Author: TechBrunch

Karen Serfati and Giannina Rossi, engineers from Argentina, have been working for US-based companies for the past 10 years and are faced with the same problem of how to manage their taxes while working as contractors in another country. It was always surfacing. Working with San Francisco-based Josefina Van Seenen, who was building strategic partnerships with AI-focused technology companies at Microsoft, they looked more deeply into this question and realized how companies around the world I discovered that taxes are not the only issue if you want to get hired in . “If you're working from Europe, Asia or Latin…

Clubhouse, the once popular live audio app, announced today that users can now send text messages to friends and hear those texts in the sender's custom voice. To stay relevant amid user churn, Clubhouse debuted group audio chats. Group audio chat allows members to send asynchronous audio messages to each other, and the messages appear in a format similar to Instagram Stories. With today's announcement, the company acknowledges that users may not be able to send voice messages to each other. So, when you train your custom voice and send a text, your friends will be able to hear your…

Ahead of the 2024 US presidential election, Anthropic, a well-funded AI startup, detects when users of its GenAI chatbot ask questions about political topics and turns them into a “trusted” source of voting information. We are testing technology to redirect. The technology, called “Prompt Shield,” relies on a combination of AI detection models and rules to display a pop-up when U.S.-based users of Anthropic's chatbot, Claude, request voting information. The pop-up offers to redirect users to TurboVote, a resource from the nonpartisan organization Democracy Works, where they can find up-to-date, accurate voting information. According to Antropic, Prompt Shield was necessitated…

Berlin-based Pacifico Biolab believes it has a unique approach that uses fermentation to create whole muscle structures, aiming to replace traditional seafood with alternatives. Fermentation, the process of growing cells in bioreactors, is already used to make many alternative proteins such as cultured meat, but co-founder and CEO Zach Austin We call the process a “complete transformation.” Prior to joining Pacifico Biolab, Austin worked as a strategy consultant at McKinsey in London. After he finished his job at the UK government's coronavirus task force, he met co-founder Washington Nelson Logroño Vintimilla, who had moved to Europe from Ecuador for graduate…

Over the past few decades, extreme weather events have not only become more severe but also more frequent. Neara is focused on enabling utilities and energy providers to model their power networks and the things that could impact them, such as wildfires and floods. The Redfern, New South Wales, Australia-based startup recently launched an AI and machine learning product that creates large-scale models of networks and assesses risk without manual inspection. Since launching commercially in 2019, Neara has raised a total of AUD 45 million (approximately USD 29.3 million) from investors including Square Peg Capital, Skip Capital and Press Ventures.…

New features and firsts for OpenAI. — Sora, a video generation model, can perform some truly impressive cinematic feats.But the model is uniform. more OpenAI has more capabilities than originally assumed, at least judging from a technical paper published this evening. Co-authored by a number of OpenAI researchers, the paper, entitled “Video Generation Models as World Simulators,” peels back the curtain on key aspects of Sora's architecture, including how Sora can handle arbitrary resolutions and aspect ratios. It reveals that it can generate videos (up to 1080p). According to the paper, Sora can perform a variety of image and video…

Spurred by the growing threat of deepfakes, the FTC is amending existing rules that prohibit impersonation of businesses and government agencies to include all consumers. Depending on the final language and the public comments the FTC receives, the rule changes will allow GenAI platforms to identify products and services that they know or have reason to know are being used to harm consumers through identity theft. It may also be illegal to provide such information. “Scammers are using AI tools to impersonate a wider range of individuals with uncanny accuracy,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a press release. “With…

After announcing results that exceeded expectations US-based Coinbase has big plans, announced in its fourth quarter earnings report. The second-largest cryptocurrency exchange will focus this year on its popular USDC stablecoin efforts, leveraging its recently launched Layer 2 blockchain base as a way to experiment and improve the utility of blockchain. The company has told investors that it intends to do so, and is committed to continuing to work on regulation on behalf of its company and the larger Web3 industry. Meanwhile, the bull market and capital flows into financial institutions are starting to pick up again. Coinbase’s strong fourth-quarter…

There's some joy in this A cold world is the equivalent of opening a new comic book on a lazy Sunday morning. There's nothing to do and no need to be anywhere. Just you, a mug of coffee, and some continuous art. Not much has fundamentally changed about American comics since publishers began collecting newspaper bindings in the early 20th century. True, the content has radically changed, but at the end of the day the basics still remain: characters and text captured in panels designed to be read in sequence. However, in recent decades, the variety of shipping methods has…

There have been many attempts at open-source AI-powered voice assistants (see Rhasspy, Mycroft, and Jasper to name a few), all of which have focused on privacy without compromising functionality. Established with the goal of creating a protected offline experience. However, development has proven to be very slow. That's because, in addition to the usual challenges associated with open source projects, programming the assistant is extremely difficult. difficult. Technologies like Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa have years, if not decades, of research and development and huge infrastructures to boot. But that doesn't deter the people at Large-Scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network…