TechCrunch Industry News

Pinterest is upgrading its visual search feature with a handful of new capabilities. On Monday, the company announced it’s rolling out new functionality to improve its feature that allows users to search using an image instead of text. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

World, the biometric ID company best known for its eyeball-scanning Orb devices, at an event late on Wednesday announced several partnerships aimed at driving sign-ups and demonstrating the applications of its tech. World is partnering with Match Group, the dating app conglomerate, to verify the IDs of Tinder users in Japan. Also, Airbnb started rolling out an AI-powered customer service bot in the U.S. last month, CEO Brian Chesky said during the firm’s first-quarter conference call on Thursday. Chesky said 50% of Airbnb’s U.S. users are already using the AI bot for customer service. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

OpenAI says it’ll make changes to the way it updates the AI models that power ChatGPT, following an incident that caused the platform to become overly sycophantic for many users. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meta made a prediction last year its generative AI products would rake in $2 billion to $3 billion in revenue in 2025, and between $460 billion and $1.4 trillion by 2035, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amazon on Thursday released what it claims is the largest, most capable AI model in its Nova family, Nova Premier. Nova Premier, which can process text, images, and videos (but not audio), is available in Amazon Bedrock, the company’s AI model development platform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The crush of traffic going into training and running AI has quickly turned into a major cost and resource headache for organizations. Cast AI is a startup building tools to ease and optimize AI and other workloads with automation — is raising a major round of funding on the back of its strong growth Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

JetBrains, the company behind a range of popular app development tools, has released its first “open” AI model for coding. On Wednesday, JetBrains made Mellum, a code-generating model the company released for its various software development suites last year, openly available on the AI dev platform Hugging Face. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yelp said on Tuesday that it’s working on deploying AI-powered “voice agents” to help service providers and restaurants handle calls, answer basic questions, and accomplish tasks like adding a customer to a restaurant waitlist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Spotify reported on Tuesday that its premium subscriber base grew by 5 million in the first quarter, representing a 12% increase year-over-year. This brings the total to 268 million, marking the second-highest total ever and the highest net addition of paid subs for a first quarter since 2020.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI-based coding has exploded in popularity on the promise that it will make developers’ jobs faster and easier. But it’s also resulted in something else: a vast increase in lines of code, and thus the likelihood of bugs resulting in crashes or other mishaps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices