Author: TechBrunch
Simulating the real world is an incredibly complex problem when done with a practical level of fidelity. Traditional methods have held automotive and aerospace design teams back, but Beyond Math is leveraging AI to develop a new way to simulate the world that can save days or weeks of wait time. “Language doesn't have a mathematical model that explains what the next word is, but physics does, and it turns out machine learning is really good at not just pattern recognition, but computation as well,” co-founder Darren Garvey said. The field where Beyond Math is taking its first steps is…
AI models have proven they can do a lot, but what tasks do you actually want them to perform? Preferably mundane tasks, and there are plenty of them in research and academia. Reliant wants to specialize in the kind of time-consuming data extraction tasks that are currently the domain of exhausted graduate students and interns. “The best thing AI can do is improve the human experience — reduce menial labor and let people do the things that matter to them,” said CEO Karl Moritz. In the world of research, where he and co-founders Marc Bellemare and Richard Schlegel have worked…
PostEx, a Pakistani startup that provides financial and logistics services to online merchants, plans to enter new markets this year, starting with Saudi Arabia, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. “We want to go into other markets and really disrupt them, because we see a gap there,” PostEx founder and CEO Mohammed Omar Khan said in an interview. E-commerce in Pakistan currently accounts for around 1.5% of the total retail market but has grown by 50% in the past 12 months, and PostEx can be credited with contributing to this growth. Online merchants in Pakistan find it difficult to sustain their business…
The AI boom is spurring demand for data centers, which in turn are increasing water consumption (used to cool the computing equipment inside them). Virginia, home to the world's largest concentration of data centers, is set to see its water usage jump by nearly two-thirds between 2019 and 2023, from 1.13 billion gallons to 1.85 billion gallons, according to the FT. It's a trend that's happening around the world, and many say it's unsustainable. Data center giant Microsoft says 42% of the water it consumes in 2023 will come from “water-stressed areas.” Google, which owns the world's largest data centers,…
OpenAI and Anthropic spend billions of dollars a year training models like GPT-4 and Claude, but the price wars have made business around these platforms rather precarious. Selling access to the models is quickly becoming a “zero-margin business,” Aidan Gomez, CEO of rival AI provider Cohere, said in a podcast appearance on Monday. For now, the costs of these AI models are outpacing the revenue they bring in. “If you're just selling models, that's going to be very hard for the foreseeable future,” Gomez said in an interview with 20VC's Harry Stebbings. By “selling models,” he means selling API access…
What's the point of chatting with a human-like bot, an unreliable narrator and a personality off color? That's a question I've been pondering ever since Google last week began testing Gemini Live, a rival to OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode that's an attempt to create a more engaging chatbot experience, complete with lifelike voices and the freedom to interrupt the bot at any time. Gemini Live is “intuitive and customized to enable real, two-way conversations,” Sissie Hsiao, general manager of Gemini experience at Google, told TechCrunch in May.[It] “For example, they can provide information more succinctly and respond in a more…
Zoom on Monday announced a new single-user webinar feature that is capped at 1 million participants. The addition comes less than a month after Vice President Kamala Harris' #WinWithBlackWomen fundraiser crashed after peaking at 44,000 users, and more recently, an X interview between owner Elon Musk and Harris' opponent Donald Trump crashed before it began. Given the audience sizes for Zoom's new feature (available in sizes of 10,000, 50,000, 100,000, 250,000, and 500,000), the company is offering live support from its events services, which Zoom representatives say will “ensure organizers deliver a professional, engaging experience” and presumably ensure events don't…
Former President Donald Trump on Sunday posted a collection of memes on Truth Social, a platform owned by his media company, that make it seem as if Taylor Swift and her fans are endorsing Trump as a presidential candidate. But as new laws go into effect, the images could have deeper implications for the use of AI-generated images in political campaigns, especially when those images misrepresent celebrities. “One of the things I'm seeing a lot in my practice right now is a general increase in AI impersonation for ad purposes,” intellectual property and entertainment attorney Noah Downs told TechCrunch, on…
Few truly autonomous systems have been deployed on the battlefield, but one startup is looking to change that with robotic systems that use cooperative behavior to give soldiers more intelligence and a tactical advantage. These systems, called “swarms,” are essentially collections of autonomous robots that can coordinate their actions. Swarm robots are the stuff of science fiction, but Swarmbotics AI emerged today in secret to make the concept a reality. The startup is developing an ecosystem of products called ANTS (Attritable, Networked, Tactical Swarm) that could revolutionize battlefield logistics. Swarmbotics was founded last summer by Steven Horton and Drew Watson,…
Depending on how you feel about the intersection of crypto and Silicon Valley libertarianism, this is either a dream idea or a bizarre one: Former a16z investor Balaji Srinivasan has rented out an island in Singapore to create his own “Network School,” where he’ll run programs on crypto, longevity, and what it takes to set up a “technocapitalist college town.” As he posted Announce this initiative. This marks the most significant milestone yet for Srinivasan's dream of creating a “network nation,” which he defines as an Internet community that has a physical location and “gains diplomatic recognition from existing nation…