Author: TechBrunch
Hey everyone, welcome to TechCrunch's regular AI newsletter. Last Sunday, President Joe Biden announced that he would not seek reelection and instead gave his “full endorsement” to Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. Within days, Harris had secured the support of a majority of Democratic delegates. Harris has been outspoken on technology and AI policy, but what would that mean for AI regulation in the US if she wins the presidential election? My colleague Anthony Ha wrote a bit about this over the weekend. Harris and President Biden had previously said they “reject the false choice between protecting…
Investment in generative AI startups, which are developing AI-powered products that generate text, voice, video and more, isn't slowing down, but it's consolidating into earlier-stage ventures and their numbers are shrinking. According to Crunchbase data obtained by TechCrunch, 225 startups raised $12.3 billion in venture capital in the first half of 2023 (January through July 16). If this trend continues, generative AI companies are on track to raise as much as or more than the roughly $21.8 billion they raised in 2023. Here's a breakdown of the first half of 2024 totals: 198 Angel/Seed Investments: $500M 39 Early Stage Investments:…
Today's story focuses on a rural Essex high school that ended up in breach of UK GDPR laws. It may come as a surprise to those who used to take lunch money to school, but kids these days can do a biometric face scan to pay for their meals. But as scandals with companies like Clearview AI have shown, collecting biometric data can easily become a privacy nightmare. That's why the UK's GDPR stipulates that the use of facial recognition technology must be opt-in by default. And in this high school, parents could only opt out of using the technology…
Thousands of stories have been written about former NFL quarterback and civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick. If there's anyone who knows more than anyone about losing control of your narrative, it's him. Now, Kaepernick is launching Lumi, an AI storytelling platform that helps creators tell and own their own stories. If you're reading this and thinking, “Huh?”, that's understandable. But the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback has more expertise in this field than you might think. First, Kaepernick says this is a solution for storytellers, and generative AI is just a tool to get there. Kaepernick has spent the last…
CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm whose botched update crashed millions of computers around the world last week, is offering $10 Uber Eats gift cards to its partners as an apology, according to multiple people who said they received the cards and sources who were aware of the gift card offerings. On Tuesday, a source told TechCrunch that they received an email from CrowdStrike offering gift cards because the company recognized “additional work caused by the July 19 incident.” “We sincerely thank you and apologize for any inconvenience,” the email read, according to screenshots shared by the source. The same email was…
When we look at the mythological Ouroboros, it's natural to think, “Well, that won't last.” It's a powerful symbol of swallowing one's own tail, but difficult in practice. The same may be true for AI: new research suggests that AI may be at risk of “model collapse” after being trained several times on self-generated data. In a paper published in Nature, researchers from the UK and Canada, led by Ilya Shmailov of the University of Oxford, show that today's machine learning models are fundamentally vulnerable to a syndrome they call “model collapse.” They write in the introduction to their paper:…
We're excited to announce that we're adding a dedicated AI stage, powered by Google Cloud, to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. This joins industry-specific stages like Fintech, SaaS, and Space, all coming together under one big roof. TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 wouldn't be complete without a deep dive into all things artificial intelligence, so we're giving you a first sneak peek at the agenda for the AI Stage, which runs all day on Wednesday, October 30. The TechCrunch stage will feature some of the industry's biggest startup names, including Alexandr Wang and Aravind Srinivas, along with partners like Nebius AI. Check out the…
The Reworkd founders launched AgentGPT last year, a free tool for building AI agents that went viral on GitHub and gained over 100,000 daily users in a week. This led them to be accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2023 class, but the co-founders quickly realized that building a general-purpose AI agent was too broad a scope. So now Reworkd is a web scraping company, specifically building AI agents that extract structured data from the public web. AgentGPT offered a simple in-browser interface that allowed users to create autonomous AI agents, and soon everyone was hyping agents as the future of…
Sara Deshpande, general partner at Maven Ventures, has been investing in the consumer technology space for 10 years. Over time, the seed-stage venture firm has grown to over $200 million in assets under management, backing companies such as Zoom, Cruise, Hello Heart, Perplexity and x.AI. Now, with plans to raise a new $60 million fund and write six to eight checks of up to $1.5 million per year, Deshpande appeared on Equity with TechCrunch senior reporter Mary Ann Azevedo to discuss the changing consumer landscape, how the company is focusing on artificial intelligence and what sets startups apart. “I've worked…
Since launching xAI last year, Elon Musk has been using the X as a sandbox to test out some of the AI features on the Grok model. Moving beyond basic chatbots, X is using this model to summarize news and trending events. Now, the platform has launched a new feature called “More about this account,” which provides a few AI-generated sentences about the user. It seems useful enough, but the results are disappointing. When paying users hover over their handle or display name on the web, they'll see a “Learn more about this account” button. Clicking this button generates an…