Meta AI, Meta’s AI-powered assistant across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the web, can now speak in more languages and create stylized selfies. And, starting today, Meta AI users can route questions to Meta’s newest flagship AI model, Llama 3.1 405B, which the company says can handle more complex queries than the previous model underpinning Meta […]
Meta AI gets new ‘Imagine me’ selfie feature Read More »
Ashish Nagar, an engineer by trade, was working at Amazon’s Alexa org on the conversational AI team when he realized that AI had the potential to greatly bolster productivity in contact centers. “Frontline workers, like customer service workers, are the biggest human capital in the world,” Nagar told TechCrunch. “So, my idea was to use
Level AI applies algorithms to contact center pain points Read More »
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
Cohere raises $500M to beat back generative AI rivals Read More »
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
CIA AI director Lakshmi Raman claims the agency is taking a ‘thoughtful approach’ to AI Read More »
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
TTT models might be the next frontier in generative AI Read More »
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%
Deepfake-detecting firm Pindrop lands $100M loan to grow its offerings Read More »
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%
Adaptive builds automation tools to speed up construction payments Read More »
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
Quora’s Poe now lets users create and share web apps Read More »
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
OpenAI Startup Fund backs AI healthcare venture with Arianna Huffington Read More »
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
Tokens are a big reason today’s generative AI falls short Read More »
