Author: TechBrunch

Cowboy is best known for its sleek electric bikes that can be found in many major European cities. And when you see these cowboys riding their bikes, you almost always see young adults with laptops in their backpacks heading to the office. That's why the company is launching an all-new bike called the Cowboy Cross. This is an all-road model that pursues comfort for long-distance travel. Last week I had a chance to see the new Cowboy Cross and test drive it for a few minutes. As for the design, it looks exactly like a cowboy bike, with its pill-shaped…

The Pokémon Company announced that it detected a hacking attempt against some users and reset the passwords for those user accounts. Last week, a warning appeared on Pokémon's official support website, saying, “Following an attempt to compromise our account systems, Pokémon has proactively locked the accounts of potentially affected fans.” The content was A warning about a hacking attempt posted by The Pokémon Company on its official support website. As of Tuesday, the warning has been lifted. A company spokesperson said there was no breach, just a series of hacking attempts against some users. “The account system was not compromised.…

Artificial general intelligence (AGI), often referred to as “strong AI,” “full AI,” “human-level AI,” or “general intelligent action,” represents a major future leap forward in the field of artificial intelligence. I am. Unlike narrow AI that specializes in specific tasks (such as detecting product defects, summarizing news, or building websites), AGI will be able to perform a wide range of cognitive tasks at or above the human level. Addressing the press this week at NVIDIA's annual GTC developer conference, his CEO Jensen Huang seemed genuinely tired of discussing the subject. Especially, he says, because he found himself being misquoted a…

“I want you to understand that this is not a concert,” Nvidia President Jensen Huang said in front of a crowd so large that it filled the SAP Center in San Jose. This is how he introduced the company's GTC event, which is perhaps the exact opposite of a concert. “You've come to a developer conference. There's going to be a lot of science explaining algorithms, computer architecture, mathematics. You feel a very heavy weight in the room. Suddenly you've come to the wrong place. It is.” It may not have been a rock concert, but the 61-year-old leather-jacketed CEO…

While the tech world waits with bated breath for Reddit's public debut, another company you may have never heard of is about to go public: Astera Labs. And that could be a more important test of investors' appetite for returning to tech IPOs. Astera announced in a public filing this week that its initial public offering will be larger in every respect than originally planned. The company plans to sell more shares, 19.8 million shares versus the previous plan of 17.8 million shares, and at a higher price. $32 to $34 per share, previous range of $27 to $30. Astera…

Threads, Instagram's Twitter-like app, is rolling out its “Trending Now” feature broadly to all users in the United States. The official rollout comes a month after the app started testing the feature with some users in the country. Trending topics are available on the search page and in the app's For You feed. Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the official launch in a post on Threads, which the company sees as “an easy way to see what other people are talking about on Threads.” said. The launch of trending topics allows users to discover timely conversations happening on social networks,…

In Monday's keynote at Nvidia's GTC 2024 event, CEO Jenson Huang reiterated the phrase “AI factory.” “In the last industrial revolution, the raw material that went into factories was water,” Huang told TechCrunch in an interview after his keynote. “And that product was electricity.” He was comparing this to the concept of a data center, which is purely a treasure trove of money, turning raw materials into something else of value. “A new industrial revolution is occurring in these regions. [server] Rooms: I call them AI factories,” Huang said. “The raw materials that are input are data and electricity. What…

In June 2023, Inflexion announced that it had raised $1.3 billion to build what it called “more personal AI.” The lead investor was Microsoft. Today, less than a year later, Microsoft announced that it was essentially eating Inflection alive (though I think they worded it differently). Co-founders Mustafa Suleiman and Karen Simonian are leaving for Microsoft, the former along with “several members” of the team, in Microsoft's words, or, in Bloomberg's words, “most of the staff.” , will lead the newly created Microsoft AI division. I'll report it. Reid Hoffman will stay on with new CEO Shaun White and try…

The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) this week announced the launch of the similarly named Open Source Robotics Alliance (OSRA). This new initiative aims to sustain the development and maintenance of open source robotics projects, with a particular focus on OSRF's proprietary Robot Operating System (ROS). First released in 2007 by former Bay Area incubator Willow Garage, ROS has played a fundamental role in robot development for decades. In a show of support, Nvidia and Qualcomm have signed on as “platinum” members of the new partnership, along with Alphabet's X spinout Intrinsic. “Nvidia is developing with ROS 2 to deliver…

Los Angeles-based Gitai announced Tuesday that its autonomous robotic arm has completed a successful technology demonstration outside the International Space Station. Gitai CEO Sho Nakanose said in an interview with TechCrunch last year that the company is aiming to reduce in-space labor costs by a factor of 100, just as SpaceX and other providers have dramatically reduced launch costs. He said he is aiming to reduce that. We still have a ways to go before autonomous robotic systems eliminate the need for human labor, especially here on Earth. However, human labor is expensive and dangerous in space, so robots can…