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I don’t code much anymore, but I’ve been hacking around with a little murder of Arduinos (apparently, as for crows, the plural for an Arduino is “killer”). My C skills are very rusty and ChatGPT has been an amazingly useful tool for coding and debugging. Being able to throw out a bunch of code, complete with the error message thrown by the compiler, only to have bots tell me that (1) I really shouldn’t be coding and (2) how to fix my n00b mistakes was pretty refreshing.
Of course, none of this will surprise anyone who’s been paying attention, but the sheer number of next-gen startups coming our way would indicate that AI’s tentacles are reaching far.
What’s really impressive is how early we are in our AI journey. Current generation technology is the technological equivalent of a toddler, and all the mediocre reviews various AI software receive is like judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree.
“I’m surprised nobody made a parody of him criticizing a three-month-old baby who says all he does is poop his pants and can’t even finish full sentences,” Steve Blank said in an interview. with TechCrunch last year. “Copilot changed every developer’s life, period. It’s probably increased productivity by 50%, and that’s if you use it wrong.”
I can’t wait to see where this all goes.
On that note. . .
It’s all AI, all the time
Image Credits: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto/Getty Images
FlowGPT emerges as the digital embodiment of the Wild West, a place where the law is more of a proposition and security measures are those pesky things you click past to get to the good stuff. Founded by a duo who seemingly decided that what the world really needed was a marketplace for AI apps ranging from the mildly useful to the potentially evil, FlowGPT is the playground for anyone who thought, “Yeah, I need an app that tells scare stories like I’m a scared girl from a movie, but can he also teach me how to code malware?’ Investors, in a move that screams “What could go wrong?” have thrown $10 million into the venture, proving once again that in the tech world, ethics can be as flexible as your funding is fixed.
Inkit looked at the world’s least reading habits and said, “Challenge accepted.” With a bold plan to become the Disney of the 21st century, they’re throwing $37 million into the problem, why not? The company’s strategy? Use AI to sift through self-published stories on their app, pick the ones that scream potential, and then turn them into bestsellers.
AI will build your website: While Wix and Squarespace reign supreme with their user-friendly drag-and-drop interfaces, 10Web, from Armenia, appears with the goal of taming the beast that is WordPress.
AI will read your news for you: Particle.news, the brainchild of ex-Twitter engineers, is entering the ring with a fresh take on digesting news. Armed with $4.4 million in funding, they have a vision to deliver a “multi-perspective” news reading experience.
AI will code for you: StarCoder 2 is a family of models, with up to 15 billion parameters and trained on 67.5 terabytes of data. StarCoder 2 is trained in approximately 619 programming languages.
The most interesting fundraisers this week
Image Credits: Liia Galimzianova (opens in new window) / Getty Images
Fervo Energy is making sure the geothermal sector is heating up, raising $221 million as it pioneers deep into the Earth’s crust to harness its heat. This Houston-based company is leveraging directional drilling techniques, a legacy of the oil and gas industry, to significantly extend the reach of its wells. By equipping these wells with fiber optic cables and an array of sensors, Fervo maps heat patterns in the subsurface and monitors well performance with unprecedented precision.
Initia enters the blockchain scene with a bold mission to tackle the notorious complexity and fragmentation that plague blockchain application development. The company aims to bridge the gap between the multi-chain universe and application-specific blockchains by offering an improved approach to interoperability and simplification. The company’s approach seeks to remove technical barriers for app developers, aspiring to become the App Store of the crypto world, where accessing and building apps is as simple as possible. With a recent seed funding of $7.5 million, the company is hitting the accelerator.
Money for photos: Photoroom, a Paris-based AI photo editing app, has successfully closed its latest funding round, securing $43 million at a $500 million valuation.
Money for money: Embat has successfully secured $16 million in Series A funding. The company aims to revolutionize the way finance teams work by digitizing and automating processes such as accounting, bank reconciliation and corporate treasury management.
Money for AI: Mistral AI has announced a major development in its journey with the unveiling of a new large language model called Mistral Large, which aims to compete with giants like OpenAI’s GPT-4. This announcement was coupled with news of a strategic partnership and investment from Microsoft.
This week’s big trend: What goes up must come down
Image Credits: Bohdan Skrypnyk/Getty Images
In the VC ecosystem, a new trend is emerging where investors are enthusiastically backing startups designed to help other startups in their shutdown processes. This trend is gaining momentum amid a high startup failure rate and a significant slowdown in venture capital funding after the 2021 boom. Startups like Sunset and SimpleClosure are stepping in to offer simplified, less painful ways to spin off companies, handling everything from legal and financial logistics to asset disposal and capital return. These services are becoming increasingly vital as the number of startups facing shutdown increases, with more than 3,200 US venture-backed companies shutting down last year alone.
Google is done: Google recently found itself in a rather awkward position as Gemini portrayed the Founding Fathers of the United States (known as white slave owners) as a multicultural group, including people of color. This incident has drawn widespread ridicule and criticism, highlighting the challenges of balancing diversity and historical accuracy in AI-generated content.
Apple killed the self-driving car: Apple is scrapping its secretive, long-running effort to build an autonomous electric car, executives announced in a brief meeting with the team Tuesday morning. The company is likely cutting hundreds of employees from the team and all work on the project has stopped.
I am the captain now: Byju Raveendran, the founder of eponymous edtech group Byju’s, told his employees on Saturday that he continues to remain the startup’s chief executive and that rumors of his ouster are “very exaggerated”, a day after a group of shareholders voted to oust him of the extraordinary general meeting.
Other TechCrunch stories not to be missed. . .
Each week, there are always a few stories I want to share with you that somehow don’t fit into the above categories. It would be a shame if you missed them, so here’s a random goodie bag for you:
Please someone buy our cars: Toyota’s recent offering of the 2023 Mirai Limited, a fuel cell vehicle, epitomizes the fuel battle the automaker is in. The deal effectively drops the vehicle’s price from $66,000 to $11,000, factoring in rebates and free hydrogen fuel incentives.
We just rock together: Bumble, once a dominant player in the online dating scene, is currently running on troubled waters, including heavy losses and the layoff of 350 people.
No, Gmail isn’t going away: An old TechCrunch story got a ton of extra traffic when an online hoax claimed Google was crashing Gmail. This is of course not the case.
Apple pours more resources into AI: Apple CEO Tim Cook promises that Apple will “break new ground” in GenAI this year. He made the announcement during the annual meeting of the company’s shareholders.
The tiger grows 65 billion stripes: Payments infrastructure giant Stripe said today it has signed deals with investors to provide liquidity to current and former employees through a $65 billion tender offer.
