Author: TechBrunch
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. is published. As the AI boom continues, we publish these articles throughout the year, highlighting important research that often goes unrecognized. Click here for a detailed profile. Catherine Breslin is the founder and director of Kingfisher Labs, which helps companies develop their AI strategies. She has spent over 20 years as an AI scientist, working at the University of Cambridge, Toshiba Research, and even Amazon Alexa. She previously…
The demand for cloud alternatives has never been greater. Case in point: CoreWeave, a GPU infrastructure provider that started as a crypto mining operation, raised $1.1 billion in new funding this week from investors including Coatue, Fidelity, and Altimeter Capital. This round values Post-Money at $19 billion and brings total debt and equity raised to $5 billion. This is a surprising number for a company that was founded less than 10 years ago. CoreWeave is not alone. Lambda Labs, which also offers a range of cloud-hosted GPU instances, raised up to $500 million in “special purpose financing vehicles” in early…
I finally got my hands on the Rabbit r1 (the company is particular about this lowercase style), which I've been writing about since its debut at CES in January. And within about 30 seconds of turning it on, I found out that it shipped two months too early. But let's be honest…is it really that good? It's weird, relatively cheap, and clearly an experiment. To me, it's about us getting together to keep up, not dunking. The real problem with r1 is obvious. The app is poorly integrated and “may just be an app.” As for the first question, well,…
While the venture world is buzzing about generative AI, Dana Grayson, a longtime venture capitalist who co-founded her own company, Construct Capital, five years ago, is looking at relatively boring software that has the potential to transform industrial sectors. I've been focusing on it. Her mission doesn't eliminate her AI, but it also doesn't depend on it. Construct recently led a seed stage round for TimberEye, for example. TimberEye, a startup developing vertical workflow software and data layers, says it can more accurately count and measure logs and, if all goes according to plan, help the startup achieve its next…
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. is published. As the AI boom continues, we publish these articles throughout the year, highlighting important research that often goes unrecognized. Click here for a detailed profile. Tara Chklovski is the CEO and founder of Technovation, a nonprofit organization that helps teach young girls about technology and entrepreneurship. She has led the company for the past 17 years, finding ways to help young women leverage technology to solve…
Threads users now have more control over who can cite their posts. It builds on a feature that allows Threads users to limit who can reply to their posts (competing services like X and Bluesky offer similar reply controls). Threads outlined plans for quote control last month, and last night Adam Mosseri, who leads both Threads and Instagram at parent company Meta, announced that the feature would be available to all users. “We hope this keeps Threads in a more positive place and gives people more control over their experience,” Mosseri wrote. As of Saturday morning, the ability to limit…
Sonia Garcia and Stas Sokolin were already familiar with the industry's problems when they decided to start Amae Health to solve a broken care system for people with severe mental illness. “I started thinking about this issue a long time ago,” said Amae CEO Sokolin. “I grew up with her sister who has been suffering from bipolar disorder for many years and we always struggled to find care for her as a family. Everything seemed piecemeal and that's how our family I tore it apart.” Garcia also has her own experience with the mental health system. She lost her father…
Illusions (basically, lies that generative AI models teach) are a huge problem for companies looking to integrate technology into their operations. Because models have no real intelligence and simply predict words, images, sounds, music, and other data according to their private schemas, they can sometimes get it wrong. Big mistake. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, a source cited an example of Microsoft's generative AI fabricating meeting attendees and implying that the call was about topics that were not actually discussed on the call. It talks in detail. As I wrote a while ago, hallucinations may be…
Keeping up with an industry as rapidly changing as AI is a challenge. So until AI can do it for you, here's a quick recap of recent stories in the world of machine learning, as well as notable research and experiments that we couldn't cover on our own. By the way — TechCrunch will be launching an AI newsletter soon. stay tuned. On the AI front, eight prominent U.S. newspapers this week, including the New York Daily News, which is owned by investment giant Alden Global Capital, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel, published articles related to OpenAI and…
Iconiq Capital raised $5.15 billion across two funds related to its seventh growth fund family, according to SEC filings. The New Mexico Investment Council, the private firm that manages the funds of some of the most prominent and wealthy people in tech, including Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, has been in business since 2011, according to meeting information from The Wall. The company was founded in 2007, and its original goal was $5.75 billion. The Street Journal reported in March 2022. It's unclear whether the company is currently raising funds toward its goal. Iconiq did not immediately respond to a…