A new startup called Ema out of San Francisco thinks it’s a lot more than just a passing fancy.
“Our goal is to build a universal AI employee,” Surojit Chatterjee, the CEO and co-founder, said in an interview.
Accel, Section 32 and Prosus Ventures are co-leading, and Wipro Ventures, Venture Highway, AME Cloud Ventures, Frontier Ventures, Maum Group and Firebolt Ventures also participating.
He himself has some 40 patents to his name in areas like machine learning enterprise software and ad tech.
Most recently, he was VP of engineering at Okta where he oversaw data, machine learning and devices; and prior to that he was also at Google, where he was engineering lead for data and machine learning where he focused on privacy and safety.
TikTok is losing even more songs over its quarrel with Universal Music Group (UMG), as the social media network is starting to remove songs published by UMG, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Tuesday.
As a result, TikTok had to remove songs owned or distributed by UMG by January 31.
Now, the company has to remove songs that contain compositions controlled by Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG).
The company says UMG and UMPG’s catalogue represents anywhere from 20-30% of popular songs on TikTok.
Artists and songwriters will also be losing out on royalties earned from their music on TikTok.
Google is hopeful it will soon be able to ‘unpause’ the ability of its multimodal generative AI tool, Gemini, to depict people, per DeepMind founder, Demis Hassabis.
The capability to respond to prompts for images of humans should be back online in the “next few weeks”, he said today.
Asked by moderator, Wired’s Steven Levy, to explain what went wrong with the image generation feature, Hassabis sidestepped a detailed technical explanation.
Instead he suggested the issue was caused by Google failing to identify instances when users are basically after what he described as a “universal depiction”.
The issue is “very complex”, he suggested — likely demanding a whole-of-society mobilization and response to determine and enforce limits.
However, at this year’s event, there was a conspicuous void: the near-absence of sex tech.
Despite being an industry that caters to a universal human experience, sex tech has always had an uneasy association with CES.
In 2019, sex tech had its headline moment at CES when pleasure tech company Lora DiCarlo won an innovation award—only for it to be rescinded, and then reinstated after widespread backlash.
This controversy highlighted the uneasy relationship between the mainstream tech industry and its more intimate cousin.
Fast forward to 2024, and it seems CES has effectively managed to chase the sex tech industry off its show floors.
