“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.
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.
With LakeFlow, Databricks users will soon be able to build their data pipelines and ingest data from databases like MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server and Oracle, as well as enterprise applications like Salesforce, Dynamics, Sharepoint, Workday, NetSuite and Google Analytics.
In a way, getting data into a data warehouse or data lake should indeed be table stakes because the real value creation happens down the line.
The first is LakeFlow Connect, which provides the connectors between the different data sources and the Databricks service.
It’s fully integrated with Databricks’ Unity Data Catalog data governance solution and relies in part of technology from Arcion.
Databricks is rolling out the LakeFlow service in phases.
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.
Gorilla, a Belgian company that serves the energy sector with real-time data and analytics for pricing and forecasting, has raised €23 million ($25 million) in a Series B round led by U.S. venture capital firm Headline.
Founded in 2018, Antwerp-based Gorilla works with energy providers across Europe, the U.S. and Australia, including British Gas’ parent Centrica, Shell Energy, and Atlanta, Georgia-based Gas South.
Throw into the mix geopolitical factors such as the Russia-Ukraine conflict, ever-evolving regulations, increasingly distributed energy sources across fossil and renewables, and the increasing use of connected technology, and we now have fertile ground for data-focused energy startups to flourish.
“No one knows what the energy sector will look like 10 years from now,” Gorilla’s co-founder and CEO, Ruben Van den Bossche, said in a statement.
Other participants in the round include the startup’s existing investors Beringea and Belgian private equity firm, PMV.
When generative AI tools started making waves in late 2022 after the launch of ChatGPT, the finance industry was one of the first to recognize these tools’ potential for speeding up the data-gathering and research process.
MIT alumni Jacob Chanyeol Choi and Subeen Pang founded Linq after they won the Samsung Open Collaboration in 2023, an accelerator-like program hosted by Samsung Financial Network.
Choi told TechCrunch that win spurred him to build large language models (LLMs) for enterprises, particularly the financial sector.
“We knew the potential for a tool that could seamlessly integrate with a company’s data ecosystem, which led to the birth of Linq,” Choi said.
In addition to its B2B service for enterprise clients, the startup also plans to build B2C tools for AI equity research.
Jordan Meyer and Mathew Dryhurst founded Spawning AI to create tools that help artists exert more control over how their works are used online.
Meyer claims that, despite the fact that it’s substantially smaller than some other generative AI training data sets out there, Source.Plus’ data set is already “high-quality” enough to train a state-of-the-art image-generating model.
Generative AI models “learn” to produce their outputs (e.g., photorealistic art) by training on a vast quantity of relevant data — images, in that case.
Image Credits: Spawning“Source.Plus isn’t just a repository for training data; it’s an enrichment platform with tools to support the training pipeline,” he continued.
And, Meyer says, Spawning might build its own generative AI models using data from the Source.Plus datasets.
But confirming the source of the alleged data theft has proven inconclusive, such is the nature of the data broker industry, which gobbles up individuals’ personal data from disparate sources with little to no quality control.
But this alleged breach of a data broker appears to be an outlier, in part because some of the data appears genuine and some already verified.
The proliferation and commoditization of personal data across the data broker industry also makes it more challenging to identify the source of data leaks.
And even if this particular data breach remains unsolved, it shows once more that the data broker industry is out of control and poses real privacy issues to ordinary people.
We couldn’t definitively solve the mystery of this data breach, but there was enough there to detail our verification efforts.
Elon Musk is threatening to ban iPhones from all his companies over the newly announced OpenAI integrations Apple announced at WWDC 2024 on Monday.
This allows users to get an answer from ChatGPT without having to open the ChatGPT iOS app.
Apple also announced another integration that would allow users have access to ChatGPT system-wide within Writing Tools via a “compose” feature.
That’s great news for OpenAI, which will soon have a massive influx of requests from Apple users.
Apple users may not understand the nuances of the privacy issues here, of course — which is what Musk is counting on by making these complaints.
Apple’s emergency SOS feature has proven useful for a fair number of people whose cars break down (or tumble down) in areas with no signal.
Soon you’ll be able to use iMessage and SMS as well — though it’s not clear what the limitations on the service may be.
Announced at Apple’s WWDC 2024 keynote on Monday, “Messages via Satellite” works much like the SOS feature did.
When you have no signal — otherwise the phone will use that — you’ll be given the option to find a satellite to relay the data.
Apple did not say when the new feature will be available or whether it’s restricted to certain phones or plans.
