Skip to main content

Deck.blue brings a TweetDeck experience to Bluesky users

With over 3 million users and plans to open up more broadly in the months ahead, Bluesky is still establishing itself as an alternative to Twitter/X. However, that hasn’t stopped the developer community from embracing the project and building tools to meet the needs of those fleeing the now Elon Musk-owned social network, formerly known […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/TBbEAPF
Post a Comment

Replit, the web-based IDE developing a GitHub Copilot competitor, raises $100M

Investors continue to pump money into generative AI tech. Case in point, Replit, an IDE startup developing a code-generating AI-powered tool called Ghostwriter, this week raised nearly $100 million ($97.4 million) at a $1.16 billion post-money valuation.

Andreessen Horowitz led the round — a Series B extension — with participation from Khosla Ventures, Coatue, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Bloomberg Beta, Naval Ravikant, ARK Ventures and Hamilton Helmer.

“We are relentless in our mission to empower a billion software developers,” Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad said in a statement, adding that the new funds — which bring Replit’s total raised to over $200 million — will be put toward further developing the core product experience, expanding Replit’s cloud services and “driving innovation” in AI.

“AI has already brought that future closer,” Masad continued. “We look forward to expanding our offerings for professional developers.”

Based in San Francisco, Replit was co-founded by programmers Amjad Masad, Faris Masad and designer Haya Odeh in 2016. Before creating Replit, Masad worked in engineering roles at Yahoo and Facebook, where he built software development tooling.

Replit

Replit offers a web-based IDE for software development.

Replit offers an online, collaborative IDE that supports a range of programming languages, including JavaScript, Python, Go and C++. With Replit, users can share a workspace with one or many users and see real-time edits across files, message each other and debug code together. Beyond that, users can share projects, ask for help, learn from tutorials and use templates.

But perhaps its headlining feature is Ghostwriter, a suite of features powered by an AI model trained on publicly available code. Ghostwriter — much like GitHub’s Copilot — can make suggestions and explain code, considering what users type and other context from their accounts, like the programming languages they’re using.

Ghostwriter appears to be the driver behind Replit’s recent explosive growth, leading to a partnership with Google Cloud and a user base eclipsing 22 million developers. But like all generative AI tools, it comes with risks — and potentially legal consequences that have yet to fully play out in the courts.

Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI are being sued in a class action lawsuit that accuses them of violating copyright law by allowing Copilot to regurgitate sections of licensed code without providing credit. Liability aside, some legal experts have suggested that AI like Copilot could put companies at risk if they were to unwittingly incorporate copyrighted suggestions from the tool into their production software.

It’s unclear whether Ghostwriter, too, was trained on licensed or copyrighted code. But Replit does note that the code Ghostwriter suggests might contain “incorrect, offensive or otherwise inappropriate” strings.

That includes insecure code. According to a recent study out of Stanford, software engineers who use code-generating AI systems are more likely to cause security vulnerabilities in the apps they develop. While the study didn’t look at Replit specifically, it stands to reason that developers who use it would fall victim to the same.

Replit has its work cut out for it, that’s all to say.

Replit, the web-based IDE developing a GitHub Copilot competitor, raises $100M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch



from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/JzcWPbS
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nimbus launches tiny EV prototype that’s like a motorbike with a roof

As shared e-scooter companies have infiltrated cities and e-bike sales have soared, micromobility has been offered up as a panacea to save us all from the ill humors and packed streets caused by gas-guzzling cars. However, one of the major roadblocks in front of well-intentioned city dwellers who’d love to trade in their cumbersome and environmentally unfriendly vehicles for an e-bike or scooter remains: What happens when it rains? Nimbus, a California-based electric vehicle startup, wants to solve that problem with a simple solution: Put a roof on it. The company recently came out of stealth with a prototype for its Nimbus One, a tiny, three-wheeled EV that “combines the convenience and cost of a motorbike with the safety and comfort of a car.” The Nimbus One. Image Credits: Nimbus The thin, pod-like vehicle is only about 2.75 feet wide and 7.5 feet long, which Nimbus says makes it three to five times smaller than a compact car — the better to park and navigate busy urban stree...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ivella is the latest fintech focused on couples banking, with a twist

Money can make people moody. There are layers of privilege, or lack thereof, that can make even the simplest conversation about bills feel like baggage to deal with. Translate that discomfort to relationships and it can feel like an awkward — and fragmented — dance on who pays which bill when (and how). Ivella , a Santa Monica-based startup, wants to build banking products for couples to take away some of these tensions. Led by CEO and co-founder Kahlil Lalji , the startup is launching with a split account product that just raised $3.5 million in funding from Anthemis, Financial Venture Studio and Soma Capital. Other investors include Y Combinator, DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder and Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia. Lalji, who helped creators with digital content before jumping into the world of fintech, says that the startup was born out of his own frustration at the expectation that couples would just use Venmo unless they were married. The best solution, so far, has been joint accounts...
Post a Comment
Read more

Multifamily housing has missed the solar boom. PearlX wants to fix that with $70M Series B

If you’re a renter and you want solar power, you’re usually out of luck. For most, the only option is a community solar program, where people subscribe to utility-scale projects, but they’re not available everywhere. And given that most renters only stay for a few years, which of them are going to pay tens of thousands of dollars for solar panels — and what landlord would let them? That’s where PearlX comes in. “Think of us as like the Sunrun for renters,” said co-founder and CEO Michael Huerta, referring to the company that rents solar installations to single-family homeowners. “PearlX is a rental electrification platform.” Earlier this year, the startup began installing solar panels and backup batteries at multifamily rentals in Texas as part of its “TexFlex” project. PearlX’s next step, which Huerta shared exclusively with TechCrunch, will be a California expansion called “Flexifornia.” The startup is also rolling out a virtual power plant, which will allow the company to tap the...
Post a Comment
Read more