Take, for example, the company’s latest foray into mobile artificial intelligence, the AI Eraser.
Nope, OnePlus went ahead and built its own version in a bid to show the world that it has AI ambitions of its own.
From the sound of its press material, the company went and built this thing ground-up, starting with its own first-party large language models.
“AI Eraser is the result of a substantial R&D investment from OnePlus,” the company notes in its press material.
AI is rolling out to OnePlus devices this month, starting with OnePlus 12, OnePlus 12R, OnePlus 11, OnePlus Open and OnePlus Nord CE 4.
News that Yahoo is buying Artifact stirred the technology watercooler yesterday.
Artifact was an interesting app, employing AI to help its users find and consume more, and more targeted news.
It had some devoted fans, but never reached the sort of scale that would have made it an attractive long-term project.
Regardless of whether or not you were an Artifact user — I was for a time — that Yahoo is still feeling acquisitive under its current ownership structure matters.
Artifact is hardly the only startup project in the market today that might be looking for a new home, after all.
Turkey has gained a well-earned reputation as a veritable cauldron of mobile games startups, leading to the rise of VCs dedicated to the sector.
The latest to join this coterie is Laton Ventures, a new gaming-focused VC that has raised a $35 million fund.
Indeed, between 2018 and 2022 Turkish gaming start-ups raised more than $1 billion in funding.
There are now at least 25 VC funds that invest in video games startups based out of Turkey.
“We’re positioning as a bridge between the Turkish gaming ecosystem, which is booming, and the international gaming ecosystem.
In recent months, the big three cloud vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — have relaxed their egress fees, which are a tax of sorts that the cloud companies charge customers to move their data to another vendor.
“In the original cloud world, the three major cloud vendors were really fighting to try to build what felt like walled gardens, and as long as you built on top of them, everything was great.
Cloud customers looking to switch providers will need to be retained through innovative and accessible features now that the punishment of egress fees is being phased out,” Seseri said.
David Linthicum, a longtime cloud consultant, says that while these recent announcements are a pleasant PR move, he warns folks to review their bills carefully because egress fees aren’t the only problem.
What are we paying for the networking fees, the egress fees, all the other hidden fees that come along with what people call junk fees that come from the cloud vendors?”But this may not affect startups as much as larger enterprise customers.
The AI world needs more data transparency and web3 startup Space and Time says it can helpAs AI proliferates and things on the internet are easier to manipulate, there’s a need more than ever to make sure data and brands are verifiable, said Scott Dykstra, CTO and co-founder of Space and Time, on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast.
Dykstra thinks the answer is through verification of data and zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs), which are cryptographic actions used to prove something about a piece of information — without revealing the origin data itself.
“It has a lot to do with whether there’s an incentive for bad actors to want to manipulate things,” Dykstra said.
Anytime there’s a higher incentive, where people would want to manipulate data, prices, the books, finances or more, ZK proofs can be used to verify and retrieve the data.
Dykstra’s most recent concern is that AI data isn’t really verifiable.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Monday show, in which we look back at the weekend what’s ahead in the week before us.
Over in the EU, a number of U.S.-based tech companies are under inquiry thanks to the new Digital Markets Act.
At some point, you have to wonder if tech giants are going to find a better working relationship with the bloc.
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The U.S. Department of Justice is suing Apple over allegedly monopolistic smartphone practices.
The federal agency is not alone in the matter, bringing 15 states and the District of Columbia into the mix as well.
Regulators and tech companies, name a more iconic duo.
But as we’re about to see with Apple, big tech companies are not going to go down without a fight.
For more on Apple’s antitrust lawsuit, check here:
If you’re looking for comparisons, Norrsken VC is a $130 million impact VC that covers climate, while Demeter Partners last raised a €250 million fund focused on climate.
World Fund is also backed by pension funds including the UK Environment Agency Pension Fund, Wiltshire Pension Fund, and Croatia’s Erste Plavi.
World Fund has completed its raise during a war in Europe, interest rate rises, and jittery LPs.
In 2023 there was over $20 billion raised by European climate tech startups, almost matching the previous year, and bucking declining trends in other sectors, according to Dealroom.
The U.K., Sweden and Germany led for total climate tech VC in 2023 but Iceland, Lithuania and Bulgaria showed notable growth.
“And the product was electricity.”He was comparing this — turning raw material into something else that have value — to the notion of data centers, which are purely money pits.
“There’s a new Industrial Revolution happening in these [server] rooms: I call them AI factories,” Huang said.
“The raw material that goes in is data and electricity.
It’s very valuable.”The distinction makes a lot of sense in a world where Nvidia benefits tremendously if it can persuade companies to think of data centers and AI tools in a different way.
“The last time, data centers went into your company’s cost centers and capital expenditure.
Suleyman — also a co-founder of DeepMind, which Google bought in 2014 to bolster its own AI efforts — will run Microsoft’s newly formed consumer AI unit, called Microsoft AI, whereas Simonyan is joining the company as a chief scientist in the same new group.
Mustafa, whose official title at Microsoft is EVP and CEO of Microsoft AI, will report to chief executive Nadella.
“Several members of the Inflection team have chosen to join Mustafa and Karén at Microsoft,” Nadella wrote in a blog post.
In a blog post, Inflection AI said that it will shift its focus to the AI studio business, where it builds and tests customer generative AI models.
“This renewed emphasis on our API also comes with some important changes in the company,” wrote Inflection AI.
