In 2013, Tatyana Marynich and Anastasiya Khamiankova opened the doors to Imaguru, a startup hub in Minsk, Belarus that would go on to launch some of Eastern Europe’s most prominent tech success stories. A decade later, they’ve been sentenced ‘in absentia’ to a combined 23 years in prison by Belarusian authorities. Their property has been […]
Meta’s LlamaCon was all about undercutting OpenAI
On Tuesday, Meta held its first-ever AI developer conference, LlamaCon, at its Menlo Park, California headquarters. The company announced the launch of a consumer-facing Meta AI chatbot app, which will compete with ChatGPT, as well as a developer-facing API for accessing Llama models in the cloud. Both releases aim to expand adoption of the company’s […]
Microsoft CEO says up to 30% of the company’s code was written by AI
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 20%-30% of code inside the company’s repositories was “written by software” — meaning AI — during a fireside chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Meta’s LlamaCon conference on Tuesday. Nadella gave the figure after Zuckerberg asked roughly how much of Microsoft’s code is AI-generated today. The Microsoft CEO […]
OpenAI explains why ChatGPT became too sycophantic
OpenAI has published a postmortem on the recent sycophancy issues with the default AI model powering ChatGPT, GPT-4o — issues that forced the company to roll back an update to the model released last week. Over the weekend, following the GPT-4o model update, users on social media noted that ChatGPT began responding in an overly […]
Sarah Tavel, Benchmark’s first woman GP, transitions to venture partner
Eight years after joining Benchmark as the firm’s first woman general partner, Sarah Tavel announced on X that she is transitioning to a more limited role at the storied venture firm. In her new position as a venture partner, Tavel will continue to make investments and serve on existing company boards, but she will have […]
X is rolling out support for 4K video uploads
X is now allowing select creators to upload videos in 4K resolution, and will roll out the feature to all premium subscribers soon.
OpenAI is fixing a ‘bug’ that allowed minors to generate erotic conversations
A bug in OpenAI’s ChatGPT allowed the chatbot to generate graphic erotica for accounts where a user registered as a minor, under the age of 18, TechCrunch’s testing revealed, and OpenAI confirmed. In some cases, the chatbot even encouraged these users to ask for raunchier, more explicit content. OpenAI told TechCrunch its policies don’t allow […]
EWOR launches ‘founder fellowship’ program with $68M fund
Supporting early-stage entrepreneurs seems to be suddenly in vogue in Europe. Back in March, podcaster and venture investor Harry Stebbings launched “Project Europe” to great fanfare, aiming to back founders aged 25 and under with a small $10 million fund — riffing on the ‘Peter Thiel Fellowship’ model of yore. Now, a new fund hopes […]
Reddit now supports translation of posts and comments into Hindi
In a bid to broaden its user base in India, Reddit has updated its machine translation feature to support the automatic translation of posts and comments into Hindi. “With this expansion, authentic, more people-powered content is now accessible in one of India’s most spoken languages,” the company wrote in an update to a blog post. […]
IXI raises $36.5M from Amazon and others to bring autofocus to prescription glasses
Blink and you’ll miss it: A startup out of Finland is taking a new look at the market for prescription eyewear. Tapping into innovations in eye-tracking and liquid crystal lens technology, IXI is building low-power glasses that will invisibly and automatically adjust to account for a wearer’s presbyopia (far-sightedness). Four years into its life, Helsinki-based […]