All posts tagged: generative

TC Startup Battlefield master class with Lightspeed Ventures: Use generative AI to supercharge efficiency

Published by skeptic

Generative AI is the hot topic in tech right now, but how can you as a startup founder take full advantage of it? Every year, TechCrunch highlights the most promising 200 early-stage founders from around the world to showcase at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. As part of our programming, we host master classes with industry experts and venture investors to provide tactical advice and insights to these founders. This is the third installment of a four-part series of master classes that cover a wide range of practical and tactical advice to founders on how to build their companies. In this session, Raviraj Jain, partner at Lightspeed Ventures, explores how early-stage startups will be impacted by genAI, how they can utilize the new tech to supercharge their efficiency, and what to look out for when adopting various forms of AI across your business. This private session was held in August, and we’re sharing this now so TechCrunch+ subscribers can also reap the benefits of Startup Battlefield. The impact of generative AI on your company Source …

Securing generative AI across the technology stack

Published by skeptic

Connie Qian is a vice president at Forgepoint Capital. She focuses on early-stage enterprise software companies in security and adjacent sectors, including AI/ML, infrastructure software, and fintech. Research shows that by 2026, over 80% of enterprises will be leveraging generative AI models, APIs, or applications, up from less than 5% today. This rapid adoption raises new considerations regarding cybersecurity, ethics, privacy, and risk management. Among companies using generative AI today, only 38% mitigate cybersecurity risks, and just 32% work to address model inaccuracy. My conversations with security practitioners and entrepreneurs have concentrated on three key factors: Enterprise generative AI adoption brings additional complexities to security challenges, such as overprivileged access. For instance, while conventional data loss prevention tools effectively monitor and control data flows into AI applications, they often fall short with unstructured data and more nuanced factors such as ethical rules or biased content within prompts. Market demand for various GenAI security products is closely tied to the trade-off between ROI potential and inherent security vulnerabilities of the underlying use cases for which the …

Best practices for developing a generative AI copilot for business

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Chris Ackerson Contributor Chris Ackerson is vice president of Product at AlphaSense where his team applies the latest innovations in artificial intelligence to the information discovery challenges of investment professionals and other knowledge workers. Since the launch of ChatGPT, I can’t remember a meeting with a prospect or customer where they didn’t ask me how they can leverage generative AI for their business. From internal efficiency and productivity to external products and services, companies are racing to implement generative AI technologies across every sector of the economy. While GenAI is still in its early days, its capabilities are expanding quickly — from vertical search, to photo editing, to writing assistants, the common thread is leveraging conversational interfaces to make software more approachable and powerful. Chatbots, now rebranded as “copilots” and “assistants,” are the craze once again, and while a set of best practices is starting to emerge, step 1 in developing a chatbot is to scope down the problem and start small. A copilot is an orchestrator, helping a user complete many different tasks through …

3 skills could make or break your cybersecurity career in the generative AI era

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Steve Cobb is SecurityScorecard’s chief information security officer (CISO), bringing more than 25 years of leadership consulting surrounding IT infrastructure, cybersecurity, incident response, and cyber threat intelligence. Indeed reports that almost one in five jobs are highly exposed to generative AI. The technology has proved advantageous for cybersecurity careers, automating threat data analysis and allowing cybersecurity professionals to focus more on mitigating the risks. And let’s face it, considering the number of high-profile breaches we’ve seen in recent months, from MOVEit to Johnson Controls, cybersecurity pros need all the help they can get. Generative AI can be a powerful tool for identifying new risks and alerts, but using it requires a unique skill set. When interviewing cybersecurity candidates, I look for three critical soft skills: lateral thinking, persistence, and communication. 1. Lateral thinking While many employers emphasize problem-solving skills in job descriptions, the ability to think outside the box is imperative in cybersecurity. Candidates must be able to quickly pivot when addressing risks and threats in real-time. For example, a good candidate with lateral thinking …

Generative AI startup AI21 Labs raises cash in the midst of OpenAI chaos

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One AI startup’s undoing is another’s opportunity. Case in point: today, AI21 Labs, a company developing generative AI products along the lines of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and ChatGPT, closed a $53 million extension to its previously-announced Series C funding round. The new tranche, which had participation from new investors Intel Capital and Comcast Ventures, brings AI21’s total raised to $336 million. The startup’s valuation remains unchanged at $1.4 billion. Ori Goshen, AI21 Labs’ co-founder and CEO, said that the cash infusion will be put toward product development and growing the startup’s headcount. (Perhaps a few of those new hires will come from OpenAI, given the string of departures there — if they don’t jump ship for Microsoft.) “We’re extremely grateful for the support of our investors who believe in our deep technology expertise,” Goshen said in a press release. “Mass deployment of AI requires deep understanding of high-performance language models that can deliver better value and impact. Our approach is about designing AI with purpose, making it significantly more efficient than building from scratch, and much …

How we run our in-house generative AI accelerator: Framework for ideation

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Anton Volovyk Contributor Anton Volovyk holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a master’s degree in finance from IE Business School. He is an expert in app monetization, business development, and leadership. At some point, every scaling business faces the decision: Do we stick to our core activity or venture into uncharted territory? It’s a choice between enhancing existing products and branching out to create something entirely new. For tech giants willing to expand into uncharted territory, the common approach often involves acquiring early-stage companies or even teams and integrating them into their ecosystems. This is because for mature organizations, breaking away from their core activity is no easy feat. In practice, going from zero to one is always more difficult than scaling from one to 100. In fact, less than 8% of ventures launched internally reach scale. And the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) strategy may not necessarily be the answer for growth either. This approach demands deep pockets, a luxury primarily enjoyed by industry titans such as Adobe, Google, or Meta, along with the …

With Muse, Unity aims to give developers generative AI that’s useful and ethical

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Unity is joining the rest of the gang in providing generative AI tools for its users, but has been careful (unlike some) to ensure those tools are built on a solidly non-theft-based foundation. Muse, the new suite of AI-powered tools, will start with texture and sprite generation, and graduate to animation and coding as it matures. The company announced these features alongside a cloud-based platform and the next big version of its engine, Unity 6, at its Unite conference in San Francisco. After a tumultuous couple months — a major product plan was totally reversed and the CEO ousted — they’re probably eager to get back to business as usual, if that’s even possible. Unity has previously positioned itself as the champion of smaller developers who lack the resources to employ a more wide-ranging development platform like rival Unreal. As such the use of AI tools could be seen as a helpful addition to devs who can’t, for instance, afford to spend days making 32 slightly varying wood wall textures in high definition. Although plenty …

Andreessen Horowitz backs Civitai, a generative AI content marketplace with millions of users

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AI image generator Stable Diffusion already has a lot of fans, and now those experimenting with the new AI technology to develop their own models have a place to share their work with other enthusiasts. A startup called Civitai — a play on the word Civitas, meaning community — has created a platform where members can post their own Stable Diffusion-based AI image models for others to discover, as well as the output of their work — AI photos — for consumers to browse and enjoy. Explain Civitai CEO Justin Maier, the idea for the startup came about because he identified there was a need for a place where people could share their models and others could find them. People, he said, would post images they had made but others didn’t know how to duplicate their work to make their own images. After wrapping up a project at Microsoft, where he had worked as a contractor on web development projects, Maier found himself intrigued by Midjourney. “It scratched that same itch that web development had …

3D generative AI platform Atlas emerges from stealth with $6M to accelerate virtual worldbuilding

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Atlas, a 3D generative AI platform, is launching today after two years in stealth with $6 million in seed funding. The funding consists of two rounds: a $4.5M round led by 6th Man Ventures (6MV) and a $1.5M round led by Collab+Currency. The platform partners with game developers and brands to build virtual worlds in a fraction of the time it takes using traditional methods. Atlas allows developers to generate detailed 3D models from reference images and text. The Vienna-based startup was founded in early 2021 by Ben James, who is a self-taught coder and has a background in architecture. “I’ve worked a lot at the intersection of design and technology,” James told TechCrunch in an interview. “I’m a self taught coder and I thought that there would maybe be an interesting way to look at architecture through the guise of machine vision. 2D drawings like plans and sections and elevations are inherently embedded with three dimensional information through line weights, annotations, etc. And what we started playing around with at Atlas was if there …

Generative AI is confusing Google

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This technology won’t be contained. Illustration by The Atlantic November 9, 2023, 1:12 PM ET This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. (Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here.) Earlier this week, I asked ChatGPT how to clean a humidifier. Then, frustrated by its answer, I asked it to design a less demanding humidifier. It did. But when I prompted the AI to estimate the cost of such a device—a few hundred dollars on the high end—I decided to live with the 30-minute white-vinegar soak it had suggested in the first place. The whole experience was quick, easy, and had the pleasant tickle of ingenuity: I felt like I’d participated in a creative process, rather than just looking something up. The problem, though, is that I never feel like I can trust a chatbot’s output. They are prone to making things up and garbling facts. Those flaws are bad enough in the context …