Author: TechBrunch

Cloud data analytics company Snowflake has been at the center of a recent spate of data thefts that have left its corporate customers scrambling to understand whether their cloud data stores have been breached. The Boston-based data giant helps some of the world's largest companies, including banks, healthcare organizations and technology companies, store and analyze vast amounts of data, including customer data, in the cloud. Australian authorities warned last week that they had learned of “successful intrusions into multiple companies using Snowflake environments,” but did not name the companies. Hackers claimed on a popular cybercrime forum that they had stolen…

French AI startup Mistral is introducing new AI model customization options, including paid plans, to enable developers and enterprises to fine-tune generative models for specific use cases. The first is self-service: Mistral has released Mistral-Finetune, a software development kit (SDK) for fine-tuning models on workstations, servers, and small datacenter nodes. In the Readme on the SDK's GitHub repository, Mistral says that the SDK is optimized for multi-GPU setups, but can be scaled down to a single Nvidia A100 or H100 GPU to fine-tune smaller models like the Mistral 7B. Fine-tuning a dataset such as UltraChat, a collection of 1.4 million…

It's fair to say that the launch of the Ai Pin didn't go according to plan for Humane. This week, the well-funded startup is grappling with another in its growing list of problems: On Wednesday, the company sent out an email to customers asking them to stop using the egg-shaped charging case. Humane said the warning was issued “out of an abundance of caution.” The company said it launched an investigation after receiving “one complaint” from a customer about charging issues. Ultimately, Humane determined that the batteries supplied posed a fire hazard. “Following our investigation, we have determined that our…

Apple will kick off its week-long Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 2024) event with its traditional keynote on June 10 at 10 a.m. ET/7 a.m. PT. The presentation will focus on the company's software products and the developers behind them, including the latest versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS and watchOS. You can watch the stream on Apple's event page , and there's also a stream on YouTube , though it tends to be a bit delayed. Over the past few years, critics have noted that the company has so far lagged behind companies like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI when…

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference next week is sure to be a key moment in the iPhone maker's history, and while the Vision Pro debuted at last year's event, don't expect the hardware to be a highlight at WWDC 2024, which starts at 10 a.m. PST on Monday. WWDC is for developers, and much of the focus will be on iOS 18. The Cupertino tech giant will be showcasing its selection of integrating AI technologies into its devices and software, including its historic partnership with OpenAI. As the big event draws closer, various leaks have surfaced about what's in store for…

Welcome to Elon Musk’s X. The social network formerly known as Twitter where the rules are made up and the check marks don’t matter. Or do they? The Tesla and SpaceX CEO announced his bid to buy Twitter in April 2022, zealously driven to rid the platform of spam bots and protect free speech. Musk ultimately paid $44 billion for the website in October 2022, following attempts to kill the deal and a dramatic legal discovery process. Since Musk bought Twitter and took the company private, there has been a whirlwind of news around the microblogging platform, including but not…

TechCrunch has been keeping readers informed about Fearless Fund's legal battle to provide business grants to Black women, and today we're pleased to announce that Arian Simone, CEO and co-founder of Fearless Fund, will speak about the organization's fight for racial equality during a fireside chat on the Disrupt 2024 Builders Stage. The Fearless Fund was sued by the American Equal Rights Union in August last year, which claimed that the organization discriminated against non-black founders by providing grants to businesses run by black women. In June this year, an appeals court ruled that Fearless Fund's corporate grants were likely…

An important step has been achieved towards a more interoperable “Fediverse” – a broader network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky and others. Now, users of decentralized apps like Mastodon powered by the ActivityPub protocol, or apps powered by Bluesky's AT protocol, can easily follow users on other networks, see their posts, like, reply and repost them. These same people will also be able to see other people's posts. The technology that makes this possible is Bridgy Fed, one of several efforts aimed at connecting the Fediverse with other networks like the web, Bluesky, and perhaps in the…

Stability AI, the startup behind the AI-powered art generator Stable Diffusion, has released an open AI model that generates sounds and songs that it says were trained exclusively on royalty-free recordings. The generative model, called “Stable Audio Open,” takes a text description (e.g., “processed studio-played rock beats, session drums on an acoustic kit”) and outputs recordings up to 47 seconds long. The model was trained using approximately 486,000 samples from the free music libraries FreeSound and Free Music Archive. Stability AI says the model can create drum beats, instrumental riffs, ambient sounds and “production elements” for videos, films and TV…

Instant delivery startups aren't the only ones struggling: Norway-based online supermarket delivery startup Oda has significantly scaled back its expansion ambitions and announced 150 job cuts to focus on just two markets: its home base and Sweden, home to online grocer Mathem, which it merged with last year. Oda, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars and was once valued as high as $900 million at the height of the SoftBank-led Vision Fund investment, has said it aims to be profitable in both countries within the next year. Oda's exit mirrors what's happening in the instant food delivery industry, where…