One of Tesla’s delivery workers who was cut this week and spoke to TechCrunch on the condition of anonymity said their location was “short staffed” but still lost multiple employees.
The decision to end discounts across its lineup in the United States, including the Model 3, Model Y, Model S and Model X is a bit of a whiplash moment for Tesla.
And in the first quarter of 2024, Tesla’s delivery numbers fell year-over-year.
It’s not clear how removing discounts on Tesla vehicles fits into the automaker’s new strategy to streamline sales and delivery.
But beyond the initial purchase, Tesla has almost always been making changes to its sales and delivery strategy.
The investor’s latest “Camp” incubator trained up and funded 9 AI agent startups they hope will take on today’s more tedious tasks.
The use cases for many of these companies sound promising, but AI tends to have trouble keeping its promises.
But are AI agents at that stage?
And it’s well within the capabilities of today’s AI agents, which would primarily be tasked with understanding natural language rather than forms.
A framework for web-based AI agents with a pay-as-you-go model so if your company’s experiment craters, you only owe a few bucks.
Additionally, in a notable step last month, the European Union opened a formal investigation into whether Meta’s tactic breaches obligations that apply to Facebook and Instagram under the competition-focused Digital Markets Act (DMA).
The Board’s opinion on “consent or pay” is expected to provide guidance on how the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) should be applied in this area.
It’s worth noting the Board’s opinion will look at “consent or pay” generally, rather than specifically investigating Meta’s deployment.
Nor is Meta the only service provider pushing “consent or pay” on users.
“However, the current ‘Consent or Pay’ model sets in stone a coercive dynamic, leaving users without an actual choice.
Offered as an answer of sorts to OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Imagen 2 and models from the growing number of startups in the nascent generative AI video space, Adobe’s model — a part of the company’s expanding Firefly family of generative AI products — will make its way into Premiere Pro, Adobe’s flagship video editing suite, sometime later this year, Adobe says.
Like many generative AI video tools today, Adobe’s model creates footage from scratch (either a prompt or reference images) — and it powers three new features in Premiere Pro: object addition, object removal and generative extend.
The lack of release time frame on the video model doesn’t instill a lot of confidence that it’ll avoid the same fate.
And that, I’d say, captures the overall tone of Adobe’s generative video presser.
Adobe’s clearly trying to signal with these announcements that it’s thinking about generative video, if only in the preliminary sense.
UK-based legaltech company Lawhive, which offers an AI-based in-house ‘lawyer’ through a software-as-a-service platform targeted at small law firms, has raised £9.5 million ($11.9M) in a seed round to expand the reach of AI-driven services for ‘main street’ law firms.
To date, most legaltech startups that are deploying AI have concentrated on the big, juicy market of ‘Big Law’ — meaning large, either country-wide or global, law firms that are keenly pushing AI into their workflows.
These include Harvey (US-based; raised $106M); Robin AI (UK-based; raised $43.4M); Spellbook (Canada-based; raised $32.4M).
Lawhive targets its platform at small law firms or solo lawyers running their own shop.
That’s a very small number of big law firms in the US in the UK.
OpenAI is expanding to Japan, with the opening of a new Tokyo office and plans for a GPT-4 model optimized specifically for the Japanese language.
Japan is the current G7 chair and President of the G7’s Hiroshima AI Process, an initiative to promote AI safety, including stronger AI governance.
EnterprisingAs president of OpenAI Japan, Nagasaki will be tasked with building a local team on the ground to double down on OpenAI’s business in the country.
OpenAI says ChatGPT is also being used by local governments to “improve the efficiency of public services in Japan.”ChatGPT has long been conversant in multiple languages, including Japanese.
For now, OpenAI is giving early access to the GPT-4 custom model to some local businesses, with access gradually opened up via the OpenAI API “in the coming months.”
Bot creators now have a new way to make money with Poe, the Quora-owned AI chatbot platform.
The addition follows an earlier October 2023 of a revenue-sharing program that would give bot creators a cut of the earnings when their users subscribed to Poe’s premium product.
Today we’re introducing a new way for model developers and bot creators to generate revenue on @poe_platform: price per message!
The offering is currently available to U.S. bot creators only but will expand globally in the future.
Alongside the per-message revenue model, Poe also launched an enhanced analytics dashboard that displays average earnings for creators’ bots across paywalls, subscriptions, and messages.
Gemini 1.5 Pro, Google’s most capable generative AI model, is now available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google’s enterprise-focused AI development platform.
Gemini 1.5 Pro launched in February, joining Google’s Gemini family of generative AI models.
Gemini 1.5 was incredibly able to find the specific perfect 50 dunk and details from just its long context video understanding!
Gemini 1.5 Pro doesn’t process a million tokens at the snap of a finger.
Google previously said that latency is an area of focus, though, and that it’s working to “optimize” Gemini 1.5 Pro as time goes on.
But this year, whether to foster developer goodwill or advance its ecosystem ambitions (or both), Google debuted a number of open-source tools primarily aimed at supporting generative AI projects and infrastructure.
Beyond MaxDiffusion, Google’s launching Jetstream, a new engine to run generative AI models — specifically text-generating models (so not Stable Diffusion).
“We’ve heavily optimized [the models’] performance on TPUs and also partnered closely with Nvidia to optimize performance on large GPU clusters,” Lohmeyer said.
The goal is to reduce the barrier to entry for getting generative AI models onto TPU hardware, according to Google — in particular text-generating models.
And Optimum TPU doesn’t yet support training generative models on TPUs — only running them.
Model N, a platform used by companies such as Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, and AMD to automate decisions related to pricing, incentives, and compliance, is going private in a $1.25 billion deal.
Vista Equity Partners is doling out $30 per share in the all-cash transaction, representing a 12% premium on Friday’s closing price, and 16% on its 30-day average.
Founded in 1999, Model N’s software integrates with various data sources and internal systems to help companies analyze trends, pricing efficacy, market demand, and more.
The platform is typically used in industries such as pharmaceuticals and life sciences, where there may be complex pricing structures, and where regulatory or market changes can impact business.
However, its valuation has generally hovered below the $1 billion market for the past six months, sparking Vista Equity Partners into action today.
