Periodic Labs came out of stealth on Tuesday with a war chest of $300 million as a seed round, backed by a tech industry’s who’s who: Andreessen Horowitz, DST, Nvidia, Accel, Elad Gil, Jeff Dean, Eric Schmidt, and Jeff Bezos. Period Labs was founded by Ekin Dogus Cubuk and Liam Fedus. Cubuk led the materials […]
Former OpenAI and DeepMind researchers raise whopping $300M seed to automate science Read More »
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 was a big year for OpenAI, from its partnership
Everything you need to know about the AI chatbot Read More »
Imagine you’re a Formula One driver hurtling down a race track at 200 miles per hour when your engineer comes on the radio and says … something. You can’t make it out, but you’re also not going to spend a lap playing out that old Verizon commercial (“Can you hear me now?”) with the race
This week on StrictlyVC Download, TechCrunch Editor in Chief Connie Loizos and StrictlyVC’s Alex Gove spoke with with Amjad Masad, founder and CEO of Replit, fresh off the company’s $250 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation. They discussed Replit’s remarkable journey from hovering around $2.8 million in ARR for years to hitting $150
How Replit went from $2.8M to $150M ARR by pivoting away from professional developers Read More »
At Amazon’s fall hardware event, the company announced will bring its upgraded AI, Alexa+, to its Fire TV devices. With Alexa+, Fire TV users will have access to expanded capabilities, like the ability to ask the AI more complex questions, get more tailored recommendations, find specific scenes in movies, and more. For instance, Fire TV
Alexa+ comes to new Fire TV devices with AI-powered conversations Read More »
The central pitch of AI browsers like Perplexity’s Comet, Opera’s Neon, and The Browser Company’s Dia is that they’ll help you complete daily tasks more efficiently. While these are agents that are limited to one browser, Composite aims to build an agentic solution that helps professionals with their tasks, regardless of which browser they use.
Composite gets backing from NFDG for its cross-browser agent tool Read More »
AI-powered app development is really taking off, and smartphone maker Nothing seems intent on capitalizing on the bandwagon: the company on Monday revealed Playground, an AI tool that lets users create apps with simple text prompts and deploy them to a platform of sorts known as Essential Apps. Currently all Playground lets you build are
Nothing launches AI tool for building mini apps using prompts Read More »
Browser maker Opera launched its AI-centric browser Neon Tuesday, with the ability to create apps through AI prompts and create repeatable prompts through a feature it calls cards. With this Opera joins a growing number of companies like Perplexity and The Browser Company that are trying to make agentic browsers happen. The company first announced
Opera launches its AI-centric Neon browser Read More »
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed SB 53, a first-in-the-nation bill that sets new transparency requirements on large AI companies. SB 53, which passed the state legislature two weeks ago, requires large AI labs – including OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google DeepMind – to be transparent about safety protocols. It also ensures whistleblower protections for employees at those companies. In addition, SB 53 creates a mechanism
California Governor Newsom signs landmark AI safety bill SB 53 Read More »
DeepSeek has gone viral. Chinese AI lab DeepSeek broke into the mainstream consciousness this week after its chatbot app rose to the top of the Apple App Store charts (and Google Play, as well). DeepSeek’s AI models, which were trained using compute-efficient techniques, have led Wall Street analysts — and technologists — to question whether the U.S. can maintain its
DeepSeek: Everything you need to know about the AI chatbot app Read More »
