OpenAI rival Anthropic is releasing a powerful new generative AI model called Claude 3.5 Sonnet. But it’s more an incremental step than a monumental leap forward. Claude 3.5 Sonnet can analyze both text and images as well as generate text, and it’s Anthropic’s best-performing model yet — at least on paper. Across several AI benchmarks … Read more
The U.S. is facing an accountant shortage. Fewer first-time candidates took the CPA exam in 2022 than in 2006, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. One possible reason people aren’t as interested in the field is the large amount of drudge work involved: Accountants have to rifle through large amounts of unstructured … Read more
Spotify is now letting non-hosted podcasters upload videos to the platform. The company quietly rolled out the new feature last week, a Spotify spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. Previously, creators who wanted to upload video podcasts to Spotify were required to sign up to be hosted on Spotify for Podcasters, a free platform for podcast creators, … Read more
Worldcoin — the crypto “proof of personhood” startup co-founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman — has been given the green light to resume iris-scanning and other operations in Kenya after a year-long government probe over privacy concerns was dropped. Kenya was one of Worldcoin’s launch countries for its iris-scanning scheme — which the startup was building … Read more
Hero, a new fintech startup based in Paris, is announcing an €11.3 million all-equity funding round led by Valar Ventures ($12.2 million at today’s exchange rate). For the past couple of years, the company has been quietly building an ambitious banking product for small companies that can essentially replace everything you’d expect from a traditional … Read more
Henrik Fisker once envisioned a burgeoning EV empire at the startup he named after himself, which was to be led by the Ocean SUV. But cracks started showing in that vision almost as soon as the Ocean hit the road in 2023. Fisker cut production targets multiple times, failed to meet sales goals and laid … Read more
With India’s election process completed and the new government starting its tenure in office, Meta has removed its restriction on election-related queries using its Meta AI chatbot. However, Google is still applying limits as part of its global restrictions on this type of queries. Meta’s restrictions lift means you can search for queries related to … Read more
When people think about the water they use, they tend to think about drinking water out of the tap or maybe their daily shower. But about 70% of the water we use goes toward growing the crops that feed us, a number that swells to as high as 90% in low-income countries. Finding water for … Read more
Move over, Perplexity. There’s a new AI-powered search engine in town — and its creators think it can best the many, many other attempts out there. Called Genspark, the platform taps generative AI to write custom summaries in response to search queries. Type in a search like, “What’s the best baby formula for newborns?” and … Read more
Pok Pok, a kids app maker focused on building play-based learning experiences for the preschool set, has made a name for itself in the iOS developer community after winning both an App Store award for cultural impact and an Apple Design Award. But now the company is ready to expand its reach by bringing its … Read more
