Category: TC

President Trump on Tuesday pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the infamous dark web exchange Silk Road, which was best known as a once-thriving online marketplace for illegal drugs. Trump announced the news in a Truth Social post, saying the pardon was in honor of Ulbricht’s mother and the Libertarian movement. In 2015, a federal…

Meta is building Oakley smart glasses for athletes: report

January 21, 2025

Meta’s Reality Labs is expanding its lineup of AI smart glasses with a new pair of Oakley-branded spectacles targeted at athletes, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Bloomberg reports the new smart glasses, with which Meta seeks to capitalize on the Ray-Ban Meta’s success, will be based on Oakley’s Sphaera glasses, and will shift the camera…

At the Microsoft Excel World Championship, selfies and a ‘hype’ tunnel

January 20, 2025

An arena. A hype tunnel, the kind through which NBA players typically streak. A competitor dressed in a jersey patterned with a six-pack abs. In a new piece, the New York Times takes readers to an event that organizers call the Microsoft Excel World Championship, a 40-minute, Las Vegas-based competition featuring 12 contestants — all…

DeepSeek claims its reasoning model beats OpenAI’s o1 on certain benchmarks

January 20, 2025

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has released an open version of DeepSeek-R1, its so-called reasoning model, that it claims performs as well as OpenAI’s o1 on certain AI benchmarks. R1 is available from the AI dev platform Hugging Face under an MIT license, meaning it can be used commercially without restrictions. According to DeepSeek, R1 beats…

Sources: AI vision startup Metropolis is buying Oosto (formerly known as AnyVision) for just $125M

January 20, 2025

The general hype around all things AI is not lifting all boats: certain startups continue to struggle and are looking for exits. In one of the latest developments, TechCrunch has heard from a reliable source that Metropolis, an AI-powered parking platform, is buying Oosto, the controversial computer vision company that used to be known as…

Bluesky launches a custom feed for vertical videos

January 19, 2025

It is the product shipping time for all social networks with TikTok’s services in the restoration phase, and the app still unavailable in the App Store and the Play Store. Bluesky said Sunday that it is launching a custom feed for vertical video in its app. Users can see a trending videos section in the explore tab…

The Pentagon says AI is speeding up its ‘kill chain’

January 19, 2025

Leading AI developers, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, are threading a delicate needle to sell software to the United States military: make the Pentagon more efficient, without letting their AI kill people. Today, their tools are not being used as weapons, but AI is giving the Department of Defense a “significant advantage” in identifying, tracking,…

AI isn’t very good at history, new paper finds

January 19, 2025

OpenAI is trying to extend human life, with help from a longevity startup

January 17, 2025

OpenAI says it trained a new AI model called GPT-4b micro with Retro Biosciences, a longevity science startup trying to extend the human lifespan by 10 years, according to the MIT Technology Review. Retro, which is backed by Sam Altman, has been working with OpenAI for roughly a year on this research, according to the…

Malware stole internal PowerSchool passwords from engineer’s hacked computer

January 17, 2025

Trump spoke to China’s President Xi about TikTok just ahead of Supreme Court ruling

January 17, 2025

Just ahead of today’s Supreme Court ruling — which saw the nation’s highest court uphold the law banning TikTok in the U.S. as of January 19 — Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that he had a “very good” phone call with China’s President Xi Jinping, which included discussion of TikTok. Though the U.S. president-elect…

Trump comments on TikTok ban

January 17, 2025

New York powerhouse VC Insight Partners nabs another $12.5B after $8B in exits

January 16, 2025

In AI copyright case, Zuckerberg turns to YouTube for his defense

January 15, 2025

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears to have used YouTube and its battle to take down pirated content to defend his own company’s use of a data set containing copyrighted e-books to train AI models, newly released snippets of his deposition reveals. The deposition, which was part of a complaint submitted to the court by plaintiffs’…

Hindenburg Research, a short seller that targeted tech and EV companies, is closing up shop

January 15, 2025

When Hindenburg Research posts a blog on its website, it often means a company’s final days are near. Today, that company is Hindenburg Research. Nate Anderson announced Wednesday he has shut down short-selling firm Hindenburg Research, after a seven-year run issuing damning reports about high-profile companies, including many of the technology world’s giants and buzzy…

Reusable rocket startup Stoke raised another massive round: $260M

January 15, 2025

LinkedIn adds free AI tools for job hunters and recruiters

January 15, 2025

If you’ve ever applied or thought of applying for a job via LinkedIn, you’ll know that the experience can be immediately disheartening: Openings that look interesting typically can see hundreds or thousands of applications in a matter of hours — data that LinkedIn, a social network for the world of work, proudly exposes in its…

SEC sues Elon Musk for allegedly failing to disclose Twitter acquisition on time

January 14, 2025

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk on Tuesday over an alleged securities violation relating to his acquisition of Twitter, now called X. The SEC claims Musk failed to disclose his 5% ownership stake of Twitter in a timely manner, violating federal securities law, according to a complaint filed in federal…

Meta execs obsessed over beating OpenAI’s GPT-4 internally, court filings reveal

January 14, 2025

Executives and researchers leading Meta’s AI efforts obsessed over beating OpenAI’s GPT-4 model while developing Llama 3, according to internal messages unsealed by a court on Tuesday in one of the company’s ongoing AI copyright cases, Kadrey v. Meta. “Honestly… Our goal needs to be GPT-4,” said Meta’s VP of Generative AI, Ahmad Al-Dahle, in…

TikTok users’ attempted migration to Chinese app RedNote isn’t going too well

January 14, 2025

American TikTok users have been thumbing their collective noses at the U.S. government’s decision to ban TikTok by spitefully joining another Chinese social media app, Red Note (aka Xiaohongshu), sending it to the top of the U.S. App Store on Monday. Unfortunately, many of those who already made the transition have faced problems with having…

ChatGPT now lets you schedule reminders and recurring tasks

January 14, 2025

Paying users of OpenAI’s ChatGPT can now ask the AI assistant to schedule reminders or recurring requests. The new beta feature, called tasks, will start rolling out to ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro users around the globe this week. With tasks, users can set simple reminders with ChatGPT such as, “Remind me when my passport…

Decentralized Instagram alternative Pixelfed launches mobile apps

January 14, 2025

Pixelfed, a decentralized alternative to Instagram, has launched its official mobile apps. The service today runs on the same ActivityPub protocol that powers an open source X alternative Mastodon, a YouTube competitor PeerTube, and other decentralized social apps, including now Meta’s Threads and Flipboard (plus its newer app, Surf), that are part of a growing…

Powerset gives founders $1 million to invest in other startups

January 14, 2025

Powerset, founded in late 2022, is an investment program with a simple hypothesis: what if the best investors aren’t venture capitalists but other founders, scribbling off checks in between late night coding sessions and board meetings? © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

North Korea stole over $659M in crypto heists during 2024, deploys fake job seekers

January 14, 2025

A joint international statement provides the first official confirmation that North Korea was behind the $235M hack of WazirX, India’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Robinhood agrees to pay $45M in SEC settlement

January 13, 2025

Robinhood has agreed to fork out $45 million to settle an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission over several alleged violations, reported the Wall Street Journal on Monday. The settlement is being made via two of Robinhood’s brokerage units. One of the violations relates to Robinhood’s November 2021 confirmation that it was hacked “with…

Groww, India’s biggest trading app, prepares for IPO

January 13, 2025

Groww, India’s largest retail stockbroker, is positioning itself to file for an IPO in 10-12 months and is seeking a valuation between $6 billion to $8 billion, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch, in what would be a landmark listing for the country’s fintech sector. The Bengaluru-headquartered’s listing would be the first IPO by…

Watch Duty was downloaded 2 million times during this week’s LA fires

January 12, 2025

Fire-tracking app Watch Duty has become a crucial source of information for Los Angeles residents threatened by the ongoing wildfires. As TechCrunch’s Maxwell Zeff explained, the app relies on a network of active and retired firefighters, first responders, official government reports, and volunteer reporters who monitor radio scanners to offer real-time updates on active wildfires.…

CES 2025: Self-driving cars were everywhere, plus other transportation tech trends

January 12, 2025

Even before CES 2025 kicked off a few trends began to emerge — or more accurately, some gaps appeared. All U.S. and some European automakers that have helped turn CES into an auto show were absent. Several Chinese automakers filled that void, notably Zeekr, the EV brand owned by China’s Geely Holdings. Wey, a premium…

Here are the five best pieces of founder advice I learned as a host of Found

January 12, 2025

After more than two years — and nearly 100 episodes — as a host of TechCrunch’s recently ended Found podcast, I have learned a lot about how founders approach building their startups. I’ve heard stories about how founders know when it is the right time to expand from their core product, to how startups approach…

Mark Zuckerberg defends Meta’s latest pivot in three-hour Joe Rogan interview

January 10, 2025

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended his decision to scale back Meta’s content moderation policies in a Friday appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Zuckerberg faced widespread criticism for the decision, including from employees inside his own company. “Probably depends on who you ask,” said Zuckerberg when asked how Meta’s updates have been received. The key updates…

TikTok ban: How both sides made their case to the Supreme Court and what the justices asked

January 10, 2025

On Friday, the nation’s highest court heard arguments on whether to uphold or block a law that could effectively ban TikTok in the U.S. The bill, signed into law by President Biden in April 2024, gives TikTok’s parent company ByteDance until January 19 to divest its U.S. operations or face a ban in the country.…

India’s payment push is cutting out Visa and Mastercard

January 10, 2025

As global regulators increase their scrutiny on Visa and Mastercard over merchant fees, India has chosen a different path: creating rival payment networks that are increasingly sidelining international card networks. The strategy builds on India’s Unified Payments Interface, known as UPI, a nine-year-old system that now processes more than 13 billion real-time transactions monthly, or…

Nvidia’s AI avatar sat on my computer screen and weirded me out

January 9, 2025

Nvidia unveiled a prototype AI avatar at CES 2025 that lives on your PC’s desktop. The AI assistant, R2X, looks like a video game character, and it can help you navigate apps on your computer. The R2X avatar is rendered and animated using Nvidia’s AI models, and users can run the avatar on popular LLMs…

TikTok tells LA staff impacted by wildfires to use personal/sick hours if they can’t work from home

January 9, 2025

Wildfires are currently devastating the greater Los Angeles area, burning over 45 square miles, torching over 1,300 structures, and putting nearly 180,000 people under evacuation orders as of Thursday. And yet, TikTok’s LA-based employees are being told to either continue their work from home or use their personal/sick days if that’s not possible, while the…

Doublepoint launches free Apple Watch app to control devices with hand gestures

January 9, 2025

Finnish startup Doublepoint launched its free app, WowMouse, for the Apple Watch this week at CES 2025. The app uses the wearable’s sensors, compass, and accelerometer to turn your hand into a mouse that can control devices through hand gestures. The Apple Watch already uses a similar technology for the double tap feature it released…

Elon Musk agrees that we’ve exhausted AI training data

January 8, 2025

Elon Musk concurs with other AI experts that there’s little real-world data left to train AI models on. “We’ve now exhausted basically the cumulative sum of human knowledge …. in AI training,” Musk said during a live-streamed conversation with Stagwell chairman Mark Penn streamed on X late Wednesday. “That happened basically last year.” Musk, who…

Gamers can’t fathom how 6x CEO Elon Musk found time to best Diablo IV

January 8, 2025

On October 16 and November 20, Elon Musk tweeted videos of himself clearing the highest level of the Diablo IV video game in about 2 minutes. While Diablo IV has been out since mid-2023, the latest “season,” called The Pit, launched on October 7. Many asked: How did he find the time to do it…

Omi, a competitor to Friend, wants to boost your productivity using AI and a ‘brain interface’

January 8, 2025

San Francisco startup Based Hardware announced the launch of a new AI wearable, Omi, to boost productivity during the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas this week. The device can be worn as a necklace where Omi’s AI assistant can be activated by saying “Hey Omi.” The startup also claims Omi can be attached to…

Sam Altman’s family responds to lawsuit alleging he sexually assaulted his sister

January 7, 2025

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to sexual assault accusations from his estranged younger sister on Tuesday, calling the claims “entirely untrue.” According to the Saint Louis Post Dispatch, in a new lawsuit filed Monday, Annie Altman alleges her older brother sexually assaulted her over a nine-year period in the 1990s and 2000s. The suit echoes…

X hires former WSJ editor and bureau chief to lead news group

January 7, 2025

X, formerly Twitter, wants to make its platform a home to the future and news and journalism. On that front, the company has now hired John Stoll, a former editor and Detroit bureau chief at The Wall Street Journal to lead its news group and partnership team at X. The hiring news was announced on…

TechCrunch Space: New year, new milestones

January 6, 2025

Hi, and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. Happy New Year! And…surprise!: This will be the last edition of TechCrunch Space for the foreseeable future. I know, it’s a bummer. But fear not: We’ll still be reporting on space startups, so I hope you’ll stay tuned. And there will certainly be a lot to cover. This…

Kirin offers a taste of its electric salt spoon at CES 2025

January 5, 2025

On the first night of CES 2025, Kirin Holdings, a Japanese company known for its beer and beverages, showed off its new electronic spoon that makes your food taste saltier. The company says its spoon uses a weak electric current to concentrate sodium ion molecules in your food, adding a stronger umami and salt flavor…

Accel could raise billions for India, but it’s sticking to $650 million

January 5, 2025

Accel has maintained its India fund size at $650 million for its eighth vehicle, even as other venture firms in the region are racing to raise increasingly larger pools of capital. The firm had ample opportunity to raise “multi-billion dollars,” said Shekhar Kirani, partner at Accel, in an interview with TechCrunch. But unlike peers who…

United Airlines accelerates its Starlink rollout, with first commercial flight planned for spring

January 5, 2025

A few months ago, United Airlines announced its deal with Starlink to offer in-flight internet access for its passengers. At the time, the airline said it would start testing the new service in early 2024 and then offer it on passenger flights later in the year. United has now accelerated this timeline a bit, with…

New ship, new year: SpaceX to deploy model Starlink satellites on next Starship launch

January 3, 2025

SpaceX is significantly upping the ante of its Starship test flight program, with the next rocket launch expected to demonstrate payload deployment for the first time. The payload in question will be 10 Starlink “simulators” that will be similar in size and weight to the next-gen satellites SpaceX plans to use Starship to deploy in…

Meta policy chief Nick Clegg steps down

January 2, 2025

The President of Meta’s Global Affairs team, Nick Clegg, is stepping down from his position at the company, the executive announced in a tweet on Thursday. Clegg, Meta’s politically centrist policy chief since 2018, will be replaced by one of the company’s most prominent Republican executives, Joel Kaplan. Clegg noted on X that Kaplan is…

Internal SpaceX documents show the sweet stock deals offered to investors like a16z, Gigafund

January 1, 2025

Like many highly valued startups, SpaceX sometimes allows its employees to cash out some of their shares by selling to company-authorized outside investors. TechCrunch has gotten a peek at an internal SpaceX document about such a tender offer from May 2022. Musk posted on X last month that SpaceX holds such sales for employees about…

Silicon Valley stifled the AI doom movement in 2024

January 1, 2025

For several years now, technologists have rung alarm bells about the potential for advanced AI systems to cause catastrophic damage to the human race. But in 2024, those warning calls were drowned out by a practical and prosperous vision of generative AI promoted by the tech industry – a vision that also benefited their wallets.…

Elon Musk’s pro-Trump critics claim they’re being censored on X

December 31, 2024

Backed by a16z and QED, Brazilian startup Carecode puts AI agents to work on healthcare

December 30, 2024

AI holds huge promise for healthcare, but not just on the medical side; many startups are convinced machine learning-based systems can do a lot of good on adjacent tasks such as appointment scheduling and confirmations. Brazilian startup Carecode is among these AI believers. It’s coming out of stealth with an ambition to reduce healthcare costs…

Nvidia’s next move: powering humanoid robots

December 29, 2024

The chipmaking giant Nvidia is leaning more heavily into robotics in 2025. More specifically, it’s launching a new generation of compact computers for humanoid robots, called Jetson Thor, in the first half of the new year, confims the Financial Times. The move, which was expected, is part of an evolving, years-long strategy. Back in March,…

Crypto industry groups sue IRS over broker reporting rule

December 29, 2024

Three crypto industry groups — the DeFi Education Fund, the Blockchain Association, and the Texas Blockchain Council — are suing the Internal Revenue Service to block new regulations that require decentralized finance (DeFi) entities to report customer information. The IRS has been finalizing crypto tax regulations as part of the Biden Administration’s Infrastructure Investment and…

Revisiting the biggest moments in the space industry in 2024

December 28, 2024

We are at the dawn of a new space age. If you doubt, simply look back at the last year: From SpaceX’s historic catch of the Super Heavy booster to the record-breaking number of lunar landing attempts, this year was full of historic and ambitious missions and demonstrations. We’re taking a look back at the…

ChatGPT and Sora are down for the second time this month

December 26, 2024

ChatGPT, Sora, and OpenAI’s developer-facing API went down Thursday for an hour and counting. OpenAI says it started experiencing a major outage at 11 AM PT, and the services still appear to be down at the time of publishing this article, around 12:40 PM PT. Frequent users of ChatGPT may recall that the service went…

Microsoft and OpenAI have a financial definition of AGI: report

December 26, 2024

Microsoft and OpenAI have a very specific, internal definition of artificial general intelligence (AGI) based on the startup’s profits, according to a new report from The Information. And by this definition, OpenAI is many years away from reaching it. The two companies reportedly signed an agreement last year stating OpenAI has only achieved AGI when…

Executive assistants, high salaries, and other ways early-stage founders will trigger a seed VC

December 26, 2024

While most seed investors believe founders should spend their raised cash however they want to, those VCs will still be judging founders’ cash management. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

PharmEasy’s $5.6 billion value shrinks to $456 million, investor data shows

December 26, 2024

Indian online pharmacy PharmEasy’s valuation now stands at about $456 million, according to disclosures from its investor Janus Henderson, a 92% drop from its peak valuation of $5.6 billion. The British American global asset firm’s Global Research Fund values its holding of 12.9 million shares in PharmEasy at $766,043, according to its latest filing for…

$132K – $149K, here’s what seed-stage founders pay early employees, based on data

December 25, 2024

Once a startup has raised its seed round, the perennial question becomes how much should the founders pay themselves and their first few employees? Kruze Consulting, a CPA firm that specializes in venture-backed startups, recently analyzed average salary ranges for over 450 seed-stage startups and shared that data with TechCrunch. The following averages are based…

OpenAI’s o3 suggests AI models are scaling in new ways — but so are the costs

December 23, 2024

Last month, AI founders and investors told TechCrunch that we’re now in the “second era of scaling laws,” noting how established methods of improving AI models were showing diminishing returns. One promising new method they suggested could keep gains was “test-time scaling,” which seems to be what’s behind the performance of OpenAI’s o3 model –…

Coralogix acquires AI observability platform Aporia

December 23, 2024

Coralogix, the well-funded observability platform, on Monday announced that it has acquired Aporia, a startup that focuses on giving businesses tools to observe and secure their AI workloads, as well as set guardrails for them to avoid hallucinations or unintended disclosures. As part of this acquisition, Coralogix will launch a dedicated AI research center, Coralogix…

OpenAI trained o1 and o3 to ‘think’ about its safety policy

December 22, 2024

OpenAI announced a new family of AI reasoning models on Friday, o3, which the startup claims to be more advanced than o1 or anything else it’s released. These improvements appear to have come from scaling test-time compute, something we wrote about last month, but OpenAI also says it used a new safety paradigm to train…

OpenAI announces new o3 model

December 20, 2024

OpenAI announced a new o3 model on Friday. In a tweet ahead of its final livestream for its “12 Days of OpenAI” event, the company confirmed previous reports that it is skipping o2 due to copyright concerns, and is releasing early evals for the o3 model. It appears to be a successor to its o1…

‘Genius Girl’ goes from inspiring a Korean TV show character to raising a $100 million AI fund

December 20, 2024

Sam Altman once owned some equity in OpenAI through Sequoia

December 19, 2024

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sat before Congress in 2023 to testify about the dangers of AI. He told American lawmakers at the time that he owns no equity in OpenAI, something he’s said many times, claiming he just runs the company because he loves it. However, Altman recently said he actually did have some equity…

K2 Space will fly its extra-large satellite for the first time in 2026

December 19, 2024

K2 Space is betting that the future of the space hardware will be big — really big. The startup is building massive spacecraft under the assumption that launch costs will continue to drop as SpaceX’s Starship and other heavy-lift vehicles come online. It looks like the Space Force is taking up their side of that…

App downloads decline 2.3% in 2024, but consumer spending grows to $127B

December 18, 2024

The global app economy continued to recover in 2024, after an earlier slowdown in 2022 — at least in terms of consumer spending. In 2024, global consumer spending in mobile apps and games reached $127 billion across the App Store and Google Play, up 15.7% from the prior year. However, those increases were driven by…

Who wants ‘Her’-like AI that gets stuff wrong?

December 18, 2024

Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, smash the link and sign up here. Last week, OpenAI launched Advanced Voice Mode with Vision, which feeds real-time video to ChatGPT, allowing the chatbot to “see” beyond the confines of its app layer. The premise is that…

GitHub launches a free version of its Copilot

December 18, 2024

Microsoft-owned GitHub today announced a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool, which will also now ship by default with Microsoft’s popular VS Code editor. Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting free…

AI startup Oddysee’s new tool can generate photorealistic 3D worlds

December 18, 2024

Odyssey, a startup founded by self-driving pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, is developing an AI-powered tool that can transform text or an image into a 3D rendering. The tool, dubbed Explorer, is similar in some ways to the so-called world models recently demoed by DeepMind, World Labs, and Israeli upstart Decart. Given a caption like “A…

Hauler Hero wants to bring waste management software into the 21st century

December 18, 2024

After nearly four years of working in sales at tradesperson software company ServiceTitan, Mark Hoadley (pictured above) was looking for a change and to potentially start something of his own in a similar industry. Hoadley’s brother-in-law, and now co-founder, Ben Sikma, was working on M&A in the waste management space at the time. Sikma discovered…

Flipboard lauches Surf, a new app for browing the open social web

December 18, 2024

Social magazine app maker Flipboard is reinventing itself for the new era of the open social web. While the company’s original app allowed users to collect content from blogs, news websites, and traditional social media services like Facebook and Twitter in order to create curated magazines, its new app called Surf, launching into invite-only beta…

Insight VC describes Databricks’ wild $10B deal and the bad advice the CEO ignored

December 17, 2024

It’s been a wild week for investors clawing their way into Databricks’ record-breaking $10 billion fund raising, one of the VCs told TechCrunch. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Bob Lee verdict: Cash App creator’s killer found guilty of second-degree murder

December 17, 2024

A San Francisco jury has found Nima Momeni guilty of second-degree murder in the stabbing of Bob Lee, the Cash App creator and former CTO of Block, according to NBC News Bay Area on Tuesday. The jury found Momeni not guilty of first-degree murder, meaning jurors decided the murder of Lee was not premeditated. Lee…

Cash App creator Bob Lee’s killer found guilty of second-degree murder

December 17, 2024

A San Francisco jury has found Nima Momeni guilty of second-degree murder in the stabbing death of Bob Lee, the Cash App creator and former CTO of Block, according to NBC News Bay Area on Tuesday. The jury found Momeni not guilty of first-degree murder, meaning jurors decided the murder of Lee was not premeditated.…

Stephen Curry’s Penny Jar Capital files to raise a Fund II

December 17, 2024

Penny Jar Capital is the early-stage firm founded by Bryant Barr and Richard Scudellari and where basketball star Stephen Curry serves as a special advisor. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Pineapple on pizza is delicious — and if you disagree, you can’t log in to WordPress.org

December 17, 2024

There are few matters in life that divide a room more than the prudence of putting pineapple on pizza. But if you’re of the persuasion that tropical fruit has no place on a pie, you’ll have to swallow a bitter pill — if you want to access the WordPress.org developer portal and forum, at least.…

Mark Zuckerberg says Threads now has 100M daily active users

December 16, 2024

Meta’s X rival Threads is growing steadily with more than 100 million people using the service daily, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Monday. Zuckerberg also noted that Threads now has 300 million monthly active users, up from 275 million monthly active users in November. While Meta has regularly released updated numbers about monthly active…

TechCrunch Space: Sayonara

December 16, 2024

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. This will be the final TechCrunch Space newsletter you receive in 2024, so to all our readers, have a wonderful holiday and see you next year. There’s a lot to look forward to next year. I expect to see much more progress from SpaceX on Starship, big changes…

Google names new India chief

December 16, 2024

Google has appointed Preeti Lobana to lead its India business, filling a key position that had been vacant since Sanjay Gupta’s promotion to Asia-Pacific president in July. Lobana, who was vice president of advertising technology at Google, takes over as the company pushes its AI products in India amid intensifying competition in the digital market.…

Revisiting 19th-century Paris with VR

December 15, 2024

While I have fond memories of past efforts to combine VR content with real-world locations, I’d assumed the pandemic had put those ambitions to an end. If I wanted VR in 2024, I thought I’d have to buy a headset, and it would be a largely solitary experience at home or in the office —…

Trump’s Silicon Valley advisers have AI ‘censorship’ in their crosshairs

December 15, 2024

President-elect Donald Trump has surrounded himself with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs — including Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and David Sacks — who are now advising him on technology and other issues. When it comes to AI, this crew of technologists is fairly aligned on the need for rapid development and adoption of AI throughout the U.S.…

Klarna’s CEO says it stopped hiring thanks to AI but still advertises many open positions

December 14, 2024

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski recently told Bloomberg TV that his company essentially stopped hiring a year ago and credited generative AI for enabling this massive workforce reduction. However, despite Siemiatkowski’s bullishness on AI, the company is not relying entirely on AI to replace human workers who leave, as open job listings — for more humans…

OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

December 13, 2024

A former OpenAI employee, Suchir Balaji, was recently found dead in his San Francisco apartment, according to the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In October, the 26-year-old AI researcher raised concerns about OpenAI breaking copyright law when he was interviewed by The New York Times. “The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner…

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