Author: TechBrunch
In winter 2025, UCLA's comparative literature classes will feature AI-generated textbooks, homework, and TA resources. The lesson in question is a survey of literature from the Middle Ages to the 17th century, and the material is generated by Kudu. Kudu is an “evolved” textbook platform founded by Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA. According to the university, this will be the first class in the humanities department to use materials developed by Kudu. To create these materials, Professor Zrinka Stahuljak provided Kudu with class notes, PowerPoint presentations, and YouTube videos from previous versions. The course creation…
Mitchell Greene held various positions in investment banking, as an analyst at Bessemer Venture Partners, and at a hedge fund backed by Tiger Management before going independent in 2011. Mr. Green currently manages the funds of more than 700 individuals who have committed $5 billion to his firm, Lead Edge Capital. How did he convince so many people to join, including such luminaries as former Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy, former Charles Schwab CEO David Pottruck, and former PayPal CEO Dan Schulman? Acquiring stakes in Alibaba, Bumble, and Duo Security certainly helped. But Mitchell suggested the appeal also pertains to an…
Famm, a queer-owned brand discovery platform, was created by BIPOC queer couple Kat Perez and Marianna Di Regolo to help users discover LGBTQ-owned businesses. Now, the company has launched a new social networking app that allows LGBTQ+ professionals and business owners to connect and collaborate. Now available on iOS and Android devices, Famm Connect includes common features such as feeds to share and discover posts, direct messaging, and sections to manage and cultivate connections. But what sets this organization apart is its focus on creating safe and inclusive spaces where LGBTQ+ professionals can truly participate. The release of a new…
Google's DeepMind team this week announced an AI model for weather prediction called GenCast. In a paper published in Nature, DeepMind researchers said they found that GenCast outperformed the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts' ENS, clearly the world's top operational forecasting system. Ta. The DeepMind team then provided a better explanation of the technology in a blog post. Whereas previous weather models were “deterministic, providing a single best estimate of future weather,” GenCast is “composed of an ensemble of more than 50 predictions, each of which is likely to occur.” It represents weather trajectories and creates “complex probability distributions…
X, the Elon Musk-owned social network formerly known as Twitter, has added a new image generator to its Grok assistant. So this new @grok An image generation feature called Aurora just shipped on Saturday, what do you think? Looks like they've been trained by them. There are no ratings or details. Just go ahead and use this. Seems to be focused on photorealism https://t.co/oR2Uvb96vV — Alex Volkov (Thursday/AI) (@altryne) December 7, 2024 Similar to the first image generator, X, added to Grok in October, this image generator, called Aurora, appears to have few limitations. Accessible through the X mobile app…
Influential accelerator Y Combinator made headlines in Africa in 2020 when it shed light on the African market and started hosting local startups in the region. This movement was huge. In this nascent market, startups especially rely on programs like this to find their footing and connect with investors, and YC has become the platinum standard in that process. Fast forward to today, however, and that attention is starting to look a little fickle. Lately, YC has been quietly reducing its focus on market development as it pursues big problems in areas such as manufacturing, defense, and climate. But some…
The next generation of New York City investors are already making their mark in the Big Apple. They come from big-name venture firms like Female Founders Fund and Lerer Hippeau and smaller ones like Chai Ventures. They work in areas like growth, consumer, and health. They canoe, hike, and play pickleball on the weekends. We chatted with some of the young investors — think, under 30 — who are helping to shape the future of venture capitalism in New York City. Here’s who is on the list so far. (This list will be updated periodically.) Layla Alexander — Female Founders…
Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's prominent startup accelerator, held a demo day for its first fall cohort this week. The 95 startups included in this latest batch are very similar to recent YC cohorts in the sense that they include many AI startups. If my calculations are correct, 87% of startups in this group will be AI companies. Similar to YC's summer and winter batches this year, there was a focus on customer service-related AI and AI agents. However, there were four companies that piqued my interest, and they all had something in common. That means we're building tools to help…
X users no longer need to pay an X premium to use Grok, the service's AI chatbot. Instead, X allows users 10 free prompts every two hours. This was reported by The Verge, citing X users who noticed the update. As TechCrunch reported last month, X initially began trialling a free version of Grok in certain countries, including New Zealand. Users can also generate 10 images every 2 hours for free. However, according to X's post, the number of images that can be analyzed is limited to three per day. More than that requires a subscription. This enables Grok to…
On Thursday, OpenAI released a chatbot that effectively costs $200 a month, and the AI community had no idea what to make of it. The company's new ChatGPT Pro plan grants access to “o1 Pro Mode,” which OpenAI says “uses more compute to get the best answers to your toughest questions. ” That means. The o1 Pro mode, an improved version of OpenAI's o1 inference model, should be able to answer science, math, and coding questions more “robustly” and “comprehensively,” OpenAI said. Almost immediately, people began requesting to draw unicorns. I asked ChatGPT o1 Pro Mode to create a unicorn…