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As more celebrities and popular influencers join Bluesky, the fast-growing social media service has been facing more concerns around impersonation and verified identity. The Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that the company has updated its impersonation policy to be “more aggressive,” adding that “impersonation and handle-squatting accounts will be removed.” The company said it should […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Attorneys for tech billionaire Elon Musk have filed for a preliminary injunction against OpenAI, several of its co-founders, and its investor and close collaborator, Microsoft, to prevent OpenAI and other named defendants from engaging in what Musk’s counsel claims is anticompetitive behavior. The motion for an injunction, which was filed late on Friday in the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

On a September morning in 2024, two Jonathan Cohens — one from the Rockaways in Queens, the other from London — stood in an empty 15,000-square-foot parking garage near Hudson Yards in New York City. As they walked over chipped yellow lines, they explained how the space would help Joco, their shared e-bike startup for […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A group of Canadian news and media companies filed a lawsuit Friday against OpenAI, alleging that the ChatGPT maker has infringed their copyrights and unjustly enriched itself at their expense. The companies behind the lawsuit include the Toronto Star, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Globe and Mail, and others who seek to win monetary damages […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. With only so many days left in the year, there was plenty of startup news to round up since last Friday, despite a short workweek in the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As more publishers cut content licensing deals with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, a study put out this week by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism — looking at how the AI chatbot produces citations (i.e. sources) for publishers’ content — makes for interesting, or, well, concerning, reading. In a nutshell, the findings suggest publishers remain at the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Reddit is concentrating on international markets such as the U.K., India, Brazil, and the Philippines to bolster its user base. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Zomato has raised $1 billion through a so-called qualified institutional placement, completing its first major fundraise since its 2021 IPO. The $30 billion food delivery and quick-commerce giant, which leads both of those categories, issued approximately 336.5 million shares at ₹252.62 each ($3), according to a stock exchange filing on Friday. The placement, which opened […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Thanksgiving weekend has long been seen as the traditional start to the most important sales period for retailers, and so far, the indication is that we’re in for a strong holiday season for e-commerce. Salesforce is tracking activity in real time and has just put out its first figures for the day. It says that […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Photonics — a field that underpins light-based systems for manipulating data — has a bright future, as the rise of AI demands better computing performance, but it has yet to be fully applied to a new generation of chips. German startup Akhetonics hopes to change that. It’s raised a €6 million seed funding round (approximately […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Threads is rolling out a redesign that keeps your feeds visible on the home screen, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced on Wednesday. The redesign allows you to quickly swipe between different feeds just like you can on X. The change is rolling out on Android on Wednesday, and will launch on iOS in the coming […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google Labs, the experimental arm of the tech giant, has introduced a new online project that offers an entertaining variation of the game of chess. The web experiment is named GenChess, which, as the name implies, uses Gemini Imagen 3, Google’s image generation model, allowing players to customize their own chess pieces using text prompts. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Beyond patriotism, there’s another huge reason to join a defense startup: it pays really, really well. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Bluesky, the social network that’s currently surging in popularity due to an exodus of users from rival X, is in breach of European Union (EU) regulations that stipulate all online platforms must regularly publish regional user numbers. The Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into full effect back in February, is an online governance framework […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

South Korean prosecutors sought a five-year prison sentence and a 500 million KRW fine, equivalent to $375,000, for Samsung Electronics Chief Jay Y. Lee at an appeals court on Monday. The appeals case comes 10 months after Lee and 13 former Samsung executives were originally acquitted of manipulating stock prices and committing accounting fraud in […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Meet the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, a tiny board designed around a microcontroller that lets you build hardware projects at scale. Raspberry Pi is once again using the RP2350, its own, well-documented microcontroller. But what is a microcontroller again? As the name suggests, microcontrollers let you control other electronic components or devices. Regular Raspberry […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Entrepreneur Marc Lore has already sold two companies for billions of dollars, collectively. Now he plans to take his food delivery and take-out business Wonder public in a couple of years at an ambitious $40 billion valuation. We talked with Lore in person in New York recently about Wonder and its ultimate aim of making […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

It’s not exactly a secret that Apple has explored the possibility of building a television. Before his death in 2011, co-founder Steve Jobs famously told biographer Walter Isaacson that he’d “finally cracked it,” but no full-fledged Apple TV (as opposed to the Apple TV set-top box) has emerged in the years since. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Now you can appear to be on a Zoom call in your office, even when you’re sipping a margarita in a hammock far, far away. Courtesy of a months-old startup called Pickle, its pitch is simple: just submit a five-minute-long training video of yourself to create an avatar, and within 24 hours ostensibly, you’re ready […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

It may be hard to remember, but George Clooney and Brad Pitt co-starred in a movie, “Wolfs,” that Apple released just two months ago. On Friday, the film’s writer and director Jon Watts said Friday that a sequel is no longer happening; in a follow-up interview with Deadline, he explained that he “no longer trusted […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re exploring the DOJ telling Google to sell off Chrome to break up its monopoly, OpenAI accidentally deleting potential evidence in The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against it, and how AI companies are using TikTok brainrot for study tools. Let’s do this. The U.S. Department of […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Tesla and Rivian may have resolved a lawsuit in which Tesla accused Rivian of poaching employees and stealing trade secrets. Bloomberg reports that Tesla told a California statement judge that the companies have reached a “conditional” settlement, and that it expects to seek dismissal of the lawsuit by December 24. Tesla filed the suit, which […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

MatX, a startup designing chips that support large language models, has raised a Series A of approximately $80 million, three sources say, less than a year after raising its $25 million seed round.  Spark Capital led the investment, valuing the company at a pre-money valuation in the mid-$200 million range and a post-money valuation of […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Marissa Mayer has a lot of insights into the promise and problems with online advertising. She played an instrumental role in the early days of Google Search and spent several years as Yahoo’s CEO. Today, Mayer is the CEO of her own company, Sunshine, which is creating apps to do things like share photos among […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Brave announced on Thursday that it’s introducing an AI chat mode for follow-up questions based on initial queries on Brave Search. Earlier this year, the company launched “Answer with AI” summaries that appear above search results after you submit a query to give you an easy-to-read answer in response to a question. Now the Answer […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

As X competitor Bluesky takes off, topping 20 million users, Meta’s own Twitter-like app, Instagram Threads, has begun rolling out a new feature called custom feeds to its global audience. Hoping to capitalize on user demand for more personalization, custom feeds are meant to allow Threads users to easily build feeds around specific topics or […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode feature to the web, letting users talk to the AI chatbot right from their browser. The company’s chief product officer, Kevin Weil, announced the launch on X. The feature, which makes ChatGPT more natural to speak with, is rolling out to ChatGPT’s paying customers this week, which means […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Vegas police received funding for tech like drones and license plate readers from Ben Horowitz. Now it wants AI to go through police footage. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Chris Wright has been a big booster of oil and gas, but he's also no stranger to climate tech. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Jessica Owens and Iana Dimkova, co-founders of Initiate Ventures, are launching their new healthcare/ life sciences-focused firm with a respectable $45 million debut fund. One of the ways they convinced limited partners to become investors is because they are building a combination early-stage and incubation firm. So not only will they invest in early-stage startups […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Indian nutrition startup HealthKart’s valuation has surged to about $500 million in a new all-secondary investment of $153 million, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The investment, one of the largest for an Indian consumer startup this year, was co-led by private equity firms ChrysCapital and Motilal Oswal, with Avendus Capital serving as […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

An investment vehicle backed by Oyo’s founder, Ritesh Agarwal, has proposed to inject another $65.1 million into the Indian hospitality startup, according to notices to shareholders that were reviewed by TechCrunch. The investment, through Redsprig Innovation Partners, would value the SoftBank-backed company at $3.8 billion, according to terms shared in a notice to shareholders. While […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Blizzard Entertainment first released World of Warcraft in November 2004, so The New York Times celebrated the anniversary by outlining the many ways we can still see the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game’s influence’s 20 years later. For one thing, while multiplayer games and early social networks such as MySpace already existed, WoW provided a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Bluesky is having a moment — a moment that’s already stretched on for nearly three months. Over the summer, the social media app saw a wave of new signups in Brazil after X (formerly Twitter) was temporarily banned there. And in the United States, unhappiness with changes at X, and with owner Elon Musk’s close […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re breaking down Bluesky’s big surge in users, Elon Musk co-leading Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” and Mark Zuckerberg’s latest foray in extreme wife-guy behavior. Let’s go. Bluesky is seeing a major surge as X users unhappy with the platform’s latest policy decisions make the move to […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, valued itself at $300 billion in a recent share buyback offer, according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal. That number might sound familiar, as the WSJ previously reported on a ByteDance buyback offer at a $300 billion valuation back in September 2022. But a year […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Microsoft is buying 10,000 tons of carbon credits from Deep Sky, a direct air capture developer. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Bluesky has grown by 2 million users — about 15% — since Donald Trump won the U.S. election last week. But the emerging social platform isn’t just acting as a refuge for left-leaning X users who are disappointed in Elon Musk’s alliance with the president-elect. A community of Taylor Swift fans, or Swifites, has also […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Haliey Welch, the 22-year-old who went viral for her “Hawk Tuah” video, has managed to turn her brief moment of fame into a full-fledged career. In just a few months, Welch has rapidly risen to fame, amassing around 5 million followers across various social media platforms.  After recently releasing her own podcast titled “Talk Tuah,” […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

There now exists an .mp3 file in this world of Mark Zuckerberg earnestly singing the lyric “to the window, to the wall, ’til the sweat drop down my balls.” The Meta founder met his wife, Priscilla Chan, at a college party where the song “Get Low” by Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz ft. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A startup is training an AI system that it claims will enable creators to generate cinematic worlds, with complete control over the scenery, characters, lighting, and motion. How? By having humans strap cameras to their backs and hike around the world. Odyssey, founded by self-driving pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke (Cameron was previously the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Firefly Aerospace has raised a massive late-stage funding round ahead as it prepares for the launch of its lunar lander later this year and the first mission of its Elytra spacecraft next year.  The $175 million Series D, which set Firefly’s valuation at over $2 billion, apparently closed in less than two months in a […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple’s latest iOS 18.1 software updates introduced a series of Apple Intelligence features, including Writing Tools and notification summaries. However, some features were missing from the lineup, like Genmoji, which allows users to create emojis from written prompts.  Now, with iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.2 public betas officially available, the highly anticipated […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Zoox is testing its custom robotaxis, which are built without a steering wheel or pedals, on public roads in San Francisco and the Las Vegas Strip.  The rollout of the autonomous vehicles, which Zoox CTO Jesse Levinson first announced at TechCrunch Disrupt, is a public show of force from the Amazon-backed company. Federal regulations prohibit […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Dapr, the Microsoft-incubated open source runtime for helping developers build secure and resilient distributed applications, has graduated from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) pool of incubating projects to become a top-level project at the same level of projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, Istio, and Vitess. To graduate to this level, a project has to be […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The majority of the aging population in Japan still prefers using cash for transactions, according to a recent report citing government data. In 2023, cashless transactions in Japan totaled 126.7 trillion yen ($885 billion), accounting for 39.3 percent of all spending in the country, said the Japanese government. The government hopes that number reaches 40 […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Lightspeed has led Wheelocity's $15 million round as the startup pivots to rural India commerce. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Amazon has confirmed that employee data was compromised after a “security event” at a third-party vendor. In a statement given to TechCrunch on Monday, Amazon spokesperson Adam Montgomery confirmed that employee information had been involved in a data breach. “Amazon and AWS systems remain secure, and we have not experienced a security event. We were […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The PRESS Act would protect a journalist's sources, and gained unanimous bipartisan support when passed by the House in January. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Equal, an Indian startup founded by Keshav Reddy, has raised $10M in its maiden funding round led by Prosus Ventures to scale identity verification and financial data sharing. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

OpenAI’s next flagship model might not represent as big a leap forward as its predecessors, according to a new report in The Information. Employees who tested the new model, code-named Orion, reportedly found that even though its performance exceeds OpenAI’s existing models, there was less improvement than they’d seen in the jump from GPT-3 to […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re unpacking the latest layoffs at Mozilla, Perplexity offering to cross a picket line, and Apple warning investors that it might never top the iPhone. Let’s get into it. The Mozilla Foundation laid off 30% of its employees in the second round of layoffs for the Firefox […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

New code introduced in the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system could make it more difficult for both police and thieves to unlock iPhones. 404 Media reported Thursday that law enforcement officials were warning each other that phones being stored for forensic examination seemed to be rebooting themselves — something that security experts confirmed […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Monarch Tractor has laid off around 10% of its workforce as part of a restructuring that will see it prioritize non-agricultural customers, license its autonomous technology, and boost sales of its AI-powered farm management software, TechCrunch has learned. Around 35 employees were cut this week by the Livermore, California-based autonomous electric tractor startup that has […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

President-elect Donald Trump looped in Elon Musk on his phone call with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday, according to Axios. As one of Trump’s top campaign donors, Musk has forged a strong alliance with the incoming president. The Tesla CEO has been rumored as a candidate for a position in Trump’s cabinet, and his […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Yelp, which made a name for itself giving restaurant recs, just bought an auto services website. In the company’s earnings report on Thursday, Yelp revealed that it agreed to buy RepairPal, a site for car repair estimates, for $80 million in cash. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of the year, subject […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Rivian reported Thursday revenue of $874 million in the third quarter — more than 12% lower than analysts estimates — as the EV startup struggled to resolve a component shortage that disrupted production of its recently overhauled flagship R1S and R1T vehicles.  Last month, Rivian lowered its annual production guidance to 47,000 to 49,000 vehicles […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

On Tuesday, two AI startups tried convincing the world their AI chatbots were good enough to be an accurate, real-time source of information during a high-stakes presidential election: xAI and Perplexity. Elon Musk’s Grok failed almost instantly, offering wrong answers about races’ outcomes before the polls had even closed. On the other hand, Perplexity offered […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Elon Musk — the billionaire CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, and the owner of The Boring Company, Neuralink, and X — took a sharp swing to the right this election to support President-elect Donald Trump, using his vast wealth, influence, and megaphone on X to influence the outcome of the election.  Musk’s support came […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Rivian’s chief software officer Wassym Bensaid opened up at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 last week about his thoughts on physical buttons (“an anomaly“) and how his company will help power VW offshoot Scout’s EVs. But there’s one other item on his to-do list that he’s “super excited” about: making Rivian’s vehicles work with third-party app developers. […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Anduril, the defense tech company co-founded by Palmer Luckey, is considering building its first major manufacturing plant, a 5-million-square-foot facility known as “Arsenal-1,” in Arizona, Ohio or Texas, according to someone familiar with the matter.  The company, which is developing autonomous drones, planes, and submarines, had announced $1.5 billion at a $14 billion post-money valuation […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

To combat the perception that its “open” AI is aiding foreign adversaries, Meta today said that it’s making its Llama series of AI models available to U.S. government agencies and contractors in national security. “We are pleased to confirm that we’re making Llama available to U.S. government agencies, including those that are working on defense […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

X is rolling out its controversial update to the block feature, allowing people to view your public posts even if you have blocked them. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) giant Affirm is launching in the U.K., its first market outside North America. Its long-anticipated arrival comes as U.K. lawmakers mull new rules to bring BNPL firms into line with other traditional consumer credit services, though such laws aren’t expected to come into effect until at least 2026 — long […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

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 […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Investor Wesley Chan has shown a knack for making very early investments into multi-billion-dollar unicorns, such as Plaid, Gusto, Flexport, and, most recently, Canva. Chan comes from an unconventional background — he grew up in an immigrant family and had only middling grades in high school. But he landed a job washing test tubes in […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

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 […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

“There is no AI without data, there is no AI without unstructured data, and there is no AI without unstructured data at scale,” said Chet Kapoor, chairman and CEO of data management company DataStax. Kapoor was kicking off a conversation at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 about “new data pipelines” in the context of modern AI applications, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re coming at you right off the heels of TechCrunch Disrupt! If you missed it, we’re highlighting conversations from Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, and Disney star turned space CEO Bridgit Mendler. Of course, we’ve got news from the rest of the tech world […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine, might hallucinate from time to time. But the company wants to show that it’s trustworthy enough to use for election results tracking. Today, Perplexity announced a dedicated hub for U.S. general election information. Populated by data from The Associated Press and Democracy Works, the company described it in a blog […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The potential value a celebrity investor can bring to a consumer company, beyond just writing a check, is obvious: marketing and promotion. But that value is less clear when it comes to backing B2B startups. Alex Pall and Drew Taggart, also known as the Chainsmokers, think their VC fund Mantis VC can bring a value […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. Money attracts money, as the saying goes. This week seemed to confirm it, with a couple startups announcing new rounds of funding only months after their previous […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.