14 h. ago Hugging Face’s new iOS app taps AI to describe what you’re looking at

AI startup Hugging Face has released a new app for iOS that only does one thing: uses offline, local AI to describe what’s in view of your iPhone’s camera. The app, called HuggingSnap, taps Hugging Face’s in-house vision model, smolvlm2, to analyze what your phone sees in real-time without sending data off to the cloud. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Technology

26 h. ago Security scheme could protect sensitive data during cloud computation

MIT researchers crafted a new approach that could allow anyone to run operations on encrypted data without decrypting it first.

Politics

6 d. ago Researchers develop innovative method for secure operations on encrypted data without decryption

A hospital that wants to use a cloud computing service to perform artificial intelligence data analysis on sensitive patient records needs a guarantee those data will remain private during computation. Homomorphic encryption is a special type of security scheme that can provide this assurance.

Politics

7 d. ago Ditto lands $82M to synchronize data from the edge to the cloud

Ditto, a company that’s setting out to bring “resilient” connectivity to edge devices, has raised $82 million in a Series B round of funding at a post-money valuation of $462 million — more than double its Series A valuation from 2023. “Edge,” in the context of Ditto’s industry, refers to a distributed computing model that […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Politics

2 w. ago Ahead of a possible $4 billion IPO, CoreWeave’s founders already pocketed $488 million

CoreWeave’s initial S-1 document for its upcoming IPO is full of surprises. Backed by Nvidia, CoreWeave runs an AI-specific cloud service from its network of 32 data centers that together have more than 250,000 Nvidia GPUs as of the end of 2024, according to the company. Since then, it has also added a number of […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Economics

2 w. ago LlamaIndex launches a cloud service for building unstructed data agents

Agents are the next big thing in AI. Some define these “agents” differently from others, but the general idea is, they’re AI-powered tools that can perform tasks autonomously. The agent hype has reached a fever pitch, but one startup was relatively early to the game: LlamaIndex. Founded by former Uber research scientists, Jerry Liu and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Politics

2 w. ago LlamaIndex launches a cloud service for building unstructured data agents

Agents are the next big thing in AI. Some define these “agents” differently from others, but the general idea is, they’re AI-powered tools that can perform tasks autonomously. The agent hype has reached a fever pitch, but one startup was relatively early to the game: LlamaIndex. Founded by former Uber research scientists, Jerry Liu and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Politics

2 w. ago Senate Democrats slam Social Security job cuts, attack Musk calling it 'Ponzi scheme'

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the benefits system is "at risk."

Politics

2 w. ago Jolla founders take the wraps off an AI assistant to power up their push for privacy

Jolla, the erstwhile mobile maker turned privacy-centric AI business — via sister startup, Venho.ai — has taken the wraps off an AI assistant that’s touted as a “fully private” alternative to letting data-mining cloud giants crawl all over your personal information.   The AI assistant is designed to integrate with apps like email, calendar and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Politics

2 w. ago Snowflake grows startup accelerator with $200M in new capital

Snowflake plans to expand its startup accelerator with $200 million in additional commitments, the tech giant that specializes in cloud-based data storage said Thursday. The new injection of capital follows a string of activity by Snowflake over the past several months that illustrates that company’s growth ambitions. The Snowflake Startup Accelerator, formerly known as the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Politics

2 w. ago CA lawmaker calls trans athlete wave 'religious civil rights issue,' accuses Dems of manipulating youth

California lawmaker Bill Essayli says the trans athlete wave has become a "religous civil rights issue" and is a scheme by Democrats to secure future voters.

Politics