Apple is set to board the runaway locomotive that is generative AI at next week’s World Wide Developer Conference.
First there’s the name: Apple Intelligence.
Apple Intelligence will arrive as an opt-in beta, similar to developer-focused operating system updates the company releases after WWDC.
Apple Intelligence will initially be focused on bolstering existing applications.
it sounds like Apple’s big push into AI is less about flash and more about making its operating system more intuitive and user friendly.
Google has acquired Cameyo, a company developing virtualization tools to run Windows apps on ChromeOS devices, for an undisclosed amount.
Cameyo CTO Eyal Dotan founded the startup in 2018, aiming to create a platform to virtualize Windows apps so that they could run on non-Windows machines and even within web browsers.
Last year, perhaps foreshadowing the acquisition, Google partnered with Cameyo to launch features including Windows app local file system integration and the ability to deliver virtual Windows apps as progressive web apps, or apps hosted in datacenters that run in browsers.
With Cameyo’s tech, organizations looking to move away from Windows — or work with both Windows and ChromeOS — have a potentially more appealing avenue, particularly as more and more apps move to the cloud and web-based technologies.
Indeed, Cameyo claims on its website that hundreds of organizations, including school districts and financial institutions, already rely on its software.
In its early days, OctoAI focused almost exclusively on optimizing models to run more effectively.
With the rise of generative AI, the team then launched the fully managed OctoAI platform to help its users serve and fine-tune existing models.
OctoStack, at its core, is that OctoAI platform, but for private deployments.
Deploying OctoStack should be straightforward for most enterprises, as OctoAI delivers the platform with read-to-go containers and their associated Helm charts for deployments.
For developers, the API remains the same, no matter whether they are targeting the SaaS product or OctoAI in their private cloud.
Suleyman — also a co-founder of DeepMind, which Google bought in 2014 to bolster its own AI efforts — will run Microsoft’s newly formed consumer AI unit, called Microsoft AI, whereas Simonyan is joining the company as a chief scientist in the same new group.
Mustafa, whose official title at Microsoft is EVP and CEO of Microsoft AI, will report to chief executive Nadella.
“Several members of the Inflection team have chosen to join Mustafa and Karén at Microsoft,” Nadella wrote in a blog post.
In a blog post, Inflection AI said that it will shift its focus to the AI studio business, where it builds and tests customer generative AI models.
“This renewed emphasis on our API also comes with some important changes in the company,” wrote Inflection AI.
Save for fintech and cleantech, B2B e-commerce and retail was the leading destination for venture capital dollars over the last five years.
Most B2B e-commerce startups have struggled to keep subsidizing their products and expanding operations, leading to retreats, closures, downsizing and mergers.
Building a B2B e-commerce business in tech winterB2B e-commerce platforms provide convenience to FMCG manufacturers like Unilever and P&G for distributing their products to the last mile.
As a result, many B2B e-commerce startups have opted for asset-heavy models to reach their customer base.
The Lagos-based B2B e-commerce startup is currently in the middle of securing a new round of equity and debt to propel its expansion.
The company’s vision for moderation is a stackable ecosystem of services, which is why it will start allowing users to install filters from independent moderation services on top of what Bluesky already requires.
For example, someone could create a moderation service that blocks images of spiders on the network.
Bluesky says installing filters from independent moderation services will be as easy as following another account.
People running moderation services will be able to set custom labels and determine what they do.
Moderation services aren’t tied to individual accounts, so multiple people can manage them together.
MIT professor Mike Stonebreaker has been at the forefront of database technology for over 50 years.
Now 80, he knows a thing or two about database technology and launching companies.
His latest project, DBOS, puts the database at the center of the software stack, reducing the operating system to a small kernel of low level functions.
“The genesis of the project was OLTP (online transaction processing) database systems have gotten a lot faster in the last 15 years.
And so the thesis was that they would be competitive as a new operating system stack,” he told TechCrunch.
Social network Bluesky, a competitor to X, Threads, Mastodon, and others, is opening up its doors with today’s news that the network is now opening up federation, following its public launch earlier this month.
The move will allow anyone to run their own server that connects to Bluesky’s network, so they can host their own data, their own account and make their own rules.
That sent some former Twitter users in search of alternatives that were more sustainable, like Mastodon and Bluesky.
While this model is similar to Mastodon, Bluesky uses a newer social networking protocol, the AT Protocol, while Mastodon and many other networks today use ActivityPub.
“After this initial phase, we’ll open up federation to people looking to run larger servers with many users,” it says.
Google said Thursday it plans to roll out the SoundPod, its portable speaker designed to instantly validate and announce successful payments, to small merchants across India over the coming months.
The Google Pay expansion in India, where the company is among the mobile payment market leaders, comes even as the firm winds down some of its payments apps in the U.S.
The sound-box was invented to serve small Indian merchants unable to afford regular point-of-sale devices but accepting of UPI payments.
The company said merchants who use SoundPod to process 400 payments in a month will get $1.5 in cashback.
Reliance, India’s largest firm by market cap, also began testing a similar device at its campus last year, TechCrunch earlier reported.
Generative AI gets a lot of press, from image-generating tools like Midjourney to Runway to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
To be clear, the execs — who hail from such industries as manufacturing, transportation and industrial goods — still see GenAI as a priority.
Eighty-nine percent responding to the BCG poll ranked the tech as a “top-three” IT initiative for their companies in 2024.
The results, taken in tandem with responses to a BCG survey late last year, put into sharp relief the high degree of enterprise skepticism surrounding AI-powered generative tools of any kind.
“Bad or illegal decision-making” touches on copyright violations — a hot-button topic in GenAI.
