Author: kissdev

[ad_1] Amazon loses money on Echo smart speakers. It’s been an open secret for the duration of Alexa’s existence. It’s the product of the kind of loss leader strategy only a company of Amazon’s size can get away with for a decade. Selling hardware at a loss can be an effective strategy, of course. Think about printers and razors, which get corporate feet into the door and make up for the loss with ink cartridges and blades, respectively. From the perspective of saturation, Amazon’s strategy can be viewed as a success. Early this year, founder Jeff Bezos claimed that Alexa…

[ad_1] Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This week we are looking at AI founders who are playing musical chairs, a massive defense tech investment, and more issues at Techstars. Let’s get into it. Most interesting startup stories from the week Image Credits: TechCrunch Founders and senior executives of the hottest AI startups have been leaping around this week. OpenAI shuffle: John Schulman, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, left the company for rival AI startup Anthropic, following in…

[ad_1] AI companies are gobbling up investor money and securing sky-high valuations early in their life cycle. This dynamic has many calling the AI industry a bubble. Nick Frosst, a co-founder of Cohere, which builds custom AI models for enterprise customers, recently said on TechCrunch’s Found podcast that he doesn’t think the AI industry is in a bubble. While he acknowledges the froth, he thinks calling it a bubble discredits the companies, like his own Cohere, that are creating genuinely useful features for its customers. “Frequently I’ll run into something where I’ll see somebody using our model, and they will…

[ad_1] Box announced on Thursday that it had acquired Alphamoon, a small Polish startup that specializes in intelligent document processing, a technology that helps companies extract metadata from dense text documents — think contracts and loan applications — automatically. The companies didn’t share the purchase price, but Box CEO Aaron Levie said the acquisition provides a crucial piece of missing functionality for Box AI, the company’s underlying AI technology, to understand documents better and move them into workflows. “Alphamoon has been building the technology to solve this problem of how do you connect leading AI to the underlying document, and…

[ad_1] Among the other attacks created by Bargury is a demonstration of how a hacker—who, again, must already have hijacked an email account—can gain access to sensitive information, such as people’s salaries, without triggering Microsoft’s protections for sensitive files. When asking for the data, Bargury’s prompt demands the system does not provide references to the files data is taken from. “A bit of bullying does help,” Bargury says.In other instances, he shows how an attacker—who doesn’t have access to email accounts but poisons the AI’s database by sending it a malicious email—can manipulate answers about banking information to provide their…

[ad_1] Every day, employees across the world spend incalculable hours performing tediously repetitive tasks, such as, for example, converting documents into PDFs and then uploading them to a drive, from where it’s sucked into a database and emailed to a team. While UiPath helped pioneer this kind of ‘robotic’ process, it’s also pivoted to an AI-driven mode of operation, even as a number of startups (Signavio, Servicetrace, and others) have arrived, snapping at its heels. Now a startup, Bardeen, is launching a service that automates such work for businesses on the heels of a new round of funding.  Bardeen’s platform uses…

[ad_1] Seeking mental health support is a complex process, but some founders believe that using AI to formalize techniques like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) can help folks who might not have access to professionals. Dr. David Burns, who has over 40 years of experience in the field of psychiatry, has now built an app, Feeling Great, based on his methods. Burns teamed up with Jeremy Karmel, who previously led growth teams at Doordash and Reddit, to build Feeling Great, which is also the title of one of Burns’s bestselling books on mental health. The company, which was found in 2022,…