Author: TechBrunch

Iceland has a population of fewer than 400,000, but is experiencing a greater-than-expected influx of tourists and venture capital — both reasons to keep an eye on what's happening and emerging in this unique island nation. “We need more pillars in our economy,” Iceland's Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, Áslaug Arna Sigurbjörnsdóttir, told TechCrunch recently at Iceland Innovation Week in Reykjavik. Diversification is already underway, with export revenues from IP-driven industries steadily increasing. But innovation in Iceland is not just a pillar in its own right, it is also linked to existing ones: Startups are building technology to…

Some retired CEOs go to space, others move to Hawaii, but David Helgason, co-founder of game engine company Unity, chose a different path after 12 years leading the company that went public in 2020 at a valuation of $13.7 billion. Helgason stepped down as CEO in 2014 but remains a director of the publicly listed company he co-founded in Copenhagen in 2004. But he spends most of his time working on Transition Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm he launched in 2021 to focus on climate issues. The fund is also uniquely called “Transition” rather than “Endgame” or anything like…

So what is AI, anyway? The best way to think of artificial intelligence is as software that approximates human thinking. It’s not the same, nor is it better or worse, but even a rough copy of the way a person thinks can be useful for getting things done. Just don’t mistake it for actual intelligence! AI is also called machine learning, and the terms are largely equivalent — if a little misleading. Can a machine really learn? And can intelligence really be defined, let alone artificially created? The field of AI, it turns out, is as much about the questions…

So what is AI, anyway? The best way to think of artificial intelligence is as software that approximates human thinking. It’s not the same, nor is it better or worse, but even a rough copy of the way a person thinks can be useful for getting things done. Just don’t mistake it for actual intelligence! AI is also called machine learning, and the terms are largely equivalent — if a little misleading. Can a machine really learn? And can intelligence really be defined, let alone artificially created? The field of AI, it turns out, is as much about the questions…

President Joe Biden vetoed HJRes. 109, a proposed congressional resolution that could have overturned the Securities and Exchange Commission's current approach to banking and cryptocurrencies. Specifically, the resolution targets the SEC's Staff Accounting Bulletin 121, which lays out rules on how banks should handle their customers' crypto assets, effectively forcing banks to treat those assets as liabilities. “SAB 121 reflects the SEC staff's careful technical view regarding certain companies' accounting obligations to protect crypto assets,” Biden said in a statement. “By invoking the Congressional Review Act, this Republican-led resolution will improperly limit the SEC's ability to develop appropriate guidance and…

Venture capitalists are eager to invest in hot AI companies and are willing to pay exorbitant share prices to get a coveted position on their own cap tables. Yet most VCs can’t participate in such deals at all. But smaller, lesser-known investors, including family offices and high-net-worth individuals, are finding their own ways to get stakes in hot private startups like Anthropic, Groq, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Elon Musk’s X.ai, which develops Grok. They use special purpose vehicles, where multiple parties pool their funds to share allocations in one company. SPVs are typically formed by investors who have direct access to…

Tumblr has officially shut down “tipping,” the opt-in feature that allowed creators to accept one-time payments from their followers. Starting today, the tip icon has automatically disappeared from all posts and blogs that have the tipping feature enabled. Creators who use this feature should note that the last day to withdraw any money received in tips is June 15th. The reason for turning off the feature was simple: it was unpopular: “Tipping has not been as popular as we hoped,” the company wrote in a post last month, and it was Tumblr's plan to put an end to a feature…

The fashion industry has a big problem: A significant number, if not most, of returned goods end up in landfills, even though many of them are unworn or undamaged. An estimated 9.5 billion pounds of returns will end up in landfills in 2022 alone, according to data from returns logistics software company Optoro. New York-based (Re)Vibe wants to help companies dispose of returned goods in a better way. (Re)vive takes back products that retailers deem too damaged to sell and repairs them – washing them, re-buttoning them, dusting off dog hair, etc. The products are then sold through various channels,…

Data is at the heart of today's advanced AI systems, but it is becoming increasingly expensive and out of reach for all but the wealthiest tech companies. Last year, OpenAI researcher James Betker wrote a post on his personal blog about the nature of generative AI models and the datasets they are trained on, arguing that the training data, rather than the model design, architecture, or other characteristics, is the key to enabling increasingly sophisticated and performant AI systems. “If you train on the same dataset for long enough, nearly all models will converge to the same point,” Betker wrote.…

Keeping up with an industry as rapidly changing as AI can be a challenge. Until AI can do it for you, here's a roundup of recent buzz in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments that we wouldn't have covered on our own. By the way, TechCrunch will be launching an AI newsletter on June 5th, so stay tuned. In the meantime, we'll be increasing the semi-regular cadence of our AI columns from twice a month to weekly, so keep an eye out for upcoming issues. This week in AI, OpenAI launched discount plans for nonprofit…