Author: TechBrunch
Mistral AI has completed its much-rumored Series B funding round, raising €600 million (roughly $640 million at today's exchange rates) in a combination of equity and debt. The round was led by General Catalyst. As TechCrunch previously reported, the funding round values the startup at $6 billion. As a reminder, Mistral AI is a relative newcomer to the artificial intelligence space: the company raised a massive $112 million seed round about a year ago to set up a European competitor to OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI giants. Co-founded by Meta and Google DeepMind alumni, the company is working on developing…
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies for more wide-ranging needs. And that growth has propelled OpenAI itself into becoming one of the most-hyped companies in recent memory, even if CEO and co-founder Sam Altman’s firing and swift return raised concerns about its direction and opened the door for competitors. What does that mean for OpenAI, ChatGPT and its other ambitions? The fallout is still settling,…
Philip Hertewig, who was CIO at marketing company Sitecore before it was sold to private equity group EQT in 2016, teamed up with Sascha Poggemann and Benjamin Meyer to found customer service automation startup Cognigy eight years ago. He says the impetus came from what he felt was confusion among both consumers and C-suite executives about how AI works, particularly around its limitations. “Big tech companies have 'false' expectations when it comes to AI,” Hertewig told TechCrunch. “In 2015, IBM was claiming its Watson platform could do anything. In 2024, that's back as 'Copilot can do anything.' Neither is true.”…
Who would have thought that Raspberry Pi, a maker of tiny, inexpensive single-board computers, would become a public company? But that's exactly what's happening now. Raspberry Pi IPOed on the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday morning at £2.80 per share, giving it a market capitalization of £542 million, or $690 million at today's exchange rates. Shortly thereafter, the company's shares rose 32% to £3.70, meaning that Raspberry Pi could raise more than $200 million during the IPO process. Currently, only certain institutional investors can trade the company's shares, so retail investors can't buy shares in Raspberry Pi yet. Retail investors…
Elon Musk has warned that he will ban iPhones from all of his company's products over the new OpenAI integration that Apple announced on Monday at WWDC 2024. In a series of posts about X, the Tesla, SpaceX and xAI executive wrote that “if Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level,” Apple devices will be banned from his business, visitors will have to leave their Apple devices at the door and they will be “kept in a Faraday cage.” Musk's post appears to misinterpret Apple's announced relationship with OpenAI, or at the very least, to blur the issue and leave…
Following the introduction of Apple Intelligence during the WWDC 2024 keynote and the confirmation of a partnership to bring GPT access to Siri through a deal with OpenAI, SVP Craig Federighi confirmed plans to work with additional third-party models, the first example cited by the executive as one of the companies Apple is exploring partnering with. “In the future, we expect to integrate with other models, such as Google Gemini,” Federighi said in a conversation after the keynote, though he was quick to add, “We don't have anything to announce right now, but that's the general direction we're heading.” OpenAI's…
When Urvashi Baruah applied to MBA programs in 2015, her dream of becoming a venture capitalist was at the core. She was rejected by every school and told that her chances in the venture industry were unrealistic, but she didn't give up. Eight years later, Baruah, 33, has been promoted to partner at Redpoint. He joined the firm as an associate four years ago and has served as a principal since late 2021. The Silicon Valley-based firm is currently investing from its ninth fund, which is $650 million. Baruah is now one of three partners at the firm that focuses…
Apple's new generative AI service, Apple Intelligence, won't just be a consumer-facing feature, but developers will also be able to take advantage of the latest technology. Apple announced during its WWDC 2024 keynote on Monday that developers will be able to integrate Apple Intelligence-powered experiences into their own apps. Apple's SDK (Software Development Kit) has been updated with a range of new APIs and frameworks, allowing app developers to integrate Image Playground (genAI image creation) with just a few lines of code. Apple showed off how apps like Craft can use this feature to make users' documents more visual by…
Apple kicked off its week-long Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 2024) event today with its traditional keynote at 1pm ET/10am PT. The presentation focused on the company's software products and the developers behind them, including the latest versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS, and watchOS. But the biggest news was the announcement of Apple Intelligence, the company's big entry into the competitive AI market. You can watch the archive on Apple's event page , or you can watch the YouTube archive here and in the embed below. If you're curious to see what predictions were coming up ahead of the…
It's WWDC 2024 keynote time! Every year, Apple kicks off its Worldwide Developers Conference with a multi-hour event of announcements, including the long-awaited Apple Intelligence and a refresh of its smart AI assistant, Siri. We expected a lot of it to be about the company's artificial intelligence ambitions (and here), and it didn't disappoint. We also got some news about Vision Pro, as well as a bunch of feature updates. Here's how to watch the WWDC 2024 archives: Developers can expect the usual hardware and software updates, as well as other items we initially expected to see announced. Brian Heater…