TechCrunch

1.

Trump says he wants to keep TikTok around ‘for a little while’

December 22, 2024 20:42:38

With a US TikTok ban scheduled to take effect in less than a month, President-elect Donald Trump said Sunday that he’d like to keep the app around, according to Reuters. “We’re going to have to start thinking because, you know, we did go on TikTok, and we had a great response with billions of views, […]

2.

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

December 22, 2024 18:30:00

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 […]

3.

The biggest flops and fizzles in 2024 transportation, from Apple Car to Fisker

December 22, 2024 17:40:00

Autonomous vehicle technology and electrification startups were once the darlings of the VC and corporate world. The two technologies promised billions of dollars in revenue — and a new pathway for automakers to make money beyond building and selling cars. Those VC-money-printing days have been over for AVs for a while now, with a few […]

4.

Apple might be working on a smart doorbell

December 22, 2024 16:44:32

There’s been a lot of reporting in recent months around Apple’s efforts to expand its footprint in customers’ homes with in-development products like a wall-mounted smart home hub. According to a new report in Bloomberg, that strategy could also include a smart doorbell. This doorbell would use Apple’s FaceID technology to scan people’s faces as […]

5.

Tetsuwan Scientific is making robotic AI scientists that can run experiments on their own

December 22, 2024 16:00:00

LLM models are already capable of diagnosing scientific outputs, but, until now, had “no physical agency to actually perform" experiments.

6.

OpenAI’s GPT-5 reportedly falling short of expectations

December 21, 2024 18:30:32

OpenAI’s efforts to develop its next major model, GPT-5, are running behind schedule, with results that don’t yet justify the enormous costs, according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal. This echoes an earlier report in The Information suggesting that OpenAI is looking to new strategies as GPT-5 might not represent as big […]

7.

OpenAI announces new o3 model — but you can’t use it yet

December 21, 2024 18:05:00

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re looking at OpenAI’s last — and biggest — announcement from its “12 Days of OpenAI” event; Apple’s potential entrance into the foldable market; and why Databricks is choosing to wait to go public. Let’s get into it. P.S. We’re off for the holidays! Week in Review […]

8.

Google pushes back against DOJ’s ‘interventionist’ remedies in antitrust case

December 21, 2024 16:12:54

Google has offered up its own proposal in a recent antitrust case that saw the US Department of Justice argue that Google must sell its Chrome browser. US District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled in August that Google had acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, with the DOJ then proposing a number […]

9.

If climate tech is dead, what comes next?

December 21, 2024 16:00:00

Climate tech is about a decade old, and people are itching for a rebrand.

10.

Hollywood angels: Here are the celebrities who are also star VCs

December 21, 2024 15:00:00

Becoming a venture capitalist has become the latest status symbol In Hollywood.
Everyone from Olivia Wilde to Emma Watson is investing in startups.

11.

Meet Skyseed, a VC fund and incubator backing the Bluesky and AT Protocol ecosystem

December 21, 2024 14:00:00

On November 15, Peter Wang posted a message requesting ideas for a new incubator and fund to support experimental projects built on the burgeoning Bluesky/AT Protocol ecosystem. Four weeks later, Skyseed emerged with an initial commitment of $1 million. This turnaround, a speed underscored by the fact that the fund doesn’t even have a website […]

12.

Sam Altman disputes Marc Andreessen’s description of AI meetings with Biden administration

December 21, 2024 00:04:16

Sam Altman dismissed what he called a "conspiracy theory" from a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen.

13.

EV startup Canoo places remaining employees on a ‘mandatory unpaid break’

December 20, 2024 23:28:29

Struggling electric van startup Canoo has placed its remaining employees on what it’s calling a “mandatory unpaid break” through at least the end of the year, according to an email obtained by TechCrunch. The company told employees they are being locked out of Canoo’s systems at the end of the day Friday, according to the […]

14.

After causing outrage on the first day of Y Combinator, AI code editor PearAI lands $1M seed

December 20, 2024 21:34:50

On the first day of Y Combinator the founders of PearAI got “cancelled." They used the hate to launch a new product, raise $1 million.

15.

Third member of LockBit ransomware gang has been arrested

December 20, 2024 20:20:17

LockBit is believed tobe responsible for at least $500 million in ransom payments alone.

16.

Feds clear the way for robotaxis without steering wheels and pedals

December 20, 2024 20:18:05

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on Friday proposed a new national framework that could make it easier for companies to deploy at scale autonomous vehicles without traditional manual driving controls — like steering wheels, pedals, and sideview mirrors. The guidelines also require AV companies to share a whole lot more safety data with […]

17.

ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot

December 20, 2024 20:15:00

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. 2024 has been a big year for OpenAI, from its […]

18.

VCs pledge not to take money from Russia or China, and Databricks raises a humongous round

December 20, 2024 20:05:00

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. This week was full of news, likely because it is also the last “real” week of 2024. Which is another way for us to say goodbye for […]

19.

Nvidia clears regulatory hurdle to acquire Run:ai

December 20, 2024 18:54:53

Chip company Nvidia gets the green light from the European Union to complete its acquisition of Run:ai. The EU came to a unanimous decision today that Nvidia could go ahead with its acquisition of Israeli GPU orchestration platform Run:ai, according to reporting from Bloomberg. The European Commission determined that if the merger went through, other […]

20.

Google is expanding Gemini’s in-depth research mode to 40 languages

December 20, 2024 18:21:25

Google said Friday that the company is expanding Gemini’s latest in-depth research mode to 40 more languages. The company launched the in-depth research mode earlier this month, allowing Google One AI premium plan users to unlock an AI-powered research assistant of sorts. The in-depth function works in a multi-step method, from creating a research plan […]