Month: September 2023

Welcome to the TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. “Once an arena just for contrarian VCs, miltech [or defense tech] is booming and there is an appetite for the government sector to outsource

As tech companies begin to monetize generative AI, the creators on whose work it is trained are asking for their fair share. But so far no one can agree on whether or how much artists should be paid. A recent open letter from the Authors Guild signed by more than 8,500 writers, including Margaret Atwood,

You’d better believe that Humane is going to milk the media hype cycle for all it’s worth. After all, the company’s been buzzy since it first engaged with the media – well before it offered the slightest bit of insight into what it’s been working on. That’s courtesy of its being founded by high-profile Apple

Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Friday show, and we’re talking about the week’s biggest startup and tech news. Consider it a full-throated recap of sorts. This week, Mary

Large language models are trained on all kinds of data, most of which it seems was collected without anyone’s knowledge or consent. Now you have a choice whether to allow your web content to be used by Google as material to feed its Bard AI and any future models it decides to make. It’s as

Web publishing platform Medium has announced that it will block OpenAI’s GPTBot, an agent that scrapes web pages for content used to train the company’s AI models. But the real news may be that a group of platforms may soon form a unified front against what many consider an exploitation of their content. Medium joins

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm. It’s able to write essays, code and more given short text prompts, hyper-charging productivity. But it also has a more…nefarious side. In any case, AI tools are not going away — and indeed has expanded dramatically since its launch just a few months ago.

What products and services will benefit the most from recent developments in AI technology? We’re keeping close tabs on the question, curious if startups will be able to best lever AI improvements or if cloud platforms are the best positioned. Or maybe it’ll be the companies building generative AI models themselves? I wonder if we’re

Pilot, a Vancouver-based startup, wants to connect people via travel and become “the hub of the global travel experience”. To do that, the company has built an all-in-one social trip-planning platform powered by AI to help people discover, plan, book and share trips with friends. The startup is part of the current Battlefield 200 cohort,

Zapier today announced the launch of Canvas, a new tool that aims to help its users plan and diagram their business-critical processes — with a fair bit of AI sprinkled in there to help them turn those processes into Zapier-based automations. Canvas is now in early access. In addition, the company also today announced that

Meta announced a host of new AI-powered bots, features and products to be released across its messaging apps, the Meta Quest 3 and the future Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The new features — ranging from an AI assistant to image editing — harness the power of generative AI to make Meta’s technology just that much

Just because generative AI is trendy right now, doesn’t mean it has to be applied to every application. But try telling that to Workday. The enterprise management platform vendor today announced a suite of new generative AI features aimed at “increasing productivity” and “streamlining business processes.” Soon, Workday customers will be able to automatically compare

After almost five months, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) has reached an agreement with Hollywood studios to end the writers strike. Starting Wednesday, writers will be able to resume work under the conditions established by their new contract. During the historic strike, AI emerged as a key point of contention between the writers and

Talkdesk, a company once valued at $10 billion that sells software to help large corporations improve customer service, has laid off more employees — the third round of cuts in less than 14 months. A Talkdesk spokesperson confirmed Tuesday via email that it had made “limited headcount reductions in a few areas.” She declined to

The European Union has warned more needs to be done to address the risks that widely accessible generative AI tools may pose to free and fair debate in democratic societies, with the bloc’s values and transparency commissioner highlighting AI-generated disinformation as a potential threat to elections ahead of the pan-EU vote to choose a new

Why is it that so many companies that rely on monetizing the data of their users seem to be extremely hot on AI? If you ask Signal president Meredith Whittaker (and I did), she’ll tell you it’s simply because “AI is a surveillance technology.” Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, Whittaker explained her perspective that AI

“Honestly, and I really can say this with a straight face, we create jobs. Because there’s so much shit to do to actually put these use cases into production, that a lot of our customers can’t fill those jobs fast enough,” May Habib, CEO at enterprise-targeted AI tool Writer, told me onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt

Getty Images, one of the largest suppliers of stock images, editorial photos, videos and music, today announced the launch of a generative AI art tool that it claims is “commercially safer” than other, rival solutions on the market. Called Generative AI by Getty Images, the tool — powered by an AI model provided by Nvidia,

Amazon said Monday it has agreed to invest up to $4 billion in the AI startup Anthropic as the e-commerce group steps up rivalry against Microsoft, Meta, Google and Nvidia in the fast-growing sector that many technologists believe could be the next great frontier. The e-commerce group said it will initially invest $1.25 billion for

Microsoft’s Bing is gaining a number of AI improvements, including support for OpenAI’s new DALLE-E 3 model, more personalized answers in search and chat, and tools that will watermark images as being AI-generated. The company announced these and other Windows and Bing news at an event this week in New York, where it also introduced

Along with AI advances in Windows 11 and Bing, Microsoft also this week announced it’s bringing new AI-powered features to its SwiftKey mobile keyboard app for iOS and Android. This third-party app lets users replace the default keyboard on their phone with an intelligent keyboard that learns your writing style so you can type faster.

FinanceGPT is a generative AI startup built to help companies in their financial analysis tasks. Initially built for startups without in-house finance teams, and VCs looking to run financial health checks for their portfolios in Africa, FinanceGPT (Ipoxcap) says it has over the last two years grown to attract a diverse range of clientele including

Plantiga Technologies, a Vancouver-based movement analytics company, wants to help people improve rehabilitation and reduce injury risks through an artificial intelligence-powered monitoring sensor pod that can be embedded into shoes, orthotics or insoles to analyze users’ movement patterns.  Plantiga is participating in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, and while it’s been around for a

Salesforce has announced plans to acquire Airkit.ai, a low-code platform that helps ecommerce companies build AI-powered customer service agents. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2017, Redwood City, California-based Airkit was created by Adam Evans and Stephen Ehikian, who sold a previous big data startup called RelateIQ to Salesforce for $390 million

Ron Williams, co-founder and CEO of Kindo, knows a thing or two about cybersecurity, having previously led security teams at League of Legends developer Riot Games, shared scooter startup Bird and Alphabet-backed Clover Health. He is now bringing this expertise to the fast-moving world of artificial intelligence (AI) with Kindo, his new AI productivity and

Generative AI has brought a host of copyright issues to the fore. Just this week, authors including George R.R. Martin, led by the Authors Guild, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the startup’s viral AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, was trained on their work without their knowledge or consent. And it’s not just OpenAI that’s having

For years, Forethought and other vendors have been selling chatbots to help answer common customer service questions without a human agent. With the growing popularity of generative AI, the company sees even more potential to expand that capability. Today, Forethought introduced the next logical step in that journey called Autoflows. “We’re announcing a concept called

News aggregation startup Artifact co-founder Kevin Systrom doesn’t believe in AI doomerism, even as he’s developing a new app that’s embracing novel AI technologies. The Instagram co-founder, speaking on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, said it’s good that people are questioning the potential impacts of AI but feels it’s more likely that people will become

As Anthropic takes on OpenAI and other challengers in the growing artificial intelligence industry, there is also an existential question looming: Can large language models and the systems they enable continue growing in size and capability? CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei has a simple answer: yes. Speaking onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt, Amodei explained that he