Author: TechBrunch
As the AI race heats up, Perplexity has persevered thanks to its focus on using technology strictly as a tool for people to “learn anything, their own way.” But how will the company stand up to tech giants, AI rivals, and the growing debate over AI and intellectual property? CEO and co-founder Aravind Srinivas explains at Disrupt 2024 in San Francisco. Perplexity is one of a handful of top AI providers vying to succeed search engines, but questions abound, including the suitability of language models for this purpose, the cost and complexity of building and running them, and, more recently,…
Echo Chunk, developer of the Wordle-style daily chess puzzle game Echo Chess, has raised $1.4 million in pre-seed funding from a16z Speedrun (Andreessen Horowitz's early-stage games accelerator), Zynga founder Mark Pincus, South Park Commons (SPC), Opendoor founder and CEO Eric Wu, and Roblox head of generative AI Stef Corazza. Echo Chunk founder and CEO Sami Ramley told TechCrunch that the main reason for the investment was to enable the community to create more puzzles using AI, and while the company is focused on Echo Chess for now, it plans to release more titles in the future. Josh Lu, a partner…
Current secondary ticket exchange systems are fraught with a variety of issues, including tickets being resold at prices far above face value, exorbitant fees and other additional costs, not to mention the risk of purchasing counterfeit or invalid tickets, resulting in a frustrating user experience. CrowdVolt aims to revolutionize the space with a user-centric bid-and-sell ticket marketplace that aims to provide buyers with affordable ticket prices with full transparency. A graduate of Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, CrowdVolt operates on a model similar to sneaker resale marketplace StockX, where buyers bid on tickets and sellers set their asking price. If…
Microsoft is facing a full regulatory investigation in the UK after it hired the core team from Inflection AI, a US-based rival to OpenAI in which Microsoft had previously invested. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) today announced that it will open a “phase one” merger investigation, kicking off a 40-working day investigation period during which it will gather evidence and decide whether to proceed with a full investigation. The news comes four months after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella launched a new consumer AI division spearheaded by Inflection AI founders, including deep learning scientist Karen Simonyan and Google DeepMind co-founder…
Russian cybersecurity giant Kaspersky Lab is laying off dozens of employees and withdrawing from the U.S. market after receiving a U.S. government order in June banning the sale of its software due to security risks. Kaspersky said it would “gradually wind down” its US operations from July 20, when the ban comes into effect, adding that its US operations were “no longer viable.” Independent journalist Kim Zetter first broke the news on Monday that the company was closing its US operations. Zetter said the layoffs would affect “fewer than 50” employees in the US. CNN also reported the same statement.…
There are a number of startups aiming to replace Google with AI-powered search (Perplexity is one of them), but a startup called Exa has a different idea: an AI version of Google. Exa's founders believe it's not humans who are in desperate need of a new kind of search engine: rather, as AI becomes more and more prevalent in businesses and consumers' lives, the AI platforms themselves will need to periodically go to the internet to search for information and return real answers, not hallucinated ones, and they won't just let you type requests into a keyboard. Exa is building…
Developer Marco Arment released the popular podcast app Overcast 10 years ago. Now, he's rebuilt and redesigned the app for the modern era. Most of the changes are invisible, but one key difference is that you can no longer stream podcast episodes; instead, you'll have to rely on downloading them. Arment justified the move by saying that the dynamic ad insertion used by most podcasts interrupts streaming playback, and that with today's network speeds, downloading episodes before playing them is a more reliable way to consume podcasts. Image credit: Overcast In addition to the changes, Arment spent nearly 18 months…
Among my friends, Lindsay Dorff is the individual investor's superpower when it comes to understanding investments, and she has become the go-to person for advice. “I had a lot of friends asking me for investment advice,” Dolph told TechCrunch. “What I really saw was two things: One, the people I was around were smart, but they didn't have the confidence to invest. And two, what I was figuring out on the institutional side from my time at BlackRock wasn't translating to the retail sector.” She started thinking about building her own tool to help her friends, especially her female friends,…
According to Pitchbook data, funding to women-founded companies overall (including mixed-gender teams) is up $15.5 billion (17%) out of $93 billion in the first half of 2024 compared to the first half of 2023, down from $24.8 billion (28%) out of $87.7 billion in the first half of 2023. So far this year, companies with all-female founding teams have raised 2.2% of the venture capital allocated this year. The data shows that all-female founding teams have not raised more than 3% of venture capital funding since at least 2014, and over the past four years, even as the amount of…
An Indian court on Tuesday launched bankruptcy proceedings for Bijoux, once India's most valuable start-up, following a petition by the Indian Cricket Board. The ruling effectively installs an interim resolution professional to manage the company's operations and ousts the start-up's founders. The National Company Law Tribunal's ruling (PDF) came in response to a petition by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), which is seeking recovery of nearly $19 million from the Bengaluru-based ed-tech startup. Byju's was previously a sponsor of the Indian cricket team. The court called on creditors, employees and vendors to file lawsuits against the…