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Author: TechBrunch
Love it or hate it, artificial intelligence, and generative AI in particular, is the tech story of 2024. OpenAI may have monopolized most of the attention and funding so far, thanks to its viral services like ChatGPT and its billions of dollars in funding, but a new report from analysts at top VC firms Accel and Dealroom says there's a wave of up-and-coming companies in Europe and Israel looking to make a name for themselves right now. Europe and Israel combined typically account for around 45% of all venture funding annually, but when you scope this out to the specific…
C12 recently announced a funding round of €18 million ($19.4 million at today's exchange rates). The company was originally founded in 2020 as a spinoff from the École Normale Supérieure's physics laboratory and has been working on a proprietary process for creating quantum computers based on carbon nanotubes. The concept of quantum computing is not new, but it is still in development. Many scientific teams are working on the subject from different angles. The goal is to create large quantum computers that can perform calculations with fewer errors. But wait, why do we need quantum computers in the first place?…
Ilya Sutskever, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, has founded a new company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), just one month after officially leaving OpenAI. Sutskever, the longtime chief scientist at OpenAI, founded SSI with former Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross and former OpenAI engineer Daniel Levy. At OpenAI, Sutskever was integral to the company's efforts to improve AI safety with the rise of “super-intelligent” AI systems, an area in which he worked alongside Jan Rijke, who co-led OpenAI's Superalignment team. But after clashing with OpenAI's leadership over how to approach AI safety, both Sutskever and Rijke dramatically left the company…
Hey everyone, welcome to TechCrunch's regular AI newsletter. This week in AI, generative AI has begun spamming academic publications, a disturbing new development in the field of disinformation. In a post for Retraction Watch, a blog that tracks recent retractions of academic research, assistant professors of philosophy Tomasz Juraczyk and Leszek Wronski wrote about three journals published by Addleton Academic Publishers that appear to be composed entirely of AI-generated papers. The journals publish papers that follow the same template, chock-full of buzzwords like “blockchain,” “metaverse,” “internet of things,” “deep learning,” etc., list the same editorial boards (ten of whom are…
Vendors would like you to believe that we are in the midst of an AI revolution, changing the very nature of how we work. But some recent studies suggest the truth is much more nuanced than that. Enterprises are excited about generative AI as vendors tout the potential benefits, but turning that desire into a proof-of-concept and working product is proving to be much more difficult. Whether it's due to technical debt from an old technology stack or simply a lack of talent with the right skills, companies are faced with the technical complexities of implementation. In fact, a recent…
Henrik Fisker once envisioned a burgeoning electric-vehicle empire led by the Ocean SUV at his eponymous startup, but cracks in that vision started to show as soon as the Ocean hit the road in 2023. Fisker repeatedly cut production goals, missed sales targets, and laid off employees. Additionally, its Ocean SUVs were hit by software and mechanical problems that rendered them inoperable for some. Problematic brakes, sudden loss of power, and doors that wouldn't open added to a list of issues that led to multiple safety investigations and ultimately a production halt to raise new capital. These and other factors…
Four years after acquiring Shine, a French fintech startup that offers bank accounts to freelancers and small businesses, Société Générale has announced plans to sell Shine to Ageras. In 2020, TechCrunch reported that Societe Generale had spent around €100 million to acquire Shine. It wasn't a huge deal, but it attracted a lot of attention at the time because it was more than just a technology and talent acquisition. Societe Generale isn't a name that pops up often in tech startup acquisition news. In short, the financial institution wanted to replicate BoursoBank’s success in online banking, but this time in…
With the Indian election process now over and a new government in place, Meta has lifted restrictions on election-related queries using the Meta AI chatbot, although Google continues to enforce restrictions as part of its global restrictions on these types of queries. The lifting of restrictions on Meta means that queries related to Indian election results, politician information, and details of public officials are now available. TechCrunch was able to get answers related to election results, politicians, and public officials from Meta AI. Meta has not made any statement on this. The company began blocking certain political queries when India's…
Ask health-focused venture capitalists to name a single top AI startup, and one name comes up time and time again: Pittsburgh-based Abridge, founded before OpenAI was a household name and before LLMs were a household term in Silicon Valley. In 2019, Shiv Rao, a practicing cardiologist, pitched a startup idea to Andy Weissman, general partner at Union Square Ventures, which Rao called a cross between SoundCloud and RapGenius for medicine. Weissman said he found it a bit funny to compare a startup AI-powered medical note-taking app to music hosting and song lyrics transcription, but the concept resonated with him. Rao…
When people think about the water they use, they tend to think of the water that comes out of the tap and the daily shower. But with roughly 70% of the water we use going to grow food, and that number rising to 90% in low-income countries, securing water for other uses can be tricky. But in many areas, farmers are encouraged to use only as much water as they think they'll need, sometimes overusing it to ensure a good crop. “Governments want to produce their own food; they don't want water to be expensive,” Kilimo co-founder and CEO Jairo…