What is worth $11 billion and wants to go to Mars to collect rocks?
NASA’s mission to Mars to collect rocks that was expected to cost $11 billion and take ages.
So, the U.S. space agency is throwing the doors open to get more input, and that means that startups are looking at an opportunity that is truly out of this world.
To close, the massive, gobsmackingly big $7.2 billion worth of new funds from a16z.
For the full interview transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, read on, or check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast.
The AI boom, love it or find it to be a bit more hype than substance, is here to stay.
That means lots of companies raising oodles of dollars, a healthy dose of regulatory concern, academic work, and corporate jockeying.
For startups, it means a huge opportunity to bring new technology to bear on a host of industries that could use a bit of polish.
But if you read the news, you might notice that men are the far and away most cited, and discussed players in AI today.
So, TechCrunch’s Dominic-Madori Davis and Kyle Wiggers decided to go out and talk to women working in AI to learn more about their work, how they got into the world of artificial intelligence, and more.
What do you call an AI company that is suffering from very public gyrations regarding its business health, place in the market, and leadership structure?
Well, you might call it Stability AI.
Stability AI’s latest leadership shakeup is no joke, with its CEO Emad Mostaque departing to work on AI products that are less centralized — which is to say, owned and built by a single company, like, say, Stability AI.
The startup’s fundraising journey is well-known to tech folks, while its best-known product — Stable Diffusion — is known even more broadly.
We dig into all that and more in today’s TechCrunch Minute:
Creative ad agency McKinney developed a quiz game called “Are You Blacker than ChatGPT?” to shine a light on AI bias.
The game tests a person’s knowledge of Black culture against what ChatGPT has been trained to know about the Black community.
Woods said the idea for the quiz came last year during a creative brainstorm at McKinney.
Woods said it doesn’t seem like ChatGPT is learning from the quiz, either, based on the fact that it keeps getting the same answers wrong in many cases.
Carter said that ChatGPT could work better for more cultures with better sourcing and having more inclusive data collection.
Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 sales will be halted again in the U.S. starting at 5 PM tomorrow, January 18, due to the rejection of a bid by Apple to have the sales ban paused throughout its appeal of an ITC decision that found its blood oxygen feature infringe on patents by medical tech company Masimo.
Meanwhile, Apple has another route available to avoid a halt: U.S. Customs said earlier in the week that it would consider a software update that disabled Apple Watch blood oxygen sensing features to put the devices beyond the scope of the ITC ban, which means the company could effectively keep selling them if it pushes a firmware update to turn off all the pulse oximetry stuff.
Apple’s appeal will still continue, however, and this doesn’t mean they won’t eventually win that, which would allow for a resumption of sale with the blood oxygen features included.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens tomorrow when that 5 PM ET deadline hits.
For those keeping track, this means the current Apple Watch models have now been removed from sale, resumed sales, and are pending another sales stoppage, all in under a month.
IT budgets should increase in 2024, but it still could be tough going for startupsI think most people would agree that 2023 was a challenging time to be a startup.
Meanwhile, sales cycles were longer and many startups struggled to grow at a decent pace.
This means that startups that aren’t well capitalized right now could continue to struggle in 2024, and the flipping of the calendar isn’t going to change that.
It means they have to fight for their piece of enterprise budgets, and that, possibly, 2024 could look a lot like 2023.
The budget outlookA good starting point for budget discussions is what the proposed budget looks like.
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