Author: TechBrunch

Google announced on Thursday that it is introducing new Gemini-powered features to the desktop version of Chrome, including desktop lens, tab comparison for shopping assistants, and natural language integration for search history. After years of being introduced and evolving on mobile, Google Lens is finally coming to desktop. Rolling out to users globally over the next few days, Lens will appear in your address bar and three-dot menu, and when clicked, it will allow you to select parts of the page and ask more questions to get more results. You can also tap on an object, like someone's backpack, in…

Google is holding its Cloud Next conference in Tokyo this week, with a focus on tailoring its database for AI workloads (because at this point in 2024, AI is all these big tech companies want to talk about), which includes updates to its Spanner SQL database, adding support for graph and vector searches, as well as enhanced full-text search capabilities. This wouldn't be a Google announcement without Gemini-powered features, which include Gemini for BigQuery and Looker to assist users with data engineering and analytics, governance and security tasks. Google argues that while the majority of companies believe generative AI is…

Rad Power Bikes, a Seattle-based electric bike startup that has raised more than $300 million from investors, has made another round of staff cuts in July, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. This marks the fifth round of staff reductions since the company cut 100 employees in April 2021. Rad's latest job cuts follow cuts made a year ago, when the electric bike maker pulled out of Europe and laid off about 40 employees. Rad has laid off staff twice in 2022. The layoffs at the popular e-bike startup come after another popular venture-capital-backed e-bike company, VanMoof, declared bankruptcy last year. The…

Google Cloud is giving Y Combinator startups subsidized access to dedicated clusters of Nvidia Graphics Processing Units and Google Tensor Processing Units to build AI models, as part of the company's efforts to get closer to promising early-stage AI startups in the hopes of developing some of them into businesses that require large amounts of computing. “We want to wrap startups in a lot of love and warmth early on in their lifecycle and get them used to building and running on Google Cloud Platform,” James Lee, general manager of startups and AI at Google Cloud, said in an interview…

Open source compliance and security platform FOSSA has acquired developer community platform StackShare, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. StackShare is one of the popular platforms for developers to discuss, track, and share the tools they use to build their applications, including everything from the front-end JavaScript frameworks they use to the cloud providers they use for specific tasks. The company's sole founder, Jonas Bechared, told TechCrunch that he started the company because he personally found it difficult to choose which technology to use to build web applications. “I saw that many other developers were facing the same challenge and thought…

Two of India's biggest startups, Ola Electric and FirstCry, are set to test investor appetite this month when they go public, but both have been forced to price their shares lower than their previous valuations as they adjust to new market realities. Ola Electric, India's largest maker of electric two-wheelers, is selling shares for 72-76 rupees (86-91 cents) a share, seeking to raise more than $730 million, according to a term sheet. At that price, the company is valued at about $4 billion, 26% lower than the $5.4 billion valuation it received in an October 2023 funding round and well…

It's official: the European Union's risk-based regulation of the application of artificial intelligence comes into force on Thursday, August 1, 2024. This kicks off a rolling countdown of compliance deadlines that will apply to different types of AI developers and applications, with most provisions being fully enforced by mid-2026. However, the first deadlines for a small number of prohibited uses of AI in certain circumstances, such as the use of remote biometric authentication by law enforcement in public places, will come into effect in just six months. Under the European Union's approach, most applications of AI are deemed to pose…

Healx, a UK startup that uses AI to discover new medicines for rare diseases, has raised $47 million in a Series C funding round co-led by Europe's Atomico and Silicon Valley-based R42. The company also announced that it has received regulatory approval to begin Phase 2 clinical trials of the drug in the United States later this year. Healx describes itself as a “drug discovery pipeline” that identifies hidden links between existing compounds (such as drugs or medicines at various stages of the development cycle) and rare diseases. It does this by collating a myriad of public and proprietary data…

Meta, which develops Llama, the largest open source large-scale language model, believes that training models in the future will require much more computing power. Mark Zuckerberg said during Meta's second-quarter earnings call on Tuesday that training Llama 4 will require 10 times the computing power that was needed to train Llama 3. But rather than falling behind its competitors, he wants Meta to build up its capacity to train models. “The amount of compute required to train Llama 4 will likely be almost 10 times what we used to train Llama 3, and future models will continue to grow beyond…

The challenge of integrating renewable energy sources onto the power grid is a burgeoning startup opportunity. UK-based Axle Energy founded the company early last year to jump on the chance to accelerate the decarbonization of the power grid. The idea to build software to support the energy transition came about because of the high global energy prices caused by the war in Ukraine, says CEO and co-founder Karl Bach (pictured above, left, with co-founder and CTO Archie de Barker). The growing adoption of renewable energy was also a big catalyst in the decision. Before becoming entrepreneurs, the pair worked for…