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.
Crunchbase is expanding the scope of its tagging options in Europe to start tracking how much venture capital funding goes to minority founders on the continent.
Diversity Spotlight is a feature on Crunchbase that lets companies add tags to their profiles to label themselves.
Crunchbase is now making this feature available in Europe.
Crunchbase initially launched the Diversity Spotlight feature in 2020, and last year expanded it to add an LGBTQ+ tag.
Women globally, meanwhile, typically receive less than 2% of venture capital funding across the world.
Google on Thursday said it is rolling out NotebookLM, its AI-powered note-taking assistant, to over 200 new countries, nearly six months after opening its access in the U.S.
The list of countries that NotebookLM now supports includes Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, and the U.K., as well as 208 other countries and territories.
It uses AI to help generate summaries and answer questions from documents, transcripts, notes and other sources that users can upload.
Some early users of NotebookLM in the U.S. anticipated it would support traditional note-taking apps, including Evernote and Google Keep.
Gemini 1.5 Pro also lets NotebookLM have up to 50 sources in each notebook, with 500,000 words per source.
Lawmakers passed legislation early Saturday reauthorizing and expanding a controversial U.S. surveillance law shortly after the powers expired at midnight, rejecting opposition by privacy advocates and lawmakers.
Critics, including lawmakers who voted against the reauthorization, say FISA also sweeps up the communications of Americans while spying on its foreign targets.
Following the passage in the early hours of today, Senator Mark Warner, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that FISA was “indispensable” to the U.S. intelligence community.
FISA requires the government to seek an annual certification from the secretive FISA Court, which oversees and approves the government’s surveillance programs.
The FISA Court last certified the government’s surveillance program under Section 702 in early April, allowing the government to use its lapsed authority until at least April 2025.
Business banking startup Mercury, founded in 2020, is now launching a consumer banking product.
“We already have a few hundred thousand users of our business banking product, and a lot of people have expressed that they want a personal banking product,” he told TechCrunch in an interview.
The person also said the fintech partner banking market as a whole has been the target of more regulatory scrutiny.
Crossing overBut success in B2B banking doesn’t automatically queue up Mercury to handle consumer banking.
Sign up for TechCrunch Fintech here.
OpenAI is expanding a program, Custom Model, to help enterprise customers develop tailored generative AI models using its technology for specific use cases, domains and applications.
“Dozens” of customers have enrolled in Custom Model since.
As for custom-trained models, they’re custom models built with OpenAI — using OpenAI’s base models and tools (e.g.
Fine-tuned and custom models could also lessen the strain on OpenAI’s model serving infrastructure.
Alongside the expanded Custom Model program and custom model building, OpenAI today unveiled new model fine-tuning features for developers working with GPT-3.5, including a new dashboard for comparing model quality and performance, support for integrations with third-party platforms (starting with the AI developer platform Weights & Biases) and enhancements to tooling.
And he would: He’s the co-founder of Read AI, which summarizes video calls across platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet.
Shim, previously the CEO of Foursquare, co-founded Read AI with Rob Williams and Elliott Waldron in 2021.
Prior to Read AI, the trio worked together at Foursquare, Snapchat and Shim’s previous startup, Placed (which Foursquare acquired in 2019).
“What makes Read unique is that its AI agents work quietly in the background, enabling your meetings, emails and messages to interact with each other,” Shim said, adding that the average summary from Read AI condenses 50 emails across 10 recipients into a single summary.
“This acceleration in growth can directly be attributed to the quantifiable return users see in terms of time savings when using Read AI in their meetings.”
The addition of music videos is included among these new features in the U.S.Spotify recently announced its plans to support music videos, saying in March it would test the option in beta in 11 select markets — which, at the time, didn’t include the U.S.
With the UMG deal, U.S. users will also have the option of watching music videos instead of just streaming audio.
To watch videos, Spotify users can access a new “Switch to Video” option from the app’s Now Playing Screen.
For instance, UMG artists will be able to share teasers of upcoming songs and users will be able to pre-save music before a new release.
By partnering with Spotify, UMG still has a way to promote its music to fans, even if its artists lose the ability to market themselves on TikTok.
Deal of the weekIf you’re looking for yet another example of investor enthusiasm for AI just take a look at the latest fundraise over at autonomous vehicle software company Applied Intuition.
Other deals that got my attention …Anaphite, a battery technology startup, raised £1.6 million ($2 million)via a government-backed grant investment led by Elbow Beach Capital.
Motional, the autonomous vehicle technology startup Motional, secured a bridge loan that provides a temporary financial reprieve as the company searches for a longer-term source of funding, TechCrunch exclusively learned.
Phantom Auto, a remote driving startup that launched seven years ago amid the buzz of autonomous vehicle technology, shut down after failing to secure new funding.
You might recall that VW’s autonomous vehicle ambitions were wrapped up in Argo AI, a startup backed solely by the automaker and partner Ford.
Danish startup Whistleblower Software is rebranding as Formalize as it expands into the broader compliance software sphere — and it has raised a fresh €15 million ($16 million) to fund the expansion.
The announcement comes as the compliance software market has exploded, due in large part to growing regulatory pressure — and investors have taken note.
Private equity giant Thoma Bravo took German compliance and investor relations software company EQS Group private in a $435 million deal last month, while startups Cypago, Hyperproof, Certa, and Anecdotes have all raised sizeable venture rounds for various flavors of compliance software these past few months.
“The compliance software market is booming, driven by the EU’s robust regulatory agenda,” Formalize co-founder and CEO Jakob Lilholm told TechCrunch over email.
“They [data compliance and whistleblowing] are primarily connected by the intention of the [GDPR] regulation,” Formalize co-founder and CTO Kristoffer Abell told TechCrunch.
