Workplace and salary review platform Glass door draws inspiration from LinkedIn’s roadmap by publishing short videos, polls, and images to extend community engagement.

Professional platforms are beginning to experiment with short-form video formats after seeing the success of consumer apps like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Earlier this yr, LinkedIn began testing a TikTok-like video feed using a brand new “Video” tab in the navigation bar. The company said video is a sought-after form of communication by users.

Glassdoor also goals to copy LinkedIn’s engagement metrics through surveys and short videos.

In addition, the company can also be introducing the Worklife Pros program. This is a gaggle of chosen people willing to share content and insights on topics comparable to navigating the dynamics of distant work, achieving a healthy work-life balance, understanding mental health in the workplace, and developing career-supporting skills.

Glassdoor chosen over a dozen people for this program from various sectors, comparable to technology, business, recruiting, and profession and money. Meanwhile, LinkedIn awards a top voice badge across sectors to experts who regularly post engaging content on the platform. Glassdoor said content from these professionals will appear on the important feed in addition to on community channels. The company added that users can contact these professionals through the use of their real name or anonymously.

Last yr, the company launched anonymous community features, leveraging the technology and platform gained from its acquisition of Fishbowl in 2021. Since introducing the feature, Glassdoor has seen a rise in engagement.

The company said it now has 25 million registered community users, up from 7 million in June 2023. Additionally, it has recorded over 44 million conversations in various circles (called communities) and notes that community users are 50 times more engaged than traditional Glassdoor users.

Moreover, these features also appear to have influenced the overall development of the platform. Glassdoor currently has 63 million unique monthly visitors. This represents an improvement because as of early 2021, the company’s user base was stuck at 55 million energetic users.

Last yr, Sound venturesThe nine-year-old Beverly Hills, California-based enterprise capital firm, led by general partners Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary and Effie Epstein, announced a brand new $265 million artificial intelligence fund that might bet on large language model firms, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Hugging Face.

In fact, the plan was to speculate in just six firms – a dangerous but potentially lucrative assumption for the team’s vision for a future through which – because of the technical talent required and the capital needed to cover computational costs – the most important winners in AI can be few and far between. mass.

Since then, Sound has raised more cash for a similar fund. It also appears to have stuck to its mission, judging by the few deals it has publicly disclosed in 2024, and we’re excited to be hosting all three of them at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 to speak about their strategy — together with the trends they’re tracking well Now.

Kutcher has arguably managed to transition between the worlds of acting and investing more easily than anyone else in Hollywood, launching his profession in 2010 with the discharge of the film Class A investments with talent manager and business partner Guy Oseary, whose early bets on Airbnb and Uber helped cement their reputations for striking the suitable deal at the suitable time.

The two, who founded Sound Ventures in 2014, brought Epstein on board just a few years later to round out their skills. Epstein previously led global strategy at Marsh & McLennan’s subsidiary, Marsh. She also served as vice chairman of planning and head of investor relations at iHeartMedia and previously worked in business development at Clear.

Epstein also previously worked in investment banking within the energy sector, bringing a wide range of experience and contacts to his firm.

You definitely don’t need to miss this bonfire on the Disrupt Stage, where you may be amongst 10,000 tech leaders, startups and VCs attending Disrupt 2024. Register today to secure your ticket price before it goes up.

Cloud service providers are chasing AI unicorns, and the latest is Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs. The startup just chosen Google Cloud as its primary computing provider for training artificial intelligence models, a move that could possibly be value a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the company said Li’s tenure as Google Cloud’s chief artificial intelligence scientist was irrelevant.

During the company’s Google Cloud Startup Summit on Tuesday announced World Labs will devote a big portion of its funds to licensing GPU servers on the Google Cloud Platform and ultimately to training “spatially intelligent” artificial intelligence models.

A handful of well-funded startups constructing basic AI models are in high demand in the world of cloud services. The largest deals include OpenAI, which exclusively trains and runs AI models on Microsoft Azure, and Anthropic, which uses AWS and Google Cloud. These corporations often pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for computing services, and sooner or later they could need much more as they scale their artificial intelligence models. This makes them beneficial customers for Google, Microsoft, and AWS to construct relationships with from the starting.

World Labs is definitely constructing unique, multimodal AI models with significant computational needs. The startup just raised $230 million at a valuation of over $1 billion, in a deal led by A16Z, to construct global artificial intelligence models. Google Cloud’s general manager of startups and AI, James Lee, tells TechCrunch that World Labs’ AI models will sooner or later have the ability to process, generate and interact with video and geospatial data. World Labs calls these AI models “spatial intelligence.”

Li has deep ties to Google Cloud, having led the company’s artificial intelligence efforts in 2018. However, Google denies that this deal is a result of this relationship and rejects the concept that cloud services are only a commodity. Instead, Lee said the greater factor is services, such as a high-performance toolkit for scaling AI workloads and a big supply of AI chips.

“Fei-Fei is obviously a friend of GCP,” Lee said in an interview. “GCP wasn’t the only option they were considering. But for all the reasons we talked about – our AI-optimized infrastructure and ability to meet their scalability needs – they ultimately came to us.”

Google Cloud offers AI startups a alternative between proprietary AI chips, tensor processing units or TPUs, and Nvidia GPUs, which Google buys and that are in additional limited supply. Google Cloud is attempting to persuade more startups to coach AI models on TPUs, mainly to cut back dependence on Nvidia. All cloud service providers today are limited by the shortage of Nvidia GPUs, so many are constructing their very own AI chips to satisfy demand. Google Cloud says some startups are training and inferring exclusively on TPUs, but GPUs remain the industry’s favorite AI training chips.

As part of this agreement, World Labs has chosen to coach its artificial intelligence models on GPUs. However, Google Cloud didn’t say what prompted this decision.

“We had been working with Fei-Fei and her product team, and at this point in the product roadmap it made more sense for them to work with us on the GPU platform,” Lee said in an interview. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a permanent decision… Sometimes (startups) move to other platforms like TPU.”

Lee didn’t reveal how large World Labs’ GPU cluster is, but cloud providers often devote huge supercomputers to startups training artificial intelligence models. Google Cloud promised one other startup training basic AI models, Magic, a cluster with “tens of thousands of Blackwell GPUs,” each with more power than a high-end gaming PC.

These clusters are easier to vow than to deliver. According to reports, Microsoft is a competitor to Google’s cloud services struggles to satisfy insane computational demands OpenAI, forcing the startup to make use of other computing power options.

World Labs’ contract with Google Cloud is non-exclusive, which suggests the startup can still strike deals with other cloud service providers. Google Cloud, nevertheless, says most of its operations will proceed.