Author: TechBrunch
TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 is gearing up to showcase the next wave of innovation. Among the outstanding finalists in the highly anticipated 'So You Think You Can Pitch' category are his three groundbreaking startups looking to make their mark. These finalists represent a variety of sectors, from social media to civic technology to sustainable energy solutions, and beat out hundreds of startup applicants to this year's program. First up is Ti¢ker. It is a purpose-built social media platform that revolutionizes the way users participate in investment activities in real time. With an invite-only model, Ti¢ker provides a safe space to…
Company X is warning users that their follower count may decrease as they attempt to broadly remove some spammers and bots from their network. According to an announcement released by the X Safety Account, the company will begin the following actions on Thursday. “Meaningful and proactive initiatives” To remove accounts that violate X's rules regarding platform manipulation and spam. Today, we are launching a significant and proactive effort to remove accounts that violate our rules against platform manipulation and spam. While we aim to be accurate in the accounts we remove, we cast a wide net to ensure X is…
OpenStack allows businesses to manage their own private clouds, like AWS, on-premises. After 29 releases, it remains one of the world's most active open source projects, and this week the OpenInfra Foundation, which leads the project, announced the release of OpenStack version 29. The new release, dubbed “Caracal,” highlights new capabilities for hosting AI and high performance computing (HPC) workloads. The typical OpenStack user is a large enterprise. It could be a retailer like Walmart or a major telecommunications company like NTT. What almost every company has in common today is considering how to bring AI models into production while…
When it comes to funding, the fintech sector hasn't had a great start to the year. According to CB Insights' Q1 2024 Venture Landscape report, fintech funding fell 16% quarter-on-quarter over the three-month period. But even more troubling than the double-digit drop, the report says the $7.3 billion raised by fintech startups globally in the last three months was the lowest level for the sector since early 2017. It was true. Notably, CB Insights counted Flexport's $260 million convertible note as a fintech deal because the company “provides trade financing and cargo insurance.” Some might argue that Flexport is not…
Agility Robotics confirmed Thursday that it had laid off a “small number” of employees. The cash-rich, Oregon-based company says the job losses are part of a company-wide focus on commercialization efforts. “As part of Agility's continued efforts to build the company for success, we have decided to part ways with a small number of employees who were not central to core product development and commercialization,” the company said. said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “At the same time, we are focused on meeting the extraordinary demand for bipedal robots in all industrial applications. “It means adding new roles to…
As U.S. lawmakers consider the possibility of banning TikTok, the short-form video app owned by ByteDance released an economic impact report on Thursday. In it, the company touts that the platform generated $14.7 billion for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) last year, and that SMB usage of TikTok led to an additional $24.2 billion in total economic activity. Additionally, more than 7 million U.S. businesses rely on TikTok, with 224,000 jobs supported by small business activity on the platform in 2023. Of those, 98,000 jobs were supported directly within small businesses on TikTok. The most affected states include California, Texas,…
If you build it, people will try to tear it down. Sometimes even the people who make things end up breaking them. Anthropic and its latest research demonstrates an interesting vulnerability in his current LLM technology. More or less, if you keep asking questions, you might end up breaking guardrails and letting the larger language model tell you that it wasn't designed that way. How to make a bomb. Of course, given advances in open source AI technology, you could launch your own LLM locally and ask for anything, but for more consumer-oriented functionality, this is a question worth pondering.…
OpenAI is expanding its program Custom Models to enable enterprise customers to develop customized generative AI models using the company's technology for specific use cases, domains, and applications. Custom Model was announced last year at DevDay, OpenAI's first developer conference, offering companies the opportunity to work with a group of dedicated OpenAI researchers to train and optimize models for specific domains. Since then, “dozens” of customers have signed up for the custom model. However, OpenAI says that while working with this initial group of users, it began to recognize the need to scale the program to further “maximize performance.” Therefore,…
Indian quick-commerce startup Zept has crossed the $1 billion annual revenue milestone just 29 months after it was founded, Goldman Sachs wrote in a note Thursday, citing Zept management. The startup, which competes with Zomato-owned Blinkit and SoftBank-backed Swiggy Instamart, has also gained market share and is now in a position “close to the second-largest player,” the report added. His Zepto, which became a unicorn last year, counts YC Continuity, StepStone Group, Glade Brook Capital, and Lachy Groom among its backers. Zepto operates across seven cities in India and leverages a network of over 300 dark stores, or micro-fulfillment centers,…
To give female academics and others focused on AI their well-deserved and overdue spotlight time, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews highlighting notable women who have contributed to the AI revolution. Start. As the AI boom continues, we will be publishing works throughout the year that focus on key research that is hard to recognize. Click here for a detailed profile. Emilia Gomez is a Principal Scientist at the European Commission's Joint Research Center and Scientific Coordinator of AI Watch, the EC's initiative to monitor the progress, diffusion and impact of AI in Europe. Her team leverages its scientific…