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Hoda Kotb on Thursday revealed the people she thinks would be a perfect replacement for the hour of “Today” she hosted with Jenna Bush Hager, while also addressing speculation she may be taking over Kelly Clarkson’s daytime talk show. Since Kotb’s departure in January, Bush Hager has continued to host the show’s fourth hour with a series of celebrity guests, including Scarlett Johansson, Taraji P. Henson, Keke Palmer, Amy Poehler and Dwyane Wade. Appearing on Bravo’s “What What Happens Live With Andy Cohen,” Kotb shared her top “contenders” to take up a more permanent position. “Anybody would be like so…
Brett Adcock, co-founder and CEO of the humanoid robotics startup Figure AI, made a rare public appearance at the Bloomberg Tech conference on Thursday. Figure has recently been the subject of a couple news articles that questioned its progress with marquee customer BMW. Figure objected so strenuously to at least one of these reports that Adcock publicly threatened to sue the publication. When asked about the skepticism surrounding the BMW relationship and whether it is a pilot or has commercial value to the company, Adcock replied with an explanation of the technical benefit of having robots on a factory floor…
If you’ve been following Anthropic, you’ll know it’s been a busy year for the AI startup. Back in March, the company announced that it raised $3.5 billion at a $61.5 billion valuation in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Since then, it’s launched a blog for its Claude models and, according to Bloomberg reporting, partnered with Apple to power a new “vibe-coding” software platform. Instead of our usual Friday news rundown, today’s episode of Equity brings you a conversation from this week’s TechCrunch Sessions: AI event in Berkeley. Our friend and co-host Max Zeff sat down with Jared Kaplan,…
In this TechCrunch Sessions: AI event, Oracle shares a rundown of how MySQL HeatWave empowers you in building AI-based solutions in areas such as personal productivity, automating workflows for compliance, service, or support, and increasing efficiencies in healthcare, among others. By leveraging HeatWave’s built-in vector store, in-database LLMs, in-database machine learning capabilities, and massively parallel processing architecture, teams can develop richer GenAI applications that incorporate real-time data, advanced personalization, and complex retrieval-augmented generation techniques without the need for separate, specialized databases or complex ETL processes. This approach simplifies the GenAI development stack, accelerates time-to-market, and allows startups and developers to…
EleutherAI, an AI research organization, has released what it claims is one of the largest collections of licensed and open-domain text for training AI models. The dataset, called the Common Pile v0.1, took around two years to complete in collaboration with AI startups Poolside, Hugging Face, and others, along with several academic institutions. Weighing in at 8 terabytes in size, the Common Pile v0.1 was used to train two new AI models from EleutherAI, Comma v0.1-1T and Comma v0.1-2T, that EleutherAI claims perform on par with models developed using unlicensed, copyrighted data. AI companies, including OpenAI, are embroiled in lawsuits…
CNN — The United Nations is calling for an independent investigation after the discovery of dozens of bodies and evidence of human rights violations at militia-run detention facilities in the Libyan capital of Tripoli. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said Wednesday he was “shocked” by revelations of gross human rights violations uncovered at sites run by the Libyan militia SSA. He called for the sites to be immediately “sealed off” and for Libyan authorities to conduct “prompt, independent, impartial and transparent investigations.” Formed in 2021, the SSA (Stabilization Support Apparatus) is an umbrella group of militias that…
A young single mom who was involved with Sean “Diddy” Combs until his arrest last year said she was habitually sexually exploited by the multimillionaire rap mogul in gut-wrenching testimony at Manhattan Federal Court on Friday. In explicit detail, “Jane,” a pseudonym, described multiple days-long events spent sleeping with strangers in dimly lit hotel rooms as Combs watched, masturbated and plied her with hard drugs. During her testimony, she became so overcome with emotion at times she couldn’t speak. Under questioning by Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey, Jane could not estimate how many men the domineering Combs paired her with…
Of all the words in the dictionary, Sarah Franklin says “balance” is perhaps her favorite — especially when it comes to companies embracing AI. Franklin leads the Jack Altman-founded employee performance software company Lattice, which is now worth $3 billion. Both onstage at SXSW London and in conversation with TechCrunch, she spoke a lot about balance — the opportunities in finding it, and the risks of not having it during this AI revolution. “We put people first,” Franklin told TechCrunch, referring to Lattice, which has started to adopt more AI and automation features. Although some companies are touting AI as…
Key points:Bitcoin recovered sharply from $100,000 on June 6, but the bears are expected to pose a strong challenge at higher levels.Several altcoins held their respective support levels, signaling a possible consolidation in the near term.Bitcoin (BTC) made a brilliant comeback on June 6, rising above $105,000, indicating solid demand at lower levels. The recovery could face selling as the price nears $109,588. Select analysts have turned negative in the near term, expecting Bitcoin to drop below $100,000. However, the Hash Ribbons metric, which has a good record of catching long-term price bottoms, recently gave a new buy signal. CryptoQuant contributor…
OpenAI’s head of marketing, Kate Rouch, has announced she’s stepping away from her role for three months while she undergoes treatment for invasive breast cancer. In a post on LinkedIn, Rouch says that Gary Briggs, Meta’s former CMO, will serve as interim head of marketing during her leave. “Earlier this year — just weeks into my dream job — I was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer,” wrote Rouch. “For the past five months, I’ve been undergoing chemo at UCSF while leading our marketing team. It’s been the hardest season of life — for me, my husband, and our two young…