Matt Burgess / Wired: A review of Telegram communities involved in explicit nonconsensual content finds 50+ bots that claim to create such content, listing 4M+ total “monthly users”  —  Bots that “remove clothes” from images have run rampant on the messaging app, allowing people to create nonconsensual deepfake images …

Amplitude, a publicly-traded company that makes digital analytics software, has acquired Command AI, an app user engagement startup formerly known as CommandBar. Most of Command AI’s 30-person, San Francisco-based team will be joining Amplitude. Command AI’s co-founder and CEO James Evans wouldn’t reveal the terms of the deal, but said candidly that an acquisition wasn’t something he’d been planning on. “Our growth was great and we had plenty of runway,” Evans told TechCrunch. “We weren’t out shopping ourselves or anything. But when Amplitude reached out a little while ago — this summer — we got really excited about the combination…

Creating engaging videos isn’t only about the visuals. So much of the appeal of good video content is about the audio, but finding (or maybe even creating) the right audio effects can be a time-consuming process. At its annual Max conference, Adobe is showing off Project Super Sonic, an experimental prototype demo that shows how you could one day use text-to-audio, object recognition, and even your own voice to quickly generate background audio and audio effects for your video projects. Being able to generate audio effects from a text prompt is fun, but given that ElevenLabs and others already offer…

Five-year-old AI customer service startup Neuron7 just closed an oversubscribed $44 million series B round led by Keith Block and his year-and-half-old venture firm, Smith Point Capital. Neuron7 sits in one of the most promising areas for AI technology: customer service. But unlike the hoards of ChatGPT customer chatbot startups, or those doing natural language searches of manuals, Neuron7 is aimed at complex service and repair operations. Its customers, for instance, include ATM field repair company NCR Atleos, medical device maker Medtronic, and printer/imaging company Lexmark, the company says.  “If you are one of the largest med device companies or…

Inversion Space has become the third company to receive a spacecraft reentry license from the Federal Aviation Administration, paving the way for the startup to launch and return its tech pathfinder mission for orbital delivery later this year.  The three-year-old startup has ambitions of transforming space into a new “transportation layer for Earth” using ultra-fast, on-demand cargo deliveries to anywhere on Earth from orbit. The Ray vehicle is the first hardware Inversion will be sending to space. Mounted on an oven-sized bus, the actual Ray capsule is only about twice the size of a Frisbee — much smaller than the…

Early is a Tel Aviv-based startup that uses generative AI to generate unit tests, helping programmers catch potential bugs early in the development cycle. The company, which launched in August, today announced that it has raised a $5 million seed funding round led by Zeev Ventures, with participation from Dynamic Loop Capital. In its current form, Early supports JavaScript and TypeScript and integrates with the Visual Studio Code IDE. From there, developers can quickly see how much of their code is covered by tests and then automatically generate validated tests right from within the IDE. Those tests, the company says,…

YouTube on Tuesday added new features to its mobile, web, and TV apps, including granular controls for playback speeds, a redesigned mini-player, collaborative playlists and badges. Until now, users had controls to increase the playback speed in increments of 0.25x. With the latest release, YouTube will let users increase or decrease the playback speed by 0.05x by tapping on the “+” or “-” symbols on the new playback speed control menu. The company has also made it easier to make collaborative playlists. You can now share a link or a QR code for a playlist with someone, and users can…

Ruben Harris and Timur Meyster, the founders of the upskilling platform Career Karma, announced today the launch of the company OutRival, which offers a service that hosts and lets businesses build their own customer service agents to take on customer interactions. AI agent companies are hot right now, and AI is one of the only sectors in venture capital seeing a flood of money rush toward it. As of September, the VC industry poured at least $64.1 billion into the AI sector and a third of all VC dollars this year went to AI startups, according to PitchBook data reported…

After bringing generative AI to Search in 2023, Google is supercharging its Shopping tab with the technology. The company announced on Tuesday that it will use AI to help users shop for products based on exactly what they’re looking for. It also launched a new scrollable feed of personalized, shoppable products.  Now, when you search for a product on Google, the results page will include an AI brief with things to consider when shopping. For instance, if you search for a “men’s winter jacket for Seattle,” you will see a summary with things Google thinks you should know before purchasing…