Author: TechBrunch
SAN JOSE — “I want you to understand that this is not a concert,” Nvidia President Jensen Huang said before an audience large enough to fill San Jose's SAP Center. This is how he introduced his GTC event at the company, 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 CEO of…
Analysts say this is likely more a one-off than a sign of LP interest in the venture waning. The Los Angeles County Employees and Retirement Association (LACERA) voted at its March 13 meeting to reduce its allocation to venture capital. The Investment Committee resolved to reduce the range of allocations to venture capital and growth stocks from 15-30% of the pension plan's private equity portfolio to 5-25%. LACERA's venture portfolio currently represents 10.8% of his PE portfolio. This subset has been very successful, with TVPI (a measure of both realized and unrealized gains on fund investments) of 2.08x at the…
Documentation startup Mintlify said dozens of its customers had their GitHub tokens exposed in a data breach earlier in the month that went public last week. Mintlify helps developers document their software and source code by requesting access to and directly leveraging customers' GitHub source code repositories. Mintlify counts fintech, database, and AI startups among its customers. In a blog post on Monday, Mintlify blamed the March 1 incident on a vulnerability in its systems, but said 91 of its customers had their GitHub tokens compromised as a result. These private tokens allow GitHub users to share their account access…
Nvidia today announced Nvidia NIM at the GTC conference, a new software platform designed to streamline the deployment of custom and pre-trained AI models into production environments. NIM is about taking the software work that Nvidia has done on model inference and optimization, combining a specific model with an optimized inference engine, packing this into a container, and making it accessible as a microservice. , so you can easily access your model. Nvidia says it typically takes developers weeks, if not months, to ship similar containers, but that's if they have in-house AI talent. With NIM, NVIDIA is creating an…
Confront Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang when he says, “Building a foundational model for a common humanoid robot is one of the most exciting problems to solve in AI today.” It's difficult. The humanoid form factor is currently one of the most hotly contested topics in the world of robotics, raising large amounts of venture capital but also generating significant skepticism in the process. Naturally, Nvidia wants the product. The chip giant has become perhaps the most important hardware company in his AI space, and has recently made a convincing case as a powerhouse of robotics innovation through initiatives such as…
Elon Musk's xAI released its Grok large-scale language model as “open source” over the weekend. The billionaire clearly wants to pit his company against rival OpenAI, which despite its name is not very open. But does publishing the code for something like Grok actually contribute to the AI development community? Yes and no. Grok is a chatbot trained by xAI to play the same vaguely defined role as the likes of ChatGPT and Claude. Ask a question and we'll answer. However, this LLM was given a cheeky tone and special access to Twitter data as a way to differentiate itself…
Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov said on his channel today that the company secured $330 million in investment through a bond sale last week. Durov said the offering was oversubscribed on favorable terms for the company. “This bond offering has been highly subscribed and we are pleased to have included a top-tier global fund with an impeccable reputation as a participant. ) was the most favorable for Telegram in our history,” he said on his channel. Although he did not name the institutions that invested in the platform, he said global financial institutions have appreciated the company's growth. Durov…
Onyx Private, a Miami-based Y Combinator-backed digital bank that provided banking and investment services to high-income Millennials and Gen Z, is discontinuing its banking operations. In a March 13 email seen by TechCrunch to customers with the subject line “Important Notice: Bank Termination and Account Closure,” Onyx wrote: Starting today, all related accounts will be closed. ” Co-founder and CEO Victor Santos admitted to TechCrunch that the company is “moving away from a B2C model,” but rather than shutting down operations, the company is changing its business model. He said he is doing so. Y Combinator lists the company as…
Chip giant Nvidia is hosting a major AI conference this week as part of its GTC event starting Monday. A keynote speech by Jensen, his CEO and co-founder of the company best known last year for its gaming hardware and now known for its huge market share in the fast-growing AI hardware market, is scheduled to be delivered by his fans. It is expected that Nvidia will announce some news. But a number of other AI companies are planning to emerge. Given that many AI startups and major companies alike are using Nvidia equipment, TechCrunch expects a significant number of…
Roblox announced Monday that it is introducing two new AI technologies to reduce the time it takes to create avatars and 3D models. Built on Roblox artificial intelligence, this technology is designed to allow creators to skip time-consuming avatar setup and texturing steps when building content on her Roblox platform. The first feature, called Avatar Auto Setup, simplifies the avatar creation process by automatically converting 3D body meshes into live, animated avatars that users can adopt right away. When a creator selects a new feature, Roblox runs numerous tests on the asset and automatically creates 3D models for him of…