Author: TechBrunch

Katsukokoiso.AI is a project by professional photographer Eugenio Marongiu, who is an alpha tester of OpenAI's text-to-video model Sora. Using an unpublished Sola model, Maronge created a piece titled “Surrealistic Elderly People” that aims to balance the absurd with striking realism. Previous users of Sora have noted that the system can be unwieldy and unreliable to release a final product. And of course, the whole technology is controversial, but that hasn't stopped artists like Maronge from experimenting. Marongiu said Sora helped accelerate his typical image-based production process. This process “involves creating images and later animating them.” Thanks to Sora, I…

Chinese open-source AI models have been in the news recently for their superior performance in various AI tasks such as coding and “reasoning.” However, it has also drawn criticism, including from OpenAI employees, for censoring topics sensitive to the Chinese government, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre. Clement DeLang, CEO of Hugging Face, said he has similar concerns. In a recent podcast (in French), he warned of the unintended consequences of Western companies building on top of high-performance open source Chinese AI. “If you create a chatbot and ask people questions about the Tiananmen Square incident, it's not going to…

On Tuesday, cloud business software provider ServiceTitan priced its initial public offering at $52 to $57 per share, expecting to raise between $446.2 million and $514.2 million in the midrange. I am. It also made some other interesting disclosures about what it will use the money for and who it will sell its shares to. In its latest S-1A SEC form, the company revealed that it plans to use significant cash (approximately $311 million) to buy back all of its non-convertible preferred stock at $1,000 per share. Investors paid. In addition, those shareholders will also be paid any accrued dividends…

Today, longtime Founders Fund partner Brian Singerman announced he is taking a step back at X. He will move from honorary partner to partner in order to achieve a better “work-life balance,” but will continue in his role as an “investor and strategic advisor” to the firm. Singerman has been with Founders Fund for more than 16 years. In his farewell post, he wrote that he was attracted to the company, founded by Peter Thiel in 2005, because it was considering a “literal moonshot” investment in SpaceX. Mr. Singerman has since invested in companies including fintech company Affirm and health…

Users of conversational AI platform ChatGPT discovered an interesting phenomenon over the weekend. Well, the popular chatbot is refusing to answer questions about “David Mayer.” If you ask it to do so, it will immediately freeze. Conspiracy theories abound, but there's a more mundane reason at the heart of this strange behavior. Word that the name is harmful to chatbots spread quickly over the weekend, with more people trying to trick the service into simply recognizing the name. Bad luck: Every time you try to get ChatGPT to spell that particular name, it may fail or cut off the middle…

U.S. officials said Tuesday that a Chinese-backed hacker group called Salt Typhoon continues to attack the networks of the nation's largest phone and internet providers, weeks after a long-running hacking campaign first came to light. announced that it had invaded some parts of the country. Cybersecurity agency CISA said affected telecom companies were still working to eliminate the hackers, in part because the hackers' motives were unclear. Rumors first surfaced in October that Salt Typhoon would be present on networks such as AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen (formerly CenturyLink). T-Mobile was targeted, but said it had largely repelled the attackers. The…

AI-driven demand for electricity is soaring that some big tech companies are at risk of falling short of their climate commitments. But Amazon is partnering with AI startup Orbital to test new materials that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, using AWS data centers as its initial location. One of the biggest costs of carbon capture is generating sufficient airflow for the adsorbent to capture meaningful amounts of carbon dioxide. Data centers appear to be the perfect place to deploy such technology, as cooling systems move large volumes of air to keep thousands of servers running at optimal temperatures. Orbital…

It's been nearly a decade since Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's cloud computing division, introduced SageMaker, a platform for creating, training, and deploying AI models. In previous years, AWS has focused on significantly expanding the capabilities of SageMaker, but this year the goal was to streamline it. At the re:Invent 2024 conference, AWS announced SageMaker Unified Studio, a single place to search and work with data from across your organization. SageMaker Unified Studio integrates tools from other AWS services, including existing SageMaker Studio, to enable customers to discover, prepare, and process data to build models. “Customers are using data in…

Clarifai, once known as a young computer vision startup working with the Department of Defense on its controversial project Maven, has been embroiled in questionable ideas about AI ethics for years before Silicon Valley came to its defense. He has distanced himself from his early days as a supporter of this, and has become interested in the development of autonomous weapons. Technology and potential cyber breaches from Russia. In recent years, the company has focused on building AI tools for enterprise and government customers. Now, the company has revealed the latest chapter in its trajectory, the ability for users to…

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's cloud computing division, announced a new family of multimodal generative AI models called Nova at Tuesday's re:Invent conference. There are four text generation models: Micro, Lite, Pro, and Premier. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on stage that Micro, Lite and Pro will be available to AWS customers on Tuesday, with Premier expected to be available in early 2025. In addition to these, there is an image generation model, Nova Canvas, and a video generation model, Nova Reel. Both were also released on AWS this morning. “We have continued to work on our own frontier model,”…