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.
Covariant is building ChatGPT for robots The UC Berkeley spinout says its new AI platform can help robots think more like peopleCovariant this week announced the launch of RFM-1 (Robotics Foundation Model 1).
“We at Covariant have already deployed lots of robots at warehouses with success.
“We do like a lot of the work that is happening in the more general purpose robot hardware space,” says Chen.
“ChatGPT for robots” isn’t a perfect analogy, but it’s a reasonable shorthand (especially in light of the founders’ connection to OpenAI).
Chen says the company expects the new RFM-1 platform will work with a “majority” of the hardware on which Covariant software is already deployed.
Heidy Khlaaf is an engineering director at the cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits.
She specializes in evaluating software and AI implementations within “safety critical” systems, like nuclear power plants and autonomous vehicles.
Imposter syndrome has a strong hold on women within tech, and leads many to doubt their own scientific integrity.
The way AI systems are trained embed human bias and discrimination within their outputs that become “de facto” and automated.
AI systems should not be exempt from standard auditing processes that are well-established to ensure public and consumer protection.
On Friday, Microsoft said Russian government hackers continue to break into its systems using information obtained during a hack last year.
This time, the Russian hackers dubbed Midnight Blizzard have targeted Microsoft’s source code and other internal systems, the company said.
This has included access to some of the company’s source code repositories and internal systems,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post.
This new intrusion comes after Microsoft revealed in January that Russian government hackers had broken into the company’s systems last November.
Midnight Blizzard is believed to be a hacking group working for Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, known by its Russian initials, SVR.
Astra Space, the launch company that went public in 2021 at a $2.1 billion valuation, is going private again after months of burning cash and failing to secure alternate investment.
The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2024, at which time Astra will cease trading on the Nasdaq.
In an investor presentation from February 2021, Astra touted a “mass produced portable launch system” that could launch from anywhere in the world.
At the time Astra completed its SPAC merger it also acquired Apollo Fusion, an electric propulsion developer for spacecraft, with the aim of integrating those systems into an Astra satellite constellation.
That constellation never came to fruition, however, and while the company did succeed in selling many Apollo Fusion propulsion systems it has struggled to turn that backlog into revenue.
Here’s why most AI benchmarks tell us so littleOn Tuesday, startup Anthropic released a family of generative AI models that it claims achieve best-in-class performance.
The reason — or rather, the problem — lies with the benchmarks AI companies use to quantify a model’s strengths — and weaknesses.
“Many benchmarks used for evaluation are three-plus years old, from when AI systems were mostly just used for research and didn’t have many real users.
In addition, people use generative AI in many ways — they’re very creative.”It’s not that the most-used benchmarks are totally useless.
However, as generative AI models are increasingly positioned as mass market, “do-it-all” systems, old benchmarks are becoming less applicable.
Today, Groq announced that it’s forming a new division — Groq Systems — focused on greatly expanding its customer and developer ecosystem.
In forming the new unit, Groq has acquired Definitive Intelligence, a Palo Alto-based firm offering a range of business-oriented AI solutions including chatbots, data analytics tools and documentation builders.
Prior to launching Definitive Intelligence, Madra and Sherry co-launched Autonomic, a cloud-based platform for connecting mobility systems, that Ford acquired in 2018.
Prior to the acquisition, Definitive Intelligence had raised $25.5 million in venture capital.
Definitive Intelligence is Groq’s second acquisition after Maxeler Technologies, a high-performance compute and AI infrastructure solutions firm, in 2022.
But Karma3 Labs is hoping to change that with $4.5 million in fresh capital backing its decentralized reputation protocol OpenRank.
This is the protocol’s first capital raise, Sahil Dewan, founder and CEO of Karma3 Labs, told TechCrunch exclusively.
“We are really obsessed with solving trust and safety issues for crypto,” Dewan said.
“We wanted to create a protocol and generalized system, not as a source of trust, but for anyone to come and build reputation systems,” Dewan said.
The OpenRank protocol allows any developer to use its “Reputation Graphs” for ratings, ranking or recommendations for applications or communities.
A U.S. government watchdog stole more than one gigabyte of seemingly sensitive personal data from the cloud systems of the U.S. Department of the Interior.
The good news: The data was fake and part of a series of tests to check whether the Department’s cloud infrastructure was secure.
The experiment is detailed in a new report by the Department of the Interior’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), published last week.
The tests were conducted between March 2022 and June 2023, the OIG wrote in the report.
The Department of the Interior manages the country’s federal land, national parks and a budget of billions of dollars, and hosts a significant amount of data in the cloud.
American health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group has confirmed a ransomware attack on its health tech subsidiary Change Healthcare, which continues to disrupt hospitals and pharmacies across the United States.
“Based on our ongoing investigation, there’s no indication that except for the Change Healthcare systems, Optum, UnitedHealthcare and UnitedHealth Group systems have been affected by this issue.”In a post on its dark web leak site on Wednesday, ALPHV/BlackCat took credit for the cyberattack at Change Healthcare.
Change Healthcare merged with U.S. healthcare provider Optum in 2022 as part of a $7.8 billion deal under UnitedHealth Group, the largest health insurance provider in the United States.
Change Healthcare said it took much of its systems offline to expel the hackers from its systems.
Do you work at Change Healthcare, Optum or UnitedHealth and know more about the cyberattack?
