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Watch: Elon Musk’s big plans for xAI include raising $6 billion

April 29, 2024 10:32 PM0


TechCrunch recently broke the news that Elon Musk’s xAI is raising $6 billion at a pre-money valuation of $18 billion.

The deal hasn’t closed yet, so the numbers could change. But it sounds like Musk is making an ambitious pitch to investors about his 10-month-old startup — a rival to OpenAI, which he also co-founded and is currently suing for allegedly abandoning its initial commitment to focus on the good of humanity over profit.

You may be wondering: Doesn’t Musk have enough companies already? There’s Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), Neuralink, The Boring Company … maybe he should spend his time on the existing businesses that have struggles of their own.

But in the xAI pitch, Musk’s connection to these other companies is a feature, not a bug. xAI could get access to crucial training data from across his empire — and its technology could, in turn, help Tesla achieve its dream of true self-driving cars and bring its humanoid Optimus robot into factories.

Of course, Musk’s hype doesn’t always match up to reality. But with this impressive new funding, xAI could become an even more formidable competitor in the AI world. Hit play, then leave your thoughts below!


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Watch: Between Rabbit’s R1 vs Humane’s Ai Pin, which had the best launch? | TechCrunch

April 26, 2024 9:37 PM0


After a successful unveiling at CES, Rabbit is letting journalists try out the R1 — a small orange gadget with an AI-powered voice interface. This comes just weeks after the launch of the Humane Ai Pin, which is similarly pitched as a new kind of mobile device with AI at its center.

While we’re still waiting on in-depth reviews (as opposed to an initial hands-on) of the R1, there are some pretty clear differences between the two devices.

Most noticeably, the Ai Pin is screen-less, relying instead on a voice interface and projector, while the R1 has a 2.88 inch screen (though it’s meant to be used for much more than typing in your WiFi password). And while the AI pin costs $699, plus a $24 monthly subscription, the R1 is just $199. Both, according to TechCrunch’s Brian Heater, show the value of good industrial design.

It sounds like neither the Ai Pin (which got some truly scathing reviews) nor the R1 makes a fully convincing case that it’s time to replace our smartphones — or that AI chatbots are the best way to get information from the internet. But if nothing else, it’s exciting that the hardware industry feels wide open again. Press play, then let us know if you’re playing to try either the R1 or the Ai Pin!


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Watch: FTC bans noncompetes, court challenge incoming | TechCrunch

April 25, 2024 9:47 PM0


The Federal Trade Commission voted 3-2 this week to ban noncompete agreements. While the FTC estimates that nearly one in five American workers is subject to a noncompete, these agreements haven’t been a huge issue in Silicon Valley, because they’re not enforceable in California.

This has arguably been one of the region’s competitive advantages, as it allows employees to start something new without worrying (in most cases) that they’ll have to spend the next few years battling their old employer in court.

With this ban, the FTC could give employees across the United States that same freedom. In fact, the commission claims this will lead to the creation of 8,500 new startups annually, as well as 17,000 to 29,000 additional patents in an average year.

Some caveats: This rule only applies to noncompetes, not non-disclosure agreements, so former employees can still get into legal hot water if their old company accuses them of spilling trade secrets. And while the FTC says most existing noncompetes will no longer be enforceable, existing noncompetes for senior executives will still hold.

Most significantly, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says it will sue the FTC over the rule, arguing that the commission doesn’t have the legal authority to issue this kind of regulation.

Hit play, then let me know what you think! (And if you’re pining for your Alex Wilhelm, fear not: He’ll be back hosting the TechCrunch Minute next week.)


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Robotic Automations

Watch: Why Perplexity AI could be worth up to $3B

April 24, 2024 9:30 PM0


Perplexity AI‘s latest, large fundraising event could be quickly superseded by another, even larger chunk of capital, TechCrunch reports. Yes, the $62.7 million that the startup raised at just over a $1 billion valuation could be quickly stomped on by a raise of as much as $250 million at a valuation that is up to 2.5 to 3x larger.

What’s going on? Quick revenue growth at the company that has reportedly reached around $20 million worth of annual recurring revenue. Sure at $1 billion that’s a 50x revenue multiple, but if the company is on a quick enough growth pace, investors paying up to 150x for its current ARR might not be as insane as it looks on paper, even if similarly priced bets back in the 2021-era often struggled.

The hype around Perplexity is a big deal, because it shows that some startups are doing well enough to attract outsized venture investment. Good. A concern that I have had for some time is that the AI boom would wind up merely enriching incumbents and not lifting enough startups up to create a new class of tech giants; my view is that having a permanent class of tech gods is not the best way to drive long-term innovation. And I think that search, in general, is a good indication of what happens when technology giants fail to meaningfully compete with one another.

So, news from Amazon and Microsoft and Meta and Adobe in the AI realm felt like a reminder this week that Big Tech is going to try to eat the AI moment. Perplexity, to bastardize Star Wars, could be among our key hopes to avoid merely seeing Microsoft or Alphabet add another trilly to their market cap. Hit play, let’s have a chat!


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Watch: How Headspin's founder fraudsters almost get away with lying to investors | TechCrunch

April 23, 2024 11:07 PM0


News that the former founder of HeadSpin is headed to prison for fraud was further evidence that the last boom in the paired worlds of startup and venture capital led to more than just a little bit of fraud. Manish Lachwani, founder in question, is getting prison time and a massive fine for lying to investors, lies that allowed his company to raise nine-figures worth of funding.

The company persists, and would likely prefer to let the entire situation fade from the public eye. Fair enough, but the tale of Lachwani — the New York Times reports that Lachwani inflated “HeadSpin’s revenue nearly fourfold, making false claims about its customers and creating fake invoices to cover it up” — is not an isolated case.

Even past the somewhat dated frauds at Theranos and Rothenberg Ventures, there’s been a lot to cover lately. From investor complaints about Bolt’s fundraising, to BloomTech, Nikola, Binance, and FTX, we’ve seen a lot of financial shenanigans. Why are we seeing so much fraud and related behavior from upstart tech companies?

Pace, in a sense. A historically abnormal period of low interest rates, capital hungry for yield flooded into the venture capital world. As a result, investors got very busy with their checkbooks and sometimes spent less time on diligence. Recall that many very young startups are more ideas and potential than hard assets and historical cash flows, so what counts as diligence for a PE firm looking to buy, say, gas stations, is different than doing diligence on a Seed-stage startup. But capital poured into late-stage startups too, leading to a lot of capital moving very quickly. Mistakes were made, or, put another way, some founders saw the boom time as a period in which they could bend the rules.

One thing to keep in mind is that as a market reaches its peak, you will often see fraud explode. Consider it a top warning. Hit play, let’s talk about it!


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Watch: Tesla's Cybertruck recall, layoffs set the stage for its Q1 earnings | TechCrunch

April 22, 2024 10:12 PM0


Tesla is not having a good start to the week. In its defense, it didn’t have a very good end to last week, either.

Today the news is that recent price cuts have irked Tesla investors, who sent its shares off around 4% in early trading today. Those losses have extended Tesla’s total share-price declines to around 43% for the year. Which is, as they say, a lot.

But those price cuts are hardly the only issues needling the U.S.-based EV company. Tesla’s last week saw the company slash its staffing, including high-performers. With the company reporting earnings tomorrow, its actions at the moment are under even greater scrutiny than usual.

The backdrop to all of this is the company’s apparent move away from a basement-priced EV, and towards a robotaxi effort that some consider to be technologically premature. Regardless, Tesla’s price cuts, pivots, and mass-recall of its Cybertruck vehicle are not the recipe for content investors. Hit play, and let’s have some fun.

After we recorded this clip, Bloomberg posted a fascinating dig into the company’s current form that we recommend as further reading.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Watch: TikTok and Meta's latest moves signal a more commodified internet | TechCrunch

April 21, 2024 8:19 PM0


The internet’s mega-platforms are slowly merging into a great blob of sameness, and even the hottest companies in the world are not immune from the trend. TikTok’s winning strategy to focus on short-form, vertical video has found fans amongst other internet platforms, and now TikTok is taking a page from its rival, books, reportedly borrowing from what made them popular.

TikTok is working toward launching a new app called TikTok Notes that will allow users to post images in an apparent bid to rival Instagram, a service best known for its static-photo-sharing feature. Instagram, of course, has expanded into video and stories itself, taking pieces of other services and incorporating them into its own product.

Instagram’s parent company Meta’s other services are frequent borrowers as well. As is nearly every social service you can imagine. Recall that great Stories Boom that led to everyone from Line to Spotify to Instagram to LinkedIn trying out the popular sharing format. If it works for one social media service, expect the rest to follow in some manner at some point — probably sooner rather than later.

There’s good logic behind the effort. The answer is why X wants to become a super app; the more a service can offer its userbase to do, the more time they may spend inside the app’s walls. Expanding a feature set can bolster engaged time, and therefore how much revenue a social media service can earn. At the same time, bloat is a real issue that can dilute a user experience and render an app, well, Facebook in time.

This theme — the slow commodification of digital services via sameification — is similar to why we’re seeing LinkedIn try to ape The New York Times’ gaming might, and to some degree why major platform companies in tech wind up trying to be good at everything: the never-ending need to grow revenue. Perhaps this is why your favorite app always feels more and more like an alien world as time passes. It will evolve away from what made it special, and unique, because sticking to those guns is not the way to create a service that the maximum number of people will use. For that, you need to become Facebook.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Watch: Meta's new Llama 3 models give open-source AI a boost

April 19, 2024 10:05 PM0


New AI models from Meta are making waves in technology circles. The two new models, part of the Facebook parent company’s Llama line of artificial intelligence tools, are both open-source, helping them stand apart from competing offerings from OpenAI and other well-known names.

Meta’s new Llama models have differently sized underlying datasets, with the Llama 3 8B model featuring eight billion parameters, and the Llama 3 70B model some seventy billion parameters. The more parameters, the more powerful the model, but not every AI task needs the largest possible dataset.

The company’s new models, which were trained on 24,000 GPU clusters, perform well across benchmarks that Meta put them up against, besting some rivals’ models that were already in the market. What matters for those of us not competing to build and release the most capable, or largest AI models, what we care about is that they are still getting better with time. And work. And a lot of compute.

While Meta takes an open-source approach to AI work, its competitors are often prefer more closed-source work. OpenAI, despite its name and history, offers access to its models, but not their source code. There’s a healthy debate in the world of AI regarding which approach is better, for both speed of development and also safety. After all, some technologists — and some computing doomers, to be clear — are worried that AI tech is developing too fast and could prove dangerous to democracies and more.

For now, Meta is keeping the AI fires alight, offering a new challenge to its peers and rivals to best their latest. Hit play, and let’s talk about it!


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Watch: NASA needs your help to bring rocks back from Mars

April 19, 2024 4:22 AM0


NASA’s decision to scrap its $11 billion, 15-year mission to Mars to bring back samples could create a startup feeding frenzy, TechCrunch reports. Describing its plans as too slow, and too expensive, NASA is going back to the drawing board, with an eye on getting the space industry to help. Sure, you might worry that NASA can’t manage its own mission on a timeline and budget that it deems acceptable, but the chance for a deluge of dollars to engulf the startups working on making space more accessible could prove a massive boon.

Startups are not all social media apps, enterprise software and NFT-based online games. There are a good number focused on the bits-and-atoms side of the technology fence, even if the idea of building advanced hardware without a software element is all but unthinkable. Ergo, hardware startups are really working both sides of the digital divide at the same time.

But space startups are not worried about it. Looking at recent TechCrunch space headlines, we can see that Dark Space is working on a way to clear space debris; True Anomaly’s working on landing on the moon; Varda Space’s work to manufacture drugs in space and bring them back to Earth seems to work, so it raised $90 million more; Orbital Fab wants to refuel satellites; the list goes on and on.

So, the NASA money might have a bunch of startup-sized buckets to drip into, and I am here for it. Yes, I am a gigantic science-fiction dweeb, but I am still nothing short of dizzy with hype for our future as a species in space. To that end, if any startup that works with NASA on the Mars rock mission needs a human to send up there to check on the dials and such, I’m your guy. Hit play, let’s have some fun!


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Watch: Google's Gemini Code Assist wants to use AI to help developers

April 18, 2024 7:17 PM0


Can AI eat the jobs of the developers who are busy building AI models? The short answer is no, but the longer answer is not yet settled. News this week that Google has a new AI-powered coding tool for developers, straight from the company’s Google Cloud Next 2024 event in Las Vegas, means that competitive pressures between major tech companies to build the best service to help coders write more code, more quickly is still heating up.

Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot service that has similar outlines has been steadily working toward enterprise adoption. Both companies want to eventually build developer-helping tech that can understand a company’s codebase, allowing it to offer up more tailored suggestions and tips.

Startups are in the fight as well, though they tend to focus more tailored solutions than the broader offerings from the largest tech companies; Pythagora, Tusk and Ellipsis from the most recent Y Combinator batch are working on app creation from user prompts, AI agents for bug-squashing and turning GitHub comments into code, respectively.

Everywhere you look, developers are building tools and services to help their own professional cohort.

Developers learning to code today won’t know a world in which they don’t have AI-powered coding helps. Call it the graphic calculator era for software builders. But the risk — or the worry, I suppose — is that in time the AI tools that are ingesting mountains of code to get smarter to help humans do more will eventually be able to do enough that fewer humans are needed to do the work of writing code for companies themselves. And if a company can spend less money and employ fewer people, it will; no job is safe, but some roles are just more difficult to replace at any given moment.

Thankfully, given the complexities of modern software services, ever-present tech debt and an infinite number of edge cases, what big tech and startups are busy building today seem to be very useful coding helps and not something ready to replace or even reduce the number of humans building them. For now. I wouldn’t take the other end of that bet on a multi-decade time frame.

And for those looking for an even deeper dive into what Google revealed this week, you can head here for our complete rundown, including details on exactly how Gemini Code Assist works, and Google’s in-depth developer walkthrough from Cloud Next 2024.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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