Maxwell Zeff, Author at TechCrunch

Intel to lay off 15,000 employees

Maxwell Zeff — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 23:05:02 +0000

Intel announced it would layoff more than 15% of its staff, or 15,000 employees, in a memo to employees on Thursday. The massive headcount is part of a large plan to reduce spending by $10 billion in 2025, following a dismal second quarter earnings report and outlook. “Our revenues have not grown as expected – […]

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 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 […]

Bungie employees say they were caught off-guard by 17% staff reduction

Maxwell Zeff — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 19:35:29 +0000

Bungie, the gaming company that created sci-fi hits such as Halo, Destiny, and Marathon, has laid off 220 employees, roughly a 17% reduction to its workforce, the company announced Wednesday. This is Bungie’s second round of layoffs since it was taken over by Sony in 2022. Two former Bungie employees affected by Wednesday’s layoffs say […]

OpenAI endorses Senate bills that could shape America’s AI policy

Maxwell Zeff — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 03:43:38 +0000

A lot of AI bills are flying around Congress these days, and OpenAI is throwing its weight behind some of them. OpenAI endorsed three Senate bills on Tuesday which could shape the federal government’s stance on artificial intelligence. One of the bills – the Future of AI Innovation Act – would formally authorize the United […]

OpenAI releases ChatGPT’s hyperrealistic voice to some paying users

Maxwell Zeff — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 18:30:00 +0000

OpenAI began rolling out ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode on Tuesday, giving users their first access to GPT-4o’s hyperrealistic audio responses. The alpha version will be available to a small group of ChatGPT Plus users today, and OpenAI says the feature will gradually roll out to all Plus users in the fall of 2024. When OpenAI […]

Meta will pay Texas $1.4B in settlement over facial recognition software

Maxwell Zeff — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 16:38:02 +0000

Meta agrees to pay the state of Texas $1.4 billion over five years, and the first payment of $500 million is due in the next month, according to a court filing.

Apple signs the White House’s commitment to AI safety

Maxwell Zeff — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 17:45:39 +0000

Apple joins 15 other tech companies — including Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI — that committed to the White House's rules for developing generative AI.

Mistral’s Large 2 is its answer to Meta and OpenAI’s latest models

Maxwell Zeff — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 20:26:40 +0000

For frontier AI models, when it rains, it pours. Mistral released a fresh new flagship model on Wednesday, Large 2, which it claims to be on par with the latest cutting-edge models from OpenAI and Meta in terms of code generation, mathematics, and reasoning. The release of Mistral Large 2 falls just one day after […]

Colin Kaepernick lost control of his story. Now he wants to help creators own theirs

Maxwell Zeff — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 15:48:55 +0000

Thousands of stories have been written about former NFL quarterback and civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick. If anyone knows a thing or two about losing control of your own narrative, it’s him. Now Kaepernick is launching an AI storytelling platform, Lumi, to help creators tell and own their stories. If you said, “Huh?” when reading […]

After AgentGPT’s success, Reworkd pivots to web-scraping AI agents

Maxwell Zeff — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Reworkd’s founders went viral on GitHub last year with AgentGPT, a free tool to build AI agents that acquired more than 100,000 daily users in a week. This earned them a spot in Y Combinator’s summer 2023 cohort, but the co-founders quickly realized building general AI agents was too broad. So now Reworkd is a […]

Adobe releases new Firefly AI tools for Illustrator and Photoshop

Maxwell Zeff — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Adobe released new Firefly tools for Photoshop and Illustrator on Tuesday, offering graphic designers more ways to use the company’s in-house AI models. Adobe’s new features let creative workers describe what they want with brief prompts and receive AI-generated textures or images that could otherwise take hours to create. As Adobe doubles down on AI, […]

These startups are trying to prevent another CrowdStrike-like outage, according to VCs

Maxwell Zeff, Julie Bort — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 23:11:46 +0000

The global outage is a perfect reminder how much of the world relies on technological infrastructure.

Fandango founder dies in fall from Manhattan skyscraper

Maxwell Zeff — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 23:03:19 +0000

J. Michael Cline, the co-founder of Fandango and multiple other startups over his multi-decade career, died after falling from a Manhattan hotel, New York’s Deputy Commissioner of Public Information tells TechCrunch. The New York Police Department responded to 911 calls from the Kimberly Hotel, a 30-story hotel on 50th street in midtown Manhattan on Tuesday […]

OpenAI unveils GPT-4o mini, a smaller and cheaper AI model

Maxwell Zeff — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 15:34:23 +0000

OpenAI introduced GPT-4o mini on Thursday, its latest small AI model. The company says GPT-4o mini, which is cheaper and faster than OpenAI’s current cutting-edge AI models, is being released for developers, as well as through the ChatGPT web and mobile app for consumers, starting today. Enterprise users will gain access next week. The company […]

Artificial Agency raises $16M to use AI to make NPCs feel more realistic in video games

Maxwell Zeff — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0000

A team of former Google DeepMind researchers are betting that their unique behavior engine for NPCs will make games more fun and dynamic.

Ethereum co-founder’s warning against ‘pro-crypto’ candidates: ‘Are they in it for the right reasons?’

Maxwell Zeff — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 20:04:42 +0000

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, issued a warning on Wednesday against choosing a candidate purely based on whether they claim to be “pro-crypto.” In a blog post, Buterin said it’s more important to scrutinize a candidate’s broader policies to ensure they support cryptocurrency’s underlying goals, including internationalism and protection for private communications. “If a […]

Anthropic releases Claude app for Android

Maxwell Zeff — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 16:02:50 +0000

Anthropic launched its Claude Android app on Tuesday to bring its AI chatbot to more users. This is Anthropic’s latest effort to convince users to ditch ChatGPT by making Claude available in more places. The Claude Android app will work just like the iOS version released in May, including free access to Anthropic’s best AI […]

Apple’s public betas for iOS 18 are here to test out

Maxwell Zeff — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 21:29:51 +0000

Apple released the public betas for its next generation of software on the iPhone, Mac, iPad and Apple Watch on Monday. You can now test out iOS 18 and many of its new features, except for Apple Intelligence, which is coming to beta this fall, and provide feedback to Apple. Anyone interested in trying out […]

Meta removes special restrictions for Trump’s account ahead of 2024 elections

Maxwell Zeff — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 22:49:09 +0000

Meta announced former President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts will no longer be subject to heightened suspension penalties, according to an updated blog post on Friday. The company says it made the decision to ensure all Presidential nominees were on equal footing on their platform ahead of the 2024 Presidential election. When Meta reinstated […]