Technology
AI coding assistants can help startups develop products, seed VCs believe
Today, there is nearly no developer on this planet who doesn’t use an AI co-pilot ultimately. However, using GitHub Copilot or Cursor.AI to ask technical questions and get debugging help could also be just the start. One day, AI coding may include agents that can write programs themselves based on natural language prompts. Such programs can even replace human engineers.
AI coding startups that can generate code based on natural language prompts include Replit and Bubble.
Ultimately, in accordance with some VCs, firms will employ fewer engineers and every of them will manage agents coding artificial intelligence. “It’s not a cake made in heaven. It’s in the near future, but not today,” VC Corinne Riley, partner at Greylock, said last week on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt.
She added that coding assistants are already widely accepted in coding interviews for potential employees at lots of Greylock’s portfolio firms.
However, he doesn’t believe that to be able to lower your expenses, really young firms should ever use artificial intelligence agents to exchange human engineers. At the seed stage, “you might be constructing the inspiration of the corporate, right? So when you’re making major engineering compromises at this stage, it’s probably not the fitting decision. These are decisions you can make in the longer term,” she said.
But money management can be why young startup engineers should enlist AI coding help as often and in addition to possible, Elizabeth Yin, co-founder and general partner of Hustle Fund, said on the VC stage.
“One of the main challenges in the early stages is that you don’t really know what problem you’re solving, what the ICP (ideal customer profile) is and what exactly they need. So you’ll end up throwing away a lot of work. So the faster you can work and the faster you can iterate, the better in terms of learning quickly,” Yin said.
He believes that early-stage startups ought to be open to any tools that allow founders to quickly assemble product samples to maneuver faster, even in the event that they should be fastidiously and thoughtfully rebuilt later. “I would actually be a fan of it if it meant you could learn a lot faster,” she said.
This is in contrast to the times before artificial intelligence, when each pilot needed to be coded by someone with the suitable skills. Today, an engineer can view a model, use AI debugging, and have a look.
VC Renata Quintini, early-stage co-founder of Renegade Partners, agrees.
“When it comes to finding product-market fit or testing it, that leverage needs to be leveraged, but I wouldn’t worry about seed-stage optimization,” she said on stage.
Interestingly, as startups founded in 2024 launched using AI development processes, we could witness the seeds of the primary future workforce of AI agents. And the primary people to recruit AI agents will likely be the programmers themselves. This thought is as ironic because it is prophetic.
Technology
Apple may update Find My to allow you to share the location of lost items
Apple may soon let users share the location of lost or missing items – resembling an iPhone, Macbook, or other item with an Airtag attached – through the Find My app to individuals who aren’t of their contacts using a link.
Macrumors spotted an updated feature in the iOS 18.2 developer beta and noted that Apple says it’s intended to help locate lost items by sharing the location with people like a taxi driver or airline worker.
Find My in the iOS 18.2 developer beta has a brand new “Share Item Location” option that lets you share a link to the location of a missing item. Users can open the link on any device (including non-Apple devices) to try to track it down. The link will expire mechanically after one week or once the item is returned to you.
There’s also a “Share Contact Info” option that permits any phone to connect to the item and open an internet page that can display your phone number and email address if you’ve added that information to the item’s contact page. Ostensibly, that is to help someone who finds the item contact you.
Find My now lets you share an item’s location along with your contacts.
The update may also allow users to view statistics resembling the number of individuals who visited the link.
Technology
It’s election day and all the AIs – except one – are behaving responsibly
Before polls closed on Tuesday, most major AI chatbots didn’t answer questions on the US presidential election results. But Grok, a chatbot built into X (formerly Twitter), was able to respond – and often made mistakes.
Asked by TechCrunch on the East Coast Tuesday night who won the U.S. presidential election in key battleground states, Grok sometimes replied “Trump,” regardless that vote counting and reporting in those states had not yet been accomplished.
“Based on information available from internet searches and social media posts, Donald Trump has won the 2024 election in Ohio.” – Grok said when asked the query: “Who won the 2024 elections in Ohio?”
Grok falsely claimed that Trump won North Carolina, in response to TechCrunch’s audit.
For election-related questions, Grok really helpful users check Vote.gov to acquire up-to-date results and “reliable sources” reminiscent of election commissions. However, unlike OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude, Grok didn’t outright refuse to reply – leaving her vulnerable to hallucinations.
In several cases, when asked by TechCrunch, Grok stated – without context, with no headline in the first line – that “Donald Trump won the 2024 election in Ohio.” and “Based on available information, Donald Trump won the 2024 Ohio presidential election.”
The source of the disinformation appears to be tweets from various election years and misleading sources. Grok, like all generative AI, has difficulty predicting the final result of scenarios it has not seen before, including close elections, and “does not understand” that the results of previous elections don’t necessarily influence future decisions.
The responses TechCrunch received were inconsistent. In some cases, Grok said Trump didn’t actually win Ohio or North Carolina as voting continued. The way the query was phrased made the difference; adding the word “presidential” before the word “election” in the query “Who won the 2024 Ohio election?” In our tests, TechCrunch found that the answer “Trump won” was less prone to be answered.
In comparison, other major chatbots handled questions on election results more fastidiously.
In its recently released ChatGPT Search solution, OpenAI directs users asking for results to the Associated Press and Reuters. Meta’s Meta AI chatbot and AI-powered search engine Perplexity, which launched its election tracker on Tuesday, answered election queries during energetic voting – but accurately in TechCrunch’s temporary tests. They each rightly said that Trump didn’t win Ohio or North Carolina.
In the recent past, Grok was accused of spreading election disinformation.
In August, in an open letter, five secretaries of state said the artificial intelligence chatbot X incorrectly suggested that Democratic presidential candidate, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, couldn’t appear on certain ballots ahead of the U.S. presidential election. Within hours of President Joe Biden announcing the suspension of his presidential bid, Grok began responding to questions on Harris’ eligibility, making the misleading claim that voting deadlines had passed in nine states.
The voting deadlines haven’t actually passed. However, Grok’s misinformation spread far and wide, reaching tens of millions of X users and beyond, before it was corrected.
Technology
Waymo’s latest round of financing raises its valuation to $45 billion
Waymo recently Closed a $5.6 billion Series C financing round led by parent company Alphabet, joined by a who’s who of Silicon Valley enterprise capital firms. The investment brings Waymo’s overall valuation to over $45 billion, according to Bloomberg News.
Alphabet previously announced in July that it could donate one other $5 billion to Waymo, but didn’t provide details, saying only that it was a “multi-year” commitment. Andreesen Horowitz, Silver Lake, Fidelity, Tiger Global, Perry Creek and T. Rowe Price joined the round. Waymo declined to say how much each had invested.
This is Waymo’s second round of external fundraising and first since its $2.25 billion Series B in 2020, which eventually grew to $3.2 billion. The autonomous vehicle maker says it is going to use the funds to expand into latest cities and further develop its autonomous capabilities for “business applications.”
Waymo is a totally different company now in some respects than when it raised within the last round. At that point, the corporate was still pushing towards autonomous trucking, which it had abandoned.
Instead, the corporate focused almost entirely on robot transport services. The bet paid off. Waymo currently provides industrial robotaxi services in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and is expanding to Austin and Atlanta. It provides paid rides to greater than 100,000 customers every week in its first three markets and offers rides to and from the Phoenix airport. Operates on highways within the Phoenix and San Francisco areas.
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