Author: TechBrunch
After months of testing during the general elections, Meta has rolled out its Llama-3-powered AI chatbot to all users in India. However, Meta AI currently only supports English and not other local languages. The company began testing Meta AI in India in April, rolling it out to select users across WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Facebook. A few days later, the company officially rolled out the bot to more than a dozen countries, but not India, likely due to the country's general elections at the time. Meta not only makes the chatbot available to all users through the in-app search bar,…
To shine a well-deserved and long-overdue spotlight on women academics and others focused on AI, TechCrunch is launching an interview series highlighting notable women who have contributed to the AI revolution. Annika Collier Navaroli is a senior research associate at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism and a Technology Public Voices Fellow at the OpEd Project in collaboration with the MacArthur Foundation. She is known for her research and advocacy in the technology space. Previously, she served as a practitioner fellow on race and technology at the Stanford Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society. Prior to that, she led…
The EU Digital Identity Wallet is an ambitious project from the European Union that hasn’t yet attracted much attention, but is worth keeping an eye on as it could have big payoffs in the coming years. The goal is to create a universal digital identity system for citizens. If all goes as planned, Europeans will be able to download and use a free EU Digital Identity wallet to access a wide range of public and private services, using identity verification and other credentials stored in an app on their smartphones. Following the recent adoption of key legal frameworks, EU countries…
Who's afraid of the Big Bad DEI? The acronym has now become almost toxic. The term creates almost instant tension between those who support it and those who want to abolish it. A prime example of this divide is the response to a post on X last week by Alexandr Wang, founder of the startup Scale AI, in which he wrote about moving away from DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and embracing “MEI” (merit, excellence, and intelligence) instead. “Size is a meritocracy, and we must always maintain that attitude,” Wang wrote. “Inviting someone to join our mission has always meant…
As Apple enters the AI race, it is also seeking help from partners. In an Apple Intelligence announcement earlier this month, Apple said it would partner with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to an improved version of Siri, and now The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple and Facebook parent company Meta are in talks about a similar deal. Those talks have not yet been finalized and may reportedly fall through. Meta declined to comment, and Apple did not immediately respond. As Sara Perez pointed out, Apple's approach to AI seems a bit boring and pragmatic at the moment. The…
Just a few weeks ago, two best friends, 18-year-old Christopher Fitzgerald and Nicholas Van Landshoot, graduated from high school. While most of their peers are making the most of their last summer before heading off to college or entering the adult world of work, Fitzgerald and Van Landschoot are hunkered down in a venture-capital firm's office in Boulder, Colorado. They're spending the summer launching their startup, APIGen, after raising $500,000 in pre-seed funding from Barana Capital. Fitzgerald will attend Penn State in the fall, and Van Landschoot plans to move closer to the university, but he's put his plans for…
Most businesses struggle to derive value from their data. A few years ago, Forrester reported that 60% to 73% of the data belonging to the average company goes unused for analytics. This is because the data is siloed or classified by technical and security considerations that make it difficult (if not impossible) to apply analytical tools. Previously working as engineers at Y Combinator-backed startups Hightouch (a data sync platform) and Fair Square (a health insurance tool), Anna Pojawis and Tyler Maran saw that many companies were being “locked out” of their analytics strategies due to engineering roadblocks, so they decided…
To shine a well-deserved and long-overdue spotlight on women academics and others focused on AI, TechCrunch is launching an interview series highlighting notable women who have contributed to the AI revolution. Charlette N'Guessan is Data Solutions and Ecosystem Lead at Amini, a deep-tech startup using space technology and artificial intelligence to address the environmental data gap in Africa and the Global South. She co-founded and led product development for Bace API, a secure identity verification system that leverages AI-powered facial recognition technology to combat online identity fraud and address facial recognition bias in the African context. She is also an…
Vox Media president Pam Wasserstein sent a Slack message and email to staff on May 29 detailing news that the company's journalists said was shocking: Vox had signed a content licensing deal with OpenAI. The deal gives the AI company access to Vox's full archive of current content and journalism work to train ChatGPT and other models. Wasserstein's alert came just before Axios exclusively revealed details of the licensing and product agreement, much to the surprise of his reporters. Atlantic's reporter who signed a contract as a major AI giant Microsoft was not notified in advance. “Atlantic staff mainly knows…
When Kevin Shu, the former YouTube product manager known on Reddit as “Sir Jack-a-Lot,” turned $35,000 into $8 million in stock trading between 2020 and 2022, many assumed his fortune and investment methods had peaked, just as the 2021 meme stock boom has peaked. But Xu disagrees, and is now building a startup for retail investors that aims to provide the kind of friendly investment advice and community people have enjoyed on platforms like the WallStreetBets subreddit, but with accountability to stop scammers and fraudsters. AfterHour, which launched in April 2022, allows users to link their stockbrokerage accounts and post…