Author: TechBrunch

Artists have finally had enough of Meta's predatory AI policies, but Meta's loss is Cara's gain: Cara, the artist-run anti-AI social platform, has grown from 40,000 to 650,000 users in the past week, catapulting it to the top of the App Store charts. Instagram is a staple for many artists, who use it to promote their work and solicit paying clients. But Meta uses public posts to train its generative AI system, which is protected by GDPR law and only European users can opt out. Because the generative AI is so front and center in Meta's app, it's pushing artists…

Google has developed a new AI tool to help marine biologists better understand coral reef ecosystems and their health to inform conservation efforts. Developed in collaboration with Google Research and DeepMind, the tool, SurfPerch, is trained on thousands of hours of coral reef audio recordings and allows reef scientists to “listen to reef health from the inside,” track reef activity at night, and track reefs in deep or murky waters. The project began by inviting the public to listen to coral reef sounds via the web. Over the past year, visitors to Google's Calling in our Corals website listened to…

Just a few years ago, one of the hottest topics in enterprise software was “Robotic Process Automation (RPA).” These services, which attempted to automate many of our repetitive business processes, seemed to fall short of expectations. But the rise of generative AI may be the missing key to building such systems. Seattle-based Tektonic is one of the newer startups in this space: The company, which combines GenAI with traditional symbolic techniques, emerged from stealth today to announce a $10 million seed round of funding led by Point72 Ventures and Madrona Ventures. The idea here is to allow users to use…

There's been a lot of buzz about generative AI and its impact on business, but if you look behind the hype and high-profile deals like last week's OpenAI-PwC deal, you'll see that the world is already years into using customer-facing no-code AI tools to extract information and do work faster. Now, one of the earliest entrants in the space, contracting specialist Sirion Labs, is acquiring Eigen Technologies, an enterprise AI pioneer focused on analyzing documents to extract insights and data in industries including insurance, finance and law. The deal highlights not only the opportunity that comes with growing demand for…

Carlo Corby and Scott Smith believed so strongly in the need for a debit card product designed specifically for Gen Z that they dropped out of Harvard and Cornell University in 2021, aged 19 and 21, respectively, to found a startup called Fizz. The duo wanted to go beyond creating debit cards for younger generations, to empower them to use the cards to build credit, improve their general financial knowledge, and ultimately achieve financial independence. They decided the best way to do this was to offer a gamified financial literacy course delivered in a “fun, interactive, quiz format,” with an…

Two years ago, Prolific Machines unveiled a proprietary manufacturing technique for growing cells for industries like cultured meat. Today, the Emeryville, California-based company announced it is ready to bring to market the bioreactors that make that possible. Deniz Kent, Max Huisman and Declan Jones founded the company in 2020 to focus on making food and medicines more efficiently and sustainably, which involves growing and controlling cells without the need for expensive recombinant proteins for cell production. Today, cell biology processes are used to produce everything from antibodies for immunotherapy to nutritional proteins in infant formula. But molecular methods are expensive…

Climate change may be the most significant environmental disaster facing humanity, but it is not the only one. In fact, humanity is already facing five of the nine total end-of-life scenarios. Every time we cross a threshold, we put the Earth's ability to self-regulate at risk. This concept of planetary limits is useful for scientists, but not so much for the rest of us. Understanding one existential crisis at a time is hard enough, but dealing with six others, from biodiversity loss to microplastics? Maybe it's best to just give up. There's no need to rush, Christophe Girardier told TechCrunch,…

Transportation accounts for around 23% of global greenhouse gas emissions, of which 72% is inland transport, and of that, 69% is from road vehicles. Given that an empty or unloaded truck produces more emissions than all international flights combined, increasing efficiency in an industry still dominated by manual labor could help reduce many of those emissions. That's part of the reason Belgium-based startup Qargo has raised £11 million ($14 million) in a Series A round led by Balderton Capital. The logistics industry is facing rising operational costs, pressure to decarbonise, soaring fuel prices and cyber attacks, making it a difficult…

Not all generative AI models are created equal, especially when it comes to how they handle controversial subjects. In a recent study presented at the 2024 ACM Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) Conference, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Amsterdam, and AI startup Hugging Face tested several open text analytics models, including Meta's Llama 3, to see how they responded to questions about LGBTQ+ rights, social welfare, surrogacy, and more. The researchers found that the models tended to answer questions inconsistently, which they say reflects biases embedded in the data used to train the models. “Through our experiments,…

More and more businesses are adopting data models – abstract models that organize elements of data and standardize how they relate to each other. But as the boom in data analytics and AI increases organizations' demands on data models, many of the old paradigms are proving to be difficult to manage and highly fragile. At least that's how engineers and entrepreneurs Artyom Kaydunov and Pavel Tyunov felt in their work. During their time at Starsbot, the data analytics startup they co-founded in 2016, Kaydunov and Tyunov frequently consulted with organizations struggling to outfit their so-called “data houses.” Cube started as…