Author: TechBrunch

Venture funding to Europe is trending flat, which could obscure the fact that European AI startups are thriving. According to VC firm Balderton Capital and Dealroom, 25% of VC funding in the region (approximately $13.7 billion) went to AI startups this year, compared to 15% four years ago, resulting in investments such as Poolside and Wayve. Created several new unicorn companies. For James Wise, general partner at Balderton Capital, the most important takeaway is: “If you have a breakthrough technology in Europe, you can earn hundreds of millions or even billions of euros as a very early-stage AI company. This…

Coralogix, a well-funded observability platform, on Monday focused on providing enterprises with tools to monitor and secure AI workloads and set guardrails to avoid illusions and unintentional disclosures. announced that it has acquired Aporia, a start-up company. As part of the acquisition, Coralogix will launch a dedicated AI research center, Coralogix AI, to be led by CEO Liran Hason and CTO Alon Gubkin, co-founders of Aporia. Aporia's technology will be integrated into Coralogix's services. “This acquisition is an important step for us. By leveraging Aporia’s technology and expertise, hundreds of AI teams already using Coralogix today will be able to…

Instagram is testing a way to show you content from friends you might have missed. The social network has started showing unseen story highlights from users' mutual followers at the end of the story tray. The stories tray is the area at the top of your feed where you can see stories from your friends. “We're always working on new ways for people to connect with Stories, and we're testing showing recent highlights at the bottom of the tray in small groups,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch. told. The feature was first discovered by social media expert Ahmed Ghanem. Instagram…

There's a mismatch in investment in climate technology: According to Sightline Climate, more than half of total investment since 2020 has gone to startups working on energy and transportation. “It's great to see these solutions working,” Juniper founding partner Michael Luciani told TechCrunch. However, as he points out, these sectors account for less than half of all carbon pollution. “A big contributor is the way we make things, not just food, agriculture and buildings, but also industrial products, chemicals and plastics,” he says. “I have come to believe that artificial biology is the best emerging solution to most of the…

Quantization, one of the most widely used techniques to make AI models more efficient, has limits, and the industry may be rapidly approaching its limits. In the context of AI, quantization refers to reducing the number of bits (the smallest unit that a computer can process) needed to represent information. Consider this analogy. If someone asks you the time, you'll probably say “noon” instead of “1200, 1 second, 4 milliseconds.” That is quantization. Both answers are correct, but one answer is slightly more accurate. How much precision you actually need depends on your situation. AI models are made up of…

Lilium was once the darling of the emerging electric aircraft industry, raising more than $1 billion before going public, but after efforts to raise money and emerge from bankruptcy failed, it shut down operations and left about 1,000 employees. employees were fired. The publication Gründersene first reported the layoffs. Patrick Nathen, co-founder and CEO of Lilium, confirmed on LinkedIn that the company has ceased operations after 10 years. “It is a sad fact that after 10 years and 10 months, Lilium has ceased operations. The company that Daniel, Sebastian, Mathias and I founded can no longer pursue our shared belief…

The cybersecurity world is full of technical lingo and jargon. At TechCrunch, we have been writing about cybersecurity for years, and even we sometimes need a refresher on what exactly a specific word or expression means. That’s why we have created this glossary, which includes some of the most common — and not so common — words and expressions that we use in our articles, and explanations of how, and why, we use them.  This is a developing compendium, and we will update it regularly.  An advanced persistent threat (APT) is often categorized as a hacker, or group of hackers,…

Telegram founder Pavel Durov said on Monday that the company is now profitable. Durov said the chat app's total revenue will exceed $1 billion in 2024. The company launched its premium subscription service in 2022 and currently has 12 million paying users. Durov also said the app will end the year with more than $500 million in cash, not including crypto assets. Telegram's CEO said the company paid down a large amount of debt this fall. “Over the past four years, Telegram has issued approximately $2 billion in debt. We took advantage of the favorable price of Telegram bonds and…

A US judge has ruled that Israeli spyware maker NSO Group violated hacking laws by using WhatsApp to secretly infect devices with the Pegasus spyware. In a landmark ruling Friday, a Northern California federal judge targeted the devices of 1,400 WhatsApp users, upholding state and federal hacking laws and WhatsApp's terms of service that prohibit the use of the messaging platform for malicious purposes. The court held that NSO Group was responsible for violating the law. . The ruling comes five years after Meta-owned WhatsApp sued NSO Group, alleging that the spyware organization exploited a vulnerability in the messaging platform's…

Elon Musk's AI company xAI is testing a standalone iOS app for the chatbot Grok, which was previously only available to X users. The app, currently in beta in Australia and several countries, provides access to real-time data from the web and X, offers generative AI features such as text rewriting, long paragraph summaries, quick Q&A, and images. can also be generated. Also text prompts. “Grok is an AI-powered assistant designed for maximum authenticity, usefulness, and curiosity. Get answers to all your questions, create impressive images, upload photos, and more. and gain a deeper understanding of your world,” the list…