Kyle Wiggers, Author at TechCrunch

OpenAI acquired Chat.com

Kyle Wiggers — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 19:11:11 +0000

OpenAI bought Chat.com, adding to its collection of high-profile domain names. As of this morning, Chat.com now redirects to OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the acquisition via email. Chat.com is one of the older domains on the web, having been registered in September 1996. Last year, it was reported that HubSpot co-founder […]

This Week in AI: It’s shockingly easy to make a Kamala Harris deepfake

Kyle Wiggers — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 18:05:00 +0000

Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. It was shockingly easy to create a convincing Kamala Harris audio deepfake on Election Day. It cost me $5 and took less than two minutes, illustrating how cheap, ubiquitous generative AI has opened the floodgates to […]

What Trump’s victory could mean for AI regulation

Kyle Wiggers — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 17:39:22 +0000

A grueling election cycle has come to a close. Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the U.S., and, with Republicans in control of the Senate — and possibly the House — his allies are poised to bring sea change to the highest levels of government. The effects will be acutely felt in the […]

It’s Election Day, and all the AIs — but one — are acting responsibly

Kyle Wiggers — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 00:08:16 +0000

TechCrunch found that X's AI chatbot produced incorrect results about the U.S. presidential election, even as votes were still being cast.

Can Pictionary and Minecraft test AI models’ ingenuity?

Kyle Wiggers — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 14:30:00 +0000

Most AI benchmarks don’t tell us much. They ask questions that can be solved with rote memorization, or cover topics that aren’t relevant to the majority of users. So some AI enthusiasts are turning to games as a way to test AIs’ problem-solving skills. Paul Calcraft, a freelance AI developer, has built an app where […]

Amazon begins delivering select products via drone in Phoenix

Kyle Wiggers — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 14:01:03 +0000

A few months after ending its drone-based delivery program, Prime Air, in California, Amazon says that it’s begun making deliveries to select customers via drone in Phoenix, Arizona. Starting today, Amazon customers in the West Valley Phoenix Metro Area have access to a drone-deliverable selection from Amazon’s catalog, including household, beauty, office, health, and tech […]

Anthropic hikes the price of its Haiku model

Kyle Wiggers — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 18:24:08 +0000

Anthropic’s newest AI model has arrived. But it’s pricier than the last generation, and unlike Anthropic’s other models, it can’t analyze images just yet. Claude 3.5 Haiku, which Anthropic announced last month, matches or bests the performance of Anthropic’s flagship model, Claude 3 Opus, on specific benchmarks. Available through Anthropic’s API and a number of […]

Meta says it’s making its Llama models available for US national security applications

Kyle Wiggers — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 17:19:59 +0000

To combat the perception that its “open” AI is aiding foreign adversaries, Meta today said that it’s making its Llama series of AI models available to U.S. government agencies and contractors in national security. “We are pleased to confirm that we’re making Llama available to U.S. government agencies, including those that are working on defense […]

US laws regulating AI prove elusive, but there may be hope

Kyle Wiggers — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 12:02:47 +0000

Can the U.S. meaningfully regulate AI? It’s not at all clear yet. Policymakers have achieved progress in recent months, but they’ve also had setbacks, illustrating the challenging nature of laws imposing guardrails on the technology. In March, Tennessee became the first state to protect voice artists from unauthorized AI cloning. This summer, Colorado adopted a tiered, risk-based […]

OpenAI has hired the co-founder of Twitter challenger Pebble

Kyle Wiggers — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 20:37:11 +0000

Gabor Cselle, the former CEO and co-founder of Pebble (a competitor to X), has joined OpenAI to work on a secret project. Cselle has been employed at OpenAI since October, according to LinkedIn, but he announced the news in a post on X only yesterday. “Will share more about what I’m working on in due […]

Women in AI: Sophia Velastegui believes AI is moving too fast

Kyle Wiggers — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 13:39:45 +0000

As a part of TechCrunch’s ongoing Women in AI series, which seeks to give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved (and overdue) time in the spotlight, TechCrunch interviewed Sophia Velastegui. Velastegui is a member of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) national AI advisory committee and is the former chief AI officer at Microsoft’s business software division. Velastegui […]

What can we do about the spread of AI-generated disinformation?

Kyle Wiggers — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 23:05:09 +0000

Disinformation is spreading at an alarming pace, thanks largely to openly available AI tools. What can be done about it?

Perplexity launches an elections tracker

Kyle Wiggers — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 21:43:04 +0000

Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine, might hallucinate from time to time. But the company wants to show that it’s trustworthy enough to use for tracking election results. Today, Perplexity announced a dedicated hub for U.S. general election information. Populated by data from The Associated Press and Democracy Works, the company described it in a blog […]

ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot

Kyle Wiggers, Cody Corrall, Alyssa Stringer — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 17:45:00 +0000

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth used by more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies. That growth has propelled OpenAI itself into […]

Chinese military researchers reportedly used Meta AI to develop defense chatbot

Kyle Wiggers — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 14:44:02 +0000

Chinese research scientists linked to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the military wing of China’s ruling party, reportedly used “open” AI from Meta to develop a tool for defense applications. According to Reuters, Chinese researchers, including two affiliated with a PLA R&D group, used Meta’s Llama 2 AI model to create a military-focused chatbot. The […]

Elon Musk skipped a hearing in Philly about his super PAC’s payouts to voters

Kyle Wiggers — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 02:02:37 +0000

A Philadelphia judge ordered X CEO Elon Musk to appear in a hearing Thursday morning over his super PAC’s plan to award $1 million a day to voters in key battleground states. But Musk skipped his courthouse appointment after the same judge granted a request to transfer the case from Pennsylvania state to federal jurisdiction. […]

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy hints at an ‘agentic’ Alexa

Kyle Wiggers — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 21:59:49 +0000

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on Thursday hinted at an improved, “agentic” version of the company’s Alexa assistant — one that could take actions on a user’s behalf. “I think that the next generation of these assistants and generative AI applications will be better at not just answering questions and summarizing, indexing, and aggregating data, but […]

Decart’s AI simulates a real-time, playable version of Minecraft

Kyle Wiggers — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 21:24:36 +0000

Decart, an Israeli AI company that emerged from stealth today with $21 million in funding from Sequoia and Oren Zeev, has released what it’s claiming is the first playable “open-world” AI model. Called Oasis, the model, which is available for download, powers a demo on Decart’s site: a Minecraft-like game that’s generated on the fly, […]

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says lack of compute capacity is delaying the company’s products

Kyle Wiggers — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 19:37:59 +0000

In a Reddit AMA, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted that a lack of compute capacity is one major factor preventing the company from shipping products as often as it’d like. “All of these models have gotten quite complex,” he wrote in response to a question about why OpenAI’s next AI models were taking so long. […]

Meta is making a robot hand that can ‘feel’ touch

Kyle Wiggers — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 17:31:53 +0000

Meta says it’s partnering with sensor firm GelSight and Wonik Robotics, a South Korean robotics company, to commercialize tactile sensors for AI. The new devices aren’t meant for consumers. Rather, they’re intended for scientists. Meta says it envisions them being used to advance research into AI that can “learn about the world in richer detail” […]