Author: TechBrunch

Welcome to Startups Weekly — a weekly roundup of must-sees from the world of startups. Want it delivered to your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. The week after Thanksgiving is usually full of announcements, and this year was no exception. Blame it on the holiday season, but you could even say that some funding round announcements were really heartwarming. This week's most interesting startup stories Image credit: Ladder This week brought new companies to closely track, salary insights, a slew of YC alumni, and more. New page: Three members of Google's NotebookLM team have left the company to follow…

U.S. government agencies legally hack cell phones and emails all the time. Think of the FBI wiretapping suspected drug lords or the NSA monitoring emails for terrorist plots. But now there is growing interest in hacking other types of devices that people commonly use, such as WiFi-connected security cameras and other IoT products. Toka is an Israeli startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz that specializes in this type of work. The company previously drew attention for a 2022 Haaretz newspaper article detailing claims that it could capture and even delete surveillance camera footage. The company is currently looking to hire a…

OpenAI seems to be in the holiday spirit. The creators of ChatGPT have announced “12 Days of OpenAI.” This is a series of reveals that will be livestreamed at 10am Pacific time over the next 12 days. Day 1 of the event saw the unveiling of OpenAI's $200 monthly subscription plan, ChatGPT Pro, and the full version of its “Reasoning” o1 model. It's unclear what else is planned, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company's event will feature announcements ranging from new demos to product launches and even “Christmas presents.” It is scheduled to be held. There may be…

Meta announced Llama 3.3 70B, the latest addition to the Llama family of generative AI models. Ahmad Al-Dahle, VP of Generated AI at Meta, said in a post on Then he said. “By leveraging the latest advances in post-training techniques… this model improves core performance at significantly lower cost,” Aldahl wrote. Al-Dahle said Llama 3.3 70B outperformed Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro, OpenAI's GPT-4o, and Amazon's newly released Nova Pro on a number of industry benchmarks, including MMLU, which evaluates a model's language understanding ability. A graph showing this has been published. A Meta spokesperson said in an email that the…

Even the people who invented AI don't always know what AI is useful for beyond writing emails. But these days, some seed-stage companies are doing amazingly useful things with AI, including Y Combinator alumni and participants in the 2024 Disrupt Battlefield. We now use LLM AI to automatically plan large, expensive events. Using a proprietary database of 400,000 venues around the world and a proprietary model based on a combination of OpenAI, Anthropic, and proprietary coding, we now collect bids by emailing venues, caterers, and more. I am. If an email goes unanswered, they may even call you to encourage…

A federal appeals court has voted unanimously to uphold a law that could ban TikTok in the United States unless the social network separates itself from Chinese ownership. The decision comes seven months after TikTok filed a lawsuit against the federal government over the ban. Friday's appeals court ruling rejected TikTok's argument that the law violates the U.S. Constitution's promises to free speech and individual liberties. “The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” the court's opinion states. “Here, the government acted solely to protect its freedoms from a foreign adversary and to limit that adversary's…

According to the Financial Times, OpenAI is considering doing away with a clause that locks out leading partner and investor Microsoft's cutting-edge technology when it comes to making artificial general intelligence (AGI) a reality. Under current rules, OpenAI's board of directors will decide when OpenAI creates an AGI, which the startup defines as “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at the most economically valuable tasks.” That will happen. Removing this provision would allow Microsoft to continue accessing and investing in OpenAI's technology even after AGI. According to the Financial Times, a final decision has not yet been taken by…

AI agent startup /dev/agents has announced a massive $56 million seed round, valuing the company at a whopping $500 million. This amount is impressive considering the company won't have the first version of its product available until at least early next year. But the reason behind investor confidence becomes a little more clear when you consider the founder's pedigree. Both co-founders of /dev/agents worked on Google's Android team during the early smartphone era. This round was the first of many deals discussed on today's episode of TechCrunch's stocks podcast, as well as whether to include the “slash” when pronouncing the…

Spotify Wrapped isn't the only service offering year-end recaps these days. In addition to year-end reviews from other streamers and social apps, Google Photos is one of the apps that allows users to look back at important moments from the past year. The feature '2024 Recap' features a collection of memories, insights and photos, with the option to add AI captions. Google says the latter feature is available to some users in the United States. Users who choose to use AI in their photos will be able to add personalized captions to their photos, generated by Google's Gemini AI model.…

Former NBA Lakers star Metta Sandiford-Artest (formerly known as Metta World Peace) has teamed up with former Boost Mobile CEO Stephen Stokols to launch True, a company aiming to invest in sports and health tech. It is reported that Sky Ventures has been launched. Sportico. The company wants to raise $100 million and write the first formal check for Barcode, the performance drinks company founded by former New York Knicks and Los Angeles Lakers performance director Mubarak Malik, Sportico reported. This news comes after more athletes are entering the venture capital field. Just last month, Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo…