AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

AI Friends, deepfake foes, and which Tiger Global partner is leaving now

Kirsten Korosec, Rebecca Bellan, Devin Coldewey — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 14:30:00 +0000

AI hardware has taken on a new shape with Friend’s $99 necklace — a pendant that gives you an AI friend to talk to and … that’s about it. Friend’s pitch is that its wearable can help combat loneliness, but other AI hardware products that have come to market lately – like Humane’s Ai Pin […]

AI music startup Suno claims training model on copyrighted music is ‘fair use’

Lauren Forristal — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 21:50:57 +0000

Following the recent lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against music generation startups Udio and Suno, Suno admitted in a court filing on Thursday that it did, in fact, train its AI model using copyrighted songs. But it claimed that doing so was legal under the fair-use doctrine. The RIAA filed the lawsuit […]

iPad sales help bail out Apple amid a continued iPhone slide

Brian Heater — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 21:31:50 +0000

In spite of a drop for the quarter, iPhone remained Apple’s most important category by a wide margin.

Microsoft now lists OpenAI as a competitor in AI and search

Maxwell Zeff — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 17:55:17 +0000

Microsoft has a long and tangled history with OpenAI, having invested a reported $13 billion in the ChatGPT maker as part of a long-term partnership. As part of the deal, Microsoft runs OpenAI’s models across its enterprise and consumer products and is OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider. However, the tech giant called the startup a “competitor” […]

Google brings Gemini-powered search history and Lens to Chrome desktop

Ivan Mehta — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 16:00:00 +0000

Google Thursday said that it is introducing new Gemini-powered features for Chrome’s desktop version, including Lens for desktop, tab compare for shopping assistance, and natural language integration for search history. Years after introducing and evolving Google Lens on mobile, the feature is finally coming to desktop. Rolling out to users across the world in the […]

Heeyo built an AI chatbot to be a billion kids’ interactive tutor and friend

Rebecca Bellan — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 16:00:00 +0000

When Xiaoyin Qu was growing up in China, she was obsessed with learning how to build paper airplanes that could do flips in the air. Her parents, though, didn’t have the aerodynamic expertise to support her newfound passion, and her teachers were too overwhelmed to give her dedicated attention. “That’s why I wanted to build […]

Google Cloud expands its database portfolio with new AI capabilities

Frederic Lardinois — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Google's new features include Gemini in BigQuery and Looker to help users with data engineering and analysis.

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

Maxwell Zeff — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 13:00:00 +0000

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 businesses. “We want to […]

The EU’s AI Act is now in force

Natasha Lomas — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 11:33:13 +0000

The European Union's risk-based regulation for applications of artificial intelligence has come into force starting from today.

Zuckerberg says Meta will need 10x more computing power to train Llama 4 than Llama 3

Ivan Mehta — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 07:53:29 +0000

Meta, which develops one of the biggest foundational open source large language models, Llama, believes it will need significantly more computing power to train models in the future. Mark Zuckerberg said on Meta’s second-quarter earnings call on Tuesday that to train Llama 4, the company will need 10x more compute than what was needed to […]

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 […]

Meta says India is the largest market for Meta AI usage

Ivan Mehta — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 03:12:44 +0000

WhatsApp’s massive 500 million users in India have supercharged Meta’s AI ambitions. Meta CFO Susan Li said Wednesday that India is the largest market in terms of Meta AI usage, a notable milestone considering the product launched in India just a few months ago. Li said during Meta’s second-quarter earnings call that people have used […]

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 […]

Copyright Office tells Congress: ‘Urgent need’ to outlaw AI-powered impersonation

Devin Coldewey — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 19:35:17 +0000

The U.S. Copyright Office has issued the first part of a report on how AI may affect its domain, and its first recommendation out of the gate is: we need a new law right away to define and combat AI-powered impersonation. “It has become clear that the distribution of unauthorized digital replicas poses a serious […]

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 […]

How to enable Apple Intelligence on your iPhone

Ivan Mehta — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 17:32:40 +0000

If you are on the developer beta, you can only use Apple Intelligence features if your language is set to U.S. English and region is set to U.S.

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. […]

Neura shows off humanoid robot 4NE-1

Brian Heater — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 15:53:28 +0000

This week’s video shows 4NE-1 doing a lot; in some sense, it’s doing more than we’ve seen from other humanoids in the space.

Tezi is building an AI agent for hiring managers

Ron Miller — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 14:00:00 +0000

AI agents are all the rage right now, and Tezi, an early-stage startup, is working on one to help HR teams find the perfect candidates for a job opening. The startup claims this bot will sift through resumes to find the ones that match the hiring criteria, find time on the recruiter’s calendar to set […]