Author: TechBrunch

X, formerly known as Twitter, has automatically enabled a setting that allows the company to train its Grok AI based on user posts. X has enabled the new setting by default, and the good news is that you can turn it off and delete your conversation history with the AI. According to the platform's settings page, when the setting is turned on, X will “utilize user interactions, inputs, and results on Grok, as well as X's posts, for training and fine-tuning purposes.” X further states, “This also means that user interactions, inputs, and results may be shared with our service…

Clutch, a marketplace for digital marketing services, has been acquired by online social network Plaiced, Clutch co-founder Madison Long told TechCrunch. The transaction closed earlier this week, but terms were not disclosed. “The creator economy is growing rapidly and we knew that an acquisition would be our next most powerful step to stay competitive and really gain market share,” Long told TechCrunch. Long and Simone May founded Clutch in 2020 to connect people with businesses looking for marketing and content creation. We last interviewed the duo in August 2022, after the company closed a $1.2 million pre-seed round led by…

As CrowdStrike updates continue to wreak havoc around the world, one startup has raised $13.5 million to provide at least some security to the types of devices affected: California-based ZeroTier has raised Series A funding in a funding round led by Battery Ventures. While established players such as Cisco and Palo Alto Networks typically secure edge networks, new pioneers in the field are thought to be focusing on devices. This is where ZeroTier steps in, claiming that it currently supports more than 3 million connected devices and 600,000 network administrators in more than 230 countries and regions around the world.…

The energy transition is a marathon, not a sprint. But there are growing opportunities to accelerate. Swedish startup Greenely* has seized that opportunity. The company closed an 8 million euro Series A funding round (about $8.7 million at current exchange rates) to expand its energy management platform to neighboring Nordic countries. This energy technology startup serves around 200,000 households in the domestic market. The company offers freemium energy consumption analytics combined with energy optimization services that enable paying customers to save electricity consumption. Examples include smarter charging of electric vehicles when energy prices are low, or Greenely reducing the energy…

Floorr launched earlier this year, reinventing the digital styling experience by empowering personal shoppers and stylists to manage and grow their business in an increasingly competitive environment. Available on the web and iOS devices, Floorr provides tools to make sales, host customized styling sessions, create mood boards, and text and voice chat with clients, all in one place. The company recently introduced a new styling tool called “Styling Sessions,” which allows stylists to create complete outfit looks using products from The Floorr's marketplace, uploading images of in-store products, or even taking photos on their phone. Additionally, The Floorr on Thursday…

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…