Nearly seven years after announcing its first fund, Sapphire Sport — the venture fund focused on sports, media, and entertainment — is spinning out from Sapphire Ventures. The fund will rebrand as an independent venture firm, 359 Capital. The firm’s new name is a tribute to the sub-four-minute mile, a feat once deemed humanly impossible…
Amazon Music announced on Monday the launch of “Fan Groups,” a new beta feature that lets users create and join groups based on their favorite genres and artists. The feature allows fans to chat, post, and listen to songs shared within these groups. The feature is currently being tested in Canada on iOS and Android…
Five years ago, when Miles “Deuce” McBride moved to New York as a 20-year-old rookie playing for the Knicks, he found the transition to a big city overwhelming and struggled to find the right crowd. “When I got up here, everybody on my team was married with kids or just kind of loners,” he told…
How do you build a single speech recognition system that can understand 1,000’s of languages including many that never had working ASR (automatic speech recognition) models before? Meta AI has released Omnilingual ASR, an open source speech recognition suite that scales to more than 1,600 languages and can be extended to unseen languages with only…
YouTube has become the biggest platform out there, offering tons of opportunities for creators to earn a living. Back in June, the company reported that its creative ecosystem added over $55 billion to the U.S. GDP and created more than 490,000 full-time jobs. However, many YouTubers have reduced their reliance on ad revenue and brand…
In this tutorial, we explore how to build and train an advanced neural network using JAX, Flax, and Optax in an efficient and modular way. We begin by designing a deep architecture that integrates residual connections and self-attention mechanisms for expressive feature learning. As we progress, we implement sophisticated optimization strategies with learning rate scheduling,…
Wikipedia on Monday laid out a simple plan to ensure its website continues to be supported in the AI era, despite its declining traffic. In a blog post, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs the popular online encyclopedia, called on AI developers to use its content “responsibly” by ensuring its contributions are properly attributed…
Kaltura, a New York-headquartered AI video platform company, is acquiring eSelf.ai, an Israel-based startup behind conversational avatars — AI-generated digital humans that can talk with users — for about $27 million. Kaltura announced today that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire eSelf, a platform supporting more than 30 languages and featuring a user-friendly…
Rad Power Bikes has informed its employees that it will shut down in January if it is unable to find new funding or get acquired, according to an internal staff email viewed by TechCrunch. The company’s leadership is “still fighting to find ways to continue,” and “the cessation of Rad’s operations is not a forgone…
January Ventures co-founder Jennifer Neundorfer stopped by the Equity podcast during TechCrunch Disrupt to chat about fundraising in this very AI-driven market. Founders and investors alike are obsessed with AI, and even Neundorfer said her firm is looking at ways to use AI to make their work more efficient, such as helping to do due…
