Author: TechBrunch

Facebook's parent company Meta is supporting Elon Musk's efforts to prevent OpenAI from converting from a nonprofit to a for-profit company. The Wall Street Journal reported that Mehta sent a letter to California Attorney General Rob Bonta arguing that allowing the move would have a “seismic impact on Silicon Valley.” The company also called on Bonta to take “direct action,” saying Musk and former OpenAI board member Siobhan Gillis are “qualified and well-placed to represent the interests of Californians on this issue.” He also said. “If OpenAI's new business model is effective, nonprofit investors could earn the same commercial returns…

World models (also known as world simulators) are being touted by some as the next big thing in AI. AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li's World Labs raises $230 million to build “large-scale world models,” and DeepMind invests in Sora, one of the creators of OpenAI's video generator. I hired him to develop the “World Simulator.” (Sora was released on Monday. Here are some early impressions.) But what exactly are these? World models are inspired by the mental models of the world that humans naturally develop. Our brains take abstract representations from our senses and shape them into more concrete understandings of…

Backstage Capital founder Arlan Hamilton announced Friday that his role at the company he founded in 2015 will evolve. “After 12 years of being deeply involved in day-to-day operations, I have decided to transition to the role of chairman and advisor,” she said in a statement posted online. She was previously the firm's managing partner. “This move allows me to expand Backstage’s mission to do what I do best: host office hours with founders and investors, chair our advisory board, and bring new opportunities through our platform. You will be able to concentrate on He also said the company will…

Prominent investor Marc Andreessen said he was “very scared” after meeting with government officials about the future of technology last May, calling the meeting “absolutely frightening.” Those meetings played a key role in why he supported Trump, he said on journalist Bari Weiss' podcast this week. His biggest fear was what some had said about the government's role in AI, and that his younger staff were “radicalized” and “bleeding” so that their policy ideas would confuse him and Silicon Valley. It was something he described as “damaging” profits. He walked away believing that the government supported controlling AI until it…

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski recently told Bloomberg TV that the company essentially stopped hiring a year ago, and that generative AI helped make this large-scale layoff possible. Ta. However, despite Siemiatkowski's bullishness on AI, the company is increasing the number of retiring human workers, as evidenced by public job postings targeting more humans and the company's own statements. It does not rely entirely on AI to replace people. “We stopped hiring about a year ago. We were at 4,500 people and now we're at 3,500,” Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg TV. “We have natural attrition; [does] Any technology company. Employees have been…

Let's call it the Reasoning Renaissance. Following the release of OpenAI's o1 (so-called inference model), there has been an explosion of inference models from competing AI labs. In early November, DeepSeek, an AI research firm backed by quantitative traders, began previewing its first inference algorithm, DeepSeek-R1. In the same month, Alibaba's Qwen team announced what it claimed was the first “open” challenger to o1. So what opened the floodgates? Well, one of them is exploring new approaches to refining generative AI techniques. As my colleague Max Zeff recently reported, “brute force” methods of scaling up models no longer yield the…

Elon Musk's AI company, XAI, could be embroiled in an escalating lawsuit with OpenAI. But that doesn't stop it from shipping new products on Friday nights. This evening, xAI revealed that it has begun rolling out an upgraded version of its flagship Grok 2 chatbot model to all users of X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. (X, which Musk also owns, often serves as a kind of testing ground for Grok.) The enhanced Grok is “three times faster” and “more accurate, follows instructions, and multi-processes.” xAI claims in a blog post. Language ability. ” Free users can only…

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever spoke on a variety of topics Friday afternoon at the annual AI conference, NeurIPS, and was subsequently honored with an award for his contributions to the field. Sutskever predicts “superintelligent AI,” or AI that is more capable than humans at many tasks, which he believes will someday become a reality. Superintelligent AI will be “qualitatively different” from today's AI and will be unrecognizable in some aspects, Sutskever said. “[Superintelligent] Systems will actually become agentic in the true sense of the word,” Sutskever said, in contrast to current AI, which is “very slightly agentic.” They “reason” and…

Former OpenAI employee Suthir Balaji was recently found dead in his San Francisco apartment, according to the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In October, a 26-year-old AI researcher expressed concerns about OpenAI violating copyright laws during an interview with the New York Times. “The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) has identified the deceased as Suthir Balaji, 26, of San Francisco. The cause of death has been determined to be suicide,” a spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “OCME has notified next of kin and there are no further comments or reports to make public…

Telegram has been under unprecedented pressure to clean up its platform this year after founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France and charged with allegedly harmful content shared on his messaging app. are. After announcing the crackdown in September, Telegram has now announced that it has removed 15.4 million groups and channels associated with harmful content such as scams and terrorism in 2024, adding that the effort will include “cutting-edge AI moderation. “It has been strengthened with tools.” According to a post from Durov's Telegram channel, the announcement is part of Telegram's new moderation page to better communicate moderation efforts…