Tech
Disrupt 2024 kicks off tomorrow and ticket prices increase
We’re just 24 hours away from one of the most highly anticipated tech events of the year! Excitement is building as we prepare to welcome the global tech community to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024!
Brace yourself for a week of vibrant energy lighting up San Francisco! Disrupt 2024 runs from October 28-30, but the excitement will resonate throughout the week with inspiration, fantastic networking opportunities, and innovative ideas.
Haven’t secured your Disrupt pass yet? There’s still time to save up to $400 on individual tickets. You can also take advantage of the Expo+ 2-for-1 Pass, allowing you to bring a friend, colleague, family member, or whoever for half the cost of one ticket. All prices will increase when the doors at Moscone West open.
Secure your pass now at a low rate.
Experience the immersive tech hub
Connect with 10,000+ tech pioneers, startup leaders and VCs
Join more than 10,000 tech visionaries, startup entrepreneurs, and VC leaders for exceptional opportunities to network, collaborate, and build meaningful partnerships.
Learn from 250+ industry heavyweights
Discover unique perspectives and insights from leading industry experts on six specialized stages, highlighting crucial sectors within the tech ecosystem: AI, startups, venture capital, fintech, SaaS, and space. Check out our final agenda for details on stage sessions.
This is only a taste of the remarkable lineup we have planned in our agenda.
- A.C. Charania, Agency Chief Technologist, NASA
- Alex Pall and Drew Taggart from The Chainsmokers, Co-Founders and Partners, MANTIS Venture Capital
- Assaf Rappaport, Co-founder & CEO, Wiz
- Ashton Kutcher, Co-founder, Sound Ventures
- Bridgit Mendler, CEO, Northwood Space
- Colin Kaepernick, Founder & CEO, Lumi
- Denise Dresser, CEO, Slack
- Erin and Sara Foster, Co-founders and General Partners, Oversubscribed Ventures
- Mary Barra, CEO, General Motors
- Matt Mullenweg, Co-Founder, WordPress and CEO, Automattic
- Navin Chaddha, Managing Partner, Mayfield Fund
- Peter Beck, Founder & CEO, Rocketlab
- Vinod Khosla, Founder, Khosla Ventures
- Wassym Bensaid, CSO, Rivian
- Meet the rest of our speakers
Engage in 200+ hands-on sessions
Join 50-minute interactive Q&A Breakout Sessions and 30-minute collaborative Roundtable discussions, where industry leaders address critical challenges in the rapidly evolving tech landscape.
This is just a glimpse of the sessions we have in store for you.
Witness the ultimate startup face-off
Get ready for an adrenaline-filled experience as the top 20 chosen startups battle it out in the Startup Battlefield 200 pitch competition on the Disrupt Stage, all in pursuit of a $100,000 equity-free prize and the sought-after Disrupt Cup. Leading VCs will evaluate the pitches, sharing essential feedback on building a successful startup. Gain key insights from these exceptional competitors during this thrilling contest.
Elevated networking experiences
Beyond the informal networking happening throughout the venue, enhance your connections using the Braindate app, which enables you to create or discover topics for more impactful discussions. Meet in person at the Networking Lounge powered by Braindate on level 2 for personal 1:1 or small-group interactions.
Enjoy 60+ pre and after-hours Side Events
Keep the excitement of Disrupt 2024 going by attending company-hosted Side Events, taking place all week across San Francisco. With a variety of options, including workshops, cocktail gatherings, morning runs, and Meetups, there’s something for everyone to join in!
Last call for low ticket rates
Don’t miss out on your last chance to save up to $400 on your ticket! Or you can take advantage of our Expo+ 2-for-1 deal, where you can bring a +1 for only half the price of one Expo+ Pass. Don’t wait—these limited-time offers end tonight at 11:59 PM PT, and ticket prices will rise when the Disrupt doors open tomorrow morning!
Tech
OpenAI has hired the co-founder of Twitter challenger Pebble
Gabor Cselle, the former CEO and co-founder of X challenger Pebble, has joined OpenAI to work on a secretive project.
Cselle, who according to LinkedIn has been employed at OpenAI since October, announced the news in a post on X yesterday. “Will share more about what I’m working on in due time,” he wrote. “Learning a lot already.”
Cselle is a repeat founder who sold his first company, the Y Combinator-based mobile email startup reMail, to Google. His second company, the native advertising startup Namo Media, he sold to Twitter before Elon Musk purchased the social network and rebranded it to X.
Nearly a decade ago, Cselle worked at Twitter as a group product manager, focusing on the home timeline, user onboarding, and logged-out experiences. Cselle left Twitter in 2016 for Google, where he was director at the tech giant’s Area 120 incubator for spin-offs.
Cselle began working on Pebble, originally called T2, in 2022 with Michael Greer, Discord’s ex-engineering head. Pebble, whose microblogging service emphasized safety and moderation, grew to a small but engaged community and raised funding from angles including Android co-founder Rich Miner.
Ultimately, though, Pebble struggled to maintain meaningful growth. The company shut down last October, reemerging as a Mastodon instance in November.
In May, Cselle joined the accelerator South Park Commons, where he worked on a range of generative AI prototypes including an homage to the viral HQ Trivia.
Csell’s hiring reveal comes the same weekend as OpenAI rival Anthropic gains its own high-profile recruit: Embark founder Alex Rodrigues. Rodrigues, who led autonomous trucking firm Embark through a SPAC merger in 2021 (and subsequent fire sale to Applied Intuition in 2023), said on Friday that he’d be joining Anthropic as an AI safety researcher.
Tech
Women in AI: Sophia Velastegui believes AI is moving too fast
As a part of TechCrunch’s ongoing Women in AI series, which seeks to give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved (and overdue) time in the spotlight, TechCrunch interviewed Sophia Velastegui. Velastegui is a member of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) national AI advisory committee and the former chief AI officer at Microsoft’s business software division.
Velastegui didn’t plan on having a career in AI. She studied mechanical engineering as a Georgia Tech undergrad. But after a job at Apple in 2009, she became fascinated by apps — especially AI-powered ones.
“I started to recognize that AI-infused products resonated with customers, thanks to the feeling of personalization,” Velastegui told TechCrunch. “The possibilities seemed endless for developing AI that could make our lives better at small and large scale, and I wanted to be a part of that revolution. So I started seeking out AI-focused projects and took every opportunity to expand from there.”
AI-forward career
Velastegui worked on the first MacBook Air — and first iPad — and soon after was prompted to product manager for all of Apple’s laptops and accessories. A few years later, Velastegui moved into Apple’s special projects group, where she helped to develop CarPlay, iCloud, Apple Maps, and Apple’s data pipeline and AI systems.
In 2015, Velastegui joined Google as head of silicon architecture and director of the company’s Nest-branded product line. After a brief stint at audio tech company Doppler Labs, she accepted a job offer at Microsoft as general manager of AI products and search.
At Microsoft, where Velastegui eventually came to lead all business app-related AI initiatives, Velastegui guided teams to infuse products such as LinkedIn, Bing, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Azure with AI. She also spearheaded internal explorations and projects built with GPT-3, OpenAI’s text-generating model, to which Microsoft had recently acquired the exclusive license.
“My time at Microsoft truly stands out,” Velastegui said. “I joined the company when it was in the midst of huge changes under CEO Satya Nadella’s leadership. Mentors and peers advised me against making that jump in 2017 because they viewed Microsoft as lagging in the industry. But in a short window, Microsoft had started making real headway in AI, and I wanted in.”
Velastegui left Microsoft in 2022 to start a consulting firm and head product development at Aptiv, the automotive tech company. She joined the NSF’s AI committee, which collaborates with industry, academia, and government to support basic AI research, in 2023.
Navigating the industry
Asked how she navigates the challenges of the male-dominated tech industry, Velastegui credited the women she considers to be her strongest mentors. It’s important that women support each other, Velastegui says — and, perhaps more importantly, that men stand up for their female co-workers.
“For women in tech, if you’ve ever been part of a transformation, adoption, or change management, you have a right to be at the table, so don’t be afraid to take your seat there,” Velastegui said. “Raise your hand to take on more AI responsibilities, whether it’s part of your current job or a stretch project. The best managers will support you and encourage you to keep pushing ahead. But if that’s not feasible in your 9-5, seek out communities or university programs where you can be part of the AI team.”
A lack of diverse viewpoints in the workplace (i.e. AI teams made up mostly of men) can lead to groupthink, Velastegui notes, which is why she advocates that women share feedback as often as they can.
“I strongly encourage more women to get involved in AI so our voices, experiences, and points of view are included at this critical inception point where foundational AI technologies are being defined for now and the future,” she said. “It’s critical that women in every industry really lean into AI. When we join the conversation, we can help shape the industry and change that power imbalance.”
Velastegui says that her work now, with the NSF, focuses on tackling outstanding fundamental issues in AI, like a lack of what she calls “digital representation.” Biases and prejudices pervade today’s AI, she avers, in part due to the homogenous makeup of the companies developing it.
“AI is being trained on data from developers, but developers are mostly men with specific perspectives, and represent a very small subset of the 8 billion people in the world,” she said. “If we’re not including women as developers and if women aren’t providing feedback as users, then AI will not represent them at all.”
Balancing innovation and safety
Velastegui sees the AI industry’s breakneck pace as a “huge issue” — absent a common ethical safety framework, that is. Such a framework, were it ever to be widely embraced, could allow developers to build systems with speed without stifling innovation, she believes.
But she’s not counting on it.
“We’ve never seen technology this transformative evolve at such a relentless pace,” Velastegui said. “People, regulation, legacy systems … nothing has ever had to keep up at the current speed of AI. The challenge becomes how to stay informed, up-to-date, and forward-thinking, while also aware of the dangers if we move too fast.”
How can a company — or developer — create AI products responsibly today? Velastegui champions a “human-centered” approach with learning from past mistakes and prioritizing the well-being of users at its core.
“Companies should empower a diverse, cross-functional AI council that reviews issues and provides recommendations that reflect the current environment,” Velastegui said, “and create channels for regular feedback and oversight that will adapt as the AI system evolves. And there should be channels for regular feedback and oversight that will adapt as AI systems evolves.”
Tech
Meta is making a robot hand that can ‘feel’ touch
Meta says it’s partnering with sensor firm GelSight and Wonik Robotics, a South Korean robotics company, to commercialize tactile sensors for AI.
The new devices aren’t meant for consumers. Rather, they’re intended for scientists. Meta says it envisions them being used to advance research into AI that can “learn about the world in richer detail” and “better understand and model the physical world.”
GelSight will work with Meta to bring to market Digit 360, which Meta describes as a “a tactile fingertip with human-level multimodal sensing capabilities.” The successor to Meta’s Digit sensor, Digit 360 digitizes touch signals, using an on-device AI chip and roughly 18 “sensing features” to detect changes in its surroundings.
“We developed a touch-perception-specific optical system with a wide field of view … for capturing omnidirectional deformations on the fingertip surface,” Meta explained in a blog post. “Additionally, we equipped the sensor with many sensing modalities, since each touch interaction with the environment has a unique profile produced by the mechanical, geometrical, and chemical properties of a surface to perceive vibrations, sense heat, and even smell odor.”
Digit 360 will be available for purchase next year, and Meta’s launched a call for proposals through which researchers can gain early access.
Meta’s work with Wonik will focus on a new generation of Wonik’s Allegro Hand, a robotic hand with tactile sensors like Digit 360. Building on a platform Meta developed to integrate sensors on a single robot hand, the upcoming Allegro Hand will feature control boards that encode data from the tactile sensors onto a host computer.
The Allegro Hand will be available starting next year.
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