Author: TechBrunch
Who's afraid of the Big Bad DEI? The acronym has now become almost toxic. The term creates almost instant tension between those who support it and those who want to abolish it. A prime example of this divide is the response to a post on X last week by Alexandr Wang, founder of the startup Scale AI, in which he wrote about moving away from DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and embracing “MEI” (merit, excellence, and intelligence) instead. “Size is a meritocracy, and we must always maintain that attitude,” Wang wrote. “Inviting someone to join our mission has always meant…
As Apple enters the AI race, it is also seeking help from partners. In an Apple Intelligence announcement earlier this month, Apple said it would partner with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to an improved version of Siri, and now The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple and Facebook parent company Meta are in talks about a similar deal. Those talks have not yet been finalized and may reportedly fall through. Meta declined to comment, and Apple did not immediately respond. As Sara Perez pointed out, Apple's approach to AI seems a bit boring and pragmatic at the moment. The…
Just a few weeks ago, two best friends, 18-year-old Christopher Fitzgerald and Nicholas Van Landshoot, graduated from high school. While most of their peers are making the most of their last summer before heading off to college or entering the adult world of work, Fitzgerald and Van Landschoot are hunkered down in a venture-capital firm's office in Boulder, Colorado. They're spending the summer launching their startup, APIGen, after raising $500,000 in pre-seed funding from Barana Capital. Fitzgerald will attend Penn State in the fall, and Van Landschoot plans to move closer to the university, but he's put his plans for…
Most businesses struggle to derive value from their data. A few years ago, Forrester reported that 60% to 73% of the data belonging to the average company goes unused for analytics. This is because the data is siloed or classified by technical and security considerations that make it difficult (if not impossible) to apply analytical tools. Previously working as engineers at Y Combinator-backed startups Hightouch (a data sync platform) and Fair Square (a health insurance tool), Anna Pojawis and Tyler Maran saw that many companies were being “locked out” of their analytics strategies due to engineering roadblocks, so they decided…
To shine a well-deserved and long-overdue spotlight on women academics and others focused on AI, TechCrunch is launching an interview series highlighting notable women who have contributed to the AI revolution. Charlette N'Guessan is Data Solutions and Ecosystem Lead at Amini, a deep-tech startup using space technology and artificial intelligence to address the environmental data gap in Africa and the Global South. She co-founded and led product development for Bace API, a secure identity verification system that leverages AI-powered facial recognition technology to combat online identity fraud and address facial recognition bias in the African context. She is also an…
Vox Media president Pam Wasserstein sent a Slack message and email to staff on May 29 detailing news that the company's journalists said was shocking: Vox had signed a content licensing deal with OpenAI. The deal gives the AI company access to Vox's full archive of current content and journalism work to train ChatGPT and other models. Wasserstein's alert came just before Axios exclusively revealed details of the licensing and product agreement, much to the surprise of his reporters. Atlantic's reporter who signed a contract as a major AI giant Microsoft was not notified in advance. “Atlantic staff mainly knows…
When Kevin Shu, the former YouTube product manager known on Reddit as “Sir Jack-a-Lot,” turned $35,000 into $8 million in stock trading between 2020 and 2022, many assumed his fortune and investment methods had peaked, just as the 2021 meme stock boom has peaked. But Xu disagrees, and is now building a startup for retail investors that aims to provide the kind of friendly investment advice and community people have enjoyed on platforms like the WallStreetBets subreddit, but with accountability to stop scammers and fraudsters. AfterHour, which launched in April 2022, allows users to link their stockbrokerage accounts and post…
The battle between open source and proprietary software is well known, but the tensions that have permeated the software industry for decades have also found their way into the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence, where they've sparked fierce debate. The New York Times recently published a glowing review of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, noting that his “open source AI” initiative has rekindled his popularity in Silicon Valley. But the problem is that Meta's Llama-branded large-scale language models are not actually open source. Or is it? By most estimates, no. But it does highlight that the concept of “open source AI”…
Hackers are advertising customer data they have allegedly stolen from Australia-based live events and ticketing company TEG on a popular hacking forum. On Thursday, hackers put up for sale data they allegedly stole from TEG, claiming to have information on 30 million users, including names, genders, dates of birth, usernames, hashed passwords and email addresses. In late May, TEG-owned ticket sales company Ticketek disclosed a data breach affecting Australian customer data, “which is stored on a cloud-based platform hosted by a trusted global third-party supplier.” The company said that “no Ticketek customer accounts were compromised” due to the encryption method…
Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje's weekly roundup of the must-reads from the startup world. Sign up here to receive it in your inbox every Friday. Elon Musk has persuaded Tesla shareholders to approve a $56 billion compensation package that would make him the highest-paid CEO in history, if he can avoid a Delaware judge's disapproval. Where better to stage this circus than Texas, home of everything giant, including egos? Shareholders at Tesla's Texas Gigafactory applauded as the vote results were announced. Meanwhile, Musk has steered his company beyond a clown with a chainsaw and is facing two new lawsuits…