Tag: In Brief

Built in four days, this $120 robot arm cleans a spill with help from GPT-4o

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Large language models have already proven transformative for robotics. While researchers and companies alike utilize the platforms to supercharge robotic learning, a pair of roboticists at UC Berkeley and ETH Zurich challenged themselves by leveraging generative AI to put a cheap robot arm to work.

Jannik Grothusen and Kaspar Janssen trained a pair of $120 robot arms to clean a spill. Using GPT-4o, the robots were programmed in four days, designing a visual language model for human-robot-interaction (HRI). The motions were trained using roughly 100 demos.

If you’d like a robot to help clean up at home, The Robot Studio has released plans on YouTube for building the arms on a budget.



Hollywood’s Olivia Wilde launches a VC firm

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Actress Olivia Wilde, famous for her roles in “Tron: Legacy” and “Don’t Worry Darling,” quietly launched venture firm Proximity Ventures late last year, according to Bloomberg.

She launched the early- and growth-stage investment fund with Neil Sirni, formerly of Roc Nation’s venture division Arrive; Jason Mack, formerly of Mack Ventures; and Santi White, the musician also known as Santigold.

The firm plans to invest in companies that are in the consumer and enterprise sectors. The firm has already inked four investments, including Pendulum Therapeutics, a biotech company.

Proximity expects to hold a first close next month.

TechCrunch reached out to Proximity Ventures for comment and will update if we hear back.

Classic Christmas song gets authorized Spanish reworking thanks to ‘responsible’ AI

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In the decades following its 1958 release, Brenda Lee’s rockabilly-tinged “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” has attained status as an all-time holiday classic. Sixty-six years later, it’s getting a Spanish language rework courtesy of “responsible” AI.

Universal on Friday announced the release of “Noche Buena y Navidad,” which utilized SoundLabs AI’s MicDrop technology to reconstruct Spanish vocals based on the then 13-year-old Lee’s original.

Lee, now 79, appears to approve. “Throughout my career, I performed and recorded many songs in different languages, but I never recorded ‘Rockin’’ in Spanish, which I would have loved to do,” the singer says. “To have this out now is pretty incredible and I’m happy to introduce the song to fans in a new way.”

With the holiday now exactly two months out, it’s a safe bet music execs are dreaming on an AI Christmas.

Amazon indicates employees can quit if they don’t like its return-to-office mandate

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AWS CEO Matt Garman has harsh words for remote workers: return to the office or quit. The Amazon executive recently told employees who don’t like the new five-day in-person work policy that, “there are other companies around,” presumably companies they can work for remotely, Reuters reported on Thursday.

Amazon’s top boss, Andy Jassy, told employees last month that there will be a full return-to-office starting in 2025, an increase from three days for roughly the last year.

Garman is the latest tech CEO to put his foot down on remote work, but he’s not the first. Earlier this year, Dell reportedly told employees they won’t be considered for promotions if they don’t come into the office. That said, remote work likely isn’t going anywhere for most people. Studies suggest most remote workers would quit if they had to return to the office.

Amazon did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

OpenAI might raise the price of ChatGPT to $44 by 2029

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ChatGPT could get more expensive to use in coming years.

The New York Times, citing internal OpenAI docs, reports that OpenAI is planning to raise the price of individual ChatGPT subscriptions from $20 per month to $22 per month by the end of the year. A steeper increase will come over the next five years; by 2029, OpenAI expects it’ll charge $44 per month for ChatGPT Plus.

The aggressive moves reflect pressure on OpenAI from investors to narrow its losses. While the company’s monthly revenue reached $300 million in August, according to the New York Times, OpenAI expects to lose roughly $5 billion this year. Expenditures like staffing, office rent, and AI training infrastructure are to blame. ChatGPT alone was at one point reportedly costing OpenAI $700,000 per day.

OpenAI could face a blowback if it increases prices too quickly. While ChatGPT has roughly 10 million paying users today, surveys suggest that many believe the current $20-per-month price is too high.

SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son has been planning his comeback

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A new Financial Times profile of Mayayoshi Son opens with SoftBank’s CEO seeming to hit bottom, staring at his “ugly” face on Zoom and telling himself, “I have done nothing I can be proud of.”

Indeed, Son largely disappeared from the public eye after SoftBank’s Vision Fund took huge losses from investments like WeWork. But FT writer Lionel Barber, whose new biography of Son is called “Gambling Man,” writes that while Son appeared to be “doing penance,” he was actually “plotting a comeback.”

Now SoftBank is betting big on AI, and finding success by taking chip design company Arm public.

There are also some fun personal details in the profile, like Son’s apparent fascination with Napoleon. When an activist investor brought up Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg in a 2020 meeting with Son, he reportedly dismissed them as “one-business guys.”

“The right comparison for me is Napoleon, Genghis Khan or Emperor Qin,” Son said. “I am not a CEO. I am building an empire.”

Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs comes out of stealth with $230M in funding

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Fei-Fei Li, the Stanford professor many deem the “Godmother of AI,” has raised $230 million for her new startup, World Labs, from backers including Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, and Radical Ventures.

World Labs is valued at over $1 billion, and the capital was raised over two rounds spaced a couple of months apart, TechCrunch reported in August.

Li’s company, which hopes to have its first product ready in 2025, aims to build AI models that understand and interact with the 3D world. World Labs is developing what it calls “large world models” that will be used by professionals such as artists, designers, developers, and engineers. Martin Casado, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, told Wired that World Labs’ customers could include game companies or movie studios.

Telegram reportedly ‘inundated’ with illegal and extremist activity

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A New York Times analysis of more than 3.2 million Telegram messages from 16,000 channels found that the messaging platform has been “inundated” with illegal and extremist activity.

Specifically, The Times found 1,500 channels operated by white supremacists, two dozen channels selling weapons, and at least 22 channels where MDMA, cocaine, heroin and other drugs were advertised for delivery.

The company’s founder and CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in France last month, with authorities alleging that Telegram’s lack of content moderation made Durov an accomplice to illegal activity on the platform.

The platform subsequently updated its website to allow abuse reports, and Durov has been posting on his Telegram channel, arguing, “Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach.”

Top court orders ban on Elon Musk’s X in Brazil

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A top court in Brazil ordered an immediate, country-wide suspension of the X platform on Friday after a months-long legal battle with Elon Musk’s social media company over content moderation, according to Bloomberg.  

The court added that anyone using VPN to access the X platform would be subject to daily fines of 50,000 reais — $8,900 — though it’s not clear how it would enforce the decree.

Earlier this month, X closed its operations in Brazil in protest against court orders asking it to remove accounts that allegedly spread misinformation. At the time, the company said Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes “threatened our legal representative in Brazil with arrest if we do not comply with his censorship orders.” Moraes warned X earlier this week that Brazil would ban the service if the company did not name a legal representative in the country.

“Soon, we expect Judge Alexandre de Moraes will order X to be shut down in Brazil, simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents,” said X’s global affairs team in a tweet Friday morning.

The platform says it will publish the Brazilian top court’s demands in the coming days and will not comply with its orders.

Will HP still demand $4B from Mike Lynch’s estate?

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Before entrepreneur and investor Mike Lynch died along with six others after the yacht they were on capsized in a storm last week, the party was celebrating Lynch’s victory in the U.S. criminal courts. In June, he was acquitted of all counts of fraud connected to HP’s 2011 acquisition of his company, Autonomy. But it was not the final chapter in that dispute. HP (now known as HPE) was still trying to recover $4 billion from him as a result of a civil case Lynch lost in the U.K.

Now HPE faces the question: does it forge ahead, even with Lynch deceased?

An article in Fortune notes HPE could be facing a PR disaster if it does; further, the estate is further unlikely to be able to do anything until it resolves any other litigation or appeals.

Still, $4 billion is no small sum, leading a legal expert to colorfully describe HPE’s predicament to the outlet as “on the horns of a dilemma.”