Author: TechBrunch

To give female academics and others focused on AI their well-deserved and overdue spotlight time, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews highlighting notable women who have contributed to the AI ​​revolution. Start. As the AI ​​boom continues, we'll be publishing several articles throughout the year highlighting key research that may go unrecognized. Click here for a detailed profile. Anna Korhonen is Professor of Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the University of Cambridge. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at Churchill University, a Research Fellow at the Association for Computational Linguistics, and a Research Fellow at the European Institute…

When you board a United Airlines flight, the gate agents, flight attendants, and others are coordinating in chat rooms to ensure the plane departs on time, coordinating many tasks that you, as a passenger, may never notice. Is there still space for my carry-on baggage? Did the caterer bring the missing orange juice? Is there a way for the family to sit together? If your flight is delayed, you'll receive an explanatory message via text and in the United Airlines app. In most cases, that message is generated by AI. Meanwhile, in offices around the world, dispatchers examine this real-time…

Welcome to TechCrunch FinTech! This week, we cover Ramp's big raise and soaring valuation, Mercury's expansion into personal banking, Klarna's new credit card, a global funding round, and more. Get TechCrunch's roundup of the biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Sunday at 7:00 a.m. PT. Subscribe here. big story Ramp, a spend management startup that rivals the likes of Brex, Navan, and Airbase, told TechCrunch exclusively last week that it had raised $150 million at a post-money valuation of $7.65 billion. Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund co-led the round, which represents a 31.9% valuation increase…

To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more profiles here. Ewa Luger is co-director at the Institute of Design Informatics, and co-director of the Bridging Responsible AI Divides (BRAID) program, backed by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). She works closely with policymakers and industry, and is a member of the U.K. Department…

The U.S. House of Representatives this afternoon passed a bill that would require TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the popular social media app or be banned in the United States. Efforts to ban TikTok date back to the Trump administration, but the issue has flared up again in recent months. The House already passed a similar bill in March, but the Senate has shown little interest in taking it up. The new version expands the period in which ByteDance can sell TikTok to nine months (versus six months under the previous bill) and allows the president to grant one additional…

Vector databases are all the rage, judging by the number of startups entering the space and investors vying for a piece of the pie. The proliferation of large-scale language models (LLMs) and the generative AI (GenAI) movement have created fertile ground for vector database technologies to flourish. Traditional relational databases like Postgres and MySQL are great for structured data (predefined data types that can be neatly filed into rows and columns), but they're great for unstructured data like images, video, email, social media, etc. Not very good for data. posts, and data that does not conform to a predefined data…

“Down round” is a dirty word for some investors, but not for Notable Capital's Hans Tung. Hans is his partner in managing Notable Capital (formerly GGV Capital), a venture firm focused on investments in the United States, Latin America, Israel and Europe. Hans, whose portfolio includes Airbnb, StockX, and Slack, appeared on TechCrunch's Equity podcast to talk about the overall state of venture and why he still believes down rounds make so much sense. According to Hans, “IPOs are really just a milestone, not the end goal. An IPO is the beginning of retail investors getting on board with this.…

Keeping up with an industry as rapidly changing as AI is a challenge. So until AI can do it for you, here's a quick recap of recent stories in the world of machine learning, as well as notable research and experiments that we couldn't cover on our own. This week, Meta released the latest editions of the Llama series of generative AI models, Llama 3 8B and Llama 3 70B. Mehta said the model, which can analyze and write text, is “open source” and intended to be a “foundational part” of systems that developers design with their own goals in…

Lawmakers passed a bill early Saturday that would reauthorize and expand a controversial U.S. surveillance law shortly after its powers expired at midnight, rejecting objections from privacy advocates and lawmakers. The bill, which passed on a 60-34 vote, reauthorizes the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), known as Section 702, which allows the government to access the records of high-tech and telephone providers. It allows the collection of communications of foreigners. Critics, including some members of Congress who voted against reauthorization, argue that while FISA spies on foreign targets, it also scrutinizes Americans' communications. White House officials and spy leaders have…

To give female academics and others focused on AI their well-deserved and overdue spotlight time, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews highlighting notable women who have contributed to the AI ​​revolution. Start. As the AI ​​boom continues, we'll be publishing several articles throughout the year highlighting key research that may go unrecognized. Click here for a detailed profile. Alison Cohen is a senior applied AI project manager at Mila, a Quebec community of more than 1,200 researchers specializing in AI and machine learning. She collaborates with researchers, social scientists, and external partners to develop AI projects that benefit society.…