Author: TechBrunch
The decade-old drama surrounding venture capitalist David Sachs and Ripple founder Parker Conrad's former company, Zenephys, devolved into a blame game on X this week, with many of Silicon Valley's elite taking sides. But while they may be entertaining to observers, some argue that these battles are damaging to all venture capital firms. The controversy began when Sachs made a political comment about Republicans and Democrats on X on Wednesday, using the term “fake coup.” Conrad responded sarcastically, “I'm telling you, coups are this guy's specialty.” Conrad was referring to the collapse of Zenefits, the HR tech company he founded.…
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. 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. That growth has propelled OpenAI itself into becoming one of the most-hyped companies in recent memory. And its latest partnership with Apple for its upcoming generative AI offering, Apple Intelligence, has given the company another significant bump in the AI race. 2024 also saw the release of GPT-4o, OpenAI’s new flagship omni…
OpenAI may be planning to enter the search industry, potentially challenging not only startups like Perplexity but also Google and Bing. The company on Thursday announced “SearchGPT,” a search feature that pulls information from web sources to provide “timely answers” to questions. UI-wise, SearchGPT isn't all that different from OpenAI's chatbot platform ChatGPT: You enter a query, and SearchGPT provides information and links to relevant sources from the web, at which point you can ask follow-up questions or explore additional related searches in the sidebar. Powered by the OpenAI model, SearchGPT (which OpenAI describes as a prototype) is being released…
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on his channel on Thursday that WhatsApp has surpassed 100 million monthly active users in the US, where SMS/text is a common form of communication. This is the first time WhatsApp has released data about its U.S. users. The company also noted that more than 50% of WhatsApp users own an iPhone, which isn't surprising given that iOS holds the lion's share of the market in the U.S. WhatsApp is a popular app around the world with over 2 billion monthly active users. The company has so far focused on countries such as India, which…
Amid the generative AI boom, companies are spending too much on cloud infrastructure and they're worried about it: According to a 2024 survey by cloud cost monitoring platform CloudZero, less than half of companies consider their cloud costs to be “healthy,” and 58% say they are too expensive. Many public cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, offer savings plans and reserved instances that aim to incentivize enterprise infrastructure investments by offering discounts, but these discounts require signing multi-year contracts that not all customers can afford. Aran Khanna, a former AI engineer at AWS, realized there might be a…
Meta's AI integration into apps like Instagram and Facebook feels a bit useless right now — why would you have to navigate through a Meta AI interface desperately trying to tell you the top five vegetarian protein sources when all you want to do is find your friends' Instagrams? But with the release of Meta's new Llama 3.1 405B model, a feature that could actually become pretty popular is on the way. In Messages with Meta AI, you'll be able to ask the AI to create an avatar of you, be it an astronaut, a superhero, or whatever you want…
Google is rolling out an update to the free tier of its AI-powered chatbot Gemini, focusing on improving the platform's performance and making it more broadly available, as it tries to keep up with generative AI rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI. Starting Thursday, Gemini 1.5 Flash, the lightweight multimodal model that Google unveiled in May, will be available on web and mobile in 40 languages and about 230 countries. Google claims that Gemini 1.5 Flash offers improved quality and latency, with notable improvements especially in inference and image understanding. The upside for Google is that it may be cheaper to…
A year ago, Arjun Pillai was in a comfortable and important role as chief data officer at B2B database company ZoomInfo, but the serial entrepreneur was getting restless. He's already launched and sold two startups, including Insent, which was acquired by ZoomInfo in 2021. “When you launch a startup, the heat is with you,” he told TechCrunch. Shortly after ChatGPT was released, he was ready to launch his third. After more than a decade of running startups and working in sales tech, he was convinced that generative AI could help make technical sales faster and more effective. “I couldn't wait.…
Disrupt 2024 is the premier event where tech careers are launched, connections are made and the future of tech talent is in focus. Disrupt Career Fair is your opportunity to showcase your company and attract the best candidates, with a diverse range of companies from tech giants to agile startups competing for top talent in fields such as AI, software, cybersecurity, design, sales/BD, research and more. Secure a one-day exhibit table at the Career Fair on the final day of the event, giving your company unparalleled access to Disrupt attendees. This package includes four team tickets (all three days) and…
Substack is rolling out a feature that lets writers draft and publish new posts directly from their phones through its iOS app, the company announced Thursday. Previously, users could only read content through the app. The update brings Substack into line with Medium and WordPress' mobile apps, which also let users draft and publish. The first version of the mobile editor will include text and image publishing; later versions will include additional features, such as the ability to sync in-app drafts to a web dashboard. The editor is currently only available on iOS, but Substack plans to bring it to…