Amazon is considering increasing its investment in OpenAI rival Anthropic. According to The Information, Amazon is in talks to invest multiple billions in Anthropic, its first financial pledge in the company since a $4 billion deal struck last year. The new investment is structured similar to the last one — but with a twist. Amazon […]

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Yelp, which made a name for itself giving restaurant recs, just bought an auto services website. In the company’s earnings report on Thursday, Yelp revealed that it agreed to buy RepairPal, a site for car repair estimates, for $80 million in cash. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of the year, subject […]

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AI startup Mistral has launched a new API for content moderation. The API, which is the same API that powers moderation in Mistral’s Le Chat chatbot platform, can be tailored to specific applications and safety standards, Mistral says. It’s powered by a fine-tuned model (Ministral 8B) trained to classify text in a range of languages, […]

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Anthropic has teamed up with Palantir and AWS to sell its AI family of models called Claude to defense customers.

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OpenAI bought Chat.com, adding to its collection of high-profile domain names. As of this morning, Chat.com now redirects to OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the acquisition via email. Chat.com is one of the older domains on the web, having been registered in September 1996. Last year, it was reported that HubSpot co-founder […]

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Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. It was shockingly easy to create a convincing Kamala Harris audio deepfake on Election Day. It cost me $5 and took less than two minutes, illustrating how cheap, ubiquitous generative AI has opened the floodgates to […]

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A grueling election cycle has come to a close. Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the U.S., and, with Republicans in control of the Senate — and possibly the House — his allies are poised to bring sea change to the highest levels of government. The effects will be acutely felt in the […]

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TechCrunch found that X's AI chatbot produced incorrect results about the U.S. presidential election, even as votes were still being cast.

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Most AI benchmarks don’t tell us much. They ask questions that can be solved with rote memorization, or cover topics that aren’t relevant to the majority of users. So some AI enthusiasts are turning to games as a way to test AIs’ problem-solving skills. Paul Calcraft, a freelance AI developer, has built an app where […]

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A few months after ending its drone-based delivery program, Prime Air, in California, Amazon says that it’s begun making deliveries to select customers via drone in Phoenix, Arizona. Starting today, Amazon customers in the West Valley Phoenix Metro Area have access to a drone-deliverable selection from Amazon’s catalog, including household, beauty, office, health, and tech […]

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Anthropic’s AI-powered chatbot, Claude, now has desktop apps. Anthropic is launching Claude apps for Mac and Windows today in public beta, which — as Anthropic writes in a blog post — “brings Claude’s capabilities directly to your preferred work environment.” These capabilities, to be clear, don’t include Anthropic’s recently announced Computer Use feature, which allows […]

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Companies are concerned that their eagerness to adopt AI has made them more vulnerable to cyberthreats. Per a recent poll of over 350 IT leaders, more than half of the executives surveyed said the complexity of AI applications weakened their organization’s cybersecurity posture. More than two-fifths of executives believe their security teams lack the skills […]

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Perplexity’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas, wouldn’t say how Perplexity defines “plagiarism” in an on stage interview with Devin Coldewey at TechCrunch’s Disrupt 2024 conference. It’s a touchy subject. News Corp’s Dow Jones and the New York Post have sued Perplexity over what they describe as a “content kleptocracy.” Many other news sites have expressed concerns that Perplexity closely replicates their […]

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AI models are struggling to accurately answer election-related questions in Spanish. That’s according to a new study from the AI Democracy Projects, a collaboration between Proof News, fact-checking service Factchequeado, and the Institute for Advanced Study in San Francisco. The study found a sharp disparity between the factuality of English- and Spanish-language responses produced by five […]

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Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. This week, the TechCrunch crew (including yours truly) is at TC’s annual Disrupt conference in San Francisco. We’ve got a packed lineup of speakers from the AI industry, academia, and policy, so in lieu of my […]

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Dropbox is laying off 20% of its workforce as the cloud company undergoes what CEO Drew Houston calls a “transitional period.” In a letter to staff, Houston said that the reduction in headcount would impact 528 people. The goal, he added, was to make cuts in areas where Dropbox has “over-invested” while designing a “flatter, […]

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People are generally skeptical of customer service chatbots, and many outright despise them. In a recent Gartner survey, 64% of consumers said that they’d prefer companies didn’t use AI of any kind — including chatbots — in their customer service. Fifty-three percent went so far as to say they’d weigh switching to a rival if […]

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Google won’t ship tech from Project Astra, its wide-ranging effort to build AI apps and “agents” for real-time, multimodal understanding, until next year at the earliest. Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed the timeline in remarks during Google’s Q3 earnings call Tuesday. “[Google is] building out experiences where AI can see and reason about the world […]

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ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies. That growth has propelled OpenAI itself into […]

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