February 22, 2025

US AI Safety Institute could face big cuts

The National Institute of Standards and Technology could fire as many as 500 staffers, according to multiple reports — cuts that further threaten a fledgling AI safety organization. Axios reported this week that the US AI Safety Institute (AISI) and Chips for America, both part of NIST, would be “gutted” by layoffs targeting probationary employees […]

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October 2023

Aleph is building a platform to reconcile disparate financial data

October 24, 2023

As cloud-based software becomes the norm for many functions inside of modern businesses, data silos are growing into an outsize problem. This is particularly true in the financial industry, where vendors are often faced with reconciling data from a diverse range of sources. According to a 2022 survey from InterSystems — which, it should be […]

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WorkMagic wants to automate all the marketing tasks for Shopify sellers

October 24, 2023

There’s no shortage of startups trying to automate marketing tasks by using generative AI. For WorkMagic, the target users are the millions of small-scale Shopify sellers who it believes can benefit immensely from cost savings in their marketing efforts. Founded in June, WorkMagic offers a full-stack platform that handles everything from image and copy generation […]

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Walmart and Outlier Ventures’ web3 accelerator launches with five startups

October 24, 2023

Walmart’s incubation arm, Store Nº8, and Outlier Ventures have joined forces to launch its web3 accelerator program, Store Nº8 Base Camp. TechCrunch got a first look at its cohort. The 12-week virtual incubator program brought in a flagship group of five companies that specialize in web3 marketing, advertising and improving payment technology, among other themes. […]

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D-ID’s newest app uses AI to make videos from photographs

October 24, 2023

D-ID, the Tel Aviv-based startup best known as the tech behind those viral videos of animated family photos, is bringing its AI video technology to a new mobile app, launching today. Originally available as a web platform, D-ID’s Creative Reality Studio allows users to upload a still image and script and then turn that into […]

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How this Turing Award–winning researcher became a legendary academic advisor

October 24, 2023
Every academic field has its superstars. But a rare few achieve superstardom not just by demonstrating individual excellence but also by consistently producing future superstars. A notable example of such a legendary doctoral advisor is the Princeton physicist John Archibald Wheeler. A dissertation was once written about his mentorship, and he advised Richard Feynman, Kip…

Death to captchas

October 24, 2023
Earlier this year, HBO Max users hoping to sign in to the service had to pass an audio challenge in which they listened to a bunch of tunes and had to select the one with a repeating pattern. When I signed in to LinkedIn recently, it asked me to prove I’m human with an unusual…

Inside NASA’s bid to make spacecraft as small as possible

October 24, 2023
The NASA probe’s retrorockets pressed desperately against the apricot afternoon skies of Mars. It was November 26, 2018, by Earth’s calendar. As the InSight lander worked its way down, slowing from 12,000 miles per hour to a graceful landing, overhead a pair of robots coursing through space monitored its progress. Though InSight was the size…

In the wake of Dash’s closure due to fraud, 5 investors talk due diligence in Africa

October 24, 2023

It’s been a tough year for tech startups globally. These struggles have manifested in layoffs, down rounds and complete shutdowns caused by current market conditions, utter mismanagement or fraud. This August, SoftBank sued one of its portfolio companies, IRL, a social media platform poised to become an event organizing alternative for Gen Zs, for fraud. Earlier […]

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This new tool could give artists an edge over AI

October 24, 2023
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The artist-led backlash against AI is well underway. While plenty of people are still enjoying letting their imaginations run wild with popular text-to-image models like DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion,…