Author: TechBrunch

Google Cloud is giving Y Combinator startups subsidized access to dedicated clusters of Nvidia Graphics Processing Units and Google Tensor Processing Units to build AI models, as part of the company's efforts to get closer to promising early-stage AI startups in the hopes of developing some of them into businesses that require large amounts of computing. “We want to wrap startups in a lot of love and warmth early on in their lifecycle and get them used to building and running on Google Cloud Platform,” James Lee, general manager of startups and AI at Google Cloud, said in an interview…

Open source compliance and security platform FOSSA has acquired developer community platform StackShare, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. StackShare is one of the popular platforms for developers to discuss, track, and share the tools they use to build their applications, including everything from the front-end JavaScript frameworks they use to the cloud providers they use for specific tasks. The company's sole founder, Jonas Bechared, told TechCrunch that he started the company because he personally found it difficult to choose which technology to use to build web applications. “I saw that many other developers were facing the same challenge and thought…

Two of India's biggest startups, Ola Electric and FirstCry, are set to test investor appetite this month when they go public, but both have been forced to price their shares lower than their previous valuations as they adjust to new market realities. Ola Electric, India's largest maker of electric two-wheelers, is selling shares for 72-76 rupees (86-91 cents) a share, seeking to raise more than $730 million, according to a term sheet. At that price, the company is valued at about $4 billion, 26% lower than the $5.4 billion valuation it received in an October 2023 funding round and well…

It's official: the European Union's risk-based regulation of the application of artificial intelligence comes into force on Thursday, August 1, 2024. This kicks off a rolling countdown of compliance deadlines that will apply to different types of AI developers and applications, with most provisions being fully enforced by mid-2026. However, the first deadlines for a small number of prohibited uses of AI in certain circumstances, such as the use of remote biometric authentication by law enforcement in public places, will come into effect in just six months. Under the European Union's approach, most applications of AI are deemed to pose…

Healx, a UK startup that uses AI to discover new medicines for rare diseases, has raised $47 million in a Series C funding round co-led by Europe's Atomico and Silicon Valley-based R42. The company also announced that it has received regulatory approval to begin Phase 2 clinical trials of the drug in the United States later this year. Healx describes itself as a “drug discovery pipeline” that identifies hidden links between existing compounds (such as drugs or medicines at various stages of the development cycle) and rare diseases. It does this by collating a myriad of public and proprietary data…

Meta, which develops Llama, the largest open source large-scale language model, believes that training models in the future will require much more computing power. Mark Zuckerberg said during Meta's second-quarter earnings call on Tuesday that training Llama 4 will require 10 times the computing power that was needed to train Llama 3. But rather than falling behind its competitors, he wants Meta to build up its capacity to train models. “The amount of compute required to train Llama 4 will likely be almost 10 times what we used to train Llama 3, and future models will continue to grow beyond…

The challenge of integrating renewable energy sources onto the power grid is a burgeoning startup opportunity. UK-based Axle Energy founded the company early last year to jump on the chance to accelerate the decarbonization of the power grid. The idea to build software to support the energy transition came about because of the high global energy prices caused by the war in Ukraine, says CEO and co-founder Karl Bach (pictured above, left, with co-founder and CTO Archie de Barker). The growing adoption of renewable energy was also a big catalyst in the decision. Before becoming entrepreneurs, the pair worked for…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company is working with the National AI Safety Institute, a federal agency whose mission is to assess and address risks to AI platforms, and has a contract to provide early access to its next major generative AI model for safety testing. The announcement, which Altman posted to X late Thursday night, didn't go into much detail, but along with a similar agreement it struck with the UK's AI Safety Agency in June, appears intended to counter the perception that OpenAI is neglecting its AI safety efforts in the pursuit of more capable and powerful…

WhatsApp's massive user base of 500 million in India is fueling Meta's AI ambitions. Meta CFO Susan Lee said on Wednesday that India is the largest market when it comes to usage of Meta AI, a notable milestone given that the product was launched in India only a few months ago. Since launch, people have used Meta AI for billions of queries, Li said during Meta's second-quarter earnings call. “WhatsApp is seeing particularly encouraging signs around user retention and engagement, which coincides with India becoming our largest market for use of Meta AI,” she noted. Meta first launched Meta AI…

While venture capitalists and other tech professionals are vacationing or attending the Paris Olympics, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and its lawyers have been busy this summer. This is the second time this week and at least the fourth time in the past few months that the SEC has filed fraud charges against a venture capital-backed founder. The SEC on Wednesday announced charges against Abraham Shafi, founder and former CEO of the social media startup known as IRL, accusing him of misleading investors. The SEC said Shafi made false and misleading statements about the company's growth and concealed his…