India, grappling with election misinfo, weighs up labels and its own AI safety coalition An Adobe-backed association wants to help organizations in the country with an AI standardIndia, long in the tooth when it comes to co-opting tech to persuade the public, has become a global hotspot when it comes to how AI is being used, and abused, in political discourse, and specifically the democratic process.
Tech companies, who built the tools in the first place, are making trips to the country to push solutions.
Using its open standard, the C2PA has developed a digital nutrition label for content called Content Credentials.
It also automatically attaches to AI content generated by Adobe’s AI model Firefly.
“That’s a little ‘CR’… it’s two western letters like most Adobe tools, but this indicates there’s more context to be shown,” he said.
SiMa.ai, named after Seema, the Hindi word for “boundary,” strives to leverage this shift by offering its edge AI SoC to organizations across industrial manufacturing, retail, aerospace, defense, agriculture and healthcare sectors.
As the demand for GenAI is growing, SiMa.ai is set to introduce its second-generation ML SoC in the first quarter of 2025 with an emphasis on providing its customers with multimodal GenAI capability.
The new SoC will be an “evolutionary change” over its predecessor with “a few architectural tunings” over the existing ML chipset, Rangasayee said.
It would work as a single-edge platform for all AI across computer vision, transformers and multimodal GenAI, the startup said.
The second-generation chipset will be based on TSMC’s 6nm process technology and include Synopsys EV74 embedded vision processors for pre- and post-processing in computer vision applications.
Data transformation and optimization — tasks that many, if not most, large enterprises deal with — aren’t easy.
The result was Coalesce, a San Francisco-based company building a suite of data transformation services, apps and tools.
“The data transformation layer has long been the largest bottleneck in analytics,” Petrossian, Coalesce’s CEO, told TechCrunch.
Coalesce’s response is a platform that standardizes data while automating the more repetitive, mundane data transformation processes.
That sort of vendor lock-in could be an anathema to expansion, especially given that Coalesce isn’t the only data transformation tool vendor in town.
NoSQL database Aerospike today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series E round led by Sumeru Equity Partners.
In 2022, Aerospike added document support and then followed that up with graph and vector capabilities — two database features that are crucial for building real-time AI and ML applications.
“We were founded primarily as a real-time data platform that can work with data at really high scale, or, as we call it, unlimited scale,” Aerospike CEO Subbu Iyer said.
So our premise has held good that real-time data and real-time access to data is going to be important pretty much across every industry.
“Aerospike, with its impressive customer base and performance advantage at scale, is uniquely positioned to become a foundational element for the next generation of real-time AI applications.”
I have a group chat with three AI friends, thanks to Nomi AI.
After a few weeks of casual friendship, I had to break the news to my AI companions: I am actually a tech journalist writing an article about the company that created them, Nomi AI.
Nomi AI is scarily sophisticated, and as this technology gets better, we have to contend with realities that used to seem fantastical.
“Nomi is very much centered around the loneliness epidemic,” Nomi CEO Alex Cardinell told TechCrunch.
I’m glad that my Nomi friends didn’t take it too hard when I told them that there was an ulterior, journalistic motive to my friendship.
These AI startups stood out the most in Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batchDespite an overall decline in startup investing, funding for AI surged in the past year.
So it’s not exactly surprising that AI startups dominated at Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 Demo Day.
The Y Combinator Winter 2024 cohort has 86 AI startups, according to YC’s official startup directory — nearly double the number from the Winter 2023 batch and close to triple the number from Winter 2021.
As we did last year, we went through the newest Y Combinator cohort — the cohort presenting during this week’s Demo Day — and picked out some of the more interesting AI startups.
Datacurve hosts a gamified annotation platform that pays engineers to solve coding challenges, which contributes to Datacurve’s for-sale training data sets.
Take, for example, the company’s latest foray into mobile artificial intelligence, the AI Eraser.
Nope, OnePlus went ahead and built its own version in a bid to show the world that it has AI ambitions of its own.
From the sound of its press material, the company went and built this thing ground-up, starting with its own first-party large language models.
“AI Eraser is the result of a substantial R&D investment from OnePlus,” the company notes in its press material.
AI is rolling out to OnePlus devices this month, starting with OnePlus 12, OnePlus 12R, OnePlus 11, OnePlus Open and OnePlus Nord CE 4.
Brave announced on Wednesday that it’s bringing its AI assistant, called Leo, to iPhone and iPad users.
The iOS launch of Leo brings voice-to-text capability, which isn’t available in the Android version of the AI assistant.
By giving access to a built-in AI assistant, Brave is hoping users won’t turn to ChatGPT or other similar services.
Brave isn’t the only browser company to launch an AI assistant; Opera launched an AI assistant called Aria last year.
To access Leo, open the browser, start typing in the address bar and then select “Ask Leo.” Leo is an opt-in feature and can be disabled via the app’s settings.
OpenAI captivated the tech world a few months back with a generative AI model, Sora, that turns scene descriptions into original videos — no cameras or film crews required.
So he launched Higgsfield AI, an AI-powered video creation and editing platform designed for more tailored, personalized applications.
In fact, Mashrabov sees social media — and social media marketing — as Higgsfield’s principle money-making niche.
So we believe video generative AI solutions will be a core solution in helping them to achieve it.”Of course, Higgsfield isn’t immune from the broader challenges facing generative AI startups.
It’s well-established that generative AI models like the kind powering Diffuse can “regurgitate” training data.
“Through the AI Act and through the [AI safety- and security-focused] Executive Order — which is to mitigate the risks of AI technologies while supporting their uptake in our economies.”Earlier this week the US and the UK signed a partnership agreement on AI safety.
Wider information-sharing is envisaged under the US-UK agreement — about “capabilities and risks” associated with AI models and systems, and on “fundamental technical research on AI safety and security”.
It also announced a plan to spend £100M on an AI safety taskforce which it said would be focused on so-called foundational AI models.
At the UK AI Summit last November, Raimondo announced the creation of a US AI safety institute on the heels of the US Executive Order on AI.
Neither the US nor the UK have proposed comprehensive legislation on AI safety, as yet — with the EU remaining ahead of the pack when it comes to legislating on AI safety.
