Author: TechBrunch
As U.S. lawmakers consider the possibility of banning TikTok, the short-form video app owned by ByteDance released an economic impact report on Thursday. In it, the company touts that the platform generated $14.7 billion for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) last year, and that SMB usage of TikTok led to an additional $24.2 billion in total economic activity. Additionally, more than 7 million U.S. businesses rely on TikTok, with 224,000 jobs supported by small business activity on the platform in 2023. Of those, 98,000 jobs were supported directly within small businesses on TikTok. The most affected states include California, Texas,…
If you build it, people will try to tear it down. Sometimes even the people who make things end up breaking them. Anthropic and its latest research demonstrates an interesting vulnerability in his current LLM technology. More or less, if you keep asking questions, you might end up breaking guardrails and letting the larger language model tell you that it wasn't designed that way. How to make a bomb. Of course, given advances in open source AI technology, you could launch your own LLM locally and ask for anything, but for more consumer-oriented functionality, this is a question worth pondering.…
OpenAI is expanding its program Custom Models to enable enterprise customers to develop customized generative AI models using the company's technology for specific use cases, domains, and applications. Custom Model was announced last year at DevDay, OpenAI's first developer conference, offering companies the opportunity to work with a group of dedicated OpenAI researchers to train and optimize models for specific domains. Since then, “dozens” of customers have signed up for the custom model. However, OpenAI says that while working with this initial group of users, it began to recognize the need to scale the program to further “maximize performance.” Therefore,…
Indian quick-commerce startup Zept has crossed the $1 billion annual revenue milestone just 29 months after it was founded, Goldman Sachs wrote in a note Thursday, citing Zept management. The startup, which competes with Zomato-owned Blinkit and SoftBank-backed Swiggy Instamart, has also gained market share and is now in a position “close to the second-largest player,” the report added. His Zepto, which became a unicorn last year, counts YC Continuity, StepStone Group, Glade Brook Capital, and Lachy Groom among its backers. Zepto operates across seven cities in India and leverages a network of over 300 dark stores, or micro-fulfillment centers,…
To give female academics and others focused on AI their well-deserved and overdue spotlight time, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews highlighting notable women who have contributed to the AI revolution. Start. As the AI boom continues, we will be publishing works throughout the year that focus on key research that is hard to recognize. Click here for a detailed profile. Emilia Gomez is a Principal Scientist at the European Commission's Joint Research Center and Scientific Coordinator of AI Watch, the EC's initiative to monitor the progress, diffusion and impact of AI in Europe. Her team leverages its scientific…
DataStax made a name for itself by commercializing its open source Apache Cassandra NoSQL database, but more recently the company has focused on using the database's capabilities to build a “one-stop GenAI stack.” Masu. One of the first building blocks to this was introducing vector search functionality to our hosted Astra DB service last summer. Since then, the company has further built out the stack to build his GenAI applications that leverage acquisition augmentation generation (RAG). And today, the company announced its next goal in this direction, announcing that it has acquired his company, Logspace, which developed Langflow. – Code…
Five months ago, Rooms, a 3D design platform created by former Google employees, launched its beta version on the App Store. Today, we're getting a big update to our free iOS app, adding new discovery-first features like an activity feed, an explore page, and the ability to browse by category. Rooms is an interior decoration app that falls under the category of cozy games. Players can build and code complex 3D rooms and mini-games using a library of over 7,500 digital items. Users can customize items by editing code in Lua, a programming language also used in Roblox Studio. Rooms…
Two years ago, Jobs for the Future (JFF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the upward mobility of low-wage workers, created JFFVentures, a venture arm that supports innovative employment technologies. In a move that signals a successful launch, JFFVentures today announced its second fund, JFFVentures Fund II, with a $50 million target. So far, $15 million has been raised. The new fund, funded in part by the Autodesk Foundation, Workday Foundation, and American Council on Education, will “enable economic mobility for workers in low- and middle-wage jobs,” according to JFFVentures. The company said it will target founders building HR, education,…
While major social apps are optimizing for maximum engagement using algorithmic feeds and personalized content recommendations, Retro wants to go in the opposite direction. The company is launching a new feature called Journal. A flexible way to share photos with your favorite people and visually record what's important in your life. Therefore, this feature can be used as something similar to a shared photo album, or it can be used to store personal records. yes i know. Photo sharing is nothing new. Many have tried, but most have failed. Marissa Mayer's latest effort, an app called Sunshine, also raises questions.…
SiMa.ai, a Silicon Valley-based startup that manufactures embedded ML system-on-chip (SoC) platforms, today plans to introduce a second-generation chipset built specifically for multimodal. Announced that it has raised a $70 million expansion funding round. Bringing generative AI processing to market. According to Gartner, the global AI support chip market is expected to reach $119.4 billion by 2027, more than doubling from 2023. However, only a few companies have started producing specialized semiconductors for AI applications. Most of the prominent candidates initially focused on supporting AI in the cloud. Nevertheless, various reports predict significant growth in the AI on the edge…