Google continues rolling out Gemini to different products as today the company announced that Android Studio’s bot is getting upgraded with Gemini Pro.
In May 2023, during the Google IO developer event, the company first introduced Studio Bot powered by the PaLM-2 foundation model.
The company is rolling out Gemini in Android Studio in over 180 countries for the Android Studio Jellyfish version.
Just like the Studio Bot, the new Gemini bot lives in the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and developers can ask coding-related questions.
The company said users can easily access the Gemini API starter template through Android Studio to add generative AI-powered features to their apps.
India’s largest audio and wearables brand BoAt is investigating a possible data breach after hackers advertised a cache of alleged customer data online.
A sample of alleged customer data was uploaded on a known cybercrime forum, which includes full names, phone numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses and order numbers.
In a statement emailed to TechCrunch, BoAt said it was investigating the matter but did not disclose specifics.
At BoAt, safeguarding customer data is our top priority,” the company said.
The brand, however, postponed its public listing plans later, after seeing a slowdown in the public market.
This grant, pegged for the company’s U.S. subsidiary, TSMC Arizona, is the latest step by the U.S. to strengthen its domestic supply of semiconductors as it seeks to reshore manufacturing of chips amid escalating geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China.
The Act is primarily aimed at attracting manufacturing stateside, and also prohibits recipients of the funding from increasing their semiconductor manufacturing footprint in China.
With the new investment, Taiwan-based TSMC, which is the world’s largest producer of semiconductors, is broadening its plans for its fabrication plants in Arizona.
Intel could receive approximately $20 billion in grants and loans from the CHIPS and Science Act for its semiconductor manufacturing.
Meanwhile, Samsung, which announced a $17 billion additional investment in Taylor, Texas, is expected to receive more than $6 billion in grants for its chip facility in Texas.
Microsoft has announced a new London hub for its recently unveiled consumer AI division.
It will be fronted by Jordan Hoffmann, an AI scientist and engineer Microsoft recently picked up from high-profile AI startup Inflection AI, which Microsoft invested in last year.
The news comes some three weeks after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella unveiled a new consumer AI division headed up by Inflection AI’s founders, which include Mustafa Suleyman — co-founder of Deepmind, the AI company Google acquired in 2014.
At the time, Nadella said that “several members of the Inflection team” also joined Microsoft’s new AI unit (Bloomberg reported that most actually joined).
In a blog post today, Suleyman calls Hoffmann an “exceptional AI scientist and engineer,” and with Suleyman himself reporting directly to Nadella in the U.S., Hoffmann will take charge of the new London unit.
Spotify already found success with its popular AI DJ feature, and now the streaming music service is bringing AI to playlist creation.
The company on Monday introduced AI playlists into beta, a new option that allows users to generate a playlist based on written prompts.
In terms of the technology, Spotify says it’s using large language models (LLMs) to understand the user’s intent.
A pop-up menu appears showing the AI Playlist as a new option alongside the existing “Playlist” and “Blend” options.
Ahead of AI playlists, Spotify launched a similar feature, Niche Mixes, that allowed users to create personalized playlists using prompts, but the product did not leverage AI technology and was more limited in terms of its language understanding.
The next big thing in mechanical keyboards is magnetic switches.
On a standard mechanical keyboard switch, you physically close an electrical circuit to register a key press.
Popularized by Dutch keyboard startup Wooting, these switches rely on the Hall Effect and have actually been around since the 1960s.
That’s one thing about board with magnetic switches: they tend to favor proprietary software over open-source solutions like VIA.
The switch is a Khailh Sakura Pink magnetic switch with a 50gf bottom-out force.
By the time that Rap Genius graced the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in May 2013, the three had landed funding from Andreessen Horowitz and were on the verge of rebranding Rap Genius as Genius and expanding its remit.
But Moghadam also began attracting attention to the annotation company for belligerent behavior, both public and private.
Indeed, in 2014, after posting tasteless comments as annotations after a mass murderer’s manifesto was posted to Genius’s platform, Moghadam resigned at the urging of Lehman, who was the company’s CEO.
Looking back, Moghadam expressed dismay that Genius contributors weren’t paid for helping to build out the platform.
Slamming the new owners of Genius, Moghadam had added that at “at least the [original] CEO [Lehman] straight up built Genius with his own two hands.
Less than a week after The Wall St. Journal reported on how a Snapchat feature dubbed “solar system” was adding to teens’ anxiety, the company has responded by adjusting how the feature works.
The ranking system for paid subscribers today shows you how close you are to your Snapchat friends by displaying your position in their solar system.
However, instead of removing the feature, as it did with the dangerous and controversial speed filter, which it was sued over for “negligent design,” Snap is simply turning the Solar System feature off by default.
A more relevant stat would be how many Snapchat+ users have used Solar System or viewed the feature.
The Solar System feature was only one of Snapchat’s friend ranking systems.
Hours later, Musk posted on X that a “Tesla Robotaxi” will be unveiled August 8.
Tesla Robotaxi unveil on 8/8 — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 5, 2024Reports have swirled for years that Tesla was working on these two vehicles.
Musk has been promising autonomous capabilities in Tesla vehicles for years.
Tesla vehicles come standard with a driver-assistance system branded as Autopilot.
Tesla vehicles are not self-driving.
New U.S. ‘green bank’ aims to steer over $160B in capital into climate techFor years, banks have been financing large renewable power projects, from utility-scale solar farms to horizon-spanning wind farms.
But the demand is there, which is why advocates have been clamoring for the federal government to support a so-called green bank, which will underwrite these sorts of projects.
That green bank is now a reality.
Green bank loans have a pretty good track record, too.
The Connecticut Green Bank, for example, has a delinquency rate that’s on par with other commercial lenders across both residential and commercial portfolios.
