A trio of Palm Harbor University High School students recently won the 2023-2024 Next Gen Tech 360 contest with an AI-driven app called New2Fit. The app features personalized workout plans, AI-driven form correction, a gym locator, and a community chat.
Microsoft's big focus at this year's Build conference is generative AI. Azure AI Studio is a toolset within Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service that lets customers combine an AI model like OpenAI’s recently announced GPT-4o with their own data and build a chat assistant or another type of app that "reasons over" that data. Copilot Studio, meanwhile, provides tools to connect Copilot for Microsoft 365 -- the AI-powered "copilot" in apps like Excel, Word and PowerPoint as well as Microsoft’s Edge browser and Windows -- to third-party data.
Stack AI’s co-founders, Antoni Rosinol and Bernardo Aceituno, were PhD students at MIT wrapping up their degrees in 2022 just as large language models were becoming more mainstream. After graduating, they moved to San Francisco and joined the Winter 23 cohort at Y Combinator, where they launched Stack and refined their idea. Today, the company has built a low-code workflow automation tool designed to help companies build AI-driven workflows including chatbots and AI assistants, for example.
Microsoft debuted a litany of new AI offerings as part of its Build developer conference as its fight with Google and Amazon continues to heat up.
The UK's data protection watchdog has closed an almost year-long investigation of Snap's AI chatbot, My AI -- saying it's satisfied the social media firm has addressed concerns about risks to children's privacy. At the same time, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) issued a general warning to industry to be proactive about assessing risks to people's rights before bringing generative AI tools to market. GenAI refers to a flavor of AI that often foregrounds content creation.
Alchemist Accelerator has a new pile of AI-forward companies demoing their wares today, if you care to watch, and the program itself is making some international moves into Tokyo and Doha. Chatting with Alchemist CEO and founder Ravi Belani ahead of demo day (today at 10:30 a.m. Pacific) about this cohort, it was clear that ambitions for AI startups have contracted, and that's not a bad thing. No early-stage startup today is at all likely to become the next OpenAI or Anthropic — their lead is too huge right now in the domain of foundational large language models.
Build is Microsoft's largest developer conference and of course, it's all about AI this year. As the name suggests, Copilot Extensions allow developers to extend Copilot with third-party skills. "Our goal: make GitHub Copilot the most integrated, powerful, intelligent AI platform there is—with unlimited possibilities to accelerate human progress," said GitHub's SVP of Product Mario Rodriguez.
A new coalition called Tech Against Scams is bringing companies together to fight online fraud.
TikTok is pulling out all the stops to prevent its impending ban in the United States. Creators in the program will get support from TikTok, and on each creator's behalf, TikTok will donate $25,000 to a non-profit of their choice. "This program enables us to connect with wider audiences, encouraging creativity for meaningful advocacy and health communication," said Alain Labrique, a director at the World Health Organization (WHO), in a statement.
Microsoft has expanded Copilot's abilities beyond that of a personal assistant.
Scale AI, which provides data-labeling services to companies that want to train machine learning models, has raised a $1 billion Series F round from a slew of big-name institutional and corporate investors that include Amazon and Meta. The fundraise is a mix of primary and secondary funding, and is the latest in a slew of big venture capital investments in AI. Amazon recently closed a $4 billion investment in OpenAI rival Anthropic, and the likes of Mistral AI and Perplexity are also in the process of raising more billion-dollar rounds at lofty valuations.
It’s been three years since Spotify acquired live audio startup Betty Labs, and yet the music streaming service isn’t leveraging the technology to its fullest potential—at least not in our opinion. Betty Labs-owned Locker Room launched in 2020 as a sports-focused social audio app where sports fans could engage in live conversations, create watch parties, and react to games in real-time. When Spotify bought the app, it rebranded it as Greenroom, a Clubhouse clone that catered to all types of fans, whether they’re interested in sports, fantasy football, music, and other topics.
An Apple iPad for $80 off is calling our name, as is a sleek stick vac marked down by over 50%. That's just for starters.
Harper came through in the clutch in a different kind of way this week.
Investors biding their time for Nvidia results looked to retail earnings and Fedspeak for clues to the economy.
The 10th-gen iPad has dropped to its lowest price ever at $329. It's our pick for the best budget iPad and it should handle basic tasks with ease.
When Hayes arrives this week, although she'll have plenty of familiarizing to do, her core — the players, the most important part of any national team — will largely already be in place.
Pinecone, the vector database startup founded by Edo Liberty, the former head of Amazon's AI Labs, has long been at the forefront of helping businesses augment large language models (LLMs) with their own data. Most recently, though, the company completely rearchitected its product to launch Pinecone Serverless, which frees its customers from having to think about managing their deployments and scaling them. Today, Pinecone serverless comes out of beta and is now generally available.
Are you sitting down? Stop it. These desks can raise or lower with the push of a button. Your body will thank you.
Rashada was allegedly promised over $13 million to sign with the Gators out of high school.
Sonos' first headphones are finally here, offering premium design, solid features and home theater chops.