Technology

Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund helped Denver-based AMP Robotics extend its Series C round to $99 million. It was $91 million in November. AMP raised $178 million in the extended Series C, led by Congruent Ventures and Wellington Management, Blue Earth Capital, Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, Tao Capital Partners, XN, Sequoia Capital, …

PaLM 2. GPT-4. Text-generating AI grows daily. Researchers cannot see how most of these models work because they are behind APIs. Open source AI is becoming as advanced as commercial AI. The Allen Institute for AI Research (AI2) will release the Open Language Model in 2024. AMD, the Large Unified …

  MEPs voted this morning to amend the bloc’s draft AI legislation, including requiring foundational models that underpin generative AI technologies like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The amendment agreed by MEPs in two committees required foundational model providers to apply safety checks, data governance measures, and risk mitigations before releasing their models, …

Disney’s total subscriber base fell 2% in the quarter ending March this year. The decline is mostly due to Hotstar. Disney+ Hotstar, which serves India and Southeast Asia, lost 4.6 million subscribers in the quarter. For the second quarter in a row, the platform’s subscriber count fell. Hotstar has lost …

The U.S. has seized 13 more domains linked to popular DDoS-for-hire websites. These “booter” or “stressor” websites allow admins to stress-test websites. The services actually launch DDoS attacks to take down websites and networks. On Monday, the DOJ announced that the FBI had seized 13 more domains linked to some …

European conferences and other in-person events are rushing to use facial recognition without considering data protection risks. beware: Spain’s data protection watchdog fined Mobile World Congress (MWC) organizers €200,000 ($224k) for violating privacy rules at the 2021 show in Barcelona. The Agencia Espaola de Protección de Datos (AEPD) found MWC …

LinkedIn will end its China local jobs app and cut 716 jobs. LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky wrote today that “fierce competition and a challenging macroeconomic climate” forced the closure of InCareer, a standalone China app. LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft and with 20,000 employees, plans to add 250 jobs in some …

IBM, like most tech giants, is betting big on AI. IBM Watsonx, a new platform for building AI models and accessing pretrained models for generating code, text, and more, was announced at its annual Think conference. It’s a slap in the face to IBM’s back-office managers, who were recently told …

According to recent tweets by owner Elon Musk, Twitter is purging inactive accounts, which may free up some long-coveted usernames. Twitter has promised to put more usernames back into rotation for years, but despite having an inactive account policy that requires users to log in at least every 30 days …

Western Digital informed customers that their data was stolen on Friday, a month after it disclosed a data breach. On March 26, the company detected “a network security incident” where hackers “gained access to a number of the Company’s systems,” according to a press release. “The Company proactively disconnected our …