AI

UK AI startup Greyparrot bags strategic tie-up with recycling giant Bollegraaf

In another sign of the scramble to accelerate the uptake and transformative potential of artificial intelligence, Dutch recycling giant Bollegraaf Group is…

OpenAI forms a new team to study child safety

Under scrutiny from activists — and parents — OpenAI has formed a new team to study ways to prevent its AI tools from being misused or abused by kids.

Attentive.ai snags $7M to boost automation in landscaping, construction services

Attentive.

Google saves your conversations with Gemini for years by default

Don’t type anything into Gemini, Google’s family of GenAI apps, that’s incriminating — or that you wouldn’t want someone else to see.

EU’s draft election security guidelines for tech giants take aim at political deepfakes

The European Union has launched a consultation on draft election security mitigations aimed at larger online platforms, such as Facebook, Google, TikTok and X…

FCC officially declares AI-voiced robocalls illegal

The FCC’s war on robocalls has gained a new weapon in its arsenal with the declaration of AI-generated voices as “artificial” and therefore definitely against the law when used in automated calling scams.

Seems Like Dakota Johnson Kinda Hates Madame Web

The SAG-AFTRA strike this summer was huge and important and powerful, but there was one thing we kind of missed during those long, quiet months: deeply unhinged press tours.

Arm’s gains are SoftBank’s gains

Not so long ago, things were looking bleak for SoftBank, the investment holding company headed by eclectic — and controversial — tech mogul Masayoshi Son.

CodeSignal launches a learning platform with an AI-powered guide

Technical assessment company CodeSignal, which counts Index Ventures and Menlo Ventures as backers, is launching a learning platform called CodeSignal Learn.

Bootstrapped for 8 years, Xensam has now snapped up $40M for AI that manages software assets

Software asset management — an area of enterprise IT designed, in part, to help companies save money — continues to draw a lot of money itself.

Meet Goody-2, the AI too ethical to discuss literally anything

Every company or organization putting out an AI model has to make a decision on what, if any, boundaries to set on what it will and won’t discuss.

Google’s and Microsoft’s chatbots are making up Super Bowl stats

If you needed more evidence that GenAI is prone to making stuff up, Google’s Gemini chatbot, formerly Bard, thinks that the 2024 Super Bowl already happened.

Peak XV takes startups on a Silicon Valley trip in AI push

Peak XV, the venture capital firm that split from Sequoia Capital last year, is taking its portfolio companies from India, Southeast Asia and Australia on an…

US Patent Office: AI is all well and good, but only humans can patent things

Airbnb plans to use AI, including its GamePlanner acquisition, to create the ‘ultimate concierge’

AI.

Andrej Karpathy is leaving OpenAI again — but he says there was no drama

Andrej Karpathy, a widely respected research scientist, announced today that he has left OpenAI.

Rasa, an enterprise-focused dev platform for conversational GenAI, raises $30M

It’s no fun as a customer to have an interaction with a bot when it’s clearly a bot with which you’re engaging.

Singularities are a pain in the neck for robot arms — Jacobi Robotics is trying to solve them

It’s easy to lose track of the fact that robotics is as much a software problem as a hardware one.

TechCrunch is heading to MWC. We want to hear about your startup.

It’s [checks calendar] a week and a half until Mobile World Congress 2024 [mild panic creeps in], and TechCrunch will be returning to Barcelona once again for the big phone show [soothing memories of tapas past].

Largest text-to-speech AI model yet shows ’emergent abilities’

Researchers at Amazon have trained the largest ever text-to-speech model yet, which they claim exhibits “emergent” qualities improving its ability to speak even complex sentences naturally.

OpenAI’s newest model Sora can generate videos — and they look decent

OpenAI, following in the footsteps of startups like Runway and tech giants like Google and Meta, is getting into video generation.

No ‘GPT’ trademark for OpenAI

S.

This German nonprofit is building an open voice assistant that anyone can use

There have been many attempts at open source AI-powered voice assistants (see Rhasspy, Mycroft and Jasper, to name a few) — all established with the goal of creating privacy-preserving, offline experiences that don’t compromise on functionality.

FTC seeks to modify rule to combat deepfakes

Spurred by the growing threat of deepfakes, the FTC is seeking to modify an existing rule that bans the impersonation of businesses or government agencies to cover all consumers.