AI

Perplexity CEO offers AI company’s services to replace striking NYT staff

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The CEO of AI search company Perplexity, Aravind Srinivas, has offered to cross picket lines and provide services to mitigate the effect of a strike by New York Times tech workers. The NYT Tech Guild announced its strike Monday, after setting November 4 as its deadline months earlier. The workers represented provide software support and […]

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Meta says it’s making its Llama models available for US national security applications

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To combat the perception that its “open” AI is aiding foreign adversaries, Meta today said that it’s making its Llama series of AI models available to U.S. government agencies and contractors in national security. “We are pleased to confirm that we’re making Llama available to U.S. government agencies, including those that are working on defense

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Built in four days, this $120 robot arm cleans a spill with help from GPT-4o

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Large language models have already proven transformative for robotics. While researchers and companies alike utilize the platforms to supercharge robotic learning, a pair of roboticists at UC Berkeley and ETH Zurich challenged themselves by leveraging generative AI to put a cheap robot arm to work. We built a GPT-4o-powered cleaning robot.– $250 for the robot

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ChatGPT Search is not OpenAI’s ‘Google killer’ yet

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Last week, OpenAI released its highly anticipated search product, ChatGPT Search, to take on Google. The industry has been bracing for this moment for months, prompting Google to inject AI-generated answers into its core product earlier this year, and producing some embarrassing hallucinations in the process. That mishap led many people to believe that OpenAI’s

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U.S. laws regulating AI prove elusive, but there may be hope

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Can the U.S. meaningfully regulate AI? It’s not at all clear yet. Policymakers have achieved progress in recent months, but they’ve also had setbacks, illustrating the challenging nature of laws imposing guardrails on the technology. In March, Tennessee became the first state to protect voice artists from unauthorized AI cloning. This summer, Colorado adopted a tiered, risk-based

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Women in AI: Sophia Velastegui believes AI is moving too fast

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As a part of TechCrunch’s ongoing Women in AI series, which seeks to give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved (and overdue) time in the spotlight, TechCrunch interviewed Sophia Velastegui. Velastegui is a member of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) national AI advisory committee and the former chief AI officer at Microsoft’s business software division. Velastegui didn’t

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GenAI suffers from data overload, so companies should focus on smaller, specific goals

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“There is no AI without data, there is no AI without unstructured data, and there is no AI without unstructured data at scale,” said Chet Kapoor, chairman and CEO of data management company DataStax. Kapoor was kicking off a conversation at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 about “new data pipelines” in the context of modern AI applications,

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MIT debuts a large language model-inspired method for teaching robots new skills

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MIT this week showcased a new model for training robots. Rather than the standard set of focused data used to teach robots new tasks, the method goes big, mimicking the massive troves of information used to train large language models (LLMs). The researchers note that imitation learning — in which the agent learns by following

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