As it looks to accelerate the pace of its AI development, Google is further streamlining the teams building its AI services, platforms, and tools. On Thursday, Logan Kilpatrick, who leads product for Google’s AI Studio developer platform, said in a post on X that Google’s AI Studio team and the team developing the API for […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
CAPTCHA programs that are used to determine whether a site visitor is a person or a bot come in pretty standard formats. Think text distortion (where users type the characters they see in a box amid other squiggles); image recognition (you’re selecting, say, all the squares in a grid with a bicycle image); and checkbox […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Vercel
The AI boom has added trillions of dollars to tech company valuations. Is it living up to the hype?
In some real ways, the answer is yes. This is especially true when it comes to the technical plumbing of modern companies. These are tasks that often go on behind the scenes and are either unknown or taken for granted by most non-technical people.
Generative AI burst onto the scene in late 2022 with OpenAI's release of ChatGPT, a chatbot that answers many questions and creates realistic and convincing content.
Since that flashy launch, this new form of AI has quietly begun to transform more mundane jobs and processes, such as web development, data analysis, legal research, and code writing.
At Vercel's Next.js conference in San Francisco earlier this year, the event was packed with young developers who were using AI models and tools to streamline hundreds of these technical tasks. This stuff has mostly been run by human technical employees. Now, that's changing in major ways.
"All the power was previously behind a gate guarded by programmers who were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Now, these capabilities are available to all," said attendee Rahul Sonwalkar, founder of Julius AI, a startup that's using AI models to automate data analysis.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
It's not just startups. A good friend who's an executive at an investment fund used ChatGPT recently to research a legal issue.
The chatbot helped him understand a lot of the background, including relevant laws and other rules.
When he met with his law firm, he was able to jump past the basics and get to the meat of the task more quickly. This is important when attorneys can cost $500 to $1,000 an hour.
My friend estimates this initial AI-powered research saved his investment firm $50,000 to $70,000 in legal fees and roughly 60 to 80 hours of work time over 2 months.
At Google, generative AI is upending how the internet giant creates products.
Another old friend of mine has worked at Google for well over a decade. He recently described how he's writing 20 times more software code than he used to, thanks to generative AI tools.
He starts in the usual way, by typing in some initial code. Then the AI autocompletes much of the rest.
The technology sometimes autocompletes in the wrong direction — essentially misunderstanding his intentions. He still needs the technical skills to spot these occasional mistakes. But fixing it is pretty straight forward: He goes back to where his own code ended and types a bit more of his own work. Then the system adjusts and completes the task accurately.
Vercel
Vercel CFO Marten Abrahamsen is no professional coder. But even he's experienced the benefits of generative AI making technical tasks more accessible.
He cited Vercel's v0 service, which lets anyone type in English language requests and responds with code and outputs such as brand new websites.
"I can't do complex coding, but I can type in English and v0 creates what I want. This turns me into a quasi-coder," Abrahamsen said.
The CFO said this tool helps him get ideas in front of more technical colleagues quicker, and ensures the nascent products are in better shape at the pitch stage.
Vercel's goal is to use generative AI to increase "iteration velocity" by automating a lot of the technical blocking and tackling so developers can spend more time on the creative parts of their jobs, he explained.
"Making developers much more productive with generative AI — investors and Vercel are quite bullish on this. That's a very interesting new use case for AI," Abrahamsen told me in a recent interview.
I tried v0 myself on Friday. It took about 45 seconds to create a website based on this simple request: "Make me a website that looks like Business Insider."
Vercel's v0 system responded in English with the steps it would take. Then, on the right hand side of the page, it swiftly pumped out the required software code and previewed the new website in less than a minute. Here's a look:
Alistair Barr/Business Insider/Vercel
I asked for a little tweak: "Make the background more blue and add photos."
v0 responded with a similar English language answer, followed by more code generation and an updated site.
I then asked to make the top of the site blue and the system added that in maybe 20 seconds.
I could go on, but you get the point. I can't code at all, and I made a relatively solid website in about 2 minutes with v0.
Alistair Barr/Business Insider/Vercel
Julius AI is taking a similar approach to automate data-analysis tasks. The service is used by scientists, marketing folks, hedge fund analysts and anyone else who needs to interpret a lot of data and isn't an expert at pulling such insights from mountains of information.
The online tool can ingest data in many forms, including Excel tables and PDFs, or via APIs and databases. You can drag and drop these into an open window and ask questions in plain English. Julius AI then taps into various AI models to spot correlations in the data and generate insights in seconds via charts and text outputs.
The service automatically generates the software code needed to do this analysis, and makes that available to re-use on other projects. This also helps users go back and check how the outputs were created.
Julius AI has about 2 million registered users and has pumped out more than 7 million data visualizations so far, according to Sonwalkar, who notes the service writes roughly 2 million lines of code a day.
"It would take an army of human coders to do that," he said. "A good engineer who's focusing on a good day can put out about 1,000 lines of code."
Quantitative hedge funds use Julius AI to create financial models from the data they drop into the tool. One model might factor in currency changes and how that impacts other parts of the world, such as oil and gas prices, for instance.
One Julius AI customer is a hedge fund with seven employees who are finance experts.
"Normally this firm would also hire a quantitative programmer to create financial models for data analysis," Sonwalker said. "AI does this in seconds now, without the need for a programming expert."
iStock; Rebecca Zisser/BI
The commercial property sector has had a bruising few years as rising interest rates pushed down values, complicated refinancing deals for hundreds of billions of dollars of expiring mortgages, and stymied investment.
In the office market, the situation was even more severe as hundreds of millions of square feet of space across the nation face accelerated obsolescence. Employees have embraced hybrid and remote work as a permanent offshoot of the pandemic, sapping demand for lesser quality space.
In recent months, however, the industry has felt relief from three successive rate cuts by the Federal Reserve that have shaved a percentage point off the fed funds rate — a benchmark for short-term lending rates. More cuts are expected in 2025. Resilient economic growth, meanwhile, has propelled demand for commercial space, including apartments, warehouses, retail stores, and hotel rooms. Some developers have even grown bullish on top-tier office projects as tenants flock to high end space.
In 2025, commercial real estate experts have signaled cautious optimism that the sector's rebound will continue, while also highlighting the challenges that could stymie growth.
Here are three trends for the industry to watch in 2025:
Of the roughly $4.7 trillion of total outstanding commercial real estate debt, about two-thirds is tied to long-term interest rates benchmarked against the 10-year Treasury yield, according to an estimate by the Mortgage Bankers Association. After dipping in the third quarter, long-term interest rates have jumped back up to the mid-4% range, close to where rates were before the Fed began cutting and far higher than where the 10-year was in recent years. The 10-year Treasury rate dipped below half a percentage point in 2020, its lowest level ever.
In 2025, observers expect long-term rates to hold steady, even if the Fed continues to trim short-term rates.
"The 10-year Treasury yield, that's really driven less now by anticipation of what the Fed might do and more by long-term expectations about economic growth and inflation and federal budget deficits," Jamie Woodwell, the MBA's head of commercial real estate research, said.
That could continue to complicate commercial real estate sales and refinancing deals.
The MBA projects that $570 billion of commercial real estate loans will mature in 2025, with banks holding about 38% of the overall inventory of outstanding debt in the sector.
Tomasz Piskorski a professor of real estate at Columbia Business School, said that 14% of commercial loans overall are tied to distressed assets that are now worth less than their debt and that 43% of commercial real estate loans "may face significant cash flow and refinancing issues." He has warned there could be tens of billions of dollars of potential losses for the banking sector and other lenders.
The real estate services giant CBRE, meanwhile, has forecast a modest 7.5% increase in investment sales activity, predicting about $410 billion of transactions in 2025. More sales would help buyers and sellers discover asset pricing and is considered a positive sign for a market recovery.
Richard Barkham, CBRE's chief economic economist, warned of lingering higher long-term interest rates that could dampen the rebound.
"Over the next four or five years we're likely to get upside shocks in inflation," Barkham said. "That points to an era of interest rates higher for longer."
Some of President-elect Donald Trump's campaign promises to enact tariffs on foreign goods, pressure the Fed for lower short term interest rates, and deport undocumented immigrants from the labor supply could spur inflation, reigniting problems in the commercial real estate financing market.
Nonetheless, the industry has been largely positive on the incoming administration.
Investors "expect better tax issues, they expect less regulation, they expect some real estate specific stuff like opportunity zones will get a bit of a boost," said Jim Costello, the co-head of real assets research at the data firm MSCI, referencing the opportunity zone program from President Trump's first term in office. Opportunity zones allowed real estate investors the chance to defer and avoid capital gains taxes if they reinvested investment proceeds in property projects in designated zones around the country.
President Trump has also sought to hire real estate executives in his administration, meaning that top officials could have an familiarity with the real estate business and its priorities. Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street billionaire who is also chairman of the large commercial real estate services firm Newmark Group, for instance, has been picked by Trump to lead the Commerce Department.
Industrial warehouse space boomed during the pandemic as American shoppers migrated online, boosting the need for logistics spaces that served e-commerce and also to onshore storage for a disrupted global supply chain.
A record total of roughly a billion square feet of industrial space was absorbed on balance by occupiers in 2022 and 2023, according to Craig Meyer, president of JLL's industrial leasing group in the Americas. That activity was enough to fill a vast pipeline of new space that was being added to the market. In 2022 and 2023, 1.1 billion square feet of new industrial space was delivered, according to JLL — also a record.
In 2024, however, demand could no longer keep pace with surging supply – stalling rental growth and pushing up vacancy.
About 375 million square feet of new space was added to the industrial market in 2024 – the third highest year on record after 2022 and 2023. But only about 111.3 million square feet of space has been absorbed on net, the lowest year of absorption in more than a decade. Vacancy has jumped to 6.8% from 4.9% a year ago. In the second quarter of 2022, vacancy had fallen as low as 3.3%.
Meyer said that the first half of 2024 was the nadir of the dip and expects a resurgent 2025.
"We had a contentious election coming up," Meyer said. "People were uncertain where interest rates were going."
In 2025, Meyer and other experts, including Barkham, CBRE's economist, see a strengthening industrial market as new supply dwindles and demand picks back up.
"The sectors that are big and improving and likely to lead investor interest are multifamily and industrial," Barkham said.
Some 268.9 million square feet of industrial space is presently under construction, according to JLL, the smallest pipeline since 2019. E-commerce, one of the biggest drivers of warehouse demand, continues to grow. According to CBRE, online sales are expected to absorb 30% of consumer spending by the end of the decade, up from 23% today, adding tailwinds to the segment.
OpenAI is bringing o1, its “reasoning” AI model, to its API — but only for certain developers, to start. Starting Tuesday, o1 will begin rolling out to devs in OpenAI’s “tier 5” usage category, the company said. To qualify for tier 5, developers have to spend at least $1,000 with OpenAI and have an account […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Vercel
Vercel, an AI startup valued at more than $3 billion, just bulked up its board with the addition of a finance executive who has experience taking tech companies public.
Stripe Chief Financial Officer Steffan Tomlinson will serve as a director on Vercel's board, the startup said on Tuesday.
Tomlinson was previously CFO at several other tech startups, guiding Palo Alto Networks, Confluent, and Aruba Networks through the IPO process.
Stripe, one of the world's most valuable startups, has long been mentioned as an IPO candidate. Vercel is earlier in its lifecycle, however the AI startup has been putting some of the early pieces in place to potentially go public someday.
"Steffan's experience leading developer-focused companies from startup to public markets makes him an ideal addition to Vercel's Board of Directors as we continue to put our products in the hands of every developer," Vercel CEO and founder Guillermo Rauch said.
Vercel
Last year, Vercel tapped Marten Abrahamsen as its CFO. He's been building out Vercel's finance, legal, and corporate development teams and systems while leading the startup through a $250 million funding round at a $3.25 billion valuation in May.
"Steffan's financial expertise and leadership experience come at a pivotal moment for Vercel as we scale our enterprise presence and build on our momentum," Abrahamsen said.
The generative AI boom has recently powered Vercel's growth. The startup offers AI tools to developers, and earlier this year it surpassed $100 million in annualized revenue.
Vercel's AI SDK, a software toolkit that helps developers build AI applications, was downloaded more than 700,000 times last week, up from about 80,000 downloads a year ago, according to NPM data.
The company's Next.js open-source framework was downloaded 7.9 million times last week, compared to roughly 4.6 million downloads a year earlier, NPM data also shows.
Abrahamsen said they are building a company to one day go public, but stressed that there's no timeline or date set for such a move.
At Stripe and Confluent, Tomlinson gained experience with software that helps developers build cloud and web-based applications — and how these offerings generate revenue.
"Steffan's track record with consumption-based software business models makes him the ideal partner to inform strategic decisions," Rauch said.
Vercel is among a crop of newer developer-focused tech companies that charge based on usage. For instance, as traffic and uptime increase for developers, Vercel generates more revenue, so it's aligned with customers, Abrahamsen told Business Insider.
Similarly, Stripe collects a small fee every time someone makes a payment in an app. Confluent has a consumption-based business model, too.
This is different from traditional software-as-a-service providers, which often charge based on the number of users, or seats. For instance, Microsoft 365 costs a certain amount per month, per user.
Tomlinson also has experience working with developer-focused companies with technical founders, such as the Collison brothers who started Stripe.
Devs expect tech vendors to supply software development kits, or SDKs, alongside their products to make it easier to create apps using those products. But many vendors only offer APIs, which are simply protocols that enable software components to communicate with each other. Alex Rattray, the founder of Stainless, thinks AI can assist, here. Stainless […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Several factors indicate that Snyk, most recently valued at $7.4 billion, could IPO soon. But the CEO told us why it might not.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A change to Meta’s developer tools is impacting third-party consumer apps that had previously integrated with Instagram. Among those affected by the changes are the Match-owned dating apps Tinder and Hinge, which had allowed their users to link their Instagram profiles to their accounts to display their posts to potential matches. Day One, the journaling […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
wakila/Getty Images
If you're looking for a deal in the homebuying market, you might want to ditch the fixer-upper and spring for a brand-new home.
For the last half-century, newly-built homes in the US have sold for much more, on average, than older homes. But these days, new homes for sale are less expensive per square foot than existing homes. Overall, newly constructed homes are selling for just 3% more than older homes, down from an average of 16% more since 1968, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Prices for existing homes have risen as fewer of them are on the market. The inventory of existing homes being resold has fallen significantly in recent years. As of March 2024, the number of existing homes for sale had fallen to 1.1 million from 1.7 million in 2019, and sales of existing homes hit a near 30-year low last year, a Harvard report found earlier this year.
High mortgage rates could be exacerbating that shortage of existing homes, as many homeowners are putting off a move and waiting for the cost of a home loan and home prices to come down.
But this trend might be turning around. Sales of existing homes are on the rise in the Midwest, South, and West, the National Association of Realtors recently reported. "The worst of the downturn in home sales could be over, with increasing inventory leading to more transactions," NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun said in a statement.
As rates fell slightly this year, more homeowners put their homes up for sale and new home construction rose. The US is on track to build a record number of new multifamily units this year — about 500,000 Still, there's a long way to go to make up for the overall shortage in housing, which Freddie Mac recently reported was 3.7 million homes.
There are a slew of other factors at play, as well. The costs of building materials and construction labor are elevated, which makes repairing or renovating older homes much more expensive. And it doesn't help that US homes are older than ever. The median age of owner-occupied homes in the US has risen to 40 from 32 when the housing market collapsed in 2008.
New homes are getting smaller, too. The typical new build for sale in the first quarter of 2024 was 2,140 square feet, down from 2,256 square feet a year prior, according to Census data. Newly built homes peaked in size in 2015 at 2,689 and have been shrinking quite steadily since then. The share of newly constructed single-family homes with four bedrooms fell to 33% last year, the lowest level since 2012, the National Association of Homebuilders found. Meanwhile, the share of new single-family homes with two bedrooms or fewer grew to its highest level in that same period.
Did you choose between a new and an older home when purchasing? Share your story with this reporter at [email protected].
On Monday, Apple’s list of finalists for its coveted “iPhone App of the Year” award once again reveals how the iPhone maker is downplaying the impact of AI technology on the mobile app ecosystem. As it did last year, Apple’s 2024 list of top iPhone finalists favors more traditional iOS apps, including those that help […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
TV Time, a popular TV and movie tracking and recommendations app with more than 30 million registered users, disappeared from Apple’s App Store for several weeks, leading to questions about its future from the app’s avid fan base. Considering that 2.5 million users use the app every month to track what they’re watching and to […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
