Author: TechBrunch

Two years after it was announced at WWDC, Apple's US-only Pay Later feature has been discontinued, the news first reported by 9 to 5 Mac and confirmed by TechCrunch. Below is the full statement provided to TechCrunch. Starting later this year, users around the world will be able to use credit and debit cards and installment loans through lenders when checking out with Apple Pay. With the launch of this new global installment loans offering, Apple Pay Later will be discontinued in the US. We remain committed to providing users with access to easy, secure and private payment options with…

Google's AI research arm DeepMind says it is developing AI technology to generate soundtracks for videos. In an official blog post, DeepMind said it believes a technology called V2A (short for “video to audio”) is a key piece of the AI-generated media puzzle. While many organizations, including DeepMind, are developing video-generation AI models, these models are unable to create sound effects that are synchronized with the video they generate. “Video generation models are advancing at an astonishing pace, but many current systems can only produce silent outputs,” DeepMind wrote. “V2A technology [could] This could be a promising approach to bring…

Amid ongoing controversy over the handling of media articles and original reporting, AI-powered search startup Perplexity has begun displaying results for fact-based queries, such as weather, time in a location, currency conversions, and answers to simple math questions, directly in its cards, to prevent Perplexity users from going to other search engines like Google for such results. To be clear, Perplexity can already scrape this data from the web and display the results in an easy-to-understand way, but the company is adding a visual twist to those results to make them more eye-catching and quicker to view. X CEO Aravind…

The competition for high-quality AI-generated video is heating up. On Monday, Runway, a company that develops generative AI tools for film and visual content creators, announced Gen-3 Alpha, its latest AI model that generates video clips from text descriptions and still images. Runway said Gen-3 offers “significant” improvements in generation speed and fidelity over Runway's previous flagship video model, Gen-2, while giving users greater control over the structure, style, and movement of the videos they create. Gen-3 will be available soon to Runway subscribers, including enterprise customers and companies participating in Runway's Creative Partner Program. “Gen-3 Alpha excels at generating…

Tender Food Inc. is a four-year-old food tech startup looking to enter a market already crowded with big-name brands. The company is doing so well that it has already landed a deal with the Boston-area fast-food chain Clover Food Lab. The Somerville, Massachusetts-based company, formerly known as Boston Meats, develops plant-based meat alternatives including beef short rib, pulled pork, chicken breast and crab meat. The company's co-founder and CEO, Christophe Chantre, told TechCrunch that the company's technology spins plant-based protein fibers, including soy protein, into structured cuts of meat in a way similar to how cotton candy is made. Berlin-based…

Startup founders, today is your day. This is your last chance to participate in the Startup Battlefield 200, the world's leading startup competition, taking place at TechCrunch Disrupt in October. This is your last chance to join 900+ other Startup Battlefield companies, including Vurb, Trello, Mint, Dropbox, Yammer, TripIt, Redbeacon, Qwiki, Getaround, and Soluto, and start your company on a global stage. Startup Battlefield 200 applications close today Don't miss your chance! Apply now before this opportunity ends at 11:59pm PDT. We're happy to announce that applying and participating in the Startup Battlefield 200 is completely free and requires no…

YouTube is introducing a new experimental feature that will let viewers add “notes” beneath videos to provide more context and information, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. If the feature sounds similar, that's because it follows the same concept as X's (formerly Twitter's) Community Notes. The Google-owned company said the feature could be used to clarify whether a song is a parody or let viewers know if old footage depicts current events. The release comes during a crucial year for the US presidential election. Misinformation was a major issue in the 2020 presidential election, and with the rise of generative AI,…

With the advent of generative AI, AI applications are transforming and reshaping industries and changing the way people work, and software development is no exception. Autify, a San Francisco and Tokyo-based startup, has built an autonomous AI agent for software quality assurance to help software engineers complete their code faster, streamline their workflow, and increase their productivity—in other words, they've built an AI QA engineer for software engineers. The startup announced on Monday that it closed a $13 million Series B round and launched a beta version of Zenes, an AI agent for software quality assurance customized for customers in…

TikTok announced on Monday that it will generate AI avatars of creators and actors for branded content and ads on the platform. The company is also launching an “AI dubbing” tool to help creators and brands expand the reach of their ads and branded content. The new “Custom Avatars” are designed to represent creators and brand spokespeople. According to TikTok, creators can create multilingual avatars with their own likeness to expand their global reach and brand collaborations. Brands can create avatars for their spokespeople or partnered creators to localize their global campaigns. There are also new “stock avatars,” which are…

A controversial European Union legislative proposal to scan citizens' private messages for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is a risk to the future of web security, warned Meredith Whittaker, head of the non-profit foundation that runs the end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging app Signal, in a public blog post on Monday. “Implementing such proposals in the context of end-to-end encrypted communications would be impossible without fundamentally undermining encryption and creating dangerous vulnerabilities in core infrastructure with global implications far beyond Europe,” she wrote. The European Commission tabled its initial proposal for mass scanning of private messaging apps to combat the spread…