Technology

New startup from Postgres creator puts the database at heart of software stack

March 12, 2024

MIT professor Mike Stonebreaker has been at the forefront of database technology for over 50 years. The former Turing Award winner invented the Ingres and Postgres databases and helped launch a number of companies including Streambase Systems (acquired by Tibco in 2013), VoltDB, Tamr and SciDB. Now 80, he knows a thing or two about […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Generative AI video startup Tavus raises $18M to bring face and voice cloning to any app

March 12, 2024

Tavus, a four-year-old generative AI startup that helps companies create digital “replicas” of individuals for automated personalized video campaigns, has confirmed a fresh $18 million in funding and revealed that it’s opening its platform for third-parties to integrate its technology into their own software. Reports emerged back in August that Tavus had raised “about $18 […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Why we need better defenses against VR cyberattacks

March 12, 2024
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. I remember the first time I tried on a VR headset. It was the first Oculus Rift, and I nearly fainted after experiencing an intense but visually clumsy VR roller-coaster. But…

How rerouting planes to produce fewer contrails could help cool the planet

March 12, 2024
A handful of studies have concluded that making minor adjustments to the routes of a small fraction of airplane flights could meaningfully reduce global warming. Now a new paper finds that these changes could be pretty cheap to pull off as well. The common climate concern when it comes to airlines is that planes produce…

LLMs become more covertly racist with human intervention

March 11, 2024
Since their inception, it’s been clear that large language models like ChatGPT absorb racist views from the millions of pages of the internet they are trained on. Developers have responded by trying to make them less toxic. But new research suggests that those efforts, especially as models get larger, are only curbing racist views that…

VR headsets can be hacked with an Inception-style attack

March 11, 2024
In the Christoper Nolan movie Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character uses technology to enter his targets’ dreams to steal information and insert false details into their subconscious.  A new “inception attack” in virtual reality works in a similar way. Researchers at the University of Chicago exploited a security vulnerability in Meta’s Quest VR system that allows…

The Download: rise of the multimodal robots, and the SEC’s new climate rules

March 11, 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. An OpenAI spinoff has built an AI model that helps robots learn tasks like humans The news: In the summer of 2021, OpenAI quietly shuttered its mulrobotics team, announcing that progress was being…

An OpenAI spinoff has built an AI model that helps robots learn tasks like humans

March 11, 2024
In the summer of 2021, OpenAI quietly shuttered its robotics team, announcing that progress was being stifled by a lack of data necessary to train robots in how to move and reason using artificial intelligence.  Now three of OpenAI’s early research scientists say the startup they spun off in 2017, called Covariant, has solved that…

The Download: organoid uses, and open source voting machines

March 8, 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. The many uses of mini-organs This week, we reported on a team of researchers who managed to grow lung, kidney, and intestinal organoids from fetal cells. Because these tiny 3D cell clusters mimic…