Timef 03/08/2025

Europe is waking up to the need to invest in defense, and so are European VCs. But with a painful history of Soviet occupations, Lithuania didn’t wait for the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to reach its third anniversary to commit 5% to 6% of its GDP to military spending — and fund […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Investor interest in AI-coding assistants is exploding. Anysphere, the developer of AI-powered coding assistant Cursor, is in talks with venture capitalists to raise capital at a valuation of nearly $10 billion, Bloomberg reported. The round, if it transpires, would come about three months after Anysphere completed its previous fundraise of $100 million at a pre-money […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Microsoft is accelerating its push to compete with OpenAI, its longtime collaborator, by developing its own powerful AI models and exploring alternatives to power products like Microsoft’s Copilot bot. Microsoft has developed its own AI “reasoning” models comparable to models like OpenAI’s o1 and o3-mini, the The Information reports. OpenAI is said to have refused […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TechCrunch will be on the ground at SXSW 2025 — the annual tech, music, comedy, and film conference that kicked off Friday in Austin — in search of the zeitgeist of this AI-centric era. Yup, we’re one sentence in and AI has already made its entrance. And why not? A quick scan of the massive […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned Friday that agentic AI could come with a risk to user privacy. Speaking on stage at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, the advocate for secure communications, referred to the use of AI agents as “putting your brain in a jar,” and cautioned that this new paradigm of computing — […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Intuitive Machines’ Athena lunar lander is dead, just one day after it touched down at the moon’s south pole and tipped over. Luckily, the company says it was able to “accelerate several program and payload milestones” and deploy a few of the experiments that were riding shotgun before Athena’s lander ran out of juice. The […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Just over two months into 2025, the number of pending AI bills in the U.S. has grown to 781, according to an online tracking tool. The tool, maintained by consulting firm MultiState, shows that the number of pending U.S. bills pertaining to AI now exceeds the total number of AI bills proposed in all of […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Discord is in early stage discussions with bankers to IPO. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Twitter alternatives — new and old — have found audiences willing to try out a newer social networks since Elon Musk took over the company in 2022. Mastodon, Bluesky, Spill and T2 are some of the social media platforms people are among them. So is Meta’s Threads platform. What is Threads? How do you create […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Meta’s Threads has begun testing a new feature that would allow people to add their interests to their profile on the social network. Instead of only advertising to profile visitors the sort of topics you might post about, the new interests feature will also direct users to active conversations about the topic. The company thinks […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Just weeks after Google said it would review its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the Google for Startups Founders Fund webpage is peppered with changes. Most notably Google is now using past tense to describe all of its fund programs for underrepresented founders.  This is a change that took place after December, according to the internet […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google on Friday added a new, experimental “embedding” model for text, Gemini Embedding, to its Gemini developer API. Embedding models translate text inputs like words and phrases into numerical representations, known as embeddings, that capture the semantic meaning of the text. Embeddings are used in a range of applications, such as document retrieval and classification, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has acquired a one-million-square-foot property in Southwest Memphis to expand its AI data center footprint, according to a press release from the Memphis Chamber of Commerce. The new land will host infrastructure to complement xAI’s existing Memphis data center. “xAI’s acquisition of this property ensures we’ll remain at the forefront […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has acquired a 1 million-square-foot property in Southwest Memphis to expand its AI data center footprint, according to a press release from the Memphis Chamber of Commerce. The new land will host infrastructure to complement xAI’s existing Memphis data center. “xAI’s acquisition of this property ensures we’ll remain at the […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

On June 5, TechCrunch Sessions: AI will kick off — and you can be part of the industry-changing conversations that will be taking place. We have an open invitation for members of the AI community to lead breakout sessions and discussions with over 1,200 startup founders, VC leaders, and AI aficionados attending our newest event, which […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple is delaying the rollout of the “more personalized Siri” experience it promised as part of its rollout of Apple Intelligence. According to a statement from the tech giant published on Friday by Apple blog Daring Fireball, the company admits it will “take us longer than we thought to deliver” on these new Siri features. […] © 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. Sometimes problems are just that: problems. But often, they are also fodder. This week brought us a mix of startups facing adversity, sometimes of their own doing, […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

With the rise of AI companions who serve as online friends or romantic interests, experts are questioning how the technology affects our real-world social connections and relationships. According to Kasley Killam, author of the social health-focused book “The Art and Science of Connection: Why Social Health is the Missing Key to Living Longer, Healthier, and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

With the rise of AI companions who serve as online friends or romantic interests, experts are questioning how the technology affects our real-world social connections and relationships. According to Kasley Killam, author of the social health-focused book “The Art and Science of Connection: Why Social Health is the Missing Key to Living Longer, Healthier, and […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

DeepSeek has gone viral. Chinese AI lab DeepSeek broke into the mainstream consciousness this week after its chatbot app rose to the top of the Apple App Store charts (and Google Play, as well). DeepSeek’s AI models, which were trained using compute-efficient techniques, have led Wall Street analysts — and technologists — to question whether the U.S. can maintain its […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The administrators of Garantex, Aleksej Besciokov and Aleksandr Mira Serda, allegedly knew their crypto exchange was used to launder money, according to U.S. prosecutors. © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google is testing a new AI-powered Gemini side panel within Google Calendar that lets users quickly and conversationally check their schedule, create an event, and look up event details. The feature is available as part of the tech giant’s early access testing program, Google Workspace Labs. You can access Gemini by clicking the “Ask Gemini” […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Unidentified hackers breached NTT Com’s network to steal personal information of employees at thousands of corporate customers © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.