Google closed its $32 billion acquisition of cybersecurity firm Wiz this week — the most important acquisition in Google’s historical past, in addition to the most important ever acquisition of a venture-backed startup. On the newest episode of TechCrunch’s Fairness podcast, Rebecca Bellan, Sean O’Kane, and I had been joined by Shardul Shah, a accomplice at Wiz’s largest shareholder Index Ventures. Shah walked us by his historical past with Wiz, which extends earlier than Wiz itself — he beforehand backed Adallom, the startup beforehand based by Wiz’s Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, and Roy Reznik. We additionally requested Shah about why…
Author: Naveed Ahmad
For those who haven’t heard, Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe has one other firm — his third by our rely. And this time it’s centered on robotics. The serial entrepreneur is greatest recognized for Rivian, the buzzy EV maker that was thrust into the highlight in 2018 after debuting an electrical truck with its now-famous gear tunnel. The publicly traded firm is now just a few months away from delivering its most essential EV but, a mid-sized SUV referred to as the R2. This EV is cheaper to construct than its flagship R1 counterpart (Scaringe tells me “roughly half”…
Most LLM brokers work properly for brief tool-calling loops however begin to break down when the duty turns into multi-step, stateful, and artifact-heavy. LangChain’s Deep Brokers is designed for that hole. The venture is described by LangChain as an ‘agent harness‘: a standalone library constructed on high of LangChain’s agent constructing blocks and powered by the LangGraph runtime for sturdy execution, streaming, and human-in-the-loop workflows. The necessary level is that Deep Brokers doesn’t introduce a brand new reasoning mannequin or a brand new runtime separate from LangGraph. As an alternative, it packages a set of defaults and built-in instruments round…
Why Doc OCR Nonetheless Stays a Exhausting Engineering Drawback? What does it take to make OCR helpful for actual paperwork as an alternative of fresh demo pictures? And may a compact multimodal mannequin deal with parsing, tables, formulation, and structured extraction with out turning inference right into a useful resource bonfire? That’s the drawback focused by GLM-OCR, launched by researchers from Zhipu AI and Tsinghua College. The analysis workforce presents GLM-OCR as a 0.9B-parameter compact multimodal mannequin for doc understanding. It combines a 0.4B CogViT visible encoder, a light-weight cross-modal connector, and a 0.5B GLM language decoder. The acknowledged objective…
On this tutorial, we construct a workflow utilizing Outlines to generate structured and type-safe outputs from language fashions. We work with typed constraints like Literal, int, and bool, and design immediate templates utilizing outlines.Template, and implement strict schema validation with Pydantic fashions. We additionally implement strong JSON restoration and a function-calling model that generates validated arguments and executes Python capabilities safely. All through the tutorial, we concentrate on reliability, constraint enforcement, and production-grade structured technology. import os, sys, subprocess, json, textwrap, re subprocess.check_call([sys.executable, “-m”, “pip”, “install”, “-q”, “outlines”, “transformers”, “accelerate”, “sentencepiece”, “pydantic”]) import torch import outlines from transformers import AutoTokenizer,…
Apple’s new MacBook Neo isn’t simply essentially the most inexpensive MacBook by far — it’s additionally essentially the most repairable MacBook in “about fourteen years,” in keeping with an in-depth teardown by how-to web site iFixit. The “massive story,” in iFixit’s view, is the battery. Whereas older MacBook batteries are supposedly glued into place, the Neo’s battery is held by a tray secured with 18 screws. That’s lots of screws, however iFixit declared that “screws nonetheless beat adhesive each time.” The truth is, this new association — which ought to make it a lot simpler to exchange your MacBook battery…
The U.S. Military stated late Friday that it has signed a 10-year contract with protection tech startup Anduril. The deal could possibly be price as much as $20 billion. In keeping with the announcement, the contract begins with a five-year “base interval,” with the choice to increase the deal for a further 5 years, and it consists of Anduril {hardware}, software program, infrastructure, and providers. The Military describes the settlement as a single enterprise contract consolidating what had been “greater than 120 separate procurement actions for Anduril’s business options.” “The fashionable battlefield is more and more outlined by software program,”…
In recent times, individuals have been more and more searching for new methods to type platonic connections, as loneliness and social isolation have grow to be extra prevalent. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General went as far as to label this subject a public well being disaster. Distant staff, who miss the on a regular basis interactions present in an workplace, and youthful people wanting to create their grownup social circles based mostly on shared pursuits and hobbies, are amongst these looking for significant friendships. Because of on-line relationship apps, the stigma related to discovering connections on-line has largely pale…
I get it; it’s not a simple time for a legacy automaker to be promoting electrical automobiles, what with incentives being gutted and Chinese language automakers knocking on the door. However Honda is taking it to a different stage. This week, Honda killed its paltry — and admittedly unpromising — EV applications. What little motivation Honda needed to compete within the EV enviornment is seemingly gone, and together with it, any likelihood of surviving the present wave of disruption that’s sweeping the trade. The corporate casts blame on U.S. tariffs and Chinese language competitors, two straightforward targets. However it by no means…
Meta is contemplating main layoffs that would have an effect on 20% or extra of the corporate’s workforce, according to Reuters. These layoffs might assist the Fb guardian firm offset its aggressive spending on AI infrastructure, in addition to AI-related acquisitions and hiring. Meta employed practically 79,000 folks as of December 31, in line with a latest submitting. TechCrunch has reached out to Meta for remark. An organization spokesperson informed Reuters that its story was “speculative reporting about theoretical approaches.” The report comes as many tech firms — most lately Block — have introduced sweeping layoffs that they are saying…