KTM City Posts

via https://ift.tt/nOAB0Cp A refrain I hear from a lot of startups is that there’s “no need to rethink the gripper.” It’s something I appreciate from an economic standpoint. It’s expensive, resource intensive and both your time and money are probably best spent elsewhere when there are already so many effectors on the market. I also recently made an analogy to a claw machine during an interview — and got some pushback. I understand a bit better now why that’s the case — at least in part. Discussing its new approach to robotic gripping, MIT invokes the perennial arcade favorite, noting, “When manipulating an arcade claw, a player can plan all she wants. But once she presses the joystick button, it’s a game of wait-and-see. If the claw misses its target, she’ll have to start from scratch for another chance at a prize.” Image Credits: MIT If you think about that for a moment, you realize that you’re suddenly faced with something that comes up over and over again in this field of st...

via https://ift.tt/v4jyocV Today, Microsoft Designer, Microsoft’s AI-powered design tool, launched in public preview with an expanded set of features. Announced in October, Designer is a Canva-like web app that can generate designs for presentations, posters, digital postcards, invitations, graphics and more to share on social media and other channels. It leverages user-created content and DALL-E 2 , OpenAI’s text-to-image AI, to ideate designs, with drop-downs and text boxes for further customization and personalization. “Since October, the AI models have steadily improved, and we’ve worked to weave these powerful capabilities throughout the Designer canvas in even more delightful ways while keeping you in control,” Bryan Rognier, GM at Microsoft’s 365 Consumer division, wrote in a blog post published today. Now Designer can generate written captions and hashtags relevant for social media posts, offering several suggestions users can choose from. It can also create animated visua...

via https://ift.tt/uGIpNW3 YouTube Music is officially adding podcasts to its platform in the United States on Android, iOS and the web. The rollout comes a few months after YouTube podcasting head Kai Chuk revealed that podcasts would be added to YouTube Music soon. The update allows users watching podcasts on the main app to continue listening to them on YouTube Music. The company notes that all users call listen to podcasts on-demand, offline, in the background, while casting and seamlessly switch between audio-video versions on YouTube Music. “This podcast listening experience is different from our music listening experience where you need a Premium or Music Premium subscription to enjoy some of these features,” the company wrote in a blog post . “This new podcast listening experience complements the podcast video experience on YouTube.” Podcasts in YouTube Music will be available regardless of whether you have a YouTube Premium subscription. YouTube even notes that payin...

via https://ift.tt/3rTBlG0 Investors continue to pump money into generative AI tech. Case in point, Replit, an IDE startup developing a code-generating AI-powered tool called Ghostwriter, this week raised nearly $100 million ($97.4 million) at a $1.16 billion post-money valuation. Andreessen Horowitz led the round — a Series B extension — with participation from Khosla Ventures, Coatue, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Bloomberg Beta, Naval Ravikant, ARK Ventures and Hamilton Helmer. “We are relentless in our mission to empower a billion software developers,” Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad said in a statement, adding that the new funds — which bring Replit’s total raised to over $200 million — will be put toward further developing the core product experience, expanding Replit’s cloud services and “driving innovation” in AI. “AI has already brought that future closer,” Masad continued. “We look forward to expanding our offerings for professional developers.” Based in San Francisco, Re...

via https://ift.tt/KIB7bch Fireside , the Mark Cuban-backed interactive entertainment app , has now confirmed its $25 million Series A, valuing the business at $138 million, post-money. The company had been rumored to be raising at a $125 million valuation last year, after attracting a number of high-profile creators to its streaming platform for live and virtual shows. The funding and valuation were confirmed through Fireside’s recent investor update, obtained by TechCrunch, which also mentions new strategic investors like Paris Hilton and others, and offers a first look at its interactive streaming technology for smart TVs. The latter is made possible through last year’s acquisition of the streaming TV platform Stremium . At the time, Fireside confirmed the deal would help it to accelerate its plans, saying it would be the “only platform that turns creators, celebrities, brands, and IP owners into the studio, networks and streaming services of the future.” The company hopes to so...

via https://ift.tt/1kyCghT To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here . Oh heeeeeey. We’re back with another crunchy edition of our Tues-daily Crunch. With Early Stage behind us, we’re setting our sights on our Disrupt event that’s coming up — and Alex just shared the agenda for the Builders Stage . Come check it out — and get your tickets for Disrupt sooner rather than later! Our favorite story this morning was Rebecca admitting she actually had fun at Fatboy Slim’s metaverse rave , and now we’re regretting that we missed it. — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3 This is only a test : Yesterday, Elon Musk tweeted a photo of his Twitter account, which seemed to show Musk also logged into another account that looked like @ErmnMusk with the name “Elon Test.” Is this a burner account? We don’t know. Amanda has more. Another car bites the dust : When other carmakers are saying “the mo...

via https://ift.tt/lExZnaM A developer is attempting to reverse-engineer APIs to grant anyone free access to popular AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 — legal ramifications be damned. The developer’s project, GPT4Free , blew up on GitHub over the past several days after links to it from Reddit went viral. At present, GPT4Free provides — or at least appears to provide — free and nearly unlimited access to GPT-4, as well as GPT-3.5, GPT-4’s predecessor. GPT-4 is normally priced at $0.03 per 1,000 “prompt” tokens (about 750 words) and $0.06 per 1,000 “completion” tokens (again, about 750 words); tokens represent raw text. GPT-3.5 is slightly cheaper at $0.002 per 1,000 tokens. “Reverse engineering is a domain that I’ve always really liked — it’s like a challenge for me,” the developer, a computer science student going by the username xtekky, told TechCrunch via a Telegram DM. “First, it was for fun, but now it’s to provide an alternative to people with no means to use GPT-4/3.5.” So...

via https://ift.tt/8IrsmwW Artifact , the personalized news aggregator from Instagram’s founders is further embracing AI with the launch of a new feature that will now summarize news articles for you. The company announced today it’s introducing a tool that generates article summaries with a tap of a button, in order to give readers the ability to understand the “high-level points” of an article before they read. For a little extra fun, the feature can also be used to summarize news in a certain style — like “explain like I’m five,” in the style of Gen Z speech, or using only emojis, for example. These styles aren’t really meant to be useful, they’re just there to add a little whimsy to the feature and potentially encourage users to try the new feature. To use the AI summaries feature, you’ll tap on the “Aa” button found on the menu above an individual news article, then tap the new “Summarize” option. The company confirmed it’s leveraging OpenAI’s technologies via its API to gener...

via https://ift.tt/7nVtBlW In a drive to offer free verification to top organizations, Twitter briefly gave a gold checkmark to a fake Disney account. The gold checkmark indicates that the account belongs to a company. It is related to the Blue for Business offering . The social network applying checkmarks to organizations with large followings slipped up and awarded it to @DisneyJuniorUK, which is now suspended. As Verity spotted first, the account follower count and content didn’t seem to resonate with Disney’s official brand. The suspended account had also used racial slurs in tweets, the report noted. After getting the gold checkmark, the account tweeted “this isn’t actually real right? someone fucking pinch me or something”. Twitter appears to have given a gold checkmark to a fake Disney Junior account pic.twitter.com/0Ab1hE3cso — Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) April 24, 2023 i think twitter fucked up and gave a verified pissmark to a gimmick account. and for dis...

via https://ift.tt/CVNwstD Woodoo , a startup working on alternative materials for various industries, has raised $31 million. The company is manufacturing composite materials based on wood so that they can replace common materials like glass, leather and steel. Around two-thirds of the amount raised is an equity funding round led by Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital with One Creation, Purple and various business angels also participating. Debts and grants represent one third of the total amount. Woodoo founder and CEO Timothée Boitouzet originally studied to become an architect. He started his career working for several famous architectural firms. Among other things, he worked on Stamford Bridge , the Longchamp Racecourse in Paris and the Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne. As is often the case with large projects like those ones, Boitouzet’s architectural firms relied heavily on glass and steel. But he started wondering about low-carbon, high-performance materials that could r...

via https://ift.tt/YgLI16P The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here —  just click The Station  — to receive the full edition of the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free.  Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B.  If there was any doubt that China is a leader in EVs, the Shanghai Auto Show should have erased those thoughts. China is developing and producing compelling EVs and reaping the sales as a result. (Eight of the top 10 best selling EV models in China are from Chinese automakers). And unlike the U.S. market, these are not just premium and luxury brands that only a slice of society can afford. BYD , the Warren Buffet-backed Chinese automaker, unveiled its Seagull EV during the show and the unassuming vehicle attracted some of the largest crowds at the show. Industry watchers believe th...

via https://ift.tt/4sTIqHO After removing thousands of legacy verification checkmarks on April 20, Twitter is restoring the Blue tick marks for large accounts — even if they didn’t pay for subscriptions. Over the weekend, multiple top accounts (with more than 1 million followers) got their verification marks back. However, many of them including writer Neil Gaiman, footballer Riyad Maharez, musician Lil Nas X, actress Janel Parrish Long and British TV presenter Richard Osman said that they didn’t pay for the blue badge. For the curious, I'm not subscribed to Twitter Blue. I haven't given anyone my phone number. What a sad, muddled place this has become. pic.twitter.com/Ju125xyoUx — Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) April 23, 2023 (and no I didn’t pay for the blue tick ) — Riyad Mahrez (@Mahrez22) April 23, 2023 on my soul i didn’t pay for twitter blue, u will feel my wrath tesla man! — pussy (@LilNasX) April 22, 2023 I’m v confused by twitter these days…...