Journals

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: NewRetirement, which offers financial retirement planning tools for consumers and enterprise customers, raised a $20M Series A led by Allegis Capital  —  When entrepreneur Stephen Chen’s mom began approaching retirement age, she was forced to borrow… Read More »NewRetirement, which offers financial retirement planning tools for consumers and enterprise customers, raised a $20M Series A led by Allegis Capital (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: Oregon’s governor signs the first US right-to-repair law that bans manufacturers from using “parts pairing” to dictate what replacement components can be used  —  Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has now signed one of the strongest… Read More »Oregon’s governor signs the first US right-to-repair law that bans manufacturers from using “parts pairing” to dictate what replacement components can be used (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica: Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus surpassed OpenAI’s GPT-4 for the first time on Chatbot Arena, a crowdsourced leaderboard used by AI researchers for LLM evaluations  —  Anthropic’s Claude 3 is first to unseat GPT-4 since launch… Read More »Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus surpassed OpenAI’s GPT-4 for the first time on Chatbot Arena, a crowdsourced leaderboard used by AI researchers for LLM evaluations (Benj Edwards/Ars Technica)

Samuel K. Moore / IEEE Spectrum: MLCommons announces results from its MLPerf 4.0 inference benchmarks, which added Llama 2 70B and Stable Diffusion XL; systems with Nvidia GPUs came out on top  —  Times change, and so must benchmarks.  Now… Read More »MLCommons announces results from its MLPerf 4.0 inference benchmarks, which added Llama 2 70B and Stable Diffusion XL; systems with Nvidia GPUs came out on top (Samuel K. Moore/IEEE Spectrum)

Nicola Agius / Search Engine Land: Google says it blocked or removed 5.5B ads and 12.7M advertiser accounts for violating its policies in 2023, up from 5.2B and 6.7M respectively in 2022  —  The number of advertisers who were blocked… Read More »Google says it blocked or removed 5.5B ads and 12.7M advertiser accounts for violating its policies in 2023, up from 5.2B and 6.7M respectively in 2022 (Nicola Agius/Search Engine Land)

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Data observability service Observe raised a $115M Series B led by Sutter Hill Ventures with participation from Snowflake, sources say at a $400M-$500M valuation  —  Enterprises today store and use data across an ever-growing number of… Read More »Data observability service Observe raised a $115M Series B led by Sutter Hill Ventures with participation from Snowflake, sources say at a $400M-$500M valuation (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

Rashi Shrivastava / Forbes: NY-based Hume, which is building a conversational AI that it claims can interpret emotions based on people’s voices, raised a $50M Series B at a $219M valuation  —  Hume has raised $50 million in funding at… Read More »NY-based Hume, which is building a conversational AI that it claims can interpret emotions based on people’s voices, raised a $50M Series B at a $219M valuation (Rashi Shrivastava/Forbes)

CNBC: Amazon plans to invest $2.75B in Anthropic, the second tranche of Amazon’s planned $4B investment in the AI startup, after a $1.25B tranche in September 2023  —  Amazon is making its largest outside investment in its three-decade history as… Read More »Amazon plans to invest $2.75B in Anthropic, the second tranche of Amazon’s planned $4B investment in the AI startup, after a $1.25B tranche in September 2023 (CNBC)

Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: Google adds a tool that lets US users swipe left or right to rate apparel and accessories to get style recommendations on mobile browsers and Google app  —  Google is rolling out a new update that… Read More »Google adds a tool that lets US users swipe left or right to rate apparel and accessories to get style recommendations on mobile browsers and Google app (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: Google adds AI-generated trip itineraries to Search, translation to Circle to Search, and curated recommendations in Maps in 40+ cities across the US and Canada  —  Google is introducing a handful of updates that aim… Read More »Google adds AI-generated trip itineraries to Search, translation to Circle to Search, and curated recommendations in Maps in 40+ cities across the US and Canada (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)