A number of major AI services performed poorly in a test of their ability to address questions and concerns about voting and elections.
Their concern was that AI models will, as their proprietors have urged and sometimes forced, replace ordinary searches and references for common questions.
They submitted these questions via API to five well-known models: Claude, Gemini, GPT-4, Llama 2 and Mixtral.
The AI model responses ranged from 1,110 characters (Claude) to 2,015 characters, (Mixtral), and all of the AI models provided lengthy responses detailing between four and six steps to register to vote.
GPT-4 came out best, with only approximately one in five of its answers having a problem, pulling ahead by punting on “where do I vote” questions.
Stability has announced Stable Diffusion 3, the latest and most powerful version of the company’s image-generating AI model.
Sora, OpenAI’s impressive video generator, apparently works on similar principles (Will Peebles, co-author of the paper, went on to co-lead the Sora project).
(Anthropic, for its part, has not focused on image or video generation publicly, so it isn’t really part of this conversation.)
Stable Diffusion seems to want to be the white label generative AI that you can’t do without, rather than the boutique generative AI you aren’t sure you need.
Interestingly, the company has put safety front and center in its announcement, stating:We have taken and continue to take reasonable steps to prevent the misuse of Stable Diffusion 3 by bad actors.
Barely a week after launching the latest iteration of its Gemini models, Google today announced the launch of Gemma, a new family of lightweight open-weight models.
To get started with Gemma, developers can get access to ready-to-use Colab and Kaggle notebooks, as well as integrations with Hugging Face, MaxText and Nvidia’s NeMo.
While Google highlights that these are open models, it’s worth noting that they are not open-source.
Indeed, in a press briefing ahead of today’s announcement, Google’s Janine Banks stressed the company’s commitment to open source but also noted that Google is very intentional about how it refers to the Gemma models.
“[Open models] has become pretty pervasive now in the industry,” Banks said.
Even ransomware gangs fail to patch vulnerabilitiesYes, even ransomware gangs are slow to patch software bugs.
Lockbit ransomware group administrative staff has confirmed with us their websites have been seized.
pic.twitter.com/SvpbeslrCd — vx-underground (@vxunderground) February 19, 2024Ransomware takedowns take a long timeThe LockBit takedown, known officially as “Operation Cronos,” was years in the making, according to European law enforcement agency Europol.
Given Kondratiev has hands in at least five different ransomware gangs, the sanctions are likely to make his life five times more difficult.
We found various Easter eggs hidden on the now-seized LockBit site.
All smartwatches should offer multiple days of battery life, full stop.
According to a blog post, the company took a “three-year hiatus and a reflective pause following the OnePlus Watch 1.”Battery is precisely the sort of thing OnePlus needs to lean into.
That said, it doesn’t take hours of direct conversations with users to know that battery life is paramount on smartwatches.
Perhaps leaning into battery life in a meaningful way will improve its fortunes for round two.
That said, anything that re-centralizes the importance of better battery life is probably a net positive for the category.
Apple last week announced new rules for EU app developers to comply with new regulation, the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Developer responses to the changes have been mixed, as several larger companies, including Epic Games, Spotify and more recently Microsoft, have come out against Apple’s changes, which seemed designed to ensure that Apple’s ability to profit from iPhone apps continues, regardless of how they’re discovered and installed.
This fee applies to apps both distributed on the App Store and through alternative marketplaces and is €0.50 for each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold.
After digging through the documents Apple provided and speaking to the company, there are a few caveats and details to these rules that developers should know.
We’re compiling them below as a starting point and will add to this list over time as we learn more.
Apple last week announced new rules for EU app developers to comply with new regulation, the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Meanwhile, the company is implementing a Core Technology Fee that Apple says pays for their access to Apple’s proprietary technologies and tools, developer services and support, and platform integrity.
This fee applies to apps both distributed on the App Store and through alternative marketplaces and is €0.50 for each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold.
After digging through the documents Apple provided and speaking to the company, there are a few caveats and details to these rules that developers should know.
We’re compiling them below as a starting point and will add to this list over time as we learn more.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups.
Get help and not hype from leading founders, investors, entrepreneurs and startup experts sharing hard-won info that every founder needs to know.
Most interesting startup stories this weekIt’s been a decade since Aileen Lee coined the term “unicorn” in a TechCrunch article to describe a startup valued at more than $1 billion.
If you’re only reading two things on TechCrunch this week, make it Startups Weekly — and Lee’s article.
Who knows, but that doesn’t stop a bunch of really interesting startups from raising absolutely buckets of cash.
Apple does not enjoy this, which should surprise exactly no one.
Somehow, despite that, society remains intact and people are mostly ok with using those platforms with reasonable success.
What isn’t so understandable is just how petulant the company is being about prying open fingers on its tightly closed fist when it comes to compliance here.
At best, it seems short-sighted: Yes, doing so will mean Apple’s revenue picture doesn’t materially change in the near-term.
And developers are increasingly irate at Apple’s antics.
Cover slide Funding timeline slide Problem slide Solution slide Product slide Strategy slide Product portfolio slide Market size slide How it works slide U.S. market opportunity slide Global market opportunity slide Vision slide Team slide (?)
But it’s interesting to see Doola take a different tack to arrive at a potential market size of $4.5 billion per year.
As I mentioned earlier, there’s a vast amount of information missing from this pitch deck.
So much, in fact, that it is essentially useless as a traditional pitch deck.
In the rest of this teardown, we’ll look at three things Doola could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!
