Category: Uncategorized

AI training data has a big price tag, one best-suited for deep-pocketed tech firms. This is why Harvard University plans to release a dataset that includes in the region of 1 million public-domain books, spanning genres, languages, and authors including Dickens, Dante, and Shakespeare, which are no longer copyright-protected due to their age. The new… Read more

Gigs, a platform that makes it easier for any company to become a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), has raised $73 million in a Series B round of funding. The announcement comes as countless companies have added mobile networking services to their product lineup this past year, including neobanks such as Nubank (a Gigs customer)… Read more

Bad news for anyone out there who still uses Skype: the Microsoft-owned phone and messaging platform has quietly stopped letting users top-up accounts with credit and buy Skype phone numbers. Instead, Skype is locking into SaaS mode: it’s pushing users to take monthly subscriptions for regional and global Skype-to-phone plans, for a set monthly fee,… Read more

It’s becoming increasingly costly to develop and run AI. OpenAI’s AI operations costs could reach $7 billion this year, while Anthropic’s CEO recently suggested that models costing over $10 billion could arrive soon. So the hunt is on for ways to make AI cheaper. Some researchers are focusing on techniques to optimize existing model architectures — i.e.… Read more

A few years ago, Australia passed legislation requiring platform giants including Facebook-owner Meta and YouTube’s parent Google to negotiate with news publishers to pay for journalism reshares. The News Media Bargaining Code forced Big Tech to cut deals with local news outlets. However, Meta has since moved away from promoting news on its platforms globally… Read more

Security researchers have discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the infotainment units used in some Skoda cars that could allow malicious actors to remotely trigger certain controls and track the cars’ location in real time. PCAutomotive, a cybersecurity firm specializing in the automotive sector, unveiled 12 new security vulnerabilities impacting the latest model of the Skoda Superb… Read more

KHP Ventures is raising a £20 million ($25.5 million) fund specifically aimed at accelerating startups addressing depression, anxiety and psychosis. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. Read more

Right after BeReal got acquired by French mobile games publisher Voodoo this summer, the candid selfie-sharing app which has been popular with Gen Zers changed how it asks users to consent to tracking. The resulting pop-up is now the target of a privacy complaint in Europe. Confirmed breaches of the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation… Read more

Tom Gardiner and Harry Marshall founded Trevor.io in 2016 as a no-code business intelligence platform to help non-data people run analysis on their internal data. That business was solid, but customers increasingly started asking the company for access to the same tools for their customer-facing data. Gardiner told TechCrunch that the company initially resisted the… Read more

Byte Federal, one of the largest Bitcoin ATM operators in the U.S., said the personal data of thousands of customers may have been compromised during a recent breach. In a filing with Maine’s attorney general, Florida-based Byte Federal said hackers tried to access the data of 58,000 customers, including names, addresses, phone numbers, government-issued IDs,… Read more