Author: TechBrunch
Cybersecurity firm Check Point has announced that attackers are exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in its enterprise VPN products to infiltrate customers' corporate networks. The company has not yet revealed who is responsible for the cyberattack or how many customers were affected by the intrusion, which was linked to a vulnerability that security researchers said was “extremely easy” to exploit. Check Point said in a blog post this week that a vulnerability in its Quantum network security devices could allow remote attackers to obtain sensitive credentials from affected devices and gain access to a victim's entire network. Check Point said attackers…
Spotify continues to face criticism over its decision to end support for its in-car streaming device, Car Thing, announced in early May. The company said the device will no longer work after December 9, 2024. On TikTok, Gen Z users have posted videos expressing their frustration with Spotify's response and recommendations such as switching to Android Auto and CarPlay. In many cases, they note, they never had access to their car's built-in infotainment system in the first place, making them the target market for dedicated players like Car Thing. The streaming service's in-car gadget hasn't been on the market long…
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,…