After years of pushing full speed ahead on AI, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says maybe it’s time for the AI industry to “pace” itself. The comments came just days after one of OpenAI’s own models broke out of its test environment and got tangled up in a breach at Hugging Face — though as Equity’s hosts point out, sloppy security seems to have…
Snapchat is the latest company to strengthen its stance against AI slop. The social network platform will no longer reward fully AI-generated videos, as it seeks to prioritize human-made content. Snapchat announced the update on Friday, stating that its recommendation systems will be adjusted to ensure that only videos created by real people are eligible…
Just a few short years ago, General Motors and Ford were all-in on electric vehicles, spending billions of dollars on those efforts. Now, the two biggest American automakers are hardly talking about EVs with their investors. TechCrunch teamed up with Hudson Labs, a New York-based financial research firm, to analyze the last seven years of…
Over the last few years, the term “weaponized incompetence” has blown up in dating discourse online. It’s used to describe someone—most often the guy, when it comes to heterosexual relationships—who acts like they are incapable of doing things like cooking, cleaning, scheduling, and just generally being thoughtful, in the hopes that their partner will simply…
JetBrains Research Open-Sources KotlinLLM. KotlinLLM is an IntelliJ IDEA plugin for Kotlin/JVM projects that adds a language feature called Smart macros. A Smart macro is a regular Kotlin function call whose body is generated Kotlin code. The public API is deliberately small. asLlm(from, hint) converts an input of type F into a typed value T,…
Ellis AI announced Thursday its emergence from stealth with $10 million in seed funding from investors including First Round Capital, 645 Ventures, Harlem Capital, Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital, Slow Capital, Kearny Jackson, and Ariel Alternatives CEO Mellody Hobson. Ellis uses AI agents to tackle the fragmented workflow private credit managers deal with, including managing documents,…
The notion that scammers can use AI to sharpen their deceptions, polish their language, and lubricate their banter with victims is now a reality for anyone fighting the fraud operations that steal tens of billions of dollars a year worldwide. But can AI fully replace a human scammer, autonomously building the web of deception leading…
Reddit reported a strong second quarter but spooked investors by mentioning in an investor letter that traffic from search engines had grown “choppy.” The company’s total revenue of $805 million jumped 61% compared to the year-ago quarter while net income was $253 million, up 183%. These beat Wall Street’s expectations. Plus, the company said it…
Nous Research has released Hermes Agent support for Buzz, Block’s open source, self-hostable workspace where humans and AI agents share the same channels. Buzz is built on Nostr. Every message is a signed event on a relay you own, and every participant, human or agent, is a keypair. That removes the bot-token model. Agents get…
Friend CEO Avi Schiffmann welcomes me into his palace—what he calls his large apartment in San Francisco. He sits on the couch in his living room, clad in an orange shirt emblazoned with a cartoon version of the motorcycle driven by Italian racer Valentino Rossi. He props his feet up on the side table and…
