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An excerpt from the upcoming book “The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future” offers new details about why OpenAI’s board briefly fired CEO Sam Altman back in 2023. Written by Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey, the book claims the nonprofit’s board members became increasingly concerned after learning about issues … Read more
CoreWeave began trading on Friday with more of a shrug than a war cry. The company priced at $40 on Thursday, below the $47- $50 price range announced. It also trimmed the number of shares offered. All told, CoreWeave raised $1.5 billion and nabbed a $14 billion market cap on Day 1, instead of a … Read more
When Intel Capital announced its plans to spin out from semiconductor giant Intel in January, it came as a bit of a shock considering the firm has been operating as Intel’s venture investment arm since 1991. In many ways this decision marks the end of an era for what’s considered by some to be the … Read more
During a livestream on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the first major upgrade to ChatGPT’s image-generation capabilities in over a year. ChatGPT can now leverage the company’s GPT-4o model to natively create and modify images and photos. GPT-4o has long underpinned the AI-powered chatbot platform, but until now, the model has been able to … Read more
Last summer, mining startup KoBold made a splash when it said it had discovered in Zambia one of the world’s largest copper deposits in more than a decade. Now, another startup, Earth AI, exclusively told TechCrunch about its own discovery: promising deposits of critical minerals in parts of Australia that other mining outfits had ignored … Read more
Microsoft is introducing a “deep research” AI-powered tool in Microsoft 365 Copilot, its AI chatbot app. There’s been a raft of deep research agents launched recently across chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok. Powering them are reasoning AI models, which posses the ability to think through problems and fact-check themselves — skills … Read more
It’s virtually impossible today to determine when a student’s writing has been composed using ChatGPT or another generative AI tool, and it can be a nightmare to disprove incorrect accusations. An AI edtech startup called Brisk has built a tool that could at least help teachers identify some of the telltale signs, and it’s now … Read more
Amazon continues to infuse AI into its shopping tools to encourage customers to make more purchases. The company announced on Wednesday a new feature called “Interests,” aimed at creating a more personalized and conversational search experience. With the new feature, customers can enter tailored prompts in the search bar, reflecting their interests, preferences, and even … Read more
Audio startup Krisp on Wednesday said it is launching a new feature that uses AI to change a user’s accent during calls. The company is initially rolling out support for changing Indian English accents to U.S. English. The startup says the accent conversion process preserves the speaker’s voice and only switches phonemes to match American … Read more
Amazon started the Alexa Fund in 2015 to back early-stage voice startups. With the advent of large language models and Amazon launching Gen AI-powered Alexa+, along with a family of multimodal AI models, the fund now wants to broaden its scope and invest more in AI startups. In a blog post Amazon shared with TechCrunch … Read more