Animating a 3D character from scratch is generally both laborious and expensive, requiring the use of complex software and motion capture tools.
Cartwheel wants to make basic animations as simple as describing them, generating a basic movement with AI and letting creators focus on more expressive tasks.
There’s a lot of value in just quickly getting it out of your head and moving.
“There’s this notion of AI replacing creative work, and as someone who does creative work, it’s like… no!
This leads to more animation, more motion, one person doing more,” said Jarvis.
Read More“Unleashing Creativity: Cartwheel’s Impressive 3D Animation Generation”
Ms. Rachel isn’t a household name, but if you spend a lot of time with toddlers, she might as well be a rockstar.
Ms. Rachel – a music teacher named Rachel Accurso – decided to use her platform for good.
And for a full-time content creator and graduate student in early childhood education, that’s not much time to record 500 personalized videos.
However, Cameo was aware of Ms. Rachel’s highly popular fundraiser, since Cameo posted about it on X.
Given that Ms Rachel intended to fulfill her Cameo requests, it’s unclear why Cameo didn’t grant her additional time to do so in the first place, rather than refunding buyers.
Read MoreCameo Flounders with Ms. Rachel Fundraiser: Fans Disappointed with Credits Instead of Videos
With the launch of TC’s AI newsletter, we’re sunsetting This Week in AI, the semiregular column previously known as Perceptron.
But you’ll find all the analysis we brought to This Week in AI and more, including a spotlight on noteworthy new AI models, right here.
The group published an open letter on Tuesday calling for leading AI companies, including OpenAI, to establish greater transparency and more protections for whistleblowers.
(Reward models are specialized models to evaluate the outputs of AI models, in this case math-related outputs from GPT-4.)
Should generative AI replace most knowledge workers within three years (which seems unrealistic to me given AI’s many unsolved technical problems), economic collapse could well ensue.
Read MoreAI Watch: Calls for Safety and Transparency by Former OpenAI Employees
Newsletter platform Substack is introducing the ability for writers to send videos to their subscribers via Chat, its direct messaging feature, the company announced on Wednesday.
The rollout of video in Chat comes two months after the newsletter platform brought videos to Notes, its X/Twitter copycat that lets users share short-form content.
To share a video in Substack Chat, writers can open a new chat and click on the plus icon in the bottom left corner.
Substack also provides the option to add a caption, put the video behind a paywall, as well as email subscribers about the video.
Additionally, writers who allow subscribers to start their own chat threads will now also be able to share their own videos.
Read MoreIntroducing Substack’s Enhanced Chat Feature with Video Capability
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is officially on its way to the International Space Station, marking a historic first for the long-delayed astronaut transportation program.
If all goes to plan, Boeing will become NASA’s second astronaut transportation provider, joining Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Boeing did execute a successful uncrewed mission to the ISS in May 2022, but this is the first time the spacecraft has carried humans.
While Boeing has struggled, SpaceX has soared: Using its Crew Dragon capsule, SpaceX has been providing astronaut transportation to and from the ISS since 2020.
This is the last major step before Starliner can be certified as an operational crew system, and the first Starliner mission is expected to launch in 2025.
Read MoreStarliner: Boeing’s Capsule Journey to the ISS Commences
But e-bike subscription startup Whizz sees it as an opportunity.
The lack of disruption in the e-bike subscription arena could mean that Whizz is in a perfect position to get a first-mover advantage.
Or it could mean that the e-bike subscription model is difficult to get right.
Other consumer-facing micromobility subscriptions in NYC have come and gone, like Beyond’s e-scooter rental offering and charging infrastructure company Revel’s attempt at an e-bike subscription.
His co-founders — Alex Mironov, Ksenia Proka, and Artem Serbovka — built and sold an e-bike subscription platform, Moy Device, to a private equity firm in Russia.
Read MoreWhizz Aims to Dominate the Subscription E-Bike Delivery Market in NYC
Brendan Smith didn’t intend to be in the critical minerals business.
But Smith and Grossman’s company, SiTration, has a different proposal: use its equipment to treat the wastewater and harvest more minerals in the process.
To turn the wafers into filters, Smith and Grossman tweaked an existing chemical treatment to etch minute pores in them.
For a larger mining site, the company would use about as much silicon as a medium-size solar farm, Smith said.
Although SiTration is starting with mining waste, including a pilot project with Rio Tinto, it’s also pitching its filtration systems to battery recyclers and metal refiners.
Read More“Utilizing Silicon Wafers to Recover Essential Minerals from Mining Byproducts with SiTration”
Every company, large or small, needs to choose software, and the bigger the company, the more complex the exercise.
Some have internal tools and processes to help narrow down the list of possible vendors and eventually make a selection.
“Taloflow replaces homegrown technology and software selection processes that can last weeks or months,” the startup’s CEO and co-founder, Louis-Victor Jadavji, told TechCrunch.
“Unlike Gartner or G2, which offer mostly generic insights, Taloflow creates tailored reports for specific use cases,” he said.
Taloflow has built large language models that sift through publicly available information and speed up the time and cost of generating the base reports.
Read MoreUtilizing AI: Taloflow streamlines software vendor selection for cost and time efficiency
The company on Wednesday introduced a beta of what it’s calling ‘AI teammates,’ in a bid to help move work inside an organization.
“We believe that the future of work is humans not just working with humans, but humans also working with AI,” Costello told TechCrunch.
“The work graph enables us to tell AI not just how work happens, but how work happens in this specific instance.
So when we embed AI teammates into a particular workflow, they’re given a specific job to do.
“We have found that we’re able to embed AI teammates to remove a lot of administrative work and tracking work within these systems very quickly, with high degrees of success.
Read More“Asana Unveils New ‘AI Teammates’ to Enhance Collaboration with Human Employees”
Hoop, a productivity startup founded by a group of early Trello employees, wants to use AI to help you automatically generate and track your to-do list.
Image Credits: HoopThe core idea behind Hoop is that it will use AI to automatically capture potential tasks from Google Meet and Slack meetings and Slack messages (with other platforms coming later, starting with email) and pull those into the Hoop to-do list.
Currently, Hoop is a bit of a single-player experience, but Garber tells me that the company plans to add more team features in the future.
“We are really, really focused on making [Hoop] as useful for the individual as possible before we expand to teams, but it’s a very natural thing for us to do,” Garber said.
And while Hoop right now mostly looks like a standard to-do list, the company plans to add different views over time as well.
Read More“Harness the Power of AI: Effortlessly Organize Your Tasks with Hoop”
