Author: TechBrunch

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…

Cancer treatment platform startup Jasper Health has laid off a significant portion of its workforce, TechCrunch has learned. Departments affected by the cuts include engineering and product design, according to LinkedIn posts from affected employees. TechCrunch was unable to independently verify the exact number of cuts, but industry sources with knowledge of those affected believe the cuts amount to about half of Jasper Health's small team. Prior to the cuts, Jasper Health had about 48 employees, according to PitchBook data. The company's co-founder and CEO, Adam Pellegrini, did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment. Attempts by TechCrunch to reach…

Entertainment giant Live Nation has confirmed that its ticket sales subsidiary Ticketmaster was hacked. Live Nation acknowledged the data breach in a filing with government regulators late after the market closed on Friday. Live Nation said in a statement that the breach occurred on May 20, when cybercriminals “sold what they said were Live Nation user data via the dark web.” The company did not say who owned the personal information, but it is believed to belong to its customers. It is unclear why it took the company more than a week to disclose the breach. Live Nation said in…

Late Friday afternoon, a time typically reserved for unwelcome corporate disclosures, AI startup Hugging Face announced that earlier this week its security team detected “unauthorized access” to Spaces, its platform for creating, sharing, and hosting AI models and resources. Hugging Face said in a blog post that the intrusion related to Spaces secrets – personal information that serves as keys to unlock protected resources like accounts, tools and development environments – and that it “suspects” that some secrets may have been accessed without authorization by third parties. As a precautionary measure, Hugging Face has invalidated some of the tokens in…

Last week, unknown hackers broke into the servers of US-based stalkerware maker pcTattletale, after which they stole and leaked the company's internal data, and also defaced pcTattletale's official website in an attempt to embarrass the company. “This took a total of 15 minutes to complete after reading the TechCrunch article,” the hackers wrote in the defacement, referring to a recent TechCrunch article that reported that pcTattletale was being used to monitor several front desk check-in computers at Wyndham hotels across the United States. As a result of this hack, leak, and humiliation campaign, pcTattletale founder Brian Fleming announced he was…

Google has also been embarrassed by its AI profiles. After a week of criticism and memes decrying the poor quality and outright misinformation that stemmed from the tech giant's unfinished AI-powered search feature, the company issued an apology of sorts on Thursday. Google, a company whose name is synonymous with web search and a brand focused on “organizing the world's information” and putting it at users' reach, actually wrote in a blog post that it “certainly saw some strange, inaccurate, or unhelpful AI profiles.” That's an understatement. This admission of failure, written by Liz Reid, Google's vice president and head…

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje's weekly roundup of must-reads from the startup world. Sign up here to receive it in your inbox every Friday. In a development that will surprise no one but excite arsonists who love to watch money burn, Elon Musk's latest venture, xAI, has raised $6 billion in funding. Valor, a16z, and Sequoia are piling money into an xAI-shaped roulette table, with Musk spinning the wheel. Ivan thinks Musk's latest market foray will eventually result in AI so advanced that, thanks to his other outlandish projects, our puny human brains will become even more obsolete. I…