology partners,” the company said in a statement. Speaking to TechCrunch, Evolve's public relations director Thomas Holmes said the incident involved a “known cybercrime organization.” “These bad actors appear to have published illegally obtained data on the dark web,” Holmes said, declining to comment further. The perpetrator of the breach…

Mark Zuckerberg said today that in an initial test in the US, Instagram is making AI characters built by creators through its Meta AI studio available to the public. In a post on his broadcast channel, Zuckerberg said these chatbots will be clearly marked as AI to inform users. “We're rolling out initial tests of AI Studio in the US and you'll start seeing AI from your favourite creators and interest-based AI on Instagram in the coming weeks. These will appear primarily in messages for now and will be clearly labelled as AI,” he said. “These AIs are still in…

Reddit is speaking out against AI companies — or at least asking them to pay damages. Earlier this week, Reddit announced it was changing its Robots Exclusion Protocol (also known as its robots.txt file), and this dry edit is part of a larger negotiation/battle between AI companies that want content they can use to train their language models, and the companies that actually own the content. “robots.txt” is a way for a website to tell third parties how to crawl the website. A typical example is a website that allows Google to crawl it for inclusion in search results. With…