Author: TechBrunch
Anne Miura Koh, co-founder of Floodgate Partners, warns that some venture capitalists are watching with caution the Trump administration's proposed massive tax hikes on university endowments. do. “Currently, there is a proposal to raise the endowment tax from 1.4 percent to 35 percent, but most people will say that endowments are very rich people, so why bother? Well, they are venture capitalists. It's a huge limited partner in private equity, whether it's legal or not. And that can really have a huge impact on funding,” she said at the Axios Dealmakers event on Wednesday. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance proposed a…
OpenAI hasn't disclosed exactly what data it used to train Sora, its video generation AI. But from the looks of it, at least some of the data may have come from Twitch streams and game walkthroughs. Sora was released on Monday and I've been playing around with it a bit (as capacity issues allow). Sora can generate videos up to 20 seconds long in various aspect ratios and resolutions from text prompts or images. When OpenAI first unveiled Sora in February, it hinted at the fact that it trained the model on Minecraft videos. So I wondered what other video…
Late last year, Gou Rao and Vinod Jayaraman founded NeuBird, which uses generative AI to automate reliability operations tasks for IT sites. Having previously sold cloud-native storage startup Portworx to PureStorage for $370 million, the duo was familiar with the IT challenges facing today's enterprises. “It's very hard to find good site reliability engineers. There's a lot of churn,” NeuBird CEO Rao told TechCrunch. “It doesn’t help that modern IT stacks are just becoming more and more complex. Humans alone cannot keep up with these changes.” To address that increased complexity, NeuBird built Hawkeye, an AI-powered SRE that can quickly…
Late last year, Gou Rao and Vinod Jayaraman founded NeuBird, which uses generative AI to automate reliability operations tasks for IT sites. Having previously sold cloud-native storage startup Portworx to PureStorage for $370 million, the duo was familiar with the IT challenges facing today's enterprises. “It's very hard to find good site reliability engineers. There's a lot of churn,” NeuBird CEO Rao told TechCrunch. “It doesn’t help that modern IT stacks are just becoming more and more complex. Humans alone cannot keep up with these changes.” To address that increased complexity, NeuBird built Hawkeye, an AI-powered SRE that can quickly…
Microsoft announced Wednesday that it will begin rolling out a way for users to share files between their iPhones and Windows 11 or Windows 10 PCs through the company's Phone Link and Link to Windows apps. This feature is currently rolling out to Windows Insiders. Windows Insiders can now download the latest Phone Link update and enable new features to start sharing files from iPhone to PC and vice versa. Image credit: Microsoft To share a file from your iPhone to your PC, you need to go to the file, tap the share icon, and select “Link to Windows.” From…
Last week, Google DeepMind announced Genie 2, a new video model that generates plausible, consistent, and playable 3D environments based on prompt images. According to DeepMind, Genie 2 comes with a host of new and exciting features that improve lighting and reflections, and can even generate videos from real-world images. Within these generated worlds, models can also create animated characters that act as embodied agents for training purposes. Characters can interact with the world by popping balloons, opening doors, and even interacting with non-playable characters. The DeepMind team seems to be hoping that these AI-generated video games will help train…
On Wednesday, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Threads were all facing varying degrees of issues as a result of the global outage that affected Meta's apps. The cause of the outage is still unknown, but Meta acknowledged “technical issues” in a post on X. “We're aware that technical issues are impacting the ability of some users to access our apps. We're working hard to get things back to normal as soon as possible,” the company said in a statement at 1:48 p.m. ET. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.” Instagram posted a similar message to X, prominently using…
In addition to the release of many new AI functions, Apple has also updated voice memo apps on iOS 18.2. On Wednesday, iPhone manufacturers have announced that iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max users will be able to stack vocal trucks on existing instrument recording with voice memo apps without using headphones. Instead, the user will be able to record vocals using an iPhone speaker to record the instruments and at the same time using 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max microphones. This update was announced for the first time in the Apple event held in September, and the company's…
After years of discussion about Apple's lack of innovation when it comes to Siri, Apple has promised to launch a smarter version of its digital assistant. Siri is getting new features and updates in iOS 18 thanks to the addition of Apple Intelligence, the company's generative AI product, and integration with ChatGPT. It's worth noting that some of Siri's notable upcoming updates, such as on-screen recognition features, are not yet available and are expected to be released at some point in the future. With the introduction of Apple Intelligence, see what you can do with your improved digital assistant. ChatGPT…
Hello everyone, welcome to TechCrunch's regular AI newsletter. If you'd like to have this sent to your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Longtime readers of this newsletter may have noticed that we skipped a week last week. That was not our intention and we apologize. The reason is that we have reached a tipping point in the AI news cycle. We are a small team and underpowered. It's becoming nearly impossible to cover all the announcements, controversies, academic papers, trends, open model releases, lawsuits, etc. Let's take this month as an example. OpenAI is in the midst of what…