Author: TechBrunch

Character.AI was sued after a 14-year-old Florida boy committed suicide. The boy's mother said he became hooked on the chatbot on the platform. Sewell Setzer III, a ninth-grader in Orlando, spent months talking to a chatbot using Character.AI's AI role-playing app, according to the New York Times. Setzer developed an emotional attachment to one bot in particular, named “Danny,” and began to constantly send emails and distance himself from the real world. Setzer confessed to the bot that he was considering suicide and sent a message just before he died. This morning, Character.AI announced that it is introducing a number…

Matt Peters has worked for cybersecurity vendors for over 10 years. He was a team leader at Check Point, was promoted to vice president of worldwide operations at FireEye, and spent more than four years as chief product officer at Expel, a managed detection and response company. Peters says there was a surprising commonality between all of these experiences. IT teams were frustrated because technology expectations rarely matched reality. Organizations demand a lot from their IT departments. According to one poll, nearly one-third of the average corporate banking staff gets a response from their IT department within an hour. Roughly…

Amazon Go helped pioneer the concept of a completely contactless store, but other companies like 7-Eleven and Walmart are also moving into this space. And the field is growing, in part due to the proliferation of several startups, including Standard Cognition, Zippin, AiFi, Grabango, and Trigo, offering their technology to retailers. But in Europe, Portuguese startup Sensei is growing its contactless store platform and has now raised €15 million in a Series A funding round led by BlueCrow Capital. Also participating were new investors Lince Capital, Explorer Investments and Kamay Ventures (the investment arm of Coca-Cola and Arkor Group), as…

Zakaria Reitano, co-founder and CEO of Ro, said he would “never say never” that he would take the seven-year-old telemedicine company public, but it is privately held. He said he believes the benefits of this are increasing. Reitano fielded multiple questions from Axios reporter Dan Primack at Axios' BFD event on Oct. 22 about whether the company has plans to IPO in the near term or in general. I got away. “This may not be a satisfactory answer, but the truth is that at this point we are focused on providing the highest quality products to our patients,” Reitano said.…

This week on Found, Dom and Becca sit down with Howie Liu, CEO and Co-Founder of Airtable, to learn how the Airtable team uses smart UX to make app development accessible to less-technical users. I'll talk about it. Liu talks about how human-computer interaction is at the core of Airtable's mission and behind each new product Airtable launches. They also get caught up in early failures, investor advice that Liu didn't follow, and the serendipitous inspiration behind Airtable's design. Listen to the full episode to hear: How Airtable leverages a common spreadsheet to help users build functional apps How the…

Federal regulators have cleared the way for electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft to share U.S. airspace with planes and helicopters. It's a win for a fast-growing industry and a timely decision for startups like Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation, which plan to commercially launch air taxi networks. 2025. The Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday announced its long-awaited final ruling on the integration of “powerlift” vehicles. The vehicle is a category the FAA revived two years ago to accommodate eVTOLs, a category that describes aircraft that can take off and land like helicopters, but will later transition. It flies forward…

OpenAI hires its first chief economist. Aaron Chatterjee served as chief economist at the Department of Commerce under President Joe Biden and as senior economist on President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. Chatterjee, who is also a professor of business and public policy at Duke University, will research the economic impact of AI at OpenAI and lead research on how AI will impact economic growth and employment prospects. . Notably, Chatterjee helped coordinate the Biden administration's implementation of the CHIPS Act of 2022, which approved approximately $280 billion in funding for computer chip development in the United States. Understanding…

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced Tuesday that it has charged and imposed penalties on four companies for making misleading disclosures in connection with the 2019 SolarWinds data breach. The four companies indicted are cybersecurity firm Check Point, which will pay a civil fine of $995,000. Mimecast will pay $990,000. Tech companies Unisys will pay $4 million and Avaya $1 million. All of these companies were victims of the hack that hit SolarWinds and affected several other companies and government agencies that were using SolarWinds software. According to the SEC, the companies committed a variety of violations that “negligently”…

One of the biggest digital supply chain attacks this year was launched by a little-known company that redirected large numbers of internet users to a network of copycat gambling sites, according to security researchers. Earlier this year, a company called FUNNULL purchased Polyfill.io. Polyfill.io is a domain that hosts open source JavaScript libraries that allow older browsers to perform functionality found in newer browsers when embedded in a website. As cybersecurity firm Sansec reported in June, once FUNNULL took control of Polyfill.io, it effectively used the domain to carry out supply chain attacks. FUNNULL then hijacked the legitimate service and…

What do actor Kevin Bacon, novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, musician Robert Smith, and journalist and historian Sidney Blumenthal have in common? is one of 11,500 signatories to the petition. “Unauthorized use of creative works for the purpose of training generative AI poses a serious and unwarranted threat to the lives of the people behind the works and should not be tolerated,” the signatories warned. There is. The petition comes at a time when lawmakers are considering how to respond to data collected for the development of generative AI. Last week, the Financial Times reported that the UK government will consult on…