https://techpressreleases.io/press-releases/ Sun, 19 Apr 2026 12:05:29 +0000 MyBB https://techpressreleases.io/press-releases/showthread.php?tid=28 Sat, 24 Jan 2026 23:29:38 +0000 jasongeek]]> https://techpressreleases.io/press-releases/showthread.php?tid=28 Birdco Blog Post Published 4/5/24

Micromobility leader’s strengthened balance sheet, significantly reduced operating expenses positions company well for long-term profitable growth; Global momentum continues with new tech and market entries

Bird today announced that the company has successfully emerged from Chapter 11 proceedings under a newly organized private parent company called Third Lane Mobility Inc. With a strengthened balance sheet, reduced operating expenses and right-sized capital structure, the transaction included the sale of Bird’s assets to Third Lane Mobility, which encompasses both the Bird and Spin Brands. Bird and Spin will continue to operate in and serve cities across the globe and are well positioned for long-term, sustainable growth as they maintain and expand operations across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Over the last three months, both Bird and Spin have won multiple new competitive bids and announced the launch of service in several new cities, including Corpus Christi, Texas; Greensboro, North Carolina; the University of Illinois; Surrey and Mississauga, Canada; Naples and Torino, Italy; as well as competitive renewals of service in Gap, France and Zaragoza, Spain.

“Today’s announcement marks the beginning of a new chapter for us as we embark on our next step as a private company. We are a substantially stronger business financially with many opportunities ahead that position us for long-term growth around the world,” said Michael Washinushi, Co-CEO. “We look forward to both servicing and expanding our city partnerships as we deliver on the promise of micromobility by offering an alternative, eco-friendly mode of transportation to locals and tourists alike.”

This news comes just in time for Spring as Bird and Spin enter their busy season and communities get back outdoors. With nearly 90 markets reopening for the warmer weather, the company anticipates tens of millions of rides across its global footprint in the coming months. More than 200,000 vehicles will be available around the world, including Bird’s and Spin’s newest and most technologically advanced models which include swappable lithium-ion batteries, a front and rear braking system, and an anti-tip kickstand, among many other features.

“We are excited to partner with all these communities, working together to enhance the livability of each one. We are deeply committed to operating Bird and Spin for the long-term and thank our city partners for maintaining trust during this process. Together we can reduce carbon emissions and create a more sustainable future,” added Stewart Lyons, Co-CEO.

In the last year alone, Bird and Spin riders traveled over 51 million miles globally, which equates to circling the earth more than 2,050 times and tens of millions of motor vehicle trips not taken. Together, these riders also helped prevent 10,191 metric tons of C02 emissions. Bird’s acquisition of Spin in September 2023 made it the largest micromobility operator in North America.

About Third Lane Mobility

Third Lane Mobility is the largest micromobility operator in North America through its subsidiaries Bird and Spin. Third Lane Mobility is an electric vehicle company dedicated to bringing affordable, environmentally friendly transportation solutions such as e-scooters and e-bikes to communities around the world. Bird and Spin’s cleaner, affordable, and on-demand mobility solutions are available in 350 cities, across Canada, the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. We take a collaborative, community-first approach to micromobility. Bird and Spin partner closely with the cities in which they operate to provide a reliable and affordable transportation option for people who live, work, and visit there.

For more information please visit bird.co, spin.app, and thirdlane.co.

https://www.bird.co/blog/bird-successful...ility-inc/]]> Birdco Blog Post Published 4/5/24

Micromobility leader’s strengthened balance sheet, significantly reduced operating expenses positions company well for long-term profitable growth; Global momentum continues with new tech and market entries

Bird today announced that the company has successfully emerged from Chapter 11 proceedings under a newly organized private parent company called Third Lane Mobility Inc. With a strengthened balance sheet, reduced operating expenses and right-sized capital structure, the transaction included the sale of Bird’s assets to Third Lane Mobility, which encompasses both the Bird and Spin Brands. Bird and Spin will continue to operate in and serve cities across the globe and are well positioned for long-term, sustainable growth as they maintain and expand operations across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Over the last three months, both Bird and Spin have won multiple new competitive bids and announced the launch of service in several new cities, including Corpus Christi, Texas; Greensboro, North Carolina; the University of Illinois; Surrey and Mississauga, Canada; Naples and Torino, Italy; as well as competitive renewals of service in Gap, France and Zaragoza, Spain.

“Today’s announcement marks the beginning of a new chapter for us as we embark on our next step as a private company. We are a substantially stronger business financially with many opportunities ahead that position us for long-term growth around the world,” said Michael Washinushi, Co-CEO. “We look forward to both servicing and expanding our city partnerships as we deliver on the promise of micromobility by offering an alternative, eco-friendly mode of transportation to locals and tourists alike.”

This news comes just in time for Spring as Bird and Spin enter their busy season and communities get back outdoors. With nearly 90 markets reopening for the warmer weather, the company anticipates tens of millions of rides across its global footprint in the coming months. More than 200,000 vehicles will be available around the world, including Bird’s and Spin’s newest and most technologically advanced models which include swappable lithium-ion batteries, a front and rear braking system, and an anti-tip kickstand, among many other features.

“We are excited to partner with all these communities, working together to enhance the livability of each one. We are deeply committed to operating Bird and Spin for the long-term and thank our city partners for maintaining trust during this process. Together we can reduce carbon emissions and create a more sustainable future,” added Stewart Lyons, Co-CEO.

In the last year alone, Bird and Spin riders traveled over 51 million miles globally, which equates to circling the earth more than 2,050 times and tens of millions of motor vehicle trips not taken. Together, these riders also helped prevent 10,191 metric tons of C02 emissions. Bird’s acquisition of Spin in September 2023 made it the largest micromobility operator in North America.

About Third Lane Mobility

Third Lane Mobility is the largest micromobility operator in North America through its subsidiaries Bird and Spin. Third Lane Mobility is an electric vehicle company dedicated to bringing affordable, environmentally friendly transportation solutions such as e-scooters and e-bikes to communities around the world. Bird and Spin’s cleaner, affordable, and on-demand mobility solutions are available in 350 cities, across Canada, the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. We take a collaborative, community-first approach to micromobility. Bird and Spin partner closely with the cities in which they operate to provide a reliable and affordable transportation option for people who live, work, and visit there.

For more information please visit bird.co, spin.app, and thirdlane.co.

https://www.bird.co/blog/bird-successful...ility-inc/]]> https://techpressreleases.io/press-releases/showthread.php?tid=25 Wed, 14 Jan 2026 13:43:43 +0000 jasongeek]]> https://techpressreleases.io/press-releases/showthread.php?tid=25 CroissantLLM trained on more tokens than Llama 2. It is a 'truly bilingual' language model that understands nuance
Ben Wodecki, Jr. Editor
February 12, 2024



At a Glance
French researchers developed CroissantLLM, a small language model with high fluency in French and English
It is small at 1.3 billion parameters but outperforms its weight class in French. It runs well on PCs and mobile devices.
Researchers trained it on high-quality French content. The goal: Give French equal footing with English in language models.
There is a delectable new open source model for English and French workloads - and it is snackable enough in size to run on mobile devices.

CroissantLLM is designed to run on consumer-grade local hardware while being “full open, and truly bilingual,” according to a blog by Manuel Faysse, a lead researcher on the team who created it.

The goal is to make French on par with English in AI models. “With CroissantLLM, we aim to train a model in which English is not the dominant language and go for a 1:1 ratio of English and French data!” he wrote.

The model is just 1.3 billion parameters in size but was trained on three trillion tokens – more tokens than the Llama 2 models − and included a dataset comprised of high-quality French content including legal documents, business data, cultural content and scientific information. It uses the Llama model architecture.

For example, you can prompt the model to explain French terms; Croissant’s deep linguistic knowledge brings out the nuances of the language − et voilà!


"CroissantLLM: A Truly Bilingual French-English Language Model" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.00786.pdf

The model and the underlying datasets were created by researchers from mainly French universities and businesses, including CentraleSupélec from the Université Paris Saclay, lluin Technology in Neuilly-Sur-Seine, France, Sorbonne Universitè in Paris, and others.

Egalitè with English
Faysse said a big challenge was to get enough high-quality French content for the training dataset. The team collected, filtered and cleaned data from varied sources and modalities, whether they are webpages, transcriptions, movie titles and others.

They collected more than 303 billion tokens of monolingual French data and 36 billion tokens of French-English high-quality translation data. “We craft our final 3 trillion token dataset such that we obtain equal amounts of French and English data after upsampling,” Faysse said.

He said the team purposely made CroissantLLM small after noticing that one of the biggest hurdles to widespread adoption of AI models is the difficulty in getting them to run on consumer-grade hardware.

Notably, the most downloaded models on Hugging Face were not the best performers, like Llama 2-70B or Mixtral 8x7B, but smaller models like Llama 2-7B or Mistral 7B, which are “easier and cheaper to serve and finetune,” he said.

CroissantLLM small size lets it run “extremely quickly on lower end GPU servers, enabling for high throughput and low latency” as well as CPUs and mobile devices at “decent speeds,” Faysse wrote.

The trade-off, he said, is that it is not as good in generalist capabilities in reasoning, math and coding compared to larger models. But the team behind CroissantLLM believe it will be “perfect” for specific industrial applications, translations and chat functionality where larger models are not necessarily needed.

The researchers also introduced a new French benchmark to assess non-English language models: FrenchBench. FrenchBench Gen assesses tasks like title generation, summarization, question generation, and question answering − relying on the high-quality French Question Answering dataset, FQuaD. The Multiple Choice section of FrenchBench tests reasoning, factual knowledge, and linguistic capabilities of models.

When tested, CroissantLLM came out among the best-performing for its size − in French − and even was competitive with Mistal 7-B.

Access CroissantLLM
You can download CroissantLLM Base and the Chat version from Hugging Face. The technical report detailing the model’s underlying architecture can be read via arXiv.

Ben Wodecki
Jr. Editor

Ben Wodecki is the Jr. Editor of AI Business, covering a wide range of AI content. Ben joined the team in March 2021 as assistant editor and was promoted to Jr. Editor. He has written for The New...

https://aibusiness.com/nlp/say-bonjour-t...lose-modal]]> CroissantLLM trained on more tokens than Llama 2. It is a 'truly bilingual' language model that understands nuance
Ben Wodecki, Jr. Editor
February 12, 2024



At a Glance
French researchers developed CroissantLLM, a small language model with high fluency in French and English
It is small at 1.3 billion parameters but outperforms its weight class in French. It runs well on PCs and mobile devices.
Researchers trained it on high-quality French content. The goal: Give French equal footing with English in language models.
There is a delectable new open source model for English and French workloads - and it is snackable enough in size to run on mobile devices.

CroissantLLM is designed to run on consumer-grade local hardware while being “full open, and truly bilingual,” according to a blog by Manuel Faysse, a lead researcher on the team who created it.

The goal is to make French on par with English in AI models. “With CroissantLLM, we aim to train a model in which English is not the dominant language and go for a 1:1 ratio of English and French data!” he wrote.

The model is just 1.3 billion parameters in size but was trained on three trillion tokens – more tokens than the Llama 2 models − and included a dataset comprised of high-quality French content including legal documents, business data, cultural content and scientific information. It uses the Llama model architecture.

For example, you can prompt the model to explain French terms; Croissant’s deep linguistic knowledge brings out the nuances of the language − et voilà!


"CroissantLLM: A Truly Bilingual French-English Language Model" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.00786.pdf

The model and the underlying datasets were created by researchers from mainly French universities and businesses, including CentraleSupélec from the Université Paris Saclay, lluin Technology in Neuilly-Sur-Seine, France, Sorbonne Universitè in Paris, and others.

Egalitè with English
Faysse said a big challenge was to get enough high-quality French content for the training dataset. The team collected, filtered and cleaned data from varied sources and modalities, whether they are webpages, transcriptions, movie titles and others.

They collected more than 303 billion tokens of monolingual French data and 36 billion tokens of French-English high-quality translation data. “We craft our final 3 trillion token dataset such that we obtain equal amounts of French and English data after upsampling,” Faysse said.

He said the team purposely made CroissantLLM small after noticing that one of the biggest hurdles to widespread adoption of AI models is the difficulty in getting them to run on consumer-grade hardware.

Notably, the most downloaded models on Hugging Face were not the best performers, like Llama 2-70B or Mixtral 8x7B, but smaller models like Llama 2-7B or Mistral 7B, which are “easier and cheaper to serve and finetune,” he said.

CroissantLLM small size lets it run “extremely quickly on lower end GPU servers, enabling for high throughput and low latency” as well as CPUs and mobile devices at “decent speeds,” Faysse wrote.

The trade-off, he said, is that it is not as good in generalist capabilities in reasoning, math and coding compared to larger models. But the team behind CroissantLLM believe it will be “perfect” for specific industrial applications, translations and chat functionality where larger models are not necessarily needed.

The researchers also introduced a new French benchmark to assess non-English language models: FrenchBench. FrenchBench Gen assesses tasks like title generation, summarization, question generation, and question answering − relying on the high-quality French Question Answering dataset, FQuaD. The Multiple Choice section of FrenchBench tests reasoning, factual knowledge, and linguistic capabilities of models.

When tested, CroissantLLM came out among the best-performing for its size − in French − and even was competitive with Mistal 7-B.

Access CroissantLLM
You can download CroissantLLM Base and the Chat version from Hugging Face. The technical report detailing the model’s underlying architecture can be read via arXiv.

Ben Wodecki
Jr. Editor

Ben Wodecki is the Jr. Editor of AI Business, covering a wide range of AI content. Ben joined the team in March 2021 as assistant editor and was promoted to Jr. Editor. He has written for The New...

https://aibusiness.com/nlp/say-bonjour-t...lose-modal]]> https://techpressreleases.io/press-releases/showthread.php?tid=18 Thu, 01 Jan 2026 03:21:38 +0000 jasongeek]]> https://techpressreleases.io/press-releases/showthread.php?tid=18 August 31, 2024



It’s a big day for us at OpusClip! We’re announcing that we’ve raised $30M in funding, which includes our recent Series A as well as prior seed funding. The Series A was led by Millennium New Horizons, with support from AI Grant, Samsung Next, GTMfund, DCM Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Fellows Fund, Alpine VC, and our angel investor Jason Lemkin.

Since OpusClip was launched a year ago, we have experienced phenomenal growth. We’ve surpassed 6M users and eight-figures in ARR. Billboard.com, Univision, Telefónica, Jenny Hoyos, and Scott Galloway are just a few of the incredible customers that leverage OpusClip.

OpusClip is a rare instance where I was a customer first, then had the chance to invest. After evaluating every option in the market as a user, it was clear OpusClip was the best option. Its explosive growth in a highly competitive space is a testament to its status as a best-of-breed AI app for marketers, businesses and creators. I have no doubt that OpusClip is on its way to becoming the next billion-dollar company!
– Jason Lemkin, founder and CEO of SaaStr
AI generated video startups are all the rage, but the majority of them help you create animations or lifeless avatars. While these technologies will certainly have their place in the ecosystem, we believe authentic, real video is always going to be the most engaging and compelling. The bigger opportunity comes with what you can do with that video once it’s recorded.

That’s where OpusClip comes in. OpusClip is an AI-powered video editing tool that transforms long-format videos into short, high-quality clips for social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels.

OpusClip is designed to give creators more creative time with AI automation and actionable growth insight, and you can see this ethos in every part of our product. Our AI automatically extracts highlights from different parts of your video, reframes clips for various aspect ratios, adds animated captions and B-Roll to increase visual appeal, and allows for directly posting to social media channels.

For brands and creators, we know great content needs to be measurable. That’s why our AI generates a virality score for each clip based on the analysis of tens of thousands of viral videos, reducing guesswork and delivering better results.

‍Introducing ClipAnything
While we’re already growing fast, we don’t plan to slow down anytime soon. As part of today’s news we’re unveiling ClipAnything, the world’s first multimodal AI clipping that can clip any moment from any video with natural language prompts.

Millions of creators, producers, editors, and other professionals already rely on OpusClip to save time and grow faster by turning their their talking-head videos into viral shorts, but talking-head videos are just a small sum of the entire video content out there. That’s why we’re excited to launch ClipAnything, designed to help everyone create and grow faster with any type of content, whether it’s vlogs, sports, TV shows, or other video formats.

Just type your prompt, and OpusClip will automatically identify the right moments to highlight for maximum impact. This is made possible thanks to our state-of-the-art video understanding, which, unlike LLMs that focus solely on words, understands and reasons across visuals, actions, emotions, audio, and dialogue. We built this in collaboration with the creative industry, from award-winning producers to major media and entertainment enterprises, to embed producer-grade storytelling and editing strategies in every clip. The new ClipAnything model has been fine-tuned based on data across our 6M users and incorporates their likes, dislikes, exports, and social performance.

Thank you to our incredible community of users and supporters. Your feedback and enthusiasm drive us to improve and innovate. We look forward to what the future holds as we continue to redefine the landscape of video editing with AI. Stay tuned for more exciting updates and innovations from OpusClip. Together, we are shaping the future of content creation.]]> August 31, 2024



It’s a big day for us at OpusClip! We’re announcing that we’ve raised $30M in funding, which includes our recent Series A as well as prior seed funding. The Series A was led by Millennium New Horizons, with support from AI Grant, Samsung Next, GTMfund, DCM Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Fellows Fund, Alpine VC, and our angel investor Jason Lemkin.

Since OpusClip was launched a year ago, we have experienced phenomenal growth. We’ve surpassed 6M users and eight-figures in ARR. Billboard.com, Univision, Telefónica, Jenny Hoyos, and Scott Galloway are just a few of the incredible customers that leverage OpusClip.

OpusClip is a rare instance where I was a customer first, then had the chance to invest. After evaluating every option in the market as a user, it was clear OpusClip was the best option. Its explosive growth in a highly competitive space is a testament to its status as a best-of-breed AI app for marketers, businesses and creators. I have no doubt that OpusClip is on its way to becoming the next billion-dollar company!
– Jason Lemkin, founder and CEO of SaaStr
AI generated video startups are all the rage, but the majority of them help you create animations or lifeless avatars. While these technologies will certainly have their place in the ecosystem, we believe authentic, real video is always going to be the most engaging and compelling. The bigger opportunity comes with what you can do with that video once it’s recorded.

That’s where OpusClip comes in. OpusClip is an AI-powered video editing tool that transforms long-format videos into short, high-quality clips for social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels.

OpusClip is designed to give creators more creative time with AI automation and actionable growth insight, and you can see this ethos in every part of our product. Our AI automatically extracts highlights from different parts of your video, reframes clips for various aspect ratios, adds animated captions and B-Roll to increase visual appeal, and allows for directly posting to social media channels.

For brands and creators, we know great content needs to be measurable. That’s why our AI generates a virality score for each clip based on the analysis of tens of thousands of viral videos, reducing guesswork and delivering better results.

‍Introducing ClipAnything
While we’re already growing fast, we don’t plan to slow down anytime soon. As part of today’s news we’re unveiling ClipAnything, the world’s first multimodal AI clipping that can clip any moment from any video with natural language prompts.

Millions of creators, producers, editors, and other professionals already rely on OpusClip to save time and grow faster by turning their their talking-head videos into viral shorts, but talking-head videos are just a small sum of the entire video content out there. That’s why we’re excited to launch ClipAnything, designed to help everyone create and grow faster with any type of content, whether it’s vlogs, sports, TV shows, or other video formats.

Just type your prompt, and OpusClip will automatically identify the right moments to highlight for maximum impact. This is made possible thanks to our state-of-the-art video understanding, which, unlike LLMs that focus solely on words, understands and reasons across visuals, actions, emotions, audio, and dialogue. We built this in collaboration with the creative industry, from award-winning producers to major media and entertainment enterprises, to embed producer-grade storytelling and editing strategies in every clip. The new ClipAnything model has been fine-tuned based on data across our 6M users and incorporates their likes, dislikes, exports, and social performance.

Thank you to our incredible community of users and supporters. Your feedback and enthusiasm drive us to improve and innovate. We look forward to what the future holds as we continue to redefine the landscape of video editing with AI. Stay tuned for more exciting updates and innovations from OpusClip. Together, we are shaping the future of content creation.]]>