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Experimenting with AI Search Functionality: Meta Trials on Instagram

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Apart from testing Meta AI chatbot with users in countries like India on WhatsApp, the company is also experimenting with putting Meta AI in the Instagram search bar for both chat with AI and content discovery. The search query in the search bar leads you to a conversation in DM with Meta AI, where you can ask questions or use one of the pre-loaded prompts. Separately, a few users TechCrunch talked to were able to ask Meta AI to search for Reels suggestions. Meta confirmed its Meta AI experiment on Instagram with TechCrunch. You can find a ton of posts about the quality of Instagram search.

74 Robotics Companies Seeking New Employees!

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It’s tough out there — and yet, doing my semi-regular jobs post always gives me hope. Seems every time I post one of these, the number increases. At 74 companies, this is undoubtedly the largest list we’ve made, by a wide margin. That means more work for me in putting this post together, but if it helps a few folks find some work, it was definitely worth it. 1X Technologies (23 roles)Advanced Construction Robotics (4 roles)Aescape (5 roles)Aethon (5 roles)Agility Robotics (5 roles)Allvision (2 roles)Ambi Robotics (2 roles)ANYbotics (25 roles)Apptronik (16 roles)Astrobotic (23 roles)Atomic Machines (2 roles)Aurora (40 careers)Baubot (10 roles)Bear Robotics (13 roles)BHS Robotics (8 roles)Bloomfield Robotics (5 roles)Boxbot (3 roles)Carnegie Robotics (1 role)Cepheid (4 roles)Chef Robotics (15 roles)Civ Robotics (5 roles)Collaborative Robotics (10 roles)Covariant (20 roles)Dexterity (42 roles)Edge Case Research (1 role)Ekumen (3 roles)Enchanted Tools (50 roles)Engineered Arts (1 role)Exotec (174 roles)Eye-Bot (4 roles)Forcen (4 roles)Formant, Inc. (4 roles)Formic (8 roles)Formlogic (12 roles)Four Growers (4 roles)Foxglove (2 roles)Fulfil Solutions (15 roles)Gecko Robotics (18 roles)GrayMatter Robotics (11 roles)Hellbender (6 roles)Johnson & Johnson Med Tech (1 role)Keybotic (2 roles)Matic Robots (10 roles)Medra (3 roles)Mine Vision Systems (2 roles)Near Earth Autonomy (4 roles)Neocis (15 roles)Neubility (1 role)Neuraville (8 roles)Neya Systems (9 roles)Nimble Robotics (8 roles)Nuro (40 roles)Onward Robotics (2 roles)Plus.ai (3 roles)Polymath Robotics (2 roles)Pudu Robotics (2 roles)Pyka (10 roles)Reliable Robotics (36 roles)Roboto AI (1 role)Robust AI (14 roles)Sanctuary AI (14 roles)Sakar Robotics (6 roles)Scythe Robotics (11 roles)Seegrid (10 roles)Sphinx (5 roles)Stack AV (40 roles)Sunnybotics (2 roles)The AI Institute (19 roles)Titan Robotics (3 roles)UnitX (8 roles)Vecna Robotics (7 roles)Vention (20 roles)Viam (4 roles)Volley Automation (10 roles)

Meta AI chatbot now being trialed for WhatsApp in India and globally

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WhatsApp is testing Meta AI, its large language model-powered chatbot, with users in India and some other markets, signalling its intentions to tap the massive user base to scale its AI offerings. The company recently began testing the AI chatbot, until now available in the U.S., with some users in India, many of them said. India, home to more than 500 million WhatsApp users, is the instant messaging service’s largest market. Meta unveiled Meta AI, its general-purpose assistant, in late September. The AI chatbot is designed to answer user queries directly within chats as well as offer them the ability to generate photorealistic images from text prompts.

Concerns Raised by UK’s Competition Authority about Big Tech’s Dominance in the GenAI Sector

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The U.K.’s competition watchdog has sounded a warning over Big Tech’s entrenching grip on the advanced AI market, with CEO Sarah Cardell expressing “real concerns” over how the sector is developing. She said it’s important that competition enforcers don’t repeat the same mistakes with this next generation of digital development. But for now the CMA has not gone that far, despite clear and growing concerns about cozy GAMMA GenAI ties. “It may be that some arrangements falling outside the merger rules are problematic, even if not ultimately remediable through merger control. (The short version of what it wants to see is: accountablity; access; diversity; choice; flexibility; fair dealing; and transparency.)

The $699 Ai Pin from Humane: Now in Stock!

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Humane today announced the availability of its first product, the Ai Pin. Ai Pin is the first of what Humane hopes will be a long line of devices aimed at harness the power and popularity of generative AI platforms such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Humane’s vision for the $699 device is one in which a new technology can free itself of its predecessors’ limitations. It really started a conversation about the incredible tool we built, but also some of the side effects.”The Ai Pin is the first of what will almost certainly be a long line of products riding the generative AI boon. Humane’s $699 entry point gets you the Ai Pin, an extra battery and an AI charging case.

Patlytics safeguards corporate IP with support from Google’s Gradient

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Patlytics, an AI-powered patent analytics platform, wants to help enterprises, IP professionals, and law firms speed up their patent workflows from discovery, analytics, comparisons, and prosecution to litigation. The outfit recently launched its product, which is SOC-2 certified, and already serves some top-tier law firms and a few in-house legal counsels at enterprises as customers. Its target users include IP law firms and companies with several patents. “Protecting intellectual property remains a major priority and business requirement for information technology, physical product, and biotechnology companies. Notably, the round also attracted a host of angel backers, including partners at premier law firms, Datadog President Amit Agarwal, Fiscal Note founder Tim Hwang, and Tapas Media founder Chang Kim.

Amazon to Expand AI Presence with Andrew Ng Appointment, Departure of Former MTV Executive, McGrath

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If the decisions made by corporate boards of directors can indicate where a company wants to be focusing, Amazon’s board just made an interesting move. The company announced on Thursday that Andrew Ng, known for building AI at large tech companies, is joining its board of directors. And given the AI whiplash that every big tech company is currently dealing with, it feels timely that McGrath is stepping away from the board now. To stay at the forefront of the tech industry, Amazon will be looking for better thought leadership on the next steps in its artificial intelligence strategy. It’s worth remembering that Amazon has been a leading player in AI for a long time.

“Revolutionizing Security Tools with Simbian’s AI Integration”

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After leaving Nvidia in 2010, Kumar pivoted to cybersecurity, eventually co-founding Fortanix, a cloud data security platform. Leveraging AI, Simbian can automatically orchestrate and operate existing security tools, finding the right configurations for each product by taking into account a company’s priorities and thresholds for security, informed by their business requirements. A separate study found that organizations now juggle on average 76 different security tools, leading IT teams and leaders to feel overwhelmed. In addition to automatically configuring a company’s security tools, the Simbian platform attempts to respond to “security events” by letting customers steer security while taking care of lower-level details. But that assumes Simbian’s AI doesn’t make mistakes, a tall order, given that it’s well established that AI is error-prone.

“2024 Google Cloud Next: What’s Been Revealed?”

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Google VidsLeveraging AI to help customers develop creative content is something Big Tech is looking for, and Tuesday, Google introduced its version. Read moreImagen 2In February, Google announced an image generator built into Gemini, Google’s AI-powered chatbot. “Vertex AI Agent Builder allows people to very easily and quickly build conversational agents,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said. Read moreNvidia’s Blackwell platformOne of the anticipated announcements is Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell platform coming to Google Cloud in early 2025. This, Kyle Wiggers writes, is “Google’s most capable generative AI model,” and is now available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google’s enterprise-focused AI development platform.

“Google’s Gemini Code Assist: Advancing Developer Productivity Through AI – A TechCrunch Minute Feature”

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Can AI eat the jobs of the developers who are busy building AI models? News this week that Google has a new AI-powered coding tool for developers means that competitive pressures between major tech companies to build the best service to help coders write more code, more quickly is still heating up. Both companies want to eventually build developer-helping tech that can understand a company’s codebase, allowing it to offer up more tailored suggestions and tips. Everywhere you look, developers are building tools and services to help their own professional cohort. Developers learning to code today won’t know a world in which they don’t have AI-powered coding helps.