AI

Oprah just had an AI special with Sam Altman and Bill Gates — here are the highlights

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Late Thursday evening, Oprah Winfrey aired a special on AI, appropriately titled “AI and the Future of Us.” Guests included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, tech influencer Marques Brownlee, and current FBI director Christopher Wray. The dominant tone was one of skepticism — and wariness. Oprah noted in prepared remarks that the AI genie is out […]

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This Week in AI: OpenAI’s new Strawberry model may be smart, yet sluggish

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Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. This week in AI, OpenAI’s next major product announcement is imminent, if a piece in The Information is to be believed. The Information reported on Tuesday that OpenAI plans to release Strawberry, an AI model that

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Mistral releases Pixtral, its first multimodal model

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French AI startup Mistral has released its first model that can process images as well as text. Called Pixtral 12B, the 12-billion-parameter model is roughly 24GB size. (Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters.) Available on GitHub as well as the AI and machine

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Sergey Brin says he’s working on AI at Google ‘pretty much every day’

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Google co-founder and ex-Alphabet president Sergey Brin said he’s back working at Google “pretty much every day” because he hasn’t seen anything as exciting as the recent progress in AI — and doesn’t want to miss out. Brin revealed the tidbit in an interview during the All-In Summit in L.A. this week. Last year, several

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Smartcat secures $43M for its AI-powered translation platform

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Can AI ever fully replace translators? Not likely. AI translations tend to lack the lexical richness of their human-translated counterparts, mainly because AI models make choices based on probability — not lived experience. Certainly, AI can produce “accurate” translations, but the translations lack the spice of life, like a textbook version of the source text.

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Apple upgrades watchOS with AI-powered features, including translation

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Apple’s watchOS is getting a few AI-powered upgrades, the company revealed at its Apple Event 2024 on Monday. Most were revealed at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, but Apple shed a bit more light during its keynote this morning. The Translate app is coming to the latest version of watchOS, watchOS 11.

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Audible recruits voice actors to train audiobook-generating AI

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Audible, Amazon’s audiobook business, on Monday announced that it’ll use AI trained on professional narrators’ voices to generate new audiobook recordings. A select, U.S.-based cohort of audiobook narrators will be invited to train AI on their voices starting this week, Audible said. The trained AI will be used to make recordings, and narrators will have

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