Author: TechBrunch
Until now, the humanoid robotics industry has been all about promises and trials. While important for the eventual adoption of new technology, these programs often only involve a handful of robots and don't amount to anything more meaningful. But on Thursday, Agility announced that it had signed a formal contract with logistics giant GXO after successful trials. Digit's first job will be hauling packages at a Spanx factory in Georgia, which is no euphemism. Neither side will say exactly how many of the bipedal robots will be taking boxes from the cobots and putting them on the conveyor belt, meaning…
If you've heard about students and generative AI lately, you may have heard a few discussions about the adoption of tools like ChatGPT. Are they helping? (Yay! Great for research! Fast!) Or hurting? (Boo! Misinformation! Cheating!) But some startups are embracing the introduction of generative AI into school environments in a positive, and understandable, way. And they're building products to address what they believe to be a market opportunity. Now, one of them has raised funding to realise that ambition. MagicSchool AI, which is developing generative AI tools for educational environments, closed a $15 million Series A round led by…
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke about the future of AI in an interview published on Thursday, saying he strongly believes there isn't “just one AI.” Touting the value of open source in putting AI tools in the hands of many, Zuckerberg took a bit of a dig at the efforts of an unnamed competitor that he believes is far from open, adding that it seems like they think they're “creating god.” “I don't think AI technology should be monopolized or one company should use it to build its core product,” Zuckerberg said in a new YouTube interview with Kayne Sutter…
AI mogul Andrew Ng's AI Fund, a startup incubator that supports small teams of experts trying to solve important problems using AI, is planning to raise more than $120 million in its second round of funding. AI Fund's second fund, AI Venture Fund II, has raised $69.75 million so far from 13 partners, with about $50 million remaining to invest, according to an SEC filing. An AI Fund spokesman declined to comment. Ng, founder of the Google Brain deep learning project, co-founder of Coursera and recently appointed to Amazon's board of directors, was one of the best-known figures in the…
On Wednesday, Evolve Bank and Trust, a financial institution popular with fintech startups, announced it had fallen victim to a cyberattack and data breach that may have also affected its partner companies. The incident involved “some data and personal information of Evolve's retail banking customers and customers of its financial technology partners,” the company said in a statement. Speaking to TechCrunch, Evolve's public relations director Thomas Holmes said the incident involved a “known cybercrime organization.” “These bad actors appear to have published illegally obtained data on the dark web,” Holmes said, declining to comment further. The perpetrator of the breach…
Mark Zuckerberg said today that in an initial test in the US, Instagram is making AI characters built by creators through its Meta AI studio available to the public. In a post on his broadcast channel, Zuckerberg said these chatbots will be clearly marked as AI to inform users. “We're rolling out initial tests of AI Studio in the US and you'll start seeing AI from your favourite creators and interest-based AI on Instagram in the coming weeks. These will appear primarily in messages for now and will be clearly labelled as AI,” he said. “These AIs are still in…
Reddit is speaking out against AI companies — or at least asking them to pay damages. Earlier this week, Reddit announced it was changing its Robots Exclusion Protocol (also known as its robots.txt file), and this dry edit is part of a larger negotiation/battle between AI companies that want content they can use to train their language models, and the companies that actually own the content. “robots.txt” is a way for a website to tell third parties how to crawl the website. A typical example is a website that allows Google to crawl it for inclusion in search results. With…
Outside of AI, few startups have attracted as much venture funding as climate tech, and like AI, companies in this space need big infusions of capital to reach a scale where they can make a difference, sometimes far beyond what a typical venture capitalist can provide. A new deal with Rondo Energy, a manufacturer of thermal energy batteries, suggests a new avenue for philanthropic grants. Climate tech startups like Rondo, especially those that manufacture hardware, face a special challenge as they move beyond the prototype and testing phase and start selling finished products to customers. Some call this the “commercial…
Meta has fixed a bug that led users to believe the company had adjusted their choices in its political content settings tool without their consent. The issue affected both Instagram and Threads users, and appeared to have reset users' content settings to defaults that limited the amount of political content from people they didn't follow. On Wednesday, Meta confirmed that it was investigating the issue and working on a fix. Late Wednesday evening, Meta's communications director, Andy Stone, announced in a thread post that the issue had been resolved. He also shared more details about the nature of the bug,…
TechCrunch is teaming up with Google Cloud as a featured partner for Startup Battlefield 200, an event that will highlight and support the most promising startups from around the world at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, taking place in San Francisco from October 28-30. At the heart of this collaboration is a shared vision to accelerate innovation. Google Cloud is committed to helping startups scale faster and smarter by combining our robust infrastructure, advanced AI capabilities, and global network. This approach aligns perfectly with the goals of TechCrunch Disrupt and Startup Battlefield 200, which aim to spotlight and nurture the next wave…