February 2024

Google’s Bard chatbot gets the Gemini Pro update globally

February 1, 2024

Google announced today that its Bard chatbot is now powered by the Gemini Pro model globally with support for over 40 languages including Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. In December, Google launched its new generative AI models with flagship Gemini Ultra, “lite” Gemini Pro, and Gemini Nano, […]

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Google launches an AI-powered image generator

February 1, 2024

Taylor Swift deepfakes be damned, Google is releasing a new AI-powered tool, TextFX, for image creation. Underpinned by Imagen 2, a GenAI image model developed by Google’s DeepMind team, TextFX offers a prompt-based UI to create and edit images. That’s no different than tools like OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, Midjourney, Meta’s Imagine with Meta AI and […]

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Okta lays off 400 employees — almost exactly a year after last staff cuts

February 1, 2024

U.S. access and identity management giant Okta has said it is laying off approximately 400 employees, or 7% of its global workforce. The layoffs come almost exactly a year to the day after Okta announced plans to reduce its workforce by 5%, about 300 employees. In an email sent to employees, which Okta shared with […]

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AI2 open sources text-generating AI models — and the data used to train them

February 1, 2024

The Allen Institute for AI (AI2), the nonprofit AI research institute founded by late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is releasing several GenAI language models it claims are more “open” than others — and, importantly, licensed in such a way that developers can use them unfettered for training, experimentation and even commercialization Called OLMo, an acronym […]

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Cast your votes for TC Early Stage Audience Choice Roundtables

February 1, 2024

A not-so-humble brag here, so brace yourself. The programming at TechCrunch Early Stage — April 25 in Boston, Massachusetts — is gonna be off the proverbial hook. How do we know? We read hundreds of applications from experienced founders and startup ecosystem experts eager to participate in Audience Choice for a chance to present at […]

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The Download: recycling’s role, and tidying robots

February 1, 2024
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Why recycling alone can’t power climate tech The potential to use old, discarded products to make something new sounds a little bit like magic. This is why, in some cases at least, recycling…