“I couldn’t get a credit card because my parents couldn’t co-sign,” Kobe recalls, “and I didn’t want to put down a large security deposit.
Scott points out that New York-based Fizz set out to offer college students a different entry ramp into building credit.
And if you ask any of them, they’ll tell you that they’re credit card averse, but they’re not necessarily credit averse,” he told TechCrunch.
”Fizz is one of several fintechs aiming to serve the expansive Gen Z market.
For instance, Frich, a financial education and social community for Gen Z, just raised $2.8 million in seed funding.
Home From College, a career platform for young professionals and college students looking for their first job or internship, announced Wednesday that it raised $5.4 million in a seed round led by GV (formerly Google Ventures).
Home From College aims to disrupt the traditional job search for Gen Z, who are gravitating toward more flexible opportunities outside of the 9-5.
Some call Gen Z the “freelance generation,” with 67% of Gen Zers embracing freelance work and 71% prioritizing jobs with flexible working hours, per Fiverr.
Gen Z is also exploring more creative roles, with many looking to build their careers in social media, entertainment, marketing, beauty, and fashion.
Another way that Home From College caters to Gen Z and stands apart from other career sites is its interview feature where students answer questions from real companies, which they can post to their profiles.
Alinea Invest, a fintech app offering AI-powered wealth management aimed at Gen Z women, has $3.4 million in seed funding ahead of the launch of a virtual AI assistant that will help users with their investing needs.
“The pain point we saw is that people like us who are young women, Gen Zs, children of immigrants, they have no idea where to start.
With the seed round of $3.4 million, Alinea wants to move further into the AI market with the launch of an AI financial advisor.
Though competition is rife in the fintech space, Alinea believes they can capture a particular demographic — the younger, Gen Z investor, and largely women.
“Financial literacy and investing is a crucial path to wealth and financial stability for women and Gen Z,” said Kelly Graziadei, F7 General Partner.
To coincide with the National Retailer Association’s annual conference in NYC, Google Cloud today unveiled new gen AI products designed to help retailers personalize their online shopping experiences and streamline their back-office operations.
But the slew of announcements show, if nothing else, how aggressively Google is attempting to court gen AI customers.
(Google’s long offered Distributed Cloud Edge as a service, but it’s now targeting retailers more directly.)
My question after being pre-briefed on all this was, frankly, are retailers really clamoring for gen AI?
But considering some of the rocky rollouts of gen AI in retail recently (see: Amazon’s review summaries exaggerating negative feedback), I can’t say I’m convinced that the retail industry will rush to adopt gen AI en masse — from Google Cloud or any other provider.
Getty Images, the stock media company, announced a new service this week at CES 2024 that leverages AI models trained on Getty’s iStock stock photography and video libraries to generate new licensable images and artwork.
The launch of Generative AI by iStock — Getty’s second gen AI tool — comes as the copyright debate over AI heats up.
Some companies developing gen AI apps argue that they’re protected by fair use doctrine, at least in the U.S.
Generative AI by iStock has a policy along those lines, too — presumably as a last resort of sort.
Any licensed visual that a Generative AI by iStock customer generates comes with $10,000 in legal coverage, Getty says.
Not uncommonly, KYC authentication involves “ID images,” or cross-checked selfies used to confirm a person is who they say they are.
There’s no evidence that gen AI tools have been used to fool a real KYC system — yet.
But the ease with which relatively convincing deepfaked ID images is cause for alarm.
Feeding deepfaked KYC images to an app is even easier than creating them.
The takeaway is that KYC, which was already hit-or-miss, could soon become effectively useless as a security measure.
Just ahead of CES, Qualcomm today announced the next generation of its Snapdragon XR platform, the aptly named XR2+ Gen 2.
These include the Snapdragon AR chips, which, for example, power the Meta/Ray-Ban smart glasses.
The line-up is a bit complicated, with the AR1 Gen 1 meant for smart glasses without a screen, the AR2 Gen 1 chips for AR-enabled smart glasses, as well as the XR1 and XR2 chips.
The XR2+ Gen 2 is the new flagship of the series, besting the previously-released non-plus XR2 Gen 2, which “only” provided a 3k resolution.
“Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 unlocks 4.3K resolution which will take XR productivity and entertainment to the next level by bringing spectacularly clear visuals to use cases such as room-scale screens, life-size overlays and virtual desktops,” said Hugo Swart, vice president and general manager of XR at Qualcomm.
As search engine incumbents — namely Google — amp up their platforms with gen AI tech, startups are looking to reinvent AI-powered search from the ground up.
Srinivas, Perplexity’s CEO, previously worked at OpenAI, where he researched language and gen AI models along the lines of Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 3.
This reporter is skeptical about the longevity of gen AI search tools for a number of reasons, not least of which AI models are costly to run.
Concerns around misuse and misinformation inevitably crop up around gen AI search tools like Perplexity, as well — as they well should.
Some plaintiffs, like The New York Times, have argued gen AI search experiences siphon off publishers’ content, readers and ad revenue through anticompetitive means.
Called Articul8 AI (an awkward abbreviation of “Articulate AI”), the new entity builds off a proof-of-concept from an Intel collaboration with Boston Consulting Group (BSG) early last May.
Reuters reports that Intel, using its hardware and a combination of open source and internally-sourced software, created a gen AI system that can read text and images — running inside BCG’s datacenters to address BSG’s security requirements.
“Articul8’s gen AI software product was built from the ground up to address the needs of enterprises and is optimized for speed of deployment, scalability, security and sustainability — including costs,” the spokesperson told TechCrunch via email.
“The Articul8 platform delivers AI capabilities that keep customer data, training and inference within the enterprise security perimeter.
“Intel and Articul8 will remain strategically aligned and Intel plans to leverage Articul8’s enterprise gen AI software for internal use cases as well as offer it to end customers as part of a joint go-to-market partnership,” the spokesperson said.
Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft’s AI-powered chatbot, can now compose songs thanks to an integration with gen AI music app Suno.
From a single sentence, Suno can generate complete songs — including lyrics, instrumentals and singing voices.
Meta has published several of its experiments with AI music generation.
Stability AI’s own gen AI audio lead quit after saying that gen AI “exploits creators,” and the Grammys have banned fully AI-generated song from consideration for awards.
Clarity on the legal status of gen AI music may arrive soon — if not from court decisions.
