Patrick Morrisey, VP of corporate communications at GM, told TechCrunch that the reduction in spending is still in effect, despite today’s capital infusion.
In total, Cruise has already raised over $15 billion, per Crunchbase data.
In October, a Cruise robotaxi ran over and dragged a pedestrian 20 feet in San Francisco.
The pedestrian had initially been hit by a human-driven car and landed in the path of a Cruise robotaxi.
In other states where AV companies don’t need to acquire permits, Cruise is already making a comeback.
Siri got a makeover at Apple’s WWDC 2024 in Cupertino, courtesy of the tech giant’s overarching generative AI push this year.
Siri is now more natural, more relevant and more personal — and it has new look, including a revamped icon.
Siri will also have the ability to take action in and across apps, so you can ask Siri to “make this photo pop” and then “add this photo” to another app.
That’s thanks to the new App Intents API, which allows devs to let Siri take actions in their apps, and the upgraded Siri’s awareness of personal context including messages, calendar events, files and photos.
Apple gave the example of Siri finding a photo of your license, extracting your ID number and entering it into a web form for you.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has transferred formal control of the eponymously firm’s named corporate venture fund to Ian Cathaway, OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch.
The Open AI Startup Fund, launched in 2021, was initially set up with Altman as its named controller.
Cathaway joined OpenAI in 2021 and played a key role managing the Startup Fund, leading investments in Ambience Healthcare, Cursor, Harvey, and Speak.
Last year, the fund had $175 million in commitments, and now holds $325 million in gross net asset value, according to an SEC filing.
The Startup Fund has backed at least 16 other startups, according to PitchBook data.
Aura combines highly realistic voice models with a low-latency API to allow developers to build real-time, conversational AI agents.
Backed by large language models (LLMs), these agents can then stand in for customer service agents in call centers and other customer-facing situations.
Deepgram’s Aura combines human-like voice models that render extremely fast (typically in well under half a second) and, as Stephenson noted repeatedly, does so at a low price.
“Everybody now is like: ‘hey, we need real-time voice AI bots that can perceive what is being said and that can understand and generate a response — and then they can speak back,'” he said.
The Aura model, just like all of the company’s other models, were trained in-house.
Smaller companies are just as eager to use AI tech to supercharge their sales processes as their bigger competitors.
Darwin AI, a Brazil-based AI startup, is developing a conversational AI assistant for small businesses across Latin America who want to get into AI, but don’t have an IT staff.
The assistant is designed to interact with customers in a more human-like manner to help generate more revenue.
Using AI, Darwin takes into account the needs of companies and then filters leads and customers.
As more companies implement automation into their processes, the conversational AI market is expected to grow over 20% annually through 2030.
Interoperability could also be imposed on designated tech giants, the CMA suggested, as well as mandates that they trade on fairer terms.
Algorithmic transparency could be another demand made of them by the new digital markets regulator.
As a consequence the UK has slipped behind peers like the European Union — which adopted its own flagship digital competition reform last year.
The deadline for in-scope tech giants’ compliance with that regime is looming in early March.
A German ex ante digital competition reform has also been operating since early 2021.
The valuation reassessment comes at a time when Reliance is expected to undertake initial public offerings for both Jio Platforms and Reliance Retail.
In 2020, Jio Platforms raised over $20 billion from a series of investments by companies like Meta, Google, Silver Lake, Vista Equity Partners and others.
Reliance Retail, which raised about $7 billion in 2020, recently raised about $1.85 billion at $100 billion valuation.
The investment bank also expects the Indian telecom industry to hike tariff in the second half of the year, it said.
“On enterprise business we see three areas where Jio Platforms could capitalize on: government contracts, SMEs and corporates (by offering VAS),” BofA added.
OpenAI is expanding its internal safety processes to fend off the threat of harmful AI.
In-production models are governed by a “safety systems” team; this is for, say, systematic abuses of ChatGPT that can be mitigated with API restrictions or tuning.
Frontier models in development get the “preparedness” team, which tries to identify and quantify risks before the model is released.
So, only medium and high risks are to be tolerated one way or the other.
For that reason OpenAI is making a “cross-functional Safety Advisory Group” that will sit on top of the technical side, reviewing the boffins’ reports and making recommendations inclusive of a higher vantage.
