NASA’s decision to scrap its $11 billion, 15-year mission to Mars to bring back samples could create a startup feeding frenzy, TechCrunch reports.
Describing its plans as too slow, and too expensive, NASA is going back to the drawing board, with an eye on getting the space industry to help.
But space startups are not worried about it.
So, the NASA money might have a bunch of startup-sized buckets to drip into, and I am here for it.
To that end, if any startup that works with NASA on the Mars rock mission needs a human to send up there to check on the dials and such, I’m your guy.
This week Boston Dynamics retired its well-known Atlas robot that was powered by hydraulics.
Then today it unveiled its new Atlas robot, which is powered by electricity.
Its new Atlas robot is leaner, and appears to have improved range-of-motion.
Size and ability to contort and maneuver are not cosmetic elements to a humanoid robot — they can unlock new use cases and possible work environments.
Happily for those of us who want a domestic robot to handle household chores and hold our hands whilst we cry, there are other startups working on the humanoid robot project.
Offered as an answer of sorts to OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Imagen 2 and models from the growing number of startups in the nascent generative AI video space, Adobe’s model — a part of the company’s expanding Firefly family of generative AI products — will make its way into Premiere Pro, Adobe’s flagship video editing suite, sometime later this year, Adobe says.
Like many generative AI video tools today, Adobe’s model creates footage from scratch (either a prompt or reference images) — and it powers three new features in Premiere Pro: object addition, object removal and generative extend.
The lack of release time frame on the video model doesn’t instill a lot of confidence that it’ll avoid the same fate.
And that, I’d say, captures the overall tone of Adobe’s generative video presser.
Adobe’s clearly trying to signal with these announcements that it’s thinking about generative video, if only in the preliminary sense.
Today, four out of 10 Formula 1 teams use an evolution of that same technology.
However, where Formula 1 cars rely on 1,000-horsepower hybrid V6 engines, Baqué’s first practical application of the technology was human-powered.
At its core, NCS helps engineers avoid potential aerodynamic pitfalls while pushing them into directions they might not have considered.
NCS will then dig into its neural network to suggest improvements or modifications, possible paths in a 3D game of choose-your-own-adventure.
But like in most sports, success is cyclical for Formula 1 teams, and right now, Williams is very much in a rebuilding phase.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups.
Ron has been working from home as a writer for almost as long as I’ve been alive.
Moar transpoLook, I’m trying my best to have a balance of everything here on Startups Weekly.
The Apple falls far from the car: Apple, after packing in its electric car project, let go of 600 staff who were reportedly working on the project.
I’d pay good money to see the prototypes …Apple, after packing in its electric car project, let go of 600 staff who were reportedly working on the project.
Can AI eat the jobs of the developers who are busy building AI models?
News this week that Google has a new AI-powered coding tool for developers means that competitive pressures between major tech companies to build the best service to help coders write more code, more quickly is still heating up.
Both companies want to eventually build developer-helping tech that can understand a company’s codebase, allowing it to offer up more tailored suggestions and tips.
Everywhere you look, developers are building tools and services to help their own professional cohort.
Developers learning to code today won’t know a world in which they don’t have AI-powered coding helps.
Spotify is building on its AI DJ feature, adding a new AI-powered playlist feature.
Spotify’s AI work nests into its other efforts to differentiate its service from rivals like Apple Music and offerings from Amazon.
Starting in just a few countries, the new AI playlist feature will roll out to more markets over time.
Some Spotify users have complained that the rollout of new products can take longer than they want to reach their home market, it’s worth noting.
But for those of us who aren’t mega-ChatGPT users, AI can seem ever so slightly remote from our regular existence.
TikTok’s upcoming Instagram competitor app for sharing photos could be named TikTok Notes, according to screenshots posted by users.
Over the last few days, TikTok users have been getting pop-up notifications about a new TikTok Notes app to share photos.
The notification says that the company is launching “a new app for photo posts” called TikTok Notes soon and users’ existing photo posts will be shared on the app.
Looks like TikTok is launching a new app for photo posts called 'TikTok Notes'.
TikTok is also experimenting with different formats like 30-minute-long videos and even text posts like X and Threads.
Working from home isn’t going away, even if some CEOs wish it would Most workers crave flexibility and work-life balanceWhen I started working from home in the late 1980s as a freelance technical writer, I was clearly an outlier.
Today, 14% of U.S. workers work at home full time (including me), and that number is expected to increase to 20% by next year, according to data published by USA Today.
Wayfair, the Boston-based online furniture company, concentrated on remote workers over in-office folks in a layoff earlier this year, according to a WSJ report.
Meanwhile Michael Bloomberg suggested remote workers weren’t actually working, but playing golf (which honestly sounds like projecting to me).
That’s a lot of executive energy being directed against working from home and toward working in the office.
The AI boom, love it or find it to be a bit more hype than substance, is here to stay.
That means lots of companies raising oodles of dollars, a healthy dose of regulatory concern, academic work, and corporate jockeying.
For startups, it means a huge opportunity to bring new technology to bear on a host of industries that could use a bit of polish.
But if you read the news, you might notice that men are the far and away most cited, and discussed players in AI today.
So, TechCrunch’s Dominic-Madori Davis and Kyle Wiggers decided to go out and talk to women working in AI to learn more about their work, how they got into the world of artificial intelligence, and more.
