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Character.AI CEO Noam Shazeer returns to Google

In a big move, Character.AI co-founder and CEO CEO Noam Shazeer is returning to Google after leaving the company in October 2021 to found the a16z-backed startup. In his previous stint, Shazeer spearheaded the team of researchers that built LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), a language model that was used for conversational AI tools. Character.AI co-founder Daniel […]

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Adept Materials’ dehumidifying paint was inspired by trees and semiconductors

The steam that condenses on your bathroom mirror may not seem like a big deal, but for architects and builders, it can be an enormous headache. “Moisture control is something that is a major pain point,” Derek Stein, founder and CEO of Adept Materials. “If you just google your favorite home builders’ name and then

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Pharma giant Cencora is alerting millions about its data breach

Cencora has so far notified over a million people around the U.S. that their personal and protected health information was compromised in a data breach earlier this year, TechCrunch has found. The pharmaceutical giant in May said that a February incident resulted in the compromise of patients’ data, which Cencora obtained through partnerships with drug

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Sequoia-backed Knowde raises Series C at a valuation cut

Knowde, an online marketplace for chemicals and polymers, just closed on a Series C round, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The San Jose-based startup raised $60 million in a round that values it lower than the $500 million valuation it garnered in its most recent round, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. This round

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Google Cloud now has a dedicated cluster of Nvidia GPUs for Y Combinator startups

Google Cloud is giving Y Combinator startups access to a dedicated, subsidized cluster of Nvidia graphics processing units and Google tensor processing units to build AI models. It’s part of Google Cloud’s effort to cozy up with promising early-stage AI startups, in hopes some of them will evolve into massive, compute-hungry business. “We want to

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Sybill raises $11M for its AI assistant that helps salespeople reduce administrative burden

Sybill, a startup that has built an AI assistant specifically for sales representatives, said on Wednesday it has raised $11 million in a Series A round led by Greycroft. The market for sales AI assistants has grown quite crowded as companies have leveraged generative AI and large language models to help salespeople automate grunt work

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Applied Carbon’s farm robot turns plant waste into biochar to capture CO2

It’s incredibly easy to dump carbon into the atmosphere and accelerate climate change. It’s a lot harder to take it out. Startups are experimenting with massive industrial systems to draw the pollutant out of the air, with facilities costing hundreds of millions of dollars to construct. That has some other founders thinking, why not use

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