Google announced a new set of features for phones, cars, and wearables today at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.
The company said that starting this week, Google Messages will get a feature that lets you access Gemini in the app.
Google is also rolling out a feature for Android Auto that reads out summaries of long text messages and contextualizes group chats.
On the productivity front, Google is extending support for handwritten notes to docs on Android phones or tablets using just a finger or a stylus.
Google is also updating the Fitbit app with support to get data from different sources like AllTrails, Oura Ring, and MyFitnessPal.
Orbital Materials — founded by Jonathan Godwin, who previously was involved with DeepMind’s material research efforts — is creating an AI-powered platform that can be used to discover materials ranging from batteries to carbon dioxide-capturing cells.
Godwin says he was inspired to found Orbital Materials by seeing how the techniques underpinning AI systems like AlphaFold, DeepMind’s AI that can predict a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence, could be applied to the materials sciences.
“[Yet] demand for new advanced materials … is growing hugely as our economies become electrified and de-carbonized.”Orbital Materials isn’t the first to apply AI to materials R&D.
Osmium AI, led by an ex-Googler and backed by Y Combinator, enables industrial customers to predict the physical properties of new materials, then refine and optimize those new materials leveraging AI.
But what sets Orbital Materials apart is its proprietary AI model for materials science, Godwin claims.
Clumio, a data backup and recovery provider for companies using the public cloud, has raised $75 million in a Series D round of funding.
‘live”) data and backup data in separate secure domains, something that many backup solutions (including first-party from the cloud providers themselves) don’t do.
Indeed, Clumio stores its backup data in what Kumar calls a “hyper-optimized data plane” on AWS.
“We leverage our serverless data processing engine in AWS to perform all core backup operations using.
Prior to now, the company had raised around $186 million, the lion’s share arriving via a $135 million Series C round more than four years ago.
The husband-and-wife duo departed World View in 2018; the following year, they started another balloon company, Space Perspective, this time squarely focused on ultra-high-altitude tourism.
Space Perspective, which aims to commence commercial service as soon as the end of this year, is entering a nascent market: its closest competitors are Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, which offer rides to suborbital space.
There’s duration: a flight on New Shepard takes 11 minutes from lift-off to landing; Space Perspective’s will last six hours.
Simultaneously, Space Perspective is working with the U.S. Coast Guard, which maintains regulatory authority over space-related activities that occur in water.
One notable difference is development costs: Space Perspective has raised $77 million from investors since 2019, while Virgin Galactic has spent more than $1 billion developing its system.
The U.S. firm specializes in building structures out of large concrete masonry blocks.
Amsterdam-based Monumental, meanwhile, specializes in the more familiar red clay variety.
Monumental has already been doing limited pilots in its native Netherlands, including the 15-meter exterior of an office building.
“At Monumental, we’re working to help the industry meet these challenges,” says co-founder and CEO Salar al Khafaji.
Funding will go toward hiring, scaling manufacturing and diversifying the manner of bricks/blocks its robots are capable of handling.
OpenAI is always making slight adjustments to its models and pricing, and today brings just such an occasion.
It’s also a popular API, being lower cost and faster than GPT-4 on a lot of tasks.
Hence the steady ratcheting down of prices — though it’s also a natural result of streamlining the models and improving their infrastructure.
GPT-3.5 Turbo also gets a new model version, 0125 (i.e.
And the company also released a new version of its free moderation API — which identifies potentially harmful text.
Silicon Valley venture capital (VC) juggernaut Sequoia is backing a fledgling Danish startup to build a next-gen software composition analysis (SCA) tool, one that promises to help companies filter through the noise and identify vulnerabilities that are a genuine threat.
For context, most software contains at least some open source components, many of which are out-of-date and irregularly — if at all — maintained.
In turn, this is leading to an array of fresh regulation, designed to strong-arm businesses into running a tighter software supply chain.
The problem is, with millions of components permeating the software supply chain, it’s not always easy to know whether a given application is using a particular component.
And this is where Danish cybersecurity startup Coana is setting out to make a difference, using “code aware” SCA to help its users separate out irrelevant alerts and focus only on those that matter.
Qdrant, the company behind the eponymous open source vector database, has raised $28 million in a Series A round of funding led by Spark Capital.
The vector database realm is hot.
In recent months we’ve seen the likes of Weaviate raise $50 million for its open source vector database, while Zilliz secured secured $60 million to commercialize the Milvus open source vector database.
We are proud to share that this new X AI feature just announced by @elonmusk is powered by the Qdrant Vector Database.
Right, using a Vector Database, powered by Qdrant.
An extra toe is like a representation of where we are beginning.”But when the brand announced that the collection was designed using generative AI, backlash was immediate.
In the year since she finalized designs for this drop, public opinion of AI art has shifted significantly.
As generative AI tools become more sophisticated, the use of AI in art has also become increasingly polarizing.
Of course, not all generative AI is exploitative; as a VFX tool, it’s immensely useful to enhance animations, from creating more realistic flames in Pixar’s “Elemental” to visualizing complex scenes in HBO’s “The Last Of Us.” There are plenty of examples of morally bankrupt applications of generative AI.
But most of the generative AI debate settles into a morally gray area, where the parameters of exploitation are less defined.
Alongside Samsung’s launch event today, Google announced a new way to search on Android phones dubbed “Circle to Search.” The feature will allow users to search from anywhere on their phone by using gestures like circling, highlighting, scribbling, or tapping.
The search results users will see will differ based on their query and the Google Labs products they opt into.
For a simple text search, you may see traditional search results while a query that combines an image and text — or “multisearch” as Google calls it — uses generative AI.
The feature was one of several Google AI announcements across Gemini, Google Messages, and Android Auto announced at today’s event.
Over time, more Android smartphones will support the feature, Google says.
