AI

Cohere raises $500M to beat back generative AI rivals

Fundraising /

Cohere, a generative AI startup co-founded by ex-Google researchers, has raised $500 million in new cash from investors including Cisco, AMD and Fujitsu. Bloomberg says that the round, which also had participation from Canadian pension investment manager PSP Investments and Canada’s export credit agency EDC, values Toronto-based Cohere at $5.5 billion. That’s more than double […]

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CIA AI director Lakshmi Raman claims the agency is taking a ‘thoughtful approach’ to AI

Government & Policy /

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 Lakshmi Raman, the director of AI at the CIA. We talked about her path to director as well as the CIA’s use of AI, and the

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TTT models might be the next frontier in generative AI

AI /

After years of dominance by the form of AI known as the transformer, the hunt is on for new architectures. Transformers underpin OpenAI’s video-generating model Sora, and they’re at the heart of text-generating models like Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and GPT-4o. But they’re beginning to run up against technical roadblocks — in particular, computation-related roadblocks. Transformers aren’t especially

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Deepfake-detecting firm Pindrop lands $100M loan to grow its offerings

Security /

The threat of deepfakes is growing as the AI tools to create them become widely accessible. There was a 245% increase in deepfakes worldwide from 2023 to 2024, an uptick spurred in part by coming election cycles, according to verification provider Sumsub. It’s also affecting the corporate sector; a recent Business.com survey found that 10%

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Adaptive builds automation tools to speed up construction payments

Fundraising /

The construction industry has a slow payments problem. Studies have found that it takes anywhere from two to three months on average for construction companies to get paid, due to factors such as delays, multiple payment layers and cost overruns. The cost of sluggish construction contract payments climbed to $273 billion in 2023, representing 14%

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Quora’s Poe now lets users create and share web apps

Apps /

Poe, Quora’s subscription-based, cross-platform aggregator for AI-powered chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, has launched a feature called Previews that lets users create interactive apps directly in chats with chatbots. Previews allows Poe users to build data visualizations, games and even drum machines by typing things like “Analyze the information in this report and

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OpenAI Startup Fund backs AI healthcare venture with Arianna Huffington

Fundraising /

Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are throwing their weight behind a new venture, Thrive AI Health, that aims to build AI-powered assistant tech to promote healthier lifestyles. Backed by Huffington’s mental wellness firm Thrive Global and the OpenAI Startup Fund, the early-stage venture fund closely associated with OpenAI, Thrive AI

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Tokens are a big reason today’s generative AI falls short

AI /

Generative AI models don’t process text the same way humans do. Understanding their “token”-based internal environments may help explain some of their strange behaviors — and stubborn limitations. Most models, from small on-device ones like Gemma to OpenAI’s industry-leading GPT-4o, are built on an architecture known as the transformer. Due to the way transformers conjure

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This Week in AI: With Chevron’s demise, AI regulation seems dead in the water

AI /

Hiya, folks, and welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. This week in AI, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down “Chevron deference,” a 40-year-old ruling on federal agencies’ power that required courts to defer to agencies’ interpretations of congressional laws. Chevron deference let agencies make their own rules when Congress left aspects of its statutes ambiguous.

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