Startups

March 27 (Bloomberg) -- Audio startup Krisp on Wednesday launched an AI accent-conversion feature that allows users to change their accents while on a call, according to TechCurnch. The first version supports converting Indian English accents to American English. Krisp said the feature does not change the speaker's voice, but only adjusts the phonemes to match the American pronunciation. The feature is currently being tested in corporate environments, and a Beta version is available on the Krisp desktop app, which users can enable at any time before or during a call. Company co-founder Arto Mina ph...

March 20 - Pete Florence, a senior scientist who worked on robotics and artificial intelligence at DeepMind, has left Google and founded his own robotics startup, Generalist AI, which TechCrunch has learned has received an investment from NVIDIA. TechCrunch has learned that the company has received an investment from NVIDIA. Pete Florence, as co-founder and CEO of Generalist AI, spoke at NVIDIA's GTC conference on March 19 in San Jose,...

March 18 - Liam Fedus, OpenAI's vice president for post-training research, has announced that he's leaving the company to start an AI startup focused on materials science. 1AI noted that Fedus posted a statement on the X platform saying, "My undergraduate degree was in physics, and I've always aspired to apply AI techniques to that field." He also mentioned that since AI in science is one of the most strategic areas for OpenAI to realize general artificial intelligence (AGI), OpenAI plans to invest in his new company...

Canadian AI startup Cohere has released an AI model called "Command A", which focuses on lightweight applications and can be easily deployed with just two NVIDIA A100 or H100 GPUs, claiming "performance comparable to GPT-4o". Cohere said Command is a lightweight application that can be easily deployed with just two NVIDIA A100 or H100 GPUs, claiming "performance comparable to GPT-4o" and "maximum performance with minimum hardware. Cohere said Command A is designed specifically for small and medium-sized business environments, with support for 256k context lengths and 23 languages, which compares favorably to competitors' "similar...

Feb. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Former OpenAI chief technology officer Robert Mulati has co-founded a new AI startup with a number of executives from his "old company," according to a report by Bloomberg. The company, called Thinking Machines Lab, is focused on developing AI models and products that support broader collaboration between humans and AI, aiming to cover a wide range of industries. "While existing systems excel at programming and math, we're developing an AI that can adapt to a variety of human specialties and support a wider range of applications," said other core members of Mulati's team...

Feb. 18 (Bloomberg) -- OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever is raising more than $1 billion (7.264 billion yuan) at a valuation of more than $30 billion for his startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI), according to people familiar with the matter, making SSI one of the world's most valuable private tech companies. (SSI) at a valuation of more than US$1 billion (currently around RMB 7,264 million), making SSI one of the world's most valuable private technology companies. Sources familiar with the matter...

Chip giant NVIDIA completed its acquisition of Israeli AI startup Run:ai on December 30, following an antitrust review of the deal. The European Commission earlier this month unconditionally approved NVIDIA's $700 million (note: currently about 5.113 billion yuan) acquisition. In October, the EU said the deal was subject to antitrust scrutiny. The regulator had previously warned that the deal could weaken the competitive environment in both companies' markets. NVIDIA currently dominates the artificial intelligence graphics processor market, with a market share of 80%...

Odyssey, a startup founded by self-driving pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, has launched an AI-driven tool called Explorer that converts text or images into 3D rendered scenes. 1AI notes that Explorer is similar in some ways to the "world models" recently demonstrated by DeepMind, World Labs, and Israeli startup Decart, with descriptions such as "Japanese garden with lush greenery" typed in. Just type in a description such as "Japanese garden with lush greenery," and Exp...

Recently, an AI startup called Artisan sparked widespread controversy when it placed a large number of advertisements in San Francisco, the heart of Silicon Valley, with a simple and brutal tagline that reads, "Stop hiring human beings. Artisan, a company backed by startup gas pedal Y Combinator that sells customer service and sales workflow software, calls its software product "AI Employee" or "Artisan," according to 1AI. Artisan." SFGate, a local San Francisco media outlet, reports that the billboards, which are scattered throughout the city, say things like "A...

Startup Friend is now previewing a Friend AI pendant hardware that hangs around a user's neck and talks to them through a built-in microphone and speaker, though Friend has yet to announce specifications for the hardware. In addition, Friend has also launched a chat and dialog platform that says users can talk in advance to virtual digital people built into its AI pendant hardware, which Techradar has tested and found to be "dramatic" in its presets, with many of the virtual people claiming to be "[a]nonymous. Fresh off the streets...

AI startup Nous Research recently launched an AI chatbot called Nous Chat, which is based on the "Hermes 3-70B" model fine-tuned with Meta Llama 3.1, and is claimed to have made deep improvements in "model architecture, data synthesis and inference, The robot is based on the "Hermes 3-70B" model fine-tuned from Meta Llama 3.1, and is said to have made in-depth improvements in "model architecture, data synthesis, fine-tuning, and reasoning", and is committed to "human-centeredness". The Nous Chat robot is said to have features such as long pulse memory, multi-round dialog, complex role-playing, and self-monologue, and is currently being used by Nous Research...

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati is raising money from venture capitalists for her new AI startup, according to people familiar with the matter. The new company plans to build AI products based on proprietary models developed in-house, the sources said. It's unclear whether Murati will become CEO of the new company. Murati's representative declined to comment because of the personal nature of the matter, said the source, who asked not to be identified. Though negotiations are still in the early stages, one source said that Murati ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) companies continue to dominate the startup investment market in 2024. Despite some voices in the market suggesting that enthusiasm for AI is starting to wane, data shows that investors remain confident in the space. In the third quarter of this year, AI companies raised a total of 18.9 billion U.S. dollars, accounting for 28% of all venture capital investment. among them, OpenAI even completed a round of financing as high as 6.6 billion U.S. dollars on October 2, becoming the largest single-round financing case in history. The following is the foreign technology media Techcrunch collated 2024 so far fundraising...

French AI startup Mistral AI has launched a new free package that lets developers fine-tune and build test applications using the startup's AI models, the company announced in a blog post on Tuesday. The startup has also dramatically slashed the price for developers to access its AI models via API endpoints and added image processing capabilities to its free consumer AI chatbot, Le Chat. Mistral has launched a free package through its API services platform, la Plateforme, which allows developers to experiment without cost, review...

According to Intelligent Surge, Zhang Qianchuan, head of product at Chinese AI big model startup MiniMax and former head of user products at Today's Headline, has faded out of the company's affairs for personal reasons, taking on the role of product consultant instead. MiniMax responded that the news is true and thanked Qianchuan for his efforts. A person familiar with the matter said that the product consultant is in fact a virtual position, Zhang Qianchuan is no longer involved in the company's business, and the departure is no different. According to the report, Zhang was previously in charge of two of the company's main products, Hoshino and Conch, within MiniMax. 2024, Zhang faded back into the...

French AI programming software startup Poolside is in talks with investors, and people familiar with the matter say the company has yet to release a product, but its estimates have shot up to $3 billion. In a new funding round, Poolside is poised to raise $500 million.Bain Capital Ventures, which is already an investor in Poolside, will be the lead investor in the round. The AI industry has lost some of its fervor because of the lack of obvious commercial returns to be seen, but the fact that investors are investing massively in a startup AI company at this time suggests that they are trying...

TechCrunch reported yesterday (September 11) that French AI startup Mistral has released Pixtral 12B, the company's first multimodal AI big speech model capable of processing images and text simultaneously. The Pixtral 12B model has 12 billion parameters, or about 24GB in size, and the parameters roughly correspond to the model's problem-solving ability, with models with more parameters generally performing better than those with fewer parameters. The Pixtral 12B model is based on the text model Nemo 12B...

In the AI industry, startups go out of business from time to time, and recently, Mayan Kansal, the founder of InsurStaq.ai, announced via LinkedIn that after a year of operations, they had to shut down the company.InsurStaq.ai was focused on developing generative AI applications for the insurance industry. Mayan mentioned in his statement that while their goal was to overhaul GenAI applications for the insurance industry, and they managed to launch some cutting-edge products, gained enterprise-level compliance, and even got press and wind...

Safe Superintelligence (SSI), an AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised $1 billion in cash to help develop safe AI systems that far exceed human capabilities. SSI, which currently has 10 employees, plans to use the funds to acquire computing power and hire top talent. SSI will focus on building a small, highly trusted team of researchers and engineers in Palo Alto, California, and Tel Aviv, Israel…

Recently, the sports technology startup SportAI completed a $1.8 million seed round. This platform uses artificial intelligence to improve sports performance. SportAI's system focuses on coaching, commenting and analysis of sports techniques, using machine learning, computer vision and biometrics. This company focuses on the B2B market and mainly serves coaches, training facilities, media broadcasts, and sports equipment brands and retailers. SportAI's cloud platform can analyze athletes' technical performance in real time and provide personalized feedback to help them in golf, tennis and other sports...

AGI startup Anuttacon has recently welcomed a heavyweight talent to join, which has attracted the attention of the industry. According to the Google Scholar page, Tong Xin, a former Microsoft global research partner, has now joined AGI startup Anuttacon as the chief researcher. At the same time, Wang Yuyang, former vice president and head of live broadcast business at Bilibili, has also joined the company as the president of user ecology. It is reported that Anuttacon is a startup that uses AI technology to create new, innovative, intelligent and deeply attractive virtual world experiences and AGI products. The company is currently recruiting researchers…

In San Francisco, a medical financial technology startup called PayZen has just completed a $232 million Series B financing round to expand its AI-driven medical payment platform. Since its inception, the startup has been committed to eliminating financial barriers to medical care, creating personalized payment plans for patients through its AI platform, while improving the financial outcomes of the medical system. Source Note: The image is generated by AI, and the image licensing service provider Midjourney NEA led this round of financing. Existing investors 7wireVentures, SignalFir…

A small team of only 10 people dared to challenge the status of the technology giant Meta. This is simply the real-life version of "David defeating Goliath"! This startup called Nous Research is no unknown company. The Hermes3 they just launched is based on the 405B model of Llama3.1. Although the team is small, their strength should not be underestimated. This "10-person team" has successfully fine-tuned multiple models such as Mistral, Yi, and Llama, and the number of downloads...

AI startup Exists released a press release on August 15, introducing its latest generative AI platform, which allows users with no programming experience to create high-quality 3D games through text input. The company's founder and CEO Dr. Yotam Hechtlinger said: "Our goal is to bring a paradigm shift to the gaming field with generative AI, just like text, image, video and audio creation." According to the official promotional video, the entire gaming AI tool is easy to use,...