Investors can’t seem to get enough of RJ Scaringe or his ideas. In less than a decade, the serial entrepreneur best known for his EV company Rivian, has raised more than $12.3 billion from venture capital firms, as well as strategic and institutional investors for his three — and counting — startups. If the latest…
Zyphra, the San Francisco-based AI lab behind the ZAYA1 model family, released ZAYA1-8B-Diffusion-Preview — a preview of its early work in diffusion-language models. The release demonstrates that an existing autoregressive language model can be converted into a discrete diffusion model with no systematic loss of evaluation performance, while delivering substantial inference speedups on AMD hardware….
A hotel check-in system left more than one million customer passports, driver’s licenses, and selfie verification photos to the open web after a security lapse. The data is now offline after TechCrunch alerted the company responsible. The hotel check-in system, called Tabiq, is maintained by the Japan-based tech startup Reqrea. According to its website, Tabiq…
OpenAI told staff on Friday that it would reorganize the company as part of an ongoing effort to unify its product offerings, WIRED has learned. OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman will now lead the company’s product strategy, in addition to his work on AI infrastructure, OpenAI confirms to WIRED. Brockman was previously assigned to…
The most important electrical grid within the U.S., the PJM Interconnection, noticed costs almost double during the last yr, based on a report revealed yesterday by Monitoring Analytics, an unbiased market monitor that serves as a kind of watchdog for the PJM grid. The offender? Knowledge facilities. Wholesale costs for one megawatt-hour of electrical energy…
On Friday, OpenAI launched a new set of personal finance tools in preview for ChatGPT Pro subscribers in the U.S., letting them connect their accounts and ask questions ranging from spending analysis to future financial planning. OpenAI has partnered with the financial connection service Plaid to manage the account connections. Users can connect to over…
AI video generation startup Runway doesn’t have the typical Silicon Valley pedigree. No Stanford founders, no ex-Google founders, no nine-figure seed round that bought them time to ignore revenue. Its three founders — two from Chile, one from Greece — met at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and built the company in New York….
Want to make money? Start building data centers. Or build batteries to power data centers. Or: pivot to defense. This is not financial advice, but it’s certainly what seems to be winning over public markets and private investors lately. Ford’s nascent energy storage business — a fraction in size to Tesla’s and won’t be ready…
As AI models increasingly become commoditized, startups are racing to build the software layer that sits on top of them. One interesting entrant into this space is Osaurus, an open source, Apple-only LLM server that lets users move between different local AI models, either locally or in the cloud, while keeping their files and tools…
Indian ride-hailing company Rapido said on Friday it had raised $240 million in fresh funding at a $3 billion valuation to compete better in the country’s growing but challenging mobility market. Led by Prosus, the equity round saw participation from existing investors, including WestBridge Capital and Accel. The round was part of a larger $730…
