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TechCrunch Top 3
- And we are back!: That’s what Microsoft says after some of its services, like Outlook, Xbox Live, and Teams, crashed during a “change made to the Microsoft Wide Area Network.” Ivan reports.
- What you send is what you will see: We’ve been hearing about text to image lately, and today is no different. Remember back in October when Shutterstock and OpenAI teamed up to add some artificial intelligence to the Shutterstock libraries? Well today the stock photography giant is showing us the fruits of that labor with a suite of generative AI tools for creating images based on text cues. ingrid has more.
- Connected: BMW i Ventures gets a renewed charge from one of its most recent investments, injecting $13 million into Ampeco, a Bulgaria-based company that provides an electric vehicle charging management platform. Miguel reports. As he points out, you might remember that BMW was one of the early investors in the companies that came out of ChargePoint and ChargeMaster.
Startups and VCs
Injective, a Layer 1 blockchain focused on building financial applications, has launched a $150 million fund ecosystem initiative, platform CEO and co-founder Eric Chen said. jaquelyn In their article, Injective launches a $150 million ecosystem fund to accelerate the adoption of interoperable infrastructure and DeFi.
One of the most notable things about construction robotics is the wide variety of tasks that can potentially be automated. Brian writes. He believes the entire category is a prime target for robotics startups, given that it addresses the big three Ds of automation: boring, dirty, and (quite often) dangerous. It makes sense, then, for Built to buy a construction robotics company, Roin.
Fun things. There are also five more:
When it comes to large language models, should you build or buy?
Image Credits: Jenny Dettrick (Opens in a new window) / Fake Images
Americans spent nearly $20 billion on pizza deliveries in 2021. Most people could probably bake one at home, but speed and convenience are powerful dinnertime incentives.
The same goes for machine learning algorithms: should companies select open source models, license long language models without modification, or customize them and pay much higher usage fees?
“While the build looks extremely attractive in the long term, it requires leadership with a strong appetite for risk over an extended period of time,” writes ML engineer Tanmay Chopra.
Three more from the TC+ team:
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big tech inc
Frederick He took a look at what Google was doing at this year’s Flutter Forward event and found that the open source framework got some new graphics capabilities and is launching its first efforts to build Flutter on WebAssembly and is working on some RISC support. -V. He writes: “Virtually all of these capabilities are still in canary branches and behind experimental flags, but they show where Google plans to take this project in the coming months.”
Now here are five more for you:
