This week was an exciting one for the AI community, as Apple joined Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and others in the long-running competition to find an icon that even remotely suggests AI to users. And like everyone else, Apple has punted. Apple Intelligence is represented by a circular shape consisting of seven loops. Or is … Read more
We could be entering a renaissance in human spaceflight research, as record numbers of private citizens go into space—and as scientists improve the techniques for collecting data on these intrepid test subjects. A sign that the renaissance is imminent emerged earlier this week, when the journal Nature published a series of articles detailing the physical … Read more
There’s a lot to happen during next week’s WWDC 2024 keynote. The stakes of the presentation are much higher than your standard post-event market moves. The pressure on Tim Cook and his team to deliver the goods is, in a very real sense, even greater than in the run-up to last year’s Vision Pro announcement. … Read more
Google said Thursday it is rolling out NotebookLM, its AI-powered note-taking assistant, to more than 200 new countries, nearly six months after opening its access in the US. The platform, powered by Google’s multimodal LLM Gemini 1.5 Pro, has also been upgraded with new features and languages to help more people use AI to generate … Read more
The Japanese billionaire who commissioned SpaceX for a private mission around the moon on a Starship rocket has abruptly canceled the project, citing lingering uncertainties about when the launch vehicle will be ready to fly. “I signed the contract in 2018, thinking that DearMoon would launch at the end of 2023,” Yusaku Maezawa, the project’s … Read more
Less than a year after launching iOS, French startup ten ten has gone viral with a walkie-talkie app that lets teens send voice messages to their close friends even when their phones are locked. Whether you think this is a recipe for disaster or the coolest thing you’ve ever heard depends on your age group, … Read more
VCs are clamoring for investments in “hot AI” companies, willing to pay exorbitant stock prices for coveted spots on their cap tables. Yet most are completely unable to make such deals. Yet small, unknown investors, including family offices and high-net-worth individuals, have found their own way to grab shares of the hottest private startups like … Read more
Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje’s weekly roundup of everything you can’t miss in the world of startups. To register here to receive it in your inbox every Friday. In a twist that will shock absolutely no one and pyromaniacs who love to see money burn, Elon Musk’s latest venture, xAI, has secured a fortuitous … Read more
Everything in society can feel like it’s focused on optimization – whether it’s standardized testing or artificial intelligence algorithms. We are taught to know what outcome you want to achieve, and to find the path to get there. Kenneth Stanley, a former OpenAI researcher and co-founder of a new social media platform called Maven, has … Read more