timef 02/05/2025

Attorneys for Elon Musk intend to move to dismiss a case that accuses the Tesla CEO, who is also the head of President Donald Trump’s DOGE organization, of using AI-generated, copyright-violating “Blade Runner”-inspired images at a Tesla press event. In a filing submitted to the U.S. District Court Central District of California, Western Division late […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

It’s sometimes said that European VC doesn’t have the firepower to compete with VCs in the U.S., which regularly raise billion-dollar+ funds these days. Perhaps further evidence of this view persists in the news that Berlin-based Cherry Ventures has closed its latest fund at $500 million, to be split between early-stage rounds and follow-on rounds […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Both startups and big tech companies have aggressively used AI to help developers write code or learn programming better. People have used chatbots to prepare for different scenarios in life, like interviews. Tech assessment platform CodeSignal, which introduced a learning platform for technical subjects with AI assistants last year, launched soft skill courses on its platform […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Chinese ecommerce and fast fashion giant Shein is facing fresh scrutiny in the European Union in relation to consumer protection rules following the launch of a coordinated action by the bloc’s Consumer Protection Cooperation Network (CPCN). The action is being conducted with reference to the EU’s Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, Consumer Rights Directive, Unfair Contracts […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Modern Synthesis’s fibers can be manipulated in ways that simple plant fibers cannot. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Generative AI models have demonstrated to app developers that combining a robust knowledge base with the right model can enable them to offer users services — once reliant on costly professionals like therapists or executive assistants — at a fraction of the price. Former VP of product at fitness company Whoop, Rami Alhamad, has a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Uber customers in Austin may notice a new offer when they open the app and hail a ride: an invitation to signal their interest in a Waymo robotaxi. For now, this doesn’t translate into a Waymo picking them up. But it will soon. The “interest list,” which launched Wednesday, is part of a partnership between […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The Taiwanese hardware maker says it has no plans patch the flaws impacting legacy router models © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

In just a few days, France will host the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, with heads of state flocking to Paris to meet global tech leaders. They’ll most likely announce some big investments and diplomatic agreements focused on safety or the environmental impact of artificial intelligence. Ahead of the summit, early-stage VC firm Galion.exe, growth investment […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

In just a few days, France will host the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, with heads of state flocking to Paris to meet global tech leaders. They’ll most likely announce some big investments and diplomatic agreements focused on safety or the environmental impact of artificial intelligence. Ahead of the summit, early-stage VC firm Galion.exe, growth investment […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The size of the new fund is a vote of confidence in a range of deep tech verticals. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google Search is in the midst of a “journey” around AI, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during the company’s earnings call on Tuesday. The start of that journey was AI overviews, a controversial and monumental shift in how Google delivers information to billions of Search users. But that was just the beginning. “As AI continues […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Cashfree, an Indian payments startup that facilitates and processes more than $80 billion for its customers each year, has raised $53 million in a new round of funding as it gears up to deepen its presence in some international markets. Krafton, maker of sleeper hit titles such as PUBG and BGMI, led Cashfree’s Series C […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Brightpick, a maker of autonomous mobile robots, on Tuesday announced a lofty addition to its current line. The appropriately named Giraffe system is notable for its large, retractable platform capable of reaching up to 20 feet (6 meters) in height to pick items from warehouse shelves. It’s a novel approach to warehouses with ceilings well […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Alphabet is shrugging off concerns sparked by DeepSeek over AI spending, boosting its capital expenditures to a whopping $75 billion. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

During Snap’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Tuesday, CEO Evan Spiegel said that the uncertainty surrounding TikTok’s future has positively affected its business. “We’re not trying to draw too many conclusions from some of the engagement lift we saw when [TikTok] went dark for that brief period of time. I would say that the overall environment […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Powerhouse venture firm Andreessen Horowitz has hired Daniel Penny as an investor, its webpage confirms.  Penny is the former Marine who was tried last year and found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the death of a homeless man on a New York City subway. After the man acted erratically, Penny held him in […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

AMD says that it plans to launch its next major data center GPUs, the AMD Instinct MI350 series, sooner than originally announced. During the company’s Q4 2024 earnings call Tuesday, AMD CEO Lisa Su said AMD plans to sample the MI350 with “lead customers” this quarter, and “accelerate” production shipments to “mid-year.” “So, we had […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As a university student, Dalton Signor was troubled by how many people around him smoked or vaped, including his grandmother and 14-year-old sister. Signor (pictured center) felt that existing smoking cessation medicines, whether patches, gums, or lozenges, are not very effective because they take too long to start working. “They take about 30 minutes to […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google removed a pledge to not build AI for weapons or surveillance from its website this week. The change was first spotted by Bloomberg. The company appears to have updated its public AI principles page, erasing a section titled “applications we will not pursue,” which was still included as recently as last week. Asked for […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Israeli spyware maker Paragon Solutions confirmed to TechCrunch that it sells its products to the U.S. government and other unspecified allied countries. Paragon’s executive chairman John Fleming said in a statement to TechCrunch on Tuesday that, “Paragon licenses its technology to a select group of global democracies — principally, the United States and its allies.” […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Cybersecurity company SailPoint is hoping to sell $1 billion worth of stock in its upcoming IPO and offer another signal that IPOs will become hot again. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Figure AI founder and CEO Brett Adcock announced Tuesday that the humanoid robotics firm is exiting a deal with OpenAI. The Bay Area-based robotics company has instead opted to focus on in-house AI, owing to a “major breakthrough.” Adcock was tightlipped in terms of specifics, but he promised to deliver “something no one has ever […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A group of developers at AI dev platform Hugging Face, including Thomas Wolf, the company’s co-founder and chief scientist, say they’ve built an “open” version of OpenAI’s deep research tool. Deep research, which OpenAI unveiled during an event Sunday, crawls the web to compile research reports on any subject. While impressive, deep research is currently […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Amazon’s power bill has been soaring lately as it adds data centers to deal with rising demand for AI and cloud services. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A new app called Tapestry, which launched Tuesday, aggregates and organizes information from across the web and social networks in a single place. It is, in some ways, like this generation’s FriendFeed, for those old enough to remember the earlier attempt from the Web 2.0 era to aggregate feeds and social media updates in a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Circularity’s process uses 40% less energy than competing CO2-to-fuel pathways. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Chris Anderson, who has run TED for 25 years, is looking to bestow the operation on anyone who has a good plan for its future, he announced in a blog post. TED is best known for its TED Talks, where ideas from tech to humor have been explored. It has featured famed tech moguls (Bill […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Meta’s Threads is doubling down on support for custom feeds as it faces challenges from the growing social network Bluesky, now with over 30 million users, which also offers custom feeds as one of its key features. On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that users can now set their custom feeds to be public […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. You might’ve noticed we skipped the newsletter last week. The reason? A chaotic AI news cycle made even more pandemonious by Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s sudden rise to prominence, and the response from practically ever corner […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech!  This week we’re looking at a startup out to help people navigate long-term care, a flurry of activity in Africa, another fintech company shutdown, and more. To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Tuesday at 8:00 a.m. PT, subscribe here. The […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

U.S. access and identity management giant Okta laid off 180 employees on Tuesday, the company confirmed to TechCrunch – just over one year after it let go of 400 workers. The company also conducted another workforce reduction in February of 2023 that affected 300 employees. While Okta did not share how many employees it has […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Amid China’s retaliation to recently-announced U.S. tariffs, Intel may find itself in the hot seat with China’s regulators. China is apparently considering an antitrust probe into semiconductor giant Intel, according to reporting from the Financial Times. This would be in addition to the set of tariffs against the U.S. that China announced on Monday. Per […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The first compliance deadline kicked in a couple of days ago for the European Union’s AI Act, a risk-based framework for regulating uses of artificial intelligence — banning a narrow selection of so called “unacceptable risk” use-cases of AI, such as social scoring that could lead to detrimental or unfavourable treatment; or harmful manipulation using […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A complete list of all the known layoffs in tech, from Big Tech to startups, broken down by month throughout 2024. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Cruise is laying off 50% of its workforce as the robotaxi program ends. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Fintech-turned-HR outfit Deel is trying to lay the groundwork for an IPO. On Tuesday, it said its annual revenue run rate climbed to $800 million in 2024 after growing by 70%. The startup, which helps businesses globally hire, manage and pay employees remotely, also said it has sold $300 million in secondary shares to General […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

DSTLRY, a venture-backed digital comic books marketplace, on Tuesday added a pair of features designed to bring customization to the platform. The first feature, dubbed Commissioned Digital Remarques, allows creators to add personalized sketches and signatures to digital comics. The second, Unlimited Digital Covers, expands platform-wide access to alternative comic book covers. Commissioned Digital Remarques […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Four years after accidentally launching a VC firm, GTMfund founder Max Altschuler has raised a second oversubscribed $54 million fund. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple on Tuesday launched a new app called “Invites” that allows users to create custom invitations for any occasion. With Invites, users can create and share invitations on their iPhone, RSVP, contribute to Shared Albums, and curate event soundtracks. To create an invitation, you need an iCloud+ subscription. However, anyone can RSVP, regardless of whether […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Thomas Shedd, the former Tesla engineer now serving as the director of Technology Transformation Services, reportedly outlined an “AI-first strategy” for the U.S. government department. According to a report from Wired citing multiple sources, the Musk ally described the plan to run the office like a “startup software company” during a Monday meeting. The New […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Researchers from TikTok owner ByteDance have demoed a new AI system, OmniHuman-1, that can generate perhaps the most realistic deepfake videos to date. Deepfaking AI is a commodity. There’s no shortage of apps that can insert someone into a photo, or make a person appear to say something they didn’t actually say. But most deepfakes […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Swiss startup LogicStar is bent on joining the AI agent game. The summer 2024-founded startup has bagged $3 million in pre-seed funding to bring tools to the developer market that can do autonomous maintenance of software applications, rather than the more typical AI agent use-case of code co-development. LogicStar CEO and co-founder Boris Paskalev suggests […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

On a clear spring evening in Michigan, the stars aligned — just not in the way Upfront Ventures partner Nick Kim expected. He’d just led a $9.5 million seed round for OurSky, a software platform for space observational data, and was eager to see what its telescope partner PlaneWave Instruments could do.  But when they […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.