Allison Cohen is the senior applied AI projects manager at Mila, a Quebec-based community of more than 1,200 researchers specializing in AI and machine learning.
One of the projects I managed involved building a dataset containing instances of subtle and overt expressions of bias against women.
I learned firsthand why this process is fundamental to building responsible applications, and also why it’s not done enough — it’s hard work!
What advice would you give to women seeking to enter the AI field?
How can investors better push for responsible AI?
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech!
One thing that stood out to me was just how much fintech representation in their cohorts is shrinking.
So there was one-third the percentage of fintech companies this year compared to two years ago.
Analysis of the weekFintech funding slid by 16% quarter-over-quarter during the three-month period ended March 31, according to CB Insights’ Q1 2024 State of Venture Report.
During the three-month period, 904 investments were made into fintech startups, which was higher than 786 in the previous quarter, signaling smaller deal sizes.
Apple is laying off 614 employees in California after abandoning its electric car project.
According to the WARN notice posted by California, Apple notified the affected employees on March 28 and the changes will go into effect on May 27.
Affected employees worked at eight locations in Santa Clara, roughly 45 miles south of San Francisco.
The company first started working on its car project, known internally as “Project Titan,” in 2014, and told employees that it was cancelling it on February 27.
Bloomberg reported at the time that some remaining employees who were working on the car project would be shifted to Apple’s generative AI projects.
Using Deadline Cloud, customers in media and entertainment as well as architecture and engineering can leverage AWS compute to render content for TV shows, movies, ads, video games and digital blueprints, said AWS GM of creative tools Antony Passemard.
Deadline Cloud then provisions Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances and manages the network and compute infrastructure.
And — for customers with on-premises compute — Deadline Cloud integrates with this compute and uses it to execute rendering jobs.
With Deadline Cloud, customers can link their own third-party software licenses with the service or leverage usage-based licensing for rendering with existing rendering tools (e.g.
As Passemard alluded to, the rise of generative AI has fueled the demand for rendering hardware, too, and led to the creation of entirely new cloud-based, GPU-accelerated providers.
Would-be Twitter/X rival Bluesky is looking to more directly invest in its developer community in order to foster growth.
The company last week announced “AT Protocol Grants,” a new program that will dole out small grants to developers building on its new social networking protocol.
Initially, Bluesky said it would release $10,000 in grants of $500 to $2,000 per project apiece, based on factors like cost, usage, and more.
The concept of decentralized social networking has been around longer than Bluesky, however, with many projects, including Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, and others, backed by the ActivityPub protocol.
Bluesky says the projects receiving the grants can be useful to either developers or end users and will be paid out via public GitHub Sponsorships.
The company did it with the iPod, iPhone, Apple Watch and, most recently, with its AirPods (the jury is still out on Vision Pro).
Prior to Project Titan, there have been several Apple efforts that failed to see the light of day.
Like Project Titan, Apple never publicly disclosed its existence before it was reportedly scrapped years back.
However, Apple scrapped it and delivered MessagePad, a smaller version of the MessageSlate prototype, later in the year.
Well before the iPhone, Apple tested a “telephone Mac” codenamed W.A.L.T.
Apple is scuttling its secretive, long-running project to build an autonomous electric car, according to Bloomberg.
The company has already started laying off some people who worked on the project, TechCrunch has learned.
Many of the nearly 2,000 employees who were still working on the project will be shifted to Apple’s generative AI projects, Bloomberg reported.
The decision to kill the project comes at a time when major automakers are reevaluating their investments in electric vehicles, and amid increased scrutiny on autonomous vehicle projects.
Apple first started working on its car project, known internally as “Project Titan,” in 2014.
However, awareness of the monetary and environmental benefits associated with carbon credits is low.
It was early, as no methodologies were available at the time to create carbon credits from agriculture.
However, the 34-year-old entrepreneur decided to start his venture once the methodologies started appearing in developed markets, including the U.S. and Europe.
Unlike nature-based credits, carbon credits from renewable energy projects are easy to measure and record and do not involve co-benefits to nature.
That said, the rigorous oversight helps bring high-quality carbon credits that can be sold globally.
When the large cloud providers have excess compute capacity, they tend to discount it through programs like AWS’s and Azure’s spot instances.
While in the recovery room, Surkov shared his idea for a company that would make this excess data center capacity available to developers.
Because of his experience with networking at Cisco and decentralized systems in crypto, Surkov had become interested in why there is so much friction in using decentralized compute.
In addition to these decentralized projects, NodeShift has also set up deals with independent data center operators.
Just on the data center side, the company says, it currently has access to about 400,000 CPUs and 28 million terabytes of storage.
Meet BlueLayer, a new European startup that is building a software platform specifically designed for carbon project developers.
This system of carbon offsetting with carbon project developers is sometimes also called beyond value chain mitigation.
BlueLayer acts as the software backend for carbon project developers.
BlueLayer aims to focus exclusively on project developers.
You might think that there is a limited pool of potential clients, but BlueLayer has already held talks with over 200 carbon project developers.
