FavFeeds: Curating Tech and Marketing Media for Independent Developer

1.

The ‘Mozart of Math’ isn’t worried about AI replacing math nerds — ever

October 5, 2024 04:50:35

Terence Tao, a UCLA professor considered to be the “world’s greatest living mathematician,” last month compared ChapGPT’s o1 reasoning model to a “mediocre, but not completely incompetent” graduate student that could correctly answer a complex analysis problem with “a lot of hints and prodding.” AI might never beat its human teachers, he now tells The […]

2.

Amazon closes more of its cashierless convenience stores

October 4, 2024 17:41:56

Amazon continues to scale back efforts around its cashierless checkout technology, Just Walk Out. The e-commerce giant closed three of its Go convenience stores in New York last week, The Information confirmed on Friday, leaving just 17 across the nation. (Amazon notes it recently opened one in Washington.) These convenience stores use AI systems to […]

3.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 Side Events schedule: Women in Tech, SignalFire, Llama Lounge, and more to host

October 4, 2024 17:13:50

With TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 right around the corner, we’re thrilled to introduce the companies hosting Side Events that will extend the buzz and excitement to the thousands of attendees and Silicon Valley locals alike. Whether it’s a fun happy hour, insightful panels, or energizing morning runs, Disrupt Week — happening from October 26 to November […]

4.

Mark Zuckerberg is leg pressing chicken nuggets

October 4, 2024 16:17:44

Meta on Friday announced its Movie Gen model, which uses AI to turn prompts into realistic videos with sound. Though Movie Gen won’t be coming to Instagram or other Meta apps until next year, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a video showing how it works. In the Instagram post, we see the recent gym […]

5.

YC takes a bite out of PearAI, and French startups have a new home

October 4, 2024 14:37:20

Kirsten Korosec, Devin Coldewey, and Margaux MacColl are unpacking another busy week in the tech world, kicking things off with Governor Newsom’s veto of SB 1047, the controversial AI bill aimed at stopping real-world disasters caused by AI systems before they happen. This may not be the last we’ll see of the bill, however, as […]

6.

Gmail users on iOS can now ask Gemini questions about their emails

October 4, 2024 14:34:24

Select Gmail users on iOS can now chat with Google’s Gemini chatbot about their inbox directly within the app, the company announced this week. The feature, which is called Gmail Q&A, was first rolled out to Android users back in August. Now, it’s available on iOS to Google One AI Premium subscribers or Google Workspace […]

7.

Meta’s Movie Gen model puts out realistic video with sound, so we can finally have infinite Moo Deng

October 4, 2024 13:01:00

No one really knows what generative video models are useful for just yet, but that hasn’t stopped companies like Runway, OpenAI, and Meta from pouring millions into developing them. Meta’s latest is called Movie Gen, and true to its name turns text prompts into relatively realistic video with sound… but thankfully no voice just yet. […]

8.

Many companies won’t say if they’ll comply with California’s AI training transparency law

October 4, 2024 12:23:56

California passed a law that'll require AI companies to say which data sets they used to train their models. But few are saying whether they'll comply.

9.

Even the ‘godmother of AI’ has no idea what AGI is

October 4, 2024 04:05:08

Are you confused about artificial general intelligence, or AGI? It’s that thing OpenAI is obsessed with ultimately creating in a way that “benefits all of humanity.” You may want to take them seriously since they just raised $6.6 billion to get closer to that goal. But if you’re still wondering what the heck AGI even […]

10.

A co-lead on Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, has left for Google

October 3, 2024 23:32:01

One of the co-leads on OpenAI’s video generator, Sora, has left for Google. Tim Brooks, who was heading development on Sora with William Peebles, announced in a post on X that he’ll be joining Google DeepMind, Google’s AI research division, to work on video generation technologies and “world simulators.” “I had an amazing two years […]

11.

Investors are scrambling to get into ElevenLabs, which may soon be valued at $3 billion

October 3, 2024 23:06:58

ElevenLabs, a startup that makes AI tools for audio applications, is being approached by existing and new investors about a new round, which could value the company as highly as $3 billion, TechCrunch has learned. The two-year-old company specializes in making AI tools to generate synthetic voices for audiobook narrations, and for real-time video dubbing […]

12.

ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot

October 3, 2024 20:45:00

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 […]

13.

OpenAI launches new ‘Canvas’ ChatGPT interface tailored to writing and coding projects

October 3, 2024 17:08:25

OpenAI introduced a new way to interact with ChatGPT on Thursday: an interface it calls “canvas.” The product opens a separate window, beside the normal chat window, with a workspace for writing and coding projects. Users can generate writing or code directly in the canvas, then highlight sections of the work to have the model […]

14.

Google brings ads to AI Overviews as it expands AI’s role in search

October 3, 2024 16:00:27

Google is rolling out a redesigned AI Overviews experience — with ads — and expanding its test of AI-organized results pages.

15.

Google Lens can now answer questions about videos

October 3, 2024 16:00:24

Lens, Google's visual search app, can now analyze videos. Plus, it can identify products in photos — and, less excitingly, serve up related ads.

16.

Video editing app Captions launches an AI-powered social media manager for sites

October 3, 2024 14:00:00

AI-powered video editing app Captions is rolling out a new tool for websites that manages their content publishing schedule for videos and even generates videos for those dates based on relevant topics to the site. The tool first scans the site to pull content, keywords, service offerings, and key selling points of a site and […]

17.

How Kapa uses LLMs to help companies answer users’ technical questions reliably

October 3, 2024 13:51:09

Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) have been all the rage in recent years, upending traditional online search via the likes of ChatGPT while improving customer support, content generation, translation, and more. Now one fledgling startup is using LLMs to build AI assistants capable specifically of answering complex questions for developers, software end users, […]

18.

Black Forest Labs, the startup behind Grok’s image generator, releases an API

October 3, 2024 13:50:32

Black Forest Labs, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup behind the image generation component of xAI’s Grok assistant, has launched an API in beta — and released a new model. The new API provides Black Forest Labs’ family of image generation models, Flux, in a managed package. Using it, developers can choose which Flux model to build […]

19.

Voyage AI is building RAG tools to make AI hallucinate less

October 3, 2024 13:00:00

AI tends to make things up. That’s unappealing to just about anyone who uses it on a regular basis, but especially to businesses, for which fallacious results could hurt the bottom line. Half of workers responding to a recent survey from Salesforce say they worry answers from their company’s generative AI-powered systems are inaccurate. While […]

20.

Hey, UK! Here’s how to ‘opt out’ of Meta using your Facebook and Instagram data to train its AI

October 3, 2024 12:44:29

After Meta recently reignited controversial plans to use the public posts of U.K. Facebook and Instagram users’ as AI training fodder, the social networking giant has taken the next step and begun to notify local users it will soon start helping itself to their information again. The bad news is the process Meta has devised […]

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