Artificial intelligence continues to become more and more integrated into our daily life, most recently with the new AI chat-bot that was rolled out on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. Over the weekend, you may have noticed the blue circle icon pop up on the search bar of your Facebook and Instagram. Whether you like it or not, the new AI chat bot is seemingly here to stay on social media.
Meta's making several big moves today to promote its AI services across its platform. The company has upgraded its AI chatbot with its newest large language model, Llama 3, and it is now running it in the search bar of its four major apps (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp) across multiple countries. This confirms and extends a test that TechCrunch reported on last week, when we spotted that the company had started testing Meta AI on Instagram's search bar.
WhatsApp has announced All, Groups and Unread Chat Filters for users.
The biggest news stories this morning: Our favorite Sony wireless earbuds are on sale for a record-low price, Interstellar is coming back to theaters in September for its 10-year anniversary, Playdate revisited: Two years later.
Meta has confirmed to TechCrunch that it is testing Meta AI, its large language model-powered chatbot, with WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger users in India and parts of Africa. The move signals how Meta plans to tap massive user bases across its various apps to scale its AI offerings. Meta announced plans to build and experiment with chatbots and other AI tools in February 2023.
X is using Grok to publish AI-generated summaries of news and other topics that trend on the platform.
Instagram is adding a handful of new features for Stories to give users more creative ways to share content and engage with each other, the company announced on Friday. Most notably, the social network is introducing a new "Reveal" feature that lets you post a hidden Story for your followers to uncover by sending you a DM. Instagram is also launching other features that let you share your favorite songs and highlight memories via Stories.
The Rabbit R1 is a cute AI gadget, but at launch it’s riddled with issues and terrible battery life. When phones can handle similar AI tasks, the R1 doesn’t do enough to justify its existence.
'I've been using it for more than 20 years,' says one longtime fan. 'My facial skin is smooth and wrinkle-free.'
The Rabbit R1 is finally here, and it's yet another useless AI gadget.
Instagram has released some new interactive stickers for use in Stories. One of these is a “Reveal” sticker that blurs content, so people have to DM the creator to get it unlocked.
The episode originally aired in Australia four years ago but has never been available on Disney+, where “Bluey” airs in the U.S. Now it has quietly appeared on YouTube, surprising fans.
Some major deals on board: A super-handy collapsible garden cart for over $200 off, a cordless Shark pro stick vacuum for over 50% off, and a 65-inch Philips 4K smart TV for under $400.
See what to do after a car crash and how to get started documenting the accident and filing an insurance claim.
Load it up with pics before you wrap it, and take your rightful place as her favorite child.
Experts share techniques to pull yourself out of a moment of anxiety or panic.
Nintendo sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice for over 8,000 GitHub repositories hosting code from the Yuzu Switch emulator, which the Zelda maker previously described as enabling “piracy at a colossal scale.”
Allozymes' ingenious method of quickly testing millions of bio-based chemical reactions is proving to be not just a useful service, but the basis of a unique and valuable dataset. The company just raised a $15 million Series A to grow its business from a helpful service to a world-class resource. The company has grown to 32 people in the U.S., Europe and Singapore, and has 15 times the lab space, which it has used to accelerate its already exponentially faster enzyme-screening technique.
First practice at the 2024 Miami GP just wrapped up and Max Verstappen in fastest.
The downturn in venture capital funding has impacted startups, VC firms, and accelerators alike. One company in the final category, Techstars, has been shaking up its operations for some time now, leading to a number of departures.
WSO2, a company that provides API management and identity and access management (IAM) services for enterprises, has been acquired by Swedish investment giant EQT. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but TechCrunch has learned via sources that the deal values WSO2 at "more than" $600 million, with EQT attaining a "significant majority" stake for the price. WSO2's products include an open source API manager, comparable to something like Google's Apigee, which businesses use for building and integrating all their digital services, either in the cloud or on-premises.
