Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan wants to bring the famed accelerator’s Demo Day presentations back as in-person events by the end of the year. During Tan’s opening remarks during Wednesday’s YC summer cohort Demo Day, he said this week’s Demo Day presentations will “knock on wood” be the final ones held entirely online. Tan added … Read more
At its Meta Connect 2024 conference, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company’s developing a “neural interface” that can be used to control its prototypical Orion AR glasses. The interface, which seems inspired by devices developed by CTRL-Labs, a brain-machine interface startup Meta acquired in 2019, takes the form of a wrist-worn wearable. Wearers … Read more
At Wednesday’s Meta Connect event, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced what he described as Meta teases Orion, ‘the most advanced glasses the world has ever seen.’ The glasses, which are notably significantly smaller than Snap’s recently announced Spectacles 5, are true AR. Orion utilize tiny projects built into the glasses temples to create a heads-up display … Read more
Consumer apps can generate a lot of traffic and revenue, but some carriers have complained that they’re not getting a fair cut of the pie for carrying all that traffic across their network infrastructure. But if you were looking for a test case that demonstrated how the two sides might be able to work together, … Read more
The European Commission has revealed a list of the first 100-plus signatories to the AI Pact — an initiative focused on getting companies to publish “voluntary pledges” on how they approach and deploy artificial intelligence. While the bloc’s legally binding risk-based AI rulebook (the AI Act) entered into force last month, it will be several … Read more
Meta has acquired the Threads.com domain name, according to Whois records of the URL that were updated on September 24. Users on domain-related forums pointed out this transfer, and TechCrunch confirmed the Whois records of Threads.com separately, which list Meta’s Instagram as the registrant. TechCrunch reached out to Meta to understand if it plans to … Read more
Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook service, continues to experiment with AI to improve audiobook discovery and offer customized recommendations. Recent tests involve AI-powered tags, which analyze customer feedback to offer tailored suggestions according to individual preferences, and topic pages that recommend tags to help you find closely related subjects. The experiments are only available to 50% … Read more
Meta Connect 2024 kicks off today at 10 a.m. PT, with a keynote from CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The developer event is set to focus on Meta’s XR (VR and AR) platforms, the metaverse, and the Facebook parent’s open source generative AI platform, Llama. Some new hardware, including the Meta Quest 4, updates to the Meta … Read more
The promise of blockchain to change the world hasn’t materialized. For the most part, the technology has instead enabled people to speculate on a new asset class. A big hurdle to realizing blockchain’s full potential, web3 proponents argue, is that decentralized services are incredibly hard to build. Tomasz Tunguz, best known for his popular startup … Read more
Anyone who works at a computer for eight-plus hours a day will likely know that the amount of tools and “context switching” required to stay productive can be overwhelming. “Where did I put that file?” “How do I manage all my Bluetooth devices?” “How quickly can I switch from my to-do list, to my GitHub, … Read more