Paul Sawers, Author at TechCrunch

UK crashes out of global top 50 supercomputer ranking

Paul Sawers — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 11:26:26 +0000

The U.K. no longer has a supercomputer in the top 50, according to new data from the Top500 project, which ranks the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems globally. The country’s current national supercomputer system, Archer2, is approaching end-of-life in 2026. According to the latest figures, it’s also now sitting in 62nd place globally, down […]

GitHub launches $1.25M open source fund with a focus on security

Paul Sawers — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 17:32:02 +0000

The open source funding problem is very real, but a slew of initiatives have emerged of late, with startups, corporations, and venture capitalists launching various programs to support some of the most critical projects via equity-free financing. Today it’s GitHub’s turn, launching the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund with an initial commitment of $1.25 million […]

Workbrew makes open source package manager Homebrew enterprise-friendly

Paul Sawers — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 12:56:00 +0000

Workbrew emerges from stealth with the mission of mitigating the risks of "shadow IT" practices around Homebrew package manager deployments.

UK competition regulator clears Alphabet’s investment in Anthropic

Paul Sawers — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 12:32:54 +0000

The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has okayed Alphabet’s partnership and investment in AI rival Anthropic, concluding that it doesn’t qualify for investigation under current merger rules. The announcement comes a month after the CMA revealed it was launching a formal “stage 1” probe into Alphabet’s various investments in Anthropic, a 3-year-old San Francisco-based […]

Google.org commits $20M to researchers using AI for scientific breakthroughs

Paul Sawers — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 17:00:00 +0000

Google is committing $20 million in cash and $2 million in cloud credits to a new funding initiative designed to help scientists and researchers unearth the next great scientific breakthroughs using artificial intelligence (AI). The announcement, made by Google DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis during a fireside chat at the closed-door AI for Science […]

Juna.ai wants to use AI agents to make factories more energy-efficient

Paul Sawers — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 10:19:18 +0000

Juna.ai wants to help factories become more efficient by automating complex industrial processes using AI agents.

This ‘AI Granny’ hack wastes telephone scammers’ time with boring chit-chat

Paul Sawers — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 18:11:21 +0000

Telephone scams are nothing new, but with the advent of AI, it has become harder than ever for people to know whether the person they’re speaking to is in fact who they say they are. But U.K. mobile network O2 is turning the tables, creating what it calls an “AI granny” to keep scammers on […]

Klarna kickstarts US IPO plans with confidential SEC filing

Paul Sawers — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 09:45:17 +0000

The Swedish BNPL startup has confidentially filed a draft registration statement with the U.S. SEC.

LocalStack raises $25M to help developers emulate and test cloud apps locally

Paul Sawers — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Knowing how your cloud application will behave in production usually requires significant development and testing in the environment in which it will be deployed, be that AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or wherever. But this can be a resource-intensive endeavor, particularly with issues relating to latency (the time it takes to constantly send data) and the […]

Meta taps US, UK universities to test VR in education, creates digital twin ‘metaversities’ in Europe

Paul Sawers — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 14:33:43 +0000

As part of an ongoing effort to embed virtual reality (VR) in education, Meta has launched a new partnership with a slew of universities in the U.S. and U.K., designed to provide feedback on a new product that Meta hopes will finally make VR just a little more mainstream. The new Meta for Education beta […]

Open source projects draw equity-free funding from corporates, startups, and even VCs

Paul Sawers — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 13:00:00 +0000

A dearth of funding for vital open source technologies is leading to a swath of support from startups, unicorns, corporations, and even venture capital firms. Last year, Bloomberg launched its FOSS (free and open source software) fund, committing up to $90,000 per year to various projects. And in October, Indian financial services company Zerodha launched […]

Google Cloud to make multi-factor authentication mandatory in 2025

Paul Sawers — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 16:35:19 +0000

The move to enable the MFA security feature comes hot on the heels of major data breaches at cloud giants, like Snowflake.

Affirm launches in the UK as ‘buy now, pay later’ market faces regulatory overhaul

Paul Sawers — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) giant Affirm is launching in the U.K., its first market outside North America. Affirm’s long-anticipated arrival comes as U.K. lawmakers mull new rules to bring BNPL firms into line with other traditional consumer credit services, though such laws aren’t expected to come into effect until at least 2026 — long […]

GenAI suffers from data overload, so companies should focus on smaller, specific goals

Paul Sawers — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 13:00:00 +0000

“There is no AI without data, there is no AI without unstructured data, and there is no AI without unstructured data at scale,” said Chet Kapoor, chairman and CEO of data management company DataStax. Kapoor was kicking off a conversation at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 about “new data pipelines” in the context of modern AI applications, […]

ForceField helps detect deepfakes and digital deception by verifying source data

Paul Sawers — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 21:33:03 +0000

A new startup setting out to combat the scourge of deepfakes and spoofed evidence in the age of AI is showing off its wares on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 this week. ForceField is building a set of “patent-pending” APIs dubbed MARQ, the first of which is designed to authenticate content. For […]

Amazon brings its Rufus AI shopping assistant to more international markets

Paul Sawers — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 16:43:48 +0000

Amazon is extending the availability of its AI-enabled shopping assistant, Rufus, to more markets in Europe and the Americas. The e-commerce giant has been widely considered to be playing catch-up with its Big Tech brethren in the AI sphere, particularly against the backdrop of the generative AI hype these past couple of years. Rufus is […]

Infraspeak raises $19.5M to bring collaboration to facilities management

Paul Sawers — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 07:01:00 +0000

It might not be the sexiest of subjects, but facilities management is central to any business that has a physical premises — the bigger that footprint becomes, the more complex it gets. Portuguese startup Infraspeak has set out to address that with an all-in-one platform that gives facility managers and associated service providers insights and […]

Google-backed Open Cloud Coalition launches to lobby European lawmakers

Paul Sawers — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 23:00:00 +0000

Europe has a new lobbying body, one with a self-stated mission to “improve competition, transparency and resilience” in the cloud computing sector. The Open Cloud Coalition (OCC) counts 10 members at launch, the most notable of which is Google, supported by international and local cloud providers Centerprise International, Civo, Gigas, ControlPlane, DTP Group, Prolinx, Pulsant, […]

How Advex creates synthetic data to improve machine vision for manufacturers

Paul Sawers — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 21:14:47 +0000

Data is pretty much everything when it comes to training AI systems, but accessing enough data to produce quality products that live up to their promise is a major challenge, even for companies with the deepest of pockets. This is a problem that Advex AI is setting out to address, using generative AI and synthetic […]

Microsoft accuses Google of ‘shadow campaign’ to influence cloud regulation in Europe

Paul Sawers — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 20:30:37 +0000

The European cloud wars are heating up. Microsoft has accused its old foe Google of waging a clandestine war against the Azure cloud company, to curry favor with policymakers and antitrust authorities in Europe. In a blog post today, Microsoft deputy general counsel Rima Alaily preempted the imminent launch of a new lobby group called […]