Author: mindlooptech

Last month, Brett Adcock, founder of robotics startup Figure AI, claimed in a post on X that his company “is now # 1 most sought-after private stock in the secondary market.” But the company has sent cease-and-desist letters to at least two brokers who run secondary marketplaces, those brokers told TechCrunch. These people said Figure AI’s cease-and-desist letters demanded that they stop marketing the company’s stock. Both brokers said they received the letters for the first time after Bloomberg reported in mid-February that Figure was seeking a $1.5 billion round at a $39.5 billion valuation — a fifteenfold increase from…

On Tuesday, Meta held its first-ever AI developer conference, LlamaCon, at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters. The company announced the launch of a consumer-facing Meta AI chatbot app, which will compete with ChatGPT, as well as a developer-facing API for accessing Llama models in the cloud. Both releases aim to expand adoption of the company’s open Llama AI models, but that goal may be secondary to Meta’s true motive: beating OpenAI. Meta’s AI ambition, in broad strokes, is fueling a thriving open AI ecosystem that sticks it to “closed” AI providers like OpenAI, which gate their models behind services. Meta’s…

You’ve got just 5 days to save up to $210 — plus 50% off your plus-one — and get inside the minds of AI’s biggest voices at TechCrunch Sessions: AI. Imagine hearing firsthand from Anthropic’s Jared Kaplan, OpenAI’s startup team, and top voices from firms like Khosla Ventures — all in one day. June 5 is your chance to dive deep into AI from every angle. Join founders, VCs, researchers, and visionaries at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall for a day packed with cutting-edge insight and connections. TechCrunch Sessions: AI 5 days Early BirdSessions you won’t want to miss at TC…

Duolingo is introducing 148 new language courses that were created with generative AI, the company announced on Wednesday. The launch comes as Duolingo has been facing backlash this week after sharing that it was going to replace contractors with AI and become an “AI-first” company. The company says the launch of the new courses doubles its current course offerings and marks the largest expansion of content in Duolingo’s history. “Developing our first 100 courses took about 12 years, and now, in about a year, we’re able to create and launch nearly 150 new courses,” said Duolingo co-founder and CEO Luis…

JetBrains, the company behind a range of popular app development tools, has released its first “open” AI model for coding. On Wednesday, JetBrains made Mellum, a code-generating model the company released for its various software development suites last year, openly available on the AI dev platform Hugging Face. Mellum, trained on more than 4 trillion tokens, weighs in at 4 billion parameters and is designed specifically for code completion (i.e., completing code snippets based on the surrounding context). Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, while tokens are the raw bits of data that a model processes. A million…

Tools for Humanity, the startup behind the World human verification project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, unveiled Wednesday a mobile device designed to help people determine the difference between a human and an AI agent. Rich Heley, Tools for Humanity’s Chief Device Officer and a former Apple director, debuted the Orb Mini device during its “At Last” event in San Francisco. The device looks like a smartphone, and has two large sensors on the front to scan users’ eyeballs. Image Credits:ScreenshotWorld, a web3 project started by Altman and Alex Blania that was formerly known as Worldcoin, is based on…

Microsoft launched several new “open” AI models on Wednesday, the most capable of which is competitive with OpenAI’s o3-mini on at least one benchmark. All of the new pemissively licensed models — Phi 4 mini reasoning, Phi 4 reasoning, and Phi 4 reasoning plus — are “reasoning” models, meaning they’re able to spend more time fact-checking solutions to complex problems. They expand Microsoft’s Phi “small model” family, which the company launched a year ago to offer a foundation for AI developers building apps at the edge. Phi 4 mini reasoning was trained on roughly 1 million synthetic math problems generated…

Amazon on Wednesday released what the company claims is the most capable AI model in its Nova family, Nova Premier. Nova Premier, which can process text, images, and videos (but not audio), is available in Amazon Bedrock, the company’s AI model development platform. Amazon says that Premier excels at “complex tasks” that “require deep understanding of context, multi-step planning, and precise execution across multiple tools and data sources.” Amazon announced its Nova lineup of models in December at its annual AWS re:Invent conference. Over the last few months, the company has expanded the collection with image- and video-generating models as…

To understand the new smart watched and other pro devices of recent focus, we should look to Silicon Valley and the quantified movement. Apple’s Watch records exercise, tracks our moves throughout the day, checks the amount of time we are stood up and reminds us to get up and move around if we have been sat for too long – let’s not forget Tim Cooks “sitting is the new coolness” line. To its detractors, love at first sight must be an illusion – the wrong term for what is simply infatuation, or a way to sugarcoat lust. Best Chromebook: Google…