Author: TechCrunch News

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 the former chief AI officer at Microsoft’s business software division…

MIT this week showcased a new model for training robots. Rather than the standard set of focused data used to teach robots new tasks, the method goes big, mimicking the massive troves of information used to train large language models (LLMs). The researchers note that imitation learning — in which the agent learns by following…

CareYaya, a platform that matches people who need caregivers with healthcare students, is working to disrupt the caregiving industry. The startup, which exhibited as part of the Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, is looking to enhance affordable in-home support, while also helping students prepare for their future healthcare careers…

CoffeeSpace is on a mission to help people find partners for their startup ideas online. The startup, which exhibited as part of the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, has launched a social networking app that matches people exploring startup ideas and looking for co-founders. …

The decline of X (formerly Twitter) under Elon Musk, has boosted engagement with alternative social networks like Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon, but it has also challenged early adopters who now have too many places to post. Naturally, some entrepreneurs are working to solve this problem with apps that let you cross-post to multiple platforms at…

Buying a home has always been complicated. You have to figure out how much money to put down and how that down payment will affect a monthly mortgage bill. Then there are the closing costs and fees. Kevin Bennett launched Further to try to help make the financial process easier to navigate — especially for first-time…

Instagram on Friday announced an update to DMs, its direct messages inbox, which will improve the experience for those who receive a lot of inbound messages, like creators and influencers. Now, the app is introducing tools that will allow users to sort and filter their “message requests” — meaning those messages that don’t arrive in…

This year, 2024, looks set to be the most profitable yet for hackers, with four ransom demands paid in the tens of millions of dollars. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only…

Companies are concerned that their eagerness to adopt AI has made them more vulnerable to cyberthreats. Per a recent poll of over 350 IT leaders, more than half of the executives surveyed said the complexity of AI applications weakened their organization’s cybersecurity posture. More than two-fifths of executives believe their security teams lack the skills…

Autonomous vehicle technology startup Aurora Innovation is targeting April 2025 for commercial deployment of its autonomous trucks, pushing its timeline back by about a quarter. The company had originally planned to launch by the end of 2024. The company said it delayed the launch so it can continue to validate its self-driving technology. …