AI

The AI industry is obsessed with Chatbot Arena, but it might not be the best benchmark

AI /

Over the past few months, tech execs like Elon Musk have touted the performance of their company’s AI models on a particular benchmark: Chatbot Arena. Maintained by a nonprofit known as LMSYS, Chatbot Arena has become something of an industry obsession. Posts about updates to its model leaderboards garner hundreds of views and reshares across Reddit and […]

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Sedric monitors the communications of employees at financial institutions to ensure compliance

Fundraising /

For financial institutions, complying with regulations is becoming a costlier proposition. According to a recent poll, 76% of financial services firms increased their compliance expenditure from 2022 to 2023, with most blaming new laws. With the cost of compliance averaging out to around $10,000 per employee these days, many firms are searching for ways to

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This Week in AI: VCs (and devs) are enthusiastic about AI coding tools

AI /

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, two startups developing tools to generate and suggest code — Magic and Codeium — raised nearly half a billion dollars combined. The rounds were high even by AI sector standards, especially considering

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The Cosmos Institute, whose founding fellows include Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, launches grant programs and an AI lab

AI /

The Cosmos Institute, a nonprofit whose founding fellows include Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark and former Defense Department technologist Brendan McCord, has announced a venture program and research initiatives to — in the organization’s words — “cultivate a new generation of technologists and entrepreneurs equipped with deep philosophical thinking to navigate the uncharted territory of our

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Ilya Sutskever’s startup, Safe Superintelligence, raises $1B

Fundraising /

Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised over $1 billion in capital from investors including NFDG (an investment partnership run by Nat Friedman and SSI CEO Daniel Gross), a16z, Sequoia, DST Global and SV Angel. SSI told Reuters that it plans to use the tranche to

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Before Midjourney, there was NightCafe — and it’s still kicking

Apps /

Elle Russell, co-founder of Cairns, Australia-based NightCafe, which offers a suite of AI-powered art-creating tools, prefers to avoid the spotlight. “I like to remain hidden behind my monitors,” she told me in a recent interview. NightCafe is similarly low profile. The company, which Russell helped her partner, Angus Russell, launch five years ago, doesn’t get

Before Midjourney, there was NightCafe — and it’s still kicking Read More »

The org behind the data set used to train Stable Diffusion claims it has removed CSAM

AI /

LAION, the German research org that created the data used to train Stable Diffusion, among other generative AI models, has released a new data set that it claims has been “thoroughly cleaned of known links to suspected child sexual abuse material (CSAM).” The new data set, Re-LAION-5B, is actually a re-release of an old data

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Generative AI coding startup Magic lands $320M investment from Eric Schmidt, Atlassian and others

AI /

Magic, an AI startup developing models to generate code and automate a range of software development tasks, says that it’s raised a large tranche of cash from investors including ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In a blog post on Thursday, Magic said that it closed a $320 million fundraising round with contributions from Schmidt, Jane Street,

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GitHub Copilot competitor Codeium raises $150M at a $1.25B valuation

Fundraising /

A startup whose product competes with GitHub Copilot and other AI-powered coding assistants has achieved unicorn status. On Thursday, Codeium said it closed a $150 million Series C round led by General Catalyst that values the company at $1.25 billion post-money. The round, which also saw participation from existing investors Kleiner Perkins and Greenoaks Capital,

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