Author: TechBrunch
Google on Thursday announced that its AI-powered note-taking assistant, NotebookLM, is expanding to more than 200 new countries, about six months after its launch in the U.S. Powered by Google's multimodal LLM, Gemini 1.5 Pro, the platform also adds new features and languages, allowing more people to use the AI to generate summaries and ask questions based on documents. The list of countries NotebookLM currently supports includes Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, and the UK, as well as 208 other countries and regions. Google has also expanded the AI-assisted app's interface language support to 108 languages, including Arabic, Assamese, Bengali, Cantonese,…
In early 2022, fintech startup Bloom (not to be confused with Gen Z-focused investment apps or heavily capitalized revenue financing platforms) was accepted into Y Combinator, becoming the first Sudanese startup to join the prestigious accelerator. In addition to the track records of its four founders at Amazon, Meta, IBM, and Goldman Sachs, the startup's premise was also notable and crucial: helping Sudanese people protect their wealth. Now, after a limited initial launch, major political turmoil in its home country, a pivot, a small round of funding, and a rebranding to Elevate, the startup is now open to the public,…
Amazon has agreed to buy the assets of Indian video streaming service MX Player from local media giant Times Internet Ltd, the e-commerce giant's latest move to popularize its services and brand in smaller cities and towns in key overseas markets. The two companies reached a final agreement on the deal on Wednesday night, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The deal values MX Player at less than $100 million, well below the $500 million valuation the streamer was at when it last raised funds, the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the companies have not yet…
Dealt, a French startup formerly known as Mon Super Voisin, raised a €6 million ($6.5 million at today's exchange rates) funding round a few months ago. More importantly, the startup underwent a significant pivot, and this funding round proves that strategy was correct. This is an interesting lesson for early-stage founders who are thinking about pivoting but aren't ready to do so yet. For our French-speaking readers, as the name suggests, Mon Super Voisin was a quintessential household freelancer marketplace: you could use the platform to find a “neighbor” who could mount your TV on the wall, help you assemble…
Cloud data analytics company Snowflake has been at the center of a recent spate of data thefts that have left its corporate customers scrambling to understand whether their cloud data stores have been breached. The Boston-based data giant helps some of the world's largest companies, including banks, healthcare organizations and technology companies, store and analyze vast amounts of data, including customer data, in the cloud. Australian authorities warned last week that they had learned of “successful intrusions into multiple companies using Snowflake environments,” but did not name the companies. Hackers claimed on a popular cybercrime forum that they had stolen…
French AI startup Mistral is introducing new AI model customization options, including paid plans, to enable developers and enterprises to fine-tune generative models for specific use cases. The first is self-service: Mistral has released Mistral-Finetune, a software development kit (SDK) for fine-tuning models on workstations, servers, and small datacenter nodes. In the Readme on the SDK's GitHub repository, Mistral says that the SDK is optimized for multi-GPU setups, but can be scaled down to a single Nvidia A100 or H100 GPU to fine-tune smaller models like the Mistral 7B. Fine-tuning a dataset such as UltraChat, a collection of 1.4 million…
It's fair to say that the launch of the Ai Pin didn't go according to plan for Humane. This week, the well-funded startup is grappling with another in its growing list of problems: On Wednesday, the company sent out an email to customers asking them to stop using the egg-shaped charging case. Humane said the warning was issued “out of an abundance of caution.” The company said it launched an investigation after receiving “one complaint” from a customer about charging issues. Ultimately, Humane determined that the batteries supplied posed a fire hazard. “Following our investigation, we have determined that our…
Apple will kick off its week-long Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 2024) event with its traditional keynote on June 10 at 10 a.m. ET/7 a.m. PT. The presentation will focus on the company's software products and the developers behind them, including the latest versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS and watchOS. You can watch the stream on Apple's event page , and there's also a stream on YouTube , though it tends to be a bit delayed. Over the past few years, critics have noted that the company has so far lagged behind companies like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI when…
Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference next week is sure to be a key moment in the iPhone maker's history, and while the Vision Pro debuted at last year's event, don't expect the hardware to be a highlight at WWDC 2024, which starts at 10 a.m. PST on Monday. WWDC is for developers, and much of the focus will be on iOS 18. The Cupertino tech giant will be showcasing its selection of integrating AI technologies into its devices and software, including its historic partnership with OpenAI. As the big event draws closer, various leaks have surfaced about what's in store for…
Welcome to Elon Musk’s X. The social network formerly known as Twitter where the rules are made up and the check marks don’t matter. Or do they? The Tesla and SpaceX CEO announced his bid to buy Twitter in April 2022, zealously driven to rid the platform of spam bots and protect free speech. Musk ultimately paid $44 billion for the website in October 2022, following attempts to kill the deal and a dramatic legal discovery process. Since Musk bought Twitter and took the company private, there has been a whirlwind of news around the microblogging platform, including but not…