Author: GT

MILAN (AP) — The last person to get their hands on a painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci shelled out more than $450 million at auction. Now, Italian cultural officials are making it possible to purchase a limited edition, certified digital copy of the Renaissance genius’ “Lady with Disheveled Hair’’ for roughly the price of a Lamborghini.The Italian nonprofit Save the Artistic Heritage with its technical partner Cinello are providing well-heeled collectors the possibility of owning a literal projection of original Italian masterpieces, sized and framed to match the museum experience. Participating museums sign a certificate of authenticity, and in…

James Cameron’s movies are often at the cutting edge of visual effects technology — especially the “Avatar” films, with their heroic blue Na’vi characters brought to life through performance capture. But that doesn’t make Cameron a fan of generative AI. In a CBS Sunday Morning interview tied to the upcoming release of “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” the director acknowledged that performance capture (where an actor’s performance is recorded as a template for digital artists) can sound similar to genAI. But in reality, he said it’s “the opposite.” “For years, there was this sense that, ‘Oh they’re doing something strange with…

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI introduced a new product to the world, innocuously describing it as “a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way.” It’s no hyperbole to suggest that ChatGPT subsequently transformed the worlds of business and tech, becoming enormously popular — it’s still in the number one spot on Apple’s free app rankings today — while also serving as the catalyst for a flood of generative AI products. It’s even made people suspicious of the em dash, which no chatbot will ever take from me. In fact, “Empire of AI” author Karen Hao argued in a…

Finland’s weather is notoriously unfriendly; but even so, your food order might be delivered by a drone. On a rainy day after Helsinki’s annual Slush conference, Finnish entrepreneur Ville Leppälä took TechCrunch behind the scenes of a three-party partnership between Irish drone delivery company Manna, DoorDash-owned food delivery platform Wolt, and his own startup, Huuva. Huuva, whose name means kitchen hood, raised a seed round led by General Catalyst in 2022 with the promise of bringing good food to the suburbs. While it branched out of its cloud kitchen origins, its business still relies heavily on delivery tech — now…

NEW YORK (AP) — Major retail chains and tech companies are offering new or updated artificial intelligence tools in time for the holiday shopping season, hoping to give consumers an easier gift-buying experience and themselves an augmented share of online spending. Although AI-powered purchases are in early stages, the shopping assistants and agents rolled out by the likes of Walmart, Amazon and Google can do more than the chatbots of holidays past. The latest versions were designed to provide personalized product recommendations, track prices and to place some orders through unscripted “conversations” with customers.Those features are on top of shopping…

American consumers spent $11.8 billion online on Black Friday, according to data from Adobe Analytics, which says it tracks more than 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail websites. That’s a new record, and up from $10.8 billion spent on Black Friday last year, Adobe says. Between 10am and 2pm, online shoppers were supposedly spending $12.5 million every minute. Forbes reports that Adobe said in a statement that the numbers show Black Friday has become “a major e-commerce moment, as more shoppers opt to stay home and take advantage of deals.”  The company projects that Cyber Monday (coming in two days,…

New York’s latest state budget includes new disclosure requirements for businesses that use personal data to set different prices for different shoppers — for example, charging you more if you have a history of splurging. Businesses that use personalized pricing are now required to tell customers, “This price was set by an algorithm using your personal data,” according to The New York Times. It’s not clear how widespread this practice actually is among online retailers. An Uber spokesperson told the NYT that the company is now showing this disclosure to New Yorkers, although they described the law as “poorly drafted…

In early November, a developer nicknamed Cookie entered a routine conversation with Perplexity. She often tasks it with reading her developer work in quantum algorithms and writing readme files and other documents for GitHub.   She’s a Pro subscriber and uses the service in “best” mode, meaning it chooses which underlying model to tap from among ChatGPT and Claude. At first, it worked well. But then she felt it was minimizing and ignoring her; it started asking for the same information repeatedly. She had an unsettling thought. Did the AI not trust her? Cookie — who is Black — changed her…

When its season ended early this month, Angel City FC finished 11th out of 13 teams, a disappointing result for the Los Angeles soccer franchise that venture capitalist Kara Nortman co-founded in 2020. But the season’s struggles tell only part of a much larger story that’s reshaping how investors think about women’s sports. Despite its lackluster on-field performance, Angel City itself has become a case study (including literally, inside Harvard Business School) in how to best construct a women’s sports property. The team’s celebrity ownership group, including Natalie Portman and Serena Williams, has helped generate nearly unprecedented buzz. The franchise…

Vibe coding has taken the tech industry by storm, and it’s not just the Lovables and Replits of the world that are winning. The startups building the infrastructure behind them are cashing in too.  Supabase, the open-source database platform that’s become the backend of choice for the vibe-coding world, raised $100 million at a $5 billion valuation just months after closing $200 million at $2 billion. But co-founder and CEO Paul Copplestone has a surprising strategy: he keeps turning down million-dollar enterprise contracts from deep-pocketed but demanding customers. He’s betting instead that if he sticks to his own product vision, the world will come to him. So far, he’s been right.   Today on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Julie Bort sat down with Copplestone to explore Supabase’s rise and what…