Apple will kick off its weeklong Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 2024) event with the customary keynote at 10 a.m. ET/7 a.m. PT on June 10.
The presentation will focus on the company’s software offerings and the developers that power them, including the latest versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS and watchOS.
There’s a stream on YouTube as well, but that has a tendency to lag a bit.
And you can bet that many of iOS 18’s AI features will make their way to macOS 15, as well.
TechCrunch will be reporting on the ground at Apple Park, bringing you the news as it happens.
Read MoreJoin the Excitement: Witness Apple’s Live Launch of WWDC 2024!
The company Wednesday issued an email requesting customers discontinue use of its egg-shaped charging case.
The company says it launched an investigation following a “single complaint” of a charging issue from a customer.
Humane is far from the first consumer electronics company to ship products with potentially hazardous batteries.
According to the note, the Charge Case is the only Humane product affected by this news.
Neither its Battery Boost or Charging Pad have been singled out by the company.
Read MoreAttention Customers: Humane Calls for End to Charging Case Usage Due to Battery Fires
French AI startup Mistral is introducing new AI model customization options, including paid plans, to let developers and enterprises fine-tune its generative models for particular use cases.
Mistral has released a software development kit (SDK), Mistral-Finetune, for fine-tuning its models on workstations, servers and small datacenter nodes.
For developers and companies that prefer a more managed solution, there’s Mistral’s newly launched fine-tuning services available through the company’s API.
Compatible with two of Mistral’s models for now, Mistral Small and the aforementioned Mistral 7B, Mistral says that the fine-tuning services will gain support for more of its models in the coming weeks.
Lastly, Mistral is debuting custom training services, currently only available to select customers, to fine-tune any Mistral model for an organization’s apps using their data.
Read MoreIntroducing Mistral’s Latest Innovations: Unveiling New Services and SDK for Enhanced Model Customization
An important step toward a more interoperable “fediverse” — the broader network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky and others — has been achieved.
Though both Mastodon and Bluesky are decentralized social media efforts, they rely on different underlying protocols.
That could shift in the future, however, to becoming opt-out for Bluesky users only.
So if my Bluesky account is @sarahp@bsky.social, then my bridged account is @sarahp.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy.
Anything from your Bluesky account that interacts with fediverse users will be bridged, including replies, @-mentions, likes, reports, and, if you have fediverse followers, your own Bluesky posts.
Read More“Connecting Bluesky and Mastodon Communities with Bridgy Fed”
TechCrunch has kept readers informed regarding Fearless Fund’s courtroom battle to provide business grants to Black women.
Today, we are happy to announce that Fearless Fund CEO and co-founder Arian Simone will speak at the Disrupt 2024 Builders Stage in a fireside chat discussing her organization’s fight for racial equity.
This June, an appeals court ruled that Fearless Fund’s business grant likely violates Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and has banned the grant’s deployment indefinitely.
Fearless Fund is one of many organizations facing the heat for having programs focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Register for your Disrupt pass today and join 10,000 tech leaders for 3 days of startup innovation this October.
Read MoreDisrupting 2024: Aria Simone of Fearless Fund Set to Make Waves
Oda, the Norway-based online supermarket delivery startup, has confirmed layoffs of 150 jobs as it drastically scales back its expansion ambitions to focus on just two markets, its homebase and Sweden, the homebase of Mathem, an online grocery that Oda merged with last year.
Online grocery is hard — complex orders with perishable items and a multi-temperature supply chain in a highly price sensitive category,” Oda’s CEO, Chris Poad, wrote on LinkedIn last week (before the layoffs were announced).
Prior to the pandemic, Oda – founded in 2013 – carved out a place for itself as one of the strong regional players in online grocery delivery in Europe.
But by late 2022 Oda was raising $151 million at a valuation of $353 million.
Local publication e24 says Kinnevik and other existing backers Summa Equity and Verdane are expected to provide the bulk of the NOK600 million ($57 million) Oda is reportedly raising.
Read More“Oda, the Grocery Startup Backed by SoftBank, Shifts Focus to Norway and Sweden with Layoffs of 150 Employees”
Stability AI, the startup behind the AI-powered art generator Stable Diffusion, has released an open AI model for generating sounds and songs that it claims was trained exclusively on royalty-free recordings.
Called Stable Audio Open, the generative model takes a text description (e.g.
Stability AI says that it’s not optimized for this, and suggests that users looking for those capabilities opt for the company’s premium Stable Audio service.
Stable Audio Open also can’t be used commercially; its terms of service prohibit it.
And it doesn’t perform equally well across musical styles and cultures or with descriptions in languages other than English — biases Stability AI blames on the training data.
Read More“Introducing the Latest Innovation from Stability AI: A Cutting-Edge Sound Generator”
The self-driving technology company announced Wednesday plans to begin testing in Austin and Miami this summer.
Earlier this week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration requested more information from Zoox to aid its probe into rear-end crash risks posed by unexpected braking.
Zoox also didn’t say when it aims to remove the safety driver or begin commercial operations in Austin or Miami.
The plans to test in Austin and Miami come as Zoox gears up for its first commercial launch.
The company won’t be testing those vehicles on public roads in Austin or Miami, just yet.
Read MoreZoox’s Autonomous Vehicles Set to Hit the Roads of Austin and Miami
And like all productivity tools, the ClickUp team has also heard the siren song of artificial intelligence.
The company has now launched what it calls “ClickUp Knowledge Management,” which combines a new wiki-like editor and with a new AI system that can also bring in data from Google Drive, Dropbox, Confluence, Figma and other sources.
With that, the company aims to build a tool that can rival other popular services like Notion and Atlassian’s Confluence.
The result, ClickUp argues, is a system that brings together the best of Notion, Confluence and Glean to allow users to quickly create documents.
This now enables the ClickUp Knowledge Management to perform retrieval augmented generation (RAG) — which has quickly become the industry standard for augmenting large language models (LLMs) with additional and up-to-date information.
Read MoreClickUp aims to challenge Notion and Confluence with its innovative AI-powered Knowledge Base
Set to arrive in Wix’s app builder tool this week, the capability guides users through a chatbot-like interface to understand the goals, intent and aesthetic of their app.
But reviews of Wix’s AI site builder aren’t exactly glowing, with early adopters reporting bugs and generic-looking finished products.
So — given that the under-the-hood tech is similar, outside a few upgraded generative AI models — why should people expect Wix’s AI app builder to be any better?
Image Credits: WixAbrahami admitted that the AI app builder — like all generative AI tools — might make mistakes.
On Fiverr, a cursory search yields a long list of highly-rated app developers, some of whom charge around the same price as a subscription to Wix’s AI app builder.
Read MoreNew Wix Tool Utilizes AI Technology to Produce Smartphone Apps
