Author: TechBrunch
Jerry Pratt and Figure quietly parted ways last month. Pratt was a research scientist at MIT after spending just under two years at the Bay Area-based robotics company. In 2022, Pratt left Boardwalk Robotics, the humanoid startup he founded and led, to become the well-funded CTO of Figure a few months before the company emerged from stealth. But it was only last week that Pratt announced his departure. The news came via LinkedIn, where he announced he was founding a new entrant into the increasingly competitive world of humanoids. Persona AI was officially founded just last month and is currently…
Hey everyone, welcome to TechCrunch's regular AI newsletter. This week in AI, music labels are suing two AI-powered music generator startups, Udio and Suno, for copyright infringement. The RIAA, the trade group representing the US music recording industry, announced the lawsuit on Monday, filed by Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Records and others. The suit claims that Udio and Suno trained the generative AI models underlying their platforms on labels' music but failed to compensate the labels, and seeks $150,000 in damages for each allegedly infringing work. “Synthetic musical output could saturate the market with machine-generated content and…
Earlier this month, TikTok released a new social app called Whee, an Instagram-like service that lets users take photos and share them with friends. Like Instagram, Whee supports the use of photo filters and has a messaging feature. But the company's plans for Whee are unclear, as the app has seen relatively few downloads and has not yet been promoted in Apple's search ads, according to new data from app intelligence firm Appfigures. Without marketing support, new apps would remain largely invisible in today's App Store. Such is the case with Whee, which was quietly released in 71 countries around…
When Paul Hedrick left a career in private equity to start Tecobas in 2015, he wanted to sell the brand's signature cowboy boots in a slightly different way than other traditional western wear companies: He wanted to sell the boots online and directly to consumers, but unlike many other DTC brands, he didn't want to wait for online sales to slowly ramp up. Instead, Hedrick, who is now Tecobus' chairman, began selling the boots, loaded into the back of his Toyota Forerunner, at farmers' markets in Dallas, Texas, and at his old elementary school. In a recent episode of Found,…
Photographers claim that Meta tags their actual photos as “created with AI.” Meta introduced this automated tagging to help people understand whether what they're looking at is real or computer-generated, but even the AI itself isn't very good at telling what is and isn't AI, which is why users like a former White House photographer and a professional cricket team end up posting photos that are flagged as AI-generated. Former White House photographer Pete Souza told TechCrunch that this could be the result of basic photo editing that photographers do before uploading their photos. So uploading the image to Photoshop,…
These days, it's hard to go an hour without reading an article about generative AI. Though the phenomenon sometimes referred to as the “steam engine” of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is still in its early stages, there's no doubt that “GenAI” is poised to transform nearly every industry, including finance, healthcare, and law. While the cool user-facing applications may get the most attention, the companies driving this revolution are currently benefiting the most: Just this month, chipmaker Nvidia briefly became the world's most valuable company, a $3.3 trillion behemoth essentially driven by demand for AI computing power. But in addition…
The European Union has announced the winners of its Large-Scale AI Grand Challenge, which was launched earlier this year with the aim of accelerating the pace of homegrown innovation from large-scale AI model makers. The four startups will share a €1 million prize, and, perhaps more importantly, they will also receive 8 million GPU hours to train their models on several of the European Union's high-performance computing (HPC) supercomputers over the next 12 months. As the European Commission states in its PR, this is expected to reduce model training times “from years to weeks.” The four winning startups, in alphabetical…
Last week, the US government announced an unprecedented ban on the sale in the US of any software made by Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky. Just days after the ban was announced, some U.S. companies that are official Kaspersky resellers, or managed service provider (MSP) partners, say they are confused, angry and anxious about how the ban affects them. The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security called the ban “the first of its kind” and said it was taking the action because the antivirus and security software maker's headquarters are in Russia and pose unacceptable cybersecurity and privacy risks to…
The hackers claim to be selling a large database linked to an Indian government portal for blue-collar workers migrating from India. The eMigrate portal, launched by the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, helps Indian workers migrate legally abroad. The portal also provides migration permit tracking and insurance services to migrant workers. According to a cybercrime forum listing seen by TechCrunch, the anonymous hackers released some of the data, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, mailing addresses and passport details of individuals who had allegedly registered with the portal. TechCrunch has confirmed that some of the data exposed…
Formation Bio, a startup backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and focused on applying AI to drug discovery, has raised more than $250 million to support its ambitious product roadmap. Formation today announced it has raised $372 million in a Series D funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from pharmaceutical companies Sanofi, Sequoia, Thrive, Emerson Collective, Lachy Groom, SV Angel Growth and FPV Ventures. The new funding brings Formation's total funding to $528 million, which the company says it will use primarily for partnership efforts and research and development. Formation declined to disclose the new valuation, but a…