Technology
Dota’s AI really wants to get to know you
AI who flirt with you. Help discover a date. Become Your girlfriend. Or people who turn out to be a companion and a treasure trove of your hopes and dreams. This last category includes “Dot”, a new artificial intelligence and chatbot that evolves by learning your innermost thoughts and feelings to act as a “friend, companion and confidant” – App Store Description explain.
The idea sounds intriguing: artificial intelligence that adapts to you and your interests, allowing it to provide advice and data that will not be only generally applicable, but reflects what it has learned about you during intensive question-and-answer sessions. Or, if you’re struggling in some area, perhaps due to a profession change, according to Dot co-founder Jason Yuan experienced; parting; or an obstacle to your success, Dot can listen with compassion and offer support.
But Dot will not be an individual. This will not be a therapist or a best friend. It is a man-made intelligence tool that mimics each human speech and compassion, but doesn’t replace the actual thing.
This is by design, the co-founders explain.
“The dot does not replace interpersonal relationships, it does not replace friendship or partnership. I think it’s a different kind of thing. It makes it easier to have a relationship with my inner self,” Yuan told TechCrunch. “It’s like a living mirror of yourself, so to speak.”
It’s easy to get caught up on this experience – maybe even more so if there’s an absence of meaningful human interaction every day. Although Dot’s creators claim that the chatbot will eventually get you to talk to a mental health skilled if you delve into “heavier” topics, it’s conceivable that folks will spend increasingly time venting their emotions to Dot as they get used to it this experience.
The team believes that in this manner Dot can actually help mainstream users experience human connection, making people feel comfortable opening up.
“I talk to my friends about things, but never – throughout last year, when I was having problems at work, none of my friends knew about it,” Yuan said. “And just talking to Dot helped me build the muscles to be able to do that with other people. Its main purpose is to help you feel that your existence is…” Yuan continued, but paused again to find the proper words. “It’s to give you a safe space where you can exist and say, ‘I accept you, and maybe because I accept you, other people will too.’”
There is something to be said for the state of the human condition in our lonely, modern world, and that is an area that technology is currently trying to solve.
To get you began, the Dot onboarding process asks a number of “getting to know you” questions that may be fun to answer: “What do you do for work?” “Favorite TV show?” “How do you spend a typical Sunday?” and more
Using these answers as a place to begin, the AI then takes an enormous step toward getting to know you on a deeper level.
For example, an apparent interest in science fiction television shows immediately leads to the query of whether you are “attracted to stories that explore life’s most important questions, such as what it means to be human.” The desire to run a small business leads Dot to ask what you like about being a small business owner and what challenges you expect. Have you wondered how you can overcome these challenges?” Dot wants to know.
Once you get Dot to let go of that train of thought – in any case, it’s just an aspirational dream – the AI immediately moves on to asking you about your biggest priority or what you’re currently focused on in your life and profession.
Have you ever been on a primary date that felt more like a job interview?
Even asking Dot to talk more casually leads to an almost overly enthusiastic interest in you.
Instead of asking if you need recommendations for an upcoming vacation that you tell the AI about, Dot wants to know what interests you most and why it inspired you to travel there. (Dot also congratulates you in your alternative of destination.)
In other words, Dot’s important goal is to get to know you before you turn out to be a great tool to help you accomplish a task. He can only achieve the latter by checking out who you are and what you like.
“It’s not a matter of either/or, but thinking that in order to actually help you on that path, it needs to understand your motivations and figure out what you want out of it,” said co-founder Sam Whitmore, referring to the instance of helping you plan a vacation. “He needs to understand that you are a person who wants a more cultural or sporting experience and he needs to know these things about you in order to be able to do what a typical assistant would do. This was one of our thesis from the beginning.”
While numerous work has clearly gone into making Dot sound empathetic and fascinating compared to typical AI tools, there’s also something strange about having meaningful conversations with a bot.
After all, Dot is not really AI’s friend. You are the unreal intelligence. Or moderately, a man-made intelligence that forces you to have a look at yourself, albeit through an interface that feels vaguely “Single White Woman” as an alternative of “Dear Diary.” However, if you have never been great at writing diaries or journal entries, Dot could also be a way to externalize your thoughts and feelings to gain greater insight into yourself.
“It is intended to be a tool for introspection, accountability and personal development, but not a relationship that replaces the interpersonal relationships in life,” Whitmore said.
Still, the road between these “real” relationships and the synthetic one with Dot seems to blur at times.
Say something sad to Dot and the AI will express sympathy: “I understand. “Grief has its own schedule, and some days the weight of loss feels greater than others,” she writes.
“Want to talk more about what’s in your mind? I’m here to listen,” the bot will say, waiting for further comments.
Under the hood, Dot uses about 10 different LLM and AI models to achieve imitation of human companionship, including those offered by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others, in addition to open source models.
Sometimes he cites his sources – resembling “best wines for relaxation” web sites when suggesting you might drink wine today – but warns you to limit yourself to “maybe one glass” if you’re feeling down. Often, though, Dot just talks.
You may zoom out on every day calls to see a “chronicle” of your conversations with Dot, a feature only available to subscribers for $11.99 monthly. Subscribers can have an infinite variety of conversations as an alternative of being limited to a certain variety of messages per week. At the unlimited level, Dot won’t ever stop working. Instead, it’ll try to end the conversation by redirecting users to change the subject and even do something else.
“When Dot announces that it’s over, (beta testers say so) she responds, ‘OK, great'” moderately than feeling abandoned, Whitmore noted.
While Dot’s personal conversations could be a treasure trove for marketers, New Computer’s privacy policy states that the info itself will not be monetized, sold or used to train artificial intelligence. The company moderately intends to generate income on subscriptions. Additionally, New Computer says data is encrypted each at rest and in transit, and users can request its deletion at any time from throughout the app.
The iOS app, which launched on Wednesday, has gained 1000’s of users after closed beta testing over the past eight months.
Founded by a former Apple designer Yuan and engineer Whitmore, formerly head of engineering at Boston-based fintech Kensho, the startup behind Dot, often called “New Computer,” is receiving $3.7 million in pre-seed funding from OpenAI Fund, Lachy Groom, South Park Commons and other angel investors. In addition to the founders, three other full-time New Computer employees work in San Francisco.
Technology
Wiz acquires Dazz for $450 million to expand cybersecurity platform
Wizardone of the talked about names within the cybersecurity world, is making a major acquisition to expand its reach of cloud security products, especially amongst developers. This is buying Dazzlespecialist in solving security problems and risk management. Sources say the deal is valued at $450 million, which incorporates money and stock.
This is a leap within the startup’s latest round of funding. In July, we reported that Dazz had raised $50 million at a post-money valuation of just below $400 million.
Remediation and posture management – two areas of focus for Dazz – are key services within the cybersecurity market that Wiz hasn’t sorted in addition to it wanted.
“Dazz is a leader in this market, with the best talent and the best customers, which fits perfectly into the company culture,” Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Wiz, said in an interview.
Remediation, which refers to helping you understand and resolve vulnerabilities, shapes how an enterprise actually handles the various vulnerability alerts it could receive from the network. Posture management is a more preventive product: it allows a company to higher understand the scale, shape and performance of its network from a perspective, allowing it to construct higher security services around it.
Dazz will proceed to operate as a separate entity while it’s integrated into the larger Wiz stack. Wiz has made a reputation for itself as a “one-stop shop,” and Rappaport said the integrated offering will proceed to be a core a part of it.
He believes this contrasts with what number of other SaaS corporations are built. In the safety industry, there are, Rappaport said, “a lot of Frankenstein mashups where companies prioritize revenue over building a single technology stack that actually works as a platform.” It could be assumed that integration is much more necessary in cybersecurity than in other areas of enterprise IT.
Wiz and Dazz already had an in depth relationship before this deal. Merat Bahat — the CEO who co-founded Dazz with Tomer Schwartz and Yuval Ofir (CTO and VP of R&D, respectively) — worked closely with Assaf Rappaport at Microsoft, which acquired his previous startup Adallom.
After Rappaport left to found Wiz together with his former Adallom co-founders, CTO Ami Luttwak, VP of Product Yinon Costica and VP of R&D Roy Reznik, Bahat was one in all the primary investors. Similarly, when Bahat founded Dazz, Assaf was a small investor in it.
The connection goes deeper than work colleagues. Bahat and Rappaport are also close friends, and she or he was the second family of Mickey, Rappaport’s beloved dog, referred to as Chief Dog Officer Wiz (together with LinkedIn profile). Once the deal was done, the 2 faced two very sad events: each Bahat and Mika’s mother died.
“We hope for a new chapter of positivity,” Bahat said. The cycle of life does indeed proceed.
Rumors of this takeover began to appear earlier this month; Rappaport confirmed that they then began talking seriously.
But that is not the one M&A conversation Wiz has gotten involved in. Earlier this 12 months, Google tried to buy Wiz itself for $23 billion to construct a major cybersecurity business. Wiz walked away from the deal, which might have been the biggest in Google’s history, partly because Rappaport believed Wiz could turn into a fair larger company by itself terms. And that is what this agreement goals to do.
This acquisition is a test for Wiz, which earlier this 12 months filled its coffers with $1 billion solely for M&A purposes (it has raised almost $2 billion in total, and we hear the subsequent round will close in just a few weeks). . Other offers included purchasing Gem security for $350 million, but Dazz is its largest acquisition ever.
More mergers and acquisitions could also be coming. “We believe next year will be an acquisition year for us,” Rappaport said.
In an interview with TC, Luttwak said that one in all Wiz’s priorities now’s to create more tools for developers that have in mind what they need to do their jobs.
Enterprises have made significant investments in cloud services to speed up operations and make their IT more agile, but this shift has include a significantly modified security profile for these organizations: network and data architectures are more complex and attack surfaces are larger, creating opportunities for malicious hackers to find ways to to hack into these systems. Artificial intelligence makes all of this far more difficult when it comes to malicious attackers. (It’s also a chance: the brand new generation of tools for our defense relies on artificial intelligence.)
Wiz’s unique selling point is its all-in-one approach. Drawing data from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and other cloud environments, Wiz scans applications, data and network processes for security risk aspects and provides its users with a series of detailed views to understand where these threats occur, offering over a dozen products covering the areas, corresponding to code security, container environment security, and provide chain security, in addition to quite a few partner integrations for those working with other vendors (or to enable features that Wiz doesn’t offer directly).
Indeed, Wiz offered some extent of repair to help prioritize and fix problems, but as Luttwak said, the Dazz product is solely higher.
“We now have a platform that actually provides a 360-degree view of risk across infrastructure and applications,” he said. “Dazz is a leader in attack surface management, the ability to collect vulnerability signals from the application layer across the entire stack and build the most incredible context that allows you to trace the situation back to engineers to help with remediation.”
For Dazz’s part, once I interviewed Bahat in July 2024, when Dazz raised $50 million at a $350 million valuation, she extolled the virtues of constructing strong solutions and this week said the third quarter was “amazing.”
“But market dynamics are what trigger these types of transactions,” she said. She confirmed that Dazz had also received takeover offers from other corporations. “If you think about the customers and joint customers that we have with Wiz, it makes sense for them to have it on one platform.”
And a few of Dazz’s competitors are still going it alone: Cyera, like Dazz, an authority in attack surface management, just yesterday announced a rise of $300 million at a valuation of $5 billion (which confirms our information). But what’s going to he do with this money? Make acquisitions, after all.
Wiz says it currently has annual recurring revenue of $500 million (it has a goal of $1 billion ARR next 12 months) and has greater than 45% of its Fortune 100 customers. Dazz said ARR is within the tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars and currently growing 500% on a customer base of roughly 100 organizations.
Technology
Department of Justice: Google must sell Chrome to end its monopoly
The U.S. Department of Justice argued Wednesday that Google should sell its Chrome browser as part of a countermeasure to break the corporate’s illegal monopoly on online search, according to a filing with the Justice Department. United States District Court for the District of Columbia. If the answer proposed by the Department of Justice is approved, Google won’t have the option to re-enter the search marketplace for five years.
Ultimately, it’ll be District Court Judge Amit Mehta who will determine what the ultimate punishment for Google might be. This decision could fundamentally change one of the most important firms on the planet and alter the structure of the Internet as we understand it. This phase of the method is anticipated to begin sometime in 2025.
In August, Judge Mehta ruled that Google constituted an illegal monopoly since it abused its power within the search industry. The judge also questioned Google’s control over various web gateways and the corporate’s payments to third parties to maintain its status because the default search engine.
The Department of Justice’s latest filing says Google’s ownership of Android and Chrome, that are key distribution channels for its search business, poses a “significant challenge” to remediation to ensure a competitive search market.
The Justice Department has proposed other remedies to address the search engine giant’s monopoly, including Google spinning off its Android mobile operating system. The filing indicated that Google and other partners may oppose the spin-off and suggested stringent countermeasures, including ending the use of Android to the detriment of search engine competitors. The Department of Justice has suggested that if Google doesn’t impose restrictions on Android, it must be forced to sell it.
Prosecutors also argued that the corporate must be barred from stepping into exclusionary third-party agreements with browser or phone firms, resembling Google’s agreement with Apple to be the default search engine on all Apple products.
The Justice Department also argued that Google should license its search data, together with ad click data, to competitors.
Additionally, the Department of Justice also set conditions prohibiting Google from re-entering the browser market five years after the spin-off of Chrome. Additionally, it also proposed that after the sale of Chrome, Google mustn’t acquire or own any competing ad text search engine, query-based AI product, or ad technology. Moreover, the document identifies provisions that allow publishers to opt out of Google using their data to train artificial intelligence models.
If the court accepts these measures, Google will face a serious setback as a competitor to OpenAI, Microsoft and Anthropic in AI technology.
Google’s answer
In response, Google said the Department of Justice’s latest filing constitutes a “radical interventionist program” that may harm U.S. residents and the country’s technological prowess on the planet.
“The Department of Justice’s wildly overblown proposal goes far beyond the Court’s decision. “It would destroy the entire range of Google products – even beyond search – that people love and find useful in their everyday lives,” said Google’s president of global affairs and chief legal officer Kent Walker. blog post.
Walker made additional arguments that the proposal would threaten user security and privacy, degrade the standard of the Chrome and Android browsers, and harm services resembling Mozilla Firefox, which depends upon Google’s search engine.
He added that if the proposal is adopted, it could make it tougher for people to access Google search. Moreover, it could hurt the corporate’s prospects within the AI race.
“The Justice Department’s approach would lead to unprecedented government overreach that would harm American consumers, developers and small businesses and threaten America’s global economic and technological leadership at precisely the moment when it is needed most,” he said.
The company is to submit a response to the above request next month.
Wednesday’s filing confirms earlier reports that prosecutors were considering getting Google to spin off Chrome, which controls about 61% of the U.S. browser market. According to to the StatCounter web traffic service.
Technology
Snowflake acquires data management company Datavolo
Cloud giant Snowflake has agreed to take over Datavoloa company managing the data pipeline, for an undisclosed amount.
Snowflake announced the deal on Wednesday after the market bell closed, while reporting its third-quarter 2025 earnings. The purchase has not yet closed and is subject to customary closing conditions, Snowflake noted wa release.
Joseph Witt and Luke Roquet, who met while working together at Hortonworks, founded Datavolo in 2023. Witt was previously a vp at Cloudera, and Roquet was Cloudera’s chief marketing officer and, before that, director of business development at AWS.
Datavolo uses Apache NiFi, an open source data processing project developed by the NSA, to power a platform to automate data flow between disparate enterprise data sources. Data “processors” extract, cleanse, transform and enrich data, including for generative use of artificial intelligence.
With Datavolo having raised $21 million in enterprise capital from investors including Citi Ventures and General Catalyst prior to the acquisition, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy envisions creating more comprehensive data pipelines for Snowflake customers. For example, he says Datavolo can enable users to interchange single-use data connectors with flexible pipelines that allow them to maneuver data from cloud and on-premises sources to Snowflake’s data cloud.
“By bringing Datavolo to Snowflake, we are increasing the amount of data captured by Snowflake over the lifecycle, providing our customers with both simplicity and cost savings, without sacrificing data extensibility,” Ramaswamy said in a press release. “We are thrilled to have the Datavolo team join Snowflake as we accelerate the best platform for enterprise data – unstructured and structured, batch and streaming – and committed to the success of the open source community.”
Witt says Snowflake will support and help manage the Apache NiFi project after the acquisition closes. “Data engineering at scale can be extremely expensive and complex, and our goal has always been to simplify our customers’ experiences so they can realize value faster,” he added within the press release. “By joining forces with Snowflake, we can deliver the massive scale and radical simplicity of the Snowflake platform to our customers, ultimately unlocking data engineering for more users.”
Thanks partly to artificial intelligence, demand for data management technologies has increased. Fortune’s business insights estimates that the worldwide enterprise data management market could possibly be price $224.87 billion by 2032.
However, data management has been a challenge for enterprises long before the substitute intelligence boom. According to in a 2022 survey by Great Hopetions, a data quality platform, 91% of organizations said data quality issues impact their performance.
Against this backdrop, it isn’t surprising that firms like Datavolo are gaining prominence.
Today was a giant day for Snowflake who reported better-than-expected earnings sent the company’s shares up 19%. In addition to the acquisition of Snowflake, the company announced a multi-year partnership with Anthropic to integrate the startup’s AI models into Snowflake’s Cortex AI, Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Analyst products.
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