Author: TechBrunch
It seems likely that not a week will go by in 2024 without a media organization, author group, or artist suing a generative AI company for using their work to train models without their permission. The problem, of course, is that there is as yet no clear framework for what constitutes copyright infringement in the context of GenAI training. While these lawsuits are sure to keep copyright lawyers busy, a new company, Created by Humans, which emerged from stealth on Tuesday, aims to avoid costly legal battles by offering a marketplace where creators can license their intellectual property directly to…
Boeing subsidiary WiskAero has acquired Velocell, a software verification and validation company that has been serving the aerospace industry for 25 years. Wisk is taking an autonomy-first approach to electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft: The company's sixth-generation aircraft, which is set to begin aerial testing later this year, is designed for human oversight but will not be physically piloted by humans. This means that Wisk, more than any other company building eVTOL vehicles, needs to ensure that its software is up to par. “There's a ton of high-integrity software in the aircraft and everywhere on the ground that…
Job hunting can be daunting, especially for those who are not immigrants to the U.S. Not only do you have to compete on the strength of your resume, but you also have to comb through hundreds of job offers to find the few that will sponsor your work visa, and if you lose your job, you only have 60 days to find another one before you have to leave the country. The lottery (the H-1B program, which randomly selects skilled foreigners to work in the US) is notoriously difficult to win. According to official data, the US Citizenship and Immigration…
For indie developers building their games on their own, regulatory compliance is probably not a top priority. You still need to write the code, design the mechanics, and test and test your game to make sure it's actually fun to play. But compliance is often not an option, especially when it comes to child safety, and the task gets harder every year as regulations around the world evolve quickly and frequently. A startup called k-ID wants to smooth out compliance efforts, raising $45 million in a Series A round to build a platform that makes it easier for game developers…
A relatively new startup called EvolutionaryScale has secured a large amount of funding to build an AI model that can generate new proteins for scientific research. Evolutionscale announced Tuesday that it had raised $142 million in a seed round led by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Lux Capital, with participation from Amazon and Nvidia's corporate venture arm NVentures. The startup also released ESM3, an AI model that it describes as a “state-of-the-art model” of biology that can create proteins for use in drug discovery and materials science. “ESM3 marks a step towards a future of biology where…
As companies shut down cloud and ghost kitchens, Local Kitchens is proving that its tech-enabled, multi-brand restaurant concept is a business model that works — and it's raising $40 million in new Series B funding for its efforts. Former DoorDash employees John Goldsmith and Andrew Munday teamed up with Jordan Bramble to found the San Francisco-based company in 2020. Their goal was to bring food from local restaurants and nationally-renowned chefs to consumers in Northern California. Local kitchens operate in a similar way to cloud kitchens or ghost kitchens, which are shared workspaces for restaurants to prepare food, often for…
Ashley Beckwith has spent years of her academic and professional career focused on the intersection of biology, materials, and manufacturing to more efficiently build medical solutions. When she realized this technology could be applied to plants and plant-derived materials, which were in desperate need, she decided to change direction. “Life on Earth is only as secure as the plant populations on Earth, and today plant populations are in danger,” Beckwith told TechCrunch. “Around 40 percent of plant species are at risk of extinction. Forest areas untouched by humans have shrunk by 12 percent. [in 2022]These plant resources are under pressure…
TestParty, an AI-powered software compliance company, today announced a $4 million seed round co-led by Harlem Capital and Urban Innovation Fund. The company's CEO and CTO, Michael Babel and Jason Tan, co-founded TestParty in March 2023 with the goal of automatically rewriting source code to help companies avoid violating global digital accessibility regulations such as the European Accessibility Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Currently, nearly all of the home pages of the world's most popular websites do not comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This means that most of the world's websites are completely inaccessible to people who…
Swipewipe, a US photo management app that has gone viral among Gen Z thanks in part to TikTok, is being acquired. French mobile app publisher and developer MWM is developing the app in-house after working with Swipewipe's indie developer Adam O'Kane to expand the app's usage. The acquisition allows Swipewipe's founders to part with some funds while still financially benefiting from their work through an ongoing revenue-sharing agreement with MWM. The sale price was not disclosed, but O'Kane praised MWM for selling the app for a life-changing amount without giving up on his hopes of future success. “If I were…
As generative AI permeates more and more industries, companies that make the chips that run the models are reaping huge profits. Nvidia, which is estimated to control 70% to 95% of the AI chip market, has particularly strong influence. Cloud providers from Meta to Microsoft, wary of falling behind in generative AI, are spending billions of dollars on Nvidia GPUs. Generative AI vendors have understandable reasons to be unsatisfied with the status quo: Their success depends in large part on the whims of the major chipmakers, so they, along with opportunistic venture capitalists, are on the hunt for promising startups…