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Ava Patel

Ava Patel is a cultural critic and commentator with a focus on literature and the arts. She is known for her thought-provoking essays and reviews, and has a talent for bringing new and diverse voices to the forefront of the cultural conversation.

“Government Pushes Electric Vehicle Agenda as India’s Two-Wheeler Startups Skyrocket to 150+ Players”

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The number of startups in India’s electric two-wheeler market has surged to over 150 from 54 in 2021, driven by government incentives to promote clean vehicles and cut oil imports, according to a new analysis. “Most are competing in the mainstream, and 85% of the 65 models launched last year were such products: high-speed as against speed and range-constrained products, which used to be a feature of the startups,” Bernstein analysts wrote. The government has offered incentives under its FAME II scheme, which provides subsidies to buyers and was recently extended to 2024. Bernstein’s analysis found low barriers to entry, with electric two-wheelers built using outsourced models and readily available components. Most established automotive companies have been granted PLI while only a few startups qualified, potentially providing a cost advantage for major incumbents, Bernstein said.

Solving AI Hallucinations: Jensen Huang of Nvidia Predicts Artificial General Intelligence Within 5 Years

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Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — often referred to as “strong AI,” “full AI,” “human-level AI” or “general intelligent action” — represents a significant future leap in the field of artificial intelligence. Huang, however, spent some time telling the press what he does think about the topic. He suggests that the tests could be a legal bar exam, logic tests, economic tests or perhaps the ability to pass a pre-med exam. AI hallucination is solvableIn Tuesday’s Q&A session, Huang was asked what to do about AI hallucinations – the tendency for some AIs to make up answers that sound plausible, but aren’t based in fact. He appeared visibly frustrated by the question, and suggested that hallucinations are solvable easily – by making sure that answers well-researched.

Observing: Difficulties facing electric vehicle manufacturers, with Fisker in a particularly delicate situation.

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Fisker’s finances are back in the news after the company warned back in February that it didn’t have enough cash to make it through its next year. The company said this week that it intends to halt production for six weeks to get its business back in order. Softening demand growth for EVs is making the normal challenges of scaling a company all the harder for Fisker and its peers. Not that we’re all doom and gloom here at TechCrunch — we’re actually rather bullish on the prospect for EVs in the near and far future. Let’s take a look at what’s going on under the hood here:

Ingrid Secures $23 Million Investment to Enhance E-Commerce Delivery Platform by Eliminating ‘Free Shipping’

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Among the many stress points in e-commerce machine, delivery has long been seen as one of the more painful ones. “Delivery is the biggest unsolved puzzle is delivery part,” Piotr Zaleski, Ingrid’s co-founder and CEO said in an interview. And in case you are at all curious: Ingrid the business was not named to ensure coverage in TechCrunch by me, Ingrid. Ingrid has identified a very obvious problem that most certainly can use fixing, but it also faces a few challenges. “The only way is to build a hell of a platform that retailers want to use to take a volume position,” Zaleski said.

Spacelytics: The Explosive Success of $paceX

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Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. You also can send a note to the whole TechCrunch crew at tips@techcrunch.com. I was finally able to catch up on this February 2024 space stock review from Case Taylor, an investor at Thomas Tull’s U.S. He provides a lot of sharp commentary on the public space companies, and as someone without a finance background, I feel like I learn a lot. This week in space historyOn March 21, 2007, a small but mighty company called SpaceX launched its Falcon 1 rocket for the second time.

“GR00T: Nvidia Collaborates with Top Humanoid Robotics Experts to Launch Revolutionary AI Platform”

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Naturally, Nvidia wants a piece. Keeping things in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is Jetson Thor, a new computer designed specifically for running simulation workflows, generative AI models and more for the humanoid form factor. Nvidia notes of the new silicon:The SoC includes a next-generation GPU based on NVIDIA Blackwell architecture with a transformer engine delivering 800 teraflops of 8-bit floating point AI performance to run multimodal generative AI models like GR00T. Naturally, Nvidia wants a piece of the action. The next several years will present a fascinating race for market share between humanoids and mobile manipulators, and Nvidia wants a piece of all of that action.

Virtual Spotlight: Discover the Excitement of the AI World at Nvidia’s GTC 2024 Conference

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Chip giant Nvidia is hosting a massive AI conference as part of its GTC event this week, which kicks off Monday. With a keynote planned from Jensen Huang, CEO and co-founder, of the company best known in year’s past for its gaming hardware and today for its massive market share in the burgeoning AI hardware market, expect Nvidia to make some news. Given how many AI startups and giants alike use Nvidia gear, TechCrunch is expecting quite a lot to shake loose over the next few days. To presage the confab, and detail just why we’re paying such close attention to a single company’s industry event, hit play below. Stick close to TechCrunch for coverage throughout the week.

“Midjourney Takes on Copyright Police in Exciting AI Showdown”

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Generative AI models like Midjourney’s are trained on an enormous number of examples — e.g. Some vendors have taken a proactive approach, inking licensing agreements with content creators and establishing “opt-out” schemes for training data sets. The problem with benchmarks: Many, many AI vendors claim their models have the competition met or beat by some objective metric. Anthropic launches new models: AI startup Anthropic has launched a new family of models, Claude 3, that it claims rivals OpenAI’s GPT-4. AI models have been helpful in our understanding and prediction of molecular dynamics, conformation, and other aspects of the nanoscopic world that may otherwise take expensive, complex methods to test.

Analyzing SuperScale’s $5.4 Million Series A Pitch Deck

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Twenty-two slides might seem like too many (the optimal length for a slide deck is around 16 slides these days), but there are some interstitial slides and an appendix in this one, and those don’t really count. This team slide came as a bit of a surprise:Putting this slide at the end of the deck makes me wonder about the seriousness of this startup. If it has five business units and 70+ team members, it throws the rest of the deck out of whack. On slide 12, the company noted it had $7.5 million worth of revenue from just its case study clients. The full pitch deckIf you want your own pitch deck teardown featured on TechCrunch, here’s more information!

” “Impending Reality: The Likely Ban of TikTok as Seen on TechCrunch Minute”

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TikTok users, however, are not taking the changing political winds — and their consequences — sitting down. TechCrunch spoke with several TikTok users that are incensed about, and fighting back against the potential ban of TikTok. But while the talk of a possible ban is getting all the press, what about the potential of TikTok simply being divested from its parent company, Bytedance? That would resolve the United States’ government’s issues, right? So, the bill may have two tracks in it for TikTok, but it could really just be a single-issue law in practice.