startups

The Hottest Startups in Zurich in 2024
14 Oct

The Hottest Startups in Zurich in 2024

stp2y0 CommentsRAG models, ,
Home to fine cheese, breathtaking scenery and footballing politics (FIFA HQ overlooks Lake Zurich), Switzerland’s largest city is also a financial juggernaut. The central square of Paradeplatz is its beating heart, where the Swiss banking system pumps venture capital funding into a thriving tech ecosystem—around CHF 72 million (more than $1 billion) was poured into Zurich startups alone in 2023.Fintech is a natural major player, but if the banking industry is the ecosystem’s engine, innovation is its fuel. Many of the city’s most exciting startups began life as student projects at its world-leading universities, which provide a steady flow of…
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The Hottest Startups in Paris in 2024
14 Oct

The Hottest Startups in Paris in 2024

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In the past two years the French capital has been in the throes of AI fever and has launched some of Europe’s most talked-about startups, including Mistral, which is currently valued at $6.2 billion (£4.7 billion). That’s partly down to the support the industry has received. President Emmanuel Macron has given French AI startups some emphatic political backing, while telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel has provided much investment and will to finance national ambition. In September 2023, Niel invested €200 million ($212 million), splitting that money between funding for startups such as Mistral, an AI research lab called Kyutai and a…
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Europe’s Innovation Ecosystem Can Make It the New Palo Alto
14 Oct

Europe’s Innovation Ecosystem Can Make It the New Palo Alto

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For over a decade, the tech industry has been chasing unicorns—those elusive startups valued at over $1 billion. The obsession began in 2013, when Aileen Lee—a Palo Alto–based VC—coined the term that captured the imaginations first of founders and investors, and then prime ministers and presidents. But these mythical beasts are also rare: only 1 percent of VC-backed startups ever reach this status.As society enters the age of AI, and financial markets put renewed value on business fundamentals, our understanding of what makes a successful tech company is evolving. Promise alone doesn't make a national, regional or global champion. Champions…
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The Hottest Startups in Stockholm in 2024
14 Oct

The Hottest Startups in Stockholm in 2024

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Why is Stockholm, a capital city with a population less than one million, home to global brands such as Skype, Spotify, Klarna and Minecraft? “I think it has to do with the Swedish creed,” says Ben Eliass, CEO of bodycare brand Estrid. “It's a nation which put emphasis on high-quality education and invested heavily in telecoms infrastructure in the nineties, so we all grew up with high-speed internet.”Many also credit a social welfare system that acts as a “safety net” for entrepreneurship. “It allows people to take high risk and start companies, not needing to be too afraid of the…
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The Hottest Startups in Berlin in 2024
14 Oct

The Hottest Startups in Berlin in 2024

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German innovation is not limited to the country’s capital. In fact, some of this year’s most prolific startups are based hundreds of miles away. The AI startup Alpha Alpha hails from Heidelberg. Helsing, which sells AI to Europe’s militaries, was set up in Munich. Yet both companies operate Berlin offices. The city attracts too much talent to ignore. Universities, such as TU Berlin, churn out Generative AI founders and the capital is such a magnet for international talent that many offices operate in English, not German.It’s also a very young city—half of its population is under 45, something that Thomas…
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OpenAI’s GPT Store Has Left Some Developers in the Lurch
11 Oct

OpenAI’s GPT Store Has Left Some Developers in the Lurch

stp2y0 CommentsAI, , ,
OpenAI first announced the option for people to build custom GPTs nearly a year ago. The company described GPTs as an automated, low-code way to create specialized experiences on top of ChatGPT, and said it believed impressive GPTs would be created by nontraditional developers like educators, coaches, and tinkerers.The Store would be accessible to customers and builders who paid for ChatGPT Plus, Teams, or Enterprise. OpenAI also stated that it would launch a GPT-builder revenue program and that US builders would be paid based on user engagement with their GPTs. It promised to provide details on the criteria for payments.The…
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The OpenAI Talent Exodus Gives Rivals an Opening
07 Oct

The OpenAI Talent Exodus Gives Rivals an Opening

stp2y0 CommentsGenAI, , , ,
When investors poured $6.6 billion into OpenAI last week, they seemed largely unbothered by the latest drama, which recently saw the company’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, along with chief research officer Bob McCrew and Barret Zoph, a vice president of research, abruptly quit.And yet those three departures were just the latest in an ongoing exodus of key technical talent. Over the past few years, OpenAI has lost several researchers who played crucial roles in developing the algorithms, techniques, and infrastructure that helped make it the world leader in AI as well as a household name. Several other ex-OpenAI employees…
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OpenAI CTO Mira Murati Is Leaving the Company
25 Sep

OpenAI CTO Mira Murati Is Leaving the Company

stp2y0 CommentsAI, , , ,
OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati resigned on Wednesday, saying she wants “the time and space to do my own exploration.” Murati had been among the three executives at the very top of the company behind ChatGPT, and she was briefly its leader last year while board members wrestled with the fate of CEO Sam Altman.“There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right,” she wrote in a message to OpenAI staff that she posted on X.Altman replied to Murati’s X post writing that “it’s hard to overstate how much Mira…
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Want to Get Into Founder Mode? You Should Be So Lucky
20 Sep

Want to Get Into Founder Mode? You Should Be So Lucky

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It’s also true that when one of those groundbreaking companies matures and faces challenges, a founder has a unique ability to make bold moves and stick to the original vision when others urge a less risky course. There are certainly cases where companies struggled when founders were replaced by managers. Remember Yahoo? And of course there’s Apple, where the founder returned and restored the company to its former glory and beyond.But there are abundant counterexamples as well. Apple isn’t exactly struggling under Tim Cook. And consider Microsoft. Its CEO since 2014, Satya Nadella, had been a company lifer, slogging away…
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The Godmother of AI Wants Everyone to Be a World Builder
13 Sep

The Godmother of AI Wants Everyone to Be a World Builder

stp2y0 CommentsAI, , , ,
According to market-fixated tech pundits and professional skeptics, the artificial intelligence bubble has popped, and winter’s back. Fei-Fei Li isn’t buying that. In fact, Li—who earned the sobriquet the “godmother of AI”—is betting on the contrary. She’s on a part-time leave from Stanford University to cofound a company called World Labs. While current generative AI is language-based, she sees a frontier where systems construct complete worlds with the physics, logic, and rich detail of our physical reality. It’s an ambitious goal, and despite the dreary nabobs who say progress in AI has hit a grim plateau, World Labs is on…
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