Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch: The Commerce Department bans Kaspersky antivirus sales in the US, says Kaspersky threatens national security and users' privacy because it is based in Russia  —  The U.S. government announced on Thursday …

Bloomberg's Ed Ludlow breaks down how cyberattacks impacted car dealerships from across the US. Plus, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever announces a new AI research lab, and AI video startup HeyGen hits a $500 million valuation in its latest funding ro …

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Sources: Poolside, co-founded by ex-GitHub CTO Jason Warner to build AI tools to speed up software development, is raising $400M+ at a $2B+ post-money valuation  —  Paris has quickly established itself as a major Europea …

Paris has quickly established itself as a major European center for AI startups, and now another big deal is in the works. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. …

We’re out-of-this-world excited to announce that we’ve added a dedicated Space Stage to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. It joins Fintech, SaaS and AI as the other industry-focused stages — all under one big roof. And we’re excited to share we’ll be hosting …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Anthropic launches Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which beats its flagship Claude 3 Opus model and outperforms GPT-4o in some tasks, available for free on the web and iOS  —  OpenAI rival Anthropic is releasing a powerful new generat …

Claude 3.5 Sonnet can analyze both text and images as well as generate text, and it's Anthropic's best-performing model yet — at least on paper. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. …

Rachel Metz / Bloomberg: HeyGen, which uses AI to let users create realistic-looking avatars, raised $60M led by Benchmark at a $500M valuation, taking its total funding to $74M  —  HeyGen lets anyone make a photorealistic avatar that can speak in …

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Daydream, which is building a search engine for personalized shopping using GenAI, ML, and computer vision, raised a $50M seed co-led by Forerunner and Index  —  For retailers, e-commerce is a bit of a puzzle at the moment. …

Brody Ford / Bloomberg: Software vendors like Salesforce are getting left behind in the AI boom, as most AI spending at this point is going toward hardware or cloud infrastructure  —  Every day in my email inbox, there's another press release from …

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Accel and Dealroom: out of 221 generative AI startups in Europe and Israel, 27% were created in London, 13% in Tel Aviv, 12% in Berlin, and 10% in Paris  —  Like it or hate it, artificial intelligence - especially genera …

The Biden administration is contemplating additional restrictions on China’s access to advanced chip technology used for AI, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the matter. The proposed measures aim to limit China’s utili …

Ilya Sutskever, one of OpenAI’s co-founders, launches Safe Superintelligence (SSI), just a month after leaving OpenAI. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. …

Hiya, folks, and welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. This week in AI, generative AI is beginning to spam up academic publishing — a discouraging new development on the disinformation front. In a post on Retraction Watch, a blog that tracks …

Bloomberg: A look at Nvidia's 591,078% rise since its IPO in 1999; long-time investors in Nvidia have had to stomach three annual collapses of 50% or more in the stock  —  - Company topped Microsoft in market cap after historic run  — Computer gami …

Companies are extremely interested in generative AI as vendors push potential benefits, but turning that desire from a proof of concept into a working product is proving much more challenging. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use …

Bloomberg: Sources: Nvidia agrees to buy Shoreline, which helps automate fixing software problems, in a deal that values Shoreline at ~$100M; Shoreline has raised ~$57M  —  The deal was struck recently and values Shoreline at about $100 million, ac …

Meta AI removes restrictions in answering election-related queries in India while Google is still restricting them. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. …

The Biden administration is sending an envoy to Japan and  the Netherlands to ask for greater cooperation in limiting China’s artificial-intelligence semiconductor ambitions. Stephen Engle reports on Bloomberg Television. (Source: Bloomberg) …

Bloomberg's Caroline Hyde breaks down why insiders are cashing in on Nvidia's rally as the stock pushes deeper into record territory. Plus, TikTok parent ByteDance embarks on a high-stakes bid to overturn the law requiring them to divest or be banned …

Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: An ex-Snap engineer debuts Butterflies, a social network where users can create AI personas that then interact with users and other AIs via posts and DMs  —  Butterflies is a social network where humans and AIs interact wi …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: AI search engine startup Genspark launches, offering a Sparkpage overview for queries, and raised a $60M seed led by Lanchi at a $260M post-money valuation  —  Move over, Perplexity.  There's a new AI-powered search engin …

Genspark taps generative AI to write custom summaries in response to search queries. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. …

Butterflies wants to let users create AI personas that then take on their own lives and coexist with others.  © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. …

Decagon is a generative AI platform that automates various aspects of customer support channels. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. …

SewerAI sells cloud-based, AI-powered subscription products designed to streamline field inspections and data management of sewer infrastructure. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. …

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Meta launches its much-awaited Threads API, letting developer publish posts, fetch content, manage replies, and view analytics, after an API beta in March 2024  —  Meta said today that it finally launched its much-awaited A …

Business Insider's annual list of the "Most Innovative CMOs" spotlights marketers who are rising to challenges while also using new technology, such as generative AI. …

Suse on Tuesday is announcing its AI strategy and SUSE AI solutions, a new vendor- and LLM-agnostic generative AI platform. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. …

The company says its platform functions like a search engine for materials, enabling the fast evaluation of a “vast number of novel structures.” © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. …

Mark Bergen / Bloomberg: Cambridge-based CuspAI, which is developing AI-powered tech for designing new materials, raised a $30M seed and has added Geoffrey Hinton to its advisory board  —  Former Google AI researcher to work with CuspAI, which has …

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Finbourne, which helps financial companies organize and use their data in AI and other models, raised a £55M Series B at a valuation just over £280M  —  Companies in fields like financial services and insurance live and …

Finbourne, founded out of London’s financial center, has built a platform to help financial companies organize and use more of their data in AI and other models. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. …

Romain Dillet / TechCrunch: Real-time data analytics startup Tinybird raised a $30M Series B, at a “significantly higher” valuation than its $37M Series A; source: it's now valued at $240M  —  Tinybird is not so tiny anymore.  The enterprise data s …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: DeepMind is developing AI tech to take raw pixels of videos and generate synced soundtracks; it's not too convincing, and there are no plans to release publicly  —  DeepMind, Google's AI research lab, says it's developing …

DeepMind says that it sees the tech, V2A (short for "video-to-audio"), as an essential piece of the AI-generated media puzzle. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. …

TikTok launches new gen AI business tools, including Digital Avatars for enhanced branded content and AI Dubbing for translations, as part of its Symphony suite of AI-powered ad solutions. …

Bloomberg: Interviews with ~12 sources detail Google's decision to create the Google DeepMind “super-unit” in April 2023, shifting the AI lab from research to products  —  The company combined its two AI labs to develop commercial services, a move …

TechCrunch: How Black founders are creating AI models like ChatBlackGPT and Latimer.ai that cater to Black and brown communities, as current AI models lack cultural nuance  —  Current mainstream AI models lack too much cultural nuance for some  —  …

Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch: With new logos for Siri and Apple Intelligence, Apple joins OpenAI and others in AI branding that is non-threatening, simple, and non-anthropomorphic  —  This week was an exciting one for the AI community, as Apple join …