Amazon brings new AI-driven features to Thursday Night Football

As Amazon's Prime Video gears up for its second year as the exclusive rights holder to NFL's Thursday Night Football (TNF), the streaming service hopes to give fans a more enhanced viewing experience with a slew of new AI-driven features. During a demo with Prime Video executives, TechCrunc

Modular secures $100M to build tools to optimize and create AI models

Modular, a startup creating a platform for developing and optimizing AI systems, has raised $100 million in a funding round led by General Catalyst with participation from GV (Google Ventures), SV Angel, Greylock and Factory. Bringing Modular’s total raised to $130 million, the proceeds will

Meta releases Code Llama, a code-generating AI model

Meta, intent on making a splash in a generative AI space rife with competition, is on something of an open source tear. Following the release of AI models for generating text, translating languages and creating audio, the company today open sourced Code Llama, a machine learning system that can gen

Google to go further on ads transparency and data access for researchers as EU digital rulebook reboot kicks in

Google has said it will increase how much information it provides about ads targeted at users in the European Union. It is also expanding data access to third party researchers studying systemic content risks in the region. The actions are among a number of steps it’s announcing today which i

Making AI trustworthy: Can we overcome black-box hallucinations?

Like most engineers, as a kid I could answer elementary school math problems by just filling in the answers. But when I didn't “show my work,” my teachers would dock points; the right answer wasn't worth much without an explanation. Yet, those lofty standards for explainability in long

Nvidia’s Q2 earnings prove it’s the big winner in the generative AI boom

Nvidia’s second-quarter earnings, which were reported Wednesday after markets closed, prove there is money to be made — and lots of it — selling the picks and shovels of the generative AI boom. “A new computing era has begun. Companies worldwide are transitioning from general-purpose to

Snap confirms EU users will soon be able to opt out of content ‘personalization’

Snap has become the latest mainstream social media firm to trail incoming changes in Europe that include the ability for users of its messaging app to switch off tracking-based content personalization. The measures come ahead of a major digital regulation compliance deadline Friday. The European Un

Wand.app raises $4.2M to scale its AI-powered creative tool for artists

Wand.app, an AI-powered creative tool that gives artists the ability to manually customize and visualize their ideas, has raised $4.2 million in seed funding led by O'Shaughnessy Ventures. Unlike AI-powered creative tools that provide limited control over the content they generate, which can be

OpenAI brings fine-tuning to GPT-3.5 Turbo

OpenAI customers can now bring custom data to the lightweight version of GPT-3.5, GPT-3.5 Turbo — making it easier to improve the text-generating AI model’s reliability while building in specific behaviors. OpenAI claims that fine-tuned versions of GPT-3.5 can match or even outperform t

Meta releases an AI model that can transcribe and translate close to 100 languages

In its quest to develop AI that can understand a range of different dialects, Meta has created an AI model, SeamlessM4T, that can translate and transcribe close to 100 languages across text and speech. Available in open source along with SeamlessAlign, a new translation dataset, Meta claims that Se

Meta confirms AI ‘off-switch’ incoming to Facebook, Instagram in Europe

Meta has confirmed that non-personalized content feeds are incoming on Facebook and Instagram in the European Union ahead of the August 25 deadline for compliance with the bloc’s rebooted digital rulebook, the Digital Services Act (DSA). Meta’s move follows a similar announcement by Tik

Match Group is going steady with AI, appoints Zynga alum to lead AI-focused team

Match Group, the company behind dating apps like Tinder and OkCupid, is getting serious about its relationship with AI. After toying with some AI-powered features on Tinder, Match Group is taking things to the next level by appointing former Zynga head of growth Mark Kantor as vice president of inn

Snapchat is expanding further into generative AI with ‘Dreams’

Snapchat is preparing to further expand into generative AI features, after earlier launching its AI-powered chatbot My AI, which can now respond with a Snap back, not just text. With the company’s forthcoming generative AI feature called “Dreams,” Snap will again experiment with A

Customer engagement platform Beamer raises $20M

Beamer, a no-code platform to build tools for measuring and monitoring product engagement, last week announced that it received a $20 million investment from Camber Partners, Beamer’s first outside round of funding. Newly appointed CEO Satya Ganni says that the proceeds will be put toward bui