Elliot Wolf, the executive producer and son of “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf, is entering a new venture aimed at engaging true crime fans. He, along with co-founders Andrew Adashek (CEO) and Noah Rosenberg (CTO), are developing Wolf Games, a new startup that leverages AI to generate daily murder mystery games. The company also … Read more
Meta is facing an AI copyright lawsuit in France that’s been brought by authors and publishers who are accusing it of economic “parasitism,” Reuters reports. The French litigation was filed in a Paris court this week by the National Publishing Union (SNE), the National Union of Authors and Composers (SNAC), and the Society of People … Read more
Ditto, a company that’s setting out to bring “resilient” connectivity to edge devices, has raised $82 million in a Series B round of funding at a post-money valuation of $462 million, more than double its Series A valuation from 2023. “Edge,” in the context of Ditto’s industry, refers to a distributed computing model that brings … Read more
Mobile gaming giant Scopely on Wednesday said it has agreed to acquire Pokémon Go maker Niantic’s gaming division for $3.5 billion. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Scimplify has raised $40 million in a new equity round backed by Accel to expand its presence in the U.S. and enter new markets. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Salesforce plans to invest $1 billion in Singapore over the next five years as it seeks to fuel the adoption of its AI agent development platform, Agentforce. Salesforce claimed that Agentforce can help alleviate Singapore’s ongoing labor issues and augment the country’s workforce and enterprises by creating “digital workforces” that combine humans with autonomous AI … Read more
Cybersecurity firm Lookout found several samples of a North Korean spyware it calls KoSpy. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
VC funding into AI tools for healthcare was projected to hit $11 billion last year — a headline figure that speaks to the widespread conviction that artificial intelligence will prove transformative in a critical sector. Many startups applying AI in healthcare are seeking to drive efficiencies by automating some of the administration that orbits and … Read more
Uber Technologies has ended its acquisition of Delivery Hero’s Foodpanda in Taiwan, the Germany-based tech firm said on Tuesday. The announcement comes roughly three months after Taiwan’s antitrust regulator blocked the deal, citing competitive issues. The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said that if Uber acquired Foodpanda, its market share in Taiwan would increase to 90%, … Read more
Reliance Jio has partnered with SpaceX to offer Starlink to its customers in India just hours after Airtel’s partnership. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
A ransomware gang has leaked internal Tata Technologies data, a month after the company confirmed a ransomware attack. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Spotify on Tuesday released its annual Loud & Clear report, detailing information about the music streaming service’s royalty payments. While Spotify revealed earlier this year that it paid out $10 billion to the music industry in 2024, the new report offers more in-depth numbers about its payments in an effort to dispel reports that the company … Read more
Anthropic, a San Francisco startup often cast as an independent player in the AI race, has deeper ties to Google than previously known. Court documents recently obtained by The New York Times reveal that Google owns a 14% stake in the company and is set to pour another $750 million into it this year through … Read more
Meta is reportedly testing an in-house chip for training AI systems, a part of a strategy to reduce its reliance on hardware makers like Nvidia. According to Reuters, Meta’s chip, which is designed to handle AI-specific workloads, was manufactured in partnership with Taiwan-based firm TSMC. The company is piloting a “small deployment” of the chip … Read more
Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow defended the $30M personal loan he took out from his startup, while announcing Bolt’s latest launch. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
President Donald Trump said he will label violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism, per a transcript shared by the White House pool reporters, a sign of deepening ties with Elon Musk. “Tesla Takeovers” have been breaking out across the globe at Tesla dealerships as people protest what they see as a hostile takeover of … Read more
When the first email was sent in 1971, Richard Nixon was president. The video game “Pong” was still in development. The Pittsburgh Pirates were a good baseball team. This is to say, technological achievements like the email have lived long enough to have their own grandchildren. And yet, one of the most storied magazines in … Read more
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says that, despite the Trump Administration’s attacks on globalism, global trade isn’t dead. In fact, he thinks that the U.S.’s key to growth will be embracing an international exchange of goods. “So, I actually am a firm believer — I think it goes all the way back to the economists who … Read more
Otherwise Fund’s Terrance Rohan, investing in Y Combinator since 2010, says he noticed a “vibe shift” with this batch thanks to AI. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The flaw was in the browser engine WebKit, used by Safari and other apps. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Watch out, fiction writers. OpenAI may have you in its crosshairs. In a post on X on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that the company has trained a “new model” that’s “really good” at creative writing. He posted a lengthy sample from the model given the prompt “Please write a metafictional literary short story … Read more
Affected staff say more than 100 employees working to protect U.S. government networks were ‘axed’ with no prior warning © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Pocket Casts, the podcast app acquired by Automattic in 2021, is now making its web player free. The company says the move offers an alternative to the big platforms’ closed ecosystems, where algorithmic-driven content is prioritized and podcasts are kept behind paywalls. Podcasts were built on open technology — the open, decentralized standard RSS, which … Read more
Flower Labs, a Y Combinator-backed startup, on Tuesday launched a preview of its distributed cloud platform for serving AI models, called Flower Intelligence. Mozilla is already using it to power the upcoming Assist summarization add-on for its Thunderbird email client. What makes Flower Intelligence unique, Flower Labs said in a post on X, is that … Read more
The intersection of robotics and AI continues to attract attention from investors and Big Tech alike. The latest indicator? Dexterity, a startup specializing in industrial robots with “human-like” finesse, has raised $95 million at a post-money valuation of $1.65 billion, per Bloomberg. The investment, which includes backing from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sumitomo Corp., highlights … Read more
Geothermal resources have enormous potential to provide the sort of consistent power that data centers crave. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
On Tuesday, OpenAI released new tools designed to help developers and enterprises build AI agents – automated systems that can independently accomplish tasks – using the company’s own AI models and frameworks. The tools are part of OpenAI’s new Responses API, which lets businesses develop custom AI agents that can perform web searches, scan through … Read more
Speaking at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, tech investor and entrepreneur Mark Cuban shared his thoughts on how AI technology can help small businesses outperform their competition. In short, he told the crowd that AI was not the answer, in and of itself, but is meant to serve as an aid that can help … Read more
Last year, Hugging Face, the AI dev platform, launched LeRobot, a collection of open AI models, data sets, and tools to help build real-world robotics systems. On Tuesday, Hugging Face teamed up with AI startup Yaak to expand LeRobot with a training set for robots and cars that can navigate environments, like city streets, autonomously. … Read more
Waymo will start offering robotaxi rides to people in its “Waymo One” early rider program in Mountain View, Los Altos, Palo Alto, and “parts of Sunnyvale” starting Wednesday, an expansion that will bring its footprint in Silicon Valley to 27 square miles. The Waymo vehicles will be available around-the-clock, and the new territories add to … Read more