In Brief

Watch this robotic wheelchair’s compliant wheels take on bumps, rocks and stairs

Transportation /

Korea’s Institute of Machinery and Materials this week showcased a robotic wheelchair with large, deformable wheels that can manage rocks, stairs and other obstacles. During normal operation, the wheel maintains a standard rigid circular form. When it encounters an obstacle, however, it becomes compliant, conforming to the object’s height and shape. The system, which also […]

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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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Volkswagen is rolling out its ChatGPT assistant to the US

Transportation /

Volkswagen is taking its ChatGPT voice assistant experiment on the road. Or more, specifically to vehicles it sells in the United States.  The German automaker announced in January at CES 2024 plans to add an AI-powered chatbot into all Volkswagen models equipped with its IDA voice assistant. But the U.S. was excluded in that initial

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The case against AI art

AI /

No matter who powerful generative AI becomes, writer Ted Chiang says it will never create true art. Chiang is one of the most admired science fiction authors writing today, best known for the novella “Story Of Your Life” (which was adapted into the movie “Arrival”). But he’s also published terrific pieces for The New Yorker

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Top court orders ban on Elon Musk’s X in Brazil

Media & Entertainment /

A top court in Brazil ordered an immediate, country-wide suspension of the X platform on Friday after a months-long legal battle with Elon Musk’s social media company over content moderation, according to Bloomberg.   Earlier this month, X closed its operations in Brazil in protest against court orders asking it to remove accounts that allegedly

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Carta’s ill-fated secondaries business finally found a buyer

Venture /

Stock-trading startup Public has acquired the brokerage accounts of Carta’s secondaries business, TechCrunch has confirmed. Carta, best known for its cap table management software, sits on a stockpile of data. It tried to expand into the bubbling hot secondary marketplace brokerage business, but in January, a startup customer publicly accused Carta of using the startup’s

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Google is working on AI that can hear signs of sickness

Biotech & Health /

Given everything you’ve already heard about AI, you may not be surprised to learn that Google is among other outfits beginning to use sound signals to predict early signs of disease.  How? According to Bloomberg, Google has trained its foundation AI model with 300 million pieces of audio that included coughs, sniffles, and labored breathing,

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