Author: TechBrunch

In Monday's keynote at Nvidia's GTC 2024 event, CEO Jenson Huang reiterated the phrase “AI factory.” “In the last industrial revolution, the raw material that went into factories was water,” Huang told TechCrunch in an interview after his keynote. “And that product was electricity.” He was comparing this to the concept of a data center, which is purely a treasure trove of money, turning raw materials into something else of value. “A new industrial revolution is occurring in these regions. [server] Rooms: I call them AI factories,” Huang said. “The raw materials that are input are data and electricity. What…

In June 2023, Inflexion announced that it had raised $1.3 billion to build what it called “more personal AI.” The lead investor was Microsoft. Today, less than a year later, Microsoft announced that it was essentially eating Inflection alive (though I think they worded it differently). Co-founders Mustafa Suleiman and Karen Simonian are leaving for Microsoft, the former along with “several members” of the team, in Microsoft's words, or, in Bloomberg's words, “most of the staff.” , will lead the newly created Microsoft AI division. I'll report it. Reid Hoffman will stay on with new CEO Shaun White and try…

The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) this week announced the launch of the similarly named Open Source Robotics Alliance (OSRA). This new initiative aims to sustain the development and maintenance of open source robotics projects, with a particular focus on OSRF's proprietary Robot Operating System (ROS). First released in 2007 by former Bay Area incubator Willow Garage, ROS has played a fundamental role in robot development for decades. In a show of support, Nvidia and Qualcomm have signed on as “platinum” members of the new partnership, along with Alphabet's X spinout Intrinsic. “Nvidia is developing with ROS 2 to deliver…

Los Angeles-based Gitai announced Tuesday that its autonomous robotic arm has completed a successful technology demonstration outside the International Space Station. Gitai CEO Sho Nakanose said in an interview with TechCrunch last year that the company is aiming to reduce in-space labor costs by a factor of 100, just as SpaceX and other providers have dramatically reduced launch costs. He said he is aiming to reduce that. We still have a ways to go before autonomous robotic systems eliminate the need for human labor, especially here on Earth. However, human labor is expensive and dangerous in space, so robots can…

As Satya Nadella's cloud giant continues its aggressive efforts to attract top talent, Microsoft has announced that Mustafa Suleiman and Karen Simonian, co-founders of high-profile AI startup Inflection AI, will , and several of their colleagues. Suleiman is also the co-founder of DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014 to strengthen its AI efforts, and will run Microsoft's newly created division, Microsoft AI. Mr. Simonian will join the company as chief scientist in the same new group. Mustafa, whose official title at Microsoft is EVP and CEO of Microsoft AI, will report directly to CEO Nadella. (Inflection AI is no stranger…

The founders of Backpack are building a cryptocurrency exchange and wallet that has seen strong growth since its launch in 2022. However, the path was not easy. FTX co-led Backpack's $20 million strategic investment round in September 2022. Less than two months later, in November 2022, FTX went bankrupt. “We lost 80% of our working capital on FTX. We spent all our time building this protocol and it was just like a knockout on the ground. [we] Armani Ferrante, co-founder of the backpack and NFT collection Mad Lads, told TechCrunch. And not only did they lose investment capital and partners,…

Fintech has exploded in popularity over the past five years. Startups in this category raised more than $350 million in VC funding from 2019 to 2023, according to CB Insights data. Despite all this growth, Ramp co-founder and CEO Eric Gilman believes the industry and companies like his have only scratched the surface. Griman recently told TechCrunch Found's podcast that despite how much his unicorn card and expense startup has grown so far, it's only tapped into 1% of its potential market share. Ta. “Although we have grown rapidly, we still have more than 99% of the market in our…

Remember when you used to “poke” your friends on Facebook to get their attention, embarrass them, or just start a poke war? Now, Facebook has added some small improvements to the poking feature. We're trying to bring back that experience with updates. The company announced Tuesday that it has recently improved the platform's suggestions for who to poke, making it easier to find poking pages through search. Additionally, Facebook has added the ability to poke your friends when you search for them on the social network. Facebook says these small changes have led to a 13x spike in poking over…

Payments company Nara pivoted to providing remittance services in 2021, tapping Africa's growing remittance market and demand for reliable and affordable services. Nala founder Benjamin Fernandez said he intended to build the product on this premise from the beginning. Over the past two years, Tanzanian fintechs have enabled consumers in the diaspora, including the EU, UK and US, to send money to their loved ones through 249 banks and 26 mobile money services across 11 African markets through consumer fintech apps. I've been doing this. In markets like Kenya, it has been integrated with mobile money service M-Pesa, allowing users…

Link-in-bio startup Linktree today introduced new features including featured layouts to better highlight your links, the ability to get the latest posts from Instagram, and support for more prominent profile photos. The company said the new featured layout is perfect for highlighting specific links. When you select Featured Layout for your links, content previews for links from YouTube, TikTok, Spotify, and Instagram will automatically expand. Featured links look like this Image credit: Linktree In January, Linktree introduced the ability to automatically pull the latest posts from YouTube and TikTok. The company is now expanding its support for Instagram to support…