AI

U.S. finalizing rules to ban certain investments in AI tech in China

Government & Policy /

President Joe Biden’s administration says it’s finalizing rules to curb investments in AI and other tech sectors in China, Reuters reports. The rules, which were first proposed in June by the U.S. Treasury and directed by an executive order President Biden signed in August 2023, cover certain AI systems, quantum information systems, and semiconductors and […]

U.S. finalizing rules to ban certain investments in AI tech in China Read More »

Despite risks, Vinod Khosla is optimistic about AI

AI /

Vinod Khosla has no doubts that humanity’s future with AI is bright. The Sun Microsystems co-founder turned prominent investor predicts that “the need to work will go away” almost entirely thanks to AI.   “Almost all expertise, it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about primary care physicians, mental health therapists, oncologists, structural engineers or accountants

Despite risks, Vinod Khosla is optimistic about AI Read More »

Bret Taylor’s customer service AI startup just raised $175M

AI /

Sierra, the AI startup co-founded by OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor, has raised $175 million in a funding round that values the startup at $4.5 billion. Sierra, founded by Taylor and longtime Google exec Clay Bavor, focuses on selling AI-powered customer service chatbots to brands like WeightWatchers and Sirius XM. There’s an “agent” component, as well.

Bret Taylor’s customer service AI startup just raised $175M Read More »

Wiz CEO says company was targeted with deepfake attack that used his voice

Security /

Even cybersecurity companies aren’t safe from deepfake attacks. Speaking on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Wiz’s CEO and co-founder Assaf Rappaport, who recently turned down a $23 billion acquisition offer from Google, noted that his employees had been targeted by a deepfake attack just two weeks ago. “Dozens of my employees got a

Wiz CEO says company was targeted with deepfake attack that used his voice Read More »

A mysterious new image generation model has appeared

AI /

A mysterious new image generation model is beating models from Midjourney, Black Forest Labs, and OpenAI on the crowdsourced Artificial Analysis benchmark. The model, which goes by the name “red_panda,” is around 40 Elo points ahead of the next-best-ranking model, Black Forest Labs’ Flux1.1 Pro, on Artificial Analysis’ text-to-image leaderboard. Artificial Analysis uses Elo, a

A mysterious new image generation model has appeared Read More »

U.K. man who used AI to create child sexual abuse imagery sentenced to 18 years in prison

Government & Policy /

In what some are describing as a landmark case, a U.K. man who used AI to turn normal pictures of children into sexual abuse imagery has been sentenced to 18 years in jail. Hugh Nelson, a 27-year-old from Bolton, used the app Daz 3D to create 3D “characters” from innocent photographs of kids. In some

U.K. man who used AI to create child sexual abuse imagery sentenced to 18 years in prison Read More »

We finally have an ‘official’ definition for open source AI

Government & Policy /

There’s finally an “official” definition of open source AI. The Open Source Initiative (OSI), a long-running institution aiming to define and “steward” all things open source, today released version 1.0 of its Open Source AI Definition (OSAID). The product of several years of collaboration with academia and industry, the OSAID is intended to offer a

We finally have an ‘official’ definition for open source AI Read More »

Meta releases an ‘open’ version of Google’s podcast generator

Apps /

Meta has released an “open” implementation of the viral generate-a-podcast feature in Google’s NotebookLM. Called NotebookLlama, the project uses Meta’s own Llama models for much of the processing, unsurprisingly. Like NotebookLM, it can generate back-and-forth, podcast-style digests of text files uploaded to it. NotebookLlama first creates a transcript from a file — e.g. a PDF

Meta releases an ‘open’ version of Google’s podcast generator Read More »

OpenAI says it won’t release a model called Orion this year

AI /

OpenAI says that it doesn’t intend to release an AI model code-named Orion this year, countering recent reporting on the company’s product roadmap. “We don’t have plans to release a model code-named Orion this year,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch via email. “We do plan to release a lot of other great technology.” The Verge reported

OpenAI says it won’t release a model called Orion this year Read More »

Perplexity says it’s now serving 100M search queries a week

AI /

Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity, says that the AI-powered search engine is now performing 100 million queries each week. Extrapolated out to a month, that’s roughly 400 million queries — up from 250 million queries in July. Perplexity’s rapid rise comes as the company teases ecommerce features, including the ability for subscribers to its

Perplexity says it’s now serving 100M search queries a week Read More »