Hoping to stall a ban, TikTok says it generated $14.7B for US small businesses last year As U.S. lawmakers weigh a possible TikTok ban, the ByteDance-owned short-form video app released an economic impact report on Thursday. In it, the company touts the platform generated $14.7 billion for small- to mid-size …...Read More

If you build it, people will try to break it. Sometimes even the people building stuff are the ones breaking it. Such is the case with Anthropic and its latest research which demonstrates an interesting vulnerability in current LLM technology. More or less if you keep at a question, you …...Read More

OpenAI is expanding a program, Custom Model, to help enterprise customers develop tailored generative AI models using its technology for specific use cases, domains and applications. Custom Model launched last year at OpenAI’s inaugural developer conference, DevDay, offering companies an opportunity to work with a group of dedicated OpenAI researchers …...Read More

Indian quick-commerce startup Zepto has surpassed the annualised sales milestone of $1 billion within just 29 months of its inception, Goldman Sachs wrote in a note Thursday, citing the Zepto management. The startup, which competes with Zomato-owned Blinkit and SoftBank-backed Swiggy Instamart, is also gaining market share, now standing “close …...Read More

Bay Area/Colombia-based delivery robotics firm Kiwibot this week announced that it has acquired Auto Mobility Solutions. The Taipei firm produces chips specifically for the world of robotics and autonomous driving. Details of the transaction have not been disclosed. Kiwi founder and CEO Felipe Chávez Cortés does, however, tell TechCrunch that …...Read More

To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often …...Read More

DataStax made a name for itself by commercializing the open source Apache Cassandra NoSQL database, but these days, the company’s focus is squarely on using its database chops to build a “one-stop GenAI stack.” One of the first building blocks for this was to bring vector search capabilities to its …...Read More

Five months ago, Rooms, a 3D design platform made by ex-Google employees, launched its beta version on the App Store. Today, the free iOS app is getting a big update that will bring a wave of new discovery-first features, including an activity feed, an explore page, the ability to browse …...Read More

Jobs for the Future’s new $50M fund looks to invest in underrepresented founders Two years ago, Jobs for the Future (JFF), a non-profit dedicated to helping low-wage workers attain upward mobility, established a venture arm, JFFVentures, to back innovative employment tech. In a move implying that the launch went well, …...Read More

As big social apps are optimizing for maximum engagement using algorithmic feeds and personalized content recommendations, Retro wants to go in the opposite direction: The company is launching a new feature called journals. It’s a flexible way to share photos with your favorite people and create visual records of whatever …...Read More