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Microsoft may have long had OpenAI as its trusty partner (after its sizable investment ), but AWS today announced that Stability AI , one of the hottest new upstarts in the generative AI space and the company behind Stable Diffusion , is doubling down on its cloud, making it its “preferred cloud provider to build and scale its AI models for image, language, audio, video, and 3D content generation.” In addition, Stability AI will also work with AWS to make its open-source tools and model available to more students, researchers, startups and enterprises (which sounds quite a bit like what Microsoft and OpenAI said when they announced their partnership). Stability AI, which recently announced a $101 million funding round at a valuation of over $1 billion, was already using thousands of Nvidia GPUs in the AWS cloud to train its models. Now, the two companies are formalizing this relationship, with Stability AI planning to use AWS’ SageMaker ML platform, on top of its lower-level infras

European Union regulators have fired another warning shot at Elon Musk over his erratic piloting of Twitter since his takeover last month — saying he has “huge work” ahead if the social media site is to avoid falling foul of major new governance rules for digital services which entered into force earlier this month . Reminder: Breaches of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) can attract penalties of up to 6% of global annual turnover. Since getting his hands on the bird, Musk has fired the top team and made slashing Twitter’s headcount a priority — with reports of 50% cuts early this month, and further sackings since (including of a large number of contractors). He’s also reversed the prior leadership’s ban on former US president Donald Trump’s Twitter account and suggested he’ll implement a general amnesty for accounts previously suspended for violating its policies — all the while engaging in public boosterism with a small group of mostly far right Twitter accounts, which can b

We’re getting ready to launch a price hike, but you still have time — 72 hours to be precise — to attend TC Sessions: Space 2022 on December 6 in Los Angeles for $199. Will you be in the room? Click, register and save: Space tech may come with a jaw-dropping price tag, but this space conference doesn’t. Buy your pass before December 2 at 11:59 p.m. PST — prices go up to $495 at midnight. Why pay more if you don’t have to? Let’s take a gander at just some programming we have lined up for the day. Check out the event agenda for specifics on all the speakers, topics and times. TechCrunch Space Pitch-off : You can improve your own pitch by watching how the VC judges react and by the questions they ask. It’s a window into what might make them decide to schedule a meeting with you. We’ll announce the competitors soon, and they’ll have to deliver their very best to impress our panel of expert judges: Jory Bell (Playground Global), Mark Boggett (Seraphim Space), Tess Hatch (Bessemer

Apple rolled out iOS 16.1.2 on Wednesday, citing updates involving user security. Apple hasn’t yet detailed the nature of the security updates , as the company doesn’t disclose security issues until after they’ve been investigated or patched. The update also includes improved compatibility with wireless carriers, as well as crash detection optimizations for iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro models. Crash detection , which was announced at Apple’s September event , is a new feature that triggers Emergency SOS if it suspects you’ve been in a crash. While this feature could be life-saving in certain situations, users have reported issues in which crash detection is falsely triggered while riding roller coasters . Apple doesn’t outright name the roller coaster issue in its patch notes, but it’s a bug that’s been on adrenaline-seeking customers’ minds. To update to the latest version of iOS, navigate to your iPhone’s settings. Then, click “general.” At the top of your screen, you should see a

Erika Brodnock Contributor Share on Twitter Erika Brodnock is a serial entrepreneur, philanthropist, research fellow at King’s College London and a Ph.D. candidate at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Erika founded Karisma Kidz and is co-founder at Kinhub (formally Kami), an employee well-being platform focused on enhancing equity and inclusion in the future of work. Johannes Lenhard Contributor Share on Twitter Johannes Lenhard, Ph.D., is centre coordinator at the Max Planck Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social Change . More posts by this contributor Book Excerpt: ‘Better Venture’ looks at how the current venture model connects to the slave trade Why don’t more VCs care about good tech (yet)? T he following is a lightly edited and truncated excerpt from “ Better Venture: Improving Diversity, Innovation, and Profitability in Venture Capital and Startups ,” by Erika Brodnock and Johannes Lenhard , published by Holloway. Bro

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here . Oh hey! While we have you here, grab your calendar — we’ve got some things for you to add. For the stargazers among us, we’ll be in Los Angeles doing TC Sessions: Space on December 6. And on April 20, 2023, we’re heading to Boston for our TC Early Stage festival . Come to either. Come to both. Come to neither. We love you all just the same. But we’d prefer to see your faces in person if we can! Oh, and did you know it’s “Giving Tuesday”? That means it’s time to think about which of your favorite causes deserve some of your time or dollars, if you have some of either to spare. — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3 And the winner is… : Okay, all you fans of taking photos of yourself “in the now,” no matter where you are. Ivan writes that BeReal won “app of the year” for 2022 in Apple’s annual App Store Awards. Order up! : Nigerian restaurant

Richard Garfield is a name familiar to many in the tabletop gaming world, most notably as one of the creators of Magic: The Gathering, the most prominent trading card game out there. But Garfield is dipping his toes into the world of digital and in particular blockchain-adjacent games, and TechCrunch took the opportunity to quiz the veteran gamemaker on the pros and cons of this and other new approaches to gaming. It should be noted at the outset that unlike the dubious profit-focused gameplay of your Axie Infinity and suchlike, Garfield’s new game, technically a “mode” of Blockchain Brawlers , is not focused on speculation but more of an experiment in distribution of a complete card-based game outside traditional publishing methods. It should probably also be noted that the game platform is full of the usual NFT and monetization chatter, but the core game itself, a 1v1 bluffing style match, is capable of being played with ordinary playing cards or for that matter numbered pieces o

AWS introduced Contact Center, its customer service oriented product some years ago, putting it smack dab in the middle of enterprise applications. It also places the company in the position of competing directly with the likes of Salesforce and other established enterprise SaaS vendors. When you are competing in that space, you need some powerful features, and today at AWS re:invent in Las Vegas, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky introduced three features to help bring more automation to managing Amazon Contact Centers running on AWS. For starters, the company is introducing new performance management capabilities under Contact Lens for Amazon Connect designed to help managers identify CSAs who are having issues. The solution uses a combination of performance review forms and machine learning-driven voice analytics to review job performance. In reality, it’s supposed to help identify agents who might need additional training or coaching. “These reduce the time the contact center managers spend

At this morning’s Re:Invent keynote in Las Vegas, Amazon unveiled AWS SimSpace Weaver, a computing service that allows developers to run city-sized simulations at scale in the cloud. The service is designed to free simulation developers from the constraints of their own hardware. Amazon’s proposed applications here are city managers simulating a natural disaster to test emergency response systems, as well the impact of sports games on traffic flow. These are  complex situations with a lot of moving parts, which shouldn’t require watching a real life instance to gain insight. Among the other advantages to running this in the cloud is the ability to have multiple external parties view and interact with the simulation remotely in real-time. Image Credits: Amazon “Simulating these events requires modeling hundreds of thousands of independent dynamic entities to represent the people and vehicles,” AWS Principal Developer Advocate, Marcia Villalba, notes in a blog post . “Each entity h

Twitter is no longer enforcing its policy against misleading information about COVID-19, per an update posted to an official company blog page . Reuters spotted the change earlier — which said the change was effective as of last Wednesday. “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy,” the social media company writes in a brief grey-on-grey note on a company webpage that’s still emblazoned with the title: “Coronavirus: Staying safe and informed on Twitter”. No explanation was given by Twitter for the policy change. Under its prior COVID-19 misinformation policy the company had said it would remove “demonstrably false or potentially misleading content that has the highest risk of causing harm”. Grey on grey update freezing enforcement of Twitter’s COVID-19 misleading information policy (Screengrab: Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch) Since billionaire Tesla owner, Elon Musk, took over the company last month, on closing his $44BN

The UK government has said it will further expand the scope of online safety legislation by criminalizing the encouragement of self-harm — in a bid to tackle what it describes as “tragic and avoidable deaths caused by people seeing self-harm content online”. The latest amendment to the controversial but populist Online Safety Bill will mean in-scope platforms will be required to remove content that deliberately encourages somebody to physically injure themselves — or else risk penalties under the legislation. Individuals posting such content online could also face prosecution under the new offence of encouraging self harm and the secretary of state for digital said the government wants to target “abhorrent trolls encouraging the young and vulnerable to self-harm”. The government said the maximum penalties will be set out in due course. It is already illegal to encourage or assist suicide, online or offline, in the UK so the creation of the new offence is intended to bring self harm