Google announced on Tuesday that Google Fi, its telecommunications service, is getting several new updates, including AI noise filters and RCS web messaging. The tech giant says calls will now use AI-enhanced audio to reduce background noise and improve voice clarity, even when speaking to someone on a landline or older device. The company says…
I’ve often joked that I would love to have a pet if only animals did not need to poop and eat smelly, wet mush from a can. I want a fuzzy pal to hang out with all day, but then I’ll hear that my friend spent $500 at the vet because their cat nibbled on…
After earlier this year launching a marketplace that allows websites to charge AI bots for scraping their content, web infrastructure provider Cloudflare is pushing for increased regulation in the AI sector. The company’s chief executive Matthew Prince says he’s in London to speak with the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), where he’s proposing stricter…
Today, OpenAI launched its new Atlas web browser in a surprise livestream. The show started with CEO Sam Altman himself, speaking directly to the audience. “We think AI represents a rare, once-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be,” Altman said. “In the same way that, for the previous way people used the internet, the…
LangChain raised $125 million at a $1.25 billion valuation, the company announced on Monday. TechCrunch reported in July that the provider of a popular open source framework for building AI agents was raising fresh funds at a valuation of at least $1 billion. The deal was led by IVP, as we previously reported. New investors…
As the entertainment industry reckons with when and how to use generative AI in filmmaking, Netflix is leaning in. In its quarterly earnings report released on Tuesday afternoon, Netflix wrote in its letter to investors that it is “very well positioned to effectively leverage ongoing advances in AI.” Netflix isn’t planning to use generative AI…
Sesame, a conversational AI startup and smart glasses maker, has raised a $250 million Series B round and is opening up its beta to a select group of testers, the company announced Tuesday. The startup, headed by former Oculus co-founder and CEO Brendan Iribe and Ankit Kumar, former CTO of AR startup Ubiquity6, is working…
Fal.ai, a startup that hosts image, video, and audio AI models for developers, has closed a new round valuing the company at over $4 billion, four people familiar with the deal said. The company raised approximately $250 million, two of the people said. Major investors in the round are Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia, according to…
Back in March, Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy organization disbanded its energy policy team, cutting dozens of staffers. Now, some of them have founded a new organization, the nonprofit Clean Economy Project. Similar to Breakthrough Energy, the organization is betting that clean energy can beat fossil fuels on cost, if not today then in the near…
Codi, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup founded by Christelle Rohaut and Dave Schuman, is launching what it hails as the first AI-powered platform to fully automate office management. Codi was founded in 2018, in a pre-pandemic world, with a mission to help companies find flexible office spaces. It was more of a marketplace, as TechCrunch previously reported, that matched companies…
