Freepik, the online graphic design platform, unveiled a new “open” AI image model on Tuesday that the company says was trained exclusively on commercially licensed, “safe-for-work” images. The model, called F Lite, contains around 10 billion parameters — parameters being the internal components that make up the model. F Lite was developed in partnership with […]
Tech Crunch
Google Play sees 47% decline in apps since start of last year
Google Play’s app marketplace is losing apps. From the start of 2024 to present, the Android app marketplace went from hosting about 3.4 million apps worldwide to just around 1.8 million, according to a new analysis by app intelligence provider Appfigures. That’s a decline of about 47%, representing a significant purge of the apps that […]
OpenAI rolls back update that made ChatGPT ‘too sycophant-y’
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday said that the company is “rolling back” the latest update to the default AI model powering ChatGPT, GPT-4o, after complaints about strange behavior, in particular extreme sycophancy. “[W]e started rolling back the latest update to GPT-4o last night,” Altman wrote in a post on X. “[I]t’s now 100% rolled back for […]
Troubled startup CaaStle is now facing two new lawsuits and more allegations
CaaStle, the embattled fashion startup whose board of directors accused its founder, Christine Hunsicke, of financial misconduct, is starting to face lawsuits from a partner and a supplier over missed payments and more allegations of fraud. As first reported by Axios and by suits seen by TechCrunch, CaaStle is being sued by P180, a vehicle […]
Meta says its Llama AI models have been downloaded 1.2B times
In mid-March, Meta said that its “open” AI model family, Llama, hit 1 billion downloads, up from 650 million downloads as of early December 2024. On Tuesday at its inaugural LlamaCon developer conference, Meta revealed that figure has reached 1.2 billion downloads. “We have thousands of developers contributing tens of thousands of derivative models being downloaded […]
Tesla board member Joe Gebbia actually bought some stock
Tesla board member and Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia acquired about 4,000 shares of the automaker’s stock, a purchase that has a value of about $1 million and change, according to a regulatory filing. That’s not a significant stock purchase, and certainly not for the billionaire board member, as Electrek noted in its reporting. It’s notable […]
Meta previews an API for its Llama AI models
At its inaugural LlamaCon AI developer conference on Tuesday, Meta announced an API for its Llama series of AI models: the Llama API. Available in limited preview, the Llama API lets developers explore and experiment with products powered by different Llama models, per Meta. Paired with Meta’s SDKs, it allows developers to build Llama-driven services, […]
Google launches AI tools for practicing languages through personalized lessons
Google on Tuesday is releasing three new AI experiments aimed at helping people learn to speak a new language in a more personalized way. While the experiments are still in the early stages, it’s possible that the company is looking to take on Duolingo with the help of Gemini, Google’s multimodal large language model. The […]
Meta launches a standalone AI app to compete with ChatGPT
After integrating Meta AI into WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger, Meta is rolling out a standalone AI app. Unveiled at Meta’s LlamaCon event on Tuesday, this app allows users to access Meta AI in a standalone app, similar to the ChatGPT app and other AI assistant apps. To win over users, Meta is trying to […]
Meta needs to win over AI developers at its first LlamaCon
On Tuesday, Meta is hosting its first-ever LlamaCon AI developer conference at its Menlo Park headquarters, where the company will try to pitch developers on building applications with its open Llama AI models. Just a year ago, that wasn’t a hard sell. However, in recent months, Meta has struggled to keep up with both “open” […]