The standard Gemma models were only available in 2 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, making this quite a step up.
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TikTok is pulling out all the stops to prevent its impending ban in the United States. Aside from initiating legal action against the U.S. government, that means shaping up its public image. On Tuesday, the platform announced its TikTok Change Makers Program, which includes 50 global creators who “create a positive impact on and beyond […]
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Apple is bringing new accessibility features to iPads and iPhones, designed to cater to a diverse range of user needs.
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Peloton, the exercise equipment maker and creator of online fitness classes, has announced that it’s laying off 15 percent of its workforce — 400 people — as CEO, president, and board director Barry McCarthy steps down after two years in the role.
McCarthy was previously CFO at Spotify and Netflix, and was coerced out of retirement in early 2022 when Peloton co-founder and then-CEO John Foley stepped down as part of a major cost-cutting effort that saw 2,800 employees laid off.
This is a developing story, refresh for updates.
Google Cloud on Tuesday joined AWS and Azure in announcing its first custom-built Arm processor, dubbed Axion. Based on Arm’s Neoverse 2 designs, Google says its Axion instances offer 30% better performance than other Arm-based instances from competitors like AWS and Microsoft and up to 50% better performance and 60% better energy efficiency than comparable X86-based instances.
Google did not provide any documentation to back these claims up and, like us, you’d probably like to know more about these chips. We asked a lot of questions, but Google politely declined to provide any additional information. No availability dates, no pricing, no additional technical data. Those “benchmark” results? The company wouldn’t even say which X86 instance it was comparing Axion to.
“Technical documentation, including benchmarking and architecture details, will be available later this year,” Google spokesperson Amanda Lam said.
Maybe the chips aren’t even ready yet? After all, it took Google a while to announce Arm-chips in the cloud, especially considering that Google has long built its in-house TPU AI chips and, more recently, custom Arm-based mobile chips for its Pixel phones. AWS launched its Graviton chips back in 2018.
To be fair, though, Microsoft only announced its Cobalt Arm chips late last year, too, and those chips aren’t yet available to customers, either. But Microsoft Azure has offered instances based on Ampere’s Arm servers since 2022.
In a press briefing ahead of Tuesday’s announcement, Google stressed that since Axion is built on an open foundation, Google Cloud customers will be able to bring their existing Arm workloads to Google Cloud without any modifications. That’s really no surprise. Anything else would’ve been a very dumb move on Google Cloud’s part.
“We recently contributed to the SystemReady Virtual Environment, which is Arm’s hardware and firmware interoperability standard that ensures common operating systems and software packages can run seamlessly in ARM-based systems,” Mark Lohmeyer, Google Cloud’s VP for compute and AI/ML infrastructure, explained. “Through this collaboration, we’re accessing a broad ecosystem of cloud customers who have already deployed ARM-based workloads across hundreds of ISVs and open source projects.”
More later this year.
Heya, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the noteworthy happenings in tech over the past several days (and change).
Famed startup accelerator Y Combinator had its Demo Days, and the venture desk took it all in with an appropriately skeptical eye. You can read their day one and day two coverage, along with an AI roundup from yours truly and analysis pieces from the rest of the dogged edit team.
But the world didn’t stop turning for YC. Also this week, Microsoft and Quantinuum, a quantum computing startup, made a scientific breakthrough — or so they claim. The companies say that they were able to run thousands of experiments on a quantum computer without a single error, a feat that’s long eluded the industry.
Elsewhere, Apple could be getting into home robots. Reportedly, the company — fresh off its decision to cancel its long-in-the-works autonomous EV — has put Apple Home and AI execs on some form of robotics project for households, although many of the details have yet to be finalized.
Lots else happened. We recap it all in this edition of WiR — but first, a reminder to sign up to receive the WiR newsletter in your inbox every Saturday.
Canoo paid for its CEO’s jet: Kirsten reports that EV startup Canoo paid the rent for the CEO’s private jet — $1.7 million— in 2023. That’s double the amount of revenue the company generated that year.
AT&T leak: Phone giant AT&T has reset millions of account passcodes after a huge cache of data containing customer records was dumped online earlier this month, Zack reports.
No ChatGPT account required: OpenAI is making its flagship conversational AI, ChatGPT, accessible to everyone — even people who haven’t bothered making an account. But it won’t be quite the same experience. Devin has the story.
Microsoft unbundles: Microsoft has introduced new versions of its Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscription services that exclude Teams, its business collaboration chat offering, following scrutiny from European Union regulators and complaints from rival Slack.
Ghost ghosts: Ghost Autonomy, a startup working on autonomous driving software for automaker partners, has shut down after raising nearly $220 million.
Alphabet and HubSpot: Reuters reported on Thursday that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is exploring the possibility of buying Boston-based HubSpot, a CRM and marketing automation company with a market cap of over $33 billion. Ron explains why that’d make for strange bedfellows.
This week on Equity, Alex chatted about BlaBlaCar’s new credit facility (and how it managed to land it), and he discusses how PipeDreams could be onto a clever model of startup construction, GoStudent’s rebound and profitability, Hailo’s chip business and the two new brands that GGV calls home as it divvies up its operations on opposite sides of the Pacific.
And over on Found, Nick Green, the co-founder and CEO of Thrive Market, was the featured guest. Thrive is a membership-based online grocery store that focuses on natural and organic food and household products. Green spoke about how Thrive isn’t just focused on offering healthy options, but also wants to ensure that everyone has access to them — including those with SNAP and EBT benefits.
NSFW on X: The social media company has confirmed that authorized users on the platform can create NSFW communities, ahead of a change that’ll see all NSFW content on X filtered by default.
OpenAI is expanding to Japan, announcing today a new Tokyo hub and plans for a GPT-4 model optimized specifically for the Japanese language.
The ChatGPT-maker opened its first international office in London last year, followed by its inaugural European Union (EU) office in Dublin a few months later. Tokyo will represent OpenAI’s first office in Asia and fourth globally (including its San Francisco HQ), with CEO Sam Altman highlighting Japan’s “rich history of people and technology coming together to do more” among its reasons for setting up a formal presence in the region.
OpenAI’s global expansion efforts so far have been strategic, insofar as the U.K. is a major hub for AI talent while the EU is currently driving the AI regulatory agenda. Japan, meanwhile, is also positioned prominently in the AI revolution, most recently as the G7 chair and President of the G7’s Hiroshima AI Process, an initiative centered around AI governance and pushing for safe and trustworthy AI.
Its choice on who will head up its new Japanese business is also notable. OpenAI Japan will be led by Tadao Nagasaki, who joins the company from Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he headed up Amazon’s cloud computing subsidiary in the region for the past 12 years — so it’s clear that OpenAI is really targeting the enterprise segment with this latest expansion.
As President of OpenAI Japan, Nagasaki will be tasked with building a local team on the ground and double down on OpenAI’s recent growth in Japan which has seen it secure customers including Daikin, Rakuten, and Toyota which are using ChatGPT’s enterprise-focused incarnation which sports additional privacy, data analysis, and customization options on top of the standard consumer-grade ChatGPT.
OpenAI says ChatGPT is also already being used by local governments to “improve the efficiency of public services in Japan.”
GPT-4 customized for Japanese Image Credits: OpenAI
While ChatGPT has long been conversant in multiple languages, including Japanese, optimizing the latest version of the underlying GPT large language model (LLM) for Japanese will give it enhanced understanding of the nuances within the Japanese language, including cultural comprehension which should make it more effective particularly in business settings such as customer service and content creation. OpenAI also says that the custom model comes with improved performance, which means it should perform faster and be more cost effective than its predecessor.
For now, OpenAI is giving early access to the GPT-4 custom model to some local businesses, with access gradually opened up via the OpenAI API “in the coming months.”
Hiring portal Indeed has redesigned the profile page for users, allowing individuals to use an AI-powered writer to fill up work experience, and also added support for multiple resumes. The company has also launched a set of smart sourcing suites for recruiters with features like AI-powered candidate summaries and custom messages.
Recruit Holdings-owned Indeed is revamping its profile page and adding AI-aided features to better compete with rivals like LinkedIn, Talent.com and ZipRecruiter. The new AI-powered work experience writer helps people form better descriptions of different projects.
The company is also adding support for saving up to five resumes so that an individual can easily pick the most relevant copy when applying for different kinds of roles. Both the features will roll out soon, Indeed said.
Image Credits: Indeed
The job seeking portal already had a toggle to make a user’s profile visible to recruiters. But now the company is turning it on by default and making it easily accessible on the settings page.
On the other side, the company is releasing a smart sourcing suite for recruiters to reduce what they are calling “irrelevant outreach” — when employers reach out to candidates that don’t match the job profile. Apart from advanced search filters, companies can also access AI-powered candidate summaries.
Image Credits: Indeed
Indeed is also adding AI-powered smart messaging and automated interview scheduling. The AI-assisted messaging tool enables hiring managers to create or modify communication with job seekers. During the testing phase, the company said it observed that recruiters that used the smart sourcing feature for hiring saved up to six hours per week.
When we asked the company about how it avoids biases or ensures that AI-powered summaries don’t miss out on key details, Indeed said that it employs a responsible AI team to thwart harm.
Indeed’s rival LinkedIn has also infused AI into multiple aspects, such as learning, recruitment, marketing, sales, messaging and profile enhancement.
Deepti Patibandla, senior director of Product at Indeed, told TechCrunch over a call that the company wants to continue its focus on getting people hired.
“While LinkedIn is more of a professional social network or a platform, at Indeed, we want to get more people hired. That is the core value of our business. As a differentiator, we want to make the hiring process easier,” she said.
“We want to make sure that people are getting the right jobs and not getting inundated by random jobs. Those two are our main focal points for now. Long term we see the opportunity for users to come to Indeed to set their career trajectory path.”
Last year, Indeed laid off 2,200 employees, or 15% of its staff. At that time, CEO Chris Hyams said that the organization was “simply too big for what lies ahead.”
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