Picsart, a photo-editing startup backed by SoftBank, announced on Thursday that it’s partnering with Getty Images to develop a custom model to bring AI imagery to its 150 million users.
The company says the model will bring responsible AI imagery to creators, marketers and small businesses that use its platform.
Image Credits: Picsart x Getty Images AI ImagePicsart’s AI lab, PAIR, is building the model.
The company is also integrating Getty Images video content into Picsart’s platform and making it available to Plus members.
Picsart isn’t the first startup that Getty Images has partnered with for responsible AI imagery, as it also partnered with AI image generator, Bria, and Runway, a startup building generative AI for content creators.
Still, Yahoo has more AI plans in the works, including for its Yahoo News property on the web.
However, while the Yahoo News app is taking learnings from Artifact when it comes to offering AI features, the AI summaries feature found on its Yahoo News is not related to its acquisition of the well-liked AI news app that had been created by Instagram’s founders, but had shut down after failing to reach a wider audience.
That would explain why most visitors to the Yahoo News website would not have likely encountered these AI summaries as of yet.
The code doesn’t reveal much about the underlying technology Yahoo is using for the AI summaries, only how they would appear to site visitors — in a lightbox, a type of web component used for displaying content.
Combined with the Artifact-inspired revamp of Yahoo News and the AI features that arrived on Yahoo Mail, it’s clear that Yahoo is betting on AI to give its older web products and services a push.
“We’ve been building with AI since 2007,” its head of product, Tomer Cohen, said in an interview with TechCrunch this week.
Below is a run-down of some of the new features:Job searches and job applications: We’re getting a new way to search for jobs using conversational prompts.
You can be sure that LinkedIn is pushing its search algorithms to tap into the interest, but it’s also boosting its content with AI in another way.
The third big area LinkedIn is leaning heavily on AI is search.
Alongside all this, LinkedIn is expanding availability of Recruiter 2024, adding more tools for marketers, and introducing enhanced, premium company pages for small businesses.
The economy remains on shaky ground in Europe, but there is some silver lining for enterprise startups: those building tools to help businesses run their finances in more steady and predictable ways are seeing a boost to their business.
“We are now poised to take the AccountsIQ product and service to the next level,” said Tony Connolly, founder and CEO of AccountsIQ, in a statement.
Thus, the prosaic accounting startup continues to get attention.
(AccountsIQ and its primary investor for this round, Axiom Equity, are not disclosing its valuation.)
In contrast, Cran says that AccountsIQ positions itself as the platform that businesses will move to as they scale up.
“We’ve got an increased threat from foreign adversaries who have shown capabilities to jam, to destroy, to spoof the signals of GPS, which is scary,” Shaun Moore, CEO and co-founder of Tern AI, a startup that wants to provide an alternative to GPS, told TechCrunch.
The current system works by having GPS receivers in cars or phones pick up signals from satellites orbiting the earth.
The GPS receivers then use the time it took for each signal to travel to calculate the distance to each satellite.
“GPS technology has not meaningfully changed in 50 years, and what we’re seeing put forth as solutions to resolve or mitigate risk are just marginal improvements.
“When we first met Tern AI, what stood out the most was how differentiated and scalable their approach was to solving a critical problem in national security,” said Stephen DiBartolomeo, principal at Scout Ventures.
Given the frequency with which their developers toss around the phrase “general purpose humanoids,” more attention ought to be paid to the first bit.
After decades of single purpose systems, the jump to more generalized systems will be a big one.
The use of generative AI in robotics has been a white-hot subject recently, as well.
One of the biggest challenges on the road to general purpose systems is training.
The proliferation of multi-purpose systems would take the industry a step closer to general purpose dream.
Earlier that same year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which establishes federal technology standards, published a roadmap for identifying and mitigating the emerging risks of AI.
But Congress has yet to pass legislation on AI — or even propose any law as comprehensive as regulations like the EU’s recently enacted AI Act.
Colorado recently approved a measure that requires AI companies to use “reasonable care” while developing the tech to avoid discrimination.
Consider this example: in many state laws regulating AI, “automated decision making” — a term broadly referring to AI algorithms making some sort of decision, like whether a business receives a loan — is defined differently.
Toner thinks that even a high-level federal mandate would be preferable to the current state of affairs.
This week in AI, Apple stole the spotlight.
At the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in Cupertino, Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence, its long-awaited, ecosystem-wide push into generative AI.
The company promised Apple Intelligence is being built with safety at its core, along with highly personalized experiences.
Apple revealed in a blog post that it trains the AI models that power Apple Intelligence on a combination of licensed datasets and the public web.
Grab bagThis week marked the sixth anniversary of the release of GPT-1, the progenitor of GPT-4o, OpenAI’s latest flagship generative AI model.
Now rebranded as Mosaic AI, the platform has become integral to Databricks’ AI solutions.
Today, at the company’s Data + AI Summit, it is launching a number of new features for the service.
Databricks is launching five new Mosaic AI tools at its conference: Mosaic AI Agent Framework, Mosaic AI Agent Evaluation, Mosaic AI Tools Catalog, Mosaic AI Model Training, and Mosaic AI Gateway.
And we’ve also found in our internal AI applications, like the assistant applications for our platform, that this is the way to build them,” he said.
But when you really pushed people, they were using Open AI.
Two of the country’s prominent fabless AI chip startups, Rebellions and Sapeon, have agreed to merge, the companies said on Wednesday.
The merger is a strategic move by Rebellions and Sapeon aimed at leading the fabless AI chip market in South Korea to take on global rivals like Nvidia.
Indeed, the deal comes at a pivotal moment in the global chip industry.
Meanwhile, KT in 2023 incorporated Atom, Rebellions’ datacenter-focused AI chip, into its cloud-based NPU infrastructure.
Last November, the company launched a 7-nanometer AI chip, X330 NPU, for autonomous vehicles, and earlier this year, it said it would develop an on-device AI chip targeting the edge computing market.
