Vast Data, to make an obvious pun, is raising vast sums of cash. The New York-based startup, which provides a scale-out, unstructured data storage solution designed to eliminate tiered storage (i.e. setups that move data between high- and low-cost storage hardware), today announced that it secured $118 million in a Series E round led by…
Alongside other AI updates announced today, Meta AI, the company’s generative AI experience, is gaining new capabilities starting today, including the ability to create new AI images when prompted as well as support for Reels, among other things. The former, a feature called “reimagine,” allows users in group chats to have more fun by recreating…
Elon Musk is looking to raise 1/44 of a Twitter for his AI company, xAI. In other words, the man behind Tesla, SpaceX and X is seeking $1 billion in funding for his next venture. According to an SEC filing, Musk has raised about $135 million so far from four unnamed investors, with the first…
The U.K.’s Internet regulator has set out draft guidance for how porn sites will need to meet a newly introduced hard legal requirement to prevent children accessing adult content. So, yep, those years-in-the-making British age checks for porn sites are finally on the way. The watchdog intends this kind of bared flesh to be safety…
For years, dedicated Star Trek fans have been using AI in an attempt to make a version of the acclaimed series Deep Space 9 that looks decent on modern TVs. It sounds a bit ridiculous, but I was surprised to find that it’s actually quite good — certainly good enough that media companies ought to…
For the next few weeks, TechCrunch’s robotics newsletter Actuator will be running Q&As with some of the top minds in robotics. Subscribe here for future updates. Part 1: CMU’s Matthew Johnson-Roberson Part 2: Toyota Research Institute’s Max Bajracharya and Russ Tedrake This time it’s Dhruv Batra, research director, FAIR (The Fundamental AI Research) at Meta….
OpenAI’s app store for AI, the GPT Store, will not launch this year as previously announced, but rather on an unspecified date in early 2024, the company said. The delay is almost certainly due to the leadership shakeup that occurred in November, just after the initial announcement. The news was first reported by Axios, which…
Yesterday in Helsinki, this editor interviewed four of the six general partners at Benchmark, the nearly 30-year-old, Silicon Valley firm that’s known for some notable bets (Uber, Dropbox), paying each general partner exactly the same way, and for continuing to raise similar-size funds over its many years rather than balloon in size. We were speaking…