Watch: What Stability AI’s CEO departure means for other AI startups | TechCrunch

Watch: What Stability AI’s CEO departure means for other AI startups | TechCrunch

What do you call an AI company that is suffering from very public gyrations regarding its business health, place in the market and leadership structure? Well, you might call it Stability AI. And no, that’s not some sort of elaborate wordplay. We’re being literal.

Stability AI’s latest leadership shakeup is no joke, with its CEO Emad Mostaque departing to work on AI products that are less centralized — which is to say, owned and built by a single company, like, say, Stability AI.

The startup’s fundraising journey is well-known to tech folks, while its best-known product — Stable Diffusion — is known even more broadly. What happened? What’s next? We dig into all that and more in today’s TechCrunch Minute:

Watch: What Stability AI's CEO departure means for other AI startups | TechCrunch

Adobe’s GenStudio brings brand-safe generative AI to marketers | TechCrunch

Adobe’s GenStudio brings brand-safe generative AI to marketers | TechCrunch

Brands want to use generative AI to personalize their marketing efforts — but they are also deathly afraid of AI going off message and ruining their brand. At its annual Summit conference in Las Vegas, Adobe today announced GenStudio, a new application that helps brands create content and measure its performance, with generative AI — and the promise of brand safety — at its center.

Currently, the tool is mostly focused on helping social, paid media and lifecycle marketers that want to create social media posts, email campaigns and display ads, with support for creating entire websites coming soon.

Adobe wants GenStudio, which it first previewed last September, to be an end-to-end solution to help marketers tailor their content to different channels and audience segments. It includes tools for content creation, managing campaigns and analytics. But to generate personalized content, you need a supply chain that makes it easy to generate a lot of on-brand content — and then the tools to measure how this content performs.

Image Credits: Adobe

Image Credits: Adobe

“I think the majority of customers we talk to are incredibly excited about GenAI but also have a lot of trepidation about GenAI in a lot of different ways around, ‘hey, what’s the status of my data? What data am I using, the status of the models,’” Adobe’s Amit Ahuja, the company’s SVP for its Experience Cloud platform, told me. “That’s resulted in — and we just ran a survey on this — a lot of them are in just kind of this almost siloed experimentation mode with it. I think the opportunity for Adobe is: how do we bring that more directly with the right security safeguards and with all the right compliance into the tools that these people are using?”

As brands try to reach these potential customers across an increasingly large number of channels and, at the same time, try to personalize their messages, there is a lot of pressure on the overall content supply chain. That, of course, is where generative AI comes in, since it can speed up content creation dramatically.

Image Credits: Adobe

Image Credits: Adobe

“If you think about the amount of content required for personalization, experimentation, all the channel fragmentation, just that, by itself, will drive a massive burden and demand on the content supply chain and the business processes around that. Put GenAI on top of that, where it’s now like: ‘hey, I can now go produce a bunch more content’ and you have this kind of rapidly expanding content machinery,” Ahuja said.

Image Credits: Adobe

Image Credits: Adobe

GenStudio takes pieces from other Adobe enterprise services for brands like the Workfront project management platform and Journey Analytics for cross-platform insights and Experience Manager and combines that with parts of its creative tools like Adobe Express and, of course, its Firefly models. Enterprises that already use these services can connect them to GenStudio, but new users don’t need to use these tools to get started with the new service.

Having these integrations, however, means that marketers can immediately start to work with a brand’s existing assets. In the context of GenStudio, that means they can remix them with new AI-generated backgrounds to create a new Instagram post, for example. With this, a brand like Coca-Cola can use an existing image of a Coke bottle and pin that to a Firefly-generated background. Firefly and similar models wouldn’t be very good at creating that bottle with the correct Coca-Cola logo, after all.

To make additional edits, there’s a lightweight version of Adobe Express embedded right into the service.

Image Credits: Adobe

Image Credits: Adobe

Brands can set their guidelines in GenStudio to ensure that the content the system produces is brand-safe, both for the visual and textual content the system can create — and there is always a human in the loop, too. The tool also continuously checks that anything a user creates in GenStudio is within a brand’s guidelines.

What’s also important here is that brands can bring in their style kits and create custom models based on their existing assets. Adobe is actually using a set of new APIs to power many of these capabilities here that are also now available to third-party developers.

For data-driven marketers, the integrated analytics may actually be the highlight of this new service. These insights start at the campaign level, but users can drill down to minute details and see why a certain campaign performed the way it did — and then adjust their next ad or social post based on that.

Adobe's GenStudio brings brand-safe generative AI to marketers | TechCrunch

Instagram co-founders’ AI-powered news app Artifact may not be shutting down after all | TechCrunch

Instagram co-founders’ AI-powered news app Artifact may not be shutting down after all | TechCrunch

Artifact , the well-received AI-powered news app from Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, may not be shutting down as planned. The company announced in January the award-winning app would be winding down operations as the market opportunity wasn’t “big enough to warrant continued investment.” However, despite an end-of-life date of February 2024, the app has continued to function in the many weeks since.

As it turns out, that’s not by mistake.

Systrom tells us that he and Krieger are continuing to keep Artifact alive for the time being and have not yet given up on a plan to maintain the app in the future — news that will likely give fans of the news discovery app a bit of hope.

“It takes a lot less to run it than we had imagined,” Systrom confirmed to TechCrunch, adding that it’s just himself and Krieger running Artifact right now. “It will still likely go away, but we’re exploring all possible routes for it going forward.” (Perhaps an exit deal is at hand?)

Artifact made a splash at launch, not only because it was the first major effort at a new social app from Instagram’s co-founders, but also because of its clever use of AI. The personalized news reading app leveraged AI to help users discover the news they were most interested in from a variety of pre-vetted sources, and offered up features to summarize news in various styles (like “Gen Z” or “Explain Like I’m Five”). It could also rewrite clickbait headlines for better clarity, among other things.

artifact’s “gen z summary” feature is so deeply out of pocket. i’ll miss it when the app goes down. pic.twitter.com/5PaMavJbNS

— @samhenrigold@hachyderm.io (@samhenrigold) March 16, 2024

Following Artifact’s announcement of its impending closure, interest in using AI to summarize the news has heated up.

Browser startup Arc implemented an AI-powered “pinch to summarize” feature ahead of its $50 million fundraise. Other startups have also turned to AI to improve the news reading experience, like RSS reader Feeeed, AI-powered news reader Bulletin and Particle, an AI news reader built by former Twitter engineers , including the senior director of Product Management at Twitter, Sara Beykpour , and former senior engineer at both Twitter and Tesla, Marcel Molina . The latter recently raised $4.4 million in seed funding, indicating investor interest in this space is growing, too.

Artifact, meanwhile, had been self-funded by the founders to the tune of “single-digit millions,” and it seems they have the funds to continue to run the app — at least in the near term.

Unfortunately for Artifact’s early adopters, the app has been stripped of its social features , like commenting and posting , but it continues to offer news reading and AI summarization features in the version that remains live today.

Instagram co-founders’ news aggregation startup Artifact to shut down

Artifact takes on X and Threads with new Posts feature

 

Instagram co-founders' AI-powered news app Artifact may not be shutting down after all | TechCrunch

Evari turns to rocket science to solve problems with heat pumps | TechCrunch

Evari turns to rocket science to solve problems with heat pumps | TechCrunch

Off a highway nestled in the woods of New Hampshire, a small group of engineers have been quietly working on advanced heat pumps inspired by rockets and satellites, of all things.

Evari emerged from stealth on Tuesday with its core technology related to rocket turbomachinery. The goal is to add dozens of miles to electric vehicles’ range while also kicking natural gas out of the home heating business.

Heat pumps use electricity to shuttle thermal energy from one place to another, and they tend to be a lot more efficient than traditional heating. In the case of home heating, they extract heat from the outside air and transport it inside to keep its occupants warm. In a refrigerator, they take heat away from the internal compartment to keep food cool. Global sales of heat pumps have been growing at a double-digit rate in recent years, but it hasn’t been enough to keep the world on track to hit net zero carbon emissions in 2050, the IEA has said.

Today, large swaths of the globe haven’t adopted air-source heat pumps because they don’t work as well when the mercury drops. Most of those places still rely on natural gas or heating oil, and convincing people to switch will require a drop-in solution that’s cheaper to run than their existing furnace or boiler and works at extreme temperatures. The basic technology that’s inside your car or your house hasn’t changed in over a century, and it still doesn’t work well at low temperatures.

“Let’s say it’s -30 degrees Fahrenheit in Minnesota, and you have a forced baseboard hot water heater,” Walker said. “No heat pump on the market can do that at any temperature, let alone really cold temperatures.”

Yet that’s exactly the kind of system Evari will eventually target. Its turbomachinery excels when there’s a large temperature differential it has to bridge. That might mean extracting heat from a cold Minnesota night to heat a home, but it also might mean dumping heat from a refrigerated container on an EV truck into a hot afternoon in Miami. Evari isn’t disclosing its target market yet, but Walker did say that it’s targeting transportation first.

What’s more, the refrigerants most heat pumps use are either potent greenhouse gases or can break down into forever chemicals , researchers have found.

Evari ’s turbo-powered heat pump uses refrigerants like propane with extremely low global warming potential. It also doesn’t require oil for lubrication. That might sound like an odd thing to highlight, but it’s hard to design an oil that works well at both ends of the spectrum and plays nice with the heat pump’s refrigerant. An oil-free heat pump can work more efficiently at a broader range of temperatures, Evari’s co-founder and CEO Steve Walker told TechCrunch.

If Evari can bring its heat pump to market at a cost that’s competitive with existing options, it stands to upend a wide range of industries. Heat pumps are used not just to heat and cool homes and vehicles, but also to generate heat for industrial processes, dehumidify buildings, keep food cold in grocery stores and more.

Walker funded the early stages of development out of pocket, tapping a modest windfall he earned from the sale of a previous startup he founded that turned waste wood into fuel. As a result, Evari has sorted out much of the technical risk, Walker said. So while the company today announced a $7.5 million seed round, it’s much further along than most seed-stage companies. The round was led by Clean Energy Ventures with participation from Farvatn Venture and angels from the Clean Energy Venture Group.

The manufacturing process for Evari’s compressors will likely be costlier than existing designs, but they should be cheaper overall because they require less in the way of materials, Walker said. “Less than 5% of the copper and rare earth materials, for instance, for the same amount of cooling or heating output,” he said. The startup’s turbocompressors range in size from as small as a dime to slightly larger than a quarter. Despite spinning at hundreds of thousands of revolutions per minute, they’re nearly silent and vibration free, he added.

By trading materials costs for some additional manufacturing expenses, Evari’s material-light approach is well-positioned to insulate the company from the growing geopolitical tensions forming over critical minerals. Much of those are either mined or processed in China or flow through Chinese-owned companies, and the U.S. government has made it a priority to decouple as much of the country’s mineral supply chain as possible.

At the same time, U.S. industrial policy has begun to favor domestic manufacturing. The Biden administration announced in February that it was devoting $63 million from the Defense Production Act to boost heat pump manufacturing specifically.

For Evari, the timing couldn’t be better. It finds itself at the confluence of three sweeping trends. Now it just has to get its super-fast compressors into production in time to catch the wave of heat pump adoption.

Evari turns to rocket science to solve problems with heat pumps | TechCrunch

With Affinity acquisition, Canva should be able to compete better with Adobe’s creative tools | TechCrunch

With Affinity acquisition, Canva should be able to compete better with Adobe’s creative tools | TechCrunch

Canva , the high-flying Australian design and visual communication startup, announced today it was acquiring Affinity (formerly Serif), a creative tools company based in the U.K. Bloomberg reported that the deal was worth several hundred million pounds (approximately $380 million U.S.), and the company confirmed to TechCrunch that the number was accurate.

Canva has typically targeted the beginner for their products, but company co-founder Cliff Obrecht sees the acquisition opening the door to more advanced users. “While our last decade at Canva has focused heavily on the 99% of knowledge workers without design training, truly empowering the world to design includes empowering professional designers too,” he wrote in a blog post announcing the deal. “By joining forces with Affinity, we’re excited to unlock the full spectrum of designers at every level and stage of the design journey.”

With Affinity, the company can also better compete with Adobe, particularly Adobe Express, says Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research. “Canva needed products with more complex capabilities to go up against Adobe,” Wang told TechCrunch. ”Their basic offering wasn’t as robust as Adobe Express. Affinity has a really easy-to-use photo editor. The page layout is also very easy to use,” he said. What’s more, he said that the two company cultures are well aligned.

As you can imagine, both sides of the acquisition were “excited” and “delighted” by the deal — and why wouldn’t they be given they just exchanged a bunch of money to join forces? In a blog post on the Affinity website, CEO Ashley Hewson tried to allay customer fears about the change. “We know that those of you who’ve put your faith in Affinity, some since we launched our very first Mac app, will have questions about what this means for the future of our products,” he wrote in the post.

But he believes (along with every CEO of every acquired company ever) that they can do so much more with the resources of the much larger Canva than they could ever do on their own. “In Canva, we’ve found a kindred spirit who can help us take Affinity to new levels. Their extra resources will mean we can deliver much more, much faster,” he wrote.

Ehab Bandar , founder at design consultancy Bigtable.co, sees a mixed bag here for both sides. “For Affinity users, it’s good news/bad news. I’m optimistic that it will stay separate, but pessimistic that they’ll have to endure a subscription plan versus one-time purchase,” Bandar told TechCrunch. “For Canva users, Canva co-founder Cameron Adams has indicated that there are already ideas for lightweight integration into the more professional design services of Affinity. As their initial non-designer customer base matures, they will expect more powerful tools, and Affinity will help deter some Adobe converts.”

In 2021 when valuations were flying high, Canva reached the lofty heights of $40 billion . In a recent secondary stock sale, however, the company fell to earth some, although with a still hefty valuation of $26 billion .

It certainly leaves them with more than enough value on the table to make purchases like this one. With Affinity, Canva gains 3 million users worldwide along with 90 employees who will be joining the company. The deal has already officially closed.

With Affinity acquisition, Canva should be able to compete better with Adobe's creative tools | TechCrunch

Adobe’s Firefly Services makes over 20 new generative and creative APIs available to developers | TechCrunch

Adobe’s Firefly Services makes over 20 new generative and creative APIs available to developers | TechCrunch

Adobe today announced Firefly Services , a set of more than 20 new generative and creative APIs, tools and services. Firefly Services makes some of the company’s AI-powered features from its Creative Cloud tools like Photoshop available to enterprise developers to speed up content creation in their custom workflows — or create entirely new solutions.

In addition, the company also today launched Custom Models, which allows businesses to fine tune Firefly models based on their assets. Custom Models is already built into Adobe’s new GenStudio .

Adobe describes Firefly services as a “comprehensive set of generative AI and creative APIs that automates workflows.” It includes APIs for removing backgrounds, smartly cropping images and automatically leveling the horizon in a photo, as well as access to core AI-driven Photoshop features like Generative Fill and Expand. In addition to these AI features, Firefly Services also exposes tools for editing text layers, tagging content and applying presets from Lightroom, for example.

“As consumer expectations around generative AI-driven personalization continue to rise, Firefly Services and Custom Models are first-of-its-kind offerings that unlock the possibility for brands to have powerful customization capabilities and more control in defining their automation processes,” said David Wadhwani, president, Digital Media Business, Adobe. “Brands are urgently looking to Adobe to shift their generative AI investments from playgrounds to production.”

Image Credits: Adobe

Image Credits: Adobe

As with most of Adobe’s enterprise-centric use cases for generative AI, these new tools are all meant to help brands speed up their content creation workflows. Yet while many enterprises want to use generative AI, they are also worried about brand safety, which has kept many of them from bringing these tools into production. From the outset, Adobe positioned Firefly as a brand-safe alternative to other models and this new set of services continues that tradition.

“The rising expectations for customer experiences have compelled brands to rethink how they produce and personalize marketing content at scale,” said Billy Seabrook, global chief design officer, IBM Consulting. “Adobe applications have been instrumental in our creative process, and now with Firefly, we can rapidly generate imagery and templates in a range of styles and sizes to align with brand standards and enable more people to participate in the creative process.

Image Credits: Adobe

Image Credits: Adobe

Adobe's Firefly Services makes over 20 new generative and creative APIs available to developers | TechCrunch