Kyle Wiggers, Author at TechCrunch

OpenAI pledges to give U.S. AI Safety Institute early access to its next model

Kyle Wiggers — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 05:48:56 +0000

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that OpenAI is working with the U.S. AI Safety Institute, a federal government body that aims to assess and address risks in AI platforms, on an agreement to provide early access to its next major generative AI model for safety testing. The announcement, which Altman made in a post on […]

Google releases new ‘open’ AI models with a focus on safety

Kyle Wiggers — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 22:25:16 +0000

Google has released a trio of new, “open” generative AI models that it’s calling “safer,” “smaller” and “more transparent” than most — a bold claim, to be sure. They’re additions to Google’s Gemma 2 family of generative models, which debuted back in May. The new models, Gemma 2 2B, ShieldGemma and Gemma Scope, are designed […]

AI startups ramp up federal lobbying efforts

Kyle Wiggers — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 20:22:27 +0000

AI lobbying at the U.S. federal level is intensifying in the midst of a continued generative AI boom and an election year that could influence future AI regulation. New data from OpenSecrets, a nonprofit group that tracks and publishes metrics on campaign financing and lobbying, shows that the number of groups lobbying the federal government […]

ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot

Kyle Wiggers, Cody Corrall, Alyssa Stringer — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 18:45:00 +0000

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies. That growth has propelled OpenAI itself into […]

This Week in AI: Companies are growing skeptical of AI’s ROI

Kyle Wiggers — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 17:05:00 +0000

Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. This week in AI, Gartner released a report suggesting that around a third of generative AI projects in the enterprise will be abandoned after the proof-of-concept phase by year-end 2025. The reasons are many — poor data quality, inadequate risk controls, escalating infrastructure costs and so on. […]

Over 100 VCs pledge support for Kamala Harris

Kyle Wiggers — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 16:44:15 +0000

More than 100 VCs, including Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla and Mark Cuban have pledged to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in the upcoming U.S. presidential election. Mobilizing under the group VCsForKamala, the VCs are also soliciting donations for Harris’ campaign. But the organizers say the effort isn’t meant to align with any one political […]

Checkly tests software by mimicking the way people use it

Kyle Wiggers — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Checkly helps devs get signals about an app's performance and downtime, offering a set of subscription-based synthetic monitoring tools.

Lineaje raises $20M to help organizations combat software supply chain threats

Kyle Wiggers — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 23:35:51 +0000

The software supply chain faces threats from all sides. A 2024 report by the Ponemon Institute found that over half of organizations have experienced a software supply chain attack, with 54% having experienced one within the past year. Supply chain attacks typically target services from third-party vendors or open source software that make up a […]

Canva acquires Leonardo.ai to boost its generative AI efforts

Kyle Wiggers — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 05:00:14 +0000

Canva has acquired Leonardo.ai, a generative AI content and research startup, as the company looks to broaden the scope of its AI tech stack. The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Canva co-founder and chief product officer Cameron Adams said it’s a mix of cash and stock. All of Leonardo.ai’s 120 employees will […]

New U.S. Commerce Department report endorses ‘open’ AI models

Kyle Wiggers — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 04:01:00 +0000

The U.S. Commerce Department has issued a new report endorsing open models like Meta's Llama 3.1, which it says promote competition.

Apple says it took a ‘responsible’ approach to training its Apple Intelligence models

Kyle Wiggers — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 00:31:39 +0000

Apple has published a technical paper detailing the models that it developed to power Apple Intelligence, the range of generative AI features headed to iOS, macOS and iPadOS over the next few months. In the paper, Apple pushes back against accusations that it took an ethically questionable approach to training some of its models, reiterating […]

Huang and Zuckerberg swapped jackets at SIGGRAPH 2024 and things got weird

Kyle Wiggers — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 00:03:14 +0000

A fireside chat on Monday between Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the SIGGRAPH 2024 conference in Colorado took a few unexpected turns. It started innocently enough, with Huang waxing positive about the capabilities of Nvidia GPUs and Zuckerberg speaking about his vision of an AI chatbot future. But by the […]

Making AI models ‘forget’ undesirable data hurts their performance

Kyle Wiggers — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 20:17:41 +0000

So-called “unlearning” techniques are used to make a generative AI model forget specific and undesirable info it picked up from training data, like sensitive private data or copyrighted material. But current unlearning techniques are a double-edged sword: They could make a model like OpenAI’s GPT-4o or Meta’s Llama 3.1 405B much less capable of answering […]

NIST releases a tool for testing AI model risk

Kyle Wiggers — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 15:25:16 +0000

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. Commerce Department agency that develops and tests tech for the U.S. government, companies and the broader public, has re-released a test bed designed to measure how malicious attacks — particularly attacks that “poison” AI model training data — might degrade the performance of an AI […]

With Google in its sights, OpenAI unveils SearchGPT

Kyle Wiggers — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 18:52:15 +0000

OpenAI may have designs to get into the search game — challenging not only upstarts like Perplexity, but Google and Bing, too. The company on Thursday unveiled SearchGPT, a search feature designed to give “timely answers” to questions, drawing from web sources. UI-wise, SearchGPT isn’t too far off from OpenAI’s chatbot platform ChatGPT. You type […]

Archera helps customers access deep cloud discounts

Kyle Wiggers — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 16:49:40 +0000

In addition to insured commitments, Archera provides consulting services to help build purchasing strategies for customers to optimize their cloud usage.

Google makes its Gemini chatbot faster and more widely available

Kyle Wiggers — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 16:00:00 +0000

In its bid to maintain pace with generative AI rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI, Google is rolling out updates to the no-fee tier of Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot. The updates are focused on making the platform more performant — and more widely available. Starting Thursday, Gemini 1.5 Flash — a lightweight multimodal model Google announced […]

A new Chinese video-generating model appears to be censoring politically sensitive topics

Kyle Wiggers — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 23:07:39 +0000

A powerful new video-generating AI model became widely available today — but there’s a catch: The model appears to be censoring topics deemed too politically sensitive by the government in its country of origin, China. The model, Kling, developed by Beijing-based company Kuaishou, launched in waitlisted access earlier in the year for users with a […]

Bing previews its answer to Google’s AI Overviews

Kyle Wiggers — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 19:06:54 +0000

Microsoft this afternoon previewed its answer to Google’s AI-powered search experiences: Bing generative search. Available for only a “small percentage” of users at the moment, Bing generative search, underpinned by a combo of large and small generative AI models (mum’s the word on which models exactly), aggregates info from around the web and generates a […]

This Week in AI: How Kamala Harris might regulate AI

Kyle Wiggers — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 17:05:00 +0000

Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. Last Sunday, President Joe Biden announced that he no longer plans to seek reelection, instead offering his “full endorsement” of VP Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s nominee; in the days following, Harris secured support from the Democratic delegate majority. Harris has been outspoken on tech […]