This Week in AI: Tech giants embrace synthetic data

Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. This week in AI, synthetic data rose to prominence. OpenAI last Thursday introduced Canvas, a new way to interact with ChatGPT, its AI-powered chatbot platform. Canvas opens a window with a workspace for writing and coding…

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LinkedIn scraped user data for training before updating its terms of service

LinkedIn may have trained AI models on user data without updating its terms. LinkedIn users in the U.S. — but not the EU, EEA, or Switzerland, likely due to those regions’ data privacy rules — have an opt-out toggle in their settings screen disclosing that LinkedIn scrapes personal data to train “content creation AI models.”…

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In 2024, it really is better to run a startup in San Francisco, according to data and founders who’ve relocated

San Francisco’s AI startup boom is so big, even international founders who don’t run AI startups are relocating there to help their companies grow, according to several founders who recently moved.  This is largely because the tech talent and investor money is still overwhelmingly concentrated there, according to new data that VC firm SignalFire exclusively…

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How to freeze your credit after a data breach

Back in 2017, Equifax announced that hackers stole half of the US population’s Social Security numbers in what, we said, “will likely end up being one of the worst data breaches to ever affect the country.” Perhaps — until this year, when about 2.9 billion rows of data were collected through a breach at National…

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Elon Musk’s X targeted with nine privacy complaints after grabbing EU users’ data for training Grok

X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, has been targeted with a series of privacy complaints after it helped itself to the data of users in the European Union for training AI models without asking people’s consent. Late last month an eagle-eyed social media user spotted a setting indicating that X had quietly…

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Privacy watchdog says it’s ‘surprised’ by Elon Musk opting user data into Grok AI training

X, formerly Twitter, quietly pushed out a change that appears to default user data into its AI training pool for Grok, a move that was spotted by users of the platform on Friday. Grok is the name of a conversational AI, or large language model (LLM), developed by Elon Musk-owned X and intended as a…

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This climate tech startup wants to capture carbon and help data centers cool down

Data centers are a growing climate problem, especially as all the energy needed to train AI models inflates tech companies’ carbon footprints. A startup that spun out of Google’s “moonshot factory” X says its technology can provide a potential solution. It can pull carbon dioxide out of the air, run partially on servers’ waste heat,…

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OmniAI transforms business data for AI

The majority of companies struggle to extract value from their data. Several years ago, Forrester reported that between 60% and 73% of data belonging to the average business goes unused for analytics. That’s because the data’s siloed or otherwise pigeonholed by technical and security considerations, making it difficult — if not impossible — to apply analytical tools….

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