Generative AI

France leads the pack for Generative AI funding in Europe, London has 3X the number of GenAI startups

Like it or hate it, artificial intelligence – especially generative AI – is the technology story of 2024. OpenAI, with its rollouts of viral services like ChatGPT and billions in funding, may have gobbled up the lion’s share of attention and money so far. But according to a new report out from top VC Accel […]

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This Week in AI: Generative AI is spamming up academic journals

Hiya, folks, and welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. This week in AI, generative AI is beginning to spam up academic publishing — a discouraging new development on the disinformation front. In a post on Retraction Watch, a blog that tracks recent retractions of academic studies, assistant professors of philosophy Tomasz Żuradzk and Leszek Wroński

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In spite of hype, many companies are moving cautiously when it comes to generative AI

Vendors would have you believe that we are in the midst of an AI revolution, one that is changing the very nature of how we work. But the truth, according to several recent studies, suggests that it’s much more nuanced than that. Companies are extremely interested in generative AI as vendors push potential benefits, but

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Genspark is the latest attempt at an AI-powered search engine

Move over, Perplexity. There’s a new AI-powered search engine in town — and its creators think it can best the many, many other attempts out there. Called Genspark, the platform taps generative AI to write custom summaries in response to search queries. Type in a search like, “What’s the best baby formula for newborns?” and

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Decagon claims its customers service bots are smarter than average

One red-hot category in the generative AI space is customer support, which isn’t surprising, really, when you consider the tech’s potential to cut contact center costs while increasing scale. Critics argue that generative AI-powered customer support tech could depress wages, lead to layoffs and ultimately deliver a more error-prone end-user experience. Proponents, on the other

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Waabi’s genAI promises to do so much more than power self-driving trucks

For the last two decades, Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of autonomous trucking startup Waabi, has been developing AI systems that can reason as a human would.  The AI pioneer had previously served as the chief scientist at Uber ATG before launching Waabi in 2021. Waabi launched with an “AI-first approach” to speed up the

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CuspAI raises $30M to create a Gen-AI-driven search engine for new materials

The modern method of coming up with new materials is to make something and then use a computer to work out whether the material came out correctly. But what if you flipped that around, using generative-AI-driven software to design the material in the first place? That’s the premise behind Cambridge, U.K.-based CuspAI, which has now

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DeepMind’s new AI generates soundtracks and dialogue for videos

DeepMind, Google’s AI research lab, says it’s developing AI tech to generate soundtracks for videos. In a post on its official blog, DeepMind says that it sees the tech, V2A (short for “video-to-audio”), as an essential piece of the AI-generated media puzzle. While plenty of orgs including DeepMind have developed video-generating AI models, these models

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Runway’s new video-generating AI, Gen-3, offers improved controls

The race to high-quality, AI-generated videos is heating up. On Monday, Runway, a company building generative AI tools geared toward film and image content creators, unveiled Gen-3 Alpha. The company’s latest AI model generates video clips from text descriptions and still images. Runway says the model delivers a “major” improvement in generation speed and fidelity over

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TikTok ads and branded content will now include AI avatars of creators and stock actors

TikTok announced on Monday that it’s introducing generative AI avatars of creators and stock actors for branded content and ads on its platform. The company is also launching an “AI Dubbing” tool for creators and brands to expand the reach of their ads and branded content.  The new “Custom Avatars” are designed to represent a

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