True Anomaly‘s first mission didn’t go as planned by any stretch of the imagination, but the space and defense startup’s CEO, Even Rogers, said he doesn’t consider it a failure.
The aim of this first mission, Mission X, was to demonstrate these capabilities on orbit for the first time.
True Anomaly closed a $100 million Series B round last year to accelerate those plans.
By all accounts, the outcome of Mission X has not slowed the company down whatsoever: True Anomaly is planning on flying at least twice more in the next twelve months.
“The success story of Jackal Mission X is twofold,” Rogers said.
Meta announced on Tuesday it’s rolling out the ability for Messenger users to create shared albums in chats, send photos in high-definition, and share larger files up to 100MB in size.
With these new features, Messenger is targeting people who tend to create shared albums or share HD images via services like Google Drive.
Now, users can create albums of photos and videos in group chats, whether it’s to organize photos of a recent spring break or grandma’s 80th birthday celebration.
The launch of the new feature follows Meta’s rollout of support for HD photos on WhatsApp back in September 2023.
The new features are rolling out on mobile to all Messenger users.
Check out the complete roundtable lineup at TC Early Stage 2024Among the highlights of Early Stage are its fan-favorite roundtable sessions.
These intimate gatherings, guided by experts, delve into targeted subjects crafted to enlighten, invigorate, and enhance your entrepreneurial endeavors.
Moreover, they serve as prime opportunities to forge connections with like-minded individuals.
Take a look at the complete roundtable roster for this year’s event featuring top VCs and founder leaders.
And don’t forget to buy your tickets now before prices go up at the door.
Spotify is building on its AI DJ feature, adding a new AI-powered playlist feature.
Spotify’s AI work nests into its other efforts to differentiate its service from rivals like Apple Music and offerings from Amazon.
Starting in just a few countries, the new AI playlist feature will roll out to more markets over time.
Some Spotify users have complained that the rollout of new products can take longer than they want to reach their home market, it’s worth noting.
But for those of us who aren’t mega-ChatGPT users, AI can seem ever so slightly remote from our regular existence.
“Our goal over time is to make a Llama-powered Meta AI be the most useful assistant in the world,” said Joelle Pineau, Vice President AI Research.
Most notably, Meta’s Llama families, built as open-source products, represent a different philosophical approach to how AI should develop as a wider technology.
But Meta is also playing it more cautiously, it seems, especially when it comes to other generative AI beyond text generation.
Ironically — or perhaps predictably (heh) — even as Meta works to launch Llama 3, it does have some significant generative AI skeptics in the house.
It’s not generative AI,” he said.
So he founded a startup, Symbolica AI, to do just that.
Elsewhere, a report co-authored by Stanford and Epoch AI, an independent AI research Institute, finds that the cost of training cutting-edge AI models has increased substantially over the past year and change.
With costs poised to climb higher still — see OpenAI’s and Microsoft’s reported plans for a $100 billion AI data center — Morgan began investigating what he calls “structured” AI models.
Symbolic AI solves tasks by defining symbol-manipulating rule sets dedicated to particular jobs, such as editing lines of text in word processor software.
Symbolic AI needs well-defined knowledge to function, in other words — and defining that knowledge can be highly labor-intensive.
Metalab goes from quietly building the internet to investing in itNearly 20 years after finding success in helping startups build products, Canadian interface design firm Metalab launches Metalab Ventures to invest in many of those product-led startups.
Then Metalab “lets them loose” to grow, CEO Luke Des Cotes told TechCrunch.
With Metalab Ventures, the venture arm will play the role of a long-term value investor, essentially “putting our money where our mouth is,” Des Cotes said.
When determining who to invest in Metalab Ventures, the process includes getting to know the founders and if the firm can add value.
“We’ve already operated very much like a venture fund,” Des Cotes said.
But this year, whether to foster developer goodwill or advance its ecosystem ambitions (or both), Google debuted a number of open-source tools primarily aimed at supporting generative AI projects and infrastructure.
Beyond MaxDiffusion, Google’s launching Jetstream, a new engine to run generative AI models — specifically text-generating models (so not Stable Diffusion).
“We’ve heavily optimized [the models’] performance on TPUs and also partnered closely with Nvidia to optimize performance on large GPU clusters,” Lohmeyer said.
The goal is to reduce the barrier to entry for getting generative AI models onto TPU hardware, according to Google — in particular text-generating models.
And Optimum TPU doesn’t yet support training generative models on TPUs — only running them.
Google Cloud on Tuesday joined AWS and Azure in announcing its first custom-built Arm processor, dubbed Axion.
Based on Arm’s Neoverse 2 designs, Google says its Axion instances offer 30% better performance than other Arm-based instances from competitors like AWS and Microsoft and up to 50% better performance and 60% better energy efficiency than comparable X86-based instances.
To be fair, though, Microsoft only announced its Cobalt Arm chips late last year, too, and those chips aren’t yet available to customers, either.
In a press briefing ahead of Tuesday’s announcement, Google stressed that since Axion is built on an open foundation, Google Cloud customers will be able to bring their existing Arm workloads to Google Cloud without any modifications.
“Through this collaboration, we’re accessing a broad ecosystem of cloud customers who have already deployed ARM-based workloads across hundreds of ISVs and open-source projects.”More later this year.
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NASA has given three space companies the chance to design the next-generation moon buggy — but only one design will go to space.
Footage obtained by TechCrunch shows the catastrophic ending that Astra’s Rocket 3.0 suffered during prelaunch testing in March 2020.
