More than two years after Google was caught flat-footed by the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the company has dramatically picked up the pace. In late March, Google launched an AI reasoning model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, that leads the industry on several benchmarks measuring coding and math capabilities. That launch came just three months after the […]
Google is shipping Gemini models faster than its AI safety reports Read More »
OpenAI’s new image-generation feature is on track to be one of the company’s most popular product launches ever. According to Brad Lightcap, who oversees day-to-day operations and global deployment at OpenAI, over 130 million users have generated more than 700 million images since the new image generator launched in ChatGPT last Tuesday. “[W]e appreciate your
ChatGPT users have generated over 700M images since last week, OpenAI says Read More »
Runway, a startup developing a range of generative AI models for media production, including video-generating models, has raised $300 million in a Series D funding round. General Atlantic led the round, which had participation from Fidelity Management & Research Company, Baillie Gifford, Nvidia, SoftBank, and others. The fresh capital will be put toward AI research
Runway, best known for its video-generating AI models, raises $300M Read More »
When OpenAI unveiled its o3 “reasoning” AI model in December, the company partnered with the creators of ARC-AGI, a benchmark designed to test highly capable AI, to showcase o3’s capabilities. Months later, the results have been revised, and they now look slightly less impressive than they did initially. Last week, the Arc Prize Foundation, which
OpenAI’s o3 model might be costlier to run than originally estimated Read More »
As it prepares to transition from a nonprofit corporation to a for-profit, OpenAI says it’s convening a group of experts to “help OpenAI’s philanthropy understand the most urgent and intractable problems nonprofits face today.” This group, which OpenAI says will incorporate feedback from “leaders and communities” in health, science, education, and public services, particularly within
OpenAI seeks to convene group to advise its nonprofit goals Read More »
Google DeepMind on Wednesday published an exhaustive paper on its safety approach to AGI, roughly defined as AI that can accomplish any task a human can. AGI is a bit of a controversial subject in the AI field, with naysayers suggesting that it’s little more than a pipe dream. Others, including major AI labs like
DeepMind’s 145-page paper on AGI safety may not convince skeptics Read More »
Anthropic announced on Wednesday that it’s launching a new Claude for Education tier, an answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Edu plan. The new tier is aimed at higher education, and gives students, faculty, and other staff access to Anthropic’s AI chatbot, Claude, with a few additional capabilities. One piece of Claude for Education is “Learning Mode,”
Anthropic launches an AI chatbot plan for colleges and universities Read More »
The Wikimedia Foundation, the umbrella organization of Wikipedia and a dozen or so other crowdsourced knowledge projects, said on Wednesday that bandwidth consumption for multimedia downloads from Wikimedia Commons has surged by 50% since January 2024. The reason, the outfit wrote in a blog post Tuesday, isn’t due to growing demand from knowledge-thirsty humans, but
AI crawlers cause Wikimedia Commons bandwidth demands to surge 50% Read More »
OpenAI has been accused by many parties of training its AI on copyrighted content sans permission. Now a new paper by an AI watchdog organization makes the serious accusation that the company increasingly relied on non-public books it didn’t license to train more sophisticated AI models. AI models are essentially complex prediction engines. Trained on
Researchers suggest OpenAI trained AI models on paywalled O’Reilly books Read More »
In this week’s episode of StrictlyVC Download, TechCrunch Editor in Chief Connie Loizos and StrictlyVC’s Alex Gove are joined by entrepreneur, futurist, and bestselling author Peter Diamandis. He’s the founder of XPRIZE Foundation and the co-founder of Singularity University. In this conversation, he lays out his vision for how tech will transform our lives and
Peter Diamandis answers the question: Is longevity only for the wealthy? Read More »
