Reading view

There are new articles available, click to refresh the page.

Anthropic reportedly ups its next funding round to $3.5B

Anthropic’s next funding round is reportedly growing larger. Anthropic, which makes the AI chatbot Claude, is finalizing a $3.5 billion fundraising round that values the company at $61.5 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. Anthropic initially set out to raise $2 billion, but investors have now agreed to a larger tranche, per the WSJ. […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Chegg sues Google over AI search summaries

Edtech company Chegg has sued Google claiming that the tech giant’s AI summaries of search results have hurt Chegg’s traffic and revenue. In the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Chegg accuses Google of unfair competition — specifically reciprocal dealing, monopoly maintenance, and unjust enrichment. Google, Chegg claims, forces […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Anthropic used Pokémon to benchmark its newest AI model

Anthropic used Pokémon to benchmark its newest AI model. Yes, really. In a blog post published Monday, Anthropic said that it tested its latest model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, on the Game Boy classic Pokémon Red. The company equipped the model with basic memory, screen pixel input, and function calls to press buttons and navigate around the […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Grok 3 appears to be driving Grok usage to new heights

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, released Grok 3, its long-awaited flagship AI model, last week. Grok 3 powers the Grok chatbot apps for mobile and the web, as well as the Grok experience on the Musk-owned social network X. Given that there’s so much competition in the AI chatbot space these days, it wasn’t a […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Perplexity teases a web browser called Comet

AI-powered search engine Perplexity says it’s building its own web browser. In a post on X on Monday, the company launched a sign-up list for the browser, which isn’t yet available. It’s unclear when it might be — or what the browser will look like, even. But we do have a name: Comet. “Just like […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Grok 3 appears to have briefly censored unflattering mentions of Trump and Musk

When billionaire Elon Musk introduced Grok 3, his AI company xAI’s latest flagship model, in a live stream last Monday, he described it as a “maximally truth-seeking AI.” Yet it appears that Grok 3 was briefly censoring unflattering facts about President Donald Trump — and Musk himself. Over the weekend, users on social media reported […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Did xAI lie about Grok 3’s benchmarks?

Debates over AI benchmarks — and how they’re reported by AI labs — are spilling out into public view. This week, an OpenAI employee accused Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, of publishing misleading benchmark results for its latest AI model, Grok 3. One of the co-founders of xAI, Igor Babushkin, insisted that the company was […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Court filings show Meta staffers discussed using copyrighted content for AI training

For years, Meta employees have internally discussed using copyrighted works obtained through legally questionable means to train the company’s AI models, according to court documents unsealed on Thursday. The documents were submitted by plaintiffs in the case Kadrey v. Meta, one of many AI copyright disputes slowly winding through the U.S. court system. The defendant, […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Sakana walks back claims that its AI can dramatically speed up model training

This week, Sakana AI, an Nvidia-backed startup that’s raised hundreds of millions of dollars from VC firms, made a remarkable claim. The company said it had created an AI system, the AI CUDA Engineer, that could effectively speed up the training of certain AI models by a factor of up to 100x. The only problem […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Report: AI coding assistants aren’t a panacea

As they gain in popularity, AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot may appear to be boosting productivity. But in reality, they could be causing overall code quality to decline. That’s the top-line finding from a new report released by software engineering platform GitClear, which analyzed 211 million code lines from 2020 to 2024. According […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

DeepSeek to open source parts of online services code

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek plans to open source portions of its online services’ code as part of an “open source week” event next week. DeepSeek will open source five code repositories that have been “documented, deployed and battle-tested in production,” the company said in a post on X on Thursday. Code repositories are storage locations […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

This Week in AI: Maybe we should ignore AI benchmarks for now

Welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter! We’re going on hiatus for a bit, but you can find all our AI coverage, including my columns, our daily analysis, and breaking news stories, at TechCrunch. If you want those stories and much more in your inbox every day, sign up for our daily newsletters here. This week, billionaire […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Sanas taps AI to change call center workers’ accents in real time

The demand for voice and speech recognition technologies is massive — and growing. An analysis by market research firm Markets and Markets found that the sector could be worth over $28.1 billion by 2027. There’s no shortage of vendors providing voice and speech recognition solutions, but some newer upstarts have managed to carve out niches. […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Guidde taps AI to help create software training videos

Creating corporate training videos for software is a time-consuming ordeal, especially if you’re an organization with a lot of software licenses. Training videos can help get employees up to speed, but they’re a big lift. They often take entire teams to produce. Tel Aviv-based entrepreneur Yoav Einav thought there might be an alternative, cheaper way […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Safe Superintelligence, Ilya Sutskever’s AI startup, is reportedly close to raising roughly $1B

Safe Superintelligence, an AI startup founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, could be close to raising more than $1 billion at a $30 billion valuation — a higher valuation than reported just weeks ago. Bloomberg reports that VC firm Greenoaks Capital Partners is leading the deal and pledging to invest half a billion […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Thinking Machines Lab is ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s new startup

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has announced her new startup. Unsurprisingly, it’s focused on AI. Called Thinking Machines Lab, the startup, which came out of stealth today, intends to build tooling to “make AI work for [people’s] unique needs and goals,” and to create AI systems that are “more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable” […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Fiverr wants gig workers to offload some of their work to AI

Gig marketplace Fiverr wants to let freelancers train AI on their bodies of work and use it to automate future jobs. At an event on Tuesday, Fiverr announced the launch of several new efforts aimed at attracting gig workers to its platform and equipping them with generative AI tools. Perhaps the most ambitious is a […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

OpenAI may give board special voting rights to ward off takeover attempts

To fend off future hostile takeover attempts, OpenAI is considering giving its nonprofit board special voting rights, according to a new report in the Financial Times. The rights would allow the board to overrule major investors in the company, preserving some of its powers after OpenAI completes its transition to a for-profit. OpenAI was founded […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Meta announces LlamaCon, its first generative AI dev conference

Meta on Tuesday announced that it’ll host its first-ever dev conference dedicated to generative AI. Called LlamaCon after Meta’s Llama family of generative AI models, the conference is scheduled to take place on April 29. Meta said that it plans to share “the latest on [its] open source AI developments to help developers […] build […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Elon Musk’s xAI releases its latest flagship model, Grok 3

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, late on Monday released its latest flagship AI model, Grok 3, and unveiled new capabilities for the Grok iOS and web apps. Grok, xAI’s answer to models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini, can analyze images and respond to questions, and powers a number of features on Musk’s social network, X. Grok 3, […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

❌