Author: TechBrunch
In a series of posts on X on Thursday, Paul Graham, co-founder of startup accelerator Y Combinator, denied allegations that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pressured him to step down as president of Y Combinator in 2019 over a potential conflict of interest. “People are [Y Combinator] “Sam Altman was fired,” Graham wrote. “That is not true.” Altman became a partner at Y Combinator in 2011, initially working part-time, and in February 2014, Graham appointed him president of Y Combinator. Altman co-founded the nonprofit OpenAI in 2015 with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Y Combinator founding partner Jessica Livingston, and has…
Factories and manufacturing facilities are becoming “smart” through sensors, robotics and other connected technologies, creating a treasure trove of potential data that can be mined for insights into bottlenecks and other improvements, or even to speed up processes that would otherwise require a lot of manual labor. However, much of the data generated is unstructured and not easy to put to immediate use. While big data analytics has long been a mainstay in industries such as finance and logistics, it has yet to fully penetrate the manufacturing sector. This has created a gold mine of untapped insights and, more recently,…
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Leveraging AI in healthcare is tough business, especially in the high-stakes world of oncology. Biotech startup Valar Labs is aiming high but starting small with a tool that could accurately predict certain treatment outcomes and save patients valuable time. The company has raised $22 million to expand into new cancers and treatments. Every cancer is different, and for many cancers best practices have been established after years of testing, but sometimes a particular treatment plan needs to be followed for many months to see if it is effective. Bladder cancer is one of them, Valar's co-founders explained to TechCrunch. BCG…
As a teen model, Katrin Kauloff achieved financial independence at a young age, and Alexandra Medina, who she met at NYU Abu Dhabi, also learned to manage money at an early age. The two bonded over the lack of forums their peers were willing to openly discuss financial wellbeing. So in 2021, they teamed up to found New York City-based Frich, a startup that aims to serve as a social financial community for Gen Z. The company's philosophy is that Gen Z is tired of insincerity: Social media is filled with unrealistic portrayals of financial success, leaving people to question…
Could AI help you tell your story? That's the idea behind a startup called Autobiographer. The startup uses AI technology to engage in meaningful conversations with users about events in their life and their thoughts about them, then converts them into prose, essentially creating their own autobiography. The startup is dabbling in contentious territory: Many balk at the idea of AI replacing art, writing, or other creative endeavors. But in Autobiographer's case, the AI guides users in telling their own story in their own words, then compiles that output into a PDF that can be exported and, one day, bound…
AI-powered web page summarization is a feature found in many AI-centric tools these days. The next step for some of these tools is to prepare detailed and nicely formatted web pages for search queries. Arc browser does this to some extent through its Arc Search app. Apple is rumored to be releasing its own smart summarization feature for web pages and articles. A recent addition to this trend is Perplexity AI. With Perplexity Pages, the unicorn aims to enable users to create reports, articles, and guides in a visually appealing format. Both free and paid users can find the option…
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies for more wide-ranging needs. And that growth has propelled OpenAI itself into becoming one of the most-hyped companies in recent memory, even if CEO and co-founder Sam Altman’s firing and swift return raised concerns about its direction and opened the door for competitors. What does that mean for OpenAI, ChatGPT and its other ambitions? The fallout is still settling,…
Hotelsbycity.com co-founders and former Priceline executives Andrew Loewen and Randy Schartner announced their latest project, Plannin, a global travel booking platform that enables creators to monetize hotel recommendations and share travel-focused content. As the value of the creator economy continues to grow, estimated to generate $250 billion in revenue, Plannin wants to put a new spin on travel booking by using influencers instead of travel agents. Plannin allows creators to tell their audience about their recent trips, their favorite hotels, post travel photos, and earn revenue by sharing their affiliate links on social platforms and encouraging their followers to sign…
After selling his second company, Bypass, a payments and point-of-sale software company for sports and entertainment, to Fiserv in 2020, Brandon Lloyd dove deeper into the payments industry and noticed something: software companies were being treated unfairly by the payments provider industry. “Companies like Stripe originally built their platform to make it easy for online merchants to accept credit cards,” Lloyd told TechCrunch, “and now it's being distributed to merchants through software companies, who need support. Instead of generating revenue and multiplying their SaaS revenue, they're handing all of their payments revenue over to the payment providers.” It's not uncommon…